Viewed through the dim mists of time, the Spanish-American war seems an unqualified success story.
It was a popular war, a war to liberate the Cuban people from the oppression of wicked Spanish feudalists, and it seemed a morally acceptable war.
In addition, it was brief and cheap, especially in terms of casualties, even money.
At the end of the conflict, John Hay, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, wrote,
It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent
intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave, and so, of course,
in that respect it resembles the recent Gulf War, no doubt.
Historians have tended to treat this war as a sort of youthful fling, the lost weekend
of American history, sort of the last innocent phase in American history, I guess.
In this way of treating the war, it tends to deny its full historical significance as
a turning point in the history of American foreign policy.
The war's bloody sequel, a savage counterinsurgency in the Philippine Islands, has disappeared
into a sort of Orwellian memory hole, not to be heard from again until the war in Vietnam,
to which it bore great resemblance.
So the war has been done to injustice. The war reflected among other things the triumph
of what Theodore Roosevelt and his cronies called the large policy, which in effect was
a policy of American Empire, informal empire, empire on the cheap by the exertion of American
political and military force overseas to secure entry into markets, whether the people who
set against the economic distress of the 1890s, the panic of 1893, and so on, and what Richard
Hofstadter has called the psychic crisis of the 1890s of war also provided a handy distraction
from domestic issues for the political leaders of the country at the time.
The war also created an independent Cuban Republic which actually functioned as a sort
Satrapy of the American Economy with the Platt Amendment incorporated into the Cuban Constitution
allowing a sort of routine weekly American intervention if the Cuban elections didn't
turn out right.
And it resulted in the cession by Spain of various territories such as Guam and the Philippine
Islands and Puerto Rico to the United States, for which we then paid the small indemnity
At a less cosmic level, the work contributed to several alcoholic beverages and some happy
The Romance of the Tropics played a role, although it was tempered by the notion that white people tend to deteriorate when deprived of the challenge of the Teutonic Winter.
Finally, it was the last American War fought without conscription, which probably adds to the happy aura.
But it was a new departure. Up to 1898, American expansion had been continental.
It had been expansion into contiguous land, which you could argue, and most Americans believed,
was in fact compatible, however required, with republicanism,
Because you can organize new territories acquired in this fashion into new territories on the model of the various Northwest ordinances, fill them up with settlers and bring them in as reasonably sovereign states on the existing model.
You can't do this with overseas or saltwater imperialism, so hence this is a turning point in that respect.
So an empire of contiguous land had come into being over the objections of separatist elements such as Confederates, Mormons, Native Americans, that sort of thing.
But it definitely, from an American point of view, it sort of extended the area of freedom and republicanism, despite that.
So up to 1898, we could view our career of Indian wars, annexations and gargantuan real estate deals as compatible with republican self-government.
I don't really undermine that, I guess, in any critical sort of way.
Now, what happens in the 1880s is you begin to get a group of people saying,
this isn't enough. We really need to strut around on the globe and exert our power
and sort of do what the Europeans are doing, you know, follow the British model or something,
have colonies, and you had some people want to form colonies, some people would settle for
and exertion of force in such a way that we had a sphere of influence.
But there was this propaganda coming from professors, politicians, missionaries,
all sorts of people suddenly calling for, in effect, expansion and the emergence of the U.S. into global power
and the rejection of the best traditions of U.S. diplomacy,
and the diplomacy exemplified in John Quincy Adams' 4th of July address and so on.
The old America goes on abroad in search of monsters to destroy,
the kind of thing which had at least influenced some policy makers some of the time.
In fact, there had been so little interest in playing a world role
that Secretary Seward had had a hard time getting the money to buy Alaska in 1867.
So you have a number of people, like Teddy Roosevelt, the ineffable Teddy Roosevelt,
his crony Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Brooks Adams, the brother of the more famous
Henry Adams, forming a kind of expansionist literary coterie and writing numerous articles
in favor of a bigger Navy and the sort of engrossment of markets by political power,
some neo-mercantilist conception, which we will come to know and love as the open door
foreign policy.
Brooks Adams, of course, in a kind of illiterative vein, says that nature is omnipotent, nations
must float with the tide, whither the exchanges flow, they must follow, and they will follow
as long as their vitality endures.
So one of these kind of vitalistic arguments about destiny
that were popular with this group.
You get a lot of this torrent of rhetoric about destiny
from Teddy Roosevelt and this whole group.
Morrison Swift, who would emerge as one of the anti-imperialists
very fairly quickly, said that there never
was such a scurvy thing as this destiny running
around the universe.
Signs should be erected everywhere,
Another theme was the sort of racial destiny of the Anglo-Saxons to go out and Anglo-Saxonize
the world, to which another anti-imperialist and an Englishman living in Canada, Goldwyn
Smith said that there was a misinterpretation of the role of the Anglo-Saxons.
He wasn't against Anglo-Saxons, obviously, but he thought this was somewhat overdrawn.
Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco,
is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder
until, in a very true and important sense, it is Anglo-Saxonized mankind?
The Frontier Expansionist Theory of American History
People panicked and Turner argues that much was important about republicanism and liberty
and somehow depended in a causal way on the existence of this continuous landed frontier.
And without the landed frontier we would be in trouble and now we needed a substitute frontier.
And this was going to take the form of foreign markets.
Then you had economic interests arguing that they needed foreign markets desperately for
their sort of overproduction, to get its overproduction under consumption as a thesis from a lot of
the interest groups and economists.
And it doesn't actually reflect any genuine violation of Say's law, but it does seem to
work in the context of protective tariffs that some businesses in fact were selling
in the home market at a higher than free market price and then wished to dump their economies
The populace suddenly want reciprocal trade agreements to get rid of what they thought were grain surpluses instead of going out of farming, which they could have been, I guess.
So you've got to get across the political spectrum, this idea that foreign markets are the panacea for American ills.
And of course, his interpretation owes a great deal to William F. Williams, the late historian who founded the Wisconsin School, Walter LeFevre, Lloyd Gardner, and a number of other people.
and so on and so forth.
So apparently the substitute frontier had to be found, but this required a neo-mercantilist
conception of the nature of trade.
This required the building of a larger navy, the acquisition of bases near the markets,
particularly the fabled, somewhat illusory China market.
The idea was, look at this, millions of Chinese out there were Chinamen, I guess they were
called then.
And every one of these guys bought a pair of shoes, you would sell a lot of shoes.
So the manufacturers had this idea that there was this sort of unlimited China market and
we had to get in there even though the Europeans had carved it up in discursive influence,
we had to use force and persuasion to get into this and other markets.
Okay, so this is part of the intellectual background and what McKinley and his advisors
are probably thinking when they come to power in the election of 1896 and election itself
In any event, because of the domestic distress, you also get a theme of bellicosity. You get, for instance, Mars Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, saying that from an early age, the
We've become a nation of shopkeepers, we've become a nation of warriors, so this anticipates
Werner Sombart's Handler, who entailed in the Traders vs. Heroes of 1915, a sort of
manifesto of German social imperialism, so you begin to get this, and Waterston goes
on to say we risk Caesarism, but even Caesarism is preferable to anarchism. We risk wars,
but a man has the one time to die, and either in war or peace he is not likely to die until
A number of foreign policy crises or opportunities come into play in these years.
One is the pseudo-revolutionary outburst in Hawaii, where a number of pineapple growers
form a revolutionary committee and depose the sovereign queen, Liliu Okolani, with the
with the help of a group of U.S. Marines that just happened to be around, this revolution succeeds.
As Walter Millis said, the Marines were landed on the admirable device of preserving order before it had been endangered.
So then the Hawaiian Revolutionaries petitioned for some kind of annexation to the U.S. on the Texas model,
and Grover Cleveland, bless his heart, just kind of tabled the thing when he came into office, going back a little further.
The other question was the boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the boundary of British Guiana.
Some people thought it had Monroe doctrine implications, but the British basically just backpedaled on the theory that someday they might need the Americans in a future war.
So they basically conceded all of the points.
The third crisis, of course, is in the outbreak of another revolution in Cuba, led by, among others, by Max Magomes and Jose Marti and directed by various Cuban hunters and revolutionary committees in places like New York, Tampa, New Orleans, and Ocala.
They had cigar makers in Ocala, Florida and Tampa who would come in to get under the tariff, so you had all this Cuban exile community.
And this, of course, is a sequel to the Ten Years War of 1868-78, another ill-fated Cuban rebellion.
And the Spanish feudalists had managed to retain power. Now the Cubans rebel again in February of 1895, and Martin Marti and these people land and he's killed.
And Gómez, the military leader of the Cuban Revolution, starts resorting to a sort of policy of terrorism, burning down the sugar cane and all that.
And so it's kind of a brutal war on the Spanish, then resort to counterinsurgency, and they could trench across the narrowest part of Cuba, La Trocha,
to divide the western part of Cuba from the eastern part, and then begin the policy of re-concentracion, or Concentracion Camp, strategic hamlets.
In the American standpoint, this is an opportunity and a danger. It's a danger to American lives
and property in Cuba. It's disorderly. On the other hand, it kind of recapitulates the
derelict province argument. The derelict province argument is that if there's someone's colony
This is right next to you and they can't keep order. You're entitled to go in and that's what
Andrew Jackson did with Florida essentially in 1819. The Spaniards knew there was a precedent.
And in addition, the policy makers from McKinley on down understood that if you
got nowhere with Spain over Cuba, if it came to that, you had a certain opportunity to gain real
estate because Spain had the Philippines and Spain had Guam and the Ladrones and so on.
There's a certain opportunity if the situation reaches the point of warfare.
So, I'll do skips and keep this going.
There's been a sort of interpretation that poor McKinley was a weak leader who was forced into this whole thing by the, I guess, the Yellow Journalists, the Hearst Newspapers and Congress and other agitators.
And apparently this is not the case. The more recent view is that McKinley knew what he was doing, he just didn't care who got the credit.
There's a wonderful quote from John Hay who writes to Henry Adams about McKinley.
I was more struck than ever by his mask. It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the 15th century.
There are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him.
So, in any event, I would then decide if the historians who believe in McKinley, in fact, knew what he was doing.
And while he wasn't hell-bent for war, if he could gain what he wanted without it, he was certainly prepared to use Cuba as an opportunity to implement a large policy, this policy of informal empire with the proviso in view that if you can get to the Philippines and you've got your coaling station and you've got your sort of forward point facing the markets of China and Asia, which is what they wanted.
Okay, now, the situation in Cuba attracted the attention of American newspapers, congressmen, there was a lot of propaganda, a lot of atrocity stories about what the Spanish were doing, and of course that wasn't really hard, they didn't have to make a lot of it up because the Spanish were committing atrocities, but then there were some that were made up anyway, just to sell newspapers, and the Cuban hunts in the U.S. of course contributed to this propaganda war, so you begin to get calls in Congress that we should intervene altruistically and liberate the Cuba,
Dispatch the Battleship Maine to Key West, which is then to be sent on to Havana Harbor.
And in the meantime, as this boat is lumbering over there, you have the de l'homme letter
in which the Spanish minister to Washington writes a private letter criticizing McKinley
and this is published.
It's somehow picked up by the Cubans or someone and published and they have to call the minister
so it creates worsening relations with Spain.
In the meantime, the battleship Maine explodes in Havana harbor with the loss of 260 American lives near the slogan, Remember the Maine.
The public tends to blame the Spaniards, although what the Spaniards would have had to gain had never been explained.
The most recent inquiry, as I understand it, in 1976, in effect says it was an internal explosion, which is what the Spaniards said in their inquiry.
This contributes to the situation, and Roosevelt, who is undersecretary of the Navy, cables Dewey to be ready to descend on Manila as Dewey out there in the Pacific poise, just in case this stuff works out.
So you begin to have a lot of calls in Congress for war, and McKinley, of course, is taking his time, he has a certain way he wants to orchestrate it,
and he's got a certain level of pretended negotiation with Spain
and this is the George Bush method
this is where you go to the Spaniards as to where the foreigners are
and you say, well these are our minimal demands
and then they agree
then you say, well we have actually five or six more
and we really can't meet you in Baghdad
we have a golf date kind of thing
so sort of self-sabotaging demands
so that the Spaniards never quite concede enough
Spaniards make all sorts of concessions. They're beginning to say, well, we'll grant Cuban autonomy.
They weren't quite ready to give it up as a piece of real estate.
And, you know, we'll cease the military efforts, have a ceasefire with the Cuban rebels and so on and all of that.
But for some reason, this is no longer enough.
So as I say, it's somewhat like the mysterious self-sabotaging diplomacy of the Bush administration.
McKinley asked Congress on April 11, 1898 to empower the President to take all these measures to secure termination of hostilities in Cuba and so forth.
And the Congress funds with a four-point resolution, which gives McKinley what he wants, but also adds the so-called Teller Amendment,
which is a restriction that basically renounces U.S. claim to sovereignty over Cuba.
This is later a problem. They wanted to get around that.
So they invent the Platt Amendment and forced the Cubans to put it in their constitution, saying that we can intervene over so often if we want to.
So that got around a bit. This was sort of a self-denying ordinance that Congress put in the picture.
Okay, now the military history, I'll be very brief on that. It's fun, but we don't have time.
Peter Finley Dunn's Mr. Dooley remarked that the U.S. thought that it weren't a dream, but fortunately the Spaniards were in a trance.
So Ndui is poised at Hong Kong to proceed to Manila, and meanwhile the army is undergoing
an interesting...
They hadn't been mobilized for a while, not since the 1860s, and they had all sorts of
logistic problems, and they would send winter uniforms down to Port Tampa, and it was hard
to match the guns with the ammunition.
It was a logistical nightmare, so they're sitting there around Port Tampa, the officers
The expedition launches are hanging around Henry Plant's hotel and the troops are all off getting venereal disease in Tampa because there's delays getting the boats ready and so on.
So it's kind of a nightmare. They finally get the expedition launch and let's see what the date is. Well, it's April.
and go over towards Cuba and one of the considerations is that they don't want to be in Cuba in the rainy season.
They remember what happened to the British in 1763, you know, they haven't worked out the whole malaria, mosquito, yellow fever thing at the time
and there's a real problem with having your guys marching around in Cuba in the rainy season.
So they had this problem, they had studied what the British had dealt with when the British seized Havana in 1763.
So they're trying to get over there and in June 22nd, 6,000 U.S. soldiers land in Cuba at the daiquiri led by 300-pound weight-challenged General Rufus Schafter.
One of the things that they had done, by the way, is to get over to the light of unpleasantness,
was they deliberately enrolled a couple of high-ranking former Confederates in the effort, got them to put on the wrong uniform and then go over there.
So one of these is fighting Joe Wheeler, former Confederate Brigadier and an Alabama congressman, and he's in Cuba.
The first blood is drawn by the Americans at Las Guasimas. It's really more of a skirmish than a battle.
Seeing the Spanish in retreat, fighting Joe Wheeler, forgot himself and shouted,
Come on, boys, we got the damn Yankees on the run.
And, of course, he laughed about it later, too.
So now it's decided to capture the Spanish fortified city of Santiago and of course as we'll go to the military details but there's the whole thing of taking the San Juan Hills and the misnamed, it's like the Kettle Hill that Teddy Roosevelt, when he charged up there all by himself, took and the neighbor points out that it was very bad in the military. Apparently Roosevelt had more bluster than tactics. He charges up to Steve Hill with all his men and in full view of the Spanish
The Spaniards had very obsolete rifles. They couldn't shoot fast enough, so the Rough Riders got through the whole thing.
Meanwhile, the Negro 9th Cavalry and 10th Cavalry actually took the major hills.
But Roosevelt forgot to mention some of these details in his book. The Rough Riders, if someone said, should have been called alone in Cuba.
Another war buff, Winston Churchill is over here about this time, a little bit before this, he's over there sort of hanging out with the Spanish officers, sort of learning about this kind of stuff, which he can then apply, I guess, in the Boer War, when he is a correspondent in the Boer War, but he's out there getting his taste in this kind of thing.
Okay, anyway, the hills are taken and so on, and the Americans basically want to get a face-saving settlement for the Spaniards, get the bar over, get out of there before everyone dies of tropical disease.
And Secretary Alger, of course, is in Washington safe, breathing, firebending, conditional surrender, but they do arrange a surrender and that's the end of the campaign.
What happens of course in the, there's a brief naval battle too in which the various clunky wooden Spanish frigates are sunk and that kind of thing with like
moralists next to no American casualties and a bunch of Spanish casualties. Same thing happens in the Battle of Manila.
Four hundred Spaniards drown or die variously, no Americans and so on, so it's one of those uneven conflicts.
So very quickly the battle of Manila is over and it's actually I guess fought after the
Spanish had conceded as one of those communication things and so then we have the problem of
what to do with the Philippine because there's been a rebellion going on since about 1893
or two and the Philippines have kind of been on hold so the Filipinos have been led to
believe that the Americans are liberating them and now the Americans suddenly appear
The Filipinos then proceed to fight a guerrilla war against the Americans.
The Americans suddenly adopt all the Spanish tactics of Butcher Weiler in dealing with
the so-called Philippine Insurrection, the Philippine-American War.
This is the unintended consequence.
We have this sort of Vietnam-like guerrilla war to actually physically keep the Philippines
and social workers after we've told Spain we want them and given them the money so to actually acquire the Philippines effectively we have to kill about 200,000 Filipinos to account starvation and all the other incidents in this war and not just gunfire and then we send them Yankees, Goldmarbs and social workers after we kill about a quarter million of them so it worked out okay. Very nice.
and sort of pattern there that we see in American history sometimes and of course this began this led to the
and some debate it actually never entered the electoral sphere because when Brian runs again
in the next presidential election he basically stays away from the issue so you don't have a
mandate for empire you basically have McKinley re-elected on sort of boring tariff and other
issues but in the press you have the emergence of the anti-imperialist league and these are basically
A set of classical liberals, some of whom had ties to the anti-slavery movement in the north,
they're kind of a northeastern, mugwump, civil service reform sort of group,
who see that there's a problem with classical liberalism and republican values
if you start acquiring overseas territories and start ruling foreign peoples by decree and force
and get into that whole contradiction there philosophically.
And meanwhile, the administration was treating the Filipino insurgents somewhat like the Apaches or something.
So they began to, for the Anthony and Pyrrhus League, people like Edward Atkinson,
Morefield Story and so on, began sort of retelling various atrocity stories, which in fact are true,
from the Philippines, talking about the mass graves and swiping out of villages.
There stands Hennessy with the indulgent parent kneeling on the stomach of his adopted child
Well, a delegation from Boston based him with an umbrella. I'm not as much of an expansionist as myself.
So Lenin, of course, called the onion fairness league the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy.
But then he had a different theory of how this stuff works. It was kind of a compliment coming from him.
So McKinley decides that we have to acquire the Philippines, really have to have them.
And he's sort of he's had that prayer session with God in the White House.
The Philippines was going to be Christianized. No one had told McKinley that they were mainly Roman Catholic already.
That's one of the problems.
This is a shame. I'm not going to have time to get my Southern stuff in here.
Some of the any appeals were in the South and there were comparisons made to Carpet Bag Rule by a couple of Southern congressmen.
Some people like Tom Watson, for example, who was sound on the Philippine wire.
There are a number of people.
Pitchfork Ben Tillman had a few things to say about him.
So you had a kind of opposite.
Mrs. Jefferson Davis, too.
I have a quote I won't have time for.
Mrs. Jefferson Davis emerges as a kind of anti-imperialist, too, at the same time.
So that's kind of interesting.
She's still alive.
So let me see.
The actual costs, if I can take a half a minute. No one's given anything statistics yet.
Here's the actual cost. U.S. deaths, 2,900, some of which are battlefield deaths.
The rest are due to bad food and tropical disease.
2,900 deaths, $250 million.
The Philippine insurrection, of course, costs $600 million for the Philippine insurrection.
cost more than the war against Spain to suppress the Philippine Bible, so it's impact studies were done.
And in summary then, I guess I'll run my time.
But what we have is a precedent for the whole policy of Opendoor Empire is set in the stages that we have the bases,
OK, in Asia and so forth and leading to all of the wonderful foreign policy disasters since then.