paper proposal

In writing my undergraduate thesis, nothing proved more vexing than the lack of attention most senators have attracted from historians examining the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Given the number of orations he delivered on behalf of the Cubans before the war, no omission appears more glaring to a researcher employing the Congressional Record than William E. Mason’s. A freshly elected Republican from Illinois, Mason attracted national attention for his eloquent pleas for a crusade against Spanish barbarity and tyranny in 1897. Unlike the chorus of populist voices also clamoring for intervention, he had no partisan interest in embarrassing the administration, indeed, Mason, according to a colleague, was an old friend of President McKinley’s from their time in Congress together who exploited that connection for patronage appointments. Yet Mason jeopardized that relationship, and his standing inside the Republican Party, with his Cuban position as well as votes on trusts, agrarian interests, and opposition to colonial rule in the Philippines. Recent work by several political scientists investigating Senate have sourced the lack of party cohesion prior to 1913 as the product of high turnover in state legislatures in the six year periods between elections: senators seeking to retain office needed to anticipate how factions would form in those parochial bodies. Other work has pointed to the deadlock between parties in the 1890s as the moment when party discipline began assuming its present form. I will not contend Mason had any real impact on the war nor argue that he held any sway in Washington. I do hope a preliminary examination of the Senator’s papers, kept at the Lincoln Presidential Library, alongside the local political context supplied by the Chicago Tribune, and the day-to-day political beat-writing Washington Post and Star, will aid me in discovering what pressures, if any, influenced Mason’s actions. Such a project may prove useful for future studies examining voting behavior in the late nineteenth century as well as enrich our understanding of the belligerent strand of political opinion in the 1890s.
Few presidents were so dissimilar in executive style and personality than Grover Cleveland and his successor. Much of the literature on Cleveland’s tenure, especially his second term, has praised him for his “honesty” and “courage” for opposing agrarian radicals in his party on grounds of principle rather than political expediency. There is much in Cleveland’s correspondence and papers to validate this assessment, but few have connected the rise of populism in the Democratic ranks to a series of politically maladroit actions by Cleveland in 1893-1894. By contrast, President McKinley is frequently damned as “weak” and “indecisive” because he deferred to a party opinion contrary to his own on many occasions, which permitted him greater control over the outcome of a policy. I am, of course, grossly oversimplifying, but I believe an examination of the means by which Cleveland and McKinley sought to control the nation’s diplomacy with Spain over Cuba could yield a more nuanced understanding of the powers of the nineteenth century executive, the conditions upon which he could go against Congress and his party, and the degree, or lack thereof, to which the character or temperament of the executive impacts the course of events. To make this project manageable, I would focus on the conditions surrounding two overlooked resolutions in Congress surrounding the Cuban question and examine how Cleveland and McKinley responded to attempts by congressmen to subvert their autonomy in diplomatic negotiations with Spain in April 1896 and May 1897 respectively. Presidential papers, the major Washington newspapers, State Department documents, and the Congressional Record should provide a good start for this project.