by Clay Risen
Not everyone agreed. The coterie of anti-imperialists in Washington and New York who had batted down campaigns to annex Hawaii and other expansionist enterprises—including the powerful speaker of the house, Thomas Brackett Reed, and the Republican Party fixer Carl Schurz—redoubled their opposition on the chamber floors of Capitol Hill and in the pages of the nation’s leading magazines. Those who remembered America’s last conflict warned that too many people leading the charge did not fully appreciate what they were calling for. Governor Edward Scofield of Wisconsin, a Civil War veteran who was taken prisoner by the Confederates during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, warned that “war is a terrible evil. It means destruction of life and property and untold misery and grief. It is brutal and savage in all its manifestations. Do those people who are talking war so freely know anything of its horrors?” Others argued that America should not become the world’s policeman. “We cannot undertake to right the wrongs of the world,” wrote the Stockton, California, Independent. “We have no occasion to declare war against Spain unless it is proven that Spain had designedly insulted us and then declines to make the usual amends.” In Kansas City, a shoemaker hung black crepe across his storefront with the notice, “Closed in memory of a Christian nation that descends to the barbarity of war.”17
But no one listened. Four days after Proctor’s speech, a naval court of inquiry in Key West investigating the Maine disaster released its findings, which had been transported, under armed guard and secret courier, to the president. The explosion, it concluded, was caused by something outside the ship—a mine, most likely. The board did not affix blame; it left it to commentators to speculate whether the mine was placed intentionally or was a derelict device from the harbor’s defenses. Nevertheless, coming so soon after Proctor’s speech, the report was all the pro-war camp needed to make its final push for war. If Spain was at all complicit in the destruction of an American ship that Havana had welcomed into its harbor, what other proof did the antiwar camp need of Spanish perfidy?18
Roosevelt, once again, led the way. In between calling for military relief for suffering Cubans, he carried forth at every opportunity about American dignity and vengeance for the victims of the Maine. On March 27, he confronted Senator Mark Hanna, a leading dove and the mastermind behind McKinley’s 1896 victory, at a party. Roosevelt was asked to give a speech after the meal. Rising to the occasion, he declared himself a member of a younger generation of Americans who, unlike Hanna and the president, “were anxious that the honor and dignity of the country should be preserved.” Still standing, he turned to the seated Hanna and declared that while the business world might be paramount to the Senate, it was not to the American people. As applause rang out, one of Roosevelt’s allies—unnamed in news reports—went in for the kill. “Now, senator,” the man said to Hanna. “May we please have a war?”19
News of Roosevelt’s dinnertime speech shot across the wires, and a transcript of it appeared the next day in papers nationwide. By the end of March, the public had turned on McKinley, too. In Durango, Colorado, a mob burned the president in effigy; one participant said they would use the ashes to pay back Spain for the gunpowder used on the Maine. The president came in for further, similar abuse in Richmond, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. Privately, Roosevelt seethed. “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair,” he wrote.20
This wasn’t entirely fair. McKinley cared about the plight of the Cubans: He arranged for Congress to spend $50,000 to aid Americans in Cuba, and he led a charity drive for the Red Cross that raised $200,000 by April 1898 (including his own, anonymous donation). He was determined to end the suffering in Cuba, and increasingly, he agreed with the hawks that for that to happen, Spain had to grant Cuba autonomy, if not outright independence. McKinley’s first annual message to Congress, delivered on December 6, 1897 (by hand; it would be decades before presidents actually read their “state of the union” messages to the House and Senate), called Cuba “the most important problem” facing American foreign relations. He had made a clean break with Cleveland’s noninterventionist policy, but, perhaps naively, McKinley held out hope that the Spanish would cave, that the newly seated Sagasta government, which he said was already taking “honorable” steps, would find a path to peace. But he also made it clear that if Spain did not follow through on its promises, he would not hesitate to intervene: “If it shall hereafter appear to be a duty imposed by our obligations to ourselves, to civilization and humanity to intervene with force, it shall be without fault on our part and only because the necessity for such action will be so clear as to command the support and approval of the civilized world.”21
Still, McKinley remained deeply opposed to using force to achieve his goal. He had fought in the Civil War, had seen men bleed out on the battlefield at Antietam, had a horse shot from under him at Berryville. Even thirty-three years later, the memory of death, and the ripples of pain it had sent through his hometown of Canton, Ohio, remained fresh, and it guided him during those first early months of 1898. “I do not care for the property that will be destroyed, nor the money that will be expended,” he told Senator Charles Fairbanks, “but the thought of human suffering that must enter many households almost overwhelms me.”22
McKinley continued to have faith even as Spain rejected his entreaties to move beyond Sagasta’s initial softening, even as those entreaties became more forceful demands. Spain countered one letter, sent on December 20, with an insistence that any further action on Madrid’s part would come only after the United States cracked down on the pro-independence Junta network, which Spain believed was the life-support system for the rebellion. And McKinley continued to have faith, if not in Spain, then in the general ability of rational men to avoid an irrational war, even after the publication of the de Lôme letter, after more Spanish rejections, after the Maine settled to the bottom of Havana Harbor. “We must learn the truth and endeavor, if possible, to fix the responsibility,” was all he would say.23
It was, simply, how McKinley operated. At a time when many Americans seemed to want passion, they had in their president a man who worshipped at the temple of dispassion, of biding time, of resisting pressure to act from all sides. McKinley, one aide told the Washington Post on February 27, “will not be jingoed into war, or act in anticipation of events which may never occur.”24
Even after the Maine and the court of inquiry’s report on its sinking, McKinley believed that he could appease the war hawks and pressure Spain to the bargaining table. On March 7 he called congressional leaders, Secretary Long, and Secretary of War Alger for a meeting in the Executive Mansion library. Turning to Representative Joe Cannon of Illinois, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, the president said he needed supplemental funds for the military—$50 million for the Navy and the Army. Cannon slipped the request into the House hopper that afternoon; two days later, the bill was on McKinley’s desk. Even before the money was spent, the very fact that America could toss around that sort of wealth stunned the world, and gave a preview of what a newly empowered, internationally aggressive America might look like. Impressing the world, and Spain, was McKinley’s plan, anyway, and for a few weeks it worked.25
In late March Spain offered to enact real reforms, and said it would be willing to suspend hostilities if the rebels asked. But political crises often take on a life of their own, especially when war is involved, and in any case no one believed that Spain was sincere, or that the rebels would be willing to accept anything less than independence anyway. As spring flowered that late March, patriotic airs became popular programs at music halls and flags cropped up with the crocuses around front yards. Without McKinley saying much, by April 1 it became the national consensus that he would declare war within the month. In Congress, Senator John Morgan of Alabama submitted a declaration of war. Even Long, who sympathized with McKinley and admired his resolute rejection of the war party, wrote in his diary on April 5: “The country is so clamorous for action that the president can
not delay longer.”26
• • •
As war approached, offers to fight, or to organize fighters, popped up around the country, like a precipitate emerging from a liquid. Young men who had grown up hearing stories of their fathers and grandfathers fighting at Gettysburg, or Chickamauga, or Veracruz, suddenly had a chance at their own adventure. And this time, they were motivated not by the desperation of national self-preservation, or the dubious logic of the Mexican-American War, but a moral compulsion to use the growing wealth they felt boiling up around them—in factories, in city streets, in railroads and street car lines and everything else that defined the newly prosperous, powerful America—to change the world.
Typical of this generation of war-happy young men was Theodore Miller, an 1897 graduate of Yale and a student at the newly opened New York Law School in Manhattan. The son of Lewis Miller, an Ohio industrial magnate, Theodore was of medium height, with wispy walnut hair, a broad chest and ropy arms that came from years rowing crew during the summer on Lake Chautauqua, New York (apart from his business career, Lewis Miller cofounded the Chautauqua Assembly, a wildly popular movement to bring intellectual life to Middle America). He was a studious, friendly young man who everyone said was going places. But in the spring of 1898, the only place Miller wanted to go was Cuba.27
Miller was living in a cramped apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with three friends from Yale, all students. Their abode—which they took to calling Poverty Flat—“was the resort of many ’97 men who either came to town, or were living in the city,” wrote his father’s close friend John Heyl Vincent. “Many a night Theodore would sleep on the lounge or even on the floor, in order to make room for a welcome classmate or two from out of town.” All anyone in Poverty Flat could talk about was the coming war. “There has been nothing exciting in here except the war but of course that is exciting enough for any patriotic citizen,” Miller wrote to his sister Mina, who was married to the inventor Thomas Edison.28
Being in New York made the pressure to drop out of school and join the Army almost too hard to bear. Even before McKinley declared war, red, white, and blue bunting hung from every lamppost in every borough. The Cuban Junta sponsored soapbox speakers around the city, and newly formed militias paraded up and down Manhattan streets. Three hundred men in Flatbush, Brooklyn, declared their intention to go to war, despite any connection to the military hierarchy. A coalition of Wall Street firms offered to raise a regiment of 1,000 men.29
“What I want to do is to get into the scrap and be able to do something worth doing,” Miller wrote in a letter to his father. “I may be too eager and ambitious, but that is what I want to do.” Lewis Miller forbade it—ostensibly because he wanted his son to first finish the school year, but also, likely, because he had invested so much in his son’s future. He had watched men of his own generation head off to the Civil War and not return; he knew what war could do to a family, to a community.30
But like any son anywhere, Theodore Miller would not countenance his father’s wisdom. His letters to his family burst with righteous impatience. “I have been working solidly and find it mightily hard to with all this war news about,” he wrote to Mina. Eventually, with war clouds gathering, Miller declared his own war, in a letter to his sister: “I am so sorry to worry mother about it but I don’t see how to avoid it. I must go if there is a need and there is—and as soon as there is room.”31
Miller’s desire to fight was sincere; others’ intentions were more whimsical, even bizarre. A group of “fashionable West End girls” in St. Louis offered to organize an all-female regiment, wearing “jaunty military caps” and carrying swords, to spur men to volunteer. A circus offered twenty-five elephants, in case the American Army needed to invade Cuba, Hannibal style. The New York Sun even reported that several hundred Kentucky “mountaineers” wanted to enlist en masse—“among them will be the representatives of every feud in Kentucky for fifty years.”32
This was all fun and a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there was a real problem. After decades of neglect, America simply did not have the military manpower to send an army into Cuba, let alone to man the coastal defenses against a Spanish fleet in case of war. Aside from the Army’s statutorily limited corps of about 28,000 men, there were tens of thousands more in state militias, but they were almost all paper soldiers; in most states, few men had even participated in a drill, or knew how to fire a rifle as part of a unit.
And so a few enterprising people, casting about, found a ready, novel solution: cowboys. Already by 1898, Americans had fantasized about harnessing the frontier prowess for violence and directing it outward. It sounds, looking back after a century of American military might, like an astoundingly stupid idea. But such was the need, and such was the hold that the frontier West had on the American mind, that at the time it made perfect sense to raise and equip a regiment of cowboys to go fight Spain alongside regular soldiers. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt had already thought of it: In 1886, hearing news of a clash along the Mexican border, he suggested raising “an entire regiment of cowboys” to Secretary of War William C. Endicott.33
Roosevelt was not alone. During a dinner in the spring of 1898 with General Nelson Miles, the top-ranking officer in the Army, Buffalo Bill Cody offered the services of the cowboys in his Wild West show. The Texas Rangers, suggested many a Lone Star voice, would be an excellent auxiliary. In late March, a man named George R. Shanton of Laramie, Wyoming, offered to raise “within ten days’ notice a company of 50 rough riders and expert shots for service in the event of war.” Melvin Grigsby, the attorney general of South Dakota, did the same, as did Porter J. Hand, an officer from Nebraska. Alexander Brodie, a veteran of the Southwest Indian Wars, enlisted the governor of the Arizona territory to telegraph McKinley directly, urging him to let Brodie raise a regiment of Southwestern miners, cowboys, and other frontier denizens for battle. On March 30, Senator Francis Warren, also from Wyoming, introduced a bill in Congress to authorize a “cowboy regiment.” The bill went nowhere, but the idea was unleashed.34
By mid-April, it was clear that America was headed to war; the only question was the timing. On April 20, McKinley ordered a naval blockade around Cuba, an act of war by international standards. Four days later, he officially declared war on Spain—with congressional approval, he backdated it to April 20, to make the blockade legal. And as part of the declaration, the president announced the formation of three volunteer regiments, to be composed of cowboys and others with similar skills, like horsemanship and marksmanship. That same day, Alger offered command of one of the regiments to Roosevelt.35
Roosevelt, to everyone’s surprise, demurred. He said he was sure that, with a few months training, he could develop enough expertise in tactics, maneuvers, and military operations. But in a few months, the war could be over, and he’d have missed his chance. And so he told Alger that he would only take a lieutenant colonelcy—second in command—and that the colonel slot should go to his friend Wood. Alger agreed immediately, and so did Wood.
• • •
Though there were three “cowboy” regiments formed during the Spanish-American War, only one seemed to matter to the public: the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, led by the president’s personal physician and the charismatic assistant secretary of the navy. Even before they all met at their training site, in San Antonio, Texas, the unit was famous. Pen-and-ink renderings of Wood and Roosevelt graced full-page spreads about the regiment in papers from New York to San Francisco. Roosevelt was already a rising star after his days reforming the police in New York, and his decision to resign from the Department of the Navy and risk his life to bring liberty abroad captured the imagination of a young America starving for passionate, visionary heroes. In a typical dispatch, the Washington Times noted “a continent-wide interest and expectancy over assistant secretary Theodore Roosevelt’s regiment of mounted riflemen.”36
Friends and acquaintances, however, thought Roosevelt was making a mistake. “I really think he
is going mad,” wrote Henry Adams. “Roosevelt is wild to fight and hack and hew . . . of course this ends his political career.” Members of the Union League Club and the Republican Club, friends and allies who had tied themselves to his political future, traveled from New York to Washington to persuade him to stay.37
One evening, a few nights before Roosevelt left Washington, he was walking with his friend John R. Proctor through Lafayette Square. Proctor had already made the case against leaving, and he pressed it one last time.
“My friends have been making me very miserable with their appeals during the last few weeks,” Roosevelt replied.
“Yes and I suppose I have been the worst of all.”
“Yes,” Roosevelt conceded. He then stopped in the path, put his hands on Proctor’s shoulder, looked him in his eyes, and said, “Proctor, I am going to Cuba. I will take all the chances of meeting death by yellow fever, smallpox or by a Spanish bullet just to see the Spanish flag once on a battlefield.”
Proctor could only look at his friend in wonder. “His earnestness was almost terrible,” he recalled.38
Roosevelt’s boss, Secretary Long, should have leapt at the chance to get rid of Roosevelt. But the old Bostonian saw a certain method in his assistant secretary’s madness. “He has lost his head to this unutterable folly of deserting the post where he is of the most service and running off to ride a horse and, probably, brush mosquitos from his neck on the Florida sands,” Long wrote in his diary. “And yet how absurd all this will sound, if by some turn of fortune he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark!”39