'Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!' How the United States emerged from the Spanish-American War as a true global power.

• Author: Depalma, Anthony
• Position: TIMES PAST 1898

On the night of Feb. 15, 1989, as most of the men aboard the USS Maine were asleep in their bunks, a huge explosion ripped apart the steel hull of the American warship and sent it to the bottom of the harbor in Havana, Cuba.

Even today, 115 years later, it's not clear what caused the explosion that killed 266 sailors and Marines. But there is no doubt that the sinking of the Maine contributed mightily to the start of the Spanish-American War two month later.

"Remember the Maine! To Hell With Spain!" became a popular slogan that, combined with sensationalized newspaper reporting, stirred resentment against the fading Spanish empire and built fervor for establishing an American empire around the world.

Although the fighting lasted just 10 weeks and wasn't much of a military contest, the Spanish-American War is a pivotal moment in U.S. history, signalling the emergence of the United States as a global power and ushering in what came to be known as the "American century."

"It is a turning point that marks the first time American expansion goes overseas," says Louis A. Perez Jr., professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The War of 1898. Perez says the Spanish-American War triggered an intense debate in the United States about what some saw as the contradiction between American democracy and intervention in the affairs of other countries. More than a century later, we're still debating America's role in the world and whether the U.S. should serve as the world's police officer (see Timeline, p. 18).

Causes of the War

There is still no definitive answer to what caused the explosion that sank the Maine, but many Americans in 1898 were convinced that Spain was responsible. While tensions had been building for some time between the two countries, there had been no outright conflicts between them.

The cause of much of the antagonism was the situation in Cuba--one of Spain's oldest colonies, claimed by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage in 1492. The Cubans began an unsuccessful 10-year revolt in 1868 against Spanish rule. When another rebellion erupted in 1895, Spain sent a new military leader whose harsh treatment of the Cuban people was reported in gory detail in American newspapers like The New York Journal and The New York World.

The sensationalized stories from Cuba were examples of what came to be known as "yellow journalism." Americans sympathized with Cuba's struggle for independence, which many felt resembled America's own fight for freedom against the British more than a century earlier.

There was another reason for the intense interest in Cuba. Every U.S. president since John Quincy Adams (1825-29) had worried that Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida, could become a strategic threat if it fell into the wrong hands. Spain's continued presence there was a glaring exception to the Monroe Doctrine--a policy introduced by President James Monroe in 1823 that said the U.S. would step in if a European power interfered in the affairs of North or South America.

By 1898, the Spanish empire that had once included territory on five continents from Africa to the coast of North America had been reduced to just Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the Spanish Sahara, a few islands in the Atlantic and Pacific, and the Philippines. Filipinos, like Cubans, were fighting for independence.

As resentment against Spain intensified, President William McKinley (1897-1901) initially rejected the idea of intervening in Cuba...