President William McKinley, roused from a deep sleep by an aide at 2:00 a.m. on February 16, 1898, received terrible news. The battleship Maine had exploded in Havana harbor with heavy loss of life. McKinley, who had been gently ministering to the public’s war fever for more than a year, was stricken. ‘The Maine blown up,’ he mumbled over and over to himself. ‘The Maine blown up!’ He hated the thought of war to the core of his being. ‘I have been through one war,’ said the Civil War veteran. ‘I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.’ This sentiment was shared by every member of his administration, save one.

As always, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was up early that morning, and working in his office in the Navy Department on Sixteenth Street. ‘I would give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow,’ ‘T.R.’ wrote to a friend. ‘This Cuban business ought to stop. The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards, I believe; though we shall never find out definitely, and officially it will go down as an accident.’

He was certainly correct about the latter. A naval board of inquiry concluded that the Maine had been destroyed by a submarine mine of unknown origin. Predictably, Spain issued a report stating that the cause of the explosion had been internal. Americans who did not work in the White House or on Wall Street thought little of such formal deliberations. They only cared that 260 American sailors were dead, and they wanted a reckoning.

That day of reckoning was at hand, for the rusted, antiquated Spanish empire had prolonged its existence for far too long. It was not the sinking of the Maine, not the rantings of the yellow press, nor the jingoistic dreams of American imperialists that brought on the war of 1898 — it was the incredible incompetence, myopic short-sightedness, and stunning brutality of the Spanish imperialists in Cuba that made conflict inevitable.

A string of cruel acts in Cuba had enraged Americans for more than a generation. In 1873, five years into a Cuban uprising, a Spanish warship captured the American steamer Virginius as it attempted to deliver guns, ammunition, and medical supplies to Cuban patriots. Four rebel leaders aboard the Virginius were subsequently shot, decapitated, and their heads displayed on pikes. Captain Joseph Fry and 48 of his crewmen were summarily executed by firing squad. Spain reluctantly released the survivors of the Virginius and paid a small indemnity, but the bloody incident was not forgotten in the United States.

In April 1895, the cry of ‘Cuba Libre!’ again resonated across the island. Spain responded to this latest revolt by sending General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau to Cuba. Dubbed ‘Butcher Weyler’ by the New York press, his scorched-earth policy devastated eastern Cuba and led to the deaths of thousands of civilians in concentration camps. The Spanish seemed intent on breaking the Cuban people in a desperate bid to continue the pretense of their position as a world power. In America, President Grover Cleveland was stridently against intervention. He could take solace as he left office in March 1897 that his successor, William McKinley, held similar views. The business interests in the country adamantly opposed war, as did most of the leading men in Congress. When the Spanish government recalled Weyler and granted more autonomy to Cuba it seemed that the crisis might pass.

Yet nothing could silence the Cuban cry for freedom. By 1897, Cuban rebels were even appearing nightly in ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s Wild West extravaganza as part of his ‘Congress of Rough Riders of the World.’ The press exploited every Spanish atrocity, real or imagined, to full effect. The American people fumed with indignation over Cuba, idealizing the insurgents as soulmates of the American revolutionaries of 1776. Their slow-burning anger needed just a spark to explode in rightful wrath. The Maine was that spark. Poet Richard Hovey gave them their call — ‘Ye who remembered the Alamo, Remember the Maine!’ — and as it became their byword, action became their creed.

War advocates had their man in the 39-year-old Roosevelt, who had worked hard for a year to improve the navy. Now, as the days passed, he became nearly frantic over the administration’s continuing inactivity. President McKinley, T.R. grumbled to a confidant, ‘has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.’

Roosevelt, although liked and respected by both McKinley and Secretary of the Navy John Long, found himself increasingly isolated within the administration and the Republican Party. The president would no longer see him, while Long simply humored him. Roosevelt found solace in his correspondence and talks with influential expansionists such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, naval officers Alfred Thayer Mahan and George Dewey, and, most importantly, army Captain Leonard Wood.

Wood and Roosevelt had met the previous June, and their jingoistic sensibilities and mutual love of football and vigorous walks led to an instant and warm friendship. A New Englander, Wood was a Harvard graduate like Roosevelt, having received an M.D. in 1884. Bored with private practice, he had gone west, hiring on as a contract surgeon with the army in Arizona and winning high praise (and eventually the Congressional Medal of Honor) for his heroic service during the campaign against the Apache leader, Geronimo. Promoted to captain and assistant surgeon in the regular army in 1891, Wood was transferred to Washington, D.C., four years later.

In the nation’s capital, Captain Wood was appointed assistant attending surgeon, giving him medical responsibility and unlimited access to high-ranking military officers, the secretary of war, and the president. He became close to President William McKinley, who placed his faith in Wood’s skill and compassion in treating Mrs. McKinley, who suffered from epilepsy.

When Roosevelt came to Washington in the spring of 1897 as assistant secretary of the navy, he found himself somewhat in awe of Captain Wood. ‘It was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals,’ he wrote, ‘who scorned everything mean and base, and who also possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind, for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone.’ They were, in every way, kindred spirits.

Mckinley made a last ditch effort for peace, demanding that Spain declare an armistice in Cuba as of April 1, 1898. The Spanish government hesitated, then finally agreed to end the fighting on the island and to submit the Maine question to arbitration. Only the question of Cuban independence reMained. By then, however, it was too late. On April 11, 1898, McKinley asked Congress to intervene on behalf of Cuba. On April 19, the Senate and House of Representatives passed a joint resolution calling for American armed intervention to secure Cuban independence, while disclaiming any designs on annexing the island. On April 23 Spain declared war on the United States, who reciprocated two days later.

McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers to augment the 28,000-man regular army. Young men from every section of the country rallied to his call. They were anxious to prove themselves equal to the task and worthy of their place as Americans. Among the first to volunteer was the man who had perhaps been the leading advocate for war — Theodore Roosevelt.

Everyone was astonished by this act. His wife, Edith, opposed it, as did best friend Henry Cabot Lodge. ‘Theodore Roosevelt,’ wrote diplomat John Hay, ‘has left the Navy where he had the chance of his life and has joined a cowboy regiment.’ Secretary of the Navy Long also fretted over this act of recklessness but foresaw that the great risk was not without potential reward. ‘He has lost his head to this folly of deserting the post where he is of the most service and running off to ride a horse and, probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands,’ he confided to his diary, ‘and yet how absurd this will sound, if by some turn of fortune he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark.’

President McKinley twice attempted to change Roosevelt’s mind, to no avail. ‘One of the commonest taunts directed at men like myself is that we are armchair and parlor jingoes who wish to see others do what we only advocate doing,’ declared Roosevelt. ‘I care very little for such a taunt, except as it affects my usefulness, but I cannot afford to disregard the fact that my power for good, whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.’

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