Please click to Digg our site.on this day the 25th President of the United States William McKinley announced his intention for the Phillipines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba to be guided towards full independence before the expiry of his term of office in 1905.

Those territories had been conceded to the United States following the recent war with Spain. The trigger for that war had been the explosion of the US Battleship Maine in Havana Harbour. The tragedy which had taken the lives of 266 American crewmen was originally blamed by war mongerers on Spanish sabotage, but later discovered to be a freak accident caused by the explosion of powder magazines.

"1. an independent Guam is a joke Japan grabs it 2. a totally independent Philippine Republic either is grabbed by Germany or becomes a British protectorate 3. Our mistake with the Philippines was not doing a treaty of protection with the Philippine Republic. We get Suibic and Davo, keep the others out and do a trade treaty. It worked well for Cuba until Fidel made hash out of it." - reader's commentsDispatched by McKinley against his better judgement, the crew's mission was to assist the valiant rebels fight their cruel Spanish overlords. But ever since the peace negotiations in Paris, rebels on all four islands had viewed the new US governments as a new set of equally unwelcome masters.

"Mad scientists save the world!" - reader's commentsA civil war veteran, McKinley perceived the decidedly un-American outcome of the conflict which his Secretary of State John Hay had foolishly called "a splendid little war". And also the pressure coming from new forces in American society who were openly advocating an expansionist policy that utterly disregarded George Washington's prophetic warning against the dangers of "foreign entanglements". Because the projection of American power meant that imperialism, like the Maine, was a dangerous powderkeg just waiting to go off.

The iron had finally settled into McKinley's soul on September 6th, when an anarchist called Leon Czolgosz had attempted to murder him in Buffalo. His life was only saved by the operation of an experimental X-Ray machine being showcased at the Pan-American Exposition which the President was attending when the fateful shot was fired. The machine located the bullet, preventing the President from being infected by his bungling doctors.