12. Arms and the Mahan
The United States of which Grover Cleveland took the helm in 1885 bore little resemblance to the country of which Andrew Jackson had been president. In many respects, this was attributable to the abandonment of the old strictures against ‘internal improvements,’ which may have died their final death when Jefferson Davis, still a Democrat at the time and the heir of Randolph and Calhoun, had supported the idea of a transcontinental rail line. But the fact was that, in a nation of continental extent, merely to move the troops and deliver the mail – two functions that even the most strict of constructionists had always held to be the Federal obligation – had required massive investments in infrastructure that simply could never have been accomplished without government intervention.
In many regards, the market in the United States was the freest in the world, the most near to Adam Smith’s laissez-faire ideal. It was simply that the government, through procurement and the building of infrastructure, had become one of the most ponderous players in that market.
It was President Cleveland’s peculiar talent to have recognized this fact, and, recognizing it, to have welcomed it without doctrinaire reservations. His two terms would see an explosion of capital and a revolution in the way America did business.
He entered upon his first term, however, in some degree of embarrassment, as the final graduated emancipation of slaves in Brazil came to its natural end and slavery as a whole ceased to exist in that country. The United States were now the only civilized nation, much less the only Power, to have, even if moribund, institutional slavery. Yet the country remained firmly mounted upon the tiger’s back, unable even now to dismount without risk.
More comfortable by far was it to survey the unceasing improvement and overhaul of the rail network, by Federally-chartered and State-chartered lines and by a scant handful of private railroads alike. Not only had these years of internal improvements transformed the country and made the old threat of disunion a forgotten nightmare; the government’s involvement in these projects, each spanning a term of years that might exceed any single administration, had further militated in favor of continuity of policy from one administration, and one party, to the next. The exemplary stability of the United States in a notably unstable world – a social as well as institutional stability – was a thing of pride.
The social stability of the American public was, in fact, a thing of wonder as well as of pride, in that these were the years in which American thinkers – Adamses and Jameses – and foreign émigrés alike were propounding theories vast in their implications and disturbing in their details, especially as they plumbed the sub-basements of the human psyche. But then, as a British observer of the American scene noted, ‘This sort of thing should doubtless have disturbed the Athenians of old mightily. The Romans, one rather gathers, would politely have hidden their yawns, reserving their excitement for a new way of building aqueducts. And there is something Roman in the American character, and we of old Europe at best Greece to their Rome.’
By contrast, even Canada, which saw a widespread rebellion in its frigid Northwestern Territories on March 11, 1885, was not immune to instability. It was rather embarrassing to all concerned when, in September of that year, a Canadian brigadier, disgusted with the situation, renounced his allegiance and entered American service, though the State Department immediately soothed Ottawa’s ruffled feathers.
The French, meanwhile, were going from bad worse. On July 10, 1885, Prussia granted a cessation of hostilities in return for Pforzheim, Metz, and Mülhausen. By now, the French were not merely disgorging their past conquests, but being forced to assent to the slow dismemberment of their country.
The contrast could hardly have been more stark. In October of 1885, the United States was transfixed by the publication of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which contained one of the great scenes of moral sensibility in American literature. ‘All right, then, I’ll
go to Hell.’ By contrast, in that same month, Russia was transfixed by Habsburg bayonets, securing peace only by ceding to the rival empire Lodz, Radom, Botosani, Beltsy, Kielce, Kalisz, and Bacau.
The Teutonic empires were getting above themselves, and Whitehall and Washington City were both beginning to be concerned.
It were pointless to detail the incessant warmaking to the south of the Isthmus of Panama. South America had descended into a Hobbesian state of nature long since, an ongoing war of all against all, and there was no surcease in sight. The United States merely quarantined the southern continent’s endemic violence and ignored it as best they could.
In May of 1886, for example, the Haitians were caught
in flagrante attempting to smuggle arms into Santo Domingo for a paper insurgency. (There were in fact no real insurgents at the time.) President Cleveland showed the iron beneath the bonhomie and gourmandise: the weapons were seized, the gun-runners given a drumhead trial and hanged, and Haitian protests met with icy contempt.
In fact, it was not just iron that the Cleveland Administration showed beneath the jollity: it was the sublime confidence – ‘Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not’ – that derived from the development of, and the Army’s being swiftly equipped with, the machine gun, in March of 1886. The Belgians, in that same month, had had to put down a Socialist revolt with cavalry and sabers. Should the Americans ever face such a situation, their answer, at the last resort, would be machine guns traversing in a crossing pattern, at about a three-foot elevation.
So grave had the European situation become – its warfare endemic, its bayonets stacked like jackstraws, its alliances serving rather to provoke than to deter war – that, on September 17, 1886, the unthinkable happened. The Sublime Porte entered into an alliance with its most ancient enemy, the Greek kingdom.
The portent was noted.
In addition to working towards the completion and integration of a rail net that covered every region of every state and territory, the United States pressed ahead with strategic industrialization and development: completing, between the first of November, 1886, and St Patrick’s Day, 1887, a fuel refinery in Texas, an explosives factory in Virginia, and the development and issuance to the Army and Navy of iron breech-loaded artillery and naval guns.
Not even a scandal that caused the resignation of half the House leadership deterred the American hell-for-leather advance, and the Democrats managed to hold onto control of both chambers of Congress.
The country received a further boost when the First Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament convened on September 29, 1887. Nothing was accomplished, of course, but it was a symbol of America’s increasing influence and presence on the world stage.
Early in 1888 – again, almost as if the Fates wanted to remind the electorate to stay the course – renewed civil war broke out in Mexico. The Cleveland Administration caught the public mood perfectly by supporting the progressives, whatever Mark Hanna and the Wall Street bankers might think: Americans might be the most conservative people in the world, but they liked to think of themselves as classical Liberals in the old Anglo-American tradition. After all, even Edmund Burke had been, technically, a Whig.
In March, the final round of rail expansion and improvement was made possible, and was as swiftly contracted for, with the development of a true integrated rail system. It seemed almost too pat that the development was announced simultaneously with that of the death of General Sheridan, one of the leading advocates of such a system as part of the country’s strategic policy.
In June, the United States Navy rendered every other fleet in the world obsolete – the prospect of doing which had helped ensure the failure of the first Washington Naval Conference – by deploying the first open-ocean capable submarines. They were based in Santo Domingo, further insulating the United State from the madness that consumed South America.
In March of 1899, the ‘Honest Neighbor’ policy met its harshest test yet, when it became necessary to seize weaponry and hang the gunrunners in a plot by one of the innumerable Mexican factions to raise a
grito in South Texas and in New Mexico. Relations were set back with all of the contending Mexican parties, fear of the gringo, of the ‘Colossus of the North,’ being about the only thing on which they were all agreed; but Cleveland, now embarked upon his second term, remained firm.
In August of that year, the United States economy grew further with the opening of a synthetic, aniline dye factory in Ohio. And in September, strange rumors, not without their element of pathos, began to reach the ears of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: of a pagan, syncretist revival amongst the Plains Indians, to repeal the verdict of history, roll back the white man’s conquest, and repopulate the prairies with buffalo innumerable: the Ghost Dance.
Nothing came of it, and the ancient barbaric glory of the mounted Plains Indians receded yet further into the mists of the past.
A year later, on September 4, 1890, it was the future that was clamorous for attention, with the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s magisterial
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. The country and its elites seized upon it as gospel.
On April 4, 1891, Flag Day, a Grand Review was held in Washington City, and immediately denounced by the Republicans and the Socialists as an pre-election-year stunt. It wasn’t, as the country would soon learn: rather, it was a not-so-subtle warning – ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ – and eminently timely. On July 12, as American attachés in Vienna and St Petersburg had warned was likely, Russia declared war upon the Austrian Empire.
By the end of the day, wires from United States legations abroad were reporting that the Habsburgs had been rallied to by Hannover, Bavaria, Bremen, Hesse-Darmstadt, Hesse-Kassel, Lippe-Detmold, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Saxony, and Lübeck. Europe was once again in flames.
Grover Cleveland had a few goals left as his second term wound down. One of them, to universal acclaim, he achieved on October 25, 1891, when the United States granted independence to Santo Domingo – or, as we must now call her, the Dominican Republic.
A month later, in November of 1891, American power, achievement, and liberty were celebrated by the premiere of a newly-commissioned work by the composer who would be, and remains, most identified with America in the years of ascension: the glorious John Philip Sousa.
The American mood was upbeat – in march time – and infectious, and the Democratic candidate was already considered effectively certain of being elected in 1892. The only Americans who could repine at American security and stability were the Socialists, and on December 29, 1891, a riot in Minnesota turned ugly. From a riot it became a revolt, and from a revolt, very nearly a rebellion; but XX Corps had put it down with little bloodshed by February 11, 1892, and its having been Socialist-inspired only redounded to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
By the end of 1892, private rail lines had begun to appear with some frequency, and the United States Navy had successfully shown the flag – and had not had to pull the lanyard on the guns – in the Panama country of Nicaragua, when there had briefly seemed a potential threat to the cross-country connection between the seas. The horizon, as Governor Fitzhugh Lee of Virginia, the victorious Democratic nominee, prepared for his inauguration as president, was serene.
