A provocative thesis underlies Joe Jackson’s Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of the American Empire. The author argues the Spanish-American War was a pivotal moment in US foreign policy that ushered in an age of American interventionism. It became the “template” for every so-called small war ever since—“from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.” The war, Jackson argues, is not only history but a cautionary tale.
Splendid Liberators is a work of modern narrative nonfiction that covers the Pacific and Caribbean theaters of that war. At the time, US Secretary of State John Hay called the conflict a “splendid little war.” To his credit, Jackson has reached beyond traditional US sources, materials, and perceptions. He uses archival materials in the Philippines and Cuba and interviews with scholars in those countries. This material and firsthand accounts gleaned from diaries, letters, and unpublished reminisces add genuine depth to this account. The result is a broad, sweeping work that captures America on the eve of empire building, replete with revealing insights that sometimes sink under the weight of tangential narrative and uneven writing.
Unrest, War, and Insurrection
Jackson begins his narrative by recounting the decades of unrest created by exploitive Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century. The vestiges of a once vast overseas empire in the New World and the Pacific were island possessions that included Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and “Spain was a parasite sucking them dry.” Spanish policy bred unrest, years of armed rebellion, and revolution that was met with terrible force. The Cuban rebellion, Jackson notes, lasted nearly thirty years and was not quelled by military action, arrests, executions, or the establishment of reconcentrados—concentration camps created to separate rural populations from rebels.
Splendid Liberators describes the outsized role the American press had in publicizing and then exaggerating Spain’s heinous efforts to suppress unrest and crush rebellion. Symbolic images of “Cuba as a starving woman with sunken eyes and fleshless ribs” in a reconcentrado first appeared in print in 1896. American correspondents were imprisoned and deported. Nothing outraged Americans more, however, than lurid stories of defiled Cuban maidens, trumpeted with banner headlines asking: “Does Our Flag Shield Women?” Eventually, “coverage reached an unprecedented level of shrillness and cascading cries for intervention became the new norm,” as correspondents flooded Cuba and yellow journalism took hold of New York City’s penny press and midwestern weeklies.
Although previous works explore this coverage more fully (for one, Charles Henry Brown’s The Correspondents’ War), Jackson is on solid ground with claims that the popular press of that day shaped American foreign policy. The author describes how pressure built on the McKinley Administration—especially on the president himself, “a man trapped between two unmoving rocks of belief” between peace and humanitarianism—to intervene in Cuba and ultimately declare war on Spain.
Even in this well-grounded beginning of Splendid Liberators, what should be a tight narrative thread begins to unravel. Jackson first loses his narrative focus here and writes pages about Stephen Crane, just one of the famed correspondents in Cuba. Then the author segues into an out-of-place discussion on the “roots of twentieth century American literature,” in which “suddenly, no higher meaning or old truths intercede, only the lonely struggle to survive amidst a revelatory rage.”
Splendid Liberators is mistitled. There was nothing splendid about one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
This will not be the last time Jackson writes maudlin prose in this book. Jackson can write vividly and with a keen eye for description. For instance, in describing the public reaction to yellow press accounts of Spanish assaults on Cuban women, Jackson writes that “America hummed like an angry hive.” At other times, he is mawkish, as when he describes American war fever making “the young and the restless want to be a part of it. The winds tremble. The distant thunder rolls.”
More troubling for the reader is the author’s decision to cast bit players in recurring roles. In the book’s front matter, Jackson lists no fewer than 96 “Dramatis Personae” with narrative roles to play. These include infantry soldier Carl Sandburg (later poet and author) and nurse Clara Maass (a victim of voluntary yellow fever trials), and others who are only on the margins of the story here. Dozens of these minor actors come and go throughout Splendid Liberators, and what should be a crisp, lively narrative becomes at times stodgy and sluggish reading.
Race and Remembrance
Splendid Liberators is a book of social and political narrative history, as well as one of military history. While Brian McAllister Linn’s The Philippine War, 1899-1902 and G. J. A. O’Toole’s The Spanish War: An American Epic,1898 are standard military histories of these wars, Jackson does a credible job writing military accounts. He covers, in sound detail, military actions from fleet engagements to land battles—including the poorly planned assault on the San Juan Heights. The author is at his best, however, when he gleans from individual accounts the suffering and privations of the men and women caught up in this conflict.
Jackson uses some of these accounts to buttress his argument that racial animosity was a key factor in events leading up to and during the Spanish-American War and especially so during the Philippine Insurrection (1899–1902). For example, he ascribes McKinley’s failure to intervene in Cuba as early as 1897 to his fear that a free Cuba would be “a racial Utopia compared” to the United States, although the author’s assessment is based only on one obscure source.
He also describes the indignities heaped upon black units in the regular army, an indictment of the bigotry and racial animus of the times. For example, Jackson brings to light the little-known race riots in Tampa, Florida. It was, he writes, “one of the worst racial clashes in an army camp during the war, a culmination of all the hatred that had grown between blacks and whites,” not only in Florida but throughout the post-Reconstruction South and during the start of the Jim Crow era.
It was, however, only a harbinger of worse things to come. Splendid Liberators recounts outrages perpetrated on the Filipino people during the insurrection after the Spanish cession of the Philippines to the US. In retaliation for gruesome Filipino guerrilla tactics, Americans carried out reprisals and executed a scorched-earth policy against people they called “n*****s” and dehumanized as “gugus.” “The war that resulted transformed the archipelago into a post-apocalyptic wasteland of famine, disease, ecological disaster, and hundreds of thousands dead.”
American troops’ atrocities are cited in this book—the execution of unarmed prisoners and civilians, torture (including infamous waterboarding, called the “water cure” then), the wholesale destruction of crops and livestock, razed villages, targeted attacks on non-combatants, murder, and rape. Given these horrific and widespread war crimes, Splendid Liberators is mistitled. There was nothing splendid about one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
Jackson’s unflinching account of the Philippine Insurrection is the best of what narrative history can offer readers. Still, this book is not without flaws. Splendid Liberators is flecked with errors that should have been corrected by the author or a careful editor. Jackson, for example, describes the Krag-Jørgensen rifle carried by some American troops as a “30 shot, 5 caliber” weapon; it is a 30-caliber rifle with a five-round magazine. In another instance, Jackson claims an officer graduated “number 3,616 in West Point’s class of 1894—the ‘goat.’” That graduating class numbered 54. These errors are not confined to the text. The 43 historic photos in the book include a picture of Frederick Funston, a pivotal figure in the conflict who fought in Cuba and the Philippines. The caption claims Funston is wearing the uniform of a junior officer of volunteers, but, in fact, this is a photo of Funston as a brigadier general in the US Army. The cover art, ostensibly illustrative of the American war with Spain that began in 1898, is a depiction of the Battle of Desmayo between Cuban insurgents and Spanish forces in 1896.
Beyond annoying errors of fact, the book can be difficult to read. Jackson sometimes skips forward and back, writing broken chronological accounts. This is distracting, especially when the author suddenly shifts from the past to the present tense when he writes not only about the same event, but even in the same paragraph. The notes, organized by page numbers, are a confusing jumble that don’t always provide a direct citation for quoted text. It’s difficult to reconcile attribution and specific claims in Jackson’s work with either a primary or a secondary source.
Jackson also makes acerbic comments throughout his book, wholly out of place even in writing a narrative history. He writes, for example, that various American presidents looked to the Philippines and “hoped to recast the archipelago ‘in our image.’ Considering America’s current number of mass killings, they succeeded.” In another instance, he claims to have found a “frequent fixture in the American character: patriotism that allows malice at home, and … murder overseas.”
In the end, Jackson’s Splendid Liberators is a bitter commentary on the onset of the age of American empire and especially on the nation’s first wars overseas. On many levels, then, this is a difficult book to read; but its critique of American exceptionalism and the nation’s little wars cannot be ignored.