Spanish American War :: essays research papers

The Spanish and American War The Americans were brought into The Spanish and American War on February 15,1898. The Americans came into this war because a naval boat of ours called the Maine was blown up. On that boat, 327of our sailors were killed in the explosion. With this explosion, the navy used it by having a slogan ,â€Å"Remember the Maine,† to get volunteers into the navy to help fight. We though that the Spanish were to blame for blowing up our ship. But, really there was something wrong with the engine which lead to the big explosion. This was not found till they lifted the ship out of the water in 1911. When this happened many newspapers journalist {yellow journalism} took advantage of the explosion and wrote whom they thought did the explosion or who did the people want it to be. One of these newspaper tycoons was William Randolph Hearst. He took great advantages of the war and stretched the truth to the extreme. He did this just to sell more newspapers and to make money. Hearst went over in h is personal boat and took pictures in Cuba of poor and starving people there. He even captured a couple of the Spanish soldiers and turned them over to the Americans. America fought because we had big money in Cuba. All together we had over a $250 million dollars invested there with sugar and other materials that we did not what to be destroyed. We also had $100 million dollars invested in the tobacco plantations, and $50million in transportation. Our president at that time was William McCleain. He did not want to get in this war because he hated war. But when he did he decided to take some other thing that we need also. These things are the Philippines, Guam, and Portico for navel passages. On April 11,1898 McCleain gave a speech to congress for war, and they approved it. The war looked in big favor for the Spanish because they had an army of 400,000 men and we only had only 28,000 men, but this changed after congress declared war. The national guard got 1million recruits during the war, this was the highest ever. In the war there were two generals from the Civil War. These guys are William Shaft who weighed 320 pounds. He had to get a special tub and had to be hoisted up onto his horse.