The Maine in flame; blame plainly falls on Spain

How yellow journalism led to the divorce of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Fans of Citizen Kane will recall the exchange when Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane says into the phone to one of his reporters “You provide the pictures; I’ll provide the war.”

This apocryphal exchange is attributed to William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time. Kane is based on Hearst, who was famed for his wealth and his ability to sway both popular opinion and political will through his dubious journalism tactics. He is also famous for having a granddaughter who was kidnapped by ‘revolutionaries’ who resembles someone I have known for a long time.¹

Eventual American conflict with Spain was inevitable. Spain’s collapse in power in the 19th century was unprecedented. After the successes of the revolutions in the 13 English colonies that became the United States and in Haiti under history’s coolest figure, the Spanish crown faced a string of successful efforts by their holdings to shuck off their far-off rulers. Just from 1810 to 1830, they lost Venezuela, Florida, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Ecuador. There were also attempted coups at home too, so all in all it was not a great time for the Spanish.

By 1898, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained in Spanish hands. There were American sugar and mining operations in Cuba, including ones that Hearst had invested in. When the first Cuban Revolution began, the US sent Maine, one of the two first American coal-powered battleships (along with the USS Texas) into Havana harbor to project power and show that it would protect American interests.² They claimed that it was in support of the Cuban rebels (and perhaps it was) but our support of local revolts has always been on a case-by-case basis that just happens to line up with the business interests of the industrial sector.

The Maine exploded in the harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260 soldiers. It was well known that steamships with coal-fueled boilers occasionally exploded³ and it would have been foolish for the Spanish to open up another front with a sneak-attack. Back then, journalistic standards required careful and sober reflection of the facts before making any strong claims or accusations. Making a quick buck by stoking up fears of imminent destruction and collapse is a recent phenomena and was below William Randolph Hearst and the leading institutions of the day.

Just kidding.

Ten weeks later, on April 25, 1898, the US declared war on Spain. On the same day, Commodore George Dewey sailed with the USS Olympia and the Asiatic Squadron of the US Navy based in Hong Kong to the Philippines. At the battle of Manila Bay on May 1, the seven newer, superior American ships sunk the ten Spanish ones, ending Spanish naval control of the Philippines after 300 years. The remainder of the war was brief and decisive, wrapping up by August. Engagements in Cuba and Puerto Rico, notably Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the Charge up San Juan Hill were the primary actions.

Many prominent revisionist historians, such as William Appleton Williams, Howard Zinn, Richard Slotkin, and James Loewen, argue that the war was just an American imperialist power grab that whetted our appetite for the military adventurism that marked the 20th century. There is certainly evidence for that, but the ultimate resolution of the war cuts both ways. The American ambassador to the United Kingdom, John Hay, negotiated the Treaty of Paris with the Spanish to end the war. Its signature on December 10, less than a year after Maine arrived in Havana, marked a half-millennia of Spanish presence in distant lands. Cuba was placed under American military control until it was granted independence in 1902. Puerto Rico became an unincorporated territory, which it remains today. The Philippines were granted to the United States in name, but the Phillipine-American War started immediately and lasted until 1902. More on that later.

All of this gets us to Guam. America wanted Guam, the largest island in the Mariana chain, where centuries of military and economic development under the Spanish administration had left a sizable population and substantial infrastructure. As with the Spanish, if you have interests in the Philippines, you need to have some waypoints between home and there to increase the likelihood of successful passage across the Pacific. America did not, however, care much for the smaller, more northern islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. If the only motivation of the Americans was overseas territorial acquisitions, it would not make sense for them to simply leave these nearby islands on the table, especially since the Spanish had no leverage. Guam, but not the remainder of the islands, became an unincorporated territory of the United States. 40 years later, the decision to only take the most southern of the Marianas would prove consequential.

So who ended up with the CNMI? A counterintuitive choice to benefit from a war concession between Spain and the United States about seafaring colonial holdings negotiated by the French in the Pacific: Germany.

1. My mom thinks that it isn’t nice when I say that her doppelgänger is Young Patty Hearst, but it definitely is.

2. The American government’s ability to convince itself that the private business interests of some of its wealthiest citizens are national security concerns is a recurring theme in our history.

3. How am I just learning about the SS Sultana, which killed almost 1,200 people when it exploded in the Mississippi River in 1865? That is almost as many as Titanic.