Episode #232 - Why President McKinley? (Part III)

July 15, 2025·1 hr 32 min·5 clips

President McKinley, haunted by Civil War memories, desperately tried to avoid war even as public fury mounted.

The USS Maine already had a story attached to it before the explosion. The host starts with a ship meant to announce American naval seriousness, then stays with the delays and disasters that made the cruiser seem cursed. Blueprints burned. Armor plates arrived years late. The Homestead strikes and industrial lockouts left sixteen people dead before the steel-nickel plants were running again. Then came the easy explanation. Later accounts blamed the yellow press, as if newspaper outrage by itself had dragged America into war with Spain. Not quite. W. Joseph Campbell's warning matters because that version lets the rest of the political machinery off the hook. The press mattered. Randolph Hearst did not single-handedly create the Spanish-American War from a newspaper office. Older ambitions were already there. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and James G. Blaine all show how long Cuba had sat in the American imperial imagination. Blaine says the quiet part plainly. His view of Cuba as part of the American commercial system lets the host point to the imperialist cards on the table without much need for decoration. Then the Jingoes arrive. These politicians wanted a more aggressive, interventionist American foreign policy, with ambition dressed up as hard-edged patriotism. Theodore Roosevelt sits close to the center of that argument. As undersecretary of the Navy, he represents the faction insisting America had the right to throw its weight around internationally. So the Maine is not the whole story. The episode treats the ship, the press, Cuba, and the Jingoists as pressures building together, not one tidy cause. That is the useful complication. A war often flattened into one explanation becomes a story about appetite, opportunity, rhetoric, and power already moving before the final crisis.

As heard by us

A careful look at how a delayed ship got folded into a much bigger war story.

Sebastian Major treats the USS Maine less as a ship tale than as a case study in delay, politics, and memory. He follows the vessel's long construction trouble, then ties it to the yellow press, Cuba, and the older American appetite for empire.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the Maine story pulled apart, this one goes straight at it.

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