In April 1898 the United States declared war on Spain. By the end of the war that December, the Spanish had lost their centuries-old colonial empire and the US had emerged as a power in the Pacific.Join Don as he speaks to Christopher McKnight Nichols, Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, The Ohio State University. Nichols' latest book, co-edited with David Milne, is ‘Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories’.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.
What triggered the Spanish-American War?
They've ceded most of the interior territory to the revolutionaries at this point.
You know, it's funny. I don't even think of the Spanish as a major military force back then. It's interesting. I just think of it as a lot of colonies, which, of course, had to have troops in them. But I never thought of them as a great military power after, you know, Cortez. It's funny how we have this sort of image in our minds. But obviously they were. The attack then moves to Santiago.
This is the famous attack, you know, that comes that Teddy Roosevelt plays a part in. But interesting other players are involved. The Buffalo Soldiers, for one thing. This is a fascinating episode. There's so much here that plays out, you know, that just sort of pops up because of the timing of all of this.
Buffalo Soldiers were the black troops that were volunteered to fight in this war because they wanted recognition, because they saw it as a good way to fight Jim Crow, essentially. And they fight under Jack Pershing, who becomes the big Supreme Commander of World War I.
Yeah, Pershing eventually holds the highest command until Eisenhower in U.S. military history. Exactly. You know, Pershing famously says in the Battle of San Juan Hill, this is the Rough Riders moment and all that, that it was this sort of glorious moment at the top of the hill where all these different units, you know, in a rough shod, not particularly – well-planned out manner all mingle.
And you see Buffalo soldiers and Rough Riders who are volunteers and regular military and sort of new conscript types, new draftee types. There isn't a draft in this moment, but people who just leapt up and decided to take up arms, but joined the army. And so you had seasoned folks who'd been in the Indian Wars and much older officer corps, some of whom were in the Civil War.
So it's this fascinating polyglot. And for someone like Pershing, it tells you, what the U.S. military, what the U.S. society is capable of in a kind of pluralistic sense, to use a contemporary language. But also for many of those in that moment, it gives a sense of how problematic this decentralized kind of command could be, that you have a lot of improvisation and
You know, there's a moment in this. I mean, I don't know if you want to go through the blow by blow, but there's a moment in this where Teddy Roosevelt decides to head off because he sees another battle with about five of his soldiers and winds up depleting their ability to do anything. And they have to be saved.
There's a couple different accounts of whether or not, you know, it was one guy with a Gatling gun who saved them or whether or not they were just really drained from charging up and down hills for a while and ravines. So there's a whole lot of this kind of thing.
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