The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 1, Issue 1, April 2015 | Page 39

the ranks of global powers.
The end of the nineteenth century saw another episode that historians can
cite as America’s entry into a more global status. The 1898 conflict most
commonly referred to as the “Spanish-American War” was such an episode. The
United States projected its military power to the nearby island of Cuba and the far-
off archipelago of the Philippines. Its chief result: a colonial acquisition of the
Philippines, after putting down a spirited native insurgency, and additional islands
in the Pacific and the Caribbean, had a far longer lasting legacy for the United
States than the toothless treaties ending the First World War or establishing the
League of Nations that America would never join.
Some believed the 1898 war with Spain was the catalyst that ushered
America into the ranks of global power states. In the decade after that war’s end,
Harvard University professor of history, Archibald Coolidge, summarized the
result of the war: “It was evident that they [the United States] had assumed a new
position among nations; that henceforth they would have to be counted with as
one of the chief forces in international affairs.” 3 The 1898 war, and the
Philippines’ rebellion against an American change in ownership, tied America to a
global wheel that would turn to further issues. The importance of that epoch
continues to be recognized by historians today. David Haglund also agrees with
the view that in the time of Teddy Roosevelt’s ascendancy, America entered the
world stage as a “world power, but had not yet emerged as a ‘superpower.’” 4
Perhaps the degree of power America wielded during that epoch might be a matter
of debate, but the fact that America had arrived onto the world stage at that time is
less debatable. An assessment within the last decade by Neil Smith has a similar
evaluation of the 1898 war and subsequent successful conquests undertaken by the
United States: “the Spanish American War . . . also marks the cusp of a radically
different globalism. The symbolic dawn of the American Century” 5 was underway
with the aggressive action of the United States; an action that was noticeably
quick through the agency of an attack against Spain, a global power in decline. 6
Among many historians, it seems agreed that the 1898 war and its
aftermath marks the beginning of an era, an “American Century” as some would
call it. Was there yet another time, previous to even the Spanish War, that saw
America wielding power with a global force? Had that bold Yankee assertion
already inserted itself unto the world stage some time before?
The declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 changed the way that
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