Spanish–American War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Spanish-American War lasted just sixteen weeks in 1898, and when it was over, the United States had acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, established a protectorate over Cuba, and stepped onto the world stage as a major power. U.S. ambassador John Hay called it "a splendid little war." Four centuries of Spanish presence in the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific ended with that phrase. What brought two nations to war in less than four months, and what did the world look like on the other side? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Crumbling Empire

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  Spain entered the nineteenth century already diminished. The Peninsular War of 1807-1814, the loss of most of its American colonies in the Spanish American wars of independence, and three Carlist Wars stretching from 1832 to 1876 had left the empire badly eroded. By the time Cuban nationalists launched their revolt in 1895, Spain's hold on its remaining colonies was partly a matter of pride and partly a matter of economics. Cuba had been under Spanish rule for almost four hundred years.

  Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the dominant figure in Spanish politics and the architect of Spain's Restoration constitution, offered a clear articulation of what was at stake. In an 1882 address to the University of Madrid, he described the Spanish nation as bound together by shared cultural and linguistic ties on both sides of the Atlantic. He announced publicly that Spain was "disposed to sacrifice to the last peseta of its treasure and to the last drop of blood of the last Spaniard" before ceding a single piece of territory. Cánovas had stabilized Spanish politics for years. His assassination in 1897 by Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo left a political system that was fragile at exactly the wrong moment.

  The liberal Spanish elites who succeeded him faced a dilemma that historian Carlos Dardé later described with unusual clarity. Granting Cuba independence without a military defeat would almost certainly have triggered a military coup and the fall of the monarchy. As the head of the Spanish delegation to the Paris peace negotiations, Eugenio Montero Ríos, put it: "Everything has been lost, except the Monarchy." Spain went to war knowing it would lose, because losing a war was preferable to losing the throne.

• 3. Cuba's Long Revolt

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  The first serious Cuban independence movement was the Ten Years' War, which began in 1868 and was suppressed a decade later. The Pact of Zanjón in February 1878 ended the fighting but resolved nothing. One revolutionary who refused to accept the settlement was José Martí, who spent the following years promoting Cuban financial and political independence from exile.

  In early 1895, after years of organizing, Martí launched a three-pronged invasion of the island. One group from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic was led by Máximo Gómez. A second group from Costa Rica was led by Antonio Maceo Grajales. A third, planned to land from the United States, was preemptively blocked by U.S. officials in Florida. Their call for revolution, the grito de Baire, succeeded in sparking an uprising. A quick victory, however, did not follow. The revolutionaries settled into a protracted guerrilla campaign.

  The Spanish response escalated sharply when Prime Minister Cánovas replaced General Arsenio Martínez-Campos, who had been criticized for containing the revolt to the province of Oriente, with General Valeriano Weyler. Weyler, nicknamed "The Butcher," ordered residents of certain Cuban districts to relocate to reconcentration areas near military headquarters. The strategy slowed the spread of rebellion. President William McKinley later described it in a political speech as "not civilized warfare" but "extermination." Martí himself was killed in 1895, but the movement continued under the leadership of the Cuban Junta, operating in the United States under Tomás Estrada Palma, who in 1902 would become Cuba's first president.

• 4. The USS Maine and Yellow Journalism

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  By January 1898, U.S. consul Fitzhugh Lee in Havana had warned Washington that Cuban loyalists to the recalled General Weyler were planning demonstrations when the new Governor General arrived. Lee requested a warship. The armored cruiser USS Maine was dispatched to Havana Harbor. At 9:40 P.M. on the 15th of February 1898, a massive explosion sank the Maine. Of the crew of 355 sailors, officers, and Marines, 260 were killed in the initial explosion and six more died shortly from injuries. Only 16 of the 94 survivors were uninjured.

  Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal quickly assigned blame to Spain. Headlines including "Remember The Maine, To Hell with Spain!" ran in their papers. A common myth holds that when illustrator Frederic Remington cabled that there was no war brewing in Cuba, Hearst responded: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Historians no longer consider this exchange verified. More importantly, historians no longer view yellow journalism as the primary force shaping national opinion. Both papers had little influence outside New York City.

  The investigation by the U.S. Navy, made public on March 28, concluded that an external explosion had ignited the ship's powder magazines, though it stopped short of naming a responsible party. Spain's own investigation reached the opposite conclusion: the explosion originated inside the ship. In 1974, Admiral Hyman George Rickover reviewed the documents and sided with an internal explosion. A study commissioned by National Geographic in 1999 using computer modeling suggested a mine could have caused the damage. The cause has never been definitively established. What the explosion did establish was the political impossibility of a negotiated peace.

• 5. The Pacific Theater

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  Theodore Roosevelt, serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1897 to 1898, had been preparing for a Pacific confrontation long before the Maine sank. He ordered Commodore George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron to Hong Kong and instructed Dewey that in the event of war, he should ensure the Spanish squadron could not leave the Asian coast and then launch offensive operations in the Philippines.

  Dewey's squadron departed on April 27 and reached Manila Bay on the evening of April 30. On May 1, in a matter of hours, Dewey defeated a Spanish squadron commanded by Admiral Patricio Montojo. Nine Americans were wounded; Montojo's fleet was destroyed. The harbor fell to American control. The German squadron of eight ships arrived ostensibly to protect German interests, but behaved provocatively: cutting in front of American ships, refusing to salute the American flag, taking soundings of the harbor, and landing supplies for the besieged Spanish. The Americans made clear that continued aggression would lead to conflict. The Germans backed down.

  Commodore Dewey transported Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader who had led a rebellion against Spanish rule in 1896, from exile in Hong Kong back to the Philippines to rally forces against Spain. By June 9, Aguinaldo's forces controlled nine provinces and had laid siege to Manila. On June 12, Aguinaldo proclaimed Philippine independence. On August 13, however, American forces captured Manila from the Spanish in the Battle of Manila without allowing Filipino forces to enter the city. This exclusion was deeply resented. Armed conflict between U.S. forces and Filipino fighters broke out shortly after the war ended, quickly escalating into the Philippine-American War, which would prove more deadly and costly than the Spanish-American War.

• 6. Cuba and the Caribbean

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  The first American landings in Cuba came on June 10, when the First Marine Battalion came ashore at Fisherman's Point in Guantánamo Bay. The Fifth Army Corps under General William R. Shafter followed on June 22-24, landing at Daiquirí and Siboney east of Santiago.

  On July 1, roughly 15,000 American troops attacked 1,270 entrenched Spanish soldiers at the Battle of El Caney and the Battle of San Juan Hill. Among the regiments were all four of the army's "Colored" Buffalo Soldier regiments, the volunteer Rough Riders under Roosevelt, the 71st New York, the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, and the 1st North Carolina. More than 200 U.S. soldiers were killed and close to 1,200 were wounded. The Spanish Mauser rifle, firing a 7mm round at high velocity, was called the "Spanish Hornet" by American troops for the supersonic crack it made overhead. Colonel Charles A. Wikoff, killed in action, was the most senior U.S. Army officer to die in the war. First Lieutenant John J. Pershing, nicknamed "Black Jack," commanded the 10th Cavalry unit during the fight and was cited for gallantry.

  The naval climax came on July 3 at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, the largest naval engagement of the war. When Spanish Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete's squadron finally attempted to break out of the harbor, American forces destroyed or grounded five of the six ships. The 1,612 captured Spanish sailors were transported to Seavey's Island at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where they were held at Camp Long as prisoners of war from July 11 until mid-September. Admiral Cervera himself was taken to Annapolis, Maryland, where the local population reportedly received him with enthusiasm. Puerto Rico fell largely separately: on the 25th of July 1,300 infantry soldiers under Nelson A. Miles landed near Guánica. Military actions continued until an armistice was signed on August 13, ending fighting across all theaters.

• 7. Disease and Medical Disaster

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  Combat casualties in the Spanish-American War were low compared to any earlier American conflict. Disease was a different story. Fewer than 400 American soldiers were killed in action. Thousands more died from illness.

  The central crisis was typhoid fever. In American military camps, 21,738 soldiers contracted typhoid, accounting for 82 percent of all sick soldiers. Of those, 1,590 died, a mortality rate of 7.7 percent. Typhoid alone accounted for 87 percent of all deaths from disease in the assembly camps at home. Yellow fever struck over 2,000 troops during the Cuban campaign. About 55,000 Spanish troops in Cuba, out of 230,000, were incapacitated by illness.

  The assembly camps proved more deadly than the Cuban battlefields. Medical officers lacked experience in camp sanitation. Embarkation had been chaotic, leaving many units without proper medical equipment. Volunteer regiments had been hastily organized. By the time the Army began withdrawing from Cuba, a group of officers chose Theodore Roosevelt to draft a formal request to Washington to pull the force out. General Shafter had already described his command as "an army of convalescents." Seventy-five percent of the force in Cuba was unfit for service by the time the evacuation began on August 7. The Army kept the Black Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment behind to support the occupation, under the false belief that their race would protect them from disease. When the Ninth finally left, 73 of its 984 soldiers had contracted the illness anyway. The medical failures led directly to the creation of special boards, including the U.S. Army Typhoid Board, to study outbreaks and overhaul military sanitation practices.

• 8. A New World Power

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  The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 10th of December 1898, transferred Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The cession of the Philippines required the U.S. to pay Spain $20 million to cover Spanish-owned infrastructure there. Cuba was set on a path to nominal independence in 1902, though in practice it became a U.S. protectorate. The treaty came into force in Cuba on the 11th of April 1899.

  In Spain, the defeat produced what became known as the Generation of '98, a broad philosophical and artistic reevaluation of Spanish society and national identity. Historians have noted that the trauma was most acutely felt among the intellectual class; the majority of the population was illiterate and lived under the regime of caciquismo, the system of local political bosses.

  In the United States, the aftermath was more complicated. The war brought Northerners and Southerners, Black and white soldiers into a shared cause for the first time since the Civil War. Four former Confederate generals served in the U.S. Army during the conflict: Matthew Butler, Fitzhugh Lee, Thomas L. Rosser, and Joseph Wheeler. During the Battle of San Juan Hill, Wheeler reportedly shouted: "Let's go, boys! We've got the damn Yankees on the run again!" The debate over what the war meant intensified in the decades that followed. Historian Louis Pérez argued that the war of 1898 "fixed permanently how Americans came to think of themselves: a righteous people given to the service of righteous purpose." The U.S. establishment of a perpetual lease on Guantánamo Bay, a decision made in the immediate aftermath of the war, would shape Cuban-American relations for more than a century to come.