Remember the Maine - And Remember the Facts
Today is the anniversary of the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine, which blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898, killing most of the crew and escalating tensions between the United States and Spain to the point that Congress declared war a couple months later.
Most Naval officials agreed that the explosion was likely an accident caused by unsafe storage of incendiary materials onboard the battleship, which had been sent to Cuba to monitor growing tensions in the Cuban civil war against Spanish colonial forces. However, we remember the Maine mostly because of the role that irresponsible American journalism played in fanning the flames of conflict, blaming Spain for an unprovoked attack, and leading to a declaration of war on specious grounds. As one famous story has it, an illustrator sent to Cuba during the insurrection by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst had told him there was no war to cover. Hearst allegedly replied, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”
Narratives around big events can take shape quickly. Although there was scant evidence of a Spanish attack on the Maine, the newspapers owned by Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer pushed the idea that the ship was struck by a mine. Coupled with American sentiment about Spain’s abuse of the colonized Cuban population, also the subject of exaggerated newspaper coverage, the march toward conflict became inevitable. By April, the Spanish-American War had begun.
The echoes of the Maine affair may ring a little more loudly this year: with images of a land war in Europe brought to us every day by social media posts; the advance of artificial intelligence and deep-fake technologies that allow designers to alter reality in any way they see fit; and escalating tensions between the United States and China, with competing narratives about spy balloons and confusion over what exactly U.S. planes shot down over the weekend.
In Havana Harbor 125 years ago, it was a lack of technology that allowed fake facts to proliferate and drive a dangerous narrative. Today, we appear to be in an opposite place, where eerie new technologies can put us in similar peril.
At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hackers circulated a deep-fake video in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears to tell his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender. A fake so obvious was easily debunked, but the mere existence of such technologies can be used to draw doubts about facts over and over again, gradually wearing down the audience’s ability to discern fact from fiction. Again, in Ukraine, after Russian forces withdrew from territory they held early in the war, Ukrainians discovered evidence of myriad atrocities, including the bodies of hundreds of murdered civilians in the city of Bucha. In response, Kremlin officials replied that the evidence was all faked in order to produce an international response against Russia.
The Spanish-American War was over by December of 1898. When it ended, the United States had control of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. It was the first war recorded on film, and helped propel the image of Theodore Roosevelt as a war hero. The publicity helped him become governor of New York that year, and then vice president in 1900, and president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. All that from a war that might never have been started if the truth about the Maine had been known from the start.
Facts still matter. And we have more of them than ever. But it’s getting harder every day to separate the facts from the flood of disinformation that floods our screens. Another anniversary of the explosion that sank the U.S.S. Maine reminds us of the importance in doing the work needed to find out what really happened.