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

5: The War’s Final Phase: The Shadow of Military Scandal on Glorified Victory

 153  5 The War’s Final Phase the shadow of military scandal on glorified victory  it is the general feeling that gross incompetency and mismanagement have marked the conduct of the war, and numerous investigations will undoubtedly be demanded. as the reports arrive the frightful conditions which exist in camp and on transports bring to light new stories of misery, starvation, and suffering which it is impossible to believe one human being would inflict upon another. . . . every case which comes before the public is more startling than the last and great indignation is felt here over the inhuman treatment to which the defenders of the country’s honor have been subjected. all of the glory which was earned by the brilliant victories of the american arms is being overshadowed by the frightful experience of the troops. Chicago Tribune, august 27, 1898 Probably the most illustrious reporter to cover the Cuban rebellion was New York World correspondent Sylvester Scovel. Richard Harding Davis wrote of him, “A more manly, daring and able young man I have seldom met.”1 Scovel traveled with the Cuban army in 1897 and reported back to the World updates of his adventures in the field, one of which landed him in a Cuban prison in February 1897. Press petitions circulated across the country to secure his release, which Spain conceded after the State Department intervened. Scovel went to Cuba seeking fame and fortune and was eager to seize the spotlight. This he surely did in the ceremony that launched the U.S. occupation of Cuba, held at the governor’s palace to officiate Spain’s surrender of arms in July 1898. Striving to be photographed alongside the raised American flag, Scovel surreptitiously climbed to the 154  chapter five roof of the palace during the proceedings. After he was ordered down, the commander of U.S. forces in Santiago, General William Shafter, slapped him for his insubordination. Scovel in turn punched back, grazing the general’s chin. He was arrested, deported, and fired by the World, and was later reinstated only after making a humiliating and self-deprecating apology.2 The great American hero in Cuba had “fallen” and the boundaries of manly bravado had been put in check—a fitting way to initiate the final phase of the war. The sensationalistic production of U.S. military victories in the battles of Manila Bay, San Juan Hill, and Santiago Bay collectively reproduced in reenactments, plays, cinema, press accounts, and advertising initially overshadowed considerations of the implications of victory. The patriotic rhetoric celebrating U.S. military accomplishments inhibited debate about the policies those troops were fighting for. Exemplifying the consensual spirit prior to the Spanish defeat at Santiago, the Indianapolis Sentinel “refrained” from “questioning the motives or wisdom of the administration” and claimed that “in the face of the common enemy a united front should be presented.”3 U.S. entry into the Spanish-Cuban conflict would likely have engendered a more conflicted response had the imperial possibilities of victory been publicly recognized from the start. Instead, public and press opinion remained relatively united in support of the decision to intervene in Cuba until “without warning, without deliberation, and apparently without clear intention,” the “burning question” of imperial acquisition arose, in the words of pastor and English professor Henry Van Dyke in his Thanksgiving Day sermon in 1898. He noted, “Nine months ago . . . not one American in five hundred could have told you what or where the Philippines were.”4 Daniel T. Pierce, editor of the periodical Public Opinion, similarly observed that several weeks after the battle of Manila Bay, “not ten ‘great’ city journals had at that time for a moment considered the annexation of the Philippines or any of the questions now grouped under the head of ‘imperialism.’”5 This chapter tracks the emerging media dissension that broke the “united front” between the battle of Santiago (July 3, 1898) and the U.S.-Spanish armistice ending hostilities (August 12, 1898) in what I call the final phase of the war, when opposition arose to the  155 the war’s final phase management of the U.S. Army as well as to the potential for imperial acquisition accompanying U.S. victory in the war. Beginning in July–August 1898, press coverage of the return on hospital ships of U.S. servicemen sick and dying from disease and privation generated a media exposé of Department of War...