Editing Spanish–American War (section)

===Historiography===
[[File:The last stand of the Spanish Garrison.jpg|thumb|The last stand of the Spanish Garrison in Cuba by [[Murat Halstead]], 1898]]

The overwhelming consensus of observers in the 1890s, and historians ever since, is that an upsurge of humanitarian concern with the plight of the Cubans was the main motivating force that caused the war with Spain in 1898. McKinley put it succinctly in late 1897 that if Spain failed to resolve its crisis, the United States would see "a duty imposed by our obligations to ourselves, to civilization and humanity to intervene with force".<ref name="Annual Message"/> Intervention in terms of negotiating a settlement proved impossible—neither Spain nor the insurgents would agree. Louis Perez states, "Certainly the moralistic determinants of war in 1898 has<!--I have not been able to find the cited source online in order to verify this, but I'll comment here: [Sic: should be "have"], but I've left this unchanged in this direct quote from a source. This probably does not warrant a visible editorial [[WP:SIC]] comment.--> been accorded preponderant explanatory weight in the historiography."<ref>Louis A. Perez, Jr., review, in ''Journal of American History'' (Dec. 2006), p. 889. See more detail in Perez, ''The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography'' (1998) pp. 23–56.</ref> By the 1950s, however, American political scientists began attacking the war as a mistake based on idealism, arguing that a better policy would be realism. They discredited the idealism by suggesting the people were deliberately misled by propaganda and sensationalist yellow journalism. Political scientist Robert Osgood, writing in 1953, led the attack on the American decision process as a confused mix of "self-righteousness and genuine moral fervor," in the form of a "crusade" and a combination of "knight-errantry and national self- assertiveness."<ref>Perez (1998) pp. 46–47.</ref> Osgood argued:
:A war to free Cuba from Spanish despotism, corruption, and cruelty, from the filth and disease and barbarity of General 'Butcher' Weyler's reconcentration camps, from the devastation of haciendas, the extermination of families, and the outraging of women; that would be a blow for humanity and democracy.... No one could doubt it if he believed—and skepticism was not popular—the exaggerations of the Cuban ''Junta's'' propaganda and the lurid distortions and imaginative lies pervade by the "yellow sheets" of Hearst and Pulitzer at the combined rate of 2 million [newspaper copies] a day.<ref>Robert Endicott Osgood, ''Ideals and self-interest in America's foreign relations: The great transformation of the twentieth century'' (1953) p. 43.</ref>

In his ''War and Empire'',<ref name=":3">{{Cite book|title=War and Empire|last=Atwood|first=Paul|publisher=Pluto Press|year=2010|isbn=978-0745327648|location=New York|pages=98–102}}</ref> Prof. Paul Atwood of the University of Massachusetts (Boston) writes:

<blockquote>The Spanish–American War was fomented on outright lies and trumped up accusations against the intended enemy.&nbsp;... War fever in the general population never reached a critical temperature until the accidental sinking of the ''USS Maine'' was deliberately, and falsely, attributed to Spanish villainy.&nbsp;... In a cryptic message&nbsp;... Senator Lodge wrote that 'There may be an explosion any day in Cuba which would settle a great many things. We have got a battleship in the harbor of Havana, and our fleet, which overmatches anything the Spanish have, is masked at the Dry Tortugas.</blockquote>

In his autobiography,<ref>{{Cite book|url=http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3335/3335-h/3335-h.htm|title=Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography|last=Roosevelt|first=Theodore|date=191|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170218032858/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3335/3335-h/3335-h.htm|archive-date=February 18, 2017|url-status=live|df=mdy-all|via=Project Gutenberg}}</ref> Theodore Roosevelt gave his views of the origins of the war:

<blockquote>Our own direct interests were great, because of the Cuban tobacco and sugar, and especially because of Cuba's relation to the projected Isthmian [Panama] Canal. But even greater were our interests from the standpoint of humanity.&nbsp;... It was our duty, even more from the standpoint of National honor than from the standpoint of National interest, to stop the devastation and destruction. Because of these considerations I favored war.</blockquote>