10 William McKinley: Architect of the American Empire Joseph R. Stromberg

Papa met José Martí in Key West, and admired his Cuban Revolutionary Party, but he says we should not fool ourselves about our interests. He hates the Spaniards as sincerely as the next man, but says the U.S. picked this fight in Cuba, Maine or no Maine, it’s just an excuse to clean Spain out of our hemisphere once and for all, and grab the Philippines and Puerto Rico while we’re at it. The War with Spain isn’t one bit different than what he still calls “the War of Yankee Aggression”: the Old South, says he, was the first conquest of the Yankee Empire.

—Peter Matthiessen

Killing Mr. Watson

“Our first man of destiny since Mr. Lincoln—the President, who else? The Major himself. Mr. McKinley. Don’t laugh!” Adams frowned severely. “I know he is supposed to be a creature of Mark Hanna and all the other bosses, but it’s plain to me that they are his creatures. They find him money—a useful art—so that he can deliver us an empire, which he has!”

—Gore Vidal

Empire

‘Consent of the governed,’ indeed! . . . War is the great civilizer. God commanded Moses and Joshua to exterminate the Canaanites.

—Hon. Henry Gibson of Tennessee,

Pictorial History of America’s New Possessions

“Ye’re a traitor,” said Mr. Hennessy.

“I know it,” said Mr. Dooley, complacently.

“Ye’re an anti-expansionist.”

“If ye say that again,” cried Mr. Dooley, angrily, “I’ll smash in ye’er head.”

—Finley Peter Dunne

Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy

The most unprofitable of all commerce is that connected with foreign dominion. To a few individuals it may be beneficial, merely because it is commerce; but to the nation it is a loss. The expense of maintaining dominion more than absorbs the profit of any trade.

—Thomas Paine

Selected Writings of Thomas Paine

William McKinley: Architect of Overseas Empire

William McKinley, twenty-fifth president of the United States, is, frankly, a rather boring character, although we should not consider this a bad trait in a president. Indeed, had he only been as boring as Harding or Coolidge, we would not need to worry as much as we do about the bloated office which presides over the American empire. He deployed an array of presidential powers—largely absent from the original Constitution but built up over time by “strong” presidents like Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln—to achieve his geopolitical and domestic goals. He left the office “enhanced,” as historians like to say.[1]

McKinley’s Early Career as a Conventional Republican

William McKinley was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843. He had some college education and taught in a country school. He served in the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry, preserving the Union, and rose to the rank of major. After the war, he studied law in Canton, Ohio; worked as an attorney; and was elected prosecuting attorney of Stark County, as a Republican in a Democratic county In 1871 he married Ida Saxton, but their happiness was undermined by the loss of two daughters and his wife’s “invalid” condition (actually, epilepsy).

McKinley was elected to Congress in 1876 and reelected in 1878, 1880, 1882, 1884, and 1888. He was a talented, highly conventional Republican noted for his dedication to sky-high tariffs and occasional waving of the bloody shirt.[2] He was a personal friend of Marcus Hanna, industrialist and, later, politician, and the myth arose that Hanna was his puppetmaster. Mark Hanna himself remarked to some Republican leaders that “you will find that he knows more about politics than all of us.”[3]

In 1890, it was realized that the 1883 Tariff Act (largely McKinley’s own work) was bringing in too much money and McKinley, now chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, undertook to subject the tariff to friendly revision.[4] The tariff cannot be discussed apart from an integrated set of political ideas and interests which emerged as a program by the 1880s. While for some of McKinley’s associates the tariff may have simply been a good thing they were getting away with, for more sophisticated policymakers in the tradition of William H. Seward, tariffs were but one means of achieving a neomercantilist expansion of the American political economy. Seward’s acquisition of Alaska and the Midway Islands projected U.S. power, potentially, into the Pacific toward appealing Asian markets for American goods and investment. This state-promoted expansion, at first merely desirable, soon came to be seen as absolutely essential to American prosperity and liberty.[5]

This is the essential context—to which we shall return—of McKinley’s clash with the James G. Blaine wing of the Republican Party over tariff policy Blaine, secretary of state under Presidents Garfield and Harrison (1881 and 1889–1892), was heir to Seward’s strategic vision (and perhaps Lincoln’s, since Lincoln had been a disciple of the mercantilist Henry Clay). He wished to combine flexible tariffs with broad discretionary presidential power to negotiate reciprocity treaties with foreign nations to gain better access to those markets. This made tariffs a tool in a larger policy of market expansion. McKinley still a pure protectionist, worked to achieve a traditional Republican high-tariff act which carried his name. McKinley learned from this fight and later emerged as a proponent of Blaine’s strategy for expanding U.S. exports, once he took on board the widespread “overproductionist” theory of America’s economic difficulties.[6]

“Overproduction” and the Panacea of Export Markets

William Appleman Williams argues that “farm businessmen” formulated the diagnosis of overproduction and its proposed cure—expanded export markets—even before metropolitan interests did. Southern and Western farmers sought regulation (and, ultimately, nationalization) of the railroads to ensure their equitable operation. Another agrarian goal was large-scale coinage of silver to reverse its demonetization in 1873–1874 and provide “easier” money, as well as to foster trade with countries on the sterling standard. Above all, the farm bloc wanted expanded markets for their crops.[7] The deflation of 1873–1879 gave them added reason to look abroad.

According to Williams, an “export bonanza” in 1877–1881, occasioned by natural disasters affecting European agriculture, underscored the possibilities overseas markets held for U.S. prosperity. The bonanza’s end, when European farmers recovered, only reinforced the growing conviction that larger export markets for U.S. farmers were both desirable and necessary Failing at first to win government assistance to open up such markets, agrarian interests exerted substantial pressure for such expansion.[8] Many metropolitan industrial interests had also arrived at the view that foreign markets were essential to their prosperity.[9] The turning point came when metropolitan Republicans led by Governor William McKinley of Ohio presented a program attractive to industrial and agrarian interests alike.

The fundamental reason for what became informal “Open Door” empire was stated in 1899 by Francis B. Thurber, president of the United States Export Association: “We must have a place to dump our surplus, which otherwise will constantly depress prices and compel the shutting down of our mills . . . and changing our profits into losses”; or as Andrew Carnegie put it, “The condition of cheap manufacture is running full.” The resulting dilemma was met by selling or “dumping” the excess product abroad “at a lower price, sometimes . . . below cost.”[10]

Writing not long after the Spanish-American War and the Boer War, the English anti-imperialist writer John A. Hobson, himself an overproductionist theorist, summarized matters thus:

The economic taproot of, the chief directing motive of all the modern imperialistic expansion, is the pressure of capitalist industries for markets, primarily markets for investment, secondarily markets for surplus products of home industry. Where the concentration of capital has gone furthest, and where a rigorous protective system, prevails, this pressure is necessarily strongest. . . . This is the essential significance of the recent change in American foreign policy as illustrated by the Spanish War, the Philippine annexation, the Panama policy, and the new application of the Munroe [sic] doctrine. . . . South America is needed as preferential market for investment of trust “profits” and surplus trust products. . . . China as a field of railway enterprise and general industrial development already begins to loom large in the eyes of foresighted American businessmen.[11]

It was the panic of 1893 and the subsequent economic crisis which set the stage for the emergence of McKinley, now governor of Ohio, as leader of an expansionist coalition:

The majority of American interest groups, farmers as well as manufacturers, and top political leaders as well as academic theorists, changed their mind between 1892 and 1897 on the question of what had caused the panic and the ensuing depression. From explaining it as a consequence of dangerous or outmoded monetary theories and policies, they came to account for it in terms of overproduction and lack of markets.[12]

McKinley and his colleagues generalized the thesis of “overproduction” advanced by various interests and industries to the American economy as a whole. Their combination of protectionism and reciprocity treaties proved very attractive and contributed to Republican victory in 1896. The expansionist consensus, of which McKinley’s policies were the mature expression, had long been developing. Rooted in a felt need to dominate world markets, the new policies bespoke a fundamentally imperial conception of America’s world role. This conception was reinforced by a “frontier-expansionist” interpretation of history put forward by Frederick Jackson Turner, which regarded the frontier as the source of American republicanism, individualism, and prosperity. With the close of the continental frontier, a “new frontier” had to be found if American society was to remain free and prosperous. Brooks Adams, historian and would-be geopolitical theorist, and his associates (including Theodore Roosevelt) came to see overseas empire as the substitute West for industrial America.[13] To that traditional U.S. sphere of influence, Latin America, were to be added the markets of Asia—above all, China—and the world. Hence, the agitation for subsidies to shippers and a modern “blue water” navy.

Given the goal of opening up markets, U.S. policymakers sought to create political conditions favorable to trade and investment in every country regarded as a potential market. A variety of tactics, ranging from reciprocity treaties to more flexible tariffs, were employed to eliminate other countries’ barriers to U.S. trade. Reform of the U.S. Consular Service, an isthmian canal in Nicaragua or Panama, Hawaiian annexation, and even meat inspection legislation to overcome European discrimination against U.S. products, were all part of a strategy of economic empire.[14] This noncolonial strategy of empire, relying on America’s preponderant power to achieve “supremacy over the whole region,” was remarkably like Britain’s “imperialism of free trade” as analyzed by Gallagher and Robinson.[15] As free trade, it was, of course, somewhat spurious.

The panic of 1893—which probably can be addressed in terms of monetary factors—and the severe depression which followed enlarged the audience for “overproduction” analysis.[16]

Implicitly rejecting Say’s Law, would-be analysts across the political spectrum reasoned that U.S. industry somehow produced significantly more than could be consumed at home, at prevailing prices. The surplus had to find “vent” overseas.

One obvious reform—drastic reduction of U.S. tariffs, or outright free trade—as a means of easing entry of U.S. goods into foreign markets did not appeal to northeastern Republicans and industrialists, and their opponents—Southern and Western Democrats, Populists, and even some Republicans—seemed to think freer trade was desirable but not the entire remedy.

Many who saw foreign markets as the cure for all ills disagreed violently with one another over monetary policy. Democrats and Populists argued that in addition to easier credit, extensive coinage of silver would assist U.S. penetration of foreign markets on the silver standard. Proponents of gold monometallism were denounced as agents of London bankers and the British Empire. Eastern interests of both major parties saw the program of the silverites as dangerously inflationary (which it was) and tarred them with the brush of foreign radicalism. (The real socialists, waiting in the wings, added the obvious corollary to overproduction, namely, “underconsumption,” to be solved by redistribution of wealth at home.)

In this divisive climate, accented by the depression, Governor McKinley—“the Major”—won his party’s 1896 presidential nomination. He had already emerged as the chief political leader of the Republican neomercantilists, as the man who could actually implement the ideas of Captain Mahan, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Hay (mentioned so often in this context that they form their own Gramscian “historical bloc” or, at least, a Gang of Four).

That McKinley was prepared for his role is clear from his address to the founding convention of the National Association of Manufacturers in January 1895 in Cincinnati, where he told the enthused delegates:

We want our own markets for our manufactures and agricultural products; we want a tariff for our surplus products which will not surrender our markets and will not degrade our labor to hold our markets. We want a reciprocity which will give us foreign markets for our surplus products and in turn will open our markets to foreigners for those products which they produce and which we do not.[17]

The election of 1896 pitted McKinley against Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, a prairie Populist, who emphasized unlimited coinage of silver and drastic tariff reduction. The Republican platform called for an isthmian canal, reciprocity, and Hawaiian annexation, and pledged loyalty to the gold standard. To give the silverites something, McKinley promised international negotiations to establish bimetallism.[18] McKinley won handily.

He came into office faced with the after-effects of the depression and the Cuban revolution against Spanish rule, which had broken out in 1895. The Cuban guerrillas’ disruption of Cuban economic activity and the heavy-handed Spanish attempts at repression endangered American lives and property in the island, while Cuban propagandists headquartered in New York made the most of Spanish brutalities. Popular and congressional opinion, spurred on by the “yellow journalists” of the period, demanded American action to liberate Cuba and restore normal economic life. In its diplomatic notes, the Cleveland administration had already implied that Spain might be allowed to restore order within limits prescribed by the United States.[19]

The Prospect of War for Empire

The Cuban revolt presented McKinley with the choice—and opportunity—of going to war to launch the imperial program. Aside from protecting investments and markets in Cuba, the administration wished to pacify the island in order to concentrate on the larger goal of penetrating Asia markets. The conjuncture of problem and opportunity led to war in 1898. The U.S. not only acquired Cuba as an informal possession but gained a foothold in Asia by taking the Philippine Islands over from Spain.

How McKinley Maneuvered the Spaniards

It is his handling of his opportunities and his assumption of the mantle of empire that rescue McKinley from his popular image as a weak president badgered into war by the people, Congress, and the press.[20] That the cause of liberating Cuba was popular helped, but McKinley had his own schedule. More was at stake—the whole integrated extension of American commerce as a political-economic system. War with Spain was a positive good, given the Caribbean and Pacific insular properties that would accrue to the United States upon its conclusion. The latter, in particular, would provide coaling stations for military and commercial vessels and effectively put America’s economic frontier well into Asia. In this respect, peace was hardly the first choice.

In the end, that is to say, the United States got the war that the vast majority of its leaders and citizens wanted. Nobody thrust it upon them. They had defined their ideological and economic interests in ways that converged upon a demand for forceful action in the arena of foreign affairs. The overseas interests that they had defined may be considered mistaken by later observers (some citizens considered them such even then), but they were very real at the time.[21]

In May 1897, the president asked Congress for $50 million to assist Americans in Cuba, and in June he submitted the Hawaiian annexation treaty which his predecessor, Grover Cleveland, had buried. The administration had begun lecturing Madrid to the effect that continued disorder in Cuba severely affected American interests there. “Spain was held responsible for a prosperity to which the United States was ‘entitled.’”[22]

McKinley’s first annual message, in December 1897, dealt with his usual economic concerns but centered on the Cuban question. Referring to the infamous Spanish policy of reconcentración, the president said, “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination.”[23] The current Spanish government, in power since October, showed signs of adopting more acceptable policies.

Alarmist reports from the U.S. consul at Havana, Fitzhugh Lee, may have stimulated the administration to send the battleship Maine to Havana harbor. The DeLôme affair was still in the news when the battleship exploded on February 15, 1898. Both these events worsened relations with Spain and added to clamor for war. The ineffable Teddy Roosevelt, undersecretary of the Navy, cabled Commodore Dewey at Hong Kong to be ready to steam to Manila in the event of war. (Theodore Roosevelt was impetuous but not really ahead of the administration.)

On March 26, the administration insisted that Spain must negotiate with the Cuban rebels over Cuban independence. On March 31, Spain agreed to close the reconcentración camps, provide $600,000 “for relief,” “grant an armistice to the Cuban rebels, and convene a legislative assembly at Havana in May to inaugurate autonomous government on the island.” “Since the President had anticipated that Spain would reject the ultimatum and had written a war message on the basis of his expectation, the conciliatory reply from Madrid forced him into hasty revisions.”[24] Nevertheless, McKinley told the cabinet on April 2 that armed U.S. intervention “would be necessary in Cuba.”[25] The pattern of the negotiations raises the question of whether the administration really wanted negotiations to succeed.

The Major Gets His War

On April 11, McKinley sent his “war message” to Congress, asking Congress “to empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba.”[26] Congress replied with a four-part resolution on April 19, which called for Cuban independence, and Spanish withdrawal, and empowered the president to achieve these goals with military force. The fourth point, the Teller Amendment, obligated the United States to “leave the government and control of the island to its people.”[27]

The war found the military unprepared for even a minor campaign, and various comic-opera episodes took place. War Secretary Russell A. Alger noted that “[t]he army had not been mobilized since the Civil War.”[28] The naval campaign in the Pacific proceeded rapidly. Commodore Dewey defeated the Spanish Fleet at Manila on May 1 before the army had attempted a landing in Cuba. Spanish forces surrendered in Cuba on July 17, ending the war. General Shafter kept the Cuban rebels at arm’s length, showing that Cuban “independence” was an American operation.[29] In the Pacific theater, the battle of Manila, on August 13, was largely an orchestrated affair fought for the Spanish officers’ honor.

The Empire Builders Go to Work

In the meantime, the administration had annexed Hawaii, using that old, dubiously constitutional dodge, the joint resolution, to get around the senatorial two-thirds rule. (The same dodge gave us Texan annexation and NAFTA.) As American forces had seized Guam and were holding Manila, there was now no shortage of coaling stations and jumping-off points to Asian markets and world “responsibilities.”

Before the battle of Manila, the U.S. called for Cuban independence (here the Teller Amendment tied the administration’s hands) and the cession to the U.S. of Puerto Rico and Manila—the city and harbor). After Spain sued for peace on August 12—the battle on the 13th was needless—U.S. demands increased. McKinley was already thinking of keeping the island of Luzon—or, indeed, the whole archipelago. His decision to keep all the Philippines had much to do with fear of German seizure of the islands, which would interfere with the larger political-economic strategy he was following.[30]

The immediate result was a colonial war, the “Philippine Insurrection,” between the Americans and Filipinos who had only recently supported the Americans against Spain. This quickly became a counter-insurgency whose conduct increasingly resembled that of the evil Spanish feudalists in Cuba, with 220,000 Filipino deaths resulting from the war. Veterans of late nineteenth-century Indian wars conducted the campaign, notable for its “marked severities.”[31] No remarks were heard from McKinley about “uncivilized warfare” or “extermination” this time; only bland generalizations about the rights of conquerors under international law, good government, and uplifting the savages.

True to his interest in the practical details, the president appointed a special commission consisting of Jacob G. Schurman, Rear-Admiral Dewey Major-General Elwell S. Otis, Charles Denby, and Dean C. Worcester to design a civil government for our new colony and, perhaps as an afterthought, to get the resources of the islands into the hands of deserving U.S. corporations.[32] Something similar took place in Cuba, where the U.S. military occupation stayed in place long enough to oversee the writing of a Cuban constitution that allowed U.S. intervention at the Americans’ discretion (the Platt Amendment) and presided over a virtual Enclosure Movement with respect to Cuban land and resources.[33]

In the Philippines the former anti-Spanish insurgents took up the slogan, “No hay derecho a vender un pueblo como se vende un saco de patatas” (“There is no right to sell a village like a sack of potatoes”).[34] The Americans were up against the classic colonial problem of finding local collaborators to be their front men and man their administration once the war was won. The rebel leaders, on the other hand, coming from the native upper class—the ilustrados—lacked mass support, and as hacendados—large landowners—were hardly able to offer land reform to win a mass base.[35] The Americans, with superior resources and firepower, ultimately prevailed, although fighting continued in remote southern islands through 1910. Ilustrados who had collaborated with Spain did the same with the Americans—and, in time, so did former rebels.

The Empire of the Open Door

McKinley invented, or at least popularized, a name for the strategy of market-expansion by political-military means. In a speech in late 1898, he said, “we seek no advantages in the Orient which are not common to all. Asking only the open door for ourselves, we are ready to accord the open door to others.”[36] The phrase soon became shorthand for state-driven overseas economic expansion. By asserting Americans’ right to trade as equal competitors in all of China in the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900, the United States sought to prevent or reverse the division of China into exclusive spheres of trade by other, less sophisticated, imperial powers.[37] To realize the asserted right of American business to trade everywhere became the key strategy and consistent theme of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. When rival powers staked out empires and when strong nationalist and national-communist movements arose in the undeveloped countries, Open Door imperialism involved America in seemingly endless interventions and major wars.

The brutal Philippine war briefly stirred up an anti-imperialist movement, but the administration was able to characterize its critics as men of little vision drawing back from the glories and opportunities of empire. In the election of 1900, William Jennings Bryan, running again, made little real use of imperialism as a campaign issue.[38] McKinley, running with Theodore Roosevelt, was easily reelected. Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley” summed things up well in his paraphrase of a McKinley speech:

As f’r our newly acquired possessions, ’tis our intintion to give them a form iv government suited to their needs, which is small, an’ in short to do as we blamed please with thim, makin’ up our minds as we go along.[39]

William McKinley: “An Uncommonly Dangerous Politician”

There might have been an American empire and a bloated presidency without William McKinley. But McKinley was indeed the man of his hour and his contribution to the destruction of republican liberty was significant. Like Tammany Hall’s Mr. Plunkitt, “he seen his opportunities and he took ’em.”[40]

McKinley brought factions of his own party into the new expansionist consensus and was a tireless spokesman for the Seward-Blaine tradition and the overproduction-underconsumptionist thesis that gave it new meaning.[41] He was an able manager and manipulator of subordinates and allies, all the more effective because he did not care that much about the final credit.[42] He shrewdly brought ex-Confederate officers into his war to make it an instrument of sectional reconciliation.

McKinley was on top of the details, political and economic, of his foreign and domestic policies. He made extensive use of the leeway given presidents in foreign affairs and the greater leeway given a president clothed in his invisible “war powers.” He traveled extensively around the country expounding his ideas. He brought academics and practical men together in three presidential commissions—one to drum up support for the Open Door and two to deal with the Philippines—and thus beginning the political corruption of American higher learning. He rather quickly overcame his initial uneasiness at ruling foreign subjects by decree and went at it with a will. Although he stands, in retrospect, in the shadow of the flashy and impetuous Theodore Roosevelt, he was a very modern president—and that is the problem.[43] Diplomatic historian Tyler Dennett comments that to get his final peace treaty ratified, McKinley “created a situation . . . which had the effect of coercing the Senate.”[44] By founding an overseas empire—which outlasted its colonial phase, being reborn as the permanent, global, “informal” American empire—he gave future presidents a vast arena within which to claim novel powers for themselves and the colossal bureaucracy they oversee. James Oliver Robertson writes:

McKinley conjured up the image of the humble, popular Lincoln, revived Lincoln’s uses of war powers, and established the image of presidential control and presidential decision-making for the United States as a world power. . . . By the use of his authority as Commander-in-Chief, McKinley acquired for the United States a territorial empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific. At the same time, the mass media spread stories of his humility, his popular origins, his prayers for guidance, and his ignorance of world geography. By his diplomatic and military direction, he “emancipated” the people of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish bondage, and made the United States their protector, defender and educator, and the prime user of their land, their resources, and their markets. McKinley’s presidency is symbol—and reality as well—of the beginnings of the modern American focus on the presidency, and of the mythology of presidential power.[45]

McKinley was untiring. On September 5, 1901, the day of his assassination in Buffalo, New York, he had given a speech praising Blaine, reciprocity, and flexible tariffs. He stated: “The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.”[46]

By taking the step into overseas—or “salt-water”—imperialism, McKinley broke the continuity of Republican landed expansion, itself not entirely unproblematic,[47] and set the stage for the expansion, not so much of markets, as of the American presidency and state apparatus into near-infinity. A modern president is responsible only to himself, executive traditions, and the officium (with a wink and a nod at his party, cronies, favored business interests, and—very distantly—the abstract “people,” whose tribune and lord he is). So much meddling and control have become possible on a global scale that the question of “economic” causation seems a bit misplaced. Felix Morley—surveying the changes that took place between 1865 and 1900—comments:

The deeper result [of 1898] was to make Washington for the first time classifiable as a world capital, governing millions of people overseas as subjects rather than as citizens. The private enslavement of negroes was ended. The public control of alien populations had begun.[48]

In the last analysis, empire is a political phenomenon not reducible to some economic “base.” The empire is the extension of the area of state control. While imperialists may have economic motives, empire is not an “economy”; the imperialists may be seeking power, prestige, adventure, or other things. Overseas, the empire creates a “double layer” of statism, superimposing its own power over that of local elites (compradores, etc.).[49]

The state organizes the political means to wealth—the “means of coercion,” to quote Sir Ernest Gellner—and, in Murray Rothbard’s words, “constitutes, and is the source of, the ‘ruling class’ . . . and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital.”[50] Empire is the state in extenso. Different motives can drive the process. It appears that the engrossing of overseas markets has been the chief aim of American empire-builders since 1898, but we cannot overlook the possibility that some of them believe their own rhetoric about global democratic perpetual war for perpetual philanthropy and moral uplift.[51]

William McKinley was a worthy contributor in this field, just as he was in the more practical aspects of empire.[52] His quiet style of leadership, combined with mastery of the political and economic details (if there was a tariff on pig iron, he knew exactly how much revenue it brought in), made him the ideal founder of a modern nonaristocratic empire grounded in state power but oriented toward commercial gain for well-connected friends and associates. It could be said that British imperial leaders employed a certain style of hypocritical legalistic and Christian rhetoric to justify what they wished to do anyway. McKinley helped establish the American variation on the theme, which is marked by an eternal innocence (accidents! collateral damage! greatness thrust upon us! totally unforeseen attacks by wily foreigners!) and a self-righteousness surpassing that of the British.

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[1] E.S. Corwin, in Total War and the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) was critical of Lincoln’s “invention” of unspecified presidential “war powers,” but in later writings could not get enough presidential power. Of sterner stuff is Raoul Berger, whose Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974) argues persuasively that the Constitution granted no inherent executive powers.

[2] Thus, in a speech at East Liverpool, Ohio, in October 1893, he said: “There is not one Southern State that is not in favor of State bank money. Do you know why? Because they still believe in State sovereignty. They don’t seem to realize that State sovereignty was shot to death twenty-five years ago.” (Murat Halstead, Life and Distinguished Services of William McKinley, our Martyr President: Memorial Association, 1901), pp. 158–59.

[3] Quoted in William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 411. Henry Adams observed that McKinley, as president, “was a marvelous manager of men” who “found several manipulators, to help him, almost as remarkable as himself, one of whom was [John] Hay.” The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, [1918] 1961), p. 374.

[4] The contemporary English liberal economic historian Thorold Rogers said of the American tariff: “The American people pretend to be the freest nation in the world, and they permit themselves to be fleeced and plundered by a few interests, which dictated their own terms at a supreme crisis of the national history.” The Economic Interpretation of History (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918), pp. 383–84.

[5] See Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963). On Seward’s precocious program, see pp. 24–32, and also Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of the American Empire: William Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973).

[6] See Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, pp. 247–48, 332–37.

[7] Ibid., pp. 132–404. For a discussion of the complex monetary issues, see Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964). Unger remarks “a rather loose connection between protectionist principles and soft money” (p. 127)—a point that probably applies to the 1870s. As yet there appears to be no real Austrian analysis of this period.

[8] Ibid., pp. 206–31.

[9] William Appleman Williams, Contours of American History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), pp. 363–64.

[10] Quoted in Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, p. 439, and Contours of American History, pp. 326–27.

[11] John A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1926] 1949), pp. 262–63.

[12] William Appleman Williams, “The Acquitting Judge” in For A New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959–1967, James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, eds. (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 44.

[13] See LaFeber, The New Empire, pp. 62–101, Thomas McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), and Lloyd C. Gardner, A Different Frontier: Selected Readings in the Foundations of American Economic Expansion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966).

[14] William F. Marina points out that “[i]t is a mistake to consider anyone who believed in developing American commercial interests as an economic imperialist. . . . [T]he essence of the anti-imperialist position was an aversion to the use of force in relations between nations.” See “Opponents of Empire: An Interpretation of American Anti-Imperialism, 1898–1921” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Denver, 1968), p. 100. Cf. Harold Baron: “The free trade concept of developing international trade had nothing in common with the neo-mercantilist governmental policy that prevailed in the United States” (“Comment on John Rollins, ‘The Anti-Imperialists and Twentieth Century American Foreign Policy,’” Studies on the Left 3, no. 1 [1962]: 26).

[15] John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (1953): 3, 1–15. For a reply which stresses the difference between “free trade” imperialism and real free trade, see Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 14, no. 3 (1962): 489–501.

[16] McCormick, China Market, p. 34.

[17] Quoted in LaFeber, The New Empire, pp. 192–93. (Not exactly Daniel Webster, but certainly what the N.A.M. delegates wanted to hear.) Businesses especially keen on the political finding of overseas markets included cotton, flour, and meat exporters (see Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, p. 340). Mr. Dooley soon pictured American business representatives addressing the poor heathen Chinese as follows: “Hinceforth ye’ll ate th’ canned roast beef iv merry ol’ stock yards or I’ll have a file iv sojers fill ye full iv ondygestible lead.” And: “We ar-re th’ advance guard iv Westhren Civilization, an we’re goin’ to give ye a railroad so ye can go swiftly to places that ye don’t want to see.” (Peter Finley Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy [New York: R.H. Russell, 1900], pp. 79–80.)

[18] Reciprocity, subsidies to the merchant marine, foreign markets, and bimetallism feature prominently in McKinley’s first inaugural address. See James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents 10 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1903), pp. 11–19.

[19] LaFeber, The New Empire, pp. 295–95.

[20] “McKinley led by indirection . . . but he was more in charge than his colleagues realized.” Michael P. Riccards, The Ferocious Engine of Democracy: A History of the American Presidency (New York: Madison Books, 1995), p. 364. Henry Adams wrote that “[t]he Major is an uncommonly dangerous politician” (quoted in Walter Karp, The Politics of War [New York: Harper Colophon Books], p. 71).

[21] Williams, “The Acquitting Judge,” p. 45.

[22] Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, p. 417.

[23] Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 10, p. 31.

[24] George H. Mayer, The Republican Party: 1854–1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 262–63.

[25] Marina, “Opponents of Empire,” p. 7.

[26] Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 10, p. 67.

[27] Joint Declaration in Merrill D. Peterson and Leonard W. Levy, eds., Major Crises in American History: Documentary Problems, II: 1865–1953 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), pp. 191–92.

[28] Quoted in G.J.A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic—1898 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), p. 230.

[29] Louis Pérez, Jr., says: “A Cuban war of liberation was transformed into a U.S. war of conquest” (Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], p. 178). In his second annual message in December 1898, McKinley stated that recognizing the Cuban rebels as belligerents would have been “logically unfounded or practically inadmissable”—whatever that might mean (Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 10, p. 82).

[30] See Marina, “Opponents of Empire,” pp. 150–51.

[31] See Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York: New American Library, 1980), pp. 307–32; and Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). Fierce resistance by Islamic Moro tribesmen on Mindanao, who could damage or kill an American officer with their bolos even after taking two .38 caliber bullets, led the Army to change over to the Colt .45 automatic pistol (see Geoffrey Perrett, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam [New York: Random House, 1989], p. 296).

[32] For an acid portrait of Worcester as an anthropologist whose main interest was timber, cattle, and coconuts (on which he made a lot of money), see Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 279–306. A Philippine nationalist newspaper in 1908 portrayed Worcester as “a bird of prey,” who

ascends the mountains of Benguet ostensibly to classify and measure Igorot skulls, to study and civilize the Igorots, but, at the same time, he also espies during his flight . . . where the large deposits of gold are, the real prey concealed in the lonely mountains and then he appropriates these all to himself afterward, thanks to the legal facilities he can make and unmake at will, always, however, redounding to his benefit.

(Quoted in Leonard Davis, The Philippines: People, Poverty, and Politics [London: Macmillan, 1987], p. 39.)

[33] See Louis Pérez, “Insurrection, Intervention, and the Transformation of Land Tenure Systems in Cuba, 1895–1902,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1985): 229–54.

[34] Usha Mahajani, Philippine Nationalism (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1971), p. 156.

[35] See Ronald Robinson, “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch For a Theory of Collaboration” in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds. (London: Longman Group, 1972), pp. 118–42, and Glenn A. May, “Why the United States Won the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 52, no. 4 (November 1983): 353–77.

[36] Quoted in Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941), p. 622.

[37] On the illusory character of Open Door profits, see Charles A. Beard, Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels (New York: Macmillan, 1939), esp. pp. 36–37. That well-connected individuals, rather than whole nations or economies, gain from these exercises is made clear by David S. Landes, “The Nature of Economic Imperialism” in Economic Imperialism, Kenneth E. Boulding and Tapan Mukerjee, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 134–41, and Robert Zevin, “An Interpretation of American Imperialism,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 348–57.

[38] See Marina, “Opponents of Empire” generally (on Bryan’s half-heartedness, pp. 194–203), and Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1968).

[39] Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy, p. 108.

[40] William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963), p. ix.

[41] The cry of “overproduction” was raised to justify an aggressive foreign export policy. But the overproductionist thesis was actually (1) rationalization of entrepreneurial error (see Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom [South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1962], pp. 64–67); (2) an ad hoc argument for grants of privilege; or (3) an honest but mistaken explanation of real trends in particular sectors and markets (not “general overproduction”), trends having some relation to prior state interventions such as protectionism, subsidies, and cartelizing regulatory reform. This is the pattern of “export-dependent monopoly capitalism” (Schumpeter’s term). Briefly, tariffs confer on many firms prices above world market levels, at which all their production cannot not be sold at home. To take full advantage of economies of scale, the full quantities had to be produced, leaving the manufacturers crying for foreign markets for the unsold “surplus.” See esp. Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), pp. 79–80ff.; Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 69–72; Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), pp. 364–69; and William L. Langer, “A Critique of Imperialism” in American Imperialism in 1898, Theodore P. Greene, ed. (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1955), pp. 15–16. Murray Greene writes that “American capitalism, which developed unimpeded by monarchical power, and German capitalism, where the monarchical element was a factor, were both characterized by strong tendencies toward protectionism and monopolism” (“Schumpeter’s Imperialism—a Critical Note” in Harrison M. Wright, ed., The New Imperialism [Boston: D.C. Heath, 1961], p. 64). Cf. F.A. Hayek’s remarks on Imperial Germany and the United States in The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 46.

[42] Secretary of War Elihu Root remarked that McKinley “was absolutely indifferent to credit . . . but McKinley always had his way” (quoted in Walter Karp, The Politics of War [New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980], p. 70).

[43] See generally Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1980), but esp. pp. 97, 136–37, 144–47, and chap. 10, “The First Modern President,” pp. 231–53. As a presidential historian, Gould finds McKinley’s activities good and writes that McKinley’s policy in the Philippines “was not dictatorial, purposely oppressive, or genocidal” (p. 188), being merely, one supposes, criminal, and callous.

[44] Dennett quoted in Marina, pp. 153–54.

[45] James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American Reality (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), p. 311.

[46]Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 10, pp. 393–97. The speech resembles the old Byrds’ song with the line “and you can believe the future’s ahead.”

[47] Some writers maintain that expansion was such an ingrained American habit that 1898 scarcely represents any change at all. See Richard Drinnon, Facing West; Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); and (a classic) Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, [1960] 1974). William Appleman Williams’s emphasis on the frontier-expansionist theory of history as a key to American thinking goes in this direction as well. And see Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, [1935] 1963). The Anti-Imperialists of 1900, who were laissez-faire liberals with ties to the old antislavery movement, found comfort, oddly enough, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which Chief Justice Taney wrote: “There is certainly no power given by the constitution to the Federal Government to establish or maintain colonies . . . to be ruled and governed at its own pleasure, nor to enlarge its territorial limits in any way except by the admission of new states” (quoted in Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia, p. 625). (Taney was denying the right of Congress to exclude slavery from the territories, but from the standpoint of republican theory his larger point was well taken.)

[48] Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, [1959] 1981), p. 118. Not too surprisingly, given the inner unity of statism at home and abroad, many corporate liberals (Progressives) were expansionists, and vice versa. As J.W. Burgess wrote in 1915, “the Jingoes and the Social Reformers have gotten together” (quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty [Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1960], p. 406). The combination of paternalistic welfarism and gunboat diplomacy symbolized by Teddy Roosevelt provides a revealing parallel to British “social imperialism.” Cf. Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1968). Robert Zevin argues that the Jingoes and Social Reformers had always been together (“American Imperialism,” pp. 358–60).

[49] On “two-layered” statism, see Vincent Ninelli, “On the Importance of Knowing Your Enemy: U.S. Imperialism and Movement Strategy,” The Abolitionist 2, no. 1 (April 1971): 1.

[50] Ernest Gellner, “Soviets Against Wittfogel: Or, the Anthropological Preconditions of Mature Marxism,” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 351, and Murray N. Rothbard, “Anatomy of the State,” Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought 1, no. 2 (Summer 1965): 18. (Gellner’s full phrase is “the means of coercion and persuasion”—suggesting that there is something for the intellectuals to do.)

[51] On the Open Door and informal empire, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Delta, 1962), pp. 16–50.

[52] Thus one of McKinley’s explanations of his Philippine policy: “Our concern was not for territory or trade or empire, but for the people whose interests and destiny, without our willing it, had been put in our hands” (quoted in Murat Halstead, ed., Pictorial History of America’s New Possessions [Chicago: Dominion, 1899], p. 512). (This is about as convincing as Lyndon Johnson’s rationales for the Vietnam War, but Johnson had five or six of them.) On American Protestant missionaries as a great force for empire, see Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), chap. 8, “The Imperialism of Righteousness,’” pp. 279–316; on post-millennial Protestants—some of them secularized (like the monstrous John Dewey)—as a force for aggravated statism generally, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Origins of the Welfare State in America,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 193–229.