What impelled the US to fight Spain was not a war-crazed public infected with yellow journalism, as most historians have for conventional wisdom, but the collusion of an ambitious political party pair seeking to again make the US a country "safe for oligarchy."
Moreover, despite the US defeating Imperial Spain, within the Republican Party, the Populist movement soon yielded to a Progressive movement led by Senator Robert La Follette, which culminated in the presidential election of 1912 in which more than 70 per cent of the votes were against the incumbent US president, William Howard Taft (1909–1913), who came third: "The privileged interests... seemed about to receive their death blow.
Hence his presidential favoritism towards the Allies and inflexible antagonism towards the Germans and the Central Powers, despite every belligerent having violated international law in prosecuting the war.
Most noteworthy is the First Red Scare (1917–1920), the Wilson administration's extended wartime suppression of the civil liberties of antiwar critics.
In 2003, Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham compared The Politics of War to the works of Henry Brooks Adams by emphasising its contemporary relevance: "Karp offers a clearer understanding of our current political circumstance than can be found in any two or twenty of the volumes published over the last ten years by the herd of Washington journalists grazing on the White House lawn."
Despite the harshly-accurate assessment of the time chronicled, Liberty Under Siege concludes reiterating the historian's trust in Jeffersonian democracy.