The Spanish-American War and President McKinley

Thanks to William McKinley in one year -- 1898 -- the USA came into possession of Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Cuba it soon gave up. The rest it kept. McKinley played a hostile Senate faction of anti-imperialists like a violin and pushed through early 1899 ratification of the Paris Treaty of Peace with Spain with one vote to spare. He greatly enlarged the powers of the Presidency. His successes in 1898 also allowed him to send troops to Peking without Congressional authority to fight the Boxers. It also paved the way to later building the Panama Canal under U.S. sole ownership. Until Professor Gould's revisionist looks at McKinley, the former Governor of Ohio had sunk to the status of a fourth-magnitude President, accused by some of genocide in the Philippines.

-OOO-