16 - The Spanish-American War
The Republocrats, Part 16: The Spanish-American War
By Vince Copeland
William McKinley had been in office barely a year when the Spanish-American War began. It resulted of course in all-out victory for the United States and the acquisition of an empire in less than four months of fighting. (That is, fighting Spain. The suppression of the Philippines required several years.)
When McKinley ran again in 1900, the Republicans claimed all the "credit" for the war and rode to victory on a wave of anti-foreign chauvinism and imperialist euphoria. The Democrats for the first and only time in their history hammered an anti-imperialist plank into their platform. However, it failed to define imperialism very clearly.
The Democratic newspapers, on the other hand, most notably the Hearst press and Pulitzer's World, were so vociferous in their support of the war at the time that the legend still persists it was all a newspaper plot.
Those who write popular inside stories about this war often explain it as coming from the intrigue of Democratic newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and the war-happy Republican Theodore Roosevelt.
Hearst, so the story goes, sent his chief photographer to Havana to get pictures of the war. The photographer cabled back that he couldn't find any war. Hearst replied: "You provide the pictures; I'll provide the war." Hearst's subsequent publicity about the war tends to convince us that the story of Hearst's conversation is true even if his power to actually start the war was not.
Roosevelt, in his more strategic position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, cabled Admiral Dewey in the Pacific fleet the moment he heard war was declared (possibly a few moments before it was declared) and ordered him to steam to Manila and engage the Spanish fleet.
The battle of Manila took place before any U.S. troops landed in Cuba, although the war was supposedly to help Cuba liberate itself from Spain.
'HOW DO YOU LIKE HEARST'S WAR?'
Hearst really did think he started the war. There is hardly any question about that. And his publicity was so wild and outrageous as to convince an unsuspecting public that it was its duty to save Cuba from Spain in a wholly idealistic and heroic effort of U.S. arms. He actually ran one headline for two days: "How do you like the Journal's war?"
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer W.A. Swanberg seems to agree with Hearst on his responsibility for the war. But in retrospect and with what we now know about U.S. and world developments, this is only superficially true.
In the first place, Admiral Dewey had been steaming up in Hong Kong for weeks, waiting for the signal to go to the Philippines. McKinley had briefed him some time earlier on what he was to do. Cleveland in handing over the reins to McKinley a year earlier had spoken about possible war with Spain.
More fundamentally, U.S. business had been penetrating South America and Mexico for 20 years and was looking hungrily at East Asia.
Swanberg does make a good case for Hearst's responsibility for the war, however. He shows how both Mark Hanna and Cleveland dragged their feet on getting into the war. And when the U.S. battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbor, Hearst accused McKinley of "treason" for not declaring war immediately.
Spain, of course, needed a war with the United States like it needed the proverbial hole in the head. It apologized all over the place for the incident and conducted investigations. No one has ever proved who set the bomb, if there was one, or found out what made the explosion.
ROLE OF THE PRESS
Not only Hearst but a majority of big newspapers demanded the war and pressured McKinley. But then the question arises: who and what did these newspapers represent?
When McKinley, after delivering an ultimatum to Spain, finally did ask Congress for a declaration of war, he knew that Spain had yielded to every one of the U.S. demands, but he withheld this news from Congress until later.
Ferdinand Lundberg summed up the factors responsible for the war as follows:
"... these facts are certain: Rockefeller's paid henchmen on the floor of Congress wanted the war; Hearst and Pulitzer demanded it; Roosevelt and Lodge forced it; McKinley and Hanna acquiesced in it; and the Rockefeller-Stillman National City Bank [now Citibank] benefited most directly from it, for Cuba, the Philippines, and indeed, all of Latin America soon afterward became dotted with National City branches, and the Cuban sugar industry gravitated into National City's hands. The most evil role was played by McKinley himself, for he withheld from Congress the knowledge that Spain at the last hour before war was declared had capitulated to every single American demand."("America's Sixty Families," p. 62)
But among the other big changes in North American life brought on by the war was a less perceptible one involving the independence of the U.S. government from its manipulators. The big political parties became more pliable on the crucial questions of war and peace. The press proved to be a key instrument in this change.
Where the war with Spain took four months, the war with the Philippine revolution took four years. Emilio Aguinaldo and his revolutionary followers had not asked for any U.S. help in their war with Spain. After the defeat of the Spanish fleet, U.S. land forces conducted a long Vietnam-type war against the people of the Philippines.
There were 385 U.S. soldiers reported killed in Cuba during the four-month war with Spain. But 9,000 were killed during the next four years in the Philippines--25 times as many.
Of course, the newspapers played down this war in the Pacific. However, there was sturdy opposition to it. An Anti-Imperialist League was formed with some very prominent people leading it, among them the great writer Mark Twain and the super-wealthy Andrew Carnegie. At this time the Democratic Party was opposed to the slaughter in the Philippines and took the position that the United States should not incorporate itself into an empire.
Idealism was the spur for some. But there was a real material reason why the smaller business people, especially those of the South, would be opposed to taking the Philippines into the U.S. trade area. A lot of light manufactured goods and agricultural products might come in duty-free and undersell domestic products--cotton, for instance.
So the Republicans taunted these Democrats for oppressing the Black people in the U.S. but not wanting to oppress the Brown people in the Philippines.
'THEY BELONG TO THE UNITED STATES'
The U.S. did not automatically take over the Philippines with the suppression of the revolution there. Because of the factionalism over free trade and the temporary but strong Democratic opposition, there had to be some Congressional action.
So at the end of 1899 the Senate resolved "that the Philippine Islands are territories belonging to the United States; that it is the intention of the United States to retain them as such, and to establish and maintain such government control throughout the archipelago as the situation may demand."
There are people, including even some historians, who believe that the U.S. stumbled into this imperialistic mode and point to the "independence" of the Philippines after 1947 to prove this. This independence, however, is purely political rather than economic, and the continued military occupation by U.S. forces belies any freedom of action.
In this same year--1898--Hawaii was annexed to the U.S. as a "possession" 2,400 miles from California. Like the Philippines, it was a profitable colony in its own right and commanded a highly strategic part of the Pacific Ocean for U.S. hegemony. It was only a year or two later that U.S. troops were putting down revolution in China. John Hay, McKinley's Secretary of State, was fashioning the "Open Door" policy to shut the door on Chinese independence while asserting the right of U.S. business to share at the vulturous feast in that country, along with Germany, Britain, Japan, czarist Russia, and other.
At the same time, the Caribbean was turned into a U.S. lake by the all but formal acquisition of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico, thus defying England and the other European merchant fleets as well as Spain.
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@mcimail.com".)
