USS Maine (ACR-1) - Launching and Delay

Launching and Delay

Maine was launched on 18 November 1889, sponsored by Alice Tracey Wilmerding, the granddaughter of Navy Secretary Benjamin F. Tracy. Not long afterwards, a reporter wrote for Marine Engineer and Naval Architect magazine, "It cannot be denied that the navy of the United States is making rapid strides towards taking a credible position among the navies of the world, and the launch of the new armoured battleship Maine from the Brooklyn Navy Yard ... has added a most powerful unit to the United States fleet of turret ships." In his 1890 annual report to Congress, the Secretary of the Navy wrote, "The Maine ... stands in a class by herself" and expected the ship to be commissioned by July 1892.

A three–year delay now ensued, while the shipyard waited for nickel steel plates for Maine's armor. Bethlehem Steel Company had promised the Navy 300 tons per month by December 1889 and had ordered heavy castings and forging presses from the British firm of Armstrong Whitworth in 1886 to fulfil its contract. This equipment did not arrive until 1889, pushing back Bethlehem's timetable. In response, Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy secured a second contractor, the newly–expanded Homestead mill of Carnegie, Phipps & Company. In November 1890, Tracy and Andrew Carnegie signed a contract for Homestead to supply 6000 tons of nickel steel. However, Homestead was, what author Paul Krause calls, "the last union stronghold in the steel mills of the Pittsburgh district." The mill had already weathered one strike in 1882 and a lockout in 1889 in an effort to break the union there. Less than two years later, came the Homestead Strike of 1892, one of the largest, most serious disputes in U.S. labor history.