Spanish-American War
The ten-week war of 1898 that destroyed the Spanish empire, handed the United States a colonial empire, and started a far longer war in the Philippines.
On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine blew up at anchor in Havana harbor, killing 266 of her crew. A naval board of inquiry concluded a mine had done it. The likeliest cause, established by later investigations, was a coal bunker fire igniting an adjacent magazine, an accident that had nearly happened on other ships of the class. None of that mattered at the time. American newspapers, then locked in a circulation war between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, had spent three years selling Spanish atrocities in Cuba to their readers, and now they had a slogan: remember the Maine.
Ten weeks
Cuba had been in revolt since 1895, and Spain's answer, herding the rural population into camps where tens of thousands died of disease and hunger, was genuinely brutal and superbly suited to sensational coverage. Congress declared war in April, attaching the Teller Amendment, which disclaimed any intention of annexing Cuba, a promise made to reassure anti-imperialists and American sugar interests alike.
The fighting was short and one-sided. Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish squadron at Manila Bay on May 1 without losing a ship. In Cuba an improvised expedition landed near Santiago in July, fought its way up the San Juan heights, with Theodore Roosevelt and his volunteer Rough Riders making the newspapers on Kettle Hill, and then watched the Spanish fleet be annihilated trying to escape the harbor. Spain sued for peace. Fewer than four hundred Americans died in combat. Roughly ten times that number died of typhoid, yellow fever, and dysentery, in camps and on transports, killed by the army's own supply and sanitation failures rather than by the enemy. John Hay called it a splendid little war.
The empire nobody had voted for
The Treaty of Paris in December 1898 made Cuba independent in name, transferred Puerto Rico and Guam outright, and sold the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars. Hawaii was annexed the same summer. In a single season the country acquired territories from the Caribbean to the western Pacific, populated by people it had no intention of making citizens.
That produced the first genuine national argument about American empire. The Anti-Imperialist League drew Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers, and its case was that a republic founded on consent could not govern subject peoples without becoming something else. The expansionists answered with markets, coaling stations, naval necessity, and a duty to civilize. The Senate ratified the treaty by a single vote more than the two-thirds required.
Cuba's independence came with the Platt Amendment, which reserved the American right to intervene and a naval base at Guantanamo Bay that the United States holds to this day. Puerto Rico is still an unincorporated territory whose residents are citizens without a vote for president.
The war that followed
The Philippines had been fighting Spain for independence, and Emilio Aguinaldo's forces had expected to inherit the country. Instead they were handed a new colonizer. Fighting broke out in February 1899, two days before the Senate ratified the treaty, and lasted three years in its conventional phase and longer in the south. More than 4,000 Americans died, along with over 20,000 Filipino combatants and, by most estimates, several hundred thousand civilians from famine and disease. American troops burned villages, herded populations into zones, and used the water cure on prisoners, and the Senate held hearings about it.
The ten-week war is remembered. The three-year one that followed it is not, which is the more revealing fact. 1898 is the moment the United States acquired the habits of a great power, and the argument it started, about whether a country founded in an anti-colonial revolution can run an empire without ceasing to be itself, has never been settled.