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Marshaling the Imaginary, Imagining the Martial Or, What Is at Stake in the Cultural Analysis of War? Amy S. Greenberg No field is more attuned to the present than military history, even though many of the people who are interested in it can seem nostalgic and backward -looking. Fear, especially what the current or next war may bring, concentrates the mind. Michael Sherry, 2000. O n February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 266 crewmen. American journalists clamored for vengeance against the Spanish authorities they wrongly blamed for the accident. Three weeks later the Fifty-fifth Congress unanimously voted in support of Pres. William McKinley’s $50-million bill for the “national defense.” By May 1898, Spain and the United States were at war. When congressmen lined up to speak in favor of the $50-million bill, they brought their martial imaginations with them to the podium. Many, like New York Democrat Edmund Driggs, saw future potential in the present crisis. “I would have this nation the absolute master of the commerce of the world,” he asserted. Equally important to the crisis at hand was the health and survival of US patriotism. “I believe that as we sow so shall we reap,” Driggs intoned. “And if in the minds of the present generation of boys and girls, young men and women, we sow the seeds of lukewarm patriotism, in the next we will reap a race of men and women who will care very little for love of country. . . . It is impossible to look up without having a feeling of pride steal over you for the patriots of ’76, the sailors of ’12, the boys in blue of ’61, the courage of the boys in gray.” In Driggs’s view, war with Spain was desirable because it facilitated both patriotism and economic hegemony, and he used a historical narrative to link the two. He cast his net widely to connect the patriots of the past to the present; soldiers in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812; Union army, even Confederates (the boys in gray) won his acclaim. A martial imaginary not 220 AMy S. GREENBERG only fired up his plan for increasing patriotism, but justified his vote in favor of war.1 One conflict, however, was notably absent from Driggs’s list: the 1846–1848 US-Mexican War. With its 85,000 US combatants and the second highest fatality rate of any US war before then or since, his omission was hardly a minor oversight. One could imagine that Driggs’s omission was accidental, except that so many other representatives made exactly the same historical leap.To prove that “the people of that grand old Commonwealth are second to none in their loyalty to the Government,” John F. Fitzgerald of Massachusetts described the sacrifices made by “the embattled farmer at Concord and Lexington ,” during the Revolution, as well as during the Civil War, skipping over Mexico. Both Benton McMillin of Tennessee and Reece C. De Graffenreid of Texas somehow also avoided mentioning Mexico even as they discussed the proud histories of their citizens at the Alamo, the War of 1812, and Civil War. Not even New Mexico delegate Harvey Fergusson, representing the last territorial vestige of the original Mexican cession of 1848, mentioned the war with Mexico in his account of the “fifty years” of “devoted” patriotism of the New Mexican.2 Nor was this the only relevant occasion upon which the Fifty-fifth Congress avoided discussing the US-Mexican War. In the heated debate over whether to declare war with Spain on April 27, Henry Richard Gibson, Republican of Tennessee, noted that it was “hard at this day to realize that Florida, Louisiana, and all of our States and Territories west of the Mississippi were Spanish territory less than one hundred years ago.” Why might Gibson have trouble remembering Spain’s role in North America? Perhaps because no Mexican conflict was mentioned in his narrative of US warfare. Gibson praised the Green Mountain boys of the Revolution, the hunters of Kentucky at the Battle of New Orleans, and then skipped directly to the Civil War. On March 24, Senate Republican John Thurston of Nebraska also missed the USMexican War in his discourse praising “the part force has played in the world’s history,” leaping nimbly from Bunker Hill to the Civil War.3 In 1898, America’s leading politicians loudly proclaimed the importance of America’s military history to the future of American arms. But...

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