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Bound for Goo-Goo Land

The euphoria that gripped Cubans in the last days of 1898 was almost beyond imagination. Their country had been racked by rebellion for thirty years, the last few filled with terrible suffering. That summer, as their uprising reached a crescendo, American troops had arrived to help them deliver the death blow that ended three centuries of Spanish rule. Now, with the victory finally won, Cuban patriots and their American comrades were preparing for the biggest party in the island's history.

Leaders of "revolutionary patriotic committees" in Havana planned a full week of festivities, to begin on New Year's Day. There would be grand balls, boat races, fireworks, public speeches, and a gala dinner in honor of the victorious rebel commanders. Thousands of Cuban sol- diers would march through the streets to receive the cheers of a grateful nation.

Just as the celebration was to begin, however, the newly named Amer- ican military governor of Cuba, General John Brooke, made a stunning announcement. He forbade the entire program. Not only would there be no parade of Cuban soldiers, but any who tried to enter Havana would be turned back. Furthermore, the general declared, the United States did not recognize the rebel army and wished it to disband.

This abrupt turnaround outraged Cuban patriots, especially the thou- sands who had fought so long and tenaciously for independence. The United States snatched their great prize, independence, away from them at the last moment. As years passed, they and their descendants would watch in mounting frustration as their new overlord used various means, including the imposition of tyrants, to keep control of Cuba.

Cubans were among the first people to feel the effect of the profound changes that reshaped the American psyche at the end of the nineteenth

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century. This was the moment when, with remarkable suddenness, Americans ceased to be satisfied with holding territory on the North American mainland. They became consumed with a grand new idea, that of a United States whose influence extended around the world. In the words of the historian Louis Perez, 1898 was "a watershed year, a moment in which outcomes were both defining and decisive, at once an end and a beginning: that special conjuncture of historical circumstances that often serves to delineate one historical epoch from another."

Territorial expansion was nothing new to Americans. They had been pushing westward ever since the first settlers arrived at Jamestown and Plymouth. In the process they appropriated a great continent, killing or displacing nearly all of its native inhabitants. During the 1840s, in their first burst of imperial war, they seized half of Mexico. Many came to believe that the United States had a "manifest destiny" to occupy and settle all the land bounded by Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The idea of going farther, though, was something quite new.

In the months after the 1893 revolution in Hawaii, that country's new leaders sought annexation to the United States, but President Grover Cleveland-who had succeeded Benjamin Harrison in March of that year-would not hear of it. He was quite right when he declared that most Americans rejected the seizure of faraway lands "as not only opposed to our national policy, but as a perversion of our national mis- sion." Five years later, this consensus evaporated. Almost overnight, it was replaced by a national clamor for overseas expansion. This was the quickest and most profound reversal of public opinion in the history of American foreign policy.

The foundation for this remarkable turnaround was laid by a handful of visionary writers and intellectuals. In 1893 one of them, Frederick Jackson Turner, published one of the most provocative essays ever writ- ten by an American historian. He used as his point of departure the national census of 1890, which famously concluded that there was no longer a frontier in the United States. That "closed the first period of American history," Turner declared, and left the country with a stark choice. It could either declare itself satisfied with its present size, some- thing it had never done before, or seek territory beyond North America. In his paper and subsequent articles, Turner left his readers with no doubt as to which he believed would be the wiser choice.

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For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific Coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash predictioni and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue.

The philosopher-sailor who translated calls like this into a plan of action was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, director of the fledgling Naval War College. His book The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued that no nation had ever become great without control of foreign markets and access to the natural resources of foreign countries. To achieve that control, he asserted, a nation must maintain a navy powerful enough to protect its merchant fleet and force uncooperative countries to open themselves to trade and investment. A navy with such ambition needed a network of supply bases around the world. Applying these arguments to the United States, Mahan urged that it not only speedily build a canal across Central America but also establish bases in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and wherever else it wished to trade.

"Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward," Mahan wrote. "The growing production of the country demands it."

Mahan was the toast of Washington during the 1890s. He appeared before congressional committees and developed close friendships with powerful politicians. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a leading expansionist, considered his writings to be secular scripture. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a glowing review of his book and corre- sponded with him on questions of sea power and the annexation of dis- tant islands. These three-Lodge in Congress, Roosevelt in the executive branch, and Mahan in the minds of men-became the Holy Trinity of American expansionism.

They and others of like mind laid out their case in different ways. Some argued that the United States had to take new territories in order to prevent European powers, or perhaps even Japan, from taking them. Others stressed the missionary aspect of colonialism, the obligation of more "advanced" races to civilize the world. Military commanders real- ized that a more forceful American military posture would give them

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greater power and bigger budgets. The most persuasive of these argu- ments, though, always came back to a single, essential point.

By the end of the nineteenth century, farms and factories in the United States were producing considerably more goods than Americans could consume. For the nation to continue its rise to wealth, it needed foreign markets. They could not be found in Europe, where governments, like that of the United States, protected domestic industries behind high tar- iff walls. Americans had to look to faraway countries, weak countries, countries that had large markets and rich resources but had not yet fallen under the sway of any great power.

This search for influence abroad gripped the United States in 1898. Spreading democracy, Christianizing heathen nations, building a strong navy, establishing military bases around the world, and bringing foreign governments under American control were never ends in themselves. They were ways for the United States to assure itself access to the markets, resources, and investment potential of distant lands.

Although the American economy grew tremendously during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, much of the country's fabulous new wealth enriched only a few thousand captains of industry. Conditions for most ordinary people were steadily deteriorating. By 1893, one of every six American workers was unemployed, and many of the rest lived on subsistence wages. Plummeting agricultural prices in the 1890s killed off a whole generation of small farmers. Strikes and labor riots broke out from New York to Chicago to California. Socialist and anar- chist movements began attracting broad followings. In 1894, Secretary of State Walter Gresham, reflecting a widespread fear, said he saw "symptoms of revolution" spreading across the country.

Many business and political leaders concluded that the only way the American economy could expand quickly enough to deal with these threats was to find new markets abroad. Among them was President Cleveland's Treasury secretary, John Carlisle, who warned in his annual report for 1894 that "the prosperity of our people depends largely on their ability to sell their surplus products in foreign markets at remuner- ative prices." Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana came to the same con- clusion. "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can con- sume," he asserted. "Fate has written our policy for us. The trade of the world must and shall be ours."

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CUBA, THE LARGEST ISLAND IN THE CARIBBEAN AND THE LAST GREAT BASTION

of what had once been a vast Spanish empire in the Americas, was in turmoil during the second half of the nineteenth century. Patriots there fought a ten-year war of independence that ended with an inconclusive truce in 1878, and rebelled again in 1879-80. Their third offensive broke out in 1895. Its chief organizer was an extravagantly gifted lawyer, diplomat, poet, and essayist, Jose Marti, who from his New York exile managed to unite a host of factions, both within Cuba and in emi- gre communities. His success persuaded two celebrated commanders from the first war, Maximo G6mez and Antonio Maceo, to come out of retirement and take up arms again. After careful planning, the three of them landed on the island in the spring of 1895 and launched a new rebellion. Marti, who insisted on riding at the head of a military column, was killed in one of the rebels' first skirmishes. His comrades posted his last, unfinished letter on a pine board at their campground. In it he urged his compatriots not only to free their country from Spain but also "to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America."

The rebel army made steady progress, and the Spanish commander, General Valeriano Weyler, adopted radical tactics to blunt its advance. He ordered his troops to force huge numbers of Cubans into fortified camps, where thousands died, and declared much of the countryside a free-fire zone. Rebels responded by burning farms, slaughtering herds of cattle, and destroying sugar mills. Soon much of the population was starving, bitterly angry, and more passionate than ever in its support for independence.

In the spring of 1897, William McKinley, a Republican who was sup- ported by midwestern business interests, succeeded the anti-imperialist Democrat Grover Cleveland as president of the United States. Like most Americans, McKinley had long considered Spanish rule to be a blight on Cuba. The prospect of the Cubans governing themselves, however, alarmed him even more. He worried that an independent Cuba would become too assertive and not do Washington's bidding.

McKinley had reason to worry. Cuban rebel leaders were promising that once in power, they would launch sweeping social reforms, starting

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with land redistribution. That struck fear into the hearts of American businessmen, who had more than $50 million invested on the island, most of it in agriculture. Early in 1898, McKinley decided it was time to send both sides in the conflict a strong message. He ordered the battle- ship Maine to leave its place in the Atlantic Fleet and head for Havana.

Officially the Maine was simply making a "friendly visit," but no one in Cuba took that explanation seriously. All realized that she was serv- ing as a "gunboat calling card," a symbol of America's determination to control the course of events in the Caribbean. For three weeks she lay quietly at anchor in Havana. Then, on the night of February 15, 1898, she was torn apart by a tremendous explosion. More than 250 American sailors perished. News of the disaster electrified the United States. All assumed that Spain was responsible, and when the navy issued a report blaming the disaster on "an external explosion," their assumptions turned to certainty.

Many Americans already felt a passionate hatred for Spanish colo- nialism and a romantic attachment to the idea of "Cuba Libre." Their emotions had been fired by a series of wildly sensational newspaper reports that together constitute one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the New York Journal and a string of other newspapers across the country, had been attracting readers for months with vivid denuncia- tions of Spanish colonialists. Like countless others who have sought to set the United States on the path to war, he knew that he needed a vil- lain, an individual on whom he could focus the public's outrage. The king of Spain was at that moment a fourteen-year-old boy, and the regent, his mother, was an Austrian princess, so neither of them would do. Hearst settled on General Weyler, and published a series of blood- curdling stories that made him the personification of evil.

"Weyler, the brute, the devastator of haciendas, and the outrager of women ... is pitiless, cold, an exterminator of men," ran one such account. "There is nothing to prevent his carnal, animal brain from running riot with itself in inventing tortures and infamies of bloody debauchery. "

The moment Hearst heard about the sinking of the Maine, he recog- nized it as a great opportunity. For weeks after the explosion, he filled page after page with mendacious "scoops," fabricated interviews with unnamed government officials, and declarations that the battleship had been "destroyed by treachery" and "split in two by an enemy's

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secret infernal machine." The Journal's daily circulation doubled in four weeks. Other newspapers joined the frenzy, and their campaign brought Americans to near-hysteria.

With such intense emotion surging through the United States, it was easy for McKinley to turn aside repeated offers from the new Spanish prime minister, Praxedes Sagasta, to resolve the Cuban conflict peace- fully. Sagasta was a modernizing Liberal who understood that his coun- try's colonial policies had brought its empire to the brink of collapse. Immediately after taking office in 1897, he replaced the hated Weyler, and then tried to placate the rebels by offering them home rule. The rebels, sensing that victory was at hand, rejected his offer. That made Sagasta all the more eager to sue for peace, and several times during the spring of 1898 he offered to negotiate a settlement with the United States. Dismissing these overtures as insincere, McKinley and his sup- porters said that they had lost patience with Spain and were determined to resolve the Cuban situation by force of arms.

Behind their tough talk lay an obvious fact. Negotiations would most likely have led to an independent Cuba where neither the United States nor any other country would have military bases. This was hardly the outcome McKinley wanted, and it would have horrified expansionists like Roosevelt, Lodge, and Mahan. Lodge went so far as to warn McKin- ley that if he did not intervene, he would kill Republican chances in that year's election.

"If the war in Cuba drags on through the summer with nothing done," he told the president, "we shall go down to the greatest defeat ever known."

Years later, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison surveyed Spain's efforts to resolve the Cuban crisis peacefully and concluded, "Any president with a backbone would have seized this opportunity for an honorable solution." Such a solution, however, would have denied the United States the prizes it sought. They could be won only by conquest. McKin- ley understood this, and on April 11 he asked Congress to authorize "forcible intervention" in Cuba.

This step alarmed Cuban revolutionary leaders. They had long believed that, in General Maceo's words, it would be "better to rise or fall with- out help than to contract debts of gratitude with such a powerful neigh- bor." The rebels' legal counsel in New York, Horatio Rubens, warned that American intervention would be taken as "nothing less than a dec- laration of war by the United States against the Cuban revolution" and

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vowed that rebel forces would resist any American attempt to take the island "with force of arms, as bitterly and tenaciously as we have fought the armies of Spain."

Protests like these had a great effect in Washington, where the cry of "Cuba Libre" still stirred many hearts. Members of Congress were reluc- tant to vote for McKinley's war resolution as long as the Cuban people opposed it. They had refused to annex Hawaii after it became clear that most Hawaiians were against the idea. Now, five years later, Americans were showing the same reluctance. Many were uncomfortable with the idea of sending soldiers to aid a movement that did not want American help. To secure congressional support for intervention in Cuba, McKin- ley agreed to accept an extraordinary amendment offered by Senator Henry Teller of Colorado. It began by declaring that "the people of the island of Cuba are, and of right ought to be, free and independent" and ended with a solemn pledge: "The United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its deter- mination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and con- trol of the island to its people." The Senate approved it unanimously.

That promise, which came to be known as the Teller Amendment, calmed the rebels' fears. "It is true that they have not entered into an accord with our government," wrote one of their leaders, General Calixto Garcia, "but they have recognized our right to be free, and that is enough forme."

On April 25, Congress declared that a state of war existed between the United States and Spain. Members of the House of Representatives celebrated their vote by breaking into rousing choruses of "Dixie" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as they left the chamber. "A spirit of wild jingoism seems to have taken possession of this usually conserva- tive body," McKinley's secretary wrote in his diary.

A nation that was still recovering from the bitter divisions of the Civil War finally had a cause everyone could embrace. President McKin- ley called for 125,000 military volunteers, and more than twice that number poured into recruiting stations. The New York Journal suggested that heroic athletes like the baseball star Cap Anson and the boxing champion "Gentleman" Jim Corbett be recruited to lead an elite unit. Not to be outdone, the rival New York World published an article by Buf- falo Bill Cody headlined, "How I Could Drive the Spaniards from Cuba

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND • 39

with Thirty Thousand Braves!" Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would quit his post as assistant secretary of the navy to raise and lead a fighting unit.

"It was a war entered without misgivings and in the noblest frame of mind," the military historian Walter Millis wrote thirty years later. "Seldom can history have recorded a plainer case of military aggression; yet seldom has a war been started in so profound a conviction of its righteousness."

Events moved quickly in the weeks that followed. Roosevelt ordered Commodore George Dewey to proceed to Manila Bay, in the Philip- pines, and destroy the Spanish fleet that had been deployed there. This Dewey did with astonishing ease in a single day, May I, after giving his famous command "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley."

Six weeks later, American soldiers landed near Santiago on Cuba's southeastern coast. They fought three one-day battles, the most famous being the one in which Roosevelt, dressed in a uniform he had ordered from Brooks Brothers, led a charge up Kettle Hill, later called San Juan Hill. On July 3, American cruisers destroyed the few decrepit Spanish naval vessels anchored at Santiago. Spanish forces soon ended their resistance, and the Cuban and American commanders, Generals Calixto Garcia and William Shafter, prepared to accept their formal surrender. Before the ceremony, though, Shafter astonished Garcia by sending him a message saying he could not participate in the ceremony or even enter Santiago. That was the first hint that the United States would not keep the promise Congress had made when it passed the Teller Amendment.

On August 12, barely two months after the American landing, diplo- mats representing Spain and the United States met at the White House and signed a "protocol of peace" that ended the war. Just 385 Americans had been killed in action, barely more than Sioux Indians had killed at Little Big Horn in the country's last major military engagement, twenty- two years before. About two thousand more died later of wounds and disease, but even that number was less than had fallen in single after- noons during intense battles of the Civil War. It had been, in the words of the American statesman John Hay, "a splendid little war."

With victory won, the time had come for the United States to begin its withdrawal and, in the words of the Teller Amendment, "leave the government and control of the island to its people." Instead it did the opposite.

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In the United States, enthusiasm for Cuban independence faded quickly. Whitelaw Reid, the publisher of the New York Tribune and the journalist closest to President McKinley, proclaimed the "absolute neces- sity of controlling Cuba for our own defense," and rejected the Teller Amendment as "a self-denying ordinance possible only in a moment of national hysteria." Senator Beveridge said it was not binding because Congress had approved it "in a moment of impulsive but mistaken gen- eroSity." The New York Times asserted that Americans had a "higher obli- gation" than strict fidelity to ill-advised promises, and must become "permanent possessors of Cuba if the Cubans prove to be altogether incapable of self-government."

These pillars of American democracy were arguing quite explicitly that the United States was not obligated to keep promises embodied in law if those promises were later deemed to have been unwisely made. Over the next year, they and others justified this remarkable argument through a series of propositions. All were calculated to soothe the pub- lic conSCience, and all were largely or completely false.

The first of these propositions was that American fighters, not Cubans, had expelled the Spanish from Cuba. Newspaper reporters told their cred- ulous readers that when the U.S. Army arrived, it found the Cuban rebel force "in desperate straits," "threatened with collapse," and "bogged down in a bitter stalemate." Quite the opposite was true. After three years of continual fighting, Cuban rebels had won control of most of the island, forced the hungry and disease-plagued Spanish army to withdraw into guarded enclaves, and made plans to attack Santiago and other cities. They were headed toward victory when the Americans landed.

The second myth that Americans were led to embrace was that Cuban revolutionaries were cowardly laggards who had watched in bewildered admiration while Americans defeated the Spanish army. "This ally has done little but stay in the rear," one newspaper correspondent reported from the front. Another found that the Cubans "made very weak allies." A third wrote that the rebel army "did little or no fighting" and "has borne no testimony to its desire to free Cuba."

This was another piece of self-deception, but understandable. Few American correspondents had been in Cuba to watch as rebels built their power over a period of years, won broad popular support, and waged a highly successful guerrilla war. To most of these journalists, the war began only when American forces landed in the spring of 1898. None understood that Cuban units had secured the beaches where

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American soldiers landed near Santiago; even the American naval com- mander there, Admiral William Sampson, said afterward that the absence of Spanish troops on the beaches "remains a mystery." Other Cubans served as scouts and intelligence agents for the Americans, although they indignantly refused repeated demands that they work as porters and laborers.

To most Americans, war consisted of set-piece battles in which armies faced off. They loved reading about charges like the one at San Juan Hill, in which few Cubans participated. The long war of attrition that Cubans had waged unfolded far from the view of American officers and correspondents. Most of them did not realize that this campaign played a decisive role in the victory of 1898.

Once Americans convinced themselves that Cubans were cowards who had no idea of how to organize an army, it was easy for them to conclude that Cuba was incapable of ruling itself. The American press never focused on the revolutionary leaders, some of whom were highly educated, experienced, and sophisticated. Instead they portrayed the rebel force as an ignorant rabble composed largely of blacks who were barely removed from savagery. As a result, McKinley and his allies in government and business had no trouble portraying them as equal to the Hawaiians in ignorance and stupidity.

"Self-government!" General Shafter snorted when a reporter asked him about it. "Why, these people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell."

Within days of the Spanish surrender, American officials began telling the Cubans that they should forget the promise of independence embodied in the Teller Amendment. President McKinley declared that the United States would rule Cuba under "the law of belligerent right over conquered territory." Attorney General John Griggs told the vice president of Cuba's provisional government that the U.S. Army in Havana was an "invading army that would carry with it American sov- ereignty wherever it went."

The confusion many Cubans felt as they heard these statements turned to indignant anger when General Brooke refused to allow their liberating army to participate in the celebration planned for the first days of 1899. Many were dumbfounded. "None of us thought that [American intervention] would be followed by a military occupation of the country by our allies, who treat us as a people incapable of acting for ourselves, and who have reduced us to obedience, to submission,

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and to a tutelage imposed by force of circumstances," General Maximo Gomez wrote. "This cannot be our fate after years of struggle."

Most Americans had little regard for Cubans, so it was natural that they would reject such protests. Many went even further. They were angry that Cubans had not fallen on their knees to thank the United States for liberating them. News correspondents reported that instead of embracing American soldiers, the Cubans seemed "sour," "sullen," "con- ceited," "vain and jealous." One wrote of his astonishment to find that they were not "filled with gratitude towards us." None seemed willing or able to understand how logical it was for Cubans to feel this way. They took the Cubans' resentment as further proof of their ignorance and immaturity.

Cuban patriots had for years promised that after independence, they would stabilize their country by promoting social justice. Americans wanted something quite different. "The people ask me what we mean by stable government in Cuba," the new military governor, General Leonard Wood, wrote in a report to Washington soon after he assumed office in 1900. "I tell them that when money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest and when capital is willing to invest in the island, a condition of stability will have been reached." In a note to President McKinley, he was even more succinct: "When people ask me what I mean by stable government, I tell them, 'Money at six percent.'"

On July 25, 1900, General Wood published an order calling for the election of delegates to a Cuban constitutional convention. Fewer than one-third of the qualified voters turned out, and even they refused to support many of the candidates the Americans sponsored. General Wood described the thirty-one delegates as "about ten absolutely first class men and about fifteen men of doubtful qualifications and charac- ter, and about six of the worst rascals and fakirs in Cuba."

That autumn, Secretary of War Elihu Root, who had been a leading corporate attorney in New York, and Senator Orville Platt of Connecti- cut, chairman of the Senate Committee on Relations with Cuba, wrote the law that would shape Cuba's future. The Platt Amendment, as it came to be known, is a crucial document in the history of American for- eign policy. It gave the United States a way to control Cuba without running it directly, by maintaining a submissive local regime. Washing- ton would go on to apply this system in many parts of the Caribbean and Central America, where to this day it is known as plattismo.

Under the Platt Amendment, the United States agreed to end its

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occupation of Cuba as soon as the Cubans accepted a constitution with provisions giving the United States the right to maintain military bases in Cuba; the right to veto any treaty between Cuba and any other coun- try; the right to supervise the Cuban treasury; and "the right to inter- vene for the preservation of Cuban independence [or] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and indi- vidualliberty./I In essence, the Platt Amendment gave Cubans permis- sion to rule themselves as long as they allowed the United States to veto any decision they made.

Members of Congress could not avoid realizing that by passing the Platt Amendment, they would be reneging on the pledge they had made to Cuba less than three years before. Each had to ask himself a painful question that the New York Evening Post framed in a pithy edito- rial: "Given a solemn and unmistakable promise of independence to Cuba, how can I lie out of it and still go to church to thank God that I am not as other men are?/I Senators resolved this dilemma without evi- dent difficulty. On February 27, 1901, they approved the Platt Amend- ment by a vote of forty-three to twenty. Republicans cast all the affirmative votes. Later the House of Representatives joined in approval, also on a party-line vote. President McKinley signed the amendment into law on March 2. That plunged Cuba into what one historian called "a storm of excitement./I

Havana was in turmoil on the night of March 2. A torchlight procession delivered a petition of protest to Wood at the Governor's Palace, and another crowd of demonstrators sought out the convention delegates and urged them to stand firm in their opposition to American demands. Sim- ilar demonstrations occurred on the following night. Outside the capital, municipal governments throughout the island poured out a flood of protest messages and resolutions, while public meetings were epidemic. On the night of March S, speakers told a procession in Santiago that if the United States held to its demands, the Cubans must go to war once more.

Cuban delegates to the constitutional convention had to decide whether to accept the Platt Amendment. American officials assured them that the United States wished no direct influence over Cuba's internal affairs, and also warned them that if they did not accept the Platt Amendment, Congress would impose even harsher terms. After long debate, much of it conducted behind closed doors, the Cuban delegates

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agreed, by a vote of fifteen to fourteen, to do what the United States wished. A year later, in an election the Americans supervised, Tomas Estrada Palma, who had lived for years in the town of Central Valley, New York, was chosen as the first president of the Republic of Cuba. General Wood, the military governor, wrote in a private letter what every sentient Cuban and American knew: "There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment."

THE PUERTO RICAN POET LOLA RODRIGUEZ DE TI6, WHO SPENT YEARS IN

Cuba, once described these islands as "two wings of the same bird." Expansionists in the United States agreed. As Theodore Roosevelt was preparing to sail for Cuba in the spring of 1898, he sent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge a letter warning, "Do not make peace until we get Porto Rico." Lodge told him not to worry.

"Porto Rico is not forgotten and we mean to have it," he assured his friend. "Unless I am utterly and profoundly mistaken, the Administra- tion is now fully committed to the large policy we both desire."

The island of Puerto Rico, which is less than one-tenth the size of Cuba, never erupted in armed rebellion against Spain. Like Cuba, though, it produced a remarkable group of revolutionary intellectuals who embod- ied the nationalism that seized many colonial hearts in the second half of the nineteenth century. For years Spain resisted their calls for self-rule, but that changed when the reform-minded Praxedes Sagasta became prime minister in 1897. Soon after taking office, Sagasta offered auton- omy to both Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuban rebels, with years of fighting behind them and thousands of men under arms, were bent on military victory and scorned his offer. Puerto Ricans, however, instantly accepted.

"Porto Ricans are generally jubilant over the news received from Spain concerning political autonomy," the American consul Philip Hanna wrote in a dispatch. "The natives generally believe that Spain will grant them a form of home rule as will be in every way satisfactory to them."

Spain's autonomy decree gave Puerto Ricans the right to elect a House of Representatives with wide-ranging powers, including author- ity to name a cabinet that would govern the island. They went to the polls on March 27, 1898. Most voted for the Liberal Fusion Party of Luis Munoz Rivera, editor of the crusading newspaper La Democracia and a passionate leader of the autonomy movement.

The home-rule government had not yet taken office when, in the

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND • 45

predawn hours of May 12, a fleet of seven American warships took up positions facing San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital. At first light, the fleet's commander, Admiral Sampson, ordered his flagship, the Iowa, to open fire on Spanish positions. A desultory artillery duel followed. The Americans fired 1,362 shells and killed about a dozen people. Spanish defenders replied with 441 shells and several volleys of infantry fire, managing to kill one American soldier. After three and a half hours, the guns fell silent. In military terms this was a minor engagement, but it sent an unmistakable message. Puerto Rico would not be able to avoid being caught up in the Spanish-American War.

For the next two months, American ships maintained a mostly effec- tive blockade aimed at preventing the Spanish from sending supplies or reinforcements to their troops in Puerto Rico. The Spanish, though, were too focused on Cuba to pay much attention to events on the smaller island. So were the Americans. Hoping to take advantage of this situation, members of Puerto Rico's new House of Representatives con- vened for their first session, on July 17. On that same day, the new cabi- net, headed by Munoz Rivera, began to function. It would hold power for just eight days.

At 8:45 on the morning of July 25, a detachment of marines and sailors from the American gunboat Gloucester waded ashore near Guanica, on Puerto Rico's southwestern coast. After a bit of shooting in which they suffered no casualties, they secured the town and raised the Ameri- can flag over its customs house. The moment that flag began to flutter in the tropical breeze, the United States effectively took control of Puerto Rico. Every institution of Spanish rule, including the autonomous gov- ernment, quickly withered away.

Some Puerto Ricans looked forward to the prospect of American rule. They hoped for a period of nation building that might last twenty years or so, followed by-depending on their political persuasion-independence or annexation to the United States. Many were inspired by a generously worded proclamation that the American commander, General Nelson Miles, issued at the end of July:

We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for centuries has been oppressed, but, on the contrary, to bring you protection .... This is not a war of devastation, but one to give to all within the control of its military and naval forces the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization.

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The war in Puerto Rico was a sideshow, almost completely overshad- owed by the conflict in Cuba. American casualties were astonishingly light, just 9 dead and 46 wounded. The Spanish and Puerto Ricans lost a total of about 450 soldiers and civilians dead, wounded, or captured. One of the most prominent American correspondents who covered the war, Richard Harding Davis, later described it as "a picnic" and "a rete des {leurs."

At the Paris peace conference of December 1898, where the terms of final surrender were fixed, Spain tried to retain Puerto Rico, arguing that the United States had never before challenged its sovereignty there. The Spanish even offered to give the United States territory elsewhere if they could keep Puerto Rico. President McKinley rejected all such sugges- tions. In private instructions to American negotiators, he said he had decided that Puerto Rico was lito become the territory of the United States." The Spanish, defeated and weak, had no choice but to accept.

On October 18, at a formal ceremony on the balcony of the gover- nor's palace in San Juan, Spanish commanders transferred sovereignty over Puerto Rico to the United States. lilt was all a quiet affair," the New York Evening Post reported. "There was no excitement, and but little enthusiasm. An hour after its close, the streets had assumed their wanted appearance. There was little to show that anything important had taken place, that by this brief ceremony Spain's power on the island of Puerto Rico had ended forever."

NO AMERICAN ALIVE IN 1898 COULD HAVE HAD ANY DOUBT ABOUT WHY THE

United States had gone to war with Spain. The conflict was fought to resolve a single question: Who would control Cuba? Conditions in Cuba led to the war, Cuba was the battleground, and Cuba was the prize. But when American and Spanish diplomats met in Paris to negotiate a treaty ending the war, they had to consider the fate of another land, one that was very large, unknown to Americans, and far distant from their shores.

Cuba had exerted a hold on the American imagination for many years, at least since Thomas Jefferson wrote of his hope that it would one day become part of the United States. The Philippine Islands were quite another matter. Few Americans had the faintest idea of where they were. Nonetheless, as a result of Commodore Dewey's victory at

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND - 47

Manila, the United States suddenly exercised power over them. No one had planned this. President McKinley had to decide what the United States should do with the vast archipelago.

McKinley was known above all for his inscrutability. He gave almost all the people he met the impression that he agreed with them, and rarely allowed even his closest advisers to know what he was thinking. Historians have described him as an "enigma" whose inner mind was "well concealed" and who "obscured his views by a fog of phraseology, conventional or oracular."

At first, McKinley seemed to want only enough territory in the Philippines to build a naval base at Manila. Then he considered the idea of granting the islands independence, perhaps under an international guarantee. In the end, less worldly considerations dictated his decision.

McKinley was a devout Christian living in an era of religious revival- ism. He would later tell a group of Methodist missionaries that while he was wrestling with the Philippines question, he fell to his knees in the White House on several evenings "and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance."

"One night late, it came to me this way," he said. "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos and uplift them and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died."

With that, the momentous decision was made. Historians still won- der why McKinley made it. He was deeply religious, and may truly have felt moved by divine revelation. In a speech to the delegation he sent to negotiate in Paris, he gave another explanation, saying he was acting to seize "the commercial opportunity, to which American statesmanship cannot be indifferent." What is certain is that McKinley, in the words of one historian, "knew the Filipinos not at all, and would misjudge their response with tragic perSistence." He himself admitted that when he heard news of Dewey's victory at Manila, he "could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles." His fervor to "Christianize" the Filipinos, most of whom were already practicing Catholics, suggested his ignorance of conditions on the islaf-lds. He cer- tainly had no idea that they were in the throes of the first anticolonial revolution in the modern history of Asia.

"The episode marked a pivotal point in the American experience," Stanley Karnow wrote in his history of the Philippines. "For the first

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time, U.S. soldiers fought overseas. And, for the first time, America was to acquire territory beyond its shores-the former colony itself becom- ing colonialist."

On May 1, 1898, three weeks after destroying the Spanish fleet, Dewey welcomed the Filipino guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo aboard his flag- ship, the Olympia. Their versions of what transpired are contradictory. Aguinaldo said they agreed to fight the Spanish together and then establish an independent Republic of the Philippines. Dewey swore that he made no such commitment. Neither man spoke much of the other's language and no interpreter was present, so the confusion is under- standable. Whatever the truth, when Aguinaldo declared the indepen- dence of the Philippines, on June 12, neither Dewey nor any other representative of the United States turned up at the ceremony.

That snub led Aguinaldo and other Filipino leaders to fear that the United States would not recognize their country's independence. Gen- eral Thomas Anderson, a Civil War veteran who was the first com- mander of American troops in the Philippines, sought to reassure them. "I desire to have amicable relations with you," he wrote to Aguinaldo on July 4, "and to have you and your people cooperate with us in mili- tary operations against the Spanish forces."

General Anderson may have been sincere, but as he was writing his let- ter to Aguinaldo, policy in Washington was changing. President McKinley, obeying what he took to be the word of God, had decided that the United States should assume ownership not simply of an enclave at Manila but of the entire Philippine archipelago. He directed his negotiators in Paris to offer the Spanish $20 million for it. Spain was in no position to refuse, and on December 10, American and Spanish diplomats signed what became known as the Treaty of Paris. It gave the United States posses- sion of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the distant Philippine archipelago, which had more than seven thousand islands and a population of seven million.

On December 21, McKinley issued an "executive letter" proclaiming American sovereignty over the Philippines. Rebels there were already proceeding along their own path. They had elected a constituent assem- bly that produced a constitution, and under its provisions the Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed on January 23, 1899, with Aguinaldo as its first president. Twelve days later, this new nation declared war against United States forces on the islands. McKinley took no notice. To him the Filipinos were what the historian Richard Welch called "a dis- organized and helpless people."

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND • 49

McKinley was well aware of Aguinaldo's insurgents and their claims. It is probable that he still underestimated the extent of territorial control exer- cised by Aguinaldo's forces, but in McKinley's opinion it was unimpor- tant how much territory the insurgent government claimed .... McKinley could not believe that Aguinaldo's insurgents would be so stupid as to resist the power and benevolence of the United States. McKinley seems to have entertained the self-contradictory notions that Aguinaldo was an evil, self-seeking bandit chieftain and that he could be as easily managed as an office-seeker in Canton, Ohio.

The Treaty of Paris gave the United States sovereignty over the Philip- pines, but it could not come into force until the Senate ratified it. The debate was long and heated. Opponents denounced the treaty as an impe- rialist grab of a distant land that shamed American ideals and overex- tended American power. Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts warned that it would turn the United States into "a vulgar, common- place empire founded upon physical force, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and the other classes must forever obey." Supporters countered with three arguments: that it would be ludicrous to recognize Filipino independence since there was no such thing as a Filipino nation; that it was America's duty to civilize the backward Filipinos; and that possession of the archipelago would bring incalculable commercial and strategic advantages.

As this debate was reaching its climax, in what the New York World called "an amazing coincidence," news came that Filipino insurgents had attacked American positions in Manila. It later turned out that there had indeed been a skirmish but that an American private had fired the first shot. That was not clear at the time, however, and probably would not have mattered anyway. Several senators declared that they now felt obligated to vote for the treaty as a sign of support for belea- guered American soldiers on the other side of the globe. "We come as ministering angels, not as despots," Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota assured his colleagues. Evidently convinced of that, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris by a margin of fifty-seven to twenty-seven, barely more than the required two-thirds majority.

President McKinley may well have believed that God wished the United States to "uplift" and "Christianize" the Filipino people. Speeches by sen- ators during the treaty debate, along with many articles in the press, however, offered a more tangible rationale for taking the Philippines.

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Businessmen had become fascinated with the prospect of selling goods in China, which, after losing a war with Japan in 1895, had become weak and incapable of resisting intervention. They saw a magnificent confluence of circumstances, as this vast land became available for exploitation at the same time they were casting desperately about for new markets.

"We could not turn [the Philippines] over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient," McKinley told Congress in his mes- sage asking ratification of the Treaty of Paris. "That would be bad busi- ness and discreditable."

When the United States assumed sovereignty over the Philippines, it inherited Spain's confrontation with the rebel army. Soldiers of the United States had never before fought outside North America. Nor, with the arguable exception of the Indian wars, had they ever fought against an army defending its country's independence. They had no idea of what they would be facing in their campaign against the "goo-goos," as they called the Filipinos, but they launched their war with supreme self- confidence.

It began in February 1899, with a pitched battle for Manila. From the beginning, there was little doubt about how it would end. The insur- gents had the advantage of numbers, but by every other standard the Americans were clearly superior. Aguinaldo and his troops were crippled by a lack of weaponry, enforced by an effective American naval block- ade. American soldiers landed in waves, by the tens of thousands, eager to fight against an enemy of whose motivations they were blissfully unaware. In letters home, they told friends and relatives that they had come "to blow every nigger to nigger heaven" and vowed to fight "until the niggers are killed off like Indians."

Faced with these handicaps, the guerrillas turned to tactics unlike any the Americans had ever seen. They laid snares and booby traps, slit throats, set fires, administered poisons, and mutilated prisoners. The Americans, some of whose officers were veteran Indian fighters, responded in kind. When two companies under the command of General Lloyd Wheaton were ambushed southeast of Manila, Wheaton ordered every town and village within twelve miles to be destroyed and their inhabi- tants killed.

During the first half of the Philippine War, American commanders imposed censorship on foreign correspondents to assure that news of episodes like this did not reach the home audience. Only after censorship

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND • 51

was lifted in 1901 were Americans able to learn how the war was being waged. Newspapers began carrying reports like one filed early in 1901 by a correspondent from the Philadelphia Ledger.

Our present war is no bloodless, fake, opera bouffe engagement. Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little bet- ter than a dog, noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evi- dence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses.

The turning point in this war may have come on the afternoon of March 23, 1901, when a thirty-six-year-old brigadier general named Frederick Funston staged one of the boldest counterguerrilla operations in American military history. Funston, who had won the Medal of Honor in Cuba three years earlier, was commanding a district on the island of Luzon when he received news, extracted from a captured courier, that Aguinaldo was encamped at a village in his district. He came up with the idea of using a group of Filipino scouts to help him penetrate the village and capture Aguinaldo. The scouts were from the Macabebe ethnic group, which considered itself a rival of the Tagalogs, to which Aguinaldo and many other rebels belonged.

General Funston and four other officers set out on their mission with seventy-nine Macabebe scouts. Their plan was for the scouts to pose as rebels and tell Aguinaldo that they were bringing him a group of Amer- ican prisoners. When the group was about ten miles from Aguinaldo's hideout, he sent word that the Americans should be kept away. He did invite the "rebels" to come, though, and as his honor guard was wel- coming them, they suddenly began firing.

"Stop all the foolishness!" Aguinaldo shouted from inside his head- quarters. "Don't waste ammunition!"

One of the scouts turned, burst into Aguinaldo's office, and, with pis- tol drawn, told him, "You are our prisoners. We are not insurgents. We are Americans! Surrender or be killed!"

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Aguinaldo and his officers were too stunned to respond. Within min- utes, they had been subdued and disarmed. General Funston appeared soon afterward and introduced himself to the rebel leader.

"Is this not some joke?" Aguinaldo asked. It was not. Aguinaldo was arrested and brought to Manila, which

Funston later said "went wild with excitement." Americans back home were thrilled with their new hero. Their satisfaction deepened when, less than a month after Aguinaldo's capture, he issued a proclamation accepting American sovereignty and urging his comrades to give up their fight.

Several thousand did, leading the American commander in the Philip- pines, General Arthur MacArthur, to proclaim the rebellion "almost entirely suppressed." He spoke too soon. Rebels who were still in the field fought with intensifying ferocity. In September 1901, a band of them overran an American position on the island of Samar with a bru- tality that set off some of the harshest countermeasures ever ordered by officers of the United States.

The episode began with what seemed like a routine landing of infantrymen at a beach near the village of Balangiga. Some seemed to realize that they were in uncertain territory. As they approached the shore, one lieutenant gazed ahead and told his comrades, "We are bound for goo-goo land now."

The Americans occupied Balangiga for several weeks, subduing it, according to later testimony, through imprisonment, torture, and rape. At dawn on the morning of September 28, they rose as usual to the sound of reveille. A few remained on sentry duty while the rest ate breakfast. The town's police chief strolled up to one of the sentries, said a few pleasant words, and then suddenly produced a long knife and stabbed him. Immediately the church bells began ringing. Scores of rebels who had infiltrated the town poured out of their hiding places. They fiercely set upon the unarmed Americans, stabbing and hacking them to death. Within minutes the campground was awash in blood. Some Americans managed to escape in boats, and made their way to a base thirty miles up the coast. Of the seventy-four men who had been posted in Balangiga, only twenty survived, most with multiple stab wounds.

News of the "Balangiga massacre" was quickly flashed back to the United States. It stunned a nation that was only beginning to realize what kind of war was being fought in the Philippines. American commanders

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND • 53

on the islands were just as shocked, but they were in a position to react, and react they did. They ordered Colonel Jacob Smith, who had partici- pated in the Wounded Knee massacre in the Dakota Territory a decade before, to proceed to Samar and do whatever was necessary to subdue the rebels. Smith arrived, took charge of the remaining garrisons, and ordered his men to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the island's interior into "a howling wilderness."

"I want no prisoners," he told them. "I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me."

American soldiers carried out these orders with gusto. They started by razing Balangiga, and then rampaged through the countryside. Know- ing that the assailants at Balangiga had disguised themselves as civilians, they took little care to discriminate between combatants and noncom- batants. Fueled by a passion to avenge their comrades, they killed hun- dreds of people, burned crops, slaughtered cattle, and destroyed dozens of settlements.

During one long and amazingly ill-conceived march through the Samar jungle, eleven marines perished from a combination of starva- tion and exposure. Their captain, delirious and only intermittently con- scious, became convinced that their Filipino porters had contributed to their deaths by withholding potatoes, salt, and other supplies. He sin- gled out eleven of them, one for each dead marine, and had them shot.

Americans had used harsh tactics since the beginning of the Philip- pine War, but the summary execution of eleven Filipinos who were working for them, and who had committed no apparent crime, was too much for commanders to ignore. They ordered the offending officer court-martialed on charges of murder. He was eventually acquitted, but the case set off an explosion of outrage in the United States.

Until this episode, many Americans had believed that their soldiers were different from others, operating on a higher moral plane because their cause was good. After Balangiga, however, a flood of revelations forced them out of their innocence. Newspaper reporters sought out returned veterans and from their accounts learned that American sol- diers in the Philippines had resorted to all manner of torture. The most notorious was the "water cure," in which sections of bamboo were forced down the throats of prisoners and then used to fill the prisoners' stomachs with dirty water until they swelled in torment. Soldiers would jump on the prisoner's stomach to force the water out, often repeating

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the process until the victim either informed or died. This technique was so widely reported in the United States that the Cleveland Plain Dealer even published a joke about it.

MA: What's the sound of running water out there, Willie? WILLIE: It's only us boys, Ma. We've been trying the Philippine water cure

on Bobby Snow, an' now we're pouring him out.

Others took the matter more seriously. "We have actually come to do the thing we went to war to banish," the Baltimore American lamented. The Indianapolis News concluded that the United States had adopted II the methods of barbarism," and the New York Post declared that American troops "have been pursuing a policy of wholesale and deliberate murder." David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, declared that Filipinos had done no more than rebel against II alien control" and that therefore "it was our fault and ours alone that this war began." The revered Harvard professor William James said that Americans were guilty of "mur_ dering another culture" and concluded one of his speeches by declaring, "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippines!" Mark Twain suggested that the time had come to redesign the American flag with lithe white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by skull and crossbones."

This spasm of recrimination continued for several months, but soon a countercampaign began. Defenders of American policy, who at first were too overwhelmed by the onslaught of horrific revelations to respond, finally found their voice. Extreme conditions, they insisted, had forced soldiers to act as they did. The New York Times argued that "brave and loyal officers" had reacted understandably to the II cruel, treacherous, murderous" Filipinos. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat said that American soldiers had done nothing in the Philippines that they had not done during the Civil War and that "in view of the provocation received and the peculiar nature of the task to be performed, the transgressions have been extremely slight." The Providence Journal urged its readers to accept lithe wisdom of fighting fire with fire."

A second theme that echoed through the press was that any atroci- ties committed in the· Philippines had been aberrations. They were "deplorable," the St. Paul Pioneer Press conceded, but had "no bearing on fundamental questions of national policy." The New York Tribune said only a few soldiers were guilty and lithe penalty must fall not upon the policy, but upon those men."

BOUND FOR GOO-GOO LAND • 55

By the time this debate reached its crescendo, in the early months of 1902, President McKinley had been assassinated and replaced in office by Theodore Roosevelt. To Roosevelt fell the task of defending the honor of the troops he loved, and he embraced it even though he had never been enthusiastic about the Philippine operation. He enlisted his close friend and ally Henry Cabot Lodge to lead the defense. In a long and eloquent speech on the Senate floor, Lodge conceded that there had been cases "of water cure, of menaces of shooting unless informa- tion was given up, of rough and cruel treatment applied to secure infor- mation." But Americans who lived "in sheltered homes far from the sound and trials of war," he warned, could not understand the chal- lenges of bringing law to a "semi-civilized people with all the tenden- cies and characteristics of Asiatics."

"Let us, oh, let us be just, at least to our own," Lodge begged the Senate. At Roosevelt's suggestion, Lodge arranged for the Senate to hold

hearings into charges of American misconduct in the Philippines. It was a clever move. Lodge himself ran the hearings, and he carefully limited their scope. There was much testimony about operational tactics, but no exploration of the broader policy that lay behind them. The com- mittee did not even issue a final report. One historian described its work as "less a whitewash than an exercise in sleight-of-hand."

On July 4, 1902, soon after the investigating committee ended its work, President Roosevelt declared the Philippines pacified. He was jus- tified in doing so. The important guerrilla leaders had been killed or captured and resistance had all but ceased. It had been a far more costly operation than anyone had predicted at the outset. In three and a half torturous years of war, 4,374 American soldiers were killed, more than ten times the toll in Cuba. About sixteen thousand guerrillas and at least twenty thousand civilians were also killed. Filipinos remember those years as some of the bloodiest in their history. Americans quickly forgot that the war ever happened.