The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [313]
DAWN IN CUBA disclosed that the Maine was indeed a total wreck. The explosion, which took place somewhere in the forecastle, had jackknifed the keel up to the level of the bridge, killing 254 men instantly. A further 8 were so badly crushed and burned that they died one by one in hospitals ashore, bringing the death toll to 262. What was left of the ship lay wedged in the mud of Havana Harbor, with only a few blackened parts of the superstructure showing above water.28
As to the cause of the explosion, Spanish authorities were apparently no wiser than the Americans. Until the Navy Department’s court of inquiry reached Cuba and made its report, there could be no official reaction on either side, beyond expressions of sincere sympathy in Havana. The Governor-General, Ramón Blanco y Erenas, had been seen crying openly in his palace, and the Bishop of Havana spared no expense in giving the dead an elaborate and dignified burial.29
Popular opinion in America was surprisingly muted,30 in contrast to the clamor of the yellow press, thanks to Captain Sigsbee’s wise plea for emotional restraint. There was also a widespread suspicion that the explosion had been internal and accidental. Secretary Long shared this view. The Maine’s forecastle, after all, had been packed with gunpowder, and its steel-walled magazines, laced around with electric wiring, needed only a short-circuit fire to convert the whole ship into a bomb. Besides, it was hard for thinking people to believe that Spain would deliberately sabotage an American cruiser with a “Secret Infernal Machine,” as Hearst’s Journal alleged.31 Should the Court of Inquiry prove otherwise, of course, there was no question that the man in the street would expect a declaration of war at once.
This was an alternative President McKinley could hardly bear to contemplate. “I have been through one war,” said the ex–Union major. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”32
A RATHER MORE JUNIOR member of the Administration had no such scruples, and no doubts as to who was responsible for the disaster in Havana Harbor. “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards I believe,” wrote the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.33
ROOSEVELT DOUBTED THAT the Court of Inquiry would be able to prove his theory of Spanish guilt. But he waited “on edge” for its initial findings, in the hope that they would at least absolve the Navy of responsibility for the explosion. Notwithstanding his private judgment, he scrupulously used the word “accident” in departmental correspondence.34
Hearst was not so patient. The Maine’s burned-out hulk had scarcely cooled before his artists were rendering pictures and diagrams to show exactly where and how the “Infernal Machine” had struck, in response to the push of a plunger on shore. On 18 February, the day before the official inquiry opened, the Journal published no fewer than eight pages of “conclusive” data, some of it so detailed that even Captain Sigsbee wondered if the paper did not have secret contacts with the saboteurs.35 Sales of the paper reached an unprecedented one million that morning. Meanwhile the enterprising Pulitzer bought and dispatched a tugboat to Cuba to learn and report on “the truth.” Within a week, his own paper, the World, had sold five million copies—“the largest circulation of any newspaper printed in any language