Remember the Spanish-American War? You probably learned about it in your history classes–which was a long time ago, perhaps.

If you were anything like me, you only remember a few key phrases: “yellow journalism.” “Remember the Maine.” The American people whipped up into a frenzy of warmongering by the hungry press. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, looking like overgrown boy scouts. The US as an imperial power.

Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation has the unwieldy subtitle “America’s place in the world from its earliest days to the dawn of the twentieth century.” The book advances Kagan’s thesis that the US was never all that isolationist to begin with—and that, from the founding of our nation, the US had demonstrated a strain of self-interested economic and geographic expansionism combined with an idealistic universalism about liberty and its spread.

This is only the first volume of a projected two-volume work. It ends with the buildup to the Spanish-American War. The next volume will pick up where the book left off, with the conduct of that war and its aftermath.

Kagan goes back to original sources to maintain that the impetus towards the Spanish-American War was not the lies told by a jingoistic and overreaching press eager for the conflict. In fact, by the time the war began, bipartisan support was strong, even among many of those who had originally opposed it. And the newspapers hadn’t gotten it very wrong.

Kagan points out [emphasis mine]:

It was true that the press did print some fabrications–sometimes fed to reporters by the Cuban junta–just as it did in every other conflict in American history. But the main thrust of what the press reported about events in Cuba was accurate. Even Hearst could not exaggerate the horrors of the [re]concentration camps, or tell a story more “sensational” than three hundred thousand Cubans dying of starvation and disease….The pressure [for war]…was the product of Cuban reality and American outrage over actual human suffering.

You’ll have to go to Kagan’s book to read the details of the political and diplomatic maneuverings engaged in with Spain by the McKinley administration in its efforts to avoid the war. Suffice to say there were many.

A turning point, after the explosion of the Maine, was a visit to Cuba and a subsequent speech by Senator Redfield Proctor of Maine.

Proctor had heretofore been against going to war over Cuba. He had traveled there to see the situation for himself and to evaluate it, with a “strong conviction that the picture had been overdrawn” in terms of the suffering of the Cuban people.

What he saw there profoundly shocked him. What the press had said about what were euphemistically known as “reconcentration camps”—places of widespread death and suffering in which huge numbers of Cubans who had wanted to be free from Spanish rule were housed—was quite true. Addressing the Senate, Proctor reversed his previous antiwar stance, stating that the reason for this war was neither the Maine nor revenge, it was “the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”

In other words, liberation from oppression.

[Part II, dealing with the continuation of the buildup to the Spanish-American war, and how it was seen by Europe and subsequent US historians—as well as how it might be compared to the war in Iraq—will appear tomorrow.]