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15/2/1898: The Maine Attraction
Despite the escalating use of lawsuits by Thomas Edison to protect what he saw as the exploitation of 'his' invention, the moving picture industry was in the doldrums by early 1898, little more than two years after its creation. The public had grown tired of endless shots of men playing cards and trains pulling into stations, of ocean waves and babies eating breakfast. Although Alice Guy and Georges Melies had already experimented with narrative film, the idea of using film to tell a story was still a few years in the future. Film had been relegated in the music hall to the status of 'chasers', the last event on the programme, intended to chase the audience out of the building. If it was to survive, the infant movie industry needed something spectacular to set it back on course. It was to receive the boost it needed courtesy of an incident off the coast of Cuba on the 15th February and the subsequent nationalistic fervour whipped up by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
The battleship USS Maine was anchored at Havana Harbour in response to riots in Havana the previous month. It was there to safeguard American interests, but its visit, according to Secretary of the Navy, John D. Long, was friendly. At 9.10pm on the 15th February, taps was sounded, and the ship's Captain, Charles Sigsbee, later reported:
I laid down my pen and listened to the notes of the bugle, which were singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the night... I was enclosing my letter in its envelope when the explosion came. It was a bursting, rending, and crashing roar of immense volume, largely metallic in character. It was followed by heavy, ominous metallic sounds. There was a trembling and lurching motion of the vessel, a list to port. The electric lights went out. Then there was immense blackness and smoke.
The situation could not be mistaken. The Maine was blown up and sinking. For a moment the instinct for self-preservation took charge of me, but this was immediately dominated by the habit of command.
Fires broke out all over the ship, and its forward part, in which most of the crew had been sleeping, quickly sank to the bottom of the harbour. Lifeboats from nearby ships were swiftly on the scene, many of them from the Spanish Alfonso XII, and Sigsbee, along with what remained of his crew, was forced to abandon ship. A total of 262 crew died as a result of the explosion, and the twisted remains of the Maine's bridge and stern would remain above the water for many years. A naval investigation lasting forty days was unable to determine the cause of the explosion.
Despite the navy's failure to discover the cause of the explosion, the American press, always keen to increase their circulation, were in no doubt as to the culprits. It was the Spanish, they proclaimed, the cowardly Spanish. The press were as unscrupulous in those days as they are today, and thought nothing of fabricating a story in order to boost their sales. William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal even published pictures showing how Spanish divers had planted a mine to the ship's hull and detonated it from shore. And the papers were still the public's main source of information - film newsreel was still in the future - so it wasn't long before public opinion was turning against the Spanish in a wave of patriotic fervour. Their rage was fuelled by the New York Journal's extensive coverage - eight pages a day for weeks after the tragedy. All the papers demanded vengeance, and the country rang with the battle-cry: "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!"
The movie companies were also quick to capitalise on the public's interest in the incident. American Mutoscope and Biograph had released the film Battleships "Iowa" and "Massachusetts" in December 1897, but following the sinking of the Maine, they quickly renamed it Battleships "Maine" and "Iowa" and described it in their catalogue thus: This scene embodies probably the only moving picture extant of the ill-fated battleship 'Maine,' blown up in Havana Harbor. It was taken, together with the 'Iowa,' in the Brooklyn Navy Yard but a few days before the 'Maine's' departure for the South. Most of the men shown in the picture were killed by the explosion under the 'Maine.'
Biograph also sent cameramen G. W. Bitzer and Arthur Marvin (brother of the company's co-founder, Harry) to record events. They filmed the wreckage of the Maine and other films in Havana, while other Biograph crews shot film of ships, cavalry and Teddy Roosevelt in Washington. By mid-March, the Biograph's films were rousing the crowds at the Pleasure Palace in New York and the Eden Musee.
Not to be outdone, the Edison Company sent William Paley to Cuba to cover the situation as a licensee. Transportation for Paley and Karl C. Decker, a reporter for the New York Journal, was supplied by William Randolph Hearst. Paley's first stop was Florida, where he filmed Burial of the "Maine" Victims, War Correspondents (a staged reconstruction of reporters racing to take copy to a telegraph office), and U.S. Battleship "Indiana". From Florida, he travelled to Havana where he shot Wreck of the Battleship "Maine" and Morro Castle, Havana Harbor.
Meanwhile, the yellow press continued to whip up anti-Spanish feeling amongst its readers by printing lurid stories of Spanish inhumanity to its Cuban subjects. Headlines such as Spanish Cannibalism, Inhuman Torture, and Amazon Warriors Fight For Rebels ensured that the story remained in the public's mind - and healthy sales for the journals. Hearst even offered $50,000 for "detection of the perpetrator of the Maine outrage". Meanwhile, Frederick Remington, despatched to Cuba by Hearst to report on the situation wired that "There is no war, request to be recalled." "Please remain," replied his boss, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."
On the 20th April 1898, U.S. President William McKinley signed a joint resolution recognising Cuban independence and demanding the immediate Spanish withdrawal from Cuba. The resolution also empowered the US military to use force to ensure such a withdrawal was undertaken. Spain officially broke off relations with America on the 21st, and four days later, Congress announced that a state of war had existed between the two countries since that date.
Almost as soon as war was declared, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith of the Vitagraph Co. produced what is often called the world's first war movie. The film was called Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, and it caused a sensation. The film was simply a close-up of Blackton's hands pulling down a Spanish flag and replacing it with the American standard. "It was taken in a 10 x 12 studio room, the background a building next door," Blackton explained in a lecture at the University of Southern California in 1929. "We had a flag pole and two 18-inch flags. Smith operated the machine and I, with this very hand, grabbed the Spanish flag and tore it down from the pole and pulled the Stars and Stripes to the top of the flag pole. That was our very first dramatic picture and it is surprising how much dramatic effect it created... the people went wild."
Declaration of war was a godsend to the movie industry for obvious reasons. Audiences, thirsty for information, had returned to the movies to see for themselves the abominations committed by the Spanish, and their numbers grew as the country prepared for conflict. The cinema had found a new purpose, that of supplying contemporary information in moving pictures to a public that had heretofore relied on the printed word.
Edison sent William Paley back to Tampa in Florida in May to record preparations for war at the main assembly point for training and acclimatisation. Blackton and Smith were also there for Vitagraph, and managed to become unofficial photographers for both the 71st Regiment, and Teddy Roosevelt's famed Rough Riders. Unfortunately for both the bored troops and the eager cameraman, departure was delayed when a congressman visiting Tampa mistook the US warships waiting some distance off Tampa Bay to escort the troops to Cuba for the Spanish fleet waiting to ambush the US transports. The impatient troops (and intrepid cameramen) eventually left Tampa on 14th June. They landed on the Cuban beaches on the 22nd. While historians record a perfectly executed landing, Albert E. Smith recalled of the landings at Siboney, "With a high surf rolling, numerous boatloads guided by young and inexpert hands capsized, and a number of lives were lost. The "excellent work, thorough and punctual," revealed to us by Henry Cabot Lodge somehow escaped my observation entirely." Paley filmed what were reportedly the first US troops to land in Cuba in U.S. Troops Landing at Daiquiri, Cuba, and filmed their progress from Daiquiri to Santiago. Unfortunately for Paley, who was already suffering from exposure to radiation from his previous position as an X-ray technician, he was forced to spend a rainy night in the open air after his cart broke down and became ill. His camera was also damaged, forcing him to return to the States.
Biograph cameraman G. W. Bitzer was also a victim of the war: although he apparently spent much of his time on Hearst's press yacht being entertained by the newspaper magnate and his entourage of "pretty young ladies", he succumbed to typhoid malaria and returned to the States. Blackton and Smith were more fortunate for Vitagraph: they followed Teddy and his Rough Riders on his "charge" up San Juan Hill. Only the realisation that what they had mistaken for the buzzing of tropical bugs was actually the whine of sniper's bullets aimed at them finally prompted them to part company with Teddy and head back for America.
For all the sometimes hair-raising escapades recounted by the major film company’s cameramen, one fact remains irrefutable: no combat footage was ever filmed of the Spanish-American war. The reason? The physical limitations of the equipment made lugging it to the site of battle, and standing upright in the midst of the fighting in order to record what was happening, impractical. "Visiting Cuba under Spanish rule was highly dangerous," recalled G. W. Bitzer, "My camera was bulky enough, but... it was (also) driven by a motor operated by over two thousand pounds of storage batteries." Also, as Albert E. Smith reported, the ship landings were so poorly handled that many horses were killed during transfer from the ship to land. Smith himself, saw one of Teddy Roosevelt's horses drowned as his troops tried to winch the animal ashore. With so many equine casualties, there were few available to carry the cameramen's equipment.
The public, however, were hungry for pictures of the war, and so the nation's filmmakers, as ingenious as ever, rose to the demand. Upon returning to America from Cuba, Blackton and Smith blithely assured awaiting reporters that they had captured footage of the American fleet sinking the Spanish Admiral Cervera's warship, an incident of which they were not even aware until they reached American soil. Undeterred, the two Englishmen bought photographs of the ships involved and nailed wooden blocks to the bottom of them so that they would stand upright in the bottom of a canvas-covered frame filled with an inch of water. On the shelves formed by these wooden bases, they placed tiny pinches of gunpowder. After hastily daubing a few clouds onto a piece of blue-painted cardboard and attaching pieces of string to each of the battleships, Blackton and Smith were ready to film their fake footage of the sea battle the entire nation was waiting to see. While Smith cranked the reel, Blackton, hidden from the camera's lens, touched off the pinches of gunpowder. Battle smoke was provided by Blackton's wife blowing cigarette smoke from one side of the table on which the frame was set, and an office boy blowing cigar smoke from the other. Both Blackton and Smith agreed that the result was less than impressive, but the film, which they entitled The Battle of Santiago Bay, played to capacity crowds for several weeks.
Vitagraph were not alone in staging battle scenes: Lubin and Biograph were quick to copy Blackton and Smith's 'innovative' interpretation of events, and Edison filmed scenes of Roosevelt's Rough Riders war exploits at his Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey.
The Spanish-American war ended in August with the signing of a Peace Protocol, and the film companies were there to record the return home of the nation's conquering heroes. Biograph even despatched cameramen to Camp Wikoff in Long Island to film quarantined soldiers inflicted with tropical fevers. Their films highlighted the inadequate conditions in the camp, a result of its unreadiness for the arrival of the Fifth Corps, and, spurred by public opinion as a result of the films, President McKinley created a commission to investigate the conduct of the War Department during the war. Biograph filmed the visit of McKinley to the camp in September, when conditions had improved immeasurably. [ADD]
Many of the films mentioned in the above article can be viewed at The Library of Congress American Memory site
Sources: Two Reels and a Crank by Albert E. Smith in collaboration with Phil A. Koury; Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company by Charles Musser; Library of Congress American Memory Website.
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