HOW THE ROUGH RIDERS GOT THEIR NAME

In April 1898, two months after a mysterious explosion sank the USS Maine in the harbor of Havana, carrying 260 American seamen to their deaths, President William McKinley bowed to public pressure and sent the United States to war against Spain, which was widely blamed for the battleship’s sinking. Many Americans were eager to go to war, but perhaps none more so than Theodore Roosevelt, the 39-year-old assistant secretary of the navy, who had grown increasingly distraught with the administration’s reluctance to intervene militarily. “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair,” Roosevelt complained to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a friend. To another friend he said, “I would give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow.”

All the while Roosevelt had been talking up war, off the record, with Richard V. Oulahan of the New York Evening Sun and other Washington-based reporters. But McKinley’s decision to go to war freed Roosevelt to chart his own course in the public eye. In short order he would quit his desk job at the Navy Department, secure a commission in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant