New Britain herald., 1917-01-17

adoration of the whole country in the degree to which George Dewey pos sessed it in the year following the Spanish war. When he returned to New York in September, 1899, bring ing with him several of the vessels 1 which had won the battle of Manila
 Bay on May 1 of the previous year, I he received 9 popular welcome of all most unexampled enthusiasm. The rank of read admiral, to which he had , been raised immediately after his vic {! tory had been replaced by that of
 admiral of the navy, created for Dew ! ey expressly in March 1899, and giv- 1 ing him a dignity equaled previously l by none but Farragut and Porter. He i had been especially thanked by con- 1 gress; he was the national hero in a i sense which neither Sampson nor l Schley ever approached, and his fame ! was expressed at the time by a null titude of jokes and stories about him | that Sprang up over the country and | by the naming for him of hundreds 1 of boy babies born in the summer of ] 1898.
 To a certain extent the tremendous ! acclaim that came to the victor of i Manila Bay was due to the fact that
 the battle was the first engagement of importance in the Spanish war, the 1 first fleet action against a foreign pow
 CT in which American ships had been engaged since the battle of Lake Champ1ain in September of 1914. Moreover the overwhelming character of Dewey's victory came a blank sur
 prise to a world which was used to
 battles in which the victor sustained ] some loss and which had not yet seen x-;o l tiago. So that the popularity which
 Dewey won overnight from a nation l which had scarcely heard of him be- 1 fore the war broke out had in it some l thing of the accidental and 1t was only l compensation that Dewey hardly ever
 got sufficient credit, except from care
 ful students of world politics, for the
 infinitely more difficult tasks which
 he performed with equal success after
 the naval victory and before the end
 of the Spanish war.
 Small Fleet in Orient.
 Commodore Dewey had been as- signed to the command of the Asiatic l fleet in January of 1898. It was evi-
 dent at that time that war with Spain
 was approaching and Dewey was eager for the appointment put the l coterie at the head of the navy de- partnent had their plans laid to name another officer. At the sugges- tion of Assistant Secretary Theodore
 Roosevelt, who considered Dewey the best man. he got Senator Proctor of 1 Vermon interested, and Proctor per ] suaded President Mckinley to name Dewey. He set to work at once to meet the problems that devolved upon
 the commander of the American fleet
 in Chinese waters. Complications in | Eastern Asia had been fairly frequent in the previous thirty years. and it
 was regarded as only natural that i America, like most of the European | powers, should maintain a fairly 1 strong fleet on the Asiatic coast.
 The squadron of which Dewey took 1 command, gathered in the neighbor-
 hood of Hong ngkong, consisted of four protected cruisers and three gunboats.
 It was a fleet strong in gun power for
 vessels of it's class. and his flagship,
 the Olympia, was one of the most
 powerful types of unarmored cruisers afoat. But he was operating many