If you guessed that the above was excerpted from last
week's press release from the Secretary of Defense, you would be wrong but
forgiven for the error. The above is from the author's preface of the
Full
Official History of the War With Spain, written by Murat Halstead and
published in 1899. As his title suggests, Halstead's project was to
give the official version of the Spanish-American War, one specifically requested
by the president of the United States.
I'm a historian whose research focuses on the late 19th Century Spanish
empire that ended with the War of 1898. Reading and teaching about
this war as the present day in Iraq goes forward is sometimes a surreal experience.
The echoes are sometimes deafening. Do you think the problems
of "embedded" reporting and corporate media are new? Check this out,
from the same preface:
The Press of the United States largely took very extraordinary attitudes
with respect to the war of our country with Spain. It was the belief
of several great journals and journalists that they must be held accountable
for the state of hostilities. They assumed airs of authority as to its
management, its objects. [...] In no war that ever took place did the
Press go so expensively into the enterprise of reporting the current history,
through special representatives, employ so many young men of courage and
talent as historians on the spot, as in this Spanish-American combat of three
and one-half months. The sums of money spent in newspaper enterprise
were enormous. The expense account of the Associated Press was unexampled.
Several newspaper proprietors employed steamers for their personal convenience
and to supply newspaper service such as never before was imagined.
And then this eerie prediction:
If the fashion of last summer is to prevail, the time will come when
the war correspondents will be a factor in the physical force of armies in
the midst of operations...
Halstead's official history seeks to right the wrongs created, in his view,
by instantaneous (for those days) coverage. The tension between official
knowledge and public media, as well as the relationship between the control
of information and state power that I'd like to explore a bit in coming posts.
If you've read my previous posts here you may have noticed that I am more
than a tad obsessed with understanding (and ranting about) the role of media
during war. Well, here is a bit of my "scholarly" explanation for this
obssession. These are not academic pieces I'll be writing here -- just
references, contexts, and ideas I'm thinking about these days.
I. ECHOES OF 1898
or, MR.
BURNS: A REPUBLICAN WHO REMEMBERS
(I said these entries wouldn't be
academic)
One of my favorite lines ever spoken on "The Simpsons" came from evil
Mr. Burns, a man so old he once griped about having lived through five years
of McKinleynomics. One of his quirks is his un-reconstructed hatred
for all things Spanish, a perhaps odd-sounding bigotry today but which also
stems from the era of President McKinley. In an
episode where Bart has hijacked
an army tank, Mr Burns observes the mayhem outside and says to his
assistant:
Burns: Smithers, we're at war.
Smithers: I'll begin profiteering, sir.
Burns: And hoarding. Leave it to the Democrats to let
the Spaniards back in the pantry.
I have to love a show that references the jingoism that led to the
Spanish-American War as
a live memory. The conflict, I think, is rather undertaught in
this country, given the importance of its consequences. While the
War of 1898 has largely been a "forgotten" history in the U.S., particularly
with regards to its impact on the new "possessions", in many ways it marked
the entry of the United States onto the global statge as a colonial power
in the Age of Empire. We might look back to it these days, when much
of the world is wondering whether the U.S. intervention in Iraq is the opening
salvo in a brand new Age of Empire.
Others have already seen the relevance of 1898 for today. In
The
American Prospect, Harold Meyerson has
argued
that "You have to go back all the way to 1898, and the immediate aftermath
of the Spanish-American War, to find a time when the question of an
American empire was on the national agenda in such pure and unalloyed fashion.
At issue then was what the United States should do with the nations--Cuba,
the Philippines, Puerto Rico--it had won from the Spanish in the ludicrous
little war just concluded." In
Salon,
Neal
Gabler suggested that it might serve as a better metaphor for Iraq than
the hawks' evocations of Hitler and World War II or the doves' calling on
the Vietnam-era "quagmire."
So I'm not the only person to comment on the echoes of the Spanish-American
War we might hear today, but I might be the only blogger currently teaching
a college course entitled "1898: From Spanish to U.S. Empires in the Caribbean
and the Pacific" (if I'm wrong about that, I'd love to hear about it).
What I would eventually like to explore more than Meyerson or Gabler
have is some of the other stories to come out of that war. They focus
on the U.S. end of thing; I will do this as well but would also like to add
a more global perspective when thinking of the war's legacies. When
the U.S. and Spain negotiated a settlement to the short conflict, for example,
there were important groups conspiculously not represented at the Treaty table:
Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos. That absence may be one
of the most important aspects of that war we need to think about today. While
it has been relatively easy for the U.S. to "forget" 1898, in colonies and
former colonies, memories often run much longer. We might think about
that as we see protests coming from what is (I think) dismissively called
"The Arab Street".
And did I say "short conflict"? Wrong. That's what comes from taking
a solely U.S. perspective on history. In the words of one U.S. official
it was indeed a "splendid little war" (today Meyerson substitutes 'ludicrous'
as the descriptor)--but to many in Cuba and the Philippines, the war had been
going on for quite some time before the U.S. stepped in to clean up the mess
and declare itself the victor. More on that later. In Cuba the
war isn't even called the same thing; it is remembered as "La Guerra Hispano-cubano-americana"--the
"Spanish-Cuban-American War." More on this later.
That's it for introducing this little series of entries. Next post
on this topic: "The U.S. and the 'Imperialism Canard'"
