Cleveland’s second term

When Cleveland was inaugurated for his second term in March 1893, the country hovered on the brink of financial panic. Six years of depression in the trans-Mississippi West, the decline of foreign trade after the enactment of the McKinley tariff, and an abnormally high burden of private debt were disquieting features of the situation. Most attention was centered, however, on the gold reserve in the federal Treasury. It was assumed that a minimum reserve of $100,000,000 was necessary to assure redemption of government obligations in gold. When on April 21, 1893, the reserve fell below that amount, the psychological impact was far-reaching. Investors hastened to convert their holdings into gold; banks and brokerage houses were hard-pressed; and many business houses and financial institutions failed. Prices dropped, employment was curtailed, and the nation entered a period of severe economic depression that continued for more than three years.

The causes of this disaster were numerous and complex, but the attention that focused on the gold reserve tended to concentrate concern upon a single factor—the restoration of the Treasury’s supply of gold. It was widely believed that the principal cause of the drain on the Treasury was the obligation to purchase large amounts of silver. To those who held this view, the obvious remedy was the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

The issue was political as well as economic. It divided both major parties, but most of the leading advocates of existing silver policies were Democrats. Cleveland, however, had long been opposed to the silver-purchase policy, and in the crisis he resolved upon repeal as an essential step in protecting the Treasury. He therefore called Congress to meet in special session on August 7, 1893.

The new Congress had Democratic majorities in both houses, and, if it had any mandate, it was to repeal the McKinley tariff. It had no mandate on the silver issue, and more than half of its Democratic members came from constituencies that favored an increase in the coinage of silver. Cleveland faced a herculean task in forcing repeal through Congress, but, by the use of every power at his command, he gained his objective. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed at the end of October by a bill that made no compensating provision for the coinage of silver. Cleveland had won a personal triumph, but he had irrevocably divided his party; and in some sections of the nation he had become the most unpopular president of his generation.

The extent to which Cleveland had lost control of his party became apparent when Congress turned from silver to the tariff. The House passed a bill that would have revised tariff rates downward in accordance with the president’s views. In the Senate, however, the bill was so altered that it bore little resemblance to the original measure, and on some items it imposed higher duties than had the McKinley Tariff Act. It was finally passed in August 1894, but Cleveland was so dissatisfied that he refused to sign it; and it became law without his signature. The act contained a provision for an income tax, but this feature was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1895.

In the midterm elections of 1894 the Republicans recaptured control of both houses of Congress. This indicated the discontent produced by the continuing depression. It also guaranteed that, with a Democratic president and Republican Congress, there would be inaction in domestic legislation while both parties looked forward to the election of 1896.

At their convention in St. Louis the Republicans selected Gov. William McKinley of Ohio as their presidential nominee. He had served in the Federal army during the Civil War, and his record as governor of Ohio tended to offset his association with the unpopular tariff of 1890. His most effective support in winning the nomination, however, was provided by Mark Hanna, a wealthy Cleveland businessman who was McKinley’s closest friend.

The Democratic convention in Chicago was unusually exciting. It was controlled by groups hostile to Cleveland’s financial policies, and it took the unprecedented step of rejecting a resolution commending the administration of a president of its own party. The debate on the party platform featured an eloquent defense of silver and agrarian interests by William Jennings Bryan, which won him not only a prolonged ovation but also his party’s presidential nomination. Bryan was a former congressman from Nebraska, and at 36 he was the youngest man ever to be the nominee for president of a major party. By experience and conviction he shared the outlook of the agrarian elements that dominated the convention and whose principal spokesman he became.

Bryan conducted a vigorous campaign. For the first time a presidential candidate carried his case to the people in all parts of the country, and for a time it appeared that he might win. The worried conservatives charged that Bryan was a dangerous demagogue, and they interpreted the campaign as a conflict between defenders of a sound economic system that would produce prosperity and dishonest radicals who championed reckless innovations that would undermine the financial security of the nation. On this interpretation they succeeded in raising large campaign funds from industrialists who feared their interests were threatened. With this money, the Republicans were able to turn the tide and win a decisive victory. Outside the South, Bryan carried only the Western silver states and Kansas and Nebraska.

Economic recovery

Soon after taking office on March 4, 1897, McKinley called Congress into special session to revise the tariff once again. Congress responded by passing the Dingley Tariff Act, which eliminated many items from the free list and generally raised duties on imports to the highest level they had yet reached.

Although the preservation of the gold standard had been the chief appeal of the Republicans in 1896, it was not until March 1900 that Congress enacted the Gold Standard Act, which required the Treasury to maintain a minimum gold reserve of $150,000,000 and authorized the issuance of bonds, if necessary, to protect that minimum. In 1900 such a measure was almost anticlimactic, for an adequate gold supply had ceased to be a practical problem. Beginning in 1893, the production of gold in the United States had increased steadily; by 1899 the annual value of gold added to the American supply was double that of any year between 1881 and 1892. The chief source of the new supply of gold was the Klondike, where important deposits of gold had been discovered during the summer of 1896.

By 1898 the depression had run its course; farm prices and the volume of farm exports were again rising steadily, and Western farmers appeared to forget their recent troubles and to regain confidence in their economic prospects. In industry, the return of prosperity was marked by a resumption of the move toward more industrial combinations, despite the antitrust law; and great banking houses, such as J.P. Morgan and Company of New York, played a key role in many of the most important of these combinations by providing the necessary capital and receiving, in return, an influential voice in the management of the companies created by this capital.

The Spanish-American War

Militarily speaking, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was so brief and relatively bloodless as to have been a mere passing episode in the history of modern warfare. Its political and diplomatic consequences, however, were enormous: it catapulted the United States into the arena of world politics and set it, at least briefly, on the new road of imperialism. To be sure, specific events drove the United States to hostilities in 1898, but the stage had already been set by profound changes in thought about the nation’s mission and its destiny.

Before the 1890s, roughly speaking, most Americans had adhered stubbornly to the belief, as old as the Revolution itself, that their country should remain aloof from European affairs and offer an example of democracy and peace to the rest of the world, but slowly in the 1880s, and more rapidly in the 1890s, new currents of thought eroded this historic conviction. The United States had become a great power by virtue of its prodigious economic growth since the Civil War; numerous publicists said that it ought to begin to act like one. Propagandists of sea power, above all, Capt. Alfred T. Mahan, argued that future national security and greatness depended upon a large navy supported by bases throughout the world. After the disappearance of the American frontier in 1890, the conviction grew that the United States would have to find new outlets for an ever-increasing population and agricultural and industrial production; this belief was particularly rife among farmers in dire distress in the 1890s. Social Darwinists said that the world is a jungle, with international rivalries inevitable, and that only strong nations could survive. Added to these arguments were those of idealists and religious leaders that Americans had a duty to “take up the white man’s burden” and to carry their assertedly superior culture and the blessings of Christianity to the backward peoples of the world.

It was against this background that the events of 1898 propelled the United States along the road to war and empire. Cuban rebels had begun a violent revolution against Spanish rule in 1895, set off by a depression caused by a decline in U.S. sugar purchases from Cuba. Rebel violence led progressively to more repressive Spanish countermeasures. Cuban refugees in the United States spread exaggerated tales of Spanish atrocities, and these and numerous others were reprinted widely (particularly by William Randolph Hearst’s New York American and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, then engaged in a fierce battle for circulation). President Cleveland resisted the rising public demand for intervention, but by early 1898 the pressure, then on his successor, McKinley, was too great to be defied. When an explosion—caused by a submarine mine, according to a U.S. naval court of inquiry—sank the USS Maine with large loss of life in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, events moved beyond the president’s control. Though Spain was willing to make large concessions to avoid war, it adamantly resisted what had become the minimum public and official U.S. demand—Spanish withdrawal from Cuba and recognition of the island’s independence. Hence Congress in mid-April authorized McKinley to use the armed forces to expel the Spanish from Cuba.

For Americans it was, as Secretary of State John Hay put it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, “a splendid little war.” An American expeditionary force, after quickly overcoming the Spaniards in Cuba, turned against Spain’s last island in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, on May 1, 1898, the American commodore George Dewey, with his Asiatic squadron, destroyed a decrepit Spanish flotilla in the harbor of Manila in the Philippines.

The fighting was over by August 12, when the United States and Spain signed a preliminary peace treaty in Washington, D.C. Negotiators met in Paris in October to draw up a definitive agreement. Spain recognized the independence of Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, but the disposition of the Philippines was another matter. Business interests in the United States, which had been noticeably cool about a war over Cuba, demanded the acquisition of the entire Philippine archipelago in the hope that Manila would become the entrepôt for a great Far Eastern trade; chauvinists declaimed against lowering the flag under Spanish pressure. Concluding that he had no alternative, McKinley forced the Spanish to “sell” the Philippines to the United States for $20,000,000.

But a strong reaction in the United States against acquisition of the Philippines had already set in by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed on December 10, 1898, and anti-imperialists declared that the control and governance of distant alien peoples violated all American traditions of self-determination and would even threaten the very fabric of the republic. Though there were more than enough votes in the Senate to defeat the treaty, that body gave its consent to ratification largely because William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic leader, wanted Democrats to approve the treaty and then make imperialism the chief issue of the 1900 presidential campaign.