The Proud Tower (28 page)

These were the problems that absorbed reformers—many of whom, together with independents and dissenters of various kinds and distinguished Democrats who had perforce become the anti-expansion party, now banded together under the banner of the League. Its forty-one vice-presidents soon included ex-President Cleveland; his former Secretary of War, William Endicott; former Secretary of the Treasury, Speaker Carlisle; Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman; President David Starr Jordan, of Stanford; President James B. Angell, of the University of Michigan; Jane Addams; Andrew Carnegie; William James; Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, and numbers of other Congressmen, clergymen, professors, lawyers and writers. The novelist William Dean Howells thought the war “an abominable business.” When his friend Mark Twain came home from an extended trip abroad, he too became a member of the League. Besides Godkin’s
Evening Post
, its chief voices were the Boston
Herald
, the Baltimore
Sun
and the Springfield
Republican
, while two other Republican papers, the Boston
Evening Transcript
and the Philadelphia
Ledger
, also gave it support.

On the side of the Anti-Imperialists was a strong sentiment, growing out of the troubles with the Negroes after the Civil War, of reluctance to take on new colored populations. Nothing but more trouble would accrue, said Godkin harshly in the
Nation
, from “dependencies inhabited by ignorant and inferior races” with whom Americans had no union “other than would be necessary for purposes of carpet-baggery and corruption.” Carl Schurz used the same argument against the Canal, saying that “once fairly started on a career of aggrandizement” the imperialists would insist that the Canal be bordered on both sides by American territory and would want to annex countries “with a population of 13,000,000 Spanish-Americans mixed with Indian blood” who would flood Congress with twenty Senators and fifty or sixty Representatives. Hawaii, where Orientals greatly outnumbered the whites, posed the same threat.

The Anti-Imperialists did not sweep up with them the Populists and followers of Bryan and those soon to be known as Progressives. While these groups opposed standing armies, big navies and foreign entanglements and were in theory anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-European, they were simultaneously imbued with a fever to fight Spain as a cruel European tyrant stamping out liberty at America’s doorstep. Bryan called for war as loudly as Theodore Roosevelt and in sincere flattery, if less promptly, had himself appointed Colonel of the Third Nebraska Volunteers, too late to see action in Cuba. Most vociferous of all was a young lawyer from Indianapolis, already famous at thirty-six as a political orator and soon to become a leader of the Progressives. The taste of empire, the rising blood of nationalism expressed in terms of wide-flung dominion, found in Albert Beveridge its most thrilling trumpet. Like Bryan, he possessed that dangerous talent for oratory which can simulate action and even thought. The war sent Beveridge into transports of excitement.

“We are a conquering race,” he proclaimed in Boston in April, even before the victory of Manila Bay. “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands.… In the Almighty’s infinite plan … debased civilizations and decaying races” were to disappear “before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man.” Pan-Germans in Berlin and Joseph Chamberlain in England also talked of the mission of the superior race, variously Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, but Beveridge had nothing to learn from them; it was all his own. He saw in present events “the progress of a mighty people and their free institutions” and the fulfillment of the dream “that God had put in the brain” of Jefferson, Hamilton, John Bright, Emerson, Ulysses S. Grant and other “imperial intellects”; the dream “of American expansion until all the seas shall bloom with that flower of liberty, the flag of the great Republic.” It was not so much liberty as trade that Beveridge saw following the flag. American factories and American soil, he said, were producing more than the American people could consume. “Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.… We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness.… American law, American order, American civilization will plant themselves on those shores hitherto bloody and benighted but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”

Beveridge was so carried away by the opportunities for greatness that the sword he waved flashed almost too nakedly. He spoke of the Pacific as “the true field of our operations. There Spain has an island empire in the Philippines.… There the United States has a powerful Squadron. The Philippines are logically our first target.”

During the summer while others volunteered and fought in Cuba and sickened of yellow fever and over five thousand died of disease, Beveridge’s personal obedience to the call of blood remained rhetorical. He poured scorn on the Anti-Imperialist arguments. “Cuba not contiguous? Porto Rico not contiguous? The Philippines not contiguous?… Dewey and Sampson and Schley will make them contiguous and American speed, American guns, American heart and brain and nerve will keep them contiguous forever!… Who dares to halt it now, now when we are at last one people, strong enough for any task, great enough for any glory destiny can bestow?” In the following year Beveridge was elected Senator. “We’re a gr-reat people,” remarked Mr. Dooley. “An’ the best iv it is, we know we ar-re.”

Theodore Roosevelt in these months was at the front. Though he held a high and crucial office he had made up his mind in advance to give it up, if war came, for active service. Men like himself, as he wrote privately to a friend, having been taunted with being “armchair and parlor Jingoes,… my power for good whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines that I have tried to preach.” He resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy immediately after Manila, declined the command of a volunteer cavalry regiment which was offered him by Secretary of War Alger, but asked to serve as Lieutenant Colonel on condition that the command was given to his friend Colonel Leonard Wood of the regular army. This was done. By June 24, two months later, he was in action at San Juan Hill. By July 3 the land fighting was over, the ebullient Rough Rider was a hero and was triumphantly elected Governor of New York in November.

Meanwhile in a Congress flushed with war, advocates of the annexation of Hawaii saw renewed opportunity. Still unable to muster two-thirds of the Senate, they had decided to resort to annexation by a Joint Resolution, which required only a simple majority. The resolution had been introduced in the Senate on March 16 but Reed had been able to prevent its coming to the floor of the House all during the excitement in April. His ruthless command, commented the Washington
Post
on April 15, made him “the most dangerous antagonist in public life.” He was in fact the only man whom the dauntless Beveridge did not care to take on. When urged to write to Reed to persuade him not to oppose expansion, Beveridge replied, “I feel that any effort of mine upon the Gibraltar-like mind and will of the Speaker would be absolutely ineffectual.”

After the war reached the Pacific, however, even Reed was finding it hard to maintain his iron control. Exasperated, he told Champ Clark of Missouri he wished Dewey would “sail right away from that place. It will make us trouble for all time to come if he does not.” The annexationists argued that if the United States did not take Hawaii, Great Britain would, or alternatively Japan, who was already plotting to gain control by encouraging the influx of Japanese subjects subsidized by their government. Besides, it now lay clearly in the American path. “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California,” McKinley told his secretary, George Cortelyou, on May 4. “It is Manifest Destiny.”

On May 4 the resolution was introduced in the House. Reed stifled it for three weeks against growing pressure. The excuse that control of Hawaii was necessary for the defeat of Spain in the Pacific he regarded as a pure pretext conceived by the sugar interests and imperialists. In this he was at odds with the President, almost all his party in Congress and with friends outside. “The opposition now comes exclusively from Reed, who is straining every nerve to beat Hawaii,” Lodge wrote to Roosevelt. Reed even went to the length of enlisting help from the Democrats. When the future Speaker, Champ Clark, a good friend though a Democrat, asked Reed to put him on the Ways and Means Committee, Reed begged him to go on the Foreign Affairs Committee instead, where he needed Clark’s help as “a man who believes as I do and who is a fighter.”

“If you put it that way,” Clark replied, much affected, “I’ll stand by you.” He agreed to sacrifice the place he had long coveted to help his party’s most uncompromising opponent.

Restiveness in Reed’s own party was increasing. On May 24 Republican members of the House took the unusual step of signing a petition for a caucus to consider the resolution. It presented Reed with a frontal challenge of all that he had fought for in his battle against the silent quorum. The fundamental premise of that battle and of Reed’s Rules was that the will of the House as expressed by the majority must prevail. Reed knew that from his unassailable height above the floor and with his mastery of procedural techniques he could, with Clark’s collaboration, fend off a vote on the Hawaii Resolution, but he could not change sentiment. He knew that his own, the majority, party wanted annexation and that the House on the whole was in favor of it. By summoning all his authority he might frustrate the resolution, but if he did, his success would nullify what he had earlier won: the reform which assured that the House really controlled itself, that no tricks of procedure, no arbitrary rules of a Speaker could obstruct the will of the majority. The purpose of the quorum battle had now come to a test, and with tragic irony, against himself. He would have to choose between his hatred of foreign conquest and his duty as Speaker; between, on the one hand, his own deepest beliefs, and on the other, Reed’s Rules.

There was only one choice he could make. Knowing too well the value of what he had accomplished in the Fifty-first Congress, he bowed to the majority. Debate opened on June 11, and on June 15 the resolution passed by 209 to 91 with practically unanimous Republican support. Reed was not in the Chair. Representative Dalzell, substituting, announced before the vote, “The Speaker of the House is absent on account of illness. I am requested by him to say that were he present he would vote No.” Reed had taken a stand, said the
Nation
, “absolutely alone” among his party. “Courage to oppose a popular mania, above all to go against party, is not so common a political virtue that we can afford not to pay our tribute to the man who exhibits it.”

Annexation of Hawaii was formally ratified on July 7, four days after the war in Cuba was brought to an end by a naval battle off Santiago. There the Spanish fleet, attempting to run the American blockade, was destroyed by the superior fire of the five so-lately-built battleships,
Indiana, Oregon, Massachusetts, Iowa
and
Texas.
With the surrender of Santiago two weeks later, Spanish rule came to an end, defeated, not by the Cuban insurgents, but by the United States. When it came to negotiation of peace terms, all the passion lavished during the past three years on the cause of Cuban liberty, all the Congressional resolutions favoring recognition of an independent Cuban Republic and disclaiming intention to annex it proved a serious obstacle to Senator Lodge’s “necessity.” To take Cuba as the fruit of conquest was impossible, however alluring its strategic and mercantile advantages, but a smaller island, Porto Rico, at least was available. Required to renounce Cuba and cede the smaller neighbor, Spain was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere. The degree of Cuba’s independence and nature of her relations with the United States was left to be worked out in the presence of an American occupation force. The result was the Platt Amendment of 1901, establishing a virtual American protectorate.

In the meantime preliminary peace terms were signed in Washington on August 12, leaving the even more troublesome question of the Philippines to be negotiated by peace commissioners who were to meet in Paris to conclude a final settlement. Drawing up a balance sheet of the war, Lodge could say with some satisfaction, “We have risen to be one of the great world powers and I think we have made an impression upon Europe which will be lasting.” Mahan writing on the same subject to Mrs. Roosevelt was rather more pompous: “The jocund youth of our people now passes away never to return; the cares and anxieties of manhood’s years henceforth are ours.”

At home the Anti-Imperialists—through meetings, protests, speeches, articles, petitions, and public conferences—were attempting to hold their country back from plucking the archipelago in the Pacific which seemed to glow with the fatal evil of the apple in the Garden of Eden. Carl Schurz urged McKinley to turn the Philippines over as a mandate to a small power, such as Belgium or Holland, so that the United States could remain “the great neutral power of the world.” In France it was the “Dreyfus summer,” and Americans, too, in those months felt that their country had reached a moment critical for its character and future. In public and private the debate raged whether to keep the Philippines or turn them over to self-government by the Filipinos. Even the usually hard-headed Mahan caught the fever of righteousness and wrote to an English friend about America’s duty to keep the Philippines, “
Deus Vult!
It was the cry of the Crusader and the Puritan and I doubt if man ever utters a nobler.”

A three-day conference to consider “some of the most momentous problems in the history of the Republic” was convened at Saratoga in August by leaders in public life both for and against expansion. The favored theme of the expansionists, which called forth their most energetic arguments, was a vision of the vast untapped markets of the Orient with their limitless opportunities for American enterprise. Speaking for the Anti-Imperialists, Henry Wade Rogers, president of Northwestern University and chairman of the Conference on opening day, forcefully made the point that it was not necessary to annex territory in order to trade with it. But he could not summon passion equal to that of Judge Grosscup, notorious as the man who had issued the injunction in the Pullman strike, who delivered an exuberant paean to “the new career of commercial activity upon which I trust we are about to enter.” With the Philippines and Hawaii in her hands, the United States would control the path to Asia, a whole continent with “doors swinging inward that will lead us to one half the desirable territory and one third the population of the earth.”