A Pilgrim’s Digression

Like other controversial wars fought by the United States, the Spanish-American War began under false pretenses, was fought to achieve dubious goals, and though a resounding victory for American hegemony in the world, this victory came at the cost of another people’s blood and land.

When the U.S.S. Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor on April 25, 1898, Spain was a fading world power with only a few scattered colonies remaining of a once great empire. When representatives of the United States and Spain signed a peace treaty later that same year, on December 10, Spain was finished as an imperial power and the United States found itself the proud owner of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. The war cost America about $250 million and 3000 lives, though only 10%, or 300, of those losses were from combat. The remaining 2700 dead were killed by tropical diseases.

The explosion that sunk the Maine that day in April 1898 was only the precipitating factor in a war the United States had wanted to fight all along. In 1878, following the end of a civil war in Cuba, American sugar corporations bought up land in Cuba, so that by 1895 the United States owned considerable interest in the country’s chief cash crop. Revolutionary fervor had not abated in Cuba, and the threat of a renewed civil war threatened American economic interests in the country.

Officially, however, President Grover Cleveland and the American media of the day reserved their outrage for supposed Spanish atrocities, such as the relocation of Cuban natives into camps, where guerilla activity could be monitored and easily put down. Many of the atrocities Spain was supposedly committing were exaggerated or even invented by the newspapers of the day, in competition with each other for sales. At least one newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, saw war with Spain as a way to thrust himself to national prominence in preparation for a political career. Thus, “horrific tales described the situation in Cuba�female prisoners, executions, valiant rebels fighting, and starving women and children figured in many of the stories that filled the newspapers.” Soon enough, President Cleveland reversed his policy of neutrality in the crisis and said for the first time that the United States might intervene.

The Spanish in turn placed the entire country under martial law, which only lent more moral weight to the argument of warmongers such as Hearst that something had to be done to “liberate” the Cuban people.

By the time the Maine was sunk in 1898, Americans had been thoroughly convinced by Hearst and others that Spain was an evil empire that ought to be thoroughly defeated. “But it was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor that gave Hearst his big story�war. After the sinking of the Maine, the Hearst newspapers, with no evidence, unequivocally blamed the Spanish, and soon U.S. public opinion demanded intervention.” Today, historians believe the Maine was sunk not by sabotage or a mine, but by an internal, accidental explosion. Like the WMD fiasco in Iraq, or like the phony Tonkin Gulf incident, which irrevocably deepened American involvement in Vietnam, the “sabotage” of the Maine was what the politicians and corporate interests had been waiting for.

Spain was easily crushed in a matter of a few months, and although Cuba was granted its independence from Spain, its sovereignty was limited and it was forced into a dependency on the United States that would continue for many years. The Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico did not even acquire that much freedom.

The United States ruled the Philippines until granting the islands independence in 1946; America did not always rule gently. In 1899, a group of guerilla Filipinos announced an independent Republic and boldly declared war on the United States, following the killing of three civilians by American soldiers. This little-known war, called the Philippine Insurrection, lasted until 1902 and cost more lives than the Spanish-American War itself, with 4200 American soldiers dead, over 20,000 Filipino soldiers dead, and over 200,000 Filipino civilians killed.

The occupation of the Philippine Islands is a black mark in the history of the United States. Last year, when the insurrection in Iraq began to look a bit more serious than a mere few “dead-enders,” as the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld called them, an email circulated, as emails will, detailing how John J. “Black Jack” Pershing dealt with Islamic extremists in the Phillipines during the period roughly between 1909 and 1916. Whether Pershing actually resorted to such brutal methods is undetermined, according to the sources I’ve read, however the fact that 200,000 civilians were killed during the Insurrection indicates to me that the American government of the islands was far from discriminating about how it dealt with its imperial subjects.

Curiously, Mark Twain, that old curmudgeon, was a critic of American involvement in the Philippines, though he had been an early supporter of the Spanish-American War. What Twain saw in our rule of the Philippines was a contradiction of everything America stood for. He wrote for the New York Herald in October 1900:

I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame for it to content itself with the Rockies. Why not spread its wings over the Phillippines, I asked myself? And I thought it would be a real good thing to do

I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.

But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Phillippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem…

It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Twain joined what was called the Anti-Imperialist League, and naturally, he was criticized for being unpatriotic. In 1901, Twain responded in an essay on the American flag:

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Phillippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I conceded and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.

Twain’s words are poisonously subtle. He distinguishes between the American flag, and thus our founding ideals, which can never be sullied, and an “administration” that he suggests is quite used to “pollution.” If words could be a knife in a fascist’s heart, Twain’s words would strike dead those of all ages who seek to dispel criticism of “wanton” wars by charging opponents with treason or lack of patriotism.

But as we know from our recent experiences, there are no words that can overcome the anger of those waving the bloody shirt of September 11, 2001. They will gladly march to Baghdad and kill ten thousand people for the sake of the three thousand lost that September day three years ago. And should anyone speak up and question whether “peace” and “security” and “liberation” (if these really are our goals in Iraq) can really be brought about by invasion, bloodshed, and subjugation, then that person is told they are not “supporting our troops.”

I support our soldiers; they always get the raw end of the deal. Our soldiers are ordered to do what our bold leaders would not ask their own children to do. And they do it for a pittance, usually with long term consequences for them and their families. I’d probably be one of these soldiers, if I were younger. I may yet be one of them, if more war stretches our services to the point that a draft is needed.

However, I do not support politicians who, in the name of freedom, send soldiers to subjugate a people and “civilize” them, teach them “the American way.” It may be beneficial to us that Iraq be democratic, but forcing them to it at the point of a gun is no different than what we did in the Philippines, and apparently to no better success. Twain writes in another essay on the issue that “we started out to set those poor Filipinos free too, and why, why, why that most righteous purpose of ours has apparently miscarried I suppose I never shall know.”

Our President may well spend the rest of his days wondering how his own “righteous purpose…apparently miscarried.” He will never admit as much, though future events may force the matter. Could it be, Mr. President, that the purpose wasn’t righteous in the first place? To liberate by subjugating, to make free by killing, to democratize by conquering and occupying … if your means so blatantly contradict your desired ends, what the hell do you expect?

Sources:
Crucible of Empire
The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War
The Spanish-American War by David Trask
Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam During the Spanish-American War
Literary Responses: Mark Twain