The War Of 1898: The United States And Cuba In History And Historiography PDF
Preview The War Of 1898: The United States And Cuba In History And Historiography
and Historiography Louis A. Pérez Jr. The University of North Carolina Press Chapel H ill & London © 199® The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Monotype Garamond and Meta types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pérez, Louis A., 1943- The war of 1898 : the United States and Cuba in history and historiography / by Louis A. Pérez, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8078-2437-2 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8078-4742-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) i. Spanish-American War, 1898—Historiography. I. Title E7IJ.P45 1998 973*8 V°72—dcai 98-2615 cip 02 01 00 99 98 5 4 3 2 1 FRONTISPIECE “Save Me from My Friends!” Cartoon appearing in Pucky September 7,1898. “Taking Cuba from Spain was easy. Preserving it from over-zealous Cuban patriots is another matter,” commented the accompanying editorial. To the memory of Ramôn de Armas (1939-1997), friend and colleague C O N TEN TS Preface, ix Chronology, xv CHAPTER 1 On Context and Condition, i CHAPTER 2 Intervention and Intent, 23 chapter 3 Meaning of the Maine, 57 chapter 4 Constructing the Cuban Absence, 81 chapter 5 1898 to 1998: From Memory to Consciousness, 108 Notes, 13 5 Bibliographical Essay, 159 Index, 169 PREFACE The war of 1898 has loomed large in national discourses of the twentieth century. All parties involved have come to understand 1898 as a water shed year, a moment in which outcomes were both defining and decisive, at once an end and a beginning: that special conjuncture of historical cir cumstances that often serves to delineate one historical epoch from another. It was special, too, in that the passage from one historical condi tion to another was discernible at die time, even as it was happening. Most U.S. historiography commemorates 1898 as the moment in which the nation first projected itself as a world power, whereupon the United States established an international presence and global promi nence. Spanish historiography has looked back on 1898 as el désastre (the disaster)—an ignominious denouement of a five-hundred-year-old New World empire, after which Spain plunged vertiginously into decades of disarray and disorder. For Cuba and the Philippine Islands, 1898 repre sents a complex point of transition from colony to nation in which the pursuit of sovereignty and separate nationality assumed new forms. For Puerto Rico, the transition was even more complicated, with central elements of nation and nationality persisting unresolved well into the next century. • • • The historical literature on 1898 in the United States has assumed vast proportions. It includes monographs and memoirs, published docu ments and unpublished dissertations, biographies and bibliographical guides, books, articles, and anthologies of all descriptions. The discus sion of 1898 in various forms has loomed large in virtually every U.S. history textbook of the last one hundred years. For all the importance traditionally accorded to 1898, and indeed the consensus has been one of the more notable characteristics of the histo riography, generations of U.S. scholars have treated the war with Spain with ambivalence, uncertain as to where exactly to situate it: sometimes a war of expansion, other times an accidental war; an inevitable war or perhaps an unnecessary one; a war induced by public opinion or one instigated by public officials. It is the thesis of this book that ambivalence in U.S. historiography is itself the product of a larger ambiguity, one that contemplates 1898 by way of such complex issues as motives and purpose, which in turn insin uate themselves into larger discourses on the nation: specifically, the way a people arrange the terms by which they choose to represent them selves. The meaning of 1898 in the United States is ambiguous precisely because what historical narradves understand the nature of the nadon to be is itself constandy in flux in the form of self-interrogadon as a means of self-definidon. Far from detracting from the historical accounts, am biguities shed light on the historiography as a form of national narrative and provide a way to gain insight into normative determinants of the historical literature. Modes of historical explanation have thus been si multaneously fitted within and derived from the moral hierarchies of the nation, fashioned in such a manner as to represent the ideals to which the nation has professed dedication. The telling of 1898—in historical discourses both popular and professional, repeated and refined—has served as a means of self-affirmation of what the nation is, or perhaps more correcdy what the nation thinks itself to be, as past and present have been conjoined in the service of self-revelation. Representations of 1898 were early invested with the ideals by which Americans wished to define and differentiate their place in the international system. A fuller understanding of 1898 must necessarily seek to expand its temporal reach and enlarge its spatial range. Advances must be sought in the reconfiguration of historiographical contours around categories shaped more by methodological considerations than national bound aries. U.S. historians whose livelihood has been the study of foreign relations have not typically been drawn to foreign archives. Nor do those who write about U.S. history ordinarily consult the historiography of other nations as a way to inform their own perspectives. This reflects a failure to take into account the part that others have played in outcomes of vital importance in U.S. history. The result has been a self-possessed— to say nothing of self-contained—historiography, given to the convic tion that it alone has raised all the relevant questions and, of course, provided all the appropriate answers, and that the rest of the world has litde useful to add. The year 1898 occupies a special place in U.S. historiography. In one sense, the historical literature has assumed fully the proportions of a literary genre almost unique to the subject of 1898, best captured in the X Preface
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