William McKinley: Architect of the American Empire

0:00I've contributed to the Cost of War book edited by John Denson and the Secession book edited by David Gordon and some of you have seen me at these meetings before. I'm dealing with William McKinley on my papers entitled William McKinley, Architect of American Empire. Can you hear me all right? I want to announce, by the way, the compendium of apodictically tasteless jokes to be edited by David Gordon also. I want to mention that. McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, is frankly a fairly boring character, although this is not a bad trait in a president. Indeed, had he been as boring as some of the others like Harding and Coolidge, we wouldn't have had to have as many meetings at this conference.

0:52And we wouldn't worry as much as we do about the bloated imperial office, which causes even backwards-rode scholars to strut about the globe like Ozymandias. But McKinley, this self-effacing man, was also William McKinley, founder of the American Overseas Empire. And it's one thing to grab all the contiguous land next to you by whatever means, some of them fair, but it is a different matter to begin to acquire overseas possessions and colonies and interests. It seems to me that in terms of republican theory and classical liberalism both, this introduces a whole new set of issues that many of the critics point out at the time.

1:37McKinley was born in Ohio in 1843, had some college education, taught school, helped preserve the Union for a while, rose to the rank of major while preserving the Union, became a lawyer after the war, Republican politician, elected county prosecuting attorney, married in 1871. This was kind of marred by their loss of two daughters at early ages and his wife's epilepsy. McKenna was elected to Congress in 1876 and five other times after that. He was talented but highly conventional Republican, noted for his dedication to the tariff and occasional waving of the bloody shirt, which is a term meaning at the time they used to occasionally complain about the South and the late war and so on.

2:29He was a personal friend of Mark Hannah, the industrialist, This led people to think that he was only a spokesman for corporate interest, symbolized by Hanna. Mark Hanna himself once told a group of Republican leaders that McKinley knows more about politics than all of us. So McKinley was quiet, but he was a great manipulator and able to get what he had in mind. And there were some other quotes that affected John Hay and other people, Henry Adams and so forth, that made this observation. In 1890, it was realized that the 1883 tariff was producing too much revenue. One of these 19th century problems we don't have anymore. And McKinley was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and was given the tariff to revise.

3:18Of course, he'd be a friendly person to revise the tariff. By the way, I want to just mention what Thurold Rogers, an English classical liberal economic historian, said about the American tariff. He said that 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, referring to the moral tariff of 1860, I guess, too. So McKinley is revising the tariff, and we have to discuss the tariff in relation to some other questions. For a lot of people, a tariff was simply a good thing that they were getting away with.

4:05They didn't have any real theory behind it. We were just getting away with it. It gives us money. Okay, it's good. Other people in the tradition of William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State had a broader vision in which the tariff was part of a larger kind of neo-mercantilist program to produce a kind of politically directed political economy which eventually had foreign policy implications. And of course Seward's ideas are of course related to those of Lincoln and beyond that Henry Clay and this whole tradition that we've been talking about these couple of days, and Seward's acquisition of Alaska and the Midway Islands reflected his vision of projecting American political power into foreign markets eventually as part of this larger program of which the tariff was just part.

4:55Now, when McKinley goes to revise the tariff, he comes into this bitter conflict with the wing of the Republican Party, led by James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine, as some people called him. And Blaine had been Secretary of State under Presidents Garfield and Harrison, and Garfield the brief, I believe, and was heir to Seward's vision of this larger economic policy with these kind of mercantilist implications. And so for Blaine, tariffs should be flexible. And you should negotiate reciprocity treaties with other countries one by one to get into their markets. But you should never give up the principle of tariff in general and just have free trade.

5:40That would be some kind of terrible sellout and then their friends wouldn't get this extra money coming to them. So this was a more interesting strategy, and McKinley didn't accept this approach to the tariff until later, but he apparently learned from this struggle with the blame-wing of his party, and eventually, by the time he emerges as a presidential candidate, has become a proponent of flexible tariffs, combined with reciprocity treaties, to have the best of both possible worlds. You don't have to have free trade, but you can break into foreign markets. and foreign markets and so on. And this brings me to one more point that as we come in towards the 1890s, many people are beginning to complain about this alleged horrible problem that's somehow endemic to the American economy, the horrible problem of overproduction.

6:33And later on you get people saying, oh well, it's also under consumption, which is more of a, I guess, kind of a left-wing twist, and you have to worry about the workers not being able to spend the money and all of that, or not having it. So this notion becomes rather universal, and William Appleman Williams, of course, did a lot to reconstruct what they were talking about at the turn of the century in a number of works, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, and so forth, and Williams added to the discussion his discovery that many of the farm spokesmen and farm journals and so on were in the forefront of promoting this idea that there was something wrong with the economy but foreign markets were going to solve it all and of course this became a general hypothesis accepted by industrialists, farmers, all sorts of people decided that this was the great panacea for anything that ailed the economy was to find foreign markets and if necessary use political power to go out and sort of coerce the foreigners into being our markets. So it becomes a bit of a problem for that reason.

7:40Now there was a quarrel across the political spectrum in the 1880s and coming down to the election of 1896 when McKinley is elected an additional quarrel over monetary policy and this is a dreaded silver problem with populists and some of the Democratic Party and Western and Southern Democrats sometimes saying that well there should be a lot of coinage of silver because that would be inflationary and that would be good and we could get into markets that are on the silver standard better like India or something. and so on. And then some of the Democrats being hardcore gold standard people and so forth. And McKinley is a little bit ambiguous, basically believes in some kind of gold standard. But when he's nominated, he's willing to throw a little bit of a concession to the silver rights and says, well, he'll negotiate along the lines of some kind of bi-metal system with some foreign countries and he doesn't really have to do it in practice, I don't think.

8:38Okay, so you have this general thesis out there that exports are the important thing and any way you can get them is going to be good. You just don't wait for the businessmen to just go out there and sort of find these markets and do this themselves. It somehow requires this political push, impetus. Okay. Now, McKinley too suffers from a panic. This is the panic of 1893 with a subsequent depression. Again, fairly brief because not that much was done to cure it. And nonetheless, there was a lot more complaint because of the depression. The populace were getting a stern enough one to nationalize the railroads and coin a lot of silver.

9:26And there were some socialists running loose at the time. I had been reading those European authors and so forth, and some of the immigrants were socialists and so forth, the Swedes and the Germans. So you had a lot of things that sort of frightened some of the property-holding interests in the Northeast, among other things. Even as McKinley is emerging, and he's become governor of Ohio, and is emerging as a leader of this expansionist coalition that wants to find the foreign markets the sort of forward foreign policy and provide this larger fix for the American economy. And this was also being combined. It's not just the occasional industrialist or theorists saying this. The intellectuals are in the forefront of this. You've got all these writers like Josiah Strong.

10:14There's a whole Protestant missionary group that want American power projected across the globe So the missionaries can find their markets more easily as well and so on. And there's intellectuals who don't find developing our continent and all these resources we have exciting enough. It's sort of boring. People like Brooks Adams think we should be doing more interesting things. Teddy Roosevelt, who's a bit of an intellectual in his own way, although he could have used some Ritalin. So you have this whole spectrum of people, professors, special interest groups, navalists, people like Captain Mahan who wanted spending on a bigger modern navy so we could begin to project our power into the world.

11:03He just liked that kind of thing, but I guess he also could argue that this was the basis of national strength and that would help the economy go and all of that. So all these ideas are in the air. The campaign of 1896 takes place, the Democratic Party is seized by the sort of populist wing and the populist flock in and William Jennings Bryan is nominated on this platform of free trade, certainly free trade compared to anything we had then and monetization of a lot of silver and so forth and frightens the Northeastern interest and McKinley is able to Rowan looking sort of solid and saying things like, has he ever met a payroll kind of thing that they used to say?

11:48And wins reasonably easily with this combination of ideas he inherited from Blaine and has been put together by this coalition. There's quite a number of these people, Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator from Massachusetts, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, who is McKinley's Minister to Britain and later Secretary of State, and Captain Mahan, and they're mentioned so often, they form their sort of their own historical block in the sense of Antonio Gramsci or at least a gang of four. And so this set of ideas are firmly in the administration's mind as they take power. Now they inherit the depression, but they also inherit another problem, which is next door, and that is the revolution in Cuba.

12:45And this is interesting because it's one of those things that's not just a problem, it's also an opportunity in terms of what Roosevelt and these people are calling the large policy. You know, wars are inconvenient, they might cost so many, but you can't rule them out. I mean, it might be the best thing sometimes. Because, looking ahead, you can see that if you at some point decided you had to pacify Cuba, because the Spaniards can't do it, you can use the derelict province argument. Well, Spain's holding territory, it can't control the next door to us, this affects our interests. The argument we used to see is Florida. Okay, so the Spaniards of course remembered that argument that I believe John Quincy Adams had put forth and so on.

13:37The minority is sort of warned by the Cleveland administration that Spaniards have only so much time to solve the problem according to how the Americans want it solved or we might have to intervene. Well, just looking a little further down the road, if the United States should have to go to war with Spain, well, one, it's fairly easy to see who's going to win. Spain has a bunch of wooden ships and a bunch of feudal aristocratic traditions that aren't going to win a war against its modern power. Spain also has the Philippine Islands. It has Guam. It has a number of things that are on the way to the markets that figure very prominently in this sort of neo-Mercantilist vision. They're always talking about the markets of Asia and the China market, and there's kind of a delusion here. Well, there's something to count up the number of Chinese.

14:22And they say, well, if every Chinaman bought a pair of shoes, this would be X-mini. And this leaves, kind of leaves aside the problem that the Chinese may not have any money at this point to buy the shoes with. But they had this delusion that the China market was just endless, which apparently is also the basis of the present policy. So, it hasn't gone away, the China market delusion. It's just more embarrassing now when they go over there and toady up to these people in the way they do. So anyway, so the Cuban situation becomes an opportunity. And I find it hard to believe that given that, that the administration had peace as its primary goal in resolving this problem.

15:07I think they sort of said, okay, if we can get everything we want without war, then that would be good, but that's really not likely. The Spaniards are running a counterinsurgency in Cuba. They're rounding up the population into camps of re-concentracion. It sounds a bit like concentration camp. When powers do this, whether it's the British in South Africa fairly shortly after this, The military planter's first consideration is not sanitation, food and taking care of the people who are being concentrated. It's more just getting them away from where they can support the guerrillas.

15:54So it's usually a pretty good death toll when this is done. And so the Cuban Revolutionary operatives in New York get out a lot of propaganda, some of which is true, about what the Spaniards are doing, and the American press is inflamed, and this is a period of yellow journalism which we're coming back into, apparently, in some ways, in which a story you make up is about as good as one you don't make up, but it has something to work with, at least on a topic. And people in Congress are saying McKinley should do something. So there's this appearance of pressure on McKinley to go to war, and there's this idea that McKinley is just weak and finally submits to Congressional and popular pressure. Well, McKinley knew what he was doing. He had his own schedule. He had to go through the motions and negotiating with Spain and then sabotage the success of the negotiations every time the Spaniards made a concession, changed the demands, somewhat like the run-up to the Gulf War, it seems to me.

16:53Or George Bush said, well, we want to talk. And then Saddam Hussein said, well, we'll meet you in Omaha on Wednesday. and Bush says, no, I've got a golf game in Paris that day, kind of thing. So something similar is going on between the United States and Spain in terms of the demands that are made by the US. And meanwhile, McKinley in early 1898 goes to Congress asking for an appropriation, merely to help the beleaguered Americans in Cuba, not for military purposes yet, but to kind of getting the ball rolling on some money to run a possible war. And he brings out the Hawaiian Annexation Treaty. There had been this Hawaiian planter, pineapple grower, some of the name Dole comes up, revolt in Hawaii.

17:40And the Hawaiian Republic was declared and the Queen of Hawaii deposed. And then these guys petitioned to be admitted to the Union. And Grover Cleveland, who didn't really want foreign possessions that much, tabled the Hawaiian Treaty. and McKinley drags it back out because it's kind of timely and this might be the time to get it ratified and so on. Meanwhile, he's lecturing the Madrid government on how it should be behaving and telling them to grant virtual independence to Cuba and so on. Spaniards are finding this a bit hard to deal with. Okay, so the negotiations break down, the battleship main explodes, and there's a dilemma letter and a few other provocations that add to the excitement. So McKinley goes to Congress on April 11th, asks for a declaration of war, gets it of course.

18:29But one embarrassment for McKinley, the Congress insists, since it's an idealistic war for Cuban freedom, that we're not going to annex Cuba after the war, and this is a teller amendment. So it kind of tied their hands with respect to Cuba, we'd have to make Cuba a protectorate and have a nominally independent Cuban government where we could potentially grab other stuff and just take it as territory. Okay, so the war is underway. The war is very brief. It's a lot of fun, not any really high casualties except for people eating the army food, tropical disease, not really any high casualties. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, won the war entirely by himself, as he later proved in his book. In the 9th and 10th Black Cavalry Regiments didn't do anything, well, you know, somewhat misrepresented in the writing of the period, especially by Roosevelt, in terms of any decisive battles.

19:27The best moment, of course, was when ex-Confederate Brigadier Joe Wheeler at the skirmish of Las Grasimas sort of forgot for a moment that his Spaniards were retreating, says, come on, boys, we've got the damn Yankees on the run, forgot for a minute which war he was Okay, so the war is successful, the Spanish surrender, and in the meantime, of course, Dewey is deemed to Manila, having been precipitated somewhat early by Roosevelt, under Secretary of the Navy, leave Hong Kong, go to Manila just in case something happens and we defeat the Spanish fleet and all that fireman-ready, gridley business, and so on. We occupy Manila, and we've engaged the help of the Philippine insurgents, ...who have been having this sort of sporadic war against Spanish rule, and now we're invested around Manila and we're not quite sure that the Filipino insurgents are going to be all that tractable.

20:20Okay, so it's a little bit difficult. In the meantime, McKinley decides later in the year that we have to have the entire Philippine archipelago, all the islands, not just the harbor, And this will be part of the jumping off and military positions facing these desirable Asian markets and calling stations and all that. Now we've got Hawaii and Guam. We've got this big chain of Pacific forward positions for economic and military purposes. Okay. And world responsibility, don't forget that. One of the reasons we had to take the Philippines, according to McKinley, was they couldn't govern themselves. And we didn't want the Germans to seize the Philippines. This would be unacceptable. Well, it's true, if you have McKinley's program in view, you don't want somebody else seizing them.

21:07So he wasn't, I suppose, terribly Germanophobic. It was just one more argument to use. All right. Now, so we, in the Treaty of Paris, acquire Guam, the Ladrones, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, some other real estate, we kind of write the Cubans constitution for them with a clause that says that we can intervene whenever we feel that things aren't going well in Cuba, the Platinum Amendment, that kind of thing. And so things are going pretty well until the Filipinos decide that they don't really think they should just be transferred from one colonial power to another. And the slogan there was the, no hay derecho a vender un pueblo coma una saca de patatos.

21:52You do not sell a country as you sell a sack of potatoes. So some people flocked to the Filipino insurgents. The problem was the Filipino insurgent leaders were all ilustrados. They were from the upper class, didn't have a large mass base, and couldn't very well offer land reform to attract the masses, since they're all big landholders like Aguinaldo and so on. So they ultimately don't prevail militarily, but in the meantime, the Americans have to run a counterinsurgency as brutal as that run by Spain in Cuba that we complained about with the loss of some 220,000 Philippine lives because of the various collateral damage and all that and so on before the Filipinos decided to collaborate with us and so on on the pre-war model.

22:39So it all worked out in the long run, and then Yankees, Goulmarmes go and civilize the Filipinos. McKinley, I thought he started using the argument that we had to Christianize the Filipinos until someone told him that the vast majority of them are already Roman Catholics. Possibly. A slight miscalculation. Okay, but to get back to McKinley, McKinley was very good at, as Louis Gould, who writes in that presidential series, you know the one volume on each president except for, well, Justice Deneke, who got two presidents for the price of one, but anyway, the series, official series, and Louis Gould says that McKinley is a very modern president because he set up commissions to study things and then tell him what he wanted to hear, so he has a couple of Philippine commissions, And he has a commission before the first Philippine Commission to discuss this whole idea of expansion in this whole foreign policy and tell him what he wants to hear.

23:36So he's always good at bringing in the academics, okay. And he's good at knowing how to pressure Congress to get what he wants. So when he gets the treaty ratified, there were people who thought, well, we don't really want the Philippines. It's some kind of big burden. We don't do this stuff. and he has to use all of his political leverage to, as Tyler Dennett said, he virtually coerced the Senate or Congress into ratifying, the Senate rather, into ratifying the Treaty of Peace. Now he'd already used the old dodge of the Joint Congressional Resolution to annex Hawaii and this is a sub-constitutional dodge to get around the Treaty Clause of two-thirds vote in the Senate which we had used for Texan annexation and more recently for the NAFTA agreement.

24:24It's apparently an agreement. Sometimes it's a treaty. It depends on what you're selling, I guess, that day. I'm going to make a long story short. He sends a special commission to the Philippine Islands consisting of Jacob Sherman, the university president, Admiral Dewey, Major General Otis, Charles Denby, old China hand and open door advocate, and my favorite, Dean C. Worcester, Anthropologist whose main anthropological interest was getting control of timber, cattle and coconuts on which he became very wealthy in the Philippine Islands and making sure that the Philippine resources got into the hands of deserving American corporations as rapidly as possible. And had they had the goods on their own, it might have taken longer. Okay, that sort of thing. So I think it adds up when you consider McKinley has to run a counterinsurgency and at least this minor war and commits us to overseas possessions which are entirely outside the logic of Republican theory.

25:24That's really quite a significant turning point. Henry Adams referred to McKinley, he said the Major is an uncommonly dangerous politician. He was too subtle, he didn't care about getting the credit as long as he got something done. McKinley pictured here was very good at letting other people take the credit or letting it appear that he hadn't done anything. So it's sort of the Eisenhower School of Leadership I think in some ways, or it's attributed to Eisenhower. Now another sequel also in this administration and after McKinley's re-elected are the Open Doornotes. Dornos, the open Dornos is since you're trying to solve the problem. Okay, the China market. China is this huge market that we covet and it looks like it's about to be cut up into exclusive separate spheres of interest by the European powers.

26:21The Russians are encroaching this way. The clever Japanese are showing some interest. All European powers tend to have some exclusive zone of trade and we're worried that this big market may be denied to us. So we try to commit them to a universal principle, part of the style of leadership that have now perfected. Oh, we have a universal principle and you should all accept it. And the universal principle is the open door. Everybody should agree that everybody should be able to trade in the China market and compete fairly. And of course they're saying this partly because they think that if this ever came about we would, of course, be the better competitors. But of course you commit yourself to this sort of policy when other powers have a different plan. And then, you have to realize that you're courting the possibility of warfare down the road and, of course, the sequel, to be very brief about it, is that Roosevelt, who succeeds McKinley after McKinley's assassination in Buffalo, New York, decided the Russians were the bigger threat to the open-door policy

27:30and we should back the clever Japanese and lean to their side in the Russo-Japanese war. I'm not sure the later Roosevelt, his cousin, was altogether happy about that. But again, if you don't have an obsession about the China market per se, you really have no reason to collide with the Japanese quite so much down the road. So conjuring up all sorts of opportunities for later foreign policy adventures and misadventures and the whole imperial colonial bureaucracy we developed as Bill Marina discussed yesterday to run the Philippines until we got tired of it and committed ourselves to the model of informal empire where we simply appoint someone like Somoza or the Shah of Iran or Noriega or Saddam Hussein to do the work for us and take our money. This usually works out quite well, I'm told, and there may be others.

28:25So, what's the time man saying back there? Okay, thanks. So, the point is, again, in terms of Republican theory and classical liberalism, there are a number of drawbacks of this policy, like governing foreign populations without their consent in non-contiguous territory. In fact, the anti-imperialist movement, which rose up to complain about the Philippine War and the general trend of the policy, was in the embarrassing position of having to quote Judge Taney. And these were heirs of the anti-slavery movement, these anti-imperialists. The delegation with umbrellas, as Mr. Dooley calls them, the delegation from Boston, the anti-imperialist league, had to quote Justice Taney from the Dred Scott decision, because it's all about Republican theory.

29:16I mean, it's unfortunate the way it turned out in terms of maybe slavery. But Taney says that the United States is not designed constitutionally to have a colonial empire and rule people permanently without their consent. And so the poor anti-imperialists are having to quote Taney among other sources to make that point, but it is a valid point. As Felix Murley put it in Freedom and Federalism in the 50s, if you look at the period from 1865 to 1898, this is what essentially happened. As he put it, the private enslavement of Negroes had ended. The public control of alien populations had begun. I think it may be a good point to stop. Anyway, McKinley helped set this process in motion and was very good at it.