ABSTRACT
President McKinleys initial instructions for the peace commissioners, as will be seen, called for a partial settlement in the Philippines— "the United States can not accept less than the cession in full right and sovereignty of the island of Luzon". One line of argument about McKinley's choice of "empire" is either overlooked or, worse, is ridiculed and counted as plainly unacceptable. Claims about "business" influence and purposes appeared regularly in much of the later literature dealing with both the war and the resulting empire. In The Rise of American Civilization, the Beards open their account of the war with a statement that in 1897, under the leadership of McKinley, "the party of business enterprise gave a new tone to American foreign policy". The United States should develop its compact continental "empire" based on contiguous territory and homogeneous population. LaFeber reported nothing on that opposition in The New Empire although several mentions do appear in his American Search.
