Some foreign critics qualified their apportionment of credit to Dewey's skill by emphasizing the characteristic complacence of the Spaniards, their naval and military slovenliness, undisciplined, ill-cared-for.The Toronto (Canada) Saturday Night, on August 27, 1899, said:There is every reason to believe that he (Dewey) would give a creditable account of himself if he ever found it necessary to engage in a battle, but of course it is absurd to class him with the great sailors of history because of the Manila incident.Nothing of that sort, however, was heard in the United States. America's ecstasy of exaltation went on from height to height. |
Some public men, and even some professional navy men, were no less exalted than the newspaper head-line writers. One of them, Commodore Winfield Scott Schley, in an interview given on board the flag-ship Brooklyn, on May 11, 1898, four days after the news of the victory, said: "Admiral Dewey's victory at Manila must deservedly take its place side by side with the greatest naval victories of the world's history." |
The battle of Manila Bay was one of the most important ever fought. It decided that the United States should start in a direction in which it had never travelled before. It placed the United States in the family of great nations, and it put Spain into outer darkness. Before the battle, British Navy officers treated the United States Navy officers with condescension. In fact, Europeans as a boy treated all Americans so. They have never done so since. |
Admiral Dewey never made the Democratic party's nomination for President in the 1900 election. Instead he was beaten by William Jennings Bryan with Adlai Stevenson as his running mate. On the Republican side, the nomination went to the incumbent President William McKinley with Theordore Roosevelt (father of FDR Roosevelt the WW2 President) as his running mate. The Republicans won the day and McKinley was returned for a further four years with Roosevelt the Vice President. Not long afterwards, whilst mingling in a crowd on foot, McKinley was shot twice and rushed to hospital. At first all looked well with a good chance of survival, one bullet causing minor damage to his kidney and the other passing through both walls of his stomach, with the subsequent holes healing (sealing) almost immediately, although the President was very poorly. Seven days later he died of gangrene and Roosevelt came to Office. The assassin, 28 year old Leo Czolgosz born a US citizen but from an immigrant family thought to be Russian (Belarus) was tried, convicted, and electrocted in a New York State prison. |