Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

that which came from the one who had been nearest and
dearest to Mr. Cleveland.
III
The "Policy of Infamy" was the not too temperate
name bestowed in 1893 and 1894 upon the administrative
efforts to reverse the policy which under Harrison had
shaped events toward the annexation of the Hawaiian
Islands. I am inclined to the belief that there are few
Americans, whatever may have been their opinions at
the time, who regret to-day that Mr. Cleveland and his
Secretary of State, Mr. Gresham, and his "Paramount
Commissioner," Mr. Blount of Georgia, did not succeed
in crushing the life out of the young republic which was
afterward to become this nation's indispensable outpost
in the Pacific and toward Asia.
When President Cleveland, under the impulse of Secretary Gresham's feud with Harrison, and in a degree
against the wiser counsels of Attorney-General Richard
Olney, sent to Congress his famous Hawaiian message of
December 18, 1893, explaining his previous withdrawal
from the Senate of the Foster-Thurston Treaty negotiated
by his predecessor, impugning the honesty of Harrison's
course, and proposing the overthrow of the new republic
and the restoration of the absurd Queen Liliuokalani, one
of the reasons alleged for the course was that the proposed
annexation "contemplated a departure from unbroken
American tradition in providing for the addition to our
territory of islands of the sea more than 2,000 miles removed from our nearest coast." How queerly that argument reads in the daylight of 1924! Of the general policy
outlined in the message I wrote, among other expressions:

Never before has an American Executive undertaken to stamp
out republicanism and set up monarchy in any part of the world.
Never before, we believe, has an American President issued
orders for the assassination of a free and successful Govern