The Spanish American War [The Age of American Imperialism]

Hi, everyone, and welcome

back to Heimler's History.

Now as America comes out

of the Gilded Age,

we are filthy rich and itching to flex our

collective strength on the world stage.

And when we looked around at the world,

it turns out that European countries had

been flexing their muscles for decades

in something called "Imperialism."

And so, not to be outdone,

America looked around and decided

to gather up some lands

for an overseas empire of her own.

Now, when I think of America's age

of imperialism, the best

metaphor to my mind is hunger.

"Daddy's hungry."

And in this lecture,

we're going to see what Daddy America was

hungry for, why Daddy America got so

hungry in the first place, and what it was

that Daddy found to stuff down his gullet.

Let's get to it.

(It's time to kick it old school).

[MUSIC]

So, what was Daddy hungry for? Well, first, Daddy was hungry for new markets.

You see, America had found a way to grow more food and produce more manufactured crap than the

American public could possibly consume. And so, what do you do in that case?

Well, you look for foreign markets, and so we trained our eyes on Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.

But Daddy was also

hungry for raw materials.

You see, despite the abundance

of resources packed under the crust

of the American continent,

we did not have it all,

and so if we were going to keep feeding

those factories, we needed to find other

lands that had raw

materials that we did not.

Okay, that was what Daddy was hungry for.

Now, why was it that Daddy was hungry?

Well, two reasons.

First, there was the lingering

idea of Social Darwinism.

You'll recall that guys like John D.

Rockefeller applied the principles

of survival of the fittest to his business

practices, but now he decided to apply

those principles at the level

of nations as well.

America had proved herself to be one

of the strongest and fittest in the world,

and therefore was justified in finding

the weak and consuming them.

"Daddy's hungry."

But the second reason Daddy was hungry was

because of that old idea

of manifest destiny.

That was the old idea that God had given

us the right to possess the entirety

of the continent from sea to shining sea,

and at this point, we had done it.

All the land, which we can now consider

the lower 48 states,

were in our possession.

The great expanse of America stretched

from the Atlantic

to the Pacific seaboards.

And listen, a hunger like

that doesn't just die off overnight.

For example, I love gummy bears,

and just because I eat a four-pound bag

of gummy bears today doesn't mean I'm

gonna be satisfied

for the rest of my life.

Next morning, I'm gonna wake up thinking,

"I could do that all over again."

So, even though the Civil War distracted

us for a little while,

now that everything was put back together

again, Daddy was hungry for more.

And since we had nowhere else to go on

this continent, we had to look elsewhere.

Now, not surprisingly,

this impulse got us into some skirmishes,

most notably

the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Now in order to tell this story,

we need to begin in Cuba.

Now Cuba had been part

of the Spanish Empire since the late

1400s, and the Cubans had had just

about enough of foreign imperial rule.

And so, the Cubans roused themselves

into a revolt against their Spanish lords.

Now, if you'll recall, way back in the day,

America embraced something

called the Monroe Doctrine.

And I compared the Monroe Doctrine

to a dog lifting its leg and peeing all

over the Western Hemisphere,

and here's why.

Because the Monroe Doctrine said

that everything in the Western Hemisphere

essentially belongs to America,

and therefore we don't want any

European intervention over here.

So, as it turns out,

Cuba happens to be

in the Western Hemisphere,

and therefore could not avoid the sprinkle

of the American urinary

habit of imperialism.

And so, America took up the Cuban cause.

Now why would America want to do this?

Well, at least one reason was something

that came to be known as "yellow

journalism," and essentially what was going

on is that people like Joseph Pulitzer

were publishing in their newspapers

accounts that were both spurious

and outlandish about Spanish atrocities

against the Cubans in order to arouse

public support for the Cuban cause.

Now in many cases,

there was a kernel of truth to these,

but they were blown way out of proportion.

So, at this point, the American public was

clamoring for a fight,

and so we sent our newest Navy destroyer

down to Cuba and just parked

it right in Havana Harbor.

Nothing going on here,

just came down to say, "Hay."

And as you can imagine,

this move caused an awful lot of tension

between America and Spain,

but nothing really happened until one day.

In the evening of February 15th, 1898,

the USS Maine exploded,

killing 260 American sailors.

Now, of course, Joseph Pulitzer and his

army of yellow journalists

jumped all over this.

They pumped out ream after ream

of newspapers accusing the Spanish

of destroying the Maine.

Now just so you know, in 1976,

the U.S. Navy did an extensive

investigation into the explosion,

and what they found was

that the overwhelming amount of evidence

suggested an internal explosion,

which is to say it was not

in fact caused by the Spanish.

But investigating the truth didn't

much matter to the American public.

We wanted Spanish blood.

Now to emphasize just how much Americans

wanted to get into a fight despite any

action that might lead to a diplomatic

solution, you should know that American

diplomats presented Spain with a list

of demands saying, "Do this,

and we will not go to war."

And apparently, Spain really did not want

to go to war with America,

because they complied with all

of the demands,

including the most stringent of them,

to which America said, "Hmm,

now, we really didn't

think you all would do all that.

You all still want to start a war?

All right, we're gonna go to war."

"Wait, what?"

Why?

Well, President McKinley knew how unwise

it would be to not start a war because,

hey, elections were coming up,

and if he didn't give the people what they

wanted, then they wouldn't reelect him.

And that is how you get

the Spanish-American War.

Now, I'll just cut to the end of what

McKinley called this splendid little war

because it only lasted for 114 days,

and I'll let you know that America

triumphed on behalf of the Cubans

and repulsed Spain from the last scrap

of their once vast New World empire.

And one of the strange strategies we

employed to win this battle

in the Caribbean was by invading another

Spanish possession way over in the

Pacific, namely the Philippine Islands.

And the freedom-loving

Filipinos were like-

"Yay, the Americans are

here to make us free!"

And as the war closed,

we sat across the treaty table from Spain

and took the Philippine Islands off

their hands for a cool 20 million.

And once President McKinley saw how

backwards and brown and un-Christian these

Filipinos were, actually,

don't tell anybody,

but their leader was highly educated

and the Filipinos were

already mostly Christians.

McKinley decided to do the right thing

and keep the Filipinos under American rule

until they became,

you know, more American.

And since the Philippine Islands were just

so dang far away,

we began to think that we needed a rest

stop, you know, some place between our

western coast and Asia

where we could just chill and eat some

coconut meat, maybe some place like,

I don't know, Hawaii.

So, in 1898, America went ahead and brought

a bunch of diseases to the native

Hawaiians and killed a bunch of them off

and was like, "So, if you all aren't using

these islands anymore, we'll take them."

And that's how you get the 50th

state of the United States.

Now with all this imperialistic activity,

there arose, not surprisingly,

a great clamor from a bunch

of people saying this is wrong.

The folks who were saying this were called

the Anti-Imperialist League,

and they argued that America should not be

taking over nations and ruling other

peoples because, in case you forgot,

there's a deep conviction in the soul

of America that people must be

governed by their own consent.

A philosopher during that time named

William James put it magnificently.

He said he couldn't believe that America

could puke up its ancient soul in five

minutes without a wink of squeamishness.

But on the other side of the argument

were the expansionists.

They raised arguments about patriotism

and about how America had a civilizing

mission in the world,

not to mention that the possibilities

for the expansion of trade

were positively fabulous.

And in the end, it was the expansionists

who won out, and on February 6th, 1899,

Congress approved the treaty with Spain

and America became an empire.

And that's all we have time for now.

I'll see you next time.