Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [966]
Still, Cuba provided some with a chance for heroics. Roosevelt led his men up Kettle Hill, a small outcropping below the principal enemy fortifications on San Juan Ridge, and shot a Spanish officer with his pistol. Even Hearst—barred by McKinley from military status—managed to capture prisoners.
Within weeks the war was over, both Cuba and Puerto Rico taken. New Yorkers went wild over America’s emergence as an imperial power. The metropolis offered now Admiral Dewey, the war’s greatest hero, a homecoming on a scale not seen since its greeting to Lafayette. The artistic community collaborated in creating a mammoth triumphal arch (out of lath and plaster) at Madison Square, the city’s reigning civic center. When the North Atlantic Squadron steamed into New York harbor on September 29, 1899—its progress upriver marked by a Journal balloon that released showers of colorcoded confetti over Grant’s Tomb—it touched off two days of frenzied adulation. The spectacle hailed the emergence of America as a new Roman Empire, and underscored New York’s position as its de facto capital.
Sampson and Schley Leading the Fleet into New York Harbor, August 20, 1898, painting by Fred Pausing. On July 3, two days after Roosevelt and the Rough Riders captured San Juan Hill, the U.S. naval forces under Rear Admiral William T. Sampson and Commodore Winfield S. Schley destroyed the Spanish fleet off Santiago. Their triumphant return to New York—here they fire a salute while steaming up the Hudson past Grant’s Tomb—was only a dress rehearsal, however, for the adulation showered on Admiral Dewey himself a year later. (© Museum of the City of New York)
WINNERS AND LOSERS
Like all wars, the struggle with Spain had its winners and losers. The losers, apart from the 379 killed and sixteen hundred wounded in action, included the more than five thousand soldiers who had died from yellow fever, malaria, or typhoid and the enormous number still suffering from such diseases. Twenty thousand such casualties were ensconced in a great hospital camp at Montauk Point, where they were ministered to by New York matrons, young girls, and such nurses as could be spared from Bellevue, Roosevelt, Presbyterian, and other hospitals, themselves packed with casualties.
Some were victims of badly preserved beef. One such was Achille La Guardia who would later die of it, leaving his son Fiorello enraged at corporate malfeasance. Other casualties included Stephen Crane—his Cuban stint had broken his health, and he would die in 1900 from TB—and George Waring, who went to Cuba to deal with yellow fever, contracted it himself, and died shortly after returning to New York City.
Topping the winners’ list was Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Rider wrote up his war memoirs (which Mr. Dooley—the fictional commentator created by Finley Peter Dunne—remarked should have been titled Alone in Cuba). In 1898 Roosevelt stumped for the governorship as a war hero, won, served two years, irritated state Republican boss Platt no end, and was accordingly bounced upstairs to serve as McKinley’s running mate in the successful 1900 campaign. When McKinley was assassinated the following year, TR assumed the office, completing a run-up from police commissioner of New York City to president of the United States in four and a half years flat.
Among the other big winners was a potpourri of New York City businessmen. With Cuba an unofficial American protectorate, the Sugar Trust expanded operations, aided by Elihu Root, longtime legal counsel to the Havemeyers; now, as newly appointed secretary of war, he oversaw the island’s military occupation and worked to lower U.S. tariffs on Cuban sugar. Low tariffs, coupled with America’s asserted right of military intervention, its possession of a naval base on the island, and its eagerness to improve Cuba’s roads and public health,