From the 1941 movie Citizen Kane directed by Orson Welles and written by Welles and Herman Mankiewicz…
Charles Foster Kane: “Read the cable.”
Mr. Bernstein: “‘Girls delightful in Cuba. Stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery, but don't feel right spending your money. Stop. There is no war in Cuba, signed Wheeler.’ Any answer?”
Kane: “Yes. ‘Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war.’” The scene from Citizen Kane I’ve referenced was apparently not a total invention of the film’s screenwriters. The larger than life character of Kane was based on the larger than life young publisher of the New York Journal William Randolph Hearst.
In 1896 Hearst had hired the artist and sculptor Frederic Remington and sent him to Cuba to draw sketches that he intended to print in his newspaper of the insurgency he thought was raging against Spain’s colonial rule.
After only a few days in Havana Remington purportedly sent Hearst a cable… “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.”
Hearst, who along with his rival publisher Joseph Pulitzer, were outdoing each other attempting to whip up Americans’ outrage against the Spanish to sell their papers, supposedly cabled Remington back… “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”
On February 15th, 1898 the battleship U.S.S. Maine sunk after it exploded in Havana harbor killing 266 of the 354 American crewmen who were aboard.
At the time the cause of the explosion was unknown but the United States blamed the Spanish military occupying Cuba anyway and when diplomatic efforts failed to resolve the matter the Spanish American War began two months later and was over in ten weeks.
Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s media warmongering may not have brought about the real war but what Welles and Mankiewicz wrote as dialogue for Citizen Kane has become the more memorable version of the exchange where Hearst allegedly claimed he would create one.
But what does any of this have to do with my photograph of an anchor from the U.S.S. Maine in a city park in Reading, Pennsylvania and right across the street from my childhood dentist’s office no less?
Until yesterday I never knew and I never asked why or how this happened but now after some research I think I have the answers.
The remains of the U.S.S. Maine were not moved out of Havana’s harbor until thirteen years later in 1911 and sunk at sea. But some of its parts were preserved to create monuments to “Remember the Maine.”
Three years after that a U.S.S. Maine anchor, rusty and covered with barnacles, arrived via railroad on a Pennsylvania— not a Reading —RR train and the anchor was placed in the city park that same day and subsequently cleaned and repainted.
Reading’s local Democratic congressman was a man named John Rothermel and it was he who had requested from the Navy that the city be the recipient of one of the Maine’s anchors.
1914 was an election year and Rothermel was seeking reelection to his seat in the House of Representatives. His Republican opponent immediately accused him of a political stunt but he wasn’t the only one. Rothermel was so unpopular with many in his own party that they too joined in the criticism. Here’s a headline I found in the local paper from that time…
DEMOCRATS TEAR JOHN ROTHERMEL TO PIECES; RIDICULE ANCHOR SCHEME TO HOLD VOTES
But then it got seriously more ugly. An article in the paper a short time later pointed out that the year inscribed on the anchor was 1846 which was 42 years before the U.S.S. Maine was built.
The idea that the United States Navy would put an antiquated piece of equipment on one of its vessels not only seemed suspect but led many to now believe that Rothermel’s “stunt” was something even worse.
With the anchor’s authenticity in doubt his procurement of it wasn’t just a scheme but now thought to be possibly a hoax and an embarrassment to Reading to boot.
More headlines followed from spring into summer until the day of the official dedication ceremony on August 1, 1914. For that event Washington sent a young assistant secretary of the Navy to clear the air and perhaps Rothermel’s name. Here is some of what he said…
“It has come to my ears that certain persons, who must have had either a strongly perverted sense of humor of a malicious design to circulate falsehood, have suggested that the national government has deliberately attempted to perpetrate a fraud on the city of Reading by sending it an anchor which was not one of the anchors of the Maine. There is of course no question that this anchor was on the Maine at the time she was blown up in Havana harbor…
Its history is complete and absolutely authenticated, but I cannot refrain from suggesting my disappointment that there can exist in any community people so small as to allow personal or political jealousies to influence them so far that they may publicly doubt the honesty of the national government.”
The speech didn’t help John Rothermel keep his seat in Congress. His own unpopularity even before the controversy created by the anchor had deep sixed his candidacy. That assistant secretary of the Navy who spoke in Reading that day? He announced his own run for the United States Senate a few months later. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he too lost his race that year.
And what about my dentist’s office directly across the street from the U.S.S. Maine’s anchor? Well, it has no relevance whatsoever to the true story I have just told you but my dentist was my father’s second cousin and I think he drilled and filled my many cavities as a favor to the family.
His services may have been free but they certainly were not pain free. He fit me in when he could between other appointments and I was never given novocaine. Yes, I still remember the pain.
My Dad, twice wounded, but kept fighting and awarded the Bronze Star in W.W. II, was amazingly impervious to physical pain. He never had Novocaine during dental work. As a kid, when I first started to have cavities drilled, about age 9, I wanted to emulate the Old Man. So until I reached 16 and discovered that I had my own "agency," I refused when the dentist asked, "Do you want Novocaine?"
This was in the 1950s when there were no high speed drills to greatly reduce the pain. Rather my dentists during those years drilled away with equipment that never whined like a Formula One engine, but ground away like an old tree stump remover. The pain was exquisite, radiating from my vibrating jaw via my trigeminal nerve through every part of my body, right down to my tightly clenched toes.
It seemed drilling a single cavity took hours. But when it was done and the last batch of amalgam pressed into what I imagined to be a vast crevasse, I stumbled to my feet as a wave of pleasure swept over me. I had survived another brush with death, the decay exorcised in my self-imposed ritual.
Some years later when all those old fillings were failing, and I began a long course of repairs, I signed on with one of my Philly neighbors, John Richter, who had just opened a new practice near my law office. He had the best high speed water cooled drills, and thanks to them, John's skill, and a hefty injection of his best pain killer, I never felt a thing. Procedures flew by like happy dreams.
It seems "modern dentistry" had also got a hold on Dad. One day when he was in his seventies, my mother revealed that for years he had been asking for Novocaine.
yes, no novocaine in those days.
As a result, even though I haven't felt much pain in a dentist's chair in many decades, my body still tenses up when I hear the sound of the drill.
I remember we were given candy after a visit to the dentist; to make sure that he got repeat business?