Spanish-American War

The Spanish-American War, fought in 1898 between the United States and Spain over interests in Cuba, was triggered by an alleged Spanish attack on the U.S. battleship Maine. The war occurred during the Gilded Age (1873–1900), a period of changing definitions of middle-class masculinity. Since the mid–nineteenth century, American middle-class men had been articulating new definitions of masculinity (associated with the notion of a “strenuous life” by contemporaries and described as a “passionate manhood” by historians) that emphasized the body, martial virtues, and military discipline. At the same time, the United States began to emerge as a world power that sought to emulate European colonial powers. The Spanish-American War, referred to at the time as a “splendid little war,”lasted a mere four months, yet it reflected an important convergence of new articulations of masculinity and U.S. foreign policy.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, American men had begun to voice increasing concerns over both their manliness and the status of the United States as an emerging world power. The emergence of the “new woman” in the late nineteenth century appeared to challenge men's position of power in public life, while urbanization and industrialization seemed to undermine middle-class American manhood by separating men from nature and removing physical exertion from their working lives. Meanwhile, the scramble for colonies among European nations after 1889 and the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea-Power Upon History (1890), which linked national greatness to control over trade, military strength, and colonial possessions, awakened fears among some American men that the United States was too weak to compete with the European nations that were carving out large territorial empires in Africa and Asia. For American men afraid of having become “soft” at home and abroad, the Spanish-American War presented an opportunity to assert national strength and reinvigorate white, middle-class masculinity.

American support for the Cuban resistance against Spain served as a defense of an ideal of male chivalry and well-ordered gender relations at home. By idealizing Cuban men as “gallant revolutionaries” and Cuban women as models of chaste femininity, American supporters of a war with Spain depicted Cuba as a society that still defined masculinity and gender relations in terms of an early-nineteenth-century notion of republican manhood and a nineteenth-century, middle-class “cult of domesticity.” The events surrounding the arrest and liberation of Cuban activist Evangelina Cisneros in 1897 reflected the convergence of U.S. concerns regarding masculinity, gender relations, and foreign policy. The daughter of a prominent Cuban family, Cisneros had been arrested by Spanish authorities on the suspicion that she had aided the resistance. The New York Journal and its publisher, William Randolph Hearst, arranged Cisneros's subsequent rescue and transport to the United States. The Cisneros affair allowed prointerventionists in the United States to cast Cuba in the role of the damsel in distress. By aiding Cuba, American men upheld their own revolutionary republican traditions, which suggested that manhood must be earned and supported male patriarchical control over both the household and the nation.

Not all Americans, however, were eager for war. Initially, President William McKinley tried to remain neutral and resolve the conflict through arbitration. As a result, McKinley and his policies became embroiled in American debates over the nature of manhood, war, and political leadership. McKinley's critics, such as Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, called him “Wobbly Willy” and accused him of lacking the physical ability to enforce his demands—a severe accusation at a time when American men increasingly saw the body as the core of male gender identity. McKinley's supporters, however, saw the president's arbitrationist stance as a sign of his moral stamina, sound character, and manly resolve and courage. After the Maine incident, however, [Page 434]McKinley found that his arbitrationist position became impossible to uphold and he declared war on Spain. As a result of the United States' victorious intervention, McKinley was praised for his manly leadership during the conflict.

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