Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [965]
Wall Street also still favored peace. Most businessmen feared war would interrupt trade, endanger currency stability, and torpedo a fledgling recovery. Their reluctance generated nationwide opprobrium. Roosevelt denounced the “craven fear and brutal selfishness of the mere money-makers.” Some Democrats joined in the baying, claiming that New York moneymen, by putting profits over people, were blocking a humanitarian crusade. The clamor reached such dimensions that Elihu Root advised McKinley not to “retard the enormous momentum of the people bent upon war” lest he bring the silverites to power.
McKinley and the metropolitan community held firm until the pressure of events overwhelmed them. An indiscreet letter from a Spanish diplomat was passed to Hearst, who ran it under banner headlines. A week later the battleship Maine (a product of the Brooklyn Navy Yard) was blown up in Havana’s harbor, and the papers screamed for war. When a Spanish cruiser paid New York a courtesy call, the World warned of treachery, claiming “her shells will explode on the Harlem River and in the suburbs of Brooklyn.” Circulations soared, the Journal passing the million mark.
The clamor and instability convinced many businessmen that peace was proving as debilitating as war. Leading figures like John Jacob Astor, William Rockefeller, Stuyvesant Fish, and Thomas Fortune Ryan adopted a more belligerent stance. In late March J. P. Morgan declared nothing further could be obtained from arbitration. Many others were converted, reported the Wall Street Journal, after the moderate Senator Proctor assured them that the terrible conditions in Cuba were not just the imaginings of the yellow press and that it was not inevitable that Cubans—the Spanish once removed—would be revolutionary. On March 25 a leading New York journalist and McKinley adviser sent him a telegram arguing that “big corporations here now believe we will have war. Believe all would welcome it as relief to suspense.” Two days later, the president presented an ultimatum to Spain; on April 11 he sent a message to Congress asking for “forcible intervention”; on April 25 the United States formally declared war.
As in the Civil War, the city immediately shed ambivalence and donned patriotic bunting. Regiments formed up and marched down Fifth Avenue, crowds cheering, flags flapping, bands playing Sousa marches. Harbor defenses were bolstered to ward off a feared invasion by the Spanish fleet. New York bankers organized popular loan drives to fund the war effort. New York newspapers, whose communication systems were superior to Washington’s, relayed information to the military: the secretary of the navy first learned of Commodore George Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay from the World.
Watching the Bulletin-Boards on Park Row at the Time of Dewey’s Great Battle of Manila Bay, from E. Idell Zeisloft, The New Metropolis (1899). (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Volunteer troops so clogged the transport system that rival regiments had to elbow their way toward the front lines. Teddy embarked for Havana with his Rough Riders—a collection of cowboys and clubmen—with six spare sets of glasses sewn to his uniform and one inside his hat.
Each of the two yellow press contenders was now printing 1,250,000 issues a day. Hearst chartered a steamship, sailed a reportorial regiment into Cuban waters, and filed his own copy. The World sent a crack squadron of investigators, including Stephen Crane, but the novelist’s forthright realism got Pulitzer into trouble.