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The Reluctant Start of the War of 1898


From the series Political battles and political cultures in the United States


In 1898, the United States went to war with the Spanish Empire over the question of Cuba, but soon found itself ruling the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico. A reluctant entry into the war against Spain led American imperialism, emerging from a century of vast, heterogeneous, and turbulent capitalist development, to the naval “baptism of fire” of its first war in Asia. Some representatives of “expansionism” espoused the new tendency, and their critics nicknamed them jingoes, after the term used for English nationalists. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann in First Great Triumph [2002] portrays expansionists as those whose writing or action, and often both, “made their country a world power”.

Admiral A. T. Mahan considered himself a “thinker”; his books set the framework for the debate between the military and publicists. The agnostic and bigoted Henry Cabot Lodge was the maneuverer who favoured a “big policy” in the Senate. Also thanks to him, the energetic Theodore Roosevelt became Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the presidency of William McKinley [1897-1901]. The sceptic John Hay, a well-married diplomat and man of letters, and Elihu Root, a business lawyer appointed as Secretary of War and a colonial administrator, were both secretaries of State who first served McKinley’s cautious policy and then that of Roosevelt, who was in the White House from 1901.

The historical theses on war

According to Zimmermann, the 1898 war was the first in which US interests merged with humanitarian sympathies for Cuba. These sympathies were aroused by the media, and Roosevelt’s role was decisive in urging McKinley to declare war on Spain in April 1898. However, according to John Offner, professor emeritus at Shippensburg University (Pennsylvania), it was an “unwanted” war: a few months before the midterm elections, “Republicans waged war to maintain control in Washington”; “investment, sensationalist press and national security were much less important” [John Offner, An Unwanted War, 1992].

Lewis Gould, a historian at the University of Texas researching the history of the GOP and the Senate, appreciates Offner’s reconstruction but denies its conclusions. The “international changes” played a role, since the administration was also interested in Asia, where the European powers were operating. McKinley started the war when Madrid failed to pacify Cuba, and his presidency marked the dawn of the “imperial executives” Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, 1980). In Imperial Democracy [1961], international relations historian Ernest R. May concludes that, “regardless of the credit or blame” that McKinley deserves for the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines, “the executive and not Congress had become the source of foreign policy decision”.

The political struggle of 1898 remains a defining battle in the dialectic between economic interests and their political expressions in US State powers. Its main contributing factors were: the key men and areas represented in the Senate, the newspapers with their political editorial campaigns, and the psychologies and political cultures of the Old and New World that they grasped and interpreted.

The Cuban uprising

The Cuban uprising against Madrid had begun in 1895. The shelling of US merchant ship “Alliance” by Spanish troops marked the first in a series of incidents that brought the Cuban question to diplomatic offices. Thousands of Americans were tied to Cuba: they were immigrants, coasting traders, nationalists, and smugglers, but also important businessmen with vast sugar estates. Ethnic lobbies, military interests, and ideals were inevitably combined and confused. The Cuban intellectual José Martí was for years editor of The Sun, one of the main newspapers in New York, a metropolis where a junta informally represented the insurgents. While other Cuban leaders favoured a US intervention against Spain, Marti asked: “Once the Americans are in Cuba, who will get them out?".

Cuban interests, although important for some States, constituted only a fraction of the Union’s trade. Secretary of State Richard Olney found the Cuban business community divided: the prominent sugar entrepreneur Edwin Atkins favoured Madrid, judging the insurgents incapable of governing themselves. Others were of the opposite opinion, since the best Cuban families were represented among the revolutionaries. The Democratic presidency of Grover Cleveland [1893-1897], firm in its resolve not to engage the country in foreign adventures, believed in a negotiated solution and adopted Atkins’ cautious point of view, in part because of racial and class prejudice [Richard Welch Jr., The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland, 1988).

Madrid refused any US interference. However, in those months a new front opened in its centuries-old empire: the Philippines, which rose up in January 1896.

Cleveland and McKinley

Cleveland wrote to Olney that sending a warship to Cuba would not be a “prudent measure”. Allan Nevins titles his biography Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage [1932], because Cleveland persisted in negotiations with Spain. The historian Offner, on the other hand, sees the hint of an ultimatum in the presidential message of 1896 claiming: “events [...] put a limit on our patience”. When Cleveland met with his successor McKinley in the White House, he predicted that war would occur within two years. McKinley replied that he would be happy to avoid it with the same success that had rewarded his predecessor’s patience.

McKinley was a pious Methodist, a Civil War veteran and a consummate Republican from the Midwest. His ties with big business, a major funder of the GOP, were personified by his sponsor Marcus Hanna, a coal businessman whom he helped to become a senator of Ohio. In his long political career, reconstructed by H. Wayne Morgan William McKinley and his America, 1963), McKinley developed protectionist views in economics, giving his name to the Tariff Act of 1890. The electoral meetings of 1896 made clear to him that big businessmen did not want to be disturbed by a war, and he was worried about inheriting one from the Democrats. On the other hand, he welcomed the public’s sympathy for Cubans in the GOP’s electoral platform.

The sinking of the “Maine”

In February 1898, two incidents removed the problem of Cuba from the desks of diplomats and brought it to the attention of the public with the help of William Hearst, editor of the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Journal, who had been calling for intervention for months. A letter from the Spanish ambassador Enrique Dupuy de Lome, leaked to the Journal, denounced the relations between Washington and Madrid and ridiculed the negotiations for Cuban autonomy. The columns of American newspapers were set ablaze by the letter’s description of McKinley: a “weakling” who “seeks the admiration of the crowd”, “an aspiring politician who tries to leave the door open” both for peace and for the “jingoes of his party”. This astonishing incident was quickly resolved through diplomatic channels but it strengthened anti-Spanish sentiment. The following week the warship Maine, sent by McKinley to protect American property, sank in Havana.

According to the classic American explanation of Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins America. The Story of a Free People, 1942), “American citizens in Cuba suffered losses of property, liberty, and even life”, but above all they were moved by the “brutality” suffered by Cuba. The US was inflamed by sensationalist newspapers to the point of demanding intervention: McKinley, out of political calculation, did not oppose it. Other historians, from the school of William A. Williams at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, attribute the war to business pressures. In The New Empire [1963], Walter LaFeber documents the decades-long search for new markets amid business associations’ fears of “overproduction”. Julius William Pratt, of the University of Buffalo (New York), writes that entrepreneurs adapted to the new Asian perspectives opened up by the war only after the fact [Expansionists of 1898, 1936]. Not even the newspapers were consistently a warmongering bloc; they changed their positions over time. In fact, there is a vast historiography on “1898” in which the various elements overlap.

The battle for centralisation

The brief Spanish-American War ended in August, when an armistice was signed by the French ambassador, as a proxy for Madrid. Meanwhile, McKinley had obtained Senate approval in July to annex Hawaii. On December 10th, with the Treaty of Paris, Madrid ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and renounced sovereignty over Cuba, which would be occupied indefinitely by the United States, although Washington ruled out its annexation.

McKinley, both when starting the war and when agreeing peace conditions, consulted with the other powers. However, in both cases, he found it more difficult to overcome the resistance of the US Congress than that of foreign countries. The international constellation of forces favoured Washington, while at home McKinley had to attempt every measure in order to obtain the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. This was an exhausting battle which involved, among other things, a bourgeois movement of opinion opposed to annexation, the “Anti-imperialist League” of Boston, to which we will return in a later article. Congress promoted the influence of the legislature in the conduct of foreign policy, but the powers of the presidency prevailed, overriding the interests and inclinations of the States and their representatives.

Lotta Comunista, February 2024

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