The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  This was not just war fever; it was a new way of thinking about war. During the 1890s, and with Cuba at the front of their minds, millions of Americans reimagined their national purpose—not just as a country that embodied liberty, but one that spread liberty to all the countries of the world, by force if necessary. It was the sort of militarism that everyone—Union and Confederate veterans, labor and business, socialists and evangelicals, hawks and doves—could rally behind. “The oppressed of all the nations of the earth are looking at America,” intoned Pastor E. O. Eldridge of Waugh Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. “We have a mission to all the nations of the world, as well as to the citizens of our own country.” America already knew it was a powerful country. In the debate over Cuba, it had found a use for that power.39

  • • •

  President McKinley, Secretary Long, and others continued in early 1898 to hope that American power would not need to be tested, that Spain would come to its senses and end the war. But where McKinley and Long saw promising moves by Spain toward compromise, Roosevelt and Wood saw intransigence. In August 1897, an assassin killed Spain’s conservative, hawkish prime minister, Antonio Cánovas; the queen replaced him with Práxedes Sagasta, a critic of Cánovas and General Weyler from the relatively progressive Liberal Party. Sagasta immediately recalled Weyler from Cuba, and announced that the Spanish colonial government would cede much of the control of Cuba’s domestic politics—tariffs, public education, infrastructure—to the local forces, while retaining control over the island’s military and foreign-facing capacities. Cubans would be allowed to elect representatives to a bicameral parliament, and take over control of local politics.

  In fact, none of this happened. A Cuban cabinet did take office on January 1, 1898, but it had almost no power, even over the areas reserved to it on paper. And although he promised autonomy, Sagasta ramped up military pressure, sending 20,000 Spanish soldiers to reinforce the hundreds of thousands already there. He ordered Weyler’s reconcentration program loosened, but not rescinded; in effect, it remained. He promised relief funds, but sent just $12,500, mere pennies per reconcentrado. (Real relief came when Sagasta permitted Clara Barton and the Central Cuban Relief Committee to enter the island in late January 1898.)40

  McKinley had taken office after saying almost nothing about Cuba during the campaign, and for most of 1897 he committed himself to continuing Cleveland’s noninterventionist policy, intercepting filibusterers and refusing congressional entreaties to at least recognize the rebels as belligerents, so they could buy American weapons. In the summer McKinley asked William J. Calhoun, a close adviser, to visit Cuba and report back on the situation. Like the many reporters who had already surveyed the island, Calhoun came back with stories about burning villages, ruined fields, and starving children—and a stalemated military situation that promised to drag out the crisis for years. Whichever side wins, he told McKinley, “is largely a matter of endurance.”41

  McKinley was hearing similar complaints from leaders in the business community, though they were less interested in the human suffering and more in the war’s impact on their investments on the island: sugar, of course, but also tobacco, mining, and light manufacturing. Like McKinley, American businesses did not want war, and they did not care particularly about the outcome of the conflict, so long as peace returned, and along with it America’s growing influence over the Cuban economy. By the time Sagasta took office, McKinley had already sent a series of letters to Madrid demanding that it find a way to peace on the island—but he offered no guidance, expressed no preference for what that would look like, and threatened no particular response if Spain did not follow suit. Not surprisingly, Spain opted to do nothing. After the initial burst of moderation under Sagasta, the Spanish and the rebels fell back into stalemate.42

  Spain, it became clear, was not willing to leave the island, while the rebels would accept nothing less than complete independence. Domestic Spanish politics played a considerable role. For the previous seventy-five years, the government and the monarchy had teetered on the edge of collapse, threatened on the left by anarchists and other radicals, and on the right by ultraconservatives—the latter having dragged Madrid through the devastating Carlist Wars during the middle of the century. It would be one thing to lose a war to the rebels, or to American intervention—there would be little shame in noble defeat. But to give up Cuba voluntarily, or even cede it significant autonomy, would be a death warrant for the fragile monarchy. “They prefer the chances of war, with the certain loss of Cuba, to the overthrow of the Dynasty,” as Stewart Woodford, the American minister to Spain, put it.43

  For men like McKinley and Long, though, this was all part of the game of diplomacy, and any result would be preferable to war. To Roosevelt and Wood, the only possible answer to Spanish intransigence was war, and they expected that, eventually, McKinley would agree. In January 1898 they made plans to quit their respective jobs should war come and find positions as officers with one of their state militias (they dismissed outright the idea of joining a general’s staff in the Regular Army, for fear that it would keep them from the action). Wood later recalled, in an interview with the writer Hermann Hagedorn, that while he was giving the president a checkup, or caring for the ailing first lady, McKinley would ask him: “Well, have you and Theodore declared war yet?” To which Wood replied, “No, Mr. President, we have not, but I think you will, sir.”44

  • • •

  Even at the time, critics derided the humanitarian impulse as window dressing for old-fashioned imperialism. They ranged from literary figures like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells to labor leaders like Samuel Gompers to politicians like Grover Cleveland and his Republican predecessor, Benjamin Harrison. Thomas Brackett Reed, the speaker of the house and a former ally of Roosevelt and his fellow jingo Senator Lodge, denounced talk of intervention as “land hunger.”45

  The anti-imperialists were not wrong. For all the talk about humanitarian intervention and the spread of liberty, what was just as real, but much less explicit, were concerns over markets, and investments, and the need to find new outlets for social frustration and an expanding, restless population. The same urge that had driven white Americans to massacre Indians and take their land was now appearing in the rhetoric around Cuba—except this time, it was clothed in righteousness. Many clear-eyed Americans saw this. But events would soon unfold in a way that rendered them helpless to stop it.

  CHAPTER 3

  “A BURST OF THUNDER”

  At around 2 a.m. on February 16, 1898, Secretary Long was asleep at his house on N Street, in Washington, across from the British embassy. He had been up late at a reception with his daughter Helen, who had then gone off to an even later ball. He awoke to a knock on his door. It was Helen, who had just returned. She held a telegram in her hand. Something terrible had happened in Havana.1

  Three weeks earlier, Long and McKinley had sent a battleship to pay a “friendly” visit to the city, a not-so-subtle demonstration of resolve after the anti-American riots that had so energized Roosevelt. That warship, the Maine, was one of the newest and best in the fleet: 324 feet long, with a complement of 374 officers and men, it bristled with Gatling guns, torpedo tubes, and four 10-inch cannons that could lob a 521-pound shell eleven miles. Although it was an impressive ship, the Maine was immediately overshadowed by more modern craft being built in Europe, and it was only marginally more powerful than some of the Spanish navy’s best ships. Still, it was a steel-and-iron avatar for the Navy Department’s renewed vigor.2

  The Maine arrived on January 25 from Key West, where the Navy had already sent the bulk of the Atlantic Squadron to take part in what it was euphemistically calling “naval exercises,” but were in fact a warning to Spain. Tensions had continued to rise that January; the Maine’s arrival came on the heels of the resignation by de Lôme, the disgraced Spanish minister to Washington. Nevertheless, the Spanish tolerated the ship’s presence, and welcomed its sailors and officers in
its cafés and other places of enticement whenever they came ashore for leave.

  On the evening of February 15, most of those men were on board, and its captain, Charles Sigsbee, was sitting in his cabin writing his daily report. His dog Peggy curled up at his feet. Havana Harbor was a fetid, polluted body of water, but that evening a gentle breeze pushed most of the foul air out to sea. At 9 p.m., the ship’s bell began to chime, and as it did a Marine bugler played taps, signaling lights-out. Forty minutes later, the Maine exploded.3

  Onshore in her rented room, Clara Barton, who was in Havana with the Central Cuban Relief Committee, felt her desk shake, followed by “a burst of thunder” and the shattering of glass. “The air was filled with a blaze of light,” she later wrote, “and this in turn filled with black specks like huge specters flying in all directions.” Nearby, the windows of a waterfront café shattered all around the New York Herald correspondent Walter Scott Meriwether, who had just walked in the front door for a drink. Within minutes, bells were pealing and whistles blowing across the city, and it seemed as if every Spanish soldier in Cuba was rushing to the harbor.4

  On board the Maine, Sigsbee had just pushed back his papers when he heard two explosions and felt the ship shudder, then jump into the air—a “bursting, rending, crashing sound or roar of immense volume,” he later wrote his wife. He stumbled out of his cabin and onto the main deck as the ship settled and began to tip to its port side. Choking on fumes, he and a scrum of officers organized lifeboats, though scores of men had already jumped into the warm waters of the harbor. Sigsbee, holding Peggy (who had somehow found her way to his side), waited until all the men they could find were off the ship, then stepped into a lifeboat.5

  Because the explosion occurred toward the front of the ship, most of the officers, whose cabins were to the rear, survived, but the overall loss was staggering—266 men, the worst naval disaster in American military history up to that point.6

  Despite several official and private investigations, no one has ever determined what caused the Maine to explode. After a thorough study by Admiral Hyman Rickover in the 1970s, the consensus holds that it was some sort of accident, most likely caused by the spontaneous combustion of coal dust in one of the ship’s fuel bins. What has not emerged is even a mote of evidence pointing to organized Spanish malfeasance, or the work of outside agitators—both common theories in 1898.7

  The lack of evidence meant little at the time, and the news that Spain had sunk the Maine shot around the world. For William Randolph Hearst, it could mean only one thing: an act of war. Refusing to consider the possibility of an accident, he splashed “War!” and “Maine Destroyed by Spanish” in banner headlines across his papers. In London, Richard Harding Davis, the reporter, was just hours away from setting off on a trip to Belgrade, to report on fighting in Serbia and Bulgaria. He read the news in an afternoon paper and knew he had to come home, that war in Cuba was finally at hand. After his public embarrassment over the Arango affair, and his rebirth as a pro-intervention hawk, Davis saw a chance to both redeem himself as a reporter and elevate himself as a foreign-affairs intellectual. “If I do miss it, I shall be wild,” he wrote to his family. And in Washington, Theodore Roosevelt grinned, and shouted, and declared that war with Spain had finally arrived. “The blood of the Cubans, the blood of women and children who have perished by the hundred thousand in hideous misery, lies at our door; and the blood of the murdered men of the Maine calls not for indemnity but for the full measure of atonement which can only come by driving the Spaniard from the new world,” he wrote to his friend Brooks Adams.8

  War had not, in fact, arrived. The morning after the Maine disaster, Leonard Wood was at the Executive Mansion giving President McKinley a routine checkup. While examining the president, the doctor offered his services as a soldier. The president shook his head. He was far from ready to declare war, and he needed time, he said, for “cool heads and cautious tongues.”9

  Next door, in the offices of the Department of the Navy, Long was likewise cautious. “My own judgment is, so far as any information has been received, that it was the result of an accident,” he wrote in his diary. He was more worried that his assistant secretary might cause things to come to a crisis all on his own, thanks to his prodigious energies and lack of restraint. Roosevelt, wrote Long, “has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine.” Long was right to worry: Roosevelt had already ordered the Navy to start buying ships—supply ships domestically, and as many warships from foreign navies as his agents could find. He telegraphed Commodore Dewey, the head of the Asiatic Squadron in Hong Kong, telling him to keep his ships coaled in case orders arrived to sail on Manila, the capital of the Philippines, where Spain’s Pacific fleet was based. And this was just in the first seventy-two hours. Calling Roosevelt “a bull in a China shop,” Long wrote that he had chosen “the one course which is most discourteous to me, because it suggests that there had been a lack of attention which he was supplying. It shows how the best fellow in the world—and with splendid capacities—is worse than no use if he lack a cool head and careful discretion.”10

  Roosevelt also began to make plans to join the war on his own—though he didn’t have much luck finding a spot for himself in a state militia regiment. In a letter to his friend William Sturgis Bigelow, he lamented that even if he found a unit to join, “The army may not be employed at all, and even if it is employed it will consist chiefly of regular troops. . . . I shall be eating out my heart.” He was determined, though, not to stay behind at the State, War and Navy Building should war arrive. “My office is essentially a peace office,” he told Bigelow. “The assistant secretary had properly nothing to do with military operations.”11

  The country’s war fever began to cool off as Madrid went to every end to cooperate with the Navy’s investigation. But then, on March 17, Redfield Proctor of Vermont walked to the floor of the Senate, in his hand a speech he had previewed for Roosevelt and Wood the day before at the Metropolitan Club.12

  A Civil War colonel who made a fortune off his state’s marble quarries, which he then parlayed into a turn in the governor’s mansion in Montpelier and then a seat in Congress, Proctor had entered the year a committed skeptic of intervention in Cuba. He had a reputation as an unsentimental, unfriendly man, and for a politician he had few allies, let alone confidants. He came from a business background, and sided with business interests in Congress. Late that winter, he had accepted an opportunity from the president to visit Cuba to see for himself whether the horror stories had any bearing in fact.13

  They did. “It is not peace, nor is it war,” Proctor told his colleagues. “It is desolation and distress, misery and starvation.” What Richard Harding Davis had documented a year before for Hearst, Proctor now verified for Congress: the trochas, the summary executions, the reconcentrados, the masses of starving innocents. “What I saw I cannot tell so that others can see it,” he said. “It must be seen with one’s own eyes to be realized.” He praised the work of Clara Barton and the Red Cross, and encouraged Americans to send them more money. But he also conceded that humanitarian aid alone was not enough. Intervention, diplomatic if possible but more likely by force, was the only solution. “When will the need for this help end?” he pleaded. “Not until peace comes and the reconcentrados can go back to their country, rebuild their homes, reclaim their tillage plots, which quickly run up to brush in that wonderful soil and clime, and until they can be free from danger of molestation in so doing.”14

  With Proctor’s speech, a dam seemed to break in the remaining opposition to war. Said one observer, the address “was like the Roentgen ray, disclosing the hideous lesions of bigotry, cruelty, and misrule: the murder of the helpless, the starvation of the unoffending, the extermination of the innocent.” Proctor was not a jingo. He was not an imperialist. For that reason, his speech won over previously skeptical corners of the American establishment, especially business interests. Proctor’s address, the Wall Street Journal no
ted, “converted a great many people in Wall Street, who had heretofore taken the ground that the United States had no business to interfere in a revolution on Spanish soil.”15

  The following weeks saw a mounting hurricane of righteous interventionist sentiment. The country, wrote the Sacramento Daily Record-Tribune, “is about to enter upon a struggle, if the present portent does not change, which has for its justification on our side the cessation of a war that has been marked by brutality; and unparalleled offense against the humanity of the age; the freeing of a people who have the right to recognition in their effort to set up self-government; and to shake off the domination of a monarchical rule that has never made colonial control a success.” Drawing on Proctor’s address, editorialists, politicians, and preachers linked freedom for Cuba with a new, grand mission of an empowered, powerful America unleashed on the world. The Scranton Tribune declared: “One of the results of this war may be the acquisition of a dignity and importance in the eyes of people across the water that the United States has not enjoyed up to this time.” Some even called intervention a religious obligation. “Sympathy with the insurgent Cubans had become the popular test of human kindness, and protest against war the unanswerable proof of Christian indifference,” wrote Russell Alger, a lumber tycoon who was serving as McKinley’s secretary of war.16