California’s commanding economic role on the Pacific seaboard was matched by its strategic importance, especially in time of war. In the late nineteenth century San Francisco served as America’s primary staging area for all military operations in the Pacific. The importance of such operations in U. S. naval planning cannot be overstated. According to Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, the foremost American naval strategist of the time, during “the last quarter of the closing [nineteenth] century, the Pacific Ocean in general and eastern Asia in particular are indicated as the predominant objects of interest, common to all nations, both in the near and in the remote future.” California’s turn-of-the-century military importance can be understood only when viewed in this larger international maritime context.
The Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War (1898-1902), a compound of two closely related conflicts, resulted in the United States becoming an overseas empire and one of the
Foremost powers in the Pacific Basin. In the first war, lasting little more than three months in 1898, Yankee forces secured Cuba’s independence from Spain. Through the peace treaty later that year the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain, but the takeover led immediately to Filipino military resistance. The path to America’s victories in both wars ran through California, specifically San Francisco.
Shortly after the outbreak of war with Spain in April 1898, American Commodore George Dewey won a spectacular naval victory on May 1 over Spanish forces at Manila, in the Philippines. (His flagship Olympia had been built in San Francisco.) What had begun as a war in the Caribbean suddenly and dramatically now had a Pacific theater. San Francisco’s Presidio served as the West Coast’s troop-training center and point of embarkation for forces voyaging to Hawai’i (where needed coal would be loaded on steam-powered warships) en route to Manila. The mission of the troops was to reinforce Dewey’s position in the event that a new Spanish naval squadron should be sent to recapture the Philippines. As assurance against this remote possibility, some 80,000 men from Washington, Montana, Iowa, Wyoming, Kansas, Tennessee, and Utah shipped out from San Francisco harbor to the Philippines.
Echoing the views of many naval strategists and West Coast maritime shippers, contemporary historian Hubert Howe Bancroft exulted in the aftermath of Dewey’s Manila victory: “San Francisco Bay [would become the commercial] open door to all the world. . . . And as the [Pacific] ocean is the largest, its borders more extended and containing more natural wealth, its islands more numerous and opulent than those of any other sea or section, its ultimate destiny and development will be correspondingly great.” California’s commercial ties to the Pacific Basin became even more numerous and profitable after America staked out and secured its military position in the Philippines.
Securing that foothold near the coveted China market required America’s suppression of Filipino resistance. That resistance developed in February 1899, as soon as islanders learned that the United States had annexed their Philippine homeland. In the ensuing three-year imperial war to put down the native “insurrection,” troop ships crossing the Pacific departed from and returned to San Francisco. For example, the 9th and 10th U. S. Cavalry units, composed entirely of African American soldiers, voyaged to the Philippine battlefields from the Golden Gate port.
California’s role in these turn-of-the-century wars had three lasting results. First, the state’s major harbors and naval shipyards, like Mare Island in San Francisco Bay and the base established later at San Diego, kept California in the forefront of West Coast military planning. Second, the wars led to the completion in 1903 of the transpacific submarine cable connecting San Francisco to Manila via Hawai’i, Midway, and Guam. America now had streamlined communication with its new Pacific dependencies. Third, Filipino immigrants began coming to California in increasing numbers, often settling in port cities. In San Diego the first arrivals, beginning in 1903, were students enrolled at the State Normal School (now San Diego State University). Their fellow islanders, coming in the following decades, often worked in the canneries and fields. They were the children of a war they did not fight and part of the Pacific Rim immigrant labor force that helped build the Golden State’s twentieth-century economy.
World History
