(C) Common Dreams
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The Meddler's Trap: McKinley, the Philippines, and the Difficulty of Letting Go [1]

['Mukharji', 'Aroop Mukharji']

Date: 2023-10-01

This article proceeds in four sections. It begins with a conceptual discussion of the meddler's trap and the three interacting beliefs that led to McKinley's annexation decision: the consequences of a U.S. departure, the solution of U.S. annexation, and a feeling of ownership. The second section analyzes McKinley's decision, tracing how his three beliefs unfolded throughout the summer and fall of 1898 to produce the meddler's trap. After this account, the paper discusses alternative explanations of McKinley's decision, and ends with some concluding remarks.

At the time of his decision, McKinley felt that the United States already owned the Philippines, owing to a U.S. presence from the war. He used this framing often, in public and in private. The endowment effect thus helps answer why McKinley came to feel that the Philippines’ future was so relevant to U.S. interests. His perception of U.S. national interests changed because his perception of the United States changed. Any outcome on Filipino territory was interpreted as an outcome on a territory of U.S. control, and, thus, on U.S. territory. Great power war had to be avoided because, in McKinley's mind, it was no longer 7,000 miles away. In this way, the two judgments and cognitive bias mutually reinforced one another, offering a problem (great power war), a solution (U.S. annexation), and an underlying value to annexation. The irony and tautology are that the problem, the solution, and the underlying value were all direct consequences of U.S. intervention in the first place, which produced the meddler's trap.

Drawing on untapped primary sources, I show how three beliefs—two judgments and one underlying cognitive bias—interacted to produce the meddler's trap and the 1898 annexation decision. 22 First, McKinley believed that if the United States, having displaced Spanish rule, were to leave the Philippines, a power vacuum would result in a great power war. This belief answers a fundamental question about what mattered to McKinley about the Philippines’ future: he wanted to avoid a major, adverse outcome. Second, he believed that U.S. governance would forestall that outcome. This belief answers another fundamental question about what difference he thought annexation would make. But a third fundamental question remains: Why would any outcome 7,000 miles away from California have mattered so deeply to U.S. interests in the first place? The answer is counterintuitive, self-fulfilling, and tautological.

I argue that what I term the “meddler's trap” best explains McKinley's decision to annex the Philippines. This explanation also contributes to an understanding of why leaders have difficulty letting go. The meddler's trap denotes a situation of self-entanglement, whereby a military intervention abroad (the deployment of troops) to solve one problem inadvertently creates a new problem that the leader feels they can solve. The leader values solving that new problem more because of the intervention that occurred in the first place. The meddling not only creates the new problem but also traps leaders into thinking that the new problem is more relevant to the country's national interests than they would have otherwise thought. This overvaluation occurs because of a cognitive bias called “the endowment effect.” 19 Individuals tend to overvalue goods that they feel they already own (regardless of whether they actually own the good). 20 The deployment of troops encourages an expanded feeling of ownership over territory. 21 Before intervention, problems abroad may seem distant and unimportant. But after intervention, even minor problems abroad take center stage. Military intervention abroad, in other words, can drive perceptions of national interest, not just the other way around.

The most common problem with these arguments is that they impute popular societal attitudes to McKinley without sufficiently probing his mindset and decision-making. Foreign trade expansionism, for instance, had many avatars in U.S. politics, but at the time, like for most of his career, McKinley was skeptical of foreign markets. He thought they were unreliable and preferred focusing instead on growing domestic demand. 15 Additionally, in the fall of 1898, he ordered an analysis of the Philippines’ financial and industrial conditions. 16 The investigation offered a lukewarm economic outlook for controlling the Philippines. Instead of predicting certainty about vast riches to come to the United States, the adviser admitted deep challenges, acknowledged incomplete information, and believed that annexing the Philippines would undercut U.S. labor and industry, especially regarding tobacco. 17 The scholarly neglect of this report and of McKinley's worldviews are some of the many sources of misreading of the president. 18

The literature offers some explanations for the United States’ extended military presence abroad. 7 Many scholars have also analyzed McKinley's decision. 8 The most prominent explanation is foreign trade expansionism. This theory was so popular in the mid-twentieth century that it helped define a new school of diplomatic history, the Wisconsin School, squarely focused on U.S. imperialism. 9 According to this logic, the United States needed new overseas markets to satisfy its overflowing domestic production, the Philippines offered that outlet, and McKinley saw his chance. 10 Scholars have advanced many other theories, highlighting the role of public opinion, 11 religion, 12 gender politics, 13 and imperialist conspirators. 14

McKinley's decision was one of the most consequential in the history of U.S. foreign policy. It led the United States to colonize a country the size of Arizona, with a population of nine million, located 7,000 miles from the California coast. It was, and remains, the United States’ largest annexation outside its hemisphere. Yet McKinley's decision is as puzzling as it was significant. He did not go to war to colonize the Philippines. In fact, annexation had not occurred to McKinley until the four-month War of 1898. Moreover, McKinley did not believe that annexation would necessarily enrich the United States, and some of his closest foreign policy advisers counseled against it. Why, then, did he do it?

McKinley's decision reflects a recurring challenge for U.S. leaders. Three of the most significant U.S. foreign policies in the last half century—the lengthy wars in Vietnam, Iraq (2003–2011), and Afghanistan—feature a similar underlying theme. For each, U.S. leaders had great difficulty disentangling the United States from faraway military interventions, even when they had bipartisan support to do so. 6 Even presidents who inherited interventions with which they disagreed had that same difficulty.

Why is it hard to let go? On October 28, 1898, U.S. President William McKinley struggled with this question. At the time, 14,200 U.S. troops were stationed in the Philippines, having recently defeated Spanish forces in Manila during the War of 1898. 1 Spain had previously held the Philippines, but after the U.S. victory, McKinley felt in control. For months he debated what to do with the archipelago. On that autumn day in 1898, as part of the postwar peace conference, McKinley ordered his negotiators to demand Spain turn over the Philippines to the United States. 2 Spain reluctantly agreed. McKinley grew up a radical abolitionist, 3 distrusted foreign markets, 4 and as a politician celebrated the virtues of a small military 5 —all reasons for why one might have expected him not to annex the Philippines. But despite those intuitions, he felt that his best choice on October 28 was to keep the Philippines under U.S. control. He could not let go.

From Vietnam to Afghanistan, U.S. leaders have had great difficulty disentangling the United States from faraway military interventions. William McKinley's 1898 decision to annex the Philippines reveals why, through a phenomenon called the “meddler's trap.” The meddler's trap denotes a situation of self-entanglement, whereby a leader inadvertently creates a problem through military intervention, feels they can solve it, and values solving the new problem more because of the initial intervention. The inflated valuation is driven by a cognitive bias called the endowment effect, according to which individuals tend to overvalue goods they feel they own. A military intervention causes a feeling of ownership of the foreign territory, triggering the endowment effect. Following the U.S. victory in Manila during the War of 1898, McKinley doubted Filipino civilizational capacity to self-govern, believed that a U.S. departure from the Philippines would cause chaos and great power war, and believed that U.S. governance could forestall that outcome. Because he had already deployed troops to the Philippines, McKinley also felt ownership over them, and this endowment effect inflated his valuation of the archipelago. Together, these mutually reinforcing beliefs produced the meddler's trap and the United States’ largest annexation outside its hemisphere.

This section uses the analytical tools of the ideology of civilization, drawn from diplomatic history, and the endowment effect, drawn from decision science, to demonstrate how the meddler's trap operated in McKinley's case. 23 The ideology of civilization informed McKinley's judgments of the problem and the solution to the Philippines’ future, and the endowment effect was the cognitive factor that inflated the underlying value to those judgments.

Prospect theory, another cognitive factor that might lead to an extended military presence, is baked into the logic of the meddler's trap. Prospect theory, discussed below, is one of a few contributors to the endowment effect, the cognitive bias wherein individuals overvalue things that they feel they own. And finally, the more informal pottery store rule (“you break it, you own it”) involves a similar set of circumstances as the meddler's trap but differs from it in three ways. 26 Both are warnings, but the pottery store rule implies a moral obligation, whereas the meddler's trap does not. In the meddler's trap, the initial intervention is a purposeful action to solve a different problem rather than an accident like in the pottery store rule. That purposeful action creates an unintended consequence that then needs resolution. Perhaps most significantly, the meddler's trap implies an increased valuation arising from a feeling of ownership. Once the proverbial pot is broken, it increases in value.

Mission creep is a phenomenon wherein the objectives of a military intervention change and result in an extended military presence. 24 The meddler's trap could thus be understood as one cause of mission creep. Sunk cost fallacy and status quo bias are two cognitive frameworks that imply an extension of ongoing policy and could lead to an extended military presence following an intervention. 25 In that sense, these two concepts complement the meddler's trap, but they differ in their underlying logics. The meddler's trap does not lead to an extended military presence because a leader feels that they have already invested in an issue (sunk cost fallacy), or because they find it easier to do nothing and continue on (status quo bias). Instead, they feel that they are confronting a different issue.

McKinley's military intervention from the War of 1898 created the conditions for each of his three beliefs. Had the United States not attacked Spanish forces at Manila and displaced Spanish rule, a U.S. departure could not have potentially triggered a great power war because there would have been no military presence (and thus no departure) in the first place. Further, had the United States not stationed 14,200 troops in Manila, using U.S. annexation to solve any problem in the Philippines would have been harder to envision, much less to execute. And finally, the very existence of a U.S. military presence in the Philippines gave greater underlying value to the problem. The threat of great power war in the Philippines would not have concerned McKinley before the war—it mattered because the United States was there.

The meddler's trap defines a category of cases wherein leaders inadvertently create a problem through military intervention, feel they can solve it, and value solving the new problem more than they would have before the intervention occurred in the first place. This self-created entanglement produced McKinley's decision to annex the Philippines. First, he believed that a U.S. departure from the archipelago would lead to a great power war. Second, he believed that U.S. annexation would forestall that outcome. Last, he felt ownership over the islands, and thus cared more about their future than he would have without a U.S. military presence. Together, these gave him a problem, a solution, and an underlying value to annexation: a potential bad outcome that he felt the United States could avoid in an area of perceived U.S. concern.

McKinley's civilizational ideology also informed a solution to the issue: U.S. governance. For social Lamarckists like McKinley, civilization was malleable and thus teachable. Different cultures could move along the axis of progress. That fluidity lies at the conceptual core of “white man's burden,” “civilizational uplift,” and “the civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrice), corollary concepts of the time that were used to justify colonialism. Many U.S. political elites, drawing from their European counterparts, believed that it was their duty to conquer and civilize foreign peoples, concealing colonial subjugation with morality. 35 Civilizational ideology led other elites to be anti-imperialist; they feared a downgrade of U.S. civilization when incorporating foreign peoples into the U.S. body politic. 36 Civilizational ideology operated differently in McKinley's mind. 37 Veiled imperial lust was not the primary motivation for his annexation decision. Instead, civilizational ideology mingled with security forecasting of war and peace. 38 McKinley believed that U.S. governance would simultaneously not only ensure the short-term order needed to forestall conflict but also move Filipinos further along the road to self-government by teaching them the methods of U.S. administration. For him, civilization and security were interlinked.

This ideology informed McKinley's belief that the Philippines was at risk of future great power war. He came to believe that Filipinos were of a low civilizational status, and, critically, that they lacked the civilizational capacity to self-govern. 34 Consequently, he worried that a U.S. departure would lead to a power vacuum. McKinley believed that the Filipinos’ civilizational capacity would prevent them from maintaining order in the face of eager, imperial powers. At the time, great powers, such as Germany and Japan, had been increasingly taking control over Pacific territories. McKinley believed that they would fight for the Philippines.

The criteria and thresholds for civilizational progress were ill-defined and contradictory. 32 It is ironic that U.S. elites considered violence abroad a mark of barbarism mere decades after a bloody, race-driven, civil war that claimed over 750,000 lives, and at a time when Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Irish Americans, and Italian Americans faced the threat of lynching and racist mob violence. 33 Indeed, these communities were often perceived by U.S. elites to be both inside and outside U.S. civilization. Despite these inconsistencies and contradictions, the many terms frequently associated with civilization included law, order, stable self-government, innovation, interconnectedness, prosperity, Christianity, modernization, industrial production, literacy, and education.

The civilizational pecking order varied from person to person and decade to decade. But in general, in the 1890s, U.S. elites tended to think of themselves (i.e., white Christian Americans of Anglo-Saxon heritage) as representing the apex of civilizational progress. Next, typically, were the British, then (sometimes) the Japanese, followed by the Germans, Russians, French, Irish, Slavs and Eastern Europeans, and Indians. Then were the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Central and South Americans, and the Chinese. Next, distantly, were the Turks. Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Africans tended to be last along the perceived line of advancement. 29 Of course, these images were deeply informed by prevailing racial, social, and cultural prejudices, stereotypes, inequalities, and attitudes. The relationship between race, racism, and civilizational ideology was especially deep, as races were believed to be the carriers of civilizational progress. But the relationship was as complex as it was deep. Racial progressives also had a civilizational ideology separate from, but related to, views on race. 30 Civilizational ideology drew from many belief systems but was not reducible to or interchangeable with any single one. 31 One might understand civilizational ideology as a precursor concept to contemporary notions of development, modernization, and globalization, and to associated terms such as the Global North/South, developed/developing countries, emerging economies, and the First/Third Worlds.

The ideology of civilization, or a civilizational ideology, was a societal barometer especially popular among U.S. elites in the nineteenth century. Scholars consider it both a worldview that grouped different peoples in a hierarchy of civilizational progress and a process toward a globalized, modernized society. 27 At the low end of civilization were savages and barbarians—at the high end, the semi-civilized and civilized. This ideology drew from pre-nineteenth-century belief systems, and it was influenced by the evolutionary theories of two naturalists, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin. Elites applied Lamarck's and Darwin's scientific theories to social phenomena, either believing that civilizational rank was fluid (social Larmarckism) or fixed (social Darwinism). 28

Two concepts are fundamental for understanding how the meddler's trap functioned in McKinley's case. The first is the ideology of civilization, a concept drawn from the field of diplomatic history. This ideology underpinned McKinley's twin beliefs about the problem and the solution, namely that great power war would follow a U.S. departure, and that U.S. governance would forestall that outcome.

Since Thaler's pioneering work in 1980, repeated experiments have confirmed the robustness of the endowment effect, but scholarship no longer considers it to be a corollary to just prospect theory. Instead of loss aversion and reference dependence as the sole drivers of the endowment effect, scholars propose additional underlying causal mechanisms, including psychological ownership, memory (an emotional attachment reminding individuals of a positive experience or performance), evolutionary factors (especially among those of European descent), reference price theory (the context of the transaction), and biased information processing (recalling more positive attributes of a good as a seller). 44 It is probable that a mixture of reasons were at play for McKinley. 45 Each individual might experience the endowment effect differently, for different reasons, and to different degrees. But for the purposes of this article, isolating the specific drivers of the endowment effect for McKinley is less important than understanding whether he perceived ownership over the Philippines at all. 46 And he did.

A feeling of ownership matters because perceived ownership of an item causes a higher valuation of that item. For example, an individual might be willing to pay $5 for a coffee mug. As a seller, however, that same individual will tend to value the same mug for more than $5. That phenomenon is called the endowment affect. Richard Thaler first theorized the endowment effect in 1980. 41 He drew from previous research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on “reference-dependent preferences” and “prospect theory.” 42 Kahneman and Tversky write that individuals make different choices depending on whether they see themselves in the “domain of losses” or “domain of gains.” If a gamble is seen as a potential loss, individuals tend to be risk-seeking. If a gamble is seen as a potential gain, individuals tend to be risk averse. Furthermore, individuals tend to dislike losses more than they enjoy corresponding gains (called “loss aversion”). Thaler built on this logic with the endowment effect, arguing that endowment creates a reference point for losses and gains. 43 People tend to dislike losing something more than they tend to enjoy gaining the same thing. The endowment effect also implies that individuals prefer something they feel they own over an alternative of equal value that they feel they do not own.

The second fundamental concept for understanding how the meddler's trap functioned in McKinley's case is the endowment effect. How did a distant land previously of minor value to McKinley transform into a central national interest? This article argues that McKinley valued the Philippines more because the president perceived it as already being in U.S. possession. He never expressed that Filipino concerns mattered to U.S. peacetime interests until after U.S. Commodore George Dewey's defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. By the time he made his decision in October, U.S. troops were already there, in control of Manila. He conceptualized leaving the Philippines as a loss of territory and international status; a “national mutilation,” as his adviser later put it. 39 To McKinley, the choice was either keeping the archipelago or losing it, as opposed to gaining the archipelago or preserving the status quo. 40

The secret peace offer, third-party accounts of his position, and McKinley's choice of Day to lead the peace commission together help prove that throughout the summer of 1898, McKinley was not planning on full annexation. He may have started to feel ownership over the Philippines, valuing it and its future more than he had before the war, when he had never given it much thought. Such a feeling would deepen over time, consistent with the endowment effect. 71 But McKinley still lacked a larger reason to annex the island chain. That reason, a belief that great power war would follow a U.S. departure, developed over August and September, as he collected more intelligence and advice about Filipino society and the intentions of competing powers.

As the war continued, however, McKinley's ambitions regarding the Philippines did not expand much, if at all, beyond a coaling station or a port, despite his warning in June. Two months after the secret peace offer, George B. Cortelyou, McKinley's private secretary, recounted a meeting between McKinley and Senator John T. Morgan. Cortelyou celebrated that Morgan, who had “well known” and “radical” views, decided to support McKinley's position on peace terms; a “triumph” for the president. 66 Before the meeting, Morgan had begun to publicly support annexation and imperialism. 67 Given that Cortelyou called Morgan's public position “radical,” the account suggests that McKinley's position was still mild in scope as of August 1898. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an expansionist, confirmed Cortelyou's assessment. After meeting with McKinley, Lodge lamented that the administration was “hesitating” on the issue and that McKinley intended “to withdraw as much as possible.” 68 Furthermore, once the fighting had ended on August 12, McKinley asked Secretary of State William Rufus Day—whose anti-expansionist view had been known to the president for months—to actually lead the Paris Peace Commission to negotiate the final peace with Spain. 69 In a note to Day as late as September 16, 1898, McKinley wrote openly about the chance of Spain keeping a portion of the archipelago. 70

Coaling stations were valuable in McKinley's era. At the time, steamships ran on hundreds of tons of coal, supplied either at permanent stations or at sea by colliers, which were more unpredictable and limited. Coaling stations expanded a country's shipping radius. Of course, countries often coaled at stations owned and operated by foreign nations, but wars could complicate this access. International norms prohibited warring nations from coaling and repairing their ships in neutral harbors. Though countries often broke neutrality rules (during the War of 1898 itself, neutral governments in Britain and Hawaii both offered the United States significant coaling help), coaling stations nevertheless served an additional purpose of self-sufficiency during conflicts. 65

As this new framing was taking root, McKinley's ambitions regarding the Philippines were still mild. 61 In June, just one month into the war, McKinley made his first attempt at securing peace with Spain through a back channel in Europe. He expressed a willingness to allow Spain to retain the Philippines if the United States could keep a port and “necessary appurtenances” (presumably a coaling station). 62 But, McKinley warned, should the war continue, his demands might expand. 63 Spain spurned this secret offer. 64

After another cabinet meeting on July 30, 1898, U.S. Secretary of Treasury Lyman Gage recounted McKinley's thinking to Charles Dawes, a McKinley confidant. Dawes recorded about the president, “He wants the facts to be carefully considered, without the consideration involving the loss of any present advantage.” 58 Two weeks later, in a cable to military leaders in the Philippines, McKinley again referenced the “possession of Manilla [sic], Manilla Bay, and Harbor.” 59 The August cable that McKinley received announcing U.S. victory at the Battle of Manila Bay may have reinforced all of this thinking. “Manila ours few accidents,” the U.S. consul reported. 60

As events unfolded over the summer, one of the three beliefs that guided McKinley's ultimate decision started to take shape. By defeating the Spanish in the Philippines and then occupying Manila, McKinley began indicating a feeling of ownership in private and in administrative interactions. On May 19, 1898, he ordered U.S. Secretary of War Russell Alger to establish order and security throughout the islands “while in the possession of the United States.” Though he wanted the “occupation” to be “as free from severity as possible,” he saw military governance as supreme and authorized the army to collect taxes, substitute new courts of his own constitution, and expel Filipino officials if they did not comply. 55 A White House memo on June 19 framed Manila as being in “the practical possession of the American squadron.” 56 In recounting the July cabinet meetings regarding the peace terms with Spain, biographer Charles S. Olcott writes about McKinley: “He did not want the islands, but, once in our possession, he felt that the people would never be satisfied if they were given back to Spain.” 57

Soon after Dewey's victory, warships from France, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan descended on Manila. This reflected common practice at the time; countries deployed warships to areas of disorder when they held property or interests there. Nevertheless, it often increased tensions. The Germans were particularly intrusive, protesting some of Dewey's policies and interfering with the Filipino insurgents, with whom Dewey was partnering against the Spanish. 52 Dewey requested U.S. army reinforcements to hold Manila while the war effort centered on Cuba. Roughly 14,200 U.S. troops arrived over the following months. 53 Meanwhile, General Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, declared Filipino independence on June 12, 1898, and lobbied for international recognition to little effect. In less than a day on August 13, the United States took control of Manila in a bizarrely staged battle against the Spanish (boxing out Filipinos in the process), unaware that a peace protocol had just been signed a few hours before in Washington, DC, where it was still August 12. 54

The Manila attack itself was a massacre. Late at night on April 30, 1898, on McKinley's command, six U.S. warships arrived at the entrance to Manila Bay. 50 The next morning, Commodore Dewey, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, sailed west in pursuit of the Spanish fleet, uttering his famous command, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” after which his squadron rained down 6,000 shells on Spanish forces. 51 Within a few hours, and at the cost of zero U.S. lives, three Spanish ships were sunk, six were compromised, and 171 Spaniards were dead.

The road to U.S. annexation of the Philippines thus began when the United States launched its naval attack against the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, at the start of the war. McKinley did not order the Manila attack with the intention of annexing the Philippines. Over the course of his political career, he never expressed much interest in the archipelago, nor in the Far East in general. Attacking Manila originated in contingency war plans that preceded his presidency. 49 War planners believed that the U.S. West Coast (and its commerce) were vulnerable to a Pacific attack in a concurrent war between Spain and Japan, and the surge in European activity in the Far East intensified this forecasting of conflict. Strategically, war planners conceived of the Philippines as a potential bargaining chip in future peace negotiations.

On April 25, 1898, the United States declared war on Spain, kicking off the War of 1898, better known as the Spanish-American War. 47 Brutal Spanish oppression of Cuban revolutionaries eventually convinced a reluctant President McKinley to pursue war against the declining European colonial power. 48 The war lasted just under four months, as the United States overwhelmed Spanish forces in Cuba, the central theater of war, as well as in other Spanish colonial possessions—Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Major powers mostly stayed out of the conflict, but all keenly awaited developments. France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia were all playing an imperial game of chess in the Pacific and were eager to know which Spanish colonies the United States would demand after its victory. The Philippines was at the top of that list.

The fall of 1898 was critical to McKinley's annexation decision.72 After the August peace protocol with Spain, McKinley had a handful of weeks to assemble a team to negotiate a final peace treaty in Paris. The primary question during negotiations was the future of the Philippines.

Coming into the war, McKinley knew little about the Philippines. Following the secret peace offer to the Spanish in June, Day wrote to U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain John Hay in London (who delivered the offer) about Filipino participation: “The insurgents there have become an important factor in the situation and must have just consideration in any terms of settlement.”73 Day could not have written such a note without McKinley's express direction. And the last line is critical: “It is most difficult without fuller knowledge to determine as to disposition of Philippine Islands.”74 McKinley was admitting ignorance.

To resolve this lack of awareness, McKinley sought intelligence and advice from experts on the ground. He began with writers. In early August 1898, McKinley asked his secretary, Cortelyou, to find him the July issue of Contemporary Review containing an “able article” (Cortelyou's words) on the Philippines by John Foreman, a British writer, businessperson, and explorer living in the Philippines.75Contemporary Review was one of a handful of popular, long-form magazines. In the article, Foreman doubted the capacity and solidarity of the nationalist movement in the Philippines. “It would not be strong enough to protect itself against foreign aggression,” Foreman wrote, adding that there would be “complete chaos.”76 Indicating his respect for Foreman's analysis, McKinley invited Foreman to meet and brief McKinley's peace commissioners in Paris. The Filipinos, Foreman told the Paris commissioners in October, were “unfit for self-government” with “ideas too undeveloped.”77 This belief was common among the few observers of the Philippines who published for elite U.S. audiences. The several other monthly, long-form journals popular among McKinley and his peers echoed Foreman's views, casting doubt on the ability of Filipinos to self-govern.78

McKinley's close military advisers produced similar assessments. Major General Francis V. Greene, for instance, who led the second wave of U.S. troops to the Philippines in the summer of 1898, traveled to Washington in September 1898 to personally advise the president on the Philippines. From September 27 to October 1, 1898, McKinley met with Greene five times, totaling about ten hours.79 Upon arrival, Greene presented a sixty-page report on the Philippines. “There is no reason to believe that Aguinaldo's Government has any elements of stability,” it reads. Independent self-government was impossible in the near-term. “They have no clearly defined ideas at all” regarding many matters of civil administration.80 “At present, incapable of self-government,” the general warned.81 McKinley then asked Greene to deliver the same report in Paris, to McKinley's peace commissioners who were negotiating a final treaty with Spain. Commodore Dewey, meanwhile, had more faith in the people from the main island of Luzon than did Greene. Still, reporting to Washington the month before, Dewey referenced the “limited amount of civilization” in most of the island chain, noting that the southern islands “are almost wholly given over to savages.”82

General Greene, perhaps more than any other adviser, helped frame the decision for McKinley.83 In addition to his report, he prepared another document for the president that laid out five strategic options: (1) return the Philippines to Spain, (2) turn them over to the Filipinos, (3) turn them over to Germany or Japan, (4) jointly occupy and administer them with one or more countries, or (5) keep them undivided.84 Greene recommended the last option, and Dewey agreed.85

McKinley's private and public justifications for annexation reflected Greene's language and framing.86 After the United States had attacked the Spanish, according to McKinley, neutrality laws would have prevented U.S. access to ports in the Pacific (given that the major ports for refueling would have been neutral British, Chinese, or Japanese ones), thereby necessitating the occupation of Manila.87 Once McKinley decided he wanted a coaling station (located on Luzon, the largest island), Greene's logic led him to accept nothing less than the entire island chain. Retaining Luzon meant that the United States would either have to give the rest of the Philippines back to Spain, sell it to another country, leave it open, or keep it entirely. McKinley felt that the first option would be hypocritical (and therefore dishonorable), given that the United States had attacked Spain precisely because of its oppressive governance. He also felt that selling the archipelago would further encourage great power competition in the Pacific and lead to a war “within fifteen minutes.”88 The geography of the Philippines meant that the United States could be surrounded by potentially hostile territory. And intelligence from Ambassador Hay in London suggested that European powers might intervene if Germany made any advances.89 Additionally, McKinley's sources of intelligence (through Greene, Foreman, and other contemporary testimony) doubted the solidarity of the nationalist movement and the capacity of Filipinos to self-govern.90 The resulting vacuum, McKinley believed, would invite other great powers, like Germany and Japan, to intervene.91 Intelligence from Hay, not to mention Dewey's friction with the Germans in July, confirmed this outside interest.92 Finally, there was the option of U.S. acquisition.

The expectation was that, left alone, the Philippines would collapse into a civil war among tribes for three reasons: Aguinaldo was weak and did not have widespread appeal,93 the Filipinos were too diverse and jealous of one another,94 and Filipinos needed civilizational tutelage in governance.95 Of those three reasons, the third dominated the first two. The administration's perceptions of Aguinaldo's hold on the archipelago were largely accurate. In 1898, Aguinaldo did not lead a united Philippines.96 Divisive sectionalism, demographic debates, and unrepresentative and unpopular leaders had led the United States to its own brutal civil war not four decades before. But no one in McKinley's administration would have argued that the United States lacked the capacity to self-govern, or that it needed tutelage. Aguinaldo's lack of widespread appeal mattered to U.S. observers because they did not believe that Filipinos could sustain a stable alternative. As for Filipino diversity, U.S. governance was believed to be easy, not because it could change Filipino demographics, but because it could teach Filipinos how to govern a diverse population.97 Civilizational ideology was the primary concern.98

If, the belief went, Filipinos could learn how to self-organize and self-govern under law and order—that is, if they could become civilized—the rest would follow. Many tribes were “law-abiding,” but they lacked the capacity “and intelligence” to figure it out for themselves.99 “The masses are decidedly too ignorant to be capable of voting intelligently,” wrote Foreman.100 The necessary and sufficient reason, thus, was that the Filipinos were believed to be of a lower level of civilization. “For security and well-being,” one article reads, “they need simply a just and enlightened administration.”101 Furthermore, this self-governance could only be accomplished by direct tutelage. Neither a diplomatic note to other powers, nor aid or advice, nor promised protection would suffice. The removal of Spanish suppression would not naturally restore a latent civilizational capacity. Self-governance had to be taught.

It is crucial to understand what the individuals informing McKinley believed.102 Though those observers drew distinctions between various groups of Filipinos, Filipinos were generally assumed to be of a lower civilization and to lack the ability to self-govern. Some Filipinos were easily civilizable, others were “an intractable, bloodthirsty set.”103 They lacked “education and experience.”104 Scientist Dean Worcester, writing in a popular monthly magazine, did recognize that a Filipino “believes himself quite capable of administering the affairs of his country,” though the U.S. government would know better.105 Day characterized the Filipinos to McKinley as “semi-barbarous,”106 “ignorant,” and “degraded.”107 Phrases like “wild tribes”108 and generalizations that there were no “able and honest”109 Filipino leaders fed the notion that chaos was inevitable with this lower civilization.

McKinley privately believed that the world was made up of a hierarchy of differing levels of civilization, with Anglo-Saxons at the top of the ladder. “It is our proud title to belong to the Anglo-Saxon race, the leaders in the march of civilization, in every age and in every quarter of the globe,” he wrote in an undelivered speech in October 1898.110 This general attitude did not imply a specific notion of the Filipinos. His awareness of Filipino society was essentially nonexistent before the summer of 1898, and he clearly did not come into the war thinking that the Filipinos were helpless, as indicated above in Day's June letter to Hay.111

McKinley's inclination to believe in a civilizational hierarchy would have thus been reinforced by the intelligence that he received from writers and officials advising him. His closest advisers offered similar intuitions about Filipinos’ ability to self-govern. McKinley eventually came to think that either chaos or interstate conflict (or both) was inevitable because he was influenced by that advice. McKinley's civilizational ideology not only produced the belief that war would follow a U.S. departure but also bolstered the twin belief that chaos would not follow if the United States stayed involved. McKinley believed in a fluid civilizational hierarchy: peoples were not equal, but they could advance.112 This fluidity was the difference between his belief system and that of anti-imperialists who argued against annexation on the basis of fixed inferiority.

This civilizational ideology drove McKinley's analysis of the situation. Even if McKinley did not have firm beliefs about the Filipinos before the war, already having a worldview that categorized societies within a civilizational hierarchy meant that he was more likely to slot Filipinos into that framework when receiving intelligence.113 The analyses that he received from his advisers and monthly journals would have identified Filipinos as a lower-order civilization in a preexisting hierarchy that he already believed in. That categorization would have greatly strengthened his probabilistic judgments about future disorder. Self-governance would have appeared impossible without tutelage from the United States. In that undelivered speech referenced above, the full quote reveals more about McKinley's thinking:

It is our proud title to belong to the Anglo-Saxon race, the leaders in the march of civilization, in every age and in every quarter of the globe. Where that flag flies it is seldom lowered; where that race enters it always remains, bringing with it the blessings of greater health and happiness, of a larger and more perfect fertility and of freer interchange with the commerce and arts of the world. It proclaims liberty; it establishes law; it enshrines religion and hastens progress; it makes the world the better for its being.114

Scholars have tended to analyze McKinley's civilizational ideology with respect to morality, duty, and “uplift,” which is the other side of the civilizational coin.115 But before October 1898, and in contrast to his statements on Cubans, McKinley had voiced few concerns for Filipinos, who had also endured centuries of oppressive Spanish colonization. His orders to the War Department in the summer of 1898 did indicate a desire to improve Filipino lives, but McKinley systematically blocked Filipinos from participating in peace negotiations about their future, and he blocked them militarily in Manila.116 McKinley's private justifications for annexation were devoid of deep concerns for their welfare, and neither his advisers nor expert testimony before the Paris Peace Commission indicated that humanitarianism was the highest priority. The many references that he began to make publicly about civilizational uplift, a duty to humanity, and benevolent assimilation bolster the idea that he was shrouding his civilizational assumptions in a veil of altruism.117 It was McKinley's assumptions about civilization rather than humanitarianism that affected his judgment about war, security, and the prospects for peace.118 The less he believed that the Filipinos could self-govern, the more he would have to worry that their independence would result in chaos. Civilizational progress translated to greater stability and peace.119

Foreign interest also mattered, but McKinley's intelligence on the likelihood of great power intervention over the Philippines was less certain and consistent than his intelligence on Filipino civilization. On the one hand, the president had reason to believe that Germany and Japan were interested in controlling the Philippines. Dewey had some testy exchanges with the Germans during the War of 1898, for instance. And although Japan had given its blessing to future U.S. control of the Philippines, it had indicated interest in setting up a government were the United States to leave.120 Yet that interest did not naturally translate to chaos and great power war in the event of a U.S. departure from either Luzon or all the islands. For instance, the advice of McKinley's chief negotiator, Day, was that the possibility of foreign acquisition of the Philippines could be averted with a carefully worded treaty.121 Ambassador Hay (who later became Day's successor as secretary of state), subtly advising McKinley against annexation, acknowledged Germany's interest but also implied that Germany might be deterred by the “danger of grave complications with other European powers.”122 Andrew White, McKinley's ambassador in Berlin, reported that concerns about Germany were exaggerated.123 Indeed, in 1899, through Hay, McKinley merely circulated a letter to European and Japanese powers, requesting that they respect China's “open door” and territorial integrity (the so-called First Open Door Note) to persuade the same set of imperialists against land grabs and expanding their spheres of influence within China.

Yet in 1898, less than a year before the First Open Door Note, McKinley thought that the Philippines would be a disaster unless the United States were its sovereign. Why? Because he believed that the Filipinos lacked the capacity for self-government. McKinley, ever the cautious statesperson, was careful not to publicly say that the Filipinos were unfit for self-government. A draft of a speech in December 1898, however, gives a sense of his true intuitions: “Having done all that in the line of duty, is there any less duty to remain there and give to the inhabitants protection and also our guidance to a better government, which will secure to them peace and order and security in their life and property and in the pursuit of happiness and opportunities to demonstrate their capacity for self-government?”124

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[1] Url: https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/48/2/49/118109/The-Meddler-s-Trap-McKinley-the-Philippines-and

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