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Destruction of the U.S. Battleship Maine
February 16, 1898.
Editorial - Military History - February 1998
A CENTURY AFTER THE UNITED STATES BEGAN ITS RISE TO GLOBAL HEGEMONY, IT IS TIME
ONCE MORE TO REMEMBER THE MAINE
Remember the Maine? Today, not many Americans
do. In contrast, by April 1898 there was hardly one American who did not
Competing newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst saw
to that. By the end of that month, the anger they exploited and stirred up
had helped to drive the United States into a war with Spain. If it seems that
the power of the news media is frightening today, the events that followed
the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15,1898,
show just how far back that power dates.
What happened to Maine that night remains
hypothetical, but in their book Remembering the Maine (Smithsonian
Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1995) Peggy and Harold Samuels sift
through the available evidence to offer their own convincing conspiracy
theory.
In the 1890s, the United States consolidated
the last of its territorial dominion between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
and bolstered by a prosperous economy, turned its attention abroad. Much of
that attention focused on Cuba, where an independence movement had gained
great popular sympathy in the United States, partly as a result of the brutal
suppressive methods employed by Spanish General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau
and partly through the sensationalistic reporting on the guerrilla war by
Pulitzer's New York Sun and Hearst's Journal. The U.S. government condemned
Spain's policies in Cuba, and American arms smugglers and soldiers of fortune
aided the guerrillas there. Washington's far-from-diplomatic consul in
Havana, former Confederate Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, distrusted the Spanish and
made no secret of his desire that they leave Cuba entirely—through American
armed intervention, if necessary.
The assassination of conservative Spanish Prime
Minister Canovas del Castillo by an Italian anarchist in August 1897 was
followed by the election of a liberal, Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, to that
position in October. One of Sagasta's first acts was to recall Weyler from
Cuba, replacing him with General Ramón Blanco y Erenas. While Weyler
departed—insisting that, had he been given only six more months, he could
have crushed the rebellion—Blanco offered the Cubans concessions of home
ruler under the Spanish flag, similar to Britain's arrangement with Canada
since 1867.
Such measure came too late. The rebels had
suffered too much under Weyler to settle for anything less than complete
independence. Equally unwilling to accept compromise was a faction of
conservative Spanish landowners and military officers, known as Weylerites,
who saw Weyler as a hero betrayed, regarded the Cubans as dangerous political
radicals, bitterly resented Yankee meddling in their colonial affairs and
considered any negotiated concession to be an affront to Spanish honor. In the
United States, President William McKinley resisted calls for armed
involvement from Americans—ranging from people who had simply been stirred up
by the press to those who saw the possibility of commercial opportunities
arising in an independent Cuba (including Lee, who was still in Havana and
still hostile toward Spain.)
In that volatile situation steamed Maine, the
U.S. Navy's first battleship of the industrial age (story, P.20), on January
25,1898. Her official mission was one of good will; her actual purpose was
intimidation. The Spanish authorities welcomed the warship to its berth with
cool cordiality. The Weylerites, according to the Samuels, planned a hotter
reception for her.
Whether planted under Maine's berth in advance
or placed under her on the night of February 15, a mine—probably a crude
homemade device—exploded under the ship, causing inward facing damage to the
keel plates that served as the principal evidence of foul play. The
Weylerites (if they did it) probably hoped only to cause enough damage to
compel the battleship to limp ignominiously home. Instead, the explosion
penetrated to Maine's magazines and she exploded, killing 267 officers and
men.
Both the Spanish government and the U.S. Navy
investigated the tragedy, but their less than conclusive findings became
irrelevant as popular sentiment, particularly in the United States,
outstripped diplomacy. If "Cuba libre" was not enough to stir up
martial sentiments, a new slogan—"Remember the Maine and to Hell with
Spain"—was.
On April 25, the U.S. Congress declared war on
Spain. The American expansionists and the Spanish Weylerites had their war.
The result finished what remained of Spain's overseas empire and set the
United States on a new course as an international imperialist power—and, a
century later, as the world's foremost power.
In the next few issue, Military History will
examine more aspects of the Spanish American War, a relatively minor and now
all but forgotten conflict that marked a turning point in American and world
history. Then each reader can decide for himself or herself whether it is
still appropriate to remember the Maine.
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