Cuba, the Philippines, and the Hundred Years’ War Frank Ninkovich (bio) Kristin L. Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xii + 305 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Louis A. Pérez, Jr. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xvi + 175 pp. Notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Although the Spanish-American War lasted only four months, it has not ended for historians. Why the war broke out and why it should have culminated in the acquisition of an American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific are questions to which historians have not been able to provide satisfying answers. Indeed, their explanations, provided in the course of a Hundred Years’ War of conflicting interpretations, have become part of the problem. The mountain of historiography that has been built up, far from furnishing a conceptual promontory from which to gain a clear view of the past, has in some ways blocked our vision. As one might expect, the recent celebration of the war’s centennial has stimulated renewed interest in the events of 1898. The works under review represent two of the more notable attempts at breaking the historiographical impasse. Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood brings the conceptual weapon of gender theory, which is relatively new to diplomatic history, to the fray. At a minimum, she considers gender to be a useful tool for linking together the jumble of unrelated causal hypotheses that now pretend to pass for explanations of the war, but she is clearly more attracted to the prospect of “grounding foreign policy decisions . . . in the gender politics of the turn-of-the-century United States” (p. 14). In other words, she advocates razing the existing incoherent structure of explanation and rebuilding on a gendered conceptual foundation. Her story begins with what she calls “the manly ideal of politics” in the 1890s. In a system that had a decidedly “fraternal character,” she says that “to win political authority, men had to appear manly” (p. 23). Hoganson argues [End Page 444] that the emphasis on fraternalism was partly related to increasing strains between classes which led to a growing concern that “the American political system was rotting from within because of an absence of manly honor” (p. 29). It was also coming under assault, she contends, from the outside, especially from feminist reformers who had rather different ideas about what the modal political personality ought to be. As some antisuffragists put it, “the transfer of power from the military to the unmilitary sex involves a change in the character of the nation. It involves in short, national emasculation” (p. 132). Male egos also suffered a body blow to their self-esteem from the Depression of 1893. The result of these concerns, she argues, was the rise of the jingoes, people who “regarded war as an opportunity to develop such ‘soldierly’ attributes as strength, honor, and a fraternal spirit among men” (p. 36). Emblematic of this threatened sense of masculine identity was the way in which the Cuban crisis was reported. Though the rebel forces who had been fighting for independence from Spain since 1895 were sympathetically portrayed by the jingo press, they were almost always depicted in chivalric terms. Cuban women were damsels in distress, eager for heroic rescue by American knights, while male insurrectos were written up as examples of chivalric honor—brave, fraternal, and respectful of Cuban womanhood. Accounts of Spain, by contrast, characterized the colonial relationship in negative gender terms “as one of lustful bondage” (p. 51) or else portrayed Spain as duplicitously effete and feminine. These images of the principals in Cuba appealed to many American males because they could imagine themselves in the benevolent role of rescuers and because “it dovetailed with their goal of revitalizing the manly ideal of politics within the United States” (p. 56). By aiding the Cuban insurgents, American honor would be vindicated abroad and American manhood revitalized within. The preoccupation with manliness helps to explain why honor was the key word...