Honor In the Dust, Gregg Jones’s excellent new history of America’s war in the Philippines opens with, what euphemistically became known as “water detail.” This tactic, first developed by the Spanish Inquisition, flushes the victim’s mouth and stomach with water but does not outwardly damage the body. In those early days of American empire, the Providence Sunday Journal assured its readers that the “water cure…does not have serious after effects.” But in our new age of waterboarding, many are still feeling the effects.
This is just one piece
of the terrifying legacy of the lesser known “nasty little war” (1901-1902)
that followed the brief and decisive Spanish-American War. At the opening of the twentieth century, the
Indian Wars had been bloodily concluded and what Jones calls the “postwar
doldrums” had lead expansionists like Roosevelt to eye glory and the
possibility of new markets in China with a beachhead in the Philippines. As Roosevelt himself asserted, “This country
needs a war.” But what American soldiers
received was not glory, but a slow and deadly slog through island jungles
fighting for something called “benevolent assimilation” and a national
resistance that should have been a warning against a similar folly in Vietnam.
Honor
in the Dust is part war novel, backroom account, and courtroom drama. Each page offers beautiful, engaging writing
and complex personalities that appall and amaze. Excellent passages are taken from Stephen
Crane and Mark Twain and lesser known personages are skillfully rendered. Such figures include foaming zealots like
Indiana Senator Beveridgere, brave critics of Roosevelt’s policies like
Massachusetts’s GOP Senator George Hoar, and brutes like General “Hell-roaring”
Jake Smith who told his troops, “I wish you to kill and burn.”
Like
John Sayles’s film Amigo or his
fantastic novel A Moment in the Sun,
Honor in the Dust is a haunting history
of overreach and tells
the early political struggle to stop it.
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