The war had produced a wave of unifying patriotic feeling. It greatly furthered reconciliation between the North and the South; two major generals, for example, were Confederate veterans. But victory raised new divisive questions. An important minority objected strongly to the U. S. acquisition of overseas possessions. Those opposed to annexing the Philippines included such diverse persons as the tycoon Andrew Carnegie and the labor leader Samuel Gompers, the venerable Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts and the southern Democratic firebrand “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, writers Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the reformers Lincoln Steffens and Jane Addams, and the educators Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and David Starr Jordan of Stanford.
The anti-imperialists insisted that since no one would consider statehood for the Philippines, it would be unconstitutional to annex them. It was a violation of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence to govern a foreign territory without the consent of its inhabitants, Senator Hoar argued; by taking over “vassal states” in “barbarous archipelagoes” the United States was “trampling. . . on our own great Charter, which recognizes alike the liberty and the dignity of individual manhood.”
McKinley was not insensitive to this appeal to idealism and tradition, which was the fundamental element in the anti-imperialist argument. But he rejected it for several reasons.
Public opinion would not sanction restoring Spanish authority in the Philippines or allowing some other power to have them. That the Filipinos were sufficiently advanced and united socially to form a stable government if granted independence seemed unlikely. Senator Hoar believed that “for years and for generations, and perhaps for centuries, there would have been turbulence, disorder and revolution” in the islands if they were left to their own devices.
Strangely—for he was a kind and gentle man— Hoar faced this possibility with equanimity. McKinley was unable to do so. The president searched the depths of his soul and could find no solution but annexation. Of course the state of public feeling made the decision easier, and he probably found the idea of presiding over an empire appealing. Certainly the commercial possibilities did not escape him. In the end it was with a heavy sense of responsibility that he ordered the American peace commissioners to insist on acquiring the Philippines. To salve the feelings of the Spanish the United States agreed to pay $20 million for the archipelago, but it was a forced sale, accepted by Spain under duress.
The peace treaty faced a hard battle in the U. S. Senate, where a combination of partisan politics and anticolonialism made it difficult to amass the two-thirds majority necessary for ratification. McKinley had shrewdly appointed three senators, including one Democrat, to the peace commission. This predisposed many members of the upper house to approve the treaty, but the vote was close. William Jennings Bryan, titular head of the Democratic party, could probably have prevented ratification had he urged his supporters to vote nay. Although he was opposed to taking the Philippines, he did not do so. To reject the treaty would leave the United States technically at war with Spain and the fate of the Philippines undetermined; better to accept the islands and then grant them independence. The question should be decided, Bryan said, “not by a minority of the Senate but by a majority of the people” at the next presidential election. Perplexed by Bryan’s stand, a number of Democrats allowed themselves to be persuaded by the expansionists’ arguments and by McKinley’s judicious use of patronage; the treaty was ratified in February 1899 by a vote of fifty-seven to twenty-seven.
World History
