The 1898 Spanish-American War led the loss of the last significant remnants of Spain’s empire, with the transfer of Cuba, cedes Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. Here, Peter Deane considers the impact of the war and whether America was ready for an empire.
The last stand of the Spanish forces in Cuba. An 1898 depiction by Murat Halstead.
Four years ago we stood on the brink of war without the people knowing it and without preparation or effort at preparation…. I did all that could be done with honor to avert the war, but without avail…. It came. The result was signally favorable to American arms and in the highest degree honorable to the Government. It imposed upon us obligations from which we cannot escape and from which it would be dishonorable to seek escape.
--William McKinley, Second Inaugural Address (1901)
May 1, 1898, Manila Bay
“You may fire when ready, Gridley.” Commodore George Dewey said to firing officer Charles Gridley, quietly. In moments, nothing was quiet as the American fleet’s guns fired to devastating effect. The Spanish fleet was destroyed without a single American death. This would be widely celebrated back home–it was the first American fleet naval battle and had ended victoriously. The United States now had strategic, but by no means complete, control of the Philippines. Dewey ordered his men to seize Cavite, the port for Manila. Dewey had cut the cable from Hong Kong to Manila to isolate further the Spanish garrison in the city of Manila. He sent news of his victory back to Washington, which would take days to arrive formally. He also asked for 5,000 Army troops, enough to defeat the Spanish garrison and occupy the area. Then he settled down to wait. He had no instructions on what to do if he won.
Now what?
The American Republic ante bellum
The United States in early 1898 was a large, prosperous nation. Its economy was growing rapidly and the nation was confident and optimistic. For the most part it was content to keep to itself. The only “overseas” possession of the U. S. was Alaska, on the same continent. The last foreign war had been fifty years before.
But for several years now, a group of influential men had formed a loose affiliation of those seeking to expand the U. S. beyond its continental boundaries. Their leader came to be Theodore Roosevelt. Manifest Destiny need not stop at the West coast. The U. S. could span the Pacific; trade and greater prosperity would follow. The U. S. could expand into the Caribbean too.
Their first goal was the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands. Grover Cleveland, in line with popular opinion, would have none of this and refused to pursue it. He did commit to expansion of the U. S. Navy, such that it became comparable to Germany’s. When Republican William McKinley came to power in 1897, Roosevelt became Assistant Secretary of the Navy. From this position he acted to increase the size and readiness of the Navy. He later drafted secret orders that, in the event of war with Spain, Dewey and the Asiatic Squadron should proceed directly to the Philippines to engage the Spanish fleet. To satisfy the growing and influential expansionist wing of his party, McKinley signed the long-delayed treaty of annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, but the Senate would not consider it—in 1897–and he knew this.
McKinley liked to keep his options open. He has often been seen as unintelligent and indecisive. He listened more than he spoke. But when he decided, he was committed to it. As one aide said, “The President had his way as usual.” This applied in Congress too.
If the U. S. Navy was in fighting shape, the Army was in no state of readiness for war or expansion. (When the war began, Roosevelt would remark, “If the Army were one tenth as ready as the Navy, we would fix that whole business in six weeks.”) The U. S. Army consisted of 25,000 regulars scattered mostly in the interior of the country. With the Indian Wars over, it was underfunded and below what the Army Chief calculated to be the needed number, at least 38,000 regulars.
The War
The Spanish-American War, when it commenced in April 1898, was felt in Congress and by the public to be about the liberation of Cuba from Spanish tyranny. People North and South rallied to the flag; the nation was united behind the liberation of Cuba. McKinley had hoped a foreign war would bind the nation together. The Congress was united behind appropriation for the war. The Army hoped for 60,000 volunteers with two-year enlistments; McKinley called for and received funding for 125,000 plus 62,527 total regulars for the duration of the war. In May, to prepare for any eventuality, he called for and had funded 75,000 more volunteers. Now the U. S. had a Great Power-size army.
The tenfold increase in size overwhelmed the Army. Scandals about the amount and quality of food and supplies blossomed after the War. In April, the Army Chief complained he had not enough munitions “to last an army of 70,000 men in one hour’s serious battle.” The Army had essentially no infrastructure along the Eastern or Gulf coasts. Tampa, Florida was chosen as the staging area. Tens of thousands of new recruits converged there. Roosevelt: “...a welter of confusion…an almost inextricable tangle.” But by Summer they had enough trained and supplied soldiers for the Cuban campaign.
The Army created the Department of the Pacific, in which to put Pacific Ocean possessions. The Army gathered the first of 15,000 (thrice Dewey’s request) troops with much disorganization at the Presidio in San Francisco for transport to the Philippines. Thousands more were to come over the next few years.
Neither the Army nor the Navy had any ships to transport troops overseas. Suitable ships were therefore mostly purchased–103–and a few chartered, in a matter of weeks. These were added to the Navy. Munitions and supplies were shipped as well.
When the first contingent of troops sailed for Manila, they detoured along the way to seize Guam. This was done without casualty. The other Ladrones islands were left to Spain. Then they sailed on.
It was in June that the Hawaiian Islands were annexed. The treaty was suddenly approved–by acclamation. One reason this finally passed is that the Japanese Empire had indicated strong interest in acquiring the Islands, which had a large Japanese population.
Also that Summer, the Russian Empire upgraded its representative from minister to ambassador, the same rank as other Great Powers.
The Fate of the Philippines
In May, Dewey’s fleet in Manila Bay was visited by naval contingents from a number of Great Powers, to congratulate him on his victory. With the status of the Islands unclear and not under American control, others were interested. It was known that the Japanese Empire was interested in acquiring the islands. The German admiral went so far as to indicate that if the U. S. did not want the Philippines for a colony, then Germany would gladly step in. This infuriated Dewey and influenced McKinley toward annexation in his indecision about the future of the islands.
Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico were widely seen as strategic necessities. There was no real debate over their future status. McKinley said that the status of the Philippines would be decided by the peace treaty conference, in neutral Paris, France. But peace commissioners rely on their instructions for guidance. At first he issued no clear instructions. But as the months wore on, he sensed that popular opinion favored not only Cuban independence, but also American annexation of the entire Philippines. He instructed his commissioners accordingly and Spain had to acquiesce.
The peace treaty signed late that year aroused tremendous national debate. Was it right or even constitutional for the U. S. to have colonies? Men such as Grover Cleveland, Mark Twain and Charles Francis Adams Jr. opposed annexation. (“Men of a bygone era,” Roosevelt called them.) Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were among those in favor. The debate, in public society and in Congress, was sometimes acrimonious. A narrow majority of senators approved the treaty in February 1899.
The one group without a voice in this debate were the Filipinos. They for years had staged an insurrection against Spanish rule with the goal of independence. Filipino insurgents and the U. S. Army were allied during the siege of Manila in August, but it quickly became apparent to the Filipinos that the U. S. had no intention of supporting full independence. The insurrection turned against the Americans. This quickly became a full-scale colonial war with upwards of 30,000 American troops involved at any given time at its peak. A total of 125,000 Americans would fight in the war over its course. It lasted officially until July 1902, but some hostilities continued for years after. The American public quickly grew tired of this war, and war in general (the first occasion in what became a pattern of popular response to war) but McKinley had chosen his course of action. However, the U. S. never again waged war for territorial empire.
In December 1898, McKinley issued a proclamation that America’s goal in the Philippines was “benevolent assimilation”. This did nothing to satisfy the insurrectos who wanted no part of it. The policy was sometimes carried out at gunpoint. The American combination of benevolent ideals supported by military force, as a tenet of American foreign policy, appeared for the first time in the Spanish-American and Philippine wars, but not the last.
The Constitution and the Flag
The Philippines all this time were under military rule, i.e., martial law. Was this constitutional? McKinley felt it was. The Constitution did not apply to a conquered colony, he felt.
Other new territories had to be governed as well. Puerto Rico easily accepted American suzerainty. One of the island’s economic mainstays was sugar cane. McKinley felt, logically (if the Constitution does follow the flag) that the tariff walls against Puerto Rican sugar should be lifted. (Never mind that this was a contradiction to his Philippine policies.) America had no tariffs against itself. The sugar lobby disagreed, and in the ensuing debate it would be decided by Congress that the Constitution does not follow the flag. Puerto Rican Sugar duties were reduced by 75%, so McKinley substantially won the immediate question.
In 1901, the Constitutional question would come to the U. S. Supreme Court. The verdict: The Constitution need not follow the flag.
McKinley’s second Annual Message (State of the Union) in December 1898 was to great extent a catalog of American accomplishments–and adaptations to empire and global power. He called for the standing, regular army to be increased to 100,000 regulars “will be none too many to meet the necessities” of the U. S. now. This shocked many, to confront the fact of America’s new role in the world. In early 1899 he called for a mainland-Hawaii-Guam-Manila cable. As usual, on both questions, he got his way.
1900
The Chinese Empire was disintegrating. Great Powers swooped in to claim coastal cities and inland spheres of influence as their own. This process not only made a mockery of China’s territorial integrity but also threatened to shut out American goods from the Chinese market.
In March, Secretary of State John Hay addressed correspondence to each of the relevant powers regarding an “open door” policy towards China. Nations seeking trade and opportunities in China were to be treated equally by all others; Chinese sovereignty was to be respected (at least in name). Some of the responses were vague, but Hay proclaimed the triumph of his policy, and the other powers played along. Thus was born the famous “Open Door” policy.
Even three years before, the U. S. would have had no say in how the Great Powers dealt with China. Now that the U. S. was a Pacific power, it had a seat at the big power table.
The Open Door was severely tested a few months later. During the Boxer Rebellion, the great power (U. S. included) diplomatic enclave in Beijing was besieged. To lift the siege and fight the Boxers, the Eight Power Alliance—all the great powers—was formed and their combined force marched on Beijing. The main force consisted of 18,000 troops under one central command. The U. S. contributed 3,400 troops from the Philippines. All eight nations participated in successfully lifting the siege.
Three years before, the U. S. would again have been a spectator, with no troops to send and no way to send them. Having troops in the nearby Philippines made U. S. participation possible. American unilateral action was not always going to be adequate to address global issues, they learned. So for the first time since George Washington’s Farewell Address, with its warnings against foreign alliances, the U. S. was acting in concert—in an Alliance—with other Great Powers. All saw the U. S. for the power it was. Afterwards, the Open Door survived as the other powers sought reparations from China, but not annexed territory.
McKinley realized the global and political significance of events. He was now responsible for Americans globally. And so he acted by joining the Alliance and committing troops. McKinley considered seeking Congressional approval for this, but was assured by his Secretaries of War and the Navy that this was not necessary, legally or militarily. He had adequate troops in Asia already. This was the first time a President had committed American troops to battle outside the contiguous U. S. without the permission of Congress. Some in Congress objected but it was done. This set the powerful precedent Presidents to come would use.
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