4. THE REELECTION AND ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT MCKINLEY
Japan had been flexing its muscles in the far Pacific, and had started, as was natural given the vulnerability of China at this time, with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. This threw wide open the gates of China and began a scramble of European powers building on their rapacious activities of some decades, to follow Japan in opening up spheres of influence in China. The United States initially declined to join in such indignities, but soon became concerned that the Europeans and Japanese would carve up all China and leave it out. Britain had offered the United States cooperation in Chinese matters in 1898 and 1899, but had been rebuffed. Hay had friends who had served in the British diplomatic service in China and he became somewhat well-informed about Chinese matters. In September 1899, he wrote the Russian, British, German, French, Italian, and Japanese governments asking for assurance that Chinese government tariffs and other arrangements would not be altered by whatever spheres of influence were being established, and that there would be no discrimination against any other foreigners in those spheres. This was a rather naïve questionnaire, to which he received rather evasive replies, but, in a time-honored gesture, Hay claimed to have achieved complete concurrence, and waving the official responses from the other six powers about, he declared the “final and definitive” acceptance of what was known as “the Open Door policy” in China.
Predictably enough, in the spring of 1900 xenophobic nationalism swept intellectual and clerical circles in China, and the Boxer Rebellion, dedicated to the expulsion of the “foreign devils” (not to mention the “long-nosed, fat-eyed barbarians”), erupted and quickly led to the seizure of the Chinese imperial capital at Peking. The foreign legations were besieged, and only relieved by an international force on August 14, 1900. The foreign powers exercised their usual heavy-handed will and extorted from China (September 1901) an indemnity of $333 million, of which the American share was to be $24.5 million. Hay issued another of his aerated circular letters to the powers enumerating everything that was supposed not to happen in China, and claiming to be upholding Chinese national dignity and the Open Door policy, which was not, in fact, compatible with any recognizable notion of Chinese sovereignty. Although there was a good deal of flimflam and wishful thinking in Hay’s position, the United States excused China from most of its indemnity to the U.S. and China dedicated much of its unpaid balance to paying for the education of promising Chinese university students in the United States. The battle for Chinese control of its own affairs would continue, often with great loss of blood and physical destruction, through most of the first half of the twentieth century. But 100 years after the Boxer Rebellion, China was back as one of the world’s greatest powers, in a remarkable and unique act of national regeneration.
From May to July 1899, a conference took place at The Hague under the auspices of the czar of Russia, Nicholas II, exploring arms limitations and seeking a regulation of methods of warfare. It proved impossible to restrict the use of poison gas and of balloons in war, and to impose weapons levels, but the Permanent Court of International Arbitration was established. The United States accepted a formula of dispute resolution through mediation and arbitration, but would not hear of compulsory arbitration or application of any such process to activities within the Americas, which it effectively reserved the right to sort out as it pleased. There were further small steps to absorb the new empire. Samoa was finally divided between Germany and the United States, with Britain being compensated elsewhere, and Pago Pago became an American naval base. And the Foraker Act in April 1900 established civil rule in Puerto Rico as an American territory like Alaska and Hawaii.
Foreign affairs had dominated McKinley’s term, and almost the only legislative initiative of note was the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which reinforced the golden barricades against the bimetallists at the approach of the election. These had been years of high economic growth and broad and general prosperity. The Republicans met at Philadelphia in June and renominated President McKinley without opposition. Vice President Hobart had died in 1899, and to the consternation of the eastern machine politicians, especially from New York, Governor Theodore Roosevelt was nominated for vice president. The governing party’s platform supported the gold standard, a protective tariff, and, suffused with the fruit of their “splendid little war” and its acquests, an isthmian canal in Central America, with the slightest concern only for the fact that it would have to be cut through the territory of another country.
The Democrats met at Kansas City in July and renominated William Jennings Bryan and former vice president Adlai E. Stevenson on a straight bimetallist platform. Silver had become a metaphor for western interests, the little man across the country, and resistance to Wall Street and the exploitive overlordship of eastern finance, although any practical connections between these causes and the bogeyman were tenuous. The Social Democrats, succeeding previous parties of the left, had met at Indianapolis in March and nominated, for the first of several star turns in the role, former railway worker and labor agitator Eugene V. Debs for president and Job Harriman of California for vice president. There were the usual Prohibition and other splinter-group candidates.
Bryan campaigned against imperialism and for the silver reform; McKinley was slightly more energetic than he had been four years before, and emphasized “the full dinner pail” as well as the easy part of imperialism: hammering a derelict colonial power and looking a good deal more liberal and full of a civilizing mission than the European colonial powers. Bryan was the exponent of the grumbles of the fringes of American society; McKinley was the candidate of American satisfaction: peace, effortless military victory, prosperity, accretions of territory, all manner of good fortune rolling in for America. McKinley led all the way and on election day the president became only the sixth man to win two consecutive, contested presidential terms, 7.22 million to Bryan’s 6.36 million, 209,000 for the Prohibitionist, and 95,000 for the socialist Debs; 51.5 percent to 45.5 percent, to 3 percent to all the others, and 292 electoral votes to 155 for Bryan. The Democrats were still in the cul-de-sac of frightening too many satisfied people to vote against them without attracting enough unsatisfied people into voting for them.
In March 1901, the Platt Amendment was adopted, which supplemented what Cuban legislators had adopted as a regime for an independent Cuba in a constitutional convention that the United States had requested. The amendment, which was adopted as part of Cuba’s constitution, and as a matter of treaty, provided that Cuba would never impair its independence by treaty opposite any foreign power; that Cuba would not borrow beyond its apparent means to service debt; and that the U.S. was authorized to intervene to ensure the survival of Cuban independence and the rule of law. The Cubans dutifully agreed to cede naval installations to the United States. The Platt Amendment was added to the treaty to ensure the permanence of the residual American rights, although the amendment itself was abrogated in 1934.
On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. For a time he appeared likely to recover, but primitive hygienic standards aggravated the problem and McKinley died on September 14, of complications from his treatment. The vice president, vacationing in the Northeast, was advised by a mounted park ranger that the president’s condition was deteriorating, and entrained at once for Buffalo. Roosevelt was in transit when McKinley died, and he was inaugurated shortly after he arrived in Buffalo. At 42, he was the youngest person ever to hold the office of president of the United States, and remains so.
McKinley was a popular and sensible if somewhat unimaginative president. He was an unenthused imperialist, but did not balk at expansion as Cleveland had; was close to monied industrial interests but not a tool of them. He was another of the group of presidents between Grant and Roosevelt who wanted to let America be America as it grew exponentially, nudging it here and there to reduce patronage in the civil service, build more warships, and avoid economic nostrums like bimetallism, more concerned about union agitation than economic combinations, but not oblivious of the concerns raised by either. Theodore Roosevelt, after passivity in the presidential office through the 36 years since the death of Lincoln, was altogether different, and abruptly raised the curtain on a new age of America’s consciousness of itself and of its presence in the world.
5. PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Roosevelt’s diplomacy, through the capable and like-minded Hay, turned first to Panama. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 had assured equality between Britain and the United States in any isthmian canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, and forbade the fortification of such a canal, and promised the abstention of both powers from violations of local sovereignty in Central America. McKinley’s Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of February 1900 and Roosevelt’s second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of November 1901 revoked the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, envisioned an American canal that would be open equally to all nations; a canal that would be neutral territory in all respects, though under U.S. auspices; and a canal that the United States would be conceded the right to fortify. The Hay-Herran Convention was negotiated in January 1903 with Colombia, of which Panama was then a province, and provided that for $10 million and an annual rental of $250,000 the U.S. would receive a renewable 99-year lease on a canal zone six miles wide across the narrowest part of the isthmus of Panama. The U.S. had also arranged to buy the assets of the Panama Canal Company.
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It was on the basis of that company having lowered its price from $109 million that the Congress opted for the Panama rather than the Nicaragua route. But the Senate of Colombia, unlike the U.S. Senate, did not ratify the Hay-Herran Convention, because it reasoned that if it waited another 18 months, the charter of the Panama Canal Company would expire and Colombia, and not the company, would receive the $40 million the United States was prepared to pay for the company’s right of way and charter.
Unfortunately, Theodore Roosevelt chose to regard this not as an astute business decision but rather as a personal and national affront, and ordered a naval squadron to the Panamanian coast to assure the “free and uninterrupted transit” between the oceans guaranteed by the Treaty of New Granada of 1846, while encouraging a coup d’état by locals whipped up by shareholders of the Panama Canal Company, led by the French adventurer Philippe Bunau-Varilla. In fact, the revolution consisted effectively of the small railway owned by the company refusing to conduct Colombian forces into Panama while wealthy locals proclaimed Panama’s independence, on November 3. Roosevelt, with his fleet intimidating Colombian central authorities from advancing on foot in the absence of rail transport, recognized the new country. Then the resourceful Bunau-Varilla, a founding shareholder of the company who had sold McKinley and Hanna on the virtues of the Panama route, presented his letters of credence to Roosevelt as minister of the Republic of Panama to the United States on November 13, and granted the Canal Zone in perpetuity to the United States through the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty also of November 13 (a busy, well-planned day for him).
It was a crisply executed opera bouffe banana-republic farce. Work on a canal was begun almost at once, though interrupted in 1905 to effect improvements in resistance to malaria and yellow fever, which had killed many canal workers. A lock canal of 40.3 miles was built between 1906 and 1914 at a cost of $365 million, under the supervision of Colonel George Washington Goethals of the Army Corps of Engineers. The political facilitation was shabby, but it was a great engineering achievement and a triumph of Roosevelt’s in reinforcing the overwhelming preeminence of the United States as the hemispheric power and becoming, with Great Britain, one of only two great naval powers in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
In July 1902, Congress passed Roosevelt’s Philippine Government Act, which put the government of the Philippines in the hands of the Taft Commission, headed by U.S. Court of Appeals judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati. After 1907, when the Philippine legislature was elected, Taft and his commission served as the upper house of the legislature. Taft was an enlightened governor and the regime was undoubtedly an unrecognizable improvement on the Spanish colonial government, in modernizing efficiency and in respect for the individual and national rights of the population.
And in 1904, after the British and the Germans had suffered default on a loan to Venezuela and asked Roosevelt if he objected to their bombardment of Venezuelan coastal cities as an encouragement to the Venezuelans to pay their debts, with no ulterior motives or colonial ambitions, Roosevelt agreed, and also agreed to transmit a proposal for arbitration to The Hague Tribunal, which was accepted. Similar problems arose with the Dominican Republic, and what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary resulted, in which it was accepted that “Chronic wrongdoing or impotence may ... require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere ... may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” The United States, despite the lack of support by the Senate, administered Dominican customs collection and debt repayments from 1904 to 1907. By this time and by these methods, Roosevelt pushed American dominance of the Americas (except for Canada) about as far as even the most imperious interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine would allow.