America First’s Forgotten Founder

The 25th president is having a moment in the spotlight.

William McKinley, twice elected to the presidency before being felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1901, won praise from President Donald Trump during the latter’s inaugural address last month. Trump praised McKinley for making “our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” Trump also pledged to restore McKinley’s name to North America’s highest peak, “where it belongs.” As the esteemed editor and McKinley biographer Robert Merry recently observed, “It isn’t difficult to see how Trump, once he became familiar with the McKinley story, would embrace it as a model for his own White House leadership.”

While it makes sense that Trump would see much to emulate in McKinley’s record on tariffs and trade, McKinley seems a less sure guide on matters of war and peace. On that front, there are better models than McKinley, on whose watch the US engaged in an unnecessary and unjust war against Spain which resulted in the subsequent occupation of the Philippines (McKinley should also earn demerits for inflicting Teddy Roosevelt on the nation).

Unlike today, at the fin de siècle America’s role as a global power was subject to debate. Mark Twain, then among the country’s most renowned literary voices, was a founding member of the Anti-Imperialist League. Twain remarked at the time, “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” Henry Adams, author, professor and scion of America’s first and finest political dynasty, wrote to his brother Brooks (who unlike Henry was an ardent proponent of empire) that he thought “our Philippine excursion” was “a false start in the wrong direction and one that is more likely to blunt our energies than to guide them.” He continued: “It is a mere repetition of the errors of Spain and England.” 

Despite these objections, the Washington establishment set off in search of monsters to destroy. Adams’ confidante John Hay, who served as McKinley’s ambassador to the Court of St. James and then, later, as Roosevelt’s secretary of state, enthused about McKinley’s “splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave.” The imperial fever of that time was a byproduct of new theories of naval superiority promoted by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan as well as Darwinian notions of racial superiority such as those infamously expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden (1899) which described native Filipinos as “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child.” Such was the distance we traveled from the days of Jefferson who, in 1791 wrote, “if there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

In Congress the charge against empire was led by the speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, a Republican from e. Reed was witty, principled and—at six-foot-three, three-hundred pounds—imposing. He ruled the House with an iron fist. Said one contemporary, “He commands everything by the brutality of his intellect.” Democratic opponents took to calling him “Czar Reed”—an epithet, quips Reed’s biographer James Grant, that he didn’t seem to mind.

The great historian Barbara Tuchman notes that as House speaker, Reed was “unalterably opposed to expansion and all it implied.” He believed that “American greatness lay at home and was to be achieved by improving living conditions,” rather than by embarking on adventures in Venezuela, Cuba, Hawaii and elsewhere. 

But by 1898 the war fever was catching. Two months following the explosion, in February, of the USS e off the coast of Cuba, McKinley declared war on Spain. Like too many progressives in present-day Washington who have spent the last three years plastering yellow and blue flags onto their bumpers, progressives in Reed’s day, including William Jennings Bryan, Albert J. Beveridge and New Republic (some things never change) founder Herbert Croly, all eagerly jumped aboard the pro-war bandwagon. “I would like to see Spain swept from the face of the earth,” said suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Reed knew that, despite his best efforts, he could not hold back the tide of empire in the House for long. He penned an article for the magazine Illustrated American titled “Empire Can Wait” and he held off legislation authorizing the annexation of Hawaii for as long as he could. The final straw for Reed was the Senate’s approval, by a 57-21 margin, of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded control of the Philippines (for $20 million), Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States.

An America-First foreign policy, properly understood, is one that eschews imperial conquests. Reed knew this intuitively but ultimately lost the debate to McKinley, Roosevelt and their pro-expansionist supporters. 

At the time of Reed’s death, on December 6, 1902, his successor, Joe Cannon, eulogized him as having “the strongest intellect crossed on the best courage of any man in public life I have ever known.”  Today, however, Reed is the unjustly neglected founder of America First.