49 Fun Facts About Spanish-American War

Which 1898 war tax was still collected in 2006?

Phone calls: the one-cent levy fell only on costly long-distance calls, and though repealed and revived several times it outlived the war by more than a century.

In which harbour did the battleship Maine blow up on the night of 15 February 1898?

Havana: she had been sent after riots in the city to protect Americans there, and the blast killed most of the men aboard, turning a show of the flag into a cause for war.

Which territories did Spain cede to the US after the war of 1898?

Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines: Cuba, the cause of the war, was not annexed, because Congress had ruled that out in advance, and it became independent in 1902 under American supervision.

Who was US president during the Spanish-American War?

William McKinley: he held out against the war fever for two months after the Maine blew up, won re-election in 1900, and was shot dead by an assassin the following year.

Spanish general Valeriano Weyler earned which nickname in the American press for herding Cuban civilians into camps?

The Butcher: his camps were meant to cut the rebels off from the countryside, but hunger and disease killed civilians in vast numbers and turned American opinion against Spain.

Which exiled Cuban poet launched the 1895 uprising against Spanish rule?

José Martí: he had organised the revolt from New York, but he was killed in a skirmish within weeks of landing and became the martyr of Cuban independence, honoured as 'the Apostle'.

What is Cuba's first war of independence, begun in 1868, called?

The Ten Years' War: a sugar planter's call to arms started it, and the peace that ended it left Cuba Spanish, so its veterans took up arms again in 1895.

What name is given to the stolen 1898 message in which Spain's ambassador called the American president weak?

The de Lôme letter: Cuban rebels got hold of it and a New York paper ran it as 'The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History', forcing the ambassador out days before the Maine blew up.

Which two New York publishers' sensational coverage of Cuba became known as yellow journalism?

Pulitzer and Hearst: the name came from the Yellow Kid, a comic-strip character the two papers fought over in their circulation war, and it stuck to their lurid Cuba headlines.

Where does the mainmast of the battleship Maine now stand as a memorial?

Arlington Cemetery: Army engineers raised the wreck from the harbour floor in 1910–12, and her mast now rises over the graves of about 230 of her crew, set on a base shaped like a gun turret.

What did the US Navy's 1898 inquiry blame for the explosion that sank the Maine?

A mine under the hull: the court named no culprit, but many Americans blamed Spain; later studies, including one for Admiral Rickover in 1974, pointed instead to a coal fire inside the ship.

How did the popular American slogan that began 'Remember the Maine' end?

To Hell with Spain! The rhyme became the war party's rallying cry, though the Navy's inquiry never said who had destroyed the ship.

What name, taken from a British music-hall song, was given to Americans clamouring for war with Spain in 1898?

Jingoes: the word came from an 1878 London song vowing to fight Russia 'by jingo', and twenty years later even Spain's ambassador was sneering at the jingoes in Washington.

Which measure in the 1898 war resolution renounced any American claim to Cuba?

The Teller Amendment: named for Colorado senator Henry Teller, it promised to leave the island to its people once Spain was gone, which is why Cuba never became an American possession like the war's other prizes.

From which Florida port did the US Army's invasion force sail for Cuba in June 1898?

Tampa: tens of thousands of soldiers crowded into the small town, and when the transports finally sailed there was room aboard for only part of the army.

Which assistant secretary of the navy ordered Dewey's squadron to Hong Kong ahead of the war?

Theodore Roosevelt: he liked to make policy whenever the Navy Secretary stepped out, and one such afternoon he cabled the Asiatic Squadron to fill its coal bunkers and be ready to strike.

Commodore George Dewey destroyed a Spanish squadron on 1 May 1898 in the harbour of which city?

His flagship was USS Olympia and he lost no men, with only nine wounded.

Which European power sent a squadron to shadow Dewey's fleet in the Philippines, raising fears it wanted the islands?

Germany: Admiral von Diederichs arrived six weeks after the battle, and the fear that Berlin or another power would seize the islands became a leading argument for the United States keeping them.

Which Filipino leader did Dewey bring back from exile in Hong Kong to rally rebels against Spain?

Emilio Aguinaldo: he declared independence within weeks of landing, but when the Americans kept the islands he turned his army against them and fought on until his capture in 1901.

Which Pacific island group did the United States annex in July 1898, in the middle of its war with Spain?

Hawaii: annexation had stalled for years, but once ships and troops were crossing the Pacific to fight, Congress pushed it through by joint resolution as a stepping stone to Asia.

US troops stormed the Philippine capital on 13 August 1898, unaware of what news from Washington?

A ceasefire had been signed: the peace protocol was agreed the day before, but the news had not crossed the Pacific, and shutting the Filipino army out of the captured city sowed the seeds of the next war.

Which rifle gave Spanish troops in Cuba an edge over the Americans in 1898?

Mauser: it fired smokeless powder, so Spanish riflemen gave off no telltale puff of smoke and were almost impossible to spot.

Where did a battalion of US Marines land in Cuba in June 1898?

Guantánamo Bay: the Marines seized it as a sheltered coaling station for the blockading fleet, and the United States has kept a naval base there under a lease dating from 1903.

Joseph Wheeler led US cavalry in Cuba in 1898, three decades after commanding cavalry in which army?

Confederate army: he was a Southern major general at 26, spent years in Congress working to heal the breach between North and South, then volunteered at 61 for the war in Cuba.

Which American novelist came under fire with US Marines in Cuba as a newspaper correspondent in 1898?

Stephen Crane: he had written The Red Badge of Courage, his Civil War classic, without ever seeing a battle, and Cuba showed him the real thing two years before tuberculosis killed him.

The 1st US Volunteer Cavalry of 1898 was popularly known as what?

The Rough Riders: the regiment mixed frontiersmen with Ivy League athletes, and although it was raised as cavalry its troopers made their famous charge in Cuba on foot.

The cavalry charge of 1 July 1898 remembered as San Juan Hill was actually made up which smaller rise beside it?

Kettle Hill: the dismounted troopers, Black regulars among them, took it first, while the infantry stormed the larger ridge beside it that gave the battle its name.

What weapon's supporting fire was described as critical to the success of the assault on San Juan Hill?

Gatling guns: when the drumming began, men on the slope feared Spanish machine guns, until an officer leapt up shouting 'It's the Gatlings, men, our Gatlings!' as Lieutenant Parker pushed his guns forward.

Which future general fought at San Juan Hill as a lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry?

John J. Pershing: his nickname 'Black Jack' is usually traced to his service with this Black regiment, and it followed him all the way to command of the American army in France in 1917.

Lieutenant Richmond Hobson became a hero in 1898 by deliberately sinking his own ship to do what?

Bottle up the Spanish fleet: gunfire wrecked the old collier's steering and she sank where she blocked nothing, yet Hobson came home from a Spanish prison an overnight celebrity.

Admiral Cervera's Spanish squadron was destroyed in July 1898 as it tried to break out of which Cuban harbour?

Santiago: following orders he thought hopeless, Cervera led his ships out past the waiting American fleet, lost every one of them and was taken prisoner, yet his courage made him a hero even to his captors.

Which battleship's 14,000-mile dash to join the fleet in 1898 made the case for a Panama canal?

USS Oregon: she left San Francisco, rounded South America and reached Florida about two months later ready for battle, and the long detour became the standing argument for cutting a canal through Central America.

Which future American poet served as a soldier in the 1898 invasion of Puerto Rico?

Carl Sandburg: he volunteered at 20 and served in Puerto Rico, then went home to Illinois and enrolled at college, the start of his life as a writer.

Which 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling urged Americans to take up colonial rule in the Philippines?

The White Man's Burden: it appeared in American newspapers days before the Senate voted on the peace treaty, which then scraped through with a single vote to spare.

The Spanish-American War was formally ended by a treaty signed in December 1898 in which city?

Paris: the American commissioners bargained there for two months in a capital largely sympathetic to Spain, and the hardest fight was over who would keep the Philippines.

Which famous American author joined the Anti-Imperialist League and attacked the annexation of the Philippines?

Mark Twain: he had cheered the war to free Cuba, then turned against what followed, serving as the League's vice-president and writing bitter satires on the conquest of the islands.

Which US Army doctor led the board in occupied Cuba that proved in 1900 that mosquitoes spread yellow fever?

Walter Reed: his board ran its experiments on human volunteers and lost one of its own members, Jesse Lazear, to the disease before the case was proved.

Which 1901 measure, written into Cuba's constitution, let the United States intervene in the island's affairs?

The Platt Amendment: Cubans had to accept it as the price of ending the American occupation, and it stayed in force until 1934.

Which disease killed far more American soldiers than combat in the 1898 war, mostly in camps at home?

Typhoid fever: it raged through the crowded training camps before most volunteers ever left the country, and the Army set up a special board whose findings reshaped camp sanitation.

Which US diplomat famously called the 1898 conflict with Spain 'a splendid little war'?

John Hay: once Abraham Lincoln's young private secretary, he coined the phrase as ambassador in London, and within weeks he was called home to become Secretary of State.

The best-known hero of San Juan Hill won which office in November 1898, three months after coming home?

Governor of New York: the colonel proved so hard to control that the state's Republican boss had him put on the 1900 ticket as vice-president to be rid of him, and an assassin's bullet then made him president.

Which Democrat lost the 1900 presidential election after campaigning against an American overseas empire?

William Jennings Bryan: he had backed the war to free Cuba and served as a volunteer colonel, then ran against keeping its spoils and lost to the president who had won it.

Which American in her seventies went to Cuba in 1898 to run relief work and nurse wounded soldiers?

Clara Barton: she had carried supplies to the wounded in the Civil War and then founded the American Red Cross, which she led to the Cuban front herself.

Which rum cocktail takes its name from the Cuban village where the US Army landed in June 1898?

Daiquiri: some 16,000 soldiers waded ashore at the village of Daiquirí, and by about 1910 a rum company's advertisements were using the name for the local mix of rum, lime and sugar.

The US Navy gunboat Gloucester, which fought in the war of 1898, had been which tycoon's private yacht?

J. P. Morgan: the Navy bought his yacht Corsair as war began and gave her to Richard Wainwright, second in command of the Maine when she blew up, and under him she helped destroy the Spanish squadron in Cuba.

Which future British prime minister first came under fire in Cuba in 1895, as an observer with Spanish troops?

Winston Churchill: a 21-year-old cavalry officer on leave, he rode with a Spanish column and wrote home that he had 'heard enough bullets whistle and hum past to satisfy me for some time to come'.

What did the US Army send up over its troops at San Juan Hill, only to draw Spanish fire onto them?

A balloon: army observers went up in it to scout the Spanish positions, but it made a perfect target and drew enemy fire onto the men waiting below.

At Cienfuegos in May 1898, American sailors rowed in under fire to cut what?

Telegraph cables: they dragged the undersea lines up from the seabed and sawed through two of them with hacksaws under fire from the shore, and every man in the boats was awarded the Medal of Honor.

How did US agents try to stop Admiral Cámara's squadron from steaming on to the Philippines?

Bought up all the local coal: Britain also barred him from refuelling in Egyptian waters, yet the squadron got through the canal, only to be called home days later after Spain's Caribbean fleet was destroyed.