A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (97 page)

By 1898, however, there were other considerations. Roosevelt, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and others had already started to push the United States onto the world stage, and as a world power the nation needed overseas coaling stations. With the annexation of Hawaii in July, the Philippines suddenly became a logical extension of American naval bases.

Combined with the presence of British and German fleets, the fate of the Philippines as an American protectorate was sealed. Britain and Germany both had fleets in the region. Germany, in particular, thought little of the United States, saying, “God favored drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” Either nation could have controlled the Philippines the moment the American fleet left, although whether they would have fought each other is conjecture. At any rate, McKinley explained his reasoning as follows:

 

…one night it came to me this way…(1) we could not give them [the Philippines] back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable;(2) that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.
⁴⁰

 

The last point, although it played a minor part in the president’s decision, had been on the minds of Protestant Americans, whose missionary societies had sent many evangelists to the islands. Methodists, in particular, wrote of saving the “little brown brother.”
⁴¹
Some historians dismiss these expressions of concern for the Filipinos as insincere excuses for national economic expansion, but, as usual, they ignore the genuine doctrinal commitment of most Christian groups to evangelize.

McKinley realized that the choice he faced was not whether to liberate the islands, but which of three nations—the United States, Germany, or Britain—would control them. Predictably, when the Stars and Stripes went up in Manila, sending the European fleets packing, it ensured a response from the eighty thousand Filipinos under Aguinaldo, who felt betrayed. An insurrection ensued, and for a year and a half, a guerrilla war of brutal proportions witnessed both sides engaging in torture and atrocities. McKinley, aware that the occupation required the support of the Filipino people, persuaded William Howard Taft to lead a fiveman commission to Manila in April 1900. Taft, who liked the Filipinos, earned their respect and soon produced reasonable, concrete steps to reduce opposition.

McKinley’s policy opened the door to anti-imperialists, such as William Jennings Bryan, the Populists, and the Anti-Imperialist League. League members handed out leaflets to soldiers in the Philippines, urging them not to reenlist. Some of the more extreme members of the League compared McKinley to a mass murderer and issued wild predictions that eight thousand Americans would die trying to hold the islands. The insurgents quoted Bryan and fellow anti-imperialist Edward Atkinson, thus inspiring the rebels and, possibly, prolonging the conflict, thereby contributing to the deaths of U.S. soldiers.

Aguinaldo himself remained elusive, despite unceasing American attempts to locate and capture him. Finally, with the assistance of an anti-insurrectionist Filipino group called the Maccabees, Aguinaldo was captured, and in April 1901 he swore an oath of allegiance to the United States. Three months later the military government ended, replaced by a provincial government under Taft.

The islands remained U.S. possessions until World War II, although in 1916, the Jones Act announced American intentions to grant Philippine independence as soon as practicable. In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act provided a tutelage period of ten more years, setting the date for independence as 1944, and providing an election in which Manuel Quezon became the first president of the Philippines. Although Japanese occupation of the islands delayed independence beyond the 1944 target, in 1946 the United States granted independence to the Philippines on the Fourth of July, once again proving wrong the critics of America who saw imperial interests as the reason for overseas expansion. Never before in history had a nation so willingly and, in general, so peacefully rescinded control over so much territory and so many conquered people as in the case of the possessions taken in the Spanish-American War.

The “Full Dinner Pail” and Assassination

Not long after the war ended, Vice President Garret A. Hobart died in office. McKinley and the Republicans knew they might have a popular replacement in Teddy Roosevelt, who had recently been elected governor of New York. McKinley had met Roosevelt when he went to Montauk to congratulate General Shafter and his troops; when the president saw Roosevelt, he stopped the carriage and extended his hand. The ebullient Roosevelt struggled to pull his glove off, finally grabbing it in his teeth before pumping McKinley’s hand. Thus, with Hobart out, the Republicans approached Roosevelt—who really wanted no job save the president’s—to replace the deceased vice president.

Political realities, however, created an inexorable momentum toward the vice presidential nomination. As Boss Platt quipped, “Roosevelt might as well stand under Niagara Falls and try to spit water back as to stop his nomination by this convention.”
⁴²
With Teddy on the ballot, a good economy, and the conclusion of a successful war, McKinley was unbeatable. His slogan, a “full dinner pail,” spoke to the economic well-being of millions without committing the government to engage in specific action. McKinley beat the Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, worse than he had in 1896, winning the popular vote 7.2 million to 6.3 million, and taking the electoral vote, 292 to 155. While McKinley looked forward to serving as “President of the whole people,” Roosevelt committed himself to being a “dignified nonentity for four years.”
⁴³

The president had undertaken few new programs (aside from turning the Northern Security Trust issue over to Roosevelt to handle) when he made a trip to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901. Just as a premonition of disaster had gripped many around Lincoln in his final days, so too did McKinley’s staff grow increasingly uneasy as he headed to Buffalo. Several crank letters threatening assassination had arrived during the campaign, but McKinley dismissed them. The threats, however, alarmed his private secretary, George Cortelyou, who on his own started a screening process for visitors. In addition, a private investigator dogged the president’s steps, and Buffalo police were on alert. McKinley refused to allow his aides to seal him off from the public, thus agreeing to a long reception line at one of the exposition buildings, the Music Temple. While a line of well-wishers streamed in to a Bach organ sonata, Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin, joined them, concealing a pistol in his bandaged right hand. As McKinley shook the man’s left hand, Czolgosz shot the president twice. The stricken Major slumped backward to a chair, urging Cortelyou to “be careful” how he informed Mrs. McKinley her husband was dead.
⁴⁴

In fact, he remained alive, unconscious. A bullet had gone through his stomach and into his back; efforts to locate it failed, despite the presence at the exposition of a new X-ray machine, which was not used. Doctors cleansed and closed the wound without extracting the bullet. Over the next few days, McKinley regained consciousness, giving everyone around him hope, but he drifted away a week after the attack. New York City papers, which had earlier published editorials calling for McKinley’s removal—Hearst had even said, “assassination can be a good thing”—engaged in finger-pointing as to whether the press should share blame in the president’s death.
⁴⁵

McKinley became the third president in thirty-five years to be killed by an assassin, and for the first time, both a president and a vice president from the same administration (1896–1900) died in office. His killer, who wanted to cause all government to collapse, only succeeded in replacing a successful president with a legendary one.

A Brilliant Madman, Born a Century Too Soon

By 1907, Theodore Roosevelt—he hated the sobriquet Teddy, and although resigned to it, allowed none to call him that in person—stood five feet eight inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds, mostly muscle. His heavyweight sparring partner described him as a “strong, tough man; hard to hurt and harder to stop.”
⁴⁶
It was a remarkable transformation for the skinny kid who had entered Harvard in the mid-1870s. Yet for such a powerful man, he was small boned, with delicate feet and hands that contrasted with the heavy girth and jowls. His famous teeth, not as prominent as the caricatures, lent a distinctiveness to his speech, which was clipped, raspy, and likened to a man “biting tenpenny nails.”
⁴⁷
Roosevelt’s pronunciation added another distinguishing tone to his speech, wherein he pronounced “I” as “Aieee” and punctuated his sentences with his favorite word, “deeeee-lighted.” Albany legislators had made legend his habit of running up to the podium waving a finger and shouting, “Mister Spee-kar.” Asthmatic and bespectacled with his famous pince-nez, Roosevelt was a swirl of energy. He burst into rooms, descending on friends and foes like a thunderstorm, leading English writer John Morely to call Niagara Falls and Theodore Roosevelt “great works of nature.”
⁴⁸
Bram Stoker, the author of
Dracula
, once meeting Roosevelt, noted in his diary, “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”
⁴⁹

Long before he became president, Roosevelt impressed people with his sharp mind and his ability to discuss intelligently almost any subject—his entrance exams at Harvard testify to his mental capacities. Obsessed with reading (he referred to it as a disease with him), Roosevelt had consumed such mammoth tomes as David Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels.
Well traveled in Europe, Africa, and America, Roosevelt marveled at the written word as much as at the visual image.

A frail child, Roosevelt spent summers working out and boxing as a means to build his body. He boxed during his Harvard years, but just as often he fought outside the ring, often decking political rivals who made fun of him. The intellectual Roosevelt, however, could penetrate to the heart of intricate legislative matters, often offending everyone in the process of doing the right thing. He spearheaded several municipal reform bills, nearly pulling off an investigation of New York corruption before witnesses developed “memory loss.” New York assemblyman Newton Curtis called him a “brilliant madman, born a century too soon.”
⁵⁰

Having overcome asthma, poor eyesight, and his own impetuous moods, Roosevelt was struck by sudden and nearly unbearable grief in February 1884, when his wife died after giving birth only a few hours after Roosevelt’s mother, who had been in the same house, expired of typhoid fever. “There is a curse on this house,” his brother Elliott had told him, and Roosevelt began to believe it. That curse would claim the alcoholic Elliott in 1891, when he had to be committed to an asylum.

To drown his grief after his wife’s death, the hyper Roosevelt left politics for his cattle ranch in Elkhorn, North Dakota, where he served as a deputy sheriff and helped track down a trio of horse thieves. Then, in 1889, after he was appointed by President Harrison to the Civil Service Commission, he returned to New York, where he developed a feud with the-then New York Governor Grover Cleveland. As in the case of the bitter antagonism between Adams and Jefferson, Jefferson and Hamilton, and Sherman and Lincoln, the Cleveland-Roosevelt feud (lopsided in Cleveland’s favor as it was) was regrettable. Here was another example of two figures of towering character and, in many instances, clear vision, disagreeing over the proper implementation of their ideals. Yet such debates refined American democracy, and were of no small import.

Even before his appointment to the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt had started to develop a national name with his authorship of books on the West, including
Hunting Trips
(1885) and
The Winning of the West
(1889), as well as ten other works. While far from an inexorable march to the presidency, Roosevelt’s steps seem measured by a certain sense of relentlessness or Providence. He entered New York City politics as police commissioner, a position that called for him to walk the slums and meet with future muckraker Lincoln Steffens and a police reporter named Jacob Riis. Roosevelt fit right in with the two men. (Riis soon gravitated from his job with the New York
Tribune
to work on housing reform, which was the basis for his popular book
How the Other Half Lives
[1890]. Steffens, whose wealthy father had instructed him to “stay in New York and hustle,” instead also became a reporter, but with the New York
Evening Post.
)
⁵¹
Roosevelt took Steffens seriously enough to initiate legislation based on his writings, although Roosevelt was dead by the time Steffens visited the Soviet Union, in 1921, and uttered the preposterous comment, “I have seen the future, and it works.”

Even as a young state assemblyman in the 1880s, Roosevelt was consumed by reform in his public career. His progressivism embraced an activist government to alleviate social ills.

For many reformers, words like “ethics” and phrases about “uplifting the masses” were only so much window dressing for their real agenda of social architecture. Not Roosevelt. He genuinely believed that “no people were ever benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is,” he added, “more important that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent than we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world.”
⁵²
Roosevelt came from “old money,” and despite such sentiment, he never entirely lost his patrician biases.