Paolo E. Coletta

McKinley, the Peace Negotiations, and the Acquisition of the Philippines

THE STANDARD JOKE about McKinleys indecisiveness went like this: Why is McKinleys mind like a bed? Because it has to be made up for him every time he wants to use it. But the stereotyped image of McKinley as an unsure president of intellectual poverty and moral weakness does not fit his handling of the peace negotiations and the acquisition of the Philippines. As the popular president of a victorious nation he probably could have convinced the American people of the righteousness of peace terms that avoided expansion in the Far East. Instead he added to and led the expansionist clamor. Since he chose to acquire them, the responsibility remains his. The objectives of this paper are to ascertain the reasons that led McKinley to acquire the Philippines, to trace and evaluate his leadership with respect both to the peace negotiations and the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, and to assess the implications of the results upon American foreign policy. Just when the Philippines entered McKinleys consciousness is difficult to ascertain. They were not in his mind during the period of the coming of the war. His use of force against Spain in Cuba was prompted by humanitarian, commercial, and strategic considerations, and his refusal to annex that island, in keeping with the Teller Amendment, led many Americans and Filipinos to believe that similar self-denial would be practiced with respect to other Spanish possessions. His consequent demand for territory from Spain illustrates the endemic temptation to victorious nations to expand their demands beyond the stated objectives of a war. The United States was not prepared to be an empire: it had no office of colonial affairs, no body of trained colonial administrators. Furthermore, McKinleys taking of the Philippines was forcible annexation in direct violation of his earlier statements abjuring wars of

The Most Thankless Task: Bryan and the California Alien Land Legislation

SECRETARY OF STATE William Jennings Bryans first contact with a problem involving the Far East arose on March 5, 1913, when the Japanese ambassador, Viscount Sutemi Chinda, spoke with him about renewed Japanophobia on the west coast and forwarded copies of anti-Japanese bills being considered by the legislatures of California and Washington. Noting that there was no antiJapanese disturbance anywhere in the United States except on the west coast, where Japanese had congregated in numbers large enough to create what he believed was economically motivated unhappiness, Bryan wrote to President Woodrow Wilson that he could solve the problem by getting Japan to agree to the dispersion of the Japanese in this country so as to relieve the economic pressure which has aroused the protest. Wilson thought the plan would spread rather than eliminate the problem and wisely vetoed it.2 On March 11 Bryan took home for study a draft on the subject prepared by Robert Lansing, aide to Counselor John Bassett Moore.3 On March 23, at Wilsons request, he wrote to Governor Ernest Lister of Washington

Bryan, McKinley, and the Treaty of Paris

ONE OF THE COMMONPLACES Of history is that the intervention of William Jennings Bryan resulted in the ratification of the Treaty of Paris by the United States Senate. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that, while Bryan did influence a number of senators, approval of the treaty resulted less from his efforts than from an overpowering public demand for colonial expansion and from superb leadership by such Republican senators as Henry Cabot Lodge, Mark Hanna, and Nelson W. Aldrich, including the making of a number of deals by which opponents of the treaty were won to its support. A perusal of the metropolitan newspapers for 1898 and 1899 and of the literary, military, commercial, and religious press of those years reveals that editors and feature writers never tired of describing the glories of empire. Their concepts, embodied in phrases like manifest destiny, the logic of events, and the white mans burden, helped engender a public opinion overwhelmingly favorable to imperial fatalism. Although anti-imperialist leagues mushroomed in all major cities, particularly in New England, they proved powerless to stop the movement of a race that gave the United States a new sense of international importance and opened up a new era of history based on altruism and commercialism. Strangely for one who wished his heart to beat in unison with the political pulse of the people, William Jennings Bryan insisted upon countering the inevitable. As early as June, 1898, Bryan prayed that a war undertaken in the cause of humanity would not degenerate into one of conquest.2 Military lockjaw kept his ample mouth sealed during the war, but his cor-

Launching the Doolittle Raid on Japan, April 18, 1942

Japan from the military than the naval side. Without denigrating the contributions of the Army Air Corps, the objective of this paper is to show that naval officers determined the feasibility of using aircraft carriers to launch army bombers, briefed their crews on carrier operations, taught them and helped them to take off from their extremely limited deck space, and brought them within range of their target-and that the U.S. Navy was willing to risk half of its carrier fleet in the Pacific to accomplish the mission. In early May 1941 Capt. Marc A. Mitscher, a naval aviator since 1915, received orders to command the new 20,000-ton aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8), building at Newport News, Virginia. He went aboard to look about her in July, then took a months leave. On October 1, 1941, with four thousand spectators assembled, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox welcomed the Hornet into the fleet. Mitschers most important officers were George R. Henderson, his executive officer, a record-breaking seaplane and test pilot who had served in the Langley and Lexington and been with him on a pioneering patrol plane flight from San Diego to Hawaii in 1939. Apollo Sock em Soucek was his air officer; Frank Akers, a precise fussbudget, was his navigator; Stephen Jurika, who had spent years in the Philippines and Japan, his intelligence officer. Soucek had established a new altitude record in the 1930s and flown from the