Splendid Liberators
Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
This immersive epic reveals the origins of the American empire and the lives of those who promoted it and those who resisted it.
In 1898, the United States won an empire, and—many allege—lost its soul. In Splendid Liberators, Joe Jackson offers an epic narrative of the Spanish-American War, the world-spanning conflict during which the United States freed Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish control only to confront resistance and resentment. The acclaimed author of Black Elk, Jackson brings the times to full, teeming life via portraits of the many leading characters—from the impetuous warrior Teddy Roosevelt, the prophetic Cuban revolutionary José Martí, and the Philippines’ dignified first president, Emilio Aguinaldo, to the Red Cross’s Clara Barton and the foe of empire Mark Twain. He ranges from the heroic theaters of San Juan Hill and Manila Bay to disease-wracked camps in Florida and Cuba where soldiers died en masse and to the White House and halls of Congress, where America’s leaders overcame enduring reluctances to seize an overseas dominion. He also follows the exploits of the legendary African American soldier David Fagen, who joined the rebels of the Philippines and fought his compatriots, and the swashbuckling Colonel Fred Funston, who was dispatched into the jungle to hunt him down.
Overturning familiar scripts, Splendid Liberators is the first work of narrative nonfiction to look at this far-flung war through American, Cuban, and Filipino eyes, and to gauge the consequences and costs of America's first major imperial adventure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The epic stories of little-remembered rebels against imperialism are resurfaced in this sweeping saga of the Spanish American War from journalist Jackson (The Thief at the End of the World). At the end of the 19th century, Spain's brutal colonial rule over Cuba and the Philippines prompted revolutionaries in both nations to make overtures to America. They "realiz too late that they'd exchanged one master for another," Jackson writes. Drawing on records he collected in both countries, Jackson spotlights fascinating episodes of resistance. These include the captivating story of David Fagen, an enlisted man in the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers, who witnessed such "ferocious racial hatred" from white fellow soldiers—against both civilian populations and enlisted Black Americans—that one night he "stuffed as many revolvers into a gunnysack as would fit" and joined the Filipino rebellion. "David Fagen became a wraith, a legend," Jackson writes—taunting notes from him began to appear outside American garrisons, antagonizing the officers and exhorting the enlisted men to join the Filipino cause. Military leadership grew obsessed with hunting him down; a local eventually claimed to have killed Fagen, but many believed that this itself was a ruse of Fagen's design. While collating astounding stories like these, Jackson shows how the conflict became the template for every one of America's "small wars" that followed, from Vietnam to Iraq. It's a vigorous and clear-eyed accounting of the brutality that birthed the "American Century."
