With the Cuban insurgents on the verge of victory, American policymakers, including President William McKinley, came to favor military intervention as a way to increase American control of postwar Cuba. By intervening before the Cubans won on their own, the United States staked its claim for determining the postwar relationship between the two countries and protecting its vital interests in the Caribbean, including the private property rights of American landowners in Cuba.
The American press, however, helped build support for American intervention not by focusing on economic interests and geopolitics but by framing the war as a matter of American honor. Most Americans followed the war through newspaper accounts. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal competed with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World to see which could provide the most lurid coverage of Spanish atrocities. The two newspapers sent correspondents to Cuba to cover every grisly story they could find—and to make up stories, if necessary. Known disparagingly as yellow journalism, these sensationalist newspaper accounts aroused jingoistic outrage against Spain.
On February 9, 1898, the Journal printed a letter that had come into Hearst’s possession. Under the headline “Worst Insult to the United States in History,” the newspaper quoted a private letter from Enrique Depuy de Lôme, the Spanish minister in Washington, scorning President McKinley as a “weak” politician who pandered to “the crowd” to win public favor. Nearly a week later, on February 15, the battleship Maine, anchored in Havana harbor, exploded, killing 266 American sailors. American newspapers blamed Spain. The World shouted the rallying cry “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt seconded this sentiment by denouncing the explosion as a Spanish “act of treachery.” Why the Spaniards would choose to blow up the Maine and provoke war with the United States while already losing to Cuba remained unanswered, but the incident was enough to turn American opinion toward war.
On April 11, 1898, McKinley asked Congress to declare war against Spain. The declaration included an amendment proposed by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado declar-ing that Cuba “ought to be free and independent.” Yet the document left enough room for American maneuvering to satisfy the imperial ambitions of the McKinley administration. In endorsing independence, the war proclamation asserted the right of the United States to remain involved in Cuban affairs until it had achieved “pacification.” On April 21, the United States officially went to war with Spain.
In going to war, McKinley embarked on an imperialistic course that had been building since the early 1890s. The president signaled the broader expansionist concerns behind the war when, shortly after it began, he successfully steered a Hawaiian annexation treaty through Congress. Businessmen joined imperialists in seizing the moment to create a commercial empire that would catch up to their European rivals.
It was fortunate for the United States that the Cuban insurgents had seriously weakened Spanish forces before the Americans arrived. The U.S. army, consisting of fewer than 30,000 men, lacked sufficient strength to conquer Cuba on its own, and McKinley had to mobilize some 200,000 National Guard troops and assorted volunteers. Theodore Roosevelt resigned from his post as assistant secretary of the navy and organized his own regiment, called “Rough Riders.” American forces faced several problems: They lacked battle experience; supplies were inadequate; their uniforms were not suited for the hot, humid climate of a Cuban summer; and the soldiers did not have immunity from tropical diseases.
African American soldiers, who made up about one-quarter of the troops, encountered additional difficulties. As more and more black troops arrived in southern ports for deployment to Cuba, they faced increasingly hostile crowds, angered at the presence of armed African American men in uniform. In Tampa, Florida, where troops gathered from all over the country to be transported to Cuba, racial tensions exploded on the afternoon of June 8. Intoxicated white soldiers from Ohio grabbed a two-year-old black boy from his mother and used him for target practice, shooting a bullet through his shirtsleeve. In retaliation, African American soldiers stormed into the streets and exchanged gunfire with whites, leaving three whites and twenty-seven black soldiers wounded. Reporting the story of this “riot,” the Atlanta Constitution denounced the “wild and demonic conduct of the [N]egro regulars,” completely ignoring the behavior of the white troops that had prompted the fracas. Undaunted, black troops went on to distinguish themselves on Cuban battlefields.
Despite military inexperience, logistical problems, and racial tensions, the United States quickly defeated the weakened Spanish military, and the war was over four months after it began. During the war, 460 Americans died in combat, far fewer than the more than 5,000 who lost their lives to disease. It was not surprising, then, that Secretary of State John Hay referred to the hostilities as “a splendid little war.” The subsequent peace treaty ended Spanish rule in Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and the Pacific island of Guam to the United States, and recognized American occupation of the Philippines until the two countries could arrange a final settlement. As a result of the territorial gains in the war, American foreign-policy strategists could now begin to construct the empire that Mahan had envisioned.