The Crowded Hour
Page 5
Weyler’s strategy was brutal. And it worked. Within a few months he had his guerrillas and volunteers acting as “beaters in,” pushing the rebels into small sections of the country before attacking them with his regular troops. He made immense amounts of money on the side off confiscated property, but also kept his lieutenants’ loyalty by lining their pockets, too. Concentrating most of his cruelty and firepower in the west, he managed to defeat the rebel generals who made forays past the trochas, killing one of the most respected and charismatic rebel leaders, Antonio Maceo, in the process. Though Weyler worked his men ferociously, he fed them well, and managed to keep them motivated. By early 1897, after fifteen months of no-quarter campaigning, he had beaten the rebels back—but the war remained at a standstill. The Spanish controlled large swaths of the west, and all the cities. But the rebels ruled everything else. Neither could move into the other’s domain, and so they remained, hacking away at each other, day by day, while the civilians, caught between them, died by the cartload. The rebels were fighting a strategy of attrition; the Spanish, of atrocity. Weyler was unmoved by his critics. “This is war,” he liked to reply.17
Weyler’s campaign may have pushed back against the rebels, but it supercharged the American public’s passion for Cuban independence. Within a few months of his reconcentration order, “Butcher” Weyler, as the yellow press nicknamed him, was perhaps the most infamous man in America. Descriptions of suffering reconcentrados filled page after page of American newsprint, as reporters in Cuba found new opportunities in purple prose. Stephen Bonsal, one of the better correspondents assigned to the Cuba beat, and one of the few to venture outside the Havana city limits, wrote: “I saw again the Eden of the New World as it now is—a mass of smoking ruins, a heap of ashes moistened with blood, and a gray, gaunt picture of hopeless despair.” Junta propagandists touring the United States would open and close their stump speeches with tales of emaciated mothers trying to nurse dying infants and wide-eyed girls in search of a morsel to eat shot down while sneaking past the guards. Mobs burned Weyler in effigy. Far from bringing the war to an end, he hastened Spain’s defeat by bringing the Americans closer to intervention.18
• • •
The American press played a particularly important, and not always admirable, role in pushing the public toward intervention in the Cuban conflict. At a time when literacy rates and the middle class were growing, the market for news was endless—by 1900 there were 2,225 daily and weekly newspapers in America. New York residents had eight morning papers to choose from, and another seven every evening.19
The facts of the rebellion were bad enough to make for compelling copy. But readers had an insatiable demand for the next tale of blood and injustice at the hands of Spain, and publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were happy to give it to them—the more sensational, the better. And nothing in the late 1890s was more sensational than Cuba.
To feed that demand, a small army of reporters camped out in Key West, across the Straits of Florida from Havana. Ostensibly collecting information from American filibusterers and Cuban rebels moving surreptitiously between the island and the American mainland, they often simply rehashed rumors or made up stories completely, fed by sources acting for the Junta. These reporters, members of the reviled but widely read yellow press, told of ravenous Spanish brutes, moving village by village, burning homes, raping girls, executing boys, and throwing babies into the fire. Not content to let the war play out, they recounted fictional battles; when news was slow, they reported that, say, a Cuban rebel general had been killed—or, depending on their mood, that he had survived, and then overcome enormous odds to destroy a Spanish column. One of the few reporters who actually went to Cuba to get the story, George Bronson Rea of the New York Herald, wrote a lengthy book, Facts and Fakes About Cuba, debunking such Key West “dispatches,” even singling out reporters and their articles for attack. “The great factories for ‘war news,’ situated in Florida,” he wrote, “rivaled Baron Munchausen in the fertility and absurdity of their inventions.”20
But the yellow press was not the only source of reporting in American papers. Several reporters, including Bonsal and Rea, made extensive trips across Cuba, meeting with rebel leaders and seeing the destruction firsthand. Their work appeared in daily newspapers, as well as in longer essays for magazines like Scribner’s and Harper’s. These reports, more so than the flotsam of the yellow press, were the real drivers in the news media pushing the American public toward intervention.
One of the most important such trips was made by Richard Harding Davis, at thirty-two years old already the most famous correspondent of his time. He had made his name as a crime reporter for the New York Sun, a beat that led him to cross paths with Theodore Roosevelt, then the chairman of the city’s police board. Later, as a freelance journalist, he covered topics from the coronation of Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, in Moscow to the Harvard-Princeton football game, an assignment for which the news baron William Randolph Hearst paid him $500—about $12,000 in 2018 dollars. It was worth the cost: Hearst sold every newspaper he printed the next day.21
Davis stood six feet tall, with a square jaw and a dimpled chin, a full head of dark hair that he wore parted in the middle, and the body of an aging quarterback (he had played football for a year at Lehigh College, in Pennsylvania). Even before the days of mass photography, everyone in America knew his face, because the artist Charles Dana Gibson had used him as the model for the male counterpart of the Gibson Girl. Like her, Davis—or, rather, the Gibson Man—appeared in magazines and advertisements, on book covers and billboards across the country. Some credit the ubiquity of the clean-shaven Davis/Gibson Man image with the turn-of-the-century disappearance of beards in respectable society.22
In December 1896, Hearst paid Davis and the illustrator Frederic Remington $3,000 each (over $90,000 in 2018) to spend a month crisscrossing Cuba and reporting along the way. They arrived in early January, but after a week Remington decided to turn back. He had signed up for the trip expecting to confront death while still wading ashore on some desolate beach on a moonless night; instead, they had been greeted in Havana by General Weyler himself, and given a pass—and an escort—to travel the island. Remington telegraphed Hearst to tell him that there was no war, and there wasn’t going to be one. “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return,” he wrote. The publisher allegedly, infamously, replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” In fact, it’s unlikely Hearst wrote anything of the kind. There is no actual record of the telegram, and the only mention came secondhand, in a memoir published by the correspondent James Creelman. Hearst himself denied it. Whatever his reply, Remington ignored him, and left Cuba.23
Davis pressed on. Unlike Remington, he was convinced that there was fighting to be seen. Whether there was any truth to the stories about Spanish crimes was a different matter, and one he would set out, with Weyler’s surprise blessing, to explore.24
At first, what Davis saw confirmed his skepticism. “I find myself growing to be the opposite of the ‘alarmist,’ ” he wrote to his mother. “They show me the pueblo huddled together around the fortified towns living in palm huts, but I know that they have always lived in palm huts; the yellow kid reporters don’t know that or consider it, but send off word that the conditions of the people is terrible that they have only leaves to cover them.”25
But slowly, his impression of the war began to change. Over the next two weeks, Davis’s travels took him across the island, nearly to Santiago on the southeastern coast. “Tonight I reached here after a six hours ride through blazing fields of sugar cane,” he wrote on January 16, after traveling along the northern coast of Cuba, from Matanzas to Cárdenas. “I always imagined that houses were destroyed during a war because they got in the way of cannonballs or they were burned because the might offer shelter to the enemy, but here they are destroyed with the purpose of makin
g the war horrible and hurrying up the end.” The countryside was indeed beautiful, he wrote—“nothing out of the imagination can approach it in its great waterfalls and mossy rocks and grand plains and forests of white pillars with plumes waving above them.” Though still in the Northern Hemisphere, he could see the constellation of the Southern Cross, hanging low over the sky, a seeming promise from God to watch over the island. And perhaps the Lord would in fact protect the island, Davis concluded, but not its inhabitants. “Only man is vile here.”26
Davis ventured into seven fortified towns. There he saw the scenes he had long doubted, of suffering and disease and death on a massive scale. One of Davis’s earliest achievements had been his coverage of the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in which a dam broke and the resulting wall of water killed more than 2,200 people. In that reporting, he focused on the human side of the destruction, the thousands of people left homeless and, soon, starving. But the misery he saw in Pennsylvania, he said, was nothing compared to what he found in Cuba: “Babies with the skin drawn so tightly over their little bodies that the bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a glove,” he wrote. And this was during the dry season. “In April and May the rains will come, and the fever will thrive and spread, and cholera, yellow fever and small-pox will turn Cuba into one huge plague spot.” Whatever skepticism Davis possessed had vanished by the time he reached Cienfuegos, on the southern coast. “There is no doubt that the process going on here is one of extermination and ruin,” he wrote to his mother. “Wherever you look you see great heavy columns of smoke rising into the beautiful sky.”27
After a few more weeks crisscrossing Cuba, Davis returned to Havana and sailed home. On board, he met a young woman named Clemencia Arango, who soon revealed that her brother ran guns for the insurgents. She was Davis’s type, a Latina Gibson girl—upper-class, well-mannered, well-educated, and dressed as if she were headed to dinner at Delmonico’s. She told him that before she boarded, a detail of Spanish police officers pulled her aside into an inspection house and had her strip-searched. She was searched again on board, as the ship was preparing to leave.28
When Davis arrived in Tampa, he sent a dispatch to Hearst, who put it on the front of the Journal, with an illustration by Remington. The drawing showed a naked Arango, her hair in a chignon, surrounded by leering Spanish officers. The headline read “Spaniards Search Women on American Steamers.” When he saw it, Davis shot back to Hearst that he had never said Arango was searched by men, that in fact he knew she’d been searched by women. But it was too late—a reporter from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World found Arango in Tampa and conducted his own interview. The resulting exposé concluded that “Mr. Davis and Mr. Remington should be well quarantined before they are allowed to mingle again with reputable newspaper men.” Davis was mortified, and vowed never to write for a Hearst paper again. Hearst, watching a headline war break out and his sales numbers rise, probably didn’t care.29
• • •
Davis came back from his month in Cuba a changed man. “Personally it was the most beneficial trip I ever took—I feel five years older and it gave many things new values,” he wrote his brother, Charles. He swung through Philadelphia and New York, and then headed to England to take up a roving correspondent job for The Times of London. And in his spare hours, he compiled a book, Cuba in War Time, which was published in the late spring of 1897. The dispatches collected in the book present a gripping, detailed portrait of a country in turmoil. The book is, moreover, an account of how Davis, an isolationist who had once looked at intervention in Cuba as a looming quagmire, became one of its most ardent advocates. When he arrived in the country, he wrote, “I refused for weeks to listen to tales of butcheries, because I did not believe in them and because there seemed to be no way of verifying them.”30
But the more he saw and the more trusted sources he encountered, the more he changed his mind. He became, upon return, a fiercely pro-war hawk, and in the conclusion of his bestselling book, he framed the case for American intervention in the rebellion in a way that would not only persuade readers on Cuba, but in decades to come would win over the public to the cause of using American power to humanitarian ends:
Before I went to Cuba I was as much opposed to our interfering there as any other person equally ignorant concerning the situation could be, but since I have seen for myself I feel ashamed that we should have stood so long idle. We have been too considerate, too fearful that as a younger nation, we should appear to disregard the laws laid down by older nations. We have tolerated what no European power would have tolerated; we have been patient with men who have put back the hand of time for centuries, who lie to our representatives daily, who butcher innocent people, who gamble with the lives of their own soldiers in order to gain a few more stars and an extra stripe, who send American property to the air in flames and murder American prisoners.31
Davis was not the only reporter making this case. But he was the only one with the reach and the respect to draw in readers to his—and Cuba’s—side. “Why should we not go a step farther and a step higher, and interfere in the name of humanity?” he wrote in Cuba in War Time. “Not because we are Americans, but because we are human beings.32
• • •
By early 1898, reporting like Davis’s had convinced large swaths of the American public, and its leaders, that their country had to intervene to stop the fighting in Cuba. For Theodore Roosevelt and his circle, Cuba represented a perfect test, and opportunity, for America as an emergent world power—intervention would be “as righteous as it would be advantageous,” Roosevelt wrote. His long talks with his new best friend, Leonard Wood, were similar to what people were saying across the country, over dinner tables, in debating societies, in bars, and in the halls of Congress. Politicians and ministers seemed to compete for the most excessive declaration of concern. “For more than three hundred years,” wrote John James Ingalls, a former senator from Kansas, “a country nearly as large as England, with all the material conditions of opulent civilization, has been made a charnel house. Possessing all the elements of Eden, it has been turned into a hell.”33
Added to the nation’s humanitarian concerns was a long list of Spanish slights against America’s people and reputation, going back to the 1873 execution of the crew of the Virginius, a filibuster carrying insurgents and supplies that the Spanish captured on its way to Cuba. Most recently, in February 1898, a scandalous memo from the Spanish consul in Washington, Enrique Depuy de Lôme, to the Foreign Ministry in Madrid had been intercepted by pro-Cuban activists and promptly published in Hearst’s New York Journal. De Lôme had called McKinley a “weak,” “low” president, and doubted whether the administration was smart and stalwart enough to win concessions from Spain. “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History,” the Journal headline had read. De Lôme was dismissed, but the scandal went down on the pro-interventionists’ ledger.34
Others were interested less in where or why a war took place than simply that one did, soon. Labor and social unrest were simmering in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893 (and a second, smaller panic a few years later); elites feared not just unions, but populists, anarchists, and socialists, and not without reason. The candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, a populist Democrat, stoked concern among the urban middle and upper classes that the country was riven with class divisions and ripe for revolt. A war would unite the country, many believed, demonstrating the weakness of class warfare. In a similar vein, a war, by bringing together soldiers from Northern and Southern states, would demonstrate that the Civil War was over, and that sectional divisions had healed. Still others, echoing Roosevelt, wanted war as a cure, said Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, for “the intense materialism of the time” that “is palsying manhood, poisoning justice, driving faith from its throne.” William James, the Harvard psychology and philosophy professor (and brother of the novelist and Roosevelt critic Henry James), believed that war was a “great preserver of our ide
als of hardihood.”35
A war would also announce to the world that the United States had arrived as a global power. Until the 1890s, much of Europe had looked at America as a hypertrophied child, with astounding economic growth and resources, but without the maturity to play a role in world affairs. They pointed to a dramatic, planned shrinkage of the United States Army after the Civil War as exhibit A. Some Europeans wrote paeans to America’s natural beauty, and even some to its rough-and-tumble individualistic culture. But no one considered it a great power on the level of Britain or France or Germany, or even a fading empire like Spain’s or the Ottoman Empire. For a time in the early 1890s, several European countries actually closed their embassies in Washington, as cost-cutting measures. Going to war would grab their attention, and victory over Spain would put Europe back on its heels.36
But if the reasons for action on Cuba were overwhelming, at first there was less agreement over what exactly was to be done. Some, like Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois, wanted to invade and take possession of Cuba outright, the fulfillment of an even greater manifest destiny than America had been pursuing up to that point: “It is time some one woke up and realized the necessity of annexing some property. We want all this northern hemisphere.” But outright annexationists were the minority. White Southerners—and most white Northerners—recoiled at the idea of adding several hundred thousand free black people to the citizenry. The business community feared that an American conquest of Cuba could be used to justify larger armies and state bureaucracies. And anti-imperialists worried that expansion would alter America’s identity as a beacon for individual freedom and self-government.37
For decades, these competing cultural and intellectual strands—a minority in favor of continued expansion, with a majority opposed—had prevented America from venturing abroad. But the particulars of the Cuban crisis—starvation and death on a massive scale, combined with threats to American investments and the opportunity to profitably control the island’s future, without having to conquer it outright—created a new and lasting justification for an activist American foreign policy. People referred to it in different ways, but most grouped it under the term “humanitarianism.” It spoke to America’s best ideas about itself; it tabled, for now, the difficult questions of outright territorial conquest; and it left open the possibility of a subtler but more pervasive form of empire. “The United States does not seek to control Cuba,” wrote an editorialist for Leslie’s Weekly. “It stands simply for the liberty of an oppressed people.” Invading Cuba would be nothing short of a victory for “civilization over barbarism,” declared Senator Ingalls of Kansas. “We are ministrars of that eternal justice for which every place should be a temple. We draw the sword to avenge the wrongs of the helpless. Our cannon speak for those who are voiceless. . . . Our victory will be the triumph of the nineteenth century over the Middle Ages; of democracy over absolutism; of self-government over tyranny; of faith over bigotry.”38