By Jay Jamison
When I was teaching introduction to logic at Lincoln Land Community College, I sometimes treated the class to a signature song from that old chestnut of a musical, “The Music Man.” The name of the song is “Ya got Trouble,” as performed by Robert Preston, and it can be found on YouTube. I played this song for the class because the lyrics are a treasure trove of informal fallacies. I then invited my students to identify the fallacies as Preston, in the character of conman Professor Harold Hill, attempts to stir up the town of River City, Iowa. Even though Preston’s delivery of the lines is impeccable, some of the references were somewhat bewildering, probably because they referred to things and events from over a century ago. One line caught my attention: “Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule!” … Remember the Maine?
On February 15, 1889 — 126 years ago — the battleship USS Maine was anchored in Havana Harbor, Cuba, to protect American interests during the Cuban War of Independence. The ship suddenly blew up in an enormous explosion and sank. Over 200 American sailors were killed. Conspiracy theories abounded in the American press, especially in the publications of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Cuba was a colony of Spain at the time, and the rumors were that the American ship had been destroyed by a Spanish mine. Hearst allegedly sent a telegram to artist Frederick Remington in Cuba that said, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Whether the quote is accurate or not, Hearst’s sentiment, as revealed in his newspapers, left little room for speculation. The news coverage stirred up the nation and Congress declared war. The Spanish-American War began on April 28, 1898, a little over four weeks after the sinking. The American rallying cry at the beginning of the Spanish-American War was “Remember the Maine!”
The cause of the explosion as expressed by the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers of the time, are dubious. Yet the hysteria the publications stirred up was enough to have many Americans spoiling for revenge. The conclusions of Admiral Hyman Rickover in a book published in 1976 (“How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed”) presented evidence that the sinking was most likely due to an internal explosion, possibly the result of volatile methane gas seeping out of the coal bunkers. The contemporary press accounts at the time overwhelmed any reasoned analysis as to the cause of the blast.
The similarity between the hyped-up news accounts of the Maine disaster and the conman Harold Hill’s prediction of looming disaster awaiting the town of River City, are quite striking. The news accounts of the cause of the disaster in Havana may have been mostly fiction, “The Music Man” is mostly fiction, too — there is no River City, Iowa, and the rabble-rousing tactics of the conman Harold Hill are funny mostly because they are so stupendously fallacious. The similarity between the published newspaper accounts of the Maine explosion and the “Ya Got Trouble” song are striking in that they both elicited conclusions playing on emotions instead of good reasoning. However, one part of “The Music Man” plot touches on a nearby reality, shown in the first scene of the movie. As a train is readying to depart the station, a salesman with a samples case jumps aboard, and the camera records the name of a real town … the sign reads: Brighton, Illinois.
