Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [107]
Campaigning on imperialism as he had planned, Bryan ranged the country as strenuously as before. He was tarnished, but his magnetism, his passion and his sincerity-of-the-moment still reached through to the people and even across the Pacific. In Bryan, but for whom the Treaty of Paris would have been defeated, the Filipinos placed their faith. “The great Democratic party of the United States will win the next fall election,” Aguinaldo promised in a proclamation. “Imperialism will fail in its mad attempt to subjugate us by force of arms.” His soldiers shouted the war cry, “Aguinaldo-Bryan!”
In their Chicago platform, anticipating the election, the Anti-Imperialists had said, “We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the subjugation of any people.” There was nothing to do, as a friend wrote to ex-President Cleveland, but “to hold your nose and vote” for Bryan. The modified rapture of such people for the Democratic candidate won them the name thereafter of the “hold-your-nose-and-vote” group. So distasteful to the Nation were both candidates that it refused to support either, preferring, as a dissatisfied reader complained, to “sit on a fence and scold at both.”
The Republicans had no such difficulties. Although they preferred to be called expansionists rather than imperialists, they were proud of the condition whatever its name, and believed in its goals. Forthright as usual, Lodge said, “Manila with its magnificent bay is the prize and pearl of the East;… it will keep us open to the markets of China.… Shall we hesitate and make, in coward fashion, what Dante calls the ‘great refusal’?” Secretary Hay having pronounced the policy of the Open Door, China’s markets were much on men’s minds. During the summer of the campaign, the siege of the legations at Peking by the Boxers and the American share in the relief expedition pointed up the far-flung role the country was now playing. Its most convinced and vocal champion was McKinley’s new vice-presidential nominee, Theodore Roosevelt, who took the President’s place as chief campaigner. Unsure of victory, for the “full dinner pail” was more a slogan than a fact, he campaigned so vigorously and indefatigably that to the public and cartoonists the Rough Rider with the teeth, pince-nez and unquenchable zest appeared to be the real candidate. He derided the specter of militarism as a “shadowy ghost,” insisted that expansion “in no way affects our institutions or our traditional policies,” and said the question was not “whether we shall expand—for we have already expanded—but whether we shall contract.”
The country listened to thousands of speeches and read thousands of newspaper columns raking over every argument for and against imperialism and every aspect of the war in the Philippines. It learned, thanks to the efforts of the Anti-Imperialists, more about the conduct of its own troops than the public usually does in wartime. Dumdum bullets, so thoroughly disapproved (except by the British) at The Hague Peace Conference the year before, were found to have been issued to some American troops. In the end the American people, like the British in their Khaki election of the same year, approved the incumbents. What a people thinks at any given time can best be measured by what they do. McKinley and Roosevelt were elected by 53 per cent of the votes cast and with a greater margin over Bryan than had been received in 1896. Expansion and conquest were accepted and the break with the American past confirmed. Still at war in the Philippines, America moved into the Twentieth Century.
For Aguinaldo, after the election, there was nothing more to hope for. Retreating into the mountains, still fighting, he was captured by trickery in March, 1901, and in captivity in April signed an oath of allegiance to the United States together with a proclamation to his people calling for an end to resistance: “There has been enough blood, enough tears, enough desolation.