Descripción
[2]pp. typed letter, signed, on Navy Department, Office of the Assistant Secretary letterhead. Original mailing folds, mild wrinkling, light even toning. Very good. A rare look behind the scenes of the United States Navy Department after one of the most notorious incidents in its history, an event which led directly to the Spanish-American War. On February 15, 1898, as it sat in Havana Harbor just off the coast of Cuba, the U.S.S. Maine exploded. The ship sank quickly, killing 260 of the 400 American midshipmen on board. The Maine had been sent to Cuba to protect American interests following a rebellion that had broken out against Spanish colonial rule on the island. Almost immediately, blame for the explosion was aimed squarely at Spain, though the American government never said so directly. Still, most Americans citizens, as well as those in Congress, laid responsibility at Spain's door. By April 1898, just two months after the present letter was written, Spain and the United States were at war in Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt himself would resign his Navy appointment on May 10, 1898 and head to Cuba with his Rough Riders. The explosion that sent the Maine to the bottom of Havana Harbor remains controversial to this day. The morning after the event Captain Philip R. Alger, a math professor at the United States Naval Academy, chemist, and explosives expert, put up a bulletin at the Navy Department claiming the explosion came from inside the Maine. Roosevelt immediately ordered Alger to remove the bulletin until an official inquiry could be performed. In the present letter, written thirteen days after the explosion, Roosevelt writes to Captain O'Neil, head of the Ordnance Bureau, and references the incident with Alger, asking: ".don't you think it inadvisable for Prof. Alger to express opinions in this matter? Captain Bradford [chief of the Bureau of Equipment] has all along believed that Prof. Alger is absolutely in error in his views. He believes the explosion was not accidental. Captain Clover [head of the Office of Naval Intelligence] is inclined to the same belief. I should certainly feel that it was not advisable for either of them to make public any such statement, and it seems to me that it is inadvisable for Prof. Alger to make these statements." Roosevelt then asks O'Neil to relate "your views about the matter unofficially," adding that "Mr. Alger cannot possibly know anything about the accident." That last sentence is curious. Conspiracy theorists might latch onto the notion that in calling the incident an "accident," Roosevelt is perhaps trying to put forth or propagate the mine theory less than two weeks after the affair. He is at least trying to control the message coming from the Navy Department, as he writes: "All the best men in the Department agree that, whether possible or not, it certainly is possible [underlined] that the ship was blown up by a mine which might, or might not, have been towed under her; and when we have a court sitting to find out these facts it seems to me to the last point inadvisable for any person connected with the Navy Department to express his opinion publicly in the matter, and especially to give elaborate reasons for one side or the other. The fact that Mr. Alger happens to take the Spanish side and to imply that the explosion was probably due to some fault of the Navy, whether in the Construction Department, or among the officers, has, of course, nothing to do with the matter." The "court sitting" Roosevelt mentions here occurred the next month. A U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry ruled in March 1898 that the Maine was destroyed by a mine, but did not identify a culprit. The mine theory prevailed in the century following the sinking of the Maine, even after a second inquiry following the raising of the Maine in 1911. However, in 1976, following the erosion of trust in the government and its military resulting from the Vietnam War (a conflict accelerated by a naval incident at the Gulf of Tonk. N° de ref. del artículo WRCAM57029
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