We are grateful to again welcome David Silbey, author of The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914-1916, and A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1900. Don’t blame him for the title. Many thanks, David.
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It really should have been a conspiracy. The timing was simply too perfect for it to be anything else. When the armored cruiser Maine blew up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260 American sailors, it came at such a dramatic moment that it had to have been a deliberate act: sabotage, attack, conspiracy. An accident would have been so deflating.
The Maine had sailed to Havana Bay as a symbolic assertion of American influence. The fighting between Cuban insurrectos and the Spanish crown had been ugly and President William McKinley thought that sending a thoroughly modern embodiment of American might to the island would protect the interests of the United States. Instead, it provoked a war.
The response within the United States to the ship’s explosion was immediate and angry. No one doubted that the Spanish had blown it up somehow. Few stopped to consider that the last thing the Spanish would want to do was provoke the United States to intervene in a civil war that Spain was already losing. The Spanish had done it, and the Spanish must pay. “This means war,” exclaimed the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who quickly set his papers to foment militarism. However yellow the journalism Hearst and his colleagues practiced, Americans were more than willing to go along with it.
McKinley appointed a court of naval inquiry, ostensibly to investigate, but also to give him time to consider. Passions ran too high. When Wall Street slid on the prospect of war, a newspaper article, in a remarkable display of public venom, referred to the financial community as the “colossal and aggregate Benedict Arnold of the Union and the syndicated Judas Iscariot of humanity.” The naval inquiry reported back that the ship had been blown up by person or persons unknown and McKinley sent a message to Congress recommending that the United States intervene in Cuba. The Spanish-American War was about to start, a war between an ancient empire, living off past glories, and a new and thrusting power.
More than a hundred years later, it looks as though the reality of the sinking was indeed deflatingly prosaic. Investigation in a less fevered time and place suggests that the Maine blew up because of a build-up of gas in a coal bunker. Improperly vented, such gas could ignite with explosive force. Most tellingly, the external armor plates of the ship were bowed outward, not inward as they should have been for an external explosion.
But perhaps not so prosaic after all, as it suggests that going to war over mistaken perceptions is not so rare in American history. The Spanish had nothing to do with the Maine; the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither fact saved either from war with the United States.
23 comments
February 15, 2008 at 3:23 pm
PigInZen
This period is probably my favorite in U.S. History. I’m sure it’s been written but I always wanted to write a paper/thesis on the impact a century of unbridled territorial growth had on the collective pysche of the late 19th century. That and the looming closing of the frontier.
It seems quite obvious and general, though, so I’m sure there are finer points to research.
February 15, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Jamie T.
I’m with you Pig. I’m doing research on the formative years of Nebraska football and reading through the newspapers you get a palpable feeling of limitless possibility. The frontier may have closed according to FJT, but the young ‘burgs in the midwest were ‘wide-awake’ and full of ‘vim’ to expand and fulfill whatever destiny they had in mind.
I have only a rudimentary knowledge of the Span/Am War, but if I remember my Cuban History the Spanish were tyrannical and the US was relatively justified in helping the rebels, they just used the Maine to go in. Too bad we replaced the tyranny with a puppet government.
February 15, 2008 at 5:06 pm
paulbeard
I didn’t realize this was such a well-studied period. I wrote an undergrad paper on the coverage of WWI in the rural gentry’s news media (Country Life magazine). I didn’t want to use a newspaper as the primary source: I wanted to see how the war crept into the society pages.
As I remember it, there wasn’t a whole lot of coverage, even though a lot of the young men of that class would have been in the trenches of Belgium and France. I shall have to look up Prof Sibley’s book.
February 15, 2008 at 8:27 pm
silbey
It’s actually “SiLBey”. There are fascinating stories of American units, going to the Philippines on trains through the United States actually ending up with more men than they started with. I.E., as they were traversing the country, young men from those “burgs” decided to volunteer informally with an Army unit.
February 15, 2008 at 8:28 pm
silbey
And, no, I’m really really not responsible for the title of the post.
February 15, 2008 at 8:35 pm
andrew
The frontier may have closed
I’ve seen Roosevelt quoted as saying something like if we give back the Philippines, we might as well give back Arizona. Would anyone happen to know the context in which he said it?
February 15, 2008 at 8:38 pm
urbino
the syndicated Judas Iscariot of humanity
My new 2nd-favorite insult. (Right after “fleshy Hogarthian tippler, of indeterminate sex,” the first half of which can be used alone when you need something a touch pithier.)
Also, I can’t let a post about the Maine pass without saying: remember the Maine, Sundance.
But perhaps not so prosaic after all, as it suggests that going to war over mistaken perceptions is not so rare in American history. The Spanish had nothing to do with the Maine; the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11.
And in both cases, it’s unclear how much of it was mistake, and how much willful disregard. The driving role of specific subsets of the mass media is interesting, too.
February 15, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Remember the Maine « The Edge of the American West
[...] of the propaganda surrounding the Maine. Well, it just so happens that on this day in 1898, as Silbey has been kind enough to remind us, the Maine exploded and sank in Havana’s [...]
February 16, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Gene O'Grady
Not to carp at an excellent set of posts, but I don’t believe it’s really correct to say that the Maine was a “thoroughly modern embodiment” of US power. In actual fact it was meant to be the first battleship of the redone US navy of the 1890 era, but it was basically a dud — not big enough or well armed enough to function as a “modern” battleship but too big, slow, and expensive to maintain to be much of a cruiser. The Texas and Indiana and immediately succeeding ships that actually won the Spanish-American War in spite of the mediocre American admirals who couldn’t get along with each other were far more useful ships. The Maine was sort of like the World War I German Bluecher, built as a response to the early British battlecruisers, but guessing wrong about what they were and turning out neither fish nor foul.
The upshot of this is that I’ve always had a tendency to lean toward the setup approach to the sinking of the Maine since it was the one ship in the US fleet that would be least missed.
The other less than relevant naval point is that TR’s Great White Fleet was comprised of ships that, at great expense, were all obsolete after the Dreadnought was built when they were less than ten years old.
February 17, 2008 at 12:17 pm
silbey
but I don’t believe it’s really correct to say that the Maine was a “thoroughly modern embodiment” of US power. In actual fact it was meant to be the first battleship of the redone US navy of the 1890 era, but it was basically a dud — not big enough or well armed enough to function as a “modern” battleship but too big, slow, and expensive to maintain to be much of a cruiser.
I’m pretty sure that the distinction wasn’t clear to either the Cubans or the Spanish or, for that matter, to McKinley. The thrust of the “thoroughly modern” remark was simply to point out that Maine was representative of a new breed of American naval building.
“Partially modern”? “Somewhat modern”?
were all obsolete after the Dreadnought was built when
Definitely. That, I should note, actually helped the United States more than it hurt, because it wiped out (at one stroke) the enormous British advantage in capital ships.
February 17, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Gene O'Grady
I believe there has recently been a sort of revisionism saying that the Spanish naval leaders, or at least Almirante Cervera, were a good more competent than has been assumed, so it’s unclear what they knew.
But I was coming more from the point of view of the US sending a ship that was thoroughly expendable. Franklin Roosevelt, at any rate, had a remarkable knowledge of the ships of the US navy, and I’m assuming TR had the same. Would be interested if anyone knows one way or the other.
Apologies for miscategorizing the Texas in my previous post — it was similar to the Maine; I meant to contrast the later battleships such as the Indiana and the Oregon.
On the subject of second-class or Coast Defense or whatever battleships, I believe that it is true that no “Coast Defense (Battle)ship” ever successfully helped to defend a coast, and that battleships were never useful except as offensive weapons?
February 17, 2008 at 1:27 pm
silbey
so it’s unclear what they knew
You’re treating the Maine as if it was going to be called upon actually to fight at that moment. But it wasn’t. It was showing the flag as a representative of a newly-modernized United States Navy. If an American carrier shows up somewhere today, the first response isn’t that it’s a Forrestal class (older) rather than a Nimitz (newer).
and I’m assuming TR had the same
TR was in fact Assistant Secretary of the Navy at that point. I don’t know that we have to look for a conspiracy theory to explain why they sent a less-effective version of the ship; that’s exactly the kind of ship you would send for this kind of show-the-flag exercise.
February 17, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Gene O'Grady
Not to belabor this (and shame on me for assimilating the destruction of the Maine to the Reichstag fire!), but two points:
I’m familiar with the Forrestal’s — in fact, I spent November 21, 1963 on one of them watching a demonstration of jets dropping napalm over the ocean (and was scared to death!) Talk about the end of innocence.
I knew TR was in the Navy department in 1898 — what I was curious about is whether he had the detailed knowledge of ships and armaments that his cousin (who held the same (?) position later) showed as president, or if he just was getting by on charisma, charm, humor, and “values.” Not an irrelevant question for our own time I think.
Since this blog is situated in the West, I might mention the cruiser San Francisco monument overlooking the Pacific; quite the most moving World War II monument I know. The lines from FDR that adorn it mention “my friend Daniel Callaghan” — when I saw it I assumed that was just formal courtesy. In fact it turns out that Callaghan really was his friend. I wonder if any president since then could have made a similar statement about an officer killed in combat.
February 17, 2008 at 2:01 pm
silbey
showed as president, or if he just was getting by on charisma, charm, humor, and “values.”,
Roosevelt seems to have had a fairly good knowledge of the Navy and naval issues. He and Alfred Thayer Mahan were connected, and he was a ‘navalist’ in the late 19th century sense (wanting the U.S. to have a bluewater fleet).
February 17, 2008 at 3:27 pm
charlieford
I don’t get the title.
February 17, 2008 at 3:33 pm
eric
It refers to the most popular blog on WordPress.
February 17, 2008 at 4:34 pm
charlieford
Ooooo-Kaaaayyy . . . I don’t think I get whatever that’s about either, but my intuition tells me I’ll do fine without.
February 17, 2008 at 4:50 pm
eric
In case you wish to defy your intuition, you can look in Wikipedia, here.
March 9, 2008 at 12:12 pm
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March 9, 2008 at 12:35 pm
5 Teaching Techniques that will Improve your Blogging | Amabanal Network
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March 9, 2008 at 9:48 pm
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March 10, 2008 at 7:03 am
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