The Proud Tower (30 page)

Anxious to end the war and placate the “new-caught sullen peoples” and govern creditably, the Administration sent various committees to investigate the atrocities, to find out what the Filipinos really wanted—short of self-government, which they said they wanted—and to report on what form of civil government to give them. In April, 1900, the shy, kindly, three-hundred-pound Judge William Howard Taft was sent out to set up a civil government, armed with a charter drawn up by the new Secretary of War, Elihu Root, which granted the Filipinos a liberal degree of internal autonomy. Since neither they nor the Americans were ready to give up fighting, the attempt was premature, but Taft stayed on, determined to govern in the interest of “the little brown brother” as soon as he was given a chance. When friends at home, concerned for his welfare, sent anxious queries about his health, he cabled Elihu Root that he had been out horseback riding and was feeling fine. “How is the horse feeling?” Root cabled back.

Despite difficulties there was no re-thinking or hesitancy among the dominant Republicans about the new career upon which America was launched. The bill for constructing the Nicaragua Canal was in the Senate and so was Albert Beveridge, more closely allied with the Almighty than ever. “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world,” he said on January 8, 1900. He informed Senators that God had been preparing “the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples” for this mission for a thousand years.

Some of Beveridge’s generation found the new image of America repugnant. Hearing the sound of “ignoble battle” coming “sullenly over the Pacific seas,” William Vaughn Moody wrote his “Ode in a Time of Hesitation,” which appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
in May, 1900. Are we still the “eagle nation” he asked, or:

Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?
Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat?
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?

This was the conscience of the few, felt too by Godkin, who, in his disillusion, said a strange and clairvoyant thing at this time. “The military spirit,” he wrote to Moorfield Storey in January, 1900, “has taken possession of the masses to whom power has passed.”

As the war passed its first anniversary with the American forces deeply extended, there was one event ahead that might yet bring it to an end: the coming Presidential election. In this the Anti-Imperialists and Aguinaldo placed their hopes. Its earliest oddity was a boom for Admiral Dewey, partly inspired by the desperation of some Democrats to find any candidate other than Bryan. Having concluded after some study of the subject that “the office of President is not such a very difficult one to fill,” the Admiral announced he was available but as his wording did not inspire confidence and he seemed vague as to party, his candidacy collapsed. Bryan loomed.

The Anti-Imperialists were caught in an agonizing dilemma. McKinley represented the party of imperialism; Bryan in Carl Schurz’s words was “the evil genius of the anti-imperialist cause,” loathed for his betrayal in the matter of the treaty and feared for his radicalism. Schurz met with Carnegie, Gamaliel Bradford and Senator Pettigrew at the Plaza Hotel in New York in January, 1900, in an effort to organize a third party so that the American people would not “be forced by the two rotten old party carcasses to choose between two evils.” Carnegie subscribed $25,000 on the spot, while the others made up a matching sum. Shortly afterward, members of the steel trust with whom Carnegie was then negotiating the sale of his company told him that if he opposed McKinley the deal would not go through. Preferring United States Steel to a third party, Carnegie withdrew his support, received his shares and retired from business. Schurz and the others, however, held a Liberty Congress at Indianapolis, at which they called on Reed to be their candidate, but neither Reed nor anyone else wanted the vain task of leading a mugwump party. At Kansas City in July the inevitable happened: Bryan was chosen.

Campaigning on imperialism as he had planned, Bryan ranged the country as strenuously as before. He was tarnished, but his magnetism, his passion and his sincerity-of-the-moment still reached through to the people and even across the Pacific. In Bryan, but for whom the Treaty of Paris would have been defeated, the Filipinos placed their faith. “The great Democratic party of the United States will win the next fall election,” Aguinaldo promised in a proclamation. “Imperialism will fail in its mad attempt to subjugate us by force of arms.” His soldiers shouted the war cry, “Aguinaldo-Bryan!”

In their Chicago platform, anticipating the election, the Anti-Imperialists had said, “We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the subjugation of any people.” There was nothing to do, as a friend wrote to ex-President Cleveland, but “to hold your nose and vote” for Bryan. The modified rapture of such people for the Democratic candidate won them the name thereafter of the “hold-your-nose-and-vote” group. So distasteful to the
Nation
were both candidates that it refused to support either, preferring, as a dissatisfied reader complained, to “sit on a fence and scold at both.”

The Republicans had no such difficulties. Although they preferred to be called expansionists rather than imperialists, they were proud of the condition whatever its name, and believed in its goals. Forthright as usual, Lodge said, “Manila with its magnificent bay is the prize and pearl of the East;… it will keep us open to the markets of China.… Shall we hesitate and make, in coward fashion, what Dante calls the ‘great refusal’?” Secretary Hay having pronounced the policy of the Open Door, China’s markets were much on men’s minds. During the summer of the campaign, the siege of the legations at Peking by the Boxers and the American share in the relief expedition pointed up the far-flung role the country was now playing. Its most convinced and vocal champion was McKinley’s new vice-presidential nominee, Theodore Roosevelt, who took the President’s place as chief campaigner. Unsure of victory, for the “full dinner pail” was more a slogan than a fact, he campaigned so vigorously and indefatigably that to the public and cartoonists the Rough Rider with the teeth, pince-nez and unquenchable zest appeared to be the real candidate. He derided the specter of militarism as a “shadowy ghost,” insisted that expansion “in no way affects our institutions or our traditional policies,” and said the question was not “whether we shall expand—for we have already expanded—but whether we shall contract.”

The country listened to thousands of speeches and read thousands of newspaper columns raking over every argument for and against imperialism and every aspect of the war in the Philippines. It learned, thanks to the efforts of the Anti-Imperialists, more about the conduct of its own troops than the public usually does in wartime. Dumdum bullets, so thoroughly disapproved (except by the British) at The Hague Peace Conference the year before, were found to have been issued to some American troops. In the end the American people, like the British in their Khaki election of the same year, approved the incumbents. What a people thinks at any given time can best be measured by what they do. McKinley and Roosevelt were elected by 53 per cent of the votes cast and with a greater margin over Bryan than had been received in 1896. Expansion and conquest were accepted and the break with the American past confirmed. Still at war in the Philippines, America moved into the Twentieth Century.

For Aguinaldo, after the election, there was nothing more to hope for. Retreating into the mountains, still fighting, he was captured by trickery in March, 1901, and in captivity in April signed an oath of allegiance to the United States together with a proclamation to his people calling for an end to resistance: “There has been enough blood, enough tears, enough desolation.”

Professor Norton voiced the elegy of the Anti-Imperialists. “I reach one conclusion,” he wrote to a friend in the month of Aguinaldo’s capture, “that I have been too much of an idealist about America, had set my hopes too high, had formed too fair an image of what she might become. Never had a nation such an opportunity; she was the hope of the world. Never again will any nation have her chance to raise the standard of civilization.”

Six months later came Czolgosz’s shot and McKinley’s place was taken by Roosevelt, “that damned cowboy,” as Mark Hanna said when he heard the news. The remark was not astute. It was an architect of the new age who now became its President at forty-three.

Reed wrote him a letter of good wishes but the exchange was formal and the gulf remained. Living in New York, Reed formed a congenial companionship with Mark Twain, whose wit and turn of mind and sardonic outlook matched his own. They were guests together on board the yacht of the multi-trust capitalist Henry H. Rogers for a long cruise of which the epic legend survives that Reed won twenty-three poker hands in succession. He visited Washington now and then, once arguing a case before the Supreme Court and entertaining the justices by his rather remarkable style of delivery. He did not revisit the floor of the House but would hold court and see old friends in the office of the Ways and Means Committee. On doctor’s orders he succeeded in losing forty pounds but his health was worrisome. In the summer of 1902 he was the central figure at Bowdoin’s centennial celebration, where he enjoyed “a rare good time” such as, he said, “we may have again but cannot sanely look for.” In December he was back in Washington and while in the Committee Room at the Capitol, was suddenly taken ill. He proved to be in the terminal stage of a chronic nephritis. Five days later, on December 6, 1902, he died, aged sixty-two. Joe Cannon, his successor as Speaker, said of him, “His was the strongest intellect crossed on the best courage of any man in public life that I have ever known.” With those two qualities and his “self-made laws,” Reed had stood his ground on the swampy soil of politics, uncompromising to the end, a lonely specimen of an uncommon kind, the Independent Man.

^*
This has also been ascribed to Roosevelt. It is not certain to whom the credit belongs.

4
“Give Me Combat!”
FRANCE : 1894–99

4
“Give Me Combat!”

“T
HE PERMANENT
glamour of France” was a phrase used by an Englishman of the nineties, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, secretary to the Duke of Devonshire. He felt that every child of Western civilization owed a debt to the country from which “came the impulse that dissolved the old world in agony and gave life and passion to the present.” For two years, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1899, the agony of that old dissolution returned. Rent by a moral passion that reopened past wounds, broke apart society and consumed thought, energy and honor, France plunged into one of the great commotions of history.

During those “two interminable years” of struggle to secure the retrial of a single individual unjustly convicted, “life was as if suspended,” wrote Léon Blum, a future premier, then in his twenties. It was as if, in those “years of tumult, of veritable civil war … everything converged upon a single question and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships everything was interrupted, turned upside down, reclassified.… The Dreyfus Affair was a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.”

It “would have divided the angels themselves,” wrote the Comte de Vogüé, on the opposite side from Blum. “Above the base motives and animal passions, the finest souls in France flung themselves at each other with an equal nobility of sentiments exasperated by their fearful conflict.”

The protagonists felt a grandeur in the storm that battered them. Decadence was exorcised in the violence of their feelings and they felt conscious again of “high principles and inexhaustible energies.” Hate, evil and fear encompassed them as well as courage and sacrifice. Their combat was epic and its issue was the life of the Republic. Each side fought for an idea, its idea of France: one the France of Counter-Revolution, the other the France of 1789; one for its last chance to arrest progressive social tendencies and restore the old values; the other to cleanse the honor of the Republic and preserve it from the clutches of reaction. The Revisionists, who fought for retrial, saw France as the fount of liberty, the country of light, the teacher of reason, the codifier of law, and to them the knowledge that she could have perpetrated a wrong and connived at a miscarriage of justice was insufferable. They fought for Justice. Those on the other side claimed to fight in the name of
Patrie
for the preservation of the Army as the shield and protector of the nation and of the Church as the guide and instructor of its soul. They assembled under the name of Nationalists and in their ranks sincere men were partners of demagogues and succumbed to methods that were reckless and brutal and terms that were foul, so that the world watched in wonder and scorn and the name of France suffered. Locked in mutual ferocity and final commitment the contenders could not disengage, although their struggle was splitting the country and fostering opportunity for the enemy at their frontiers, which every day the enemy measured.

“We were heroes,” proclaimed Charles Péguy, who transmuted and exalted the political movements of his day in mystical terms inherited from Joan of Arc. In 1910 he wrote, “The Dreyfus Affair can only be explained by the need for heroism which periodically seizes this people, this race—seizes a whole generation of us. The same is true of those other great ordeals: wars.… When a great war or great revolution breaks out it is because a great people, a great race needs to break out, because it has had enough, particularly enough of peace. It always means that a great mass feels and experiences a violent need, a mysterious need for a great movement,… a sudden need for glory, for war, for history, which causes an explosion, an eruption …” If the values and forces Péguy saw in the Affair were large, it was because they were those of that time and that experience. The Affair made men feel larger than life.