Bonus Episode - Cuban Conspiracies and Schoolyard Chants

Cuban conspiracy theories, schoolyard chance, and America's most complicated president.

All that and more on today's bonus episode of Our Fake History.

Roll the theme.

Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and normally this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

But on our bonus episodes, I like to take questions from the listeners so I can get a little bit deeper into a topic that we have recently explored on the regular show.

Now, if you've been listening, then you know that we've recently completed a massive trilogy on President William McKinley.

And honestly, this may have been one of the more challenging series I've ever done on this podcast.

Why?

Well, the topic is massive.

There are so many things I wanted to talk about when it came to McKinley, and I simply did not have time for all of it.

Those of you that heard part three of the series probably noticed me audibly struggling with how deep I should go into the Spanish-American War.

Honestly, one day I think I will return to that topic because there's so much I still want to talk about.

McKinley's also a challenging topic because he's simultaneously simultaneously the least interesting American president and the most interesting American president.

And I think this is key to his appeal for certain types of biographers.

There is a lot to say about President William McKinley's era.

But as a man, he's a bit of a blank slate.

You can project a lot onto him.

So that dynamic really ended up fascinating me, but it makes for a challenging topic to turn into a podcast.

So with that said, I've been really fascinated to see what you folks wanted to hear more about.

So let's get to your questions.

One of our wonderful patrons, Michael Friedman Schnapp, submitted this question through the Patreon chat.

He writes,

As an American who lived through the George W.

Bush presidency, and after paying extra close attention to Karl Rove, I read the James Moore biography on him.

I'm curious how you regarded using Rove as a source.

Perhaps the best Rove story is that in the 1980s, he called the cops and told them that there was a bug, wiretap, in his office and blamed it on a political opponent in a heated governor's race.

However, there's strong forensic evidence that Rove planted the bug himself.

The guy is only topped as a dirty trickster in American politics by Roger Stone and Nixon.

So, how should we regard his academic work?

I get that there were many Roman sources we rely on who were politicians or courtesans.

I'm looking at you, Cassius Dio.

But we know Rove is a manipulative actor.

How should we handle him as a quote-unquote historian?

Thanks so much for that question, Michael.

I should start off by saying that I cannot confirm the story that Carl Rove bugged his own office.

I assume that Michael got that from the biography that he mentioned in his question there.

But I have not dug into that one myself, so please do not cite this podcast as proof that that actually happened.

But this is a great question because it strikes at the heart of what I do all the time on this podcast, which is critically evaluating secondary sources.

Now, sometimes it can be hard to parse a particular historian's or other author's biases on a particular topic.

But in the case of Karl Rove, his reputation precedes him.

In fact, one of the reasons that I thought that this topic might be rich for our fake history was because such a well-known and controversial modern political strategist had taken up the story of McKinley.

So I think you have to head into a book written by someone like Karl Rove, assuming that they are trying to make a point with the story.

The question is, what point are they trying to make?

Now, I think we should take this approach to any history that we read.

We should always be asking, what are the biases here?

What angle is this particular author taking?

The best work out there declares its biases, very clearly says, here is my approach, here is what I am influenced by, here is what I am trying to say about this particular moment.

And most importantly, here is all the historical evidence that supports my particular read on this moment in history.

When your author is Karl Rove, I think it's fair to assume that a very specific set of political biases are going to be influencing his writing.

So, how then should we use his book?

Well, I really liked how Michael compared Karl Rove to the ancient Roman historians like Cassius Dio or Suetonius.

You can only really trust those folks when their information aligns with the writing of other ancient historians.

You need to compare and contrast your sources.

Now, what I discovered was that Karl Rove's book was mostly in alignment with the other major historians that I was reading, except when it came to the controversial moments in McKinley's career.

Rove consistently downplayed any of the accusations that McKinley may have been corrupted by the money that was pumped into his campaign by wealthy donors.

He also goes out of his way to argue against the idea that there was any type of coercion done by major businesses during the 1896 election.

Like I said at the end of the last episode, I felt like Karl Rove treated President McKinley as though he was his campaign manager.

He was trying to protect his man as best he could throughout the pages of his biography.

So, what was Karl Rove's big point with his McKinley biography?

Well, I think he was subtly turning McKinley into a type of early Republican saint.

And again, this is just my opinion.

You can totally disagree with me on this, but that's what I got from his book.

I think that for Karl Rove, President William McKinley represents a rebirth of the Republican Party, where it got away from its roots as the party of Lincoln and became the party that would perhaps be more recognizable to the likes of Ronald Reagan or George W.

Bush.

The rise of William Jennings Bryan in the Democratic Party during the election of 1896 represents the moment when the Democratic Party first really embraced left-wing economic ideas.

Karl Rove obviously sees this as a bad development in American politics.

So he casts McKinley as the supremely reasonable man and William Jennings Bryan as a bit of a kook.

And I think that is his overarching point about all of this.

He is trying to tell his readers that Republicans are the reasonable choice, and Democrats are kooky.

I would say that this interpretation is is deeply affected by his political biases.

But I will say that this is a fairly subtle narrative in Rove's work.

And if the name on the cover didn't say Karl Rove, my antenna may not have been tuned to it as acutely as it was.

So I suppose the lesson here is that we should always be hunting for bias in whatever we are reading, especially works of history.

If I had only read Karl Rove's book, I would have been left with the impression that William McKinley was an unfairly forgotten president who secretly shaped the future of America.

Hopefully, I was able to show in my podcast series that there's a lot more to the story than that.

Okay,

the next question comes to us from listener David Stanley.

David writes, Hello, I've often heard the theory that someone in the U.S.

government ordered the sinking of the Maine as a Casas Belli against Spain.

In Elmore Leonard's novel, Cuba Libre, he has characters who are involved with the events who think that.

Do you know if there was a conspiracy theory that was current in 1898?

Thank you very much for the great work.

David, thanks so much for the question, David.

First, I think it's safe to say that almost every explanation for the sinking of the main qualifies as a conspiracy theory, other than, of course, the explanation that it was an accident.

As I explained in the episode, the newspapers of the day, especially the Hearst and Pulitzer papers in New York, assumed that the Spanish must have been behind the attack.

That in itself was a conspiracy theory.

The Spanish government completely denied that they had anything to do with the destruction of the main.

And honestly, I believe them.

The Spanish had absolutely nothing to gain by destroying the USS Main.

If you believe that it was the Spanish, then you are essentially embracing the idea that a group of hardcore Spanish monarchists upset about American infringements of Spanish sovereignty took it upon themselves to destroy the armored cruiser.

That is a conspiracy theory, as these alleged attackers would have been acting against the wishes of the elected Spanish parliament and the liberals that happened to be in power at the time.

If you embrace the idea that the main was blown up by the Cuban rebels or by the rioting Spanish soldiers on the streets of Havana, that too is a conspiracy theory.

In this case, the destruction of the main would have been a false flag operation meant to frame the Spanish so the United States intervened on the island.

In either case, you have a conspiracy of people secretly plotting to do this attack.

Now, I find that explanation more plausible because at least the Cuban rebels or the rioting soldiers had a motive to blow up that ship.

I understand why they would have thought that that might have been worth it for them.

Now, As you pointed out in the question, there is a theory out there that Americans may have been behind the destruction of the Maine.

Could it have been those jingos in Congress or other jingoistic Americans who were just screaming for war with Spain?

Now, I understand why some folks might be attracted to that particular conspiracy theory, but I have seen absolutely no evidence to back it up.

Remember, 261 American sailors and Marines died when the Maine exploded.

So if you're going to argue that Americans killed their own soldiers, man, you really want to have some good evidence to support that.

Personally, I have not seen any of that evidence.

Now, a more widely believed conspiracy theory from around the turn of the century was that William Randolph Hearst paid for saboteurs to destroy the main.

Now, once again, there is no hard hard evidence of this, but this fits the larger narrative that we discussed on the series, that the New York newspapers were behind the entire war.

I even tried to debunk the myth that William Randolph Hearst told one of his correspondents, you supply the pictures and I'll supply the war.

Well, fake quotes like that have helped buttress this conspiracy theory that William Randolph Hearst would have done anything to make a war happen between America and Spain.

This is the Lex Luther conspiracy theory, the idea that one greedy media tycoon was behind the whole thing.

But once again, there's absolutely no evidence of this.

Now, as I said on the series, there are those studies that showed that an external explosion may have started a chain reaction that eventually blew up the entire main.

But none of these studies have ever properly explained how this mine could have been planted at that time in Havana Harbor.

If there had been a mine, it was obviously not there when the ship first arrived.

It had to have been planted after the ship was anchored.

This would have required saboteurs to do an underwater mission at night to properly plant the mine and then not get blown up themselves.

The ship was so well guarded, I just don't see how that could have been possible.

But I also totally understand why people have a hard time accepting that the destruction of the USS Main could have been an accident.

The timing of everything was just far too significant.

It's hard to believe that something random could have occurred right then.

It feels like someone had to have been behind it.

But honestly, I think the best evidence suggests that it purely was an accident.

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The next question comes to us from Patreon.

Kurt S.

asks this, as an outsider to America, is there a reason Teddy Roosevelt is not embraced as a figurehead in politics?

It seems like he could also be spun as a quote-unquote compassionate conservative while still projecting a bunch of machismo for those who need politicians who can get into bar fights and openly call for American empire.

He had a moment in meme culture a decade or so ago, but to my knowledge isn't getting name-dropped as an inspiration by sitting politicians.

All right, Kurt, this is an awesome question.

So, Theodore Roosevelt was lurking on the sidelines of that McKinley series we just did, and it took all of my power not to go down a TR rabbit hole.

Personally, I find Theodore Roosevelt to be a fascinating figure.

He's one of the more interesting people to ever hold the office of President of the United States.

But man, oh man, is he complicated?

I said earlier that William McKinley is a bit of a blank slate that you can project your own feelings onto.

Theodore Roosevelt is not one of those people.

He is the opposite of a blank slate.

He is a slate that is so full of stuff that wrapping your head around all of it is nearly impossible.

This is reflected in the historiography, where the number of books on William McKinley is actually fairly small.

Theodore Roosevelt has libraries of books written about him.

He is one of the most studied American presidents.

But that extra layer of scrutiny has meant that his historical reputation has had a bit of a wild ride.

He has been celebrated as one of the greatest American presidents, but also denigrated as an imperialist, a racist, a terrible force in American politics.

Now, you asked why Theodore Roosevelt isn't more of a figurehead in American politics these days.

Well, I think there was a time when he was.

There were moments over the past 100 years since T.R.'s death when his memory was celebrated and he was held up as a model for a great leader.

But in our current political paradigm, he's a bit of an orphan.

On the one hand, he was a big government progressive who believed in social programs, busting up monopolies, reining in the excesses of capitalism, helping the little guy.

Roosevelt was famously one of the driving forces behind the creation of America's national parks.

On the other hand, he was a jingo, a chauvinistic American patriot that felt like America needed to seize more territory overseas and assert itself as a militaristic great power.

He believed in the glory of war and thought that armed conflict was essential in making men men.

And that is just the beginning.

But I think even with that thumbnail sketch, you could see how he doesn't really fit in any of our ideological camps today.

As such, in the context of American politics, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are reaching for Theodore Roosevelt as their political model.

And I completely understand why, because in the modern political context, he is neither fish nor foul.

A few years back, my friend Daniele Bolelli over at the History on Fire podcast put out an excellent series on Theodore Roosevelt that I really loved, and I thought did a great job of capturing the complexity of the man.

There are things about him that are despicable and there are things about him that are incredibly admirable.

And honestly, I'm not even sure how I feel about the guy.

So if you are ready for a fascinating but morally complex journey, then please go learn more about Theodore Roosevelt.

I'm sure the day will come when I will look at him more closely on this podcast.

In fact, I'm really interested in doing a episode or two specifically about the Rough Riders, who, again, were sort of on the periphery of the story we were telling in the McKinley series.

So look forward to that.

The next question comes to us from Zarek Mack.

Zarek Mack writes, Dear Mr.

Major, I've noticed that throughout McKinley's term, Mark Hanna is often seen as the corrupt political boss with McKinley in his pocket.

Yet, according to biographer Thomas Beer, in 1894, George Pullman, a fellow Republican, refused to negotiate with workers, causing a violent riot.

Hanna was outraged and publicly spoke out against him, saying, quote, the damned idiot ought to arbitrate.

What did he think he was doing?

A man who won't meet his men halfway is a fool.

End quote.

Beer also claims that he lent money to Union veterans to attend Ulysses S.

Grant's funeral.

Now, I don't know the bias of Beer, so is this a historical myth?

A one-off deal shown in a favorable light, or should Hannah's legacy be approached differently?

Thanks for the question, Zarek.

I think you've put your finger on something that I was struggling with throughout this entire series.

In many ways, McKinley and Hannah's political careers were defined by their relationship with big business and American millionaires.

However, that does not mean that they were complete capitalist ideologues.

In fact, it does not seem like they were.

McKinley was a bit of a moderate when it came to the question of organized labor, so it doesn't surprise me to hear that Hannah also thought that concessions should be made to American workers.

But those quotes that you supplied from Thomas Beer's biography, to me, seem fairly consistent with McKinley and Hannah's overall political perspective.

And that was that American business needed to just keep on trucking.

Labor disruptions were bad and needed to be ended.

When labor disruptions became violent and owners actively started fighting their own workers, these men believed that that was bad, that things had gone too far, that this wasn't in the service of making money.

Remember, during the election of 1896, Mark Hanna produced a huge amount of campaign materials, some would call it propaganda, that tried to convince industrial workers that their interests were the same as the interests of their bosses.

Violent labor disputes where owners hired mercenaries to attack unionized workers made it harder to make that case.

So I could understand why Hanna perhaps advocated for moderation on that front.

So what does this all mean for Mark Hanna's historical legacy?

Well, there's no doubt that Hannah was instrumental in bringing new levels of corporate money and influence into American democracy.

And obviously, there's a strong case to be made that this has had a corrosive effect on that political system.

But also, Mark Hanna was not a caricature.

He was not simply the cigar-chomping, money-suited Plutocrat that appeared in political cartoons of the era.

There was more to him.

So to answer your questions, Eric, no, I don't think that quote changes everything.

It just gives us a little bit more nuance in our understanding of Mark Hanna.

Okay,

our last question today comes to us from Patreon.

Geronimo Santiago de Davis says this, just finished episode one and OMG James G.

Blaine makes his appearance.

When he ran for US president against Grover Cleveland, they incited a juvenile back and forth of chanting taunts that I learned in probably grade 5 and still remember today.

For time context, I retired last year.

The Blaine supporters pushed the rumor that the bachelor Cleveland had a bastard child.

They chanted, Ma, Ma, where's my pa?

Gone to the White House, ha ha ha.

The Cleveland supporters, meanwhile, were a bit more generic, but tied their chant to various Blaine blusters that turned out wrong.

Blaine Blaine, James G.

Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine.

Certainly he was wrong about Canadians capitulating to economic intimidation.

Wonder if there's any obscure source for Blaine wanting Greenland as well.

Thanks so much for that, Geronimo.

Man, those rhymes, that is pretty rich.

I really enjoyed that.

Nothing like a good schoolyard chant to push you over the line in a presidential contest.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Yes, interestingly, James G.

Blaine became a bit of a recurring villain in this series.

He's a figure that before I started researching this, I knew very little about,

but he may have been one of the more aggressive American imperialists of the era.

When McKinley introduced his big tariff bill in 1890, he wasn't thinking much about Canadian sovereignty.

It was James G.

Blaine who thought that maybe this would push Canadians into the American political orbit.

And sure enough, when I was looking at the debates around how America should approach Cuba, there was James G.

Blaine loudly advocating for Cuban annexation.

Anytime I needed a quote from an imperialist, there was James G.

Blaine with a perfect one ready to go.

Now, to answer your question, no, I have not seen anything suggesting that James G.

Blaine thought that America should annex Greenland, but, you know, it was the kind of thing that he would have loved.

Blaine Blaine, James G.

Blaine, a continental liar from the state of Maine.

I will never forget it either.

Thanks so much for sharing that.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again next week for the final episode of season 10.

It's going to be a fun little one-off.

I hope you all really enjoy it.

Thanks again to everyone who supports this podcast through Patreon by buying merch at our TeePublic store.

Just go to ourfakehistory.com and follow the links to the TeePublic store to get t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, and all sorts of other cool stuff.

If you want to get in touch with me, please send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

But you can also find me on Facebook, facebook.com slash ourfakehistory, on Instagram at OurfakeHistory, on blue sky at our fake history I'm still putting things out on tick tock and you can go to YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel there

as always the theme music for this show comes to us from Dirty Church you can check out more from dirty church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major.

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