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A visitor to the peaceful village of Hiram, Maine, might well wonder why a Spanish American War monument overlooks the principal intersection. Only a handful of local residents served in any military capacity during that conflict, while 110 men and boys went from Hiram to fight in the Union army between 1861 and 1865, and 42 of them never returned. Another 27 served during World War I, from that town of something over 1,000 citizens. Yet Hiram has no specific monument to veterans of the Civil War, which is our most memorialized war, or to those of the First World War.

The generation that donned uniforms in 1898 had grown up in the shadow of the Union veterans, who were regarded with an admiration approaching awe during the late 19th century. Through the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans relentlessly propagated the example of their own selfless and heroic service to their country, and young men inevitably envied the reverence those old soldiers attracted. Not since 1861 had the United States faced a crisis that demanded an effusive patriotic response, and as the century came to a close the population seemed primed for an opportunity to show that the national spirit still flourished.

As in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the policy decisions that led to the Spanish American War were guided by the political ambitions of expansionist factions within the U.S. government. The popular reaction, meanwhile, was manipulated by exaggerated or perfectly false stories circulated in the American press. In 2003 it was rumored weapons of mass destruction; in 1898 there was the bogus claim that Spanish agents had sunk the USS Maine in Havana harbor. In both cases, that combination led to an unnecessary war that brought disastrous consequences. We can't yet say which of them produced the worse results.

Because of the attenuated condition of the Spanish empire, it was a quick war. Land and naval actions in Cuba and Puerto Rico gave us complete control of those islands within a few weeks. After a short sea battle at Manila, American forces seized the Philippines, and an expedition to Guam took that island without a fight. That led almost immediately to the annexation of Hawaii, because Pearl Harbor suddenly became an important coaling station for U.S. ships on their way to those new possessions in the far Pacific.

This was all very satisfactory to the expansionists, including Teddy Roosevelt, who had been so "bully" on thrashing those belligerent Spaniards. As assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt ought to have known about the notorious design flaw in battleships like the Maine, in which coal bunkers prone to fire lay tight against the powder magazines. He did not mention that defect as a potential explanation for the explosion in Havana.

What we gained from the war with Spain were the islands that made us a threat to the rising power in Asia. On Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was the target of the Japanese attack that crippled our Pacific fleet and finally lured us into World War II. Guam fell four days later. The last American troops in the Philippines surrendered five months later.

The attack on Pearl Harbor alone killed more Americans than died from all causes during the Spanish American War, most of whom fell victim to disease. Maine and New Hampshire each raised one volunteer infantry regiment in May of 1898, and both of them idled the summer away in camp on the Chickamauga battlefield, in Georgia. A few dozen in each regiment died there, mainly from poor sanitation, and the rest came home in September, bored stiff.

The most notable casualty among the soldiers from Oxford County was 2nd Lt. Lucian Stacy, from Porter, who had graduated from West Point in 1896. He went to Cuba with the 20th U.S. Infantry, taking part in the campaign for Santiago, but he came down with malaria after the fighting ended. He had just arrived at home on convalescent furlough when he died on Sept. 4, the day before his 29th birthday. His parents buried him in Kezar Falls.

A second crop of recruits went off to suppress the Philippine "insurrection," after the natives of those islands objected to the Americans simply imposing another imperial regime in place of the Spanish. Alvin Lord, a teenager from Cornish and a former employee of North Conway's Kearsarge House, enlisted for that service on Jan. 29, 1899. The following August he died at his post, defending his country's spanking-new territory against its defiant denizens from a fortified island in Manila Bay called Corregidor. A generation later, thousands of other Americans would find that bastion rather worthlessand more difficult to defend against a better-armed enemy.

William Marvel is a resident of South Conway.

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William Marvel: Wars of the First Amendment - Conway Daily Sun