EMPIRE BY DEFAULT: The Spanish American War and the Dawn of the American Century. <i> By Ivan Musicant</i> .<i> Marion Wood/Henry Holt: 740 pp., $35</i>

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the shortest and easiest of all American wars. It has not been a favorite American war--nothing like the Revolution or the Civil War, which for one thing did not take territory from other countries. In some ways, the war with Spain resembled the war with Mexico of the 1840s that lasted much longer and brought in far more territory. Both wars have something vaguely unpleasant about them, a stigma that has made them unappealing to the collective American memory and has deprived them of the importance they merit.

Yet the Spanish-American War was enormously popular at the time, and the pressure of popular opinion was probably the most important factor in getting us into it. William McKinley, a cautious president, did not make up his mind to attack the Spanish colonies of Cuba and the Philippines until he was sure that most people wanted decisive action and that the Republican Party was going to benefit from the war in the next election. Once his mind was made up, however, he went to the other extreme and decided to get the most out of the war.

“Empire by Default,” by Ivan Musicant, is primarily a military history. It begins with the origins of the war but really gets going with the story of the roles of the Navy and Army that makes up the largest part of this lengthy book. Musicant, whose previous work dealt mainly with American naval affairs, has ransacked the existing library on the war, in English and Spanish, and has stitched together the facts of every encounter and battle. No other work has made more or better use of the Spanish sources.

In his account of the military side of the war, Musicant’s method is to leave nothing out. His pace is so leisurely that a reader is made to live through every move as if every little detail deserved to be recorded for posterity. This fixation on minutiae may sometimes try the reader’s patience, but it can also increase the tension of some chapters, as in the case of the battle of Manila Bay.

The title of Musicant’s book suggests that this was not a “splendid little war,” as in the phrase by ambassador and later Secretary of State John Hay. It was little, but it was far from “splendid.” It was, in fact, a totally one-sided war. The Spaniards were so outmanned and outgunned that there was never any doubt about the military outcome. The Spanish commanders knew that they were beaten from the outset and fought on in a hopeless cause. Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay took all of a morning. Admiral Cervera, the Spanish commander at the naval battle at Santiago de Cuba, the only real engagement of the Cuban campaign, was totally defeatist from the start; he knew that he did not have a chance. Musicant notes that “the Spanish Navy was a disorganized collection of antiquated junk, unfinished vessels of dubious worth, and scarcely serviceable ships in commission.” And this was primarily a naval war.

Yet Spanish public opinion, with the same ardor as the American, forced a feeble government to fight. Spain was then at the lowest point of two centuries of decline; only its defeat forced the country to examine itself and bring about a measure of recovery. The American victory could not have come so easily and at such small cost if the enemy had been any other European power. The Spanish-American War was virtually a walkover that did not test what the United States could do in a major war.

In fact, the United States was so unprepared for war that some of Musicant’s most graphic pages tell the story of both naval and especially Army foul-ups. Water on ships “looked like muddy glycerin and tasted like the ship’s bilge.” Food was not much better. The care of the wounded approached “a scandalous state.” The Army “had suffered a medical disaster.” Getting the Army from Florida to Cuba brought about such misery for the troops that soldiers in later wars may find the story hard to believe.

And yet, Spain’s capitulation was hailed as a glorious victory. For one thing, powerful newspaper publishers, such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, had worked up such a war fever that they could not afford to greet the victory as anything less than a momentous breakthrough to national greatness. For another thing, the war had been instigated by a cabal of intellectually minded politicians, including then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who viewed the war as if it were a test of manhood and maturity. Above all, a popular yearning for excitement and glory pushed politicians to extreme positions, when they did not have them without encouragement from their constituents.

After the war, a special commission was formed to investigate the War Department’s administration of the conflict. The best thing that could be said about its management of the war was that the hearings revealed no “instance of notable idiocy or corruption in high places.” Gen. Nelson Miles, the commanding general, created a sensation by denouncing the Army’s refrigerated and canned beef. The canned beef was the worst; the meatpackers provided “bad lots containing scraps of gristle, pieces of rope, and sometimes dead maggots.” A surgeon testified that the refrigerated beef “tasted to him of boric and salicylic acid, poisonous chemicals sometimes injected into beef as a preservative.” Epidemics of malaria and other diseases forced an Army corps out of Santiago de Cuba “in unqualified panic.” Ten times the number of men died of sickness as were killed in action. McKinley forced the head of the War Department, Russell Alger, to resign in disgrace.

Yet the war brought Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands under the control of the United States. The protectorate over Cuba was no surprise because it had been coveted ever since Thomas Jefferson’s time. Puerto Rico and Guam, taken as indemnity from Spain, also caused little astonishment. But the Philippines were different. The war had ostensibly broken out on behalf of Cuba and nothing else. The Philippines were so far away, on the other side of the Pacific, that at first McKinley hardly knew just where they were. As Musicant puts it, “in 1898, the Philippines might as well have been the moon.”

To take the Philippines violated century-old rules of American policy. The islands were not contiguous to the United States, as California and New Mexico had been in 1848. The inhabitants of the Philippines had not asked to be taken in nor had they given their consent--two conditions previously regarded as necessary. They had long had a Catholic tradition and were now handed over to a Protestant country. No one expected them to become states, as had other territories that had eventually been taken into the Union.

In short, the Philippines were colonies, nothing less and nothing more. Their condition did so much violence to the entire tradition of the United States that it required a new national ideology to justify this fruit of the war.

But Musicant stops short of analyzing the political transformation caused by the war. He merely notes in his subtitle that it brought about “the dawn of the American century” and that the United States “had now joined the imperial club.” In fact, the United States seemed to wake up one day in 1898 to discover that it had become a “world power,” a term not used by Musicant. By becoming a “world power,” the United States felt itself to be authorized to behave like other world powers, such as Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Japan, and to give up its old claim of exception to the European order. A well-known Harvard professor, Archibald Cary Coolidge, soon wrote a book in 1908 entitled “The United States as a World Power,” in which he observed that “the war of 1898 was a turning point in the history of the American republic” and that “the day had come when they [the Americans] were called to play a part in the broader affairs of mankind even at the cost of sacrificing some of their cherished ideals.” It is this pretension to World Power that links the Spanish-American War to the present.

For all of the bulk of his book, Musicant decided to leave out two critical aspects of the Spanish-American War. After the war with Spain was over, another war in the Philippines began. It was waged by the American Army against the indigenous nationalist force under the command of Emilio Aguinaldo. They had been fighting the Spaniards long before the appearance of the Americans and had supported the American offensive in the false belief that victory over the Spaniards would result in Philippine independence. When this expectation proved illusory, Aguinaldo’s force turned against the Americans, and two years of bloody campaigning were necessary to “pacify” the interior. Thus the “splendid little war” was followed by a dirty little war, which Musicant mentions only in passing. It is a matter of judgment whether the Spanish-American War lasted only until the peace treaty with Spain in December 1898 or until the Philippine forces gave up in May 1902. The Philippines did not gain their independence until 1946.

Musicant also decided to omit all mention of the intense struggle in the United States against the war and its attendant imperialism, which was not a pejorative term in that period. Among the distinguished opponents of the war were William James, the philosopher; Mark Twain, the writer; Carl Schurz, editor, senator and secretary of the Interior; Charles Francis Adams of the famous family; Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist; and others. An active, if short-lived, Anti-Imperialist League was organized in Boston. Congress contained some anti-imperialists. They were not all agreed on everything, but they put up a valiant, if futile, struggle against the main tide of opinion. They were also part of the story of the Spanish-American War.

Musicant’s book is workmanlike and clearly written. It will appeal most to those who like their military history in great detail and in a popular form.