McKinley once related to a group of visitors to the White House that he had
been unable to sleep at night before he made his decision to annex the
Philippines. And he said that he had prayed regularly and finally one night he
said a voice came the him that said that you had to annex all of the
Philippines, because, otherwise, he said, the voice told that if you gave the
Philippines back to the Filipinos, that would be, quote, "cowardly", unquote,
and, moreover, if you did that, the French and the British and the Japanese and
the Germans might move in and that would be, as McKinley told his visitors,
quote, "bad business", unquote. And so McKinley said that he had decided that
night that he would have to annex all of the Philippines and he went to bed and
he slept soundly because he had decided that it was now the role of the United
States, as he told these visitors, to, quote, "lift up and civilized the
Filipinos even as we annex islands." Most historians do not believe that
story. For one thing, he was telling a group of Methodist missionaries that
particular story. He knew his audience and the Methodist missionaries were
very impressed with the reasons why McKinley decided to take the Philippines.
The other reason, though, I think that is more important, that well before the
war, in late 1897-early 1898, McKinley had understood very clearly that war
against Spain meant not only taking Cuba; it meant taking the Spanish
possessions in the Pacific, and McKinley wanted this very badly and he had
decided that he would take at least the Port of Manila. The only question was
whether or not you could take the Port of Manila without taking the rest of the
Philippines, and he had decided finally that he could not. As a consequence,
McKinley had made the decision to annex the Philippines
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