Americans go fighting mad when they hear the Maine was sunk
Second article of a series.
This story – or one similar to it – Mr. Average American read in his newspaper on Feb. 16, 1898:
Havana, Cuba – (Feb. 15)
The noise of a terrible explosion startled Havana at 10 o’clock tonight. It was soon learned by the people who flocked to the waterfront, when the sound proceeded, that the explosion had occurred on the U.S. battleship Maine on the harbor. Definite particulars are not yet ascertainable, but it seems certain that many persons onboard the Maine were killed and wounded, and possibly the ship is so badly injured that she cannot be saved… No explanation of the explosion is obtainable at this time. Whether one of the ship’s magazines blew up, or bombs were placed beside her and set off by the Spaniards is not known.
What was Mr. Average American’s reaction to the shocking news? Remember his provincialism. Remember he was what we would call today a “small-town guy.” If he lived in a city, the chances are he has spent his boyhood on a farm or in a tiny hamlet. International affairs were of no concern to him, because he didn’t know the people who lived across the ocean and didn’t want to. He spoke good old Mid-American English, wore galluses and button shoes and hadn’t the faintest idea where Japan started and finished because he had hidden Deadwood Dick in his geography at school and devoured every word.
Frightened by foreigners
Foreigners rather frightened him. He didn’t trust them because they didn’t talk his lingo. So what did he do?
He pushed back his coffee cup, the one with the mustache guard which the children had given him the previous Christmas, he elbowed the ham and eggs out of reach, and he hammered on the breakfast table with his face. and he bellowed:
Why those dirty ----!
Mr. Average American was mad. 43 years later, with our radios blaring “Pearl Harbor––Jap planes––ships sunk” in our ears, another generation discovered exactly what a man he was.
Then he hurried downtown for more details.
Gets another dispatch
There had been another dispatch at 4 a.m.:
By a miracle, Capt. Sigsbee and most of the officers of the Maine were taking off in safety, but 100 of the crew, it is believed, were killed… It is apparent to the observers on shore that the vessel is sinking rapidly to the bottom of the bay… The entire city is panic-stricken.
Mr. Average American said to a stranger at the newsstand on the corner, “It’s war.” The stranger agreed.
Later in the morning, Washington received its first report from the commander of the Maine, urging that judgment be reserved until the cause of the disaster could be determined. He had been the last man to go over the side of his ship. By late afternoon, the death toll was known to be 251. Final casualty list showed 266 men to have lost their lives.
And so it was war, although not immediately. In spite of tension that threatened to reach the breaking point any day, Mr. Average American waited while a board of inquiry sifted the evidence. It reported that an outside explosion had sunk the Maine.
Ultimatum sent
An ultimatum was sent to the Spanish government on April 20, demanding a satisfactory reply by the 23rd. Hostilities were declared to have begun on April 24. The Nashville, a cruiser, stopped a Spanish merchantman with a shot across the bow a day or so afterward. On the 27th, three warships under Adm. Sampson bombarded Matanzas, Cuba.
Now Mr. Average American was in it up to his glossy derby hat.
The adjustments he had to make quickly were enormous. Except for the Mexican War of 1846, which he could recall only if he was an old man, he had no conception of what it meant to come to grips with an alien power. The Civil War was not comparable, either in a psychological or tactical sense.
Here, for the first time, with a job the whole country could tackle, from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine – Key West to Duluth. Frankly, Mr. Average American didn’t know whether to feel elated and exalted by his new responsibilities, or scared to death.
But he did know he was gosh-a-mighty sore at the Spaniards.
Falls prey to rumors
At first, he fell prey to the wildest of alarms and rumors. It must be borne in mind that he possessed none of the modern means of rapid and widespread communication and transport.
There were hundreds of miles of sparsely-inhabited coastline which offered ideal beachheads for an invader, who might land and be well-established before a defense could be put up.
So it was logical that the “war jitters,” as we term them today, slapped Mr. Average American squarely in the face.
He spent his worst month of his life wondering what was going to happen to him.
Spain’s surprising lack of first-class sea-fighting machinery had not yet been exposed at Manila and Santiago. Mr. Average American’s friends at the office put on long faces and whispered excitedly that we had gone in over our heads. When he stopped in the tobacco shop, he heard that our Navy was led by jim-dandy officers who were cut-ups in a ballroom but not much at sea. A neighbor said he knew ammunition was scarce. There weren’t enough shells for the big guns.
Expected Spanish fleet
New York, Boston – all the great seaports – were positive the Spanish fleet was heading straight at them. Adm. Cervera’s squadron of four cruisers and three torpedo-boat destroyers had sailed from Saint Vincent, in the West Indies, on April 29, and had been lost sight of the horizon. Today, a swift plane could have ferreted them out in a few hours, but in ‘98, all Mr. Average American could do was guess. Being human, he guessed the worst and it soon became fact to him.
It was not until a month later – May 29, to be exact – that Cervera was found by Adm. Schley. He was at anchor in the Bay of Santiago. He had made no attempt to leave a calling card on America’s shores.
It may have been the race of the battleship Oregon that kept Mr. Average American’s spirits up during the anxious days of late winter and spring. Certainly, this was one of the most memorable episodes of the country’s history, one that alternately chilled and thrilled the public as nothing had before.
When the Maine went down, the Oregon was in the Pacific at San Francisco. One of the Navy’s most powerful fighters, she was ordered to make haste to the Eastern Seaboard, and under forced draft, she headed south.
For all anyone knew, Oregon might be the difference between victory and defeat in this war. Her course was long and arduous, for there was no Panama Canal; to reach her destination, she had to steam the full western length of South America, plough through the Straits of Magellan, head northeast to the outermost tip of Brazil and then cover a stretch that was believed dominated by the Spanish fleet.
The Oregon sailed on March 19, and for 17 days – until June 1 – Mr. Average American followed her with breathless anxiety. She became a symbol of America’s war effort. Her progress was recorded in newspaper headlines. She might have been Mars’ counterpart of the Kentucky Derby or the Rose Bowl game from the treatment she got.
As the Oregon near the end of her run, the reporting grew lyrical. Every American was stirred. Dewey, meanwhile, had destroyed a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, but the Oregon “made it,” and Mr. Average American gloated over such verses as:
They held her South to Magellan’s mouth,
Then East they steered her, forth
Through the farther gate of the crafty strait,
And then they held her North.
Six thousand miles to the Indian Isles!
And the Oregon rushed home,
Her wake a swirl of jade and pearl,
Her bow a bend of foam.
One can picture how Mr. Average American and his cronies celebrated the Oregon’s “arrival” home.
The Oregon played its part well. Under its guns, the first Marines landed in Cuba; it helped blast Cervera out of the water at Santiago.
Only a skirmish
It turned out, however, that the Spanish-American War was little more than an international skirmish – hardly that, if measured in today’s terms. There was some fierce fighting in front of El Caney and at San Juan Hill where the Rough Riders under two young, impetuous gallants, Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt, distinguished themselves, but the naval battles proved to be hardly more than target practice for our gunners.
A youthful lieutenant, Richard Pearson Hobson, who was to become known all over America as a speaker on Chautauqua platforms, raised the blood pressure of the folks back home by taking a coaling ship, the Merrimac, under the forts at Santiago to try to sink her in the mouth of the harbor and thus bottle up the enemy fleet. He was not successful, but he and his six companions escaped harm and became national heroes, no less than Roosevelt and Wood.
Mr. Average American was feeling his oats and walking with his chest out. His country was winning its first foreign war since it had become of age. The world had learned that the Yankees were good fighters as well as shrewd tradesmen and funny people who slapped each other on the back and laughed at their own stories.
Peace came in August, before thousands of the volunteers who had responded to two calls were trained sufficiently to leave their camps.
To Mr. Average American, it was a good peace. Out of it, the United States acquired the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
The head of the house proudly told Mrs. Average American, “Now we’re important people.” He had to live until 1917 to learn just how important.
