A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (95 page)

Intellectuals may have bought the new pragmatism and secular scientific approach to life’s challenges, but middle America had not. Jean Pierre Godet, a Belgian immigrant in Cedar Falls, Iowa, reflected the turn-of-the-century faith that still gripped most Americans with this simple prayer:

 

Dear God, thanks for Cedar Falls and all 391 residents [and for] this good piece of farmland two miles outside of town. From there I can watch the rest of the people with a little perspective. I’d like to learn to be like the best of them and avoid the bad habits of the worst of them. I’d like to pay off my bank mortgage as fast as I can and still have time to sit down with my neighbors…. And if You don’t mind, I think I’ll keep the mortgage in the family Bible…[to] let You remind me that I have some debts to pay…while I remember that honesty is the never-ending rehearsal of those who want to be the friends of God and the 391 people in the good little section of the Kingdom where we live.
¹⁸

 

Citizens in Godet’s “little section” of Cedar Falls exulted in sharing their freedom with others. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could never be impositions or values foisted on unwilling recipients. Quite the contrary, they were the embodiment of Americanism. “I have fallen in love with American names,” Stephen Vincent Benét once wrote. “The sharp names that never get fat, the Snakeskin titles of mining claims, the Plumed War-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.”
¹⁹
The words of immigrants like Godet, “I love America for giving so many of us the right to dream a new dream,” were as lost on the muckrakers as they were on many modern historians obsessed by class, race, and gender oppression.
²⁰
Yet they have never been lost on those who would lead: “An American,” John F. Kennedy said decades later, “by nature is an optimist. He is experimental, an inventor and builder, who builds best when called upon to build greatly.”
²¹

Operating under such assumptions, overseas expansion—whether in Hawaii, Panama, or Cuba—could prove only beneficial to whatever people were assimilated. Consequently, the era of American imperialism could just as easily be relabeled the era of optimism. Emerging from the lingering effects of a depression, still healing from the ravages of the Civil War, and divided over a broad spectrum of issues, Americans nevertheless remained a people of vision and unselfishness. The liberties they enjoyed belonged by right, they thought, to everyone. If manifest destiny itself was dead, the concept of an American presence in the world, of Americans who “build greatly,” had only just started.

Major McKinley

Save Cleveland, few American politicians have so consistently upheld high standards of personal character, and yet at the same time so consistently been on the wrong side of important issues, as William McKinley. Born in Niles, Ohio (1843), and raised in Poland, Ohio, McKinley absorbed a sense of spiritual design for his life from his Methodist mother. In this he resembled Lincoln, convinced that God had important plans for his life, and he professed his Christian faith at age sixteen. He also inherited from his mother a strong abolitionist sentiment and a commitment to the Union. When the Civil War came, McKinley was working in his hometown, but he quickly joined the Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment under the-then major Rutherford B. Hayes, whom he greatly admired. “Application, not brilliance, carried him,” remarked his biographer, and certainly McKinley displayed an appreciation for doing the little things right.
²²
When opportunity came, he literally grabbed it by the reins.

Assigned to commissary duty, at the Battle of Antietam, McKinley grew concerned about his regiment, which had left at daybreak, when he saw stragglers returning to camp. Reasoning that his comrades were probably under fire and without supplies, he organized a group of wagons, one of which he drove himself, to carry food, coffee, and other supplies to the front. Racing the horses through the blizzard of musket and cannon fire, McKinley provided welcome rations to his regiment, earning him a battlefield promotion to lieutenant. Before the end of the war, he was further promoted to captain, then major. Hence he remained, from that time on, Major McKinley to his friends and admirers.

Returning to Ohio after the war, McKinley met his wife, Ida—like Lemonade Lucy Hayes, an ardent prohibitionist—further instilling in him another Progressive notion that had started to influence many of the intellectuals and politicians of the day. Self-effacing, genuinely unaffected by money and its lures, and deeply committed to his sickly wife, McKinley went into law in Canton, where his penchant for taking cases from groups other lawyers often ignored, like the Masons and Catholics, attracted the attention of the Republican Party. He won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1876, joining such future political notables as Joe Cannon and James Garfield alongside a Senate class that featured James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, and Lucius Quincy Lamar. In the House, McKinley fought tenaciously for the protective tariff, opposing the “tariff for revenue only” crowd. The Major was convinced that tariffs protected laborers, and brought prosperity for all. Only after he had won the presidency, and had to deal with the reciprocity of trade with Canada, did McKinley begin to appreciate the value of free and open trade. He was equally committed to sound money, although he entertained arguments for bimetallism as long as silver’s value remained fixed to gold.

His friendship with his old military superior, Rutherford Hayes, grew while Hayes was in the White House, and the McKinleys were frequent dinner guests. McKinley and fellow Ohioan John Sherman (with whom he disagreed sharply over silver) escorted Chester Arthur to his Congressional address following the assassination of Garfield. By 1890, after guiding a new protective tariff—the McKinley Tariff—through the House, the Major had arrived on the national stage. Nevertheless, local district politics led to his defeat that year for the House, after which he promptly was elected governor of Ohio. In sum, McKinley paid his dues and greased his own skids.

Although a McKinley presidential boomlet had occurred in 1892, it was not yet his time. In 1896, however, he was ready for a full run at the White House, aided by Marcus A. Hannah, his political mentor.
²³
Mounting a “front porch” campaign, in which people literally traveled to his house to hear his ideas, McKinley spoke to 750,000 people from thirty states. His denuded yard, tramped over by so many feet, became a sea of mud in the rain. But his work was effective, and the lag between William Jennings Bryan’s burst of energy following the “Cross of Gold” speech and the election provided just enough cushion for the Republican to win. The closeness of the electoral vote, 271 to 176, and the popular vote, 7.1 million to 6.5 million, between two candidates with such strikingly opposite views, reflected the sharp divisions within the country over the money question, the tariff, and, most recently, the depression and its cures. McKinley did not get a single electoral vote south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and only won California, North Dakota, Iowa, and Oregon out of the entire West.

Nevertheless, political scientists have long considered the election of 1896 a critical realignment, in that pro-Republican voters remained a solid bloc for the next twenty-six years. This bloc would elect one Republican president after another—interrupted only by the 1912 election, in which two Republicans split the vote and allowed Woodrow Wilson to win. Not only would Minnesota, Iowa, and Oregon generally remain in the Republican column, but in 1900, McKinley would add South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Utah, and Washington after the realignment. Four years later, in 1904, Republicans added Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado, giving them not only the solid North, but also the entire West, except for the former Confederate state of Texas. Only when Teddy Roosevelt stepped down did the Democrats again recover momentum in the West.

At first, however, such a massive shift was not obvious in the conduct of the new administration. McKinley impressed no one after naming his cabinet (“a fine old hospital,” Henry Adams remarked).
²⁴
The last president to write his own speeches or, at least, dictate them, McKinley won no accolades for inspirational rhetoric. And as a committed husband to an ailing wife, McKinley hardly fed the social appetites of the Washington elites. Ida McKinley spent her days secluded in her room, entirely miserable. When in public, she was prone to seizures and fainting, perhaps an undiagnosed narcolepsy; a platoon of doctors—legitimate and quacks—never managed to control her condition. Yet the Major could continue a conversation right through one of Ida’s seizures as though nothing had happened.

Foreign affairs crept into the spotlight during McKinley’s term, particularly American dealings with Hawaii and Cuba. Harrison and Cleveland had left the Hawaiian problem unsettled. Located two thousand miles west of California, the Hawaiian Islands (also called the Sandwich Islands) had played host to American sailors, traders, and missionaries in the 1800s. Rich in sugar, fruit, and other products, the United States had extended tariff favors to Hawaii, and American business interests soon controlled important sugar plantations, often dominating the islands’ economies. In 1893, with tacit U.S. support, republican forces on the islands staged a rebellion against Queen Liliuokalani, who had gained the throne two years earlier when David Kalakaua, her brother, died. Liliuokalana inherited charges of corruption, including special favors to sugar magnate Claus Spreckels. Her brother had also repealed laws prohibiting sales of liquor and opium to Hawaiians. An antimonarchy movement, spearheaded by the Reform Party, forced Kalakaua to sign the “Bayonet constitution” in 1887—so named because it was signed under threat of an armed uprising. The constitution gave foreigners the right to vote. When Liliuokalani ascended to the throne, ostensibly to maintain and protect the constitution, she immediately sought to overthrow it. Thus the rebellion of 1893, while certainly supported by whites, was a response to the queen’s poor judgment as much as it was an American plot.

The new government sent a treaty of annexation to Washington, but the lame duck Harrison forwarded it to the Senate. When the antiexpansionist Cleveland came into office, he dispatched a team to Hawaii to determine if the revolution was genuine or an American-contrived plot. Based on its findings, Cleveland concluded that the latter was the case. He determined that although Liliuokalani had indeed planned to elevate herself again above the constitution, a group of eighteen Hawaiians, including some sugar farmers, with the aid of U.S. Marines, had overthrown her and named themselves as a provisional government.

What is often missed is at least one earlier attempt by Hawaii to become a part of the United States: in 1851, King Kamehameha III had secretly asked the United States to annex Hawaii, but Secretary of State Daniel Webster declined, saying, “No power ought to take possession of the islands as a conquest…or colonization.” Webster, preoccupied by slavery, was unwilling to set a precedent that might allow more slave territory into the Union.

By the time the issue reached McKinley’s desk, another concern complicated the Hawaiian question: Japan. The Empire of Japan had started to assert itself in the Pacific and, seeing Hawaii as a threat to her sphere of interest, sent warships to Hawaii and encouraged emigration there. This greatly troubled Theodore Roosevelt, among others, who energetically warned Americans that they could not allow Japan to claim the islands. McKinley, in private, agreed with Roosevelt, though he was coy when it came to stating so publicly. Before he assumed office, McKinley had told representatives from Hawaii, “Of course I have my ideas about Hawaii, but consider that it best at the present time not to make known what my policy is.”
²⁵
Nevertheless, once in office he pointed out that if nothing was done, “there will be before long another Revolution, and Japan will get control.”
²⁶
“We cannot let those islands go to Japan,” McKinley bluntly told Senator George Hoar.
²⁷

Indeed, it was Hawaii herself that, in June 1897, refused to admit a new contingent of Japanese laborers, prompting a visit from Imperial warships. And it was not big business that supported Hawaiian annexation—quite the contrary, the western sugar beet interests opposed the infusion of Hawaiian cane sugar. At the same time, McKinley knew that an annexation treaty likely lacked the two-thirds Senate majority to pass, since most of the Southern Democrats disliked the notion of bringing in as citizens more Asians and brown-skinned Hawaiians. Therefore, to avoid dealing with the insufficient Senate majority, the Republicans introduced a joint resolution to annex Hawaii, apart from the original (withdrawn) treaty. On July 7, 1898, McKinley signed the joint resolution of Congress annexing the Hawaiian islands.

Cuba Libre!

A far more difficult problem that McKinley had inherited was a growing tension with Spain over Cuba. A Spanish possession, Cuba lay only ninety miles off the coast of Florida. At one time it had been both gatekeeper and customhouse for Spain’s New World empire, but, like Spain herself, Cuba had lost influence. The Cubans desired freedom and autonomy, as illustrated by revolts that erupted in 1868, 1878, and 1895, all suppressed by the 160,000 Spanish soldiers on the island. General Valeriano Weyler, who governed the island, had a reputation for unusual cruelty, leading to his nickname the Butcher. For forty years the United States had entertained notions of purchasing Cuba, but Spain had no intention of selling, and the installation of Weyler sounded a requiem for negotiations to acquire the Pearl of the Antilles.

American concerns were threefold. First, there was the political component, in which Americans sympathized with the Cubans’ yearning for independence. Second, businessmen had important interests on the island, cultivated over several decades. Sugar, railroads, shipping, and other enterprises gave the United States an undeniable economic interest in Cuba, while at the same time putting Americans in a potential crossfire. Third, there was the moral issue of Weyler’s treatment of the Cubans, which appealed to American humanitarianism.