Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [96]
Still firm in command of the Republican members, Reed could subdue any unhealthy lust among them for annexation, but as Speaker he was bound to pilot Administration policy through the House. The question was, what was Administration policy: the soft reluctance of McKinley or the “outward” drive of Lodge and Roosevelt powered by the ideas of Mahan and the persuasions of the sugar trust? The answer came in June, when a new treaty of annexation was concluded with the Hawaiian government, signed by McKinley and sent to the Senate for ratification. Although there was little likelihood of assembling two-thirds of the Senate in favor of it, the anti-expansionists were worried. Carl Schurz, whom McKinley, always anxious to please, had earlier assured of his disinterest in Hawaii, faced him with the issue after dinner in the White House, over cigars. Very uncomfortable, McKinley pleaded that he had sent the treaty to the Senate only to get an expression of opinion. Nevertheless, Schurz left with a heart “heavy with evil forebodings.” In England the Spectator said somewhat nervously that the treaty marked “an end to the historic policy of the Republic since its foundation … and will mean its gradual evolution into a less peaceful and possibly militant power.”
With regard to Cuba, the country was becoming increasingly excited. Reed regarded the Hearst-fabricated furor over Spain’s oppression with contempt and Republican espousal of Cuba’s cause as hypocrisy. He saw his party losing its moral integrity and becoming a party of political expediency in response to the ignorant clamor of the mob. Without compunction he suppressed the resolution recognizing the belligerence of the “Republic” of Cuba. He too took to the magazines to argue against expansion—in an article whose title, “Empire Can Wait,” became a rallying cry for the opponents of Hawaii’s annexation. It spoke the awful name; as yet the outright words “empire” and “imperialism,” which connoted the scramble for Africa then at its peak among the European powers, had not been used in the United States. James Bryce, perhaps the only Englishman who could have been allowed to give advice, urged Americans to have nothing to do with a policy of annexation. America’s remote position and immense power, he wrote in the Forum, freed her from the burden of armaments crushing the European powers. Her mission in the world was “to show the older peoples and states an example of abstention from the quarrels and wars and conquests that make up so large and lamentable a part of the annals of Europe.” To yield to the “earth-hunger” now raging among the European states would be “a complete departure from the maxims of the illustrious founders of the republic.” Behind his sober words could be sensed the love a man feels for the object of his life’s work and a pleading to America not to contradict the promise that hung about her birth.
Mahan’s mind, planning the strategy of a war with Spain, had already leapt beyond Hawaii to the far-off Spanish possession of the Philippines. What motivated him was not earth-hunger but sea power, the controlling idea which had drawn from him the grand orchestral words about the British Navy in the Napoleonic wars: “Those far distant, storm-beaten ships upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.” At the end of 1897 he entered the rising debate with a book, The Interest of America in Sea Power, in which were collected his major articles over the past seven years. He also advised