“There are too many pickpockets!” Yoli insisted. “They slit the bottom of women’s purses and bags, and steal.” And women suffer other indignities. “There you are, stuffed in tight with some guy’s cock in your ass. ¡No hay que exagerar! It’s no exaggeration!”
That very morning, Yoli had frustrated my plan to join her daughter, Gisele, a student who rode a crammed guagua into the city every day. Gisele slipped out without my seeing, as Yoli distracted me with fruit and café con leche. When I protested, Yoli scolded: “That was a terrible idea.”
Maybe she was right. There were no smiling passengers on the camello that passed between me and the monument. The traffic parted, briefly, and I jogged across the eastbound artery to the median strip.
Havana postcards from the ’20s and ’30s show a graceful arrangement of symmetrical grass plots and palm trees on either side of the monument, but all those living things are long gone. The Maine swims in an asphalt desert.
The memorial is an abstract image of the Maine afloat in a symbolic sea of shallow fountain pools. The fountains are dry now, of course. Special Period Cuba does without such frills. But up close I perceived the memorial’s long stretches of stacked marble steps as a white wake streaming along the vessel’s sides. As I climbed them, I understood the steps’ down-and-outward spread as the outline of an 1890s battleship.
Our minds’ eyes are used to seeing “ship,” and especially “warship,” as a craft with a steeply raked bow and stern, topsides projecting far ahead and abaft of the waterline. That basic shape was as essential to a Nelson-era frigate as it is to an aircraft carrier. For a brief period in the late 1800s, however, steam-powered fighting vessels reversed that expectation. Freed from dependence on the wind, steam-driven iron-and-steel battleships reverted to the ancient forms of oar-powered galleys. The Maine was one of the U.S. Navy’s first modern warships, and typical of late-1800s design in her long, low profile, with a forward jut down into the sea that showed she was built to ram her enemies.
The monument has that down-spreading shape. And the two columns are gathered toward its center like the ship’s own twin smokestacks. In its overall form, the monument is the Maine made simple—or, rather, the Maine made mythological. Stone wake, stone bow and stern, stone smokestacks: it’s as if the Maine had been a hero on a quest, one of the many young men sent to slay Medusa before Perseus showed up with the proper equipment. Arriving unprepared, the naïve hero looked the demon in the face and was petrified.
Between 1898 and 1912, if tourists visiting Havana from Stateside wanted to see something of the Maine, they could simply be shown the wreck itself. A rusting tangle of distorted plates and beams, unrecognizable as a ship—her keel thrust up like a sea monster’s waving tentacle—she squatted in the harbor mud for more than a decade, receiving wreaths from tourist boats and serving as the world’s most famous hazard to navigation.
But the Maine was more than just a shrine. The ship also was the crime scene and only known clue in a politically potent murder mystery. Though America had gone to war in the popular conviction that the battleship had been blown up by a Spanish mine, the conviction was based on an absolute absence of evidence. No eyewitnesses, no physical traces, no chain of circumstances offered the slightest support for the accusations blared from newspaper headlines. Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the Navy, had only the telegram announcing the ship’s destruction to support his immediate verdict: the Maine had been blown up by a Spanish “act of dirty treachery.” American anger was, perhaps, inevitable, but from the point of view of international jurisprudence, the war cry, “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” was little better than incitement to lynching.
In the years after the war, disillusionment caused many citizens to question their former certainties. “The day after the ship was sunk,” novelist and historian Rupert Hughes wrote in a 1909 article for the once-ferociously prowar New York Herald, “you could hardly find an American who did not believe that she had been foully done to death by a treacherous enemy. Today you can hardly find an American who believes Spain had anything to do with it. People have come quietly to believe, ‘They will not raise the Maine because they are afraid to.’”
Eventually the navigation hazard and the unsolved mystery compelled a unique salvage-investigation effort. In 1911 the Army Corps of Engineers enclosed the wreck of the 319-foot-long ship in an elliptical cofferdam composed of thirty-two hundred interlocking steel pilings, driving each seventy-five-foot section more than thirty feet down into the oozy harbor bottom. Amazingly, the unprecedentedly ambitious structure succeeded, allowing the salvage team to pump forty-two feet of water and mud out of the enclosure, which bore up against some four million pounds of pressure from the surrounding harbor.
The revealed wreck was a nightmare. Though “the after portion … was relatively sound,” up forward “there was only a twisted mass … bearing little resemblance to the bow of a ship,” wrote Peggy and Harold Samuels, coauthors of the 1995 study Remembering the Maine. “Decks and cabin floors were covered with three to five feet of mud, oyster shells, barnacles and coral encrustations. The stench of dead marine life, drying filth from the harbor water, and corrosion was overwhelming. Human bones were scattered about.” The bones, representing sixty-four lost crew members, were gathered up and reinterred at Arlington. The wreck was examined by a board of experts convened to resolve the mystery of her destruction, then towed out of the harbor and sunk at sea.
The salvage team had extracted many souvenirs from the wreck, most notably the port turret and its great guns, which were stored for use in a future monument. Cuba announced its intention to honor the yanqui dead with a suitable memorial.
At the top of the monument’s steps, on either side of the twin columns and the two classically draped giantesses, two great cannon from the Maine’s port turret range away like outstretched arms. Made to fire ten-inch shells, the guns are thirty feet long; their breech ends butt against the columns’ base, and their long tapers give the monument’s breadth its slump-shouldered shape. The guns are draped with salvaged anchor chain. It used to hang in garland swoops, but vandals have yanked sections loose to hang like … well, like chains, fetters hanging from arms too tired to lift them.
These guns are the biggest pieces of the Maine visible to anyone without a submersible robot, like the one that found the bulk of it thirty-seven hundred feet down, three miles northeast of the harbor mouth, in October 2000. The Canadian, Cuban, and U.S. ocean scientists aboard the Cuban research vessel Ulises weren’t looking for it, but they knew the relic by its distinctive mutilation. “Of course, I read about the USS Maine, and I recognized it immediately by the absence of a bow, which was cut away mechanically and not naturally broken away,” their crew chief, Russian-born Canadian marine engineer Paulina Zelitsky, told the Miami Herald. After the 1912 investigation and salvage operation, a bulkhead was patched over the Maine’s shredded bow; it was refloated and towed from the harbor to be sunk with an odd mixture of pomp and privacy. No one took its position as the cocks were opened to drown the hulk. What’s left of it, a shape something like a stout fish with its head cut off, rests in very dark water. One of its boilers fell close by, and the sand is littered with coal.
Other bits and pieces of the Maine are scattered around the United States. The battleship had two masts, not for sails but for signaling and lookouts. When the devastated ship settled to the harbor floor, her uppermost superstructure and peeled-back bow remained out of the water, and the still-standing mainmast became an icon of contemporary photos and newspaper engravings. Today the mainmast stands watch over the 229 Maine crewmen buried on Sigsbee Drive in Arlington National Cemetery. The foremast, smashed in the explosion but eventually salvaged, was set up on Trident Point on the seawall at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, thus setting up a perennial midshipmen’s in-joke that claims that the Maine—with one mast in Virginia and the other in Maryland—is the longest ship in the Navy.
Th
e Westbrook Veterans’ Memorial Park in William McKinley’s hometown, Canton, Ohio, preserves the base of the ship’s conning tower. Shells are scattered across the States, at soldiers’ homes, courthouses, and city halls. The desire to possess a Maine relic was strong enough to give value even to odds and ends, such as the centerpiece of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey’s, memorial, a piece of an engine ventilator shaft.
Getting down to knickknacks, the Washington Navy Yard museum displays a silver tray from the Maine’s wardroom. The Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis has a bugle, a log glass, a life preserver, two porthole covers, and an electric light shade and bulb; among items from Sigsbee’s quarters are the keys to the fatal ammunition magazines, as well as the captain’s inkwell, binoculars, and an 1888 penny.
The Maine’s sacred mojo extended beyond hull and fittings, beyond gear and bric-a-brac, to imbue even abstractions with patriotic power: In 1911, forty gallons of seawater drawn up from the wreck site were shipped to Philadelphia so the United Spanish War Veterans could more reverently float a Maine model at their thirteenth-anniversary ceremonies.
The United States paid its last great tribute to the Maine on May 30, 1913, with the dedication of the Maine monument in Manhattan’s Central Park. Fifteen years and three months after the explosion in Havana Bay, and a year and two months after she’d been sunk again, the lost ship and her sailors received every imaginable honor the people and their government could bestow.
A key member of the monument committee was William Randolph Hearst. Fifty years old in 1913, the son of western mining magnate George Hearst had long since invented a national role for himself as publisher of the New York Journal, the San Francisco Examiner, and a still-growing syndicate of papers across the country. In 1896 he’d purchased the ailing Journal and begun an all-out circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Hearst’s strategy was based on sensationalism: scandals and exposés, high-stakes contests and shameless publicity stunts. Hearst reporters were encouraged to root out corruption in high places—even in corporations Hearst owned a piece of.
In those early days, Hearst’s politics were aggressively populist, his marketing ploys unbeatably belligerent. Unfazed by the sight of red ink, he dropped the Journal’s price to a single penny, forcing other papers to go for broke. He bought Pulitzer’s best writers and illustrators for the Journal, regardless of their price, even winning the bidding war for R. F. Outcault, creator of America’s first successful Sunday newspaper color comic strip. That masterwork, known to World readers as “Hogan’s Alley” and to Journal fans as “McFadden’s Flats,” featured a goofy brat wearing a garish yellow nightdress that served as the “word balloon” for his illiterate and irreverent thoughts. “The Yellow Kid” was such a circulation booster that Pulitzer hired another artist to draw him when Outcault defected to Hearst. For more than a year, the Kid appeared in both papers at once; each claimed the “real” Yellow Kid, and the front-page squabble over custody of a funny-page imp made both Hearst and Pulitzer look ridiculous to high-minded competitors and readers, who sneered at the “Yellow Kid papers” and “yellow journalism.”
Pulitzer had no more scruples about objective truth than Hearst, but Hearst’s outsize personality and editorial showmanship made him the personification of yellow journalism. He was quick to see the lurid potential in stories about Cuba’s renewed war for independence. The Journal reveled in atrocities and outrage, ignored inconvenient facts, and demanded U.S. intervention to end Cuba’s suffering.
The most famous Hearst anecdote is the work of James Creelman, an intrepid reporter who, like many top-notch yellow journalists, worked alternately for Hearst, Pulitzer, and other publishers. In his 1901 memoir On the Great Highway: The Wanderings and Adventures of a Special Correspondent, Creelman recalled,
Some time before the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana, the New York Journal sent Frederic Remington, the distinguished artist, to Cuba. He was instructed to remain there until the war began, for “yellow journalism” was alert and had an eye for the future.
Presently Mr. Remington sent this telegram from Havana:
WR HEARST
New York Journal NY
Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war.
I wish to return.
REMINGTON
This was the reply:
REMINGTON
HAVANA
Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.
WR HEARST
The proprietor of the Journal was as good as his word, and today the gilded arms of Spain, torn from the front of the palace in Santiago de Cuba, hang in his office in Printing House Square; a lump of melted silver taken from the smoking deck of the shattered Spanish flagship serves as his paperweight; and the bullet-pierced headquarters flag of the Eastern Army of Cuba, gratefully presented to him in the field by General Garcia, adorns his wall.
There’s no reason to doubt Creelman’s account … other than the facts that Creelman was in Europe during the time Remington spent in Havana (making his story a hand-me-down at best); that Remington never confirmed the story; that Hearst denied it; and that no one else ever reported this irresistibly quotable alleged exchange.
Creelman strongly approved of yellow journalism’s attempts to “furnish” a war to free Cuba. Hearsay or whole cloth, true or false, the anecdote lives on in part because it describes Hearst’s publishing style in a nutshell. After all, it’s a black-and-white fact that two weeks after the shooting started, Hearst ran a front-page house ad asking, “How Do You Like the Journal’s War?”
Orson Welles cribbed Creelman’s “I’ll furnish the war” story for the screenplay of Citizen Kane, and the anecdote will probably be unkillable so long as that film lives. Unfortunately, the theory it illustrates—that yellow journalism caused the Spanish-American War—is proving just as stubborn. Considering all his boasting, it’s no surprise that Hearst has been singled out, from 1898 on, as the villain of a bold-headline melodrama: America Led Astray by Profit-Crazed Publisher! Power-Mad Press Pushes Passive President to WAR!!!
In the 1890s, words and images appearing in one paper were not immediately available to all papers, everywhere. For example, the “Yellow Kid” comics—which only ran from 1896 to 1898—weren’t syndicated and reprinted all across the country. Essentially in-jokes for observers of New York street life, they weren’t seen outside the city until they appeared in history books. Likewise, New Yorkers were the targets of the yellow papers’ inflammatory headlines and mendacious reportage. And not just any New Yorkers: Yellow journalism appealed to lower-class, Democratic-voting Manhattanites, including hordes of immigrants whose interests and ideas were foreign to much of the rest of the country and distinctly underrepresented in Washington.
Comprehensive studies of late 1890s newspapers have shown that the excesses committed during Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s circulation war were not much imitated elsewhere in the nation. Before the Maine’s destruction, almost all Republican papers were opposed to war, as were most Democratic papers. War with Spain was far down on the list of most Americans’ priorities. Even after the disaster, many papers urged restraint.
As for the American whose opinion mattered most in time of war, it’s hard to be sure just what William McKinley had decided about the pros and cons of war with Spain before the explosion in Havana Bay.
We do know a few things for certain. For one, his decision was not shaped by the Journal or the World. The president simply didn’t read those trashy papers. And we know that he was no war-lover. Maybe a silver-spoon baby such as William Randolph Hearst thought a real war would be as much fun as his circulation battles, but Hearst had been born in 1863, when twenty-year-old McKinley was already soldiering under Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes in the Twenty-third Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Most members of McKinley’s core constituency—the conservative business and banking interests who had filled his electoral war chest—believed a war
would be bad for business, an unnecessary risk offering few opportunities.
The catastrophes that launch wars may shock the president as much as the public, but it would be foolish to imagine that any administration in American history ever failed to see a war coming. It is the business of the president or his top advisers to scan the horizon for threats and decide how to meet them. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been appalled by Pearl Harbor, but he certainly wasn’t surprised by war with Japan. Lincoln may have tried to prevent the showdown at Fort Sumter, but he wasn’t startled by civil war. Some presidents have even seen opportunities on the horizon and invented threats to exploit them: for example, James K. Polk manufactured an incident along the Rio Grande that gave the United States an excuse to seize real estate that Mexico had refused to sell.
Likewise, no president ever went to war because the news media expected him to.
Maybe someday a historian will review American media from the winter of 2002–2003—count up all the “Saddam = Al Qaeda” reports on cable shows, tabulate the New York Times reports of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction—and conclude that no president could have resisted such pressure. Focus time’s telescope in one narrow spot, and even the mice look like elephants.
But now, today, while we still remember what it was like to be sold that war and who really did the selling, would any American seriously suggest that the media pressured George W. Bush into a war he didn’t want to fight?
There is no reason to believe that William McKinley was any less in charge of his war.
Yet the yellow-journalism-did-it theory persists, because the images and anecdotes used to support it are fun to show and tell. More importantly, it persists because our schools and history books must explain the Spanish-American War somehow, and the yellow-journalism theory is the only explanation that gets both the people and their leaders off the hook.
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