Some might have balked at the prospect of leaving the nation’s political power center for an isolated position in the Far East, but Dewey relished the autonomy. He sought the post after McKinley took office, then was given a boost by the new assistant secretary of the Navy, the bombastic Theodore Roosevelt, at whose urging McKinley appointed Dewey toward the end of the year. The new commander reported to his flagship, the Olympia, in anchorage at Nagasaki, Japan, and in February 1898 sailed for Hong Kong, where the squadron rendezvoused. It entered a period of hectic detailed preparation for battle, and the ships were repainted with new gray battle camouflage replacing admiralty white.2 Sailing from the British colony on April 24, Dewey turned north for thirty miles, before resuming a southerly course to engage the Spanish.
The circumstances that led the United States and Spain to war could be described as romantic and high-minded by some, or manipulated and contrived by others. To a certain extent, both descriptions are true. Cuba had been chafing under the Spanish leash for years, and going as far back as the Ostend Manifesto in 1854, some Americans had wanted to either purchase or seize Cuba as an American territory. So real was the possibility of obtaining Cuba due to its proximity and Spain’s weakness that all that was needed was a push from Southern politicians. Instead, they obsessed over acquiring Kansas as a slave state, leading historian David Potter to artfully describe the South as having “sacrificed the Cuban substance for a Kansan shadow.”3 By the 1890s, as the United States turned its attention from Reconstruction to its western frontiers and burgeoning presence in the world, the tensions in Cuba seemed all the more relevant. Spain, after all, was a sagging European nation, hardly possessing power to tell Cubans what to do. American sugar and other business interests in Cuba felt directly threatened by insurrectionist activities, which would disappear if Spain was gone. Finally, the “Yellow Press,” sensing a new age of American influence on the globe, incessantly cranked out propaganda portraying brave Cuban freedom fighters battling the oppressive Spanish overlords. Perhaps none of this would have reached a boiling point without the De Lôme letter of February 9, 1898, wherein Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, the Spanish minister in Cuba, sent a personal letter that was (illegally) intercepted by Cuban revolutionaries and made public. In it, he referred to U.S. president William McKinley as “weak and catering to the rabble” and as standing well with “the jingos of his party.”4 When the battleship Maine was ordered to Havana as a show of America’s interest in the island—and remained there peacefully for more than a week—the crisis seemed to dissipate. But on February 15, the Maine was rocked by an explosion, obliterating the forward third of the ship. A naval board of inquiry, which lacked technical expertise, conducted a four-week investigation that concluded a mine had destroyed the ship. Blame flew in all directions, but mostly it landed in the lap of the Spanish. Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt anticipated the moment when the United States would step onto the world stage.5 While his superior, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, took four hours off on the afternoon of February 25 to visit an osteopath for a massage, Roosevelt ordered Commodore Dewey at Hong Kong to concentrate his squadron and prepare for war with Spain. The United States Navy owed Roosevelt a great deal, as well before hostilities with Spain, Long had acquiesced to Roosevelt’s energetic rebuilding of the fleet. On April 11, McKinley asked Congress for a war declaration, but Congress delayed for two weeks until Spain made the matter moot by declaring war on the United States.
Based on the principles of Alfred Thayer Mahan, naval historian and president of the Naval War College, which called for a new blue-water navy capable of taking on the Europeans and the Japanese in a decisive battle of massed firepower, the doctrine Roosevelt and Dewey subscribed to emphasized long-range gunnery focused on capital ships. Dewey would soon reap the rewards not only of Mahan, but of Benjamin Harrison’s Navy secretary, Benjamin F. Tracy. From a distance, Tracy could have been mistaken for Andrew Carnegie with his short-cropped beard and white hair. Like Roosevelt, he was a New Yorker, possessing great energy and vision. Working with Mahan, Tracy had supported construction of modern warships funded in the Navy Bill of 1890. The resulting battleships Indiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon were authorized and, two years later, joined by the Iowa.
Dewey had none of those ships under his command, but the overall improvement of the force he did have could be traced in a straight line from Tracy to Mahan to Roosevelt. The squadron Dewey took to the Philippines consisted of the Olympia, a cruiser, the Boston—one of the famous “A, B, C, D” protected cruisers that had kicked off a new era of American naval power—the Baltimore and Raleigh, two more protected cruisers, the Petrel and the Concord, both gunboats, and the McCulloch, a Treasury Department revenue cutter. Hardly the equal of some of the powerful squadrons that had sailed in previous eras, Dewey’s Asiatic force represented a substantial part of the American fighting ships at the outbreak of hostilities. The nation counted 5 battleships, 2 cruisers, 12 protected cruisers, 3 unprotected cruisers, and some 45 miscellaneous vessels (including Civil War–era monitors and an “armored ram”) in its arsenal. Added to that, slightly over 120 other yachts, cutters, tenders, tugs, and colliers made up the “auxiliary navy.”6
Despite its inferiority to England’s Royal Navy, the American fleet had staged a remarkable resurgence since the Civil War, when hundreds of vessels were mothballed or scrapped. Engineer-in-chief Benjamin Isherwood had presided over the last burst of innovation when he shepherded through the construction process the USS Wampanoag (launched in 1864). With its advanced technology, including a geared steam engine, full iron plating, iron turrets, and two 100-pounder guns, the Wampanoag bested almost any ship in the world. Isherwood’s propulsion gear turned a screw that endowed the Wampanoag with blazing speed—almost 18 knots (33 miles per hour) on its sea trials in 1868. Yet that year she was decommissioned, renamed, and condemned due to heavy coal consumption and concerns about her length-to-breadth ratio. Put into a pier to rot in 1874, the Wampanoag signaled the end of an era, for it would be more than twenty years before another American warship would attain such speeds. The U.S. Navy became a punch line in Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost. Americans were boring, said Virginia, who befriends the ghost, because “we have no ruins or curiosities.” The ghost replies, “You have your navy and your manners.”
It was a remarkable combination of technological breakthroughs and the literary success of an obscure captain teaching history and tactics at the Naval War College that revived America’s fortunes at sea. Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose father Dennis had been a professor at West Point, had commanded several vessels in the Civil War (many of which were involved in collisions, leading to questions about his judgment as a commanding officer). Appointed lecturer at the War College, Mahan received a full year at the instruction of college president Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce to focus his attention on the historical uses of sea power. Assembling research, Mahan produced a radical new doctrine that served as the intellectual bête noire of the land-oriented “Heartland of Eurasia” concepts advocated by British geographer Halford Mackinder.7 As both Imperial Germany, then later, Nazi Germany, then finally, the Soviet Union marched to military dominance, strategists obsessed over figuring out which view—Mahan’s or Mackinder’s—was right.
Whereas Mackinder would stress control of the “Heartland of Eurasia,” consigning the ocean powers to lesser importance, Mahan saw oceangoing commerce as critical to fighting wars. An advocate of mass firepower from heavy ships, Mahan advocated consolidating the fleet for a great, decisive sea battle, where victory would open up enemy coasts for invasion. Within a few years, Mahan was the equivalent of a literary star, but only across the oceans, where both the Japanese and British lionized him. A prophet without honor in his own land, Mahan’s reputation grew steadily abroad until it was impossible to ignore at home. That his ideas fit well with the muscular expansionism championed by Theodore Roosevelt was so much the better for him.
Wha
t gave substance to the prospect of a deep-water American navy, however, was not the bespectacled Roosevelt’s rousing interventionist speeches but the steelmaking genius of an immigrant Scotsman, Andrew Carnegie. Arriving penniless in the United States at age thirteen, Carnegie worked as a bobbin boy, telegrapher, and general go-fer for J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Possessed of an uncanny sense of “the next big thing,” Carnegie seamlessly moved from railroads to the bridges that supported them to the iron that built the bridges. Willing to share his rewards with keen managers and the practical inventor-engineers he employed, Carnegie nevertheless kept his eye on obtaining complete control over his business through the “Iron Clad Oaths” each partner was required to sign, allowing Carnegie Steel (that is, Carnegie himself) to have the first shot at purchasing the partner’s shares should one decide to sell or otherwise leave the company.
Carnegie didn’t invent anything, but he employed the top minds and managers—fellow immigrants, such as the Kloman brothers, or Civil War veterans, such as “Captain” Bill Jones. A master motivator, Jones once inspired his division to out-produce a rival simply by writing the steel output of the rival’s plant on the floor. During the Johnstown Flood of 1889, Jones personally provisioned an entire trainload of relief supplies. He, the Klomans, Julian Kennedy, and others in the Carnegie stable were hands-on innovators who refined Carnegie’s product through their ceaseless improvements, both technical and managerial. Julian Kennedy, who managed Carnegie’s blast furnaces, typified Carnegie’s hands-on executives; he had 150 patents during his career with the company, more than half in operation somewhere in Carnegie’s mills.
What Carnegie’s company produced, however, was nothing less than the finest steel in the world, every bit the equal of any of the British yards. Obsessed with driving costs down and production up, Carnegie pushed his men and mills to turn out the best, cheapest steel in the world, though not for the U.S. Navy. Having seen his Bessemer furnaces force the cost of making rails down from $28 a ton to $11.50 a ton between 1880 and 1900, Carnegie nevertheless backed away from bidding for ship armor plate. The Scotsman’s pacifism dovetailed nicely with his opinion that the profits were too low in ship plating until 1889, when the construction of two new battleships, the New York and the Maine, suffered delays due to insufficient plating. Sniffing an opportunity, Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy appealed to Carnegie to rethink his involvement with the Navy. “There may be millions for us in armor,” Carnegie concluded, yet still he dawdled, hoping for an even better arrangement.8 Finally in 1890, Tracy threatened to purchase steel from the British, forcing Carnegie to build a new plant near Homestead, Pennsylvania, and win the contracts for three new battleships.9
Even with the efforts of steel men like Carnegie and his protégé Charles Schwab (who left Carnegie Steel after it was sold to J. P. Morgan to lead a successful turnaround of Bethlehem Steel), American ships still lagged behind the best British designs. But they were catching up fast, and in 1898 they didn’t have to fight the British. Dewey knew his ships were decidedly better than those of the Spanish. Whether he had enough firepower and skill to defeat the Spanish fleet remained to be determined, but the commodore brimmed with confidence, thanks to information provided by both the American consul, Oscar F. Williams, who had remained in Manila as long as possible to scout enemy strength, and the Olympia’s own Ensign Frank B. Upham, who donned civilian dress and cavorted with sailors arriving in Hong Kong from Manila. It was from Upham that Dewey learned the Spaniards claimed to have mined the Bay. Finally, Dewey had information from a business acquaintance in the Philippines that powder supplied by contractors to the Spanish fleet was of such uneven quality as to render Spanish gunnery poor, which, combined with the reports of Williams and Upham, led him to believe he could easily best the Spaniards. By the time he sailed from Hong Kong, Dewey had obtained and assessed information on the Spanish fleet, forts, mines, the depths and locations of channels and entrances to Manila and Subic bays, the state of the tides, currents, and winds, and his personnel were fully ready for battle. Dewey later credited the intense training and intelligence gathering in Hong Kong for his victory, saying, “This battle was won in Hong Kong harbor.”10
“Drunken, Canting, Lying, Praying”
Europeans watching from afar were confident that exactly the opposite would happen and America’s military would prove inadequate. They saw the war through a kaleidoscope of class, national, and religious lenses, all reflecting not only what they thought would happen but also what some hoped would transpire. For the European socialists, all three parties to the conflict—the Spanish, the Americans, and the Cuban elites leading the revolution—were agents of “capitalist exploitation.”11 Catholics in general sided with the Spanish, as did the French, with their heavy investments in Spanish bonds. Everywhere the war was analyzed and sides were taken based on national self-interest. Nations such as Austria, with its Hungarians, Germans, Gypsies, Slovaks, Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, and Romanians, took a dim view of revolutionary rhetoric, no matter what the underlying circumstances, and Austrian emperor Franz Josef had family connections to the Spanish royal family. But Austria had no overseas colonies and did not particularly care to support nations that did, so it favored the United States. Some monarchs such as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, whose “first romantic impulse was to fly to the aid of Maria Cristina [of Austria] in defence of the monarchical principle,” supported Spain, but this did not carry over to the population as a whole, especially among Protestants.12 Moreover, Germany’s main foreign policy objective was to neutralize France, a goal in which the war served no end.13 The Kaiser did possess some colonial ambitions in Asia, but in the end Germany would follow a policy of strict neutrality, expressed in a poem in the German satirical journal Kladderadatsch: “Uncle Sam I Cannot Stand, for Spain I Have No Sympathy.”
France, on the other hand, not only retained a strong monarchical streak, but cultivated a strain of anti-Americanism over the French failure to maintain colonies in the Caribbean. This, combined with the concern that revolutionary fervor in one part of the world might, to paraphrase American socialist historian Charles Beard, cause democratic feelings in other French colonies to foam perilously near the crest, inspired France to support Spain.14 France was not alone in its fears: three Russian volunteers managed to reach Cuba, for which Soviet historians would later lionize them as warriors in the “Cuban War of National Liberation.”15 Only Britain, whose interests in the Caribbean benefited from the Monroe Doctrine, concluded that the threats posed by an independent Cuba or a Cuba controlled by the Americans were outweighed by a victory by monarchist Spain, since a principal beneficiary of a Spanish victory would be Imperial Germany, which might try to wrest control of Pacific colonies away from Spain. Thus the British, while officially neutral, surely sided with Uncle Sam, even if their military experts continued to view American fighting prowess with condescension.16
England’s “experts” were in good company with their skepticism about U.S. military power. Many Europeans found themselves embracing contradictory and mutually exclusive views. Continental newspapers routinely blared condemnations of the Monroe Doctrine (which was never invoked as a casus belli by the United States). The Dutch press warned that a victorious United States would turn its eyes toward Dutch possessions in the Caribbean.17 Further, they predicted the United States would need 70,000 troops to establish order in the Philippines, estimating the number of the rebels there under Emilio Aguinaldo at 40,000. The Dutch journalists were slow learners. Even as the remnants of the Spanish fleet in Manila were surrendering, Dutch papers prophesied that the “real” Spanish fleet was on its way to Cuba and would teach the Americans a lesson.18
Certainly Spanish newspapers exuded confidence in the war’s outcome, with some calling for outright invasion of the United States. El País roared, “The Cuban problem will not be solved unless we send an army to the U.S.,” and El Correo Español called for war.19 When the results of the American commiss
ion investigating the sinking of the Maine concluded it was a planned explosion instead of an accident, Spaniards marched in the streets shouting “To New York!” Most Spanish Republican presses adopted anti-American rhetoric, referring to the United States as “a nation of immigrant outcasts and avaricious shopkeepers, without culture, without honour, without a soul…brutal pigs, weak and stupid drunkards, arrogant and immoral cowards….”20
Overconfidence, on the part of Europeans when it came to fighting Americans, persisted for over a century, most of it originating from the low military budgets of the young republic and disdain for an army built overwhelmingly on citizen soldiers.21 Spain merely echoed the British, who had consistently dismissed Americans since their first defeats in the Revolution. One English surgeon sneered at the “drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness” who opposed his red-coated regulars.22 Opinion had scarcely improved by the War of 1812, when an Englishman described American regulars’ movements as “loose and slovenly,” nor in the Mexican War, where the major British papers predicted a Mexican victory.23 As a military power, America “is one of the weakest in the world…fit for nothing but to fight Indians,” a view shared by the Mexicans and their dictator, Santa Anna, who promised to plant the Mexican flag in Washington, D.C.24 The British minister in Texas in 1845 doubted that U.S. soldiers could “resist artillery and cavalry,” and the London Times agreed, stating that Mexican forces were “superior to those of the United States.”25
A Patriot's History of the Modern World Page 3