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By Root 3964 0

Spain. Up until then the U.S. Senate was for Cuban independence, but back burnered the issue. There was little clamor to send the American navy into a firefight. Still, through these jingoistic newspapers, the public was made aware of such heinous acts as a Spanish firing squad executing the Cuban revolutionary Adolfo Rodriguez and the horrific conditions of prisons in Havana. Public sympathy in America was turning against the ogre, Spain. Besides the Cuban insurrection, the Spanish authorities were also trying to squelch the Philippine liberation movement (the Philippine Islands were then a Spanish colony). Hatred for all things Spanish became widespread in the United States, fueled by—in large part—the Hearst and Pulitzer papers.

Influenced by this so-called yellow journalism, Roosevelt had no trouble actively disdaining Spaniards in 1897. To Roosevelt the Spanish government exuded a conceited authoritarianism that he despised. He believed that the United States had an obligation to challenge any brutal European monarchy that was thumbing its nose at the Monroe Doctrine. Disregarding the fact that American sugar tariffs enacted in 1894 had disrupted the Cuban economy, Roosevelt blamed Spain for Cuba’s impoverished living conditions. He was glad, if anything, that the tariff had helped set the Cubans against Spanish rule.

Roosevelt, as a Mahanian naval strategist, had serious concerns about Spain. In particular, he had carefully read “War with Spain—1896,” a national security document written by an astute naval intelligence officer, Lieutenant William Wirt Kimball for the Naval War College. Roosevelt thought Kimball’s analysis was spot-on. He had even written to Mahan that the “Kimball Plan” avoided the politics of imperialism versus anti-imperialism altogether. It was a blueprint for war preparedness. Kimball insisted that if war with Spain occurred, a naval engagement would be preferable to a land war in Cuba and the Philippines. This made great sense to Roosevelt. Boiled down, the Kimball Plan called for an offensive strike against Madrid in three war zones: the Philippines, Cuba, and on the high seas against Spanish shipping. The crucial strategic point was for the United States to cleverly draw the Spanish navy into protecting the far-flung Philippines, leaving Cuba wide open to a U.S. invasion. What Roosevelt as a naval historian most deeply admired about the Kimball Plan was its specificity: every Spanish ship was described and analyzed in minute detail. In many ways the document stylistically resembled his own Naval War of 1812. If war came T.R. wanted the U.S. Navy prepared for all the challenges the Kimball Plan presented. He wrote to Kimball, “The war will have to, or at least ought to, come sooner than later.”1

Around Christmas 1897 Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt became obsessed by the idea of war with Spain. He worried that if the United States didn’t confront Spain in the Western Hemisphere than there would be “disastrous long term consequences for future American security.” 2Overflowing with patriotic spirit, Roosevelt believed that fighting for the independence of Cuba and the Philippines was both a noble cause and a strategic imperative. Spain’s ambitions had to be thwarted. There were echoes in Roosevelt’s thinking of 1886, when he had promoted armed conflict with Mexico, and of 1891, when he had fantasized about shooting “dagos” in Chile.3 Although he found time to scold Frederic Remington for having drawn badgers improperly in an illustration in Harper’s Weekly and continued reading up on the Olympic Mountains, for the most part Roosevelt was consumed that holiday season with promoting an imperialistic pamphlet of quotations he’d assembled under the title Naval Policy of the Presidents.4 He also corresponded with Commodore George Dewey (whose fleet was maneuvering in the Pacific) and impetuously directed the North Atlantic Squadron to join the U.S.S. Maine at Key West, Florida, to immediately begin winter exercises.5

On January 25, 1898, the Maine dropped anchor in Havana harbor in what