The war and the conquest of the Philippines hastened another though peaceful expansion. The Hawaiian Islands had been a matter of interest to the United States since the American missionaries had begun to work there in the thirties. A growing, American, sugar-raising population had long hoped for annexation and had carried out a successful revolution shortly before 1893. Harrison had concluded a treaty of annexation with the provisional government, but Cleveland had refused to approve it. On July 7, 1898, however, the Newlands Resolution accomplished the annexation of the republic, and in 1900 a regular territorial government was provided for the group of islands. The spectacular journey of the Oregon around Cape Horn revived the demand for an isthmian canal. Expansion suddenly took possession of the American mind, and a new idea of duty, summed up by Rudyard Kipling in The White Man's Burden, filled a large portion of the press.
The United States had suddenly passed from internal debate over free silver to war and conquest. At the end of 1898 the War Department, that had proved its inadequacy in nearly every phase of the war, was forced to develop a colonial policy for Porto Rico and the Philippines and to guide Cuba to independence. It was still under the direction of General Russell A. Alger, but was torn by dissension and criticism upon the conduct of the war. Not until Alger was asked to retire, in 1899, and Elihu Root, of New York, succeeded him, was the War Department made equal to its task.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best account of the war with Spain is F.E. Chadwick, Relations of the United States and Spain: Diplomacy (1909), and Relations of the United States and Spain: The Spanish American War (2 vols., 1911). These works have in large measure superseded the earlier studies; J.M. Callahan, Cuba and International Relations (1899); J.H. Latané, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish America (1900:—so far as it relates to Cuba); H.E. Flack, Spanish-American Diplomatic Relations preceding the war of 1898 (in Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. XXIV); and E.J. Benton, International Law and Diplomacy of the Spanish-American War (1908). Useful narratives relating to the army are R.A. Alger, The Spanish-American War (1901); H.H. Sargent, The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba (3 vols., 1907); J. Wheeler, The Santiago Campaign (1899); J.D. Miley, In Cuba with Shafter (1899); and T. Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (1899). The navy may be followed in J.D. Long, The New American Navy (2 vols., 1903); E.S. Maclay, History of the United States Navy (3 vols., 1901, the third volume containing allegations that precipitated the Schley-Sampson controversy); G.E. Graham, Schley and Santiago (1902); W.S. Schley, Forty-five Years under the Flag (1904); W.A.M. Goode, With Sampson through the War (1899). The public documents of the war are easily accessible, especially in the Annual Reports for 1898 of the Secretaries of War and Navy, and in the Foreign Relations volume for that year. The controversies after the war illuminated many details, particularly the Schley Inquiry (57th Congress, 1st Session, House Document, no. 485, Serial nos. 4370, 4371), and the Miles-Eagan Inquiry (56th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document, no. 270, Serial nos. 3870-3872).
CHAPTER XVII
Out of the humiliating debates upon the war, on the capacity of Alger and Shafter, on the management of the commissary and the field hospitals, on the failure of Sampson and Shafter to coöperate, on the tactics and the alleged weakness of Schley, and on the diplomatic sincerity of McKinley, only one name caught the public ear. The only career that placed a soldier in line for political promotion was that of Theodore Roosevelt, who was still under forty years of age, although he had lived a keen, aggressive, and public life for nearly twenty years. Just out of Harvard in 1880, Roosevelt entered the rough and tumble of New York politics. He was a reform legislator when Cleveland was governor, and an opponent of the nomination of Blaine in 1884. He did not fight the ticket or turn Mugwump, for he had already formed a political philosophy, that only those who stayed within the party could be efficient in reform; but he dropped out of the ranks and took up ranch life in the West. Harrison made him a Civil Service Commissioner and supported him in a stern administration of the merit system. Before he left this office in 1895, to become Police Commissioner of New York City, the breezy and vigorous assaults of Roosevelt upon political corruption had already marked him as a reformer of a new type, who remained an active politician and a party man without losing his interest in reform. As police commissioner he gained new fame and more admirers. In 1897 he took the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy and prepared for war. He had already found time to write many books on the West, reform, naval history, and outdoor life. He resigned his post in April, 1898, on the eve of war, raised a regiment of volunteers, which the public speedily named the "Rough Riders," kept his men in the center of the stage while there was fighting, risked and violated all theories of discipline to attack the sanitary policy of the Administration in the autumn, and in October received the nomination of his party for Governor of New York, over the ill-concealed opposition of Thomas Collier Platt.
During the campaign of 1898 Roosevelt carried his candidacy to the voter in every part of the State. He spoke from rear platforms day after day. Rough Riders, in uniform, accompanied his party and reinforced his appeal to mixed motives of good government and patriotic fervor. He was elected in November, and on the same day the Republican control of Congress was assured. It was made possible for the party to fulfill the last of the obligations laid upon it by the election of 1896.
A currency act, passed in March, 1900, was the result of Republican success. It established the gold dollar by law as the standard of value, legalized the gold reserve at $150,000,000, and made it the duty of the Treasury to keep at a parity with gold the $313,000,000 of Civil War greenbacks, the $550,000,000 of silver and silver certificates, the $75,000,000 of Sherman Act treasury notes, as well as the national bank notes, which aggregated $300,000,000 in 1900. The law left the currency far from satisfactory in that it made it dependent upon redemption, and hence liable to sudden changes in value, but it silenced the fear of free-silver coinage.