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101 5 Empire and Exclusion THE UNITED STATES, 1896–1929  On a spring afternoon in 1904 the eighty-four-year-old Daniel Gould Burr arrived at the city fairgrounds in Paris, Illinois. Bedecked in the regalia of a U.S.–Mexican War veteran, the frail man took a seat under some nearby trees. At an appointed hour he rose to his feet and read aloud the roster of Company H of the Fourth Regiment of Illinois Volunteers.The Fourth Illinois had fought with distinction under General Scott in Mexico, most notoriously capturing General Santa Anna’s prosthetic leg at the Battle of Cerro Gordo. Sergeant Burr, however, was a by-the-book soldier who refused to commandeer even a much-needed blanket from his Mexican foes. His compulsion for abiding by the rules led him to this final duty in 1904. Members of Company H had reunited regularly, and now, nearly sixty years later, Burr was the last survivor. After completing his forlorn roll call, he ate a picnic dinner alone and spent the remainder of the day “in meditation.” At nightfall friends took the solitary veteran home. That winter he joined his deceased comrades.1 Between 1896 and 1929 the number of Mexican War veterans declined rapidly.As their ranks thinned, interest in the conflict resurged.The Spanish– American War and the Mexican Revolution inspired a new generation of authors to reinterpret the war according to the needs of their time. The growth of the monument-building movement in the 1920s likewise drew attention to U.S.–Mexican War sites in the American Southwest. The rapidly aging veterans, however, had little to do with these new forms of memory. While the men were willing to offer an olive branch to Mexico at the end of their lives, their descendants felt no such obligation. As the last of the old warriors died, control of the memory of the U.S.–Mexican War passed largely into the hands of men and women with very diverse agendas. Devoted to the ideals of American imperialism, nativism, and white supremacy , this younger generation sought to supplant older histories to promote its 102 Chapter 5 social, political, and economic prominence in the region. Memory became a means of demarcation and exclusion in the United States.2 The year 1896 marked the semicentennial of the U.S.–Mexican War. In a nation enamored of anniversary celebrations, the reaction of Americans to this one was telling. Individual volunteer units like the Palmetto Regiment, Mormon Battalion, and Missouri Mounted Volunteers scheduled reunions to commemorate their founding, but on the national level there was little interest in remembering the conflict. Battles had been fought in New Mexico , Texas, and California, and they seemed more natural places to honor the occasion. What did take place, however, revealed much about the regional dynamics of memory.3 Of all the territories annexed by the United States, New Mexico had the largest population. When Stephen Watts Kearny led his army into Santa Fe in August of 1846, the Mexican province had over sixty thousand inhabitants . Kearny’s taking of the region was initially bloodless. In January of 1847, however, Hispanos and Native Americans from the Taos Pueblo rose against the authority of the United States in a violent rebellion that cost the lives of hundreds of people. The revolt ended with several prominent New Mexicans being publicly executed in the Taos plaza. The fiftieth anniversary of the conquest of New Mexico and the subsequent Taos revolt drew little attention in the territory.4 Another motivation may explain New Mexico’s reluctance to celebrate the centennial of the war. In 1896 New Mexicans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds were campaigning for statehood. An important part of that effort was changing popular perceptions that the territory was foreign and unrefined, and reminding the nation of the region’s Mexican War origins hindered that goal. New Mexicans instead preferred to identify with the territory ’s more distant and romantic Spanish, and therefore European, past. Consequently, local newspapers neglected even to mention the anniversary of the war. In a society in which Anglos and Hispanos had learned to accommodate one another, there were no public ceremonies, speeches, or memorials drawing attention to an uncomfortable and inconvenient past.5 In February of 1896 a group of Texans proposed holding a semicentennial commemoration to honor the “existence of Texas and acquisition by the United States of all those sister states and territories added to the American union by...

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