The story behind Dewey’s assignment to Asia demonstrated the war thinking that gripped parts of official Washington, including the White House, long before McKinley’s peace efforts fizzled. At the center of this particular intrigue was the navy’s irrepressible bureaucratic busybody, Theodore Roosevelt, whose officious ways had stirred Long to muse that “the best fellow in the world—and with splendid capacities—is worse than no use if he lack a cool head and careful discretion.” On September 27, with Long out of the office on holiday, Roosevelt intercepted a letter to his boss from Senator Chandler touting Commodore John Adams Howell for the Asiatic command. Bad idea, thought Roosevelt, who considered Dewey a far better choice. Though Howell had gained fame as an inventor of innovative naval weapons, Roosevelt considered him unequal to the assignment, particularly if the United States went to war. In seeking to get Chandler to withdraw his recommendation, Roosevelt readily conceded Howell’s “great inventive capacity” but characterized him as “irresolute and . . . extremely afraid of responsibility”—two characteristics Roosevelt considered particularly odious. The assistant secretary hoped his well-known expansionism would carry weight with Chandler, himself a leading Senate expansionist. It didn’t work.
When Chandler rebuffed Roosevelt’s entreaty, the assistant secretary summoned Dewey to his office, motioned him to a chair, handed him a cigar, and lit it. “Do you know any Senators?” he asked.
The commodore said he had a longtime family connection to Redfield Proctor from his home state of Vermont. This was ideal. In addition to his cordial friendship with McKinley, Proctor was a rich businessman with tentacles of influence throughout the Republican Party and within the administration. Whereas Chandler had joined the congressional push to hasten a war with Spain over McKinley’s objections, Proctor always honored his friendship with McKinley. Even in delivering his eloquent and influential report to the Senate on the depredations he had witnessed in Cuba, he took care to avoid any expressions that could possibly unsettle the president.
When Dewey approached Proctor, the senator seemed “delighted” to help and promptly called at the White House to put the case before McKinley, who already had been entreated by Roosevelt on the same matter. Commodore Dewey, said Proctor, “is the man you want.” The president nodded his assent and promised to press the matter “right away” with Long.
“Here,” said Proctor, sliding a slip of paper across the table, “write it down, Mr. President.”
The commander-in-chief complied, writing in pencil, “Long, appoint Dewey command Asiatic Squadron.” Proctor picked up the powerful sheet.
“You’ll never regret this, Mr. President,” he said, then proceeded to Long’s office to present his fait accompli. Long wasn’t amused to have his decision-making prerogative yanked from him on such an important personnel matter. He went along but communicated his displeasure to Dewey with a retaliatory belittlement. He refused to bestow the promotion in rank that normally would go with such an assignment.
“I am glad to appoint you, Commodore Dewey,” said Long to the naval officer, emphasizing his rank, “but you won’t go as a rear admiral. You will go as a commodore.” He paused to let the implications sink in, then added, “Perhaps you used too much political influence.” When Dewey protested that others also had employed political influence, the secretary cut him off. “You are in error, Commodore,” he said.
Only later did Roosevelt deliver to Long the Chandler letter revealing that the secretary himself had been in error. The gentlemanly Long acknowledged as much in a letter to Dewey but didn’t reverse what the commodore considered a “little pinpricking slight.”
Adding to the intrigue of the matter was the question of why Roosevelt had selected this particular officer as the best man for Asia. Dewey had demonstrated distinctive gallantry as a young Civil War officer under the command of the legendary David Farragut, then settled in to an unremarkable career that interspersed various shipboard and overseas duties with intermittent Washington assignments. In 1889, after eight years at sea, he returned to Washington for a series of increasingly important desk jobs, culminating in his rank of commodore and the presidency of the Board of Inspection and Survey, responsible for inspecting and approving all new warships. In this capacity the dutiful Dewey learned a great deal about the navy’s latest warship technology.
Yet it appeared that his career was nearing its end. He lamented to a friend in 1894 that the peacetime navy offered “little opportunity for a naval man to distinguish himself” and predicted he would be “known in history . . . as ‘George Dewey who entered the Navy at a certain date and retired as Rear Admiral at the age limit!’ ” In the meantime, Dewey, a widower for many years, enjoyed his Washington life. Fastidious in dress and manner, with closely cropped white hair and a well-manicured mustache, he cut a notable figure in social Washington and derived particular pleasure in hanging out at the prestigious Metropolitan Club on H Street, where Roosevelt also was a member.
The young assistant secretary took a shine to the veteran naval officer. Although Dewey demonstrated no particular expansionist vision of the kind that animated Roosevelt and his friends Henry Cabot Lodge and Alfred Thayer Mahan, the commodore projected an air of decisiveness and dependability that Roosevelt appreciated. The assistant secretary often dined with Dewey at their club and invited him along for horseback rides through Rock Creek Park. It was natural for the power-conscious Roosevelt, always bent on getting his own men in key positions, to identify Dewey as precisely the right man for Asia. In a pattern that was becoming familiar at the Navy Department, the meddlesome Roosevelt overstepped his authority in conducting his Dewey intrigue but was proved correct on the merits.
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THE MCKINLEY ADMINISTRATION’S preparation for the coming naval war had been in progress throughout the president’s efforts to reach his goals without war. Mahan’s geostrategic analyses may have captured with clarity and eloquence the path to national greatness through the projection of sea power, but the country had been pursuing that path almost by instinct, seemingly part of an inexorable pursuit of its manifest destiny as an imperial dominion. By early 1896, as McKinley busied himself with his presidential campaign, the U.S. House was appropriating money for four new battleships and fifteen torpedo boats, the former “to carry the heaviest armor and most powerful ordnance . . . and to have the highest practicable speed for vessels of their class,” as a congressional report put it. When the appropriation measure reached the Senate, that chamber moved to keep the building program apace with new technological developments. It supplanted some torpedo boats with “torpedo boat catchers,” designed to destroy enemy torpedo boats that posed serious threats to battleships. The great maritime powers of the time—Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia—were rushing to build such vessels, and America’s decision to follow suit reflected the country’s global ambition.
In the meantime the U.S. naval fleet consisted of four battleships of the first class, two of the second class, and forty-eight other ships, including armored cruisers, torpedo boats, and other assorted vessels. “I have all Navy in good shape,” wrote Roosevelt in his diary, perhaps taking a bit more personal credit than was warranted. But the auguries were good. The new battleship Iowa passed its trials with an impressive top speed of seventeen knots, a shade more than the contract called for.
Long’s Navy Department moved early in 1898 to prepare its fleets for prospective battle. It shipped tons of ammunition to the Asiatic squadron, ordered all ships to remain fully coaled up, and consolidated most of its Atlantic fleet at Key West, Florida, and its Asiatic fleet at Hong Kong. It scoured the globe for ship-buying opportunities of the kind that had brought the two prospective Brazilian ships into the U.S. fold. It also ordered all combat ships to be painted black to obscure their profiles at sea and render them more elusive targets. In January and February, Washington naval officials ordered Dewey to retain men whose enlistments had expired and, in the event of war, to contain the
Spanish fleet in Asia and attack the Philippines. One of these orders was dispatched by Roosevelt, again when Long was out of town, but the instruction reflected naval policy that had been developed beforehand.
Closer to home, Long organized his Atlantic fleet into two flotillas. One was the North Atlantic squadron under the command of Commodore Sampson, with twenty-four ships of various sizes and missions. Sampson’s flagship would be the armored cruiser New York, and the squadron would operate out of Key West, ready for offensive actions against Cuba in event of war. The other was the smaller but highly maneuverable “Flying Squadron” of five powerful ships under Commodore Winfield Scott Schley: the armored cruiser Brooklyn (Schley’s flagship), the battleships Massachusetts and Texas, and the cruisers Columbia and Minneapolis. Operating out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, the Flying Squadron was to stand ready for quick action at any point along the Atlantic Coast to rebuff Spanish attacks upon the homeland—attacks the Spanish fleet almost assuredly lacked the range to pull off. Roosevelt thought this fleet was placed at Hampton Roads merely to assuage the “hysterical anxiety by the Northeast and its representatives in Congress.”
Sampson and Schley were as different in background and temperament as two men in the same navy could be. The ascetic-looking Sampson—tall, slender, stoop-shouldered, with deep-set eyes under thick black eyebrows—was a man of modesty, coolness, and deliberation. He once taught chemistry at Annapolis, and journalist Richard Harding Davis said the fifty-nine-year-old Sampson looked like a “calm and scholarly professor of mathematics.” He grew up poor in upstate New York, the son of a day laborer, and pursued whatever meager opportunities for education he could find until he managed to get to the Naval Academy, where he graduated first in his class. He saw combat at the Southern blockade during the Civil War and had a ship sink under him. Recently he had commanded the ultramodern battleship Iowa and served as president of the naval board of inquiry on the sinking of the Maine.
Schley, just four months older than Sampson, grew up in relative comfort near Frederick, Maryland, and embraced life with a fun-loving spirit and glad-handing openness that were alien to Sampson. At Annapolis he graduated near the bottom of his class, reflecting a tendency to place “pleasure and holidays in higher esteem than plodding study,” as he put it. Though he too served with distinction during the Civil War and had some high-profile assignments afterward, he had displayed what some naval officials considered bad judgment during an 1891 naval tour in which he allowed sailors to go ashore in Chile during a time of tension there. The result was a melee, with two sailors killed. In contrast to Sampson’s quiet ways, Schley displayed a talent for self-promotion and collecting friends and followers through his ready wit and unfailing charm.
While the navy seemed prepared for war, many harbored concerns about the army. “If the Army were one-tenth as ready as the Navy,” Roosevelt wrote a friend, “we would fix that whole business in six weeks.” Allowing for the usual Roosevelt hyperbole, there was some truth in his observation. The army’s commanding general, Nelson A. Miles, had been warning his civilian superiors for years about the service’s manpower and equipment deficiencies and the “unguarded condition of our coast.” In a November 1895 message to Congress, Miles reported that the “entire Gulf coast and all the great cities of the Atlantic coast northward to Philadelphia are entirely without modern guns.” The general believed the army’s enlisted strength should equate to at least one soldier for every 2,000 citizens. That meant a minimum strength of some 38,000 enlisted men, whereas the army numbered only about 25,000.
Miles, fifty-nine when war broke out, boasted a military career that spanned thirty-seven years. At the start of the Civil War, the twenty-two-year-old farm boy enlisted in the Union army and rose from private to brevet major general by war’s end. Wounded four times, he received the Medal of Honor for gallantry at Chancellorsville. After the war, he became a Regular Army colonel but rose again through his bold actions in the Indian wars of the Great Plains. Broad-faced and handsome, Miles stirred respect and affection from his troops and the press but often feuded with fellow officers. Roosevelt called him a “brave peacock.” Though he possessed courage in abundance, he wasn’t particularly endowed with vision or imagination.
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SUCH WAS THE state of the U.S. military in April 1898 when war began. By then McKinley was organizing his team and his White House working quarters for the coming challenge. An upstairs office next to the Cabinet Room was converted into a “War Room,” with fifteen telephone lines and twenty telegraph machines. The walls displayed maps used to trace troop and ship locations throughout the Caribbean and in Asia. Captain Benjamin Montgomery became the president’s telegrapher, and “an expert Western Union operator” named Smithers also was assigned to the room. Soon thousands of secret cables were passing through daily, including outgoing administration orders for warship and army unit movements and incoming reports on activity at sea and in the field. The president enhanced his command over the army, and demonstrated his bureaucratic cunning, by promoting Henry C. Corbin, fifty-six, to brigadier general and nominating him for adjutant general. In that capacity the hulking, brilliant Corbin became a kind of unofficial chief of staff to the president, exercising immense power and giving the president significant leverage over Alger and Miles.
“The President appears to be cheerful,” Cortelyou wrote in his diary, “and . . . notes with the greatest interest every matter having the slightest bearing on the pending situation.” On April 22 McKinley joined Secretary Long on the longest walk he had taken since becoming president and felt, he told the secretary, much refreshed from it. But as war pressures mounted, the president became more inclined to show displeasure to subordinates. When Corbin embarrassed him by congratulating two military officials on their promotions before McKinley had sent their names to the Senate, he gave the adjutant a serious dressing down—and didn’t seem the least bit remorseful about his uncharacteristic harshness. “It’s a good plan to call some people down now and then,” he told Hastings and Cortelyou. “We all need to be called down once in a while.”
More serious was the matter of the Cabinet. Cortelyou considered it “a good working Cabinet but in some respects not a strong one.” Some members lacked force and a grounding in “the mighty epochs of human history or . . . international affairs.” He considered William Day to be a conspicuous exception to that critique. Long felt McKinley had “made a mistake” in putting four men into his Cabinet who seemed too old or infirm for their jobs, “cripples,” as he called them—Sherman, Gary, Alger, and himself. Postmaster-General Gary resigned on April 21, the day war began. And Long reported to his diary that he himself had been feeling much more healthy and fit in recent weeks.
But the Sherman problem was becoming acute. Long wrote that the secretary of state had become “of little use in the Cabinet; now and then a flash of his old strength, but generally quiet, retiring, and silent.” He also was developing a tendency toward peevishness as his mental capacity declined. Hay in London heard that a “crisis was precipitated by a lapse of memory in a conversation with the Austrian Minister of so serious a nature that the President had to [act] without an instant’s delay.” On April 22 McKinley sat down with Sherman to ask, in his typically gentle manner, for his resignation. Two days later, at a Cabinet meeting, the secretary reluctantly announced his departure. The president prevailed upon Day to accept the position, but only through the duration of the war and with the proviso that he could name his first assistant. He appointed John Bassett Moore, a bearded, stocky law professor at Columbia University and former State Department official who was considered the country’s leading scholar of international law. The country embraced Day’s elevation. “Judge Day,” declared the Louisville Commercial, “has developed qualities that entitle him to a place among American statesmen of the first rank.” McKinley finally now had a strong team at State.
That left War Secretary Alger, who didn’t seem up to the war challenge. You
ng Charles Dawes speculated that he might be “endangering his position . . . by his actions and unwise talk.” Alger complained frequently that his “prerogatives are being encroached upon,” Dawes wrote in his journal, adding wryly that, fortunately for the war effort, there was some truth in his complaint. Long took a similar view. “At present it seems as if the Army were ready for nothing at all,” he wrote in his diary after an April 20 military meeting with the president. It was clear that Alger had not brought to the army the kind of war preparations that Long and Roosevelt had executed in the navy. But McKinley concluded that replacing Alger would be too disruptive at such a critical time.
On April 22 Congress authorized a call for volunteers and followed up four days later with legislation to increase the regular forces to 62,527 men for the war’s duration. Though the War Department insisted that a volunteer force of 60,000 would be sufficient, McKinley on April 23 called for 125,000 volunteers to serve for two years or until war’s end. (He later was to add another call for 75,000 men to cover all possible contingencies.) War-planning sessions yielded the decision that Cuba would be invaded, but not until after Sampson could destroy the Spanish Atlantic fleet—and probably also not until after the summer rainy season, when yellow fever and malaria would be rampant. Miles argued that this would give him the time required to drill and equip his troops in the United States. He told the president that he didn’t have enough ammunition “to last an army of 70,000 men in one hour’s serious battle.” McKinley accepted that argument with the idea that, in the meantime, the blockade would curtail Spanish efforts to further fortify the island, and the army would send a force of 5,000 men to Cuba’s southern coast to supply arms to rebel forces under General Máximo Gómez. On April 29 Miles ordered Brigadier General William R. Shafter, the Fifth Corps commander, to assemble the 5,000-man force at Tampa, Florida, and prepare for the Cuban expedition.
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