New York At War
““The measure of confidence placed by two great nations in each other has grown and expanded,” the prince, speaking in his native tongue, told his hosts. Enthusiastic applause greeted his comments from the men at the banquet tables and from the jewel-bedecked ladies seated in the ballroom’s balcony boxes. Among the most conspicuous guests were New Yorkers of German birth or ancestry who had worked their way to success and distinction in the city, men like publisher Hermann Ridder, brewer Jacob Ruppert, real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau, and banker Jacob Schiff.1The prince had arrived two weeks earlier to take formal possession of the schooner Meteor, commissioned as a royal yacht by the kaiser from a shipyard on Shooter’s Island in New York harbor. On February 25, President Theodore Roosevelt chatted affably with the prince at the yacht’s ceremonial launching there. But the prince’s goodwill tour had a larger diplomatic purpose. At the end of the brief American war with Spain in 1898... (a war in which Roosevelt and other New Yorkers figured prominently), the American and German Pacific fleets had almost come to blows in the waters off the Philippines.MoreLess
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