Worldmaking (11 page)

When the president's war message was announced, impromptu street parties sprang up across American towns and cities, the Stars and Stripes were unfurled in the hundreds of thousands, and young men patiently stood in line to volunteer, appreciatively accepting free drinks from men and kisses from the ladies.
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The United States, not McKinley's administration, stood up, puffed out its chest, and picked a fight with Spain, mainly because it could—it was cathartic. War also served the useful purpose of tying the North and South together in a patriotic embrace just thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War. When Congress authorized McKinley's message and declared war on Spain on April 19, it disavowed the notion of imperial expansion. It fell to Albert J. Beveridge—a fast-rising political star who would serve as U.S. senator for Indiana from 1899 to 1911—to grasp the significance of the moment in a blissfully unvarnished speech justifying expansionary war. His words closely echo Mahan's view that the military's purpose is to protect and project commercial interests:

American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours … And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.
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Mahan was enjoying a family vacation in Europe when he was summoned to advise his wartime government. In mid-March, Mahan had sent Roosevelt contingency plans for a “strict blockade” of Havana and the western half of Cuba in the event of war against Spain. While Mahan had doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing Cuban independence above what he viewed as more substantive strategic goals, he remained keen to prove his intellectual worth to Roosevelt and McKinley in this moment of crisis. Delighted with the strategic merits displayed in Mahan's blockade proposal, Roosevelt informed his mentor that “there is no question that you stand head and shoulders above the rest of us! You have given us just the suggestions we want, and I am going to show your letter to the Secretary.”
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Mahan's blockade of Cuba was incorporated into U.S. naval strategy when Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long instructed Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, commander of the North Atlantic Station, to follow the plan. Impressed by the blockade recommendation, President McKinley appointed Mahan to serve on a three-man Naval War Board—alongside Rear Admiral Montgomery Sicard and Rear Admiral Arent Schuyler Crowninshield—charged with coordinating U.S. strategy.

The newly constituted board's strategizing was aided by the fact that the enemy was hopelessly outgunned—a decrepit Spanish fleet faced a modern steel-hulled American navy consisting of four ten-thousand-ton first-class battleships, one six-thousand-ton second-class battleship, two armored cruisers, eleven protected cruisers, and a vast array of auxiliary cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo vessels. It was a war between the twentieth century and the nineteenth, and the victor was never in doubt. As Rear Admiral Pascual Cervera confided to his diary as war loomed in 1898, “We may and must expect a disaster. But as it is necessary to go to the bitter end, and as it would be a crime to say that publicly today, I hold my tongue and go forth resignedly to face the trials which God may be pleased to send me.”
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The trials that materialized were likely worse even than Cervera could imagine.

As Mahan voyaged back across the Atlantic from April 30 to May 7, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey scored a remarkable victory against the Spanish fleet far from Cuba in the Pacific theater. In previous years, Mahan's Naval War College had carried out contingency planning for war against Spain, extolling the merits of an attack on the Philippines, its sprawling colony in the Pacific. On May 1, Dewey's Asiatic Squadron had followed this logic and destroyed the Spanish fleet led by Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón. The battle was so one-sided that Dewey was able to place the American fusillade on hold so his men could eat breakfast. In the space of a few hours, at the cost of just one American life (induced by a heart attack), Spain's position in the Pacific was destroyed.

Mahan was delighted with Dewey's comprehensive victory but less enamored of the planning authority on which he served. He was quite happy to be put out of a job. On May 10, Mahan advised Secretary Long to disband the board and allocate all planning authority to a single naval officer on active duty. He believed that the unwieldy Naval War Board impeded effective decision making: “Individual responsibility … alone achieves results in war.” Mahan's response to finding himself in a position of genuine power and influence was admirable. If the apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Kissinger is correct and “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” it certainly didn't excite Alfred Mahan. Nevertheless, Long was not impressed by Mahan's selflessness, and the board continued in its existing form with Mahan, in Warren Zimmermann's words, “the dominant figure.”
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On May 19, 1898, Rear Admiral Cervera made a fateful decision to dock his fleet in Cuba's Santiago Bay. Hemmed in by Mahan's blockade, Cervera was unable to dodge the heavily armed American ships—the
Indiana
,
New York
,
Oregon
,
Iowa
,
Texas
, and
Brooklyn—
that loomed ominously in the distance. After six weeks of inaction, Cervera concluded that he had little choice but to face his destiny with as much vim as possible. On July 3, in full daylight, Cervera sailed his flagship,
Infanta Maria Teresa
, directly into the path of the American battleships in the hope that the distraction might allow the rest of his ships to break for the open sea. The Battle of Santiago Bay lasted just four hours. It is estimated that 160 Spaniards were killed, 240 were wounded, and 1,800 were captured, including Cervera himself. One American was killed during the battle and no U.S. warship suffered any damage. As Mahan wrote after the conflict, “We cannot expect ever again to have an enemy so entirely inept as Spain showed herself to be.”
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Steeped in the history of the great Anglo-French naval battles, Mahan could muster little enthusiasm for writing about the Spanish-American War. His
Lessons of the War with Spain
, published in 1899, was an underwhelming affair. The main lesson he conveyed was that the United States should never allow itself to become as unprepared and technologically deficient as Spain was in 1898.

Spain had been trounced at sea—its fleet incapacitated—and it took heavy punishment from the U.S. Army in Cuba itself. Theodore Roosevelt had been disappointed to miss the Civil War—and by the fact that his father did not serve—and he viewed the Spanish-American War as an opportunity to hone this martial aspect of his character. He resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy when hostilities commenced and set about raising a volunteer force, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry (“Rough Riders,” as they were colloquially known), to do battle against Spain in Cuba. The force mirrored Theodore Roosevelt's myriad interests, background, and personality traits, comprising Dakota ranch hands, Ivy League scholars, East Coast polo players, cowboys, and policemen. The Rough Riders scored a much-storied victory against entrenched Spanish forces at San Juan Hill, and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt emerged from the war a popular hero. But it was the two crushing naval victories that paved the way for America's ultimate success. The decapitation of Spain's Caribbean fleet, allied with Mahan's suffocating blockade, detached their vulnerable forces from the Spanish mainland some four thousand miles away. Hostilities ceased on August 12, 1898, and a formal peace treaty between the United States and Spain was signed in Paris on December 10. Cuban nationalists played no substantive role in the peace negotiations—they would learn their fate from afar. An important precedent was established that would hold true through the twentieth century: the destiny of newly liberated colonial peoples would be dictated by great powers at “international conferences” with less than pure motives.

*   *   *

America's victory against Spain was one-sided, predictable perhaps, but it sent shock waves across the nations of the Old World—France, Britain, Russia, and Germany—long accustomed to viewing the United States as economically powerful, territorially sated, and avowedly isolationist: a second-tier power in world affairs. The United States was no longer a suitable target for embassy belt-tightening. As America celebrated and Spain lay supine,
The Times
of London offered a prescient editorial: “This war must in any event effect a profound change in the whole attitude and policy of the United States. In future America will play a part in the general affairs of the world such as she has never played before. When the American people realize this, and they realize novel situations with remarkable promptitude, they will not do things by halves.”
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It was with “remarkable promptitude” that President McKinley recognized the strategic and economic possibilities opened up by his famous victory. Although he initially harbored doubts about the wisdom of an imperial landgrab, informing Secretary of State John Hay soon after Dewey's victory that he would be happy enough with “a port and necessary appurtenances,” he had been pushed toward bold actions yet again by the popular clamor to realize the spoils of war.
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At the war's end, American forces occupied Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. More than ten million people—Hispanics, Indians, Polynesians, Chinese, and Japanese—were now in Washington's care. Dominating the North American continent in the name of Manifest Destiny was one thing. But the United States now had in its grasp the power to transform itself into a bona fide imperial nation—a possibility that some Americans found seductive.

Ostensible independence was granted to Cuba—in keeping with the original declaration of war—but the Platt Amendment, passed enthusiastically by Congress and reluctantly by a helpless Cuban Assembly in 1899, transferred Guantánamo Bay to the American military on a perpetual lease and gave the U.S. government virtual carte blanche to intervene in Cuba's affairs when its commercial and strategic interests were threatened. This was “independence” of the most compromised type. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were simply annexed in their entirety. President McKinley later told a group of fellow Methodists that he had prayed to God to seek guidance on what to do with the Philippines. The Almighty, an apparent devotee of realpolitik, answered that independence might leave the islands open to French or German imperialism—an unconscionable threat to American-led stability in the Pacific—and that the Filipinos were regardless “unfit for self-government.” God advised McKinley “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.”
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Filipinos were not pleased to lose one colonial master only to have another take its place so quickly. A popular insurrection against U.S. rule commenced in 1899. In embracing imperialism with such equanimity, the pragmatic philosopher William James wondered how America could “puke up its ancient soul … in five minutes without a wink of squeamishness.”
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Mahan believed that annexing the Philippine archipelago in its entirety was likely to create significant problems for the United States. As he confided to a considerably more gung-ho Henry Cabot Lodge, “I myself, though rather an expansionist, have not fully adjusted myself to the idea of taking them, from our own standpoint of advantage.”
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His preferred option was to keep the island of Luzon, with Manila and Subic Bay—an ideally situated Pacific base for the United States—and leave the remaining islands to Spain. Mahan's skepticism about the wisdom of annexing the Philippines looks insightful in retrospect. The United States would spend the next fifty years there, quelling one popular revolt after another, resorting to brutal tactics that sullied its name in the court of world opinion and revealed an obvious disconnect between virtuous words and unpleasant deeds. Direct imperial rule was a wholly unpleasant experience for America. The informal commercial empire that Mahan favored better allowed the United States to cling to claims of higher virtue vis-à-vis its European competitors. The reality of empire jarred with America's lily-white self-image.

While Mahan had doubts about swallowing the Philippines whole, he was nevertheless delighted that America had strengthened its position in the Pacific and Caribbean at scant material cost. He wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge congratulating him on his skill in smoothing the ratification of the Treaty of Paris through the Senate, declaring that “the country is now fairly embarked on a career which will be beneficent to the world and honorable to ourselves in the community of nations. I try to respect, but cannot, the men who utter the shibboleth of self-government, and cloud therewith their own intelligence, by applying it to people in the childhood stage of race development.”
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Mahan's racist paternalism, entirely unremarkable of a man of that era cocooned in a privileged milieu, explains why he thought giving much of the Philippines back to Spain was a good idea—the indigenous population simply lacked the sophistication to establish stability and a measure of prosperity in the nation. Even inept Spanish rule was preferable to self-rule. The notion of national self-determination was ludicrous to Mahan; it was a well-intentioned but dangerous chimera.

Another fashionable theory to which Mahan objected vehemently was that international collaboration designed to limit armaments and mediate conflict was a potential route to world peace. Nothing in history suggested to him that such a course was plausible. An opportunity to vent his spleen on this issue was presented when Secretary of State John Hay appointed Mahan as a delegate to the First Hague Conference of 1899. Created at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, the conference was designed to seek constructive agreement on ways to limit the production of armaments, outlaw certain weapons systems that were currently in development (submarines and poison gas were the two most prominent targets), create diplomatic machinery to arbitrate on future conflicts, and extend the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention of 1863 to naval warfare. Twenty-six nations attended this hugely ambitious conference, which was predictably mocked in the American press as the “Czar's Peace Picnic.”
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