Eddie Evans's List: Spanish-American War and World War I

• On June 15, 1898, a group of anti-imperialists gathered at Faneuil Hall, in Boston, at the invitation of Gamaliel Bradford, a noted Boston reformer. Speakers at the meeting “attacked the [imperial] policy from the perspective of morality and the American tradition in diplomacy.”⁴
• It involved politicians from both major Parties, labor leaders, industrialists, reformers and intellectuals. Grover Cleveland, William James, Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schurz, Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers and Jane Addams were just some of its members. The leaders of the League had little in common other than their Anti-Imperialism.

• The Canal's necessity arose out of the industrialization of the Gilded Age, highlighted by the exponential growth of manufacturing.   With the explosion in manufactured goods, the demand for exporting them expanded proportionally. In the pre-Canal years between 1870 and 1910, gross shipping tonnage in the United States nearly doubled.   Emerging markets in the Pacific Rim and the rapid growth of the western United States were untapped resources for trade with this growth in retail goods.

• he Hay–Bunau–Varilla Treaty of 1903 created the Panama Canal Zone and allowed the US government to begin building its 51–mile waterway through the Isthmus of Panama in May 1904.
• n constructing the Panama Canal, American planners and builders faced challenges that went far beyond politics and engineering. The deadly endemic diseases of yellow fever and malaria were dangerous obstacles that had already defeated French efforts to construct a Panama Canal in the 1880s. The crippling effects of these diseases, which incapacitated many workers and caused at least 20,000 to die, led the French to abandon their goal in 1889.

• But by the 1890s, the U.S. Navy had converted to all-steel and -steam, and ranked among the top five navies in the world.
• On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion sank the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor, triggering a war between the United States and Spain.
• War fever was fanned by the press, particularly publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Although the United States claimed it had no designs on Cuba, many believed the war would be an opportunity to seize other overseas possessions and begin building an American empire.

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• Walter Reed, James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse Lazear conducted their yellow fever research as part of the American occupation force in Cuba in the wake of the Spanish-American War.
• The Spanish-American War and the subsequent occupation of Cuba can be traced to the rapid growth of the American public’s interest in economic, territorial, and cultural expansion during the 1890s.
• The Depression and the dominance of monopolies such as Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel forced struggling farmers and aspiring entrepreneurs to look abroad for better economic opportunities.
• By 1890, however, the “Wild West” appeared to be explored, organized, and settled. If Turner was right, and if America had truly lost its frontier, then it seemed that the federal government needed to acquire new territory in order to keep American democracy alive.
• Yellow journalists such as Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal printed exaggerated reports of Spanish atrocities ordered by General Valeriano “the Butcher” Weyler in order to rally support for American intervention on behalf of the Cuban revolutionaries—and to sell their newspapers.
• Sent to Havana harbor in January of 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was destroyed by an explosion of unknown origin on February 15, killing 260 American servicemen.
• The problem, even before war had been declared, was whether or not to keep any of the territories occupied by American troops at the end of the war.
• Congress was divided between “imperialists,” who wanted to annex the newly occupied countries, and “anti-imperialists,” who did not want to add non-North American lands to the United States.

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• And now, four centuries from the discovery  of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution,  the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first  period of American history.
• t follows then, that the Anglo-Saxon,  as the great representative of these two ideas, the depository  of these two great blessings, sustains peculiar relations to  the world's future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar  sense, his brother's keeper.
• He has made  us adept in government that we may administer government among  savage and senile peoples
• With  the completion of the Panama Canal all Central American will  become part of our system. We have expanded into Asia, we have  attracted the fragments of the Spanish dominions, and reaching  out into China we have checked the advance of Russia and Germany

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• It was said to have been a “splendid little war.” But splendid scarcely characterized the war’s logistical dimensions, which were ineptly managed by American military and civilian leaders of uneven competence and limited planning ability. As a result, far more American servicemen died from tropical disease during the Spanish-American War than from battlefield wounds.
• To an extent unmatched in other conflicts, American journalists figured prominently in the prelude to the Spanish-American War, in the war’s conduct, and in its aftermath. “Never, before or after, were correspondents so conspicuous for audacity and daring—and interference in matters not their business,” Charles Brown, a media historian, has perceptively written.