SPLENDID LIBERATORS

A searching account of the Spanish-American War, which made Spain’s empire America’s.

Jackson, an accomplished historian and journalist, begins his long, richly detailed narrative with Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, who was in Havana investigating conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government had herded into concentration camps, with an estimated 425,000 dead of disease and starvation. While she was there, the American warship Maine blew up in Havana’s harbor, providing the pretext for an American invasion. As Jackson writes, the Cuban campaign inaugurated the United States as a Pacific power “and created beliefs that America was a stern yet benevolent country tasked by Destiny to enforce peace and bring prosperity to the world.” That comforting thought was soon disproven, especially in the Philippines, whose people discovered that they had merely substituted one colonial power for another and then endured a vicious war that saw an estimated 600,000 Filipino deaths. Whereas the Cuban campaign brought glory to Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, “the Philippine War would be America’s most quickly forgotten war, the one least celebrated in song or legend, the one least memorialized.” And for good reason, Jackson recounts: American soldiers committed countless atrocities while being felled right and left by disease and starvation themselves; many soldiers committed suicide, and others deserted to join Filipino rebels, while the American leadership attempted to control the news—unsuccessfully, as it turns out, although one senior officer said to a reporter, “If you should hear of a few Filipinos more or less being put out of the way, don’t grow too sentimental over it.” Those who are today insisting on American exceptionalism and attempting to whitewash history will no doubt be angered by Jackson’s revelations and his somber conclusion that “U.S. history is haunted by a ruthlessness often shackled to professed idealism.”

A splendid book, if centered on one of the most shameful episodes in American history.