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Android Apocalypse posted:Hello thread. I don't want this slipping into forums limbo, so anybody gonna post some more President history? One day I will  My life has kinda gotten away from me with the advent of the Presidential campaign season, plus the fact that I actually managed to enter into a stable relationship. I apologize, guys, I really do. I actually have part of another update written, but it's just been sitting on Google Drive for a while. Does anyone know a medium I could use where I could insert images and formatting that would translate into BBcode? I'd love to be able to write posts and insert everything I needed without having to do it here. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Feb 7, 2020 |
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Feb 7, 2020 03:33
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Happy to see this thread pop up from the bottom of my bookmarks today!
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Feb 7, 2020 03:38
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:One day I will You can just put the BBcode with links to the images in the document. Then copy and paste.
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Feb 7, 2020 04:00
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Helsing posted:
I would say Kennedy offered a vision though of America that was compassionate and informs a lot more liberal policies than we have today. I think because he saw the advantages his wealth gave him he was more apt to change the laws and society to be more equitable. I mean he was very forward about saying wealth doesn't make you a good American, it just makes you wealthy.
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Feb 9, 2020 01:49
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My life has similarly become very complicated, but my presidential speeches posts are still a planned thing.
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Feb 9, 2020 15:14
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Happy 2nd threadaversary! Can't believe we've made it another year. Been talking with Fritz and I know they're working on another update.
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Feb 17, 2020 15:54
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Hey, guys! I'm back, and I come bearing gifts: McKinley, the final chapter! Part 2: A New American Century  When we last left William McKinley, he’d just been elected President--in large part thanks to the talents of his chief strategist, Mark Hanna. As I mentioned in the last introduction, despite a rather extraordinary life, William McKinley was not a tremendously impactful President. He was the last of our Gilded Age Presidents--and much like his contemporaries he tended more towards consensus-seeking than confrontation-seeking. “Big Bill” is remembered much more for his successor (and the manner in which his successor ascended to the White House) than he is for his own personal achievements. That said, the timing of McKinley’s Presidency--from 1897 to 1901--meant that he would preside over the dawning of the 20th century. I realize that it sounds like I’m not up on my Howard Zinn when I explain how important this particular transition was, but trust me--it was. The United States underwent an interesting metamorphosis--from developing nation to colonial power. We’re not going to follow a chronological accounting of McKinley’s time in office, but like I said--he was a man very much defined by events. Sit back, now, and let me tell you a few tales of American expansionism. Some (Cabinet) Assembly Required  “I never met a man in my life with whom I was so favorably impressed by a day’s acquaintance,” wrote one of McKinley’s nominees for his Cabinet. His attitude mirrored many of those who were offered jobs in the McKinley administration. McKinley knew, at any rate, that the competency of Cabinet officials could well determine how successful his Presidency was--and he chose appropriately. His first choice for two of the most important departments--State and Treasury--turned him down, however. For Treasury, he’d wanted one of his old House colleagues, Nelson Dingley (R-ME), the current chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Dingley suffered from poor health, though, and begged off when McKinley offered him the job. State was a bit more of a conundrum. His first choice was Mark Hanna--but Hanna had let it be known back in Ohio that he wanted to be a Senator more than he wanted any White House job. During a visit to DC, Hanna encountered McKinley’s cousin William Osborne and reiterated this desire, a claim that had been backed up by trial balloons in Ohio newspapers for weeks. “Mr. Hanna has his heart set on going to the Senate,” Osborne promptly wrote McKinley. It didn’t dampen McKinley’s desire to have a fellow Ohio man in the spot though, and since he couldn’t have Hanna and didn’t want Foraker, he would approach the only other power player in Ohio politics. As transition manager, Hanna sat down with John Sherman in early December with full authorization to ask him if he’d accept State if offered it. Sherman knew immediately that he wanted it, but played coy--only sending Hanna a response after two weeks. “After full reflection, I have made up my mind to say ‘yes’,” Sherman wrote. Ascending to the Cabinet would clear his Senate seat--something that served Hanna’s ambitions as well. After Dingley turned down Treasury, Herman Kohlsaat, one of McKinley’s wealthy financiers, called him from Chicago. “I have a Secretary of the Treasury for you,” he announced. “Who is it?” McKinley asked.  Lyman Gage was the current president of the First National Bank at the time. He was a Republican, but he’d voted for Cleveland in 1884, thinking Republican nominee James Blaine “unsavory”. He embraced protectionist tariffs, and he was solidly behind gold as the sole monetary standard for the United States currency system. McKinley sent Charles Dawes to interview him, but the details of their conversation leaked to the press--which was embarrassing for both Gage and McKinley. Gage denied receiving a Cabinet offer, but said he would accept if he was offered one--however, he would feel “no sense of disappointment or chagrin” if no offer came. The lengths these guys had to go to in order to pretend they had no ambitions, I swear. There was one more thing McKinley had to do: fill the “New York” slot in the Cabinet. Basically, this meant finding someone that New York boss Thomas Platt would find acceptable; this would ensure he kept his horses in the barn when McKinley tried to push legislative items through Congress. There was a problem, however. McKinley had already tendered the Justice Department offer to Judge Joseph McKenna of California, a former four-term Congressman who had been a friend of McKinley’s during his own days in the House, and for the War Department he’d put up Russell Alger, a lawyer and wealthy lumber merchant who, like McKinley, had served in the Civil War and had been instrumental in delivering the Michigan delegation during the nomination fight. The Navy Secretaryship went to John D. Long, a Massachusetts corporate lawyer who’d been an early supporter of McKinley’s. All the major Cabinet posts had been filled. But McKinley had an idea. A few months earlier, he’d tendered an offer for Attorney General to this man.  Cornelius Bliss had served as treasurer of the national Republican Party and had proved himself very effective as a fundraiser. Though he was aligned with New York’s reformists, Bliss had friends on both sides of the aisle--and given that all his other options had been rejected as unacceptable by McKinley, Platt felt that accepting Bliss was the best shot he was going to get to preserve his influence in Washington. When offered the job at the Justice Department, however, Bliss turned McKinley down. He cited his wife’s failing health--a problem McKinley could certainly relate to. Now that the “New York” problem was still a thorn in McKinley’s side, however, he sent a string of associates to Bliss’ house to plead with him to accept an offer. Platt himself even weighed in, trying to cajole Bliss into accepting a Cabinet post--and it worked. McKinley granted Bliss the Interior Department. Thomas Platt breathed a sigh of relief--New York was represented in the Cabinet. The final Cabinet, indeed, was very representative of the man at its head--it showcased men from all corners of the country: New England, the West, the Midwest, the South, and New York. Many of these men were friends from their previous endeavors; Sherman, Alger, and McKenna had all gotten to know each other during the battle at the convention. McKinley had managed to satisfy the New York reformers without antagonizing its political bosses, and all these men were of substantial stature in the public’s eyes. But even then, there was still the question of Theodore Roosevelt. Yup. Roosevelt, if you’ll remember, had done some major barnstorming on behalf of McKinley in the final weeks of the campaign--although it’s unclear if his rather incendiary rhetoric won McKinley any votes. However, his friends and allies were clamoring for McKinley to find him a place in the Cabinet--specifically, they wanted him to become Navy Secretary Long’s assistant. These included Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, new British ambassador John Hay, and a young federal appeals court judge named William Howard Taft. McKinley understood that Roosevelt’s energy could be off-putting to some--to Taft, he said “The truth is, Will, Roosevelt is always in such a state of mind”--but no man makes as many friends as Roosevelt did in politics without doing something right, and McKinley was no fool. He gave Roosevelt the Assistant Secretary job under Long, giving Roosevelt what his friend Maria Storer said was “a chance to prove he can be peaceful”. Aloha Bill  In the twilight years of the 19th century, America was finding that it was like a barrel bursting its hoops. Its economic power was becoming such that we were starting to wonder what kind of military power we’d need to protect our commercial interests--and since most of those were in international shipping, that meant a strong navy. We were entering into an era of American expansionism in all sorts of ways. In the North Pacific, however, we encountered what is perhaps the first test of our limits in that arena. The former Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii, was a Polynesian kingdom that had, for decades, served as both a haven and a magnet for Americans. It was mostly traders seeking supplies and respite from the sea after long voyages at first, but eventually the missionaries came, worried over the fate of pagan souls. By the 1840s, at the height of the whaling era in America, nearly 90% of all the ships calling at Hawaii flew the American flag, and the sons and daughters of the visiting missionaries were embedded deeper into the social elite, sometimes through marriage and childbearing. Guys, we were boring into Hawaii like ticks WAY before it became a territory, let alone a state. In 1842, President John Tyler made what was perhaps the first official American declaration of policy concerning Hawaii--that while America had no designs on acquiring Hawaii as a colony, it would not tolerate any other nation doing so, effectively declaring Hawaii a protectorate under the Monroe Doctrine. Later on, during Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, we struck trade deals with Hawaii, removing tariffs on various goods shipped between our nation and their kingdom. Though this affected agricultural staples, lumber, and livestock, as well as tobacco from America, the chief reason these agreements were put in place? Sugar. Yup. Tariff-free sugar was a huge boon for Hawaii’s economy--the demand in America was absolutely exploding due to the advent of the canning industry. By 1881, production in Hawaii was nearly 47,000 tons. Three years later, it had nearly doubled to 71,000 tons--and in 1890, it had nearly doubled again to 130,000 tons. In this time, the sugar plantations in Hawaii had become so mechanized that they were more akin to factories than farms. Some years, profit margins were exceeding 50%. And with money comes lots and lots of change. Wealthy white businessmen began demanding more and more influence and privilege within Hawaii’s governmental structure. Native populations couldn’t maintain their smaller farms and social positions, and inevitably the old ways and customs began to degrade. Out of this came a proclamation that became known as the Bayonet Constitution--a document that, much like the Magna Carta nearly 700 years earlier, took pains to limit the king’s power and grant it to the people...the problem being, of course, that it was heavily slanted in favor of the white minority. White men destroy everything they touch. It took care of the king, anyway. King Kalakaua, Hawaii’s sovereign, struggled to adapt to these changes. As the steadily-growing white population tipped the balance of power away from him, he was at pains to maintain the peace between native Hawaiians and the immigrants. When he died, his sister took over.  Queen Liliuokalani was known as “Queen Lil” in America, which is a relief, because I was NOT looking forward to typing out that full name a million times. Lil had married a white man, but she revered Polynesian culture far more than her brother had--and she chafed under the Bayonet Constitution. She replaced it with a new charter by royal decree, but her reign was immediately met with economic turmoil. Remember all that tariff-free sugar? Well, that’s where ol’ Bill McKinley enters our story. If you’ll recall, we talked a bit about the McKinley tariff bill--the one he got passed while in Congress. Well, turns out that one of the things it did was restore the tariff on imported sugar--and give domestic producers generous tax credits. That killed the Hawaiian sugar boom for nearly two decades before Woodrow Wilson’s administration got the tariff rolled back. Well, you know what white people do when they feel threatened, of course. They ask to speak to a manager--or, in the case of Hawaii’s white population, start a rebellion. They requested troops from the USS Boston, which was moored off of Honolulu. These soldiers were deployed, ostensibly, to protect American lives and property--but they didn’t station themselves near American residential areas. No, instead, they decided to camp out around Honolulu’s Government Building. This was enough to force Queen Lil off her throne. She abdicated, and the 1,600-year-old kingdom of Hawaii was dead. In the middle of all of the turmoil was this man.  John Stevens was the U.S. minister to Hawaii. He was a strong advocate for annexation, and just about everything he did throughout the crisis in Hawaii was improper. Not only did he tell Queen Lil that he would not support her--despite the fact that he was accredited by her government--he wouldn’t even offer assurances of U.S. neutrality. It gave the troop landing from the Boston an air of invasion rather than rebellion, and when the victorious rebels pronounced the creation of a provisional Hawaii government, he was quick to tender them recognition by the United States. This guy was a dick. The new (and very white, pro-U.S.) government immediately sent a delegation to Washington to pursue annexation, but despite signing an annexation treaty only eleven days after arriving in the capital, a poll of the Senate received only lukewarm support for annexing Hawaii. There didn’t seem to be any urgency in the matter...and this proved to be a mistake. See, if you recall your Presidential history, President Harrison lost his reelection bid in 1892 to former President Grover Cleveland, who was opposed to American expansionism and withdrew the treaty five days after he was inaugurated. Cleveland didn’t like Minister Stevens, and he didn’t like the idea of America disregarding native Hawaiian sentiment either, if you can believe it. He sent a retired Georgia Congressman named James Blount to investigate, and Blount’s report said about what you’d expect--it excoriated Stevens’ conduct and was very complimentary to Queen Lil. It killed any momentum for annexation and, were it not for the fact that the provisional government had its talons dug in deep, there was even talk of restoring Queen Lil to her throne. But Cleveland had no stomach for sweeping military action. Disgusted, he shoved the issue back at Congress for the remainder of his term. Then came William McKinley. Sure, momentum for annexation had been muted, but advocates had never gone away, and two months after McKinley was elected, former Secretary of State John Foster stopped off in the transitional offices in Chicago on his way to Honolulu. He told McKinley that the provisional government would be sending another delegation to Washington as soon as McKinley took the Oath of Office. “The ultimate fate of the islands, if they are not annexed by the United States, will be annexation by some of the other great powers,” Foster said. Once McKinley took the Oath and dropped the “-elect” off his title, he allowed the issue to be handled through backroom deals in Congress. House Speaker Reed opposed annexation--in fact, like Cleveland, he opposed expansionism in general. McKinley couldn’t afford to piss Reed off at this stage; he’d need him for the tariff he was trying to push through Congress. Hawaii was in no hurry; why should McKinley be? Well…  Enter the Japanese. See, the Europeans and Americans weren’t the only burgeoning population on the Hawaiian Islands. Even as they wrested control from the native Hawaiians, the growing Japanese population on the islands, under Tokyo’s patronage, was threatening to upend the West’s hegemony. Japan demanded that Hawaii’s native Japanese be granted voting rights as a protection against governmental and civic abuse. Those bastards. We’ve been over this: what do white people do when they sense their dominance being threatened? Well, in this case, we had reason to be concerned: Japan’s foreign minister, Count Okuma Shigenobu, was a Meiji politician who was very much in sync with the new wave of jingoism roiling Japanese society. Okuma felt that the West had slighted and exploited Japan long enough, and now it was time for Japan to exercise its strength--and what better place to do that than in Hawaii? Tensions mounted when, in response to the new American-friendly Honolulu government’s decision to reject hundreds of Japanese migrants, Japan sent its biggest warship to Honolulu’s harbor. Well, America wasn’t gonna take that lying down. Navy Secretary John Long ordered the armored cruiser Philadelphia, along with two smaller warships, to Hawaii under the command of Admiral Lester Beardslee. Back home, newspapers began warning people of Japan’s desire to pull the Hawaiian Islands out of America’s sphere of influence--a warning that gained extra heft when the Japanese ambassador in Washington, Hoshi Toru, told Secretary of State Sherman that Japan firmly opposed any U.S. annexation of Hawaii because it undermined Japanese interests in the island. Uh oh. Navy Secretary Long concluded that the necessary solution was a swift vote on annexation, a conclusion he quickly apprised McKinley of. McKinley asked Long’s deputy Theodore Roosevelt to identify all the warships that could be sent quickly to Hawaii (remember, this was pre-Panama Canal!), and Admiral Beardslee was ordered to stay indefinitely in Hawaii with his four combat ships. The situation got worse, as these situations are wont to do. Hawaii rejected yet more Japanese immigrant workers, angering Minister Okuma--and McKinley’s choice for Minister to Hawaii was certainly reflective of the burgeoning annexationist sentiment.  Harold Sewall had served in the Maine House of Representatives and as a national GOP official before McKinley sent him to Honolulu, and instantly he was slammed by publications like the Nation as “a Jingo and an annexationist”. Sewall was, indeed, wholeheartedly committed to annexing Hawaii, a view that was central to earning him the post. As if that wasn’t enough, a special emissary aboard the Japanese warship Naniwa, Akiyama Masanosuke, declared that Hawaii’s rejection of the Japanese immigrant workers constituted a violation of an 1871 treaty that Japan had signed with the Republic of Hawaii--and he vowed to investigate the matter, something he claimed would spawn indemnity demands. Washington got scared. If Hawaii rejected indemnity claims, it might be the final straw for avoiding a war between themselves and Japan--an outcome that would be less than desirable for the thousands of American expats living in Hawaii, as well as the provisional government in Honolulu. McKinley needed to act quickly. Dusting off the annexation document State had fashioned in 1893 (that had been tabled when Cleveland defeated Harrison), he sent it to Congress for review. The situation became more urgent in early June of 1897 when the administration received some disturbing news from Honolulu: three separate dispatches detailing Japanese demands on Hawaii. Okuma wanted indemnity for the rejected immigrants, guarantees that future immigrants would be allowed entry, and that all Japanese on the island would receive voting rights. This was topped off by a demand that Hawaii act quickly on these requests. Well, that was it. On June 8, one day later, McKinley decided to get the treaty signed and sent to the Senate for ratification. Two days after that, Secretary Long cabled Admiral Beardslee, “Watch carefully the situation. If the Japanese openly resort to force, such as military occupation or seizure of public buildings, confer with Minister and authorities, land a suitable force, and announce officially provisional assumption of protectorate pending ratification of treaty of annexation.” On June 16, 1897, Sherman and the Hawaiian diplomatic attaches signed the treaty. Sherman also told Minister Hoshi that this abrogated any terms of past treaties between Hawaii and Japan, though he did not anticipate any loss of rights for Hawaiian citizens and residents, including the Japanese immigrants there. By the grace of whatever deity you believe in, we avoided war. Hoshi recommended sending a full fleet to Hawaii to take it by force--but Okuma, incredibly, said no. “It is too late,” he said. Unless Japan wanted war with the United States, they’d have to accept the inevitable. They asked Great Britain three separate times for support and been rebuffed each time, and Japan...well, they had very little leverage in the matter. quote:Sherman dismissed Japanese concerns so airily that The Nation was moved to write, “The sum and substance of the whole correspondence is that we snap our fingers at Japan.” The magazine added there was “no such thing as a right to annex a country, and that Japan, if its interests are affected, has just as much right to prevent our annexing as we have to annex.” It would, of course, take many months before annexation was complete--but it was our first step into a larger world, and it signified a huge departure from American foreign policy norms. As for McKinley himself, he did not hail the acquisition of Hawaii in public statements or in speeches. There is no record of him discussing the strategic significance of annexing Hawaii in the councils of government either. He was not given to overstatement or loquaciousness the way Theodore Roosevelt or Henry Cabot Lodge were on the subject, for example--but McKinley understood its significance nonetheless. As Robert Merry writes, “this spirit clearly was more a matter of instinct than philosophy” for him. Cuba (Possibly?) Libre  Ninety miles off the coast of Florida, Spain’s colonial empire was slowly dying. I should explain. The island of Cuba was, as you all know, a Spanish colony--but with the turn of the century, the influence of the Spanish colonial empire was waning fast. And what happens when colonial authority deteriorates? Rebellion, of course. Spanish colonial overlords and an insurgent Cuban rebel force had been battling for about two years in the third of what would eventually be three wars of liberation by the time McKinley took office, and the conflict was showing no signs of cooling down. This, of course, put McKinley in a bit of a bind. He didn’t want to fight Spain, of course, but he did want to enforce the Monroe Doctrine and get the Spanish out of the Caribbean once and for all. He felt he could do it with some flexible diplomacy. Sounds great, right? Negotiate them out instead of getting people killed? Yeah, no. Congress was getting increasingly anti-Spain, and that meant they were increasingly supportive of the insurgency. Popular sentiment was with Congress, too--and McKinley knew it. Plus, the business community, one of McKinley’s key constituencies, opposed any measure that would upend America’s economic recovery--and antagonizing a key trading partner would do just that. It’s important to know that this sentiment was new to American foreign policy. Cleveland, for example, had been very pro-Spain, and he was enthusiastically in favor of Spain’s continued dominion over Cuba. Historians speculate that this was a derivation of Cleveland’s anti-expanionism--after all, if he didn’t want America to fill the power vacuum and didn’t think these territories could govern themselves, the best prospect for stability lay with the status quo. Plus, if Spain lost in Cuba, it could attract European powers that posed far more of a threat to American interests than they did. McKinley sympathized with the rebels, even though he questioned whether autonomy could succeed. The problem was that there was no evidence the rebels would accept autonomous government over complete independence, and Spain was clearly unable to quash the rebellion in a timely fashion. It was sapping Spain’s financial health and political stability, and the growing chaos that close to America’s shores was in no way beneficial to American interests. Plus, McKinley had a vision: he wanted a canal through the isthmus in Central America, an expanded naval fleet and reciprocal trade agreements generating markets for American products, and a Spanish Cuba did not fit into this vision. The problem? Neither did war with Spain. We couldn’t fight them, but we really needed them out of our space. So McKinley did what he always did--he focused on smaller, more incremental improvements that would help U.S.-Spanish relations. One of these was the fate of Americans languishing in Cuban jails. Sen. John Morgan (D-AL) insisted Cuban prisons were “crowded” with Americans forced into intolerable conditions, “without a place to lie down or a bench to sit upon, and with all of the inconveniences that it is possible to conceive of.” Gee, you’d think we’d have given those camps on the border more thought, considering it’s been done to us already. One of these prisoners was a man named Ricardo Ruiz. Ruiz was a Cuban dentist who’d become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1880, but had since returned to Cuba and lived there ever since. He was arrested and charged with blowing up a train on behalf of the rebels, and he was placed in solitary confinement where he eventually died from brain injuries that Spanish authorities insisted were self-inflicted. Uh… Anyway, the coverage of the incident was sensational--and most of America’s newspapers pointed accusatory fingers at Spanish officials for brutalizing one of its citizens. On March 9, 1898, Ruiz’s widow arrived in Washington with her children to seek help in getting financial redress from the colonial Cuban government. After Ruiz’s death, then-President Cleveland had already agreed to a joint Spanish-American commission to investigate it--so McKinley just took it one step further. He appointed a commissioner to Cuba to investigate the broader situation--to take the measure of the war, the strength of the Cuban colonial government and of the rebels, and to take a closer look at the circumstances surrounding Ruiz’s death.  William J. Calhoun had been a corporate lawyer and an Illinois state house Congressman, but it was McKinley’s appointment as special counsel to the American Consul General in Cuba that really gave him the breakout moment his career needed. Calhoun had known McKinley for a long time--they’d been friends when they’d attended the Poland Seminary together back in Ohio. Calhoun left Washington for Havana on May 8, 1897 for a month’s stay in Cuba. McKinley hoped this inquiry would freeze American political activity on the issue.  Sen. Jacob Gallinger (R-NH) immediately introduced a resolution that called on McKinley to denounce the execution of captured rebel general Juan Rius Rivera. William Randolph Hearst, the famous muckraking journalist (and proto-Bond villain), wielded the full power of his New York Journal to press the issue. It printed Gallinger’s speech in full. “It is time,” Gallinger said, “that this war is ended, it is time that the great nation of Spain should be given to understand that this is the close of the nineteenth century, and that war should be fought upon a higher plane than that of butchery, crime, and of rapine.” Despite the objections of the anti-imperialists, the Senate unanimously passed Gallinger’s resolution, with Sen. George Hoar (R-MA) and Sen. Eugene Hale (R-ME) abstaining...and this was followed up by Alabama’s Morgan introducing a resolution that declared a “condition of public war exists between the government of Spain and the government proclaimed” and pledged America’s “strict neutrality between the contending parties”. Well, State wasn’t having this poo poo. Assistant Secretary of State Alvey Adee (I know) sent a memo to Secretary Sherman wherein he expressed the opinion that this was nothing more than an attempt to back-door us into war with Spain. Robert Merry will explain. quote:“A ‘recognition of belligerency’—as the issuance of a formal proclamation of neutrality is generally styled—is not a middle course,—it would rather be a stepping stone to intervention.” That’s because it would impose more severe obligations of neutrality than the country faced under its prevailing bystander stance, in which the Cuban insurgency was viewed as merely an internal Spanish matter. This new position, argued Adee, would give Spain rights of search and interdiction on the high seas in order to enforce America’s stated neutrality. That in turn “could scarcely fail to provoke a casus belli which would precipitate . . . [an] offensive and defensive alliance with the Cuban insurgents.” In other words, it would stop America from protecting its own interests--meaning that Spain would, in the interests of “enforcing” American neutrality, seize and search American ships. That’s what McKinley wanted to avoid...but no such luck. The Senate passed Morgan’s resolution 41-14. Eighteen Republicans voted aye, but it was one of the Democrats who voted aye that caught McKinley’s attention. Sen. Arthur Gorman (D-MD) voted yes because he claimed that McKinley wasn’t doing enough to protect American citizens and diplomats in Cuba from the war’s chaos. He wasn’t worried about the resolution itself--he knew that when it went to the House, Speaker Reed would kill it dead--but he perceived a real danger in being thought of as weak when it came to protecting Americans abroad. On June 8, Calhoun returned from Cuba. He said, regarding Dr. Ruiz, that the real cause of the dentist’s death probably would never be realized--but Spanish authorities had, in fact, detained Ruiz illegally and bore the brunt of the responsibility for his death. Calhoun wrote an extensive report on the war, including its devastating effects on American trade and investment, the horrors unleashed by the Spanish colonial government, and the prospects for any kind of palatable outcome. Spoiler alert: there wasn’t one. The Spanish had gone full scorched earth--burning entire villages and fields, destroying food stores and not caring if they maimed non-combatants, including children. McKinley knew now that the insurgents would not accept anything but full independence, and he also knew that the Spanish general in charge, Gen. Valeriano Weyler, couldn’t produce a military victory. Additionally, he knew that the propertied classes in Cuba would fight independence tooth and nail if they perceived that the masses would upend the traditional power structure. McKinley wasn’t sure what outcome he wanted, but he knew what had to be done--Spain had to negotiate a settlement with the rebels. In order to deliver his message, however, McKinley had to solve a couple problems. First up? The consul to Havana.  Unbelievably, Fitzhugh Lee was a former Confederate cavalry general--and the nephew of Robert E. Lee. The idea of a man who turned traitor against his own country being allowed to serve in its government makes the gorge rise in my throat. This wasn’t the principal objection to him, however--Lee made little attempt to hide his pro-insurgent views, and the Spanish colonial government’s antipathy towards him was matched only by the man who’d appointed him. Former President Cleveland, angered by what he viewed as “dogmatic and slanted” reports from the ground in Cuba, urged McKinley to fire Lee...but McKinley demurred. He thought Madrid would interpret Lee’s firing as a sign of weakness, and despite his disdain for the man personally, he secretly appreciated Lee’s more blunt assessments of the situation on the ground in Cuba. The other matter was the Minister to Spain. “What am I going to do about the Spanish mission?” the President asked John Hay and Henry White, a former diplomat who’d served in both Austria and Great Britain. He asked White to take the post, but White declined. So did former Secretary of State John Foster. Elihu Root, a man who would play a great part in the next President’s administration (as some of you might know) but was for now a lawyer in New York, said no. Finally, McKinley chose this man.  Stewart Woodford (R-NY) had served brief stints both in Congress and then as New York’s lieutenant governor. Thomas Platt had suggested his name for a Cabinet post, only to have McKinley reject it, but he was well-placed for the Madrid mission. He was friends with all the factions in New York, for one, and he was conscientious, well-spoken, and given to exercising discretion in the delicate portfolio McKinley was entrusting him with. Woodford arrived in Spain on September 1 to find civic chaos, accentuated by the assassination of Prime Minister Antonio Canovas del Castillo. The assassin was an anarchist with, ostensibly, no ties to the Cuban conflagration--but it did nothing to help the country’s sense of crisis. World history lesson incoming! At the time, Spain was governed by this woman.  Queen Regent and widow of King Alfonso XII, Maria Cristina wasn’t Spanish herself--she was Austrian, a member of the Hapsburg dynasty. She now sat the throne until her son, Alfonso XIII, turned sixteen in 1902--but Spain’s government was split between two factions: the Conservatives, strong-willed nationalists who viewed victory in Cuba as a matter of Spanish honor, and the reform-minded Liberals, who were more inclined to seek a negotiated settlement with the Cuban rebels through some sort of autonomous government. Maria Cristina was trying to maintain the peace between the factions, but Prime Minister Canovas was very much a Conservative himself--he’d appointed the brutal General Weyler in Cuba, after all. Politically, Maria Cristina tended to side with the Conservatives--she wanted a military victory and she knew the Spanish public was in no mood to give up the fight or bow to American pressure to do so. Installing Canovas’ war secretary, General Marcelo Azcarraga Palermo, as the new Prime Minister, she kept the Liberals at bay. Woodford’s predecessor informed him that “popular feeling is very bitter against the United States” and that the Queen Regent struggled with “the quandary of not wishing to offend us and yet trying to keep in touch with the popular feeling.” You can understand the Queen Regent’s dilemma, and so could Woodford when he presented her with his credentials on September 13. “I read it in her face and manner,” he wrote McKinley. Five days later he sat down with Spain’s foreign minister, Carlos Manuel O’Donnell y Abreu, the duke of Tetuan, and Woodford read McKinley’s missive. I’ll let Robert Merry outline it for you. quote:In friendly but firm tones, the McKinley document outlined America’s dark concern about a nearby conflict that brought to the United States “a degree of injury and suffering which can not longer be ignored.” Thus Spain must seek an end to the war as quickly as practicable by crafting “proposals of settlement honorable to herself and just to her Cuban colony and to mankind.” The president issued a veiled threat by suggesting that, if his efforts to foster peace proved fruitless, he would face “an early decision as to the course of action which the time and the transcendent emergency may demand.” That could mean, at the least, U.S. recognition of the insurgency’s belligerency rights. Woodford told Tetuan that McKinley wanted a response and evidence of Spanish compliance by November 1. Woodford’s report to Washington afterwards outlined Tetuan’s reaction. He seemed “courteous and temperate”, Woodford wrote, but the man seemed “deceived” about the likely success of Weyler’s Cuban offensive. quote:I felt compelled to assure him, frankly and so plainly that there could be no misunderstanding, that my government could not stand idly by during any further indefinite time, but that Spain must convince us...that she could and would put the war in the way of prompt and certain settlement or devise some way by which the good offices of the United States could be exerted to that end. Literally “Fix your poo poo or we’re gonna have to do it for you”. Spanish officials took heart that McKinley was not asking for money to indemnify Americans harmed in the war, not even the family of Ricardo Ruiz. Woodford had done his job well--courteous language and a lack of any stark ultimatums had convinced Spain that perhaps they could have their cake and eat it too. They’d keep America at bay and preserve their honor--and maybe buy time for military success--if they could put together a minimally acquiescent response to McKinley. Then, in late September, everything changed. See, in the weeks prior, Woodford had been speaking with the ministers from Britain, Russia, France, and Germany--and in between emphasizing that America had no interest in acquiring Cuba as a colony, he outlined the hazards posed to American interests. Unsanitary conditions, yellow fever, the interruption of the sugar trade and other commercial blockages, and other “enormous losses suffered by U.S. citizens in their persons and property” amounted, Woodford said, to “very great sums”. Cuba’s insurgency of around 40,000 was beating a trained army of nearly 200,000 soldiers. Clearly, Spain could not quash the rebellion. The ministers were receptive. Most of them believed that Cuba’s fate belonged to Spain and the United States--among the great European powers, only Vienna opposed U.S. intervention (and this was presumably because of the Spanish queen’s Hapsburg heritage). The Queen Regent responded to American pressure by asking Praxedes Mateo Sagasta, the leader of the Liberals, to form a government. A Liberal policy manifesto issued in late September on Cuba meant dialing back the slashing and burning and working towards autonomous Cuban government. “Senor Sagasta is a very shrewd politician,” Woodford wrote McKinley. “I think that he has really come to believe that civilized methods of warfare and quite liberal autonomy are the only possible methods by which Spain can retain...a hold on Cuba.” Sagasta promptly installed as Minister of Colonies a prominent fellow Liberal, Segismundo Moret y Prendergast. Prendergast was British-educated and he’d advocated for Cuban autonomy since 1891. The new Liberal manifesto claimed that, had Spain embraced Prendergast’s reform proposals, the country “would have averted the disasters and prevented the horrors of the present insurrection”. Sagasta moved fast. Recalling Weyler, he replaced the bloodthirsty Nationalist general with General Ramon Blanco y Erenas, a Spanish military veteran who, despite his ill-fated efforts to put down a similar insurrection in the Philippines, was chosen for his ability to move the Spanish colonial military into a position to work towards Cuban autonomy. McKinley was all in favor of this--he sent Madrid a private cable that said “President McKinley will endeavor to induce the insurgents to accept autonomy, and if they refuse he will do his utmost to put an end to agitations, and to prevent filibustering, as he believes now that Gen. Weyler is recalled, Congress will support this policy.” It looked as though McKinley had gotten his cake and the ability to eat it too--Spain would withdraw nearly completely from the Western Hemisphere, and McKinley wouldn’t have to fight them. Come on. Do you REALLY think I’d be telling you this story if that’s how it ended? In mid-October, the Cuban rebels rejected autonomy. It was independence or nothing. This inflamed the conservative elements of Spain’s government, most of whom quickly advocated for “energetic action to crush the rebellion by force of arms”. Yeah, cause that’s worked out so well thus far. Nevertheless, Sagasta persisted. The Liberal government was confident that once the system of autonomy was crafted and announced that it would gain majority support...but as details of it emerged, it didn’t quite have the effect Sagasta hoped. Woodford reported to McKinley that Spanish public opinion was settling into an “acquiescent, but not enthusiastic approval” at first, but slowly this became “still acquiescent, but less cordial than last week”, then finally it was “growing less and less cordial toward the United States”. These feelings would dovetail with the other major foreign policy event of the McKinley Presidency which I will talk about a bit later. Consul Lee in Havana echoed the sentiments of the slowly simmering anger among Spanish colonial officials. Opposition to Sagasta’s reforms had slowly congealed into a local defense organization composed of businessmen and the managerial class, he reported to McKinley. “Not an autonomist in their ranks,” Lee wrote. Plus, the firemen, who numbered 25,000, all of whom were armed, were inflamed against what they perceived as undue American interference--anger which Lee felt might be used against U.S. citizens and diplomats. Lee recommended that McKinley send a warship or two to Havana to protect Americans there, if necessary. As the first year of his Presidency neared its end, one could easily interpret the Cuba affair as a foreign policy failure for McKinley. After all, the Cuban revolution had not cooled, and Spain’s willingness to grant the rebels autonomy was rejected due to their desire for full independence. For his part, McKinley knew that inserting American power into the colonial crisis in Cuba could do one of two things: it could either end the war in Cuba and cement peaceful relations between America and Spain...or put us on a path towards war. quote:McKinley held fast to the idea that America under his leadership could effectuate a happy solution to the Cuban carnage without being drawn into a war with Spain. But his actions since summer signaled unmistakably that he was prepared for war if the peaceful approach failed to produce the speedy outcome he had demanded in the name of his country. As Collier’s Weekly summed up the president’s message to Spain, it was “tantamount to saying, Make peace in Cuba yourself, or we shall feel constrained to make it for you.” Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Mar 9, 2020 |
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Mar 8, 2020 23:48
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“Remember The Maine!” You recall, of course, in the last section, that I detailed how Spanish colonial opposition to American interference in the Cuban rebellion had led Consul Fitzhugh Lee to believe that President McKinley ought to send a battleship or two to Havana harbor. Such a gesture would prove two things: one, that America wasn’t loving around, and two, that we would protect our people if the Spanish authorities thought to do any of them harm. Not an entirely unjustified concern--you remember the story of Ricardo Ruiz. Well, McKinley took his advice. On January 21, 1898, this ship made its arrival.  The 324-foot, 6,682-ton battleship USS Maine had four ten-inch guns and 6 half-dozen inch guns. Under the command of Captain Charles Sigsbee, it glided into Havana harbor “as easily and smoothly as possible,” Fitzhugh Lee reported. Sigsbee received a cordial welcome from a representative of Vice Admiral Jose Pastor, the Spanish captain of the port, as well as an officer on the Spanish flagship in the harbor. It was a grand affair indeed--Spanish forts fired their guns in salute, and “all the ceremonies called for by naval etiquette had been observed,” reported the Washington Post. Lee described palace authorities as “rattled”, but no anti-American incidents or unrest emerged. This, of course, was during the negotiations for implementing Prime Minister Sagasta’s autonomy plan...then came an abrupt turn in tone. On February 3, Foreign Minister Pio Gullon e Iglesias sent a sneering, dismissive reply to McKinley’s December 20 note outlining U.S. policy towards Cuba and Spain. Uh oh. In essence, it told America to butt out. America’s mere proximity to Cuba gave it no right of intervention or even diplomatic pressure, Gullon said, and Spain recognized no U.S. prerogative to prescribe a termination time for the war against the Cuban rebels. Spain took umbrage at U.S. “hints of a change in conduct,” implying possible military intervention, and it would continue its “firm resolution” to preserve its sovereignty over Cuba. If you’ve got whiplash right now, you’re definitely not alone. So why did I tell you all this, you might be wondering? On the night of February 15, 1898, the sky was covered in clouds over Havana. It was warm and still, and the waters barely caused the Maine to tug at her anchor. After the bugler played “Taps”, following the two bells signal from the ship’s clock, lights went out across the ship. At 9:30 PM, Lt. John Blandin, the watch officer, was walking idly along the port quarterdeck. He stopped near one of the turrets and cast his gaze across the water to the lights in Havana. A fellow officer, Lt. John Hood, approached him and jokingly asked if he was asleep. “No,” Blandin said. “I’m on watch.” That’s when it happened. A massive boom rocked the entire ship as a fiery blast tore through the Maine’s hull without warning. An eyewitness on the pier three hundred yards away saw the explosion as shards of steel, cement, and wood chunks flew up and out in all directions. Aboard the ship, Captain Sigsbee was writing a letter to his wife when he was jolted out of his seat by the explosion. Rushing up to the main deck, he was engulfed in a cloud of smoke from the explosion that made it nearly impossible to breathe.  It was devastation. The ship’s two main stacks had already collapsed, and its bow had been crushed into a mass of twisted metal. Sigsbee knew then it was only a matter of time until the Maine was decorating the bottom of the harbor. Within an hour, with waves now licking the poop deck (heh), Sigsbee gathered what survivors he could and found them refuge on a nearby American steamer called the City of Washington and a Spanish man-of-war called the Alfonso. Once he ensured that his men were safe and being tended to, Sigsbee descended to the captain’s cabin on the City of Washington and wrote his report to Navy Secretary Long. quote:“Maine blown up in Havana Harbor at nine forty tonight and destroyed. Many wounded and doubtless more killed or drowned. Wounded and others on board Spanish man of war and Ward Line steamer.” The cable reached Washington via Key West at 1am the following morning. A courier delivered it to Long’s residence. Long, alarmed, immediately sent an officer to inform the President. McKinley emerged, disheveled and in a dressing gown, from his bedroom, but when he read the note Long had sent, he muttered “The Maine blown up...the Maine blown up!” The disaster in Havana harbor was threatening to transform the political and diplomatic landscapes. It wasn’t known who or what had caused it--but McKinley immediately grasped what it could potentially mean. It would engulf his incrementalist diplomacy, fuel the fires of war agitation in America, and upend any plans he had to get Spain to leave Cuba without having to fight them. It’s important to know this: we didn’t declare war overnight, guys. This wasn’t like Pearl Harbor. The notion that this could potentially be an accident, however, was nearly inconceivable to many Americans on both sides of the political aisle, and their anger was not assuaged by Madrid’s official response decrying the explosion and offering their official condolences. McKinley sought to counter this attitude. He approved Secretary Long’s decision to convene a naval board of inquiry and tried his absolute hardest to keep the nation tranquil until it came up with a report. If he could just tamp down the initial sentiment, McKinley felt, he could save this thing. Throughout the day on February 16, he summoned members of the Cabinet and numerous congressional leaders to urge calm and patience. “My duty is plain,” he told Sen. Charles Fairbanks (R-IN). “We must learn the truth and endeavor, if possible, to fix the responsibility. The country can afford to withhold its judgment...until the truth is known.” It’s a great idea...in theory. The problem, of course, is that just like now, Americans are stupid, scared animals--and the agitators had absolutely no problem wielding fear as their weapon. Theodore Roosevelt, still Assistant Navy Secretary, wrote a friend, “Being a Jingo….I would give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow.” Roosevelt felt strongly that the Maine was “an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards”. Hard to believe this man won the Nobel Peace Prize. The newspapers didn’t help either, particularly William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Told by his editor that the disaster in Havana would make Page 1 “along with other big news,” Hearst shot back, “There is not any other big news. Please spread the story all over the page.” Hearst and Pulitzer were soon in a sort of journalistic arms race to see who could be more bellicose--on the evening of February 17, 1898, the Journal ran this.  One of the articles even went so far as to claim that American officials had discovered a “torpedo hole” in the Maine’s hull. This, of course, was not true, but that didn’t matter to Hearst. As I said before, the dude was basically a Bond villain. Congress seemed as susceptible to Hearst and Pulitzer’s machinations as the general public. Sen. William Mason (R-IL) speculated that the facts of the attack were “being concealed from the people...and members of Congress.” Populist Senator William Allen from Nebraska sought to resurrect the notion of rebel belligerency rights, though his opposite number Joseph Thurston (R) sought to tamp down such sentiments. “Calmness, silence, patience are necessary,” Sen. Thurston declared. Thurston’s sentiments prevailed, much to McKinley’s relief. A Cabinet secretary, on the condition of anonymity, told reporters that McKinley “would not be jingoed into war, or act in anticipation of events which may never occur.” Madrid was in chaos, meanwhile. Minister Woodford reported an inconsistency of behavior that “bordered on the bizarre,” Robert Merry writes. The queen pleaded with Woodford to ask McKinley to quash the pro-Cuban rebel elements in America--but almost simultaneously, the Madrid government was willing to move not only on a commercial treaty with the United States, but also an indemnity payment to the family of Ricardo Ruiz--a sharp turnaround from their previous stance. Then the Minister of Colonies spoke up. Minister Moret accused a U.S. naval officer, known only to him as “Brownsfield”, of landing his ship, the Brooklyn, in the Dominican Republic to assist with rebel efforts there. Additionally, Moret also accused Consul Lee of privately advocating U.S. annexation of Cuba--and maintaining ties to the rebels. Given Lee’s public stances, he probably wasn’t wrong...but that was beside the point. Some officials in Madrid, Moret warned, wanted to boot Lee out of Havana to demonstrate Spanish pride. Woodford reported this to McKinley, with the additional warning that Spain might also go after offending U.S. newspaperment, including reporters that worked for the Journal and World. Woodford was left, diplomatically anyway, speechless. He had no recommendations. He told Moret it was Spain’s affair, and conveyed the other complaints to Washington, where officials promptly went public with Spain’s grievances against Consul Lee. McKinley was in no mood to countenance any complaints from Madrid. “The President will not consider the recall of Gen. Lee. He has borne himself throughout this crisis with judgment, fidelity, and courage, to the President’s entire satisfaction.” Washington also rebutted the claims that Captain Arent S. Crowninshield (not “Brownsfield”, as Madrid had identified him) was aiding rebels in the Dominican Republic and any assertion that he was was foolish. This was humiliating for Spain. McKinley had brushed aside their request to recall the Havana consul and made their complaints about a respected naval officer look petty and foolish. It didn’t help Spain’s attitude towards America at this point...but right now, Washington wasn’t worried about them declaring war on America. Spain had no money. They had nearly $400 million in debt, and annual debt-service costs absorbed over a third of a nearly $160 million budget each year. And yet for all their money troubles, Spain was not sufficiently humbled to entertain selling Cuba to the insurgency--they had actually offered to pay Spain for their independence, nearly $200 million in exchange for Spain pulling out all their troops and leaving. Madrid rebuffed any and all offers to help facilitate the island’s purchase. “The Spanish people are as patriotic a race as ever lived,” wrote The Nation. Maybe, but there’s a thin line between pride and foolishness here. Had Spain abandoned Cuba and taken the money, they might have been better off. Meanwhile, the naval inquest McKinley had launched finally reached a conclusion--that the Maine had been blown up by an external explosive, rather than an accidental internal combustion. This meant foul play--someone, somewhere in Cuba had conspired to blow up a United States naval vessel. (You should know, guys, that this didn’t hold up to further scrutiny. There were more inquiries after this one, and the conclusion that the original inquest drew was called into question. To this day, we still do not know for absolute certain who or what blew up the Maine.) The report did not identify the perpetrators, but it suggested “a grave responsibility appears to rest upon the Spanish Government”, as the Maine had relied on Spain for the security of what it thought was a friendly port. This, at least, was indisputable. Spain had assured the United States that its property was safe, and this accident had occurred on their watch. Somebody screwed up. Once again, McKinley, fully grasping what this would do to jingoistic sentiment in the country, tried to preemptively tamp down any hint of patriotic fervor. In his cover document to Congress, he called the disaster an “appalling calamity” that generated “an intense excitement” that in less controlled nations might have led to “hasty acts of blind resentment”. After summarizing the facts of the report, McKinley revealed that he’d communicated the Navy’s findings to Spain, as well as what America thought of the whole situation. quote:“I do not permit myself to doubt that the sense of justice of the Spanish nation will dictate a course of action suggested by honor. . . . It will be the duty of the Executive to advise the Congress of the result, and in the meantime deliberate consideration is invoked.” I cannot say this enough times: he desperately wanted to avoid war, by any means necessary. Unfortunately, much of America wasn’t in the mood for bland platitudes. Nearly 300 American servicemen were dead, and most Americans wanted something a bit more stirring from their Commander-in-Chief. “It is to speak moderately,” suggested the New York Times, “to say that the general tone of comment on the message was one of disappointment.” House Minority Leader Joseph Bailey (D-TX) introduced a resolution recognizing Cuban independence. Democrats rallied to the measure almost to a man, and a smattering of Republican mavericks threatened to join them. Such a measure would have handed McKinley and his incrementalist diplomacy a crippling political defeat--but thanks to Speaker Reed’s parliamentary dexterity and a promise from McKinley of a major new Cuba policy, disaster was averted. The upper house was not quiet either. Sen. Morgan of Alabama introduced a resolution declaring war on Spain based on “the succession of events which have occurred on the island of Cuba, notably the starving and imprisonment of American citizens.” Worst part about this is that the Maine didn’t even figure into Morgan’s calculations--it was just an extra inducement for Senators on the fence to join him. Vice President Hobart warned McKinley that he was losing his grip on the Republican-controlled Senate. Things escalated. The President did enjoy scattered support for his Cuba policy around the country; many said that he had “risen above politics in his treatment of the Cuba question”. This was helped, somewhat, by Prime Minister Sagasta’s offer to end the reconcentrados policy and set aside a large sum of money for a Cuban relief effort. However, public anger at Spain was intensifying, not subsiding. A group of protestors burned McKinley in effigy in Richmond, VA--and they added an effigy of Mark Hanna for good measure. Sorry, Fancy/Friendbot/axeil; Virginia was real poo poo for a real long time. On April 6, McKinley received communiques from the ambassadors of six different European nations appealing desperately for a peaceful settlement of differences between the United States and Spain. He was set to give an address to a joint session of Congress, and people were on pins and needles. Consul Lee had sent McKinley a dispatch the day before, pleading with McKinley to delay so that he could have time to get vulnerable Americans out of Cuba before the President’s message to Congress inflamed anti-American passions in Havana. McKinley summoned Navy Secretary Long, War Secretary Russell Alger, and newly-minted Secretary of State William Day, Sherman’s replacement. Long was adamant that McKinley deliver his speech anyway...but he did not know his man. “I will not do such a thing if it will endanger the life of an American citizen in Cuba,” he said. McKinley would postpone for 5 days, till April 11. McKinley’s eventual proposal would be for “neutral intervention”. quote:He justified “neutral intervention” on four grounds: first, to serve the cause of humanity in stopping the “barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries” that blighted the island; second, to protect and indemnify American citizens beset by the chaos of the Cuban war; third, to stop the war’s devastation to U.S. commerce; and, fourth, to terminate the violence and instability so close to U.S. shores that posed a constant threat to the country’s well-being, prosperity, and tranquility. The Maine explosion, he said, represented a distilled example of this constant threat. He saw no prospect of Spain’s bringing peace to the island: “I ask the Congress to authorize and empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the government of Spain and the people of Cuba, and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government capable of maintaining order and observing its international obligations, insuring peace and tranquility and the security of its citizens as well as our own, and to use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.” McKinley’s message turned out to be a bit underwhelming. quote:Typically the president’s message contained no soaring rhetoric, and Secretary Long considered its conclusion to be “somewhat indefinite and hardly a sequitur from the argument which precedes it.” For members of Congress who wanted stirring patriotic language and recognition of Cuban independence, it generated waves of anger. “The message has caused great discontent in Congress,” reported the New York Times. Joseph Foraker told the paper, “I have no patience with the message,” and Missouri’s Democratic representative Alexander Dockery called it “anemic.” And yet, despite the jingoists’ impatience, McKinley had irrevocably set his country on a path to war with Spain, whether Congress or the public realized it or not. Public sentiment seemed to be with McKinley, even if many in Congress weren’t. It was now Congress’ turn to take up the issue, and on April 13, Democrats pushed a resolution to recognize Cuba as an independent nation. Republicans beat it back, 150-190--but the House DID give lopsided approval to a measure McKinley was promoting, authorizing and directing him to end the Spanish-Cuban war and foster a stable and independent Cuban government, using U.S. military force as needed. Guys: IT’S THE SAME FUCKIN’ THING. The resolution demanded that Spain “at once relinquish its authority and government in the island of Cuba and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters.” The Senate proved to be a bit more quarrelsome; Sen. David Turpie (D-IN) added an amendment to the Senate version of the resolution that would recognize the Cuban Republic as the “the true and lawful government of that island”. Another, from Sen. Henry Teller (R-CO), would disavow any U.S. domination of Cuba following hostilities. Both amendments made it into the approved version of the Senate resolution, but McKinley made it clear that he would veto if Turpie’s amendment made it into the final conference report. Ultimately the President got what he wanted--in conference, the House stripped out the Turpie amendment, and this version passed both houses of Congress. McKinley knew now that he was going to get war. Secretary of State Day sent an ultimatum to the Spanish government, to be delivered via the Spanish ambassador in Washington and Minister Woodford in Madrid. Abruptly, Spain’s minister requested his passport and left Washington, and McKinley gave Spain until Saturday (it was Wednesday, April 20, 1898) to answer, and the Senators standing around him as he signed the resolution were fully cognizant of what he was doing. “This is a historic occasion; you are virtually signing the declaration of war, Mr. President,” said Sen. Stephen Elkins (R-WV). Yup. When word of the ultimatum reached Madrid, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Spain broke off diplomatic relations with the United States and informed Minister Woodford before he could make his official report. Woodford departed for home the same day. Things were happening quickly now. McKinley asked for a declaration of war on April 25, 1898, and at 4pm he was awakened by the White House doorkeeper--Congress had granted his request, with the stipulation that war had actually begun with Spain’s actions on April 21 (when the Spanish minister had left the United States). Sitting in his bedroom in his bathrobe, President William McKinley signed his name to the war resolution with two pens--one for his first name, the other for his last. He gave his friend Webb Hayes one of the pens and the inkwell he’d dipped it in as a souvenir. Despite his ponderous, incremental leadership, he was now a war President...and there was no going back. War...War Never Changes  I want you all to know that I really tried to come up with a better title; I’m open to suggestions. There are some startling parallels to the Civil War when we consider how the Spanish-American War started, believe it or not. For example, President McKinley’s first act was to order a blockade of Cuba by the Atlantic fleet, led by Commodore William Sampson. Next he wired Commodore George Dewey, commander of the Asiatic fleet at Hong Kong, to proceed immediately to the Philippines and attack the Spanish fleet there. quote:“Dewey, Hongkong, China: War has commenced between the United States and Spain. Proceed at once to Philippine Islands. Commence operations at once, particularly against the Spanish fleet. You must capture vessels or destroy. Use utmost endeavors. [Secretary of the Navy John] LONG.” Let me explain. The story behind Dewey’s assignment to Asia was emblematic of the war footing America had put itself on long before diplomatic talks with Spain had broken down. At the center, of course, was, well…  He’s just...everywhere. You recall, of course, that Theodore Roosevelt was John Long’s irrepressible assistant Navy secretary. Long mused that “the best fellow in the world--and with splendid capacities--is worse than no use if he lack a cool head and careful discretion.” The previous September, Roosevelt had intercepted a letter to his boss from Sen. William Chandler (R-NH) that recommended Commodore John Adams Howell for the Asia command. Well, that just didn’t sit well with ol’ Teddy. He considered Dewey a far superior choice, despite Howell’s fame as an innovator in naval weaponry. If the United States went to war, Roosevelt felt, Howell would not be up to the task. So he tried to get Chandler to withdraw his recommendation. Chandler refused. Roosevelt would not be deterred. He called Dewey to his office, and over a pair of what I imagine were VERY fine cigars, Roosevelt asked the Commodore, “Do you know any Senators?” You can see where this was going. Dewey said that he did, in fact--Sen. Redfield Proctor (R-VT) was a longtime family friend. Dewey was from Vermont, in fact. This was fortuitous--Proctor was friendly with McKinley and a very rich businessman with a lot of influence throughout the Republican Party and the White House. Proctor, Dewey and Roosevelt made their play; long story short? It worked. McKinley ordered Long to appoint Dewey as the commander of the Asiatic Fleet. Secretary Long went along with the recommendation, but he was quite cognizant of Roosevelt’s insubordination on the subject, and he refused, subsequently, to give Dewey the promotion that would normally come with such a post. “I am glad to appoint you, Commodore Dewey,” Long said, “but you won’t go as a rear admiral. You will go as a commodore.” When Dewey protested, Long informed him that perhaps he shouldn’t have used political clout to get the job. This was bullshit, of course, because if you’ll recall, Commodore Howell had done the same thing--and Roosevelt “failed” to deliver the letter detailing as such until well after the fact. Long acknowledged his error in a letter to Dewey later, but he would not give Dewey a promotion nonetheless. Ugh. I swear, the bio I do of Theodore Roosevelt is gonna be the most schizophrenic piece of literature you’ll ever read. A few notes on military preparation first, before we continue. McKinley was a student of naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose analyses asserted that the path to national greatness would depend on a nation’s ability to project sea power--but that was hardly relevant to a nation that had been pursuing naval supremacy for a while. As early as 1896, when McKinley was still just a candidate for President, the House was approving money for four new battleships and fifteen torpedo boats. The battleships would, as the Congressional report put it, “carry the heaviest armor and most powerful ordnance...and to have the highest practicable speed for vessels of their class.” The Senate added their own suggestions: they appropriated more for “torpedo boat catchers”, vessels specifically designed to destroy enemy torpedo boats. As of now, America’s fleet was small. We had four front-line battleships, two second-class battleships, and 48 other ships of various size and purpose, such as torpedo boats, armored cruisers, and support vessels. Auguries were good, though--the new battleship Iowa, part of the House’s new allocation, reached a top speed of seventeen knots--more than its building contract called for. To win a naval war, we needed a bigger navy. The Army, on the other hand, did no such prior preparation. Its commanding general, Nelson Miles, had been warning his superiors for years about deficiencies in manpower and equipment. For example, Miles said that the entire Gulf coast and all the big cities on the East Coast up to Philadelphia were without modern guns. The general believed that a good rule of thumb for enlisted numbers was about one soldier for every 2,000 citizens. Given an American population of around 76 million people, that meant about 38,000 enlisted men. In 1898 we were only at about ⅔ of that--the Army numbered only 25,000 men. Such was the state of our military in April 1898 when William McKinley signed a Congressional resolution declaring war on Spain. On the 22nd, Congress authorized a call for volunteers and followed up with legislation a few days later to increase the regular army size to over 60,000 men. McKinley made his own bid for 125,000 volunteers to serve for either two years or until the war’s end. The plan was fairly straightforward--invade Cuba and drive the Spanish out. Unfortunately, we could not do so until after Admiral Sampson destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Atlantic. McKinley’s war strategists wanted to avoid Cuba’s rainy season too, where yellow fever and malaria would be rampant. General Miles was fine with this--it would give him time to drill and equip his troops. Meanwhile, the blockade would curtail Spanish efforts to fortify the island, and the army would also supply arms to Cuban rebel troops under the command of General Maximo Gomez. 5,000 men, under the command of General William Shafter, would sail from Tampa to the southern coast to rendezvous with rebel soldiers there. Then we hit a snag. A Spanish fleet at Cape Verde under the command of Admiral Pascual Cervera abruptly left its post and sailed west into the ocean’s vast expanse. This presented a problem--if Cervera suddenly popped up in Cuba we’d find ourselves outgunned. McKinley postponed the Cuban expedition, and the camp at Tampa that was accumulating American troops set to sail for Cuba started to increase exponentially in size. One of the men at this camp you might recognize.  Again?! Yes, again. Theodore Roosevelt, moved no doubt by an overly-large amount of patriotic fervor, had resigned his commission as Assistant Navy Secretary, joined the Army, and gotten himself commissioned as a lieutenant colonel. He helped to organize the U.S. Volunteer Cavalry and became the unit’s second-in-command under his friend, Colonel Leonard Wood. This unit consisted mainly of Roosevelt’s friends and acquaintances he’d met during his time in the West hunting and ranching, as well as eastern aristocrats from his prep school and Harvard days. Hell, Roosevelt had had his army uniform specially tailored by Brooks Brothers. :facepalm: I’m not often at a loss for words, but geez. Roosevelt quickly became frustrated at what he perceived as a lack of organization at Tampa. He wasn’t the only one either. General Shafter wrote to Washington, “The place was overestimated and its capacities are exceeded.” Indeed, the Tampa camp now exceeded some 17,000 men and it was only planned for around 5,000. McKinley was dealing with his own problems. Realizing that the $50 million allocution for the war was about to run out, he asked Congress for a series of tax increases: excise taxes on beer and tobacco, a stamp tax on stock transfers, bank checks, and the like, which would raise in excess of $100 million. Yes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were beaten to the punch on stock transfer taxes...by William McKinley, over a hundred years ago. Unlike now, however, these new levies had no trouble with either house of Congress--both the Senate and House passed them quickly. It alleviated enough of the problems in Tampa to allow the soldiers to wait. Meanwhile, in the Philippines (remember, we were fighting Spain there too!), Commodore George Dewey was turning the Spanish fleet to ash. Yes, on the evening of May 1, 1898, rumors began to filter into Washington of a major naval victory in the waters off the Philippine Islands. The New York Times was optimistic, but still cautious: “While it is quite clear that the Spanish squadron has suffered a crushing defeat, the dispatches leave in doubt the intensely interesting question whether the American squadron has suffered material damage.” Still, the facts never get in the way of a good story for Americans in the middle of a war. Newsboys rushed to the streets to hawk the evening papers, in blatant violation of city ordinances that prohibited them from calling aloud their wares after 8pm, but the police didn’t bother to stop them. The news of Dewey’s victory was, said McKinley’s personal secretary George Cortelyou, “a source of the greatest satisfaction to the President and others who had gathered here”. Slowly, a narrative of the battle began to emerge. Please bear with me, guys, I’m not great at this. Dewey had left for the Philippines from Mirs Bay, near Hong Kong, on April 27 with nine ships, six of which were fighting vessels, and about 1,600 crewmen. Dewey’s Pacific fleet was heavily armed--his fighting ships’ fifty-three heavy guns included ten eight-inch breech-loaded cannons. According to his intelligence, Spanish Admiral Patricio Montojo would be waiting for him in Philippine waters, most likely in Subic Bay. Here’s a map--Subic Bay is that red marker:  Dewey arrived on the afternoon of April 30, and the commodore sent in three scouts to ascertain Montojo’s whereabouts. He wasn’t there. Dewey knew this meant he’d be in Manila Bay, which you don’t need a picture for because it’s literally right off the coast of Manila in that previous image. Knowing that this would be a far better place for a battle, Dewey was elated. “Now we have them!” he exclaimed to one of his officers. Long story short? It was a massacre. Dewey sank the Spanish flagship, the Reina Cristina, in addition to every other warship Montojo’s fleet had.. Montojo himself had escaped, but that hardly mattered. Dewey maneuvered his fleet into Manila Bay and threatened to destroy the city if Manila’s batteries continued firing on him. They went silent. He and his men moved into the city and occupied the abandoned Spanish garrison, neutralized all the shore batteries, and severed the telegraphic cable when Spanish officials denied him access to it. Back in America, Dewey became a folk hero overnight. Manufacturers instantly began putting his image on products to sell them. A new chewing gum was dubbed, and I swear I’m not making this up, “Dewey Chewies”. His image was emblazoned on, according to one historian, “everything from badges and banners to paperweights, pitchers, cups, plates, butter dishes, shaving mugs, and baby rattles”. Politicians back in Washington were no less effusive in their praise, some of them going even as far as to give McKinley a bit of guff. Robert Merry writes. quote:[UK Ambassador] John Hay wrote to praise the “mingled wisdom and daring” of his audacious Manila Bay entrance. Publicly Hay captured the national pride unleashed by this unassuming sailor: “It is these quiet, gentlemanly Americans,” he told the London press, “. . . who may be depended upon to surprise the world when the opportunity of making history comes in the line of duty.” Senator Proctor took to crowing just a bit in a letter to McKinley, highlighting his own wisdom in pushing Dewey for the Asiatic command. “We may run him against you for President,” wrote the senator. If McKinley was taken aback at such a ribbing, he didn’t show it. He quickly promoted Dewey to rear admiral and told the nation, “The magnitude of this victory can hardly be measured by the ordinary standards of naval warfare.” Dewey finally got the promotion he was owed before his deployment to the Philippines. General Miles’ Army, meanwhile, brought forth a plan to send 5,000 occupying troops to Manila to secure the city and eliminate the danger posed to Dewey’s fleet from a possible Spanish campaign to retake it. Soon, troops were mustering under General Wesley Merritt, the army’s second-ranking officer, who was to command the entire theater in the Pacific. By month’s end, Merritt had command of nearly three times the original number of men. McKinley’s aim was, unbeknownst to many, a bit more expansive than anyone thought. quote:...he fully meant to exploit the Dewey victory boldly. In a letter to [War Secretary] Alger, he revealed his intention to subdue all of the Philippines, at least for the time being, under an American military government. Not only should U.S. forces bring about the “acquisition and control of the bay,” he wrote, but they should also become “an arm of occupation to the Philippines for the twofold purpose of completing the reduction of Spanish power in that quarter and of giving order and security to the islands while in the possession of the United States.” That left to the future the eventual political disposition of the islands, a question McKinley wasn’t yet prepared to answer. Yikes. Imperial America, here we come. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge and his allies, including a certain lieutenant colonel waiting in a camp in Tampa, thought so too. He wrote Roosevelt a letter. “Unless I am utterly and profoundly mistaken, the administration is now fully committed to the large policy that we both desire.” In the Caribbean, the war was just beginning. A day later, McKinley convened a joint military-Cabinet meeting to draw up expansive new plans to take the war to Cuba. The idea was that 5,000 men would sail to the south coast to join the rebels under General Gomez, like the original plan said--but they would also serve as the vanguard for a 50,000-strong force to invade Havana. General Shafter’s regulars would capture the beachhead at Mariel, about 30 miles to the west of Havana, then the volunteers would follow right behind them through the training camp at Tampa. The problem, however, was that Secretary Alger didn’t have anything approaching an adequate army and he knew it, despite his rash answer of “three weeks” when McKinley asked how long it would take to equip and deploy the first battalions. To add insult to injury; he got pantsed (not literally) by Navy Secretary Long on this very subject at the next meeting. This was bad on a few levels. McKinley needed an aggressive, speedy war--nothing less would satisfy his diplomatic and political obligations. Delays could introduce power ambiguities into the Caribbean, which might lure other European powers into exploiting the chaos and trying to gain a foothold in the region. Plus, the Navy couldn’t maintain a blockade forever. Hurricane season was going to arrive in late summer, and the task of sealing off the island imposed a lot of wear and tear on the Atlantic fleet. Beyond that, I already mentioned that the rainy season was coming--and McKinley certainly didn’t want to launch an invasion then due to the risk of yellow fever and malaria. Win early and win often--that was what McKinley needed to force Madrid to the negotiating table. America had, no doubt, wanted this war--and the impression among many was that McKinley had had to be dragged along for the ride rather than leading the charge, leading many to believe he was an inert President, insufficiently engaged and aggressive when the country’s honor and interests were threatened. McKinley couldn’t afford for people to think that--he knew that nothing kills a President’s political standing quicker than perceptions of ineptitude, militarily or otherwise. So on May 9, General Shafter received his orders--they said to “seize and hold Mariel or the most important part on the north coast of Cuba and where territory is ample to land and deploy Army.” For reference, Mariel is here, where the red marker is:  (For those of you who remember my Carter bio, Mariel was also the site of a famous “boatlift” of refugees nearly a century later.) Washington ordered the army to move volunteer forces at Camp Chickamauga in Georgia to Tampa in preparation for incorporating into the main invasion force. All of this was to be done, McKinley said, “without delay”. <extremely Ron Howard voice> There were delays. Yes, regrettably. First, the Army scheduled the Cuba landing without giving the Navy enough notice so its chartered convoy ships could be brought into position for such a massive and complex transport operation. Secretary Long was outraged. He complained to McKinley, who authorized a delate until May 16...but then Admiral Cervera’s fleet (remember, the one that vanished from Cape Verde?) reappeared near Martinique in the eastern part of the Caribbean. And STILL the army in Tampa didn’t have what it needed. Theodore Roosevelt, working to outfit his new Rough Riders, wrote in his diary, “The blunders and delays of the ordnance bureau surpass belief. They express us stuff we don’t need and send us the rifles by slow freight! There is no head, no energy, no intelligence...in the War Department.” Knowing that the Army was still without basic necessities, General Nelson Miles proposed that McKinley put off the Cuba invasion and instead attack Puerto Rico. McKinley was against the idea...until word came on May 19 that Cervera had positioned his fleet in Santiago harbor, off of Cuba’s second-largest city, in an attempt to evade the nearby American Atlantic fleet. This was a huge opportunity. Right now, Santiago was cut off from the main force of Spanish soldiers, defended approximately by 10,000 regulars but cut off from the sea by the American blockade and the land by the Cuban insurgents. The United States could win on both land and sea, smash Cervera’s aged and poorly-armored warships, and seize Santiago, gaining a foothold in Cuba for the attack on Havana. On May 31, the President sent orders to General Shafter: land a force near Santiago, and “capture or destroy the garrison there,” then help Admiral William Sampson, commander of the fleet currently blockading the island, to help destroy Cervera’s fleet. Once again, we ran into problems. Shafter wasn’t up to the task of organizing 50,000 men for an amphibious assault on Cuba, and Colonel Leonard Wood, a Rough Rider and dear friend of Theodore Roosevelt, described the atmosphere as “...confusion, confusion, confusion. War! Why is it an advertisement to foreigners of our utterly unprepared condition.” It got so bad that General Miles, who arrived in Tampa June 1, discovered 300 railroad cars loaded with war materiel along the roads--but all the invoices describing what was in each of them had been lost. The officers were forced to go car to car to inventory them. Miles’ volunteers, who were “suffering for clothing”, as he put it, languished as fifteen cars of uniforms sat mere miles from the encampment because no one knew they were there. Military waste and inefficiency? Not a new thing. Even the voyage was beset with miscues. When the massive convoy headed out of Tampa Bay towards Cuba, two U.S. vessels reported seeing Spanish men-of-war galleons in the St. Nicholas Channel (the waters between the Bahamas and Cuba’s north coast). Turned out they’d panicked--the ships they saw? U.S. vessels. Idiots. The initial skirmishes, once the convoy of troops reached Cuba, were largely successful. At the town of Las Guasimas, a combination of troops under the command of General Joseph Wheeler and Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders routed a Spanish garrison (they were not supposed to do this; the mission was reconnaissance only). Wheeler, a native Alabaman (and former Confederate), had a moment where he forgot where he was, yelling at the retreating Spaniards, “We’ve got the drat Yankees on the run!” Jesus loving Christ, why would you let them serve in the military? :facepalm: The American forces were limited to about 16 killed and 52 wounded, and despite the fact that Wheeler and Roosevelt had disobeyed orders, taking control of Las Guasimas cleared the road to Santiago and set the Americans up nicely to march on the city. On June 30, the attack commenced. By 2pm on July 1, America had seized the San Juan Heights--a major waypoint on the road to Santiago. This was, if you know your American history, the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders’ charge up Kettle Hill (not San Juan Hill as some have suggested). It made Roosevelt a hero back in America. Everything seemed to be going well as McKinley briefed his Cabinet back in Washington on the state of the operation, updating them as he received messages through the clicking telegraph machine in the War Room adjacent to where they were meeting. The final report from Shafter did not come till midnight--the Americans controlled the San Juan Heights and the enemy fortifications at the town of El Caney, just north of Santiago. From the San Juan Heights they could look down into the city. Great! Yeah, about that. Around 2am, as McKinley waited up in anticipation of further reports, Shafter sent a cable. “I fear I have underestimated today’s casualties. A large and thoroughly equipped hospital ship should be sent here at once to care for the wounded.” Uh oh. For 34 hours after that, Shafter was silent--until Secretary of War Alger finally got fed up and wired Shafter, “We are awaiting with intense anxiety tidings of yesterday.” Around noon on Sunday the 3rd, Shafter sent another cable--and this one did nothing to help the sense of dread hanging over official Washington. Shafter claimed that he could not take Santiago, and he planned to withdraw to an outer perimeter five miles back, where rail lines would facilitate his supply operations. He claimed he wasn’t feeling well, and expressed concern and sorrow over his rather high casualty rate. McKinley and his Washington advisors could only speculate, but it is highly likely that Shafter was just overwhelmed by doubt. He was so wracked by it (and the gout he was suffering; Shafter was 300 pounds and had a chronic case of it) that he lost his nerve thinking about all the things that could possibly go wrong. Then Shafter sent another cable that caused the White House to nearly despair completely. According to him, Admiral Cervera had left Santiago harbor with his entire fleet the previous night. Shafter was so clueless that he didn’t comprehend how monumental a strategic disaster this was--he was just happy that the admiral’s guns couldn’t menace his men anymore. Worse still, he was wrong. Yup. See, unbeknownst to Shafter, Cervera hadn’t gotten far. His fleet had met the Americans. Three of Cervera’s ships were forced ashore and burned; two others were blown up within four miles of the port at Santiago. His flagship, the Cristobal Colon, had been forced ashore 75 miles west of Santiago and taken down her colors. Adding to the air of general blithering incompetence about General Shafter, the fleet’s commander, Admiral Sampson had been in conference with him when the attack had begun. Commodore Winfield Scott Schley, Sampson’s second-in-command, was helming the fleet’s flagship, the Brooklyn. Sampson missed much of the naval battle but raced aboard his ship in time to give chase to the Cristobal Colon. News of such a stunning naval victory took Washington by storm, sending waves of relief through the McKinley White House. McKinley himself sent Sampson a cable: “You have the gratitude and congratulations of the whole American people. Convey to your noble officers and crews, through whose valor new honors have been added to the Americans, the grateful thanks and appreciation of the Nation.” Finally Shafter snapped out of his funk. Before dawn on the next day he demanded the surrender of Spanish forces in Santiago, and the next day he cabled Washington: “I shall hold my present position”. The commanding Spanish general, Jose Toral, had no choice. The terms were generous--his men were allowed to board ships and return home to Spain, without their weapons (although the officers were allowed to keep their sidearms). Santiago was subdued, and General Miles promptly took an army to conquer Puerto Rico. Given that it was less than a tenth the size of Cuba, Miles took barely two weeks to finish his mission. There were few casualties, and Miles accomplished his mission with smooth efficiency and little rancor...yet he received few plaudits. His victory was not as “picturesque” as the ones in Cuba or the Philippines. Competence is truly a double-edged sword.
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Mar 8, 2020 23:50
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With the Americans in control of Santiago, the Spanish fleets at the bottom of the Caribbean, and many of Spain’s troops on transports home, the rest of the war was exactly as speedy as McKinley had hoped. Not even a month had passed before McKinley received, through the French ambassador, a message from a special envoy of Queen Maria Cristina herself. The message was full of the usual cloying diplomacy about Spain’s war aims, a lot of blather about honor and prestige, but the message was clear--Spain would withdraw completely from Cuba and leave it to govern itself, if America would do likewise. The French were all for America granting Spain what they called “liberal and honorable terms”. McKinley was very amenable, but his terms were rather strict. First, Spain was to relinquish all presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico--and that was just to get the Americans to the table. “This requirement,” McKinley wrote, “will admit of no negotiation.” The Philippines, however, could be settled in the peace talks. This turned out to be somewhat prescient, because while McKinley’s Cabinet was largely behind the idea that Spain should give up Cuba and Puerto Rico, there was some dispute over the Philippines. Secretaries Long, Day (State), and Lyman Gage (Treasury) all advocated just taking over the port at Manila--but others, like Cornelius Bliss, McKinley’s Postmaster General, recommended taking the entire archipelago. The final version of the United States’ demands read as follows. quote:Thus the final version demanded, first, that Spain relinquish Cuban sovereignty and evacuate the island immediately; second, that in lieu of a pecuniary indemnity Spain must grant to the United States Puerto Rico and all surrounding islands as recompense for its “losses and expenses . . . incident to the war” and also an island in the Ladrones to be selected by the United States; third, the United States would occupy and hold Manila, city and harbor, pending the final settlement, “which shall determine the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines.” It met initial resistance in Madrid. Spain had not anticipated the United States caring so much about the fate of Puerto Rico, for instance--and they were suspicious that any step taken on the Philippines in the negotiations would lead to the United States taking over the whole archipelago after the war was over. The French, acting as intermediaries, thought Spain would accept losing Cuba and Puerto Rico--but he did tell McKinley of Madrid’s suspicions on the Philippines. Perhaps the United States would accept something in place of Puerto Rico? No, McKinley said. He felt his bargaining position was strong enough where he didn’t have to. In Santiago, his leverage was being undermined. Remember that rainy season the Army had hoped to avoid? Well, they didn’t. Shafter’s men in Santiago were being overrun by malaria and yellow fever as a result--largely due to his incompetence in getting his men to higher and safer ground after the fall of the city. God, this loving guy sucked. He couldn’t get them on an overland march cause they were all so sick, so Shafter’s council decided that his men needed to leave. Uh oh. Without an occupying force in Cuba, McKinley wouldn’t be able to negotiate from a position of strength. Plus, Shafter was woefully ignorant of just how bad conditions had gotten. quote:What he didn’t say, if indeed he even knew, was that his troops had been increasingly devastated by malaria, far less deadly than yellow fever but capable of weakening the troops and rendering them dangerously vulnerable when yellow fever arrived with the rainy season. In ignoring Washington’s order to get his men to safer territory, Shafter had debilitated his army. It didn’t help that the general’s dysfunctional quartermaster corps had not adequately fed or clothed the troops, nor had the medical corps adequately tended to them. This. Guy. Was. Incompetent. Pop quiz time! What’s the worst thing you can do with an army of men who are all sick and can barely move? If you answered “try to move them over a massive distance”, congratulations! As it turns out, that’s exactly what Shafter tried to do. He wired McKinley on August 2 that he was ready to bring his men home--which was news to McKinley. There were no transports ready, nor were there any landing sites for the soldiers to decamp to on the East Coast. McKinley promptly told Shafter to instead try to move his men to San Luis, further into the interior of Cuba, where the ground was higher and there was less sickness. Shafter couldn’t do this--his original negligence had made his army near immobile, and he couldn’t own up to his situation because it would expose his ineptitude to his superiors. But the news leaked anyway that Shafter had completely cocked up the situation, and McKinley was furious. “He became very much agitated and indignant,” War Secretary Alger wrote. What would Madrid do with this information, McKinley wondered? There were still Spanish forces in Cuba--would they use it as an opportunity to try and retake what they’d lost? Well, no. Spain still had no desire to continue fighting, and a draft of a peace treaty was signed anyway. How anti-climactic--Shafter’s incompetence bailed out by Spain’s lack of will to fight. quote:...State officials drafted the protocol and submitted it to McKinley for his approval, which he gave after some minor tinkering with the language. The next day the document was presented to Cambon, who sent it to Madrid with an admonition that McKinley remained unmovable and “Spain will have nothing more to expect from a conqueror resolved to procure all the profit possible from the advantages it has obtained.” On August 12 the French minister reported back that he had been authorized by Madrid to sign the protocol on behalf of the Spanish government. At four o’clock that afternoon, Cambon and Thiebault reappeared at the White House for a signing ceremony in the Cabinet Room. Present were the French diplomats, the president, Secretary Day, and various invited officials from the State Department, the White House, and the military. America had defeated one of the world’s oldest colonial powers, driven them out of the Western Hemisphere, and established itself as its own colonial power--incidentally, this would put a damper on Democrats’ attempts to punish Republicans in the midterms. They gained 29 seats, eight of which came from splinter parties, in the House in November 1898, and Republicans picked up seven (!) Senate seats. The Presidential Election of 1900  Phew, now we get to talk about one of my favorite aspects of all this stuff again--electoral politics! McKinley, like all his predecessors, had thought about what life would be like after he left office--and he had evinced at least a slight desire to maybe not stand for reelection in 1900. The pressures and anxieties of 1898--the war, the peace negotiations, and a decline in Ida’s health, to name a few--had worn heavily on McKinley. quote:...if I could go out of office in 1901, of course with the feeling that I had reasonably met the expectations of the people. I have had enough of it, Heaven knows! I have had all the honor there is in the place, and have had responsibilities enough to kill any man. You [turning to Charles Dawes] have heard me say this repeatedly, as have you [to George Cortelyou]. There is only one condition upon which I would listen to such a suggestion, and that is, a perfectly clear and imperative call of duty. . . . I would be perfectly willing to have any good Republican, holding of course my views on the great questions that have come before the administration . . . to occupy this place; and I repeat that when the time comes the question of my acquiescence will be based absolutely upon whether the call of duty appears to me clear and well defined. Yet another politician claiming that he needed to be “called to service”. I say bullshit--McKinley clearly wanted a second term, he just didn’t want to look like he wanted a second term. McKinley had changed how the rest of the world viewed America--we were now a world power, not a nation of hermits living in isolation. Surely he’d want to be the man who helped to field the first round of challenges we’d face. It helped that McKinley had gotten some rest. He spent nearly a month along the shores of Lake Champlain, with its walking trails, sailing excursions and carriage routes. McKinley kicked the press off his train and conducted only urgent business while he was on vacation. “In view of Mrs. McKinley’s ill health,” the Washington Post wrote, “the President hopes to be able to spend his time while here in absolute rest and quiet.” As for Ida, she struggled initially. One early carriage ride taxed her so much that it had to be cut short--but eventually the peace and quiet buoyed her too. Her stamina increased--enough to permit two carriage rides a day, if she wished. McKinley would need his strength. As of 1899, Presidents vying for second terms hadn’t had it end well for them. Since Andrew Jackson in 1832, only three Presidents had managed to win second terms--Lincoln, Grant, and Cleveland. Most second terms ended much worse than the first. Considering this, you might be forgiven for thinking McKinley would quietly exit the stage and bring Ida back to Canton...but you’d be wrong. McKinley in early 1900 was at the very peak of his popularity--that tends to happen when you’re a war President. In his Annual Message to Congress that year (this is what we now call the State of the Union), McKinley focused on domestic issues--growth in American trade futures, now that we were an imperial power (he didn’t use those words, they’re mine), and the fact that we’d broken all records for imports and exports. Despite the fact that we’d declined roughly 20% in per capita imports, we’d increased exports by nearly 60%--a figure McKinley used to demonstrate “the enlarged capacity of the United States to satisfy the wants of its own increasing population, as well as to contribute to those of the peoples of other nations.” quote:America had emerged as the world’s greatest industrial nation. In output of iron ore, coal, and coke, and in corollary iron and steel production, the United States caught up with global leader Britain in 1889, then pulled ahead in 1897, McKinley’s first presidential year. “That lead can never be broken,” declared an industrial expert named Charles H. Cramp. The United States stood “at the head of nations in the primary industry of modern civilization.” Around the same time, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie predicted that the United States would take the global lead also in shipbuilding and other industrial manufacturing. “I see nothing to prevent this country of ours from being the chief source of supply of steel and the articles made from steel for the rest of the less-favored world,” he said. We’d grown strong indeed, and much of it was due to McKinley and the tariff policies he’d pushed as both a Congressman and as President. Not everything had gone as planned, however. In October 1899, McKinley’s Vice President, Garret Hobart, had fallen seriously ill. He died less than a month later, in late November. The loss hurt. It wasn’t just because it left a vacancy on the ticket, but Hobart had played a larger role than I think most historians realize in McKinley’s affairs--he’d been a trusted advisor and friend to the President, sought out for his counsel and opinions on nearly all major matters. His wife, Jennie, had been one of Ida’s closest friends and supporters. Indeed, the Chicago Record wrote, “No president and vice-president have ever been so intimate as McKinley and Hobart.” Given the history of the two offices, I think this might have been accurate. Now McKinley faced the delicate question of who would replace Hobart on the ticket in 1900, even as the dawn of the new year had the Chicago Tribune heralding him as the vanguard of the new century’s leadership. “It is settled that he is to be nominated by acclamation,” the Republican-leaning paper wrote. McKinley would not have to placate fellow Republicans this time on his path to the nomination. He would, however, face a new challenge on the foreign policy front. See, turns out his adventures in imperialism had not just earned him the ire of most Democrats, but a decent number of his fellow Republicans as well. In soon-to-be former Speaker Reed’s valedictory speech, he took what many observers thought was a swipe at McKinley. To the voters of his beloved ME-1 district, Reed said he hoped they would “always be true to the principles of liberty, self-government, and the rights of man”. It wasn’t just Reed. Issues such as Puerto Rico, the planned isthmian canal in Central America (we will talk more about this when I do Theodore Roosevelt), and our occupation of the Philippines threatened to divide Republicans in the fall. Indeed, Illinois Senator William Mason threatened to resign his seat over what he deplored as “the way we [are] treating those poor people. I am ashamed of my country.” (This subject is covered in more depth in Blindeye’s bio of William Howard Taft, if you’re interested.) There was, briefly, the lingering question of George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay. Many supporters of his envisioned him as a replacement for McKinley, but for all his talents in the military arena, he did not demonstrate any in the political one. In an interview with the New York World, Dewey mused, “The office of the President is not such a very difficult one to fill, his duties being mainly to execute the laws of Congress.” Whoops. Americans didn’t like that very much. Claiming that the President should be just a dupe who signs whatever Congress puts in front of him was too reminiscent of some of our more passive Gilded Age Presidents for some, and even worse, some of our antebellum Presidents for others. McKinley himself felt that Dewey could have overcome this had he taken a strong stand against retaining the Philippines upon coming out as a Democrat, but his indecisiveness on all the major issues did not inspire confidence. His candidacy became a bit of a joke very quickly. On June 11, Republicans began assembling for their convention in Philadelphia. The idea was to keep the party light on drama and heavy on ceremony. Indeed, the only question facing newly-crowned RNC chairman Mark Hanna was who the new Vice President would be. He’d floated a number of names--Postmaster General Cornelius Bliss was one, Senate lifer William Allison (R-IA) was another. As for McKinley, he was refusing to name a personal choice. Two days later, reporters accosted Hanna and asked when McKinley would do so. “The President will not interfere, he has no candidate,” Hanna said. “My only desire is to get the best man.” He was asked about Bliss and Allison, as well as young Iowa Congressman Jonathan Dolliver, who came recommended by Charles Dawes, McKinley’s point man in the Midwest. But Hanna had come to the convention with two aims: he wanted Bliss to take the job, and he wanted to stop someone else from getting it. Who, you ask? *checks notes* Oh, sweet loving Lord, not again.  Cue the fireworks guy! After his time in the Army, Theodore Roosevelt had run for and won the governorship of New York, staking his claim as a fire-breathing reform-minded Republican, exactly the type of Republican Hanna hated. “The steam engine in trousers”, as his friends called him, had actually emphatically denied being at all interested in the Vice Presidency earlier in the year, even going so far as to travel to DC and meet with McKinley to tell him so. When McKinley, to his shock, agreed that he wouldn’t be right for it, Roosevelt’s ego caused him to be a bit more shocked than he was relieved. As for Bliss, he continued to rebuff Hanna’s advances. His family was very opposed to the idea, and Bliss would not go against them. So now Mark Hanna was left in a position where he could not find his “best man available”--no one would both meet his standards and galvanize the convention. The only man who could excite the delegates was, indeed, Theodore Roosevelt. The Rough Rider showed up in Philadelphia wearing the hat from his military uniform, and when he entered the Walton Hotel at 2pm on June 16, all the patrons immediately started cheering. “Here comes Teddy,” shouted one man. A crowd formed around him, chanting “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy.” Blushing, Roosevelt doffed his hat and bowed. Senator Thomas Platt, Roosevelt’s New York nemesis and the architect behind the plan to make him Vice President (so New York would no longer have to deal with him), observed that Roosevelt was “in a state of rare excitement, even for him”. The delegations stampeded to Roosevelt’s room the next morning. First came the West--Colorado, California, the Dakotas, and Nevada, then the Eastern delegations promised their support and begged Roosevelt to acquiesce if he was nominated for the job. The tidal wave was nearly irresistible. Most operatives began to bow to the inevitable--they could see that the town was, as the Associated Press reported, “Roosevelt mad.” The Roosevelt wave was washing away all opposition, even as Roosevelt himself continued to insist to Mark Hanna he wasn’t a candidate. TR loved the adulation and there was very little real chance he’d turn down the job if the delegates pushed him into it. Hanna’s associates knew the danger was very real--only Hanna himself didn’t seem to acknowledge it, and if he continued to resist, that could be embarrassing to McKinley, who was following the events from Washington. McKinley sent a policy statement to the convention at midnight for George Cortelyou to read to party officials: “The President has no choice for Vice-President. Any of the distinguished names suggested would be satisfactory to him. The choice of the Convention is the lawfully constituted body to make nominations, and instead of giving advice he awaits its advice.” That’s pretty hands-off. But Hanna still resisted the tide of pro-Roosevelt sentiment. He rushed directly to the governor’s room, demanding to know if he was a candidate. Roosevelt waffled for a minute, then said he would most likely issue a withdrawal statement the next morning...but his words dripped with ambiguity and Hanna was too seasoned an operative not to see it. Bewildered and irritated by McKinley’s refusal to take the lead, he battled through the night to harden the delegations against Roosevelt. “McKinley won’t let me use the power of the administration to defeat Roosevelt. He is blind, or afraid, or something.” Charles Dawes had been watching Hanna with growing alarm. After Hanna gaveled the convention to order, Roosevelt had entered the hall with a very well-timed flourish that inflamed Hanna’s already smoldering anger. He was rapidly spiraling out of control and Dawes feared that he would place McKinley against the will of the convention by dint of his actions. He contacted McKinley, who released another statement. “The President’s close friends must not undertake to commit the Administration to any candidate. It has no candidate.” That was more unequivocal than the last one, and it was the one that finally made Hanna sit up and listen. He bowed to the pressure, and Roosevelt was nominated by acclamation. The ticket was set. The Democrats, for their part, had nearly as little mystery during their convention. Their nominee was no surprise.  William Jennings Bryan was back to try again, and his playbook remained the same. In the years between 1896 and 1900, Bryan had retained an enormous hold on a large portion of the Democratic Party--his fiery brand of populism led him to wage a campaign of anger against established institutions and policies of the day. Since bimetallism had largely fallen by the wayside for the time being due to gold prices spiking, Bryan turned his attentions to the trusts and imperialism. He had supported the war in Cuba originally because he supported Cuban independence--but he was outraged that America had retained colonial control over the Philippines. McKinley, much like 1896, planned no public speeches or campaign tours, not even another front porch campaign--but when he ventured out he was always met with adulation. One onlooker during one of these outings yelled, “Major, what are you going to do with us the next four years?” McKinley smiled and replied, “It is more important just now to know what you are going to do with me the next four years.” “We are going to stand by you,” the man replied, and the crowd cheered. It was like that for the entire general. Mark Hanna didn’t sit idly by either, as Robert Merry writes. quote:Hanna revived the super-efficient organizational engine of four years earlier. By late September it produced seventy different documents (brochures, letters, pamphlets), as well as ten or more different posters and lithographs. It distributed 110 million individual items. Newspaper inserts and supplementary materials amounted to two million copies per week. McKinley speeches and utterances were translated into German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Dutch, “and four or five other languages.” The aim was to break the electorate down into discrete ethnic groups for targeted messages. The speakers bureau was revived to ensure that McKinley’s message got to precisely the right location at the right time. Even Theodore Roosevelt turned out to be a campaign asset. Since McKinley wouldn’t campaign, Roosevelt enthusiastically took up the slack, blitzing the country with speeches and touting McKinley as one of the greatest Presidents in American history. Guys, I can’t understate how popular he was--Roosevelt drew massive crowds everywhere he went, to the point where people were turned away from the venues for lack of space. In eight weeks, he traveled over 21,000 miles and delivered 673 speeches to an estimated 3-4 million people in 24 states. Not bad. Election Day wasn’t close.  McKinley outperformed his 1896 map, stealing South Dakota and even Bryan’s home state of Nebraska from him. He won 292 electoral votes to Bryan’s 155, and earned a popular vote margin of over 850,000, a full 25% larger than his 1896 margin. He’d done it--not just won reelection, but done it his way; letting voters judge him on his merits and tending to his obligations. His victories in the West had largely killed bimetallism as an issue and demonstrated a clear embrace of his overseas initiatives and his handling of the Spanish-American War’s aftermath. As he told his secretary, George Cortelyou, “I can no longer be called the President of a party; I am now the President of the whole people.” But there was one person who was not all sunshine and light that night. “I did not want him to run a second time,” Ida McKinley told reporters. “I thought he had done enough for the country….and when his term expires we will come home and we will settle down quietly and he will belong to me.” Cue the ominous music. End Of The Line  Wait, what? We’re already here? Yep. William Osborne, McKinley’s cousin, had written him in early 1898. “I am becoming somewhat anxious about your safety,” he said. It was a time when anarchists were adopting assassination as a political tool. In the fall of that year, an anarchist named Luigi Lucheni stabbed Empress Elisabeth of Austria to death, and two years after that another anarchist named Gaetano Bresci (from Paterson, NJ!) had murdered King Umberto of Italy. The Prince of Wales had survived an assassination attempt a few months before, and worst of all in October 1898, the newspapers actually reported that two or three Italians had been dispatched to America to kill McKinley at his home in Canton. Yikes. This weighed heavily on Ida--and her condition deteriorated accordingly. In addition to her physical ailments, she started suffering what Charles Dawes observed as “extreme mental depression”. It was so bad that her doctors recommend she relinquish her First Lady tasks and return to Canton, essentially “retiring” from the First Ladyship. Ida would not hear of it, but her condition continued to deteriorate. She started to forget things--she would insist that she and her husband had never been to places that they had been to, and get very peevish if someone attempted to correct her. Such was the state of McKinley’s affairs as he attended his inauguration in March then dealt with the affairs of the first few months of his second term. In September of 1901, McKinley planned to give a speech on trade policy in Buffalo, as well as to pay a visit to the Pan-American Exposition. He did not know that as his train sped towards Western New York, this man lay in wait.  Born in Detroit twenty-eight years before, Leon Czolgosz was the son of Polish immigrants. He had spent his life bouncing around factory jobs and spent most of his free time at a working-class saloon in Detroit called Dryers, where he sat, read the newspaper, and kept mostly to himself. “I never had much luck at anything,” Czolgosz recalled, “and this preyed upon me. It made me morose and envious.” This is pretty much how all these stories start. Czolgosz went to hear a lecture by Emma Goldman, the brutal-minded writer, thinker, and lecturer dubbed “the queen of anarchy”. Goldman advocated assassination as a form of political expression. “She set me on fire,” Czolgosz said. “Miss Goldman’s words went right through me, and when I left the lecture I had made up my mind that I would have to do something heroic for the cause I loved.” Czolgosz studied the exposition’s grounds in Buffalo carefully and began to develop a plan. He actually was in the crowd at McKinley’s trade speech at the Esplanade, but he couldn’t get close enough to do the deed--a big policeman stepped in front of him and blocked his view. He tried to get near the President’s departing carriage, but he was herded back with the rest of the crowd. But he knew that McKinley would be visiting the Temple of Music for a reception the next day, so he went well before the President’s scheduled arrival, positioning himself where he knew McKinley would stand for the receiving line. In his right hand, which was wrapped in a handkerchief so as to look like an injury, he concealed a .32-caliber revolver. McKinley was unaware of Czolgosz’s presence as he shook hands with a little girl who was accompanied by her father, then a short, dark, mustachioed man who the Secret Service agents took a couple glances at before he passed. Then came Czolgosz. As the President reached, thoughtfully, for his unbandaged left hand, Czolgosz pressed the muzzle of the revolver against McKinley’s chest and fired twice. At the first shot, McKinley gasped and reeled back on his toes, taking the second bullet in his abdomen. He fell backwards into the arms of a nearby policeman. “Am I shot?” He wheezed. “I fear you are, Mr. President,” said Detective John Geary, the man who had caught him. As for Czolgosz, the Secret Service had swarmed him and slammed him to the ground. A black waiter named James Parker leapt on him to pin him there as another agent seized his hand and ripped off the handkerchief-bound pistol. “My wife,” gasped McKinley to George Cortelyou, who had hurried over to kneel by his boss’ side, “be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her--oh, be careful.” Even as he lay bleeding out his only thought was of Ida. I’m tearing up a little here.  “Let no one hurt him,” McKinley said, seeing Czolgosz lying bleeding on the floor, beset by law enforcement and with a VERY angry crowd pressing in on all sides of him. The Secret Service dragged Czolgosz away. This was him in the immediate aftermath, in the back of the prison wagon.  When the First Lady was informed, she did not respond at all how her attendants expected. She did faint, briefly--but she was almost immediately back on her feet, self-possessed and assertive. “Tell me all,” she demanded. “Keep nothing from me! I will be brave--yes, I will be brave for his sake!” Jesus Christ, who’s loving cutting onions in here goddamnit?  Friends and associates rushed to McKinley’s bedside in Buffalo. The surgeons who operated on him had made a determination on both bullets. One had barely penetrated his body near the rib cage--but the second bullet had showed no exit wound, causing the doctors to worry. They cleaned up the area around the stomach lacerations and sewed the holes in McKinley’s stomach shut to keep gastric or intestinal contents from giving him blood poisoning. They were unable to find the second bullet, but they were confident it had done no further damage to his vital organs He was sewn up, bandaged, and brought to the Milburn House to recuperate in one of the upstairs bedrooms. For the first few days, McKinley seemed on the road to recovery. His strength began to return, and on the fourth day, he was cheerful, chatting amiably with his well-wishers and visitors. On Wednesday, the next day, he was given beef broth--the first food his damaged stomach would handle, and the next day he added a few bites of toast to it. What the doctors did not know is that while Czolgosz’s second bullet had missed the stomach, it had caused ballistic trauma to McKinley’s pancreas. Dangerous enzymes began leaking into the area between the pancreas and the stomach, and by Friday his recovery had begun to noticeably reverse. He began to deteriorate, and his doctors wrote in their log at 2:50 AM on September 13, 1901, “The President’s condition is very serious, and gives rise to the greatest apprehension.” That afternoon he awoke from a stupor and asked to have Ida brought to him. Cortelyou led her into the room. “It is useless, gentlemen. I think I ought to have prayer,” McKinley mumbled. Ida took his hand and bent to kiss him. “Good-bye--good-bye, all,” McKinley rasped. “It is God’s way. His will, not ours, be done.” And he slipped back into unconsciousness. President William McKinley died at 2:15 AM on the morning of September 14, 1901. He was gone, surrounded by his loved ones and supporters. As Vice President Roosevelt took the oath of office and traveled to Washington D.C., the nation grappled with its third assassination in just thirty-six years. McKinley lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda as nearly 100,000 people filed by after standing for hours in the rain. His body was then returned to Canton, where another 100,000 paid their respects at his final resting place, the West Lawn Cemetery in an elaborate tomb paid for by donations from nearly a million schoolchildren across the nation. What legacy did the Major leave? Well, it wasn’t a great one. Today, McKinley languishes around the middle of most academic polls on Presidential performance and standing. In seven of the most prominent he’s ranked 15th, 16th, and 14th--though he did reach as high as 11th in a 1982 Chicago Tribune survey. The question of how you feel about McKinley lies in how much influence you believe he had over the events that surrounded his Presidency. His detractors depict him as a passive observer, a man who events happened to, not the other way around. I’m inclined to agree, but Robert Merry would argue differently. quote:Most of those close to McKinley...never questioned whose hand was on the tiller of the national destiny or whose judgment would prevail as government officials grappled with the challenge of molding unfolding events into American greatness. It was McKinley. As Root said, he always got his way, in part because he never cared who got the credit. With his inevitable commissions, constant overtures to members of Congress, openness toward the press, widespread public advocacy of his policies, leadership of indirection, and affable persona, he always managed to shepherd the flock where he wanted it to go. He seldom failed to get all the apples from the orchard. As always, dear reader, make your own judgment. --- It’s done! God, it is GREAT to be back. I have enjoyed writing this even though it took a loving gazillion years, and I hope you enjoy reading it. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 8, 2020 23:51
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quote:McKinley was dealing with his own problems. Realizing that the $50 million allocution for the war was about to run out, he asked Congress for a series of tax increases: excise taxes on beer and tobacco, a stamp tax on stock transfers, bank checks, and the like, which would raise in excess of $100 million. Yes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were beaten to the punch on stock transfer taxes...by William McKinley, over a hundred years ago. Unlike now, however, these new levies had no trouble with either house of Congress--both the Senate and House passed them quickly. It alleviated enough of the problems in Tampa to allow the soldiers to wait. The state can always find money for war. It's when it needs to improve the lot of it's common people that suddenly there are budgetary constraints.
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Mar 9, 2020 11:54
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Good to see this is back. Great write-up as always. Surprised, however, that there was no mention of the Boxer Rebellion, since that tied into The Phillipines and America being a player on the global stage.
Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 9, 2020 |
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Mar 9, 2020 19:10
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Excellent writeup about McKinley. Back in high school I learned that Teddy Roosevelt was put in as VP as the rest of the Republican Party was fearful of him & wanted him in a harmless position. Then McKinley gets assassinated & whelp. This writeup fleshes out the events.
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Mar 9, 2020 21:29
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This was great. I knew that we had pretty much taken Hawaii by force, but I didn't know about the added drama with the Japanese. It's a bitter irony that a country created by declaring its independence from a colonial power became such a colonizing force in the 20th century and beyond. I must admit that the descriptions of the chaos surrounding the occupation of Cuba was schadenfreude for me. I despise imperialism.
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Mar 10, 2020 02:18
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Amazing writeup! I'm so glad this thread is back 
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Mar 10, 2020 03:33
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Emma Goldman is basically a turn-of-the-century Laura Ingraham, if you need an analogy. Ok, just finished the whole piece and this is just a galling comparison. Goldman is nothing less than a hero of the working class and is in no way comparable to the fascist Ingraham. Furthermore, Czolgosz did nothing wrong. If only more workers would kill the imperialists where they stand, the world would be a better place for it. Edit: seriously, the more I think about this comparison the more disgusting it gets. For the love of god read Goldman's biography and educate yourself. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 10, 2020 10:19
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Orange Devil posted:Ok, just finished the whole piece and this is just a galling comparison. Goldman is nothing less than a hero of the working class and is in no way comparable to the fascist Ingraham. I'll delete the line, but I don't care if she was for free love and weed. Someone who advocates murder as a political tool is never going to draw a favorable opinion from me. Sorry if that offends you. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 10, 2020 13:26
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Name a president who didn't advocate murder as a political tool.
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Mar 10, 2020 13:57
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Orange Devil posted:Name a president who didn't advocate murder as a political tool. Does Jimmy Carter count?
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Mar 10, 2020 16:12
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"As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore." - Barbara Lee
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Mar 10, 2020 18:04
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Oh, I guess now that McKinley's done it's time for me to choose a new subject. I'm throwing open the floor to any and all Presidents that are not yet covered in the list in the OP. I'll pick whichever I like the best, so let me know who you wanna see!
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Mar 10, 2020 18:55
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Android Apocalypse posted:Does Jimmy Carter count? People keep saying he did some really lovely things (almost as if being a head of state of a global power naturally causes this but whatever) so he probably did at one point or another. EDIT: Fritz Coldcockin posted:Oh, I guess now that McKinley's done it's time for me to choose a new subject. I'm throwing open the floor to any and all Presidents that are not yet covered in the list in the OP. I'll pick whichever I like the best, so let me know who you wanna see! maybe we could do a relatively quick one with one of the Mediocre Presidents, like, say, William Henry Harrison ("I died in 30 days!")
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Mar 10, 2020 18:56
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I'm down for a WHH write up.
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Mar 10, 2020 20:24
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Thirding a WHH!
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Mar 10, 2020 20:25
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Of the remaining presidents, I think I'd most like to see you cover Jackson, J. Q. Adams, and Cleveland. I get the feeling Jackson's bigger than what you feel like tackling now, though.
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Mar 10, 2020 20:35
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I'd like to know more about Martin Van Buren
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Mar 10, 2020 22:50
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Come now, folks, surely we have more opinions than this? 
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Mar 12, 2020 12:54
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William "half hour" Harrison
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Mar 12, 2020 13:14
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Grover Cleveland
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Mar 12, 2020 13:18
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WHH
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Mar 12, 2020 14:33
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Been lurking this thread forever, glad to see it back up!Ferrosol posted:I'd like to know more about Martin Van Buren I kind of want to reply to this--while I'm sure Fritz Coldcockin could write a way better summary of van Buren than I could, I'm actually related to him and I could probably dig up some interesting not-public info on him through family archives because we have a lot of them. I do know he was a giant piece of poo poo. Which is probably true of anyone who was buds with Andrew Jackson. He was also in a lot of ways a founding father of partisan politics in the US as he thought giant parties were the Best Thing Ever. I'd actually be interested in learning about Grover Cleveland for similar reasons--though I'm not directly related, my great-aunt married one of his descendants and I'd like to know if my cousins are related to two lovely presidents instead of just one. Masakado fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 02:11
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I'd go for Van Buren too. He's one of those relatively faceless 19th century presidents you rarely hear about these days.
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Mar 13, 2020 02:59
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Wildcard Option: American President... Jefferson Davis.
Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 06:35
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Jack2142 posted:Wildcard Option: American President... Jefferson Davis. he was objectively a bad president, imagine a stereotype of a southern aristocrat and a bit of a tyrant
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Mar 13, 2020 14:13
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Couple more days of voting, guys, then I'll pick one of the options I've seen...leaning towards William Henry Harrison at this point cause people have been calling for him since the thread began
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Mar 14, 2020 17:37
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Another great update! OP updated. We're getting close to having a bio for everyone, which I never thought would happen. I'm gonna vote William Henry Harrison since he died of pneumonia and well *gestures towards the world today*. axeil fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Mar 16, 2020 |
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Mar 16, 2020 21:13
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Then Harrison it shall be! I will get to work on writing an entry, seeing as how the coronavirus has closed my school and left me with three weeks of complete and utter boredom
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Mar 18, 2020 00:02
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William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States Over the course of this project--which, by the way, has spanned two years now, by my count--I have written many, many biographies. Some were insanely long, some not so much. One thing that’s remained constant, however, is the fact that William Henry Harrison, our current subject, has been the elephant in the room for the entire time. Elected to the office in 1840, Harrison was, at the time, the oldest man to ever win the Presidency. It should be understood--Harrison was a hero. He certainly didn’t have a reputation to match George Washington, but to America in the 1830s, he was a modern military hero on the order of, say, Andrew Jackson. His pre-Presidential life stands in stark contrast to his present-day historical standing--mostly near the bottom of nearly every Presidential ranking done by reputable scholars. Understand that this is not out of dislike for the man personally, but out of a lack of data. After all, William Henry Harrison was President for a mere 31 days. Yes, but for want of an overcoat on a chilly March day, Harrison would not hold the record for the shortest time in office. His oversight would, in turn, give the United States a chance to exercise an as-yet-unused provision in the Constitution--what powers does the Vice President wield in the event the President dies? Let’s spend a little time talking about this extraordinary man whose legacy, over time, became utterly pedestrian. We’re Settlers!  The Harrison family is old. Real old. Like O.G. American old. I went over this a little in my Benjamin Harrison biography (our current subject is the grandfather of the 23rd President, incidentally), but it should be understood that the Harrisons can trace their roots all the way back to Jamestown, when the first Benjamin Harrison arrived there in 1633. Harrison The First established a plantation he named “Berkeley” along the shores of the James River, 24 miles east of what would eventually become Richmond, Virginia. It was there that our current subject was born. Harrison’s wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to a son the couple named William Henry on February 9, 1773. Like many young, rich Virginians, William grew up privileged and cared for by slaves--the manor house on the plantation was always alive with activity. Virginia was a hotbed of political activity, after all--you recall “no taxation without representation”? Harrison’s father Benjamin was a member of the Second Continental Congress and a signatory to the Declaration of Independence--it’s safe to say that the spirit of independence was strong in the Harrison household. Given this fact, it meant that many important people stayed at the manor house. Young William got the chance to meet both George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, in fact. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, however. During the war, Harrison and his family were forced to flee their manor, and they watched British troops ransack their home, burning furniture and destroying the property. In response, the elder Harrison joined Virginia’s militia and fought the British at Yorktown. Harrison’s father was something of a hero himself--he would go on to serve as the first governor of Virginia after the United States won its independence. Harrison’s education took place largely at home until he was fourteen--his father wanted him to go into medicine, given that it could provide a solid living after a few years as an apprentice. I guess holding jars of leeches for quacks was quite lucrative. Anyway, this course took him to Hampden-Sydney College near Richmond--but his stay was short-lived. Apparently, Dad’s religious beliefs clashed with the school’s Episcopalian doctrines. William instead went to the Medical School of Pennsylvania to study--but Fate intervened. Shortly after he arrived in the spring of 1791, Harrison’s father died. Whoops. With Harrison Senior dead, it meant William had no money and needed a new career. Soldier Boy  So what was a young, out-of-work almost-doctor to do? Join the Army, of course! Yes, Harrison actually wrote later, “In 24 hours from the first conception of the idea of changing my profession, I was an ensign in the 1st US Reg of the infantry.” With the war for independence over and the Constitution becoming the governing document for the country, we were now looking westward into the unsettled lands known as the Northwest Territory. This was, for those of you who are not students of history, the area of the United States that included Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin--the area of the country that would eventually become the Upper Midwest. I should qualify that “unsettled”, however--you see, the land wasn’t exactly unsettled. As American settlers pushed westward they ran into the Native American populations--and they didn’t take too kindly to a bunch of white men seizing their lands for farming. Harrison arrived at his new post, Fort Washington, at what is now Cincinnati, Ohio, in the fall of 1791. Understand this: Cincinnati was, like now, a shithole. It was just a different kind of shithole. Harrison was on the edge of civilization--the settlement he was in consisted of a few dozen log cabins, and it was isolated from the East due to the fact that it had no roads and only occasional mail dispatches. How horrid. To add to Harrison’s woes, life as a soldier out there sucked rear end. Poor rations and a lack of proper equipment made frontier duty practically exile. However, our boy, much like in all of these stories, caught a break. The fort commander sent him to Philadelphia to escort his wife and children back to Fort Washington.  General “Mad Anthony” Wayne was a Pennsylvania native who’d earned his stripes during the Revolution. Wayne had picked up his nickname at the Battle of Stony Point, where he led a 30-minute long bayonet charge against a numerically superior British force and (somehow) managed to drive them out and capture British fortifications at Stony Point, New York, on the Hudson River. Wayne had been named commander at Fort Washington after the war, when now-President George Washington called him back to duty to whip the disorganized United States Army into shape. He took a liking to young William Henry Harrison. What better way for a young soldier to move up in the world than to gain the notice of a highly-placed military officer? Harrison became an aide-de-camp to Wayne and was given a salary of $64 a month--over $1700 in 2020 dollars, which, admittedly, isn’t much, but it was more than the young officer was making. Harrison was promoted to lieutenant, and in 1794, he fought under General Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers against a combined force of British troops and about a thousand Native Americans. Wayne had the numbers--about 1500 regulars and an equal number of mounted volunteer militia--and a very effective use of the same bayonet charge that had won him his promotion to general carried the battle. Both sides lost only small numbers, but it was the Native Americans who were hurt most--their losses included ten of their chiefs. It broke the back of Native resistance in the Upper Midwest and effectively ended what was known as the Northwest Indian War. As for Harrison, he shined that day--something Wayne would make mention of in his official report of the battle. He stood as witness to Wayne, the principal negotiator in the Treaty of Greenville--the document ended the Northwest Indian War and ceded roughly half of the territory that eventually became Ohio. Three years later he was promoted to captain--but he resigned his commission a year later. Wait, what? Yes, this story has an intermission. Love, Politics, And Other Horror Stories Let’s back up a bit. Harrison’s life took an unexpected turn when he went to Lexington, Kentucky, on Army business. At a party, he met this young woman.  Anna Tuthill Symmes was the daughter of the Chief Justice of New Jersey’s Supreme Court, John Cleves Symmes, who had been a delegate to the Provincial Congress of New Jersey and the Second Continental Congress. Growing up on Long Island, she had received an unusual amount of education for a woman of her time--she’d attended Clinton Academy in East Hampton, then a private finishing school in New York City. Anna was very much a modern woman--she knew how to ride and hunt, and she was well-read and very politically conscious. Her father disapproved of Harrison--he was a soldier when they met, and he wanted to spare his daughter the hardships of camp life. Apparently Mr. Symmes did not know that the best way to make a suitor irresistible was to tell his daughter she could not date him. Harrison instantly became Anna’s forbidden fruit, and behind her father’s back the romance flourished. When Anna’s father refused Harrison’s request for his daughter’s hand, the couple eloped in 1795. Steamy. Indeed, at the end of 1795, General Wayne left Fort Washington in the command of his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Harrison, who was living there with his new bride. At Wayne’s farewell dinner, Judge Symmes confronted his new son-in-law for the first time, demanding to know how he was going to provide a living for Anna. “By my sword and my own right arm,” Harrison answered, defiantly. There was no denying Harrison’s star was rising, and it won over his recalcitrant father-in-law. Symmes sold Harrison 160 acres of land in the town of North Bend, Ohio, where Harrison built a two-story log cabin. Anna would give birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, a year after their wedding--in fact, she’d be the first of ten (!) children...most of whom would not live to see their forties. One of them, young John Scott, would come along in 1804--and he would sire another Benjamin Harrison, the man who eventually became America’s 23rd President. The Harrisons lived fairly well for frontier standards, but money was always a problem...and Harrison was constantly looking for a profitable business venture to supplement his rather meager military pension. In 1797, he’d been promoted to captain, like I mentioned--but he quit the Army a year later. Fortunately for him, this guy--a close friend--was serving as President John Adams’ Secretary of State.  Timothy Pickering was a career politician. He’d served as George Washington’s last Secretary of State as well as John Adams’ first--and he’d held two other Cabinet positions prior to that: Postmaster General and Secretary of War. With Pickering’s help, Harrison secured a post as Secretary of the Northwest Territory--and due to the frequent absences of the territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair, Harrison often stood in for him as acting governor. In this capacity he made a lot of friends back East, and his advocacy for settlers in the territory made him their champion. See, Congress had legislated a territorial policy that led to high land costs--and Harrison was the settlers’ chief advocate for lowering them again. Eventually, the territorial population got high enough that they were permitted a delegate in Congress. Guess who they chose. Indeed! William Henry Harrison, at the tender age of 26, won election in 1798 as a non-voting delegate to Congress on behalf of the Northwest Territory...by a single vote. He beat out the son of the territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair Jr.. As a delegate, like I mentioned, Harrison couldn’t vote--but he could submit legislation, make recommendations for amending bills, serve on committees, and engage in debate. He became chairman of the Committee on Public Lands and was a huge advocate of the Land Act of 1800. This law made it possible to purchase smaller tracts of land in the Northwest Territory for reduced cost--before, it was being parceled out as one-size-fits-all. Now, one could buy land at $2 per acre--a very important factor that contributed to rapid population growth in the Territory. Goddamn cheeseheads. Anyway, Harrison also served on the committee that determined how the territory would be broken into smaller sections. It was decreed that the eastern section that eventually became Ohio and half the Lower Peninsula of Michigan would remain the Northwest Territory, while the rest would become the Indiana Territory--and it included all of what eventually became Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Western Michigan (the Upper Peninsula), and part of Minnesota. Confusing, I know. Here’s a map that shows what we were working with.  For his efforts, Harrison received a promotion--President John Adams made Harrison governor of the Indiana Territory in 1800. He was 27 years old. With his wife and (by now) three children, he made for Port Vincennes, the new territorial capital. It lay 200 miles west of Cincinnati and was only accessible by boat--there were no roads. Port Vincennes wasn’t much better than Fort Washington. It was a town of about 700 residents, most of whom were of French descent and those who had intermarried with Native Americans. Housing was simple--most domiciles were log cabins, wood-frame houses, or mud huts. In a rather ironic twist, Harrison had no intention of living like the pioneers--he ordered the construction of a massive, thirteen-room stone mansion. The glass in the windows? Imported from England. It was reminiscent in design to Berkeley, the plantation manor house he’d grown up in. Stout and very defensible against Native American attacks, the thick brick walls were impervious to anything besides cannon fire, and the building was festooned with firing ports for defense. The mansion and the farm that adjoined it were christened “Grouseland” by Harrison, and it was so out-of-place in this simple little town that it became something of a tourist attraction.  Swanky. So now that Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory, what do you think his chief responsibility was? If you answered “find a way to peacefully coexist with the Native American populations”, you are correct. Harrison was a skilled negotiator, but his attitude towards the Indians was remarkably medieval. He obtained millions of acres for white settlements, but he recalled that it was only proper that “one of the fairest portions of the globe” be put to good use, rather than wasted in “a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages”. Yikes.  The Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809 was, perhaps, one of Harrison’s biggest successes. In September of that year, he met with representatives of the Potawatomie, Delaware, Eel Rivers, and Miami tribes to the town of Fort Wayne--where he promised large subsidies and payments in return for their tribal lands. Harrison was good at this--he largely avoided talking to the tribes that weren’t in favor of selling. The Miamis were initially not in favor of this one, but negotiations with the Potawatomie brought them around. A treaty was signed after two weeks, lubricated with nearly two hundred gallons of whiskey. Christ. The treaty got us 3 million acres of land along the Wabash River north of Port Vincennes, but the natives did not fare well once white people started moving in. A lot of them died due to having no natural immunity to the diseases the settlers were bringing in. Lands they had used for hunting were replaced rapidly by farms. The Indians had become more dependent on U.S. government handouts due to overhunting the local wildlife--after all, no animals, no pelts, and no trade goods to sell to the settlers. Of the many, many black marks on American history, this is perhaps one of the biggest--the treatment of the Indians, especially in the time preceding the Civil War. Tecumseh And Tippecanoe Naturally, what with white people driving ever further westward, friction with the natives was inevitable--but it came to a head when they finally united around a leader.  Tecumseh was the chief of the Shawnee tribe. With the help of his brother, Tenskwatawa, known as “the Prophet”, he united several tribes under one banner as a confederation. Tecumseh wasn’t just revered among his own people--even American officials who met him were impressed by him. One of Harrison’s men wrote him re: Tecumseh, “Perhaps one of the finest looking men I ever saw--about six feet high, straight, with large fine features and altogether a daring, bold-looking fellow.” As a young man, Tecumseh had befriended some white settlers that had taught him to read and write in English. As for Harrison, he knew better than to underestimate Tecumseh. quote:The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay him is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order. The settlers were growing anxious at the sight of Tecumseh’s ever-growing numbers, so Harrison invited his brother, the Prophet, to council--but Tecumseh came himself instead. Harrison had asked that the delegation from their camp be small, but Tecumseh brought a large contingency of warriors to the meeting. In a final act of defiance, when Harrison offered Tecumseh a seat next to him at the table, Tecumseh refused and sat on the ground, saying that it was the proper place for Indians. Surrounded by his men, he cut a formidable figure indeed. It made the white men in the council uneasy. Tecumseh then proceeded to let loose a barrage of grievances. The land did not belong to the tribes that sold it, he said, but to all Native Americans, and therefore the Treaty of Fort Wayne was null and void. If the Americans kept stealing land through their grossly one-sided treaties, Tecumseh said bluntly, “I do not see how we can remain at peace with you.” Things got heated when Harrison dismissed Tecumseh’s central thesis on treaties, arguing that if the Great Spirit really wanted the natives to be one nation, he would not have given them so many different languages. I guess diversity was not on the menu. Naturally, of course, Tecumseh didn’t take kindly to this. He jumped to his feet, as did his band of warriors. There were no guns in the negotiations, and the Americans were outnumbered. Just when it started to look like Custer’s Last Stand was going to happen nearly 60 years early, Harrison calmly drew his cavalry sword and said the meeting was over and future discussions would take place through intermediaries. Well, of course, tempers eventually cooled. Tecumseh apologized in writing to Harrison, and discussions resumed the next day--but the talks would go nowhere. The pair would meet again in 1811 for another round of talks, but the last time they met? Tippecanoe. Yup, Harrison and Tecumseh’s final meeting was in battle. To prepare for the Indian uprising, the former Army Captain began training more than a thousand volunteers and regulars. Despite the fact that he wasn’t in the military, President James Madison issued him orders to march north through the Wabash River Valley and meet with the Native Americans to try and reach a peaceful solution to the standoff...and if not?  Not a joke. Harrison was ordered to destroy Tecumseh’s tribal confederation if no peace deal could be reached. Anyway, when he reached the Indians’ encampment along the Tippecanoe River, Tecumseh was away meeting with other tribal leaders, but his brother, the Prophet, reached an armistice with Harrison in his place. The armistice lasted less than 24 hours. See, Tecumseh’s brother was not a tenth of the man he was. Also, he was...kinda dumb. See, he claimed he’d had a vision from the Great Spirit that the white men’s bullets would not harm his people--so their attack would be a great victory. And attack they did, at dawn the next day. Harrison’s men were still in camp. As you probably know, the white men’s bullets DID, in fact, harm the Indians. Badly. Though confusion reigned in the initial ferocity of the Indians’ assault, Harrison’s officers pulled their men together, and they pushed the Indians out of their camp. The next day, Harrison took his men on the offensive. They destroyed the camp at Prophetstown, killing hundreds of the Prophet’s men, and the victory at Tippecanoe proved a deathblow to Tecumseh’s confederacy. Fun fact: Harrison almost died! A bullet went through his hat and another grazed his skull during the battle. Nevertheless, the men made a hero out of their captain--and Harrison picked up the nickname that would follow him the rest of his life: “Old Tippecanoe”. The War of 1812  At this point you might be asking, “Well, what became of Tecumseh? He wasn’t at Tippecanoe!” Sit tight and I’ll explain. Well, of course, when you kick the crap out of a bunch of Indians like Harrison did, you make a lot of friends in the political class. Unfortunately, for every one that actually respects you, there are ten who want to use you for political gain. Harrison had made himself one very influential friend back in Washington.  You all know him, of course. Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay was early in his political career at this point, but his eloquence and competence had earned him a large following among his colleagues in Congress. If you all remember your American history, you recall what else was going on in 1812: the United States was declaring war on Great Britain. We could, at this stage, launch into a long treatise on the causes for such an event, but that would probably quintuple the size of this post. Anyway, Clay obtained for Harrison a commission as a brigadier general in the Army, in recognition of his actions on behalf of the Northwest Territory and his heroism at Tippecanoe. “No military man in the U. States combines more general confidence in the West,” Clay wrote to Secretary of State James Monroe. “I hope the President will find it proper to bestow upon him one of the Brigadier’s appointments lately authorized.” Harrison certainly earned his appointment. After the Americans defeated the British on Lake Erie, Harrison marched north against a combined British-Indian army with none other than his old nemesis Tecumseh in charge of the Indians. In what would eventually become known as the Battle of the Thames (it took place along the Thames River in Canada), Harrison came in with a distinct numerical advantage--3,500 regulars against only 800 British troops who had begun a retreat by the time he’d gotten there. The British were supplemented by another 500 Indians led by Tecumseh, and they fought on even after the British fled, mostly to give their women and children time to flee. The reason we talk about this battle, of course, is that during it, Tecumseh was killed. With his death went any hope of a true confederation of Native American tribes that could resist westward expansion into their lands. Who killed him is still a mystery--we know it was not Harrison, as he wasn’t anywhere near the site of the chief’s death. Historians contend that it could have been Colonel (and future Vice President) Richard Mentor Johnson, who had been severely wounded in hand-to-hand combat with an especially skilled assailant during the battle. Johnson never claimed credit for killing Tecumseh, but he would receive much of the credit nonetheless--and that fame was what propelled him into the Vice Presidency over 25 years later. In the aftermath of the battle, soldiers found a badly mutilated body that they thought might be Tecumseh’s--but Harrison refused to let British prisoners attempt to identify it. Doesn’t take a genius to realize why--he wanted the propaganda victory. Even as Harrison gained more and more fame, he gained a rather powerful enemy.  John Armstrong had been named the new Secretary of War, and he had, shall we say, creative differences with William Henry Harrison’s prosecution of the war. Ironic, considering that Armstrong would be forced to resign a year later due to his insanely stupid conviction that the British would never attack Washington D.C.. Anyway, Armstrong tried to force Harrison out of the top ranks of the army to make room for his own friends and political appointees. To add to Harrison’s woes, his father-in-law had just died--and left him in charge of the estate. This turned out to be a problem, as Judge Symmes owned huge swathes of land out West--most of which was either poorly or incorrectly surveyed. Trust me, this was a much bigger problem in 1814 than it would be today. Pissed off at his superiors in the military and beset with personal issues, Harrison threw his hands up in disgust and submitted a letter of resignation to President Madison--which was intercepted by Secretary Armstrong. Armstrong tried to accept his resignation on Madison’s behalf--but Madison discovered Armstrong’s ruse, “politely asked” him to resign, then begged Harrison to accept a different commission long enough to negotiate the peace treaties with the Indians in the West. It wasn’t a generalship, but Harrison accepted it, discharged the treaties, then returned home to his farm near Cincinnati. It appeared, at long last, that Harrison finally found peace. He wrote to a friend, “I am settled here. I believe for life--with as good a prospect of happiness as any person can have.” He had a wife and a very large family--his ninth child was born when he was 41, and the family had also adopted the daughter of a friend of his that had been killed at Tippecanoe. The farmhouse? It was the original log cabin Harrison had built at the beginning of his and Anna’s marriage--but now it had been expanded and modified into a sixteen-room clapboard house on a 3,000 acre farm. From here, Harrison routinely held court. One minister who routinely stayed with the family wrote, “The table was loaded with abundance and with substantial good cheer, especially the different kinds of game.” Just When I Think I’m Out… His time as the governor of the Northwest Territory, however, had planted a very fertile seed. Harrison enjoyed politics too much to stay out of the game, and as much as he enjoyed his life at Grouseland, it was too far from the hustle and bustle he loved. With that in mind, he ran for and won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1816. From there, his political career followed a bizarre sine wave of success and failure--he spent only a single term in Congress, mostly because his financial situation at home was so dire he had to return to Ohio. So, he got himself elected to the Ohio Senate in 1819. After failing to get reelected, he returned to his farm again for four more years--but in 1825, Ohio sent him to the United States Senate. It was in the Senate that we finally start to get an idea of what Harrison believes: he supported more federal funding for infrastructure, in particular a project that extended the Cumberland Road westward through the Appalachian Mountains into the mostly-unsettled-West. In the fall of 1827, Harrison also came out in favor of then-President John Quincy Adams’ protective tariffs, and he supported Adams’ reelection in 1828. Harrison was very much ahead of his time in several ways--he supported an activist federal government that was committed to promoting business interests and economic expansion. Very reminiscent of the old Federalists in a lot of ways. Just as John Quincy Adams was about to get creamed for reelection by Andrew Jackson, however, Henry Clay cut Harrison’s Senate term short when he recommended Harrison for appointment to the Minister to Colombia position. Harrison accepted, mostly because the job came with a $9,000/year salary and he needed the money. At this point, Harrison had his eye on the White House--and he viewed the ministership as a stepping stone on the way there. Originally, he’d hoped to bootstrap his success out West into the 2nd spot on the ticket with Adams in 1828. Henry Clay, however, wanted it as well--and getting Harrison out of the country served that aim quite well. Neither man got what they wanted--Adams chose Richard Rush, son of Founding Father Benjamin Rush (I guess Adams was going for symmetry), and got creamed in the fall of 1828. Colombia in 1828 included the present-day countries of Venezuela and Ecuador and was ruled by this man. Ruled by revolutionary hero Simon Bolivar, it made for a decent diplomatic post. Harrison made friends fast among Bolivar’s circle, although their attitudes were a little patronizing--the Colombian Foreign Minister called him “a simple and good man...more of a country man than a diplomat.” Harrison didn’t last long in Colombia--he was there a little more than a year before President Andrew Jackson recalled him. Harrison left Colombia with little more than a working knowledge of Spanish. poo poo kinda spiraled from there. His son, John Cleves, died of typhoid fever not long after Harrison returned to Ohio, leaving Harrison with a widow and six children to feed. The farm could not support seventeen inhabitants, so Harrison took a job as clerk of the county courts in Cincinnati. It kept the financial wolf from the door, but Harrison was in his sixties by this point. His political career appeared to be over. As Governor Pat Brown once said, he was as dead as Kelsey’s nuts. The Presidential Election of 1836 (And the Convention of 1840) We’re gonna switch it up for a bit and talk about two elections at the same time! Isn’t that lovely? During the 1820s, the way we elected a President changed quite a bit. Not only did we start actually counting the popular vote, but instead of the guy who placed second becoming Vice President, candidates started selecting running mates and voters would cast their ballots for a President/Vice President ticket instead. Presidential elections were now in the hands of the people. The straight, adult, male, white people anyway. It did mark a significant change in how general elections were conducted, however. No longer could power brokers sway the outcome of an election; candidates now had to convince millions of voters spread across nearly 20 states. The newly-formed Democratic Party and their champion, Andrew Jackson, had used this to great effect in 1828 when they galloped to victory over President John Quincy Adams. Jackson needs no introduction. I haven’t done a biography on him yet, true--but he has come up numerous times in other biographies and we’re all familiar with the nature of the man. He served two terms in office--from 1829 to 1837--and his new party, the Democrats, was in turn opposed by the formation of another new party, the Whigs. The Whigs were a diverse coalition, and their problem was mostly that the glue holding them together was their dislike of Jackson and his policies. Some Whigs were old-timey Federalists--they were in favor of federally-subsidized internal improvements, high tariffs, and a national bank. Others, such as Virginia’s John Tyler, had walked backwards into the alliance out of a dislike for Jackson--and their strong support of what they called “states’ rights” led them to oppose Jackson when he all but declared war on South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. In 1836, the Whigs were set to take the Presidency back, and to do so, they were gonna have to beat this guy.  Martin Van Buren had one HECK of a political resume. The New York native had been the state’s Attorney General, its governor, a United States Senator, the Minister to Great Britain, and eventually Jackson’s new Vice President in 1832 when former Vice President and Nullification Crisis agitator John C. Calhoun was edged off the ticket. The “Little Magician”, as he was known, was poised to coast to the Presidency on the backs of Jackson’s endorsement and still-enduring popularity. To beat him, the Whigs devised a plan that would sponsor four different regional candidates on the ballot. The idea was that no one would win an electoral college majority--and the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where they would be able to win courtesy of a few backroom deals. Ugh. It sounds so much more scummy when I write it out like that. Anyway, let’s meet the contestants in this Lottery of Failure.  Hugh Lawson White had succeeded Andrew Jackson in the U.S. Senate from Tennessee. He’d held a number of state positions prior to that, including Chief Justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court. White was a former supporter of Jackson’s, but he’d left the Democrats over the Nullification Crisis.  Everyone’s favorite firebrand! Massachusetts’ Daniel Webster had represented, at some point, both New Hampshire AND its neighbor to the south in Congress, believe it or not. He’d actually supported Jackson’s actions during the Nullification Crisis, but had broken with him early on over the Bank of the United States--Webster had actually represented the Bank in court.  Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina was a first-term senator from the state, and he’d actually been one of the Whig Party’s founding members--despite being elected as a Democrat from North Carolina. His opposition to Jackson was pretty broad--on tariffs, on the bank, and on nullification, so Mangum’s appearance here actually makes the most sense.  And last but most certainly not least, the reason we get to talk about all this! William Henry Harrison was the fourth candidate the Whigs put forth. In 1836, Harrison was already an old man--he was in his mid-sixties and a mere county clerk in Cincinnati--but his appeal in the West, combined with the friends he’d made in the East, made him the ideal compromise candidate if the Whigs’ plan worked. <extremely Ron Howard voice> Their plan didn’t work. Martin Van Buren won the election of 1836, of course, but it did not escape the Whigs’ notice that Harrison had won over 70 electoral votes--highest total of all their candidates. Van Buren was, unfortunately, snakebitten from the time he entered office. In true Ronald Reagan fashion, Andrew Jackson had mucked up the works and left someone else to take the blame--and unfortunately, that someone turned out to be his successor and closest ally. The economic panic of 1837 began almost immediately after Van Buren took the oath of office--and it was only worsened by a corresponding downturn in the British economy. This caused a drop in the price of American cotton--the backbone of the South’s economy--which, in turn, caused a cut in British financial interests in the United States. British banks began to refuse to extend loans in the United States, and calling the debts early caused further cascading effects on the American economy. Plus, in 1836, the wheat crop in America had failed--which meant we had less to export and offset the drain. Creditors began to seek foreclosures, and people stopped spending money. State governments curtailed their plans for public works--roads, bridges and canals were allowed to fall into disrepair, and Jackson’s abolition of the Second Bank of the United States had allowed the brunt of the country’s financial burden to fall onto the backs of less-stable state banks. Those banks proceeded to fail--causing $9 million of the government’s money to evaporate. Yikes. By the fall of 1837, the unemployment rate had soared to nearly 30%, and those lucky enough to actually have jobs had suffered severe wage cuts. To his credit, Van Buren tried--he reestablished an independent banking system that would control federal funds in the hopes of reviving America’s financial system--but it was too little too late. Van Buren’s troubles, of course, did not go unnoticed by the Whigs, who scented an opportunity for redemption in 1840. Now-Senator Henry Clay expected to win the nomination, of course, writing a friend, “Our cause everywhere is making sure and certain progress, my particular cause could hardly be improved.” Clay did not know, however, that his fellow Whigs were not as bullish on his prospects as he was. Clay had a lot of baggage that troubled his fellow party leaders--for one thing, the North was repulsed by the fact that he was a slaveowner. His call for a new national bank had earned him some powerful enemies among the borderline Whigs, and the fact that he’d lost in 1832 had done nothing to polish his reputation. Still, Whigs thought that they could win the Presidency on the backs of one of their statesmen--either Clay or Webster. Problem was that the Whigs’ diversity was also one of their greatest handicaps--both Clay and Webster alienated sizable contingents of the party. As such, the aforementioned national convention would be needed to decide on a nominee. So, in December of 1839, the first Whig national convention was gaveled to order in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Despite his issues, Henry Clay still was the favorite. He commanded the support of nearly the entire South, and a number of border states. Had Webster remained his only opponent, he might have been the nominee in the end--but Webster, realizing that he wasn’t going to get much support outside New England, had dropped out a few months earlier...and endorsed his friend, William Henry Harrison. Yes, Harrison never stopped running, really, after 1836. Ohio’s party leaders had endorsed him as early as 1837, in fact. There was no denying that he was the West’s prodigal son--and the friends he’d made back east definitely helped. Harrison also got a boost from the convention rules--each state was allocated two delegates for each member of the House of Representatives, and four more for its two Senators. However, four Southern states didn’t show up--which hurt Clay more than any of the other contenders. The convention also ruled that a state’s delegation would be cast in favor of a majority vote of the state’s delegates--so, for example, Clay’s sizable minority in New York would be undercut if a majority got behind another candidate. As it turns out, that’s exactly what happens. New York political boss Thurlow Weed had decided early on that Clay was unacceptable--he was a slaveholder, after all, and the New York delegation early on declared itself for General Winfield Scott. Scott had followed a career trajectory similar to Harrison’s, only he’d spent much more time in the military--he’d been promoted to general in the War of 1812 and spent much of the 1820s and 30s fighting wars against the Indians in the South, including the Second Seminole War and the Creek War of 1836. The first four ballots were deadlocked. Clay led, but he didn’t have anything near a majority--and then the dam broke. Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens, a Harrison supporter, “accidentally” dropped a letter on the floor while walking among the Virginia delegation (which was pro-Clay at the time) wherein Winfield Scott expressed sympathy for abolitionists. Well, that dog won’t hunt, monsignor. The Virginia delegation, perhaps the largest Southern delegation, immediately declared that Harrison was their second choice, not Clay. It gave Harrison the appeal he needed--with Virginia as their cover, the Southern delegations stampeded to Harrison’s banner, and along with the West, it was enough to make William Henry Harrison the nominee of the Whig Party on the fifth ballot. His vice president, I’m sure you all know. Hell, I did the bio on him already.  John Tyler was one of those borderline Whigs I mentioned--out of opposition mainly to Jackson’s actions during the Nullification Crisis, he’d backed into the Whig alliance--and he’d been a supporter of Clay’s at the convention. Tyler was a native Virginian, but Virginia did not cast its ballots for him when the Vice Presidential nominee was chosen. Embarrassing. The rest of the convention became an exercise in kissing Henry Clay’s rear end. Speeches were given in tribute to the Kentucky senator, and attendees roared with approval when a letter from Clay was read aloud from the podium (none of the candidates themselves actually attended the convention). Clay was, mercifully, magnanimous in defeat publicly, though he was heard to say in private the day after the convention closed, “My political friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them.” Douche-chill. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Apr 1, 2020 |
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Mar 31, 2020 20:13
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The Greatest Campaign in the History of Basic Cable Buckle up, guys, cause this campaign got lit. I timg’d this cartoon because it really is worth seeing at its original size. Look at it. It’s a thing of beauty. After Harrison accepted his letter in late December 1839, he became the oldest man to ever win a major party Presidential nomination--he was 66 years old and would be 67 by the time the actual 1840 election rolled around. He did pledge to serve only one term in office, but he was intentionally vague about everything else, asserting that his career and past actions made stating his positions unnecessary. Just once I’d love to see a modern politician try to get away with this. Wouldn’t you? There was no Whig party platform--in addition to the party being insanely diverse in terms of political views, the Whigs knew that if they didn’t leave Harrisburg united they’d be in trouble and a platform fight would not serve that end. Democrats were unimpressed by Harrison. Their papers called him “General Granny” and “Granny Harrison”. The New York Herald said, “Mrs. Harrison of Ohio is undoubtedly a very excellent matron for her time, but if we must take a woman president, let’s have youth and beauty, not age and imbecility.” Other papers dubbed him “General Mum” for not stating his positions on the issues. But ultimately it was Democrats who dug their own graves that year. Not because of the economy, of course, but because of a criticism they made that came back to bite them in the rear end. John de Ziska, Washington correspondent for the Baltimore Republican, said sneeringly that the best way to get rid of Harrison was “Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of a sea coal fire and study moral philosophy.” Other Democratic papers quickly picked up on the “hard cider” gibe. It was, of course, errant nonsense. Harrison had grown up in privilege--he was born and raised in a plantation manor house, and he had not lived in a log cabin for decades--the original log cabin on Grouseland was now a massive farmhouse. Nevertheless, the Democrats’ miscalculation was the Whigs’ salvation. The “log cabin” idea was a jab at what many Americans viewed as their national heritage--though not all of them lived in log cabins now, many had earlier in life, or knew people who did. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat who had toured America in the 1830s, chronicled it as the pioneer’s first dwelling. The Whigs decided to take the log cabin and hard cider and run with it. In his account of the 1840 election, historian Robert Gray Gunderson described that within a month of Harrison accepting the nomination, “cabins, raccoons, and cider became symbols of resurgent Whiggery.” Indeed, by the time the Ohio Whigs met for their state convention in February 1840, tens of thousands of delegates and spectators filled the streets as a mile-long parade featured log cabins on wheels, with their builders drinking mugs of hard cider on the roofs. There were giant wooden canoes with Harrison’s face on them (a pun on “Old Tippecanoe”). Many of those who came to Columbus were dressed as pioneers, in buckskins with coonskin caps on their heads. Jesus Christ, how ridiculous.  There was even a song written, called “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”. Harrison supporter Alexander Coffman Ross wrote new lyrics to an old minstrel song called “Little Pigs”, and the song instantly became a huge hit among Harrison’s supporters. If you want to hear a grossly-overqualified vocalist sing it, here’s a recording. “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” would, according to many historians, become the first real slogan used in Presidential campaigning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tip_and_Ty_again.ogg (I couldn't get it to embed properly. Anyone wanna help?) Democrats were left back-footed. Van Buren’s campaign manager, former Postmaster General Amos Kendall, decided that Democrats were not going to try and affirmatively defend Van Buren--but rather just attack Harrison. It was hard, however, to pierce the shell of “log cabins and hard cider”, and the Whigs didn’t just build Harrison up--they tore Van Buren down. Nicknaming him “Martin Van Ruin”, they cast him as the architect of the Panic of 1837. Charles Ogle, a Pennsylvania Congressman and Harrison supporter, used a debate on White House renovations in Congress to spend three days lambasting Van Buren for “living in luxury at considerable public expense”. quote:If he is vain enough to spend his money in the purchase of rubies for his neck, diamond rings for his fingers, Brussels lace for his breast, filet gloves for his hands, and fabrique de broderies de bougram a Nancy handkerchiefs for his pockets--if he chooses to lay out hundreds of dollars in supplying his toilet with ‘Double Extract of Queen Victoria’, Eau de Cologne, Corinthian Oil of Cream...if, I say, Mr. Van Buren sees fit to spend his cash in buying these and other perfumes and cosmetics for his toilet, it can constitute no valid reason for charging the farmers, laborers and mechanics of this country with bills for HEMMING HIS DISH RAGS, FOR HIS LARDING NEEDLES, LIQUOR STANDS, AND FOREIGN CUT WINE COOLERS. Seriously...what? Of course it was bullshit. Van Buren had never bought any of these things. The White House hadn’t even appropriated a tenth of what it would cost to buy this poo poo. Indeed, his upbringing in Kinderhook, New York, had been considerably more humble than Harrison’s. Democrats dubbed Ogle’s speech the “Omnibus of Lies”, but Whigs called it the “Gold Spoons Speech” and reprinted it thousands of times for consumption by voters. It gave rise to this cartoon:  If you can’t read the text, on the left, Van Buren is smiling because he’s holding a goblet of champagne, but grimacing at an “ugly mug of hard cider” on the right. It was hamfisted, stupid, and patently untrue, but it worked. On the backs of misinformation, slogans, and a candidate who steadfastly refused to open his mouth, the Whigs destroyed Van Buren in 1840.  Van Buren didn’t even win his home state of New York. How embarrassing. The Long, Storied, and Consequential Presidency of William Henry Harrison  See, it’s funny because it’s not true. Throughout the campaign, Harrison’s health was raised as an issue by his opponents. His advanced age, as we’ve already seen, led Democrats to cast him as a decrepit old man, though the Whigs continued to insist his health was robust. There was no real way to tell, as candidates did not do personal appearances by-and-large in those days--but Harrison had broken the mold a little. He’d given 24 different speeches between June and October. All of them were in Ohio and all had lasted nearly 3 hours--and the fact that Van Buren had given no addresses, as far as the public was concerned, just put the lie to the charge that Harrison was a sick man. After Harrison won the election, his house in Ohio was besieged by office-seekers. Now that the Whigs were in power, every fucko and their uncle wanted a goddamn job. Harrison hated it. He was even forced to put up with them at his dinner table, and Senator Henry Clay even managed to lasso Harrison for a visit at his home in Kentucky. Clay expected to run the government from the Senate, of course--he had no desire for a Harrison Cabinet post, but he gave Harrison several recommendations for positions, with the understanding that Harrison would follow those recommendations. Of course, being the first Whig President meant that Harrison wasn’t going to be able to fill federal jobs from Ohio--so he had to travel to Washington in mid-January, nearly two months before his March 4 inauguration date. His progress was very slow and very public...and he got very little rest along the way. Even Whigs who weren’t seeking government jobs wanted to see and meet Harrison. Often, his hotel was surrounded nearly all day and all night. He finally reached Washington on February 9, his 68th birthday. The gibes about his health, of course, had bothered Harrison. He was a man of the frontier and a war hero, goddamnit, and he was going to prove to everyone that he was healthy as a horse. He allowed Secretary of State Daniel Webster to edit his inauguration speech...but it still spanned an hour and 45 minutes--the longest inaugural address in history. Yes, yes, I know.  It was a chilly, rainy March day when Harrison took the oath, and after parading down 1600 Pennsylvania on the back of his old warhorse “Whitey,” he stood out there in the rain with no overcoat or hat as he spoke. There was no relief from the office-seekers even after the -elect dropped off his title, and relations with Henry Clay broke down so badly that Harrison ended up banning him from the White House. Despite the office-seekers, Harrison enjoyed a walk to the market each morning--but on March 24, he got caught in a terrible rainstorm and came down with what most historians agree started as a bad cold. Combined with his fatigue and the primitive treatment that he received from his doctors--they bled him and treated him with things like opium and camphor, Jesus loving Christ--Harrison quickly deteriorated. He missed his wife’s calming presence, and the stress of the job and the press of all the office seekers had finally gotten to be too much. On April 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison died. His last words were, “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.” Harrison’s death, of course, meant that Article II, Section I, Clause 6 of the Constitution was invoked for the first time--and it would be left up to now-President John Tyler to set a precedent that has held for nearly 180 years. Anna Harrison was preparing to leave North Bend for Washington when she received news of her husband’s death. Staying in North Bend with her grieving family, she prepared what would eventually be Harrison’s final resting place--the family plot near Anna’s father. Harrison’s remains were initially interred, however, in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington. William Henry Harrison was very much a man defined not by his life, but by his death. It forced us, in many ways, to grow as a nation--to “stress test” the Constitution to ensure it could hold up to an event such as this. I think his death was a teachable moment for us. Say, for example, that the first death of a President had not come in 1840 but rather when Lincoln was killed in 1865. What, then, would we have been up against? ___ Well, I thought it would all fit in one post, but 1½ is just as good, right? Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
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Mar 31, 2020 20:16
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Thank you so much, Fritz! I'd heard that Harrison's death was now believed to be caused by septic exposure in the white house plumbing, rather than exposure to weather. Any thoughts on that?
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Apr 1, 2020 06:35
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Discendo Vox posted:Thank you so much, Fritz! I'd heard that Harrison's death was now believed to be caused by septic exposure in the white house plumbing, rather than exposure to weather. Any thoughts on that? Never heard that theory. There isn't a whole lot of authoritative literature on the man, so it's hard to tell. Most historians agree that it was a combination of a bad cold that turned into pneumonia + his doctors being quacks + advanced age.
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Apr 1, 2020 15:27
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