The Almost War off 1895 Posted on 3/21/2020 at 15:48:34 by John Wells
I’ve been reading Maark Zwonitzer’s book The Statesman and the Storyteller, about John Hay, Mark Twain, and the rise of American Imperialism. In 1895 Henry Cabot Lodge and President Cleveland got into a huff over Great Britain’s interfering with Venezuela and were talking war to defend the Monroe Doctrine. The following is a commentary about the disparity of naval forces:
At present, the US Navy could count something less than three dozen vessels to be put to use on open seas, and only two of them battleships; this was as against forty-four battleships and nearly three hundred vessels for the British..... ....Then, too, early efforts to “extemporize” US naval power did not seem promising. Three new first-class battleships were still some months away from completion. The iron-hulled coastal monitor Monadnock was to come on line at any time, the country was assured, but this assertion seemed dubious given that the shipbuilders had, at that late date, been on the job for twenty years. .... ... One of the finer cruisers in the Atlantic Squadron, the Charleston, was sitting in the far-off port city of Nagasaki, Japan; the ship had two broken pistons and was unable to move under its own power. When the USS Texas—billed as the fastest battleship in the World—arrived in Staten Island for its little shakedown jaunt, an anchor fell off and dropped to the bottom of the bay. Ten days later, on a four-hour run into the Atlantic, its bearings overheated, its drainage system faltered, the engine room flooded with water and oil, and the trial had to be abandoned.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and we did not go to war over Venezuela.
