The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  When Alvin Ash, a Rough Rider from New Mexico, asked Roosevelt for something, anything else to eat, he handed a canned beef ration to him by way of explanation. “Are you complaining already?” Roosevelt said. “This is war, not pink tea. You’ve got to expect hardships.”

  “That’s all right, colonel,” Ash replied. “I’ve been used to hardships all my life, but I’ve always been fed right. And this canned carcass ain’t right.”

  Roosevelt sniffed it, and agreed. He ordered all the canned beef tossed overboard.7

  That didn’t solve the lack of food. Some men had the foresight to stock up on pies and fruit from vendors at Port Tampa. Those who could procure some bacon from the galley, either by purchase or theft, would let it sit in the sun on a metal surface, and in less than an hour it was fried to a crisp. Some of the ships, including the Yucatan, also had a store of frozen beef, an experimental product sent south by a meatpacking company wrapped in burlap. But the men refused to touch it, let alone eat it; it had, said trooper Frank Hayes, “a bilious whitish green in color and a more or less cadaverous aroma”—derived, he concluded, from the application of formaldehyde. The cooks, who prepared food for the officers, made a fast side business selling meat sandwiches for 25 cents, a steep price that enlisted men were nonetheless eager to pay. Water was 5 cents a glass. The crews sold whiskey and beer as well—$20 a gallon for the former, 25 cents a pint for the latter. One cook reportedly made $1,100 during the five-and-a-half-day voyage.8

  Theodore Miller had a different strategy. Posted to guard duty near the galley, he relied on his warm, loose smile and quick way with words to make friends with the cooks. “I worked it just right, so I could get fresh water and something to eat most any time I asked,” he wrote. One cook, named Tony, often slipped him an entire dinner. Otherwise, “I should have certainly starved.”9

  When they weren’t dreaming of food, many of the Rough Riders were bent over, seasick. The lack of healthy, sustaining sustenance and the close, stuffy quarters didn’t help, and on top of seasickness, disease spread easily. Hamilton Fish had procured a basket of lemons at Port Tampa, and he dispensed them to stricken comrades, or made batches of lemonade, poured them into the troopers’ tin cups and carried eight to ten at a time down to the ship’s improvised sick bay, nervously stepping with the rolling of the decks. Those beyond the help of a few ounces of lemonade required a time-draining transfer to the Olivette, the hospital ship. “Every now and then some troopships would run up the ominous sick signal,” wrote the New York Times, “whereupon the fleet would slow up and the sick would be brought aboard the Olivette”—which also carried most of the reporters.10

  With all their fits and starts and confusion along the way, the ships made a ripe target for a Spanish attack. The fleet did not maintain a lights-out policy after dark, making things even easier for a courageous, or suicidal, Spanish captain. “At night when the ships were all lit up, it looked like a small town,” wrote Billy McGinty, “with lights forming a village built on a hill because the ships ahead of us seemed to be higher than the others.” A swift-running gunboat, dispatched from Havana or Matanzas or any of the ports along the northern Cuban coast, could have gotten close enough to fire off several torpedoes at the unarmed troopships before the American gunboats or cruisers could react. The fleet tried to remain alert to attack, and several times a day, having encountered a strange vessel, an American torpedo boat, which was normally towed by a larger warship to save fuel, “was slipped like a greyhound from the leash, and sped across the water toward it,” Roosevelt recalled in his memoir. On every occasion, it was a false alarm. The Spanish knew the Americans were coming; it was sheer luck—and Spanish incompetence—that left the fleet unharried as it moved east.11

  Roosevelt and Wood did their best to maintain order and discipline on board. They drilled the men in infantry tactics and held physical exercise sessions twice a day, at 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.; at night they continued the officers’ school that had begun in San Antonio. On Sunday, June 19, they held church service; Miller, an avid glee-clubber at Yale, sang in the choir next to Roosevelt. After everyone was asleep, Roosevelt stayed up, reading the manual of arms, cramming as much knowledge about tactics and military leadership into his head as he could before they landed. “Many nights I have waked up at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and I would find him with a piece of candle or an old smoky lantern, with bleary eyes, studying some military work,” recalled one trooper, Sherrard Coleman. The next morning Roosevelt would pelt the regulars in the regiment with questions, especially Allyn Capron, a ramrod of a West Point graduate who, like so many of the veterans, had extensive experience as an Indian fighter. Roosevelt was especially curious about retreating, which to him was a venal sin but which the manual treated as just another tactical maneuver. In the face of overwhelming fire against infantry, the manual said the only smart thing to do was to pull back. Capron disagreed. Modern rifles were too accurate, he told Roosevelt; a full retreat, exposing your back, was suicide. “You had better impress on your men that the only way for them is to charge through it and to charge through it quickly,” he said.12

  Most of the men had never seen the ocean, and they stood at the railing and stared for hours at the multitudinous seas passing beneath them. Years later, Ash, from New Mexico, joked about the time his hat blew in the water: “I said, ‘Oh Jesus, my hat’s blowed into the creek.’ ” Another trooper was astonished when Roosevelt told him that, in fact, the ocean was not drinkable. The sailors seemed taken with the unworldliness of the American soldiers, and plied them with stories about Cuban wildlife: about boa constrictors hanging from trees, ready to drop on passersby, of the “accuracy by which gigantic monkeys could bean one with a coconut from the top of a palm tree,” recalled the New Mexico trooper Royal Prentice.13

  Life on board wasn’t all bad; the four companies from the Second Infantry, which were on the Yucatan with the Rough Riders, had a regimental band, and when it played the Rough Riders’ mascot mutt, Cuba, would run in circles howling on the Yucatan’s deck (the other two mascots, Josephine the mountain lion and Teddy the eagle, had been left in Tampa). With nothing else to do, the men sat and gawked at the flying fish and dolphins that popped out of the waves, or lay back and marveled at the expansiveness of the sky, picking out shapes in the cloud formations. To wash their clothes, they would tie them in a ball, attach a rope, and let them trail behind their ship—but haul them in before the current tore them to pieces. Alongside the clothing, several ships trailed fishing lines. And there were minor excitements: On at least one occasion, they encountered a water spout; when it got too close to the fleet, a warship fired a cannon at it, and when the shell broke the cyclone water showered down on the surrounding ships. A trade wind from the east kept the decks cool. The indigo waters were “as smooth as a mill pond,” Wood wrote to his wife. On June 18, they caught their first glimpse of the Southern Cross, its vast cruciform sitting just above the horizon.14

  It was along the railing, looking out at that pond-smooth water, that Roosevelt came to know Buckey O’Neill, the worldly lawyer-turned-sheriff-turned-mayor of Prescott, Arizona. Roosevelt enjoyed the men in the regiment, but he never shed his intellectual snobbery; as much as he liked to imagine himself a man of the West and its people, he lived off smart conversation and the play of ideas. He needed a witty interlocutor, and many of the men in the regiment were not that. O’Neill was different. Here was a man who seemed the mirror of Roosevelt: Raised in Washington, D.C., and formally educated, O’Neill had broken free of his Eastern confines and crafted a variegated life on the frontier, gambling and politicking and writing, the archetypal Rooseveltian hero. “Down at the bottom, what seemed to interest him most was the philosophy of life itself, of our understanding of it, and of the limitations set to that understanding,” Roosevelt wrote. O’Neill had found sustenance in the military, finally, and he seemed intent on staying in after the war ended, and climbing the ranks. “Who would not risk his life for a star?” h
e asked Roosevelt, as the two of them stood on deck one evening.15

  For days, the men were left to guess their first destination; most continued to believe they were headed to Puerto Rico. It was only when they passed the last of the Bahamas, Great Inagua Island, and turned south did they realize they might be headed for Santiago. As the fleet rounded Cape Maisí, on the southeastern corner of Cuba, a small sailboat approached. As the ships watched it warily, the sailor on board unfolded a large flag and ran it up his mast. It was the Estrella Solitaria, the flag of Cuban independence. Cheers erupted from the ships.

  • • •

  The difficulties encountered by this underresourced army on a poorly planned expedition did not find their way back to the American public that June. Eventually they would; after the fall of Santiago, men would begin to rotate home and bring with them stories of mismanagement and incompetence and unnecessary death. In 1899 Congress would appoint Grenville Dodge, a former congressman and railroad executive, to hold hearings on the campaign and draw up a list of charges against the quartermaster’s and transportation departments. Careers would be ended, reputations destroyed. But that was still long in the future.

  For now, the Army enjoyed almost universal acclaim, before it had even fired a shot. It helped immensely that most of the 100 reporters who traveled with it to Cuba felt no special urge to reveal the ugly truth behind the expedition, though they all knew it privately. When one of them, Poultney Bigelow, an American writing for The Times of London, wrote about the “acephalous War Department in Washington, which had permitted the lack of supplies and logistical shortcomings in Tampa, Richard Harding Davis lashed out in the Army’s defense. In a rebuttal published in the New York Herald, Davis said of Bigelow’s reporting that it was “doubtful if anything has appeared in print since the beginning of the war, in even the yellow journals, so un-American, so untrue, or so calculated to give courage to the enemy.” It was, in short, “treason.” After that, few dared follow Bigelow’s lead.16

  Even still, it is hard to imagine a hundred reports like Bigelow’s shaking the public’s pro-war sentiment that June. This was an era long before public polling, but the tone of the country was set in its streets and in its daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines. Men continued to line up to volunteer, and the camps around the Southeast continued to swell with recruits. Patriotic, pro-war poetry filled newspapers and magazines, most of it doggerel. One representative example: “Go, at thy country’s call./Whatever gentle bonds may hold thee here,/Whatever tender claims may seem more dear./Thy duty!—first of all.” Newspaper ads incorporated aspects of the war into their product pitches, like one from the Herman Wise clothing store in Astoria, Oregon, that read: “Remember the Maine and Herman Wise when you are ready to buy a suit, a hat, a shirt, or anything else in that line.”17

  Calls for sectional and class reconciliation in the name of national unity during wartime got a boost as well. Leslie’s Weekly wrote on April 28: “We have regained faith in ourselves as a nation; politics and quibbling and the dollar have been forgotten, and we have stood out loyal and strong. It has been a lesson showing the world that in a period of stress we have not lost ourselves in hysterics, but instead have been calm and self-held.” That same issue included a short, crudely allegorical piece about two new fictional auxiliary cruisers, the Dixie and the Yankee, which “have not always fought together in the past, but in the future they will be inseparable on sea as well as land.” Silly, but true: When the men of the 6th Massachusetts marched through Baltimore on their way to Florida, thousands of people turned out to greet them with flowers and flags; when the regiment had moved through that same city in April 1861 (albeit with an older generation of soldiers), pro-Southern militants had attacked them with bricks. Mobilization for the war, Leslie’s wrote, “wiped away every vestige of the bitterest parts of the Civil War.” Those prominent voices who might object that African Americans felt differently were few and far between, and never heeded in the rush to celebrate the new national harmony.18

  Anti-imperialism, for the moment, was barely audible in the national conversation. Even the business leaders and editorialists and politicians who had railed against going to war now rallied behind the flag, or kept silent. Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, two prominent anti-imperialists, supported intervention once the war began. William Jennings Bryan, the “Boy Orator of the Platte” and the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, had strongly opposed intervention in 1897, but on the day McKinley declared war he wrote to the president, volunteering his services. Bryan joined a Nebraska volunteer regiment, traveled to Florida to await deployment, and promptly caught typhoid fever.19

  To be fair to Bryan, Twain, Carnegie, and others, their advocacy for the war was not rooted in the jingoism of Senators Beveridge or Lodge. They did not dream of American colonies, or even of American influence over nominally independent nations. Rather, they saw the war as McKinley and Roosevelt had painted it: as a humanitarian intervention, both to end the slaughter of Cuban civilians and to bring the American experience of liberty to a downtrodden people. Bryan had supported the Teller Amendment, which was tacked onto McKinley’s war authorization and forbade the United States from annexing Cuba. In a speech delivered in February 1899, Bryan justified his support for the war in terms that would have rung very strange to his forebears in the Jeffersonian, Democratic tradition, but which would echo through practically every American military undertaking of the twentieth century: “Universal peace cannot come until justice is enthroned throughout the world. Until the right has triumphed in every land and love reigns in every heart, government must, as a last resort, appeal to force.”20

  Commodore Dewey’s naval victory at Manila had set the tone for the rest of the war. Already, essayists were declaring it a turning point for the country, its debut on the world stage—and not as just another great power, but one with a mission, a vision, a set of ideas about a better world and how it could use its power to achieve it. This was partly propaganda, the fever dream of too many liberals in Congress and idealist editors at the nation’s leading magazines. But it was also a deeply felt, and widely shared, sentiment. Walter Hines Page, the editor of The Atlantic and a cautious imperialist, argued that the war revealed a new turn in the American character, a willingness to shed its citizens’ blood in order “to remove from our very doors this cruel and inefficient piece of medievalism.” He worried, though, about the public’s willingness to unify so quickly behind McKinley; though he called the war-born national unity “inspiring,” he warned that it “puts a new responsibility on those leaders, and may put our institutions and our people themselves to a new test. A change in our national policy may change our very character; and we are now playing with the great forces that may shape the future of the world.”21

  The import of the war was immediately felt abroad. Europeans had watched for decades as America grew in numbers and economic power, and the perspicacious among them knew it was only a matter of time before those two strengths combined behind an assertive foreign policy. The only question was what form it would take. Now they had their answer. “One thing should be said at the beginning: it is predominantly the humanitarian instinct which has led ‘the plain people of the United States’—to use Lincoln’s phrase—to acquiesce in the war with Spain,” wrote the Manchester Guardian on May 9. “The dominant aim of the American people is not to avenge the loss of the Maine, not to annex Cuba, but to do a bit of stern work in the interest of humanity.” More cynically, the Daily Telegraph warned that the appeal to humanitarianism, combined with America’s great demographic and industrial strength, invited in “the all-devouring militarism with which we in the old world are so well acquainted.” What truly stunned observers, at home and abroad, was the speed with which Americans volunteered to fight, and what that speed demonstrated about the American character and about this new global power. It was this sense of idealistic, voluntaristic militarism that shook Europeans even more than the sheer size of th
e American industrial economy. “One grand use of this war,” wrote the London Spectator, is to demonstrate that a great power could project its influence abroad “without wasting its toil upon the maintenance of armies.”22

  At the center of the acclaim were the Rough Riders. More than any other regiment, they represented the new American way of war. “The American has looked upon war as a disagreeable necessity, that comes along about once in a generation, and which is to be met, not by maintaining a large standing army, but by depending upon the bravery and the aptitude of our people for military service,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer. The volunteer, the paper wrote, stood in contrast to the European conscript, “an automaton.” And when Americans do go to war, they do so without regard to wealth or class. “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,” the unsigned article concluded, “whether Fifth Avenue millionaires or Western cowboys,” were off to fight “together in Cuba for the great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.”23

  CHAPTER 8

  “NO COUNTRY ON THE EARTH MORE BEAUTIFUL”

  After rounding Cape Maisí and the eastern end of Cuba, the fleet passed Guantánamo Bay, where a few weeks earlier American Marines—at the time, a specialized section of the Navy used to support amphibious landings—had made the first land assault of the war, an effort to secure that pristine natural harbor for later use. The attack was a success, but twenty-nine Marines had been killed or wounded. By the time their comrades found their bodies, several had been mutilated, almost beyond recognition, their eyes and ears and large chunks of skin and muscle gone. American officials accused the Spanish of torture, and then, even worse, of disfiguring corpses, and said as much to reporters. But the culprits were not enemy soldiers, but something more revolting: vultures and land crabs. The latter could grow to a foot or more in diameter and lived mostly off scavenged meat, human or otherwise. The crabs—Gecarcinus lateralis, also known as blackbacks, for an inky splotch across the top of their shells—could be an ugly, unnerving sight, especially when they traveled in swarms, often thousands strong. Throughout the campaign they could be counted on to appear whenever there was bloodshed and fallen men. For all the man-made horrors the invading army encountered in Cuba, land crabs left the deepest, creepiest impression. “The sound they make in crawling over the twigs and dried leaves is enough to drive a healthy man to insanity,” recalled one correspondent.1