THE “LEAST DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT”

In the spring of 1898, Americans treated the prospect of war in Cuba like a cross between a debutante’s ball and “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show. No red-blooded man, regardless of training, wealth, or aptitude for firing a weapon, dared to be left out. It was simply the most rowdy, chaotic, even slapstick conflict that the United States has fought before or since. Only through a truly remarkable run of Yankee good luck and Spanish ineptitude did the United States manage to avert a national catastrophe.

For many the prospect of adventure in the Caribbean was simply too much fun to be left to the government. Frank James, brother of the notorious outlaw Jesse, offered to lead a company of cowboys into battle. Sioux Indians were said to be ready to go to Cuba to collect scalps. One enterprising engineer, John P. Holland, claimed to have developed a “submarine torpedo boat” and offered to demonstrate his craft by using it to transport a bomb to Havana’s Morro Castle, provided the navy would promise to purchase one afterward. The offer was rejected.1 Even William Jennings Bryan joined the fray, serving as a colonel in a Nebraska regiment, though he never got any farther than Florida.

McKinley and senior cabinet members had to fight off crowds of men seeking impressive-sounding commissions. “Everyone who has ever carried a musket … seems bent on getting a high command,” the Army and Navy Journal wrote. One general reported a stack of applications that reached nearly to the ceiling. Secretary of War Alger felt so much political pressure to grant a personal hearing to well-connected applicants that he received more than a hundred visitors a day, forcing war planning to be conducted in the evenings and on Sundays.2

There were so many commissions to sign that McKinley and his aides formed a small assembly line to speed things up. Seated at a table, McKinley would take each piece of paper from a tall stack and sign it, and as he was reaching for the next one, an aide would whisk the signed order away and lay it on the floor while the ink dried. Grumbling, McKinley wondered aloud why he had to be the one to sign all the orders.

Throughout the heartland, eager young men flocked to enlist, lining up at makeshift booths or abandoned stores taken over by army recruiters while backslapping neighbors congratulated them on their patriotic spirit. They paraded together to train stations, crowds cheering, bands playing such hits as “Marching Through Georgia” and “Maryland.” Young girls rode to city squares in their Sunday best to wave flags and beg for cartridges as souvenirs.

On New York’s Fifth Avenue, the society set were more inclined to pay for their contributions than risk their own patrician necks. John Jacob Astor purchased a complete battery of artillery, including guns and ammunition, and donated them to the effort. The Armour Company promised a scarce refrigerator ship to transport food to the troops.3 Heiress Helen M. Gould donated $100,000 of her private estate to the navy. Newspaper publisher Hearst made plans to buy “some big English steamer” and have her sailed to the Suez Canal and sunk to prevent the Spanish from reinforcing their fleet in the Pacific.4

The normally reserved Atlantic Monthly published an American flag on its cover.5 The rival New York papers, the Journal and the World, scrambled to assemble fleets of boats to transport reporters, artists, and even printing presses to Cuba. Hearst, ever the patriot, was awarded the honorary rank of naval ensign for donating his yacht—the Bucentaur—to the war effort and would later lead a fleet of twenty tugboats to Cuba. To his readers’ delight, he would manage to personally help capture twenty Spanish soldiers and force them to kneel and kiss the American flag while his photographers captured the moment.6

For all of the delirious flag-waving, no group snared the public’s attention like the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, owners of that most critical qualification for success in America: a catchy nickname. The Rough Riders were a publicist’s dream, filled with larger-than-life characters of the sort that only the United States could produce. No persona, of course, was bigger than the second-in-command, Theodore Roosevelt. By rights, Roosevelt should have remained at his post as assistant secretary of the navy, where his skills were needed now more than ever. Long was incensed when he heard of Roosevelt’s plan to fight. “He has lost his head.… He means well, but it is one of those cases of aberration—desertion—vain-glory; of which he is entirely unaware.”7 Yet Roosevelt, who had been dreaming and bragging to friends about leading men into combat for years, was no more likely to remain in Washington than Ida McKinley was to lead a combat division.

Within days of the announcement that the regiment was being formed, Roosevelt’s mailbox filled to overflowing with some twenty-three thousand applications from a collection of candidates as diverse as the nation itself.8 Many came from his rarefied social circles. From his alma mater there was the outstanding quarterback Dudley Dean and tennis champion Bob Wrenn. Other athletes included Craig Wadsworth, the steeplechase rider; Joe Stevens, a crack polo player; and Hamilton Fish, a former captain of the Columbia crew.9

Yet the man who had spent many a happy night under the stars of the Dakotas on hunting expeditions was no snob. The Rough Riders included cowboys, four New York City policemen, famed Indian hunters, and Native American Indians as well. One trooper who had never seen a body of water larger than the headwaters of the Rio Grande displayed the limited worldview that more than a few Rough Riders possessed. When his hat blew off aboard a transport ship miles from shore, the man shouted to a friend, “Oh-oh-Jim! Ma hat blew into the creek.”10

Poor planning, bungled leadership, and interservice rivalries complicated the war’s planning at every turn. Decisions as basic as the size of the American expeditionary force and its objectives changed almost by the day. The choice of a staging area caused no small headaches. At one point, the invasion force was ordered to assemble in Dry Tortugas, Florida. The command was rescinded when it was pointed out that there was “absolutely no water” there.11 The eventual choice of Tampa Bay was a triumph of bureaucratic myopia over common sense. The first troops arrived to discover that only one rail line served the port itself, after crossing nine miles of sandy and swampy terrain. What’s more, the military was forced to share the line with railroad companies that sold tickets to tourists.

Charged with getting the embarkation organized was William Rufus Shafter, a crusty old Indian fighter more famous for his portly frame than his management skills. The Tampa gossip mill estimated that he weighed at least three hundred pounds and could walk no faster than two miles an hour—“just beastly obese,” as one observer put it.12 Skillful strategist though he may have been on the frontier, Shafter lacked any background for leading such a large number of men. Tasks as basic as locating equipment and food were reduced to a hopeless muddle. Bills of lading and invoices on newly arrived trains were frequently forgotten or went missing, forcing officers to open each car to see what was inside. Many cargoes were simply lost. Some fifteen cars full of uniforms were marooned on side tracks around the city at the same time that militia troops were desperate for clothing.13 Logistics grew so convoluted that at one point, supplies were backed up as far as Columbia, South Carolina, five hundred miles away.14

Most disappointing of all was that the army was desperately short of the latest rifles—the new Krag-Jorgensons that fired a smokeless powder. Most soldiers would have to make do with their old Springfields, single-shot rifles that emitted a black puff of smoke when fired, signaling their location to the enemy. In certain quarters, even a Springfield was a luxury. Some of the National Guard troops arrived with rusty weapons unfit for field service; others had no weapons of any kind. Arms were in such short supply that sentries at the Chickamauga Battlefield Park in Georgia marched with broomsticks.15

Yet as far as the senior officer class was concerned, whoever had picked Tampa had gotten one thing right: their accommodations. The palatial Tampa Bay Hotel might have been the entire area’s only redeeming quality. While troops made the best of mildewed canvas tents, officers at the hotel relaxed in wicker chairs on porches “as wide and as long as a village street.” Busy waiters kept the guests cooled with a constant supply of iced tea,16 whisking through the luxurious lobby that blazed with flowers. On the hotel’s round, stuffed sofas, American officers mixed with foreign military attachés in crisp dress uniforms. Evenings were spent dancing under colored electric lights and palm trees in the ballroom with female guests that included family members of soldiers and at least a couple of journalists. One panting Chicago correspondent described Kathleen Blake Watkins, a reporter for the Toronto Mail and Express, thus: “By gosh, for a five-card draw she’s hot stuff. There’s steam comes out of her boots all the time, and the whole Chicago fire brigade couldn’t put her out.”17 One general summed up the feelings of many: “Only God knows why [Morton F.] Plant built a hotel here, but thank God he did.”18

The fumbling mob of would-be soldiers might have stumbled along for weeks were it not for an astonishing discovery. On May 1, 1898, from the far-off Cape Verde Islands, a desolate few specks on the map four hundred miles off the west coast of Africa, a New York Herald correspondent reported that he had seen Spain’s Atlantic fleet set sail in the direction of the United States. In fact, he had followed the fleet in a small steamer until it disappeared heading west and calculated it would be heading for Puerto Rico, a journey of 2,480 miles that would take twelve to fourteen days.19 The Herald story, when it landed on American doorsteps, gave rise to a terrified manhunt for Pascual Cervera y Topete and his ships. A Spanish fleet consisting of four armored cruisers and three destroyers was heading in the direction of the East Coast with evil intent.20 And nobody knew exactly where it was. With most of the American navy blockading Havana, the Spanish could in theory simply lay anchor off any number of American cities such as Baltimore, New York, or Boston and pound private homes and businesses into rubble.21

With panic spreading up and down the eastern seaboard, American naval ships chased down one ghostly report after another. A telegraph operator in Newfoundland claimed that he had heard gunfire at sea. Strange ships were spotted off Fire Island. New naval ships under construction near Norfolk were thought to be the target of Spanish torpedo boats. Commanders in the Caribbean guessed at the Spanish route, some taking up positions near Puerto Rico, where they waited for the enemy to arrive on the horizon. Fast scout ships were dispatched as far south as Venezuela to check one report. But the Spanish were nowhere to be seen.

While easterners moved inland and out of range of seaborne guns, and the American navy burned tons of coal in its wild-goose chase, a telegraph operator at the governor-general’s palace in Havana, Domingo Villaverde, listened quietly as messages between the island and Madrid streamed back and forth. Villaverde had worked for the Western Union telegraph company and now eagerly shared intelligence tidbits with the U.S. government.22 Among the many messages that now passed across his desk were notes suggesting that the Spanish fleet had laid anchor at Cuba’s second city, Santiago de Cuba, on the southeast coast.

His report, when it landed in Washington, initially failed to win much credibility. It seemed such an unlikely place for the Spanish to be hiding, so far from Havana. It would take weeks before an incredulous and embarrassed naval commander would even check it out, but finally on May 29, 1898, Commodore Winfield Scott Schley sailed close enough to the harbor mouth for one of his men to take a good look inside. There, as they had been all along, were the Spanish ships, low on coal and praying for resupply.23 He would not be able to attack them, well protected as they were in the harbor, but neither could they escape. Schley now triumphantly announced to a reporter from the Associated Press, “We’ve got them now, Graham, and they’ll never go home.”24

McKinley, too, in these early hours of the war, seemed to have realized that the Spanish fleet would never go home. Though American troops hadn’t even left for Cuba yet, his ever-evolving thinking had already turned to what the economic and political landscape of the Caribbean and the Pacific would look like when Spain surrendered.

The first hint of how far he had let his imagination run came on June 6, 1898, in the form of a message that Secretary of State Day sent to John Hay, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in England, outlining the peace terms the United States intended to demand from the Spanish. Madrid, the president had decided, would have to evacuate and surrender Cuba. That was hardly a surprise. But now McKinley also required the Spanish to surrender a port in the Philippines. And he would not stop there. The president wanted the Spanish to cede Puerto Rico and at least one other Spanish possession in the Pacific.

The man with no overseas ambitions just a year ago now spoke of extending America’s footprint from the Caribbean to the farthest reaches of the Pacific. Back in Canton, before the election, he would have scoffed at the absurdity. Yet much of what he had known and believed back then had changed. He knew he needed to find an outlet for excess production, but he had assumed that it could only be accomplished through painstaking trade negotiations. The conflict with Spain, however, presented him with a chance to open more territory to American commerce than he had ever dreamed of. Spain’s entire empire, perfectly positioned for building a bridge across the Pacific, was there for the taking. He had even been presented with a legal fig leaf for taking it all over, as he could claim the territory as war reparations in the peace talks that would follow the end of the fighting. Perhaps most surreal of all was how enthusiastically the American public seemed to bless an expansionist agenda.

Time was also running out. Just as the United States was sensing a new role for itself in global affairs, so, too, were other powers. Japan, eager to be thought the equal of the Europeans, hoped to carve a place of importance for itself in Asia. Germany, united only two decades previously, was anxious to catch up to England as the world’s dominant empire. In the fast-changing international landscape of the 1890s, just sitting still would have been a decision with important implications. If McKinley did not move quickly to safeguard the stepping-stones he needed to achieve his objectives, rival nations would. In a frank chat a year later with Henry Pritchett, superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, McKinley claimed he had initially opposed bringing additional territory under U.S. control. That began to change, he said, as he realized the public’s willingness to accept expansion. Ultimately, the president continued, “alternatives had to be faced which rejection of those countries would involve.” Taking Hawaii and Puerto Rico, McKinley said, was the “least dangerous experiment.” He felt the same way about the Philippines.25Whitelaw Reid, a Republican newspaper editor and diplomat who knew McKinley well, described the president’s predicament best. Without mentioning McKinley by name, Reid wrote, “The candid conclusion seems inevitable that, not as a matter of policy, but as a necessity of the position in which we find ourselves and as a matter of national duty, we must hold Cuba, at least for a time and till a permanent government is well established for which we can afford to be responsible; we must hold Puerto Rico; and we may have to hold the Philippines.”26

Aboard the USS Charleston, one day out of Honolulu with the first American troops bound for Manila, Captain Henry Glass summoned his crew. The ship, he told them, had received fresh secret orders while in the Hawaiian Islands that he had been instructed not to open until now. Carefully ripping open the envelope that contained his papers, he began to read. With crew members exchanging puzzled glances, he announced that the small American flotilla would not go directly to the Philippines after all. They would be making a small detour to a dot of land none of them had heard of before—the Spanish colony of Guam.

Guam was ideally suited to America’s new needs as McKinley saw them. Home to only ten thousand people and located halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, it was a perfect stopping off point for American ships on their way west. None other than the great naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan had the island, or something like it, in mind when he referred to the importance of acquiring “other deep water ports” in the area.27

Glass and the American ships arrived off the coast of Guam on June 20, 1898, their ships shrouded by a driving downpour that engulfed them one minute, then passed just as quickly to reveal views of the lush island. Oscar King Davis, a correspondent with the New York Sun traveling on a troopship, waxed about the beauty of the place: “We could see that it was very green with heavy foliage and thick growth of trees. Along the shore was a line of sheer cliffs with a narrow sand beach in front of them. The beach was fringed with palms and heavy tropical growth which sometimes climbed the face of the cliffs.”28 The only thing missing was the Spanish military.

At the harbor of San Luis d’Apra, where Glass figured to find at least one Spanish gunboat, the scene was one of tropical tranquillity. Not only were there no ships, there were no soldiers either. Unopposed and not sure what to expect, Glass ordered the Charleston to enter the harbor, directly under the nose of Fort Santa Cruz. Puzzled by the silence, the Americans fired a handful of shells into the fort to see if they could wake anybody up. There was no response.

While Glass pondered what to do, his men spotted two small boats flying Spanish flags rowing in their direction. Aboard were the island’s Spanish military leader, Lieutenant Garcia Guiterrez; an army health officer, Surgeon Romero; and a native, Francis Portusac, who claimed to have become a naturalized American citizen in Chicago in 1888.29 Fearing little from the strange group, Glass saw to it that the men were welcomed aboard with crisp military salutes and ushered to his cabin—neither the Americans nor the Spanish knowing why the other was there.

The Spanish officer began: “You will pardon our not immediately replying to your salute, Captain, but we are unaccustomed to receiving salutes here and are not supplied with proper guns for returning them.”

Perplexed, Glass answered, “What salute?”

Looking at each other with puzzled expressions, one of the Spaniards replied, “The salute you fired. We should like to return it, and shall do so as soon as we can get a battery.”

As the misunderstanding dawned on Glass, he explained with a wry smile: “Make no mistake, gentlemen. I fired no salute. We came here on a hostile errand. Our country is at war with yours.”30

For a few moments, the Spanish sat silently as the news sank in. The isolated garrison on Guam had received no word that their country was at war. The mail boat, which visited every two months from Manila, was late this time, they explained, and they had just assumed there was some minor problem. Just when they had regained their composure, Glass gave them another piece of bad news. “You understand, of course, gentlemen, that you are my prisoners?” For a second time, shock and disbelief spread across their faces. The men had no choice but to give themselves up, and indeed offered to return to land to deliver Glass’s surrender demand to the governor, who was four miles away in Agana. With nowhere to run, the rest of the Spanish garrison in Guam, as well as the irritated governor, surrendered the next day.31 The United States had acquired its first possession of the war.

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