by David Milne
On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine, docked in Havana harbor, was destroyed by an explosion that claimed the lives of 260 of its 347 crew. Fitzhugh Lee, the U.S. consul general in Havana, witnessed the devastation. He noticed flames rising above the harbor walls, hurried down to establish the cause, and returned promptly to his office to inform Washington that the Maine had been sunk with the loss of many lives and that Spanish officers had been helpful and courageous in rescuing wounded Americans from the harbor as ammunition exploded around them. Lee was in no position to speculate on the cause of the explosion, but he noted, “I am inclined to think it was accidental.”96 The majority of Navy Department officials agreed with Lee’s assessment, although some suspected a more malevolent cause.
The cause of the explosion eludes us even today, although foul play appears highly unlikely. For the past century, official investigators and amateur sleuths have attributed the destruction of the Maine to either an accidental coal bunker fire or a collision with a Spanish mine. There was less equivocation in 1898 when prominent American newspapers, and politicians such as Roosevelt and Lodge, instinctively attributed the “attack” on the Maine to Spanish skullduggery and demanded an appropriately fierce response from President McKinley. In the week following the explosion, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal devoted eight pages daily to the sinking of the Maine. Lurid allegations stated as fact, such as “The Maine was destroyed by treachery” and “The Maine was split in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine,” increased the Journal’s circulation from 416,885 copies on January 9 to 1,036,140 on February 18.97 It even printed implausible diagrams showing how Spanish saboteurs had attached underwater mines to the hull and detonated them from the beach. When the illustrator Frederic Remington arrived in Cuba to find much ado about nothing, as the oft-recited story goes, he cabled Hearst: “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst was said to have replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”98 Joseph Pulitzer’s World was more restrained, but its editors were similarly convinced that this was no accident. Taking their cue from New York’s “yellow press,” jingo editors from across the nation joined the action, although some believed that fighting Spaniards in Cuba was beneath the nation’s dignity. As William A. White, a Kansas editor, wrote: “As between Cuba and Spain there is little choice. Both crowds are yellow-legged, garlic-eating, dagger-sticking, treacherous crowds—a mixture of Guinea, Indian and Dago. One crowd is as bad as the other. It is folly to spill good Saxon blood for that kind of vermin … Cuba is like a woman who lets her husband beat her a second time—she should have no sympathy.”99
As the French ambassador to the United States observed, “A sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation.”100 On March 14, Roosevelt, who was similarly spoiling for a fight, complained to Mahan, “I fear the President does not intend that we shall have war if we can possibly avoid it.”101 The beating of the war drum was deeply unsettling to the level-headed Mahan, who was genuinely appalled by the irresponsibility of the Hearst press and its chauvinistic aspirants across the nation. In a speech to the New Jersey chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, he pleaded for restraint: “We should be very cautious in forming hasty conclusions in reference to such things as this disaster. People are liable to jump at conclusions at a great national crisis like this which might involve them seriously.”102 Mahan, still focused intently on the Pacific and on the transisthmian canal, was not convinced that an American war against Spain was a strategic priority.
President McKinley shared Mahan’s caution, but the saber-rattling mood across the nation made it difficult for him to pursue a moderate course.103 Seven weeks after the Maine tragedy, with no declaration of war against Spain in sight, McKinley was hung in effigy in Colorado. The Hearst press reported with satisfaction that the president’s picture was commonly booed and hissed in New York theaters. As Ernest May writes,
To maintain a business-like “hands-off” policy toward Cuba could easily infuriate veteran, Negro, church, or other groups in the party … In no circumstances could McKinley, either as a Republican or as a conservative, ignore his responsibility to maintain a united party …
McKinley found himself faced with a terrible choice. He could embark on a war he did not want or defy public opinion, make himself unpopular, and risk at least the unseating of the Republican party if not the overthrow of what he conceived to be sound constitutional government.104
On March 28, a Naval Court of Inquiry issued a report that claimed presumptuously that the Maine had been destroyed “by the explosion of a submarine mine which caused the partial explosion of two or more of the forward magazines.”105 The logic of the battle cry “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” had become impossible for McKinley to ignore.
On April 11, 1898, President McKinley’s request for authorization to stop the fighting in Cuba was read out in the House of Representatives. The president’s primary justification for U.S. intervention was startling in its humanitarian emphasis. He requested Congress
to authorize and empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba, and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government, capable of maintaining order and observing its international obligations, insuring peace and tranquility and security of its citizens as well as our own, and to use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.106
Thus McKinley sought war to protect Cubans, and Americans, from the deprivations of a particularly unpleasant conflict. In emotive terms he evoked the suffering of Cubans, “a dependent people striving to be free,” who were being killed and maimed by “cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized practices of warfare.” McKinley justified the conflict not in terms of America’s national interest but “in the cause of humanity and to put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries now existing there, and which the parties to the conflict are either unable or unwilling to stop or mitigate.”107 His humanitarian casus belli allowed him to justify the conflict with some measure of sincerity. But as Ernest May astutely observes, McKinley led “his country unwillingly toward a war that he did not want for a cause in which he did not believe.”108 McKinley appeared to be a prisoner of events—dragged to war by a popular swelling of pugnacity.109
When the president’s war message was announced, impromptu street parties sprang up across American towns and cities, the Stars and Stripes were unfurled in the hundreds of thousands, and young men patiently stood in line to volunteer, appreciatively accepting free drinks from men and kisses from the ladies.110 The United States, not McKinley’s administration, stood up, puffed out its chest, and picked a fight with Spain, mainly because it could—it was cathartic. War also served the useful purpose of tying the North and South together in a patriotic embrace just thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War. When Congress authorized McKinley’s message and declared war on Spain on April 19, it disavowed the notion of imperial expansion. It fell to Albert J. Beveridge—a fast-rising political star who would serve as U.S. senator for Indiana from 1899 to 1911—to grasp the significance of the moment in a blissfully unvarnished speech justifying expansionary war. His words closely echo Mahan’s view that the military’s purpose is to protect and project commercial interests:
American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours … And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.111
Mahan was enjoying a family vacation in Europe when he was summoned to advise his wartime government. In mid-March, Mahan had sent Roosevelt contingency plans for a “strict blockade” of Havana and the western h
alf of Cuba in the event of war against Spain. While Mahan had doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing Cuban independence above what he viewed as more substantive strategic goals, he remained keen to prove his intellectual worth to Roosevelt and McKinley in this moment of crisis. Delighted with the strategic merits displayed in Mahan’s blockade proposal, Roosevelt informed his mentor that “there is no question that you stand head and shoulders above the rest of us! You have given us just the suggestions we want, and I am going to show your letter to the Secretary.”112 Mahan’s blockade of Cuba was incorporated into U.S. naval strategy when Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long instructed Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, commander of the North Atlantic Station, to follow the plan. Impressed by the blockade recommendation, President McKinley appointed Mahan to serve on a three-man Naval War Board—alongside Rear Admiral Montgomery Sicard and Rear Admiral Arent Schuyler Crowninshield—charged with coordinating U.S. strategy.
The newly constituted board’s strategizing was aided by the fact that the enemy was hopelessly outgunned—a decrepit Spanish fleet faced a modern steel-hulled American navy consisting of four ten-thousand-ton first-class battleships, one six-thousand-ton second-class battleship, two armored cruisers, eleven protected cruisers, and a vast array of auxiliary cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo vessels. It was a war between the twentieth century and the nineteenth, and the victor was never in doubt. As Rear Admiral Pascual Cervera confided to his diary as war loomed in 1898, “We may and must expect a disaster. But as it is necessary to go to the bitter end, and as it would be a crime to say that publicly today, I hold my tongue and go forth resignedly to face the trials which God may be pleased to send me.”113 The trials that materialized were likely worse even than Cervera could imagine.
As Mahan voyaged back across the Atlantic from April 30 to May 7, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey scored a remarkable victory against the Spanish fleet far from Cuba in the Pacific theater. In previous years, Mahan’s Naval War College had carried out contingency planning for war against Spain, extolling the merits of an attack on the Philippines, its sprawling colony in the Pacific. On May 1, Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron had followed this logic and destroyed the Spanish fleet led by Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón. The battle was so one-sided that Dewey was able to place the American fusillade on hold so his men could eat breakfast. In the space of a few hours, at the cost of just one American life (induced by a heart attack), Spain’s position in the Pacific was destroyed.
Mahan was delighted with Dewey’s comprehensive victory but less enamored of the planning authority on which he served. He was quite happy to be put out of a job. On May 10, Mahan advised Secretary Long to disband the board and allocate all planning authority to a single naval officer on active duty. He believed that the unwieldy Naval War Board impeded effective decision making: “Individual responsibility … alone achieves results in war.” Mahan’s response to finding himself in a position of genuine power and influence was admirable. If the apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Kissinger is correct and “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” it certainly didn’t excite Alfred Mahan. Nevertheless, Long was not impressed by Mahan’s selflessness, and the board continued in its existing form with Mahan, in Warren Zimmermann’s words, “the dominant figure.”114
On May 19, 1898, Rear Admiral Cervera made a fateful decision to dock his fleet in Cuba’s Santiago Bay. Hemmed in by Mahan’s blockade, Cervera was unable to dodge the heavily armed American ships—the Indiana, New York, Oregon, Iowa, Texas, and Brooklyn—that loomed ominously in the distance. After six weeks of inaction, Cervera concluded that he had little choice but to face his destiny with as much vim as possible. On July 3, in full daylight, Cervera sailed his flagship, Infanta Maria Teresa, directly into the path of the American battleships in the hope that the distraction might allow the rest of his ships to break for the open sea. The Battle of Santiago Bay lasted just four hours. It is estimated that 160 Spaniards were killed, 240 were wounded, and 1,800 were captured, including Cervera himself. One American was killed during the battle and no U.S. warship suffered any damage. As Mahan wrote after the conflict, “We cannot expect ever again to have an enemy so entirely inept as Spain showed herself to be.”115 Steeped in the history of the great Anglo-French naval battles, Mahan could muster little enthusiasm for writing about the Spanish-American War. His Lessons of the War with Spain, published in 1899, was an underwhelming affair. The main lesson he conveyed was that the United States should never allow itself to become as unprepared and technologically deficient as Spain was in 1898.
Spain had been trounced at sea—its fleet incapacitated—and it took heavy punishment from the U.S. Army in Cuba itself. Theodore Roosevelt had been disappointed to miss the Civil War—and by the fact that his father did not serve—and he viewed the Spanish-American War as an opportunity to hone this martial aspect of his character. He resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy when hostilities commenced and set about raising a volunteer force, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry (“Rough Riders,” as they were colloquially known), to do battle against Spain in Cuba. The force mirrored Theodore Roosevelt’s myriad interests, background, and personality traits, comprising Dakota ranch hands, Ivy League scholars, East Coast polo players, cowboys, and policemen. The Rough Riders scored a much-storied victory against entrenched Spanish forces at San Juan Hill, and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt emerged from the war a popular hero. But it was the two crushing naval victories that paved the way for America’s ultimate success. The decapitation of Spain’s Caribbean fleet, allied with Mahan’s suffocating blockade, detached their vulnerable forces from the Spanish mainland some four thousand miles away. Hostilities ceased on August 12, 1898, and a formal peace treaty between the United States and Spain was signed in Paris on December 10. Cuban nationalists played no substantive role in the peace negotiations—they would learn their fate from afar. An important precedent was established that would hold true through the twentieth century: the destiny of newly liberated colonial peoples would be dictated by great powers at “international conferences” with less than pure motives.
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America’s victory against Spain was one-sided, predictable perhaps, but it sent shock waves across the nations of the Old World—France, Britain, Russia, and Germany—long accustomed to viewing the United States as economically powerful, territorially sated, and avowedly isolationist: a second-tier power in world affairs. The United States was no longer a suitable target for embassy belt-tightening. As America celebrated and Spain lay supine, The Times of London offered a prescient editorial: “This war must in any event effect a profound change in the whole attitude and policy of the United States. In future America will play a part in the general affairs of the world such as she has never played before. When the American people realize this, and they realize novel situations with remarkable promptitude, they will not do things by halves.”116
It was with “remarkable promptitude” that President McKinley recognized the strategic and economic possibilities opened up by his famous victory. Although he initially harbored doubts about the wisdom of an imperial landgrab, informing Secretary of State John Hay soon after Dewey’s victory that he would be happy enough with “a port and necessary appurtenances,” he had been pushed toward bold actions yet again by the popular clamor to realize the spoils of war.117 At the war’s end, American forces occupied Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. More than ten million people—Hispanics, Indians, Polynesians, Chinese, and Japanese—were now in Washington’s care. Dominating the North American continent in the name of Manifest Destiny was one thing. But the United States now had in its grasp the power to transform itself into a bona fide imperial nation—a possibility that some Americans found seductive.
Ostensible independence was granted to Cuba—in keeping with the original declaration of war—but the Platt Amendment, passed enthusiastically by Congress and reluctantly by a helpless Cuban Assembly in 1899, transferred Guantánamo Bay to the American m
ilitary on a perpetual lease and gave the U.S. government virtual carte blanche to intervene in Cuba’s affairs when its commercial and strategic interests were threatened. This was “independence” of the most compromised type. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were simply annexed in their entirety. President McKinley later told a group of fellow Methodists that he had prayed to God to seek guidance on what to do with the Philippines. The Almighty, an apparent devotee of realpolitik, answered that independence might leave the islands open to French or German imperialism—an unconscionable threat to American-led stability in the Pacific—and that the Filipinos were regardless “unfit for self-government.” God advised McKinley “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.”118 Filipinos were not pleased to lose one colonial master only to have another take its place so quickly. A popular insurrection against U.S. rule commenced in 1899. In embracing imperialism with such equanimity, the pragmatic philosopher William James wondered how America could “puke up its ancient soul … in five minutes without a wink of squeamishness.”119
Mahan believed that annexing the Philippine archipelago in its entirety was likely to create significant problems for the United States. As he confided to a considerably more gung-ho Henry Cabot Lodge, “I myself, though rather an expansionist, have not fully adjusted myself to the idea of taking them, from our own standpoint of advantage.”120 His preferred option was to keep the island of Luzon, with Manila and Subic Bay—an ideally situated Pacific base for the United States—and leave the remaining islands to Spain. Mahan’s skepticism about the wisdom of annexing the Philippines looks insightful in retrospect. The United States would spend the next fifty years there, quelling one popular revolt after another, resorting to brutal tactics that sullied its name in the court of world opinion and revealed an obvious disconnect between virtuous words and unpleasant deeds. Direct imperial rule was a wholly unpleasant experience for America. The informal commercial empire that Mahan favored better allowed the United States to cling to claims of higher virtue vis-à-vis its European competitors. The reality of empire jarred with America’s lily-white self-image.