|
TIME MACHINE
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
|
One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
The Spanish-American War, Almost
On October 31 the Spanish man-of-war Tornado, acting on a tip, sighted an American-registered freighter named Virginius off Morant Bay, Jamaica. It immediately started in pursuit. The Virginius was a notorious gunrunner, bringing arms, recruits, and supplies to anti-Spanish rebels in Cuba from supporters based in New York City. The Spanish navy had been chasing her for three years.
The creaky Virginius began to take on water as she fled. Crewmen jettisoned cargo and desperately threw hams and bacon into her furnaces for lack of coal, but it was no use. The Tornado landed a solid cannon shot, and the crippled, lightly armed Virginius surrendered. Her 103 passengers (mostly Cuban expatriates recruited for the insurgent army) and crew of 52 (predominantly American and British) were taken prisoner. Spanish sailors hauled down the Virginius’s American flag and trampled on it.
On November 4, four passengers from the Virginius were shot by a firing squad in Santiago, Cuba. All were well-known rebel officers who had been sentenced to death in absentia months earlier. Word of the executions reached Washington on November 7. Five days later, as President Ulysses S. Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish considered their response, the situation got drastically worse: News arrived that thirty-seven officers and crewmen had been shot. Twelve passengers were executed soon afterward, and even more would have been killed if a British warship had not appeared and trained its guns on Santiago.
The American public could have tolerated four shootings, but not fifty-three. Jingoists called loudly for a seizure of Cuba in retaliation, though with the horrors of our own Civil War still fresh in mind, many Americans opposed the idea. Spain would have been no pushover: The U.S. Navy was nowhere near as dominant as it would be in 1898, and the postwar Army was little more than a frontier police force.
The government was reluctant to press Spain too hard for another reason: The Virginius’s registration, which gave it the right to fly the American flag, had been fraudulently obtained. To get around neutrality laws, an American acting as a front for the Cuban rebels had falsely sworn that he was the ship’s owner. Yet that was an internal matter. The papers had been issued by the proper authorities and were entitled to respect from other nations. The bottom line was that Spain had captured an American ship in neutral waters and killed fifty-three men. Something had to be done.
In Madrid the American ambassador, Daniel Sickles—a fiery former Union general who had once murdered a romantic rival and been acquitted for insanity—did his best to stir up a war. Spain’s equally combative foreign minister, José de Carvajal, spent his days in a café composing dismissive replies to Sickles’s notes and reading the more inflammatory passages aloud to cheers and applause. Meanwhile, in Washington, Fish and the Spanish minister, Adm. José Polo de Bernabé, calmly worked out a settlement that would preserve both sides’ honor.
On December 16 the Virginius—leaking badly, stripped of everything valuable, roach-infested and encrusted with all manner of filth, but proudly flying the American flag—was turned over to the U.S. Navy. She would make it as far as Cape Fear, North Carolina, before sinking. On December 18 Spain handed over the ninety-six survivors it still held, thirteen of them American citizens. The general who had ordered the executions was censured, and Spain paid a total of eighty thousand dollars to the families of the slain Americans (Britain got reparations as well). The requirement of a formal salute to the American flag—a question of great importance to both countries—was dropped because of the ship’s faulty registry.
The compromise worked out well for everybody involved except those who were shot and the Cubans, who would suffer through constant repression and sporadic civil war until America stepped in to settle matters in 1898. In that invasion the first American killed was Sgt. Hamilton Fish of the Rough Riders—the grandson of the Secretary of State who had so skillfully avoided war in 1873.
|
|
Seventy-five Years Ago
The Lessor of Two Evils
On October 22 the Senate Committee on Public Lands held its first hearings on the affair popularly known as Teapot Dome. The inquiry related to two parcels of oil-bearing land, Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California. The parcels had been set aside to provide petroleum for naval vessels, and in 1921 Interior Secretary Albert Fall had secretly leased them to a pair of oil drillers without soliciting bids.
The first week of testimony was a disappointment for anyone seeking scandal. Geologists reported that wells on neighboring land were sucking oil out of the area, which explained why Fall had found it necessary to start drilling. A few days later Fall (who had resigned as Interior Secretary) testified that he had not asked for bids because he knew he could get a better price without them. In any case he had wanted to avoid publicity for fear of making other countries think America was beefing up its Navy.
Next to take the stand was the Navy Secretary, Edwin Denby. The senators asked why he had let the Interior Department lease out the Navy’s land. Denby said he had no idea. Further questioning revealed that he was being completely honest: He paid very little attention to what went on in his department and was so guileless that he never suspected anything underhanded. Denby’s repeated “don’t knows” and “can’t recalls” made clear that he was too dumb to be crooked, which by itself made him one of the late President Warren Harding’s best appointments.
Just when its inquiry was looking like a series of dry wells, the committee struck a gusher. Late in the year it learned that immediately after leasing the oil reserves, Fall had paid off ten years of back taxes and made expensive improvements to his New Mexico ranch. Fall explained that his friend Ned McLean, publisher of the Washington Post, had lent him one hundred thousand dollars. It turned out that McLean had indeed sent Fall checks for that amount but Fall had returned them uncashed. McLean’s testimony and eccentric behavior showed him to be just as dim as Denby, but fortunately for the country he was not in government service. Being independently wealthy, he had no need to join the Harding administration.
If McLean had not given Fall the money, who had? In January 1924 Edward Doheny, the Elk Hills lessee, admitted having made a large cash “loan” to Fall. Harry Sinclair, the Teapot Dome lessee, had also given Fall money, it turned out. Fall took the Fifth Amendment, and from then on the public was disposed to believe any accusation leveled against Harding’s “Ohio Gang” of cabinet members, advisers, and hangers-on.
The accusations were plentiful. As Teapot Dome was unfolding, another Senate committee heard how the Veterans’ Bureau had inflated hospital construction costs and skimmed off the excess as graft. A custodian of Alien property seized during World War I had taken bribes to divert some of it to improper hands. The Director of Federal Prisons was said to have covered up sales of narcotics to inmates. Attorney General Harry Daugherty was accused of obstructing justice in numerous ways.
In the end the multifarious batch of investigations simply petered out. President Coolidge, having no obligations to his predecessor’s cronies, did not hesitate to clean house, requesting Denby’s and Daugherty’s resignations. Then, with all the protagonists gone from office, the scandals became old news for Congress and the public. In a string of trials stretching into the early 1930s, some of the accused were convicted but more were acquitted, and the Ohio Gang came to be remembered as more buffoonish than wicked. In his recent book The Strange Deaths of President Harding, the historian Robert H. Ferrell dismisses all the fuss by saying, “The Harding scandals lacked large historical importance. The participants displayed no remarkable skills.” The fact that this pallid statement puts Ferrell among Harding’s fiercest supporters is as telling a comment as any on the record of the Harding administration.
|
|
Tree of Liberty?
On October 27 the famous Washington Elm, under which George Washington supposedly took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775, collapsed onto Garden and Mason Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Workers had been removing branches to ease the strain on the ailing tree (whose trunk had rotted into “a mere mass of punk,” in the words of a later historian) when they tugged too hard and accidentally knocked the whole thing down. Local residents swarmed over the site to gather souvenirs, but enough wood was salvaged to fashion into more than a thousand assorted tokens and relics, including gavels for the legislatures of all forty-eight states. A botanist estimated the tree’s age at 210, meaning that it had been around 60 in Washington’s day.
Cambridge’s veneration of the Washington Elm dated back many years—though not, it turns out, all the way back to Washington himself. The first mention of his taking command beneath it came in the 1830s, when a few octogenarian Revolutionary War soldiers dimly recalled something of that nature happening somewhere in the vicinity. (One such account included a description of Washington reading the 101st Psalm.) From these shaky beginnings the legend grew steadily.
An 1837 version depicted a pensive Washington standing beneath the elm’s sheltering branches, unsheathing his sword, and thinking that he would not sheathe it again until his country’s liberty had been won. Over the years descriptions of the event got more elaborate, especially in the patriotic fervor of the Civil War, when a tablet was erected on the site. By the time of the Centennial, in 1876, the general’s conjectured private thoughts had been embroidered into a stirring, emotional speech before massed thousands of troops and civilians, at whose climax the general brandished his sword and made a florid public declaration while bands played.
In 1925, for the 150th anniversary of Washington’s ascension, Cambridge replaced the original plaque at the site with one marking where the beloved elm had formerly stood. Then five years later Samuel Batchelder, a Harvard University professor, cast serious doubt on the story that had made the tree’s reputation. He combed through records, letters, and diaries from 1775 and found no mention of any such event. In any case, he wrote, there would have been no reason for Washington and Artemas Ward, the general he was replacing, to leave their headquarters and stand beneath a tree simply to hand over the order book and conduct a few other formalities. And with the whole Boston area in peril less than three weeks after Bunker Hill, no one had time for elaborate ceremonies. Washington was much more concerned with inspecting his troops and reconnoitering the enemy, who were rumored to be preparing an attack.
According to Batchelder, Washington may well have stood under the elm sometime around July 3 and reviewed the few regiments stationed in Cambridge, to the usual accompaniment of fife and drum. But no grand ceremony took place, and the actual transfer of command was a perfunctory bureaucratic event that doubtless took place indoors. Modern historians tend to downplay or dismiss the Washington Elm tradition. Still, the plaque remains embedded in the street at the corner of Garden and Mason, joining Longfellow’s “spreading chestnut tree” (at Brattle and Story Streets), the Whitefield Elm (under which the revered evangelist preached), and many others on Cambridge’s roster of famous vanished trees.
|
|
Twenty-five Years Ago
Nixon Into the Bunker
At the start of October, although the Watergate scandal had been snowballing all year, President Richard Nixon still had hopes of keeping it from turning into an avalanche. Despite numerous damaging accusations, a substantial fraction of the public still believed the President or was willing to suspend judgment in the absence of firmer evidence. His lawyers had plausible constitutional arguments for keeping tapes of his Oval Office conversations secret. And with a sleazy hack poised to succeed him, many citizens worried what would happen if Nixon were removed from office. Then, in less than two weeks, the wheels fell off the wagon. By Halloween, instead of boldly challenging Congress and the courts, Nixon was desperately scrambling to stave off impeachment.
The trouble began with the only member of the Nixon administration so insignificant that he could make no contribution to the Watergate conspiracy itself: Vice President Spiro Agnew. Despite his noninvolvement in that scandal, Agnew was plenty corrupt: He had systematically extorted bribes and kickbacks as governor of Maryland and continued to collect on them as Vice President. A federal investigation was making Agnew look guilty enough to embarrass even Richard Nixon, who pressed the Justice Department to force him out.
On October 10, with no advance warning, Agnew shocked the country by resigning from office. As part of a deal with prosecutors, he also pleaded nolo contendere (the same as guilty, but with no admission of wrongdoing) to tax evasion in return for avoiding prison. The rarely used nolo plea, roughly equivalent to today’s “whatever,” allows a defendant to assert that he wasn’t really guilty, which Agnew has been doing ever since.
Two days later an appeals panel ruled that Nixon had to give subpoenaed tapes to John J. Sirica, a federal district judge. On October 19 Nixon announced he was ignoring the decision on grounds of Executive privilege. As a compromise he offered to prepare summaries of the conversations. At the same time, he ordered Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, to cease his efforts to obtain the unedited tapes.
Cox told Nixon to take a hike. Nixon told Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire him, and Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, also refused to fire Cox, so Nixon fired him. The highest surviving Justice Department official, Solicitor General Robert Bork, then fired Cox and abolished his office to finish off the so-called Saturday Night Massacre.
A firestorm of denunciation immediately erupted, with polls showing a plurality in favor of impeachment for the first time. In defying the courts, Nixon could arguably claim to be standing up for the independence of the Executive branch, but his hamfisted attempt to squelch Cox’s investigation made clear that he had something serious to hide. On October 26 Nixon backtracked, promising to appoint a new special prosecutor, but the damage had been done. The President had indelibly stamped himself as deceitful and made any compromise on the tape issue impossible.
The most important event of the month attracted little notice at first. On October 20, as Nixon was figuratively roaming the Justice Department with chain saw and hockey mask, the government of Saudi Arabia cut off oil sales to the United States in retaliation for America’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Other Middle Eastern states joined the embargo, which turned an already serious fuel shortage in the United States into a full-blown energy crisis. The squeeze depressed all sectors of the economy, and before long, as drivers rose at five in the morning to wait for hours on line for dollar-a-gallon gasoline priced at an outrageous fifty cents a gallon, President Nixon’s economic record started looking a whole lot worse. Then as now, a President could complain of persecution and find sympathetic ears as long as the country was reasonably prosperous. Nixon had, after all, won forty-nine states less than a year before. But with unemployment and prices both zooming upward, friends became as hard to find as open gas stations for the beleaguered President.
In less than a month Nixon had been shorn of his best argument against impeachment (Agnew), the basis for what remained of his public support (the economy), and the fig leaf (Executive privilege) he had been using to hide the tapes’ damning evidence. From then on, his situation deteriorated so fast that he would soon feel compelled to declare, “I’m not a crook”—and find that no one believed him.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
