That the then tiny State Department (it had a workforce of eighty-six people, many of them clerks) would even care about Asia underscored a sea change in the American attitude toward the Far East. A year earlier, the United States had annexed Hawaii. And in December 1898, at the height of the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley, moved by what he said was “Providence,” had ordered the invasion of the Philippines and seized Guam. China suddenly did not look so far away.
