Chapter 27

By 1890 the American frontier was officially declared closed, and a new generation of leaders looked overseas for markets, coaling stations, and national glory. Naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan's 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, argued that great nations needed a powerful navy, merchant marine, and overseas colonies to prosper.

Mahan's ideas fueled a naval buildup and a new imperialist mood among American statesmen, including a young Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Missionaries, businessmen eager for foreign markets, and believers in Anglo-Saxon "civilizing" superiority all pushed the United States toward a more assertive role in world affairs.

American sugar planters had long dominated the Hawaiian economy. In 1893 they conspired with the U.S. minister to the islands and a detachment of U.S. Marines to overthrow Hawaii's independent monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, who had tried to reassert native Hawaiian control over the government.

President Grover Cleveland, an anti-imperialist, refused to annex the islands after learning of the plot's illegitimacy, and Hawaii lingered as an independent republic for several years. Amid the patriotic fever of the Spanish-American War, however, Congress annexed Hawaii by joint resolution in 1898, prizing its naval base at Pearl Harbor.

Cuban rebels rose against Spanish rule in 1895, and Spain's harsh general Valeriano Weyler herded civilians into disease-ridden "reconcentration" camps. American newspapers, locked in a fierce circulation war, seized on the atrocities. Publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst practiced sensational "yellow journalism," exaggerating and sometimes inventing Spanish cruelties to sell papers.

Tensions exploded when the battleship USS Maine, sent to Havana harbor to protect American citizens, mysteriously blew up on February 15, 1898, killing more than 260 sailors. Though the cause was never conclusively proven, the yellow press instantly blamed Spain, and the nation rallied to the cry "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!"

Pressured by public opinion and business interests eager to end the disruption to Cuban trade, President William McKinley reluctantly asked Congress for war. Congress obliged in April 1898, attaching the Teller Amendment, which pledged that the United States would not annex Cuba but would leave it to the Cuban people once Spain was expelled.

Secretary of State John Hay later called it a "splendid little war" — brief, low in American casualties, and hugely popular. The United States was woefully unprepared logistically, but Spain's decrepit empire could offer little resistance to American naval power.

The first blow fell not in the Caribbean but in the Pacific. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey's American fleet steamed into Manila Bay in the Spanish Philippines and, without losing a single sailor, destroyed the aging Spanish squadron anchored there.

Dewey's stunning victory made him an instant national hero and thrust the United States into an unexpected colonial entanglement half a world away. American troops soon landed to occupy Manila, working uneasily alongside Filipino rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo, who was already fighting Spain for independence.

In Cuba, a poorly organized but enthusiastic American expeditionary force landed near Santiago. Among them was the volunteer cavalry regiment known as the "Rough Riders," led by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his Navy post to fight.

On July 1, 1898, the Rough Riders and African American regular army units famously charged up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill outside Santiago, helping force the surrender of the Spanish fleet trapped in the harbor. The victories at San Juan Hill and the naval Battle of Santiago effectively ended Spanish resistance in Cuba within weeks.

The Treaty of Paris (1898) ended the war on generous terms for the victor: Spain freed Cuba, and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam outright. After anguished debate, McKinley decided to demand the Philippines as well, paying Spain $20 million for the islands.

The treaty ignited a fierce national debate over imperialism. The Anti-Imperialist League, joined by figures like Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, argued that ruling distant peoples without their consent betrayed American principles of self-government. Imperialists countered that the Philippines offered valuable trade footholds in Asia and that the U.S. had a duty to "uplift" and Christianize its new subjects. The Senate narrowly ratified the treaty in early 1899.

Feeling betrayed that their fight for independence had merely traded one colonial master for another, Filipino insurgents under Emilio Aguinaldo turned their guns on American occupiers. The brutal Philippine-American War (1899–1902) killed far more Americans and Filipinos than the war with Spain, and both sides committed atrocities before the insurrection was finally suppressed.

In Cuba, the U.S. Army occupied the island and helped stamp out yellow fever before withdrawing — but only after Cuba was forced to write the American-imposed Platt Amendment into its own constitution in 1901. It limited Cuban treaty-making, permitted American intervention, and secured a U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, making Cuba a "protectorate" in all but name.

With European powers carving China into "spheres of influence," Secretary of State John Hay issued the Open Door Notes (1899), asking the powers to preserve equal trading rights for all nations in China. When the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion erupted in 1900, American troops joined an international force to crush it, and Hay used the moment to reaffirm the Open Door policy and China's territorial integrity.

President Theodore Roosevelt pursued an assertive foreign policy of his own, engineering Panamanian independence from Colombia in 1903 to secure rights to build the Panama Canal, completed in 1914. His 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine asserted an American right to intervene in Latin American nations' affairs to preempt European intervention — summed up in his motto, "speak softly and carry a big stick."