According to historian, Ralph Raico, the Spaniards had already agreed to all of our demands and President McKinley either refused or failed to pass this critical information on to the Congress (he also lied about the Maine). This fact alone should be enough to make McKinley one of the worst Presidents in U.S. history. Of course the fact that this conflict proved to be one of the least heroic wars that the country had ever fought, essentially turned into a land grab (Puerto Rico, Cuba as a protectorate, Hawaii as an afterthought) and quickly pivoted toward an even more atrocious conflict (the Philippine War in which we undoubtedly gave the Japanese a lot of food for thought down the road) absolutely clinches it for me.
You forget that had the Spanish Armada been able to stay afloat long enough to make it to our shores we'd have had a glut of debris littering the East Coast. Thank God for The Rough Riders.
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