Empire by Default
Musicant, Ivan
BOOKS IN REVIEW Long Live Punctilio! Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century Ivan Musicant Henry Holt / 740 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Florence King C...
...It was "Spanish colonialism at its repulsive worst," writes naval historian Ivan Musicant, "a combination of brutality, beneficence, and ineptitude" that was lumbering to a halt after four hundred years, but Spain would not and could not admit it...
...I don't know what that tune is you were singing but it's a corker...
...A Washington newspaper poll of naval officers found a majority believed it had been an accidental internal explosion...
...1 TAS Address Changes Made Easy...
...The author's portrait of the Spanish is a fascinating study of the reactionary mind...
...Be prepared to wipe away a few tears...
...1 but the American public believed that Spain had officially sanctioned the placement of a mine, and the possibility that a few freewheeling Spaniards had taken it upon themselves to plant one was genetically unthinkable: There were no freewheeling Spaniards...
...Spain lost 3z3 men...
...The world marveled over the casualty figures...
...Eyewitnesses were heard from...
...The monks had virtually enslaved the natives, forcing them to work on church lands and hanging them by their thumbs or crushing their bones if they disobeyed...
...She was, said Vice Admiral Pascual Cervera, good for "nothing but a buoy...
...The sorriest vessel was the Vizcaya, whose bottom had not been scraped...
...He had never heard it before but his instincts told him it would do for this war what the rebel yell had done for the last one: "Men, we've got 'em on the run...
...Spain responded by sending General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, son of a German father and a Spanish mother, dubbed "Butcher" Weyler by William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal after he instituted his "reconcentration" policy of moving the entire rural population into the cities, burning their fields and killing their animals so that the rebels would not be able to live off the land...
...Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century Ivan Musicant Henry Holt / 740 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Florence King C uba was a gleam in presidential eyes long before nearsighted Teddy Roosevelt packed six extra pairs of spectacles to make sure he could see San Juan Hill...
...someone forgot to load them so the men had to carry coal on board in sacks, which took days instead of hours...
...W hen the sui generis United States, part fresh kid and part gentle giant, comes up against iron tradition and anachronistic mayhem of this magnitude a memorable story is sure to result...
...Shortly after nine on the night of February 15, 1898, as the last notes from the Marine bugler's taps faded away, Sigs72 Ju y 19 9 8 • The American Spectator bee heard what sounded like a rifle shot, followed by a metallic roar...
...Box 655, Mt...
...No one 44 The author's portrait of the Spanish is a fascinating study of the reactionary mind...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...Anyone who is disgusted with Pat Schroeder's politically correct navy will get a thrill up the spine and a lump in the throat reading these descriptions of a time when America's sailing men were wind-whipped, not pussy-whipped, and morale was in the stratosphere...
...the United States—exactly one...
...1 conceived a plan to block up the harbor by sinking a collier containing 2,000 tons of coal, "corking the Spanish like a bug in a bottle...
...An American torpedo officer said it was spontaneous combustion, citing the position of the powder magazine next to the coal bunkers...
...the Texas responded with, "Two-thirds of the...crew are fighting for first place...
...As war fever mounted, McKinley made one last peace effort, consulting...
...Led by Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipinos did not rebel against Spain per se but against the Catholic monastic orders who ran the islands like medieval Inquisitors...
...By the second administration of Grover Cleveland, Cuba was exciting new attention...
...1. Please write your new address in the space provided...
...Richmond P. Hobson The American Spectator • July 1998 73 r MOVING...
...From the Iowa came the reply, "Every man on this ship wants to go...
...To this end they burned the big sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations, and shut down the factories by proclaiming that anyone who went to work would be shot...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...A revolution broke out that quickly degenerated into a Pink Panther movie after the death of Jose Marti in 1895 left it without a sane leader...
...Cut to the insomniac William McKinley, Civil War veteran, praying and weeping and taking his epileptic wife's sedatives to silence the voice-overs: Minister to Madrid James Russell Lowell intoning poetically, "The gravity of the Cuban situation is hardly yet understood in Spain," and U.S...
...It is told by Ivan Musicant in Empire by Default, a soupto-nuts account of the Spanish-American War that captures the texture of 1890's life so well and presents the players so vividly that readers can produce their own mental movie...
...By contrast the Spanish navy was the mouse that roared punctiliously...
...T he author's account of the land war has its moments, but much of it seems merely dutiful and sometimes it slips into a drone...
...FLORENCE KING'S most recent book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...The Minister of the Admiralty was certain of victory because, he said, the Spanish navy was made up of proud Spaniards while the American navy consisted of "immigrants without a past...
...intervention...
...Scene: The "Star-Spangled Banner" is played at the end of every vaudeville show to the cheers of Hearst-hyped patrons who see the Spirit of '76 in every independence movement, no matter how chaotic or far-flung...
...Cut to Congressman "Uncle Joe" Cannon, later Speaker of the House, bemoaning a weak president's slavish devotion to public opinion: "McKinley's ear is so close to the ground it's full of grasshoppers...
...Meanwhile, in the Philippines, another revolution was in progress...
...Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 ATTACH ADDRESS LABEL HERE IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...
...When he stepped on deck "he slowly straightened himself up, and with an effort unbuckled his sword belt, kissed the hilt of his sword, and with a graceful bow presented it to Evans, who refused it to the cheers of his battleship's crew...
...One battleship sailed without guns because the engineers had not finished fitting her out...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: L VCAFRMJ 74 44 When a good loser makes a grand gesture the humanity of every man is exalted...
...Cervera's orders, "cooked up in the fantasy world of ministerial chambers" in Madrid, were to "destroy Key West and blockade the entire east coast of the United States...
...As American sailors of 1898 discovered after the United States inflicted a crushing defeat on Spain at Santiago Bay, punctilio arouses a universal emotion: When a good loser makes a grand gesture the humanity of every man is exalted...
...he doesn't mention it...
...It is fruitless and useless...
...A blanket of barnacles and a full lawn of sea grass as thick as a vegetable garden cut her speed in half and used up so much coal that she, too, had to be towed, but she was carrying the wrong type of towing equipment so she yawed her way acrossthe Atlantic in a tangle of parting lines...
...and Spain, and that it had set off a second explosion in the powder magazines, was inconsistent with American public opinion (and perhaps the author's...
...But Souths have a way of rising again...
...Seeing a badly wounded Spanish captain in a shattered lifeboat, Capt...
...Diving teams from both nations inspected the wreck...
...At the last note the men gave a rousing cheer and firing commenced...
...I want the music to reach the upper deck...
...Cervera, a rare realist, shook his head...
...Under the outlandish "General" Gomez, the freedom fighters sought to make Cuba worthless to Spain by seeing to it that there was nothing to export...
...O Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$34.95) El Payment enclosed O Bill me later O At various times TAS rents its subscriber list to other organizations...
...It was not the only music heard that day...
...There's a logical explanation for this...
...William T. Sampson cabled Washington: "The fleet under my command offers the nation as a Fourth of July present the whole of Cervera's fleet...
...In retaliation the freedom fighters captured the monks and boiled them in oil or roasted them on spits...
...Aboard the Raleigh a young lieutenant went below deck to check on the crew in the powder division and found them singing a new popular song...
...keep it up...
...Fighting Bob" Evans of the Iowa hoisted a canvas chair into the boat to bring him up...
...Charles Sigsbee, could not drag the harbor bottom or use picket boats as he wanted, but he did mount a nighttime quarter watch instead of the usual anchor watch after reading the violently anti-American handbills circulating in the city...
...Now there was not only nothing to export, but nothing to eat...
...And through the rest of the battle, the strains of "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" rolled up through the ammunition hoists and cheered the men at the guns...
...Her "punctilio," that native blend of fierce pride, unbending honor, and supercilious inertia that comprised the Spanish psyche would not permit her to consider granting independence or even dominion status to her few remaining colonies...
...Musicant, winner of the Samuel Eliot Morrison Award for Distinguished Naval History, is a blue-water man whose heart is clearly in his magnificent account of the war at sea...
...It was not until 1865 that all talk of Cuba finally ceased, leading the anti-expansionist reformer, Carl Schurz, to say with evident relief, "One South was enough...
...she had to be towed to the Philippines...
...OlO• July 19 9 8 • The American Spectator...
...A Spanish naval officer saw a "brilliant illumination of colored gases" consistent with an exploding powder magazine...
...God bless you," the minister said serenely...
...Sigsbee, who believed then and ever afterwards that his ship had been sunk by a mine, telegraphed the War Department, "Public opinion should be suspended until further report," but it did no good...
...Said Capt...
...He was absolutely right," says the author, "but would anyone of consequence listen...
...No American politician would have dared cast suspicion on the freedom-fighters, but the Court of Inquiry hinted as much in its verdict: The explosion was caused by a mine "planted by persons or agencies unknown," but Spain was held responsible only because it had occurred in a Spanish harbor...
...Martin's...
...It hardly mattered that the Spanish still held out in Santiago, or in Havana for that matter," writes Musicant...
...Of the 355 officers and men on board, 96 survived, thanks in large part to Spanish naval vessels that sped to the scene and showed the wounded every courtesy and solicitude...
...When a cruiser was found to be admitting water through her propeller shaft the crew plugged it with cement, making it impossible to use her engines...
...Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states," a sentiment echoed by John Quincy Adams, who regarded the annexation of the island as a natural follow-up to our acquisition of Spanish Florida and a necessary step in establishing the newly proclaimed Monroe Doctrine...
...Navy total control of the sea, and thus, according to Mahanian doctrine, had won the war in an afternoon...
...For this reason her skipper, Capt...
...Another had no hoisted coaling baskets...
...The Vatican plan fell through when Congress passed and McKinley signed a Joint Resolution authorizing U.S...
...Consul Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of the Confederate general, urging him to send a battleship to Havana to rescue American citizens in case the insurgent riots grow worse...
...The possibility that the noble Cuban freedom-fighters had planted a mine to start a war between the U.S...
...This has echoes of "One Southerner can lick twenty Yankees" and "Gentlemen always fight better than rabble...
...The mission, which involved setting off explosives with split-second timing, would be carried out today by Navy Seals, but Hobson had to do it with seven volunteers: The signal had gone from the flagship seeking volunteers "for a desperate and perhaps fatal expedition...
...The battle had wrested for the U.S...
...Moreover, any change in their status would have amounted to blasphemy: "It was an enduring part of Spanish mythology that the empire had been bestowed by God as a reward for the liberation of the Iberian peninsula in 1492 from Islam...
...It is Don Quixote...
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...That day Adm...
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...When plans were being made to blockade Santiago, Lt...
...Charles Sigsbee, "In everything they did, except in respect to etiquette, the practiced nautical eye could not fail to note their inferiority...
...Nonetheless, the reader of Empire by Default comes to admire Spanish punctilio, recognizing it as the "civility" we crave today, an antidote to our spiritual grunge...
...Franklin Pierce nearly went to war to acquire Cuba and even considered buying it from Spain to placate the South, whose long-standing dream of annexing it as a slave state remained alive through most of the Civil War...
...she was never officially accused of planting it...
...Hobson was besieged with junior officers begging for a chance at death or glory...
...That's all there is to it...
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...secretly with Archbishop John Ireland in hopes of getting Pope Leo XIII to wield his unparalleled influence over Spain, all the while worrying that his Protestant midwestern constituency would find out about it...
...rogue patriots are not consistent with punctilio...
...At Manila Bay, the moment Commodore George Dewey's immortal order, "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," was passed to the fleet, "bands in the Olympia and Baltimore began playing "The Star-Spangled Banner...
...The arrival of the Maine was billed as a diplomatic gesture symbolizing a new era of understanding...
...Her blind spot grew out of two unique attitudes...
...the Maine's watch officer saw no gas bubble or water column consistent with a mine, nor did anyone see the surest evidence of a mine: dead fish on the surface...
...Spanish divers reported that the hull plates forward of the boilers were bent outward, indicating an internal explosion, but said nothing about the damage to the keel: It was bent into an inverted V, the apex thrusting upward through the deck, indicating an external explosion...
...We go to a Trafalgar...
...Hearst's banner headline read: "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain...
Vol. 31 • July 1998 • No. 7
