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Prevailing interpretations of the causes of the Spanish-American War emphasize the role of yellow journalism, business interests, or congressional politics in forcing President William McKinley into a war that he neither sought nor wanted. This article reexamines McKinley's decision making in the months leading up to the Spanish-American War in the context of "Victorian" values, such as arbitrationism, pacifism, humanitarianism, and manly self-restraint, and argues that McKinley's actions were based more on these values than on external pressures. A closer look at the evidence suggests that McKinley's speech before Congress on April 11, 1898, may have been more a moment of unprecedented presidential power than a showing of personal weakness.
The Spanish-American War deeply divided the American people. Although its resounding success from a military standpoint and the astonishingly high ratio of heroes produced to casualties suffered led John Hay to deem it "a splendid little war," many Americans at the time and in the years since considered it an unnecessary, unwanted, and unwarranted conflict. In combination with the messy entanglements in the Philippines that directly followed, the Spanish-American War called cherished American ideals into question, spawned leagues of anti-imperialists, and fostered resilient strains of pacifism that would endure in American cultural and political life at least until World War II. Even though the heated contests surrounding the Spanish and Philippine conflicts gradually ebbed out of American politics as most Americans came to accept them as part of the past, these debates have remained alive to historians, who, after all, are in the business of keeping the past in mind. In what was a short and otherwise well-documented conflict, no aspect of the Spanish-American War has produced more debate among historians than the question of why it started in the fitst place. At the center of these debates stands President William McKinley. That a president who, in his own words and by all accounts, was profoundly in favor of a peaceful resolution to the Cuban crisis took the final steps that made war unavoidable presents a basic problem of interpretation to any historian writing on the war or the origins of American imperialism.
The historical intetpretations of McKinley's decision to make war on Spain in the spring of 1898 are exceedingly numerous. While the...