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Martial Spirit (American military experience)

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Walter Millis' profound book--first published in the early 1930's--is a "re-examination" of the causes, course, and effects of the Spanish American War. He argues that contemporary histories and explanations did not adequately do justice to the War's real causes or its importance as a pivotal moment in American History. His thesis is that the Spanish American War represents a manifestation of a "martial spirit" and a not-so-innocent rite of passage for the United States from a self-consciously moral regional power into a global power.
Mr. Millis, although a graduate of Yale, is no academician but a life-long journalist and editorialist, first in Baltimore and later in the New York newspaper hierarchy. The Martial Spirit (1931) is his first history and its warm reception when it was first published, given its editorial tone of condemnation, can be attributed to the less confident attitude of an America in the midst of the Great Depression.
The title draws its power from the thesis. Millis does a painstaking job painting a picture a pre-War American identity that is convinced of its moral superiority and the purity of its motives. The first quarter of the book is devoted to this pre-war portrait while simultaneously chronicling our not-so pacific/pure intentions with respect to Cuba. He argues that another spirit is also part of our collective national identity--a "marital spirit." Less eloquently, this trait is a propensity for the naked use of power. It had been fed with our own internal conquest of the vast regions of the west. However, once the frontier had been conquered this spirit finds its expression in the eventual War with Spain. Millis does a particularly good job of demonstrating the almost revolutionary influence of the "yellow press" in keeping the fires of the martial spirit stoked with inflammatory and often false information. This is not surprising given his background as a journalist.
Millis provides abundant evidence to support his thesis. At times the book reads like a morality play at others like a black comedy...but throughout he uses primary source memoirs, newspaper editorials, and diplomatic demarches interspersed with a rich blend of analyses and editorializing of his own. Millis' discussion surrounding Secretary of State Olney's dispatch to Great Britain regarding Venezuela is one of the many powerful proofs of both the not-so latent martial spirit and self-perceived righteousness of our country during that period. It is almost on par with the seminal passage in Thucydides' Melian dialogue--except in this version, to paraphrase, "the strong do what they can (Great Britain), and the stronger (the United States) do even more."
Millis' also argues that the war was avoidable and unnecessary. All the events that lead up to the explosion of the Maine seem to point to a crisis that has passed. No matter how much the newspapers and the martial spirit push for war, the realities of the Cuban situation and the integrity of Spanish diplomatic attempts to mollify the United States seem to decrease the momentum for a deepening of the conflict beyond an unpopular guerrilla war. Millis also richly exposes the irony of becoming embroiled in a counter-insrugency in the Philippines with the United States in a role similar to the one we portrayed for the Spanish "oppressors" of Cuba.
The Martial Spirit goes a long way toward exposing and clarifying the national myths still in existence today about the Spanish American War. It also establishes the practice of revisiting history by new generations on firm ground. The third, fourth, and nth order effects of history, hinted at by Millis as still "scarcely calculable" in 1931, are still playing themselves out today in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The present-day actions of the expatriate Cuban community in South Florida are eerily reminiscent of the Marti junta in New York. Finally, the messy interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen not as something new, but something much older.
The book closes with a powerful unanswered question about where this martial spirit, yoked to incredible power, can lead. Posed in 1931, Millis revisits this question in the post-nuclear book _Arms and Men_. Perhaps the question is even more powerful for our own time than for that of the 1930's or 1950's. That this question is still relevant and thought provoking is only one of the many reasons Millis' book remains powerful.
John T. Kuehn, US Army Command and General Staff College (2010)