The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [45]
In fact, the issue of disease had become yet another facet of imperialism. Bacteriology had been dominated by Germany and France, but tropical medicine became medicine’s new frontier for England and the United States. Colonizing Africa, India and the Americas would be impossible without controlling the fevers so deadly to white settlers. What’s more, medicine itself began to take on an imperialist slant—if disease spawned and spread from tropical countries like Cuba, it was America’s responsibility to step in and clean them up for the sake of American health. As Robert Desowitz, a professor of tropical medicine, wrote: “An undercurrent of opinion had long held that the United States should take over Cuba for medical reasons, a yellow fever cleansing. The sinking of the Maine was just the ticket to do so.”
In this spirit, Americans vehemently debated the question of Cuba over dinner tables, in men’s clubs, even from the pulpit. News of Spanish concentration camps and starving Cuban prisoners softened American sentiment toward intervention, the prospect of sugar softened economic reasoning, and the thought of toppling a smug European presence just seemed appealing in general.
As the Maine—and national pride—erupted in flames and sank into a watery grave in the Havana harbor, America had its battle cry. The cause of the explosion would be publicly debated in the weeks following the tragedy, and well into the next century. A 1976 examination of the USS Maine’s records finally resolved that the explosion, an internal one, most likely resulted from spontaneous combustion: The coal had been located dangerously close to the ammunitions magazine. In the three years before the Maine steamed into the Cuban port, a number of other vessels reported fires in the coalbunker. In 1898, however, the United States Court of Inquiry found a different cause: An enemy mine situated under the bottom of the ship.
If the reason for war with Cuba was not immediately evident, it soon found its clarity in the publications of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In the end, the Spanish-American War would be the most popular war this country ever fought. While only 1 in 6 soldiers would make it into combat, 200,000 volunteers boarded trains and waited in American military camps hoping to go. The war would be won in just 113 days, liberating Cuba, adjoining Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States.
In spite of this, the war would cost more lives than ever expected. Over 2,500 American soldiers would be lost—not to the Spanish, but to disease. Only 385 would actually die in action. With far more volunteers than there were accommodations to hold them, soldiers crowded into American camps hoping to make it to Cuba before the fighting ended or before typhoid or dysentery picked them off one by one.
Conditions in Cuba were no better, where not only typhoid, dysentery and malaria ran rampant but also yellow fever. As fever season encroached, one soldier wrote that taps was played continuously in the camp: “The volleys became more frequent and one bugle followed