Booktalk

I wish I had better news.

Reading The True Flag, about the American debacle of "expansionism" that we consecrated with the name Spanish-American War, I lose some of the resolve that I am hoping will sustain me in my own era of yellow journalism, "bully"ing leadership, and heavy-handed international "aspirations."

The trench between 19th and 20th century America reflected a total loss of common ground. Prodded by big business looking for new markets to match an industrial glut of production, exacerbated by a flood of cut-throat newspapers competing (at any cost) in a more literate America, and goaded by a core of savvy manipulators, the US became something else; something other than what many believed we could ever become: empire-builders. In that trench, in that vacuum as the Spanish Empire folded, the US, promising independence to both Cuba and the Philippines, instead annexed Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and, at a sickeningly human cost, the Philippines.

Stephen Kinser paints a noble picture of the anti-expansionists and a hard-edged portrait of the empire-builders, who ultimately succeeded. It is the story of one group relying on the precepts of the constitution as their only weapon, versus another with the position, power, and insider-manipulation as theirs. Dialogue was sabotaged by a press that was as unreliable as it was abundant. Driving the vision of America as world power was the behind-scenes Henry Cabot Lodge who found his chess piece in Teddy Roosevelt: charismatic, shallow, aggressive.

What it led to; more than strategic territory, new markets, and economic dominance, was a loss of innocence, a betrayal really, of the original promise of the nation; that we were the good guys who played fair in a world of aggressors. Who paid the price were native citizens anticipating their own try at independence who at best became indentured to the US and at worst lost their lives to us; more in the Philippines than were killed by the Spanish in over three centuries of empire.

In all, this book was a lesson in hard-ball history. And I fear it is a cautionary tale for the present; where open-minded thoughts of equality and hope look to have their hands full with a compromised fifth estate, and a vision of constricting walls replacing one of expanding ones.

P.S. I thought, perhaps, my tone in this post was less than neutral, but in reading Paul A Kramer's piece in the today's Chronicle Review, History in a Time of Crisis, he asked what is the role of historians in a time of authoritarian politics? He suggested three roles: "disrupting inevitabilities, digging out lost alternatives, and widening horizons of empathy." I am not exactly a historian, but I will dip-in under his umbrella reasoning for drawing the similarities that I do.