The Spanish American War

This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, neutral.

Prof. Jorge Majfud.

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

Questions

1. What was one of the most relevant events of the Spanish-American War?
2. What is a «false flag operation»? Name some of the most well-known historical cases. Some have been confirmed, and others are still disputed. 
3. What role did Yellow Journalism play in triggering the Spanish-American War?
4. Who were the real beneficiaries of Cuba’s «liberation» in 1898?
5. How did Rudyard Kipling’s poem justify American imperial expansion?
6. Why were the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico transferred to the United States after the war?
7. What were the most critical consequences/outcomes of the defeat of Spain?

Table of contents

Newspapers

Quotes

“This continent is for White people, and not only the continent, but the islands adjacent, and the n**gro must be kept in slavery at Cuba and Haiti, under white republican masters. As for the free blacks, there is another continent for them… The Monroe doctrine is not sufficient.”

John O’Sullivan, inventor of Manifest Destiny myth. Democratic Review, July 1852.

“I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it for a fair equivalent, well—if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery. And a footing in Central America will powerfully aid us in acquiring those other states. It will render them less valuable to the other powers of the earth, and thereby diminish competition with us. Yes, I want these countries for the spread of slavery. I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth, and rebellious and wicked as the Yankees have been, I would even extend it to them. I would not force it upon them, as I would not force religion upon them, but I would preach it to them, as I would preach the gospel. They are a stiff-necked and rebellious race, and I have little hope that they will receive the blessing, and I would therefore prepare for its spread to other more favored lands.”

Albert Gallatin Brown. US Senator, former Governor of Mississippi, and former Confederate Senator. Washington 1858

“The defect of the reservation system was apparent. It is socialist Henry George’s system and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people consent to give up their lands and divide among their citizen’s so each can own the land he cultivates they will not make much progress.”

Senator Henry Dawes.“Friend of the Indians,” on the General Allotment Act of 1887

“Nineteenth-century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world’s surface, temperate America and Australia… the democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien. The presence of the n*gro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a trans-oceanic aristocracy.”

Theodore Roosevelt, National Life and Character, 1894.

Documents

Yellow Journalism

The term is most associated with the circulation war between two New York publishers: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World ans William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal

Yellow journalism was a style of sensationalist, exaggeration-heavy news reporting that dominated major U.S. newspapers in the 1890s, and it played no small part in stoking American public support for war against Spain in 1898. The term is most associated with the circulation war between two New York publishers, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal. Each paper battled for readers with dramatic headlines, exaggerated or fabricated stories, emotional illustrations, and a heavy focus on scandal and crisis — prioritizing sensation, always, over strict accuracy.

Its role in the lead-up to war unfolded in stages. During the Cuban rebellion of 1895 to 1898, as Cuban rebels fought for independence from Spain, yellow journalists ran graphic and often embellished stories about Spanish «reconcentration» camps and General Valeriano Weyler’s brutal tactics — earning him, in the American press, the nickname «Butcher Weyler.» In February 1898, a private letter from the Spanish ambassador criticizing President McKinley was leaked and published by Hearst’s Journal, fueling public outrage; this became known as the de Lôme Letter. Then came the turning point: the explosion of the USS Maine on February 15, 1898. Though the cause was unclear — and likely an internal accident, as later investigations suggested — the yellow papers immediately and confidently blamed a Spanish mine, running headlines that accused Spain of an «act of war.» It was here that the slogan «Remember the Maine,» which you saw earlier on that piece of sheet music, was born — itself a product of this press campaign. These emotionally charged, often unverified stories whipped up public and congressional pressure, pushing a reluctant McKinley toward a war he had initially hoped to avoid. Congress declared war on Spain in April 1898.

There is a famous line, possibly apocryphal, often attributed to Hearst: «You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,» reportedly said to the illustrator Frederic Remington in Cuba. Most historians today consider the exchange unverified, perhaps invented after the fact — but it endures, cited again and again, because it captures something true about the spirit of yellow journalism even if the words themselves were never spoken.

What remains of all this is less an event than a warning. Yellow journalism became a textbook case of how sensationalist media can shape public opinion and foreign policy, a phrase still invoked whenever news coverage strays toward exaggeration or bias. And it left something else behind too: the beginnings of a reform, an insistence — however imperfectly kept — that journalism should answer first to fact.

Platt Amendment

The Platt Amendment was the clause that turned Cuban independence into something more like a supervised freedom. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1901 and attached, almost as a condition of existence, to the Cuban constitution, it emerged in the years following the Spanish-American War, when the United States occupied the island after Spain’s defeat and before it would agree to leave.

Named for Senator Orville Platt, the amendment restricted Cuba’s sovereignty in ways a newly independent nation should never have had to accept: it barred Cuba from entering treaties that might compromise its independence, limited its ability to take on foreign debt, and —most consequentially— granted the United States the right to intervene militarily in Cuban affairs whenever it judged that life, property, or «individual liberty» were threatened. It also secured, indefinitely, the lease of land for a U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, a foothold that endures to this day, long after the amendment itself was gone.

Cuba did not embrace these terms so much as submit to them; the alternative, made clear by Washington, was continued military occupation. And so the amendment was written into the Cuban constitution of 1901, less an act of legislation than a condition of birth. For the next three decades it hung over the island’s politics — invoked, threatened, occasionally acted upon — a reminder that independence, on paper, is not the same as independence in practice. The United States would in fact use it to intervene in Cuban affairs on more than one occasion, most notably in 1906.

It was finally abrogated in 1934, under Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, as part of a broader, if incomplete, retreat from the more heavy-handed forms of American intervention in Latin America. What survived, though, was Guantánamo — and something less tangible besides: a memory, still alive in Cuban political consciousness, of a sovereignty that arrived conditional, and of how long the conditions can outlast the moment that created them.

Further Readings

Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from «The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America» that may be considered for this topic.

1883. He who rules the seas will rule the world

Callao, Perú. March 17, 1883—At night, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan reclines in his bed and, while reading a book by the Swiss Antoine-Henri Jomini (probably The Art of War, published in 1838), has a foundational idea about the key to world power. An invincible navy ensures the political and commercial dominance of nations. The idea is older than the sailboat, but what matters is setting sail when the wind is blowing astern and to starboard.

After a religious experience that had assured him of God’s favor through the Holy Spirit, Captain Mahan, the son of Professor Dennis Hart Mahan from the Military Academy at West Point, had been assigned to a mission in Peru. Along the coasts of South America, he honorably defends the interests of the United States in the War of the Pacific, during which Bolivia loses the Atacama Desert, the Bolivian coastline, its access to the sea, and vast nitrate reserves to Chile. As a captain, Mahan is a disaster. His ships collide and are disorganized. He neither understands nor wants to understand the new technologies replacing the elegant sails with dirty steam engines.

But he has better luck as a theorist. A strong navy, Mahan writes, can blockade, intimidate, and halt the free trade of any nation with opposing interests. Nothing new. During the European Renaissance, the navy of a small country, Portugal, was one of the most powerful and effective on the planet, and through it, the empire expanded to different continents. Now, the navy of another country not known for its territorial expanse, Chile, is the strongest in the Americas and has defeated Bolivia and Peru before Mahan’s eyes. The United States, on the other hand, has invested all its energies in expanding its territory to the south and its industries to the north, becoming a new empire, nearly as powerful as the British Empire, but it has hit its dry borders and does not want to push them further to avoid including so many Blacks and mestizos. It already has enough problems with those inside.

For the United States, the time has come to release its expansive energies without exhausting itself in new border wars. The eagle has grown and must take on the world, but it lacks something, Mahan reflects, something no global empire can do without: he who dominates the seas dominates the world. Unlike Russia, China, Brazil, or any other vast country, the United States now has direct access to the two most important oceans on the planet. This is the moment to understand the needs of the next stage for the race chosen by God.

A few years later, in 1890, Mahan will publish his famous book and manual, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783, with a very poor bibliography for its time, though that is ultimately irrelevant. The book, printed in Boston, becomes an immediate success in the circles of power in Europe and the United States, especially in military schools like the Naval War College in Rhode Island. Its author rediscovered gunpowder: “The U.S. Navy must secure strategic points in every sea. Each is part of a network of exchange between regions where the world’s wealth accumulates.”

Theodore Roosevelt, who met the author in 1888, reads the book avidly and does not stop recommending it as the most important book written in a long time. The German emperor, Wilhelm II, orders his generals to read it carefully. Japan and other European countries also dedicate painful resources to strengthening their respective fleets.

In the United States, the most fanatical creationists tirelessly justify imperialism with a central principle of Darwinism, the struggle for life. In the article “The United States Looking Outward,” published by The Atlantic Monthly in December 1890, Mahan acknowledges: “Honestly, I am an imperialist.” To leave no doubt, he defines it: “Imperialism is the extension of national authority over foreign communities. It is the dominant key to the world politics of our time.” Thus, “the country must look outward for its own well-being.”

The great world wars are set in motion. The Maritime Stage of the United States begins. On land, it will not have as much success. In fact, the greatest global power will have no rivals at sea or in the skies, but it will no longer dare to engage in ground combat. When it does, it will not fare well, not even against small countries populated with inferior races.

A century later, in First Great Triumph, the American diplomat Warren Zimmermann will define this era as the “birth of American imperialism,” without noting that it was already part of a process that began in 1783 with the invasion of indigenous nations and continued with the dispossession of Mexico. For Zimmermann, Mahan’s definition of imperialism “means that a country does not need to seize foreign territory to exercise imperial authority over it.” Such elementary ideas will never be understood by the deniers of American imperialism throughout the 20th century and beyond.

1890. A Massacre with Much Consideration and Justice

Wounded Knee, South Dakota. December 29, 1890—The (…)

1891. A Crash Course in Racism

Tampa, Florida. November 26, 1891—Arriving from New York by invitation of a friend, José Martí visits the Ybor cigar factory in Tampa for the first time and discovers the profession of the factory reader. Not long before, on January 10, he had published in La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York something that was not so obvious at the time but rather subversive: “There is no hatred of races, because there are no races… The soul emanates, equal and eternal, from bodies diverse in form and color.”

The previous generation of Cubans in New York and Florida had dreamed of the annexation of Cuba to the United States. Gradually, as a consequence of the Jim Crow laws that followed the Civil War, the Cubans in exile began to shift their initial dreams toward the dream of independence. On December 7, 1875, President Ulysses Grant abruptly woke them up: the Cubans could not govern themselves. This idea will solidify in the press over the coming decades, in Congress and in the White House, not through the force of evidence but through convenience. Conservatives do not want a new state full of Black people in the Union, but they also do not want another Haiti, a republic of free Black people just 90 miles from their shores. “Any idea of independence is unsustainable,” said Grant. Consequently, the president had made an offer to Spain for the island, without much success, which further angered the patriots in the United States.

On Monday, March 9, 1896, The Journal of New York will publish an editorial under the title “A True American” praising the Americanism of Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama, which “is not only attractive but captivating” because “he has the virtue of capturing attention while convincing the minds of his audience through logic and teaching… Senator Morgan knows the horrors of war, but he is a patriot, not a coward. He knows that war could be avoided, but it would still mean letting a European power meddle in the hemisphere. The vigor, wisdom, justice, and patriotism that Senator Morgan has put into advancing Americanism, that is, annexation, is admirable because it is the Americanism of Manifest Destiny. It is the Americanism of the glory of every patriot. It is the Americanism of the United States against the rest of the world. This Americanism, with or without war, will bring us peace. It is a warning to the nations of the world for all time that the influence of the United States in the hemisphere is unmatched, because it is just, selfless, and noble. Because it is a promise of civilization and liberty.”

But dreams that die continue to live on. The Cuban exile moves from New York to the cigar factories in Tampa, Florida. Before Tampa was called Tampa, it was called Pino City. The Pino brothers, Manuel and Fernando, had opened their cigar factory in that bay a year earlier. In the factory, the Cubans roll cigars while listening to the young man who reads the world’s news to them. He comes from New York, and they say he is a poet and very learned. They say his name is José Martí and that he fits in neither here nor there. He hates weapons, but reads very well, from novels to philosophical essays and political news. It’s worth paying him a few coins for the service while the others focus on something more productive. The tradition of the factory reader in Florida will continue decades after Martí’s death on a Cuban battlefield. In 1921, the editor of El Internacional will claim that the workers of Tampa are “guilty of the unforgivable crime of being workers with a consciousness of their rights.” A member of the Tampa Cigar Manufacturers board will disagree: it’s not any consciousness of rights; “the cigar workers are agitators, supporters of class struggle.”

Be that as it may, José Martí is an independence advocate, as are the humanists and romantics of these times. From the millionaire Eduardo Hidalgo Gato to the socialists Benjamín Guerra, Diego Vicente Tejera, and Carlos Baliño, they all support the cause of the renowned poet. Meanwhile, 15,000 Cubans migrate to Tampa in search of more work in the flourishing tobacco factories. Wages, excellent. A country that is not an island. A continental country. A world power. Like every immigrant to a powerful country, the newcomers exaggerate their virtues and try to convince themselves, convert themselves, justify themselves based on the facts, beyond the facts, and despite the facts.

When the Cuban Vicente Martinez-Ybor founded Ybor City, the Cuban tobacco business had begun to thrive, and the new neighborhood had transformed from a village of barely a thousand inhabitants to a prosperous city with a name on the maps. Ybor City, moreover, had until yesterday a peculiarity: it was diverse. Black Cubans, whites, men, women, Spaniards, and Italians, worked, rested, and enjoyed themselves shoulder to shoulder. However, some things don’t work as well as job opportunities. As expected, Ybor City will draw the attention of the authorities, and they will be forced to end the scandalous practice of racial indiscrimination. Blacks, whether they speak English or Spanish, must form their own districts and are forced to sever ties with the Cuban National Club, which at the time provided medical assistance. One of its founders, the Afro-Cuban José Ramón Sanféliz, admits: “Blacks in Cuba are like whites, so many who come to Florida are bothered by their new social status.” José Rivero Muñiz confirms: “all Cubans, regardless of skin color, are equally admitted to the revolutionary cause.” Another Afro-Cuban, Juan Mallea, will remember the old times: “in our Cuban club and in our work, there was no distinction between blacks and whites. The only discrimination we found was when we left Ybor City.” The Jim Crow laws force Black and mixed-race Cubans to leave the Cuban National Club of Tampa, so they found the Martí-Maceo Union at 1226 East Seventh Avenue in Ybor City. The Ku Klux Klan intimidates the members of the Martí-Maceo club for decades, as well as the white Cuban clubs that show solidarity with the blacks.

As if it were a timid sign of progress, in 1896 in New Orleans, the Supreme Court will rule in favor of Homer Plessy, a quadroon (an individual with one-quarter African blood and the rest European), accused of not recognizing his place in society according to the 1890 Separation Act. In truth, Plessy is, according to chronicles of the time, one-eighth Black, but in Louisiana, he had sat on a train for whites, whites as pure as milk and meringue. Cubans, even those from the upper classes and slave-owners, all fall into this category and gradually get used to living in Black neighborhoods. The few who pass the color test are classified as foreigners, like the Italians from the north or the French from the south.

As a form of social progress, the judge will determine that Homer Plessy, having twenty percent mulatto blood, has the same rights as a white… But on the next train, he must sit, like all others of his condition, in a seat reserved for non-whites. The motto of “equal but separate” becomes unwritten law for another century. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Lincoln years earlier, established racial equality but said nothing about the separation of races or the importance of each one. Shortly after, in 1899, at the Cuban Circle, Black people would no longer be admitted, so Juan Mallea and other Black Cubans had to leave and found another club. Such was the law of the country that had just abolished slavery.

José Martí reads for the workers who cannot read and gathers these indignations against racism in his articles published in newspapers in Buenos Aires and New York.

1893. Democracy, an Instrument of White Supremacy

Chicago, Illinois. July 12, 1893—The University of Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner presents his study “Problems of American History” at the American Historical Association. Jackson Turner concludes that American democracy is not founded on high culture or any ideal but on “the men who come from the forest” (Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill), on the spirit of the frontier, the perpetual pushing of boundaries, and the conquest of what lies beyond, in the exercise of taking freely what they need and extending freedom to the untamed territories. The United States, the expansive spirit that detests the presence of the State (a cursed representative of the limits of the individual, except for its sacred conquering and protecting army), is no longer the product of the ideas of the philosopher Thomas Jefferson but of the soldier Andrew Jackson.

But now the frontiers have collapsed under the pressure of this dominating and conquering spirit. Frederick Jackson Turner’s explanation will quickly catch on and become known as the Frontier Thesis, studied in almost all universities until the Second World War. What will not be said is that, when Anglo-American expansionism collided with its territorial borders (the Pacific Ocean to the west and the ocean of Black or mixed-race people to the south), especially after the overthrow of the “tyrant queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani” in 1893, the same paranoia continued through multiple overseas operations, relying on its two lethal arms: the Marines and transnational corporations. Against President Grover Cleveland’s opinion, the businessmen and Christian missionaries of Hawaii appointed Sandford Dole as the democratic president of an independent nation in a kingdom they barely knew but that everyone realized had natural coal reserves, the blood and oxygen of the new smoke-puffing ships, symbols of the future. “We need Hawaii as we need California,” President McKinley will say in 1998; “it is Manifest Destiny.”

The family of savior missionaries founded Dole Food Company, which would span three centuries with its fruit empire. The Black and mixed-race people of the South would go from being poor owners of their countries and their plots to being poor employees of some powerful American transnational corporation, with virtually no rights other than to work and die of hunger, from preventable diseases, or under the bullets of some patriotic army, the moral reserve of nations serving foreign capital.

In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney will proclaim a new extension of the Monroe Doctrine: the United States not only has the right to exclude any European country from interfering in the internal affairs of Latin American countries but also has the right to rule over any of them “and its word is law.” As always, in this declaration of rights that would later be known as the Olney Doctrine, the affected parties also did not participate in any agreement.

If in the United States the North had won the traumatic Civil War in 1865, now the South once again dominated the politics of the United States, just as it had done since Andrew Jackson in the thirties.[1] Only this time, the cultural component of a few books that sold out upon release was added, previously represented by journalists like John O’Sullivan and a widespread culture of alcohol, fights, and motivational tavern songs that recruited volunteers for the war at hand. Conservatives were never very good with ideas, but they were very good at the media promotion of two or three ideas that could be understood by a seven-year-old.

In Europe and the United States, a myth even simpler than that of Professor Jackson Turner was polished, one easier to consume and digest by the people under the presumption of scientific theory. According to these modern shamans, the Aryan seed had emerged in Iran. That’s why the two words sound similar. From there, thousands of years ago, some of these chosen ones would have migrated to China and others to India, where they made great civilizations possible. However, when the Aryan males mixed with the local women, the luminous race degenerated. Only the Aryans who followed the sun, those who migrated westward and on their way exterminated the inferior races so as not to mix with their desirable women, kept the seed pure and reproduced in Germany, only to continue the path of the sun and migrate to America, where they produced the Teutonic Democracy, always without mixing, and thus remained superior and relentless. In Spain and Italy, the Aryans would have succumbed to the female temptation of the Mediterranean and, therefore, became impure, poor, and lagged behind.

In his best seller of 1893, titled National Life and Character, the British emigrant to Australia, Charles Henry Pearson, states that, if liberated, the non-white races (blacks, reds, yellows, and other tropical variations) by military force and, above all, by their industrial capacity, would threaten the global predominance of the white race, which, sooner or later, would face annihilation. In England, the book sows panic among the upper class and politicians. By the River Thames, in the palace of Westminster, the repeated speeches of the people’s representatives are alarming: the day might come when the inferior races, by the sheer force of their numbers, end up dominating the commerce of their own countries. It’s even feared and declared that the day might come when blacks walk through the halls of London and Paris and the day could even come when marriage to white women is legalized.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the promising writer Theodore Roosevelt writes in The Sewanee Review an enthusiastic 35-page review of Pearson’s book, which he calls one of the best books of the fin de siècle. However, he corrects the author, affected by a certain pessimism, melancholy, and weakness typical of the Europeans of his time. The New York writer, Roosevelt, states that it would still take blacks thousands of years to approximate the race of the ancient Greeks: “Blacks are a perfectly stupid race,” he thinks, writes, and publishes.

Three years later and three years before becoming president of the United States, the same Teddy would confirm his convictions and the convictions of any educated man: “The democracy of the 19th century needs no more reasons to justify its existence than the simple fact of being the instrument for the white race to control the best regions of the New World.”

Across the country, white people rebel against the new rights of black people. Uprisings, lynchings, and coups follow. On November 9, 1898, a mob takes over the courthouse in Wilmington, the largest city in North Carolina, and declares the “Independence of the White Race” based on the “superiority of the white man” and the country’s constitution, which “had not been written to include ignorant people of African origin.” Black people, the majority in this city, had managed to participate in the recent elections, electing some representatives. The next day, two thousand armed white men take to the streets, destroying and burning businesses and the only newspaper in the city run by black people. Predictably, word spreads that some black people opened fire on the white vandals, prompting orders to “kill any damn black person in sight.” To restore order, the governor commands soldiers who had returned from Cuba to take over the city. As a result, several hundred black people are executed, and thousands are forced to abandon their homes. The government and its black representatives, elected at the polls, are replaced by a dictatorship that will never be called a dictatorship but rather the government of responsible and peaceful citizens who had restored “law and order” and the will of God.

Theodore Roosevelt is right: democracy, at least this one, is an invention to favor the white race. To be more precise, it favors wealthy white people. Even feminists, advocates for women’s suffrage like future Senator Rebecca Latimer Felton, will recommend lynching black people who won the 1898 elections in North Carolina, as the more educated and politically active they become, the greater the threat they pose to the virginity of white women. In 1922, for 24 hours, the racist feminist will become the first female senator of the United States from Georgia. The second woman will be Kelly Loeffler, also from Georgia, who, in 2021, will lose her re-election bid to the black candidate Raphael Warnock. On that same day, January 6, thousands of white fanatics will storm the Capitol in Washington, where the Electoral College was set to confirm the defeat of their candidate, President Donald Trump, in the previous election.

For most of the 20th century, as a way to avert the catastrophe of the white race foretold by Charles Pearson, the word race will be replaced by communism. The semantic shift is so effective that it will outlast several generations of misfit critics and unpatriotic individuals.

1895. Yellow journalism is born

New York, NY. February 17, 1895—At the New York World Building, the tallest building in the city, Joseph Pulitzer releases one million copies of the New York World featuring a comic about a character named Mickey Dugan. On May 5, the homeless, barefoot, drunk, and foul-mouthed boy appears dressed in a yellow robe in the first full-color comic strip the world has ever known. The novelty lies in the old being represented in a mass medium. Foul-mouthed and drunk children are hardly a rarity. Children become men with whiskey at home, and men become brave with more whiskey in taverns. Shortly after, the deceitful boy will move, likely for money, to the New York Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst. As quantum physics proves, for some time the character continued to exist simultaneously in his old home and the new one.

But the New York World and the New York Journal dedicate more serious pages to politics and the upcoming war. The competition between the two is fierce, and they resort to sensationalism and the fabrication of facts to stir up primitive emotions like anger and patriotism. The New York Press, a modest newspaper in the city, disdainfully brands the persuasive work of the two major newspapers as “yellow journalism“.

The invention of fake news as a private business model and the war against Spain in Cuba will be forever intertwined. Both enemies, Pulitzer and Hearst, are businessmen and know that nothing sells better than war, misinformation, and the stoking of tavern patriotism. This year, the New York Journal has been selling an impressive 30,000 copies a day. By the time the War against Spain breaks out, which won’t even be a real war, the Journal will be selling over a million copies a day. By then, it will have halved the price of the newspaper (to one cent) in an effort to attract “less sophisticated” readers. It will also have halved any commitment to facts and decency. Among the favorite stories that will later be reproduced in hundreds of other local newspapers across the country, those depicting the Spaniards as barbaric criminals, depraved and pursuing defenseless, almost naked Cuban women, will be particularly appealing.

This war won’t be the first war where the ends justify the means, but it will be the first in history fueled and heated by the media in pursuit of boosting sales.

Joseph Pulitzer will die on October 29, 1911, on his yacht, anchored in Charleston, South Carolina. As his secretary read him a European news story in German, the famed editor is said to have whispered, in his native tongue, “softly, more softly,” and passed away peacefully.

Since 1917, the most coveted journalism award in the country will bear his surname, honoring his fight against corruption and for journalistic excellence.

1898. They attack us again. We’ll never forget the Maine

New York, NY. February 17, 1898—The New York Journal reports that the USS Maine has been sunk in Havana due to an attack by Spain. In one of its front-page headlines, it quotes the opinion of its friend, Secretary Theodore Roosevelt, who doesn’t believe it was an accident. The newspaper offers “a $50,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the criminals who killed 258 American Marines.”[2] Public opinion, as so often, explodes with outrage and demands a war to avenge such an offense. The New York Journal saves $50,000 while newspapers sell like hotcakes.

The two giants of journalism who had just invented yellow press, the New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst and the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer, contradict the accounts of the survivors and confirm the foreign attack years before the first commission is formed to investigate the incident, which, as always, will only matter to historians, not to history.

Remember the Maine!

To Hell With Spain!

Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain! We’ll never forget it. Songs are written, and postage stamps are issued with the commandment “Remember the Maine.”

Joseph Pulitzer, privately, admits that “not even the most lunatic could believe the Spaniards sank that ship,” but few are interested in a possibility that doesn’t sell. On February 17, the two newspapers competing for the nation’s attention publish a report from Captain Charles Sigsbee claiming the explosion was not an accident. It will later be revealed that the report was fabricated. In fact, the foremost explosives expert of the time, Navy officer Philip Rounsevile Alger, concludes that the tragedy could only have been caused by an explosion in the combustion chamber, adjacent to the coal bunker: “Not even the most powerful torpedo known to modern military technology could have caused an explosion like the one that sank the Maine“. A small newspaper, The New York Times, publishes that “no one can be so stupid as to believe that the Spanish could have sunk the Maine.”

But reality is not what it is, but what half the people and businesses want it to be. Within a few weeks, the entire country had become familiar with the “barbaric act” against their Marines. Hundreds of newspapers, like The Nebraska State Journal on April 10, have no doubt about the “criminal responsibility of Spain for the sinking of the Maine and the slaying of its crew, something that most people accept… That’s a declaration of war.” The representative from Nebraska and later Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, a fierce rival of President McKinley and the big corporations in political power, succumbs to the old Anglo-American passion: “Humanity demands that we intervene,” he says. In times of war, almost everyone agrees. Especially when the one with a hammer sees all problems as nails.

Two days earlier, President William McKinley had resisted declaring war on Spain. “I have been in a war, and I do not want to see bodies piled on top of each other again,” he had muttered last Tuesday at a meeting with friends. But the Atlanta Constitution mocked the president and labeled his hesitation as “a display of American manhood.” The solution of those who will not march to any war is the same as always: in one of its editorials, the newspaper asserted, “what we need is a man in the White House.” The same belligerent macho complex has haunted the future president Theodore Roosevelt ever since his father, a philanthropist and powerful businessman, paid a substitute to replace his son in the Civil War.

On February 13, the same newspaper, under the front-page headline “Women of Atlanta Cry for an End to Spanish Harassment in Cuba,” claimed that “the time has come when the voice of Humanity cries out for an intervention by the United States in the Pearl of the Antilles to put an end to the atrocities of Spain against the children and women of that island… Their pleas are directed toward the republic that, in its finest moments of glory, must act with dignity and without selfishness, as the civilized nation it is.” The United States is barely recovering from one of its worst economic depressions and needs markets beyond its borders. The great crisis of 1893 had destroyed businesses, closed five hundred banks, and left 30 percent unemployed in New York and 40 percent in Michigan. Multiple charity houses had to open to offer soup. But the country suffers the well-known W of severe recessions. The Panic of 93 was followed by the Panic of 96. Some question the greed of the rich, and others the Tariff Act of then-congressman William McKinley, which sought to protect domestic industries with a levy of up to 50 percent on imported goods. Soon, the high tariffs of the McKinley Act were replaced by lower tariffs stipulated in the Wilson-Gorman Act.

When Spain insisted on not selling Cuba, the United States took advantage of the Some Democrats, momentarily transformed into a kind of American socialist, lost the elections, and the media spread the false rumor that there were American citizens in the concentration cities.[3] The war with the weakened Spain is on a collision course.

To avoid the inevitable, McKinley offered 300 million dollars for Cuba, but once again, Spain refused. Half a century earlier, encouraged by American slaveholders, the Venezuelan and Cuban patriot Narciso López had launched an expedition from the United States to liberate Cuba, but he had found no enthusiasm on the island because the Creole slaveholders were not as interested in independence. Three years after James Polk offered one hundred million for the same island, another president, Franklin Pierce, had made a new offer of 130 million to buy it without the need for another war. The island is as tempting as Haiti was to France: fertile land producing what the continent cannot, especially sugar, the new white gold.

To help the president with a decision he did not want to make, the New York Journal did not lag behind and began feeding rumors about his masculinity. On February 9, they published a leaked letter from Spain’s representative in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, in which the Valencian diplomat allegedly suggested McKinley’s weak character. In exaggerated headlines, the newspaper that invented yellow journalism titled, once again resorting to superlatives: “The Greatest Insult in the Entire History of the United States“. Surprised by the public release of his letter, worsened by poor translations, Dupuy de Lôme resigned from his post in Washington. The President of the United States demanded an apology from the Spanish government, which arrived immediately on February 14, one day before the famous explosion in the port of Havana.

In Havana, the correspondents from New York newspapers had found no more significant news and focused on reporting some fights between Spaniards and Americans. In January, the New York Journal, eager to outsell its rival, had reported on an incident between drunken men as the greatest offense in the country’s history to the point of headlining: “Next to War With Spain (One Step Away from War with Spain)” demanding the nation’s honor be repaired with a declaration of war “within the next 48 hours”.

McKinley, the president who in his 1896 inauguration speech had assured that his policy would be based on “non-interference in the affairs of other governments” and “avoiding the temptation of any territorial aggression,” as Woodrow Wilson would do two decades later, swallowed his words and on January 24 sent the USS Maine to Cuba under ambiguous reasons: some rumors that the German navy might be sailing in the Caribbean, a certain sense of humanity toward the oppressed people of Cuba…

In January, in a letter to Henry White, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (promoter of Theodore Roosevelt in the new government and the idea of the United States as a benevolent empire) wrote: “any day there could be an explosion in Cuba“.[4] Three weeks later, without any record of the slightest incident, on February 15, an explosion sank the USS Maine outside Havana and killed 261 U.S. marines. Only the captain (who, at the moment of the explosion, had just sealed an envelope with a letter to his wife), his officers, and a few others survived. Commander Francis W. Dickins reports an accident. Naval officer George Dewey confirms it: there has been an accident. Naval captain Philip R. Alger concludes that there was an explosion caused by a sudden fire in the engine room, near the powder magazine.

Within hours, William Hearst, the most successful entrepreneur in American journalism (a former left-leaning Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives who had recently shifted to the conservative right), with one foot on his desk 2,300 kilometers from Havana, orders his editor to break the news that will ignite the patriotic hearts of every American and help him sell more newspapers than his eternal rival, József Pulitzer.

On April 11, President McKinley, demonstrating the practical value of historical amnesia, declares in a message to the nation: “I do not intend to annex Cuba by force… that, based on our moral codes, would be a criminal aggression.” On April 20, so often accused of being less of a man, he signs the declaration of war against Spain. It is the perfect opportunity to forget the wounds of the Civil War and unite once again against a new foreign and corrupt enemy that has unjustly attacked us. It is the end of an old empire and the confirmation of a new one emerging, according to the formula established by Thucydides two thousand years earlier.

Before the last shots are fired in Cuba and the Philippines, on May 2, William Hearst publishes an editorial in the New York Journal titled “Victory! Complete! Glorious!” where he declares, with the same zeal as in past exploits: “truth is with us and God is with the truth.” That is, God is with us, and that day he sells a million and a half newspapers thanks to a war invented to sell newspapers.

As will happen in the Philippines months later, the Cuban rebels were on the verge of defeating the old Spanish empire when the “rescuing fleet” arrived from Tampa, Florida. There is a compelling reason, and as usual, there is a lot of money at stake, and the press does not talk about it: the Cuban rebels had promised agrarian reform, and Americans owned most of the arable land on the island. If barbaric Spain was unwelcome in the Caribbean, much less so was a free Cuba that questioned land ownership as guaranteed by the previous administration. In the language of the North, “a republic incapable of governing itself.”

Thirty years of rebel struggle end three centuries of Spanish domination, but when the rebels declare a week of celebrations and parades of guerrillas through the streets of Havana, the new governor of Cuba, General John Brooke, says no way and decrees that the United States does not recognize the rebel army.

As happened for generations after the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, when the press and taverns repeated “Remember the Alamo!”, when headlines, high school textbooks, and songs by Jane Bowers made multiple generations weep as if it had been a foreign aggression, the virile nation that remembers almost nothing, says it is unwilling to forget and insists, once again: “Remember the Maine!”.

The remains of the Maine will be recovered in 1913. In 1974, the U.S. commission led by Admiral Hyman Rickover will conclude that the real cause of the sinking was exactly what had been reported from day one by its own crew: an explosion in the engine room. “We found no evidence of the explosion of a mine,” the report adds. What is not up for debate is the lie perpetuated by the mainstream American press, by politicians, and ultimately, by an entire nation that will soon forget the matter as a way to complete the tradition.

There is no question about the benefit the incident brought to the United States and, above all, to its major businesses, from newspapers to sugar companies. As Senator Platt aptly summed it up—the same man who would author the 1903 amendment that would keep Cuba under the protectorate of Washington for decades—whether by accident or by an attack from Spain, there was no power in this world that could have prevented that war.”

Irony and paradox combined, a few years later the famed millionaire Andrew Carnegie and his detested left-wing extremist William Bryan would end up joining forces in an anti-imperialist crusade. In a letter to Bryan, Carnegie would acknowledge that industrial workers were against imperialist annexations, and the two would meet almost secretly in New York. Carnegie would offer McKinley to pay out of his own pocket the twenty million dollars Washington was offering to buy the Philippines and then return the country to the Filipinos. On May 16, 1902, Carnegie himself would confirm this in several newspapers. But neither the ultra-wealthy Carnegie nor the progressive Bryan would manage to alter the course of history.

1898. The liberated do not participate in the treaties of liberation

Washington, DC. April 11, 1898—In response to the accidental sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the United States Congress supports the declaration of war against Spain. After thirty years of guerrilla struggle against Spanish administration, the Cuban rebels are increasingly close to victory. For obvious reasons, the American landowners on the island remain nervous but hopeful.

When the Marines land in Cuba, they cannot comprehend (as reported by Admiral William Sampson, hero of the Battle of Santiago and a figure in several epic paintings) “the mystery of the island’s empty beaches” that pave the way for an easy victory over the old and decaying European empire. The mystery was no mystery at all: after years of battles and many deaths, the Cuban rebels had succeeded in driving the Spanish army away from the coasts and other strategic positions. 200,000 Spanish soldiers had been displaced by the rebels in a long and exhausting guerrilla conflict.

Suddenly, between July 1st and 2nd, more than 15,000 American Marines defeat fewer than five hundred Spanish soldiers in the Battle of San Juan Hill, the battle that will decide Cuba’s fate in just a few days. On July 17th, Santiago surrenders to the Marines, and the press in the United States celebrates that the triumph only cost three hundred American lives. When the United States wins another heroic war, the major newspapers will repeat that the Cubans, inherently cowardly, never contributed to their own liberation and only stood by to watch as we saved them and gave them freedom. The rebels did not agree, but it didn’t matter, nor were their opinions recorded by any newspaper or document. At least eighty percent of the rebels who have been fighting and dying on the island for decades are black or mulatto with no significant property. It is no coincidence that in mid-January, the consul in Cuba, General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of General Robert Lee and a former member of the Confederate Army, himself had described the social situation in an utterly clear manner: “the armed rebels insist on an independent Cuba, but the more educated and intelligent ones desire to annex their country to ours.” To a large extent, these educated and intelligent people are white creoles and Spaniards who are protected by the American military from chaos. This is an old echo of a story that will continue to repeat itself throughout other rebellions in the 20th century. The disappointment of the Cuban rebels with the occupying forces, for this and other events unfolding before their eyes, continues to grow with the mockery and racist insults they frequently receive for their futile protests as they eat rations imported from the United States. The New York Times on July 20, under the headline “The Pretensions of the Cuban Soldiers,” reports: “not even our officers disguise their disgust toward their former allies for neither fighting nor working when they should have.” General Calixto García, a former ally, refuses the invitation to a ceremony for raising the American flag and is accused of being resentful, which, according to the newspaper and field rumors, proves his ignorance and that of his soldiers, who were useless in the fall of Santiago. For his part, General Máximo Gómez protests because the Cubans are being treated as if they were incapable of making their own decisions. General William Rufus Shafter, another former combatant of the Civil War against the racist South of his country, reports that the Cubans are incapable of governing themselves. “The city and the rest of the island are a mess, and the army has no respect for these people; all the Cubans we have encountered here are filthy, disgusting Negroes who, even though they eat from our hand, are not going to work or fight with us.”

Almost half a century earlier, on October 18, 1854, a memorandum from the United States government, originating in Ostend, Belgium, and known as the “Ostend Manifesto,” had been leaked in Belgium and had revealed the true fears of the northern country: the loss of control over Cuban slaves, it was understood, could lead to “a second Haiti, with all the imaginable horrors for the white race.” According to the manifesto, the United States had to declare war on Spain if it resisted ceding Cuba, in order to protect slavery on the island, threatened by a completely weakened European power. James Buchanan, later president of the United States, had been the author of this secret communiqué. “We cannot allow another Haiti so close to us, an African republic in Cuba. We cannot tolerate such a horror on our doorstep, betraying our future.” After assuming the presidency of the United States in 1857, James Buchanan offered Mexico $15 million for Chihuahua and Sonora, because from the north and looking at a colored map, they seemed to belong to the same territories taken in 1848. Unsuccessful, he also tried to buy Cuba from Spain for $100 million. The attempts to continue expanding the slave system, its rich culture, and its even richer economy, persisted until the Civil War erupted at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 2, 1861.

In Puerto Rico, the independence leader Luis Muñoz Rivera does not celebrate the new war of the United States against Spain in Cuba. He knows that Washington needs a Caribbean base to build the Panama Canal and suspects that Puerto Rico has been chosen. On May 12, after two months of blockade, a dozen U.S. warships bombarded San Juan, as Zachary Taylor had done with Veracruz in Mexico half a century earlier, or Captain George Hollins when, a few years later, also from a distance, he swept San Juan del Norte in Nicaragua with a rain of cannons from the sea. Now, over 1,300 bombs rain down on the capital of Puerto Rico, randomly killing a dozen residents who could not escape the city in time. The journalists watch from the ships and report objectively what they see, which is almost nothing. At eight in the morning, Admiral William Sampson orders the bombardment to cease due to the lack of enemy response. Only the ship El Terror fails to understand the order and continues firing for half an hour more.

General Nelson Miles announces the arrival of “enlightened civilization” and promises “protection for its inhabitants.”[5] As is the custom of all empires, President McKinley invents a justification to take Puerto Rico, one that sets a precedent for the future “Dollar Diplomacy“: the island is merely compensation for the economic losses inflicted by Spain to American investors in Cuba.

Two months later, on July 28, the U.S. Marines commanded by General Miles issued a proclamation to the people of the island: “the war has been for freedom, for justice, and for humanity… We have come to Puerto Rico to bring you the flag of liberty.” Thus, Washington installed a military dictatorship, one of the first in a long series that would span, like an endless rosary, the entire century to come.

Shortly before, on April 25, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had ordered an attack on the port of Manila in the Philippines. The new metal ships defeated the old wooden ones. Hundreds of Spaniards died in the attack, and not a single American. Soon after, Spanish and American officers agreed to stage a nonexistent battle with flares to transfer the capital of the Philippines from the old empire to the new without bloodshed and with an excellent excuse to deny it to Aguinaldo’s rebels, who were supposed allies of the United States against Spain. In the invasion of freedom, several thousand Filipinos would die in combat, hunted for sport or executed to avoid dealing with prisoners and even less with the wounded. In other words, there were no casualties. Soon after, on July 17, the U.S. Navy took possession of Hawaii to establish a naval base, and the same story of Manila repeated itself in Havana. But malaria claimed ten times more lives of American soldiers in the tropical islands than Spanish resistance. A few months later, on August 12, the surrender treaty was signed in Paris, by which Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The Philippines were captured one day after the signing of this armistice, leading the United States to offer Spain $20 million for the purchase of the archipelago. Just as no indigenous people participated in the sale of Louisiana in that same city in 1803, now no Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino, or Guamanian participated in their liberation.

Some intellectuals like Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Jane Addams protested what they called “American imperialism” and were accused of what others called “anti-American propaganda.” Meanwhile, some American socialists, despite their frequent past antimilitarism, had supported their country’s aid to the Mambí rebels against Spanish colonialism and its concentration camps, and now were not entirely displeased: on August 27, Victor Berger, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of the United States, published in Chicago’s Social Democratic Herald an essay in favor of changing Cuba’s status from a semi-slave colony to a capitalist country, as this was the natural path to socialism. Others, less optimistic like Herbert Cason and Daniel DeLeon, condemned the replacement of Spanish cannibalism with American cannibalism. For Eugene Debs, the “war for humanity” was nothing but pure hypocrisy. “There can be no doubt that the success of the United States will ripen the fruits of its capitalism by enslaving the workers of the world.”

In 1900, the military governor of Cuba appointed by his friend Theodore Roosevelt, General Leonard Wood, informed Washington and the civilized press that irresponsible Cubans were capable of electing “radical leaders” and that most of the members of their assemblies were not “safe leaders.” Worse yet, according to Wood, the Cuban army was composed of “a large proportion of blacks, barely civilized, in whom the old savage spirit has reawakened after these years of combat.”

In the August 1960 issue of Reader’s Digest (Selecciones), Senator Karl Mundt, furious at the defiance of the island’s new leader, Fidel Castro, will declare: “We, who liberated that island from its medieval chains; we, who gave it order, life, technological knowledge, and wealth, are now cursed for our civilizing and cooperative virtues!” Fidel Castro owes “respect to the memory of the American soldiers who died fighting in the hills of San Juan, in the jungles of Cuba to give Cuba its independence”.

1898. Those incapables of governing aren’t left to govern themselves

Manila, Philippines. May 1, 1898—Naval Captain George Dewey, standing on one of the new metal ships, the USS Olympia, doesn’t need to exert much effort to sink the old wooden galleons of the decaying Spanish Empire. In just a few days, he takes possession of “some islands of blacks incapable of governing themselves”. Without hesitation, the English, French, Germans, and Japanese anchor their warships in Manila Bay, but they are soon forced to withdraw from the liberation process.

In the United States, newspapers speak of the blue-eyed blonde, descendant of Thor, the great Saxon god, the god of war and thunder. “Americans have seen the fair-haired naval officer, a paragon of racial superiority, civilization, and manhood”. The Wichita Daily Eagle of Kansas mocks the anti-imperialist tendencies of Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts and, in its May 3 editorial, denounces the Filipino people as “a race incapable of appreciating the friendship of the noblest civilization that ever existed”. In the English magazine Review of Reviews, the young Winston Churchill praises Admiral Dewey for his campaign in the Philippines: “Dewey possesses what the best naval officers possess, virtues found only in England and other Northern races”. The Nordic Christians not only flirt with the Germanic god Odin but even become Darwinists. On July 9, 1898, the Baltimore American states that “it is the old law of the survival of the fittest. The weak must bow before the strong, that is, the American race, the noblest that walks the Earth today.”

The advancements in American naval technology are not enough to make the marines invincible, so they dare not venture inland into an unknown country. The generals estimate they do not have enough men and decide to leave that task to the natives of the islands, the rebels led by Emilio Aguinaldo.

On June 27, 1898, Admiral George Dewey writes to the Secretary of the Navy in Washington from Hong Kong with a certain optimism and sympathy for Emilio Aguinaldo: “The Filipinos are superior in intelligence and more capable of self-government than the Cubans; I say this having known both races very well.” Dewey and Aguinaldo get along well. Aguinaldo reads the Constitution of the United States and finds it perfect, so he decides to accept an alliance with that country. There was no chance that the Americans would not live up to their ideals, he said, and the Americans named his rebels as “freedom fighters.”

Soon after, Emilio Aguinaldo and his rebels manage to besiege Manila. The Spaniards, who are surviving on rats and horses, are just one step away from final surrender. Dewey is not entirely pleased. He makes his calculations. It is not possible to take the countless islands that the natives know better than anyone, but it is possible to take the capital, Manila. Plan A is to bombard the Spaniards and take the fortified capital, but Plan B is more reasonable. So Dewey agrees with the besieged to fake a battle. The Americans will fire a few cannon shots, and soon after, the Spaniards will surrender honorably. This way, the Filipinos will accept the taking of Manila by their allies.

Everything unfolds as agreed, and the major press in the United States publishes emotional articles about the heroic battle of Manila. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, President McKinley, more pragmatic than idealistic, discovers a masterful formula: “we must keep everything we have for the duration of the war. Only then will we have everything we want.”

Once the war with Spain is over, the rebel Emilio Aguinaldo is named president of the islands. He lasts a few months. Exactly 4,234 American soldiers and about one million Filipinos will die in this liberation process.

When William McKinley receives the news that the Philippines is part of the territory he governs, with that strange and inexplicable pride that will endure for generations, he admits: “when I received Admiral Dewey’s cable, I looked at the map and couldn’t locate that country.”

On December 10, Spain and the United States sign a peace treaty in Paris, by which one cedes to the other Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines without inviting any inhabitant from those tropical islands. As is already customary, the United States compensates the defeated, this time Spain, with twenty million dollars, turning dispossession into a legal sale at the low price of necessity.

On December 21, President McKinley issues his famous Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, in which he claims that “the military government of the United States in the Philippines seeks to preserve the value of liberty and individual rights.”

Betrayed in its promises of liberation, on June 2, 1899, the makeshift Republic of the Philippines declared war on the United States. The unequal war would end three years and nearly one million dead Filipinos later, in 1902, with the defeat of the Philippines.

The Filipinos continue their rebellion, this time against the United States, resorting to the only possible strategy, guerrilla warfare, though they will still have to wait half a century more to achieve the long-awaited independence they came so close to attaining in 1898.

1898. (…)

Baltimore, Maryland. July 9, 1898 (…)

1899. The White Man’s Burden

London, England. February 4, 1899—The celebrated British Indian poet Rudyard Kipling publishes in The Times of London his most remembered poem in history, White Man’s Burden, in honor of the conquest of the Philippines.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain,

To seek another’s profit,

And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.

Just one day later, it is published across the Atlantic in the The New York Sun. The color illustrations, a sensation in the yellow press of the time, teach the new illiterates as the stone reliefs once taught the Bible in medieval cathedrals. In one, Uncle Sam carries on his back an Indian, a Cuban, and a pair of cave-dwelling-looking blacks. Further ahead goes his British equivalent, John Bull, carrying a Chinese man, a Turk, an Arab, and another black. The two climb a hill while navigating obstacles (or leaning on them) represented by rocks named ignorance, superstition, vice, barbarism, oppression, slavery… The hypocrisy of propaganda knows no bounds. At the summit, a beautiful white woman represents the goal: civilization. Coincidentally, around the same time, photographs will be taken of Africans oppressed by European vice, carrying a white businessman in a basket on their backs, seated as if in the comfort of his own home.

In 1901, in the North American Review, the most important American writer of his generation, Mark Twain, will publish the essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” denouncing the imperialist messianism of Christian missionaries who believe they have seen a sign from God to conquer and oppress those they call savages. Twain concludes: “For the Philippines we already have a flag: it is ours, but we have replaced the white stripes with black ones and the stars with pirate skulls.” In other publications, Twain will continue his critique of his country’s imperialism. Professional critics will attempt to pigeonhole the Southern writer as “a master of humor.”

1899. We Were Attacked, This Time by Pacific N*s

Manila, Philippines. February 4, 1899—Sentinel William Grayson from Nebraska shoots two Filipinos at the corner of Silencio and Sosiego streets. Seven days later, the United States Navy bombards the city of Iloilo, initiating what history books will call the Philippine-American War.

Things weren’t going so badly up until that point. McKinley had received the report from Admiral and sudden national hero George Dewey in Manila about the progress the Filipinos were making to peacefully organize their own Republic, but he had filed it away without further comment. The dangerous idea of the peaceful blacks of the Pacific was beginning to trend in the American press. At the time, the U.S. Marines controlled the fort of Manila but not the rest of the Filipino maze, which was in the hands of the rebels allied against Spain. In Washington, the congressman from Colorado, Henry Teller, asserts that as soon as an American soldier is attacked by the natives, Americans will not hesitate to stand behind their army, as they always have.

The solution was inevitable. The officers decide to push the boundaries of the exclusion zone around the capital, and one night, unnoticed, four drunk men cross the new border. The guards respond to the intrusion with gunfire, and two Filipinos die instantly. Immediately, the press and Congress in the United States are inflamed with outrage over the unprovoked attack by the rebels of the former ally, Aguinaldo. A swift retaliatory action begins, and within 24 hours, hundreds of the so-called “peaceful blacks“ are massacred.

The United States, legitimized by the twenty million it had paid to Spain and by the treacherous attack of the four drunk men, takes possession of all the islands in the archipelago. The revered hero George Dewey, in his autobiography, will admit: “after paying twenty million dollars for the islands, we still had to impose our authority by force on a people we were trying to benefit against their own will.”

The guerrillas kill a marine, and General Lloyd Wheaton orders the massacre of the thousand inhabitants of the village. Captain Fred McDonald orders the execution of all the inhabitants of LaNog. Only one young mother is spared, by the grace of her beauty, and she is first raped by the officers and later by the soldiers.

President McKinley laments that on this side of the Atlantic, the word imperialism does not carry the same prestige as on the European side and, in his reelection campaign, convinces his electorate that his government’s interventions in the tropical islands are no longer about expanding U.S. territory. but rather a noble sacrifice to help those peoples who have missed the train of civilization. The slogan of the McKinley-Roosevelt campaign is “America has not planted the flag on foreign soil to acquire more territory but out of pure humanity.”[6]

A month earlier, on January 5, 1899, the rebel Aguinaldo had declared: “My government cannot stand idly by as a portion of our territory is violently seized by a nation that arrogates to itself the title of champion of oppressed nations… I denounce these acts before the world so that humanity may render its verdict on who is the true oppressor and tormentor of humanity.”

If not for humanism, then for God. President McKinley confessed that he had knelt down to seek advice from God on how to proceed in the Philippines and that God had ordered him to civilize that poor, lost people of the Pacific. Two years later, on June 17, 1902, soldier Robert E. Austill would write to his friend Herbert Welsh: “Our countrymen in America are asking us to kill all the men here and rape the women to improve the race on these islands.”

Over 20,000 Filipinos will die in combat, and nearly a million will perish from hunger and war-related diseases.

1899. Burn those letters

Boston, Massachusetts. May 18, 1899—The Anti-Imperialist League of the United States (founded by Gamaliel Bradford, a retired banker) published in the historic Boston Evening Transcript several letters sent from the Philippines and censored in Manila. Among these, one can read: “The boys stole everything they could from every house they found; what they couldn’t steal, they destroyed” (Soldier Guy Williams of Iowa); “The soldiers didn’t know what to do with four prisoners, and when they asked Captain Bishop, the captain replied that they already knew the orders, and the four prisoners were executed” (Charles Bremer, from Minneapolis, Kansas); “Filipinos are brainless monkeys, incapable of appreciating any sense of honor and justice, so it’s no wonder the boys shoot them before asking if they’re friends or enemies” (a Utah fighter); “I’m always ready to go into battle; the only thing I’d like to know is why we’re fighting” (Sergeant Arthur Vickers, of Nebraska); “No matter how many we kill, they never seem to end” (Soldier Sylvester Walker); “The boys are suffering from endless diarrhea; I fear it won’t be a bullet that kills me but some cursed disease” (Soldier Martin P. Olson); “The scene I’ve seen reminds me of rabbit hunting in Utah, with one difference: some rabbits could escape; the natives cannot” (Soldier Fred D. Sweet); “They will fight until their race is wiped off the face of the Earth because they’re fighting for a just cause” (Soldier Ellis Davis, from Kansas); “It’s like rabbit hunting; we pass by, they jump out of some hole and run, but they don’t get far because we shoot them dead; our regiment takes no prisoners” (Soldier Arthur Minkler of Kansas); “I killed seven or eight; I had a lot of fun this morning; when they sent me back, I thought I was going to a court-martial, but the colonel laughed and said I’d done an excellent job” (Burr Ellis, from Frazier Valley, California); “Caloocan had 17,000 inhabitants, and now not a single one remains; the twentieth battalion from Kansas wiped out the village… Maypaja had 5,000 people, and not a soul remains there” (Captain Elliott, from the Kansas regiment); “A battalion from Tennessee was sent to the detachment with thirty prisoners and arrived with a hundred chickens and not a single Filipino”(Soldier Leonard Adams, from the Washington regiment); “We bombed a place called Malabon and then went and killed those who remained, men, women, children…; a pity” (Anthony Michea, Third Artillery); “The Filipinos are very interested in learning, and the new government of Aguinaldo has taken the matter of schools seriously; the number of people who speak Spanish and their native language and also know how to read and write is impressive” (Colonel Henry Page); “We all wanted to kill negroes; it’s like an addictive game; we killed thousands, and everyone went crazy; when the slaughter ended, it didn’t look very good, but that’s war” (a volunteer from Company H of the First Regiment of the state of Washington); one night, one of ours was found dead in the city of Titatia, so General Wheaton ordered it to be burned to the ground; a thousand men, women, and children were executed until not a single one remained… tell those who question us that everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the Glory of my beloved America” (soldier A. A. Barnes, Battalion G, Third Artillery).

1899. The inferior races die more easily

Manila, Philippines. July 20, 1899—General Frederick Funston, veteran of the war in Cuba and Medal of Honor recipient for his actions in the Philippines, tortured and raped women at will before explaining the facts: “there are those in our country who question the ethics of this war… They don’t know that the Filipinos are actually illiterate, semi-savages fighting a war against Anglo-Saxon order and decency.” In a letter sent to his family in New Jersey, Soldier Kingston writes: “we killed men, women, and children… I feel in glory when I see my gun aimed at a black man and shoot.”

On Thursday, July 20, soldier and correspondent for the New York Evening Post in the Philippines, H.L. Wells, confirmed: “so far no one has questioned the fact that our soldiers in the Philippines shoot blacks for sport… But the American people can rest assured that there have been no more Filipino deaths than necessary; at least not more than the British deemed necessary to kill in India and Sudan; not more than the French killed in Annam [Vietnam].” America will only kill 200,000 Filipinos in a few years.

Seventy years later, in the documentary Hearts and Minds, American General William Childs Westmoreland, hero of the Vietnam War and with so many decorations they won’t fit on his uniform, declared that “Asians don’t understand the value of life. Over there, life is cheap, it’s part of their Eastern philosophy, besides there are so many of them.”

The fact that the wounded were finished off on the ground or that the ammunition used was dum-dum bullets, bullets that expand upon entering the victim’s body, won’t be discussed for long either, but some American critics and analysts are struck by the fact that in the war against the Philippines, there are tens of thousands of dead and almost no wounded or prisoners, when the historical pattern of wars is the opposite. In the recent Civil War in the United States, there was one death for every five wounded; in the Philippines, there are fifteen dead for every wounded man. The de facto governor, General Arthur MacArthur, has an explanation for this strange statistical phenomenon that a few fools refuse to accept: “what happens is that men of Anglo-Saxon blood don’t die as easily after being wounded as those who belong to the inferior races.”

In his famous essay published in December of that same year, titled Expansion and Peace, Theodore Roosevelt explains it even better: “peace comes through war.” Roosevelt, future vice president and then president when McKinley is assassinated, is a man of solid convictions, as solid as his motto “speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far.” In 1897, he had stated that “the democracy of this century needs no more justification for its existence than the simple fact that it has been organized so that the white race takes possession of the best lands of the New World, from America to Australia… If it were left to an aristocratic system, Chinese immigration would have been allowed as slavery would have been, to the curse of the white race. Fortunately, democracy, with a clear selfish instinct in favor of the white race, has been able to keep the invading races at bay.”

The century about to begin will confirm it with the same bloodbaths motivated by economic interest and supported by tribal selfishness, but under other noble excuses. For this, historical amnesia is more important than anesthesia to cut off an arm. On October 18, 2003, just a few months after the invasion that in Iraq will repeat the same brutality of the “liberation of the Philippines“, during a celebratory session of the Philippine Congress, President George W. Bush will repeat: “The United States is proud of its part in the great history of the Filipino people; our soldiers helped liberate the Philippines from colonial tyranny.” There will be applause, and a tear or two will fall without reaching the ground.

1900. God has chosen us to regenerate the world

Washington, D.C. January 9, 1900—On Tuesday, in his speech to Congress on the Philippine question, the historian and progressive senator from Illinois, Albert Beveridge affirms that “The Philippines are ours forever. We know that beyond the Philippines lies China, a land of unlimited opportunities for business… We will not renounce the mission of our race, God’s mandate, like slaves whining under the weight of their burden. We will do it with determination for our mission received from God, who has marked us as the Chosen People to regenerate the world… I have traveled through those tropical lands, and I can assure you that no land in the United States is as fertile and suitable for production. The forests of the negroes are truly invaluable… Their inhabitants are part of a barbaric and decadent race, corrupt, cruel, and dishonest… For them to learn anything about self-government, these people will need many decades of the American example. Example, example, and more example… Mr. President, the issue is far more important than a political matter for our nation. It is more elemental. It is a racial question. God has not spent a thousand years preparing the English-speaking Teutonic people for nothing, for us to admire our own beauty. No. God has made us the masters of organization to correct the chaos that reigns in the world… This is the Divine mission of the United States, and for this, we deserve all the happiness possible, all the glory, and all the riches derived from it… Only a blind man could fail to see the hand of God in this harmony of events… Gentlemen, pray to God that we never fear to shed blood for our flag and its imperial destiny.”

A year later, Beveridge will oppose granting full statehood to New Mexico and Arizona because they are not sufficiently populated by whites. According to the historian politician, those states still had too much Indian and Hispanic population, who were intellectually incapable of understanding concepts like self-government.

Following the last conquests in the Caribbean and the Pacific, a third of the American population is dark-skinned. The old empire that tries to shed years debates between continuing to expand and ceasing to lose whiteness. In September 1898, Beveridge had proclaimed about the taking of Puerto Rico: “The law of liberty, from which governments derive their power, applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territory without their consent, just as we govern our children without their consent. Do you not hear how the bells of Puerto Rico welcome our flag?”. According to an interview published in Harper’s Magazine, for Harvard University historian Albert Bushnell Hart, everything Washington does today it has always done. “For over a century, the United States has been a colonial power… anything done in the future will be based on the habits of the past.” On October 24, 1899, the Indianapolis Journal had published a similar idea from the governor of New York and future president of the country, Theodore Roosevelt, who left no doubts about the continuity of the dispossession of Indigenous nations and the new colonialism: “Every argument that can be made for the Filipinos could have been made for the Apaches… Just as peace, order, and prosperity followed our expansion over the land of the Indians, so it will be in the Philippines.”

On March 31 of this year, the respected Senator Beveridge will publish a lengthy and illustrative article in the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia, asserting that “we are the most militant nation in the world… we know it better than anyone, and we are the ones best prepared to bless it and, as a result, to bless ourselves.”

1900. No more blacks, please

Washington DC. March 23, 1900—The generals in Havana and the politicians in Washington give euphoric speeches about the liberation of the long-desired Pearl of the Antilles. There’s just one detail that bothers them: the Cubans in the United States and in the press are almost all white, but the Cubans that the Marines found on the island are almost all black.

Consequently, a phenomenon that is not at all strange repeats itself. A hundred years earlier, though on a more modest scale, President Thomas Jefferson had supported the Haitian rebels in their revolution for independence against the French Empire. But once the Haitians won, establishing in 1804 the first free republic in the hemisphere, Jefferson and his government refused to recognize the existence of a republic of disobedient blacks. Despite Dessalines’ declarations of goodwill to maintain trade relations with the United States, Washington harassed and blockaded the rebellious country until its Revolution was destroyed.[7] Now, after demonizing the Spanish Empire in the press and finally bombing it to defend the defenseless Cubans who were heroically fighting for their independence, they suddenly discover that they are black and incapable of governing themselves. The unexpected awareness of Cuba’s blackness condemns it: it is not fit to be a state of the Union nor an independent state. The solution is clear: a protectorate, adorned with the colors that are in fashion at each moment in history.

Within the borders, another phenomenon matures. Due to the war with Spain in the Caribbean, something strange begins to happen: little by little, black Americans abandon their sympathy and gratitude for the Republican Party of Lincoln. No one quite knows why. To make matters worse, the options are only one: the Democratic Party, the party of slavery in the South. Little by little, liberals and conservatives switch parties, like someone changing their house and spouse with a neighbor.

Neither Cuba nor Spain are considered as relevant as the never-resolved problem of the blacks. Congressman and former judge David Albaugh Armond of Missouri, in a speech in the lower house, asserts that “the blacks are so ignorant they don’t even know how to eat; they barely know how to breathe; they exist as machines exist.” In the upper house, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi confirms it: “that little chocolate-colored cocoanut-headed boy named Andy Dotson, who shines my shoes every morning, is not prepared to be a citizen.” Another senator, the one-eyed Benjamin Ryan Tillman, former governor of South Carolina, known for whipping his black workers years after slavery, was abolished, continues his “war against the domination of blacks” with eloquent words in the sacred chamber of the Senate: “We no longer know how to eliminate them all, though that is what we should do until not a single one remains… Yes, we have shot them when we could, and we are not ashamed of it.”

On March 23, 1900, Senator Tillman, like many other congressmen, expressed concern over a great injustice stemming from the Civil War: “In my State, there are 135,000 Negroes who can vote and barely 90,000 Whites with the same opportunity. Can someone explain to me how it is possible that, in a free and fair election, we Whites can defeat the Negroes? They have left us with a nearly impossible task.” In other words, if we don’t win, it’s not fair. Meanwhile, thanks to the Jim Crow laws, Negroes cannot drink from the same public fountains as Whites, whose children continue to be breastfed by Black women who are left without milk for their own.

Several newspapers, such as The Topeka Mail and Brizze of Kansas in their April 15, 1898 editorial, had already provided some clues about the mystery of imperialists opposing new annexations. Regarding the possibility of Cubans governing themselves, the newspaper had asserted and echoed the idea that “it’s curious that Democratic legislators from the South, who do not accept that their Negroes are capable of governing themselves, are in favor of Cuba’s independence… Even the Southern American Negroes are more intelligent and educated than the Cuban Negroes.” In some way, those who were now against a new wave of annexations to the Union were more racist than the expansionists. They did not want Cuba, nor the Dominican Republic, nor Haiti, nor Puerto Rico, nor the Philippines, nor any other territory as full states of the sacred Union because they were filled with irresponsible Negroes who should not become citizens.

In reality, this is nothing new. Senator Carl Christian Schurz of Missouri, a German immigrant and one of the most fervent patriots, as often happens among newly assimilated individuals, made it even clearer: we do not want a hybrid race in the Union.^[8] On June 23, 1898, the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York, on page 6, had criticized the New York Herald for its reasons not to support the insurgents in Cuba. According to the Herald, “a free Cuba means another Negro Republic, and we don’t want that so close. Haiti is already too close… If Cuba is going to be a free State, it must be under our rules and our flag.” The Democrat had stated that there is no evidence that the Cuban people wanted to be a State of the Union, but Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had already explained the matter when he supported the option of a war with Spain: “We do not want annexation, but a military base is necessary for a maritime route that crosses Nicaragua. For this reason, the fertile island of Cuba will be an unavoidable necessity.” Cabot Lodge had also supported the annexation of the Philippines and the restriction of immigration due to racial issues. Working with a team of lawyers, philanthropists, and climatologists, Cabot Lodge had founded the Immigration Restriction League, which would promote the enactment of a law favoring Anglo-Saxon immigrants and preventing the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans, to preserve the American Way of Life and prevent poverty and crime among those populations.

Of course, with its historical embellishments, this mindset comes from long before. In 1836, Texas had gained independence from Mexico to reinstate slavery, which the Mexican governments had insisted on prohibiting throughout their territory. Shortly after protecting the right to slavery in their constitution and prohibiting the liberation of any Negro, in 1845 Texas had joined the Union thanks to the slaveholders of Texas and the Southern slaveholders of the United States led by President James Polk, who at the time held a majority in the government. The anti-slavery members in the United States Congress had resisted the annexation of Texas first and the invasion of Mexico afterward, considering both actions immoral and against all international law. But they were in the minority. Thus, thanks to the racism of the Anglo-Saxon heroes of the South, the United States expanded its lands and slavery. More land, more prosperity on the backs of the inferior races, and more slave-owning senators to fight against the corrupt politicians of the North who had dared to free the majority of their and from whom they then attempted to secede for the same reasons they had seceded from Mexico. When the U.S. Army entered Mexico City, astonishing the invaders with its beauty and organization, discussions erupted in Washington and in the national press. Some proposed taking the entire country, which was at their mercy, broken and economically and morally devastated by an earthquake and the bombings of their northern neighbor. Others resisted. Not without magnificent irony, this time those who resisted expansion were the slaveholders and racists. How to understand this? There was a problem. In old Mexico, there were too many millions of Mexicans who, though cowardly and inferior due to their race, could not be turned into slaves because they were accustomed to chaos and disobedience. If the people of Manifest Destiny incorporated this territory with such a pleasant climate and did not turn them into slaves, then they would have to grant U.S. citizenship to millions of individuals belonging to an inferior race. Neither option was tolerable in 1848.

Twenty years later, in 1869, Dominican President Buenaventura Báez, in his fourth presidency, had offered his country first to Franc―and then to the United States―so that his half-island could become one of their states. President Ulysses Grant(critical of the expansionist war he himself had to fight against Mexico and a hero of the Unionist army of the North against the slaveholding Confederates of the South) had seriously considered the offer. The Dominican Republic, he thought, could be a state where the blacks of the United States could move without being harassed. A commission that included the celebrated writer, social activist, and former slave Frederick Douglass approved the idea. But the U.S. Senate vetoed the generous Dominican proposal to hand itself over to the highest bidder, citing “instability of its population.” The racists, who could no longer be slaveholders, opposed it once more: it was inconceivable to grant American citizenship to so many blacks at once. When in 1821 the Dominican Republic declared its independence from Spain, the United States had refused to recognize its existence because the new country was a republic of mulattoes and they could not tolerate black or mulatto consuls in the capital. Even less so when it was incorporated into Haiti, and Senator John Barrier of Georgia declared that recognizing Haiti “would introduce a moral contagion much worse than the plague.” In March 1826, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri had explained it better: “The peace of our country cannot allow the fruits of a black revolution to be displayed among our blacks as an achievement. We cannot allow black ambassadors or consuls to establish themselves in our cities, walking through our communities, showing the blacks of this country the honors that effort can provide them.”

Seventy-two years later, in June 1898, Congressman Champ Clark of the Democratic Party of Missouri, proudly demonstrating his knowledge of geography and various world cultures, argued in his speech against the annexation of Hawaii: “How would we bear the shame of seeing a Chinese senator from Hawaii, with his ponytail hairstyle and pagan idols, standing in this very chamber to speak in his corrupt English?”

Like Cuba, Hawaii would become a military base for several decades until, in 1959, it was recognized as a state. The United States will intervene multiple times in the Dominican Republic for political and economic reasons, directly or by appointing dictators, but will want nothing to do with another state filled with Blacks and mulattoes who might have some political power in the Union. Now, they had to be more creative with the liberation of an island as full of Blacks and mulattoes as Cuba. Neither Congress, the press, nor the rest of the American population was ready for a new Haiti as an associated State, nor could they tolerate more Blacks as citizens.

They already had enough trouble with their own Blacks, naturalized by Lincoln a couple of decades earlier, those who believed they had the same rights as whites to sit in the same seats in theaters, schools, industries, municipalities, colleges, stadiums, congresses… Having lost their status as slaves, the idea now was for them to leave, not for more to arrive.

1900. Unable to understand Anglo-Saxon freedom

Manila, Philippines. June 3, 1900—The commissioner, former interim governor of Cuba and future president of the United States, William Howard Taft, known to his friends as Big Bill, arrives in the Philippines with his young and petite wife, Nellie, to replace Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr. and thus establish a civilian government in a country that no one can locate on the map and that might not even be a country.

The fragile Nellie, who had promised to be First Lady when she was just a young girl wandering through the halls of Washington, steps ashore hand in hand with her burly husband. In a letter to her family in the civilized world, she admits: “when we arrived at the port of Manila, the welcoming crowd we expected was not there”.

Big Bill promotes the idea he conceived during the pleasant voyage across the Pacific, accompanied by long rests during the day and rum-filled conversations at night, which he called the “policy of attraction”, based on a very simple idea: if the American governors were benevolent with their subjects, over time the subjects would wish to be called Americans.

But the Filipinos, who never felt the good treatment of their colonizers, continue to resist in various guerrilla groups. Without the peace of the Pacific and without the captain’s rum, William Taft swaps dreams for reality and reports: “These people are very ignorant, aside from being the worst liars I’ve ever known. At best, they are immature adults… They still need fifty or a hundred years to understand what Anglo-Saxon freedom means.”

A year later in Balangiga, on September 28, 1901, at least 38 U.S. Marines will be killed in an ambush by the rebels, who lose 25 fighters. The cowardly attack (or fight against the occupation) will provoke indignation in U.S. Public Opinion. Immediately, General Jacob Hurd Smith (with two proud bullets in his body, one from the Civil War, fighting against the South’s slaveholders, and the other from an incident in the invented war against Spain in Cuba) will give the order for which he will be remembered by history: “I want no prisoners. Kill everyone over ten years old.” After cutting off all supplies to the island of Samar, the operation begins, which, in a few days, will leave thousands of Filipinos dead. Experts will estimate between 3,000 and 10,000 victims. The number of executed will never be determined precisely, but a comparison of the 1887 and 1903 censuses reveals no growth but a lack of 15,000 people.

On May 5, 1902, the New York Journal will publish a sarcastic cartoon in which a vulture perched on an American flag replaces the bald eagle, presiding over an execution of Blacks, followed by the legend: “Guilty of being born just ten years before we arrived.”

A court-martial determines that the massacre carried out by General Jacob Hurd Smith was not justified, and Secretary of War Elihu Root recommends his early retirement, which President Theodore Roosevelt accepts to calm Public Opinion.

Without evidence to this day, U.S. intelligence will hold rebel General Vicente Lukban responsible for the massacre of the 38 Marines, and on February 18, 1902, he will be captured alongside some American rebels turned guerrillas, such as William Denton (others, like John Winfrey, died in combat against the Marines). Months later, Lukban will be forced to swear loyalty to the United States.

On May 30, 1902, during the Memorial Day ceremony at the cemetery of the fallen in Arlington, President Theodore Roosevelt, furious over the accusations of Marine cruelty in the Philippines, will proclaim before journalists and thousands of attendees that, ultimately, war is a fierce struggle between civilization and savages. That is why he is always in favor of all wars. The Filipinos, he says, are nothing more than a mix of Chinese and Blacks, and the ongoing war is the most glorious of all the wars waged by the glorious nation, the United States.

Five days later, on July 4, in celebration of U.S. independence, just as President George W. Bush will do exactly one hundred years later in 2002 regarding the invasion of Iraq, President Theodore Roosevelt declares the end of the conflict in the Philippines and the immediate restoration of peace in the region. Both (and many others between them) were wrong or pretended to know what they were doing. Like the dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq, other rebel generals, such as Colonel Faustino Guillermo and so many others, will be hanged in the Philippines in the decades to come.

 If the inferior races could understand what Anglo-Saxon freedom means, it would not be necessary to resort to such extremes.

 In 1906, Mark Twain, one of the founders of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York, will publish an essay analyzing the glory of what the reports defined as a heroic victory. Under the title “The Moro Massacre,” Twain will reflect on the “dead or alive” order to resolve the problem of a village of six hundred “dark-skinned savages” who had taken refuge in a mountain crater seven hundred meters high. According to the triumphant reports, the inhabitants could not be taken out alive but were taken out dead, after a day and a half of shooting from above with state-of-the-art weapons to respond to the stones raining down from the besieged below. Twain will satirize the words “heroism” and “bravery of our troops.” For centuries, the idea that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” will be attributed to Twain himself.

 In any case, and for generations to come, history will continue to rhyme in every verse. As in No Gun Ri, when on July 26, 1950, for three days straight, the American soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the army massacred 400 South Koreans, claiming they feared that among that miserable line of refugees there might be some soldiers from North Korea. When the victims and their executioners acknowledge the facts in 1999, a commission will declassify official documents from that time and recount at least two hundred similar cases. As is fitting and customary, decades after the events occurred, President Bill Clinton will apologize for the unfortunate events.

 None of these massacres will be called sadism, nor racism, nor Anglo-Saxon fanaticism, but purely “honor,” “bravery of our heroes who fought to defend our country,” “promotion of foreign freedom in the land of the corrupt,” “backward cultures that do not understand our sacrifice,” “the white man’s burden,” and an endless but repetitive battery of orthopedic speeches.

Washington will continue to support freedom and democracy in the Philippines with brutal dictatorships, such as that of Ferdinand Marcos who, from 1965 to 1986 and with the assistance of the CIA wielding the new toy of “the fight against communism,” will kill thousands of dissidents, in addition to torturing hundreds of thousands and exiling many more for not being true Filipinos—meaning, for not thinking like Washington and Manila.

1901. Imperialism is a manly affair

Minneapolis, Minnesota. September 2, 1901—Four days before the assassination that will cost President William McKinley his life, his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, gives a speech in Minnesota without once mentioning the buzzword, imperialism. Instead, he defends “the expansive energy” of men who, with ax in hand, made the United States thanks to “the essential manliness of the American character.” Speeches equating masculinity with imperialism abound and resonate in the weakest corners of voters’ psychology. And what better than war to prove a man?

In 1897, shortly after being appointed assistant secretary of the navy by President McKinley, Roosevelt wrote to a friend: “I am almost always in favor of war, and I believe this country needs one.” Roosevelt is another aristocrat who never overcame the trauma of his parents paying someone else to go to the Civil War on his behalf. During his years at Harvard, he took up boxing, but it wasn’t enough to calm his white male complexes. Before reaching the White House as president, he would often pose dressed as Daniel Boone in the New York studios, and every other day, he would repeat that those who didn’t dare to go to war in distant lands were not men and did no honor to the Teutonic race.

In 1898, as a result of the invasion of Cuba and the Philippines, the most prominent woman in the United States, Jane Addams, had joined the Anti-Imperialist League. Pro-Roosevelt cartoons began depicting anti-imperialists dressed as women. Cartoons opposing the new fever (such as those by Grant Hamilton) depicted Roosevelt as an imperialist with a cowboy hat and a sword between his legs that more closely resembled an erect penis than any known sword. Like other anti-imperialists of the time, Addams also fought for the rights of the working classes in the United States and for women’s equality.

Minorities had also taken a stand against imperialism. In 1898, in a major speech in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the most influential black teacher and leader of the time, Booker Taliaferro Washington, had refused to accept the new colonialist adventures under a fierce conscience that will soon be forgotten: “We went to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) with a Bible in hand to win the souls of the natives and ended up taking their country without granting them the right to say whether they agreed or not.”

But Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt’s chief ally, dismissed these criticisms as inconsistent. On March 7, 1900, he took the floor in Congress to refresh the historical memory of his powerful colleagues: “It has been said over and over, to the point of weariness, that we did wrong in taking those islands without the consent of their inhabitants, since it violates the principle of justice by which the United States stands. The consent of the governed!” A passionate Lodge reminded his fellow congressmen that the Declaration of Independence was not made with the consent of the governed and continued: “Did we consult the blacks “Women?” No. Then, he thundered: “We took Louisiana without consulting its inhabitants and governed it without their consent as long as we deemed it necessary… Then came the War against Mexico and, through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, we acquired a large portion of that country’s territory… There were many Mexicans living in those territories, and we never asked for their consent to govern them… The United States has a great mission in the world. A mission for good and for freedom. The mission of fulfilling Manifest Destiny.”

In his later years, Theodore Roosevelt would have an ideological crisis of conscience and shift to progressive causes. He would found the Progressive Party and both Booker Washington and Jane Addams would support his candidacy. Naturally, this time Roosevelt would lose the 1912 election, because it is not men, no matter how macho they may be, who determine the fate of a nation and the history of all other nations in the world.

(…)

1901. The constitution does not follow the flag

Havana, Cuba. December 25, 1901—Christmas. U.S. warships rest in the port of Havana. The United States is not interested in annexing what the newspapers call “a Second Haiti“ and “a Republic of Blacks.” Three years earlier, on August 12, 1898, the New York Times had already translated the original intentions into good intentions: Americans have the noble obligation to “make Cuba a permanent possession of the United States only if the Cubans prove incapable of governing themselves… We must help them educate themselves in politics.” Now, free Cuba is drafting its new constitution, to which the Platt Amendment is immediately introduced. The journalist, editor of the New York Tribune, and ambassador Whitelaw Reid insists on “the absolute necessity of controlling Cuba to ensure our own defense.” Protests fill the streets of Havana, but others see it as the only way to get rid of the U.S. The island’s governor, General Leonard Wood, thinks differently. In a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, he assures that “without a doubt, the Platt Amendment guarantees that, in practice, Cuba will never be independent.” The amendment is approved by the U.S. Congress and sent to Havana. The Cuban Congress, fearing the Marines might never leave, reviews it and makes four minor corrections, but Washington reminds them how things work, and Havana immediately removes the corrections. On June 2, the Constitution and its Platt Amendment, as received, are ratified by Havana. Senator Platt declares: “Happily, the Cubans have accepted to trust the United States.”

The amendment guarantees the United States the right to intervene in the island whenever it deems necessary to “ensure life, property, and individual liberties” and six other conditions, including the obligation to lease the naval base at Guantánamo to its protector neighbor, which would be signed on May 22, 1903. The rent payment of two thousand dollars increases to four thousand in 1934. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the checks sent by the U.S. accumulate on a desk without being cashed, except for the first due to an administrative error. Renting has its advantages over ownership: it does not constitute U.S. territory, so its generous laws do not apply in someone else’s house. A century later, these benefits will be demonstrated by the prison that will house Caribbean immigrants as well as potential Middle Eastern terrorists.

In a drawer of lawyer Gonzalo de Quesada’s desk rests a letter José Martí sent him on October 29, 1889. Quesada remembers his friend, who died three years earlier in a battle that didn’t need him, and rereads it as if it were the first time: “…and once the United States enters Cuba, who will be able to remove them?”

Strictly in accordance with Article 3 of the Platt Amendment, in 1906 and for three years, the former governor of the Philippines and future president of the United States, William Howard Taft, based on his prior tropical experience, will be proclaimed governor of Cuba to “stabilize the island.” Other interventions and further protests will follow this one, under other good reasons. Future presidents of the United States will insist that their country is not an empire because it does not seek to appropriate more land than it has already taken. It is satisfied, and its congressmen never tire of repeating that they do not want another state of ungovernable Black people.

The old state business of appropriating land and foreign countries becomes a private matter, with the corresponding moral support from the military forces of the strongest. Twenty years after the Platt Amendment was approved, as in the rest of the Caribbean and Central America, 75 percent of Cuban land will be owned by U.S. companies, and ten percent will be in the hands of Spanish landowners. All, of course, within the framework of the law.

That same year, after various debates about the legal status of the inhabitants of the Philippines, Guam, and other new tropical acquisitions, the Supreme Court determines that “the Constitution does not follow the flag.” In less poetic terms, the inhabitants of the occupied territories are not entitled to the same rights that prevail in the continent of civilized white people. A hundred years later, on the same island, the same moral and legal logic will repeat when hundreds of prisoners detained in Guantánamo are declared innocent of charges but not subject to the civil and human rights that prevail in the Land of the Laws to claim anything for years of detention and systematic torture.

Under the constitution that Washington rewrote for Cuba, the Americans will invade the island several times with the support of the upper class of Havana. In 1912, the marines stationed in Guantánamo and the new Cuban army will suppress an uprising by the blacks of the Independent Party of Color, led by bricklayer Evaristo Corominas. Afro-Cubans, especially the fifteen thousand former black independence fighters, will protest the discrimination they face in the new politics. The protest and uprising will end with at least 4,000 rebels massacred, their leaders executed (Evaristo Corominas will be killed in an ambush on June 27), and the Independent Party of the Blacks condemned to a healthy nonexistence. There will be no plaques, medals, cannons, or official ceremonies for those who fell in their fight for human dignity. Naturally, there will be plenty of medals for the invaders and a few for their patriotic collaborators.

1902. The border with Mexico disappears

Washington DC. June 17, 1902—The Newlands Reclamation Act (Land Reclamation Act) is passed in honor of Nevada representative Francis Newlands for the Western states. Thanks to this law, and similar ones that preceded it, 50 electrical dams and 600 reservoirs are built on all the major rivers in the region, creating artificial lakes for an irrigation system that turns those deserts into the most fertile and productive lands in the country. In 1911, the Theodore Roosevelt dam will be built and, as a result, the largest artificial lake in the world.

The deserts transformed into prosperous plantations absorb water and cheap labor. To ensure this flow never stops, the border with Mexico disappears. Mexican laborers are ideal: they come, work hard for very little, and when the job is done, they return to their country without a word. They know nothing about rights and do not want to stay. No one stops them. No one wants them to stop.

The dikes not only enrich the deserts and investors. They also impoverish other lands. The lands of the Indians and other native settlers, which were not as productive, dry up. The Pecos River basin that runs through New Mexico and Texas, irrigates some areas while leaving the populations that depended on it without water and food. To escape poverty and hunger, their residents migrate to the new green areas and become temporary laborers.

They have lost more than just the land of their ancestors.

1902. No, until the race improves

Indianapolis, Indiana. November 27, 1902—A new commission from the U.S. Senate has just completed a visit to New Mexico and Arizona to assess the level of civilization in those territories and is now back in Indianapolis on its way to Washington. The commission’s report, it is suspected, will not be very encouraging for those citizens of the Territories who are demanding the same political rights as the rest of the country.

The dream of Arizona and New Mexico to become full states of the Union has been failing since those territories were torn from Mexico more than half a century ago, in 1848, and the victors did not want to take the rest of that country because it was too populated with Indians and mestizos, potential new citizens and irresponsible voters. But not only did those forcibly converted to U.S. rule not gain the same political rights as the whites who came from the north, but gradually, violently or legally, they lost their properties until they became a marginalized class first, and later an ethnic minority.

On March 3, 1877, Congress in Washington passed the “Desert Land Act” to develop the area, intensifying the dispossession and social inequalities that would persist for generations to come. At the time, the representative of Northern California, John K. Luttrell, had insisted on accelerating the process of privatizing land and available water, although it was never clear how a river that flows through multiple properties can be privatized. What had become clear was that the new law allowed for the privatization of public and communal lands, previously used without knowing the benefits of private property. Mexican families were not only evicted, for decades, at gunpoint, but they also lost ownership of their ancestral lands, case after case. In response, resistance groups like Las Gorras Blancas were formed, known for their raids on trains, caravans, and old ranches now in the hands of the gringos. Once again, the losers became the corrupt, the bandits who must be pursued by the law and lynched by those protected by the law. Later, Las Gorras Blancas managed to become a political party with few prospects and changed their name to the United People’s Party. According to its founding manifesto, this party had been born to “protect the rights of the poorest,” and the ethnic cause faded into convenient oblivion.[9]

On May 3, 1897, in San Antonio, Texas, Ricardo Rodríguez was denied the right to citizenship. A law of 1872 stated that “only Caucasian whites and Africans are entitled to citizenship.” While the laws did not prohibit discrimination against blacks but the opposite, after Lincoln’s constitutional reform they could no longer be denied citizenship. But Ricardo was Indian, born in Mexico when Texas was Mexico. The new laws contradict the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which half a century earlier Mexico had ceded half of its territory to the United States in exchange for Article VIII, which stated that “Mexicans who prefer to remain in the territory may retain their Mexican citizenship or adopt American citizenship.” In any case, the Texas law does not consider Tejanos to be part of either of the two races recognized in its legislation. T.J. McMinn, Jack Evans, and other politicians attempt to block the Ricardo Rodríguez case to prevent Mexican voters. They do not resort to tricks: they argue that Rodríguez is incapable of becoming an American citizen “due to his race.” After a year of litigation, on May 3, Judge Thomas S. Maxey rules in favor of Rodríguez. From then on, Tejanos were allowed to vote in Texas, though they would still need another century of struggle to hold political positions of any significance.

These multiple forms of ethnic and social cleansing were not as spectacular or loud as invasions and wars, but they had a devastating effect. When on November 25, 1878, J. Howe Watts, the son of Supreme Court Justice John Watts and a translator for the Gazette returned to New Mexico, after 21 years, Santa Fe had become a nearly white, nearly civilized city. Now, Anglos and Germans were the fastest-growing population. Watts wrote to historian Hubert Howe Bancroft: “Many things have changed. Before, anti-American sentiment was very strong; now it is not. Mexicans have become Americans. They themselves recognize that we are a superior race and that they must assimilate to our customs. Now they speak English, especially those of mixed heritage.”[10]

Time and again, Arizona and New Mexico had tried to become states of the Union but failed. In Arizona, half of its population is still composed of converted Mexicans. Most of its inhabitants were born there and thus cannot become citizens. White immigrants from the North are the true citizens, the true owners of the land, of good traditions, of laws, of the police, and of governments. Like New Mexico, Arizona is also maintained as a territory. As in New Mexico, in Arizona, citizens are allowed to vote as long as they do not look too much like Indians. Converted Mexicans who have not been able to lighten their skin are not considered ready to govern themselves. Politicians and journalists refer to the new Americans as belonging to a “hybrid race” resistant to the forms of good governance. Casimiro Barela, a Colorado senator born in Embudo, Mexico, a year before his parents’ land became part of the United States, was one of the main activists for the right of the New Mexico Territory to become a state. His supporters backed him by appealing to the idea that its inhabitants had Spanish blood, meaning they were European, not of the best kind, but European nonetheless. The argument did not fare well when, a few years later, the war against Spain broke out, which, like all wars of possession in the hemisphere, was not even a real war. To calm any doubts about the patriotism of New Mexico’s inhabitants, its governor, Miguel Otero, revealed touching statistics: no other region in the country, proportionally, provided more patriotic fighters for the Spanish-American War than New Mexico.

Now, when the federal government commission tasked with certifying the assimilation of Arizona and New Mexico returns on November 27 to Indiana, the press rushes for the scoop. The Indianapolis Journal, under the front-page headline “Senators inspecting territories find no time for pleasures,” will report that Senator Beveridge of Indiana, along with Dillingham of Vermont, Burnham of New Hampshire, and Heitfeld of Idaho, visited New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and the Indian Territories, covering six thousand miles by train and car to fulfill their arduous mission. For some reason, the senators and the press repeatedly emphasize their inability to partake in pleasures. “Although the New Mexicans tried to make their inspectors’ visit enjoyable, the senators made it clear, kindly but firmly, that theirs was a business trip, with no room for pleasures.” Senator Shipp, equally annoyed by the behavior of the inhabitants of those territories, insists that in every town “they were received with musical bands and they let them play, but made it clear that theirs was a mission of work.” In 1916, the journalist and professor Henry Louis Mencken, one of the most influential writers of the time, will publish the essay “The Citizen and the State” in which he defines his country’s puritanism as “the fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.”

Among the illustrious visitors who accompanied the commission was Baron L. G. Rothschild from Indianapolis, who generously acted as a guide. In truth, Rothschild didn’t know much about the territory, but he did know his mission. “Baron Rothschild was the soul of the group,” acknowledges Senator Shipp. Rothschild took the distinguished senators through the poorest neighborhoods of each city and paraded them through brothels and cabarets where senators could take photographs of drunks and prostitutes while confirming that few spoke English. Progressive Senator Albert Beveridge, a Republican member of the Committee on Territories, insists that New Mexico has a mixture of “savage and foreign blood.”

The photographs, more than the final report, are all Washington needs to decide whether New Mexico deserves to be incorporated as a State of the Union. The answer is no. First, they must be educated, civilized, and speak English well. But Congress is not radical and is content with reducing the number of Spanish speakers to less than a quarter so that these territories can become full, serious states with voting rights in Congress. The Territories will have to wait another ten years until their population improves. On January 12 and February 14, 1912, New Mexico and Arizona will become states of the Union. By then, Hispanics had already been reduced to a fifth of the total population.

Texas had declared independence from Mexico in 1836, and half of Mexico had been annexed by the United States in 1848 for economic and racial reasons, to extend the slavery of Blacks and because the mixed race of Mexicans did not know how to govern themselves and would not be governed. The rest of Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other tropical islands would not be annexed so as not to grant American citizenship to so many Black people. The Indian territories and the conquered Mexican territories would not become states with voting rights in Congress until white people were an absolute and clear, very clear, majority. Even the indigenous population, the first Americans, would not be recognized as citizens until 1924. In Arizona and New Mexico, they would have to wait until a few years after World War II for their right to vote to be recognized. A century later, Puerto Ricans would not be able to vote for the president of the United States or any other president.

Historians would insist on Manifest Destiny, on the cause of the culture of freedom, on free enterprise, on the indomitable spirit of a superior race, created by God and improved by the laws of Darwin in Germany and in the Thirteen Colonies to dominate the world, on the love of democracy and freedom… Those who think differently will be discredited as radicals. Dangerous anti-American radicals.

  ^[1] President Grover Cleveland had won the popular vote in the 1888 election but not the votes of the Electoral College, a legacy of the slave system since the founding of the United States. Cleveland was a radical opponent of interventionism and what was now called imperialism. The majority of the population in the United States also opposes the annexation of Hawaii, but the elected president, Benjamin Harrison, proceeds in the opposite direction, which is how history is made.

[2] The amount equals one and a half million dollars at 2020 value. No mass media outlet in the United States in 2020 will ever dare to offer so much.

[3] History is full of paradoxes. For the first time, the Democrats of candidate William Jennings Bryan shifted from being conservative and radically racist Southerners to being progressives with the support of the ruined rural sector. In the 21st century, the unemployed proletarians of the North will become the base of the ultraconservative politics of the Republican millionaire Donald Trump.

[4] Lodge considered blacks and other non-Caucasian races like the Italians to be inferior, but he also had a black friend. George Henry White was a black representative of Irish origin from North Carolina, elected the previous year. His state will not elect a black or mulatto to replace him until almost a century later, in 1972.

[5] General Miles had fought in the Civil War against the slaveholders of the Confederacy. Like many at the time, like many in the many generations to come, he fails to see that Anglo-Saxon racism in the United States projects beyond borders with the brutality of wars, occupations, and functional dictatorships in the name of tender flags such as order, civilization, liberty, and democracy.

^[6] San Francisco State University professor Stuart Creighton Miller will write in 1982 that “the Americans marched to war against Spain with altruism to liberate Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from their tyrants. If they stayed in the Philippines for too long, it was to protect them from European predators”.

^[7] Dessalines had decided the revolution by ordering the massacre of over 3,000 Frenchmen indiscriminately accused of conspiracy (excluding Poles and Germans), a brutality that doesn’t compare to the countless massacres of the powerful civilized empires. It doesn’t compare in numbers or in the fact that empires oppress the weak to exploit them, while the Haitian revolution was against an oppressive and slave-holding empire. Contrary to the traditional narratives that will survive until the 21st century, the United States does not qualify as a “free republic” but, to be more precise, as an open and brutal ethnic and class dictatorship.

^[8] Senator Carl Schurz will also oppose President Grant’s proposals to provide American Blacks with federal protection of their new rights and, along with other senators, will make Grant’s proposal to eradicate the Ku Klux Klan impossible.

^[9] Over time, and especially with the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, racism will become politically incorrect, and fingers will point toward the poor, lazy, and corrupt, possible allies of the new enemy, communism. However, both racism and classism will continue to sleep together.

^[10] In his The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of Arizona and New Mexico, published in 1889, historian Bancroft acknowledges that “a reservation for whites controlled by the Apaches would not be a greater violation of the norms of eternal justice than the current state of affairs”.

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