If you have heard “Remember the Maine” as the story of yellow journalism and American aggression, you have probably heard the truth… well, a part of it anyway.
In the classic tradition of Paul Harvey, I am here to bring you… THE REST OF THE STORY.
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128 years ago today – Feb 15, 1898 – The USS Maine Exploded and Sank in Havana Harbor.
The suspicious accident and Spain’s brutal concentration camps policy in Cuba contributed to the outbreak of war 65 days later.
Newspapers of the day, especially William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, published scathing, alarmist essays claiming the explosion was the result of sabotage. (It was not sabotage. In fact, in the preceding 15 years, five similarly designed ships exploded and sank, and 13 others suffered large fires without exploding.)
The explosion occurred while Cuba was embroiled in its third revolution in 30 years, and the US and Spain were already on the verge of war. The Spanish-American War began officially 65 days later.
The war, most often remembered for Teddy Roosevelt and San Juan Hill, has deep roots in the strangely overlooked Spanish policy of concentration camps, and the American reaction to them.
The camps, which resulted the death of at least 170,000 civilians, more than 10% of Cuba’s population, (some reports place the number as high as 400,000) began 15 months prior to the Maine’s explosion.
They were the policy of Spain’s appointed dictator of Cuba, Valeriano Weyler, who announced – “La Reconcentración Campesina” – (The Peasant Reconcentration), as a strategy intended to starve the rebels economically by forcibly removing all non-combatants from the countryside to concentration camps in more urbanized areas.
Clara Barton, the Red Cross founder who visited the camps and gave congressional testimony in 1898 and wrote about it again in 1904
During the war, Barton personally tended to wounded soldiers, including the Rough Riders, and established hospitals and orphanages. Despite her age (age 77), she worked directly in field hospitals and soup kitchens, sometimes feeding up to 10,000 soldiers daily.
