[On February 4th,
1899 Filipino rebels launched an attack on American troops in Manila, the
opening salvo in what would become the Philippine American
War (or Philippine
Insurrection—see Thursday’s post for more on that distinction). So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that largely forgotten,
brutal turn of the 20th century conflict, leading up to a weekend
post on the war’s legacies for 20th and 21st century
histories!]
On how
remembering the Philippine conflict drastically reframes another American war.
I’m not sure the
1898 Spanish American War figures much at all in our collective memories, but
the few details that do seem to stand out emphasize American interests (“Remember
the Maine” as a battle-cry) and
heroism (Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill).
Those are both understandable and typical ways to remember a war, of course,
and both do reflect complex but undeniable sides to the conflict (its fraught
origins and its clear climax, respectively). Both also closely parallel an
earlier military conflict, the Mexican
American War, a war that similarly began with hazy justifications and ended
with a decisive
victory in enemy territory. As a result, it’s easy to see the Spanish
American War, the nation’s first international military conflict since the
Civil War, as a sort of return to form, a more unifying military battle and
victory after the divisive horrors of the Civil War and its aftermaths (and the
similarly brutal late 19th
century “Indian Wars”).
Yet when put in
context of the Philippine American War, our understanding of the Spanish
American War changes significantly. For one thing, the two conflicts overlapped
so fully that it’d be fair to say that American military action never really
ceased: it’s true that outright hostilities between the U.S. and Spain ended
with an August
12, 1898 Protocol of Peace, but the Treaty of Paris which
formally ended the war wasn’t signed until December 10, and it wasn’t ratified
by the U.S. Senate until February
6, 1899—two days after the battle that began the Philippine American War. The
two conflicts certainly pitted the U.S. against different adversaries (and I’ll
have more to say about the Filipino ones in the coming posts), but the same war
can feature distinct fronts and theaters, and given that U.S. troops were only
in the Philippines because of the Spanish American War, I believe a strong case
could be made that the subsequent conflict with Filipino forces represented a
second front in an ongoing conflict. If so, the Spanish American War would shift
from one of our shortest conflicts to something far more long-lasting and destructive.
Even if we see
the Philippine American War as a follow-up to, rather than an extension of, the
Spanish American War, the subsequent conflict reminds us of a crucial element
to the earlier one: that however we categorize its origins, the Spanish
American War became an excuse for the United States to expand into and occupy
imperial territories. In that way, and in all the concurrent histories it
featured and that I’ll discuss in this week’s series (wars of occupation against
local insurgents, debates at home over these imperial ventures), the Spanish
American War foreshadowed quite potently (as John Sayles makes clear in his masterful
historical
film Amigo) 20th and
21st century conflicts such as the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. And reframing
this side to the Spanish American War can even help us rethink the Mexican American
War—the U.S. might not have stayed in Mexico after that conflict ended, but the
territories added to the U.S. by the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo certainly could be seen as imperial extensions, and
the subsequent conflicts with both Mexican and Native American communities
could be read as wars of occupation in their own right.
Next war context
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
