Films like Milk and Walk The Line offer nothing but celebrated performances by the leads.   Both were nominated for academy awards.  Does anyone remember their directors?  Are they really just the same film “Ambitious man faces adversity but succeeds due to x.”  Does that tell us anything about ourselves or our culture?  Does it not merely reaffirm values and myths we all share?  Oh wait, Milk dies, so the film is “tragic” and moving because its “true.”  Simply because something is sad and true does not mean that ending is not a lazy cliche masquerading as “meaning.”  Moviegoers hoping to see a great movie or great story-telling were left with scene-chewing leads, shabby history, stereotypical characters, and conventional plot development.   

What does anyone remember about Patton save George C. Scott’s tour-de-force?  Nothing in that film redefined the way war movies were made.  Instead, it spawned more movies seeking to replicate its box-office by copying its methods.

The genre cannot engage a thoughtful viewer intellectually or emotionally.  We are placed in awe of our subject (and our actor) and are meant to walk away admiring the man or cheering the cause.  But, in doing so, all we really do is validate our own prejudices, and the experience of watching such a film renders empathy impossible.  Think about it.  Anyone who has a film made about their life is already extraordinary.  We can watch directors recreate pivotal moments in their lives and see the choices these great men make, but those are moments the viewer can never “experience,” because he is not great and never will be.  None of us understand what it is like to be at the head of an army, a movement, or possess any discernible talent.  As viewers, we simply watch actors go through the motions of stories we know in a style that has become so hackneyed as to beckon parody.  

This is not to say there are not bio-pics I do not value.  Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Oliver Stone’s Nixon remain two of my favorite films.  The former might be more faithful to the life of William Randolph Hearst than the latter is to what the books say about thirty-seventh president.  But this does not matter.  They are psychological studies more concerned with the tragedy of power and the paradox of the American Dream.  In this sense, they play like Greek tragedies that the Romans, or at least Livy, might recognize as history, which is to say, they are instructive tales borrowing equally from legend and fact that are designed to impart moral lessons to the audience.

But they fail as history as we currently understand the discipline and suffered attacks as biased, inaccurate, or flat-out wrong.  Stone and Welles were less interested in fitting their stories to chronologies and checking footnotes than making statements about ideologies and myths that shape how every thoughtful person born in this country considers the goals and aspirations of their life.  Stone’s  W. fails as history and drags when it merely hits check marks on George W. Bush’s life, but proves gripping drama when it returns to the father-son dynamic because the tension between parent and child is a universal experience that the audience understands.  Bush’s story, as told by Stone, is compelling to the audience when it is a story of personal development and family. 

One of my favorite movies as a child was Truman, an HBO film starring Gary Sinise as our thirty-third president.  I can summon long stretches of dialogue verbatim.  The movie moves briskly through the life and times of the Missouri farmer turned soldier turned politician turned senator turned president.  The film draws its inspiration from David McCullough’s Truman, the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography.  Both McCullough’s book and its silver screen adaptation appeal primarily because their subject was presented as an honest everyman who finds himself in power and performs admirably.  Truman exists in our popular consciousness as the president we all think we would be should power fall on us one day - hard-working, honest, just, and determined. 

As biography. McCullough’s Truman ranks among the best of recent memory, certainly among the most influential.  McCullough is a first-rate stylist, but with Truman he was blessed with a subject who left much of his own “voice” behind in  diaries and letters.   In short, Truman is a monograph that is effortless to read  and easier to enjoy.

I am going to bed.  I am going to write about the strengths and weakness of biography as “history” focusing on Truman, and contrasting its approach with political memoirs and, finally, with Barton Gellman’s Angler, the recent Pulitzer Prize biography of Vice President Dick Cheney that offers quite a few anecdotes on the “Dark Side” and its utility as a “political” argument.  Finally, I will assess them all against Plutarch’s rubric on biography established in his “Life of Alexander.”  Writing about Angler was my original goal, but I got sidetracked, obviously.

Part II up whenever.

Two Epic Weeks in September 2007:

I play one fantasy baseball league a year.  I won my leagues in 2005 and 2006, was unlucky and finished second in 2004, and I am not going to comment on 2008.  While statistically the best team I ever assembled was my 2006 squad, my 2007 championship was certainly the most satisfying.

I finished one game over .500 and 34.5 games out of first place in my league in 2007, meaning I barely qualified for the six team playoff in a head-to-head league.  This meant, to win the championship, I had to defeat the 3rd, 1st, and 2nd ranked teams in successive weeks.  To win, the players on my team need to statistically outperform my opponent’s in the ten categories at the end of the week.  That my team finished 34.5 behind the top team meant my team was not very good at doing this.

Of the ten categories, five are for hitting and five are for pitching.  The hitting categories are fairly straightforward.  Every team can start up to nine offensive players every day.  The goal is to accumulate more runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, and home runs over the course of a week while producing a high batting average.  As four of the categories take a total, rather than a mean, it makes sense to start nine players every day and hope for the best.  How a team performs in hitting usually reflects a combination of skill and luck on the part of the owner.

Pitching is different.  The five pitching categories are wins, strikeouts, saves,  ERA, and WHIP.  Wins and strikeouts are fairly straightforward, the more you have, the better you are.  To get saves, you need specialists who close baseball games, and these are usually very hard to acquire, if you lack them, in fantasy baseball leagues in September.  You are allotted seven slots for pitchers, meaning, in theory, one could start seven pitchers a day, everyday, and be guaranteed the wins and strikeout titles.  This would render fantasy baseball pitching categories contingent upon who had the fastest internet connection at 12:00 a.m.  Yahoo prevents this from occurring by imposing a cap on total innings pitched for the year while also including two categories that offset this plan which reflect quality of pitching rather than quantity: ERA and WHIP.  ERA is earned run average per inning while WHIP reflects the number of walks/hits a pitcher allows per inning.  The fewer baserunners and runs you allow, the better pitcher you are.   A fantasy owner who grabs marginal pitchers off the scrap heap every day will invariably lose these categories to an owner who devoted attention and resources to the position in the draft and trades.

In other words, a team lacking good starting pitching is probably fated to lose WHIP and ERA.  A team without superstar closers risks losing saves every week as well.

Such a team was my team in 2007.  Injuries and bad luck left my fortunes in a terminal condition as the playoffs loomed.  Surprisingly, I made it to the championship game by edging out my first two opponents.  Unfortunately, two days into the two week championship round, I was struggling.  My ERA and WHIP were probably irreperably high, given the quality of my opponent’s starters, and my offense was not stalling.

I am many things, but I am not a quitter.  I realized I could guarantee myself a victory in two pitching categories by signing three or four starters every day for the remainder of the playoffs.  This would mean he would have a 3-2 edge going into the hitting, where I would have to hope my crappy team could take at least three categories, including batting average, which is the tiebreaker.  Not outside the realm of possibility, and certainly more likely than standing pat and hoping for the best.

After several days of signing/releasing marginal starting pitchers, I had a lead in wins and strikeouts, much to the consternation of my opponent, who voiced his objections on the discussion board, claiming this is not how fantasy baseball championships should be played.  Well, he got lucky that his starting pitching stayed healthy, I reasoned, and the league permits me to pursue this strategy, which offered me my only chance at winning.

In a fit of stupidity, my opponent surrendered his insurmountable advantage in ERA/WHIP to take me on in Wins and Strikeouts.  Rather than enjoy his 3-2 advantage in pitching, my opponent went all in hoping to sweep the field.  In other words, four categories were soon up for grabs, and, more or less, dependent upon luck.  As he signed marginal starters who suffered terrible losses, his ERA and WHIP crept higher while mine steadily lowered until, by the middle of the second week, we were virtually tied in four pitching categories.

I ended up winning WHIP, ERA, Ws, Ks, Rs, and SBs that week, for a 6-4 triumph and my third straight championship.  My awful pitching actually won me  my league because I neutralized my opponent’s advantages there and scared him into an arms race where he sacrificed his control over the outcome.  Had my opponent not gotten greedy, he would have won ERA/WHIP, and the title, as he would have had the tie breaker in batting average.

Ahead to 2009:

After an embarassing showing in 2008, I returned resolute to recapture my league this year.  I went into a draft with a plan.  My team is only going to win six categories a week, but we will win them EVERY WEEK, or put up a good effort trying.  Those cateogires are stolen bases, runs, batting average, wins, strike outs, and saves.   Ten of my first twelve picks were hitters.  The other two were closers.  The hitters were not chosen arbitrarily based on what position I needed, but were picked for consistency in stolen bases, runs, and batting average, in other words I had a team of speedy lead-off hitters: Jacoby Ellsbury, Chone Figgins, B.J. Upton, Derek Jeter, and high average guys like Hunter Pence, Bobby Abreu, Albert Pujols, and Russell Martin.  I drafted a few starters in the closing rounds, but built up my bench with high average guys with multiple position ellgibility, meaining players who I could start at different spots rather than fixed ones, which are hard to find.

In my first week, my starters tanked and my closers were awful and I abanoned any hope of winning ERA and WHIP.   I decided to abandon any attempts at attaining these wins, save by chance, and put my faith in my capacity to sign pitchers facing the Padres, Nationals, and Pirates or a slumping team, every day, and shoot straight-up for wins/strikeouts every week.  I have won those most weeks, as well as stolen bases every week save one, (the goofy postall star half week which is a grab bag) and runs/batting average most weeks.  Home runs and Rbis are harder to come by, but I got lucky Pujols is having his best season ever and several of my lower draft picks, like Robinson Cano, Felipe Lopez, and Brandon Inge are exceeding expectation.

One of my trades has gone badly this year.  Having too many outfielders, I traded Bobby Abreu straight up for Carlos Guillen.  Guillen has been hurt all year while Abreu has hit over .300 with high marks in SBs, RBIS, and Rs.  That said, I would have had nowhere to play him, had I retained him.

I recently made a controversial trade, sending Chone Figgins and an underperforming Alex Rios to an opponent for  Mark Teixiera and Clint Barmes.  Teixeria is strong across the board save in stolen bases while Barmes is quielty having a solid year, and is elligible at all the infield positions save 1b.  Figgins, of course, is solid for runs, average and stolen bases, as is Rios, who also has displayed power in the past, but not this year.

The knock against Teixiera is that he only plays 1b, which is currently occupied on my squad by Albert Pujols, which means Teixiera is locked into my “utility” spot.  While this is not bad in and of itself, the benefits Teixera brings me might not be enough when faced against a team that is strong in RBIs and HRs, which could prove fatal to my chances if my stolen base guys all slump that week in the playoffs.  A hot Chone Figgins can carry a team in stolen bases for a week, and in losing him,  I jeopardize my master plan.

Another Teixiera problem is that he plays for the Yankees.  One third of my line up is now composed of Yankees, which means if they slump as a team in September, I am in trouble.  This probably won’t happen as the Yankees will be in the playoff hunt and play in a hitters park and have the best line-up in baseball, but its still a worry.

On the plus side, I am more competitve with Pujols and Teixera in my line-up, especially if one goes on a tear for a week in September, which both are prone to do, in categories I should have no business winning.  I am also better off having Barmes than Rios on my team as Rios was deadweight who barely contributed while Barmes can spell a slumping player at a number of positions and plays in Coors Field, which is the best hitter’s park in the country.

Also, Figgins only outperforms Texiera in runs and stolen bases, two categories I almost always have sizable wins in each week.  While getting 12 stolen bases a week is nice, I can usually win with 5 or 6, so Figgins does little more than run up the score, provided my other players are not slumping.

On the pitching side, I have five closers pitching every day and almost always win saves, as well as wins and strikeouts, so I feel I am well positioned for a run at the title, provided the Yankees do not slump and neither does my stolen base department.

I am confident I can win in September in this league and look forward to implementing more fully my strategy in the 2010 draft, especially as I am actually following baseball closely this year and will have a good sense of who is good and who isn’t.
Oh yeah, I have a thesis to finish.  Fantasy baseball is infinitely more interesting though.

One bad inning from a closer and one bad start can cripple a team for the whole week.

Anyone who knows me well probably knows two things about me.

1. My opinion of the outgoing governor of Alaska.

2. I procrastinate while I work.

In lieu of Governor Palin’s surprising decision that almost assuredly removes her as a viable candidate for the presidency in 2012, several former leaders of the Republican Party provide examples of how to best employ one’s time in the Wilderness.

Richard Nixon: After he lost the presidency in 1960, Nixon seemingly retired from political life, until he announced his candidacy for the governorship of California in 1962.  Suspicion that Nixon was only seeking the statehouse to vault himself back into national politics dogged his underdog campaign and he convincingly lost to incumbent Pat Brown.  The former vice president gave an awkward concession speech in which he attacked the press for being in the tank for Brown and misrepresenting his statement.  He concluded what turned out to be a retirement speech by chastising the assembled reporters for forcing him to withdraw from public life, famously concluding in what he said was his last press conference, that they would not have “Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Nixon’s retirement from politics at age forty-nine surprised people across the nation.  The former vice president had been a national figure since investigating Alger Hiss in the late 1940s and was considered the rising star of the Republican Party.  Nixon went to Wall Street to become a corporate lawyer, where he performed rather well, though he confessed to a friend that the boredom of legal work would leave him “mentally dead in two years, and physically dead in four.”  In 1964, Nixon campaigned for Barry Goldwater.  Two years later, in the midterm elections, he went state to state raising money and giving speeches for Republican congressional candidates.  The strategy, which Nixon lays out quite clearly in his memoirs, was to advance the party while developing mutally beneficial relationships with as many policymakers as possible.  As the Republicans performed rather well in the midterms, although not officially a candidate, Nixon was a presumed frontrunner for the 1968 election.   His support was nationwide in the Republican Party and no potential candidate could match his resources at the grassroots level.  By the time the primaries began, his nomination was a foregone conclusion.

Richard Nixon’s example is one Palin might be wise to follow.  No one in the G.O.P. has the star power she possesses and representatives from conservative districts would race to have a fundraiser with the charismatic celebrity.  Although the nominating system today in no way resembled that of 1968, where party elites held a great deal more sway, Palin stumping for Republicans in the 2010 midterms would at least earn her the gratitude of many at the base level and, if the Republicans perform well, which if the economy and history are any factor, they probably will, could vault her back into the national spotlight as credibile figure.

Popularity in the grassroots Republican ranks, however, may not translate at a national level, nor in the primaries where independents and Democrats are permitted to register.  In associating herself with the far right, she may discount herself as a viable political figure in the Republican primaries.  As the nominations of McCain, Dole, and Bush I demonstrate, Republicans are strategic voters in contested fields, and a more moderate candidate might perform better.

Ronald Reagan:

Like Reagan, Sarah Palin vaulted onto the political scene through a speech.  Reagan’s “Time For Choosing Address” in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 outlined a conservative manifesto from which the Great Communicator rarely departed over the next twenty-five years.  Palin’s address to the RNC in 2008 may have been the highwater mark of her national career, although it was bereft of the vision and ideological appeal of Reagan’s message, which is still widely circulated among conservatives today and simply referred to as “The Speech.”

Reagan’s address brought in more money for the Republican Party than any other event in the otherwise dismal 1964 election, with many checks postdated for after the election.  It also excited California Republicans who eagerly sought to regain control of the government.  Once elected in 1966,  and reelected in 1970, Reagan’s communication skills served him well as he seemingly effortlessly built an enduring coalition of supporters from Barry Goldwater’s limited government philosophy and social conservatives dissatisfied with the direction of the nation following the tumult of the 1960s.  Declining to run for a third term in 1974, Reagan challenged incumbent President Gerald Ford two years later for the presidency, nearly capturing the nomination.  Although 65 years old, after Ford’s defeat, Reagan appeared to be the future of the Republican Party.

Despite his promise, Reagan was out of elected office.  Although he stumped for conservatives across the country in 1978, his path back to power in 1980 differed from Nixon’s.  Reagan delivered a widely syndicated biweekly radio address on the affairs of the day, usually taking aim at President Carter’s foreign policy and the inefficiencies of the welfare state while unabashedly celebrating pride in traditional American values at a time where the country’s moral was perhaps at its lowest ebb in recent memory.

Reagan’s editorials, the drafts of which indicate he wrote himself, accomplished two goals.  They kept him relevant in national political discourse while simultaneously kept his ideas fresh and forced him to grapple with national issues that could appeal to a wide audience.  Reagan was blessed with a photographic memory and a brilliant style of oratory that made his compositions appear spontaneous and sincere, two qualities Americans profess to desire out of politicians.

Sarah Palin has neither the mastery of language nor is she at the forefront of an ideological reaction to modern liberalism, but Reagan’s ascent forty years ago is all the easier today as the internet and proliferation of television news coverages lowers the costs of relaying a message to the masses.  Palin’s style irritates many, but millions find it endearing.  Her devotees, and there are legions of them, are emotionally invested in her political fortunes and take upfronts to her character and family personally.  She has a base of supporters from which she can expand, if she desires, and she can manipulate the media for this effect by creating controversies and using her star power to make her the de facto leader of the Republican opposition to President Obama.

Sarah Palin could become to the conservative movement what Reagan was to it in the wake of Watergate, if she can display greater ideological coherence while simultaneously broadening her appeal toward Republicans suspicious of her motives.

Newt Gingrich:

After the debacle of the 1998 midterms, where the Republicans lost seats despite the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the charismatic Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House of Representatives and has not sought nor held elective office since.  A polarizing figure in his time in the national spotlight, Gingrich was also a policy wonk who over the past decade has lent his influence toward advancing a host of small government programs developed by conservative think tanks.  He is also a regular sparring partner on television talk shows and usually puts forth a strong and disciplined message on behalf of the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin has been accused of being many things, but a master of public policy is not one of them.  Indeed, she appeared unprepared and uninformed while off script on a host of issues during the 2008 campaign.  Nonetheless, if Palin is truly done with politics, she could employ her influence ala Gingrich in organizing social conservatives across the nations into a coherent lobby under her nominal direction which could possess considerable influence in moving public debate, and especially in Republican circles.

Abraham Lincoln:

Comparing oneself to Lincoln is always a bad idea.  Comparing our contemporary politicians to the Great Emancipator will only make the deficiencies in our current crop of politicos all the more glaring.  Nonetheless, Lincoln’s road out of political oblivion offers another alternative to Governor Palin.

Lincoln famously lost the 1858 Illinois Senate Election to Stephen A. Douglas, but emerged from it as a national figure with potential for the Republican nomination two years later.  Lincoln only captured the nomination because a deadlock existed between the other contenders that emerged out of personal rivalries and regional politics.  Should the field seeking the Republican nomination fail to produce a clear front runner before the onset of the primaries, Palin possesses the political capital to enter the raise and immediately alter its dynamics.  Although a loser with no record, she, like Lincoln in 1860, appealed to her supporters as a champion of righteousness with a broad appeal that could unite the party.  There is no shortage of dissatisfaction with Obama, and he should be a vulnerable incumbent come 2011.  The probablility of a drawn out and bitter race between candidates like Romney and Huckabee (whose supporters blame each other for losing the race) or a fiscal conservative alienating the social conservatives might leave Palin in a strong position, if she chooses her battles wisely, keeps herself relevant and moderates her rhetoric.

There are probably other courses that could be pursued, but its time for me to return to work.

Something about the tone of the film, however, marks it as the residue of a bygone era.  Bond movies no longer celebrate gimmicks or gratuidous violence and Batman no longer makes us laugh or gives us one-liners.  Action heroes are now too self-aware and sophisticated to engage in hijinks.   Even the absurd Ironman paid lip service to collateral damage in warfare and the illicit arms trade.    Moviegoers, or at least critics, expect an action movie to concede to its audience that our heroes can no longer shrug off violence or social responsibity, that theprotagonist be at least two-dimensional.

Transformers does nothing of the sort.  In concept, it is the residue a bygone era where a manchiean Cold War loomed over the nation.   Earth is little more than the site of a proxy war between two races of alien robots: the Deceptigons and the Autobots.  The Autobots protect human beings from the irrepressible Deceptigons  (i know missspelling that, but it doesn’t matter) out of a commitment to the ideal that all beings are entitled to freedom and liberty.  The Deceptigons only want to exploit the earth for malovent purposes and care not for life.  Neither side is capable of compromise: all differences must be fought out and superior fire power seems to always prevail.  In other words, there is unambiguous good and evil and it is locked in a never ending struggle.  The good guys are individuals with personalities and quirks while the bad are mindless pawns.

With an amorphous “War on Terror” replacing the Cold War, very few action movies are still made with these assumptions in mind and I feel the critics of this film are reacting against this genre rather than assessing the film on its own grounds.

Ruthlessreviews.com, a unabashedly crass website that is probably Not Safe For Work to open, has catalogued a series of 1980s actions movies and attempted to measure them against an ideal “80s action” film.  I will use employ their rubric to assess this film to further my idea that Transformers 2 comes from another decade:

Homoeroticism: 1980s movies were notortious for their misogynist themes.  The protagonists found women distracting to the mission and only reluctantly embraced their affections, and only at the end of the mission.  The epic bonding that took place was usually between the muscle toned hero and his buddies (Think Top Gun or Predator).

The human characters of Transformer 2 are engaged in a slapstick romance that caricatures the overcommited high school sweethearts.  At one point, an evil robot incognito as an amorous coed attempts to seduce the title character, but is thrawted, first by the guy’s car, and then when his girlfriend returns.  If Shia Labeuf has learned anything from this episode, its that all women aside from Meghan Fox are only interested in him because they want to kill him – which is a variant on the 80s action theme that our singleminded superhero has no time for girls.

The robot characters conform much more closely to the Schwarzenegger/Stallone ideal.  They are giant robots with guns and power in lieu of muscles and they wrestle with other giant robots.  At one point in the movie, Optimus Prime (the boss good robot) combines with another robot and the audience is treated to a sequence of guns loading and parts meshing and Optimus getting bigger and bigger with a phallic bazooka gun attached to his shoulder.  It is very similar to a scene in Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The robots also appear asexual, representing another ideal motif of the 1980s ubermensch.

Corpse Count: 1980s action films were notorious for high corpse counts, mostly in sequences of frenzied action where the hero takes out regiments of bad guys in minutes.  Hundreds of thousands of people die in Transformer 2, though very few appear onscreen.  Explosion after explosion after explosion in the middle of cities must kill thousands of people, but the damage is only implied.   An aircraft carrier is destroyed, as are several tanks and many soldiers apparently meet their ends, though the only bodies we see are in an obligatory funeral.   Lots of robots “die” or whatever happens when you kill a robot.  The closest we come to a classic rampage of righteousness comes when an outnumbered Optimus Prime furiously destroys about ten or so bad guys in thirty seconds.

In a soap operaish twist, everytime a major character seems to die, they come back to life, one way or another.

One reason for this may be that this film is PG-13 while most of the 80s canon is R, and the rules for violence are very different.  The intended audience also differs.  Nonetheless, our heroes kill without cognitive dissonance and bad guy deaths are seen as good and collateral damage for humans are regretable, but acceptable losses in the fight for earth.

Novelty Death: A novelty death is one where a character dies in an over-the-top manner or comically gratutious manner and were a staple of the 80s action genre.  Transformers 2 appears free of these, save in the opening sequence where the bad robot smashes some of our hunter gatherer ancestors with his foot, consciously summoning images of a human today dispatching an unwanted bug.

Post-Mortem One Liner: In 1980s movies, the hero always delivered some witty remark while dispatching a foe, especially in a novelty death.  Optimus Prime “curbstomps” a bad guy in the beginning of the movie and said something very 80sish ubermacho kind of way.  There were a few others, but nothing memorable.

Was There A Stupid Chief?: A stupid chief in a 1980s film is the bureaucratic wimp in the suit who doesn’t trust our hero or believe that violence is the best way to deal with evil (Think Die Hard).  He exists mostly to be proven wrong by the hero, or provide background plot information.  There is a stupid chief in our film, the national security advisor.  He rails about how diplomacy can work, blames the autobots for the whole war, threatens to shut down the U.S./autobot alliance, and misreads every situation.  He is invariably a bespectled white middle aged nerd who our noble troops dispense with by shoving him out of an airplane (they give him a parachute first).

Stupid Political Content: 1980s action movies were often filled with latent and not-so-latent right wing, anti-government, anti-liberal messages that often celebrated vigilantism, Vietnam revisionism, and reaffirmed faith in American arms and noble purposes.  Transformers 2 seems to lack any overt political messages, though it could be used as a recruiting film for the U.S. army in the way Top Gun was used by the U.S. Air Force.   The audience sees submarines, air craft carriers, destroyers, numerous planes, tanks, noble men in uniform fighitng with grace under pressure, and lots and lots of weapons, all while a blaring soundtrack tells you that a weapon firing is “cool.”

How Bad Was It Really?: I think it works if you go with it.  I was never on the edge of my seat, but I found myself appreciating the film for the confidence its director displayed.  A fair critique of the film could be that the plot only serves to lead one from one special effects scene to another and that the film’s humor is sophomoric, but this film never attempts to do more than be a special effects fest, and these it does very well.

My biggest  issue with the film is one anyone who knows me well can predict.  CGI battles are visually stunning and wonders of technolocial achievement, but they sacrifice much of the drama and gritty realism that combat in older films possessed.   It is difficult for me to grasp how an audience can become invested in anything save the outcome of science fiction battle where all of our combatants move like video game characters instead of human beings.  For example, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vadar swordfought and the outcome on the battle rested on compsure and character.  Obi Wan and Anakin, or worse, Yoda and anyone, jump around and move so fast that one can never tell what blow means what or who is winning or losing, except from cues from the soundtrack.  Transformers is even worse because the fights in the film are entirely devoid of human participation and were more or less a robot lunges and another and one of them eventually dies.

Indeed, watching the film, I was struck by how little agency the human characters had over the outcome of the fight.  While the fate of the world ultimately rested upon Shia Labuef making the right decision, our soldiers and our fighters could do little more than deliver long range aerial strikes at the combatants.

I never watched the show Transformers, but a running theme throughout must have been the destructive power of modern technology if not in the hands of  zealous guardians committed to preserving human life.  Transformers the film only glances this issue, threatening to remove from this action fest any redeeming value, yet I’ll give Bay the benefit of the doubt and suggest that his blockbuster can be viewed as a commentary on mass society’s lack of participation in the struggle between good and evil.  Men must increasingly rely upon mechanized warfare to achieve their aims, and this overspecialization leaves the bulk of our population intellectually and emotionally alienated from the struggle between good and evil  – if such a struggle still exists – as Bay might be suggesting any uneasiness with the ideologically rigid combatants in his film reflects our own unnatural insecurities aboud the world we inhabit that we cynically masquerade as a “nuanced perspective” on life, which conforms very closely to themes from 80s action films.

Okay, working the rest of the day.

For the record, I don’t think Michael Bay was making any kind of statement on society, save this is what he and his producers thought would make money.

Occasionally, however, a president will receive a sudden boost inpolling.  Political scientists call these “rallies.”  Almost every rally effect measured over the course of seventy years of extant records has followed a highly publicized international incident.  The logic, therefore, goes that the public is prone to “rally around the president” in times of international crisis or war, giving the executive an otherwise improbable short time surge in popularity.

Political scientists have made careers out of defining what is and is not a “rally” and how to properly measure a “crisis” and the public’s perception of it and whether or not foreign crises stand to help or hurt a president.   Because political scientists like making models that possess predictive power, some of the most sophisticated of these scholars have attempted to ascertain under what conditions a rally may be most likely to occur, employing  time series models that divide years and administrations into halves and quarters.  In these brackets, they track the number of crises that occur and their impact on a president’s approval rating while controlling for a host of economic, political, and international factors.  The tautology inherent in this approach is evident and the methodological issues with it should be apparent to anyone with a basic grasp of quantiative literature.

Nonetheless, for the sake of this brief essay, I will put these aside and make a BOLD CLAIM

Coverage of foreign affairs usually boosts a president’s approval rating

Over the past three weeks, however, sabberrattling in North Korea, a media frenzy over Iran, and a quasi-revolution in Honduras have done nothing for President Obama’s approval ratings, in fact, they have gone slightly down, according to Gallup, the poll of record for this literature.

Why?

An easy explanation would be that an economy in a recession renders moot any nominal boost from crises abroad for a president’s approval rating.  The Obama Administration has also attempted to mitigate the importance of each of these affairs and remains heavily invested in an ambitious domestic agenda.  Voters, the argument would follow, simply are not paying attention to the international arena, or if they are, it is not reflected in the polls because the economy renders this an abnormal period in polling numbers.   Obama recieved no boost from the Somalian pirate episode in April, which even the strictest political scientist would have to consider a prototypical matieral rally jumper.

Another explanation could be that President Obama’s approval ratings are artificially high due to his recent electoral victory and triumphalist victory tour.  The luster will come off the administration at some point over the next twelve months and those supporters who are not diehards will only “approve” of the president’s performance when foreign news dominates the headlines.  The president is still in his “honeymoon” phase, which makes results here atypical.

Perhaps Obama is so innately polarizing that his polling numbers are in no way correlated to anything his administration accomplishes domesitc or international.  This seemed to be the case during President Bush’s second term, which would suggests a rally effect is highly contingent upon the domestic political environment, which further suggests the concept of a “rally” might be a relic of the Cold War era, with exceptions made for September 11 and the Iraq War.

Maybe with two wars going on, the new president is riding a perma rally effect?  Meh . . . impossible to disprove.

Or maybe Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcet died last week and no one is paying attention to anything else right now.  In deciding what constitutes a crisis, many quantitative use of force scholars will only use  incidents appearing on the front page of the New York Times as their units of analysis.  This appears antiquated.   Maybe scholars should look at the number of “tweets” a news item recieves to judge public perception of it?

Conclusion:

Any number of contingent explanations could inhibit a predicted rally effect, if we assume foreign crises invariably boost presidential popularity, as many political scientists do.  The obvious flaw in this line of logic is that it can explain away any dissonance by saying “something else was more important,” which means making a predictive model is quite difficult.  This, of course, is what historians like John Lewis Gaddis have been saying all along, that there are no “independent variables” in reality, all are dependent in some way on another one.  This is not to suggest there is no value in this methodology.  Quantiative studies can help a scholar only able to view a few trees to get a better sense of a forest, but to anyone familiar with a particulars of an era, explaining why or why not a president might not have recieved a boost in approval with reference to other times and other eras risks overlooking a host of otherwise imperctible proxmial causes.

Bush is apparently hoping to follow the example of his father, George H.W. Bush, who, for understandable reasons, kept a low profile during his son’s tenure.  Bush would defend his son against what he felt were unfair criticisms from the press, but largely kept his opinions to himself.

The Cincinnatician ideal of the reluctant soldier dates back to the beginning of our republican heritage when George Washington consciously emulated it as he retired from power in 1797.  Each of his next four successors also limited their political activity to private correspondence.

Is it the norm for former presidents to do so?  Since James Monroe left office in 1825, thirty-nine different men have occupied the presidency.  Obama remains in office while eight others died during their terms, leaving us thirty-one examples.  James K. Polk dropped dead less than three months after leaving office, leaving us with thirty former presidents to evaluate, a managable number.

One out of Five Former Presidents sought the presidency again after leaving office:

Martin Van Buren: Defeated for election in 1840, Martin Van Buren found after one term, but soon found was a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1844.  After losing the nomination to James K. Polk, Van Buren ran as a “Free Soiler” in 1848 against Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass.  While failing to capture a state, Van Buren probably drew enough support away from nominally Democratic voters to put Taylor over the top in several key Northern states.

Millard Fillmore: The Whig Party refused to endorse the unpopular Fillmore for a term in his own right in 1852, giving their nomination to war hero Winfield Scott.  Disgruntled with abolitionists in the Republican Party, Fillmore ran for the presidency on the “Know-Nothing” nativist ticket in 1856, capturing about twenty percent of the vote and Maryland.

Ulysses S. Grant: Although Grant’s two terms in office were generally considered a disappointment even at the time, the Civil War hero remained popular within the Republican ranks and a faction led by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling tirelessly worked to put him on the ticket in 1880.  Grant’s opponents, led by Maine senator James G. Blaine deadlocked the convention and the nomination fell to dark horse Ohio senator James A. Garfield.  Grant soon developed throat cancer and died in 1885.

Grover Cleveland: Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888 but lost the electoral college to Republican Benjamin Harrison.  His wife Frances Folsom allegedly told the White House staff to take care of everything because the Clevelands would return four years later.  Her words proved prophetic as the economy crashed in the early 1890s, which doomed Harrison and the Republican Party.  Cleveland was the only nominee within the Democratic ranks agreeable to both the southern conservatives, the so-called “Bourbon Democrats,” and northern reformers.

Theodore Roosevelt: Teddy Roosevelt rather foolishly promised only to serve one term as president in 1904.  When time came to name a successor, Roosevelt chose his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft and went on safari in Africa for a year. Although Taft was a brilliant jurist and capable administrator, he lacked the political skills, crusading ardor and passion for progressive reform Roosevelt so craved.   Roosevelt was also uneasy with Taft’s support for maintaining the independence of the Supreme Court from the popular will.  Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination to Taft, but outperformed him in the general election.  Unfortunately for Roosevelt, only Woodrow Wilson, a man he detested, benefitted from the rift in the Republican ranks.

Herbert Hoover: Hoover left office in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression.  Uneasy with the New Deal and possessing a personal dislike for his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover hoped to capture the Republican nomination in 1936 and 1940 and vindicate his reputation.  Not much came of his plans, however, as Hoover was still too closely aligned with his failure to prevent the Depression.  Later in life, he became active in public affairs and was a staunch anti-communist.

In addition to those six, four additional former presidents served in government:

John Q. Adams: Aside from being the only president to produce a book of poetry, John Quincy Adams was the only former chief executive to serve in the House of Representatives following his time in office.  He represented a Boston district in Congress from 1831 until he died in the Capitol in 1848.  Adams was the leading abolitionist voice in Washington during that time, protesting most famously against the “Gag Rule” and Mexican-American War.  His speeches earned him the nickname “Old Man Eloquent.”

John Tyler: The first vice-president to assume the presidency on the death of a president, Tyler alienated the Whig Party with his independence from the party leadership and especially his pro-annexaionist position over Texas.  He failed to garner support for Democrats for a term in his own right and returned to his Virginia plantation in 1845 to sire seven more children.  At the outbreak of the Civil War, he supported secession and the Confederacy and was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, dying before he could take his seat in 1862.

Andrew Johnson: Like Tyler and Fillmore before him, Johnson was a president who assumed office on the death of another with little support from his own party.  A southerner who opposed the radical reconstructionists who dominated Republican leadership in the late 1860s, Johnson barely survived impeachment before the Senate in 1868.  Six years later, he was elected to represent Tennessee in that body, dying shortly thereafter in 1875.

William Howard Taft: Taft never desired to be president.  He much would have preferred to be a judge on the Supreme Court.  Destiny got in the way, but Warren Harding appointed Taft Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921, a position he ablely held until his death nine years later in 1930.

So, one third of our former presidents either sought the presidency or officialy returned to politics.

Active in Electioneering:

Harry S Truman: Truman left office with the lowest approval ratings on record in 1953, but still remained a force within the Democratic Party through the 1950s.  Although not officially invovled in politics, he came out against Senator John F. Kennedy’s nomination for president in 1960, saying the Massachusetts senator was too inexperienced to be president and accused the Kennedy campaign of improper conduct during the primary season.  Truman would be reconciled to Kennedy later, but his criticisms were widely aired.

Gerald Ford: Despite the Watergate scandal, an energy crisis, the American defeat in Vietnam, and rising unemployment and inflation, Gerald Ford nearly defeated Jimmy Carter in 1976.  Four years later, conservative Ronald Reagan sought him out to serve as his vice president, with the hopes that the liberal Ford and conservative Reagan would unite the party against Carter.  Ford was agreeable, but requested official responsibilities over domestic policy and the appointment of Henry Kissenger as Secretary of State, a position the conservative branch of the Republican Party would not stand.  The nomination went to George H.W. Bush.  Ford kept a relatively low profile, with comments critical of George W. Bush’s foreign policy only emerging posthumously.

George H.W. Bush: Bush has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office in 1993, but the elevation of his sons to high office has provided him a forum to air his policy positions and granted him at least some influence over the course of Republican politics since 1993.

Bill Clinton: Clinton’s criticisms of George W. Bush were fairly muted compared to Jimmy Carter’s, but the political career of his wife Hillary Clinton ensured that the 42nd president would be actively engaged in the 2008 Democratic Primary.

Criticising Contemporary Policy:

While each of the aforementioned executives had issues with movements in their own party, the following presidents:

Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland both vocally opposed William McKinley’s annexing of the Philippines in 1898.

Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were two of Woodrow Wilson’s staunchest critics on foreign policy prior to the American entry into World War I.  Roosevelt advocated joining the war on the part of the allies in 1914 and advocated militarizing the country in preparaing for war.  Taft headed the “League to Enforce the Peace,” an isolationist group unsympathetic to Wilson’s drift toward internationalism.

Richard Nixon served as a diplomat-at-large for former presidents following his resignation in 1974, but he also published numerous books and magazine articles criticising the humanitarian drift in American foreign policy under Presidents Carter and Reagan.

Jimmy Carter vocally opposed the Iraq War in 2003 and has been very critical of U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush.

So who stayed out of the Limelight?

Andrew Jackson retired to his Tennessee plantation and died eight years after leaving office.

Franklin Pierce failed to capture his party’s nomination in 1856 and returned home to New Hampishire, dying in 1869.

James Buchanan allegedly told his successor, Abraham Lincoln, that “If you are as happy going into this office as I am leaving it, you are the happiest man on the earth.”  He retired to his Pennsylvania farm and died in 1868.

Rutherford B. Hayes famously promised to serve one term in office, which he relinquished in 1881.  He returned to his Ohio home and died in 1893.

Chester Alan Arthur was dying of Bright’s disease when he left office in 1885 and did not live to see the next election in 1886.

Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919 while campaigning for the League of Nations and never fully recovered.  After leaving office as a recluse in 1921, he died three years later.

Calvin Cooldige refused to participate in politics after he left the Oval Office in 1929 and died at home in Massachusetts four years later.

Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961.  Although his successor John F. Kennedy sought his advice on foreign affairs and he gave token endorsements to the Republican Party’s nominees in 1964 and 1968, Eisenhower remained on his farm in Gettysburg Pennslyvania until he died in 1969.

Lyndon Johnson: Johnson left office under a sea of criticism in 1969 and returned to his ranch to pen a memoirs defending his conduct of the Vietnam War.  His health took a turn for the worse during this period and he died just four years after leaving office in 1973.

Ronald Reagan left office in 1989 and retired to his ranch in California.  While Reagan supported George H.W. Bush in his 1992 election campaign and remains, even twenty years after leaving office and five years after his death, the most important figure in American conservatism, Alzeimers disease hindered his participation in public life.  Reagan announced his retreat into private life in a letter in 1994, dying ten years later.

Arthur, Wilson, Coolidge, and Johnson died within four years of their leaving office.  Jackson, Buchanan, Eisenhower, and Reagan were advanced in years, each was at least seventy years old by the time they left office, meaning they had little opportunity for a post-presidential political career.

Only Hayes and Pierce were relatively young and healthy enough to participate meaningfully in political life and each declined the opportunity.  Only two out of thirty former presidents appear to have inhabited circumstances similar to Bush’s and behaved in a manner Bush finds becoming.

I should say I support Bush’s position on the activities of former presidents, but history demonstrates  that men who have held the nation’s highest office tend to find retirement a dull business, choosing instead to enter the political arena in one form or another.

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.

[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).

Below is an essay I wrote for a course on academic writing I took at UChicago that vaguely touches on work I’m doing for my thesis, and, hopefully the rest of my life. Those of you who know me well are aware I am interested in American foreign relations. As an undergraduate, state relations were my primary focus and I devoted about six months of my life to debunking classical realist interpretations of late nineteenth century foreign policy while simultaneously assailing conventional wisdom on presidential power in foreign policy-making by contending the executive’s policy only made sense when one considers the partisan composition in Congress. Needless to say, my thesis was conceptually messy in parts as I attempted to write two arguments while saying unkind things about Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Bryan and empathizing with William McKinley.

As a graduate, my interests have evolved. I am much more interested in what Amy Kaplan, borrowing from William A. Williams, has called “the culture of U.S. imperialism.” By this phrase, I refer to the cultural norms and central assumptions about the world that policymakers in the late nineteenth and twentieth century possessed and how these impacted the tone and tenor of our foreign policy. Much work has been done in this field in recent years, my contribution is narrow, but I hope will someday be significant. My thesis examines the connection between sovereignty and race at the turn of the twentieth century, maintaining that only by reconstructing the Spanish as savage and backward could the United States violate its sovereignty in Cuba. Put another way, exterminist Spanish military tactics deprived Spain of the privilege of sovereignty in its war against Cuba because they were against codes of civilized law, thereby, the Spanish, in targeting noncombatants and destroying property and permitting 200,000 civilians to starve were no longer civilized and thus the United States could declare war on them without suffering charges of uncivilized or aggressor. Rhetorically, the United States made this argument. I want to argue it was present in the McKinley Administration’s policy debates and impacted the decision for war in ways no one has yet contended, with important implications for understanding the United States as an expanding state grappling with the logical implications of its anti-imperialist and authoritrarian ideologies that is important for understanding future American interventions in the Third World. At the same time, I hope my focus on global norms continues the move toward “internationalizing” studies of American foreign policy, specifically, treating American colonial projects as analogous to European models that should firmly make the United States a unit of analysis in studies of imperialism.

In my thesis, I am using consular reports and diplomatic correspondence to supplement the president’s papers, the Congressional Record, three national journals of differing ideological composition, four newspapers, unique for geographic origin partisan persuasion, and tons of secondary source material on U.S. foreign policy.

Since I had to change my readers for the paper for this class, I wrote to an audience comprised of skeptics on humanitarian motives for state intervention. To do so, I must argue that rhetoric can illuminate motivations in ways traditional sources cannot. Instead of relying upon the more mundane correspondence of midlevel bureaucrats, I employed McKinley’s famous war address as a source for how rhetoric can be used to illuminate worldviews that shape how a conflict with humanitarian aspects can gain the urgency that it does.

Any one still taking a history class, look at what I was able to pull from one primary source. If you get the opportunity to write a research paper, I recommend a similair approach. The burden comes from reading enough secondary source literature so one can make any meaningful arguments. Here I suggest finding an anthology of methodological essays in your field and reading it cover to cover. Almost every one will direct you to a problem or gap in the scholarship which should permit you to pursue a project like mine.

In terms of secondary literature, I am taking a firm stand with the “cultural turn” school. Although I shall stake my ground quite clealry in my thesis, it’s significance will be inaccessible to anyone unfamilair with the historiography on American emprie. This is not because I am just that brilliant, but because I am jousting with arguments I expect my readers to know and will only allude to in my footnotes, leaving the nonspecialist with little more than what I hope is an engaging monograph on an interesting time and interesting method for understanding why states behaving the way they do. This is true of all academic writing, at least sophisticated academic prose. As this piece functions to be read by a wider audience, I think it can give interested parties a snapshot into my year’s work so far.

Have at it:

“In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of endangered American interests which give us the right and duty to speak and to act, the war in Cuba must stop.”^[1]

With this April 11, 1898 message to Congress, President William McKinley set in motion the Spanish-American War and launched a still raging debate among scholars on its origins.  The war was controversial in its own day as McKinley’s Secretary of State William R. Day implored a scholarly friend not to dismiss the president’s words as empty rhetoric, claiming only an appreciation of the administration’s humane motives could make McKinley’s actions “intelligible.”^[2] While few historians discount the administration’s humanitarian sympathies, most do not grant “humanity” or “civilization” any causal power in the decision for war.^[3] Scholars are much more interested in the ambiguous “American interests” McKinley understood to be “endangered” when he put forth his case for a war with Spain.  Given the conflict’s imperial aftermath, commercial, strategic, and domestic political motivations for war appear significantly more salient than disinterested humanitarianism.^[4] The distance between America’s espoused benevolence and its subsequent actions renders scholars rightly suspicious of its political rhetoric.^[5] Few foreign policy actions are as benign as a state’s leadership publicly acknowledges, compelling many historians to ignore political rhetoric in their excavations of state behavior. ^[6]

Although political rhetoric may not contain forthright expressions of motive, it can help historians illuminate the often illusive cultural norms and ideologies which shape the worldviews of policymakers.^[7] At the very least, rhetoric can reveal the politically viable discourses available to a state in mustering support for its actions.  In recent years, scholars of American history have mined rhetoric for insights into “the norms, prejudices, and self-understandings of the intended audience.”^[8] Historians of foreign relations can draw upon these works to recreate the cultural prisms through which state leaders viewed the world and America’s role in it, which recent scholarship strongly suggests play a decisive role in the crafting of foreign policy.[9]

Political rhetoric can also illuminate the influence of international discourses over American thinking.  Accordingly, historians tracing the resonance of international and transnational norms and ideologies should take seriously rhetorical portrayals of foreign states and justifications of war.  As the Spanish-American War defies easy explanation, President McKinley’s invoking of “humanity” and “civilization,” in his war message can help uncover the currency of these ideas in U.S. political discourse, even if it sheds little light over why the administration moved to war when it did.  At least rhetorically, humanity and civilization superseded the protections international law afforded Spanish sovereignty.  This paper proposes that McKinley’s message can help reveal American attitudes toward these concepts, as well as toward international law and sovereignty at the turn of the twentieth century.

Whatever its immediate political or diplomatic purpose, McKinley structured his message as a rebuttal to claims that an American intervention violated international law.  The president made four arguments justifying American intervention: the alleviation of vast suffering, injured American citizens, disrupted American commerce, and the perpetual disorder wrought by an ongoing stasis in Cuba.^[10] McKinley considered each claim sufficiently controversial to necessitate a vigorous defense, though he devoted the bulk of his words to outlining a war waged for the sake of humanity that America had no choice but to enter.

Few scholars of international law accepted McKinley’s arguments that the American intervention into the Spanish-Cuban War was defensible from a legal perspective.^[11] According to the law of nations, the Spanish-Cuban War was an insurrection, not a war.  Legally, states were thus obligated to assist Spain in any way as it attempted to put down the rebellion, unless a state recognized the Cubans as belligerents.  Belligerent status conferred upon the rebels an equal standing with Spain under international law, but it also entailed recognizing the Cuban revolutionaries as a government, which would hamstring any future American actions on the island while rupturing diplomatic relations with Spain.  Accordingly, the United States government never expressed anything but sympathy for the Cuban cause, a position McKinley defended in his message by correctly maintaining that granting the revolutionaries the privileges of a sovereign state would be premature while unnecessarily complicating America’s efforts to pacify the island.[12]

In this intermingling of deference for international law with an assertion of national interest, McKinley’s address seems to suggests the former only gained salience when it furthered the ends of the latter.  While this may be the case, that McKinley summoned international law to defend what was at the time an unpopular position suggests he believed such an appeal would resonate with the public.[13] At the very least, this reveals the president felt the standard international law conferred upon recognizing foreign governments could deflect domestic criticism of his actions, which suggests the administration felt compelled to legitimize the war from a legal standpoint.

Absent recognition of belligerency by the United States, Spain legally possessed unlimited sovereignty within its own borders, rendering moot any American protests over how it waged its war, and seemingly evincing any American intervention as illegal absent pressing cause.  Outside states could only intervene in a civil war if the conflict immediately threatened their security or with a mandate on humanitarian grounds from the assent of other great powers.  McKinley misleadingly argued the “large dictates of humanity” made the war “justifiable on rational grounds,” as the European powers were genuinely sympathetic to Spanish efforts and suspicious of American avowed disinterest in Cuba.^[14]

Rather than belaboring this point, the president stressed that the United States’ proximity to Cuba imparted upon it a moral duty to arrest the suffering wrought by the conflict.  “It is specifically our duty, for it is right at our door,” the president stated as he neared his conclusion.^[15] Here McKinley drew upon an argument made frequently in Congress and the press in favor of intervention.  While international law dictated strict neutrality, common law suggested neighbors possessed moral obligations toward one another that superseded parchment technicalities.  The most fervent orators clamoring for intervention frequently compared the United States’ position toward Cuba with a rich man passing a beaten one along the side of the highway.  Morally, it followed, the United States was obligated to aid in whatever way it could.  These interventionists unceasingly abused international law as an amoral abettor of cowardice and evil.  More mainstream Cuban sympathizers were willing to grant international law some credence and preferred to depict the American position vis-à-vis the Caribbean as analogous to a policeman tasked with upholding neighborhood harmony.  The policeman, the argument followed, had afforded Spain and Cuba considerable leeway in settling their dispute absent his intervention, but the quarrel had grown too large for him to continue to ignore, given his responsibilities for order in the region.  This view lacked the crusading ardor of the moralizing Cuban sympathizers, but it conveyed intervention as restrained and thoughtful while also couched in legal metaphors that more closely corresponded with the tone and tenor of the president’s address.  Although McKinley never made these arguments in his speech, the phrase “at our door” was in common usage and his application of it suggests he and his audience saw the conflict in similar terms.

While asserting that proximity to Cuba imparted upon the United States a moral responsibility to intervene, McKinley also outlined Spanish atrocities in graphic detail.  The United States was not entering the conflict only to ameliorate the suffering wrought by an unending civil war: it also sought to remedy the “cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized practices of warfare,” that had “shocked the sensibilities and offended the humane sympathies of our people.”^[16] This rhetorical strategy suggested that Spanish military tactics had deprived Spain of the privileges of sovereignty that in the late nineteenth century were closely tied to norms of European civilization.  Thus, when McKinley spoke of the “horrors of the strife of a new and inhuman phase happily unprecedented in the modern history of civilized Christian peoples,” he separated Spain from that class of states.^[17] Furthermore, he implicitly assured his audience that the United States retained its civilization, even as it entered into a war.  McKinley underscored this point by repeatedly stressing the “forbearance” and “patience” the American people had granted Spain as it attempted to regain control of the island.  The president also lauded the American government’s sincere efforts at diplomacy and its strict enforcement of neutrality laws, which further implied that the United States had exhausted all other possible methods of conflict resolution.^[18]

Spanish tactics had not only offended American sensibilities, but had proven counterproductive to a peace on the island the United States as a civilized nation would find acceptable.  “Reconcentration,” the president claimed, “was not civilized warfare; it was extermination.  The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness or the grave.”^[19] Although scholars still debate the death toll from the war, most now place Cuban noncombatant fatalities between 175,000 and 200,000 while Spanish losses primarily from malaria exceeded 50,000.^[20] At the time, however, Americans believed over 400,000 Cubans had perished in the reconcentration camps and had not unjustly concluded that Spanish efforts to remedy this humanitarian catastrophe were irredeemably wanting as the rebellion continued to exhaust the Spanish state’s fiscal and military resources. For McKinley, “a final military victory for either side seems impracticable,” with the war only “ending with the physical exhaustion of the one or the other party, or perhaps of both.”^[21] Such had been the outcome of the previous revolution in Cuba and one McKinley desired to avoid for humanitarian and strategic reasons as anything short of the Spanish withdrawal from the island rendered chronic instability a continual problem for American policymakers.

McKinley also stressed the United States could no longer avoid a war because the chronic stasis in Cuba had damaged more traditional U.S. interests.  The president presented a series of grievances against Spain made with explicit reference to conditions under which international law permitted a neutral state to intervene in a civil conflict.  McKinley contended that Spain’s failure to quash the revolution had injured American commerce and entailed a costly enforcement of neutrality. Traditionally, these were legally grounds for arbitration, but not generally considered precursors for war.  Although some Americans had invested heavily in sugar plantations in Cuba and the nation’s trade with the island had ceased due to the rebellion, these ventures represented such a small portion of the United States’ economy that McKinley was wise to avoid drawing too much attention to them.  He also only briefly touched upon the burdens of enforcing neutrality with Spain.  While the war had obligated the American government to patrol its coasts for filibustering expeditions carrying illicit munitions to the Cuban revolutionaries, such activity was nowhere near as onerous as McKinley protested and was expected of a friendly neutral during wartime.  McKinley’s claims that the lives and property of American citizens in Cuba were imperiled by the conflict were also insufficient grounds for war as such cases were traditionally handled by arbitration.

The president lacked a hard case to claim the war in Cuba proved an existential threat to the American nation.  His argument rested on vague and ambiguous claims that the war in Cuba had chronically upset American political tranquility and disturbed public opinion.  In perhaps the most interesting passage in his address, McKinley appears to blame Spain for allowing the war in Cuba to distract the American public from more pressing domestic concerns.  “Issues wholly external to our own body politic engross attention and stand in the way of that close devotion to domestic advancement that becomes a self-commonwealth whose primal maxim has been the avoidance of all foreign entanglements,” he stated.^[22] If Spanish-Cuban War did not directly threaten the United States’ material interests, it permitted a volatile political situation within its politics that threatened to destabilize its government.  While international law apparently makes no allowance for such a scenario, it would appear McKinley believed that humanitarian factors coupled with political ones created a situation where each in combination with the other rendered a situation that was intolerable.

McKinley’s contention that the United States considered the aforementioned actions as justifications with a war with Spain might suggest international law mattered very little to the administration.  Rather than being influenced by traditional codes of state behavior, the United States was seemingly establishing its own rules of international engagement.  Critics of international law within the United States were correct to argue that strict legal barriers hamstrung America’s freedom of action within a region of the world it had traditionally considered its own unique jurisdiction.  They were also correct to condemn international law as excessively privileging state interests in lieu of anti-colonial and democratic movements to which the United States government was, at least ostensibly, ideologically committed to advancing.  Yet if international legal codes were immaterial, McKinley strained in his address to make the case that the war was justified by them.  Rather than expedient rhetorical sophistry, McKinley’s address reflected a sincere effort to enlist his audience to support an intervention that could only be defensible on moral grounds if they accepted his argument that it was also legally permissible.

McKinley flattered his audience for its moral superiority over the Spanish and implored them to accept war to maintain it.  Rather than making the war a zealous crusade or a vendetta for revenge following the Maine explosion, McKinley urged the nation to understand his actions as justifiable legally and advancing constructs of humane warfare and civilization.[23] The United States would now only respect the sovereignty international law afforded other states in the Western Hemisphere if they maintained order in their territories without resorting to gross violations of civilized warfare as the Spanish had.  In the age of imperialism, sovereignty had always been closely correlated with European civilization.  McKinley argued that Spain’s inability to provide public order in Cuba and its heinous exterminist tactics deprived it of that protection, thereby legitimizing intervention.  International law, for McKinley, thus retained its authority as it justified and perhaps mandated intervention.  Civilized nations arbitrated their disputes with one another.  Accordingly, as a civilized power, America could only wage a righteous war and could only abandon peace without desecrating law.  McKinley fairly portrayed American efforts at diplomacy with Spain as a sincere, but ultimately unfruitful endeavor as Spanish barbarity, duplicity, and incompetence left the United States little recourse to war.  Spanish military tactics justly attracted American opprobrium and McKinley’s message suggested that war with Spain would function as a pedagogical device for the rest of world so it may understand that crimes against noncombatants would no longer go unnoticed or unpunished.   

That political incentives existed for McKinley to win a war with Spain were surely not lost on the administration.  Nor could McKinley have been unaware of the military and commercial benefits a war would afford the victorious United States.  That these issues may have been more salient in the president’s acceptance of war does not render his rhetoric minimizing these rationales as meaningless.  Instead, the president’s speech functions to illuminate American assumptions on international law, civilization, and codes of conduct in warfare that scholars ignoring rhetoric would be hard pressed to prove from a more limited source base.  While alone they cannot explain why the United States entered the war when it did, they give us an insight into a worldview that resonated in 1898 and the residue of which was arguably still shaping elite and popular assumptions of American foreign policy throughout the twentieth century.

^[2] Cited in Kevin Philips, William McKinley in the American Presidents Series, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York: Times Books, 2003), 95.

^[3] Many scholars come from the realist school and refuse to accept that the United States government would mobilize its resources for a war waged primarily for humanitarian reasons.  Other historians inclined to see America’s actions as driven by moral or ideological actions are correct to point out McKinley’s reluctance to engage in a war with Spain, even as stories of atrocities continued to be reported.

^[4] A summary of the literature on the Spanish-American War would be a paper in and of itself.  For those new to the topic, Jerald A. Combs provides an excellent summary of the controversies in the field in his The History of American Foreign Policy to 1920 (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 130-153.  On the immediate causes of the war, experts in the field will find Lewis L. Gould’s bibliographic essay illuminating The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1980).  Paul T. McCartney updates the literature in his Power and Progress: American National Identity the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1-16.  Scholars on foreign relations should also be familiar with James A. Field’s “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” American Historical Review 83 (June 1978): 644-678 and Louis A. Perez, Jr.’s, “The Meaning of the Maine: Causation and the Historiography of the Spanish-American War,” Pacific Historical Review 58 (1989): 291-322.

^[5] Writing recently on humanitarian interventions in the nineteenth century, Gary J. Bass dismisses the Spanish-American War as “sullied by imperialism,” Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008), 317-9.  Journalist Samantha Power does not even address the Spanish-American War  in her widely read work on U.S. humanitarian actions The Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2002).

^[6] For literature on the uses of humanitarian rhetoric in war making, see especially Eran N. Ben-Porah, “The Rhetoric of Atrocities: The Place of Horrific Human Rights Abuses in Presidential Persuasion Efforts,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37 (June 2007): 181-202; John R. Butler, “Somalia and the Imperial Savage: Continuities in the Rhetoric of War,” Western Journal of Communication 66 (2002): 1-24; Robert L. Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 55-65; Robert L. Ivie, “Images of Savagery in American Justifications for War,” Communication Monographs 47 (Nov. 1980): 279-294.

^[7] Michael H. Hunt makes this argument most forcefully in his Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 14-16.

^[8] McCartney 15.  For works relating to the Spanish-American War, see also Kristin L. Hoganson’s Fighting For American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and Louis A. Perez, Jr.’s Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

[9] For a good survey of the contemporary field of international history, see Palgrave Studies in International History, ed. Patrick Finney (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).

^[10] McKinley, “Message to the Congress of the United States,” 757.

^[11] The best two works on international law and the Spanish-American War at the time are Elbert Jay Benton, International Law and Diplomacy of the Spanish-American War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1908) and Horace Edgar Flack’s “Spanish-American Diplomatic Relations Preceding the War of 1898,” in Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science ed. J.M Vincent, J. H. Hollander, and W.W. Willoughby (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1906).

[12] Although many scholars find McKinley’s reasoning cynical, no one save the most ardent Cuban patriot maintains that the Cuban revolutionaries had anything resembling a functioning government at any point during the insurrection.  Their leadership was unelected, controlled no cities, held no ports, possessed only dubious popular legitimacy, and functioned off of pillaging and looting the countryside.  See John L. Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of Spain and the United States over Cuba, 1895-1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 187-193; McKinley, “Message to the Congress of the United States,” 756.

[13] McKinley’s refusal to explicitly recognize Cuban independence disappointed many who had been clamoring for war.  A helpful essay tracing the eruption of criticism the president received following his address can be found in Paul S. Holbo, “Presidential Leadership in Foreign Affairs: William McKinley and The Turpie-Foraker Amendment,” American Historical Review 72 (1967): 1321-1335.

^[14] Ibid., 756.

^[15] Ibid., 758.

^[16] Ibid., 752.

^[17] Ibid., 754.

^[18] Ibid., 753.

^[19] Ibid., 756.

^[20] The most diligent work investigating this number comes from Jon Lawrence Tone’s War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 195-212.

^[21] McKinley, “Message to the Congress of the United States,” 756.

^[22] McKinley, “Message to the Congress,” 753.

[23] The Maine explosion and its aftermath have received more attention than any other aspect of the Spanish-American War.  That McKinley was committed to arbitrating the matter with Spain is without doubt, and that he only referred to the politically volatile explosion in passing only further suggests that he sought to lay claim to a war waged for interests higher than revenge or self-interest.