WEBVTT NOTE The Spanish-American War as Trial Run 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Viewed through the dim mists of time, the Spanish-American war seems an unqualified success story. 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:15.000 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. 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:21.000 In addition, it was brief and cheap, especially in terms of casualties, even money. 4 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:25.000 At the end of the conflict, John Hay, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, wrote, 5 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:30.200 It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent 6 00:00:30.200 --> 00:00:34.700 intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave, and so, of course, 7 00:00:34.700 --> 00:00:39.420 in that respect it resembles the recent Gulf War, no doubt. 8 00:00:39.420 --> 00:00:44.480 Historians have tended to treat this war as a sort of youthful fling, the lost weekend 9 00:00:44.480 --> 00:00:51.620 of American history, sort of the last innocent phase in American history, I guess. 10 00:00:51.620 --> 00:00:56.620 In this way of treating the war, it tends to deny its full historical significance as 11 00:00:56.620 --> 00:01:01.700 a turning point in the history of American foreign policy. 12 00:01:01.700 --> 00:01:08.180 The war's bloody sequel, a savage counterinsurgency in the Philippine Islands, has disappeared 13 00:01:08.180 --> 00:01:13.940 into a sort of Orwellian memory hole, not to be heard from again until the war in Vietnam, 14 00:01:13.940 --> 00:01:17.380 to which it bore great resemblance. 15 00:01:17.380 --> 00:01:26.300 So the war has been done to injustice. The war reflected among other things the triumph 16 00:01:26.300 --> 00:01:31.020 of what Theodore Roosevelt and his cronies called the large policy, which in effect was 17 00:01:31.020 --> 00:01:38.780 a policy of American Empire, informal empire, empire on the cheap by the exertion of American 18 00:01:38.780 --> 00:01:43.420 political and military force overseas to secure entry into markets, whether the people who 19 00:01:43.420 --> 00:01:52.500 set against the economic distress of the 1890s, the panic of 1893, and so on, and what Richard 20 00:01:52.500 --> 00:01:59.860 Hofstadter has called the psychic crisis of the 1890s of war also provided a handy distraction 21 00:01:59.860 --> 00:02:06.620 from domestic issues for the political leaders of the country at the time. 22 00:02:06.620 --> 00:02:10.900 The war also created an independent Cuban Republic which actually functioned as a sort 23 00:02:10.900 --> 00:02:19.700 Satrapy of the American Economy with the Platt Amendment incorporated into the Cuban Constitution 24 00:02:19.700 --> 00:02:24.200 allowing a sort of routine weekly American intervention if the Cuban elections didn't 25 00:02:24.200 --> 00:02:26.080 turn out right. 26 00:02:26.080 --> 00:02:32.460 And it resulted in the cession by Spain of various territories such as Guam and the Philippine 27 00:02:32.460 --> 00:02:38.980 Islands and Puerto Rico to the United States, for which we then paid the small indemnity 28 00:02:38.980 --> 00:02:58.440 At a less cosmic level, the work contributed to several alcoholic beverages and some happy 29 00:02:58.440 --> 00:03:15.440 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. 30 00:03:15.440 --> 00:03:25.440 Finally, it was the last American War fought without conscription, which probably adds to the happy aura. 31 00:03:25.440 --> 00:03:30.440 But it was a new departure. Up to 1898, American expansion had been continental. 32 00:03:30.440 --> 00:03:35.440 It had been expansion into contiguous land, which you could argue, and most Americans believed, 33 00:03:35.440 --> 00:03:40.440 was in fact compatible, however required, with republicanism, 34 00:03:40.440 --> 00:03:57.440 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. 35 00:03:57.440 --> 00:04:03.440 You can't do this with overseas or saltwater imperialism, so hence this is a turning point in that respect. 36 00:04:03.440 --> 00:04:13.440 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. 37 00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:19.440 But it definitely, from an American point of view, it sort of extended the area of freedom and republicanism, despite that. 38 00:04:19.440 --> 00:04:29.440 So up to 1898, we could view our career of Indian wars, annexations and gargantuan real estate deals as compatible with republican self-government. 39 00:04:29.440 --> 00:04:35.440 I don't really undermine that, I guess, in any critical sort of way. 40 00:04:35.440 --> 00:04:39.440 Now, what happens in the 1880s is you begin to get a group of people saying, 41 00:04:39.440 --> 00:04:44.440 this isn't enough. We really need to strut around on the globe and exert our power 42 00:04:44.440 --> 00:04:49.440 and sort of do what the Europeans are doing, you know, follow the British model or something, 43 00:04:49.440 --> 00:04:54.440 have colonies, and you had some people want to form colonies, some people would settle for 44 00:04:54.440 --> 00:04:58.440 and exertion of force in such a way that we had a sphere of influence. 45 00:04:58.440 --> 00:05:04.440 But there was this propaganda coming from professors, politicians, missionaries, 46 00:05:04.440 --> 00:05:12.440 all sorts of people suddenly calling for, in effect, expansion and the emergence of the U.S. into global power 47 00:05:12.440 --> 00:05:17.440 and the rejection of the best traditions of U.S. diplomacy, 48 00:05:17.440 --> 00:05:23.440 and the diplomacy exemplified in John Quincy Adams' 4th of July address and so on. 49 00:05:23.440 --> 00:05:26.440 The old America goes on abroad in search of monsters to destroy, 50 00:05:26.440 --> 00:05:32.440 the kind of thing which had at least influenced some policy makers some of the time. 51 00:05:32.440 --> 00:05:38.440 In fact, there had been so little interest in playing a world role 52 00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:43.440 that Secretary Seward had had a hard time getting the money to buy Alaska in 1867. 53 00:05:43.440 --> 00:05:56.160 So you have a number of people, like Teddy Roosevelt, the ineffable Teddy Roosevelt, 54 00:05:56.160 --> 00:06:02.240 his crony Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Brooks Adams, the brother of the more famous 55 00:06:02.240 --> 00:06:09.920 Henry Adams, forming a kind of expansionist literary coterie and writing numerous articles 56 00:06:09.920 --> 00:06:16.440 in favor of a bigger Navy and the sort of engrossment of markets by political power, 57 00:06:16.440 --> 00:06:21.760 some neo-mercantilist conception, which we will come to know and love as the open door 58 00:06:21.760 --> 00:06:27.280 foreign policy. 59 00:06:27.280 --> 00:06:32.560 Brooks Adams, of course, in a kind of illiterative vein, says that nature is omnipotent, nations 60 00:06:32.560 --> 00:06:38.120 must float with the tide, whither the exchanges flow, they must follow, and they will follow 61 00:06:38.120 --> 00:06:40.120 as long as their vitality endures. 62 00:06:40.120 --> 00:06:43.320 So one of these kind of vitalistic arguments about destiny 63 00:06:43.320 --> 00:06:44.920 that were popular with this group. 64 00:06:44.920 --> 00:06:47.920 You get a lot of this torrent of rhetoric about destiny 65 00:06:47.920 --> 00:06:53.200 from Teddy Roosevelt and this whole group. 66 00:06:53.200 --> 00:06:56.640 Morrison Swift, who would emerge as one of the anti-imperialists 67 00:06:56.640 --> 00:06:59.200 very fairly quickly, said that there never 68 00:06:59.200 --> 00:07:02.120 was such a scurvy thing as this destiny running 69 00:07:02.120 --> 00:07:03.360 around the universe. 70 00:07:03.360 --> 00:07:04.880 Signs should be erected everywhere, 71 00:07:04.880 --> 00:07:12.600 Another theme was the sort of racial destiny of the Anglo-Saxons to go out and Anglo-Saxonize 72 00:07:12.600 --> 00:07:19.040 the world, to which another anti-imperialist and an Englishman living in Canada, Goldwyn 73 00:07:19.040 --> 00:07:24.120 Smith said that there was a misinterpretation of the role of the Anglo-Saxons. 74 00:07:24.120 --> 00:07:27.520 He wasn't against Anglo-Saxons, obviously, but he thought this was somewhat overdrawn. 75 00:07:27.520 --> 00:07:45.280 Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, 76 00:07:45.280 --> 00:07:50.480 is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder 77 00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:56.080 until, in a very true and important sense, it is Anglo-Saxonized mankind? 78 00:07:56.080 --> 00:08:07.080 The Frontier Expansionist Theory of American History 79 00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:34.080 People panicked and Turner argues that much was important about republicanism and liberty 80 00:08:34.080 --> 00:08:39.080 and somehow depended in a causal way on the existence of this continuous landed frontier. 81 00:08:39.080 --> 00:08:45.080 And without the landed frontier we would be in trouble and now we needed a substitute frontier. 82 00:08:45.080 --> 00:08:49.080 And this was going to take the form of foreign markets. 83 00:08:49.080 --> 00:08:55.240 Then you had economic interests arguing that they needed foreign markets desperately for 84 00:08:55.240 --> 00:08:59.800 their sort of overproduction, to get its overproduction under consumption as a thesis from a lot of 85 00:08:59.800 --> 00:09:02.680 the interest groups and economists. 86 00:09:02.680 --> 00:09:06.580 And it doesn't actually reflect any genuine violation of Say's law, but it does seem to 87 00:09:06.580 --> 00:09:12.940 work in the context of protective tariffs that some businesses in fact were selling 88 00:09:12.940 --> 00:09:18.940 in the home market at a higher than free market price and then wished to dump their economies 89 00:09:48.940 --> 00:09:59.940 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. 90 00:09:59.940 --> 00:10:06.940 So you've got to get across the political spectrum, this idea that foreign markets are the panacea for American ills. 91 00:10:06.940 --> 00:10:17.940 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. 92 00:10:17.940 --> 00:10:20.540 and so on and so forth. 93 00:10:20.540 --> 00:10:26.580 So apparently the substitute frontier had to be found, but this required a neo-mercantilist 94 00:10:26.580 --> 00:10:28.460 conception of the nature of trade. 95 00:10:28.460 --> 00:10:34.180 This required the building of a larger navy, the acquisition of bases near the markets, 96 00:10:34.180 --> 00:10:37.220 particularly the fabled, somewhat illusory China market. 97 00:10:37.220 --> 00:10:41.180 The idea was, look at this, millions of Chinese out there were Chinamen, I guess they were 98 00:10:41.180 --> 00:10:42.180 called then. 99 00:10:42.180 --> 00:10:46.860 And every one of these guys bought a pair of shoes, you would sell a lot of shoes. 100 00:10:46.860 --> 00:10:50.500 So the manufacturers had this idea that there was this sort of unlimited China market and 101 00:10:50.500 --> 00:10:54.380 we had to get in there even though the Europeans had carved it up in discursive influence, 102 00:10:54.380 --> 00:10:59.180 we had to use force and persuasion to get into this and other markets. 103 00:10:59.180 --> 00:11:04.820 Okay, so this is part of the intellectual background and what McKinley and his advisors 104 00:11:04.820 --> 00:11:13.100 are probably thinking when they come to power in the election of 1896 and election itself 105 00:11:13.100 --> 00:11:43.100 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 106 00:11:43.100 --> 00:11:46.720 We've become a nation of shopkeepers, we've become a nation of warriors, so this anticipates 107 00:11:46.720 --> 00:11:54.020 Werner Sombart's Handler, who entailed in the Traders vs. Heroes of 1915, a sort of 108 00:11:54.020 --> 00:11:59.460 manifesto of German social imperialism, so you begin to get this, and Waterston goes 109 00:11:59.460 --> 00:12:04.900 on to say we risk Caesarism, but even Caesarism is preferable to anarchism. We risk wars, 110 00:12:04.900 --> 00:12:09.820 but a man has the one time to die, and either in war or peace he is not likely to die until 111 00:12:09.820 --> 00:12:24.820 A number of foreign policy crises or opportunities come into play in these years. 112 00:12:24.820 --> 00:12:32.180 One is the pseudo-revolutionary outburst in Hawaii, where a number of pineapple growers 113 00:12:32.180 --> 00:12:39.100 form a revolutionary committee and depose the sovereign queen, Liliu Okolani, with the 114 00:12:39.100 --> 00:12:46.100 with the help of a group of U.S. Marines that just happened to be around, this revolution succeeds. 115 00:12:46.100 --> 00:12:53.100 As Walter Millis said, the Marines were landed on the admirable device of preserving order before it had been endangered. 116 00:12:53.100 --> 00:13:00.100 So then the Hawaiian Revolutionaries petitioned for some kind of annexation to the U.S. on the Texas model, 117 00:13:00.100 --> 00:13:06.100 and Grover Cleveland, bless his heart, just kind of tabled the thing when he came into office, going back a little further. 118 00:13:06.100 --> 00:13:16.100 The other question was the boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the boundary of British Guiana. 119 00:13:16.100 --> 00:13:27.100 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. 120 00:13:27.100 --> 00:13:30.100 So they basically conceded all of the points. 121 00:13:30.100 --> 00:13:50.500 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. 122 00:13:50.500 --> 00:13:59.400 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. 123 00:13:59.400 --> 00:14:08.400 And this, of course, is a sequel to the Ten Years War of 1868-78, another ill-fated Cuban rebellion. 124 00:14:08.400 --> 00:14:20.400 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. 125 00:14:20.400 --> 00:14:30.900 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. 126 00:14:30.900 --> 00:14:38.900 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, 127 00:14:38.900 --> 00:14:48.900 to divide the western part of Cuba from the eastern part, and then begin the policy of re-concentracion, or Concentracion Camp, strategic hamlets. 128 00:14:48.900 --> 00:15:04.060 In the American standpoint, this is an opportunity and a danger. It's a danger to American lives 129 00:15:04.060 --> 00:15:10.180 and property in Cuba. It's disorderly. On the other hand, it kind of recapitulates the 130 00:15:10.180 --> 00:15:15.820 derelict province argument. The derelict province argument is that if there's someone's colony 131 00:15:15.820 --> 00:15:19.820 This is right next to you and they can't keep order. You're entitled to go in and that's what 132 00:15:19.820 --> 00:15:25.820 Andrew Jackson did with Florida essentially in 1819. The Spaniards knew there was a precedent. 133 00:15:25.820 --> 00:15:31.820 And in addition, the policy makers from McKinley on down understood that if you 134 00:15:31.820 --> 00:15:37.820 got nowhere with Spain over Cuba, if it came to that, you had a certain opportunity to gain real 135 00:15:37.820 --> 00:15:42.820 estate because Spain had the Philippines and Spain had Guam and the Ladrones and so on. 136 00:15:42.820 --> 00:15:48.820 There's a certain opportunity if the situation reaches the point of warfare. 137 00:15:48.820 --> 00:15:53.820 So, I'll do skips and keep this going. 138 00:15:53.820 --> 00:16:05.820 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. 139 00:16:05.820 --> 00:16:11.820 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. 140 00:16:11.820 --> 00:16:20.820 There's a wonderful quote from John Hay who writes to Henry Adams about McKinley. 141 00:16:20.820 --> 00:16:28.820 I was more struck than ever by his mask. It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the 15th century. 142 00:16:28.820 --> 00:16:32.820 There are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him. 143 00:16:32.820 --> 00:16:39.820 So, in any event, I would then decide if the historians who believe in McKinley, in fact, knew what he was doing. 144 00:16:39.820 --> 00:17:05.420 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. 145 00:17:05.420 --> 00:17:35.420 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, 146 00:18:05.420 --> 00:18:12.420 Dispatch the Battleship Maine to Key West, which is then to be sent on to Havana Harbor. 147 00:18:12.420 --> 00:18:18.580 And in the meantime, as this boat is lumbering over there, you have the de l'homme letter 148 00:18:18.580 --> 00:18:24.400 in which the Spanish minister to Washington writes a private letter criticizing McKinley 149 00:18:24.400 --> 00:18:25.400 and this is published. 150 00:18:25.400 --> 00:18:28.920 It's somehow picked up by the Cubans or someone and published and they have to call the minister 151 00:18:28.920 --> 00:18:31.740 so it creates worsening relations with Spain. 152 00:18:31.740 --> 00:18:39.660 In the meantime, the battleship Maine explodes in Havana harbor with the loss of 260 American lives near the slogan, Remember the Maine. 153 00:18:39.660 --> 00:18:45.860 The public tends to blame the Spaniards, although what the Spaniards would have had to gain had never been explained. 154 00:18:45.860 --> 00:18:55.540 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. 155 00:18:55.540 --> 00:19:11.540 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. 156 00:19:11.540 --> 00:19:19.540 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, 157 00:19:19.540 --> 00:19:25.540 and he's got a certain level of pretended negotiation with Spain 158 00:19:25.540 --> 00:19:28.540 and this is the George Bush method 159 00:19:28.540 --> 00:19:32.540 this is where you go to the Spaniards as to where the foreigners are 160 00:19:32.540 --> 00:19:34.540 and you say, well these are our minimal demands 161 00:19:34.540 --> 00:19:35.540 and then they agree 162 00:19:35.540 --> 00:19:38.540 then you say, well we have actually five or six more 163 00:19:38.540 --> 00:19:40.540 and we really can't meet you in Baghdad 164 00:19:40.540 --> 00:19:43.540 we have a golf date kind of thing 165 00:19:43.540 --> 00:19:45.540 so sort of self-sabotaging demands 166 00:19:45.540 --> 00:19:48.540 so that the Spaniards never quite concede enough 167 00:19:48.540 --> 00:19:56.540 Spaniards make all sorts of concessions. They're beginning to say, well, we'll grant Cuban autonomy. 168 00:19:56.540 --> 00:19:59.540 They weren't quite ready to give it up as a piece of real estate. 169 00:19:59.540 --> 00:20:06.540 And, you know, we'll cease the military efforts, have a ceasefire with the Cuban rebels and so on and all of that. 170 00:20:06.540 --> 00:20:08.540 But for some reason, this is no longer enough. 171 00:20:08.540 --> 00:20:15.540 So as I say, it's somewhat like the mysterious self-sabotaging diplomacy of the Bush administration. 172 00:20:15.540 --> 00:20:24.540 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. 173 00:20:24.540 --> 00:20:30.540 And the Congress funds with a four-point resolution, which gives McKinley what he wants, but also adds the so-called Teller Amendment, 174 00:20:30.540 --> 00:20:35.540 which is a restriction that basically renounces U.S. claim to sovereignty over Cuba. 175 00:20:35.540 --> 00:20:37.540 This is later a problem. They wanted to get around that. 176 00:20:37.540 --> 00:20:44.540 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. 177 00:20:44.540 --> 00:20:53.540 So that got around a bit. This was sort of a self-denying ordinance that Congress put in the picture. 178 00:20:53.540 --> 00:20:59.540 Okay, now the military history, I'll be very brief on that. It's fun, but we don't have time. 179 00:20:59.540 --> 00:21:06.540 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. 180 00:21:06.540 --> 00:21:15.300 So Ndui is poised at Hong Kong to proceed to Manila, and meanwhile the army is undergoing 181 00:21:15.300 --> 00:21:16.300 an interesting... 182 00:21:16.300 --> 00:21:23.140 They hadn't been mobilized for a while, not since the 1860s, and they had all sorts of 183 00:21:23.140 --> 00:21:27.700 logistic problems, and they would send winter uniforms down to Port Tampa, and it was hard 184 00:21:27.700 --> 00:21:28.700 to match the guns with the ammunition. 185 00:21:28.700 --> 00:21:33.780 It was a logistical nightmare, so they're sitting there around Port Tampa, the officers 186 00:21:33.780 --> 00:21:43.780 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. 187 00:21:43.780 --> 00:21:57.780 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. 188 00:21:57.780 --> 00:22:03.380 and go over towards Cuba and one of the considerations is that they don't want to be in Cuba in the rainy season. 189 00:22:03.380 --> 00:22:11.380 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 190 00:22:11.380 --> 00:22:16.380 and there's a real problem with having your guys marching around in Cuba in the rainy season. 191 00:22:16.380 --> 00:22:22.580 So they had this problem, they had studied what the British had dealt with when the British seized Havana in 1763. 192 00:22:22.580 --> 00:22:36.820 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. 193 00:22:36.820 --> 00:22:39.820 One of the things that they had done, by the way, is to get over to the light of unpleasantness, 194 00:22:39.820 --> 00:22:48.780 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. 195 00:22:48.780 --> 00:22:56.280 So one of these is fighting Joe Wheeler, former Confederate Brigadier and an Alabama congressman, and he's in Cuba. 196 00:22:56.280 --> 00:23:00.480 The first blood is drawn by the Americans at Las Guasimas. It's really more of a skirmish than a battle. 197 00:23:00.480 --> 00:23:04.880 Seeing the Spanish in retreat, fighting Joe Wheeler, forgot himself and shouted, 198 00:23:04.880 --> 00:23:10.080 Come on, boys, we got the damn Yankees on the run. 199 00:23:10.080 --> 00:23:14.780 And, of course, he laughed about it later, too. 200 00:23:14.780 --> 00:23:44.780 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 201 00:23:44.780 --> 00:23:52.780 The Spaniards had very obsolete rifles. They couldn't shoot fast enough, so the Rough Riders got through the whole thing. 202 00:23:52.780 --> 00:23:59.780 Meanwhile, the Negro 9th Cavalry and 10th Cavalry actually took the major hills. 203 00:23:59.780 --> 00:24:08.780 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. 204 00:24:08.780 --> 00:24:24.780 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. 205 00:24:24.780 --> 00:24:39.780 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. 206 00:24:39.780 --> 00:24:49.780 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. 207 00:24:49.780 --> 00:24:56.820 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 208 00:24:56.820 --> 00:25:02.820 moralists next to no American casualties and a bunch of Spanish casualties. Same thing happens in the Battle of Manila. 209 00:25:02.820 --> 00:25:09.820 Four hundred Spaniards drown or die variously, no Americans and so on, so it's one of those uneven conflicts. 210 00:25:09.820 --> 00:25:17.660 So very quickly the battle of Manila is over and it's actually I guess fought after the 211 00:25:17.660 --> 00:25:22.640 Spanish had conceded as one of those communication things and so then we have the problem of 212 00:25:22.640 --> 00:25:27.220 what to do with the Philippine because there's been a rebellion going on since about 1893 213 00:25:27.220 --> 00:25:32.140 or two and the Philippines have kind of been on hold so the Filipinos have been led to 214 00:25:32.140 --> 00:25:34.820 believe that the Americans are liberating them and now the Americans suddenly appear 215 00:25:34.820 --> 00:25:44.340 The Filipinos then proceed to fight a guerrilla war against the Americans. 216 00:25:44.340 --> 00:25:49.740 The Americans suddenly adopt all the Spanish tactics of Butcher Weiler in dealing with 217 00:25:49.740 --> 00:25:54.980 the so-called Philippine Insurrection, the Philippine-American War. 218 00:25:54.980 --> 00:25:56.740 This is the unintended consequence. 219 00:25:56.740 --> 00:26:04.100 We have this sort of Vietnam-like guerrilla war to actually physically keep the Philippines 220 00:26:04.100 --> 00:26:28.100 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. 221 00:26:28.100 --> 00:26:34.100 and sort of pattern there that we see in American history sometimes and of course this began this led to the 222 00:26:35.860 --> 00:26:41.060 and some debate it actually never entered the electoral sphere because when Brian runs again 223 00:26:41.060 --> 00:26:44.980 in the next presidential election he basically stays away from the issue so you don't have a 224 00:26:44.980 --> 00:26:49.540 mandate for empire you basically have McKinley re-elected on sort of boring tariff and other 225 00:26:49.540 --> 00:26:54.180 issues but in the press you have the emergence of the anti-imperialist league and these are basically 226 00:26:54.180 --> 00:26:59.620 A set of classical liberals, some of whom had ties to the anti-slavery movement in the north, 227 00:26:59.620 --> 00:27:04.020 they're kind of a northeastern, mugwump, civil service reform sort of group, 228 00:27:04.020 --> 00:27:08.260 who see that there's a problem with classical liberalism and republican values 229 00:27:08.260 --> 00:27:15.780 if you start acquiring overseas territories and start ruling foreign peoples by decree and force 230 00:27:15.780 --> 00:27:20.340 and get into that whole contradiction there philosophically. 231 00:27:20.340 --> 00:27:26.340 And meanwhile, the administration was treating the Filipino insurgents somewhat like the Apaches or something. 232 00:27:26.340 --> 00:27:33.340 So they began to, for the Anthony and Pyrrhus League, people like Edward Atkinson, 233 00:27:33.340 --> 00:27:38.340 Morefield Story and so on, began sort of retelling various atrocity stories, which in fact are true, 234 00:27:38.340 --> 00:27:43.340 from the Philippines, talking about the mass graves and swiping out of villages. 235 00:27:43.340 --> 00:28:10.620 There stands Hennessy with the indulgent parent kneeling on the stomach of his adopted child 236 00:28:10.620 --> 00:28:16.500 Well, a delegation from Boston based him with an umbrella. I'm not as much of an expansionist as myself. 237 00:28:16.500 --> 00:28:22.580 So Lenin, of course, called the onion fairness league the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy. 238 00:28:22.580 --> 00:28:29.220 But then he had a different theory of how this stuff works. It was kind of a compliment coming from him. 239 00:28:29.220 --> 00:28:33.380 So McKinley decides that we have to acquire the Philippines, really have to have them. 240 00:28:33.380 --> 00:28:37.740 And he's sort of he's had that prayer session with God in the White House. 241 00:28:37.740 --> 00:28:45.740 The Philippines was going to be Christianized. No one had told McKinley that they were mainly Roman Catholic already. 242 00:28:45.740 --> 00:28:51.740 That's one of the problems. 243 00:28:51.740 --> 00:28:57.740 This is a shame. I'm not going to have time to get my Southern stuff in here. 244 00:28:57.740 --> 00:29:05.740 Some of the any appeals were in the South and there were comparisons made to Carpet Bag Rule by a couple of Southern congressmen. 245 00:29:05.740 --> 00:29:09.740 Some people like Tom Watson, for example, who was sound on the Philippine wire. 246 00:29:09.740 --> 00:29:12.740 There are a number of people. 247 00:29:12.740 --> 00:29:14.740 Pitchfork Ben Tillman had a few things to say about him. 248 00:29:14.740 --> 00:29:18.740 So you had a kind of opposite. 249 00:29:18.740 --> 00:29:19.740 Mrs. Jefferson Davis, too. 250 00:29:19.740 --> 00:29:21.740 I have a quote I won't have time for. 251 00:29:21.740 --> 00:29:24.740 Mrs. Jefferson Davis emerges as a kind of anti-imperialist, too, at the same time. 252 00:29:24.740 --> 00:29:26.740 So that's kind of interesting. 253 00:29:26.740 --> 00:29:28.740 She's still alive. 254 00:29:28.740 --> 00:29:33.740 So let me see. 255 00:29:33.740 --> 00:29:38.740 The actual costs, if I can take a half a minute. No one's given anything statistics yet. 256 00:29:38.740 --> 00:29:43.740 Here's the actual cost. U.S. deaths, 2,900, some of which are battlefield deaths. 257 00:29:43.740 --> 00:29:47.740 The rest are due to bad food and tropical disease. 258 00:29:47.740 --> 00:29:52.740 2,900 deaths, $250 million. 259 00:29:52.740 --> 00:29:58.740 The Philippine insurrection, of course, costs $600 million for the Philippine insurrection. 260 00:29:58.740 --> 00:30:07.940 cost more than the war against Spain to suppress the Philippine Bible, so it's impact studies were done. 261 00:30:07.940 --> 00:30:11.540 And in summary then, I guess I'll run my time. 262 00:30:11.540 --> 00:30:19.900 But what we have is a precedent for the whole policy of Opendoor Empire is set in the stages that we have the bases, 263 00:30:19.900 --> 00:30:26.220 OK, in Asia and so forth and leading to all of the wonderful foreign policy disasters since then.