How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The newspapers played it up, portraying Cuba as a damsel in distress,24 her dusky virtue besmirched by the rapacious Catholics of Spain. Should the United States enter the fray? Should it, perhaps, take over? The debate was long and loud. Roosevelt, then serving as assistant secretary of the navy, volunteered to personally invade Cuba. But opinions were decidedly mixed, and McKinley settled on a half measure. At Roosevelt’s urging, he agreed to station a warship, the USS Maine, off the coast of Havana as a show of resolve. Beyond that, he would continue to wait.

  Not for long, as it turned out. On February 15, 1898, the Maine mysteriously exploded, killing 262 men. It was, depending on the explanation, possibly an act of war.

  “I don’t propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe,”25 wrote McKinley the next day. “The country can afford to withhold its judgment and not strike an avenging blow until the truth is known.”

  Roosevelt displayed none of McKinley’s caution. “Dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards” was his diagnosis,26 and the newspapers concurred. “Remember the Maine!” replaced “Remember the Alamo!” as the battle cry of a wounded nation.

  In retrospect, McKinley was right to hesitate. As far as we can tell, the Maine’s explosion was probably the result of spontaneous combustion in its coal bunkers, a surprisingly common hazard at the time (barely a month later, the USS Oregon’s coal stores spontaneously burst into flame). Whatever the cause, McKinley was loath to ramp up the conflict with Spain. “I have been through one war,”27 he said, thinking of his service in the Civil War. “I have seen the dead piled up. I do not want to see another.”

  Roosevelt rolled his eyes. “McKinley is bent on peace,28 I fear.”

  *

  Normally, when the president of the United States wants one thing and the assistant secretary of the navy wants another, both custom and Constitution dictate that the president prevails. But Roosevelt had an uncanny knack for orchestrating events in his favor.

  It helped that he reported to John D. Long, the secretary of the navy, a mild-mannered, grandfatherly figure (“a perfect dear,”29 cooed Roosevelt) given to prolonged absences. Roosevelt had little patience for bureaucratic details, but there was one he comprehended with the utmost clarity: whenever Long was gone, Roosevelt was, technically, the acting secretary of the navy.

  On February 25, 1898, Long took the afternoon off to visit an osteopath, and Roosevelt sprang into action. He ordered all squadron commanders to keep their ships full of coal, requisitioned supplies of reserve ammunition, alerted station commanders to the possibility of war, and sent demands to both houses of Congress for the unlimited recruitment of seamen. Most fateful were the orders he sent to Commodore George Dewey of the Asiatic Squadron.

  A casual observer might have wondered why a revolution in Cuba required the attentions of the Asiatic Squadron. But Roosevelt, emboldened by Mahan, envisioned an all-out attack on the Spanish Empire. He hoped that if war came, “Dewey could be slipped like a wolfhound from a leash.”30 He thus ordered the commodore to amass his ships in Hong Kong and, in the event of war, attack the Philippines.

  Secretary Long had instructed Roosevelt to “look after the routine of the office while I get a quiet day off.”31 When he returned, he was astounded to find that his subordinate had instead laid the groundwork for a transoceanic war. Nevertheless, probably fearful of taking any action that the newspapers might interpret as weakness, Long allowed Roosevelt’s orders to stand.

  Predictably, McKinley succumbed to popular sentiment and agreed to war. Anti-imperialists in Congress, determined to prevent the affair from spiraling out of control, passed an amendment to the war declaration: the United States could fight Spain, but it couldn’t annex Cuba.

  That amendment said nothing, however, about the Philippines, to which Commodore Dewey sailed with all due haste.

  *

  The Battle of Manila Bay,32 as the resulting conflict was known, made an auspicious start to the war. “Nineteenth century civilization and fifteenth century medievalism lay confronting each other” is how Dewey’s aide described the scene.33 In just over six hours on May 1, 1898, Dewey sank or captured every Spanish ship. The captain of Spain’s flagship was killed. The commander of Spain’s shoreside batteries committed suicide.

  The only U.S. fatality was due to a heart attack.

  “That night the scene was awful but grand,”34 reported the crew members of Dewey’s flagship as they watched Spain’s fleet burn. “Occasionally a magazine would burst, like the eruption of volcano, throwing its flaming debris high into the air.”

  McKinley, meanwhile, called for 125,000 volunteers to carry the war to the Caribbean. The army was swamped with applicants. And bouncing up and down enthusiastically at the head of the line was one Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy.

  Roosevelt’s eagerness to leave his post and join the army baffled his friends. “Is his wife dead? Has he quarreled with everybody? Is he quite mad?” asked the historian Henry Adams.35

  Congress had authorized the formation of three volunteer cavalry regiments, and Roosevelt was offered command of one. In a rare act of self-effacement, he declined, instead arranging to have his friend Leonard Wood take the job, at the rank of colonel. Roosevelt accepted the lower rank of lieutenant colonel and began to gather his men.

  The First Volunteer Cavalry recruited from all over the country, and Roosevelt was proud to draw to his ranks not only Harvard men but Yale and Princeton graduates as well. Yet the Ivy Leaguers made up only a small portion of the regiment. To Roosevelt’s delight, most of its recruits came from the territories, from “the lands that have been most recently won over to white civilization,36 and in which the conditions of life are nearest to those that obtained on the frontier when there still was a frontier”: Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Indian Country. The First Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders, included numerous men who boasted Indian-fighting on their résumés.

  Curiously, the regiment also had a few Native Americans. Roosevelt took pride in this, too, though he believed that those lacking white ancestry were of a “wilder type,”37 requiring “rough discipline” from him. “And they got it, too,” he wrote.

  His unit complete, Roosevelt set out for Cuba. He traveled with two horses, his black manservant (“the most faithful and loyal of men”),38 a revolver that had been pulled from the wreck of the Maine, and his copy of Edmond Demolins’s book Anglo-Saxon Superiority.39 The regiment landed easily at Daiquirí and made its way west to Santiago de Cuba, the center of Spain’s forces.

  *

  What happened next has been recounted so many times that it’s hard to register how bizarre it was. That the man who played such an important part in starting and expanding the war—a political appointee with no combat experience—should also become the hero of its decisive battle seems more fictional than factual. But an aura of “Wait, that really happened?” engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt’s life.

  After all, this was a man who was in turn a Harvard student, cowboy, policeman, war hero, and president, as well as an African explorer—virtually the entire list of boyhood fantasies, minus astronaut. Later in life, as he was about to speak at a campaign event, Roosevelt got shot in the chest at close range and then proceeded to give his intended speech for an hour as the blood ran from his body.

  So, the battle for the San Juan Heights.40 It began simply enough. Spain held the hills outside Santiago; the United States wanted them. The Rough Riders stood fifth in line, behind four other regiments, to take Kettle Hill. Meanwhile, another division was charged with capturing the more important San Juan Hill, half a mile away.

  Roosevelt bristled at his placement at the back and requested repeatedly to enter the fray. He finally got permission to “support the regulars in the assault.”41 That was all he needed. “The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse and then my ‘crowded hour’ began.”42

  The horse was important. A transportation logjam en rou
te to Cuba had forced the enlisted Rough Riders to leave their mounts back home, so Roosevelt, as an officer, was one of the few with a horse. That made him faster, but also a target. Undaunted, he rode to the front of the line, ordering his men to follow on foot.

  The novelist Stephen Crane, watching from a distance, saw only “a thin line of black figures moving across a field.”43 From Roosevelt’s perspective, the dash up Kettle Hill was more dramatic. He lustily galloped up and down the line, “passing the shouting,44 cheering, firing men.” A bullet grazed his elbow as the Rough Riders took the hill.

  He could have stopped there, with a wound and a story to tell, but he looked over to San Juan Hill, where a U.S. division had engaged the Spanish, and judged he could take that, too. He let his horse go, jumped a fence, and with a handful of men (“bullets were ripping the grass all around us”) charged on foot.45 Looking back to see no one following, Roosevelt ran back to Kettle Hill (still under fire), hopped back over the fence, and berated his troops. Now, with his men finally behind him, he crossed the fence a third time, crested the hill, and killed a Spaniard with his Maine-salvaged revolver.46

  Right after that, with the Spaniards subdued, Roosevelt and the Rough Riders repeated their charge for the benefit of a film crew—the first documentary battle footage ever shot.47

  *

  After San Juan Heights, things fell swiftly into place. U.S. troops laid siege to Santiago de Cuba, and U.S. ships defeated the Spanish fleet outside the city. The Spanish surrendered the city within the month. In Puerto Rico, too, Spanish resistance collapsed quickly; the ground campaign lasted seventeen days and cost only seven U.S. lives. In Manila, the Spanish fought an honor-preserving mock battle, in which they put up a token fight before surrendering.

  It was a complete rout. The empire that had once dominated the Americas had been defeated entirely in less than four months—a “splendid little war,”48 the ambassador to Britain remarked to Roosevelt. Back home, writers crowed about the vigor of the United States and the decrepitude of Spain. The Spanish empire was a “house of cards,”49 wrote Woodrow Wilson. “When the American power touched it it fell to pieces.” The president of Stanford offered a similar explanation: “We succeeded because we were bigger,50 richer, and far more capable than our enemy.”

  Well, maybe.

  It’s easy to regard Spain as an obsolete feudal power—the Sick Man of the Caribbean. But Spain had a sizable and seasoned imperial army.51 Its 200,000 troops in Cuba, 30,000 in the Philippines, and 8,000 in Puerto Rico easily outnumbered the 25,000 officers and men that the United States had on hand on the eve of the war. McKinley hastily inflated the army to some 275,000 troops, but it reached that size only at the end of the war, well after the major battles had been won.

  How did the United States, outmatched on paper, win so decisively?

  Part of the answer, mentioned frequently, is that the U.S. Navy was in better shape than the Spanish one (the consequence of Mahan’s influence). But another part, too often ignored, is that the United States was not the only adversary Spain was fighting. The war is usually called the Spanish-American War and is said to have started in 1898. Yet a more accurate name would be the Spanish–Cuban–Puerto Rican–Philippine–American War. Cubans call it the War of 1895, Filipinos date its start at 1896—and neither of those counts the many earlier uprisings and wars.

  The United States was, in other words, a latecomer,52 supplying a burst of force at the end of a long, bloody conflict that had already nearly destroyed the Spanish Empire.

  By January 1898, four months before the United States entered the fray, Máximo Gómez, the leader of the Cuban army, described the conflict as a “dead war.”53 Gómez had fought Spain for three decades, but, for the first time, he saw victory clearly in view. “This war cannot last more than a year,” he predicted, accurately.

  The United States relied on men like Gómez. Roosevelt himself remarked on how easily his regiment had landed at Daiquirí. As few as five hundred Spanish troops could have presented “very great difficulties”54 to the Rough Riders had they been there to defend the coast, he noted. But the Spanish weren’t there, and the reason they weren’t is that the Cuban army had just run them off. Similarly, the thirty thousand Spanish troops in Oriente Province had not been able to relieve the besieged eight thousand Spanish soldiers in Santiago because Cuban forces had them pinned down.55

  The pattern held in the Philippines. Tell Aguinaldo Come Soon as possible was Commodore Dewey’s cable in the days before he sailed to Manila.56 Dewey demolished the Spanish fleet and blockaded Manila Bay, but his whole force consisted of 1,743 officers and men.57 Even with reinforcements, he lacked the power to defeat Spain on land. There, he deferred to Emilio Aguinaldo, the exiled revolutionary, whose forces took city after city in the coming months.

  Aguinaldo’s operations were carried out with “the greatest vigor and with unvaried success,”58 reported one U.S. writer. “By day we could see their attacks,”59 remembered Dewey, “and by night we heard their firing.”

  *

  Cubans, Filipinos, and (to a much lesser degree) Puerto Ricans had fought Spain for decades, draining its resources and exhausting its morale. Yet little of this registered in the United States. Right after landing in Cuba—the landing enabled by the Cuban defeat of Spanish troops at Daiquirí—Roosevelt eyed his Cuban allies and judged them to be “utter tatterdemalions” of “no use in serious fighting.”60

  “We should have been better off if there had not been a single Cuban with the army,”61 he wrote. “They accomplished literally nothing.”

  That judgment, which was shared widely, mattered. Feeling that Cubans had contributed little to the war, U.S. commanders felt no compunctions about sidelining them from the peace. Thus did they negotiate first the surrender of Santiago and then of Cuba directly with Spain, excluding the Cubans. Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s friend and the Rough Riders’ commanding officer, took charge of Santiago.

  The Cuban general Calixto García resigned in protest. “I will never accept that our country be considered as conquered territory,”62 he said. But what could García do? The Cubans, just like the Spanish, were exhausted by decades of harrowing war. Taking on a fresh adversary was hard to contemplate.

  It wasn’t much different in the Philippines. There, Aguinaldo’s forces had liberated most major cities and were laying siege to Manila. Aguinaldo understood all this to be part of the independence war of the Philippines, and in fact had already issued a declaration of independence, raised a flag, and played the Philippine national anthem. Yet, as in Cuba, Spain surrendered to the United States, not the local rebels. When the U.S. and Spanish forces brokered their secret agreement to stage a mock battle over Manila, it was on the condition that the Spaniards relinquish the city to U.S. troops only and that Filipinos not be allowed to enter.

  As the Spanish governor-general explained, he was “willing to surrender to white people but never to Niggers.”63

  Filipinos who had besieged Manila for two and a half months, at the cost of thousands of lives, thus watched in astonishment as their allies entered the city unopposed, locked Filipino soldiers out, and fraternized with the enemy.

  One minute after the Spanish flag came down over Manila, an enormous U.S. flag climbed the flagpole in its place.64 The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  *

  The war may have begun as an empire-wide revolt by Spain’s colonial subjects, but it ended as the “Spanish-American War.” The peace treaty, negotiated in Paris, was between Spain and the United States alone. Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. Puerto Rico and Guam (a Micronesian island, valuable as a Mahan-style base) came free. Because of the amendment anti-imperialists had passed, the United States couldn’t annex Cuba. But it could occupy it, placing the country under military control until a suitable government could be installed—a government suitable to Washington, that is.

  No representative from Cuba, Puerto Rico, t
he Philippines, or Guam had a say in any of this. It’s doubtful that they would have agreed to it. “This is not the Republic we fought for,65 this is not the absolute independence we dreamed about,” said a bitter Máximo Gómez.

  But it was pretty close to what Teddy Roosevelt had fought for and dreamed about.

  5

  EMPIRE STATE OF MIND

  It had all happened very fast for William McKinley. Imperial affairs were far outside his ken. Speaking of the Philippines, he supposedly confided to a friend that before the war with Spain, he “could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.”1

  The geography section, moreover, was the easiest part of the exam. The real head-scratcher was the final essay question, worth most of the grade: Having seized Spain’s empire, what should the United States do with it? Explain your answer with reference to economics, geostrategy, and the prevailing racial ideologies of the late nineteenth century.

  The question was particularly vexing with respect to the distant and populous Philippine Islands. They were near China, and thus potential stepping-stones in a trade empire of the sort that Alfred Thayer Mahan had proposed. Yet the United States had no existing business in the Philippines—by one count, there were fewer than ten U.S. citizens there when the war broke out.2 Commodore Dewey doubted that Washington would take more than a coaling station.3

  But that was before Dewey dispatched the Spanish fleet to the bottom of Manila Bay, before Teddy Roosevelt crested San Juan Heights. The collapse of Spain’s beleaguered empire placed the whole Philippine archipelago in McKinley’s surprised hands. What to do? Return the islands to Spain? Sell them? Leave them be? “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,”4 McKinley explained to an audience of churchmen, “and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night.”