Teddy Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, “I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.”

William James, the philosopher, and one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote about Roosevelt that he “gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life…”