“Mr. Crane’s Vivid Story” (scenes 1- 15(of24), Booker T. Washington at the Peace Jubilee, Chicago Auditorium, October 16th 1898)

“Mr. Crane’s Vivid Story” (scenes 1- 15(of24), Booker T. Washington at the Peace Jubilee, Chicago Auditorium, October 16th 1898)

The complete screenplay: Mr. Crane’s Vivid Story: New and Improved

Post-advertising-Edward-Amets-faked-Spanish-American-War-film-356x500-2

USS Maine Tablet (1912) old Rochester, NY city hall. Fitzhugh Street

Scene 1: Havana, February 1898

images7UV9U3U3

from 1896 film, Boxing match or Glove Contest

Scene 2: Pawtucket, Rhode Island, February 1898

Screen-Shot-2015-11-25-at-12.24.37-PM

The Roosevelt Room in the White House

Scene 3: Washington, February 1898

 

600x300xBuffalo.jpg.pagespeed.ic_.Gy-iNOWiNp

Buffalo Soldiers in Montana, 1896

Scene 4: Montana, February 1898

Scene 5: New York, February 1898220px-StephenCraneandCora1899

Scene 6: The Cuban Countryside, February 1898

amessage

41cgA7EuDyL__SL500_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

1893 edition

evangelina-cosío-cisneros%202
 Scene 7

Scene 8: Havana, May 1898

crank 2Scene 9, Siboney, Cuba June 1898

shafter on cart Scene 10

Scene 11negro troops

 

 

Scene 12 cuban flag

Scene 13Black_Maria

Scene 1420150312-Petes_Tavern-1_0

Scene 16

Scene 19Griggs

For background, see: (from War, Literature and the Arts)

“Infirm Soldiers in the Cuban War of Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Harding Davis”

“Strains of Failed Populism in Stephen Crane’s Spanish War Stories”

“Imperium in Imperio: Sutton Griggs’s Imagined War of 1898”

“The Spanish-American War as a Bourgeois Testing Ground: Richard Harding Davis, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane”

also On Spanish-American War Monuments and Rochester. And remembering the Buffalo Soldiers on Veteran’s Day

Scene Fifteen: Chicago Auditorium, October 16th 1898

In October, Booker T. Washington was asked by President William R. Harper of the University of Chicago to deliver one of the addresses at the Peace Jubilee in Chicago celebrating the victory over Spain.  Along with an overflow crowd of 16,000, in the audience was President William McKinley, the members of his cabinet, foreign ministers and a large number of army and navy officers.

Discussing the black troopers who had fought in Cuba, Washington would say:

When you have gotten the full story of the heroic conduct of the Negro in the Spanish-American War—heard it from the lips of Northern soldier and Southern soldier, from ex-abolitionists and ex-masters—then decide for yourself whether a race that is thus willing to die for its country should not be given the highest opportunity to live in its country.

For the full text of the speech and for Washington’s account of its reception, see this excerpt from his Story of My Life and Work

Below is an excerpt from  “Imperium in Imperio: Sutton Griggs’s Imagined War of 1898”  describing the aftermath of the war and the consequences for the black soldiers and African-Americans in general.

Also, see Scene 4: Montana, February 1898  and Scene 11

Washington speaking at the October 16th Peace Jubilee in Chicago, 1898

Washington speaking at the October 16th Peace Jubilee in Chicago, 1898

Crane1897

Stephen Crane, Greco-Turkish War, Greece, 1897

Just once the convention lost complete control of itself. A tall slender youth had spoken some moments in a vein so modest that the chairman interrupted: “Gentlemen,” said he, “the speaker hasn’t much to say for himself, so I’m going to put in a word of my own. I can’t help it. That man, gentlemen—that man there was in the front of the charge at San Juan!” At that the air seemed suddenly to be composed of equally active parts of handkerchiefs, hats and hilarious cheers. The slender youth bowed acknowledgements and said his speech ought to take a military turn, but that he hesitated to say the thing he had in mind. “It was not a pleasant thing.”

“Say it out!” Yelled twenty voices.

So he said it out. He was disappointed in Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, said he, had slandered the Negro soldier; and there was really no braver soldier in the world. The Negro never flinched, never retreated. “Why, gentleman, way back in the old there was a Negro in the fight. And as for what Col. Roosevelt says about Negro soldiers being dependent upon white officers, I’ll tell you the truth. There wasn’t any officer in control on San Juan Hill—or rather every Negro private was a Negro captain!”

— Henry J. Barrymore’s account in the Boston Transcript of Sergant-Major Frank Pullen’s speech at the August 1900 Meeting of the Negro Business  League from Booker T. Washington’s The Story of My Life and Work 1.

In October 1898, Booker T. Washington was invited to speak at the Peace Jubilee in Chicago. Several weeks earlier, the black troopers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry had returned to the United States following victory in the Cuban Campaign. Washington had strongly supported the American intervention in Cuba, claiming that, if asked, he could enlist 100,000 enthusiastic African-American soldiers.

Before an overflow crowd of 16,000 including President McKinley, Washington celebrated the triumphs of the African-American soldiers:

When you have gotten the full story of the heroic conduct of the Negro in the Spanish-American War—heard it from the lips of Northern soldier and Southern soldier, from ex-abolitionists and ex-masters—then decide for yourself whether a race that is thus willing to die for its country should not be given the highest opportunity to live in its country. 2.

wash 2Washington’s rhetoric highlights the hopes shared by many African-Americans that black participation in the Spanish-American War would win respect from whites and improve black status at home. Before the war, Edward Cooper, the conservative editor of the Washington Colored American urged African-Americans to respond to McKinley’s call for volunteers so that “the Negro’s manhood [can be] placed directly in evidence.” Furthermore, in his address, Washington depicts the war as a vehicle for defusing and ameliorating racial antagonism: “recognition [of black heroism in Cuba] had done more to blot out sectional and racial lines than any event since the dawn of our freedom.” Cooper echoed Washington’s sentiments when he proclaimed to his readership: “Our soldierly qualities have been proven . . . The asperities of sectional and race hatred have been wonderfully softened.”3.  Washington’s Peace Jubilee address was warmly received and widely reprinted in the national press.

Within the African-American community, the black troopers became immediate folk heroes:

In Negro homes pictures and plaques depicting the charge at San Juan occupied places of honor. Books, which celebrated the deeds of black soldiers in Cuba, found a ready market. Hundreds of poems ranging from the polished verse of Paul Laurence Dunbar to the crude rhymes of unknown poets extolled the exploits of Negro troops.4

In Cooper’s terms, the soldiers were direct evidence of black manhood tested and proved. Furthermore, for a brief short-lived moment, even the white press championed the black soldiers. In October 1898, after the 10th cavalry marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the cheers of the citizens and a review by McKinley and his Cabinet, the Army and Navy Journal commented, “Never in history has the Negro advanced so rapidly in public estimation as in this war.”5.

from Frank Freidel's The Splendid Little War, 1958

from Frank Freidel’s The Splendid Little War, 1958

Ultimately, the hopes of the African-American community would be disappointed. Almost immediately, attention given to African-American heroism dwindled. As Amy Kaplan has shown:

While African-American newspapers repeatedly lambasted the white press for never mentioning the names of individual black soldiers and for ignoring their contributions, Roosevelt’s account [the subject of Pullen’s tirade] raised special outrage for its blatant distortions of those accomplishments which has entered the public light.6.

African American “Buffalo Soldiers” in Cuba, 1898

African American “Buffalo Soldiers” in Cuba, 1898

In James Roberts Payne study of poetry written by black soldiers—as well as Dunbar’s “The Conquerors: The Black Troops in Cuba” and James Weldon Johnson’s short lyric “The Color Sergeant: On an Incident at the Battle of San Juan Hill”—Payne points to a progressive sense of disappointment, as the poems oscillate between “themes of extreme idealism and embittered disillusionment.”7. In late October 1898, only two weeks after the Peace Jubilee, Charles Knox of the Indianapolis Freeman lamented, “The millennium that is to be has not dawned. Caney and Santiago may as well not have been.”8. Sergeant-Major Pullens’s outburst in the form of his speech to the Negro Business League shows that this anger remained two years after the event.

Instead of the war leading to Washington’s vision of racial lines blotted out or Cooper’s image of racial hatred softened, the war precipitated a wave of mob violence against African-Americans. To many Southern whites, the victory over Spain—rekindling the martial spirit of the old Confederacy—was proof of Anglo- Saxon superiority. Returning black soldiers, often encamped in the south, were targets of white attack. Nowhere was the connection between the triumph in Cuba and assertions of white supremacy clearer than in the infamous November 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina white race riot. There, self-appointed vigilance committees created top quell black assertion, referred to themselves as “Rough Riders.” By late 1898, Dunbar, dismayed by post-war events, feared that he detected, “a new attitude produced by the war which was anything but favorable for black citizens.” By 1900, W.E.B Du Bois confirmed indeed that Knox’s millennium had not come. In his customary tone of distanced irony, Du Bois remarked that “the Spanish War and its various sequels have greatly increased some of our difficulties in dealing with the Negro problems.”

Notes
1. Booker T Washington, Booker T. Washington’s Own Story of His Life and Work (Atlanta: J.L
Nichols & Co, 1901) Chapter XV. Washington would later turn Life and Work into the shorter and better-known Up from Slavery, which did not include Barrymore’s account of Pullen’s remarks.

2.Washington, Life, Chapter XV.

3.William B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden 1898-1903 (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1975) 109.

4. Gatewood, 107.

5. Jack Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974) 79.

6. Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill.” Cultures of United States Imperialism. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. (Durham: Duke Univesity Press, 1993) 227

7. James Robert Payne, “Afro-American Literature of the Spanish-American War.” MELUS, Vol. 10,No.3 (Autumn 1983), 19-32.

8. Gatewood, 110.
9. Gatewood, 110.
10. Du Bois’s quote from “The Twelfth Census and the Negro Problem” appears in: Frederick
Wegner, “Charles W. Chesnutt and the Anti-Imperialist Matrix of African-American Writing, 1898-
1905.” Criticism, Fall 1999, footnote 45. In his essay, Wegner sums up the Negrophobia of the
period: “The Spanish-American War, by inciting a patriotic martial frenzy throughout the nation, had
completed the South’s post-Reconstructionist rapprochement with the North, at the expense of its
black citizens.” Wegner also discusses Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 The Marrow of Tradition, which is
based on the Wilmington Riots. In the novel, Chesnutt does not make any direct references to the
Cuban War, although he alludes to American imperial ambitions. Unlike Sutton Griggs, Chesnutt wrote for
a white audience; he sent copies of The Marrow to both President Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and to Roosevelt himself.

See the “News” at Northeast: Booker T. Washington’s visit with George Eastman

About The Author

dkramer3@naz.edu

Welcome to Talker of the Town! My name is David Kramer. I have a Ph.D in English and teach at Keuka College. I am a former and still active Fellow at the Nazareth College Center for Public History and a Storyteller in Residence at the SmallMatters Institute. Over the years, I have taught at Monroe Community College, the Rochester Institute of Technology and St. John Fisher College. I have published numerous Guest Essays, Letters, Book Reviews and Opinion pieces in The New York Times, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Buffalo News, the Rochester Patriot, the Providence Journal, the Providence Business News, the Brown Alumni Magazine, the New London Day, the Boston Herald, the Messenger Post Newspapers, the Wedge, the Empty Closet, the CITY, Lake Affect Magazine and Brighton Connections. My poetry appears in The Criterion: An International Journal in English and Rundenalia and my academic writing in War, Literature and the Arts and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Starting in February 2013, I wrote for three Democratic and Chronicle  blogs, "Make City Schools Better," "Unite Rochester," and the "Editorial Board." When my tenure at the D & C  ended, I wanted to continue conversations first begun there. And start new ones.  So we created this new space, Talker of the Town, where all are invited to join. I don’t like to say these posts are “mine.” Very few of them are the sole product of my sometimes overheated imagination. Instead, I call them partnerships and collaborations. Or as they say in education, “peer group work.” Talker of the Town might better be Talkers of the Town. The blog won’t thrive without your leads, text, pictures, ideas, facebook shares, tweets, comments and criticisms.

Donate

Like what you see on our site? We’d appreciate your support. Please donate today.

Featured Posts

Loading