The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (121 page)

R
OOSEVELT MIGHT HAVE REACTED
more gratefully to the Administration’s sudden decision to make a show of naval force had
his domestic worries not intensified in the last days of January. Edith was running a constant fever, and could not sleep for the pangs of sciatica; Ted’s strange nervous condition was worse, and Kermit, too, was sick.
¹⁵
The presence of a squalling two-month-old infant in the house was an added distraction. On top of all this, Roosevelt now discovered that he had personal tax problems in New York. Last summer he had filed an affidavit stating that he was a resident of Manhattan, in order to avoid a heavy assessment in Oyster Bay; in New York, however, his assessment turned out to be even heavier, making him wish he could cancel the original affidavit.
¹⁶
Family physicians and accountants were pressed into service, while the Assistant Secretary waited restlessly for further news from Havana. On the last day of the month Henry Cabot Lodge made an eerie prediction: “There may be an explosion any day in Cuba which would settle many things.”
¹⁷

For a week nothing happened, then, on 9 February, William Randolph Hearst’s sensational
New York Journal
published on its front page the text of Minister de Lôme’s undelivered letter, under the banner headline, “
WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY
.” The paper announced that an agent of the Cuban
insurrectos
had intercepted the letter on the eve of its delivery and sent it to another agent in New York, who in turn gave it to the
Journal
for publication.
¹⁸
All possible doubt as to the document’s authenticity was avoided by printing it in facsimile.

While ordinary Americans fumed over de Lôme’s characterization of their President, students of foreign policy boggled at the implications of his concluding paragraph:

In other words, the Spanish Government appeared to be totally cynical in its relations with the United States, and its promises to help secure some sort of autonomous government in Cuba.

To add insult to injury, Minister de Lôme (who at once admitted that he had indeed written the letter) cabled his resignation to Madrid before the State Department had a chance to demand that he be recalled. Thus the United States had to be content with an inadequate Spanish apology, referring, in sarcastic tones, to mail-theft and sensation-mongering newspapers.
²⁰

That night a highly excited Theodore Roosevelt accosted Mark Hanna and two other Senators at a reception. In his haste to urge war upon them, he did not notice that Hanna was accompanied by Henriette Adler, a young Frenchwoman recently arrived from Paris. Roosevelt launched into a typical fist-smacking harangue, and Mlle. Adler found herself wedged between him and the wall. She tried to follow what he was saying, but was distracted by his flailing right arm, which swept nearer and nearer her bodice. Eventually his elbow ripped off a silken rose and some gauze, whereupon she exclaimed
“Mon Dieu.”
Roosevelt, wheeling, made profuse
pardons
. To her alarm, he continued to pour war rhetoric upon her in French, until Nannie Lodge tactfully appeared with a safety pin. The Senators screened Mlle. Adler off, while Roosevelt switched back to English.

It was “a bully idea,” he proclaimed, to send the
Maine
to Havana. Senator Hanna said nothing, but stood listening with his jowls sunk on his white tie. Mlle. Adler, decent again, ventured a suggestion that the United States should consider the opinion of other European powers before attempting to crowd Spain out. France and Germany were bound to object to any denial of imperial rights in the New World; she had heard a statement to this effect herself, in Paris only two weeks before.

The Assistant Secretary waved France’s scruples aside as unimportant and irrelevant. “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America before I’m sixty!” Hanna stared at him. “You’re crazy, Roosevelt! What’s wrong with Canada?”

Later, in the carriage back home, Mrs. Hanna tried to explain to the dazed Mlle. Adler that Roosevelt, despite his abnormal vehemence, was more “amusing” than violent. But the Senator,
chewing on his cigar, thanked God Roosevelt had not been appointed Assistant Secretary of State. “We’d be fighting half the world,” he growled.
²¹

I
NCENDIARY TALK WAS COMMON
in the days following the
Maine’s
arrival in Havana Harbor, from Henry Cabot Lodge’s threatened “explosion” to Mark Hanna’s “waving a match in an oil-well for fun,”
²²
and the more personal misgivings of Mrs. Richard Wainwright, wife of the cruiser’s executive officer: “You might as well send a lighted candle on a visit to an open cask of gunpowder.”
²³
But as mid-February approached, and life in the Cuban capital drowsed on as normal, even Consul-General Lee began to relax.

On the evening of the fifteenth, tourists aboard the liner
City of Washington
, just arrived in Havana Harbor, leaned on the railings and admired the
Maine’s
sleek white beauty four hundred yards away. The air was hot and motionless, and the harbor scarcely heaved. Its stillness was such that they could hear accordion music coming across the water. Tropic dark came quickly, and the tourists went below to dinner. About two hours later another strand of music sounded from the
Maine:
the sound of a bugler blowing taps. Its melancholy beauty caused Captain Sigsbee, who was writing in his cabin, to lay down his pen and listen until the last echoes died away. He looked at his watch. The time was exactly
9:40 P.M.
²⁴

A
BOUT FOUR HOURS LATER
Secretary Long was wakened in his Washington home and handed a telegram. The first sentence alone was enough to banish all further thought of sleep: “
MAINE BLOWN UP IN HAVANA HARBOR AT NINE-FORTY TONIGHT AND DESTROYED
.” Long’s eye, running on across the sheet, leaped from phrase to incredible phrase: “
MANY WOUNDED … DOUBTLESS MORE KILLED OR DROWNED … NO ONE HAS CLOTHING OTHER THAN THAT UPON HIM … PUBLIC OPINION SHOULD BE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER REPORT
.” The telegram was signed “
SIGSBEE
.”
²⁵

Within minutes Long telephoned the White House and ordered a naval attaché to rouse the President. It was not yet two in the morning, and McKinley absorbed the Secretary’s news with some difficulty. After hanging up he paced back and forth in front of the bewildered attaché, mumbling slowly to himself, “The
Maine
blown up! The
Maine
blown up!”
²⁶

Meanwhile, the telegraph wires were still humming, shocking the State Department, Navy Department, and New York newspaper offices into action. In little more than an hour Joseph Pulitzer’s
World
had broadcast the first report of the disaster under a four-column headline. Not to be outdone, James Gordon Bennett spread the story across six columns of the
Herald
, and William Randolph Hearst gave it the entire front page of the
Journal
. “This means war,” he told his night editors.
²⁷
By dawn the news, complete with a transcript of Captain Sigsbee’s report, was thumping onto front porches all over the country, and stimulating newsboys to new heights of shrillness. No doubt some of them repeated McKinley’s own phrase, “The
Maine
blown up!” In the face of such a catastrophe, Presidents and paupers spoke with but one voice.

D
AWN IN
C
UBA
disclosed that the
Maine
was indeed a total wreck. The explosion, which took place somewhere in the forecastle, had jackknifed the keel up to the level of the bridge, killing 254 men instantly. A further 8 were so badly crushed and burned that they died one by one in hospitals ashore, bringing the death toll to 262. What was left of the ship lay wedged in the mud of Havana Harbor, with only a few blackened parts of the superstructure showing above water.
²⁸

As to the cause of the explosion, Spanish authorities were apparently no wiser than the Americans. Until the Navy Department’s court of inquiry reached Cuba and made its report, there could be no official reaction on either side, beyond expressions of sincere sympathy in Havana. The Governor-General, Ramón Blanco y Erenas, had been seen crying openly in his palace, and the Bishop of Havana spared no expense in giving the dead an elaborate and dignified burial.
²⁹

Popular opinion in America was surprisingly muted,
³⁰
in contrast to the clamor of the yellow press, thanks to Captain Sigsbee’s wise plea for emotional restraint. There was also a widespread suspicion that the explosion had been internal and accidental. Secretary Long shared this view. The
Maine’s
forecastle, after all, had been packed with gunpowder, and its steel-walled magazines, laced around with electric wiring, needed only a short-circuit fire to convert the whole ship into a bomb. Besides, it was hard for thinking people to believe that Spain would deliberately sabotage an American cruiser with a “Secret Infernal Machine,” as Hearst’s
Journal
alleged.
³¹
Should the Court of Inquiry prove otherwise, of course, there was no question that the man in the street would expect a declaration of war at once.

This was an alternative President McKinley could hardly bear to contemplate. “I have been through one war,” said the ex–Union major. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”
³²

A
RATHER MORE JUNIOR
member of the Administration had no such scruples, and no doubts as to who was responsible for the disaster in Havana Harbor. “The
Maine
was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards
I
believe,” wrote the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
³³