In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

137 T he causes of America’s War with Spain can be divided into several major categories. The diplomatic reasons generally have to do with Spain’s presence in the western hemisphere in direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Its apparently despotic rule over Cuba a mere ninety miles from the United States seemed contrary to both the sanctity of our hemisphere and the cause of liberty among the oppressed Cuban people. The role of the American press and its use of “yellow journalism” are well known to historians to the extent that it constituted a “cause” of the war in and of itself. Public reaction to the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor was stimulated in part by its understanding of the situation based on the press’s exaggerated reports of Spanish atrocities leading up to that tragedy. Finally, the degree to which sectional reunion and the desire to rekindle the nation’s patriotic fire influenced “war fever” in 1898 cannot be underestimated. If part of the catalyst for remembering the Civil War was a desire to recapture the essence of American manhood, then the connection between the glories of the past war and the possible benefits of a new conflict made a great deal of sense. The United States at the end of the century was a nation nearly bursting at the seams with industrial progress and national pride. The decades after the Civil War had been filled with unprecedented economic growth that had only been recently tarnished by unemployment and labor problems resulting from the Panic of 1894. Industrial giants like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie presided over massive corporations, built around oil and steel, that generated great wealth for their owners and shareholders. Increasing numbers of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were entering the industrial workforce as a source of low-paid, unskilled, and exploitable labor. At the same time, the western frontier, once the bellwether of American expansion and Manifest Destiny, had finally been conquered by the forces of civilization. Politically, a Republican administration led by Civil War veteran William McKinley had overcome the disruptive forces of Populism in 1896 by appealing “To Cement Forever the Bonds of Sectional Reunion” eight 138 · conflicting memories on the “River of Death” to traditional social values, sectional reconciliation, and economic conservatism . America was in the midst of dramatic changes that foretold great promise, while at the same time prompting a certain amount of apprehension among its citizens. When confronted by such changes, Americans sought reassurance that their values, goals, and interests could be preserved and promoted in spite of this chaos. They found those reassurances in the dual euphoria of sectional reunion and the prospects of territorial expansion and a righteous foreign war.1 The Spanish-controlled islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico represented one of the last bastions of the Old World that infringed on U.S. territorial sovereignty as spelled out by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. During the early 1890s, a Cuban revolutionary movement began to orchestrate armed resistance against the Spanish on parts of the island. This insurgency brought forth a Spanish military response that included a harsh, scorched-earth policy on the offending districts. Aside from the influential pro-Cuban blocks in several American cities, the activities in Cuba might have had a minimal impact in the United States if it were not for the remarkable influence of aggressive expansionists like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge and the role played by the nation’s popular press.2 Along with the boom in industrial production, the late nineteenth century experienced a similar rise in newspapers and periodicals capable of reaching large numbers of readers. The New York papers, in particular, commanded a great deal of influence. Joseph Pulitzer had recently purchased the World from Jay Gould and molded it into a sensationalistic tabloid along the lines of the San Francisco-based chain of papers owned by William Randolph Hearst. The use of sensational, lurid headlines and speculative reporting predated the Spanish-American War itself, but the situation in Cuba lent itself to the types of stories that required few verifiable facts but lots of gory, and often entirely fabricated, details. The “yellow press” enjoyed two main sources of information on the situation in Cuba. One was the Cuban contingent in New York, whose “unrivalled propaganda bureau” was happy to regularly supply the papers with stories of Spanish outrages and insurrectionist successes. Walter Millis observes that “whatever may have been their prowess...

Share