The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

It seemed like fate that Roosevelt would arrive in Washington, in this job, at this moment. He soon reentered his old social circle of Adams, Hay, and Lodge; they lunched at the Metropolitan Club, then met again in the evening at Adams’s home. They were, almost to a man, advocates of American expansion—their detractors called them “jingoes,” and they embraced the term as a badge. Some jingoes advocated for outright, European-style imperialism, complete with colonies abroad and a massive navy and army to maintain them. Some were simply bruising for a war. Still others wore their imperialism more subtly, advocating for commercial and military alliances, not crass territorial grabs, and often cloaked their rhetoric in the language of liberty and freedom, American-made products ready for export. For most expansionists, it was a bit of all three. However dubious some of their conclusions, the question they raised was an important one: At the end of the nineteenth century, America stood unrivaled in its economic growth, and destined to soon overtake the rest of the world in sheer wealth. But how should America protect that wealth, and what should it do with it? As it became a world power, this was a moment when decisions were being made that would shape America’s future for decades to come.

  • • •

  One evening at a dinner party, Roosevelt met President McKinley’s personal doctor, an Army captain named Leonard Wood. Like Long and very much unlike Roosevelt, Wood was a reserved son of South Shore Massachusetts. Unlike Long and very much like Roosevelt, though, Wood was what a later generation would call an adventure junkie. As an Army surgeon, he spent years on the front lines of the Indian Wars; later, while stationed in Atlanta, he played with and coached for the Georgia Tech football team. After he cut his head open during a game, he sewed the wound shut himself. In September 1895 Wood moved to Washington to serve as President Cleveland’s personal doctor (and frequent companion at the poker table); when McKinley took office, such was Wood’s reputation that there was no question of replacing him—especially since Mrs. McKinley was frail and persistently ill. But even while Wood was tending to presidential ailments and making a name for himself on the Washington social scene, no one expected he was done with his martial aspirations. “If we ever have another war, you will be sure to hear of Wood,” Henry Lawton, with whom Wood had tracked and captured the Apache leader Geronimo, said. Wood was, in short, everything Roosevelt admired in an American male. The two became fast friends.22

  They hiked Rock Creek Park. They kicked footballs. They got in the boxing ring and punched each other in the face. During the winter they tried out cross-country skis that Roosevelt had ordered by mail. Wood was one of the few people Roosevelt had met, besides his father, who could push him beyond his physical limits. Roosevelt was smitten. In a letter dated January 11, 1898, he wrote to Wood: “Tomorrow (Wednesday) can you take a walk, or a football kick, or something vigorous? For ten days I have done nothing, and I am feeling as if I had been stewed; but I had a nice walk with the children on Sunday in spite of the rain, and only regretted that Leonard could not go.” Wood engaged not only Roosevelt’s obsession with physical exertion, but his imagination as well, at one point nearly persuading him to go to the Klondike in the middle of winter to locate stranded miners. Clearly, the two needed a project, a goal, for their intellectual and physical efforts. And soon they found one: Cuba.23

  CHAPTER 2

  “ONE DOES NOT MAKE WAR WITH BONBONS”

  Spain had controlled Cuba since the beginning of its empire in the Western Hemisphere: Christopher Columbus landed there on his first voyage, in 1492. Just twenty-two years later Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded the city of Santiago, on the island’s southeast coast. The Spanish brought sugarcane, from the Canary Islands; it grew like a weed in Cuba’s loamy soil, with Santiago as one of the sugar industry’s main ports—and the island’s first colonial capital, before Havana. Cuba was also the place where Spain pioneered the genocidal approach to settlement that it and other colonial empires would employ against native populations for the next 350 years. Within a generation, Velázquez had so devastated the Ciboney, Guanahatabey, and Taino peoples that the Spanish turned to importing enslaved Africans to work the cane fields.

  Over the next 200 years, Cuba became the beating heart of the Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere—Havana was one of the largest Spanish cities outside Spain. After the revolution in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century shut down cane production in that country, European demand for Cuban sugar exploded, and the Spanish clamped down on dissent on the island for fear of meeting the same fate as the French colony to Cuba’s immediate east. Spain also imported tens of thousands more slaves to feed the expanding sugar industry, which required even tighter control. As the rest of Spanish America fell to revolution and revolt, Spain’s hold on Cuba closed even tighter, like a prized possession saved from a fire. Occasionally, politicians in the United States made moves to acquire the island: In 1848, President James K. Polk authorized his minister in Spain to offer $100 million for it. Madrid replied that it would rather see Cuba sink into the ocean.1

  Spain’s desperate love for Cuba was not mutual, and rebellion finally erupted on the island in 1868. The response was swift and cruel. During the ensuing conflict, known as the Ten Years’ War, the Spanish army laid waste to the rebels’ stronghold in the rural, eastern half of the country, then dug a massive ditch—called the trocha—across the entire island, from Jucaro on the Caribbean to Morón, near the Atlantic coast. The Spanish posted guards and strung barbed wire along the trocha, a measure that did more to break up the movement of civilians than to impede the flow of rebels. Spanish authorities executed anyone over fifteen years old suspected of aiding the insurgency—more than 2,900 people in total—and they confiscated 13,000 Cuban estates, the proceeds from which allowed the colonial generals to return to Spain as millionaires. Eventually a new general, Arsenio Martínez Campos y Antón, arrived to make peace, and in 1878 the two sides did. The war had devastated the country: After ten years some 45,000 Cubans were dead; thousands more had been deported to Spanish penal colonies along the North African coast or on Fernando Po, an island in the Gulf of Guinea. Some 60,000 Spanish soldiers had died as well, mostly from tropical disease.2

  With peace returning, the jungle overtook the trocha, and a sense of fraught normalcy overtook the island. The war and its aftermath created an investment boom: American dollars arrived looking for fortunes to be made in Cuba’s sugarcane fields and copper mines, which had been abandoned by their Spanish owners. Investment reached $60 million in 1897 (about $1.8 billion in 2018 dollars). Thousands of Americans, both Anglos and Cuban Americans, lived in the country, or traveled between it and Florida and New York. If Cuba remained a Spanish colony in name, it was also growing much closer to the American orbit.3

  The agreement to end the Ten Years’ War was called the Pact of Zanjón, and it promised Cuba a constitution and an elected assembly. In practice, Spain thwarted even moderate reforms, while keeping taxes and tariffs high to cover the costs of fighting its own insurrectionary troubles at home. Spain also promised to abolish slavery on the island—which it did, beginning in 1886 and freeing the last slave in 1890. But because Spain had done little to rebuild the Cuban economy after a decade of fighting, and because American capital was consolidating sugar and mining operations—thereby reducing the need for labor on the island—the freedmen could not find work, and soon became part of a new army of dissension. And that was when things were good, when Americans had money to spend and workers to hire. Then came the Panic of 1893, at the time the worst economic depression in U.S. history.4

  Largely the result of a bubble in the railroad industry, the panic shuttered thousands of businesses and sent millions of American workers into the streets. It also sent politicians scrambling for a response. One was the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act, a package of free trade measures that, through the predictably opaque machinations of Washington, ended up raising tariff rates on a number of products, including a 40 percent tariff on cane sugar—which, by then, h
ad become postwar Cuba’s lone hope for economic development. Overnight, word of the new rates spread among the island’s fields and villages, and despair set in. Anger was not far behind. When the tariff passed, one Spanish observer in Cuba recalled, “Youths, old men, women, and children cleaned off their machetes and their rusty rifles, waiting impatiently for the call to revolt.”5

  The tariffs went into effect in August 1894; almost exactly six months later, on February 24, 1895, a wealthy planter named Bartolomé Masó raised the one-starred Cuban flag above his plantation near Manzanillo, in southeastern Cuba; that same day uprisings sprang up in towns across the country. Masó, with his fortune and land, was an exception: The rebels mostly came from the middle and lower classes of Cuban society, and were emphatically multiracial. American reporters and filibusterers—men who traveled to Cuba to join the fight, against Washington’s wishes—were often shocked to find black men serving as officers, with lighter-skinned conscripts following their orders.6

  Within months after the insurrection began, the Cuban rebels had won a series of pivotal engagements and pushed into the Spanish-held west, nearly to the outskirts of Havana—before they ran out of ammunition. By the end of 1895, the war was at a stalemate: The Cubans had the manpower, but not the gunpowder. And so they turned to the United States, and to the network of Cuban American activists known as the Junta. Based in New York but with chapters across the country, the Junta raised funds for the rebels and bought them weapons and supplies—but perhaps most important, it undertook a massive public relations campaign to turn the American public to the rebels’ side. Pro-Cuban rallies filled Madison Square Garden, in New York, and touring tent speakers rivaled religious revival meetings in small towns from North Carolina to Kansas. Junta “sources” passed along information to reporters looking for juicy, bloody stories of Spanish atrocities; soon, fed with news, rumors, and outright falsehoods by Cuban activists, national magazines and newspapers were calling on readers to support the Cuban cause. In August 1895, an editor for Cosmopolitan wrote: “There is still a struggle going on for human liberty, and that almost at our very doors.” Pro-independence plays, like James F. Milliken’s The Cuban Patriot (1897), proliferated. So did middling poetry: “Arise! ye lovers of the right;/strike fast, O sons of liberty!/United in your purpose, smite,/and bleeding Cuba will be free!” read one poem, from December 1896. Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, one of the widest-read periodicals of its time, published pro-Cuban articles aimed at young readers, like “Don Carlos’s Raid: A Story of the War in Cuba,” a fictional tale told through the eyes of two young rebels.7

  The public answered, especially footloose young men in search of adventure. At any time, dozens of Anglo-Americans could be counted among the rebel ranks. One, Frederick Funston, had been turned on to the Cuban cause after attending an 1896 Junta rally in New York; after winning the trust of Junta organizers, he managed to slip by boat onto the Cuban shore along with four other “would-be Lafayettes and von Steubens,” as he put it. Funston fought in two campaigns as an artillery officer, and was later wounded and captured by the Spanish. Somehow, he survived, and made it back to the United States—only to return as an officer in the American invasion and, after that, the American army of occupation in the Philippines.8

  The cause of Cuban freedom in the latter half of the 1890s had appeal across classes and regions. Christian organizations poured out funds to help their coreligionists. Midwestern farmers and unemployed factory workers, beaten down by the depression, saw something of themselves, oppressed by distant moneyed interests, in the struggling Cuban peasants. African Americans flocked to the news that dark-skinned men were helping to lead the fight. Labor activists and socialists even saw the possibility of a revolt against capitalism on the island, the opportunity not only to overthrow the Spanish, but “wage slavery” itself (in this they were prescient, though by sixty years).9

  Officially, the United States banned assistance to either side of the war, whether by the government or private citizens; in practice, the ban was impossible to implement, given the size of America’s southern coast and the short passage across the Straits of Florida. Between 1895 and 1898, more than sixty ships, carrying guns, medical supplies, cannons, and men, set off from the United States; the Americans stopped twenty-three of them, Spain another two, and two more were lost at sea. But the rest got through with much needed men and supplies—most of the rebels’ machetes were manufactured by a company in Providence, Rhode Island.10

  Despite strong favor among the American public for Cuban independence, President Grover Cleveland, during his second term in office from 1893 to 1897, vowed to stay neutral. He was disgusted by the Cuban rebels—“the most barbarous and inhuman assassins in the world,” he called them. Cleveland wasn’t entirely off base. Something else set this rebellion apart from the Ten Years’ War: This time, both sides pursued a scorched-earth strategy, and both insisted that there were no neutrals—every Cuban had to declare for or against the rebels. There was no right answer, and the wrong answer at the wrong time meant death. General Máximo Gómez, one of the rebel leaders, gave orders to execute any civilian who worked with the Spanish. To undermine the Spanish economy, he temporarily banned the processing of sugarcane, likewise punishable by death. In a strategy that later rebels and revolutionaries across the twentieth century would follow, Gómez both lived off the land and denied his enemy access to it. He insisted that anyone who sided with the rebels had to move east to the “free” provinces—in other words, turning the rest of the country into a free-fire zone. As he reportedly liked to say, “What even if the whole generation perish, when countless generations will benefit so greatly?”11

  After a few months of fighting, the government in Madrid recalled its general in Cuba, Arsenio Martínez Campos, and replaced him with one of his former colonels, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. German by ancestry and born on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, Weyler had spent most of his career serving far from home—in Cuba during the Ten Years’ War, then in the Canary Islands and the Philippines, with a brief return in between to Spain to fight in the Third Carlist War (1872–1876), in which far-right supporters of a conservative contender for the Spanish throne, Carlos VII, attempted to overthrow the country’s constitutional monarchy. When Weyler finally returned to Spain again, as a general, he became something of an expert in squashing communists, anarchists, and various regional rebellions in Catalonia and along Spain’s disruptive northern fringe. When the conservative government of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo decided to send Weyler to Cuba, patriotic Spanish cheered in the streets. Spain, it seemed, was done fooling around.12

  Cánovas made Weyler both governor and general—essentially, a military dictator—and gave him wide latitude to suppress the rebellion. Weyler was a particularly close student of the American Civil War, and a great admirer of William Tecumseh Sherman and his March to the Sea campaign through Georgia. The doctrine of total war was, to Weyler, the only path to victory. He even had his own aphorism; where Sherman said, “War is hell,” Weyler said, “One does not make war with bonbons.” Like Sherman, he understood the relationship between an army and the land, and in Cuba and the Philippines he had seen how civilians and farms could sustain a rebel force. Even if a civilian didn’t support the rebellion, his land might, by offering places to hide and a few chickens or ears of corn to steal at night. It wasn’t enough, Weyler figured, to forbid civilians from siding with rebels. The two populations had to be separated, and the land between them destroyed.13

  Weyler redug the trocha, then built another to the west of Havana, between Mariel, on the northern coast, and Playa Marjana, on the Caribbean. He thus split the country into thirds, each containing one of the leading rebel generals and his troops. Weyler threw “flying columns” of soldiers into rapid-fire raids on rebel camps and villages suspected of supporting the rebel cause. If rebels were not to be found, suspect civilians would do as an example, and a dozen or so men and older boys would be lined up and
shot, or hung from a nearby ceiba tree. Thousands of other Cubans were exiled to Spain’s African colonies.14

  But Weyler still couldn’t put down the rebellion. On October 21, 1896, he issued a declaration: Within eight days, all civilians who lived in villages and on farms had to move into a series of fortified towns, and “any individual found outside the lines in the country at the expiration of this period shall be considered a rebel and shall be dealt with as such.” He outlawed the movement of food between towns and the grazing of cattle outside them. He surrounded the towns with barbed wire and armed guards, to keep rebels out but with orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave.15

  These camps—the forerunner of those used a few years later and to similar ends during the Boer War and the American war in the Philippines, and a loose model for camps used for even darker purposes during the rest of the twentieth century—were not chosen because of their proximity to fertile soil or fresh water, but for their access to the rail lines and trunk roads the Spanish army used to move around the country. It wasn’t long before the overcrowded towns began to run out of food and medical supplies, and people began to die. One correspondent, for Leslie’s Weekly (a separate publication from Leslie’s Popular Monthly), estimated that 100 people died a day in Havana, which had 25,000 so-called reconcentrados—the term for the people forced to live in the camps—living in pockets on its outskirts, in addition to its usual population. Clara Barton, who was in Cuba with the Red Cross, noted that by early 1898 more reconcentrados had died in the swelling, fortified town of Juraco than comprised its entire population before the war. Total deaths under Weyler’s policy may never be countable; records were not maintained, and bodies were buried en masse. At the time, some claimed the death toll from Weyler’s reconcentration policy was as high as 500,000. Even the most skeptical, latter-day analysis allows for at least 100,000.16