“THE MAINE BLOWN UP!”

The air hung heavy and humid over Havana the evening of February 15, 1898, making an uncomfortable night for the crew of the Maine, now in port for three weeks. A flood tide had swung the ship around buoy number four¹ so that her bow pointed toward the mouth of the harbor. Voices and laughter drifted across the bay from nearby vessels, including the American steamer City of Washington, which was tied up off the Maine’s stern. Except for the sentries and watch officers, the rest of the ship’s crew relaxed. Enlisted men, wearing as little clothing as naval decorum would allow, danced in the starboard gangway to accordion music. The soft notes of a mandolin, played by a gunner’s mate, echoed in the aft turret. Several of the officers had already gone to sleep in keeping with the ship’s practice of turning in early.²

When her keel was laid in the New York Navy Yard on October 17, 1888, the Maine was meant to be an example of America’s growing naval ambitions. At 319 feet and capable of seventeen knots, she carried four ten-inch guns and six six-inch guns in her main battery that were designed to penetrate the armor of an enemy ship. Seven six-pound guns were meant to sweep an enemy’s decks. But she had suffered a star-crossed record even before her hull touched water. American naval expertise had disintegrated to such a point that it took nearly seven years to complete work. Her design was by then outdated. Unlike most modern naval vessels, which had guns built on the centerline, the Maine’s ten-inch turrets were offset, the forward turret on the starboard side and the after turret on the port, an unwieldy configuration in battle that was based on a centuries-old idea that the ship might be called on to ram other vessels.³

With a white hull, and cabins and superstructure painted a dusty brown, she was commissioned on September 17, 1895, to an equally problematic life at sea. In February the following year the Maine ran aground, and a year after that five men were washed overboard off Cape Hatteras; only two were recovered. Two days later, two men were injured when a piece of ammunition exploded.⁴

Charles D. Sigsbee took over the ship on April 10, 1897, only a few weeks after being promoted to captain. A graduate of the Naval Academy and veteran of the Civil War, the studious-looking officer with a handlebar mustache and round glasses had, like most American sailors, spent little of his career engaged in real fighting. With the country at peace since the Civil War, he had focused on technical projects and in 1880 published a highly regarded but impossibly technical book called Deep-Sea Sounding and Dredging. As captain, he made his own contributions to the Maine’s inglorious history. While attempting to enter New York Harbor without a pilot through the treacherous Hell Gates, he was forced to smash into Pier 46 to avoid colliding with a crowded excursion steamer.⁵

There had been no such excitement in the weeks since the Maine arrived in Havana. Fearful that his enlisted men might get into trouble ashore, Sigsbee restricted them to the ship. Their only taste of Havana was the view from the harbor, where it was possible to look up the cobbled streets into the center of the city and see its dilapidated white and pastel buildings. Sigsbee also took precautions to protect the ship itself. He had beefed up the number of men on watch from the time of entering port, moved ammunition to places where it could quickly be fired, and kept an extra boiler on line at all times to power the hydraulic turrets.⁶ Yet in keeping with the stated friendly purpose of his trip, the captain had allowed officers to go ashore and had joined them many times himself.

Twice he attended bullfights, once to see Mazzantini, the famous gentleman bullfighter from Spain. He found it a depressing affair. “To comprehend the Spanish bull fight, it should be considered a savage sport passed down from generation to generation from a remote period when human nature was far more cruel than present.” The sight of several horses being killed by bulls was “shocking to the American mind.”⁷ On another occasion, Sigsbee had lunched at the Havana Yacht Club. They were treated, American officers said, with correct politeness, but resentment clearly bubbled just below the surface. One flyer making the rounds of Havana described “these Yankee pigs who muddle in our affairs, humiliating us to the last degree, and … order to us a man-of-war of their rotten squadron.” Enough copies of the flyer had been stuffed inside the consulate gates, Lee told Sigsbee, to plaster its walls.⁸

Tensions had grown perceptibly since February 9, 1898, when William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal splashed a private letter across its front page, written by the Spanish ambassador Dupuy de Lôme to a friend in Cuba. In it he mocked McKinley as “weak” and a “bidder for the admiration of the crowd.”⁹ Stolen by a member of the junta and supplied to reporters, the letter enraged Americans, who took any criticism of their president as a personal insult. Fully aware of the letter’s combustible force, both the United States and Spain tried to paper over the incident. The Spanish recalled Dupuy de Lôme, and McKinley refused to make a big deal of it. But there was no assuaging America’s wounded pride. Congress put forward three different resolutions demanding recognition for the rebels.

On the evening of the fifteenth, Sigsbee sat in the admiral’s rooms aboard the Maine quietly writing at a polished wood table, wearing a lightweight civilian “office jacket” rather than his heavier uniform. He had just finished a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, advising him against employing torpedo tubes on battleships and cruisers, and was working on a letter home when, a little past the hour, he heard the ship’s bugler play “Taps.”

Putting his pen down to listen, the captain flinched at what sounded like a rifle shot. A few moments later, he recoiled from a tremendous “bursting, rending, and crashing sound or roar,” followed quickly by “heavy, ominous, metallic sounds” as the ship lurched and began to list toward port.¹⁰ Smoke billowed into his cabin.

Sigsbee would later admit that his first reaction was fear that the ship would sink with him trapped in it. But he quickly regained his composure and the “habit of command.” He felt his way down the dark passageway where he collided with Private William Anthony. Despite the pitch darkness and smoke, the cabin orderly saluted and delivered the obvious news: There had been an explosion and the ship was sinking.

There had, in fact, been two explosions, the first on the port side, near two six-inch gun magazines, the second farther back, near the ten-inch magazine that contained between eight and nine tons of black powder. The sheer force of the explosions buckled the ship in half. Flames incinerated men in their bunks. Those near the blasts were killed instantly, their limbs and chunks of flesh part of a soaring plume of debris that would fall up to half a mile away. Other sailors were trapped belowdecks, doomed to suck at air pockets that shrank to nothing as the ship went down.

While members of the crew fought their individual battles of survival, Sigsbee made his way to the main deck and tried to survey the damage, though his eyes, still unaccustomed to the dark, could not take in the full extent of the carnage. In fact, his first instinct was to post sentries to protect the Maine from further attack. That there was little left to guard occurred to him only after a few moments of thought.¹¹

Ashore, Havana had been alive with “happy and grotesque masqueraders” roaming the streets as carnival celebrations entered their second night. Those near the water first noticed a searing bright light from the direction of the moored ships. One group of American newspaper reporters recalled sitting at a brightly lit outdoor café when they saw the sky over the bay shine “with an intense light and above it all could be seen innumerable colored lights resembling rockets.”¹² Then, rumbling across the water’s smooth surface came the thunderous report, so loud that it shook buildings and shattered windows.

Lee had seen the explosion as well, “a great column of fire,” and hurried to the waterfront, pushing his way through a large crowd for a view of the destruction. He could hardly comprehend the scene that greeted him. Flames still roared aboard the ship, which had nearly totally sunk. Only a tangle of wreckage and the ship’s mast remained above the surface. Spotlights carried by small boats darted across the water’s surface, illuminating debris and bodies.¹³

McKinley turned in early on February 14, 1898, climbing into one of two brass beds in his sparsely decorated sleeping quarters. About three in the morning, an aide gently woke him. Secretary Long was on the telephone with urgent news. Clad in a nightgown, McKinley groggily slipped out of bed and padded the few steps down the hall to his office.¹⁴ He listened quietly as Long relayed Sigsbee’s note. Pacing back and forth, the president muttered: “The Maine blown up! The Maine blown up.” Details were as yet sketchy, but it was clear there had been an astonishing number of fatalities.

Aboard clanging streetcars, around farmhouse breakfast tables, and on factory floors, there was only one topic of conversation the morning of February 15. Not since the Civil War had the United States known such a military calamity. Of the 354 officers and men aboard the ship, 266 either lost their lives or died shortly thereafter.¹⁵ Wives, mothers, and girlfriends of the sailors streamed toward the White House that first morning seeking the latest information; a surprisingly large number were ushered directly to the president’s second-floor office. Not even Pulitzer and Hearst were able to come to grips with it all. The explosion, coming in the evening as it did, sent page one editors at both newspapers scrambling to rework their layouts for the next day’s editions. In the New York Journal’s greater New York edition, a story on the explosion had to share space with a piece on the long-running gold versus silver debate, the headline an uncharacteristically sober CRUISER MAINE BLOWN UP IN HAVANA HARBOR.¹⁶ For once, the paper underplayed the facts, reporting that more than one hundred had been killed, less than half the actual figure.

As the magnitude of the event sank in, the media began to awaken to the wider implications. It was impossible to believe it had been an accident. The place and timing were too much of a coincidence. But if not happenstance, who had done it? It didn’t take long for the newspapers to decide.

DESTRUCTION OF THE WARSHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF THE ENEMY, ran the Journal’s headline on the seventeenth, promising a $50,000 reward for anyone who could help convict the culprit.¹⁷ On the eighteenth, the front page screamed: THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS WITH WAR FEVER. Like its rival, the World didn’t find its voice until the seventeenth. Ignoring the possibility of an accident, the paper speculated in a banner headline whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or a torpedo.¹⁸ A dramatic illustration of the blast showing men tossed into the air consumed half a page. Two days later, the newspaper depicted how the Spanish ship Vizcaya, then due in New York as part of the original agreement to send the Maine to Havana, could easily bombard much of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.¹⁹ That nobody possessed a shred of evidence as to the actual cause didn’t slow down the World’s editors, who announced the paper was sending divers to perform their own investigation. Just as their owners hoped, the stories sent circulation of both newspapers soaring—in the case of the Journal’s, more than doubling to over a million.²⁰

Americans mourned the Maine as if she were a martyred saint. Sober businessmen pinned REMEMBER THE MAINE buttons to their lapels. Families decorated living rooms with models of the ship. Music halls advertised patriotic productions depicting the Maine and her crew.

Their grief transcended the loss of one ship. The alleged bombing felt like an attack on the nation itself, and no country in the 1890s was as much in love with loving itself as the United States. Many of the patriotic songs and traditions of today date from this period. In 1893, Wellesley College professor Katharine Lee Bates, inspired by a visit to Pikes Peak, wrote the words to “America the Beautiful” with poetic images of “purple mountain majesties” and the “fruited plain.” It was not just a line but a statement of fact for many: “God shed his grace on thee.”

Three years later, aboard the British steamship Teutonic bound for New York from Europe, John Philip Sousa wrote one of the most stirring patriotic tunes the country has ever produced. As he strolled the deck with fellow passengers, bundled against the damp air, he heard a strange tune playing in his head, as if his brain had suddenly turned into a radio, ceaselessly “playing, playing, playing” over and over for the rest of the voyage.²¹ Writing the notes down once back in New York, Sousa thought the powerful tune of blaring horns was an impressive melody. It was to become the anthem of the age: “The Stars and Stripes Forever”:

Hurrah for the flag of the free!

May it wave as our standard forever,

The gem of the land and the sea,

The banner of the right.

Let despots remember the day,

When our fathers with mighty endeavor,

Proclaimed as they marched to the fray,

That by their might and by their right,

It waves forever.²²

Displaying the flag had become a matter of course at parades and public events and inside private homes. Civic groups and charitable organizations raised money to buy flags for schools. The largest weekly magazine, The Youth’s Companion, made distributing flags one of its main promotional activities, selling twelve-by-eighteen-inch silk flags for thirty cents each, and planning a nationwide flag day for school-children.²³ Almost as an afterthought, the magazine’s editors hit upon the idea of creating a salute that young students could recite and assigned the job of writing one to a member of its promotions department. Francis Bellamy, a thirty-five-year-old ex–Baptist minister, locked himself in a room for two hours after dinner one night to produce the following: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.” A few tweaks and it was done the next day. What we now know as “The Pledge of Allegiance” first appeared in print in the September 1892 edition of The Youth’s Companion.²⁴

McKinley had never been one to subscribe to knee-jerk reactions and would not break form now. As was routine for major accidents, the navy announced immediately that it would investigate the explosion. Over the course of three weeks, nearly eighty witnesses and survivors would be interviewed, naval experts would be consulted, and—importantly as it would turn out—the wreckage of the ship would be studied. The president would take action only after this considered review. And with good reason.

There were perfectly plausible explanations for the disaster that had nothing to do with the Spanish. Spontaneous combustion of coal, which could easily have caused such a massive explosion, was an all-too-common occurrence aboard U.S. naval ships. Since 1895, three coal bunker fires had been reported on the Olympia, four on the Wilmington, and at least one each on the Petrel, the Lancaster, and the Indiana. Coal fires on the Cincinnati and the New York had nearly caused their magazines to explode. And the Maine, like several other ships, suffered from a design flaw that made it especially vulnerable: The coal bunkers and the magazines shared a bulkhead through which heat might pass and ignite the ammunition.²⁵

Meeting Senator Charles W. Fairbanks, a Republican from Indiana and a leading conservative, on February 17, 1898, McKinley promised to keep a level head. “I don’t propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe,” he said. “My duty is plain. We must learn the truth and endeavor, if possible, to fix responsibility. The country can afford to withhold its judgment and not strike an avenging blow until the truth is known. The Administration will go on preparing for war, but still hoping to avert it. It will not be plunged into war until it is ready for it.”²⁶

While combat sounded like a grand adventure and a welcome test of manhood to hotheads like Roosevelt, it was a waste of humanity for men who had been there, even veterans like McKinley who had seen plenty of glory. When Leonard Wood, an army officer and friend of Roosevelt, met McKinley at the White House one morning, the president snapped, “Well, have you and Theodore declared war yet?” Wood replied no, but that he still thought war was coming. McKinley fired back, “I shall never get into a war, until I am sure that God and man approve. I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.”²⁷ It was a noble commitment, but one that would exact a severe price from the president.

McKinley’s attempts in the coming weeks to resolve the conflicting pressures of the Cuban crisis cemented his image as one of the most enigmatic of American presidents. He would be criticized, in Roosevelt’s words, as having the backbone of a chocolate éclair.²⁸ Yet he would display iron fortitude in pursuing his goals. He opposed war, despite enormous public pressure, as a matter of principle. Yet he quietly undertook steps that would extend military action to the Pacific. He would literally worry himself sick over the public’s thirst for Spanish blood, yet made little effort to bring the national mood off the boil.

For many observers it was the résumé of a weak and ineffectual president, a rudderless leader swept away in the current of events, a peace-at-all-costs administration. Many had long thought of him in these terms anyway. It fit the image the Democrats had tried to fashion of him during the campaign—a puppet of Mark Hanna, the man who slavishly bowed to public opinion by keeping his ear so close to the ground that it was “full of grasshoppers.” As Secretary of the Treasury Lyman G. Gage wrote in his memoirs, “By many he was misjudged as complacent and weak, subject to undue influence from the more powerful among those responsible for his action.”²⁹

That McKinley had never articulated a coherent foreign policy, other than the faint reference to dignity in his inaugural address, only made him harder to understand. When events were thrust upon him, McKinley’s reaction was to deal with each crisis individually and as an extension of his domestic agenda to aid the economy. Pragmatism and opportunism rather than ideology would govern his thinking in foreign affairs. The results might appear inconsistent, but he was proud of this quality. “We cannot always do what is best,” he once told a gathering in Canton, “but we can do what is practical at the time.”³⁰

McKinley’s personal style didn’t help to shed light on the workings of his mind, either. Thundering speeches with colorful images of national glory were not part of his biological makeup. Loud public pronouncements seemed to limit room for maneuver, a vital advantage for a dealmaker such as himself. Instead, McKinley preferred to manage from behind the scenes, steering people by baby steps in the direction he wanted. McKinley, for example, often conducted cabinet meetings by the Socratic method. Even when he held a firm view on an issue, he would lead gatherings of his advisers without expressing an opinion, gently steering the group toward decisions he had already reached. During these critical weeks, he made only one major public appearance, a February 22, 1898, speech at the University of Pennsylvania celebrating George Washington’s birthday. He hardly touched on anything remotely relating to Cuba, other than to remind his audience that Washington had emphasized “sober and dispassionate public judgment,” adding, “Such judgment, my fellow-citizens, is the best safeguard in the calm of tranquil events, and raises superior and triumphant above the storms of woe and peril.”³¹ Yet McKinley was now, in his own quiet way, proving that there was much more to him than his critics understood.

Until now, most Americans had assumed the country stood before two distinct alternatives where foreign affairs were concerned. The first was to avoid foreign dealings altogether, save in the rare case of a Cuba. The second was to acquire colonies that could be controlled politically by Washington and possibly become part of the Union. Benjamin Tracy, secretary of the navy from 1889 to 1893, underscored how many Americans perceived the concept of empire when he had told The New York World in 1891, “The sea will be the future seat of Empire. And we shall rule it as certainly as the sun doth rise. To a preeminent rank among nations, colonies are of the greatest help.”³²

McKinley, more out of intuition than calculation, began pursuing a third alternative. The United States would extend its influence abroad, but it would be neither political nor territorial. Rather, the country would aim to establish a commercial hegemony.

What has variously come to be known as “informal empire,” “the new imperialism,” or “commercial empire” was, in fact, not a new concept as McKinley entered the White House. The British, as early as the 1840s, had moved away from the classical notion of colonial empire to one based on free trade. The repeal in 1846 of Britain’s infamous Corn Laws, originally enacted to protect domestic farmers from foreign competition, was a major step in this direction. In the decades that followed, the British found their industries prospered just as well in free markets as they had in the heyday of colonial expansion.³³

The concept of a commercial hegemony instinctively appealed to McKinley and the nation’s business leaders. On the one hand, there need not necessarily be any soul-searching domination of foreign countries. For an “informal empire,” all that was needed abroad were reliable and protected trading routes—as well as political and economic stability within America’s trading partners. Bringing such conditions to attractive markets was the sort of global role that ordinary folks could also feel good about as they sat in church on Sunday mornings. What backward nation would not relish America’s civilizing patronage?

Moreover, this was a vision of empire that ideally suited American industry. With their massive economies of scale and hyper-competitiveness, U.S. companies could not lose in a truly open global marketplace. The Iron Age wrote in December 1897 that the United States is “slowly realizing that we hold the key of the position, since there are no indications that European manufacturers will ever displace us in the van of progress.”³⁴ As businessman and leading proponent of the “trade, not territory” school of foreign affairs Edward Atkinson put it, “commerce is today the prime factor in the world’s work. Its development is the chief object of nations.”³⁵

Such thinking had driven McKinley’s approach to Cuba from the start. Though genuinely anxious to aid sick and starving peasants there, his primary objective was to establish political stability. This he aimed to achieve as practically and peaceably as possible. First, he had hoped that with American help, the Spanish might restore order on their own. He would continue to pursue that option as long as possible while exploring other peaceful solutions. He even offered to buy Cuba; both Spain and key U.S. senators quickly rejected that idea. But with the sinking of the Maine, and continued Spanish intransigence, McKinley began to accept the idea that only American arms could bring order to Cuba.

As McKinley quietly prepared for war, he demonstrated a clear understanding of what war with Spain would really entail, as well as America’s place in the world once the shooting stopped.

On Friday afternoon, February 25, 1898, Secretary of the Navy Long decided to take the afternoon off for “mechanical massage,” a device in which the patient was strapped into an electric chair that caressed his stomach and legs. Something of hypochondriac, he had suffered mightily under the strain of the sinking of the Maine and the public outcry that followed. Aware that Roosevelt, his deputy, was prone to hyperactivity, Long left written directions not to touch anything while he was away. He should have known better. Like a mischievous child, Roosevelt churned out an orgy of orders while the adult was out of the room. Among other things, he asked the House Naval Affairs Committee to authorize the enlistment of “an unlimited number of seamen,” and had guns sent from Washington to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to be mounted on cruisers.

Whatever benefit Long received from his treatment was surely lost by Saturday morning when he discovered what his subordinate had been up to. Long wrote in his diary: “The very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon.… He has gone about things like a bull in a china shop.… It shows how the best fellow in the world, and one with splendid capacities, is worse than useless if he lacks a cool head and careful direction.”³⁶

There was one order, however, that Long heartily approved. Roosevelt had told Commodore George Dewey, commander of the American fleet in Asia, to move the bulk of that fleet from Nagasaki in Japan to the British colony of Hong Kong. The American vessels were to be ready for “offensive operations” in the Spanish colony of the Philippine Islands.³⁷ Long added his stamp of approval the next day with his own message: “Keep full of coal, the very best that can be had.”³⁸

When McKinley sifted through ship-deployment orders and studied the maps, he was struck by the meager size of the U.S. armed forces. There was almost no army to speak of, a grand total of twenty-five thousand or so troops, well short of what the job ahead seemed to demand. In Cuba alone, the Spanish had as many as two hundred thousand soldiers, depending on how many were out sick. The navy was no better. Despite a recent building spree, the U.S. fleet still resembled a bathtub flotilla. There were but four first-class battleships, only one second-class battleship, and a pair of armored cruisers. The rest of the fleet was a collection of monitors and protected cruisers.³⁹

The Spanish, on the other hand, possessed an extensive collection of torpedo gunboats and torpedo-boat destroyers—classes of vessels that the United States lacked entirely. And Spanish crews were thought vastly superior to the tattered collection of American sailors, many of whom didn’t even speak English. The conventional wisdom in Europe, and among more than a few Americans, was that the Spanish could put a superior force to sea.⁴⁰

With these worries in mind, on Sunday evening, March 6, 1898, McKinley summoned “Uncle” Joe Cannon, the profane and blunt-speaking chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, to the executive mansion. Escorted to the president’s library, Cannon found McKinley waiting for him at the door. Without offering a chair or hardly a hello, McKinley dove in: “Cannon, I must have money to get ready for war. I am doing everything possible to prevent war, but it must come, and we are not prepared for war. Who knows where this war will lead us; it may be more than war with Spain. How can I get money for these extraordinary expenditures?”

Taken aback at the president’s unusual abruptness, Cannon noticed the tension in his face. “His manner was grave; his face showed the lines of care.” As the two talked, McKinley still did not sit, nervously striding back and forth.

While the president paced, Cannon explained that he had already reviewed the Treasury’s reports and was sure there was $50 million or so that could be raised “without embarrassment or without having to provide for a bond issue or new taxation.” After briefly discussing the details, McKinley walked to his desk to provide Cannon the written documentation of his request for funds. On a blank sheet of telegraph paper, he wrote a single sentence: “For national defense, fifty million dollars.” Cannon put the scrap in his pocket, returned to his hotel, and drafted legislation.⁴¹Three days later, on March 9, 1898, the House passed the bill with a vote of 311 to 0. The Senate likewise passed the legislation without a hint of opposition, 76 to 0. Joe Wheeler, a representative from Alabama, greeted the vote with a rebel yell.⁴²

If the president’s financing request was meant to shock and awe the Spanish, as some historians believe, the gambit succeeded. The size of the American war chest staggered Sagasta’s government. It was unthinkable to the nearly destitute Spanish that any nation could summon such funds so quickly. From Spain, Woodford wrote to McKinley: “To appropriate fifty millions out of money in the Treasury, without borrowing a cent, demonstrates wealth and power. Even Spain can see this.… The ministry and the press are simply stunned.”⁴³

Late on the evening of March 24, 1898, four naval officers stepped off the train from Key West at Pennsylvania Station to a waiting crowd. For three days, they had carried the naval board of inquiry’s report into the sinking of the Maine. Wrapped in sailcloth and heavily sealed, the report was kept under constant guard. They elbowed their way past reporters and curious bystanders. Lieutenant John Hood, a Maine survivor, hugged the report with one hand and fingered a revolver under his coat with the other.⁴⁴

The navy had turned to numerous sources in its investigation, but the work of its own divers provided the most compelling explanation for what had happened. Descending to the bottom of Havana harbor in primitive dive suits with large metal helmets and air tubes connected to a pump on the surface, the divers discovered evidence that an external explosion had sunk the ship. After probing in the muck and darkness, they reported that the plating on the bottom of the Maine had been shoved inward, forming an inverted V about fifty-nine feet from the bow. Divers also found a large hole in the muddy sea bottom directly underneath, measuring fifteen feet in diameter and seven feet deep.⁴⁵

Naval experts such as Commander George Converse, skipper of the Montgomery, concluded the damage was caused by a low-grade underwater mine, probably filled with nothing more than gunpowder, that had been placed on the harbor bottom. Yet the board of inquiry stopped there. Determining the identity of the alleged bombers was not their job.

So began the darkest hour of McKinley’s presidency. For the public, there was little doubt that Spain was responsible for the Maine tragedy, even if the board of inquiry had not provided a smoking gun linking the country to the crime. Yet McKinley, ever sober, ever pragmatic, stood fast against the war cries. Evidence that the Spanish were responsible for the Maine was circumstantial at best. Without an overwhelming reason to go to war, he would remain fixated on the North Star that guided him all along: to preserve Cuba’s commercial value as cheaply as possible—without shedding American blood. Maybe now, he told himself, the Spanish would finally be shaken out of their stupor and get down to some serious negotiating. Quietly, he prepared a fresh ultimatum for Woodford to present to the Spanish. Rather than announce a call to arms, as so many hoped and expected he would, McKinley now told Congress that he would keep them advised of the progress in renewed peace talks and that “in the meantime deliberate consideration is invoked.”

From coast to coast, incredulous Americans let out audible cries of outrage when the president’s plans began seeping into headlines. The shock transcended economic and political lines. Newspaper editors, laborers, industrialists, and even members of his own party turned on McKinley with venom that the gentle president had never imagined possible.

“If the occasion goes past and we allow this Cuban struggle to run on indefinitely, the American people will have lost several degrees of self respect and will certainly not have gained anything in the opinion of mankind,” The Washington Post wrote on March 29.⁴⁶

Biting personal attacks began to surface. In Virginia, a raging mob burned effigies of McKinley and Hanna and fired revolvers into the dummies.⁴⁷ McKinley’s picture was hissed at in theaters and torn from walls. Congressmen descended on the executive mansion and State Department, demanding action. Jokes made the rounds, such as “How is McKinley’s mind like a bed? It has to be made for him.” Fifty Republican members of the House, calling themselves the “reconcentrados,” asserted the right of Congress to declare war. A delegation of “war” Republicans demanded an immediate war message.

Roosevelt, who had been angling for a war—any war—since before joining the administration, now nearly burst with enthusiasm. With characteristic abandon, he dispatched naval attachés around the world to scour shipyards for vessels that were battle ready or could quickly be made so, anything from private yachts to spanking new ships. When Spain’s Ministry of Marine tried to buy two Brazilian navy cruisers under construction in the United Kingdom—the Amazonas and the Almirante Abreu—he snatched them away with bids that the cash-strapped Spanish couldn’t match. He also purchased the Diogenes, a new cruiser built in Germany for another country. Ships in Key West and Hampton Roads were stripped and made ready for war. Part-time arms dealer Charles R. Flint was stunned at Roosevelt’s haste. When Flint told Roosevelt that the Brazilian warship Nictheroy might be available for half a million dollars, Roosevelt jumped so fast he didn’t even waste time drawing up a written contract. All told, the navy purchased or leased more than one hundred ships.⁴⁸

At times, Roosevelt’s passion turned against McKinley’s advisers. On Saturday night, March 26, 1898, Roosevelt delivered a rousing call to arms at Washington’s Gridiron Club. “We will have this war of freedom,” he said in an after-dinner speech, punching a clenched fist into an open palm. And then he turned to speak directly at Hanna, in his eyes the living embodiment of spineless economic interests, and added: “The interests of the business world and of financiers might be paramount in the Senate,” but not with the public. Anyone who wanted to stand in the way of popular opinion was “welcome to experiment.” The Ohio senator’s face flushed and he gripped the arms of his chair.⁴⁹

Roosevelt might have done a bit more homework before making the accusation. Republican Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont, a former secretary of war and wealthy businessman, had already gone a long way toward winning business leaders over to the idea of going to war with an electrifying speech about the horrors he had witnessed firsthand in Cuba during a recent trip. Cuba, he said, was condemned to misery as long as the Spanish remained in charge. Captains of industry, including John Jacob Astor, Thomas Fortune Ryan, William Rockefeller, and Stuyvesant Fish, soon came around to the conclusion that it was time for the United States to fight. According to a special emissary sent by McKinley to gauge their mood, they were now “feeling militant.” From Boston on March 21, 1898, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge reported that economic leaders now believed that “one shock and then an end was better than a succession of spasms such as we must have if this war in Cuba went on.” Four days after the Lodge update, a New York newspaper correspondent sent a telegram to Washington that likely was shown to the president: BIG CORPORATIONS HERE NOW BELIEVE WE WILL HAVE WAR. BELIEVE ALL WOULD WELCOME IT AS A RELIEF TO SUSPENSE.⁵⁰

Even small children were caught up in the militant mood. On one of his customary carriage rides in late March, McKinley happened across a group of young children playing at military drill. On the order of their eight-year-old commander, a glittering toy pistol hanging around his neck, the group dropped to the ground and fired off rounds from their cap guns in a mock volley just as the president passed. A Washington Post reporter later asked the stern-faced little commander for a comment. “If our mamma would let us, we could go wight [sic] down now and blow up Spain easy.”⁵¹

The criticism and the strain of holding the frothing-at-the-mouth country to leash took a terrible toll on the president. McKinley’s secretary George Cortelyou wrote in his diary that the president “did not look well, and his eyes had a far-away, deep-set expression in them. For lack of sleep and worry, the president looked exhausted and dark circles ringed his eyes. His voice shook when he spoke.” He jumped at the slightest sound and began taking narcotics to help him sleep.

McKinley’s old friend H. H. Kohlsaat, on one visit to the White House before the board of inquiry report, found him in a fragile mood. Sitting on a large crimson brocade lounge in the White House Red Room, the president held his head on his hands with elbows on his knees. “I have been through a trying period,” he said, noting that his wife’s health was worse than usual. “It seems to me I have not slept over three hours a night for over two weeks. Congress is trying to drive us into war with Spain. The Spanish fleet is in Cuban waters, and we haven’t enough ammunition on the Atlantic seacoast to fire a salute.”

According to Kohlsaat, the president then broke down and cried like a “boy of thirteen.” Together the pair sat there, Kohlsaat consoling McKinley by putting a hand on his shoulder until McKinley gathered himself. He finally said, “Are my eyes very red, do they look as if I had been crying?”

“Yes,” Kohlsaat replied.

“But I must return to Mrs. McKinley at once. She is among strangers,” the president said. The First Lady was then in the Blue Room, attending a piano recital.

Kohlsaat suggested a plan. “When you open the door to enter the room, blow your nose very hard and very loud. It will force tears into your eyes and they will think that is what makes your eyes red.” According to Kohlsaat, the president carried out the scheme with “no small blast.”⁵²

While newspaper editors and headline-seeking politicians poured out their scorn on the president’s measured response to the board of inquiry report on the Maine, his ambassador in Madrid, Stewart Woodford, shuttled back and forth between the U.S. mission and Spain’s foreign ministry. The door to a peace deal still remained open, if only just a crack. McKinley directed Woodford to tell the Spanish on March 29, 1898, that they could avert U.S. intervention if Spain would agree to a plan that included ending the reconcentration program, distributing supplies to the needy, and agreeing to an immediate armistice that would last until October 1, during which time McKinley would, if desired, help mediate a peace settlement.⁵³ If peace terms could not be decided by that deadline, the president was to be the final arbiter of the dispute. He gave the Spanish until March 31 to reply.⁵⁴

The answer, when it arrived late that evening in Washington, revealed that pride—combined with fear for what capitulation would mean for the brittle Spanish monarchy—made an agreement impossible.⁵⁵ The Spanish had acceded to some of McKinley’s conditions, ending the concentration camps and providing relief to the needy. They also suggested submitting the Maine disaster to an international arbitrator. But Spain would agree to an armistice only if the rebels asked for it first. Madrid could under no circumstances look like it was surrendering. War now seemed all but assured. McKinley promised an anxious Congress that he would present a “war message” in early April 1898.

In the remaining days, a flurry of eleventh-hour diplomatic activity emanated from corners that heretofore had shown little interest in getting between Madrid and Washington. The major European powers, many friendly to Spain, dispatched their ambassadors to the White House to plead for a peaceful solution. There were suggestions that the pope, hoping to help Catholic Spain save face, might mediate a resolution. All were politely rebuffed. Nor had McKinley given up on bringing the Cubans around to an autonomy plan.

Horatio Rubens, the junta spokesman, described a dramatic interaction with McKinley, who had summoned him to the White House. Looking like “an eagle” under “shaggy heavy brows,” the president strode around his office with such force that the tails of his frock coat “seemed to swing with a warrior determination.” McKinley, Rubens said, barked at him: “You must accept an immediate armistice with Spain.” When Rubens asked if Spain was now ready to grant Cuba its independence, the president answered with a rising voice: “That isn’t the question now. We may discuss that later. The thing for the moment is the armistice.”

Rubens refused to back down: “But, Mr. President, we can talk here, while they continue to fight down there.”

McKinley answered sharply. “No, no. That cannot be thought of. The loss of life and property must stop at once.”⁵⁶

Finally, on April 10, 1898, the day before McKinley was to send his “war message” to Congress, Spain performed one final act in the theater of negotiation. In Madrid, Woodford was told that Spain was now prepared to suspend hostilities, thereby fulfilling the last of McKinley’s demands from March 29. Assistant Secretary of State Day was so excited by the Spanish response that he snatched the paper directly from the operator and scurried across the White House lawn where McKinley was meeting with the cabinet.

The room fell quiet as the president read Woodford’s report and laid it on the table. There were caveats to the Spanish proposal. The Spanish commander in Cuba was to decide how long and under what conditions fighting would stop. And there was no mention of America’s role as a mediator between Spain and the rebels.⁵⁷

Several members of his cabinet, perhaps the last peaceniks in the country, seized on the concession. As debate moved around the table, they argued that the president should inform Congress that a delay was needed. McKinley, however, would not change course, not at this late hour. With little explanation, he simply appended the dispatch to the papers he had already prepared to send to Congress.

McKinley’s long-awaited war message generated the same anticipation as the latest Charles Hale Hoyt Broadway production. Congressmen, journalists, visitors—anybody who could get in—packed into the House of Representatives on April 11, 1898, eager to hear the call to arms. The audience listened “with intense interest and profound silence”⁵⁸ as House pages took turns reading the seven-thousand-word message. Hastily written and the product of too many cooks, it was dejectedly described by Long as “the best that McKinley could do” given the strain the president had suffered under.⁵⁹ The message began slowly, with a laborious recitation of the history of the dispute and a clinical explanation of the justification for American intervention—namely to address the humanitarian crisis and protect American commercial interests. Far from the clarion trumpet sounding a charge into war that many had hoped for, McKinley’s message simply asked lawmakers to “authorize and empower the President to take measure to secure full and final termination of hostilities between the government of Spain and the people of Cuba.”

To the surprise and dismay of many, McKinley did not call for Cuban independence. In fact, he said, it was not “wise or prudent for this government to recognize at the present time the independence of the so-called Cuban Republic.” What’s more, when the Spanish were evicted, the United States would hand Cuba over to the Cubans only when Washington decided they were ready. “When it shall appear hereafter that there is within the island a government capable of performing the duties and discharging the functions of a separate nation, and having, as a matter of fact, the proper forms and attributes of nationality, such a government can be promptly and readily recognized.”⁶⁰

This is precisely the view that McKinley had held all along, yet newspapers and congressmen recoiled in bitter disgust. THE PRESIDENT’S CUBAN MESSAGE DISAPPOINTING TO THOSE WHO WANT CUBA FREED was The New York Times’ headline on April 12, 1898, the paper adding that it had caused “great discontent in Congress.”⁶¹ Telegrams and letters poured into the capital from ordinary citizens demanding the United States help Cuba attain its freedom. The Washington Post reported that McKinley’s real ambitions had been unmasked. “The foremost ground of criticism and the one which was paramount was the absolute silence of the president [in his message] as to the independence of Cuba. This omission took Congress by surprise and created the utmost feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment. Whatever else might have been in the President’s mind, it was supposed that the ultimate aim of his policy was the freeing of Cuba, but the message gave no corroboration of this fact.” Senator Marion Butler of North Carolina expressed the view of many when he complained, “If I can understand the message, it means that the president is opposed to Cuban independence now and forever.”⁶²

For Butler and others, it was unthinkable that the United States could enter into a war with Spain until McKinley had been convinced to speedily grant Cuba’s independence. For over a week—a painfully long period for Congress and a nation that had been counting the days until war would commence—the president sparred with an odd coalition of jingoists, populists, and political rivals who wanted to reword the resolution to authorize military action in a way that also compelled the president to recognize Cuba’s independence. McKinley’s friends, especially in the House, rallied to his cause. Speaker of the House Thomas Reed turned his rooms in the Shoreham Hotel into what one newspaper reporter described as “the headquarters of a commander-in-chief.”⁶³ Time and again, McKinley’s congressional opponents and supporters debated semantics and linguistic nuances until Senator Henry Moore Teller, a Republican from Colorado, stepped forward with a carefully scripted compromise that was acceptable to the president and a nearly exhausted Congress. In the wording of what would become known as the “Teller Amendment,” the United States acknowledged that “the people of the island of Cuba are, and of the right to be, free and independent.” But it went on: “The United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.”

“Except for the pacification thereof”—it was a loaded phrase, the importance of which would soon become clear.

The Spanish now realized, maybe for the first time, that they were actually going to war. The government broke off relations with Washington, and American diplomats were ordered out of the country in a flight that nearly produced the first shooting of the war. Angry Spanish mobs were waiting for the legation’s special train as it pulled out of Madrid station, pelting the cars with rocks as it built up speed. As stones bounced off the train’s roof, an equally enraged Woodford sprang from his bed in a skimpy nightshirt and, mustache bristling, cocked a six-shooter and prepared to fight his way out of the country if he had to.⁶⁴

In Washington the president was doing a little bristling of his own. McKinley ordered a naval blockade of stretches of the Cuban coast and published a call for 125,000 volunteer soldiers.

Almost lost in the rush to arms was the conflict’s victim. Angry at being cut out of the diplomatic loop and opposed to the war, Secretary of State Sherman resigned on April 25, 1898—a departure that must rank as one of the least noticed in American diplomatic history. William Day, who had essentially been doing the job since McKinley moved into the White House, replaced him.

On the rainy morning of April 25, 1898, the president finally sent a formal declaration of war to Congress. It was the end of an excruciating process that had sapped his strength.

As Congress went about the formalities of declaring war, McKinley tried to take advantage of a rare moment when attention was focused elsewhere and lay down on his bed to nap. Ida happened to be spending a weekend away, visiting friends in New York, and the president couldn’t stand the solitude. Desperate for company, he asked a visiting friend to stay in his room. Still, he couldn’t relax. Getting out of bed, he wandered down the hall before finally collapsing on a sofa. As he stretched out, he asked a group nearby to keep up their chatter to help him sleep.⁶⁵ At about 4 P.M., the doorkeeper brought the resolution for the president to sign.

It had been a trying time for McKinley, one in which he was caught between two powerful historic forces: the rise of one empire and the decline of another. Such realignments seldom happen peacefully. Now, with war inevitable, McKinley cast his gaze beyond the immediate events in Cuba. It was strange in many ways. He had spoken with heartfelt emotion about the horrors of war, yet now that fighting was at hand, he was ready to expand it.

The United States was about to learn an important lesson of foreign relations: Once overseas adventure has been launched, it is difficult to row back. McKinley fully appreciated the risk he had taken. “I am not anxious about the result of the war. There can be one result and it will not be long delayed,” he told a friend. “What I have in mind is what will come after war—the problems we do not see now but that are sure to come in some way. And they will not be easy problems. Other nations have had that experience, and we shall not escape it.”⁶⁶