It was

the chief engineer of the War 
Department that McKinley called 
"our mapmaker." It was, he says, 
a quandary manifest, and moral, and 
entrepreneurial (by which we know 
it was just business as usual) when he
confessed he did not know what to do 
with an entire nation dropped into our 
laps after the Spanish-American war. 
And then he said,  one night late it 
came to me this way, for the sake of 
preventing anarchy and misrule. 
And lo, it was a kind of history that
almost seemed to write itself.