Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1916 — APRIL, '98. [ARTICLE]

APRIL, '98.

Do you remember this time 18 years ago? fft was a day when the country was stirred. War was about to be

declared—the date was to be April the 25th. For nearly a month the work of mobilizing the army and getting ready had engaged the attention of the government Those who are old enough recall w hat hymns of hate" there were, what hardened things we called Spain and things Spanish. Set opposite to our enmity toward the cruel Don was our passionate sympati y for the Cuban patriots. What a lot of things the word Cuban recalls’—Gomez, Garcia. VVeyler; old Cup’ -Gen. Blanco. Santiago, Evangeline, Cisneros, Moro castle, concentration camps and good Havana 6 R d and yellow were the despised iitp-- the farmers of a mien more ;«tr:.i-jc. than financfaily wise did i< b<i’h their Spapi-h cocks. Out ; :>t~; ,r; way they—unmindful of preP inm.- before—began ’o peer seaward for the ever dreaded Spanish arm; da. which might come any •minute. And when Wa? was declared the friglv of the coast was pitiful till the Oregon rounded the horn and Schley smashed Cervera’s fleet. The lithograph presses were soon to be busy. They were to turn out the countenances V>f Miles, Shafter, .McKinley. Sampson, Dewey and Schley by the millions. There, together with posters bearing the American and Cuban flags, the latter with the mystic inscription. ‘‘Cuba Libre,’’ were hung in every parlor window in the land. Already there were explosive paragraphs about one dynamic warrior, young T. Roosevelt

Sc >n came the call for volunteers. What with patriotic mass meetings, the marching away of the local company of militia (escorted by the G. A. R. t, newspaper extras with their pen and ink sketches, and every kid in town threatening to rnn away and become a drummer boy, the times were fast ones, indeed. It was the day before camera art got into newspapers—save a few in New York-—-a day before aeroplanes, gas bombs, wireless messages, and the torpedoing of unarmed ships: a day when typhpid was accepted as a part of every day regime, a day of hard tack, unpreparedness and genuine American patriotism. When the spirit of ’9B beset the land no bandit Villa would have v-;ntured to cross the border and no women and baby slayers would have dared to redden their hands with Lusitania outrages. In the vernacular of bur janitor: “them wuz the good old days.”—Lake County Times.