To the series of victories which began with Dewey’s exploit at Manila, the Post rose with fitting enthusiasm. It called the Santiago campaign, when it ended on July 15, a brilliant impromptu. Who would have thought two months earlier that a triumph of such magnitude would so soon be won? Then the flower of the Spanish navy had lain in the harbor, and a Spanish force estimated at 20,000 to 35,000 held the well-fortified city; but in less than two months the fleet had been destroyed, the city taken, and the army made prisoners, all with a loss of less than 300 American lives. The Post paid a due tribute to the valor of American fighting men:
Lieut. Hobson deprecated the cheers that welcomed him back to the American lines. “Any of you would have done it.” Very likely. We know that practically every man on the fleet offered to go with him when volunteers were called for. Such high appeals to bravery and duty command their own response. But the men below—the engineers, exposed to death without being able to strike a blow; the stokers, whose enemy is the cruel heat in which they have to work—where does their heroism come in? Of course, in the same self-forgetful devotion to their duty which marks some world-resounding deed of an officer like Hobson. That was a frightful detail of the Spanish flight to ruin—the officers having to stand over gunners and stokers with drawn pistols to keep them to their task. Ships on which that was necessary were evidently beaten in advance. Contrast the state of things on the Oregon, in her long voyage against time from the Pacific. Captain Clark reported that even the stokers worked till they fainted in the fire-room, and then would fight to go back as soon as they recovered consciousness. To hurry up coaling, the officers threw off their coats and slaved like navvies. There we see the spirit of heroism pervading a ship from captain to coal-heaver; and it is that which makes the navy invincible.
III
As summer ended, however, and the cessation of fighting gave the country an opportunity to ask itself what it should do with Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, the continuity of the Evening Post’s policy became plain. For one thing, it now felt able to state its frank opinion that the war had been criminally unnecessary. Gen. Woodford, our last Minister at Madrid, and Congressman Boutelle made speeches at a Boston dinner on Oct. 28 in which they both virtually said as much. In all its references to the conflict after midsummer the paper made clear its conviction that it was “due solely to the combination of a sensational and unscrupulous press with an equally reckless and unscrupulous majority in Congress and a weak executive in the White House.” But the chief energies of the Post were devoted to opposing the designs of those who wanted to annex the Philippines and Cuba, or at least the former. When the war was impending, it had dreaded the loss in life and money much less than the deterioration which might be produced in the national fiber, and had predicted the possible transformation of America into an international swaggerer. Now Godkin saw indisputable evidence that the European virus of imperialism, economic and political, was entering our veins.
“Manifest Destiny” was the argument used against the Evening Post, Springfield Republican, Senators Hoar, Hale, and Spooner, Carl Schurz, and the other leaders in the struggle against annexations. What would you do with the Philippines? they were asked. Since they were in our hands, could we abandon them without thought of their future? “As matters now stand,” answered the Evening Post on Oct. 1, 1898, “having possession of Manila, we should do what we could to make Spain give the Philippines a better government or hand them over to the lawful owners—the inhabitants.” The whole American theory of government was opposed to alien rule. We could never incorporate the Philippines in the Union—this argument the Post had also used against annexing Hawaii—and it was a total reversal of national policy to acquire territory that could not be incorporated. Replying to the contention that the Filipinos might be unable to erect a good government, the Post asked if New York and Pennsylvania under Platt and Quay had one.
The chief assertions of the Evening Post, some of them since validated and some invalidated by time, are worth noting seriatim. It feared that the cost of subjugating, garrisoning and governing the Philippines would be heavy. It pointed out that in the management of inferior peoples—the negro slaves, Indians, Chinese—had lain the source of our chief national troubles. Our Federal authorities had always shown marked incapacity for governing such wards, as their “century of dishonor” in dealing with the Indians, and wretched treatment of the freedmen during Reconstruction proved. The American Government had been erected to provide for the welfare and liberty of the American nation alone, and if we undertook in a spirit of expansion to carry benefits to every misgoverned race with which we came in accidental contact, we would soon be in trouble in every part of the globe. The Post believed that half the talk of Duty and Destiny was raised by people on the make, who wanted their trade to follow the flag. The name of the United States, it asserted, had been great because it stood for peaceful industry, contempt for the military adventures of Europe, and the right of every separate people to liberty; its influence had furnished the chief hope for disarmament, and now was it to be thrown away for the pride of possessing “subjects”? Above all, Godkin apprehended the effect of expansion on our national character. The great question, as Bishop Potter put it, was not what we should do with the Philippines, but what the Philippines would do with us.
So intense was the Post’s feeling that it virtually opposed Theodore Roosevelt when the fall of 1898 he ran for the Governorship against the Tammany candidate Van Wyck. Ordinarily, it would have supported him enthusiastically in such a contest, but Roosevelt’s annexationist speeches led it to declare that Tammany control would be a local and temporary evil, while any encouragement to imperialism would be national and irrevocable. Early in 1899 the Post’s correspondents in Manila warned it that, as one wrote, “the United States must make up their minds either to fight for these islands or to give them up.” Just before the peace treaty, carrying annexation of the islands, was ratified, occurred Aguinaldo’s attempt to rush the American lines at Manila. Godkin declared that we had paid $20,000,000 simply for a right to conquer, adding bitterly:
We have apparently rushed into this business with as little preparation or forethought as into the Cuban War. We got hold of the notion that it would be a good thing to annex 1,200 islands at the other end of the world, simply because we won a naval victory over a feeble Power in the harbor of one of them, and because people like Griggs of New Jersey wanted some “glory.” We then went to work to buy 1,200 islands without any knowledge of their extent, population, climate, production, or of the feelings, wishes, or capacity of the inhabitants. We did not even know their number. While in this state of ignorance, far from trying to conciliate them, assure them of our good intentions, disarm their suspicions of us—men of a different race, language, and religion, of whom they had only recently heard—we issued one of the most contemptuous and insulting proclamations a conqueror has ever issued, announcing to them that their most hated and secular enemy had sold them to us, and that if they did not submit quietly to the sale we should kill them freely.
It was now impossible to advocate immediate and complete evacuation, and during the spring of 1899 the Post suggested another solution. It proposed that instead of administering the islands as a possession, we content ourselves with setting up a protectorate, allowing the Filipino republic to function under our general oversight. The islanders were willing to accept this, for they knew they could not stand alone against the voracity of Europe. We could send them schoolteachers, sanitary experts, missionaries, and government advisers, but we would not have to crush their spirit before we began helping them, and would be their friends, not their conquerors. Godkin was shocked by the lighthearted irresponsibility of the annexationists. “The one thing which will prevent expansion being a disgrace, is a permanent colonial civil service,” he wrote a friend, “but who is doing a thing or saying a word about it?”
While the controversy over the Philippines was at its hottest, in the spring of 1899, Mr. Godkin left for Europe, where he had spent every summer but one since 1891. In 1897 he had received his D. C. L. at Oxford, and in 1898 an honorary degree at Cambridge, but this year the alarming state of his health was his sole reason for sailing. The warnings of the doctors in Paris and Vichy were so earnest that he resolved to give up his connection with the Evening Post. His formal withdrawal took place Jan. 1, 1900, but though he was home in New York by the beginning of the preceding October, he contributed only advice and an “occasional roar,” as Henry James put it, to the Post thereafter. It was a depressing moment for him to lay down his pen. The United States seemed to have caught the infection of the Old World fever that he feared. His native country was busy crushing the Boer republics. The political condition of the nation, the State, and the city, with Mark Hanna, Platt and Quigg, Croker and Sheehan at the height of their power, was such as to make the editor feel that the forces against which he had battled were too strong to defeat. But as Charles Eliot Norton wrote him, he had earned the right to leave the field. “When the work of this century is summed up, what you have done for the good old cause of civilization, the cause which is always defeated, but always after defeat taking more advanced position than before—what you have done for this cause will count for much.”