The Imperial Cruise Read online

  American Progress by John Gast, 1872. Civilization follows the sun across the American continent, bringing order and prosperity as dark savages recede. This painting became the most popular nineteenth-century depiction of America’s westward expansion. Painted at the height of America’s longest conflict—the Indian Wars—American Progress doesn’t depict the thousands of U.S. Army soldiers who ethnic-cleansed the land of non-White Others. (Library of Congress)

  Much more representative of how the West was won is the 1890 photograph taken near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. American Aryans stand triumphantly around a mass grave into which they dump frozen Indian carcasses. The “battle” (said the White victors) or “massacre” (said the Red losers) at Wounded Knee was the final grand drama of a quarter century of merciless warring upon the Indians—the longest conflict in America’s history.

  “Burial of Dead at Wounded Knee, 1890.” How the West was really won. The White victors called Wounded Knee a “battle.” The Indian losers called it a “massacre.” (Stringer/MPI/Getty Images)

  This was total war—here’s a typical U.S. Army order during the Indian Wars: “Proceed south in the direction of the Antelope Hills, thence toward the Washita River, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.”10 General William Tecumseh Sherman—who commanded the Indian Wars from 1866 to 1884—ordered his troops: “During an assault the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”11 They did not, and through the decades the Indian dead included uncounted thousands of mothers, children, and elderly, some killed merely for sport, their private parts sliced off and used to make prized wallets or to decorate hats, their scalps and their genitals displayed as trophies.

  Theodore Roosevelt, then a U.S. civil service commissioner, visited South Dakota three years after the Wounded Knee Massacre. He wrote that the U.S. government had treated the Indians “with great justice and fairness.”12

  ONE OF THE HISTORIANS who arose to explain the success of American expansion was a University of Wisconsin professor named Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner too believed that the northern German forests had formed the Teuton, that the British Isles had formed the Anglo-Saxon, and that American greatness was part of the Aryan westering. “Forest philosophy,” he wrote, “is the philosophy of American democracy [and] the forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character.”13

  By this time the United States was a continental nation of seventy-six million people, spread across forty-five states. America occupied more land area than all other countries except Russia and Canada.

  In 1893, the thirty-two-year-old Professor Turner, in a speech before the American Historical Association in Chicago, announced, “Now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”14

  The idea that America’s frontier was gone stunned westering White Christians. Roosevelt was one of the first to sense the revolutionary qualities of Turner’s thesis. As John Judis explains in The Folly of Empire, “For Roosevelt… the closing of the frontier [meant] the loss of those elements in national life that made Americans virile and vigorous, stimulated their taste and aptitude for competition, and gave them a strong and unifying sense of racial solidarity. Roosevelt worried that with the absence of battle, Americans would grow soft and overcivilized and unable to defend themselves against a new ‘masterful race’ that still carried within the fighting qualities of the barbarian.”15

  In addition to concerns about the end of the frontier, in 1893 the United States economy sank into its worst depression ever. Six hundred forty-two banks closed and an incredible sixteen thousand companies shuttered their doors. The most actively traded company on the New York Stock Exchange—National Cordage—went belly-up. Giant pillars of the economy such as the Northern Pacific Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad crumbled. America had experienced economic downturns before, but this was much bigger, lasting for four frightening years, from 1893 to 1898. At one point, four million workers were idle—more than one-fourth of a labor force of fifteen million—at a time of no government support for the unemployed.

  Not surprisingly, anxiety about overcivilization increased. Kristin Hoganson, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, writes in Fighting for American Manhood, “The depression of 1893 exacerbated anxieties about manhood, for unemployment resulting from the depression led to fears of male dependency. Rather than providing for their families, as men were expected to do, thousands failed to fulfill this basic male responsibility.”16

  Overseas expansion was seen as a cure-all for the triple whammy of overcivilization, economic depression, and the end of the frontier. Battling Others for their land would enhance the American male’s barbarian virtues and secure profitable markets, and the United States would once again have a frontier in which to hone its Teutonic blade. For many, the sun was not setting on America, but rising on a new ocean of opportunities.

  The United States was not the first White Christian country to the imperial feeding frenzy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had fifty colonies, France thirty-three, and Germany thirteen. More than 98 percent of Polynesia was colonized, 90 percent of Africa, and more than 56 percent of Asia. Across this broad swath of the planet, only seven countries were still fully independent nations. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge expressed America’s “empire envy”: “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world, the United States must not fall out of the line of march.”17

  The U.S. Army had brought the Aryan to the Pacific coast. It now passed the baton to the U.S. Navy. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the newly founded Naval War College, lectured about the need for U.S. expansion “to seek the welfare of the country.”18 Captain Mahan published his collected lectures in an 1890 book entitled The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783. Overnight the groundbreaking book made Mahan the best-known American naval officer and the Naval War College an internationally respected institution.

  The U.S. Navy’s traditional approach had been defensive—the protection of America’s borders. Mahan preached an offensive mission: the U.S. Navy should seize strategic world ports, each “one link in the chain of exchange by which wealth accumulates.”19 The United States, he stated, could experience British-style imperial greatness by concentrating its naval power at the “links” or “pressure points” of international commerce. By striking quickly and sharply at any of these nerve centers, the United States could paralyze whole oceans. To bring Asian booty back to the United States, Captain Mahan said the U.S. Navy must establish links in the Pacific, cut a canal through Central America, and turn the Caribbean into an American lake.

  In the Atlantic Monthly, a reviewer called Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower upon History “distinctively the best and most important, also by far the most interesting, book on naval history which has been produced… for many a long year.”20 The reviewer’s name was Theodore Roosevelt.

  NOW THE AMERICAN ARYAN sought his naval links. By the 1890s, a generation of young nationalists had arisen around the globe to reclaim their homelands from the White Christian colonial powers. Spain was battling insurrections in both its Cuban and Philippines colonies.

  Spain had a conventional Western-style army trained to fight set battles with heavy armaments and many men. The Cuban freedom fighters had little money or arms, so they turned to guerilla warfare: Small bands burned sugar fields, mills, and plantations. They tore up telegraph lines, railroad tracks, and bridges and attacked Spanish forces to seize weapons.

  To combat these guerilla tactics, the Spanish introduced a “reconc
entrato” policy that “concentrated” Cuban civilians into concentration camps. (After World War II the term concentration camp has come to mean “extermination camp.” But in the 1890s, concentration camps referred to areas where noncombatant civilians were held in order to deny material and moral support to the freedom fighters.) The Spanish put the entire island under martial law and gathered Cubans in central locations where they could be watched by the Spanish army. The concentration camps were roofless and virtually uninhabitable—pigpens, cattle pens, and barbwire-enclosed fields. Food was scarce and lacked nutritional value. Disrupted lives bred mental terror and sleeplessness, which soon gave way to hopelessness. Famine and disease felled thousands of innocent civilians.

  By 1898, one-third of Cuba’s population languished in these camps. At least 30 percent perished from lack of proper food, sanitary conditions, and medicines. More than four hundred thousand Cubans died. One reporter wrote, “In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the women, herded together in towns like cattle, who are going to die, while the men, camped in the fields and mountains, will live.”21

  The underdog Cuban freedom fighters received positive press coverage in the United States as a result of an excellent public-relations effort by expatriate Cubans based in New York City, who deftly spun the American press toward stories favorable to their revolutionary cause. The Yellow Press painted the greasy Spaniards as brutal villains who murdered, tortured, and raped innocent Cuban women and children—indeed, newspapers portrayed the entire island as a pure woman being raped by Spain. A New York stage production about the Cuban revolution featured a scheming Spanish villain who attempted to have his way with an attractive Cuban girl. And editorials presented the United States as a chivalrous man outraged at the brutal Spanish for assaulting the helpless Cubans.

  Many Americans assumed that the Cubans were revolting to become more like America. Senator William Mason of Illinois said, “Cuban boys had come to our colleges, learned about George Washington and returned home to tell their compatriots.”22 On March 4, 1896, the Chicago Times-Herald wrote, “The struggle Cuba is making for civil and political liberty is identical with the struggle the founders of the republic of the United States made against the selfishness and oppression of the crown of Great Britain.”23 Charles Kendall Adams, president of the University of Wisconsin, asked Madison’s 1897 graduating class, “What has Spain ever done for civilization? What books, what inventions have come from Spain? What discoveries in the laboratory or in scientific fields? So few have they been that they are scarcely worth mentioning.”24

  IN 1895, ROOSEVELT RESIGNED as a civil service commissioner to become one of three New York City police commissioners on the civilian oversight board. In a letter to his sister Bamie, he complained, “The work of the Police Board is as grimy as all work for municipal reform over here must be for some decades to come; and it is inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating.”25 Agitated, bored, and ambitious, Roosevelt quickly turned his sights to Washington.

  The former governor of Ohio, congressman, and Civil War veteran William McKinley was the Republican Party’s 1896 presidential nominee, and Teddy knew that if he worked to ensure McKinley’s election, he might receive a high-level job in the new administration. Roosevelt campaigned in a number of states for McKinley, who won, and then enlisted powerful friends to help him lobby the president-elect for the post of assistant secretary of the Navy. McKinley was hesitant, confessing to one of Roosevelt’s friends, “I want peace and I am told that your friend Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody. I am afraid he is too pugnacious.”26

  Roosevelt worried that if more time elapsed, McKinley might learn what a disaster the New York police board had become. Writes Edmund Morris: “By March 4, when William McKinley was inaugurated, the situation at Police Headquarters had become an open scandal. Newspapers that day carried reports of an almost total breakdown of discipline in the force, new outbreaks of corruption, tearful threats of resignation.”27 Knowing this, Roosevelt and his friends furiously lobbied for his appointment. “The only, absolutely the only thing I can hear adverse,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Teddy, “is that there is a fear that you will want to fight somebody at once.”28

  President William McKinley. He jump-started the national careers of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. McKinley was the first president to advance the idea that the U.S. military invaded foreign countries with benevolent intentions. His logic struck a humanitarian chord and is still embraced today by the American public. (Library of Congress)

  Eventually the lobbying paid off. On April 6, 1897, Theodore Roosevelt was nominated as assistant secretary of the Navy, at a salary of $4,500 a year. One New York City police commissioner laughed triumphantly and declared, “What a glorious retreat!”29 Notes Morris, “An inescapable aura of defeat clouded his resignation…. No matter what he said about ‘an honorable way out of this beastly job,’ the fact remained that he was leaving a position of supreme responsibility for a subservient one.”30

  At the time, the hottest debates in Washington were about whether to annex Hawaii and whether to invade Cuba. The secretary of the Navy, John Long, was Roosevelt’s boss, and Teddy had promised him that he would be entirely loyal and subordinate, though to his sister Roosevelt confided, “I am a quietly rampant ‘Cuba libre’ man.”31

  On April 26—after just one week in office—Roosevelt gave President McKinley a memo with four warnings of possible trouble with Cuba. This was just the beginning of his pro-war campaign. The nerve center of American strategic planning was the Naval War College. Assistant Secretary Teddy—in office only seven weeks—journeyed to Newport, Rhode Island, to address the War College planners. There, Roosevelt delivered a powerful “peace through strength” speech in which he said the word “war” sixty-two times, approximately once a minute.

  Teddy’s war cry caused a nationwide sensation when his speech was printed in major newspapers. Exclaimed the Washington Post, “Theodore Roosevelt, you have found your place at last!” The Baltimore Sun called it “manly, patriotic, intelligent and convincing.”32 The Naval War College planners got the message and, on June 30, 1897, submitted to Washington a plan to wage war on Spain that stated, “hostilities would take place mainly in the Caribbean, but the U.S. Navy would also attack the Philippines.”33

  In September of 1897—when Secretary Long was out of town—Roosevelt met with the president three times and gave McKinley a memorandum in which he advocated immediate war and recommended that the United States take and retain the Philippines. He also lobbied Congress. Representative Thomas Butler (Pennsylvania), a member of the House Naval Affairs Committee, remembered, “Roosevelt came down here looking for war. He did not care whom we fought as long as there was a scrap.”34 Teddy’s private correspondence supported this: in a letter to a West Point professor, Roosevelt wrote, “In strict confidence… I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”35

  AMERICA’S ORIGINAL NEMESIS IN the Philippines was Emilio Aguinaldo, the freedom-fighting general and first president, who would see his country’s short independence snatched by the United States. His neighbors recognized his promise early—they elected him mayor of his hometown when he was only seventeen years old. A talented pupil who studied America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Aguinaldo dreamed of his country throwing off its Spanish masters. By the 1890s, he was a leading freedom fighter, now General Aguinaldo of the Philippines Revolutionary Army. In 1896, he wrote of an independent Philippines: “The form of government will be like that of the United States of America, founded upon the most rigid principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality.”36

  Hoping to emulate America’s War of Independence, on January 29, 1897, the Filipino freedom fighters appealed to the U.S. State Department: “Pray that help be extended to the Filipinos to expel the Spanish by f
orce, just as the Emperor Napoleon helped America in the war of separation from England, by whose aid the Americans attained independence.”37 The United States turned a deaf ear to their pleas.

  In battle after battle, the Philippines Revolutionary Army—consisting of motivated but poorly trained and meagerly armed fighters—beat back Spanish colonial forces. On December 14, 1897, the two sides signed a truce. The Spanish promised democratic reforms and asked Aguinaldo and other freedom fighters to leave the country temporarily as Spain made the transition. Aguinaldo established a government-in-exile in nearby Hong Kong, where he could keep a watchful eye on officials in Manila.

  THE UNITED STATES’ ROAD to war began with two Spanish challenges to American manhood. The Spanish minister to the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, had written a letter to a friend in Cuba describing a meeting with President McKinley. A Cuba Libre sympathizer in the Havana post office stole de Lôme’s letter and forwarded it to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in New York, who published it. Minister de Lôme had written that President McKinley was “weak and catering to the rabble, and besides, a low politician.”38 Hearst’s New York Journal called de Lôme’s comments the “Worst Insult to the United States in History,”39 and rival papers offered similarly outraged interpretations.