He was confident that Dewey, his man in Hong Kong, had enough ships to “overmaster” the Spanish Asiatic Squadron, but just to make sure, the vessels now patrolling Hawaii should add their gunpower to the Commodore’s. On the Eastern seaboard, “a flying squadron composed of powerful ships of speed and great coal capacity” should be readied for instant dispatch to the Canaries, whence it might attack Cadiz, or slip through Gibraltar by night and destroy Barcelona.
The memorandum ended with rapid-fire demands for more ammunition, men, and colliers. “When the war comes, it should come finally on our initiative, and after we have had time to prepare.”
Roosevelt’s fine writing-paper was not altogether wasted. Something about his “impetuosity and almost fierceness” persuaded the Secretary to order the Cincinnati and several other South Atlantic cruisers into equatorial waters, and station a small force at Lisbon, where it could monitor Spanish naval movements. Meanwhile the formidable North Atlantic Squadron, which Roosevelt had seen in practice the previous fall, joined the Maine at Key West (ostensibly to begin “winter exercises”) and proceeded to fill up with coal.10
Long, surprisingly, went even further than Roosevelt in suggesting to President McKinley that the Maine should be detached and sent to visit Havana as “an act of friendly courtesy.” McKinley sounded out the Spanish Minister, Enrique Depuy de Lôme, on this subject, and etiquette required His Excellency to express diplomatic delight.11 The President was, after all, his own accredited host. But de Lôme’s private attitude may be judged from a letter he had written to a Spanish friend a few weeks previously. “McKinley is … weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd, besides being a would-be politician [politicastro] who tries to leave a door open behind himself while keeping on good terms with the jingoes of his party.”12
Unknown to de Lôme, the letter did not reach its destination.13
THE MAINE DROPPED ANCHOR in Havana Harbor on the morning of 25 January 1898. Spanish officials went aboard in polite but chilly welcome. Captain Sigsbee, not wanting to exacerbate local feelings, announced that there would be no leave for his crew. Contrary to expectations, no demonstrations of welcome or protest broke out in the city, and a relieved Consul-General Lee cabled: “Peace and quiet reign.”14
ROOSEVELT MIGHT HAVE REACTED more gratefully to the Administration’s sudden decision to make a show of naval force had his domestic worries not intensified in the last days of January. Edith was running a constant fever, and could not sleep for the pangs of sciatica; Ted’s strange nervous condition was worse, and Kermit, too, was sick.15 The presence of a squalling two-month-old infant in the house was an added distraction. On top of all this, Roosevelt now discovered that he had personal tax problems in New York. Last summer he had filed an affidavit stating that he was a resident of Manhattan, in order to avoid a heavy assessment in Oyster Bay; in New York, however, his assessment turned out to be even heavier, making him wish he could cancel the original affidavit.16 Family physicians and accountants were pressed into service, while the Assistant Secretary waited restlessly for further news from Havana. On the last day of the month Henry Cabot Lodge made an eerie prediction: “There may be an explosion any day in Cuba which would settle many things.”17
For a week nothing happened, then, on 9 February, William Randolph Hearst’s sensational New York Journal published on its front page the text of Minister de Lôme’s undelivered letter, under the banner headline, “WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY.” The paper announced that an agent of the Cuban insurrectos had intercepted the letter on the eve of its delivery and sent it to another agent in New York, who in turn gave it to the Journal for publication.18 All possible doubt as to the document’s authenticity was avoided by printing it in facsimile.
While ordinary Americans fumed over de Lôme’s characterization of their President, students of foreign policy boggled at the implications of his concluding paragraph:
It would be very advantageous to take up, if only for effect, the question of foreign relations, and to have a man of some prominence sent here in order that I may make use of him to carry on a propaganda among the Senators and others in opposition to the [rebel] junta.19
In other words, the Spanish Government appeared to be totally cynical in its relations with the United States, and its promises to help secure some sort of autonomous government in Cuba.
To add insult to injury, Minister de Lôme (who at once admitted that he had indeed written the letter) cabled his resignation to Madrid before the State Department had a chance to demand that he be recalled. Thus the United States had to be content with an inadequate Spanish apology, referring, in sarcastic tones, to mail-theft and sensation-mongering newspapers.20
That night a highly excited Theodore Roosevelt accosted Mark Hanna and two other Senators at a reception. In his haste to urge war upon them, he did not notice that Hanna was accompanied by Henriette Adler, a young Frenchwoman recently arrived from Paris. Roosevelt launched into a typical fist-smacking harangue, and Mlle. Adler found herself wedged between him and the wall. She tried to follow what he was saying, but was distracted by his flailing right arm, which swept nearer and nearer her bodice. Eventually his elbow ripped off a silken rose and some gauze, whereupon she exclaimed “Mon Dieu.” Roosevelt, wheeling, made profuse pardons. To her alarm, he continued to pour war rhetoric upon her in French, until Nannie Lodge tactfully appeared with a safety pin. The Senators screened Mlle. Adler off, while Roosevelt switched back to English.
It was “a bully idea,” he proclaimed, to send the Maine to Havana. Senator Hanna said nothing, but stood listening with his jowls sunk on his white tie. Mlle. Adler, decent again, ventured a suggestion that the United States should consider the opinion of other European powers before attempting to crowd Spain out. France and Germany were bound to object to any denial of imperial rights in the New World; she had heard a statement to this effect herself, in Paris only two weeks before.
The Assistant Secretary waved France’s scruples aside as unimportant and irrelevant. “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America before I’m sixty!” Hanna stared at him. “You’re crazy, Roosevelt! What’s wrong with Canada?”
Later, in the carriage back home, Mrs. Hanna tried to explain to the dazed Mlle. Adler that Roosevelt, despite his abnormal vehemence, was more “amusing” than violent. But the Senator, chewing on his cigar, thanked God Roosevelt had not been appointed Assistant Secretary of State. “We’d be fighting half the world,” he growled.21
INCENDIARY TALK WAS COMMON in the days following the Maine’s arrival in Havana Harbor, from Henry Cabot Lodge’s threatened “explosion” to Mark Hanna’s “waving a match in an oil-well for fun,”22 and the more personal misgivings of Mrs. Richard Wainwright, wife of the cruiser’s executive officer: “You might as well send a lighted candle on a visit to an open cask of gunpowder.”23 But as mid-February approached, and life in the Cuban capital drowsed on as normal, even Consul-General Lee began to relax.
On the evening of the fifteenth, tourists aboard the liner City of Washington, just arrived in Havana Harbor, leaned on the railings and admired the Maine’s sleek white beauty four hundred yards away. The air was hot and motionless, and the harbor scarcely heaved. Its stillness was such that they could hear accordion music coming across the water. Tropic dark came quickly, and the tourists went below to dinner. About two hours later another strand of music sounded from the Maine: the sound of a bugler blowing taps. Its melancholy beauty caused Captain Sigsbee, who was writing in his cabin, to lay down his pen and listen until the last echoes died away. He looked at his watch. The time was exactly 9:40 P.M.24
ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER Secretary Long was wakened in his Washington home and handed a telegram. The first sentence alone was enough to banish all further thought of sleep: “MAINE BLOWN UP IN HAVANA HARBOR AT NINE-FORTY TONIGHT AND DESTROYED.” Long’s eye, running on across the sheet, leaped from phrase to incredible phrase: “MAN
Y WOUNDED … DOUBTLESS MORE KILLED OR DROWNED … NO ONE HAS CLOTHING OTHER THAN THAT UPON HIM … PUBLIC OPINION SHOULD BE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER REPORT.” The telegram was signed “SIGSBEE.”25
Within minutes Long telephoned the White House and ordered a naval attaché to rouse the President. It was not yet two in the morning, and McKinley absorbed the Secretary’s news with some difficulty. After hanging up he paced back and forth in front of the bewildered attaché, mumbling slowly to himself, “The Maine blown up! The Maine blown up!”26
Meanwhile, the telegraph wires were still humming, shocking the State Department, Navy Department, and New York newspaper offices into action. In little more than an hour Joseph Pulitzer’s World had broadcast the first report of the disaster under a four-column headline. Not to be outdone, James Gordon Bennett spread the story across six columns of the Herald, and William Randolph Hearst gave it the entire front page of the Journal. “This means war,” he told his night editors.27 By dawn the news, complete with a transcript of Captain Sigsbee’s report, was thumping onto front porches all over the country, and stimulating newsboys to new heights of shrillness. No doubt some of them repeated McKinley’s own phrase, “The Maine blown up!” In the face of such a catastrophe, Presidents and paupers spoke with but one voice.
DAWN IN CUBA disclosed that the Maine was indeed a total wreck. The explosion, which took place somewhere in the forecastle, had jackknifed the keel up to the level of the bridge, killing 254 men instantly. A further 8 were so badly crushed and burned that they died one by one in hospitals ashore, bringing the death toll to 262. What was left of the ship lay wedged in the mud of Havana Harbor, with only a few blackened parts of the superstructure showing above water.28
As to the cause of the explosion, Spanish authorities were apparently no wiser than the Americans. Until the Navy Department’s court of inquiry reached Cuba and made its report, there could be no official reaction on either side, beyond expressions of sincere sympathy in Havana. The Governor-General, Ramón Blanco y Erenas, had been seen crying openly in his palace, and the Bishop of Havana spared no expense in giving the dead an elaborate and dignified burial.29
Popular opinion in America was surprisingly muted,30 in contrast to the clamor of the yellow press, thanks to Captain Sigsbee’s wise plea for emotional restraint. There was also a widespread suspicion that the explosion had been internal and accidental. Secretary Long shared this view. The Maine’s forecastle, after all, had been packed with gunpowder, and its steel-walled magazines, laced around with electric wiring, needed only a short-circuit fire to convert the whole ship into a bomb. Besides, it was hard for thinking people to believe that Spain would deliberately sabotage an American cruiser with a “Secret Infernal Machine,” as Hearst’s Journal alleged.31 Should the Court of Inquiry prove otherwise, of course, there was no question that the man in the street would expect a declaration of war at once.
This was an alternative President McKinley could hardly bear to contemplate. “I have been through one war,” said the ex–Union major. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”32
A RATHER MORE JUNIOR member of the Administration had no such scruples, and no doubts as to who was responsible for the disaster in Havana Harbor. “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards I believe,” wrote the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.33
ROOSEVELT DOUBTED THAT the Court of Inquiry would be able to prove his theory of Spanish guilt. But he waited “on edge” for its initial findings, in the hope that they would at least absolve the Navy of responsibility for the explosion. Notwithstanding his private judgment, he scrupulously used the word “accident” in departmental correspondence.34
Hearst was not so patient. The Maine’s burned-out hulk had scarcely cooled before his artists were rendering pictures and diagrams to show exactly where and how the “Infernal Machine” had struck, in response to the push of a plunger on shore. On 18 February, the day before the official inquiry opened, the Journal published no fewer than eight pages of “conclusive” data, some of it so detailed that even Captain Sigsbee wondered if the paper did not have secret contacts with the saboteurs.35 Sales of the paper reached an unprecedented one million that morning. Meanwhile the enterprising Pulitzer bought and dispatched a tugboat to Cuba to learn and report on “the truth.” Within a week, his own paper, the World, had sold five million copies—“the largest circulation of any newspaper printed in any language in any country.”36
More responsible newspapers, such as the Evening Sun, cautioned readers that the true facts of the disaster were not yet known, and might be slow in coming. The Maine’s bow was reported buried so deep in the mud of Havana Harbor that digging would be needed to get at the break. Day after day passed with no announcement by the court, until “Is there anything new about the Maine?” became an impatient refrain of everyday conversation. One passenger on a New York electric car was heard to remark that if the Assistant Secretary of the Navy took over the investigation, results would be forthcoming in no time. “Teddy Roosevelt is capable of going down to Havana, and going down in a diving-bell himself to see whether she was stove in or stove out.”37
A HELPLESS VICTIM of the gathering tension was Edith Roosevelt, whose fever heightened to the point that Roosevelt, for the second time in his life, was confronted with the prospect of death in his bedroom. He confessed that he was so “extremely anxious” about her as to be numb to the full consequences of the Maine disaster. As for his son, “Hereafter I shall never press Ted either in body or mind. The fact is that the little fellow, who is peculiarly dear to me, has bidden fair to be all the things I would like to have been and wasn’t, and it has been a great temptation to push him.”38
On the morning of Friday, 25 February, Edith’s weakness finally shocked him into seeking the best medical help available.39 He sent to Johns Hopkins University for Sir William Osler, the great Canadian physician, and left for work as usual, in what torment posterity can only guess.
It so happened that John D. Long was also feeling the strain that morning. Since his violent awakening on the night of the sixteenth, the Secretary had been plagued with insomnia, along with various aches and pains, which he carefully noted in his diary. He had discovered that relief was to be had in “mechanical massage”—a treatment whereby a Washington osteopath strapped him into an electrical contrivance that soothingly jiggled his stomach and legs.40 Long now felt the need of renewed treatment, so much so that around noon he resolved to take the rest of the day off, leaving Roosevelt in charge of the Department as Acting Secretary.
The “mechanical massage” was most satisfactory, and the Secretary proceeded to visit his corn doctor, after which he “walked about the streets in an aimless way” and finally headed for home,41 unaware of the cablegram even then winging halfway around the world:
DEWEY, HONG KONG: ORDER THE SQUADRON, EXCEPT THE MONOCACY, TO HONG KONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OF DECLARATION WAR SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, AND THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. KEEP OLYMPIA UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS.
ROOSEVELT42
This momentous message, which Dewey later described as “the first step” toward American conquest of the Philippines,43 was by no means the only order Roosevelt issued during his three or four hours as Acting Secretary. He sent similar instructions to “Keep full of coal” to squadron commanders all over the world, and to make sure they got it, authorized the Navy’s coal-buying agents to purchase maximum stocks. He alerted European and South Atlantic stations to the possibility of war, and designated strategic points where they were to rendezvous in the event of a declaration.44 He ordered huge supplies of reserve ammunition, requisitioned guns for a project auxiliary fleet, and summoned experts to testify on the firepower of the Vesuvius. He even sent demands to both Houses of Congress for legislation authorizing the unlimited recruitment of seamen.45
Having thus, in a sing
le afternoon, placed the Navy in a state of such readiness it had not known since the Civil War, Roosevelt wrote a “strictly confidential” letter to warn Adjutant-General Tillinghast of the New York National Guard that the world situation was “sufficiently threatening” to warrant plans for statewide mobilization. “Pray remember that in some shape I want to go.”46
After work he paid a courtesy call to Secretary Long. If he gave any report on his actions during the last four or five hours, it was of such masterly vagueness that no memorandum of the conversation appears in Long’s diary. Yet something about Roosevelt’s “enthusiastic and loyal” manner made the Secretary uneasy. “If I have a good night tonight, I shall rather feel that I ought to be back in the Department …”47
Refreshed by “splendid” slumbers, the Secretary hurried back to work next morning, Saturday, 26 February. He would have gone whether he felt better or not, “because during my short absence I find that Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine … the very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon.”48
War preparations in the Navy Department were now moving at such a pace that it would take Long days to slow the momentum, let alone stop it. The evidence is that the Secretary did not even try. For all his anger and embarrassment over “action most discourteous to me, because it suggests that there had been lack of attention,” Long was forced to defer to the workings of an intellect larger and a political instinct sharper than his own. None of Roosevelt’s letters and cables was countermanded. Even the historic order to Dewey was allowed to stand.49 But Long resolved never to leave Roosevelt in sole charge of the department again. The times were too “trying,” and the Assistant Secretary had severe family problems, which could only aggravate “his natural nervousness.”50
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 68