Before 1898, when American soldiers died in foreign wars, their bodies stayed where they fell. The dead of the Mexican War lay in Mexican soil. The Confederate and Union dead of the Civil War remained where they were buried, sometimes hastily, on the fields. The decision in 1898 to retrieve American bodies from Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico was a new policy and remains, in modified form, the policy of the United States today. Congress made the appropriation; the War Department's Quartermaster Corps did the work. Bodies were disinterred under tropical conditions that had often left identification impossible. Many of the dead arrived at Arlington as unknowns. They were buried in what is now Section 22 of the cemetery, with members of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Section 23 and civilian nurses, all of whom had died of disease, in Section 21.

The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America - a hereditary lineage society for women who could trace ancestry to colonial-era leaders - took up the project of memorializing the Spanish-American War dead in 1900. Their first effort was modest: four Spanish guns captured during the war were mounted on granite pedestals in the burial field. Two were modern guns from the Spanish armored cruisers Vizcaya and Infanta Maria Teresa, both destroyed in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898. The two smaller bronze cannon came from a Spanish coastal battery somewhere in Cuba. The bronze guns were spiked; the modern guns had their breechblocks removed. Winifred Lee Brent Lyster - wife of a Michigan doctor and a distant relative of Robert E. Lee - chaired the society's Spanish War Memorial Committee. She raised nearly $7,300 and selected Arlington as the site. Secretary of War Elihu Root approved the project on October 23, 1901.

Lyster and another committee member, Hortense Addison Batre, traveled to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in the summer of 1901, where they were struck by the inscriptions over the exhibit-hall doorways. They learned the lines had been written by the poet and Century Magazine editor Richard Watson Gilder, an influential literary figure of the Gilded Age. They asked their colleague Mary Townsend, who knew Gilder, to convince him to write words for the Arlington memorial. After some hesitation he agreed. The committee considered listing the names of all the dead on the memorial, but the number was too large. Instead they decided to produce a Memorial Record Book - the Book of Patriots - and a bronze tablet at Arlington bearing Gilder's inscription. The book, eventually hand-bound in green Levant Morocco leather by Baltimore's Ruzicka Bindery, ran to 324 pages of parchment with hand-drawn India ink lettering and ornamental chapter heads for each state. It took three years to complete.

On the afternoon of May 21, 1902, 150 representatives of the Colonial Dames' National Council adjourned their Washington meeting and drove out to Arlington for the four-thirty dedication. Major General John R. Brooke, commander of the U.S. Army's Department of the East, presided. Roughly a thousand Spanish War Veterans attended under the leadership of their national commander Lee M. Lipscomb. The memorial is a single granite column rising from a square plinth in the center of a small grass plaza. Around the top of the plinth are forty-four bronze stars - eleven on each face - representing the forty-four states then in the Union. A polished black granite sphere sits at each corner of the base, and a bronze eagle with outstretched wings perches atop the granite ball that crowns the column. The four captured Spanish cannon stand across Lawton Avenue on a flagstone terrace, aimed east. The Boston Evening Transcript criticized the design at the time as too plain for the site, urging that the Colonial Dames should have raised more money for something grander. The Transcript expressed the hope that the Army would not allow any other memorials nearby. The Army has not.

The Record Book Committee, led by Esther Gill Jackson of Maryland, raised an additional 760 dollars to publish the Book of Patriots and designed a stand to display it inside Arlington House. Lois B. Cassatt of Pennsylvania - a relative by marriage of the painter Mary Cassatt - submitted the winning design in January 1904: a soapstone table on a brick pillar, with a lockable fireproof box for the book itself. The book stand was installed in 1904 in the basement of Arlington House. Cemetery officials, unaware that the stand was designed to rest on bare earth, instead placed it on a wooden floor above. The thing was so heavy the floor sagged and had to be reinforced. In 1932 the cemetery's administrative offices moved out of Arlington House to the Old Administration Building, and the book stand was moved with them. Its whereabouts have been unknown since at least 2013. The book itself is preserved. A third bronze tablet, added by the Colonial Dames on October 19, 2008, reads: 'In Honor of All Who Serve Our Country.'