1898

  

“The old order — the rule of the white people.” 

Race riots in Wilmington, N.C., end with the black community in ruins. Josephus Daniels, editor of The News and Record, the state’s most influential newspaper, fueled outrage in stories about sex and race and power. As a book review in The New York Times points out, when trouble exploded,

 

Successful black men were targeted for banishment from the city, while black workers left all their possessions behind as they rushed to the swamps for safety. Over 60 people died. No one seemed to care. The governor of North Carolina cowered in the face of the violent rebellion, worried about his own life. President William McKinley turned a blind eye to the bloodshed. 

 

An avowed white supremacist took over as mayor. In the wake of the violence, leading newspapers explained, “We must hope that by far the greater part of Negroes in this city are anxious for the restoration of order and quiet and ‘the old order’ — the rule of the white people.”  

The men who led the overthrow of city government went on to successful political careers. Daniels was a cabinet member under President Woodrow Wilson. Furnifold Simmons served 30 years as a United States senator.  The grandson of Alex Manly, who wrote about the riots, says simply “If there’s a hell, I hope they’re burning in it, all of them.” 

 

* 

“The great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.” 

Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders attracted all kinds of recruits, the mayor of Prescott, Arizona, the grandson of Grant’s secretary of state, the two top-ranked tennis players in the country. Five percent of the men in the regiment, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, were from Harvard.

 

Roughly 16,000 Americans fought in Cuba, but Roosevelt’s unit gained widespread fame. The “Rough Rider” hat sold well; Stephen Crane chronicled the regiment’s exploits, as did a dozen other writers. The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded them: “Whether Fifth Avenue millionaires or Western cowboys, they fought together and died together in Cuba for the great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.”

 

The Rough Riders landed in Cuba on June 22; by August, Spain was suing for peace.

 

Roosevelt credits African American soldiers who helped take San Juan Hill in his book on the war; the newspapers of the nation said little about them at the time.

The attack on San Juan Hill.

 

*

 

“The tyranny of the most cruel of modern nations.”

 

McLaughlin, in A History of the American Nation; pp. 529-530; (1911), describes the motivation for American intervention in Cuba, after the Spanish crush a rebellion:

 

Moreover, the people of the United States were shocked by the methods used in suppression of the rebellion, which were cruel in the extreme, entailing untold misery not so much upon the soldiers in arms as on the women, children, and other non-combatants. A large portion of the whole island was laid waste, its commerce destroyed, while tens of thousands of its citizens died of want and starvation.

 

This is ironic given the fight at Wounded Knee earlier in the decade and our fighting against the Filipinos to follow.

 

Charles Morris in The Great Republic also lays out the motivation for war against Spain, involving: “the wresting of the Philippines, Porto Rico, and the Ladrones from the tyranny of the most cruel of modern nations, and the addition of Hawaii to our domain.” “The Greater United States, at one bound, assumes its place in the van of nations, and becomes the foremost agent in civilizing and Christianizing the world.”

 

The Publishers Introduction has this to say:

 

With a fervent trust in a guiding Providence, and an abiding confidence in our ability, we enter upon the new and grander career, as in obedience to the divine behest that the Latin race must decrease and the Anglo-Saxon increase, and that the latter, in a human sense, must be the regenerator of all who are groping in the night of ignorance and barbarism.

 

Morris adds in his Author’s Introduction:

 

It may be fairly said, then, that the founders of our nation came from the cream of the populations of Europe, born of sturdy Teutonic stock, and comprising thrift, energy, endurance, love of liberty, and freedom of thought to a degree never equaled in the makers of any other nation upon the earth. They were of solid oak in mind and frame, and the edifice they built had for its foundations the natural rights of man, and for its superstructure that spirit of liberty which has ever since throbbed warmly in the American heart.

 

He admits that the Native Americans had been driven back, step by step, but claimed: “Yet the Indians are probably as numerous to-day as they were originally, and are certainly better off in their present peaceful and partly civilized condition than they were in their former savage and warlike state.”

 

Oddly enough, elsewhere he condemns the Spanish for their behavior in settling America: “Spain sent her armed expeditions thither, and in time they overran the sections [of land] named, their footprints marked everywhere by fire and blood.” 

A way of life was destroyed.

* 

James Whitcomb Riley, “The Hoosier Poet,” is busy writing all kinds of sentimental poems. 

Not sure when he published “The Boy Patriot,” but it’s clear Riley never thought much about the high costs of war. The fact that it appeared in the anthology, The Book of Joyous Children (1902) may tell us something: 

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand
Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,
Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band;

I want to hear, high overhead, The Old Flag flap her wings

While all the Army, following, in chorus cheers and sings;

I want to hear the tramp and jar

Of patriots a million,
As gayly dancing off to war

As dancing a cotillion.

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand

Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,
Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band.

I want to see the battle! –

The battle! –

The battle! –

I want to see the battle, and be in it to the end; –    
I want to hear the cannon clear their throats and catch the prattle
Of all the pretty compliments the enemy can send! –
And then I know my wits will go, – and where I should’nt be –

Well, there’s the spot, in any fight, that you may search for me.

So, when our foes have had their fill,
Though I’m among the dying,
To see The Old Flag flying still,
I’ll laugh to leave her flying!

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand

Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,

Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band.

*

 

In a humorous piece by Riley, “Hik-Tee-Dik,” the reader meets two “loud and hilarious” boys. At school, Billy and Buddy are always causing a commotion. When they enter class, shouting their war cry, “Hik-tee-dik,” they’d “ bang the school-door till the plastering fell.” 

Three days in a row, they pretend to “clinch,” and in wrestling with each other, knock over the teacher’s desk. 

Finally, they get beat: 

For the teacher, she righted her desk – raised the lid

And folded and packed away each little kid –

Closed the incident so – yes, and locked it, she did –

Hik-tee-dik! Billy and Buddy!

The teacher has her way.