UNCLE SAM’S INTERVENTION

The United States became an imperial power almost by accident. On Feb. 15, 1898, the armored cruiser USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. A month later, following an official investigation into the matter, a Navy board of inquiry concluded a mine had sunk the vessel, thus implicating Spain, Cuba’s overlord. On the heels of that decision the United States declared war on one of Europe’s oldest empires. In the Spanish-American War, naval supremacy was to prove decisive.

In Banana Wars naval historian Ivan Musicant asserts, “The American naval renaissance and the rise of the United States as an empire and world arbiter were parallel and symbiotic.” Unlike the U.S. Army, which bumbled into the conflict with poor logistics, outdated rifles and tins upon tins of contaminated meat, the Navy, with its augmented fleet of cruisers, revenue cutters, gunboats, armed tugs and yachts, supply and repair vessels and colliers, successfully routed a Spanish fleet that had seen better days. The Navy’s crowning achievement occurred on May 1, when Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron took Manila Bay in a single day. Soon thereafter prominent citizens in New York and San Francisco erected the Dewey Arch in Madison Square and Dewey Monument in Union Square, respectively, as symbols of U.S. naval might.

Imbued with confidence and a fleet that could stand up to a first-class European navy, President Theodore Roosevelt, among the great cheerleaders of American imperialism, added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, warning European nations to refrain from future interference in Latin American affairs. “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence that results in a general loosening of