American Experiment (193 page)

Bryan had simply failed to attract two of his great potential constituencies—eastern urban labor and midwestern farmers. Not a single county in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or Wisconsin, James Sundquist noted, showed a gain in its Democratic percentage over the combined Democratic-Populist strength of 1892. Cleveland’s unpopularity, Bryan’s inability to appeal to industrial labor, McKinley’s coalition politics, and Hanna’s massive propaganda campaign had left the grand old Democracy a shrunken remnant. Many voters had simply been scared away by Republican orators and editors. “To the image of the Democrats as the party of rum, Romanism, rebellion, and economic recession,” in Sundquist’s words, “was added another R—radicalism.”

Not only did the GOP emerge as a grand new party combining its old business, farm, veterans, and black support with widened labor backing; it was emerging also as a powerful governing instrument in Washington and in many of the state capitals. Whether tested by the quality of the GOP’s national leadership in McKinley, Hanna & co., its explicit platform speaking out forthrightly on major issues (save woman’s suffrage!), its year-round organizational structure building up from town and precinct committees, its ability to mobilize electoral support, its high capacity for raising money and commanding publicity, its congressional leadership and cohesion, the “redeveloped” Republican party was in a position, according to Paul Kleppner, to control most of the nation’s policy-making institutions after 1896.

It was easy for Bryan Democrats, silverites, and Populists to denounce the GOP as the party of plutocrats, tariff-mongers, monopolists, and gold bugs, because in part it was. But Republicanism was much more than this. The party not only reflected the interests of big capitalists; to a marked degree it disciplined those interests—in the party’s own interest, of course. The party would limit immigration even though many big employers wanted to import cheap foreign labor; the party would restrict trusts to some degree; above all, the party would maintain its appeal to farmers and workers by returning to a “free homestead policy,” restricting immigration, creating a National Board of Arbitration to mediate labor disputes. Furious at Frick and other industrialists who provoked fights with labor,
Republican party leaders would not let them dominate party councils.

So the McKinley Republicans prepared to govern in 1897 in a spirit of self-confidence and high expectations. Within four months of inauguration, McKinley signed the Dingell tariff bill raising rates higher than ever but also authorizing reciprocity negotiations with other countries. A year later, Congress passed the Erdman Act providing for limited mediation of railroad labor disputes—a belated response to the Pullman strike. But there was no rush of legislation—the Republicans had no interest in passing a lot of laws. Rather, McKinley and his congressional leaders ran a tight ship, at least in domestic policy. Especially notable was McKinley’s firm but delicate touch—with assists from Hanna—in curbing the power of old-time Republican state bosses such as Thomas C. Platt of New York and Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania.

Not all the groups in McKinley’s big coalition fared well during his presidential term. Lower-income labor, striking workers, and poor farmers received little help from the White House. As usual, the most forgotten group was blacks, North and South. Despite the GOP’s “unqualified condemnation of the uncivilized and barbarous practice” of lynching in its 1896 platform, lynch law took more and more victims in the nineties. In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation in railroad carriages, in
Plessy
v.
Ferguson;
two years later it sustained the poll tax and literacy tests in
Williams
v.
Mississippi.
Few were around to offer militant protest. Frederick Douglass had died in 1895, and Booker T. Washington accepted segregation. “In all things that are purely social,” Washington liked to say, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to our mutual progress.” Carnegie called him the most remarkable man alive, noting that Negro illiteracy had been almost cut in half in thirty years and that black land ownership had expanded.

Certainly Carnegie was satisfied with McKinleyism. “Triumphant Democracy is once more Triumphant,” he had written a Scottish friend after McKinley’s election. “All is well.” Later he would break with the President on foreign policy, but domestically McKinley stood for the things the steel magnate believed in. They both believed in liberty, but a negative liberty to be achieved against government and not through it. “The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these,” said Carnegie; “it is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, which the Declaration of Independence claims….” They both believed in Horatio Alger individualism, competitiveness, getting ahead, in the self-made man rising from rags to riches. They both believed in majority rule, perhaps in part because majorities had tended to vote the “right way.”

Majority rule—that was the test. Populists, left-wing Democrats, socialists had long dreamed the dream of a coalition of the poor that would use their only political resource, votes, to win control of government and convert it into an instrument of social and economic justice. Third parties had mobilized minorities, not majorities. Bryan had utterly failed to put together a mighty coalition of the have-nots. And even if a truly popular coalition had won control of government, checks and balances against the majority within the government—the power of a money-dominated, unrepresentative Senate, for example—would have thwarted true majority rule. Few of the have-nots would have found any triumphs in Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy. The have-nots were “ready to question whether, indeed, there was a democracy, when the courts could halt their strikes by injunctions, jail their labor leaders, declare laws taxing men of wealth unconstitutional, and smile indulgently on monopolistic trusts,” in Joseph Wall’s view. “Congress seemed eager only to protect those who were already secure, and the President looked to Wall Street, not Main Street, for support and guidance.”

Triumphant
Democracy?
McKinley, Carnegie, et al. seemed really to believe in a very Republican
Republic.
And soon people would charge that McKinley, at least, seemed to believe in a most imperial Empire.

In Havana, late in January 1898, the
Maine
swung slowly at anchor in the middle of the harbor, the increasingly tense crew confined on board. Armed sentries were posted on deck, ammunition piled by the guns, steam kept up. Still the men aboard waited week after week, as officials in Washington considered bringing the big battleship home.

The arrival of the
Maine
in Havana had been just one more step toward American involvement in the Cubans’ war for independence from Spain. That struggle had resumed in 1895, after a truce of two decades, and by 1898, more than a hundred thousand men had fallen on both sides of the conflict. Spain, with nearly 200,000 soldiers on the island, controlled Havana and the other major cities; the revolutionaries, with only a fifth as many men in the field at any one time, dominated most of the countryside. The pleas of the revolutionaries received considerable support in the United States. As meetings to support
Cuba Libre
mushroomed across the nation, sympathy for the rebels was compounded by indignation at the apparently heartless countermeasures of the Spanish.

Two flamboyant editors eyed the Cuban situation with avid interest: William Randolph Hearst of the New York
Journal
and Joseph Pulitzer of the New York
World.
Engaged in a no-holds-barred circulation war, they
largely ignored the gritty realities of the struggle, filling their columns with rumors, invective, fiction, and lurid atrocity stories designed to titillate rather than inform. By 1898, Hearst and Pulitzer were between them selling more than 1½ million copies daily, and a host of papers across the country rushed to imitate them. Popular sympathy for the Cuban revolution, which predated the Hearst-Pulitzer war, surged to a new high. Grover Cleveland had resisted these pressures, being perhaps more concerned with the threat to U.S. commercial interests and by the possibility that the rebels, many of whose leaders were black, would establish a biracial republic just ninety miles from the United States.

William McKinley had come to office facing a welter of conflicting forces over Cuba. Spain still held the island, precariously, but it was tiring of the expensive conflict. The rebels continued to press for recognition in the United States and military victory in Cuba. A large portion of the American public and the Congress—and the Republican party platform—supported Cuban independence, but had no clear plan for bringing it about. Businessmen favored any peaceful means of bringing more stability and U.S. trade to the island. A small group of expansionists, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and McKinley’s own Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, urged the annexation of Cuba as the first step in building an overseas U.S. empire. The yellow journalists continued to play up anything that would yield rousing headlines.

McKinley’s deftness in shepherding domestic issues through Congress was matched by his careful handling of the Cuban crisis. He deflected congressional moves to recognize the Cubans, put increasing pressure on Spain to loosen its hold on the island, and continued to interdict arms shipments to the rebels. A new Madrid government seemed to respond favorably to McKinley’s call for an end to the cruel and futile occupation policy when, in late 1897, it announced a number of reforms, including a plan for Cuban autonomy within the Spanish empire. The private messages from McKinley’s minister to Spain make clear, however, that the President viewed autonomy as a step toward gradual United States absorption of Cuba, as either a commercial dependency or an outright colony. Thus McKinley carefully avoided any move that would help the rebels in Cuba to achieve independence on their own, Philip Foner has concluded.

McKinley’s subtle intervention was hampered by the refusal of the rebels, and of many of the Spanish officers in Cuba, to accept autonomy. Late in January 1898, Havana was convulsed by riots protesting the new policy, and Secretary of the Navy John D. Long ordered the
Maine
to the city to protect American lives and act as a restraining influence. While the battleship kept its tense vigil in Havana harbor, Hearst’s
Journal
published a
letter, stolen from a friend of Spanish Ambassador Dupuy de Lôme, that called into question Spain’s sincerity in granting the recent reforms—as well as containing some gratuitous insults to McKinley. Amidst great public outcry de Lôme was recalled, and the President was confronted with the knowledge that even the Madrid government doubted autonomy was feasible. Then, as pressure to recognize Cuba’s independence again mounted, the
Maine
blew up, killing 266 of the men on board.

“
THE WARSHIP MAINE WAS SPLIT IN TWO BY AN ENEMY’S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE,”
headlined the
Journal,
while Assistant Secretary Roosevelt assured a friend that “the
Maine
was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards”—but most of the public withheld judgment pending the findings of the official inquiry. Seventy-eight years after the sinking of the
Maine,
the U.S. Navy Department would publish a study, prepared by a senior officer and two experienced civilian engineers, attributing the disaster to spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker below decks, which ignited an adjacent ammunition store. But the four officers sent in 1898 to investigate for the U.S. government, pressured by press and public demand for a quick judgment, ruled that the battleship was sunk by “the explosion of a mine situated under the bottom of the ship.” Who had put the alleged mine there, the four could not say.

The press jingoes had no doubt who put the mine there. The cry for war rose over the land. McKinley had already anticipated war by gaining a congressional appropriation for $50 million. Some in Congress, however, felt that America should enter the conflict as the ally of the Cubans. In an attempt to head off such a move, McKinley assured key legislators that he was negotiating with Spain for Cuba’s independence. In fact, the Spanish did accede to most of the President’s demands. They failed, however, to give independence to the island—which McKinley did not ask for—or to transfer it to the United States, which seems to have been the President’s true aim. On April 11, just two days after Spain made further diplomatic concessions, McKinley sent his war message to Capitol Hill.

For more than a week a minority in Congress tried to force the President to recognize the Cuban rebels. Ohio’s Senator Joseph Foraker charged that otherwise “this intervention” would be converted from an act of “humanity” into an “aggressive conquest of territory.” On April 20, McKinley signed a joint resolution that did call for Cuba’s independence and authorized American intervention to help achieve it, but withheld recognition of the revolutionaries. The resolution also incorporated the compromise Teller Amendment, which disclaimed any United States intention to annex Cuba. Congress rallied behind the President only after Madrid broke relations with Washington, and by overwhelming majorities
the House and Senate voted that a state of war existed with Spain. It was April 25, 1898. For the first time in fifty years the United States faced a foreign foe.

America had three assets in its war with Spain—a strong navy, a small but professional army, and a well-thought-out strategy. It was the navy that first made itself felt, striking a dramatic blow halfway around the world from Cuba. On the morning of May 1, six U.S. cruisers and gunboats under the command of Commodore George Dewey steamed into Manila Bay and confronted Spain’s larger but antiquated Asian fleet. For five hours, amidst sweltering heat and drifting clouds of gunsmoke, Dewey’s ships battered the Spaniards; by noon, every Spanish ship had been wrecked, while the American squadron was all but untouched. Dewey’s telegram announcing the victory—which took seven days to reach America from the Philippines —electrified the country.