Were there more important issues in the minds of expansionists?
Although a number of Americans believed that, by creating a new co- hort of veterans, the Spanish-American War had ensured the well-being of the nation’s political system for another generation, some men continued to be plagued by anxieties that an extended peace would lead to, as one au- thor put it, “effeminate tendencies in young men,” foremost among them the middle- and upper-class white men who enjoyed the many comforts of in- dustrial society. Rather than easing their minds, the post–Spanish-American War valorization of the serviceman as the ideal citizen and political leader only underscored the question that had troubled them before the war: What would happen if the martial spirit dissipated in the United States? Theodore Roosevelt mentioned some of these concerns in 1901 in a letter to his English
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