When US first swung the big stick

In July 1898 the American diplomat John Hay boasted in a letter to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, then the commander of the Rough Riders volunteer cavalry, that their country had benefited quite well from what he called a “splendid little war” against Spain, quickly taking control not just of Cuba, but of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines too.

- CLAY RISEN

Though Roosevelt and his men were still in Cuba, Hay was already praising a war “begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave.”

That assessment may have come too soon. As Joe Jackson makes clear in his compelling, thoroughly researched but occasionally exhausting book, Splendid Liberators, the Spanish-American War remains perhaps the most misunderstood conflict in US history.

It was certainly not splendid: More than 4,000 US soldiers died between 1898 and the declaration of peace in 1902 in the Philippines, where an insurgency had drawn the Americans into a brutal guerrilla war. Civilian deaths were well over 500,000 in the Philippines and Cuba, thanks to the horrific tactics employed by the Spanish and the American occupying forces.

And while at the time the war might have seemed “little,” it was in fact world-altering: In a single conflict, the United States captured virtually every Spanish colonial territory; it established itself as a major power along the eastern edge of Asia; and it revealed an enviable capacity to turn its robust industrial and economic base into military might, almost overnight.