The Spanish-American War is widely misunderstood to be one conflict that began in 1898, lasted about four years, and was fought between the United States and Spain in two locations a world apart from each other, Cuba and the Philippines. While there is an element of truth in this, it is more accurate to think of two wars. The Philippine-American War, doubtless America's least known war, was fought between the United States and the Filipinos. It was a guerrilla war carried out entirely in the Philippine archipelago. The fighting began in February 1899 and continued for many years. The precursor to this war was the much shorter Spanish-American War, fought with Spain during the spring and summer of 1898 and waged principally in Cuba but also in the Philippines, in a single but decisive naval battle in Manila Bay in May, and in Puerto Rico, when in July the United States Army under General Nelson Miles invaded and occupied that island. This war was declared by the United States in late April, and the two nations signed a peace protocol in mid-August. The short duration and decisive outcome of the engagement with Spain led many U.S. leaders to agree with John Hay, the ambassador to Great Britain, when he wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt that it had been a "splendid little war" (Gale, p. 31).
The decision to enter the war did not come without significant resistance, however. What course to take in international affairs was not clear for a country just emerging from isolation. Officially, the American government sought to avoid war. But there were those who hankered for a fight as a way of showing that the nation had muscle, and in truth, most Americans did side with the Cubans against the Spanish colonialists. A sensationalist press fanning these hot attitudes helped decide the country's course of action.
The war was a coming-of-age rite for the nation. Its most famous soldier, Theodore Roosevelt, used it to define a national cult of manly patriotism and then rode his battlefield exploits into the White House. He was a thirty-nine-year-old asthmatic who had undertaken a rigorous bodybuilding program of hunting, horse riding, and boxing to overcome his physical limitations. For three years he had worked as a cowboy in the Badlands of the Dakotas. His memoir of the war, The Rough Riders (1899), bore an epigraph from the martial cadences of the 1863 patriotic Civil War poem "The Reveille" by Bret Harte (1836–1902) that captured the valorous and unquestioning rectitude Roosevelt wished to project:
"But when won the coming battle,
What of profit springs there from?
What if conquest, subjugation,
Even greater ills become?"
But the drum
Answered, "Come!
You must do the sum to prove it," said the
Yankee-answering drum.
CUBAN INDEPENDENCE AND "REMEMBER THE MAINE"
Three decades before this war began, in the late 1860s, Cuban guerrilla fighters had fought for national autonomy from Spanish colonization. Unsuccessful then, they had renewed their efforts in the early 1890s. By that time, though, the United States had also become deeply interested in the island. American investments in the Cuban sugar business had grown to more than $50 million, and annual trade between the United States and Cuba was worth twice that amount. In addition, many Americans lived and worked on the island. These interests were jeopardized by the revolution, and by 1896 strong pressure had built for the United States to either purchase Cuba from Spain or, if Spain could not regain control, to intervene militarily. President Grover Cleveland had maintained a policy of neutrality, but President William McKinley, inaugurated in 1897, was predisposed, cautiously, to intervention. Almost as though to precipitate an incident, McKinley renewed the custom of having American warships pay uninvited visits to the Spanish colony.
So it was that on 25 January 1898 one of the nation's newest battleships, the U.S.S. Maine, a pride of the American fleet with its steam-power and its advanced steel construction, showed up in Havana harbor. The Spanish foreign minister, seeing the ship's presence as an act of intimidation, criticized McKinley in a private letter for being "weak" about neutrality and referred to him as a "petty politician." The letter was leaked to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, which promptly printed it under the inflammatory banner headline, "The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History." McKinley demanded an apology from the Spanish government and he received it, but the situation was tinder. The spark came only days later, on the night of 15 February, when the Maine exploded and sank to the bottom of the harbor. When Hearst heard this, he demanded that the story be spread all over the front page and proclaimed, "This means war!" (O'Toole, p. 34).
A Naval Court of Inquiry determined that the cause was a submarine mine, although it took care not to name a guilty party. The jingoists in the United States Senate drew their own conclusion, however,and rallying to the slogan "Remember the Maine," blamed the Spanish government. A rebuttal by a Spanish court of inquiry was dismissed out of hand. McKinley ordered a blockade of Cuba, and four days later, on 25 April 1898, Congress declared war, though it promised to leave as soon as the war of "pacification" was over. A European naval authority, using nothing more than the published testimony in the Navy's own report, later proved that the Naval Court had reached a false conclusion, starting with an incredible, fundamental error—mistaking the location of the explosion. After still more inquiries conducted in the decades following, the true culprits, according to a comprehensive review of a century of debate, were conservative Spanish fanatics loyal to the ruthless and charismatic General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the colonial governor who had been sent to Cuba in 1895 to quell the nationalist rebellion. "They had the opportunity, the means, and the motivation, and they blew up the Maine with a small low-strength mine they made themselves" (Samuels, p. 310).
The shooting war actually began on 11 June with the capture of Guantánamo Bay. The best known and most storied moment in the war occurred on 1 July in the San Juan hills near Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city and a Spanish stronghold. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt had gathered an assortment of Ivy League polo players and western dead shots who were eager to live a rough and hardy life again. At a crucial moment, Roosevelt took unauthorized command. He spurred his horse up the ridge, pistol in one hand and saber in the other. His Rough Riders, together with an African American regiment, captured the position. It was a turning point in the war. Soon thereafter, when the Spanish agreed to surrender 23,000 troops around the city, the end of the war was near. Four years later, the United States made good on its promise and Cuba received its independence.
The war involved 190,000 Spanish troops, while 250,000 American soldiers, 200,000 of them volunteers, were allied with as many as 50,000 Cuban freedom fighters. It cost the United States $250 million and fewer than 3,000 lives—90 percent of whom died from disease and bad food. In the words of G. J. A. O'Toole in The Spanish War, "As wars go this was a cheap one" (O'Toole, p. 17).
STRONG SYMPATHY FOR A JUST WAR
It was a popular one, too. Most of its distinctive features were positive—coming to the aid of a people fighting for their freedom while at the same time defeating a former superpower, remembering the Maine, glorying in Roosevelt's charge. The war made the nation feel ebullient and proud. The huge number of volunteer soldiers reflected that pride.
The enthusiasm for this war that was mirrored in Harte's "The Reveille" was also in the imagination of Richard Hovey (1864–1900), and with more righteousness. Hovey's lineage included five Mayflower Puritan ancestors, and his many poems about this war revealed that moral fervor. Although he is unknown today, no poet more faithfully expressed the religious aspect of the nation's mood at the time of the war. In "The Word of the Lord from Havana," written two days after the sinking of the Maine in February 1898, the loss of the ship is viewed as a punishment as well as a message from God warning against America's neglect of the world's oppressed. Hovey's sonnet "America" (October 1898) recalls that the nation was conceived in violence and would not shrink from war to accomplish its holy mission, and "Unmanifest Destiny" (July 1898) concludes with a sure affirmation of the hand of Providence:
I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;
I only know it shall be high,
I only know it shall be great.
(Hovey, p. 17)
Doubtless, such sentiments resonated with writer and publisher Elbert Hubbard (1856–1916), an ardent sympathizer with Roosevelt's rugged individualism. When he heard about the bravery of Lieutenant Andrew Rowan's secret mission to meet with Cuban general Calixto Garcia, Elbert wrote an inspirational essay, "A Message for Garcia," praising duty and initiative. Hubbard published it in February 1899, and it immediately took on a life of its own, with millions of copies distributed to American railroad employees, and later to Russian and Japanese workers, and finally to members of the United States Navy at the brink of World War I. According to the historian Charles H. Brown in The Correspondents' War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War, the words of the essay "could be recited by most Americans who had heard them come forth in organ tones from high school and college elocutionists for a quarter of a century" (Brown, p. 173). Though Rowan's exploits received the most attention, equally daring deeds were conducted with much less notice by a dozen correspondents who also carried messages to Garcia and other Cuban leaders or "who engaged in a variety of other espionage" (Brown, p. 173).
THE "CORRESPONDENTS' WAR"
In this war as in no other, American newspapers and their correspondents were deeply engaged in arousing feelings of patriotism, heroism, and adventure. The press campaigned so forcibly that it "sometimes actedas though it were the government" and that publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer "usurped the functions of the Department of State" (Brown, p. vi). Before the war began, Hearst's Journal sent the novelist Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) to Cuba to write stories about the freedom fighters and their Spanish oppressors. His dispatches coincided well with Hearst's efforts to pressure McKinley to intervene, for horrified by what he saw, Davis reported on "mass sickness, starvation and death" (Brown, p. 80).
Other novelists also transformed themselves into journalists to participate in the adventure. Frank Norris (1870–1902) put aside his nearly finished McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) to report on the action for McClure's Magazine. He could hardly contain his eagerness: "You want to see excitement, turmoil, activity," Norris wrote, "the marching and counter-marching of troops, the excited going and coming of couriers a-horseback, the glint of epaulets and brass at street corners" (Brown, p. 170). Once in Cuba, he changed. A dispatch describing a dead Spanish soldier ends in horrified silence: "his face the color of wax; one poor, dirty hand hooked like a buzzard's claw; his arm was doubled under him, and—but the rest is not for words" (Brown, pp. 349–350).
To Norris, Stephen Crane (1871–1900), whom he met in Key West, embodied his idea of a war correspondent: "tanned to the color of a well-worn saddle"(Brown, p. 171). Crane was in Key West preparing to write a series on the Cuban revolution for the Bacheller publishing syndicate, which had serialized his novel The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895). His essay "War Memories" (1899) reflected on his experiences in Cuba, which included several battles as well as the action in Havana after the conflict ended. His 1897 writings about the sinking of the Commodore, a ship smuggling arms to the Cuban insurgents on which Crane was a crew member, drew acclaim first as a newspaper report, "Stephen Crane's Own Story," and then as a short story, "The Open Boat."
Crane was the first of many to draw upon the country's enthusiasm for the war and its enchantment with Cuba and revolution. Novels like Kirk Munroe's "Forward March": A Tale of the Spanish-American War (1899) romanticized the war and America's might, and The Rough Riders (1927) by Herman Hagedorn (1882–1964) mythologized Roosevelt's unit. Hagedorn's book was adapted as a movie the same year it was published, and a remake appeared in 1997. The Bright Shawl, a spy novel by Joseph Hergesheimer (1880–1954), featured a beautiful young dancer whose shawl represents the youthful dreams of Cuban freedom fighters in the decades before the war. It was published in 1922 and made into a film the following year. By far the best-known, most-sophisticated—and least-favorable—treatment of the war was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum (1856–1919). The novel was popular enough in its own time and it was given considerable additional cultural longevity by the 1939 movie adaptation. Embedded in its fairy-tale narrative is an elaborate criticism of the consequences of the Spanish-American War as well as a satire of contemporary politics and monetary policy.
"EMBALMED BEEF" AND THE JUNGLE
The war did have other dark features, but some of them led to positive outcomes. Alarmed by the high death rate among the soldiers due to sickness, General Miles accused the suppliers of meat for the troops, the powerful "beef trust" and especially Armour & Company, of sending meat that had become spoiled in the heat. (Since the meat had been "preserved" with chemicals, it was facetiously called "embalmed beef.") This was the most famous scandal of the war. Miles's charges, reinforced by Roosevelt's own first-hand observations, embarrassed McKinley and the army and led to investigations by a specially appointed "beef court" in February 1899 and, in turn, to the forced resignation of the secretary of war, Russell A. Alger. As recorded later by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), affidavits published in the New York Journal in March 1899 concluded: "In other words, the Armour establishment was selling carrion" ("The Condemned-Meat Industry, 1906"). The fury over these revelations set the stage for Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), an enormously influential exposé of the filth and corruption of the nation's beef industry that gained important credibility for muckraking journalism and virtually by itself led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), a benchmark in progressive legislation.
See alsoImperialism and Anti-Imperialism; Philippine-American War; Weaponry
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Works
Hovey, Richard. Along the Trail: A Book of Lyrics. 1903. New York: AMS, 1969.
Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders. New York: Scribners, 1899.
Sinclair, Upton. "The Condemned-Meat Industry." Every-body's Magazine 14 (1906): 608–616. Available at http://www.wadsworth.com/history_d/templates/student_resources/0030724791_ayers/sources/ch20/20.3.armour.html.
Secondary Works
Berner, Brad K. The Spanish-American War: A Historical Dictionary. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1998.
Brown, Charles H. The Correspondents' War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War. New York: Scribners, 1967.
Dighe, Ranjit S., ed. The Historian's Wizard of Oz: Reading of L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002.
Gale, Robert L. John Hay. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Linneman, William R. Richard Hovey. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Mansfield, Harvey. "The Manliness of Theodore Roosevelt." New Criterion 23, no. 7 (March 2005): 4–9.
O'Toole, G. J. A. The Spanish War: An American Epic—1898. New York: Norton, 1984.
Samuels, Peggy, and Harold Samuels. Remembering the Maine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
"The Spanish-American War." Small Planet Communications. Available at http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/splendid.html.
"The United States Becomes a World Power: The Spanish American War." Digital History. Available at http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=190.
"The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War." Hispanic Division, Library of Congress. Available at http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/.
Terry Oggel
