Rust-Sploshed Hulk

On May i, 1898, Manila Bay was thunderous with gunfire. Weaving skeins of smoke twined about the embattled fleets. There lay the Spanish defenders, here the besieging U. S. Pacific Fleet, a brood of assorted fighting craft clustered about their proud flagship U. S. S. Olympia. On the battle-stripped U. S. Revenue Cutter McCullouch one Edward Walker Harden, a young newsgatherer on a lark (with Cartoonist John Tinney McCutcheon), swelled with patriotic rapture as he watched Spanish ship after Spanish ship founder. To him the dimly-seen U. S. S. Olympia, hulled five times and her rigging shot away, was the epitome of U. S. naval power, of U. S. naval glory.

After the battle, the potent U. S. S. Olympia shared with Admiral Dewey an hour of fame. In 1921 antique U. S, S. Olympia bore the body of the Unknown Soldier from France to Washington. Today obsolete U. S. S. Olympia rusts away in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The Navy Department recently proposed to convert her into a few thousand dollars worth of scrap iron.

In 1898 obscure Newsman Harden gave the New York World a scoop on the battle of Manila Bay. Last week Mr. Harden, now a potent New York banker (James B. Colgate & Co.), was saddened by the ignominy in store for old battleship Olympia.

So he drafted a letter to Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams. He offered to buy the Olympia from the Government, proposed to recondition her and anchor her in the Potomac near Washington, where hordes of sightseers could poke fun at her outdated guns or gravely consider the footprints on her bridge, outlined in brass tacks, where Admiral (then Commodore) Dewey stood when he said: "You may fire when ready, Gridley."

Secretary Adams was sympathetic to the offer but without authority to accept it. He hoped that Congress and the President would approve the conversion of the Olympia from a rust-sploshed hulk to a well-polished national memorial.