Penguin History of the United States of America (82 page)

This did not matter much during most of the nineteenth century. The shield of the Royal Navy (maintained by Great Britain, at her own expense and for her own purposes), America’s real remoteness across the oceans and the salutary display of strength and purpose that was the Civil War combined to keep the United States as free from undesirable foreign entanglements as the Founding Fathers wished. But the world was changing. Expanding America, borne on the wings of industrial technology, was beginning to meet similar expansive forces, sustained by the same inventions. The scramble for Africa in the 1880s did not involve the United States, which was occupied in swallowing the last of the American West and was beginning also to take an interest in the Pacific; but the scramble for Asia, which occured in the nineties, concerned it deeply. The American people were as eager as any European nation to bring progress to China in the same way as the British had brought it to India: by trade, by preaching, by teaching, if necessary by gunfire. They took a proprietorial attitude to Japan: had it not been an American sailor, Commodore Matthew Perry, who between 1852 and 1854 had forced that country to open commercial and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world? So the events of the nineties filled them with alarm: the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the acquisition by the European powers of several key Chinese ports, the extension of extraterritorial rights even in ports which they did not own, what seemed to be the ever-strengthening British hegemony (the Chinese customs were administered by the British), finally the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, which the United States actively helped to crush. Even while the legations in Peking were under siege, John Hay, McKinley’s Secretary of State, circulated a note to the powers stating that in future the United States wanted ‘China’s territorial and administrative entity’ to be preserved and wanted all parts of China to be equally open to all nations for trade. This was the Open Door. In its mixture of high-mindedness, low attention to the main chance (Hay, like many of his contemporaries, thought that the China trade was much more lucrative, and more open to American capture, than was really the case) and total inattention to the actualities of power, it was a characteristic American diplomatic initiative of the pre-Pearl Harbor type. Like the Monroe Doctrine, it had better luck than it deserved. None of the other powers felt itself strong enough to make a grab for sole rule in China (though that too would change in due course); so all were happy to acquiesce in Hay’s suggestion. China would remain formally independent; in reality she would
be exposed to simultaneous robbery from all quarters. Only the robbers would not try to swipe each other’s loot.

Properly understood, these events not only showed that the forces which were carrying America into the imperialist phase of her history were at work in other countries too, which was by itself enough to make the world a more dangerous place for the United States; they also showed that the strength of the British Empire was beginning to decline. Britain’s nineteenth-century pre-eminence had various causes; perhaps the most important was simply that she was the first industrialized nation. Now that other countries were successfully copying her, indeed in many respects surpassing her, it would be more and more difficult – eventually, impossible – for her to hold on to the extraordinary position and possessions that she had won in the world. To begin with she had to admit to herself that she could not annex China, or even keep that country as part of her exclusive informal Empire. She was beginning to wane, by inches. This meant that America could no longer rely on the Royal Navy as an automatic guarantee against alien interference. In 1903, preoccupied with the rising threat from imperial Germany, Britain withdrew her Caribbean squadron, glad to think that the United States would take her place. Yet this development was perhaps the most ominous of all, for it implied that, to protect her interests, America would now have to take a much more leading, active part in diplomacy, and would have to build up her armed forces to a far greater extent, than had been customary for nearly a hundred years. The only alternative was to think and behave like a third-rate power, eventually to be treated like one and in the end, perhaps, to become one. And although two generations of Americans were to agonize over the choice in the first decades of the twentieth century, there could be no doubt, given the country’s proud and energetic temper, which way it would eventually be settled.

For one thing, the United States, as has been shown, was in the grip of forces, above all galloping industrialism and urbanization, which were making play with all the advanced countries. An upsurge of passionate nationalism marked the last twenty years of the nineteenth century and the first fourteen of the twentieth in all the leading European countries and Japan. As the headlong pace of modern development showed no sign of slackening – rather the reverse – the peoples and their rulers clung to each other for reassurance and cemented their union with hatred, fear and contempt of foreigners. In the deepest sense, none of the great powers took foreign policy any more seriously than the United States: they used it as a weapon in internal politics, never considering seriously that it might fatally wound the hands which wielded it. And so the world went on to disaster.

It should therefore be clear that the United States was running out of time in the nineties; but the peace could undoubtedly have been preserved for many years more but for a string of secondary causes. To be sure, these secondary causes were themselves products, or perhaps by-products, of the great underlying determinants of the age: nationalism, economic ambition,
social tensions, political obsolescence. But they were not in themselves very formidable. Better management could have faced them down quite easily.

Businessmen were zealous to export, since they feared (prematurely) that the domestic market was saturated. American farmers were looking for a protected market overseas where they need not fear foreign competition and so could dump the results of what they were told was their propensity to over-produce. Many of the new urban newspapers, struggling to build their circulations ever higher, were quite unscrupulous in their attitudes. There had been trouble in Cuba for years, as the inhabitants carried on a never victorious, never defeated revolt against their Spanish rulers, who were anxious not to give up their country’s last colony in the New World. Cuba, only ninety miles from the coast of Florida, naturally interested American readers, who were regularly regaled with more or less false stories of Spanish tyranny. The rogue newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, sent the artist and reporter Frederic Remington to Havana with instructions to report and draw the atrocities and the war. Remington wired back that there were no atrocities and no war and that he was coming home. Hearst told him to stay where he was: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ Hearst could not afford to be scrupulous: he had a private war of his own on his hands, a circulation war with another newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, who was eventually to redeem his name by founding a School of Journalism at Columbia University, New York, and also the Pulitzer prizes – given annually to what is taken to be the best piece of journalism, and to the best specimens of theatrical, historical and fictional writing. Hearst reasoned that he could defeat Pulitzer only if there was a war, for nothing else sells newspapers so well. He got his way. A United States battleship, the
Maine
, on a courtesy visit to Havana, blew up in harbour on 15 February 1898, killing most of the crew. The explosion was almost certainly an accident, but Hearst thought otherwise. ‘Remember the
Maine
! screamed his papers, announcing that the episode was the result of a fiendish Spanish plot. Clamour for action mounted appallingly. As usual, there was an election due: President McKinley felt he had no alternative. After much prayerful wrestling he did the weak thing and declared war on Spain.

It was a short, businesslike affair. Fine new American warships crushed the Spanish effortlessly. The Royal Navy observed a benevolent neutrality in the Atlantic. In the Pacific, Commodore George Dewey sank or disabled the pathetic squadron of cruisers and gunboats that the Spanish mustered against him, and seized Manila in the Philippines. In the Caribbean an expeditionary force landed in Cuba and inflicted a tactical defeat upon a Spanish force at the Battle of San Juan Hill (1 July 1898). It was a cowboys-and-Indians affair, rather absurdly making a national hero of Lieutenant-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, second-in-command of a body of volunteer cavalry known as the Rough Riders, no doubt named after the
performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The battle led to a stalemate on land, and the American army began to rot away from disease; but at sea another crushing American victory soon followed, the Battle of Santiago Bay (3 July). Santiago surrendered on 17 July, and that was the end of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. In the subsequent peace treaty (signed at Paris) Spain granted independence to Cuba, and the United States took Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to be colonies of her own. It was as neat a piece of piracy as the Mexican War; and as in the past the US government salved its conscience by making a cash payment to the defeated enemy. The war’s only consequence of real value was an investigation by the US army which established the nature of yellow fever and thus led to its elimination, at least in mainland America. It was also not without importance that the war enabled McKinley to begin the modernization of the government offices in Washington which was long overdue. He found the War Department asleep, and left it awake.

For a time, the Americans were proud to have joined the ranks of the overtly imperialist powers. It was as if they had yet to discover that life is a serious business. They received the compliments of the arch-imperialist himself (Kipling) in the notorious verses,
The White Man’s Burden
:

Take up the White Man’s burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Understandably, the new-caught Filipinos did not see it like that. American missionaries comforted themselves for the seizure of the Philippines with the thought that the natives could now be converted to Christianity: it was disconcerting to discover that they were Christians already, having long ago been forcibly converted to Catholicism by Spain. In fact the Filipinos, like the contemporary Japanese, felt themselves ready for modern nationhood and saw in the Spanish-American War a wonderful opportunity to win their independence, which their leader Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed immediately after the Battle of Manila. When they discovered that the United States proposed to substitute its rule for Spain’s they took up arms and fought so well that it was three years and more before they too were defeated. The shameful, though not unprecedented, sight of Uncle Sam behaving like George III roused widespread opposition within America, led by Bryan, who again ran for the Presidency against McKinley in 1900; but he lost as decidedly as he had done in 1896. McKinley had not been so sure of victory as to omit all useful precautions, however: he had taken
Theodore Roosevelt (now Governor of New York) onto his ticket as Vice-Presidential candidate. The problem of the Philippines remained, even though Bryan and Aguinaldo were both crushed. The islands were valueless as markets and expensive to defend, being 6,000 miles from the American mainland; but the rise of Japan to ascendancy in the eastern Pacific after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) meant that their defence could not be ignored. Before long everyone, even Theodore Roosevelt (who had been influential in bringing about their annexation), agreed that the Philippines were an expensive nuisance and their conquest had been a mistake.

Yet the imperialist instinct was by no means exhausted. The Caribbean had long been an area of great appeal to American expansionists, and the events of the Spanish War had vastly strengthened their ambitions. The latest Treaty of Paris had given the United States an official protectorate of Cuba. The difficulties of strategy during a war in two oceans reinforced the arguments for a trans-isthmian canal through Nicaragua or Panama, at the same time as the conquest of yellow fever made the scheme at last practicable (the French had made a great effort to dig a canal in the eighties, but their workmen had been wiped out by the disease). Britain’s withdrawal from the Caribbean and the American annexation of Puerto Rico further involved the United States in the Caribbean; and always the pressure of trade and investment drove it to look southward. The first quarter of the twentieth century was to see intervention in Latin America on an unprecedented scale: armies entered Mexico, the US Marines sustained or overthrew governments in the islands, American business interests came to dominate the economy of the Caribbean and in dubious circumstances the United States dug a canal through the isthmus of Panama (1904-14). In an age of accelerating competition between the nation-states America was coming to play a conspicuous part, as greedy and short-sighted as the rest; and never thought to ask where, unless restrained, this sort of behaviour would lead.

For the prime concern of the American people, as so often before and since, was their own domestic life. Imperial wars might be exciting to read about, but real life happened on the sidewalks of home. Besides, a change was at hand. The long political stagnation that had followed the Civil War epoch was coming to an end: a great alliance for reform was emerging, and would dominate public life for the next two decades. It gave the voters much more to talk about than foreign affairs and imperial responsibilities.

Probably at no time in a democratic society are change, improvement, even reform, quite absent: conservative governments have to adjust to the changing demands of time as well as radical ones. But epochs which generate reform over a wide span of life and years do not arise from such piecemeal impulses. They occur when a society is confident and efficient enough to contemplate large-scale innovation unafraid, and when there is a consensus among its rulers and shapers that such innovation is desirable. A consensus of this sort emerged rapidly in the first years of the twentieth century, until
by the beginning of the second decade it seemed that all Americans were now reformers.