The Reick Telegram and the Spanish-American War

One of the most controversial subjects relating to the origins of the Spanish-American War is the attitude of the business community toward the approaching conflict in the winter and early spring of 1898. Writing in the 1930s, Julius W. Pratt found that “the overwhelming preponderance of general business opinion” opposed intervention in Cuba. “After the middle of March 1898,” Pratt went on, “some conservative forces came to think intervention inevitable on humanitarian grounds, but many of the most influential business journals opposed it to the end.”1 Three decades later Walter LaFeber challenged Pratt's thesis. In The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (1963), LaFeber contended that business attitudes began to shift “during the last two weeks in March when influential business spokesmen began to welcome the possibility of war in order to end the suspense which shrouded the commercial exchanges.” Philip S. Foner agreed in 1972. “With the support of a substantial section of, if not the entire, business community, McKinley moved to war,” he wrote. The LaFeber thesis has not entirely supplanted the Pratt argument, but the role of the business community in legitimizing war with Spain receives a greater emphasis among diplomatic historians in the wake of LaFeber's work.2

Argument (complex analysis · Economic history · Economics · Empire · Interpretation (philosophy · Intervention (counseling · Order (exchange · Political science · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Cuban History and Society · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

• American Business and the Spanish-American War

  Julius W Pratt•Hispanic American Historical Review•1934

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