the spanish war ruined what wasn't already ruined here in the empire and this writer backs that up;

 In his 1899 essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” America’s foremost classical liberal William G. Sumner put forth a critique of the Spanish-American War that, in retrospect, was more horrifyingly accurate than he could have imagined.

Reflecting on the defeat of Spain in Cuba and elsewhere by the United States, it is worth quoting at some length:

“We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies…We have self-government…if you mean by it acquiescence in what a little group of people at the head of the government agree to do. The war with Spain was precipitated upon us headlong, without reflection or deliberation and without any due formulation of public opinion. Whenever a voice was raised in behalf of deliberation and the recognized maxims of statesmanship, it was howled down in a storm of vituperation and cant. Everything was done to make us throw away sobriety of thought and calmness of judgment and to inflate all expressions with sensational epithets and turgid phrases. It cannot be denied that everything in regard to the war has been treated in an exalted strain of sentiment and rhetoric very unfavorable to the to the truth.”

Unfortunately, it is entirely unnecessary to explain how prescient these insights have proven.

In the words of that later monster—crowned great president courtesy of statist historians—Woodrow Wilson, “No war ever transformed us quite as the war with Spain transformed us.”

Indeed, the so-called Progressive Era is instructive for its wholesale abandonment of the old American traditions in favor of those institutions of the rival European nation-states, whose central banks, welfare states, standing armies, and propaganda arms made managing both population and permanent wars possible.......more........