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Much of the literature on the Spanish-American War focuses on the “character” and “agency” of President William McKinley in shaping foreign policy.  Those revisionist scholars arguing McKinley was a strong and purposeful executive often cite the administration’s repudiation of the Turpie-Foraker Amendment that challenged the president’s autonomy in crafting his foreign policy in the wake of his war message to Congress as a sign of presidential strength.  McKinley’s success in passing his agenda through Congress was less the development of any personal contribution than the product of the enormous structural and institutional advantages relative to the legislature that the presidency provides foreign policy initiatives from the executive in crisis situations.

Pressure from congressional Republicans forced a reluctant President William McKinley to assent to a war with Spain that he did not want, but could no longer avoid.  Such a maxim has become axiomatic for general studies of American history and is rarely interrogated by American imperialism specialists.  Whether the war was indeed “unwanted,” “unnecessary,” or merely “politics by other means,” the clamor for hostilities from the legislature limited the president’s leeway and flexibility in pursuing diplomacy with Spain is usually cited to illuminate either the weakness of the president’s character or the powers of his office more generally.[1] Much debate in historiography revolves around the extent McKinley had assented to a war for reasons of humanitarianism or geopolitics independent of explicit congressional pressure.[2] Accessing the mind of President McKinley is not the intent of this paper.  For reasons the reticent McKinley took to his grave, the president submitted to Congress a message on April 11, 1898 in which he asked the legislature to confer upon him the authority to employ a military force at his own discretion to secure the pacification of Cuba, absent improbable Spanish concessions.[3] The far-fetched prospect of future negotiations with Spain still provoked hostility from belligerent members of both parties in Congress, as did the omission of the Maine explosion as a justification for war, but McKinley’s refusal to recognize the Republic of Cuba as an independent nation ran roughshod over the sentiment of the majority of congressmen in both chambers, and, presumably, constituent opinion.  Opposition to the White House’s Cuban policy coalesced and produced a flurry of amendments to the authorization bill proclaiming the independence of Cuba that appeared to gain momentum after the Turpie-Foraker Amendment cleared the Senate on April 16 before dissipating two days later when Republican whips in the House marshaled an unyielding coalition on a resolution assenting to the president’s wishes that forced rebel Republicans in the Senate to capitulate.

McKinley’s champions cite this episode among their strongest claims that the president was an above-average executive who adroitly wielded and expanded the powers of his office in the face of intense congressional pressure.  If the president capitulated to Congress in asking for war, this argument maintains, he successfully extracted from the legislature a war fought on his terms.  Surmising the post-message maneuvering, Paul S. Holbo writes:

McKinley had lost control of the situation temporarily to an unruly combination of idealistic jingoes, suspicious Populists, and political rivals. After great effort he re-established his authority over American foreign policy.  He asserted the primacy of the President in foreign affairs at a time when either an independent-minded Congress or an inflamed public opinion might have inspired action that he deemed unwise.  In this way he contributed substantially to strengthening the institution of the presidency.[4]

Lewis L. Gould, the president’s staunchest and most prolific defender, contextualizes the message as significant in part of a broader trajectory where McKinley asserted increasing executive autonomy from congressional influence in foreign affairs.[5] Writing in the wake of decades of crude and unfair caricatures of McKinley’s leadership, such conclusions were decisive in revising academic assessments of the president and the larger significance of the Spanish-American War in U.S. history, but dwelling on the legislature’s acquiescence to McKinley’s requests as the product of some ambiguous maneuvering that neither Gould nor Holbo ever really source or define as somehow illuminating the competency of the executive overlooks the structural advantages a foreign crisis confers upon the executive in establishing an agenda, mobilizing support, creating deadlines, and disarming potential opposition.[6] Rather than placing resistance to the president’s agenda following his message in the context of congressional dominance of the nineteenth century or as “part of a struggle with Congress as to which branch decides to go to war,” scholars seeking to make sense of the legislature’s acquiescence to the president’s demands should examine the congressional capitulation during the week following McKinley’s message as an extraordinary crisis period where the strengths of the executive branch and weaknesses of the legislature in foreign affairs more resemble those observed in the post World War II era.[7] If congressional pressure in the era of legislative supremacy yielded an executive amenable to war, the institutional weaknesses of the Congress when confronted by an executive with a set agenda on foreign affairs better explains the sources of McKinley’s victory than any persuasive skills.  McKinley’s success can only be considered an anomaly closely correlated to his persuasive prowess if analyses of executive and legislative relations exclude the frequency of presidential successes in similar contexts later in the twentieth century.

This paper will treat the president’s message as a unilateral action demanding the use of force on the president’s terms.  Where congressional pressure certainly constrained the president to present an interventionist policy, McKinley relied upon a set of diplomatic and military information exclusive to the White House to outline a set of objectives that were at a wide variance with congressional opinion and which also entailed extensive executive autonomy in conducting affairs in Cuba through mitigating likely domestic and international constraints.[8] Unresponsive to the majority opinion of Congress, the president established an agenda in a crisis situation that imposed high political costs for further delay and compelled the legislature to accept his proposals or undertake the difficult task of rallying a bipartisan majority in both chambers behind a credible alternative.[9] Relying upon the institutional sources of presidential and congressional power in the twentieth century outlined by William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, this paper will contend that McKinley attained his objectives due to a disciplined Republican majority in the House and the structural weaknesses that encumber decisive action for the president’s opponents.[10] This paper will further claim that an instinctive inclination toward apathy, informational asymmetries, prominence of other electoral priorities, and a lack of institutional willpower that usually provoke what Stephen R. Weissman has termed a “culture of deference” in the realm of foreign policy making in the legislature’s relationship to the executive functioned in the wake of McKinley’s address.[11] In doing so, this paper hopes to provide a case study that that suggests the president’s capacity to define and direct foreign policy is neither strongly a function of the individual characteristics of a master politician nor a novelty of the post World War II era.

A Note on Sources

Before proceeding further, I will discuss my source base.  Aside from the relative paucity of foreign deployments to weigh quantitatively, I imagine the impossibility of measuring public opinion without polling data, the absence of a definitive “paper of record,” and a general unfamiliarity with the nation’s history prior to World War II has contributed to the dearth of political science literature on the institutional dynamics of foreign policy making in the nineteenth century.[12] My primary sources for tackling this episode will be the Congressional Record and the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Daily Tribune, and Boston Daily Globe.  In contrast to popular perceptions of rampant sensationalism in the press, each of these papers covered the same events with objectivity that also allowed a wide range of uneditorialized opinions to emerge.  Each newspaper has also been cited by prominent historians of the period as a mainstream, if sometimes partisan source.  All supported intervention and were generally supportive of McKinley’s efforts, although the Democratic Daily Globe expressed greater reservations about the efficacy of the president’s message and was more partisan than the others.  The Daily Tribune also carried daily summaries of leading editorial opinion from the partisan presses.  Through an online archive of historical newspapers, I read every article in which the term “Cuba” appeared in the text between 4/10/1898 to 4/20/1898 that appeared relevant to the debates in Washington.[13] As all four papers closely covered affairs in Washington at the time, I believe I can confidently track the weakening of the Cuban independence position in the legislature.  Drawbacks to employing newspapers from this period as primary sources include the unclear distinction between rumor and fact that pervaded reports from Washington during this tumultuous time, the credibility of often uncited sources, and the biases inherent in news reporting that tend to dramatize events and may systematically over-represent and exaggerate the levels of interparty resistance to the president’s proposals.  For these reasons, I believe historians who rely heavily on newspaper accounts of the debate surrounding the Turpie-Foraker Amendment seem prone to overstate the probability of a Republican revolt.  Along the same lines, those primarily reliant upon the Congressional Record and one or two papers to gauge resistance to the president’s agenda appear unable to distinguish between influential and fringe opinion.  I hope my application of a twentieth century construct of similar situations coupled with a close reading of the Congressional Record and the four newspapers I examined should allow me to assess the contingencies and structural contours of policymaking that proved crucial for the course of the Spanish-American War and the precedents the nonrecognition of the Cuban belligerency established in the U.S. foreign policy tradition.

A Brief Overview of the Cuban Crisis, the Presidency, and Congress

In the spring of 1896, one year after the breakout of the Spanish-Cuban War, after much debate, a concurrent resolution recognizing the Cuban belligerency passed both houses of Congress.[14] As an expression of congressional opinion, the document had no binding commitment on the executive or his policy, but it foreshadowed politics over Cuba for the next two years as politically expedient expressions of sympathy for the Cuban revolutionaries by the opposition parties in Congress were stymied by Presidents Cleveland and McKinley who feared conferring recognition to the Cuban rebels would foster conditions that would allow a minor incident to provoke a war with Spain.  With majorities in the House and Senate, McKinley was afforded considerable leeway in conducting diplomacy in his first months in office, though a stalemate ensued between belligerents while humanitarian conditions worsened on the island.  Halfhearted Spanish reforms failed to attract the support of the Cuban insurgency.  Even before the Maine explosion, the stability in Cuba so desired by the American government proved beyond Spain’s grasp.  After the navy commission appointed by McKinley traced the origin of the Maine explosion to an outside source in late March, the White House realized it could no longer depend upon cooperation from anxious congressional Republicans.[15] As eleventh-hour Spanish concessions still proved wanting, McKinley prepared a message for war.

Reaction to the President’s Message:

Although rumors on the contents of the president’s message had spread through the press in the days before it was delivered on April 11, the more controversial aspects of the address had apparently caught the media by surprise. McKinley’s request that Congress authorize him to employ the military without recognizing the independence of the Cuban republic, the omission of the Maine as a casus belli, and an ambiguously worded promise of “future intervention” at his discretion, when coupled with his inclusion of Spain’s latest concessions, led to worries of further indecisiveness from the executive and provoked a wave of criticism from congressional Democrats and many Republicans.  The Times summarized the general response in Washington as “a common feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment . . . A halting and confusing message.”^[16] Congressional Democrats and Populists almost unanimously condemned the message as a weak affirmation of public sentiment and hostile to the Cubans where Republican support for the president was varied, though he received many strong endorsements from his staunchest supporters.[17] “I shall feel compelled to stand by the Republican platform instead of the President’s policy, or, rather, lack of policy,” one Illinois Republican stated, referring to the 1896 Republican Party endorsement of Cuban independence.[18] Editorials in the major Republican and Democratic presses divided upon party lines on supporting the president, though many papers, including the usually friendly Daily Tribune and the surprisingly sympathetic Democratic Times, rebuked the administration for overlooking the Maine.[19] While the House and Senate Committees on Foreign Relations prepared resolutions for the authorization of force, several Democratic senators launched polemics against the president’s policies, and a general consensus existed that any document brought to the Senate floor would be amended successfully by the opposition to include a provision recognizing Cuban independence.[20]

Contrary to most unilateral foreign policy decisions a president undertakes, McKinley’s address attracted a high level of scrutiny and criticism.  Rather than attributing this resistance as the product of some bygone “institutional pride,” an examination of the traditional sources of legislative deference illuminates how the contingencies of the Cuban crisis created environment conducive to congressional scrutiny.[21] Unlike more mundane issues of foreign policy, many politicians genuinely sympathized with the Cuban cause, or at least believed their constituents were deeply invested in its outcome.  The typical apathy congressmen exert over monitoring presidential action abroad was negated by personal and electoral investment in the outcome.[22] Although the Republicans held a firm majority in the House, the balance in the Senate depended upon a tenuous alliance with a clique of five Silver Republicans more prone to ally with the Democrats and Populists on Cuban policy.[23] Although a majority of Republicans supported the president, six senators, led by Senators Foraker and Mason, reliably allied with the opposition out of conviction that constituted a threat to presidential leeway.  As Howell and Pevehouse have noted, a large deployment generally attracts higher levels of congressional oversight.[24] While the executive possessed privileged access to military and diplomatic information, Cuba, by virtue of its proximity to the United States and prominence in U.S. public discourse, afforded a wealth of experts independent of the administration from whom Congress could consistently draw upon to challenge the administration’s positions.  Although the president’s defenders often pleaded for deference to the executive’s opinions as arising from superior resources, the administration’s many critics included among their ranks men who had traveled to Cuba on “fact-finding missions” and could claim first-hand knowledge on affairs in the island.   Given that the urgency for intervention revolved around emotional, ideological, and humanitarian poles, it should also not be surprising that many congressmen were confident in their information on the conflict and allowed their worldviews to trump deference to the executive’s wishes.  As has occurred when a confluence of similar conditions arose following World War II, Congress exerted an influence over executive policy.  Initiatives from Capitol Hill contributed to the prominence of the Spanish-Cuban War in the serious press, the timing of the president’s decision to intervene in the conflict, the level of force to be applied, and, to a lesser extent, established the viable options for McKinley in considering his policy toward Spain.

If McKinley’s message failed to immediately attain from the legislature its objectives, it set in motion a process that raised the costs of congressional resistance to his agenda.  A presidential message is a challenge to the Congress that places upon it “the burden of revising a new political landscape.”[25] Even if McKinley’s proposed intervention was not as robust as many in Congress had hoped, it was nonetheless a call for action that, independent of the status of Cuba, commanded wide public support.[26] Although majorities of Republicans in both chambers supported an amendment declaring Cuban independence, fighting the administration on this point entailed antagonizing the executive, splitting the Republican Party, and dividing the country as war loomed over the horizon, delaying effective action during a crisis situation, imperiling the party’s political fortunes and the nation’s image abroad.  Politically, the Democratic Party stood to gain from encouraging divisions in the Republican caucus, but opposition to the president risked charges of obstructionism or partisanship that could serve to unite the Republicans behind the administration.  The omnipresent threat of a presidential veto over a joint resolution contrary to his wishes also hovered over any congressional action.  While the president and his sympathizers in Congress had previously argued that the Cuban Republic failed to meet the standards international law demanded of recognition, McKinley also accurately stressed such an action would hinder American freedom of action in Cuba by legally subordinating U.S. armed forces to Cuban command while on the island, potentially implicating opponents to his proposal as threatening national security.  “Very few Republicans dared to denounce the document publically,” the Post reported following the address, “for there was a forceful realization that the President had shifted the responsibility of future action to Congress and the men who had been clamoring loudly for decision and vigor in the White House found that they must share that responsibility.”[27] As Howell and Pevehouse projected, the incentives for congressional resistance to a president’s agenda declines while the costs of opposition can become almost prohibitively high when the president’s party commands a majority in at least once branch of Congress.[28] While McKinley’s message was influenced by what he thought was attainable from Congress, it appears unlikely any reasonable proposal the president advanced could muster decisive opposition from the legislature due its partisan composition.

The Turpie-Foraker Amendment and its Aftermath

McKinley’s agenda sailed through the House, but met resistance in the Senate.  While the press reported a majority of Republican congressmen supported Cuban independence, the House Committee on Foreign Relations under direction from the Republican leadership in close contact with the executive promptly provided a resolution authorizing the president to intervene militarily in Cuba that largely conformed to McKinley’s wishes on April 13.[29] The resolution echoed the rationales provided in the president’s message and called for the establishment of a stable government in Cuba.  A wide Republican majority and strict rules on debate had abetted the president’s cause in the House, but the prospect of unlimited discussion and the relative parity of partisan forces in the Senate sapped the president’s momentum.  The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations produced a resolution outlining Spanish complicity in the Maine explosion as a primary rationale for war that also ambiguously resolved that the Cuban people “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent.”[30] Over the next three days, the Senate suspended all business unrelated to Cuba and debated the Turpie-Foraker Amendment to the resolution that authorized the explicit recognition of the insurgent government.  On April 16, the minority resolution recognizing the Cuban Republic gained a majority vote of 51-37 and the subsequent Teller Amendment forbade the U.S. government from ever annexing the island.[31] The proposals were then amended to the House bill and sent to the lower house as a joint resolution that, if passed, authorized the president’s signature or veto.

The success of the Turpie-Foraker Amendment suggests a president cannot completely disarm the opposition by declaring a crisis and demanding action.  In a widely cited oration, Senator Daniels of Virginia declared “I will not be driven by committees.  I will not be driven by Presidents. I had rather be a Cuban reconcentrado upon the island than an American senator and not proclaim the independence and freedom of the brave young Cuban republic.”[32] Given alternative sources of information on Cuba from the executive, the divergence in worldview over the extent political ideologies and sympathies could guide the strategic decision over the recognition of the Cuban Republic, as well as the popularity of the Cuban cause, it should not surprising that McKinley encountered resistance where serious partisan gains stood to be gained.[33] Gould and Holbo point to the passage of the Turpie-Foraker Amendment as marking a nadir of presidential influence that sparked a real possibility of launching a Republican revolt in the House that would force McKinley to capitulate to the legislature which the president, through probable, though unspecified, coordination with his House allies, averted.  Rather than marking a pivotal moment in the trajectory of the Spanish-American War, a close reading of newspaper reports, when coupled with a perspective that highlights the advantages of the executive in pushing through his agenda, suggests that the Turpie-Foraker Amendment was the peculiar product of a divided Senate that had little chance of derailing the president’s position given the strength of his partisan in the House that was buttressed by the advantageous aftereffects a unilateral directive confers upon the president’s policy.

Although several Senate Republicans voted against the president’s proposal out of an ideological commitment to Cuban independence, the majority of the votes went down a party line.  At first glance, forcing the issue of recognition appeared a win-win proposition for the Democrats, as the Post reported: “Defeated, Democrats will go on favor of recognition, a popular position.  If it wins, then the Democrats receive full credit for the action, besides which the President will either have to veto the proposition or accept it in the face of his argument in his message.”[34] As the president had invested himself politically in the outcome of the resolution, many Republican legislators faced the difficult task of reconciling their personal assessments of the Cuban cause to their loyalty to the titular chief of their party upon whose success in conducting an imminent war likely lay their own immediate electoral futures.  Following the passage of the Turpie-Foraker Amendment, the Daily Globe noted that the Cuban question had “become a large extent political, and instead of a congress meeting it as a united body, political expediency is governing men’s motives.”[35] Reporters also noted how Democratic partisanship functioned to solidify Republican ranks.  “The action of the Senate declaration for the recognition of Cuba’s independence against the direct and specific recommendation of the President has given conservatives a rallying cry from the standpoint of party loyalty, which proved very effective yesterday,” the Post observed. “One of the most prominent Republican leaders on the floor of the House denominated that the action of the Senate resolution a direct assault upon the president, which no loyal Republican could endorse.”[36] Few addresses in the House or Senate by supporters of the president failed to summon a “rally around the president” cry. “If we are to go to war, [McKinley] is to be our leader,” Senator Spooner declared.  “We should rally round him and uphold his hands rather than seek to minimize his influence with the nations of the world.  We should rather say: ‘God bless you in your efforts.  You lead – we will follow.”[37] The shared electoral fortunes of the executive and Republican congressmen rendered resistance to his proposals a potentially costly move.  Partisanship greatly inhibited the fostering of a joint resolution that conveyed the majority sentiments of the Congress to the president.

If the House sustained its previous position, the Turpie-Foraker Amendment was only tenable so long as the Republican insurgents supporting it in the Senate were immune from external pressure for action.  Rather than being applauded in the press for defending the Cuban Republic, the debate over the resolutions came to been as impeding necessary action.[38] In summarizing a bipartisan cross-section of editorial opinion in sixteen major eastern newspapers, the Daily Tribune found a near unanimous frustration with the delay for action in the wake of the president’s call for a military intervention.[39] The Times applauded movement in the House toward the president’s position as representing a welcome deference to the executive as war loomed.[40] An impatient Post editorialist bluntly called upon the House to “Strike out the independence proposition and pass the Senate resolutions.”[41] The president’s call for action in his message resonated with public sentiment on the suffering in Cuba that bolstered the resolve of the House and placed the unwelcome label of obstructionist upon the Senate.  “Discussions over niceties of language and forms of expression are out of place when they delay action on essentials,” the Daily Tribune surmised in explaining the capitulation of the Senate, “There are some excellent reason why that skeletal government should not be recognized.  There would have been no serious demand made for that recognition if scampish politicians had not fancied that they could worry the Republicans and perhaps disorganize them by raising that issue.”[42] The president’s message created a political environment that deprived any potential rivals of the incentives, time, and popular support to organize effectively to resist his definition of policy.  If Foraker and his fellow Senate Republicans had depended upon the breakdown of the Republican ranks under a wave of sympathy for the Cuban rebels following the passage of his amendment, they greatly discounted the impact of electoral incentives, partisanship, and an overriding demand for imminent action in shaping the decision-making of their House colleagues.

If the political environment created in the aftermath of the president’s message made political resistance to his agenda almost prohibitively costly, the Constitution conferred upon him the constitutional power of recognition and a veto that enhanced his position.  The power to recognize a foreign government was understood by constituioanl norm and historical precedent to fall under the executive branch which provided those summoning arguments in support of the president a firm basis from which to contend.[43] It was on these grounds that Times suggested the President veto any resolution recognizing the Cuban Repubic.^[44] Although the president could veto or simply ignore the provision for recognition on a constitutional basis, though the political costs of either action would further impede his capacity to wage an effective war with Spain.  Rumors that McKinley had stated he would veto any joint resolution compelling him to recognize Cuban independence competed with those claiming the president would follow the will of Congress.  Some news stories suggested that fears the president might exercise a veto over congressional action may have impacted the decision-making, but it is unlikely for reasons already outlined that the House Republicans would ever allow such a contingency to occur.[45] Nonetheless, the president possessed constitutional powers to further check congressional action out of sync with his proposals.

Conclusion

Dissident Senate Republicans slowly surrendered on the afternoon of April 18 as they saw their colleagues in the House repudiate their efforts by striking the Turpie-Foraker Amendment from the joint resolution authorizing the president to exercise force in Cuba.  Although face-saving squabbles over the inclusion of the phrase “the Cubans are and of by right free,” extended the debate well into the night, an unpopular position opposed by majorities in both chambers of Congress prevailed due to the contingent partisan composition of the houses and the inherent weaknesses for potential opposition with the legislative branch when confronted with a foreign policy proposal outlined by the executive in a crisis situation.  It was often said of McKinley he had a winning way with others that usually allowed him to get what he wanted from them while leaving them feeling as though they had agreed with the president from the start.  In the case of the president’s war message, McKinley succeeded in launching the Spanish-American War on his own terms due to the powers of the presidency in a foreign policy crisis.

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[1] For a typical treatment of the Spanish-American War see Sidney W. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (Washington: CQ Press, 2008), 202-3. John L. Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895-1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 15; Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 17.  If later historians of the McKinley presidency tend to stress his executive acumen, earlier works like Margaret Leech’s In The Days of McKinley (New York: Harper, 1959) and H. Wayne Morgan’s America’s Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Overseas Expansion (New York: A.A Knopf, 1965) empathize with McKinley for the difficulty of his position, but criticize him for a lack of imagination on diplomatic and public relations fronts. Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire: An Economic  Interpretation of American Expansion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962) makes a strong case for McKinley as a purposeful executive responsive to the imperatives of the financial climate rather than the legislature.

[2] McKinley’s diplomatic correspondence with Spain coupled with his promise for future action unless Spanish colonial reforms produced stability in Cuba within a reasonable time indicate a willingness to intervene militarily as early as June 1897.  The extent anticipated pressure from congressional Republicans shaped his diplomacy and rhetoric can never be more than speculated upon, but factors outside of congressional pressure, especially the worsening humanitarian crisis on the island that had claimed the lives of close to 200,000 Cuban noncombatants, weighed heavily on his thinking at the time according to his close friends, see Charles G. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years ed. Bascom N. Timmons (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1950); John Davis Long, The Journal of John D. Long, ed. Margaret Long (Ridge, NH: Richard R. Smith, 1956).

[3] The full text of the message may be found at: Papers Relating to the Foreign relations of the United States, with the annual message of the President transmitted to Congress December 5, 1898, 750-760; ONLINE: [Accessed 8 March 2009]  http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?id=FRUS.FRUS1898

[4] Paul S. Holbo, “Presidential Leadership in Foreign Affairs: William McKinley and the Turpie-Foraker Amendment” The American Historical Review 72 (July 1967): 1333. ONLINE:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1847795  [Accessed: 11 March 2009]

[5] Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1980), 86.

[6] For influential literature critical of McKinley and a weak presidency in general, see Kennan’s American Diplomacy, Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1955), 17-18; Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit: A Study of Our War With Spain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co. , 1931); Joseph M. Wisan, The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934).

[7] Kenneth B. Moss, Undeclared War and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 65-6.  In his study on presidential war power, Louis Fisher cites the struggle between Congress and the president for control over recognizing the Cuban insurgency, but also explicitly places the initiative and objectives for war in the Congress that ignores any presidential influence over the Cuban policy: Presidential War Power, 2nd ed. (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 51-4.

[8] For an account of the pre-message diplomatic efforts see Offner 177-82.

[9] This is not to suggest the president’s congressional allies had no input on the content of the message.  In close consultation with leaders in the House and the Senate, McKinley certainly produced a communication he believed could attract support from the legislature, but the rationale for the war and the powers he sought in directing it were arrived at independently

[10] William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6-49.

[11] Stephen R. Weisman, A Culture of Deference: Congress’ Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 12-25.  His six criteria are more focused on unused legal means the Congress possesses to check the executive and appear more responsive twentieth century developments, but I borrow the oft-cited term, 17-25.

[12] Scholars of institutional development are justly more concerned with shifts in domestic politics, especially in tracing the emergence of the rhetorical presidency.  An interesting dissection of the problems of measuring “public opinion” can be found in Richard F. Hamilton, President McKinley, War, and Empire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006).  Peter D. Feavor and Christopher Gelpi’s, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) illuminates the weaknesses of grouping one period with another.   Historians that tackle presidential failures at expansionism over the nineteenth century tend to stress the breakdown of stubborn Senate opposition in the wake of an evolving cultural milieu as decisive for the imperial aftermath of the Spanish-American War, see Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire, Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 and Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[13] I settled on “Cuba” because it produced substantially more matches than “McKinley” or “Congress.”

[14] Offner’s An Unwanted War provides the most detailed monograph on the lead-up to the war.

[15] Whether or not Congress would have declared war without presidential assent is an open question, but it seems unlikely that congressional Democrats would have forced a war upon an unwilling president given the ample political benefits for their party in the midterms by nonaction in the administration.

^[16] MESSAGE CAUSES SURPRISE: Feeling in Congress that the President Has Clouded the Situation Rather than Cleared It. 1898. New York Times (1857-Current file), April 12, http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 8, 2009).

[17] NATION SICK AT HEART :Pres McKinley’s Message Causes a Sad Disappointment. A Few Republicans Praise It, Some Faintly, And Some Sneer at It With Bitterness. 1898 Boston Globe (1872 – 1925) April 12 http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).

[18] FEELING IS VARIED: Members of Congress Discuss McKinley’s Message. 1898. Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963), April 12, http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 9, 2009).

[19] VIEWS OF THE PRESS :Editorial Comment on President McKinley’s Message. DIVIDE ON PARTY LINES. 1898. Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963), April 12,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 9, 2009).

[20] Congressional Record 3701.

[21] Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[22] Weissman 20-2.

[23] In the 55th Congress, the Republicans held 206 of the 357 House seats.  44 out of 90 senators were Republicans, 34 were Democrats, and the remainder a scattering of Populists, Silverites and Silver Republicans.

[24] Howell and Pevehouse 40-2.

[25] Howell and Pevehouse 7.

[26] No major newspaper publication advocated measures short of intervention.  While some still hoped for a belated Spanish withdrawal, all accepted this contingency was unlikely.

[27] WAR NOW DELAYED: Spain’s Release of Cuba Not the President’s Ultimatum. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 12,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).

[28] Howell and Pevehouse 36-8.

[29] CONGRESS DIVIDED :Conflicting Opinions Running Riot at the Capitol. ONE EFFECT OF THE MESSAGE Delay and a Divided Republican Party a Probable Outcome. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 12,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009); Congressional Record 3810.

[30] Congressional Record 3773.

[31] Congressional Record 3988.

[32] Congressional Record 3886.

[33] WAITS UPON SENATE :The Issue of War or Peace Is Not Yet Decided. ALL FAVOR INTERVENTION But the Text of the Resolutions Opens the Way for Debate. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 15,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).

[34] WAITS UPON SENATE :The Issue of War or Peace Is Not Yet Decided. ALL FAVOR INTERVENTION But the Text of the Resolutions Opens the Way for Debate. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 15,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).

[35] ARTHUR E HOUGHTON.  1898. CAMPAIGN PLAN :It is Believed the Upper Branch of Congress Will Yield on This Issue. President, it is Said, is Ready to Sign the Senate Resolution if Shorn of the Turpie Amendment. 1898. Boston Daily Globe (1872-1922), April 18,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009)

[36] SENATE AND HOUSE :Former May Yield Recognition of Cuban Independence. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 18,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).

[37] Congressional Record 3890.

[38] The Daily Globe accused the Republicans of playing politics with Cuba and lauded the Democrats for their consistency, but the Post and Times, both nominally Democratic, as well as the editorial opinion extant in the Daily Tribune convey frustration among major dailies proved more compelling than assessing the origins of partisan squabbles.

[39] PRESS VIEWS ON THE ACTION :Opinions of Leading Newspapers on the Senate’s Resolutions Recognizing Cuba. New York. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Boston.. 1898. Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963), April 18,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 8, 2009).

[40] DOUBT ENDS MONDAY. Both Houses of Congress Are Expected to Agree On a Fixed Policy in Cuba. PLAN OF THE PRESIDENT GAINING FRIENDS. 1898. New York Times (1857-Current file), April 17,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 9, 2009).

[41] The Cuban Resolutions. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 18,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).

[42] CUBA IS TO BE FREED. 1898. Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963), April 19,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 8, 2009).

[43] While almost every speech supporting the president overviewed this claim, Offner summarizes it briefly on 182-3.

^[44] RECOGNITION SHOULD BE VETOED. 1898. New York Times (1857-Current file), April 18, http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 9, 2009).

[45] SENATE AND HOUSE. Former May Yield Recognition of Cuban Independence. 1898. The Washington Post (1877-1954), April 18,  http://www.proquest.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ (accessed March 7, 2009).