Worldmaking (10 page)

Mahan and Roosevelt had maintained regular correspondence since the publication of
The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
and the latter's elevation to government hastened this flow—although Mahan's pen was the busier. In a candid letter to Roosevelt in May 1897, Mahan explained the purpose of his correspondence: “You will believe that when I write to you it is only to suggest thoughts, or give information, not with any wish to influence action, or to ask information. I have known myself too long not to know that I am the man of thought, not the man of action … The comparison may seem vain but it may be questioned whether Adam Smith could have realized upon his own ideas as Pitt did.”
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Mahan was being a little coy in this instance for, as subsequent letters make clear, there is little to distinguish the desire to “suggest thoughts” and the “wish to influence action.” The issue that Mahan pushed with the greatest energy was the necessity that the United States move swiftly to annex Hawaii. Japan had launched a highly ambitious program of naval building—taking a direct cue from Mahan's writings—that threatened to tilt the balance of power in the Pacific toward Japan. To assert American interests in the Pacific, and forestall Japan's potential advance, it was vital that McKinley take the Hawaiian Islands “under our wing,” as Mahan suggestively put it to Roosevelt.
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Mahan further pressed Roosevelt to lobby President McKinley for substantial increases to the naval budget, noting that “it is lamentable to have to insist on such commonplaces … but at times I despair of our country arousing until too late to avert prolonged and disastrous conflict.”
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Roosevelt replied that “all I can do towards pressing your ideas into effect will be done,” affirming Mahan's efforts and inviting additional correspondence. He further confided that in an ideal world the United States would construct a canal through Nicaragua “at once,” build a dozen battleships, annex Hawaii, and expel Spain from Cuba “tomorrow.” Aware that these sentiments were incendiary, Roosevelt advised Mahan to be discreet on the issues raised in their correspondence: “I speak to you with the greatest freedom, for I sympathize with your views, and I have precisely the same idea of patriotism and of belief in and love for our country. But to no one else, excepting Lodge, do I talk like this.”
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In August 1897, Roosevelt wrote to Mahan that “I wish I could get a chance to see you. There are a number of things about which I want to get your advice, and a number of things I would like to talk over with you.”
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The foreign-policy issue that Roosevelt wanted to discuss with Mahan above all was Spain's war against nationalist rebels in Cuba, and the myriad opportunities that the insurrection offered to the United States.

*   *   *

A Castilian proverb offers insight into Spain's shortcomings as a colonial power. In a bout of generosity, the story goes, God granted Spain a wonderful climate, fine grapes, and beautiful women. But when angels requested that he also give the nation effective political leadership, he refused, stating that granting this wish would make Spain heaven on earth—disincentivizing virtuous living in pursuit of the afterlife.
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Spain's record of governing Cuba offered confirmation. Its colonial government was distant, repressive, and polarizing; the island's economy was hamstrung by Madrid's imposition of shortsighted restrictions on trade with other nations; and huge disparities in wealth, evident soon after Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1492, created tight-wound social tensions. In 1895, José Martí, the great Cuban nationalist and poet, sailed from the Dominican Republic to lead a popular revolt against Spanish rule. Just one month after his arrival, Martí was killed by the Spanish during the Battle of Dos Ríos. Cuban nationalists quickly overcame this setback and the insurrection gained force as the months progressed. The brutality of Spain's response increased proportionally with the threat posed to its imperial prestige. Its troops murdered, raped, and pillaged in an effort to terrorize its opponents into submission. The war was a humanitarian catastrophe for Cuba, and belligerent sections of the United States press attacked Spain for the massacres it perpetrated. For American expansionists, the Cuban Revolution represented a gilt-edged opportunity to fight a beatable European power in the name of a conveniently altruistic goal. The spoils of any victory against overstretched, territorially bloated, imperial Spain were likely to be significant. And with the dissolution of Spain's restrictive trade practices, U.S. business interests could penetrate Cuba's economy and make substantial profits. Sensing an economic opportunity, Henry Cabot Lodge declared in a speech to the Senate that “free Cuba would mean a great market to the United States; it would mean an opportunity for American capital.”
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Political momentum for a war against Spain had been gathering pace during the final years of the Cleveland administration. With a new Republican president in place, the clamor intensified.

William McKinley remains one of America's most enigmatic presidents, a legacy that he purposefully bequeathed. America's twenty-fifth president refused to commit himself to paper, so historians and biographers have no personal correspondence from which to fashion a portrait. His friends' papers are disappointingly guarded on the subject of McKinley's character. So we have in our possession just tidbits of evidence from which to draw our conclusions: McKinley was commended for gallantry several times during the Civil War, he was a devout Christian who refused to work on the Sabbath, and he was utterly devoted to his invalid wife, Ida Saxton, whose life was blighted by epileptic seizures. He was high-minded, virtuous and, like Mahan, something of a prude—chastising friends and colleagues for bad language or inappropriate anecdotes.
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At the time of his inauguration, McKinley was an unknown quantity on foreign policy. In Congress he had avoided service on committees that attended to foreign or military affairs. Throughout the presidential campaign, he made no reference to Cuba, and he assured those who asked that there would be “no jingo nonsense” in his administration.
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Having fought on Virginia's bloodstained battlefields during the Civil War, he evinced little interest in military adventure of the type that Theodore Roosevelt—who was too young to have fought in the conflict—believed was natural and ennobling. William McKinley was not, in other words, the obvious man to launch America's first war of imperial acquisition against a major European nation.

For Mahan, as for many other “jingos,” Cuba was extremely important in geostrategic terms. Located 90 miles from Key West and measuring 760 miles in length, Mahan observed that its “positional value” was incalculable, and that a hostile navy in Santiago Bay “could very seriously incommode all access of the United States to the Caribbean mainland, and especially to the Isthmus.” As Mahan described it, Florida, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico formed a long peninsular line interrupted by narrow passages to the sea. If this line was interrupted by an avowedly hostile power, then the Gulf of Mexico might be blocked, causing untold damage to American commerce. This dismal potential outcome made Cuba as important—and potentially dangerous—to the United States as Ireland was to Great Britain.
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On February 15, 1898, the USS
Maine
, docked in Havana harbor, was destroyed by an explosion that claimed the lives of 260 of its 347 crew. Fitzhugh Lee, the U.S. consul general in Havana, witnessed the devastation. He noticed flames rising above the harbor walls, hurried down to establish the cause, and returned promptly to his office to inform Washington that the
Maine
had been sunk with the loss of many lives and that Spanish officers had been helpful and courageous in rescuing wounded Americans from the harbor as ammunition exploded around them. Lee was in no position to speculate on the cause of the explosion, but he noted, “I am inclined to think it was accidental.”
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The majority of Navy Department officials agreed with Lee's assessment, although some suspected a more malevolent cause.

The cause of the explosion eludes us even today, although foul play appears highly unlikely. For the past century, official investigators and amateur sleuths have attributed the destruction of the
Maine
to either an accidental coal bunker fire or a collision with a Spanish mine. There was less equivocation in 1898 when prominent American newspapers, and politicians such as Roosevelt and Lodge, instinctively attributed the “attack” on the
Maine
to Spanish skullduggery and demanded an appropriately fierce response from President McKinley. In the week following the explosion, William Randolph Hearst's New York
Journal
devoted eight pages daily to the sinking of the
Maine
. Lurid allegations stated as fact, such as “The
Maine
was destroyed by treachery” and “The
Maine
was split in two by an enemy's secret infernal machine,” increased the
Journal
's circulation from 416,885 copies on January 9 to 1,036,140 on February 18.
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It even printed implausible diagrams showing how Spanish saboteurs had attached underwater mines to the hull and detonated them from the beach. When the illustrator Frederic Remington arrived in Cuba to find much ado about nothing, as the oft-recited story goes, he cabled Hearst: “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst was said to have replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war.”
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Joseph Pulitzer's
World
was more restrained, but its editors were similarly convinced that this was no accident. Taking their cue from New York's “yellow press,” jingo editors from across the nation joined the action, although some believed that fighting Spaniards in Cuba was beneath the nation's dignity. As William A. White, a Kansas editor, wrote: “As between Cuba and Spain there is little choice. Both crowds are yellow-legged, garlic-eating, dagger-sticking, treacherous crowds—a mixture of Guinea, Indian and Dago. One crowd is as bad as the other. It is folly to spill good Saxon blood for that kind of vermin … Cuba is like a woman who lets her husband beat her a second time—she should have no sympathy.”
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As the French ambassador to the United States observed, “A sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation.”
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On March 14, Roosevelt, who was similarly spoiling for a fight, complained to Mahan, “I fear the President does not intend that we shall have war if we can possibly avoid it.”
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The beating of the war drum was deeply unsettling to the level-headed Mahan, who was genuinely appalled by the irresponsibility of the Hearst press and its chauvinistic aspirants across the nation. In a speech to the New Jersey chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, he pleaded for restraint: “We should be very cautious in forming hasty conclusions in reference to such things as this disaster. People are liable to jump at conclusions at a great national crisis like this which might involve them seriously.”
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Mahan, still focused intently on the Pacific and on the transisthmian canal, was not convinced that an American war against Spain was a strategic priority.

President McKinley shared Mahan's caution, but the saber-rattling mood across the nation made it difficult for him to pursue a moderate course.
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Seven weeks after the
Maine
tragedy, with no declaration of war against Spain in sight, McKinley was hung in effigy in Colorado. The Hearst press reported with satisfaction that the president's picture was commonly booed and hissed in New York theaters. As Ernest May writes,

To maintain a business-like “hands-off” policy toward Cuba could easily infuriate veteran, Negro, church, or other groups in the party … In no circumstances could McKinley, either as a Republican or as a conservative, ignore his responsibility to maintain a united party …

McKinley found himself faced with a terrible choice. He could embark on a war he did not want or defy public opinion, make himself unpopular, and risk at least the unseating of the Republican party if not the overthrow of what he conceived to be sound constitutional government.
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On March 28, a Naval Court of Inquiry issued a report that claimed presumptuously that the
Maine
had been destroyed “by the explosion of a submarine mine which caused the partial explosion of two or more of the forward magazines.”
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The logic of the battle cry “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” had become impossible for McKinley to ignore.

On April 11, 1898, President McKinley's request for authorization to stop the fighting in Cuba was read out in the House of Representatives. The president's primary justification for U.S. intervention was startling in its humanitarian emphasis. He requested Congress

to authorize and empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba, and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government, capable of maintaining order and observing its international obligations, insuring peace and tranquility and security of its citizens as well as our own, and to use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.
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Thus McKinley sought war to protect Cubans, and Americans, from the deprivations of a particularly unpleasant conflict. In emotive terms he evoked the suffering of Cubans, “a dependent people striving to be free,” who were being killed and maimed by “cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized practices of warfare.” McKinley justified the conflict not in terms of America's national interest but “in the cause of humanity and to put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries now existing there, and which the parties to the conflict are either unable or unwilling to stop or mitigate.”
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His humanitarian casus belli allowed him to justify the conflict with some measure of sincerity. But as Ernest May astutely observes, McKinley led “his country unwillingly toward a war that he did not want for a cause in which he did not believe.”
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McKinley appeared to be a prisoner of events—dragged to war by a popular swelling of pugnacity.
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