Although the Korean War is sometimes referred to as “the forgotten war,” the Spanish-American War is truly a forgotten war. That is regrettable, given the enormous effect the war had on the United States, Spain, Cuba and the Philippines, not to mention Puerto Rico and Guam. It ended the Spanish Empire, made the United States a global power, and brought fame and the presidency to Theodore Roosevelt. And much like America’s ill-fated adventure in Vietnam, the war showed how a nation’s good intentions can have a bad, even terrible, effect when carried out through unwise political and military policies.
“Splendid Liberators” by Virginia Beach author Joe Jackson, a comprehensive history of the Spanish-American War — and the Philippine-American War that immediately followed it — should do much to make readers remember what some of its U.S. participants thought of as a “splendid war.” As Jackson shows, the conflicts seem less splendid when one remembers that, for example, although the United States lost about 4,000 military personnel to combat and disease in the Philippines, the Filipinos lost between 10,000 and 20,000, and the number of Filipino civilians who died was at least roughly a quarter million and may have reached 1 million or more. The wars ejected the Spanish from Cuba and the Philippines but included, on both sides, waterboarding, concentration camps and scorched-earth policies.
“A thousand boys in blue” bound for Manila, Philippines, aboard the SS City of Rio de Janeiro, which sailed for the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. From an 1898 stereographic print during the Philippine-American War. (Courtesy/ Griffith & Griffith/Library of Congress)
Jackson’s book is a social and cultural history as much as it is a military history. It insightfully sketches Cuban and Filipino leaders such as Calixto García and Emilio Aguinaldo, and American politicians, journalists and nurses such as William McKinley, Stephen Crane and Clara Barton, not to mention numerous “ordinary” people whose names are almost lost to history. Moreover, Jackson did research in both Cuba and the Philippines and found participants’ letters and diaries not widely drawn on in prior histories of the war. The result is a fascinating read (despite its 800-plus pages) that serves as an indispensable resource for those who wish to study what Jackson says became “the template for every American ‘small war’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” — for example, the “Banana Wars” in Central America and the later conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Joe Jackson’s “Splendid Liberators.” (Courtesy/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Americans who do not know much about the Spanish-American War itself may know the cry “Remember the Maine!” that sprang up after that U.S. warship exploded in Havana’s harbor in February 1898. The destruction gave impetus to the American belief that it was time for the Spanish to relinquish control of the resource-rich island just 90 miles from Florida. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randoph Hearst used their newspapers — and exaggerated or even invented “facts” — to whip up war fervor and blame the Spanish for what was probably an accident. The Maine incident led to a U.S. blockade of Cuba in April 1898 and soon to declarations of war by the United States and Spain.
On May 1 a U.S. fleet under Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. On July 1 the “Rough Riders” (1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry) under Col. Theodore Roosevelt; the 3rd U.S. Cavalry; and the 10th U.S. Cavalry (African American “Buffalo Soldiers”) successfully attacked Spanish-held Kettle Hill, part of the San Juan Heights. On July 17 a U.S. fleet destroyed the Spanish fleet at Santiago de Cuba, and the war ended with the signing on Dec. 10 of the 1898 Treaty of Paris. Although U.S. histories generally credit Americans with freeing Cuba from Spain, the Cubans, as Jackson makes clear, believe that although U.S. participation was helpful, they would have ousted the Spanish on their own.
U.S. soldiers in a trench during the Philippine-American War, shown in an 1899 stereographic print. The caption writer, referring to U.S. Army officer Frederick Funston, wrote, “ ‘Till my regiment is mustered out’ — Funston’s reply when asked how long he could hold a captured trench.” (Courtesy/Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)
And as Jackson also makes clear, most of the horrors of the war were yet to come. Although the treaty freed Cuba (legally at least; the United States dominated Cuba’s economy until the revolution led by Fidel Castro in the 1950s), it gave the U.S. control of Spain’s former holdings of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. But the Filipinos, understandably, did not want U.S. masters any more than they had wanted Spanish ones. And the length and scale of the savage fighting in the Philippines dwarfed the conflict in Cuba.
From early 1899 until July 4, 1902, and then, on a more limited scale from 1902 until 1913, the United States sought to assert control over Philippines. The war made famous such characters as the wily David Fagen, an African American soldier who, perhaps in reaction to the virulent racism of the time, deserted from the U.S. Army, joined the Filipino insurgents and became one of their officers, and the jingoistic Frederick Funston, an outspoken and controversial Army officer, eventually a major general, who fought in both Cuba and the Philippines, was awarded the Medal of Honor, and relentlessly sought to capture or kill Fagen (whose fate remains unknown).
The war saw America employ the concentration-camp and scorched-earth techniques it had condemned the Spanish for using in Cuba, use the “water cure” (waterboarding) that Roosevelt privately called “an old Filipino method of mild torture,” and summarily execute hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Filipinos. Among the Filipinos, the death toll soared. The result was an uneasy peace that led to the Philippines’ becoming a U.S. commonwealth in the 1930s. It did not become independent, effectively ending the U.S. experiment with empire, until 1946, after the United States and its allies, including the Filipinos, had expelled the Japanese who occupied the islands during World War II.
The U.S. Army used Gatling guns, here “trained on the Filipinos, near Manila,” according to the caption writer for this stereographic print in 1899. The rapid-fire weapons were lethal but, being heavy and mounted on carriages, were not suited to jungle warfare. (Courtesy/American Stereoscopic Co./Library of Congress)
“Splendid Liberators” adds to the list of interesting histories that Jackson, formerly a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot, has written, including “The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire,” one of Time’s Top Ten Books of 2008, and “Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary,” winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize.
Although he uses the occasional cliché, sometimes switches from past to present tense when describing past events, and has an unusual fondness for “ammo” over “ammunition,” Jackson’s writing is clear and crisp and consistently results in works that, as here, are excellent examples of what narrative nonfiction should be (even if, in this case, the book is arguably longer than necessary). It is well illustrated with maps and photos and includes voluminous notes.
One finishes “Splendid Liberators” with an appreciation for how vast the panorama of history can be and admiration for individual feats of heroism on all sides. But one also wishes that U.S. political and military leaders had been more wise during these conflicts — and that their successors had studied the wars in Cuba and the Philippines more closely and learned more from them. Although, as Jackson notes, at the time one could say that the “United States had learned, as do all conquerors, that Empire and Death go hand in hand,” that lesson is one the United States and other nations have had to learn again — at high cost in treasure and, of course, in blood.
Timothy J. Lockhart is a Norfolk lawyer and former naval intelligence officer who retired from the Navy Reserve as a captain. His seventh novel, “Broken Kite,” was published by Stark House Press in February. He and Jackson served on a speakers panel during the Muse Writers Conference in Norfolk in September.
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About the book
“SPLENDID LIBERATORS: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire”
Joe Jackson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 816 pp. $39.
