The USA in the Time of William McKinley 1897-1901
by Mike Donovan
“Big Mac” 1896 -- Tariff and Currency
“Mr. McKinley's War” - Mister friend of big business –Ninth President re-elected - 5’7” 195 lb. – Lawyer - Assassinated at the Buffalo Expo in 1901 - VP Garrett Hobart of New Jersey who died in office in 1899 - McKinley-Hobart only elected team to both die in office – 1900 VP Theodore Roosevelt – Hannahman - Tony C McKinley - Devout Methodist – Cigar smoker
The joys of isolationism stops here. From President Andrew Johnson to the end of Cleveland's second term, the United States was so directed inward that there was serious talk about cutting the federal budget by doing away with the foreign service entirely. All that would change in McKinley's time.
‘Big Mac’ was one of the most likable of the generally likable men who have won the United States Presidency. Billy McKinley was a kind and gentle man who fought in the Civil War, led America into a possibly unjust war with Spain, suppressed the Philippine insurrection without mercy, and then was murdered.
The Spanish-American War was the key event of McKinley’s era. The US did not lose a single soldier in combat nor an inch of territory in that one-sided conflict.
McKinley and Hobart won the election of 96 with 271 electoral votes to 176 for Billy Bryan and Sewall. McKinley won the North along with California and Oregon. The Dems won everything else.
Popular vote 1896 ----------McKinley R) 7,104,000
Bryan D) 6,502,000
Popular vote 1900------------McKinley R) 7,207,000
Bryan D-P) 6,358,000
Woolley Pr) 208,000
Back to back 7-6 victories for Mac.
The Prohibitionists were disappointed in 1900, losing 55,000 votes since the last time they ran a man, which was in 1892. John C. Woolley could only find 200 thousand sober voters at the turn of the century.
McKinley was shot in Buffalo, a real double whammy. It's bad enough just to be in Buffalo.
McKinley’s cabinet
Secretary of State --------John Sherman ---1897
William R. Day--1897
John Hay ---------1898-1901
Secretary of War –-----Russell A. Alger----1897-1899
Elihu Root-----------1899
Secretary of Treasury---Lyman J. Gage 1897-1901
Attorney General ----------Joseph McKenna—1897
John W. Griggs-----1897-1901
Philander C. Knox—1901
CABNOTES
Joe McKenna left AG because he was appointed and confirmed for the US Supreme Court.
BIO
Billy McKinley was born in Niles, Ohio on January 29, 1843, a Tyler baby. His parents were named William and Nancy.
His early schooling came in the town of Poland, Ohio. McKinley mixed schooling with local jobs, including one in a foundry. Later he enrolled in Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. By the time he was 18 he had a part time job as a schoolteacher. He also worked part time at the local post office.
Then came Sumter.
In June of 1861 William McKinley enlisted in the Union Army and served to the end of the war. He rose from private all the way up to brevet major, this last promotion coming in March of 1865. His men gave him the affectionate nickname of “Big Mac.” He served with distinction in many battles including Cedar and Fishers Hill, as well as the famous battle at Antietam in September of 1862.
After the war Big Mac studied law at a private firm and spent three months at Albany Law School, passing the bar in 1867. He set up his own shingle in Canton. The bridge to politics came when he was appointed county prosecutor for Clark (0ne book says it was Stark) County.
In 1871 came change. WM married Ida Saxton on January 25. She had pretty blue eyes and lovely green money. Ida was the daughter of a wealthy banker.
The young McKinleys had two daughters, but both died very young. Mrs. Mac had health problems and was an invalid by the time her husband was the President. William loved her and cared for her in a way which made the world admire him. He was undoubtedly a religious man and practiced his faith in his life through his wife. He tried to practice his faith in politics, but if he started an unjust war he may have failed.
William McKinley was elected to Congress, and was something of a silverite. His name first reached national attention for the very high tariff bill that he sponsored successfully in 1890.
Congressman McKinley failed in his bid for re-election in 1890. This was probably a testimony to the negative fallout from the McKinley Tariff.
McKinley however had a wider appeal than his local defeat would indicate. His particular area of Ohio was traditionally Democratic and so the Republicans still looked to him for state leadership. The state of Ohio was a toss-up state then as it is now. The Republicans nominated him to be the next Governor of Ohio. McKinley won and took over the state house in 1891. He was reelected in 1893 and served till 96.
Mac then entered national politics, becoming involved with the millionaire Mark Alonzo Hannah. Alonzo had helped get McKinley the Governorship. Now it was time for “the president maker” to put Mac in the White House.
EVENTS
ELECTION OF 1896
ACQUISITION OF HAWAII
BRADLEY-MARTIN BALL 1897
KENT STATE LAREDO 1899
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
PHILIPPINE INSURRECTION
COEUR D’ALENE STRIKE
ELECTION OF 1900
SPA 1900
HAY-PAUNCEFOTE TREATY 1900
BOER WAR
BOXER REBELLION AND THE OPEN DOOR
THE TRIP TO BUFFALO
ELECTION OF 1896
McKinley won the Election but Bryan stole the campaign.
It's hard to understand McKinley without understanding the man who made him president, Mark Hannah.
Mark Alonzo Hannah was a powerful Senator from Ohio and the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Hannah's first choice for 1896 for the Reps was Senator Sherman (of the Silver Purchase Act fame.) But after listening to Sherman giving a few speeches, Hannah decided that he needed to look elsewhere for a more presidential type of presidential nominee. He decided that his new chess piece was William McKinley, a man less qualified than Sherman but a more capable orator and personality. And Hannah was shrewd enough to know that winning with candidate inferior was better than losing with candidate superior. If Hannah had led the Republicans a hundred years later in 1996 he would have dumped Dole and put McCain on the top of the ticket.
From the close of the Civil War until the turn of the new century every Republican presidential winner was born in Ohio and had been a Union Army officer.
It’s hard to believe, but until McKinley’s time elections in the United States were not conducted with a secret ballot. Each party usually had a different color ticket and people voted in full view. So while it might have been officially called a 'secret ballot' it never really was until the 1890’s when the “Australian ballot” was adopted here. This was the fully secret ballot. The Election of 1896 was the first honestly secret US Presidential election. The secret ballot was certainly a great development for the socialists, anarchists, and Communists. Now they could vote their conscience still buy their groceries the next day.
The number one issue in the battle of 1896 was the currency clash of ‘Silverites’ versus ‘Goldbugs.’ The issue never slept. Both parties had trouble with minorities over the metallic controversy. The parties argued with each other and amongst themselves over currency. Silver versus gold made it difficult for either major party to maintain any unity. Both conventions had walkouts over coin.
The conservative view, backed primarily by the Republican party (the party of big business and trickle down economics) was that the addition of massive amounts of inflationary currency in silver devalued the long standing gold dollar. They said that the silver pump rewarded those in debt at the expense of those owed the dough, and was at worst as Populist contraption. The eastern bankers of all parties, conservative Republicans, and Europe, all favored gold.
The liberal view, backed primarily by the Democratic Party (the party of labor and the little people) was that there simply wasn’t enough gold in circulation to sustain an operable currency, and it had to be supplemented or replaced entirely by silver coins (to be minted at a value of 16-1 silver to gold.) The Democrats were confident that the new silver mines of the American West could provide the silver needed.
Unlike the Republicans and the Democrats, the Populists had a fairly united front on the currency issue. A collection of populeftist groups rallied around silver. They wanted inflation, the more the better and the sooner the better, and it had to be done in silver.
Gold was positively demonized by the silverites as the root of all evil and the abolition of its dominance became their key to economic recovery and prosperity.
As usual the truth was probably half way between the two extremes, but there were no compromises. It was one or the other.
Gold versus silver issue passed 'the diner test.’ Americans were debating this issue in every barbershop, diner and household. It’s hard to connect today with the furor that swept the country for so long over currency in the late 1800’s.
It’s hard to get politically stimulated over this even as an historical story. Other issues offer a chance to play left versus right in historical retrospective. I can argue with a leftist historian about the Philippine Insurrection for example, but we would have a tough time dukeing it out over silver versus gold.
McKinley is often portrayed in general history books as the mere tool of Mark Hannah the president maker. But McKinley was his own man and would have been a front-runner for the Republican nomination even without the backing of Hannah.
The Republican Convention met in St Louis. McKinley was the clear choice, his opposition being several favorite sons with only regional backing such as Tommy Reed of Maine. William concealed his true feelings about gold (he liked it) until as late as possible in the Convention. The goldbug Republicans wanted first to make sure they had enough delegates locked up to hold off a silverite walkout before the gold endorsement went into the platform. After they felt they had the numbers McKinley secured the nomination and, sure enough, there was indeed a silverite walkout.
The Republicans needed to balance the ticket with an easterner and added Garret Hobart as VP. a corporation a little-known lawyer from New Jersey. Mark Hannah would raise over 3 million for the campaign and donated over $100,000 of his own money.
The Bryan Democratic camp raised less than half a million dollars to operate with. But they did provide good oratory. William Jennings Bryan traveled 18,000 miles and gave almost as many speeches, while McKinley gave his few speeches to groups from his front porch in Canton, Ohio (home of the NFL Hall of Fame).
The way many past historians write about the Republican money advantage, it is clear they lived through it and were still furious about it 40 years later, implying that the Republican victory of 1896 was somehow dishonest.
The Democratic convention in Chicago was a mess of arguing between geographical partisans, tariff debaters and silver squabblers.
Left wing Illinois Democrat Governor Altgeld could have run if he had been a natural born American. “Silver Dick” Bland, a Congressman who actually favored gold was a strong contender. Virginian Henry Halsworth was also in the hunt. He bagged three deer and a quail but only 23 convention votes.
The Republicans were definitely going for the gold, but which side of the coin was the Democrat Party on? The convention had to make a clear choice. Silver was popular but most conservative Eastern Democrats were for gold. The Demos were afraid of how many votes would cross party line and vote Republican if the party went silver.
The Democratic platform conspicuously omitted any praise for the sitting Democrat President Cleveland. This was rude, dude. It was partly to protest Cleveland's pro-gold stance, and partly to mark a formal if subtle protest against the man in general. He was too much a pro-business eastern establishmentarian.
The convention had a platform but it was open to days of debate before finalization. A long famous evening was spent on the gold vs. silver mess. Three speakers ranted for silver and got a pretty good response. The next four consecutive contrarian speakers panned the crowd for gold. They were better orators and made excellent arguments for gold. The crowd was beginning to turn yellow.
This is all leading up to the 'Cross of Gold' speech by William Jennings Bryan. It is one of the famous things in American history, something you should know if you like to play along with TV quiz shows.
A 36-year old ex-congressman from Nebraska rose up and gave a passionate speech in praise of free silver that history may never forget. Bryan closed and he crushed. William Jennings took that Chicago crowd, picked it up, spun it around on his shoulders, and then threw it 80 feet out of the ring on the fly. WJ gave histrionics a new definition when he analogized gold economics and the crucifixion of Jesus.
As he would throughout the campaign, Bryan denounced gold as “ a weapon of mass destruction.” Not money, per se, but gold alone, was the cause of all troubles.
“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” He screamed, at the final moment in a great and violent speech, and the place went berserk. The cheering went on for an entire hour! With that one silly, spectacular speech he won himself the nomination, a big name, and the Dems won themselves three future defeats. You shall crucify the Dems on this cross of Bryan!
A lot of people think of Bryan as a famous Populist politician of the era, but he was a staunch Democrat who happened to embrace some populist issues. A lot of people who lived through his era of fame feel that he was of a shallow mind.
WJB was a man whose talent always ran miles ahead of his knowledge. Bryan could stir a crowd into a frenzy on the need to stop the pitted prune. His style was his substance. In fact, of all the main Populist positions, free silver was the one that he knew the least about, and the one that the Populists felt the least passionate about. The Populists cared a lot more about shorter work days and railroad rebates than about free silver, and some Populist candidates didn't favor free silver at all. Yet Bryan made himself a famous “Populist” crusader hero by making himself King Silver.
The Populist Party now had a huge dilemma. They were a powerful political force and had won Electoral votes in 1982. Now what should they do? Bryan was emerging as an ersatz Populist hero, and to oppose him would be dividing the anti-Republican masses, enabling those rats to win. Maybe it would be best to endorse Bryan and not run anyone. The problem was, that would also mean the end of the Populist Party.
The Populists faced up to the situation, endorsed Bill Bryan, and were never a major force in United States politics again.
Cleveland was leaving office as an unpopular man. While a lame duck he visited a friend, and when the friend tried to call his rambunctious dog off. Cleveland said, “Oh no, let him play. At least somebody likes me.” The Bryan nomination was a poor reflection on the incumbent. Here was a Grover who had stood firm on the gold standard his entire two terms and campaigned openly as its staunchest defender three times. Then in 1896, his own party nominates a man who hates gold at the top of his lungs.
The tariff, high or low, was a huge campaign issue as usual. McKinley was famous for being in favor of high tariffs and was called in jest 'President McTariff.'
Silver and gold was almost as hot a topic at the Republican convention in St Louis as it was at the Democratic in Chicago. In a telling moment, when the Republicans in St Louis adopted the gold standard, a group of delegates from pro-silver western states got up and, led by Senator Teller of Colorado, left the hall and the party.
The Populist Party later held its convention, also in St. Louis. Dissatisfied Democrats infested the Pop convention with a plan to have them also nominate Bryan for president. Many Populists were opposed to this for obvious reasons, what was the point in even being a Party if you’re only going to adopt another convention’s candidate? The Southern populists were especially opposed to the idea because of the presence of Art Sewell of Maine who was VP nominee for the Dems. Sewell agreed to drop out of the VP race in order to placate the Southern populists and the convention nominated Bryan for Prez with Thomas E. Watson as veep. The Dems later reneged on the deal and maintained the Maine banker Sewell on the VP spot.
The wiser leaders of the Populists realized that to nominate their own candidate would divide the left and further insure the victory of the right-wing McKinley. They swallowed their pride and digested their party with it.
Poor Bill. He lost in 1896 with a silver foot in his mouth!
Many factors hurt Bryan with the voters. He was too much of an anti-saloon preacher for many poor but modernist Protestant immigrants of which there were thousands arriving every day. Also he campaigned hard for an increase in farm prices. This attracted the farm vote but repelled the city vote. What non-farmer wants to vote for higher food prices?
ECONOMIC RECOVERY 1897-1900
The Panic of 1893 and the depression which followed made a nice recovery as soon as the Republicans came back into power. But it was more a matter of luck than skill. The Europeans had bad weather in 1897 and the need for American wheat doubled that year, creating higher prices and prosperity for American farmers. Large gold fields were discovered in Alaska, Australia, and South Africa while methods for refining the metal from ore dramatically improved.
The influx of all this new gold eliminated the paranoia about gold supply on both the national and international fronts, created the inflation that the silver nuts had been calling for so long, and produced an exiting new round of capitalist investment with a fantastic expansion in the iron and steel industries. President McKinley wanted to do away with the silver dollar forever but he needed a majority in the Senate to pull that off and did not obtain this until after the Congressional elections of 1898. In his message to Congress in December of 1899 he requested a gold standard act which was passed and signed the following March.
The economy climbed steadily in these last years of the 1800’s, but not everyone was dancing with joy.
The Populist Party was the worse for the new good times. It had depended on farmer misery for it’s voting base and the national rebound was the demise of agrarian political radicalism, for the time being. The next rounds of leftist discontent would come from the cities, not the farms. The sickle was handing over the torch of poor left negativism to the hammer.
The Populists had made a mistake in making silver the primary issue in its election campaigns. It really stood for more than that but the PP had latched on to a hot issue in order to troll for votes. When gold made a comeback and proved silver superfluous the Populists were left pointing fingers in the middle of an unfinished speech with an audience making its way towards the exits.
LAREDO SMALLPOX RIOT 1899
Late in 1898 a smallpox outbreak in Laredo Texas led to violence between Mexican-Americans and the Texas Rangers police force.
When the smallpox hit town the mayor of Laredo ordered a house-to-house inspection in search of contaminated people and their clothing, with forced evacuations to a central hospital facility for the afflicted.
Some Mexicans resisted the tough homeland security procedure. They claimed hat if they wanted to stay in their abode they were entitled to do so. Local authorities did not agree and sought outside help in the form of the Texas Rangers.
At the home of a resisting Mr. Herrera, a gunfight erupted. One Ranger shot Herrera in the chest and then another Ranger fired two shots point blank into his head. Another Ranger shot Huerrera's sister Refugia in the arm. Smallpox was small change compared to getting shot up in your own home.
When the smoke cleared the Rangers retreated. When they returned there was an armed mob of 100 angry Mexicans (some armed) around the body of Herrera. Someone in the crowd fired a shot. Big mistake. The Rangers fired a Kent State volley into the crowd, killing one and wounding 13.
The smallpox epidemic receded by the end of 1899 but the diseases of racial and political resentment remained.
“THIS IS THE BEST PARTY OF ALL-TIME, YAHOO!”
Teen-agers are apt to say this in a moment of illusory ecstasy at a party full of cheap wine, bad music and missing parents, but on February 10, 1897 a bunch of New York City rich tried to achieve exactly that, the best party of all-time. Little did they know that the Bradley-Martin Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria would create a back-lash against the rich that made the greatest party a smashing failure.
Beatrice Snobnolia had some money and then married a very rich guy named Bradley Martin. She not only adopted his last name, she adopted his first name too. She legally took the married name of Mrs. Bradley-Martin. That's a far cry from today's women who keep so often keep their own name as the middle name. My wife is Hilarie Wenzel-Donovan. Wenzel is not my first name. But Beatrice knew how to move in social circles and did it better as a Bradley-Martin than she could have as a Beatrice Snobnolia.
Mrs BM decided to throw the best party in the history of the world and the arrangements were made for a costume ball at the Waldorf. The party was deliberately arranged on short notice so that the rich revelers would have to buy American. yes, there was a supposedly noble motive at work here. Mrs. Martin felt bad that U.S. clothing industry was at a near standstill, and the upper class were partly responsible because they were buying all their clothes from Paris, London, and Rome. So lets throw a huge party for the filthy rich on short notice, make it a costume ball, and force the rich to spike the New York fashion industry. Hopefully there might be some trickle down help for the whole country. Well, at least that was their story after the whole thing caused such a furor.
The party was a big hit while it was happening. Millionaires arrived in the most fantastic expensive costumes. The spread was fit for a king. The drinks, the orduerves the music, the butlers, the main course were all the most expensive items in the world.
But the down side was that no one bought the logic of the party as motivated to help the garment industry. Few even heard about that angle, let alone bought it. The reaction was enormous and it was all bad. The party cost the Bradley-Martins a total of $387,334.35, and this in an era when a dollar could buy a yacht with change coming back. Newspapers all over the land were printing the figure of $387,334.35, and condemning the whole affair with passion. Beatrice Bradley-Martin became the Marie Antoinette of the American class struggle. Preachers in the pulpit tore them to shreds like Christ losing his temper with the money changers in the Temple.
The New York City tax collectors singled out the Bradley-Martins and in an act of ersatz socialism, raised their tax rates to triple what all their neighbors had to pay. Imagine the city of Brookline being mad at me for all my complaints about noise pollution (I do call the police regularly on this) and then I get a bill in the mail for property tax and realize that I am paying three times as high a percentage as anyone else in my condo. There is no justification for taxing the Bradley-Martins in punishment, and there is plenty of justification for spending as much as one damn well pleases on a private party.
That's the way the Martins saw it and they moved to England in a huff. A lot of history books make it seem as if the public anger intimidated them to move, like they were almost afraid of being harmed. But really it was their own defiant gesture, and they already had a fourth home in England, so it wasn't like they arrived in Liverpool wiping the sweat from their brow and saying, “whew, that was a close call.” But some of the accounts make it seem like that.
The Bradley-Martin Ball says a lot about the rich vs. poor tension that was dominating American thought in 1897.
That's a party I wish I could have attended with Moe, Larry, and Curly. The four of us would have set things straight within about 12 minutes.
EVANGELINA OCTOBER 7 1897
The dramatic rescue from a Cuban jail of an 18 year old babe named Evangelina Henrietta Cisneros is a marker on the road to the Spanish American War. It is also a story worthy of a movie.
The young Cuban woman was considered most attractive and she supported the rebels. She also had a few American friends who knew William Randolph Hearst.
Evangelina was arrested while conducting agitation for Cuban freedom on the Isle of Pine Combs.
While a prisoner, a Colonel Jose Ferrero made sexual advances towards her to a degree that would make Bill Clinton shudder. She screamed in panic and five Insurrectos broke into the jail and tied up Colonel Jerko. Within the hour the Spanish made a counter-rescue of the Colonel and Evangelina Henrietta Cisneros was prisoner again. This time they took her to the Havana Hilton, a notorious prison for lunatics and undesirables.
William Hearst got wind of this and sent down a team of reporters with instructions to rescue the young lady. The lead reporter was karl Decker and with a team of five men and plenty of guns, they busted her out on October 7 1897. Two days later she snuck off the island in disguise on the steamship Seneca.
When Evangelina made it to New York she became an American heroine. She published a book that sold 200,000 copies. It was called No, Way, Jose!. Hearst made sure that Cisneros got all the royalties.
A lot of history books say that the whole thing was probably an elaborate hoax, a big fat publicity stunt. But recent scholarship by a professor from American University would suggest that the story is true. If so, its time for someone to write the script.
Evangelina Cisneros married one of her rescuers six months later. Would she do that if it was all a fake?
THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR AND THE PHILIPPINE INSURRECTION 1898-1901
The United States went to war with Spain in 1898 and won a resounding victory. But most American historians blame America for starting the war, take no pride in the military triumph, and consider the post-war acquisitions of the Philippines and Puerto Rico an imperialist chauvinist injustice. According to the historical consensus, the war was supposedly instigated by the right-wing press, Teddy Roosevelt should be ashamed of himself for being such a war-lover, and, worst of all, the war may have been instigated at the root by a desire of the right to destroy the momentum of the left/populist and the socialist movement in the United States in the 1890's. Historians actually believe that the United States answered the demands for labor rights and better working conditions by whipping up a war and forcing the entire left into a scared patriotism, lest they be lynched by the red, white and blue mob.
It pains me to have to say this, but that is all true.
But I have no team to root for in this historical controversy (and it still is that) because I find it telling in a bad way they way many historians gloat over it, like they're glad the USA could be proven a bad guy. This helps their grand thesis that the United States is the bad guy in general. I can prove that you stole a bicycle when you were 15, therefore I prove that you are a bad person and probably still a criminal today. The Blame America First crowd of historians are to this day delighted to tell the story of the Spanish American War.
The image of the USA in the Spanish-American War of a big bully giving a one-sided thrashing to an undersized and helpless foe is only true in hindsight. There is some truth to this, but it should be kept in mind that when this war began, the betting money in Europe was that it would be a long and difficult war for the United States even if America did seem to be the likely winner. No one was predicting the type of complete victory that was achieved. The winner of every fight looks like a bully after the results are in, but the loser would as gladly danced over the winner’s beaten body had the contest gone another way. Spain had seven heavy armored cruisers. The United States wasn't picking a fight with a second rate navy, and the United States Army consisted of only 28,000 troops, mostly scattered throughout the west. When Admiral Dewey was in Hong Kong and was preparing an expedition to take Manila, the men at his Diplomat Club were betting heavily against him. Even his British friends were offering 25-1 or worse that his mission would succeed. In other words if you wanted to bet that America would be defeated in the Philippines, you would have to put up 25 dollars to win one! That's how confident the European diplomats were that the Spanish would defeat the United States. And then the historians tell us that the United States should be ashamed for picking a fight with a weak power, like Spain in 1898 was Grenada in 1983.
Many history book write it up as if the boorish United States picked a fight in the cause of greed and sinful pride against a pathetic second rate foe. Yes, after the fact it turned out that Leeds was indeed a bad soccer team, but Coventry didn't know that when they first walked onto the field. McKinley and the Yanks went to war for reasons of greed and sinful pride, but did so because it didn't feel like a big bad bully compared to the other imperialist powers of Europe, not because it knew it was one. The fact is that the United States, picked a fight that it only hoped it could win. It didn't have anything like a strong standing army at the time, and Spain did.
On the eve of the war the USA was no imperialist power. On Valentine’s Day, 1898, the United States outside of the North American mainland consisted of the island of Midway taken/occupied in 1867. That was about to change very fast. As a result of the Spanish American War of 1898, the US expanded into the Caribbean and the far Pacific. The short-term result of the war was glory for American military power and national prestige and the acquisition of new lands. The long-term result was entanglement in Pacific political problems, a reputation for imperialism (beginning that great debate between left and right) and a big problem of administration, maintenance and protection of the prizes. The story of Puerto Rico and Guam are probably the only cases of positive results for all concerned.
The cause for war ('casus belli' for you snobs) was the Cuban Revolution. Spain refused to give Cuba independence, and the USA jumped into another nation's civil war, not the last time that would happen.
Spain, the power that had once ruled the New World was by 1898 down to two possessions in America, Cuba and Puerto Rico. The Cuban people had watched with envy as one nation after another from Mexico to Argentina had won their independence from the weakened Spanish crown. They wanted some of that Bolivar too.
There were three wars for Cuban Independence, the first one, called The Ten Years War, not to be confused with the 30 Years War between France and England and the Six Years War between me and my first wife. The Ten Years War, began in 1868 and ended in 1891. The Spanish had their hands full suppressing it. (all right, it ended in 1878.)
There was a money connection of course. Cuban sugar was a 100 million dollar a year trade relationship with the USA. The United States had allowed Cuban sugar into the states duty free and this had relieved some of the poverty on the island. But when the McKinley Tariff was passed in 1890, the duty on imported sugar jumped to a whopping 40% excise, and the sugar train slowed to a near stop. Sugar mountains sat in Cuban warehouses and the already impoverished island became desperately poor. There was starvation, meaning open rebellion. The starving will always rebel. The March 1917 Revolution in Russia began with starving women smashing in the windows of bread-shops in St Petersburg. The South gave up in 1865 when the women of Richmond began doing the same thing.
The third and final war for Cuban Independence began in 1895 when Max Gomez led a rag-tag army of native rebels in open revolt against the Spanish Queen. Valero 'Butch' Weyler of Spain opposed Gomez. His full name was General Valeriano Weyler. VW attacked the rebels and ordered all civilians in rebel areas rounded up and isolated in ‘concentration camps.’ This was the beginning of this famous term, later used both in the Boer War and World War II. Spanish troops then went into the areas now supposed to be unpopulated and trashed the. The bastardos destroyed everything they could destroy especially all food sources. They gave the Cubans a shot of General Sherman. The Spanish suppressors executed most civilians that were found in the ‘forbidden zone.’ General Sherman never did that.
History books always tell of the cruel Spanish destructive and murderous methods of quelling the rebellion, but it's only fair to say that the Rebels began the war by destroying their own lands and their own economy themselves. They wanted to render Spanish Cuba completely unprofitable and give Madrid a motive to get out. Spain responded murder for murder, destruction for destruction. It was this very one-sided reporting that dragged the United States into the war, yet many history books still play along with the same fallacy. The war has been over for more than a hundred years. There is no longer any reason to make Spain into the personification of evil and the rebels into the image of Christ on a cross of burned sugar cane.
The Cuban rebels started a spin campaign in the American press. Americans were easily persuaded and soon gave powerful sympathy to the Cuban revolutionaries. The rebels reminded Americans of themselves in 1776. The the Sons of Liberty didn't burn Boston and Philadelphia and kill 398 British troops in 1774, but both sides of the story weren't being reported.
Most Americans had no real love for Spain. After the American Revolution Spain tried to hem the U.S. in at the Appalachians with sneaky greedy deals with the French.
Cuban-American trade was completely shut off by the revolt. The Americans wanted their trade with Cuba to get back on track. Sugar trade, in spite of the steep U.S. sugar tariff it was still a powerful and rewarding industry.
Rioting broke out in Havanna late in 1897. D.C. was concerned for the safety of American citizens. The American consul at Havanna asked McKinley to send a warship as a gesture of solidarity and protection. A battleship would be a veiled warning to both the rebels and their Spanish masters to not harm Americans in Cuba. The request was granted and that is how the USS Maine was dragged into the middle of a civil war. A warship visit was normal for international relations in ordinary times. But the Maine deliberately wore out its welcome, staying in Havanna for six weeks. The US Navy could not pretend after six weeks that it was just there on a routine visit. It gave rebels plenty of time to plan sabotage against the Maine.
The redneck newspapers of New York, the World and the Journal were running one-sided and exaggerated accounts of Spanish atrocities in Cuba with a call for US intervention on the side of the rebels. Publishers Hearst (World) and Pulitzer (Journal,) were just trying to sell newspapers and, to paraphrase Charlie 'Citizen' Kane, if they had to start a war to sell papers, they would start a war to sell papers. And they did not earn a “Pulitzer Prize” for their efforts, either. (besides Citizen Kane, no other popular Hollywood film has ever focused on the Spanish American War.)
Pulitzer managed to assuage his war guilt by inventing a Prize for works with the merit of having more class than his papers ever had.
DE LOME LETTER
The Spanish minister to Washington Chico De Lome helped spark the war by his indiscreet big mouth pen. He wrote a letter to a friend in which he ripped into McKinley worse than even the US Democratic Party ever did. He called William “a weak pathetic unmanly man who worshipped the adulation of the crowd and made his decisions accordingly.”
The New York World got a hold of the letter and published it on page one. The United States flew into a rage. It was just a personal criticism by one Spanish individual that was supposed to be off the record, but the yellow press made it seem as though this was an official condemnation of the American President by the King. And it is a good case of 'never put in writing what you would never want to see printed on page one.'
De Lome resigned and made his way to Fall River Mass where he boarded a freighter disguised as an old lady and made his way back to Spain for a reprimand. Spain was trying hard to avoid war with an America that seemed to want war fairly badly, and out of the sidelines comes De Lome messing things up with his careless quill.
The right-wing US jerks exploited the De Lome baloney and is usually listed as a major cause of the Spanish-American War. At face value it really wasn't anything to get the country all riled up about, but when you're spoiling for a fight it's not hard to find an excuse. It was the United States saying to Spain at a bar, “hey, why'd you bump into me? You wanna make something of it?”
REMEMBER THE MAINE 2.15.98
On February 15 1898 at 9:40 p.m. the USS Maine blew up in Havanna Harbor with the force of the last moments of the USS Arizona in 1941. 260 men died on the spot and six more from injuries over the next week. 102 survived. The front third of the ship blew off completely and the two pieces sank real fast..
American reacted furiously rage against Spain, not against the rebels who had a clear motive to do it. The yellow press ran with this story as if the deed had been plotted in the chamber of deputies in Madrid, as if Spain wanted to murder American sailors as a warning to the United States to stay out of Cuba.
That only barely made sense, and then only if the Spanish were slightly insane.
There was the possibility that the explosion was a technical accident, but no one wanted to consider that. It should have been obvious that the Rebels had much more to gain by dragging the United States into a war with Spain, than Spain could gain by dragging the United States into a war with Spain.
Later investigations repeatedly determined that the Maine was destroyed by an underwater mine. But Admiral Rickover in the 1970's wrote an entire book that 'proved' that the Maine exploded accidentally from sparks in the coal room that set of the magazine. If Rickover is right than it was just a bizarre twist of fate that this should happen when the Maine just happened to be in Havanna with two nations on a hair trigger for a potential war.
Rickover is wrong because it is too much of a coincidence, like a wife who takes out an large accident insurance policy in secret on her husband and then he accidentally falls off a moving train to his death three days later. Yes, that's from a movie. There's insurance fraud investigator Lee J. Cobb saying, “do you have any idea what the mathematical probability of that is?”
What is the mathematical probability that Cuban rebels would have the main motive to blow up the Maine, would decide not to act, and then the ship would blow up on its own at exactly that propitious moment? How often in history does a U.S. battleship spontaneously blow up and sink to the bottom? What is the mathematical probability that the one time that happens in a 30 years span of naval activities is at the exact moment and in the exact place when it would inspire American intervention? It's just Lee J. Cobb vs. Hyman Rickover. I'm going with the Cobbster, and name the movie.
So what if Rickover is a genius? Look at how many wizards study the JFK assassination and come to wild conclusions they pronounce with certainty. Use that as a yardstick for Rickover's definitive theory of the mineless Maine.
Plenty of analysts dispute Rickover's conclusions. The Cuban insurrectos blew up the Maine with an underwater mine. And since Jimmy Carter worshipped Rickover, we must doubt Rickover anyway. That's a cheap shot at both of them of course. Having said that, the one time in U.S. history a Jimmy Carter would have been the right man on the job would have been in the aftermath of the Maine and amidst the yellow press clamor for war. Carter would never have gone to Congress asking for war against Spain – come to think of it.. Jimmy probably wouldn't have asked for war against Japan after Pearl Harbor either.)
ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM – IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS OR NOT
In March 1898 the USA gave Spain an ultimatum. Spain had to stop the military repression in Cuba and grant an armistice to the Cuban rebels. Note that this did not include a demand for recognition of Cuban independence. Also Spain had to agree to dismantle and discontinue the odious concentration camps.
On April 9, 1898 the Spaniards agreed to the American demands and the US minister in Madrid cabled the good news to McKinley. Two days later the President went to Congress and asked for war.
Hmm.
The Spanish-American War did not begin with a formal declaration of war against Spain. It was closer to the GHW Bush Congressional authorization to use force in 1991 than to the FDR declaration of war against Japan in 1941. What McKinley asked for and received from Congress on April 11 1898 was permission to use US military forces to win the independence of Cuba from Spain. War with Spain would be a byproduct of the declaration, but not the stated motive. This way the US would not look like a belligerent starting a war but rather a friendly neighbor helping some poor people against an oppressor.
The American left was not buying this and the Teller Amendment was the result of this distrust. TA was a clause tacked on to the declaration of hostilities pledging the United States not to keep Cuba after liberating it. That was quite a liberal gesture for the era. There would be no imperialist acquisitions disguised as liberation. The T amendment was adopted and if it had not been, The United States would probably possess Cuba today, and there never would have been a Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Proof that the suspicions of the left were well founded is the fact that the US did end up keeping Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Teller hadn’t foreseen these other conquests and the loophole was exploited.
For now, with Teller keeping dishonor at bay, a national clamor began for war. There was a broadway play with a song in it called “Unleash the Dogs of War” and every time it was sung the place went berserk. Before the Cuba crisis, the song had been sung to the apathetic response it undoubtedly deserved.
The pressure on McKinley to unleash the dogs was unbearable. The newspapers were calling him a “spineless squid” among other things. Here was a man who fought four brave volunteer years in the Civil War and newspapermen were calling him a chicken. McKinley bravely resisted. But Big Mac was all shook up. The President (according to one modern historian) woke up crying from bad dreams about death and war.
His own Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt spoke out against McKinley, declaring that “the President had no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.’ (I say better a chocolate éclair than a murderous macho alpha male warmonger, which is what Teddy Roosevelt was as far as I’m concerned. Later he would be on the 1900 ticket as the chocolate éclair’s running mate and would take over as president when an assassin ate the éclair.
There was an aborted attempt in foreign circles to try and pressure McKinley against a declaration of war. Sir Julian Chebnoski, the British Ambassador in Washington, approached the foreign ambassadors of five other European countries with the idea that a collective protest might be raised against McKinley. All five of the Ambassadors thought it was a great idea and they went off to report the plan to their home governments.
When Lord Balfour heard about this he gave Chebnoski an earful. “What in the bloody name of Moses are you doing?,” he cabled Sir Julian, “We're going to need the Yanks for the big one against Germany down the road. We must not spoil relations with them over this.”
The coalition foundered without its founder Julian, and without the Royal Navy had no power behind its diplomatic threats. The plan for European intervention in the Spanish-America was dead in the water.
After President Éclair got his Congressional authorization to use force to liberate Cuba, a fleet under Admiral George Dewey left Hong Kong for the Philippines.
It was to the credit of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt (who often worked over the head of the Navy Secretary) that this Dewey force was already in place in the Far East and well maintained. Roosevelt had foreseen the chance for imperialist conquest he so desired. It was his personal importunities that had sent Dewey to Hong Kong in the first place.
On May 1 a squad of American battlewagons entered Manila Harbor. There was a battle, if you could call it that. In the fight later nicknamed the ‘Thrilla in Manila,’ the Spanish fleet was completely destroyed and almost 400 men perished. The Americans suffered eight wounded when a shell from a shore battery hit the USS Baltimore. The only American death came from a sailor who died of heatstroke.
The American ships took target practice on the inferior Spanish fleet. In the middle of the shelling a group of US sailors was cheering sadistically as the American shells hit their targets. Dewey became red with rage and let them have it with the now famous admonition, “Knock it off, knuckleheads! Those poor boys are dying over there!” The story is supposed to accentuate the quality of mercy in our victorious effort.
The Spanish commander Adrian Lopez Gonzales chose not to keep his ships near the city's shore batteries. If he had he could have doubled his firepower in the duel with the Yankee steel clippers. One historian believes that Gonzales moved his ships away from the city because he didn't want to see any civilians injured from the return shelling. Maybe.
However, the Americans did not have the capability of following up the naval victory with a land operation. At this point Dewey could have simply sailed his fleet back to the United States and there never would have been Pearl Harbor and WWII for the US in the Pacific. But Admiral Dewey was determined to hold Manila, even though the War had begun strictly over Cuba and there was no US land forces on hand.
Dewey sent guns and supplies to Philippine rebels under to at least keep the Spanish forces trapped in the capitol of Manila. The rebel leader was Emil Aguinaldo, one of my all time favorite characters of history. The Spanish regime in the Philippines had booted Emilio out of the islands years ago. Dewey transported Aguinaldo safely back to the Archipelago’s main island of Luzon to help with the war effort. the Americans did not promise him that an American victory would lead to an independent Philippine nation. But Emilio somehow got it into his rebellious brain that these were the conditions. This would lead to serious trouble later.
When American landing forces finally did arrive, they got behind the city and it was curtains for the Spanish empire in the Philippines. The Spanish saw that they were Cornwallissed. It was Yorktown at Manila and on August 13, 1898 the Spanish forces at surrendered.
The war may have been unjust, and America may have been greedy for keeping the Philippines, but there is no question that Germany, Japan and England were all ready to fill in the imperialism blank if the US won the war and then left the Philippines to its own fate. The German diplomats in Manila talked eagerly with Berlin about acquiring the entire archipelago if the United States left the scene. Japan offered to co-administer the Philippines with Great Britain. At that time Japan and the UK were formal allies. Japan asked Britain to pressure the United States to agree to this. Instead the British pressured Japan to drop the idea and in turn pressured the United States to please keep the Philippines to avoid trouble for all concerned. The UK also indicated that it would gladly purchase the Philippines if that option ever presented itself.
The Philippinos were not likely to win independence if the US departed. It was the age of gobbling. All the great powers were gobbling up whatever underdeveloped, politically unprotected and militarily feeble lands were left on the globe. The Insurrectionists would not have emerged victorious against any of these three powers alone, and would have been hopeless against combos. And there were intimations of rule over the Philippines by two or more of the great Powers.
There was no UN or League of Nations to stop the other predatory powers from taking the Philippines, not even on windbag bluffing paper. This was an era when bald shameless and frank territorial aggrandizement, like the 1990 invasion of Kuwait which shocked the world, was done routinely, without apology, and shocked no one. Nor was there any outcry against it after it was done. Might was right and that was that, and the attitude of Theodore Roosevelt is instructive as a reflection of many more like him. It represented the conservative side no doubt, but TR was a product of his time more than a creator of it.
After Manila the war switched to the Cuban theatre. Admiral Pascual Cervera gathered a Spanish war fleet in the Azores preparing for a trip west to the Caribbean.
On the East Coast of the United States panic swept the cities. It was called “The Hispanic Panic.” From Boston to Miami, people waited fearfully for the Spanish ships to appear and bombard their city. Terrified Boston bankers took their deposits inland to Worcester, and the banks in that Central Massachusetts city could not handle them.
But Admiral Cervera had little desire to bombard Newport or Charleston even if he did have the capability. It was similar to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor when San Francisco and LA feared imminent attack. In retrospect we can safely know that this threat wasn’t very real, but try telling that to people at the time.
Antiquated monitors from the Civil War were taken out of storage and sent out to guard the entrance to east coast city harbors. US Admiral Sampson, the head of the Navy in the field had to divert a large segment of his forces to patrol the coast and set the public mind at ease. There were visions of Spanish battleships shelling Manhattan into burning rubble. Influential Senator Reed of Maine demanded and got a monitor to protect precious Portland.
But Admiral Cervera was worrying about surviving the upcoming battle, not shelling department stores and monuments.
The U.S. Fleet was ordered to intercept and destroy the Spanish Fleet before it reached Santiago, but Cervery slipped through the screen and made it to port. It was a slight setback for the American Navy. Cervera got his 19 ancient warships into Santiago Harbor. Soon two American fleets bottled him up.
On land, the US Army started out less prepared than the navy. There were less than 30,000 men in the uniformed US Army. Almost ten times that number quickly volunteered to help ‘Remember the Maine.’
The US armed forces gathered at Tampa for the D-Day on Cuba. Volunteers and militia also trained at a camp near Chattanooga.
The American Army wanted to wait another four months of training before invading Cuba but when Cervera made it to Santiago the President agreed with his advisors that a poorly trained US Army could still win in Cuba, with the help of insurrectionist allies on the Island. So a knowingly badly trained army went to take Cuba for the Cubans.
The land war didn't last very long. If the Spanish knew how incredibly badly trained and organized the American forces besieging Santiago were, it might have lasted far longer. They might not have surrendered.
There was a sharp clash at La Guasimas, another at El Caney, a brief fight at El Producto, and then the big one at San Juan Hill. The Cuban land war was two bad teams fighting it out and the far worse one losing by its superior incompetence. Spain made a slightly better than poor performance by America seem first-rate.
TEDDY AT SAN JUAN HILL
Theodore Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy when the war he so long desired finally broke out. He immediately asked for permission to form a fighting unit. Amidst some harsh criticism for showboating, TR got permission to resign his post in D.C. and form a volunteer regiment, which became famous as the “Rough Riders.” The stole the name from a second half act in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
The Rough Riders were volunteers. Except for their division commander Leonard Wood they were also trained and led by volunteers. Roosevelt became a Lieutenant Colonel immediately.
The United States made the same mistake in this war that the North made in the Civil War. It did not integrate the volunteers into units commanded by the well-trained regulars. As a result, the bulk of land forces were poorly trained volunteers. The Rough Riders were rough around the edges. Fortunately they were up against poor opponents in the 1898 Spanish occupation troops in Cuba.
Teddy was drooling at the chance to prove his manhood in combat and he got it at a place called San Juan Hill. Actually it happened when he led a charge against Kettle Hill which was part of San Juan Heights, and San Juan Hill was sitting unharmed on the left flank of the battle scene. But history officially considers it the Charge up San Juan Hill (like the Battle of Breeds Hill which became falsely accepted as the Battle of Bunker Hill.)
Ted was told to hold his position on the far side of a little valley under Spanish fire. He asked his commander to charge down one side, and up the other side and to take Kettle Hill. It would all have to take place in one hit fire zone and TR got permission and lived his ultimate dream to personally kill people to make a point about the national manhood.
Some have disputed the standard account of TR's charge and say that a black regiment did most of the hard fighting and the Rough Riders just took most of the credit. TR was definitely a white supremacist, so if that were true he wouldn't do anything to set the record straight.
Roosevelt himself thought that his performance at San Juan Hill was deserving of the highest medal. At war’s end he wrote a friend,
“I am entitled to the Medal of Honor, and
I want it.”
Every move Theodore Roosevelt made in Cuba got page one coverage in most of the United States newspapers. A lot of people found it all a bit obnoxious, and complained that his wasn't the only life on the line down there. One editor said that if Roosevelt writes a book about the war he should title it, “Alone in Cuba.”
Bill Clinton awarded Theodore Roosevelt the Congressional Medal of Honor just as he was leaving office and pardoning Marc Rich. If Theodore Roosevelt deserved the CMH than George Washington should have six of them, plus 17 Silver Stars. Leave it to someone who never served in the military to give it to TR and not lift a finger to get one for GW.
NAVAL BATTLE OF CUBA
The American Army was in poor condition, but the Navy was in fairly good shape, thanks to the large naval construction program started by President Arthur and pumped up further by President Harrison (Cleveland didn't help out much - typical Dem.) The United States had three first-rate battleships and two that were ok. The Spanish had only one first-rate battleship and it was under repair in Spain. The Spanish Navy was big enough, but it was made up of a lot of old cruisers, and I am presuming you know that a battleship beats a cruiser like a full-house beats three aces.
On July 3, 1898 Cervera’s fleet tried to make a run for it out of Santiago de Cuba. It was Manila all over again. The American warships pounded their Spanish counterparts to smithereens. The US Navy sank the entire Spanish fleet, killing 474 brave unlucky men. The US Navy suffered one casualty, a drunken sailor who fell overboard while cheering a direct hit.
The Spanish Admiral knew he was doomed before he left Santiago Harbor. But Spain needed to save face, and could not surrender without a fight, You got to go through the motions of a fight before you can surrender. I had boxing matches as a boy with big bullies, lasted ten minutes, scored no punches, took many, and maintained my precarious status in the neighborhood. It was a little bit like that, except that it was completely different.
PHILIPPINE INSURRECTION
Victory in war did not in this instance lead to peace. It led only to more war. The United States would lose ten times more men in the Philippine Insurrection than it had buried in the Spanish-American War.
Spain was already at war with the Philippines when the United States went to war with Spain. This has to be borne in mind when studying the Insurrection.
Spain conquered the Philippines long ago, but in the late 1890's there was a movement for independence that led to military clashes between Spaniards and Philippinos.
The United States thought that since it had defeated Spain it could walk right in as benevolent new masters and find a welcome mat from the rebels. After all, Uncle Sam had liberated them from oppressive Spanish rule. They should be grateful and welcome U.S. tutelage and let US have naval bases, army bases, a new empire in the far east. Whatever the United States wanted, it deserved it and the Philippinos should be grateful to offer it.
At first there were feelers in this direction. America had just helped them defeat the Spanish at Manila, and even smuggled rebel leaders into Luzon.
The rebels who helped the Spanish were careful to surrender at Manila to the United States forces, and both sides were careful to exclude the Philippinos from the surrender arrangements. Neither Spain nor the United States wanted to hand the Philippinos a revolutionary victory in the aftermath of a war between two western powers. The USA went to war as a statement against Spanish colonial dominance of the Cubans, had inherited the Spanish colonial occupation of the Philippines, and by defeating the Spanish colonialists in the Caribbean, became the colonialists in the Pacific.
On February 4 1899 Philippine Rebs shot up an American patrol and the battle was joined. The fighting would go on for years.
Many pundits compare the current War in Iraq with the War in Vietnam. Iraq bears a much stronger resemblance to the Philippine Insurrection. Vietnam was always in doubt and America lost. Iraq and the Philippines were wins that ended with a terrible insurrection from the population just supposedly freed.
The papers had been following the Cuban situation for years, but the Philippines were on the other side of the world, a remote locale even to the well read. Most members of the Congress could not even locate them on a map (three Congressmen from Kentucky couldn't even locate a map.)
PHILIPPINE BACKGROUND
There are over 7,000 islands in the Philippines and less than half of them even have a name. The archipelago is at a crossroads geographically. The Philippines are the Middle East of the Pacific world, a clearinghouse center-of-the-wheel for races, religions and political ideals. The southern islands are dominated by Muslims who came there from Indonesia and Malaya. The northern islands are native Tagalog. China planted colonies along the coasts of Luzon and Palawan and have long left a cultural imprint. Many Philippine words are of Chinese origin.
There is a large Hindu element in the Philippines. It came from India but not directly. First the Indians moved from India to the Sumatra-Malay area and then a century or two later took the boat ride one step further and ended up on places like Samar and Mindanao.
The broken up physicality prevented the Philippines from becoming a country. Invaders from a homogenous nation like Spain had an advantage of political and military unity, while Philippinos could only dream. There were dozens of languages, religions, races and political movements in the islands. How could such a fractured world unite and drive off an invader like Spain or the United States? Not easily. If the 13 Colonies in 1776 had each been an island, and some of these islands were further broken up into 7,000 islands, could Washington have beaten the British in the Revolution? Could the colonists have even united at all?
The Philippines were discovered in 1521 for the same reason that North America was discovered in 1492. The Ventians had a monopoly of the overland spice trade on land, Western Europe needed a slice of spice, and naval exploration was the only way to get it.
Spice was so hot a commodity that it was commonly used as currency in Europe. It all came from Asia. There were three routes to Europe from Asia and all functioned well until the Moslem Turks capture Constantinople in 1453. That shut off two of the routes. The only route for Asian spice to Europe stopped at Venice and V had no interest in sharing the wealth. The only way that western Europe could get spicy profits from it would be to find an alternate route to Asia and it obviously had to be by water.
The King of Spain did not sponsor and bankroll Columbus and Magellan for the noble ideal of exploration. He did did it for money. Columbus tried to sail west to Asia in 1492 but had hit a roadblock called the Americas. Columbus found something important but it was not profitable just yet. Chris had not yet proven what he had sailed to prove; that Asia (spices and money) could be reached from Europe by sailing west.
Ferdinand Sean Magellan in 1521 convinced the King of Spain that he could finish the job that Columbus had only started.
In 1521-22 Magellan made it the hard way around the world, by way of the southern tip of South America. FM landed in the Philippines in 1522. The natives welcomed him with a spear through his back. His ship with a few survivors made it back to Spain to a heroes welcome but without the hero's body. Magellan's mission had ended the earth frontier by circling the globe. It took him 20 weeks. Today, the Space Shuttle can do it in 20 minutes.
This brief stopover for victuals and massacre was the basis for Spain's long-term claim to the Philippines. Spain kept the Philippines as a colony for almost 400 years. It always had more control over the north islands, where Christianizing missionary work met with some success. Spain had less success Christianizing the Muslims of the southern islands of Mindanao, Palawar, and Cramisan. The Muslims didn't like the Spanish a whole lot. The Inquisition back home probably didn't help.
THE INSURRECTION
The USA had fought a war to give the Cubans their independence and then denied it to the Philippines.
On February 4, 1899 the forces under Aguinaldo launched a sustained attack on United States Army forces holding the city of Manila. More than 40,000 isurrectos attacked, crying “Yankees Die!” The rebels actually thought they could win.
These insurrectos had already fought hard against the Spanish and felt that the Americans were a softer breed. The Philippino attack was planned to coincide with an uprising inside the city from an Insurrecto political group. The rebs would press the Yanquees from without and upset then from within. The Philippines would be independent in time for the anniversary of the Maine.
The Americans had only 21,000 soldiers vs. 40,000 Philippinos and an internal revolt. But US combat troops were better trained, and had much better weapons. So who do you think won the important Battle of Manila on February 4, 1899?
The American commander in Manila was Brigadier General Willie Otis. History has not been kind to him even though 'The Big O' was never defeated. Otis was not what you'd call a “people person.” The historians imply that a warmer and more shrewd leader might have been able to negotiate with the rebels and perhaps the Insurrection could have been avoided.
Oits had 21,000 US troops, but only 14,000 were first-rate and well organized. They were split into two divisions of 7,000 solders each. One was led by Tom Anderson, the other by Arthur MacArthur, the father of his more famous son, Dugout Doug. These U.S. Army troops were well equipped with cannon and machine-guns, to go along with their powerful but difficult to control Springfield .45 calibre rifles. The standard weapon for the Insurrectionists was the Brown Bess musket.
Surrounding them on all sides but the water side were 40,000, or more by many estimates, angry Philippine insurgents under Aguinaldo. The Philippine had the home field, the numbers, and the morale. All the Americans could count on was superior discipline, training, supply, firepower, plus complete control of the sea.
The Americans stuffed the rebels into a Manila envelope on the 14th. But there would be few dazzling clashes like that to come. The exiting battle of Manila was the exception rather than the rule for the Philippine Insurrection. 2.14.99 was a full scale old-fashioned battle between large concentrated forces. It was a hopeless dream for the American commanders to find many more of these in the next three years.
Naval power helped throughout the war. Whenever the Yanks could force the Philippinos into a box near the water, the Navy would open up on the Rebel positions. There was carnage on the beaches from ship to shore shells.
After this big battle, The Insurrection became a war of terrorism and attrition. Most of the Americans who died in the Philippines over the next three years died alone on lonely village roads, or in two's and three's at various points around the huge archipelago. After the Bunker Hill of Manila, Aguinaldo and his followers knew they couldn't win a pitched battle against American forces.
The fighting and rebellion spread to many of the large islands. Most of the smaller ones escaped the carnage.
The US Army chased Aguinaldo all over the Philippines. The rebels had a government, but they had to keep moving the capitol when the American forces closed in.
Aguinaldo's situation was similar to that of George Washington when he lost at Bunker Hill and then got chased all over the continent while avoiding a pitched battle and conducting rear-guard harassment operations. The main difference in the two cases is that the Philippinos lost.
There were 11 phases in the Insurrection.
1- Battle of Manila – The big clash of February 4, 1899, and the mop up operations after victory.
2- Island Consolidation – To end of February 1899 - Ports on key islands occupied by US forces. Iloilo on Panay. Cebu taken on February 26.
3- Malolos - March 1899 – Rebs lost their capitol of Malolos. General MacArthur (Douggie dadd7) chases the 'government”out of Malolos. Aguinaldo's “government” flees like Dolly Madison in 1813.
4- Cruise to Santa Cruz – April 1899 – General Lawton steams to Laguna Bay and gains control of the important port of Santa Cruz.
5- San Yisidro – April- May 1899 - Rebel force scattered out of the town of San Yisidro by Lawton's' troops. (The town of San Yisidro California was the site of the McDonalds Massacre)
6- Rainstorm – Summer of 99 - The rain lasted from June to October and brought the insurrection to a stuck-in-the-mud stalemate. Minor operations continued on both sides. Monsoon-land was the opposite of classic European war when the summer was fighting season.
7 – Zapote River Rout – June 1899 - US Army smash Insurrectos on June 13, 1899 at the Zapote River. Note the bias in my choice of verbs.
8 – October 1899 - Schwan Song for rebs on Northern Luzon – Generals Wheaton and Schwan attack and disperse or destroy almost all of the Insurrectos on Northern Luzon in October. Two brigades under Brigadier General Crest attack and capture Cavite county and have fewer cavities than other brigades.
9 – Tarlac Taken 11-99 – The rebel stronghold of Tarlac fell on November 12, 1899 to Mac's troops. American newspapers celebrate the Tarlac victory.
10 – Sanjac – November 1899 – General Wheaton landed on the two Insurrrecto held ports of San Fabian and San Jacinto. The battle at San Jacinto on November 12 was a rout in the Yankees favor (A small aircraft carrier in WWII was named after this battle. George HW Bush flew missions off the San Jacinto and was splashed as a Sanjac pilot after a raid on Chi Chi Jima.)
11 - In the later phases, the revolt shifted to the southerly islands. The Mohammedan Moros on Samar and elsewhere inflicted many casualties in the infidels.
CAPTURE OF AGUINALDO – MARCH 23, 1901
The Americans had the most power on the battle-board but they still had to checkmate the king. As long as iconic Emilio the great was on the loose in the Pacific jungles, the Insurrection was not over. Aguinaldo was the moral, political and military leader of the Philippine Insurrection.
But no one knew where EA was. He was the Osama bin Laden of 1900, the bad guy terrorist rebel on the run with his band of political assassins aspiring to be a real army.
The beginning of the end came when one of Aguinaldo's messengers was captured and sang like a parakeet. The traitor's name was Cecilio Segismundo, who claimed later that he only gave his leader away because the Americans tortured him. The Yanks insisted that Cecil had copped out without being physically abused in any way.
For whatever reason, this Segismundo guy tipped the USA to the whereabouts of the little brown king. An elaborate plan was hatched to capture Aguinaldo. It involved intrigue and adventure, employed virtually no military force, and it worked.
The plan to capture Aguinaldo was the brainstorm of Fred Funston, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army. Funston knew that Aguinaldo was hoping to get reinforcements at his headquarters in the town of Palinan in northeastern Luzon. Funston planned a dangerous audacious and deceptive plan to capture Aguinaldo by sending him a fake reinforcement battalion of Isurretos at Palinan.
The mission would be led by Cecil the traitor, and Roberto Lazaro, another dependable Philippino “loyalist.” More importantly, the Yanks hired the Macabeebes, tribesmen who had served Spain when Spain ruled in return for a little autonomy. Working for Uncle Sam was no problem on their conscience. The Macabeebes were the Cossacks of the Philippine Insurrection and had a reputation for fierce fighting. It was a dangerous mission, and they didn't mind.
Arthur MacArthur approved the plan and the fake reinforcement units set sail for Casiguran Bay in Luzon where they landed on Valentine's Day 1901.
The men pretended to be towing American prisoners to deliver to Auguinaldo. The Trojan Horse relief squad marched overland for five weeks, being cheered as heroes by the rebel populace as they passed through. The Macabeebes even hit their prisoners now and then with bamboo sticks to make it look good, something the Yanks didn't appreciate too much.
Word travelled faster than the mission and reached Aguinaldo. He broke into a big grin when he heard that the reinforcements were on the way. He was especially pleased to hear that the relief party had five American prisoners, including a prize officer. Emilio sent some of his best fighters out to meet the party in advance and take charge of the American prisoners. Cecil Funston and Laz had to think fast when Aguinaldo's scouts approached.
The fake Insurrectos quickly hid the fake prisoners in the jungle and claimed that the PW's had never left the beach, and were “in a cage back at Casiguran Bay.” Augie's scouts bought that line. The brown saps continued on towards Casiguran Bay to pick up the prisoners who weren't there while the Trojan Horse relief battalion marched on towards Aguinaldo's crib with the fake prisoners.
Cecil, Laz and company entered Aguinaldo's village with the prisoners in chains. They showed off their glum Yanks. The rebel leader Aguinaldo was on the second floor of his HQ looking out the window as he saw the reinforcement brigade enter the square below. The fake rebels lowered their guns and began to make small talk talk with the real rebels in the square while a small party under Cecil and Laz went upstairs to greet and chat with Emilio. Aguinaldo thanked them profusely. They all hugged him and said that no one will rest until the dirty Yankees are booted out of the Philippines. Emilio smiled warmly and made a joke. They all began to joke around about little things. Aguinaldo was laughing as Laz went to the window and watched below as his Macabeebe double agents wandered about while slyly positioning themselves behind the real Insurrectos. Laz gave a signal from the window. The Macabeebes made their move, attacking some, shooting some, throwing some to the ground, and getting others to raise their hands in surrender.
Aguinaldo heard the shooting in the middle of his chatting and ran angrily to the window to tell his men to stop shooting rounds like it is was a drunken party. He didn't realize what was going on until Cecil and Laz threw him to the ground and put him in a sleeper hold until he said “Uncle Sam.” A few loyal rebels tried to break into the room to save Aguinaldo but Placido and Cecilio shot them down.
Just moments after Aguinaldo realized that he had been tricked, the American decoy PW Frederick Funston entered the room and said, “You are being taken prisoner in the name of the United States.” Since Placido and Laz were sitting on his back at the time, Emilio decided not to dispute it.
Aguinaldo surrendered formally and within an hour seemed at ease with the whole situation. At least now he might live for a while. Being the 1 bandito was dangerous work. The Yanks and the Macs brought him in chains to Manila on March 28. On April 28 Aguinaldo took an oath of loyalty to the United States and asked his followers to do the same. No more chains. Aguinaldo later emigrated to the USA, lived to be almost 80 years old, and died in Hammondsport NY in 1953 as the proud owner of two wine vineyards.
The Insurrection did not end just like that, right then and there, but the capture of Aguinaldo was the watershed event in the conflict. But there was much bloody sporadic fighting to go yet, but from now on Sam had the momentum.
With their fearless leader captured, the Insurrectos still had plenty to fight for, but their cause became a ship without a rudder.
Fred Funston won the Medal of Honor for capturing Emilio with his treacherous scheme. Funston became a famous a national hero. The colorful Funston might have gone down as one of the most famous Americans if he had just lived a little longer.
When American entered World War I, President Wilson named Funston to command the AEF, the American Expeditionary Force. Just as he was about to sail for the front, Fred Funston died of a heart attack in his office.
The prestigious job of heading the AEF went to General Jack Pershing, a far less lovable or charismatic man than Funston. Pershing is a thousand times more famous than Fred Funston, but it could have been the other way around.
Fred earned his Medal of Honor. If the Insurrectos had foiled the plan, they would have used Funston's body as a machete holder.
The Spanish Insurrection cost the US 4,000 plus killed in action, and only half as many wounded, an eerie stat.
The three-year battle gave the United States Army a lot of experience, a lot more than the Spanish-American War did. Not a single organized unit of the regular U.S. Army did not see some service in the Philippine Insurrection.
In a way the Insurrection saved the U.S. Army from being mothballed back into its prewar condition. People thought, 'Look at how much the military had been needed. Now we need them more than ever to protect our new overseas possessions.' Years of jungle fighting had given the Army a sense of pride, unity of purpose and brotherhood it had not possessed in all of American history. The Civil War had been complete nation disunity. The other previous wars had been divided affairs without a unanimous sense of a clear noble mission in any of them. The US Army guys in the Philippines fought hard, hated the enemy, believed in the mission and got a lot of partisan press coverage. After the war it was not going to be easy to retire these Army units to quiet American frontier posts. America was now an international player and its troops were developing a sense of a national mission to do good for the world, not just their country. The golden age of peace between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War was to be a one-shot-deal.
Over 20,000 Philippine fighters went down to US machine guns, bombs and bayonets. The cruelties on the Island of Samaar were so severe that after the war any officer who had served on Samaar would be announced as such when entering a room and the other officers would stand!
Almost every general history book since 1960 stresses the acts of American cruelties during the Philippine Insurrection and completely ignore the fact that the atrocities were committed on both sides.
There is no doubt that the fighting in this War after the War was as savage as anything in American history. It was My Lai 1968 in 1901. Children would bait American troops into death traps and American soldiers started shooting civilians and then start interrogating them. Americans employed water torture on Philippino captives, trying to get information out of them by blowing up their stomachs with water till their tattoos were illegible.
The enemy was just as cruel. Americans were tied up exposed in the hot sun and left to die from the bites of millions of ferocious hungry ants. American Army men trapped in ambushes were hacked to death with machetes and bolos (the Filipino knife) after they surrendered. Units sent out to rescue their U.S. buddies found only body parts. Fresh white heads were posted all over the place. This was not your European style war. This was men on both sides turning into base animals, and now how the hell am I supposed to get to sleep tonight?
THE DEBATE OVER THE PHILIPPINES
Throughout the Spanish-Philippine-American War of 1898-1902 a great debate between the liberals and the conservatives took place in America. The liberals condemned U.S. occupation of the Philippines and many also condemned our War with Spain that brought the Philippine situation on Sam's shoulders.
The Republican conservatives were now the newly converted internationalists, who thought that it was the duty of an advanced nation like the United States to watch over the Philippines, who were not yet ready for independence.
We've heard this kind of language before. Like when the South (and doughfaces in the North) claimed that the “blacks weren’t ready for freedom,” meaning the right to vote. We hear this over and over about the Philippines as history books written in the occupation years validate it as a good thing. They just weren't ready for independence.
Well, who was to say when they were ready?
Another question should be examined. Did the Philippines deserve independence just because someone else wins a war for them? If they can’t win their own war, then maybe they should just take their lumps until they can. Independence is something you earn, like as in Yorktown. It wasn’t handed to America by an avuncular great power. France helped but the point is the same.
Both sides of the debate over the fruits of the Spanish-American War were trying for the unobtainable.
They wanted a happy balance between military glory and benevolent civilizing of the defeated peoples. The parallels are not unlike the present day (2010) crisis in Iraq where the USA is an occupying force in a foreign land after going to war with a third country that was oppressing a smaller one. Now, how do we please and appease the natives and occupy them at the same time? Hmmmm.
Probably the only realistic argument that can be found for keeping the Philippines as a prize was that in the dog-eat-dog world of 1900, one of the predator European powers would have gobbled up the Philippines in about 9 minutes after the last US U.S. warship left the Cavite naval yard. The US would have been weaker in the world because Germany or Britain or France would have been that much stronger. What's more, American combat glory and sacrifice would have gone un-rewarded.
Alfred Mahan had just written a very influential book that planted in American mind the idea that the USA needed a Pacific empire and that it should be based in Hawaii and the Philippines. That was written before the war, and now here was a contemporary opportunity to get the Philippines that was better than anything Mahan could have dreamed about. The United States could be benevolent towards Cuba, ostensibly nice to the Philippine people, and gets a world empire at the same time.
At home the political battle lines were drawn on this volatile foreign policy issue. The Election of 1900 was largely a referendum on whether to keep the Philippines, or withdraw. To turn them over to anyone else would mean winning the war as interventionists and then departing as isolationists in the next breath.
McKinley was torn but in the end decided to keep the Philippines. He claimed that he got the word directly from God after three sleepless night. Maybe it was a hallucination from sleep deprivation.
The acquisition of the Philippines was arguably the biggest mistake in the history of the USA.
If the United States had never taken full possession of the Philippines it is quite possible that Japan would never have attacked Pearl Harbor and that the USA would not have entered World War II as an active combatant.
It was the Philippines that converted the United States into a Pacific power and it was in the determination to maintain that power that brought America on a collision course with Japan.
The question arose ‘Does the Constitution follow the flag?’ This meant do the natives of the Americanized Philippine territories have the same legal rights as Americans back in the states? Did the primitive native on one of the remote Philippine Islands have the right to sue his neighbor or demand a trial by jury when accused?
Early Supreme Court decisions seemed to favor the idea that the Puerto Ricans and natives of the Philippines did not have anything close to the same rights as US citizens.
The Spanish-American War inspired the same sort of home front anti-imperialism protest that was hurled against W over Iraq.
In 1899 noted educator and philosopher William Graham Sumner gave a lecture, printed in the Yale Law Review. The title of his speech says it all, The Conquest of the United States by Spain. Here’s a couple of juicy clips as he lived up to the liberal courage of an earlier Sumner named Charles.
“We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies. …
“The war with Spain was precipitated upon us headlong, without reflection or deliberation, and without any due formulation of public opinion. Whenever a voice was raised in behalf of deliberation and the recognized maxims of statesmanship, it was howled down in a storm of vituperation and cant. Everything was done to make us throw away sobriety of thought and calmness of judgment and to inflate all expressions with sensational epithets and turgid phrases. It cannot be denied that everything in regard to the war has been treated in an exalted strain of sentiment and rhetoric very unfavorable to the truth. At present the whole periodical press of the country seems to be occupied in tickling the national vanity to the utmost by representations about the war which are extravagant and fantastic.”
W. G. Sumner was an interesting character. He was a leftist on foreign policy buy scary right on economics. In fact he was famous as a leading force in socio-economic Darwinism, preaching the idea that those who were poor deserved to be, and those who were rich should not be condemned for it or punished through taxation. He wrote that laissez-faire “should be translated bluntly into ‘Mind Your Own Business.' ”
WHY DID THE USA KEEP THE PHILIPPINES?
When McKinley was debating about whether to give in to the great national clamor for war, he said that the answer came to him in a dream. McKinley said that God spoke to him and told him he had to do this for the good of mankind.
One historian believes that the tale of the inspired dream was a later invention by a supportive reporter and the McKinley had long made up his mind that he was going to keep the Philippines. The tortured McKinley's conscience may have been a ruse to just make it look good that this was no easy decision. The President may have been waiting for public opinion and Congressional support to grow in strength before making his move.
Another reason the USA kept the Philippines comes down to what might be called a “Samoa complex.” One witness to the negotiations at Paris that settled the Spanish-American War testified that the Samoa episode of 1889 was very much on the minds of the American delegation.
Back in 89 the Americans had occupied one of the Samoan islands and became entangled in a three way competition with Britain and Germany. Each had one of the islands and claimed control over the Samoan Islands as a unit. There was a chance of a shooting war breaking out between Britian and Germany and also between the USA and Germany.
The three navies were on the verge of hostilities when a typhoon hit the Samoan islands and put the warships up on the beach. War was averted and a treaty was drawn up settling the Samoan crisis peacefully.
But the Samoan crisis, forgotten today and scoffed at as crucial here now by most historians, was still very fresh in 1899. Back then it was only ten years ago and there weren't two world wars to drown out its memory. The entire American mind-set was about great power rivalries and the US need to stand up for itself a little better this time.
McKinley probably would have kept the main island of Luzon anyway, but the Samoan experience motivated him to keep the entire archipelago. Clearly, if the United States had kept Luzon and let the other islands be, the other Europeans in the Pacific would have moved in. There could have been a multiple entanglement in the Philippines between the Yanks, the Philippinos, the Brits, the Germans, and perhaps the Chinese, with Japanese and Spanish looming for good measure. Who knows how many countries could end up with an island of their own in the Philippines? It might have made the Euro-carving up of China look like weak imperialism by comparison.
LIBERAL FOREIGN POLICY GOES SPLATT WITH PLATT
The Platt Amendment cancelled out all the lefty good will engendered by the Teller Amendment, and made the United States an imperialist power over Cuba.
The Teller Amendment made is US policy to not keep Cuba after liberating it from Spain.
But after a lot of re-thinking in the national mind-set, after Americans faced the reality of becoming a colonial power in the Pacific, it was time to make some adjustments to Teller.
Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut proposed a rider to the 1901 Arm Appropriations Bill that declared that the United States would maintain control over Cuban foreign policy and reserved the right of US military intervention if Cuba did anything that Washington didn't like. Furthermore the United States was to award itself a large Naval base in Cuba, free of charge. That is how the USA got its mitts on Guantanamo, where is still sits legally thanks to Platt, but immorally by standards of common sense. The only right thing to do is give it back, just like the British gave Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1999. Elect me President and I will give Guantanamo back to the Cuban people immediately!
Today, the United States uses Guantanamo to hold political prisoners without trial indefinitely because 'Gitmo' is a political non-entity. It isn't part of the United States so it doesn't have to abide by any American laws. It is whatever the current administrations wants to use it to be. America gave the Panama Canal back to the Panamanians, so what's the story? You can say it's because Cuba went Communist and still remains Communist (in a world that had discarded Communism everywhere else), but that point doesn't hold up considering how long the US held on to Cuba when Castro was only a gleam in his father's eye.
“GAVELSTON, OH GAVELSTON, I AM SO AFRAID OF DYING”
There was a hit song by the name of Gavelston with that line in the lyrics. It is a sweet lovely tune, but on September 8 1901 it was a line recited by Gavelstonians in pure horror and reality. The Gavelston Texas Hurricane of 1901 was the worst natural disaster in the history of the country.
If quizzed, a lot of people today off the top of their heads would say that Katrina was the worst natural disaster in American history. But Gavelston beats Katrina by at least four to one. 1,879 people perished in the Katrina floods and rains. Gavelston took 10,633 people to meet the Lord.
OMG!
The Gavelston Hurricane had sustained winds of 135 miles per hour and the storm surge completely inundated the city. The city literally disappeared from the face of the earth for about seven hours! The tops of a few trees and one church steeple was all that was visible at one point and then the steeple when down and Gavelston did not exist except for Captain Nemo.
The only good thing that came out of it was a new national movement for reform in city government. Aftermath studies concluded that the slipshod city government of Gavelston was partly responsible for the hell-high death toll. A more responsible city government could have got the word out faster and saved many lives. Other cities that resisted reform in city government had to face reminders of how dangerous it was to have big boss irresponsible rule. If it could happen to Gavelston it could happen to Chicago.
IDAHO MINERS STRIKE 1899
In the middle of the Spanish-American War a nasty strike took place in northern Idaho between the Western Mineworkers Union and the United Mine-owners Association. It was the usual issues, pay cuts, layoffs, and working conditions.
At one point the strikers floated a homemade boat-bomb down a river into a building, blowing it up with a Hollywood-worthy explosion. At another point the strikers fatally shot a man named Kneebone for refusing to join the union. From this point on, workers were threatened with being ‘kneeboned’ if they didn’t join up. The strike was settled but with enough bitterness left over that six years later a mine-owner opened a Christmas package received in the mail and celebrated his last holiday with a bang.
BOOKSWORMS
YELLOW KID/VEBLEN/GILMAN
Time for a look at the books.
In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a landmark work on the history of female liberation in 1898 titled Women and Economics. WE was groundbreaking at the time for it challenged the male dominance of society. Sweet Charlotte protested the demeaning relegation of females to the role of sexuality and motherhood, a mere supporting appendage of the male leader in the home or workplace. Gilman was recently voted the sixth most influential woman of the 20th century (Beatrice Arthur finished fifth.)
Gilman's personal life was not as happy a story as her achievements for humanity. Charlotte was hospitalized for nervous exhaustion before she wrote her fine and highly readable book, and she killed herself while afflicted with cancer late in life, the latter something anyone might do, but not everyone does the Tom Eagleton impression.
THE “LEISURE CLASS”
An important and famous book was published in 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Theodore Veblen. Like most writers, Veblen was just a guy who understood that as long as he could continue to write about something, anything, and get it published, he would never have to work for a living. Why do you think I’m writing this book right now?
His book, like all philosophical books, is a bunch of dartboard jive, pretending with sound writing to have a concrete grasp on issues that are anything but concrete. Every phrase in his book can be (and was) dissected and disputed endlessly by the lazy coffeehouse intellectual elitists, just as easily as he dissected other non-concrete theories to begin with.
There is a book called The Tyranny of Words, by Stuart Chase, simply the best and most important book I have ever read. Chase was a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. Stuey contends that every person puts a different interpretation on every political or philosophical word, so argument is pointless since no one agrees on the referents. We all know what a word like ‘pencil’ means, but when it comes to words like socialism, fascism, capitalism, government, aggression, free trade, democracy, and a thousand other political terms, everyone has their own take.
In conclusion Chase concludes that all philosophical and religious argument, to name only two categories, are a complete waste of time. About 98% of all political argument is hot air too. That's how Chase saw it.
The great philosophers are just a bunch of windbags who want to beat the system and not work for a living. That’s the only great philosophy. Beat the system by writing and talking about it. Even if you don't change a thing, you slip through the cracks and die with a well rested smile on your face.
Whenever I read a general history I try to read it all. No cheating by skipping the boring chapters. But every textbook has to include chapters that are as hard to get through as the Himalayas. When I turn the last page of the source notes from an interesting chapter and see the next chapter is ‘Philosophical trends,’ or ‘Religious thought’, or ‘new patterns in education’ my heart sinks to my shoes. It’s going to take a week to get though this when the same amount of material if interesting would take a day. I’d almost rather watch a sit-com than read this stuff! I don't mean to be cruel, but sometimes it gets that bad.
Care for a tiny sample? Here from A History of the Republic is a paragraph from the chapter ‘Minds in Transition.’ They are discussing the great philosopher William James and then the great John Dewey. If you can get anything useful out of this passage then you are way ahead of me on the bell curve,
“James developed his case against the “awfully
monotonous” Spencerian universe, wrote a
brilliant exposition on the active role of mind
.. and later expounded his views on pragmatism.
… He regards theories as “instruments, not
answers to enigmas.” Pragmatism “has no
dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.”
… James declared that ‘the true is the name of
whatever proves itself to be good in the way of
belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable
reasons,” he laid himself open to the charge that
pragmatism was only a high-sounding name for
vulgar expediency: anything is good that works.
The same charge was later leveled at John
Dewey’s “instrumentalism,” another version of
the pragmatic philosophy. Starting out as an
idealist, Dewey had been converted to pragmatism
in the late 1890’s after reading James, but soon the
disciple began to influence the master. Far more
than James, Dewey believed in the intelligence as
a tool for social reform.”
Is it any wonder that the first thing most college students do after they graduate is to stop reading college textbooks for the rest of their lives? They survive the courses, they get their diplomas and that’s the end of that. A used 350 page novel at a flea market goes for three dollars. A used 750 page mint-condition college textbook goes for 50 cents. You want to know why? The above passage is instructive - because it is not.
NEWSPAPERS
When Grant was President there were 600 daily papers in the USA. When McKinley left office in a box there were more than 2,600. Newspapers were evolving in the McKinley era from responsible journals for the learned into rags for common people on the go. Their role in egging-on the Spanish American War has been sadly noted.
The three newspaper kings were Charles Dana of the New York Sun, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal. Dana Sun started it, and then Pulitzer World copied him and out did Dana Sun at his own game. Then Hearst Journal had to copy Pulitzer World and out-yellowed JP. (the contrived last names are deliberate repeats to help me and you remember it better. It's hard to remember which rag is run by which jackal.)
The term ‘yellow journalism’ derived from a comic strip character called ‘The Yellow Kid’ who did his thing in both Hearst and Pulitzers dailies, and the strip was painted in yellow.
Part of the problem was the rise in profits from newspaper advertising. Good publishers wanted large readerships and fine journalism, but the twin goals were mutually exclusive. Big companies with expensive ads only cared about large readerships.
The largest readerships commanded the highest price for ads and the lowest journalism attracted the largest readerships. The formula fell into place and the intellectual was the loser across the board, from the moralist publisher who went bankrupt to the sophisticated reader who stopped buying the 2 cent paper, but whose money was not missed. The formula is still in place today in all aspects of media.
The smart person money is the dumb money, and the dumb person money is the smart money.
Put the five smartest people in any town in a room to test products. Whatever they like is doomed to disaster. Print and manufacture anything they hate.
MR DOOLEY
Many newspapers carried a cartoon strip called Mr. Dooley by artist/writer Peter Finley Dunne. Mr Dooley was a cartoon Irish-American pub owner who had pithy and earthy things to say about politics and things in general. Mr. Dooley was more popular than Donesbury was in the 1980's and I wonder if Doonesbury was a name chosen to sound like Dooley.
The national leaders paid attention to what was said in the Dooley strips, and TR even laughed sometimes when the character criticized him and his policies.
The big gimmick in Mr Dooley was his brutally bad English. You had to translate to misspeak to follow it, if you get my drift, ef u git ma druft.
Every historian constantly quotes what Mr Dooley had to say about every political issue.
I hate Mr Dooley. I wish the historians wouldn't quote him. That awful misspeak quotation business is as about as unpleasant a read as anyone can concoct for this reader. Every time an historian quotes Mr. Dooley I write something very impolite in the margins about it. It's like then they quote slaves or hillbillies and every word is misspelled. I'd rather watch a bad TV ad 30 times in row than try to decipher another lame Mr Dooley quote. The quotes are, like poetry and music quotes, always superfluous. They add zero to the understanding. The historians only quote Mr. Dooley to show off their well rounded command of everything going on in the era, not because it adds anything.
Frank Vandiver said this about humor. “Humor is like ready money, it serves its time.” That's right. No one I know is listening to comedy albums from the 1950's. No one. And I am in the comedy business. Mr Dooley quotations are an inconsiderate, irrelevant, disjointed annoying burden needlessly placed upon the reader to serve only the selfish goals of the writer. The reader gains nothing but a raging desire to hurl the book into a raging fireplace.
Mr. Dooley is anachronistic irritating garbage. It worked in 1902. It doesn't work anymore. Gaf et ar rist fureva, wol ye plees er a'll gow ti yer huse in sit di bildan un fiya. That sample that is easier to follow than the Mr. Dooley quotes. I'm trying to exaggerate it and I can't. Mr Dooley is worse than the exaggeration.
CHINA AND THE OPEN DOOR
The First World War was eventually fought on the European continent, but the rivalries that led up to it were played out elsewhere for two decades or more prior to 1914. China was a center for this international rivalry at the turn of the century.
China had just lost a major war with Japan in 1894-5. The ruling Manchu Dynasty was in decline and China was politically weak and disunited. It had no military power because warlords ruling their own quasi-independent kingdoms were too busy fighting internally among themselves.
The Europeans were carving up China into 'spheres of influence,' a euphemism for rank imperialism.
In Europe, England, France, Germany and Russia kept the local peace and accepted their respective boundaries, but at the same time they battled for imperialist boundary adjustments in the far corners of the globe. The sparring war leading up the Great War was made up of distant sparks of proxy conflict like those of the post-World War II era between the USSR and USA, that could have led to the Great Great War.
In China we find a complex mix of conflicts and negotiations both between the European powers and with the Chinese governments. Note the 's.'
Russia had a malevolent control over Manchuria, acquired at the point of a Romanov sickle. The Tsar had acquired an agreement (concession under threat) from China to build a railway across the heart of Siberia. This would save a trans-Siberian Russian railroad a staggering amount of mileage on its trips to and from the Pacific Russian port of Vladivostok
Japan was clashing with Russia as both tried to acquire predominance in Manchuria. Japan had already taken Korea from China. Germany had an exploitive economic preeminence in the province of Shantung, and a lease on the port of Kiachow. The British had control of Hong Kong and other southeast ports of China. The French had a grip of the extreme south of China including a min-empire in what is today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The only nation that had no say in what happened to China was China. Fueled by a racism that justified their deeds, the Euros were carving up China at such a pace that it was generally accepted that in time that entire country would be gobbled up and administered by someone with an Anglo-Saxon or Slavic face. Little wonder that an anti-foreign explosion was brewing in the land of Confucius.
In 1899 Secretary of State John Hay, worried that the USA was going to be squeezed out of the China trade by the complete consummation of the country by predatory powers, proposed what he called the ‘Open Door’ policy. By this policy the USA was asking all of the imperialist powers of the world to respect equal trading rights for all nations within their spheres of interest.
Americans worried about the China trade. It was widely believed in the United States that the country was growing too rapidly for its staggering output of industrial and agricultural goods. America, like Hitler later, felt it needed economic lebensraum and that without foreign markets such as China, the U.S. economy would suffocate.
Religious organizations also pressured the McKinley administration. The US had a large number of missionaries in China. There was fear that with China divided into spheres of interest, none of which included the United States, the Europeans would squeeze the American missionaries out. The Hay-Mac Open Door note (or ‘open the door’) was sent to six European countries asking their agreement that trade with all countries be respected within these various spheres of dominance ('influence' was a euphemism.)
Specifically the United States was to maintain its 'most favored nation' status regardless of who occupied what port, railroad or territory. America wanted all the money to be gained from China but without any political or military entanglements, and without the stigma of being one of the sea hawks. Hay had no intention of preventing or even protesting the Euro-bully partitioning of China. Uncle Sam was the little red hen that wanted the yen, without the hard work of imperialism.
The Hay Open Door policy was no friendly gesture towards China as some fools later contended. Hay was simply representing the mugger who wants the wallet to be divided fairly among the thieves. And the United States hadn’t even been there at the robbery.
The European nations gave vague lip service to Hay's proposal, refusing to make any concrete commitment to it. On March 20, 1900 Hay announced that the six nations had given their ‘definite’ agreement. This was a total bluff and an exaggeration. In truth Russia had pretty much said no, Italy said yes, and the rest, France, Britain, Germany and Japan gave vague lip service, a virtual a nolo contendre at best. They wouldn't contest the Open Door idea and wouldn't approve it either. They would continue on and hope the open door would get blown shut by all the hot air.
A new turn of events changed the China setting in the summer of 1900. An underground organization of defiant young Chinese called the ‘Boxers” by the West (a derivation from their own title of the “Heavenly Fists” or “Harmonious Righteous Fists”) began attacking all foreigners over China. There were murders and beatings galore. Suddenly it was not safe to walk the streets of China with round eyes and western clothes. Thousands of Euros bit the Chinese dust, and many missionaries met the Lord. Many Franciscan Friars fried.
The center of the rebellion was at Peking, where the Boxers were best organized. They surrounded the foreign legation at Peking and tried to overpower it by military force. The European rivals in the foreign settlement became close allies in a hurry. The united foreign legations fought the Boxers off for 55 days to save their lives. If the Boxers broke through the barricades it would mean Chinese justice and as is well known, “Chinese justice is swift.”
A rescue mission of united Europeans landed at Tientsin and marched overland to rescue the beleaguered garrison. 2,500 American troops were included in the relief army. The overland march to Peking succeeded and the white foreign devils were saved. Among the Americans that had been trapped in Peking was future President Herbert Hoover.
After the rescue the situation for China got worse. Now the Chinese had to pay an enormous indemnity to the European nations and lost all hope to throw the foreigners out. Now the Chinese were branded as the bullies, and western newspaper readers could root for the home team against China without moral guilt, which was certainly not true before Boxer.
The open door policy was probably a long-term mistake, for it committed the US to protecting the territorial integrity of China at a time that no one else was taking up that task. It was this sudden patronizing concern for China’s welfare that brought the United States to war with Japan in 1941, when the true initial motive was more selfish than moralistic. America became entrapped in the Pacific War because it bought its own publicity, which is always a mistake. The open door policy became part of U.S. political heritage now, so when Japan invaded China in 1937 it was taken as an act of aggression against a vague Pacific system of alliances even though China had understandably never reciprocated the alliance sentiment.
This mistaken perception of an historical friendship between the two countries led to a shock in Washington when China became Communist in 1949 and then attacked US troops in the Korean intervention. The friendship America saw as genuine, the Chinese viewed as condescension, even if it was the lesser of evils compared to the overt conquest and occupation by the other western thugs.
CENTRAL AMERICAN CANAL DEVELOPMENTS
“Hey hey - ho ho – Clayton-Bulwer has got to go”
That was in essence the chant at the State Department when it came to the Central American canal issue.
Britain and the US had agreed by the CB Treaty that any ocean- to-ocean canal in the Americas would be co-built and co-owned by these two nations alone together.
But England’s need for a trans-isthmus canal was diminishing while America’s need was growing. Both states had equal rights with unequal interests, so something had to give. One thing was certain. The US now wanted exclusive ownership and control over the canal.
The Hays-Pauncefote treaty, signed by both countries on February 5, 1900 was supposed to settle the matter. By its terms the US won the privilege of building and owning the canal and of collecting profits from it, could not fortify it and would be obliged to keep the canal open to all ships (military as well as commercial) of all nations at all times; in times of war as well as peace. This meant that if the USA was at war with say France and Germany, it would have to allow the battleships of those nations to pass through the canal so they could invest San Francisco and Seattle. From the west Japan could send its fleet through the other way to bombard New York City. It was obviously a ridiculous concept.
Now Europe was the little red hen. The USA was to bake the bread so that everyone else could eat it. Both US Houses of Congress said no. The House had more on the ball in voting on this treaty than did the State Department did in negotiating it in the first place.
The Capitol gang first voted Hayes-Pauncefote down overwhelmingly. Next, they added amendments to it. Then they approved it. The amendments did not specifically say that the United states could fortify and defend the canal but the original clause stating it could not fortify was deleted.
This time it was Britain that rejected the treaty.
Under Ted Roosevelt this treaty would be fixed up and mutually passed.
ELECTION OF 1900
The three issues of 1900 were imperialism, the trusts, and the currency. The Democrats were split over currency, but united in opposition to the other two. They wanted something drastic done about the power and evils of corporate combinations, and were dead set against keeping of the Philippines.
The currency split within the Democrats made William Jennings Bryan a difficult choice in 1900. WJ had already lost in 1896 and now he was hanging onto a stale argument. The nation was no longer so passionate in advocating the mass coining of silver. Many new goldfields had been discovered since 1896 so it was hard to continue yelling that “you shall not hang this country on a cross of gold.” A lot of people hung gold around their necks and fingers. They weren't mad for silver like madman Bryan, at least no anymore.
So many Democrats were against the silver plank of 00 that they became known as “Gold Democrats.” These Gold bugs agreed with the Bryanites on the anti-US imperialism plank, but they did not advocate the free coinage of silver. When Bryan won the nomination, many Gold Democrats still supported him, but a great many others bolted the party and supported Mark (R) Hannah for president.
The Republicans were fairly well united for McKinley, but there was still the Vice President spot. Hobart was out. Who would replace him? A lot of names were passed around. One of them was Roosevelt, the governor of New York.
Mark Hannah didn't like the idea. Hannah liked to control the Party and he knew that TR was a wild animal who could never be controlled. Hannah also knew, however, that the Vice Presidency was a political dead end (unlike today.) Since he didn't care for Roosevelt and knew that TR was a young and powerful Republican figure on the rise, Hannah calculated that getting Roosevelt into the VP spot would cage the animal for a good long stretch. Furthermore, Boss Platt of New York was complaining that he couldn't control his own state party because of Roosevelt's impetuous independence. Platt was all in favor of giving Roosevelt the Vice Presidency, just to get him out of New York.
The party also appreciated that Roosevelt was a fabulous campaigner and speechmaker, and was very popular in the west. TR could get in the cage, get out of New York, and help McKinley win the election. The only roadblock might be getting TR to agree to it. Roosevelt was not an intellectual giant but he wasn't stupid, and knew that the Vice Presidency was no stepping stone to higher political ambition. Veep might not be a good career move for Teddy, and besides, he enjoyed being governor of New York, his beloved home state.
Roosevelt gave in and took the spot because, after all, it was still the perception of great power even if it wasn't.
Voter turnout in the election of 1900 was 73.2 percent of eligible voters. Turnout in later 20th century elections was around 50 percent [CBS]. In 1900 the same two heavyweights slugged it out that had fought in 1896.
So it was McKinley vs. Bryan in a rematch like Cleveland-Harrison and Eisenhower-Stevenson. McKinley beat WJB again in roughly similar final stats. McKinley won the Battle of 1900 by a 292-155 score. Bryan could not even take his home state of Nebraska. The Silver issue hurt the Democrats, while war milked the natural feeling of patriotism that conquest creates. When a country loses a war, the left wins at home, when it wins, whether the war was right or wrong, the right wins at home.
The negative liberal reaction to the conquest of the Philippines was serious indeed, and there were more newspapers condemning America for its imperialism in the Spanish-American war, than newspapers defending it. But the election proved, at it would later in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004 that liberals always make majority of the noise but only sometimes command a majority of the votes.
The Democrats campaigned with confidence. One Senator told a crowd in Toledo that “After March 4, Mrs. Bryan will be sleeping in the White House.' A heckler yelled, “Only if she's planning on sleeping with McKinley!” The crowd laughed and the senator seethed.
The Prohibitionists lost 55,000 votes since the last time they ran a guy, which was in 1892. John C Woolley could only find 200 thousand voters in 1900. It was a sobering experience for their movement.
Bryan was also the candidate of the Populist Party, but they had shrunk quite a bit since 1896 and weren't courted much anyway.
The economy helped McKinley. The depression, which began in 1893, was receding under McKinley and was over by 1899, largely due to a steady rise in the price of wheat. The wheat crop that year in Europe was weak and once again ‘Europe’s distress was Americas’ success.’ Major discoveries of gold in Alaska, Australia and South Africa produced the mass-coin inflation that the “Silverbugs” had always wanted rendering the silver issue useless.
In March of 1900 McKinley put the US on the gold standard officially with the passage of the Gold Standard Act. The USA would remain on the gold standard until taken off it by Richard “Silver Dick” Nixon.
SPA 00
The Socialist Party of America was formed in 1900. The three leading men were Mo Hillquit (‘He’ll never quit’), Vic Berger, a German immigrant from Milwaukee, and Eugene Debs. These are the three giants of US Socialist History, and if they had carve a Mount Marxmore in the Dakotas, their faces would be on it. I’ll leave the fourth spot open for consideration.
The SPA had little to say in the election of 1900 but became a formidable force over the next two decades.
BOOKER T AND THE NAACP 1901
One of the finest and most enjoyable books I have ever read is Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington, published in 1901. Washington is a controversial figure in Black History because of his accommodating and passive attitude towards a white society considered oppressive and abusive by other black intellectuals.
I had been warned so many times that this guy is the ultimate 'step ‘n fetch it' Sambo, that I was pleasantly surprised to read a brilliant and warm account of an individual's life. Washington says little about advocating passivity and cooperation with white racism. His crime is more in the realm of omission. He simply is not preoccupied with white racism, the unfair treatment of blacks, or agitation to change any laws, state or federal to advance the cause. Booker T. simply felt that first you learn a skill or a trade and make yourself a valued and productive member of the community, then later on you take on the legal and sociological issues of racism.
The opposite of BTW was W. E. B. Du Bois, a more militant (and thoroughly Marxist) Black writer whose brilliant works included ‘The Souls of Black Folks,’ Black Reconstruction in America, and the masterpiece Whitey Got Ta Go.
The Web vs Wash ideological split was a fight between a lovable carpenter and an angry scholar. I’m confident that if I were a black man in 1900 I would have gone over to the Du Bois camp. It was a dichotomy similar to Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X in the 60's.
PASSING OF HARRISON
During McKinley’s last year in office and on earth former President Benjamin Harrison passed away (March 13 1901) in Indianapolis. Coincidentally, 100 years later Marvin Harrison was a star player on the Indianapolis Colts.
ASSASSINATION 9.6.01
McKinley’s Secretary, a Mr. George Cortelyou was concerned about the President’s trip to Buffalo in September of 1901 for the Pan-American Exposition. Cortelyou did not like the idea of a scheduled public reception where the President would mingle with a mob of strangers. George cancelled the event. But McKinley was a gregarious man and when he found out about the cancellation he had it rescinded. He told Cortelyou that, “no one would want to hurt me.”
McKinley started the trip by visiting Niagara Falls. Bill would not cross completely over to the other side because he did not want to be the first President ever to leave the country. He would be ‘crossing over’ sooner than he thought.
On September 5, 1901, Mac gave a significant speech in which he abandoned the Party’s long-standing high tariff position. He said that this was a new world in which America could not function in a self-contained mercantilist manner. There was too much product in America. Overseas markets would have to be found. In order to maintain these markets, America would have to open its doors to much reciprocal free trade.
After the speech McKinley went into the crowd and shook hands with as many constituents as he could in 15 minutes. Tomorrow’s assassin was in the crowd on the 5th, but did not pull the trigger. It was a Taxi Driver moment.
September 6 was doomsday. The man who murdered William McKinley camouflaged his tiny derringer pistol by pretending to have an injured hand covered with bandages. The secret servicemen near McKinley were lulled by this trick. When McKinley approached Leon Czolgosz in the receiving line outside of the Grand Music Hall it was too late. Leon offered his left hand to shake McKinley and Mac seeing the bandaged right hand, offered his own right, but at an angle to accommodate the left of Czolgosz. When the two hands were a few inches apart the first shot rang out hitting the President in the breast. The second shot followed fast. The gun position was the same, but McKinley had reacted to the first hit by leaping a little bit in the air and this motion cost him his life. The little jump caused the second bullet to hit a lower and more vital area near the president's abdomen. McKinley spun to the left and collapsed backwards into a chair.
“Am I shot?” he asked Cortelyou who had rushed to help him.
Cortelyou held up his bloody hand and said, “I’m afraid so, Mr. President.”
Immediately after the shots rang out two men standing near Czolgosz hurled the assassin to the ground. One was a Secret Serviceman. The other hero was an African-American waiter.
The kindly president cried out to his security people to not hurt his assailant. What's up with that? I would have told them to beat him to a pulp. I guess McKinley was a kind man.
McKinley died a week later, on September 14, 1901. His last words were whispered to his beloved wife, “Good-by all, good-by. It is God’s way. His will be done.”
The lunatic Leon Czolgosz later gave his motive as the desire to kill a famous ruler. He was convicted in a short trial and electrocuted.
As of this writing only one President has been assassinated in the last 109 years. There is knowledge of the threat in the average American mind but that is all. It's not a looming terror based on recent experience, To the American of 1901 however there was something of a panic in the air about anarchist violence. McKinley was the third president to have been slain by a madman in a span of 36 years. Imagine living in a time when three presidents have been slain in the last 36 years. This had political implications. Assassination was epidemic all over the world. At about the same time as the Garfield tragedy anarchists in Russia assassinated Tsar Alexander II with a bomb. Now assassination fever had reached America's open front door yet again.
Political murder was problematic in the USA. Left wing anarchists weren’t cut any slack in this atmosphere. Anyone who even spoke of left-wing violence was suspected and treated as if guilty of actual violence. Even though the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley were acts of individual depravity, the murders were widely interpreted as political acts representing the influence of the left wing. Freedom of speech and the freedom to adhere to political parties of all stripes suffered accordingly. Assassination, and attempted assassination set back the left every time, even if the perp was just a looney loner.
Leon actually thought (like Guiteau in 1881) that the supporters of the opposition Democratic party would make him a hero. The Dems would, in his ill mind, embrace any assassin as a hero for shooting the hated President, they would defend him from prosecution, and even maybe give him a good job in Party Headquarters. Instead the Democrats applauded with everyone else when they gave Leon Colgoltz the juice of justice. (Incidentally, the first electric chairs were built by the General Electric Corporation, with their famous slogan, “GE, We Bring Good Things to Life!”)
SOURCES
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford – c) 1961 (second edition)
Bailey died in 1973. Professor Elizabeth Cohen of Harvard has taken up the project of keeping this book revised and re-pubished. So the newest edition has three authors.
The Battle of 1900 - c) 1900 is an extraordinary and wonderful citizens guide for the election. This is not a mere pamphlet or handbook, but is a very thick hardcover book. I’ve never seen anything contemporary to match it in quality, substance, and style for its purpose. It profiles the candidates, the issues and all the influential members of government. And it makes an absolute effort to be neutral while presenting each side’s partisan viewpoints, a delicate skill.
An up to date replica imitation of this book should be published for every current Presidential election.
A Country Made by War, by Geoffrey Perret – This general military of the United States is a great book, but Perret seems torn between loving war and being cynical about it. When he challenges the conventional wisdom on certain subjects, he does so with aplomb and impeccable logic that I'm sometimes instantly converted. I don't always agree with him when he argues, but he writes with passion, and what else can we ask of an author, besides that and not including poetry quotations?
A Diplomatic History of the United States, by Samuel Flagg Bemis, Farnam Professor of Diplomatic History in Yale University – c) 1934 Henry Holt
I have a lot in common with this famous historian. Bemis was born in Worcester. I played at the Aku Lounge in Worcester several times. Sam graduated from Harvard. I often perform stand-up at a club in Harvard Square. SFB taught at George Washington University. I crossed the George Washington Bridge only a month ago. He won two Pulitzer Prizes. I finished third in the Segram's Comedy Festival in both 1992 and 1996! We are two peas in a pod.
The Enduring Vision, Boyer-Clark-Kett-Purvis
provided the sad medal of honor quote by TR.
The Growth of the American Republic Vol II 1865-1937, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager – c) 1940 (fourth edition )
The great historians with a relentless bias in favor of the Democrat and against the Republican Party aren't very kind to the kindly McKinley, but they aren't very kind to anyone for that matter.
History of a Free People, by Henry W. Bragdon (Phillips Exeter Academy) and Samuel P. McCutchen (School of Education, New York University) – c) 1954 MacMillan
HFP is for the slave/student in 1954 America when kids still got hit for wrong answers. Heck, I got hit for wrong answers in Latin class in 1970! The tone of 'learn this or else' permeates the work.
I've defaced this book a bit.
A History of the United States, Since 1865, by T. Harry Williams of Louisiana State University, Richard Current of the University of Wisconsin, and Frank Freidel of Harvard – c) 1964 Knopf
Of all three professors, only the Harvard guy goes with the informal first name. Hmmm.
This book really cooks in the era of McKinley and TR. They make some points so rich that they are almost out of place in a general history.
The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred President, by Murat Halstead – published in 1901
This sensitive old-fashioned book has many chapters on the Buffalo shooting and Mr. McKinley's anguished final days. Half the book is about the end of the man. It's a great book.
Labor in America, A History, by Foster Rhea Dulles - c) 1949 - Tom Cromwell, NY
Dulles is on the dull side, and that isn’t a forced pun. He really is. His name is perfect, like a comedian named Will Arrogant, or CEO named I.B. Ruthless
The March of Democracy: Vol II, From Civil War to World Power, by James Truslow Adams – c) 1933 Scribner
I've read four of JTA's books cover to cover with a lot of notes and underlining. I hate him. I rip him good in the marginal notes on virtually every page. What bad man he is. A lot of historians have an axe to grind. James Truslow has about 70 axes. The groups he hates the most are all Republicans, Northerners, and Negroes.
The Martial Spirit, by Walter Millis is an account of the events leading to U.S. entry into the Spanish-American war. MS is a bitter book. Walt is still very angry at the United States as he typed up this work. The emotion is seeping through every page.
At least Millis is adult enough to own up to his bias in the title. Martial is not a complimentary word.
I find the inner tone in this book to be tragically nasty.
The National Experience, by three Yalees and a Stampp c) 1981 refutes the commonly accepted image of McKinley as a puppet of Mark Hannah and the ‘president makers’. Historians Blum, Stampp and Morgan dismiss this,
“The campaign caricature of McKinley as a spineless puppet of the millionaire boss had no foundation in fact, for the evidence is that Hannah constantly deferred to his friend and respected his wishes.”
The famous historians in this high school senior textbook are Kenneth Stampp, John Blum, Art Schlesinger, Willie Rose, and Edmund Morgan.
One Night Stands With American History, Odd, Amusing, and Little Known Incidents, by Richard Shenkman and Kurt Reiger, c) 1980
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994
The book is a glossy work of fine art, but slanted badly.
Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morrison - c)1965 Oxford University Press
Poor McKinley was damned if he did, damned if he didn't. First Ted Roosevelt says that he “has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair” because he wouldn't go to war. Then, 70 years later, the eminent historian Morsion writes that a president “with any backbone at all” would have stood up to those clamoring for war. Whatever Billy Mac decided, someone was going to say the he had no backbone.
Morison says that the old guard Republicans were against going to war with Spain, but that the young Republicans, led by Cabot Lodge, overwhelmed the objectors and pressured McKinley to arms.
Presidential Elections, by Hogenboom
Rise of the American Nation, by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. This was my South Boston High textbook in 1972
I don’t get good vibes from these guys, if you’ll pardon my 70’s lingo. I hope Mr. Powers, my Southie history teacher would approve the history homework I'm turning in now. I didn’t study as hard as I could or should have back then.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia – c) 1966 – Revised abridged edition c) 1977 Harper & Row
JAG has this well-written take on taking the Philippines,
“The imagination of Americans had been captured by the trappings of empire, not by its essence. It was titillating to think
of a world map liberally sprinkled with American flags and of the economic benefits that colonies might bring, but few citizens were ready to join in a worldwide struggle for power and influence. They entered blithely upon adventures in far-off regions without realistically facing the implications of their decisions.”
Yes, John. And all this did lead to WWII in the Pacific. But you are a lefty on this per se, not because it leads to problems. In the expand vs not expand, you would have sided against McKinley in 1901 just as surely as you surely sided against W. in 2003. You are Columbia and you are liberal. This brilliant paragraph is a beard for your gut feelings against the US acquiring anything that smacks of imperialism, even if the consequences are good.
The United States, The History of a Republic, by Hofstadter, Miller and Aaron, c) 1957 – Relentless excellence and equally relentless pro-Dem bias. If a Republican has ever done a single good thing for America, these guys never got the memo.
The United States Since 1865, c) 1959 by Foster Rhea Dulles – He of the famous Dulles Brothers. His brother Allen was Director of the C.I.A and another brother was John Foster, the Secretary of State under Eisenhower. Slow reading and scholarly. Solid, but dulles.
The Wars of America, Volume 2 - by Robert Leckie – The second volume by the Marine hero/scholar starts with the Spanish-American War. Leckie then devotes as much space to the Philippine Insurrection as he gave to the Spanish -American conflict. Leckie has been one of my favorite authors for many decades.
But he loves war. Leckie's written as many war books as Gene Hackman has been in war movies!
FILM
Citizen Kane, a vicious look at the life of Willie Hearst - I’m not sure if I ripped a line off from the movie or not (about the press starting a war if they had to), and I’m not going to watch it again to make sure. Called by many the greatest movie ever made, CK bored me twice until it was explained to me. Now I get it.
55 Days at Peking, c) 1967 is a fine historical movie about the Boxer Rebellion starring David Niven, Charlton Heston and Ice T. It can be watched for entertainment and education, and the fictional add-ons do not damage the historical context. It’s long, though. It takes about 55 days to get through it.
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