The Men Who “Made” the Spanish-American War

This book makes the case that Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph Wheeler, with help from Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis, brought about the Spanish-American War.

While this is a generally held, though perhaps exaggerated, idea, Bernstein lays out the evidence of their support for war. He does this while also giving us looks at their lives, private and public, and personalities, against the background of events, foreign and domestic, that had shaped their world view. So, we learn about the politics of bimetallism, a street brawl in Chile, a Venezuela debt crisis, Mahanians, meetings in smoked-filled rooms, newspaper circulation battles, real battles, from the Civil War to the Balkans, but particularly in Cuba. And, of course, how their actions helped move the nation to war.

While a good yarn, one which throws a lot of light on American life and politics in the 1890s, Bernstein is a bit careless; he fails to mention that the orders Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt issued on February 25, 1898, to Commodore Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet in the Philippines should war break out, were in the standing orders in the event of a war with Spain, and not, as is often written, Teddy acting on his own initiative.

The book’s principal flaw, however, shared by most works on the Spanish-American War, is that it fails to address the role of the Cuban nationalists in bringing about the conflict, by supplying the atrocity stories, and in Cuba covertly targeting Americans and American interests, and perhaps worse, having demonstrated skill in blowing up ships. Nor do we hear much about the role of the Spanish actors, some of whom perversely wanted war. So, while offering often very lively and entertaining accounts of these interesting Americans of the time, Team of Giants fails to fully explain how the war came about.

---///---

Note: Team of Giants is also available in e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

www.nymas.org