In April 1899, about a year after the start of the Spanish-American War, the former head of the short-lived 1st Volunteer Cavalry reflected on the great responsibility that awaited the U.S. in the wake of its victory.
The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course of infamy.
It didn’t take long for the warning, offered by Theodore Roosevelt, to ring true: Teddy himself would soon confront the challenges of managing newly ceded Spanish territories after becoming vice president and later president. Fresh off the conflict that cast off the remnants of European colonialism in the Americas, however, Roosevelt shared the sense of optimism that inspired the American intervention in the first place. In the 1899 speech from Chicago, Roosevelt praised the valor of the troops who drove “Spanish tyranny from the islands.”
The Spanish-American War is among our most understudied foreign entanglements, in part because of its brevity—active combat lasted just a few months from start to finish. But the conflict not only set the course for U.S. global dominance; it helped establish the model for how future generations of Americans would envision that leadership role. For the first time, the U.S. began to see its military abroad as not just a fighting force, but a moral one.
By the late 19th century, the United States was in the throes of an identity crisis. More than three decades after the Civil War, many Americans were breaking with their isolationist roots and looking beyond their own borders. This shift was driven by both the rise of an educated, urban elite in the U.S. and a changing international context. Booming international commerce and advances in transportation technology made it easier to connect to the outside world, and Americans found themselves at once repelled by European-style imperialism and enticed by the economic promises of a bigger presence overseas. Still others saw humanitarian and ideological imperatives for the spread of American values.
These various groups found common cause in Cuba. The sugar-rich island was one of Spain’s few remaining American territories at the end of the 1800s, and it felt the full force of the dying empire’s brutality when it tried to break away in multiple waves of rebellion throughout the century. Following an uprising in 1895, Madrid dispatched commander Valeriano Weyler to quell dissent. Weyler, nicknamed “The Butcher,” systematically destroyed the island’s agriculture and forced its rural population into concentration camps, policies that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the course of just three years.
Stateside, an already-large Cuban diaspora was doing its best to rally the American public behind its countrymen’s independence movement. And it wasn’t hard for Americans to identify with the Latin American uprising, inspired as it was by high taxes, poor political representation, and the desire to buck European rule. Appeals for U.S. intervention also echoed the 75-year-old Monroe Doctrine, which staked out American leadership in the Western Hemisphere.
“Why should we not go a step farther and a step higher, and interfere in the name of humanity?” journalist Richard Harding Davis wrote in 1897. “Not because we are Americans, but because we are human beings, and because, within 80 miles of our coast, Spanish officials are killing men and women as wantonly as though they were field mice, not in battle, but in cold blood.”
As Cuba’s fight for independence continued to rage, President William McKinley deployed the USS Maine to Cuba in January 1898 in preparation to evacuate U.S. citizens from the war zone if necessary. But a month later, a mysterious explosion destroyed the battleship as it docked in Havana Harbor, killing 266 American sailors. “Remember the Maine” quickly became a rallying cry for America’s pro-war camp, though historians still debate whether the blast was the result of intentional Spanish sabotage—as the U.S. government suspected at the time—or caused by a boiler malfunction.
Still, when McKinley went to Congress seeking a war declaration on April 11, it was the plight of the Cuban people, not the suspected attack, that formed the basis of his case to lawmakers:
Since the present revolution began, in February, 1895, this country has seen the fertile domain at our threshold ravaged by fire and sword in the course of a struggle unequaled in the history of the island and rarely paralleled as to the numbers of the combatants and the bitterness of the contest by any revolution of modern times where a dependent people striving to be free have been opposed by the power of the sovereign state.
The argument found a receptive audience, and McKinley called on Spain to withdraw its forces from Cuba by April 23 or face a military confrontation. When Spain showed no signs of departing the island territory, the U.S. began a blockade of Cuba, prompting Madrid to declare war on Washington on April 24 and the U.S. to declare war on Spain the following day.
America’s opening salvo the following month was not against Cuba, but against the Spanish-held Philippines, taking Spain by surprise and destroying its fleet in Manila Bay. The following month, the U.S. launched an attack on Cuba, seizing Santiago in just over a month. The U.S. would go on to take the strategically located islands of Guam and Puerto Rico, Spain’s last remaining colonies, before the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war in December 1898.
Washington would go on to exercise control over Cuba until 1902, the Philippines until 1946, and Guam and Puerto Rico to this day. In short, it was the end of one world power and the beginning of another. The victory solidified the world’s view of the U.S. as a rising naval force, but it also changed the way Americans thought about their own military might. After mostly avoiding foreign wars for more than a century, particularly against European countries, the U.S. now realized that hard power was an indispensable tool for shaping geopolitical and moral reality—in its own backyard and beyond.
And yet, America’s collective memory of the war is mixed. Much has been written in recent decades about the role of yellow journalism in selling the war on the home front by sensationalizing the events of the Cuban revolution. As New York Journal owner and editor William Randolph Hearst is alleged to have instructed a reporter dispatched to Cuba: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”
But other scholars argue that Spain’s well-documented atrocities on the island spoke for themselves. The latter half of the 19th century witnessed particularly brutal campaigns to suppress Cuban rebel combatants and civilians alike, including through mass executions. In Valeriano Weyler’s detention centers, widely considered the world’s first modern concentration camps, disease ran rampant. In his book War and Genocide in Cuba, historian John Lawrence Tone estimates that 10 percent of the Cuban population died in the reconcentrados.
U.S. intervention helped bring an end to this painful chapter in Latin American history. And although Cuba’s postcolonial history is far from an unmitigated success story, the image of the American soldier as a liberator and protector remained a powerful symbol into the 20th century. Calls to enter World War I had a strong moral valence, particularly after Germany sank the RMS Lusitania, killing more than 1,100 people aboard the British passenger ship. Likewise, early advocates for America’s involvement in the Second World War viewed the fight against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as a necessity of both virtue and ideology.
As World War II came to a close in Europe, U.S. forces once again came face-to-face with their adversary’s evil as they freed concentration camps scattered across formerly Nazi-occupied territory, further contributing to the notion of American military strength as a force for global good. Postwar, the U.S. used its role as the dominant world power to foster democracy and encourage the reconstruction and economic development of war-ravaged Europe. Washington has also continued intervening on behalf of what it views as vulnerable populations worldwide.
Very few conflicts go untainted by controversy and missteps, and the Spanish-American War and successive U.S. military campaigns are no exceptions. But it’s hard not to be grateful for the standard set by the fighters of Santiago, particularly when one considers the alternatives to American military dominance. In the last century, the U.S. played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazism and communism—ideologies that together led to the deaths of more than 100 million people. The U.S. Navy ensures free navigation in the international waterways through which 90 percent of all trade travels. The overseas presence of American service members protects like-minded allies and promotes global security. Let’s hope that proud tradition continues for another 125 years to come.
