United States

Rough RidersRough Riders, including Theodore Roosevelt (centre), at San Juan Heights, Santiago, Cuba, 1898.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Before the 1890s, roughly speaking, most Americans had adhered stubbornly to the belief, as old as the Revolution itself, that their country should remain aloof from European affairs and offer an example of democracy and peace to the rest of the world, but slowly in the 1880s, and more rapidly in the 1890s, new currents of thought eroded this historic conviction. The United States had become a great power by virtue of its prodigious economic growth since the Civil War; numerous publicists said that it ought to begin to act like one. Propagandists of sea power, above all, Capt. Alfred T. Mahan, argued that future national security and greatness depended upon a large navy supported by bases throughout the world. After the disappearance of the American frontier in 1890, the conviction grew that the United States would have to find new outlets for an ever-increasing population and agricultural and industrial production; this belief was particularly rife among farmers in dire distress in the 1890s. Social Darwinists said that the world is a jungle, with international rivalries inevitable, and that only strong nations could survive. Added to these arguments were those of idealists and religious leaders that Americans had a duty to “take up the white man’s burden” and to carry their assertedly superior culture and the blessings of Christianity to the backward peoples of the world.

Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1897Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

It was against this background that the events of 1898 propelled the United States along the road to war and empire. Cuban rebels had begun a violent revolution against Spanish rule in 1895, set off by a depression caused by a decline in U.S. sugar purchases from Cuba. Rebel violence led progressively to more repressive Spanish countermeasures. Cuban refugees in the United States spread exaggerated tales of Spanish atrocities, and these and numerous others were reprinted widely (particularly by William Randolph Hearst’s New York American and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, then engaged in a fierce battle for circulation). President Cleveland resisted the rising public demand for intervention, but by early 1898 the pressure, then on his successor, McKinley, was too great to be defied. When an explosion—caused by a submarine mine, according to a U.S. naval court of inquiry—sank the USS Maine with large loss of life in Havana harbour on February 15, 1898, events moved beyond the president’s control. Though Spain was willing to make large concessions to avoid war, it adamantly resisted what had become the minimum public and official U.S. demand—Spanish withdrawal from Cuba and recognition of the island’s independence. Hence Congress in mid-April authorized McKinley to use the armed forces to expel the Spanish from Cuba.

For Americans it was, as Secretary of State John Hay put it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, “a splendid little war.” An American expeditionary force, after quickly overcoming the Spaniards in Cuba, turned against Spain’s last island in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, on May 1, 1898, the American commodore George Dewey, with his Asiatic squadron, destroyed a decrepit Spanish flotilla in the harbour of Manila in the Philippines.

Roosevelt, Theodore; Rough RidersTheodore Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, 1898; print created by Kurz & Allison. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-pga-01946)

The fighting was over by August 12, when the United States and Spain signed a preliminary peace treaty in Washington, D.C. Negotiators met in Paris in October to draw up a definitive agreement. Spain recognized the independence of Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, but the disposition of the Philippines was another matter. Business interests in the United States, which had been noticeably cool about a war over Cuba, demanded the acquisition of the entire Philippine archipelago in the hope that Manila would become the entrepôt for a great Far Eastern trade; chauvinists declaimed against lowering the flag under Spanish pressure. Concluding that he had no alternative, McKinley forced the Spanish to “sell” the Philippines to the United States for $20,000,000.