" For King well understood that while war made progress possible, it also threatened progress, activating the backlashers, revanchists, and racists who run through U.S. history. The War of 1898 opened the military to more African Americans, giving them a mechanism to claim a place in the nation. The same year also witnessed, in Wilmington, North Carolina, white soldiers returning home and slaughtering African Americans, driving them from public office. For all that war turns reform into a transactional arrangement (some suffragists, for instance, traded their support for Woodrow Wilson's war in exchange for his support for their right to vote), and for all that war worked as a safety valve (helping to vent extremism outward), it also created the aggressive, security- and order-obsessed political culture King criticized. "

― Greg Grandin , The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America