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Politics

Walter Reed, James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse Lazear conducted their yellow fever research as part of the American occupation force in Cuba in the wake of the Spanish-American War. A review of the cause and outcome of the war is helpful if one wishes to understand the political and social context in which the commission worked.

The Spanish-American War and the subsequent occupation of Cuba can be traced to the rapid growth of the American public’s interest in economic, territorial, and cultural expansion during the 1890s. This interest was due in part to domestic economic distress. The Depression and the dominance of monopolies such as Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel forced struggling farmers and aspiring entrepreneurs to look abroad for better economic opportunities.
Equally significant was the alleged disappearance of the American frontier. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier shaped and maintained the American democratic spirit by providing pioneers with new land to independently explore and new problems to creatively solve. By 1890, however, the “Wild West” appeared to be explored, organized, and settled. If Turner was right, and if America had truly lost its frontier, then it seemed that the federal government needed to acquire new territory in order to keep American democracy alive.

In addition, after the wars of the 1880s, Native Americans appeared to be “pacified” and ready to adapt to Euro-American culture. Many white Americans who were convinced that Native Americans were happier than they had been before European contact felt morally obligated to spread their cultural traditions elsewhere, just as the British, French, and Germans were doing in Asia and Africa.
The “yellow press” exploited these developments in American opinion during the Second Cuban War for Independence (1895-98). Yellow journalists such as Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal printed exaggerated reports of Spanish atrocities ordered by General Valeriano “the Butcher” Weyler in order to rally support for American intervention on behalf of the Cuban revolutionaries—and to sell their newspapers. Pulitzer and Hearst furthered their anti-Spanish campaign by publishing Spanish ambassador Dupuy de Lôme’s insulting judgment of President William McKinley as “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd.”The Maine explosion provided the yellow press with its most effective headline. Sent to Havana harbor in January of 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was destroyed by an explosion of unknown origin on February 15, killing 260 American servicemen. Many Americans believed that the Maine had been sunk by a Spanish submarine mine. Hearst’s battle cry, “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!,” established the Maine disaster as a rallying point for interventionists. On April 25, 1898, Congress declared war on Spain.

© Spanish-American War 2007