In some respects, the Spanish-American War presents a similar narrative to the Mexican-American War. It began with a ‘splendid little’ campaign of avowedly retributive conquest (1898) but soon turned into a seemingly open-ended territorial occupation (1899-1913) that raised fundamental questions about the U.S. republic and its dubious use of anti-colonial rhetoric to justify its continuing expansion. Many Americans who had cheered the liberation of Cuba after the Maine incident couldn’t understand why the U.S. now opposed Aguinaldo’s Philippine nationalist movement and why it was paying a massive indemnity to Spain for the privilege of replacing it as the hegemon in that part of the Pacific.
Among these critics were prominent satirists like Mark Twain (in essays like “To a Person Sitting In Darkness” and “A Defense of General Funston”), Finley Peter Dunne (in his “Mr. Dooley” columns), and George Ade (in his reports from Manila and his musical comedy The Sultan of Sulu). The role of satire in the anti-war movement was again critical because public support for U.S. imperialism largely rested on the new visual idiom created by satire magazines like Puck and Judge, which tended to globalize racial stereotypes differentiating civilized whites from Indian savages and African imbeciles.1 Dissenters to what Twain called the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” were predictably ridiculed as shrill, joyless ‘Aunties’ and it is thus no coincidence that Anti-Imperialist League president and Count Tolstoy disciple Ernest Crosby also wrote a satirical novel describing a war in the “Cubapines.”
The most interesting moment of Crosby’s Captain Jinks, Hero arrives with its pithy statement of the paradox that Twain encountered when he became a vocal anti-war activist in 1902. As American satire became increasingly commercialized in the various media of page, stage, and platform that exploded in the decades following the Civil War, the rather unique acceptance of the satiric muse as a legitimate voice of political and social dissent that the 19th-century United States shares with 18th-century Great Britain was unravelling. Like his contemporary succesors (e.g. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert), Twain was simultaneously criticized for being too funny - thus an unfit political commentator - and for being too serious - thus an incompetent comedic entertainer:
"They make themselves ridiculous," said Sam. "They don't see how ludicrous their suggestions are that we should actually retire and let these countries relapse into barbarism… they have no sense of humor."
"And yet," retorted Cleary, "our greatest humorists, Mark Swain, Mr. Tooley, and the best cartoonists, and our only really humorous paper, Knife,2 are on that side."
"But they are only humorists," cried Sam, "mere professional jokers. You can't expect serious sense from them. They are mere buffoons. The serious people here… are with us to a man."
1 A process which is later turned on its head by the Filipino satirists who published the
newspaper Lipang Kalabaw during the U.S. occupation.
2 The original incarnation of Life magazine was largely devoted to political satire.
