Team of Giants: The Making of the Spanish-American War

If not for an unlikely alliance among a bespectacled cowboy, a former Confederate general, and a millionaire newspaper publisher, the Spanish-American War might never have been. How these three outsize characters—Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, and William Randolph Hearst—helped ignite the war that established the United States’ offshore empire is the rousing tale that Matthew Bernstein tells in Team of Giants.

From his days as a Dakota deputy sheriff, Theodore Roosevelt had dreamed of leading a cowboy regiment into battle. With a little help from his friends, in 1898 he got his wish. While Roosevelt raised the Rough Riders in San Antonio, Congressman Wheeler delivered bellicose speeches from the US Capitol, and Hearst pulled out all the stops in the San Francisco Examiner and New York Journal. With the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor and President William McKinley’s call for war, the two greatest star reporters of the era, rivals Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane, headed for Cuba to do their part. In Bernstein’s sweeping history, these towering figures come to life as they set in motion events that would put a period on the Civil War era, transform the global media landscape, and alter geopolitics for the twentieth century—with the plight of the Cuban people serving as a backdrop for a world-class contest of wills and wiles.

A stirring narrative built on rigorous research, Team of Giants is a fresh account of the role the martial ambitions of these men played in a war that would launch the American Century and set each man on the path to his own place in history.
 

Matthew Bernstein teaches English at Harris Newmark High School and Los Angeles City College. He is editor of the Wild West History Association Journal and the author of George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age.