Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century

by Ivan Musicant

The definitive version of the Spanish-American War as well as a dramatic account of America's emergence as a global power.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, War, Military History, Spain, American

768 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the long, involved story of a short, messy war across two oceans. Published one hundred years later, Musicant's book is the best history of this 1898 war I have found.
At war's end, the USA annexed pieces of Spain's empire, like Puerto Rico and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Immediately, we had a messier war of indigenous insurgency in the Philippines, best told in Stanley Karnow's book In Our Image. The Panama Canal was a later, direct result. You can find all our familiar politics on view around 1898: the dance of intervention and isolationism, of American exceptionalism and empire.
Musicant writes well about politics and the armed services, especially the Navy. The story of ships includes the explosion of the Maine in Havana and the battles of Santiago and Manila Bay. The army's campaign's include Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill before Santiago, Cuba, and General Nelson Miles, the old Indian fighter, overrunning Puerto Rico. Real characters from all sides, in Spain, Cuba, and the Phillipines, are well portrayed.
Florida is a big part of the story as the Army assembled in Tampa - with difficulty - and, of course, Cuba is 90 miles from Key West.
When I was a kid I had a lot of art in prints on walls by Frederic Remington of Western scenes: he was a correspondent here, and often portrayed Florida and Cuban cattlemen and rancheros.
I put this book down - oh, a few years back, in mid-campaign - and picked it back up during recent hurricane events in Puerto Rico. The chapter on Nelson Miles and the brief campaign across that island was brief and telling.
We live on in the consequences of our conflicts. This one is a dynamo that keeps on giving.
Highly recommended.

[Doug McNair · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good military and political history of the Spanish American War. It was my main source when playtesting Great War at Sea: 1898 and was an important source when I was designing Infantry Attacks: To Hell With Spain!. It suffers a bit from the fact that the author seems to have relied mostly on American sources; some of his conclusions aren't upheld by Spanish accounts. But the wealth of military detail and the author's strong narrative voice more than make up for it. An excellent history of a brief period that changed American forever.

[Josh Liller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went looking for a standout book about the Spanish-American War, and I found it.

Musicant sets the stage with introductions into American society and politics in the 1890s, and to the situation in Spain and Cuba. He chronicles the spiral into war. The book is nearly 200 pages into its 650 or so pages of main text before the war actually begins, and that's a good thing.

This book covers the usual high points, namely Manila Bay and Santiago. Theodore Roosevelt is just another officer and the Rough Riders just another regiment; they don't get the focus they often do. An entire chapter is spend on the events in and around Santiago after Cervera's defeat. The logistical problems are covered. The Puerto Rico and Manila Campaigns each get a chapter. The peace process - which lasted longer than the war - gets a chapter as do the immediate postwar scandals, particularly the meatpacking issues.

I thought some of the extensive political debates dragged on a bit, but that was an issue more of the subject matter than the writing. The biggest weakness of the book is that it wraps things up a bit abruptly; a longer Epilogue would have been better. The explosion of the USS Maine also gets a curious treatment: only the Sampson Board of Inquiry and its Spanish counterpart mentioned; the 1911-1912 investigation during the salvage of the wreck and the 1970s investigation by Hyman Rickover which cast a lot of doubt on the mine theory go unmentioned.

Musicant is a very good writer, including numerous pithy and sometimes biting comments. He's not shy about his opinions including McKinley as a weak leader and just how badly the Spanish were in over their head. One of my favorites: "The material and professional rot that permeated the Spanish armed forces after for hundred years ran deeper than even the most pessimistic of projections." The Naval Battle of Santiago is described in particularly dramatic fashion. If I had to compare him to another author I think it would be Rick Atkinson.

If you don't mind reading a book on the subject twice as long as most of the alternatives, I think you'll find it well worth your while. Probably not your first book on the subject, but a must read for anyone interested in the Spanish-American War. I really enjoyed it.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear, comprehensive and lively history of the war.

Musicant has a good grasp of the military aspects, and the coverage of the battles is dramatic. He describes how McKinley wanted to focus on America’s economic recovery following the 1893 depression but proved unable to ignore the unrest in Cuba. He describes how the US military proved far more efficient than anybody had a right to expect, since it had no experience in fighting a war like the one that broke out (more troops would end up dying of disease than combat) He also covers how the US raised bigger forces than it really needed, and how outmatched the Spanish were; the war was basically a naval one, and the Spanish navy was a pile of junk.

Some more background on American attitudes toward empire would have been helpful, and his discussion of the war’s origins, background, and long-term impact seems a bit hasty. There is nothing on the later insurgency in the Philippines, or on antiwar sentiment at home. The narrative can also bog down in minutiae at times, and the pace is rather slow.

A thorough, readable and very well-written work.

[E. Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely detailed account of the Spanish American War. Musicant is a scholar on every aspect of the war. If you want to know the size of every cannon, the name of every battalion, the food and logistics, every part of a naval ship, every battle plan and every possible outcome, and the biography of every Spanish and Cuban actor...this is the book for you. If you just want the story, G.J.A. O'Toole's The Spanish War will suffice.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good middle of the road revisit of the Spanish-American War, as it steers between the gung-ho jingoism of the Rooseveltians (which has been revived in some circles) and the "revisionist" school of anti-imperialists. As in all of his previous histories of US military operations, Musicant starts out with the premise of good intentions and geopolitics. President William McKinley had no grand strategy, he writes. His administration was led into the war step by step and made its strategy as it went along.

Only the very facts Musicant marshals litigate against this median path. The US had been inflamed by a pro-war partisan press for three years, regarding Spanish atrocities in Cuba - much like it would a century later demanding "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya. The American "Maine" inquiry did not *have* to select only the points of evidence necessary for a pro-war verdict. The US did not *have* to turn Cuba into a protectorate once Spain was defeated, nor brush aside Aguinaldo and his Philippine insurrectos from the fruits of victory. This was determined from the beginning by those itching for US expansion into its "rightful place in the global sun."

This beginning predated the actual rebellion in Cuba, that allegedly launched the Spanish-American War. The US had already savored the fruits of saltwater empire in Hawaii, only to have it snatched away by Cleveland's middle-of-the-road Democrats. The pro-empire GOP had to marshal every trick in its bag to countermand this impasse, with the pliable McKinley as its deceptively bland spokesman. The media blitz that legitimized the military one was likewise paid for by the same strategists that put McKinley in office. As Musicant does relate, Cuban leader Jose Marti launched his Second War of Independence to *pre-empt* open US designs for annexation; a wise move on his part, as this most surely would have occurred with or without war. Yet the very presence of the Junta and Liberation Army, ironically, gave the US the pretext it needed for direct intervention.

While it's true that McKinley himself was more a man of pious platitudes, his closest advisor - the financier Mark Hanna - always salivated over the Philippines as the gateway to "the riches of China and the East." Alfred Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt were his biggest theoretical allies pushing for empire, seeing Spain as a suitably weak target for assertion. American warmakers have always specialized in taking on weaker opponents for self-aggrandizement, from Mexico to Iraq. Spain was a prime example of a "pissant country" being "in the way" of American objectives. One can't pursue strategy in such conscious, linear fashion and then claim victory by "default."

McKinley's waffling -as Roosevelt would have described it - was political calculation as much as "weak will." He was anxious to preserve presidential authority in the face of a jingo Congress and an anti-imperialist minority. It was thus "unseemly" for him to strike anything but a disinterested, magisterial pose no matter how rabid his party and its financiers wanted to smash and grab, or predetermined the course.

Thus I totally disagree with Musicant's central tenet that the US Empire was created by lack of design. However, his book book is a readable, detailed, and thorough account of the battles and politics of a pivotal but largely forgotten swing period - though not to be taken as the final word.

[William J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very detailed story of the build up, execution, peace negotiations and aftermath of the Spanish American War.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who grew up near Tampa, one of the most important cities in the waging of the Spanish-American War, I have always been fascinated by the absence of mind that led the United States to strive to compete with the empires of the world at the time and then, almost as quickly, to forget that they were an empire and to hypocritically condemn other imperial nations while managing to the present day to more or less preserve our empire.  And let us clearly understand that this book demonstrates pretty clearly that the imperialism that possessed the American people at the turn of the 20th century was not forced on it from above but rather demonstrated that the American people were pushing for more war and more demands and more territory and America's leaders were often far more shy and timid about making the demands that the people wanted, although by and large what the American people wanted the United States ended up getting at the bargaining table, largely because politicians feared the consequences of not responding to America's dangerously bellicose mood despite their own fears and concerns.

This book is more than 600 pages long and is divided into eighteen mostly sizable chapters.  After acknowledgments the author discusses the end of the frontier in 1890 (1) and the longstanding problems of Cuban desire for independence from Spain (2), the fateful trip of the Maine to Havana harbor (3), and the efforts after the Maine's explosion for the US to get to a war footing (4), just before the US won a smashing naval victory at Manila Bay (5) and then engaged in the difficult task of raising up an army for invading Spanish territories (6).  After that the author discusses the dangerously bellicose Spanish mood (7), the American efforts to hunt Spain's Atlantic squadron (8), American empire builders (9), the blockade of Cuba (10), the beginnings of the Santiago campaign (11) as well as San Juan Hill (12), and the present of the destruction of the Spanish squadron near the 4th of July (13).  After that the author discusses the capitulation of the Spanish forces in Santiago (14), the American conquest of Puerto Rico (15), the Manila Campaign (16), the peace negotiations that ended the war in American victory (17), and the scandal of canned meat and sickness after peace (18).  The author closes the book with a discussion of America's empire as well as the usual notes, bibliography, and index.

If you are looking at a history of the Spanish-American War that gives a lot of context, this book is definitely a worthwhile one if it is a fairly heavy read.  Blending military, diplomatic, and political history together and looking at the point of view of Americans, Cubans, Spaniards, Filipinos, and others (like the diplomatic community of other European nations), this book does a good job at pointing out with a dry and ironic sense of humor the pride and absence of mind that led to warfare between the United States and Spain and that led American to stumble its way into the possession of a global empire.  It is a great shame that America did not have the sort of soul searching that should have resulted from the acquisition of an empire.  It is almost as if we forgot that we had an empire, and do not recall today that we still have it, even as we have acquired the swagger and the bad reputation that empires have without having acquired the self-awareness as to our state.  This is lamentable, and has led to a growing divide between the self-image of Americans and the way that we are seen by others, which was already the case in 1898 and has only increased to this day.

[Paul Barta · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5: somehow, too much information

The Spanish-American War, at least from an American classroom perspective, is a bit of a footnote. When we learned about it, it was a few relevant fun facts between the Gilded Age and TR's presidency: the Maine, yellow journalism, why Puerto Rico is a part of the US, anti-isolationism, etc. There was no home front, no national battlefields run by the NPS, nothing stateside to visit. This book takes a deep, Marianas Trench level dive into the war and shows what it really was: a quick, anticlimactic ass-whooping. Turns out America was not fully competent at war, but won easily because Spain was 350 years past their prime, ran the war through delusional bureaucrats sending sometimes-competent generals to do egregiously stupid things, and inevitably surrendered. Calling it a "war" is like calling a 25 year old with bad punching technique beating the tar out of a senile 80 year old man in a bar fight a "boxing match."

I learned all that from this book, which is great, automatic 3 stars. But is there enough in this ass-whooping to account for 750 pages? Absolutely not. To be fair to Musicant, he lets you in on every piece of info about the war, including interesting parts like Roosevelt's role at Kettle Hill and fun small things like Spanish officials on Guam not knowing the war even started when asked to surrender. But this is surrounded by everything that made my APUSH teacher from a decade ago a bad teacher: the intense focus on names and dates, the pithy useless asides, and a distinct lack of an editor who could say "Hey man, we don't need this part." The lack of editing comes through obvious and giant situations: it takes 200 pages to even get to a declaration of war, and those 200 pages are mostly a back and forth between Spain and US playing diplomatic war footsie under a table while the Maine explodes. I can see a lot of readers leaving this book and all its good and potentially interesting info behind before the war even begins.

[Scott Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book!

I found that while he did skip around chronologically, this was necessary in explaining the entire war in the history surrounding it.

I was also happy to see that Teddy Roosevelt wasn't the primary focus of this book. He really goes into some great detail describing all the major players. I especially liked that he took time to explain the Spanish side of the war and how their thoughts shaped the war and the peace talks.

I was sad to see that this appeared to be the author's last book before he passed away. I will definitely be looking to read other books he wrote.

[James Christensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spanish American War - in-depth (too) - preferred the condensed version found in "The Spanish-American War" by Albert Marrin where I summarize the war & its effects.

[Valerie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lost interest halfway through. This book could have been shortened significantly.