America's Road to Empire; The War with Spain and Overseas Expansion
New York, N.Y. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965. Later printing. Trade Paperback. xii, [4], 124, [4] pages. Includes Foreword, Preface, Table of Contents, Footnotes. Bibliographical Note, and Index. Also includes maps of Cuba and the United States, as well as maps of Hawaii, the Philippines, and China. The chapters are: Cuba, Voluptuous Cuba; Enter Mr. McKinley; Intervention, The Splendid Little War, The Fruits of Victory, and Epilogue. Popular belief has it that the United States went to war with Spain for specious reasons and that, except for the hysteria engendered by the "Yellow Press," the Cuban problem could have been settled peacefully. Professor Morgan argues that the administrations of Cleveland and McKinley pursued a logical course aimed at removing Spain from Cuba by diplomatic means, but that their plan failed because of Spanish inability to reform the island and end the devastating guerilla warfare that raged there. This is one of the America in Crisis series. Professor H. Wayne Morgan was the George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus, at the University of Oklahoma. When Morgan received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1960 for his dissertation on the congressional career of William McKinley, there was not an identifiable field of Gilded Age studies within the historical profession. Between the Civil War and Reconstruction and the popular topic of progressivism, the late nineteenth century languished as an area for scholarly interest. There were robber barons, politicians in the mode of Matthew Josephson, and a comic-opera war with Spain that Walter Millis had covered twenty-five years earlier, but otherwise a kind of dead-zone existed between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Into that void stepped Morgan, known to one and all as "Wayne." He burst on to the national historical scene as an exponent of a new view of the Gilded Age. He published in 1962 a volume on Eugene V. Debs as a presidential candidate, based on his master's thesis. His real impact came with the appearance of William McKinley and His America, published with the Syracuse University Press in 1963. The first full life of McKinley since Charles S. Olcott's two-volume biography in 1916, William McKinley and His America, featured the hallmarks of what would become the Morgan style -- extensive research in manuscript sources, a deft use of language, and a sense of redressing the historical balance for a neglected politician and his period. On the issue of McKinley and the war with Spain, Morgan was more deferential to the older view of the president's leadership than he would be two years later in America's Road to Empire (1965). In 1969, Morgan published From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896, again with the Syracuse University Press. Based on Morgan's command of the manuscript sources and contemporary newspapers, his narrative, as Charles W. Calhoun says, "overthrew the stale polemics of Matthew Josephson and others" in a work that showed "a fine eye for the telling detail and apt quotation." From Hayes to McKinley was underrated when it came out but remains the only synthesis of the era's politics on the national level. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Spanish-American War, William McKinley, Imperialism, Expansionism, Grover Cleveland, Cuba, Henry Cabot Lodge, USS Maine, Theodore Roosevelt, Philippine Insurrection
ISBN: 047161520X
[Book #82372]
Price: $25.00