by H. W. Brands
The American protest simply provoked the Spanish government. Cuba had become a test of Spanish will, and resistance to American meddling the proof of Spanish pride. When McKinley floated an idea that the United States might purchase the island as a way to resolve the conflict, the Spanish prime minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, retorted publicly: “Spain is not a nation of merchants capable of selling its honor.” Some American war hawks asserted that what Spain wouldn’t sell, the United States might seize. But McKinley rejected that thought. Forcible annexation, he said, would be “criminal aggression.”20
With each passing month the president’s options narrowed. To do nothing would be to countenance the continued destruction of the island. To push the Spanish harder, as by recognizing the insurgents’ provisional government, would risk war. The assassination of Cánovas in August 1897 gave McKinley some breathing space as he awaited the formation of a new government, which turned out to be headed by Cánovas’s opponents, the Liberals. And in fact the Liberals announced a series of reforms, including home rule for Cuba under a Spanish protectorate. McKinley interpreted the measures as a positive sign, declaring hopefully in his December annual message that the Spanish government had embarked on a course of amelioration “from which recession with honor is impossible.” He added, however, in words chosen as much to appease American war hawks as to encourage the Spanish, that if a satisfactory settlement in Cuba was not soon reached, “the exigency of further and other action by the United States will remain to be taken.”21
Now it was the Spanish government that was trapped. Loyalists in Cuba rioted against the autonomy plan, reasonably fearing the loss of their political and economic power. To protect American nationals and their property on the island, the McKinley administration requested permission to dispatch an American naval vessel. The Spanish government, hoping to demonstrate that the Americans had nothing to fear, approved the request. On January 25, 1898, the Maine steamed into Havana harbor and dropped anchor.
The momentary calm that followed was shattered by two explosions. The first was diplomatic: the publication of a confidential letter purloined by the Cuban junta from the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme. In the letter Dupuy de Lôme sneered at McKinley as “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd, besides being a would-be politician who tries to leave a door open behind himself while keeping on good terms with the jingoes of his party.” The junta handed the letter to Pulitzer’s Journal, which printed a facsimile under the banner headline “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”22
A week later a second explosion occurred, in Havana harbor. On the evening of February 15 a tremendous ball of fire engulfed the Maine, killing 266 and wounding many more. The American press seized at once on Spanish perfidy as the cause, ignoring the captain of the Maine, who judged it an accident. McKinley called for an investigation, uncertain what it would yield beyond time to consider his next move. Meanwhile, to placate the growing war party in Congress, he requested an appropriation of $50 million for national defense. Congress approved the measure almost at once. The war hawks were pleased; the Spanish were awed. “To appropriate fifty millions out of money in the Treasury, without borrowing a cent, demonstrates wealth and power,” McKinley’s minister to Spain wrote home. “The Ministry and press are simply stunned.”
The Maine report reached the president in late March. The examiners concluded that an external explosion, probably a mine, had sunk the ship. The board wouldn’t say who planted the mine, but the American press and public weren’t so diffident. “Nine out of ten American citizens doubtless believe that the explosion which destroyed the Maine was the result of the cowardly Spanish conspiracy,” the Cleveland Leader asserted, probably accurately. Hearst’s World, having got out front of the story by declaring, “Remember the Maine and to Hell with Spain!” considered its judgment confirmed.23
IT WAS WHILE the explosion was being investigated that Roosevelt seized control of the Navy Department. He had campaigned hard for McKinley in 1896 and been rewarded with the second slot at the Navy Department. His chief was John Long, whose uncertain health often kept him out of the office. During one such absence, on a Friday afternoon in February 1898, Roosevelt exploited his opportunity as acting secretary to prepare the navy for the war with Spain he hoped to provoke. He dashed off orders on scraps of paper, handing them to clerks who coded and cabled them to American commanders around the globe. He repositioned the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. He requisitioned coal and ammunition. He placed docked ships on alert to get up steam at the first hint of war. And he sent a portentous cable to George Dewey, the commander of America’s Asiatic squadron:
SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL. ORDER THE SQUADRON EXCEPT MONOCACY TO HONGKONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OFDECLARATION OF WAR WITH SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, AND THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.24
Roosevelt’s cable became operative when the findings of the Maine commission forced McKinley’s hand. The war hawks in Congress screamed louder than ever. “By God!” one apoplectic senator thundered on a visit to the State Department. “Don’t your president know where the war-declaring power is lodged? Well, tell him, by God, that if he don’t do something Congress will exercise the power and declare war in spite of him! He’ll get run over and the party with him!” Roosevelt attended the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington and waved his fist in the face of Mark Hanna. “We’ll have this war for the freedom of Cuba in spite of the timidity of the commercial interests!” he vowed.25
Yet McKinley still hesitated. He sent a note to Spain demanding an end to hostilities in Cuba, a definitive reversal of reconcentration, relief for the Cuban people, and American arbitration toward full independence. When the Spanish government balked, McKinley’s time ran out. “If the President of the United States wants two days, or if he wants two hours, to continue negotiations with the butchers of Spain, we are not ready to give him one moment longer for that purpose,” Democratic congressman Joseph Bailey of Texas warned. One of the lingering congressional holdouts asked Tom Reed to dissuade the war hawks. “Dissuade them!” Reed told a reporter. “He might as well ask me to stand out in the middle of Kansas and dissuade a cyclone.”26
McKinley prepared a war message, convinced he had no choice. Not even an eleventh-hour suspension of hostilities, announced by Spain in the second week of April, could avert the inevitable. “It comes too late,” Republican senator Stephen Elkins of West Virginia, one of the last doves, declared. “Had it come a few days ago, I think we could have averted war.” But no longer.27
Yet the war message was hardly a clarion of righteous wrath. In fact, McKinley didn’t even ask for a war declaration. He simply requested authority to secure an end to hostilities in Cuba, to establish a stable government there, and to “use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.”28
The war hawks had expected more, and they made their disappointment plain. “It is the weakest and most inconclusive speech sent out by any president,” Bailey of Texas asserted. Senate Republican Joseph Foraker of Ohio told a reporter, “I have no patience with the message, and you may say so.” Democrat Joseph Rawlins of Utah called the message “weak, impotent, imbecile, and disgraceful.”
But it did the job. Congress granted the president the authority he requested, adding demands for Spanish withdrawal and recognition of Cuban independence. Senator Henry Teller of Colorado appended a clause forswearing annexation by the United States, and the war hawks had no choice but to accept it. Spain broke diplomatic ties with the United States and, after American ships began blockading Cuba, declared war. Congress reciprocated, backdating its war declaration to the day Spain cut ties.29
THE ONSET OF WAR inspired Roosevelt to one of the most impetuous and least responsible acts of his thirty-nine years of life. He abruptly resigned his post at the Navy Department, where he might have h
ad significant influence on the outcome of the war he had helped precipitate, to join a regiment of volunteers, in which he would have next to none. Roosevelt’s friends and allies, including his political sponsor, Henry Cabot Lodge, urged him to remain in Washington. His family noted that his wife, Edith, was incompletely recovered from complications attending the birth of their fifth child. Who would tend the children if he left home? How would she and they cope if he were killed? But Roosevelt closed his ears, his mind, and his heart to all influences save the martial. “I suppose, at bottom, I was merely following my instinct instead of my reason,” he acknowledged afterward. “It was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to answer that call.”30
America mustered for the Spanish war the way it had mustered for all of its wars till then. To the small core of the regular army it added a much larger force of volunteers raised in the states and territories and led by a combination of career and newly commissioned officers. Roosevelt’s regiment was peculiar but not unique. When Congress authorized the raising of special cavalry units from the West consisting of cowboys, Indians, hunters, and frontier scouts, Roosevelt lobbied friends at the War Department for a commission with one such regiment. The secretary of war, Russell Alger, granted Roosevelt’s request and more, offering him command of the regiment. Roosevelt, for once in his life, judged himself inadequate to a task, and he demurred on grounds of utter lack of pertinent experience. He suggested Leonard Wood for command, with himself as second. Alger accepted.
Between the announcement and the muster, the War Department discovered funds to increase the regiment from 780 saddles to 1,000. Consequently, in addition to the Westerners the First Volunteer Cavalry included two hundred soldiers who learned their horse craft not on the plains of Colorado or the deserts of Arizona but on the polo fields of Long Island and the steeplechase courses of Newport. “You would be amused to see three Knickerbocker club men cooking and washing dishes for one of the New Mexico companies,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge from camp at San Antonio. Roosevelt, an awkward child whose athletic endeavors had been limited by myopia and characterized by enthusiasm rather than grace, gushed over the athletes who joined the regiment. One was “perhaps the best quarterback who played on a Harvard eleven,” he wrote; another was a former national tennis champion. A Yale high jumper and the captain of the Columbia crew team were almost as impressive. Yet the cowboys, whom Roosevelt revered even more than he did the athletes, were the heart and soul of the outfit. “They were a splendid set of men, these southwesterners,” he wrote afterward: “tall and sinewy, with resolute, weather-beaten faces, and eyes that looked a man straight in the face without flinching.”31
Long before Roosevelt’s Rough Riders—as an editorial alliteralist labeled them—shipped out for Cuba, Roosevelt landed the first blow against Spain, albeit vicariously. On May 1 George Dewey and the American Asiatic squadron, following Roosevelt’s order from the Navy Department, steamed into Manila Bay and in a six-hour battle sank three Spanish ships and burned seven others. Hundreds of Spanish seamen were killed or wounded. Dewey lost no ships, and only seven of his men were wounded, none seriously.
The news required several days to reach America, as Dewey had cut the submarine cable on the way in, but when it did arrive it made Dewey a national hero and the envy of all those, like Roosevelt, who dreamed of covering themselves in comparable glory. Roosevelt’s special worry was that the Spanish would surrender before he bloodied his lance. “Do not make peace until we get Porto Rico,” he urged Lodge, presumptively exploiting a loophole in the Teller amendment, which said nothing about Spain’s other Caribbean colony. When it became apparent that the War Department had raised far more troops than it could transport to Cuba, Roosevelt grew nearly frantic. He hustled his men from San Antonio to Tampa, the port of embarkation for the invasion across the Florida Strait, and he fought, almost physically, for a place for his regiment aboard one of the transports. He couldn’t, however, find space for most of their horses, and the Rough Riders prepared to become weary walkers.32
They landed at Daiquirí, on Cuba’s south coast, not far from Santiago. The landing was uncontested but nearly disastrous, as almost none of those involved had any experience putting troops ashore on an open beach. Massive confusion resulted in the drowning of many horses and mules but, miraculously, only two men, troopers of the African American Tenth Cavalry.
Santiago was the objective of the invasion, chosen because the city’s harbor protected the Spanish Cuban fleet, which American strategists hoped to drive out to sea, where American warships waited. Protecting Santiago were San Juan Hill and the smaller Kettle Hill, so called by the American troops for the large iron vessel, used for boiling sugar cane, they found on top. The Americans assaulted the heights on July 1. Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill in the face of daunting fire from the Spanish troops’ German Mauser rifles, which outclassed the Civil War–era Springfield rifles most of the Americans carried. “The Mauser bullets drove in sheets through the trees and the tall jungle grass, making a peculiar whirring or rustling sound,” Roosevelt wrote. “Some of the bullets seemed to pop in the air, so that we thought they were explosive; and, indeed, many of those which were coated with brass did explode, in the sense that the brass coat was ripped off, making a thin plate of hard metal with a jagged edge, which inflicted a ghastly wound.”33
The Rough Riders took Kettle Hill before joining other American units in the assault on San Juan Hill. The Spanish fought bravely but were badly outnumbered and forced to retreat, leaving the Americans in command of the heights before Santiago, from which their guns could bombard the city and the ships in the harbor. Admiral Pascual Cervera there upon decided to hazard the open sea. His fleet steamed out into the Caribbean, only to be crushed by the American ships there. The war might have ended at this point had Lodge and others in Washington not heeded Roosevelt’s advice that Puerto Rico must be captured first. Seizing the second island required modest effort and a few more weeks, but on August 12 Spain’s representatives in Washington capitulated.
JOHN HAY CALLED IT ironically a “splendid little war,” yet that was before the full cost of the conflict became evident. The American war effort wasn’t egregiously inefficient by historical military standards, but because the battles went so well, the losses beyond the battlefield loomed large by comparison. American soldiers’ experience of the tropics had been limited to the Mexican War, and most of what had been learned at Vera Cruz had been forgotten in the intervening fifty years. Hygiene was abysmal in some of the American camps, reflecting the still rudimentary state of epidemiological knowledge. Malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, and dysentery claimed about twenty-five hundred lives, or ten times the number lost in battle. Refrigerated railcars and ships brought fresh beef almost to the front, but unscrupulous jobbers passed tainted meat—beef injected with chemicals to mask its putridity—off on the troops. The soldiers’ complaints eventually produced a public outcry and an investigation of the “embalmed beef” scandal. The commissary general of the army was court-martialed and convicted, although for insulting a fellow officer—Nelson Miles—rather than for poisoning the rank and file.
Theodore Roosevelt led a mutiny against the hazardous conditions in which his men were compelled to live in Cuba. Promoted to colonel of the regiment after Leonard Wood was reassigned, Roosevelt fought as hard against the War Department to obtain proper provisions, clothing, and shelter for his men as he had fought against the Spanish to gain the San Juan Heights. He jumped the chain of command to write Lodge in Washington imploring that the regiment be removed from Cuba as soon as possible, now that the fighting was over, lest more take ill and die. “It is simply infamous to keep us here during the sickly months that are now on and which will last until October,” he told Lodge. “If there was need of our holding a town agai
nst any foe, I would care not one jot more for yellow fever than for Spanish bullets and would not mind sacrificing the lives of my entire command. But to sacrifice them pointlessly from mere stupidity and inefficiency is cruel.” Roosevelt gathered signatures of division and brigade commanders in Cuba on a round-robin letter to the commanding general in Cuba, William Shafter, warning that the army faced destruction from disease. “The army must be moved at once, or perish,” Roosevelt and the others wrote. In a separate letter Roosevelt suggested Maine as a suitable landing spot; the men might recuperate there in quarantine till the danger of transmission to the American population passed.34
Roosevelt’s outspokenness didn’t endear him to the careerists at the War Department, who vetoed his nomination for a Medal of Honor. (It was awarded posthumously a century later.) But unlike some of the other signers, Roosevelt didn’t intend to remain in the army, and anyway he had nearly all the rewards he could want. From the moment the Rough Riders mustered at San Antonio, reporters followed them like boys behind a circus parade. Richard Harding Davis took a special shine to Roosevelt, featuring him in numerous dispatches home. “Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that you would like to cheer,” Davis wrote of the fight for San Juan Hill. “He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot handkerchief, à la Havelock, which, as he advanced, floated out straight behind his head like a guidon.” Not to be outdone, Roosevelt told his own story in a memoir first serialized in Scribner’s and then published in book form, bound in khaki, as The Rough Riders. The book swelled to bursting with Roosevelt’s pride in himself and his men. “Is it any wonder I loved my regiment?” he asked after recounting one gallant deed of many. Reviewers poked fun at Roosevelt’s egotism. Rumor claimed that the publisher had run out of the uppercase letter I in setting the type. Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley characterized the book as “Th’ Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows.” Dooley didn’t begrudge Roosevelt his turn in the limelight. “If Tiddy done it all he ought to say so an’ relieve th’ suspinse.” But he suggested a new title: “Alone in Cubia.”35
