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Senators at a reception. In his haste to urge war upon them, he did not notice that Hanna was accompanied by Henriette Adler, a young Frenchwoman recently arrived from Paris. Roosevelt launched into a typical fist-smacking harangue, and Mlle. Adler found herself wedged between him and the wall. She tried to follow what he was saying, but was distracted by his flailing right arm, which swept nearer and nearer her bodice. Eventually his elbow ripped off a silken rose and some gauze, whereupon she exclaimed “Mon Dieu.” Roosevelt, wheeling, made profuse pardons. To her alarm, he continued to pour war rhetoric upon her in French, until Nannie Lodge tactfully appeared with a safety pin. The Senators screened Mlle. Adler off, while Roosevelt switched back to English.

It was “a bully idea,” he proclaimed, to send the Maine to Havana. Senator Hanna said nothing, but stood listening with his jowls sunk on his white tie. Mlle. Adler, decent again, ventured a suggestion that the United States should consider the opinion of other European powers before attempting to crowd Spain out. France and Germany were bound to object to any denial of imperial rights in the New World; she had heard a statement to this effect herself, in Paris only two weeks before.

The Assistant Secretary waved France’s scruples aside as unimportant and irrelevant. “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America before I’m sixty!” Hanna stared at him. “You’re crazy, Roosevelt! What’s wrong with Canada?”

Later, in the carriage back home, Mrs. Hanna tried to explain to the dazed Mlle. Adler that Roosevelt, despite his abnormal vehemence, was more “amusing” than violent. But the Senator, chewing on his cigar, thanked God Roosevelt had not been appointed Assistant Secretary of State. “We’d be fighting half the world,” he growled.21

INCENDIARY TALK WAS COMMON in the days following the Maine’s arrival in Havana Harbor, from Henry Cabot Lodge’s threatened “explosion” to Mark Hanna’s “waving a match in an oil-well for fun,”22 and the more personal misgivings of Mrs. Richard Wainwright, wife of the cruiser’s executive officer: “You might as well send a lighted candle on a visit to an open cask of gunpowder.”23 But as mid-February approached, and life in the Cuban capital drowsed on as normal, even Consul-General Lee began to relax.

On the evening of the fifteenth, tourists aboard the liner City of Washington, just arrived in Havana Harbor, leaned on the railings and admired the Maine’s sleek white beauty four hundred yards away. The air was hot and motionless, and the harbor scarcely heaved. Its stillness was such that they could hear accordion music coming across the water. Tropic dark came quickly, and the tourists went below to dinner. About two hours later another strand of music sounded from the Maine: the sound of a bugler blowing taps. Its melancholy beauty caused Captain Sigsbee, who was writing in his cabin, to lay down his pen and listen until the last echoes died away. He looked at his watch. The time was exactly 9:40 P.M.24

ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER Secretary Long was wakened in his Washington home and handed a telegram. The first sentence alone was enough to banish all further thought of sleep: “MAINE BLOWN UP IN HAVANA HARBOR AT NINE-FORTY TONIGHT AND DESTROYED.” Long’s eye, running on across the sheet, leaped from phrase to incredible phrase: “MANY WOUNDED … DOUBTLESS MORE KILLED OR DROWNED … NO ONE HAS CLOTHING OTHER THAN THAT UPON HIM … PUBLIC OPINION SHOULD BE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER REPORT.” The telegram was signed “SIGSBEE.”25

Within minutes Long telephoned the White House and ordered a naval attaché to rouse the President. It was not yet two in the morning, and McKinley absorbed the Secretary’s news with some difficulty. After hanging up he paced back and forth in front of the bewildered attaché, mumbling slowly to himself, “The Maine blown up! The Maine blown up!”26

Meanwhile, the telegraph wires were still humming, shocking the State Department, Navy Department, and New York newspaper offices into action.