Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [97]
On February 15, 1898, the United States armored cruiser Maine blew up and sank in the harbor of Havana with the loss of 260 lives. Although the cause of the explosion was never ascertained, it was impossible in the mood of the time to assume other than a dastardly Spanish plot. The proponents of war burst into hysteria; the peace-minded were outshouted. McKinley hung back, but fearful of a split in his party, soon gave way to the clamor. Speaker Reed did not. During the two months in which negotiations aimed at forcing Spain into war were being pursued, he did his best to hold back the wave, limiting time for debate and quashing resolutions recognizing Cuban independence. When Senator Proctor, who owned marble quarries in Vermont, made a strong speech for war Reed commented, “Proctor’s position might have been expected. A war will make a large market for gravestones.” He was attacked by the pro-war press and his rulings aroused resentment in the House, which, on the whole—like the country—wanted war. “Ambition, interest, land-hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be” acknowledged the Washington Post, “we are animated by a new sensation.… The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle.”
It was too strong for Reed to control. Asked by reporters one morning at breakfast at the Shoreham for comment on the stampede for war, he showed a letter he had just opened from Governor Morton of New York urging him to step down from the chair to the floor of the House and dissuade the members from intervention. “Dissuade them! The Governor might as well ask me to step out in the middle of a Kansas waste and dissuade a cyclone!” He could not keep the ultimatum to Spain from coming to the floor, and the vote for it in the House of 311 to 6 was a measure of the cyclone. To one of the six Reed said, “I envy you the luxury of your vote. I was where I could not do it.”
War was declared on April 25, 1898. Mahan, then in Rome, asked by reporters how long he thought the war would last, replied with what proved dead reckoning, “About three months.” Returning at once he was appointed one of the three members of the Naval War Board. Roosevelt sent him a plan of campaign for action in the Philippines and on receiving his comments wrote, “There is no question that you stand head and shoulder above the rest of us. You have given us just the suggestions we want.”
On April 30 Commodore Dewey’s squadron steamed into Manila Bay and with a day’s bombardment, loosed by the classic order, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” destroyed or put out of action the Spanish squadron and shore batteries. Never had the country felt such a thrill of pride. GREATEST NAVAL ENGAGEMENT OF MODERN TIMES was one headline. It faced the country suddenly with a new problem which none but a few had thought of: What to do next? The American people on the whole, as Mr. Dooley said, did not know whether the Philippines were islands or canned goods, and even McKinley confessed “he could not have told where those darned islands were within 2,000 miles.” The disciples of Mahan knew well enough where they were and what must become of them. Within four days of Dewey’s victory Lodge wrote, “We must on no account let the islands go.… The American flag is up and it must stay.” Since there had been a Filipino independence movement in existence for thirty years, for which many had fought and suffered prison, exile and death, Senator Lodge’s simple solution took little account of the consent of the governed. Its leader was Emilio Aguinaldo, a young man of twenty-eight who had been in exile in Hong Kong. Upon Dewey’s