The Spanish-American War of 1898: America Becomes an Empire
The phrase "splendid little war" comes from a letter John Hay wrote to Theodore Roosevelt in July 1898, while the fighting was still going on. Hay was U.S. ambassador to Britain at the time. He would soon be Secretary of State. The phrase stuck because Americans wanted it to stick. Ten weeks of combat, fewer than four hundred battle deaths, and at the end of it the United States had Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, effective control of Cuba, and a newly annexed Hawaii thrown in as a bonus. If you measured empire by acreage acquired per dead soldier, it was the best deal in American history.
That framing is the problem. It turns a deliberate act into something accidental. It treats the war as if it found America rather than the other way around.
What was actually happening in Cuba
Cuba had been in revolt against Spanish rule, on and off, since 1868. The latest war of independence began in 1895 and was going badly for Spain by 1897. The Spanish governor, Valeriano Weyler, instituted a policy of reconcentración, herding rural Cubans into fortified towns to deny the rebels their base of support. Tens of thousands of civilians died in those camps of disease and starvation. American newspapers, especially the Hearst and Pulitzer chains, ran the story hard. Some of what they printed was true. A lot was invented. Either way, by early 1898 a substantial portion of the American public believed Spain was committing atrocities against a brave neighboring people who only wanted to be free.
There was something else going on, too. American businesses had roughly fifty million dollars invested in Cuban sugar and tobacco, and Cuban-American trade ran at about a hundred million a year. The war was disrupting all of it. Sugar planters and northeastern manufacturers wanted stability, and stability meant the end of the Spanish-Cuban conflict by whatever means.
The Maine
The USS Maine arrived in Havana harbor in January 1898, ostensibly on a friendly visit, actually as a show of force. On February 15, an explosion sank her at anchor. Two hundred and sixty-six American sailors died.
The American press declared, immediately and without evidence, that Spain had done it. "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain" became the slogan of the spring. A Navy investigation in March concluded the explosion was caused by an external mine, though it could not identify who placed it. The Spanish investigation concluded the explosion was internal, probably a coal bunker fire igniting the adjacent magazine. Later investigations in 1911 and 1976 both pointed toward internal causes as the more likely explanation. The current consensus among naval historians is that the Maine almost certainly was not sunk by Spain.
It did not matter. By the time the technical truth caught up, the political truth had already done its work.
A war that was ready before it started
This is the part that gets left out of the textbook version. Theodore Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy when the Maine exploded. On February 25, while his boss was out of the office for the afternoon, Roosevelt cabled Commodore George Dewey at Hong Kong with orders to keep his squadron fueled, concentrated, and ready to attack the Spanish fleet in the Philippines the moment war was declared. War was not declared until April. Dewey destroyed the Spanish Pacific squadron at Manila Bay on May 1.
Think about what that sequence means. The United States was at peace with Spain in February. The dispute, such as it was, concerned Cuba, which is in the Caribbean. And yet the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was preparing an attack on a Spanish colony on the other side of the world, ten thousand miles from Cuba, before any declaration of war and before any congressional authorization. The Philippines was not a response to anything. It was an opportunity that someone in Washington had already decided to take.
McKinley signed the war declaration on April 25. The Teller Amendment, attached at the last minute by an anti-imperialist senator from Colorado, promised that the United States would not annex Cuba. Notably, no similar promise was made about anywhere else.
The fighting
The land war in Cuba was brief, chaotic, and badly run. The American army was small, undertrained, and equipped for a campaign in Montana rather than the Caribbean tropics. Yellow fever killed far more soldiers than Spanish bullets did. The most famous engagement, the charge up San Juan Heights in July, made Roosevelt a national hero and was conducted largely on foot, since the Rough Riders' horses had been left behind in Florida.
Santiago fell in mid-July. The Spanish fleet attempted to escape and was destroyed off the Cuban coast. By August, Spain was asking for terms. The whole thing had taken about ten weeks.
The Philippines was a different war. Spanish resistance there collapsed quickly, but Filipino revolutionaries under Emilio Aguinaldo had been fighting Spain for years and assumed the Americans were allies in a war of independence. They were not. When the Treaty of Paris transferred the Philippines from Spain to the United States in December 1898, for twenty million dollars, the Filipinos discovered they had traded one colonial master for another. The Philippine-American War that followed lasted, in its conventional phase, until 1902. Counting the longer counterinsurgency, fighting continued in parts of the archipelago into the 1910s. Estimates of Filipino civilian deaths run from two hundred thousand to over a million.
That war is not usually included in the "splendid little" accounting.
The empire question
McKinley said later, to a group of Methodist ministers, that he had walked the floor of the White House night after night praying for guidance on the Philippines, and that the answer eventually came: the U.S. could not give the islands back to Spain, could not hand them to a European rival, could not leave the Filipinos to govern themselves because they were "unfit for self-government," and so there was nothing left to do but take them all and Christianize them. He apparently did not know that most Filipinos had been Catholic for three hundred years.
The deeper truth is that the United States had been moving toward overseas empire for at least a decade before McKinley's prayerful evening. Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History came out in 1890 and argued that great powers required coaling stations, naval bases, and overseas colonies. Roosevelt read it. So did the people who would later push for the annexation of Hawaii, the seizure of Samoa, and the construction of the canal across Panama. The Spanish-American War did not start American imperialism. It consummated it.
Hawaii is the giveaway. The islands had been controlled by American sugar interests since the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani, but formal annexation had stalled in Congress for five years. In July 1898, in the middle of the war, with the Philippines newly in American hands and the Pacific suddenly looking like an American lake, Congress passed annexation by joint resolution. It was not a coincidence. The war made the rest of it possible.
What 1898 actually settled
The Treaty of Paris was signed in December 1898 and ratified by the Senate the following February, narrowly. The anti-imperialist movement, which included Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers, and a substantial faction of the Democratic Party, fought hard against it and lost. The United States acquired Puerto Rico and Guam outright, took the Philippines for cash, and established a protectorate over Cuba that lasted, in various forms, until 1959.
The constitutional questions were ugly and were resolved in the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court decisions handed down between 1901 and 1922. The Court ruled, roughly, that the Constitution did not automatically follow the flag. The new territories were "unincorporated," which meant their inhabitants were subject to American sovereignty but not entitled to full American constitutional rights. That doctrine is still operative. It is the reason Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico are American citizens but cannot vote for president while they live there, and the reason American Samoans are not automatically citizens at all. The constitutional shape of the empire of 1898 is still with us, even after most of the empire itself is gone.
The myth, and what it conceals
The standard story of 1898 treats the war as a humanitarian intervention that grew, almost despite itself, into something larger. Cuba was suffering. The Maine exploded. America acted. One thing led to another. By the end, somehow, there were colonies.
The actual story is that a generation of American policymakers, military officers, journalists, and business interests had decided well before 1898 that the United States needed to become a global power on the European model, with overseas possessions and a serious navy and a hand in the affairs of distant places. Cuba gave them their occasion. The Philippines was what they actually wanted. The war was short because the planning had been long.
What 1898 ended was the illusion that the United States was a continental republic with no imperial appetite. What it began was the version of America that has been arguing with itself ever since about whether empire is something Americans do, or something that happened to us, or something we are still pretending not to be.
The "splendid little war" was none of those things. It was a long-planned act of expansion that most of the country wanted. Calling it splendid does not make it small.