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The memory of war is deeply etched on American public consciousness through memorials of national significance. Witness the Vietnam Memorial, then the Marine Corps’ Iwo Jima Monument, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Gettysburg. Yet the interested observer must look much harder for scattered and unobtrusive memorials of the Philippine-American conflict or even the Spanish-American War that preceded it. Not so in 1899 when Admiral George Dewey returned triumphantly from his 1898 naval victory over the Spanish in the Battle of Manila before the Philippines came under formal American control in the Treaty of Paris of December 1898. Dewey stayed in Manila assisting the American military occupation and then, in the summer of 1899, began a slow triumphal return via the Mediterranean.1 The nation’s leaders had wavered over whether to grasp the nettle of empire, but they did. Dewey arrived home the hero who had upheld the nation’s honor and laid the foundation for that empire. While still governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that “The thunder of Dewey’s guns . . . raised in a moment’s time the prestige of American arms throughout the world and added a new honor to American citizenship at home and abroad.”2 Despite Roosevelt’s confident bombast, Dewey’s views on empire were at first unclear. He made noises on both sides of the question, as befitted a man sizing up his chances for a presidential nomination. But he judged that the Filipino people lacked “honesty” and suitability for self-government.3 When Secretary of the Navy John D. Long christened the Philippine “dominion” an “imperial” form of “expansion”at Dewey’s tumultuous Washington reception in early October 1899, Dewey led the loud round of applause. The New York Times declared Dewey lost to the cause of anti-imperialism. The pomp and ceremony was that of a country entering the true world of nations because it now had colonies (in Empire in American History ian tyrrell 541 Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines) and was set on a course of “moral and physical growth.”4 Since the spring of 1899 a New York committee had been planning a spectacular return for Dewey, and for the purpose a special arch was constructed at Madison Square modeled in part on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The Dewey Arch, as it became known, was decorated with the works of sculptors and crowned with an imposing quadriga of four seahorses drawing a ship. Inscriptions to the “West Indies” and the “East Indies” were planned in order to symbolize the joining of the Pacific and the Atlantic, thereby adding to the imperial theme. At night the arch shone with the glare of electric lightbulbs; in its showy brilliance the monument commemorated the achievements of an empire newly minted and very modern, an empire of the electric age. Yet the cost was said to be comparatively small. Representations of empire were evidently, like the empire itself, to be done on the cheap.5 Fireworks displays greeted the hero of Manila, and poets extolled his achievements in doggerel verse while Dewey subjected himself willingly to naval and land parades. A New York street parade was held on September 30, 1899 (filmed by the Edison Company for a short newsreel), but Dewey did not actually enter the arch. He mounted the official viewing platform just a few meters short to review the parade, thereby allegedly becoming the“first victor in military history denied the rite of passage through his triumphal arch.”6 City officials became cautious about the structural soundness of the memorial, which sculptors, not architects, had designed. If the arch had not already deteriorated it quickly did so thereafter because it was made of plaster similar to that used to build the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892. Attempts to raise money to rebuild the memorial with more durable materials failed, and, a poet lamented, “into calm disdainfulness she sinks.”7 Within two years the triumphal arch had been demolished. Today the “only existing reminder . . . near the site is a bar and restaurant called Dewey’s Flatiron,” which features a tacky replica of part of the arch’s top together with a portrait of the victorious “admiral of the navy” and his exploits.8 Dewey stated in his autobiography that had he died while crossing the Atlantic an“outpouring of subscriptions”would have quickly made the arch a permanent monument “in marble.” Dewey’s mistake...

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