From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898

2: The Spectacle of Disaster: The Explosion of the U.S.S. Maine

 55  2 The Spectacle of Disaster the explosion of the u.s.s. maine  awake! united states! how proudly sailed the warship Maine, a nation’s pride, without a stain! a wreck she lies, her sailors slain by treach’rous butchers, paid by spain! eagle, soar on high and sound the battle cry! wave the starry flag! in mire it shall not drag! Marie elizabeth lamb (april 1898) Press campaigns to raise awareness of Cuba’s humanitarian crisis had been growing steadily since 1895, but the single incident that irrevocably focused media attention on Cuba occurred at precisely 9:40 p.m. on the evening of February 15, 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 266 of the 354 American sailors on board. Pulitzer and Hearst immediately named Spain as the culprit, but many editors around the country urged their readers to withhold judgment before a thorough investigation could be made. It was not the jingoist calls of a few high-circulation “yellow” papers that unified the nation on a belligerent course. The Maine explosion set in motion a consolidation of support for the Cuban cause across American print, visual, and popular media that transformed audience engagement with events in Cuba. Following the incident, cultural producers incorporated the Maine and Cuba’s plight into nearly every venue of American popular culture, including stage plays, early motion pictures, advertisements, material displays , and world’s fair attractions. 56  chapter two The Maine affair poses a revealing case study in how late-nineteenth -century visual and popular forms interacted within the culture of spectacle to consolidate patriotic sentiment by means of a powerful narrative of national disaster.1 Historians who argue that the yellow press prepared the public psychologically and emotionally for war point to the Maine affair as the prime example of sensationalistic journalism. This chapter will show, however, that Americans were exposed to the Maine catastrophe through a much broader cultural framework than merely reacting to a handful of warmongering newspapers and politicians. If the cultural production focused on the Maine had ceased with the declaration of war, one could make the case that the media hype surrounding the explosion was a propagandistic tool to rouse support for war. But the enduring popularity of the Maine in film, theater, and world’s fair attractions during and after the war demonstrates that it was more than a political instrument . American culture reoriented itself in the 1890s around values of pleasure, consumerism, and spectacle, and this entertainmentbased culture collided with the politics of the Maine disaster.2 On January 24, 1898, President McKinley ordered the U.S.S. Maine to Havana harbor to protect American life and property in Cuba after rioting broke out on the streets of the city in mid-January. Many Americans first heard of the battleship the next day, when press headlines and illustrations broke the announcement. As the Maine settled into its stay in Havana, Captain Charles D. Sigsbee reported no indication of tensions. The ship seemed to attract more attention, rather, as a tourist destination for Cubans; “there must have been three or four hundred of them on board from time to time,” wrote Sigsbee.3 Back in the United States, however, hostilities escalated when, on February 9, the New York Journal published an intercepted personal letter written by the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Dupuy de Lôme, characterizing President McKinley as “weak and catering to the rabble, and, besides, a low politician” and admitting to duplicitous diplomatic dealings with Washington.4 De Lôme immediately resigned, but the incident heightened suspicions of Spain just days before the Maine explosion. On the morning of February 16, an eight-year-old boy from an upper-class family in Milton, Massachusetts, came down for breakfast and glanced at the newspaper headline in the Boston Herald:  57 the spectacle of disaster “Maine Destroyed!” He looked up at his father, who told him, “That means war.” Years later he wrote, “Whenever the battleship Maine is mentioned, my memory leaps to that dining room scene and to the excitement aroused by the word ‘war.’” He recalled overhearing his parents discussing that night whether they should rethink their summer vacation plans on Cape Cod in favor of a safer destination, such as Alaska, in the event of Spanish military strikes against the North Atlantic coast.5 For many Americans, the destruction of the Maine...