Angry Planet - When Americans Became ‘Splendid Liberators’

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

America spent most of the 19th century at war with itself. It conquered its western expanse then collapsed into civil war. Once the North beat the South, partisan politics consumed the country for a generation. A string of assassinations, progressive firebrands, and civil service reforms burned people out on domestic politics and a bored and febrile nation began to search for meaning beyond its borders. It noticed the Spanish Empire was awfully close.In Splendid Liberators, award winning journalist Joe Jackson chronicles the beginning of the American myth of the “good war.” He’s on the show today to talk to us about Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and a general who lay in state at the Alamo.Recurring patterns in American historyRoscoe Conkling jumpscareRemnants of the Spanish-American War in South CarolinaWhat did liberty mean in the 19th century?Clara Barton, Leonard Wood and the dual American personalityThe first modern concentration campsThe Battleship of MaineWhen Congress used to fight, physicallyDrones won’t win a warThe US in the Philippines‘The water cure’American historians facing reality in the PhilippinesTeddy, finallyLaying in state at the AlamoBuy Splendid LiberatorsA Defense of General FunstonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. How are you doing today? I'm fine. How are you? I'm doing all right. I've been generally in a state of high anxiety, I think the last 12 months, as many other Americans perhaps are, but I've been reading a lot of history. And it's calming me down a little bit. Is it really? It is, actually, yeah. That's interesting. So you see that there are recurring patterns and it's like, okay, this isn't the end of the world? Yeah, that's exactly.

Yeah, especially like specifically in America, like reading American history. And I'm like, okay, it's going to be like, this is bad, to be clear. And it shouldn't be happening. But like, and there are things that are unique about the specific situation we're in. but like we've kind of done, we do this, this country. Like, it's got to, we're going to get through it. It's just about survival. Right.

And like, working on what comes after. And I think we'll be okay. Yeah. It's, it's like, we want to think the history is linear and we learn from it. But I mean, you know, we probably do a little bit, but we keep coming back to the same tropes over and over again. Yeah. And I think that that's like, that's been something that's very important to remind myself

of this time around because it just, I think it's maybe some of the ugliest it's been in my lifetime. But not so, it's been pretty ugly before. Yeah, it's interesting for me because, I mean, obviously I'm a little bit older than you, but I mean, it got pretty ugly during Vietnam and Kent State. And so it wasn't exactly the same. But, I mean, you know, people were at each other's throats. and you had a president who was quite adept at, you know, using emotions for his own gain and a lot of hiding of facts and calling people an American and Americans turning against one another

and people getting killed. I mean, it was, you know, you just think about that kind of stuff. It is interesting that there was one podcast, I think I was on where the host was saying, you know, I remember I read a lot about Kent State, and everybody says that's the worst, but this is the worst, it's going on in Minneapolis. And I thought, you know, it's really the worst to whoever is living through it, you know. Yeah. So, and it doesn't diminish, you know, what's happening in Kent State is not diminished by what's happening in Minneapolis and vice versa. I mean, they're just all bad.

And they're just all springing from kind of the same thing. So the thing that's been giving me comfort. It's kind of a perfect lead into your book, actually, because it takes place right before. Have you read Age of Acrimony by chance? Who did it? Oh, the name escapes me just right now. I'm on the spot. But it's about, it's a recent history, and it is about end of civil war kind of right up until where your book takes up.

Oh, yeah, I know about that. I don't have that. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, just like how politics worked. then and like Roscoe conkling and people being shot at while they're giving political speeches and you've got to have people to beat back the crowns just like you know we've and and all the stuff that's going on now has been in us for a long time and like conversations in the Atlantic

monthly about whether or not not universal suffrage is is good or not not just should ex-slaves vote but should workers be allowed to vote. workers be allowed to vote. Women. And yeah, I know, I know. So the next book that I'm working on right now, I mean, it's real interesting. I mean, there's always, um, there's always, like, people, like agendas of control. The, um, the book I'm working on now has to do with Nellie Bly's, um, 10 days in the madhouse where she was writing an expose for Joseph Pulitzer. And I mean, you know, that came in the midst of a lot of change for women and there was a lot of fear of that and during this period when she when she portrayed a madwoman

the majority of this is the late Victorian era in the United States the majority of people who were thrown into asylums were women I mean it was it was a form of control back you know, in the marital sphere and, you know, the political sphere. And now you've got this, you know, now you see this going on with immigrants. I mean, there's always this fear that, you know, that the ruling cast is going to lose control.

That's the, so I live in South Carolina. Oh, you do? Where? I do. I live in Columbia. which is a perfect segue to the beginning of the book of the book. I'm on by the way

you're listening to Angry Planet. We were talking to Joe Jackson about his book, Splendid Liberators. So two thoughts. Like one, we've got one of the big plantations that still like exists within the city that you can go visit was owned by a woman who ended up the sole heir of her estate and then was

you can imagine she ended up in a madhouse because people wanted to take the estate away from her. Right. And then the other thing is thinking about like people being afraid, like these systems of control and people being like being afraid of losing power, like is written into so much stuff in this city. I think about it every time I go down to the state house grounds. And I also think about the Spanish-American War. Have you been by chance to the state house grounds in Columbia, South Carolina, sir? A long time ago when I was a college student. Yeah.

So they, we've got, it's always struck me as is odd because there's a lot of civil war stuff and a lot of questionable statues on the Columbia State State House grounds. But second to the civil war in commemoration is the Spanish-American War. We've got one of the guns from the main. There's one of the, one of the, one of the Spanish cannons was here and that it was scrapped in 1942, but they've still got, like, the part of the cast of turth that it was on. And there's just a memorial. And it's, it is this war that I think is not in American consciousness at all, really anymore. But it shaped, has shaped so much of the country, which is, you know, a bit what your book's about.

Yeah. Yeah, I was, I mean, I think you're right. And it shaped it very quickly. I had originally thought about doing a kind of a story about two rabid antagonists who are major characters in my book. One was a guy by the name of Frederick Funston who was a war hero during the Spanish and Philippine-American. War. And the other one was a black deserter who, by the name of David Fagan, who charged up San Juan Hill, and he went to the Philippines, and he ran afoul of the rampant racism over there, and he became an insurgent with the Filipino side. And he appeared on the front page of

of the New York Times as well. And I thought, well, these two guys fought side by side. They, you know, that's an interesting mirror image. But when I was writing the book, I had gone to, I had gone to Cuba. I'd gone to Puerto Rico. I'd gone to the Philippines. I'd collected all of my evidence. And I had just started writing the book.

when my wife and I were plowed into by a drunk driver and it nearly killed us and it took about a year to recuperate. And during that recuperation, I was watching the January 6th riots at the Capitol. And I thought, I couldn't help but think, who are we? What is our, do we have a national character? Is that idea even relevant any longer? And I was thinking about that because that was such an important topic during the late 1800s, early 1900s. The United States asked time and time again, who are we? Shouldn't we, aren't we the light of the world?

Shouldn't we expand and Christianize and civilize the world at the same time that there were Spanish colonies that wanted to rebel? bell and become independent. And they had the same question, who are we? And as I was watching the takeover of the capital, I thought we've changed so much within four short years. And it donned on me, you know, during the Spanish-American War, when we went from being isolationist to an empire, we changed really quite quickly within four short years. And I was very very quickly. very interested in the, and, um, the psychological background and motivations and reasons behind that. Yeah. What's the, the, your book is kind of about the creation of this American myth, non-prejorative,

like myth, because like America tells itself a story about itself. Right. That's part of how it sustains itself. And that story has changed and morphed over the generations. And I think that the thing that you're talking about that's born, that you kind of document in Splendid Liberators, we're watching that it sustained us in the 20th century and we're watching it kind of change and die now.

Right. Right. And I think it's hard for some of us to live through, having been kind of in the tail end of this thing for so long. So can you tell me about like, especially in the context of your book, like what is liberty? What did it mean to people then? And what did it mean to people in Cuba and in the Philippines?

Well, in Cuba and the Philippines, I mean, it was getting out from under the yoke of the Spanish Empire and being able to shape their own destinies. And for them, at least in the very beginning, it was just the idea of getting out from underneath the Spanish oppressors. we had because of various factors we had joined the Cuban fight

because there was only 90 miles to our south and American adventurers were getting involved in the fight even before the main blew up and then the main blew up and we declared war upon Spain and it was when we went over there and the Spanish capitulated. They didn't like to say that they surrendered. They capitulated that we were suddenly,

we suddenly had a whole lot of new territories that we didn't do any, know what to do with. And one was, we had promised not to make, Cuba a territory, but we turned it into an economic fiefdom. The other ones, we hadn't made any promises. And yet the rebels who were there saw what we had done in Cuba, and they thought, oh, the United States will help us. And we had made promises to them that we will, we are the new font of liberty and freedom. We believe in self-determination. And we, and we believe in. And we we will help you throw off this yoke of Spanish colonialism.

But then when we got over there, we decided we wanted to keep these rich territories. And we began, you know, what would be the template for these forever wars, these wars where we think that overwhelming force is going to win the day quickly, as it did in Cuba, but then an insurgency begins, and we fight for a long time, and it becomes quite bloody and there are lots of atrocities. And it's interesting because when I was in Cuba, one thing that made me think about this was, when I was in Cuba, I talked to a Cuban historian, who was kind of highly respected by other people. historians in Cuba, Francisco

Sevillairea. And she said, you know, the Cubans were watching you all when you were down at San Juan Hill. Because there were two personalities, and America seemed divided between these two personalities. One was Clara Barton, and that seemed to that Flair Barton seemed to

represent a kind of altruism in the American soul that did not have any sort of

you know there wasn't any sort of payback or anything and then there was the first

governor who the first Cuban governor that Americans seemed to revere

but we know better guy by the name of the Leonard Wood Leonard Wood basically created the framework for America becoming a Spanish economic colony from 1899 until 1959, the revolution in 1959. And they stood side by side, you know, and which direction would America take?

and America decided to take the go in the direction of Leonard Wood. Now, I found that really very interesting. Can you tell me, tell us a little bit more about Barton and kind of her journey in who she was and what she did? Well, Barton was, Barton had already founded the American chapter of the Red Cross, and she had been involved in relief. work in wars pretty much since our own civil war. She had famously set up released work during the Johnstown flood. She had gone and helped the Armenians during the Armenian Genocide, and she was just

coming off of that when there was a great hue and cry for her to go to Cuba to provide relief to Cuban peasants and farmers. They were called Pacificos in order to starve out the rebels. The Spanish Army basically collected all of the Pacificos. thousands and thousands of Pacificos into these concentration camps called Reconcentrato zones, and they were dying by the thousands. And so she petition McKinley to be able to provide relief to the Reconcentratos. There are some famous photos of that time where, there was a mountain of bones and there was a fellow sitting atop the mountain of bones

studying a and they were all they were all the victims of the reconcentrato camps and there was a fellow who was kind of dressed like Charlie Chaplin sitting atop this mountain of bones studding a skull much like Hamlet did in did York skull in the play And so she was there to try to provide relief. She was there when the Maine blew up. And she was allowed into the fight when the United States invaded Cuba after the Maine blew up. So although the U.S. Medical Corps was so. abysmal that she basically, her Red Cross basically started trying to save the lives of the American soldiers.

Tell us the story of the, and I've got the picture. I found the picture. I'm going to use it as the show notes picture. He does look a lot like, the hat's not quite right, but he does look quite a bit like Charlie Chaplin. Yeah. That is horrifying. So the, the, the, the blowing up of the main is like central to this. And I think that that is a story that was pretty central to American mythology for a while.

And again, you know, memories being what they are, generations being what they are. It's not something that's super well remembered. But I got one of the canons here down at my state house. Yeah, that's right. It's important. It's, you know,

Benjamin Tillman made sure that he got that cannon and got it placed here because it was so important. So what happened to the main and why did it become this central part of the story? Well, I think the main was, I think the main, we're talking about mythology. I think the main was the kind of the first chapter in the mythology that we built up as we're the world's savior. I mean, we kind of really see it when during World War, at the end of World War, one, but really World War II when we come and save the world. In this case, the United States had a lot of investments in Cuba, even before we started

fighting down there. And the consul general in Havana, a guy by the name of Fitzhue Lee, had asked for the, and ask for the Maine to come down into Havana Harbor to, in order to, you know, kind of show American might and hopefully psychologically protect American investments. And about three weeks after it arrived, it blew up. it looks like it's a mystery which has never been solved but in the 1970s there was an extensive investigation by uh admiral hyman rickover the father of the nuclear navy that basically said that um that those juggernights back then they were coal driven and they there there was

off in a storehouse or a room where there were giant piles of coal. And you pile coal on top of itself with enough weight, and deep down within the piles, spontaneous combustion begins. And it can start a fire. And there had been many instances of fires like that in American battleships built around that time. and there was a design flaw in those battleships because the coal storage bunkers were right next to the magazines for shells and gunpowder. And it was just a disaster waiting to happen.

And Rickover deemed that, you know, the heat got, you know, the spontaneous command. combustion created enough heat that it went through the walls, and it blew up the magazine and killed 256 sailors in the main. There was a lot of emotion going on already, because the United States thought that it was, believed in American exceptionalism at this time. We thought we were different than the rest of the world. We thought that we were not a violent empire like the European empires, that people would come to us.

And yet this, you know, Reconcentratos were dying in the thousands, 90 miles to our south. And there was this huge outcry, this popular culture outcry that went on for two or three years. We've got to do something about these poor people down there. They're dying in the thousands. how can we say that we are the chosen nation for the world to lead the world to a new sort of consciousness and civilization if we can't do anything about this 90 miles to

our south? So there was already a lot of, there was already a lot of emotions surrounding Cuba, and then all of a sudden the main blew up, and God knows how it happened, but Spain must be behind it somehow, though we never proved how it took place, and so we declared war on Spain. So, I mean, it really is an interesting study in group psychology, just the overwhelming waves of emotion that, you know, generated from that moment. And then there were politicians like Teddy Roosevelt and people who wanted to turn America into an empire that were able to ride that wave and we declared war. So then was it about vengeance in that moment?

I think it was about vengeance in that moment. I think it was very much about vengeance in that moment. That I don't think that there was a whole lot of thought. It's really interesting. I mean, there are a lot of histories that, that portray William McKinley is weak because he was vacillating on whether or not to declare war on Spain. And I felt kind of sorry for him because basically he had been in the Civil War. And he said famously, you know, I was in Antietam.

I saw the piles of dead. I don't want to declare war and get us into something like that again. And yet he also believed in popular opinion. And newspapers on both sides of the political aisle and politicians who were both for him and against him, They were just, you know, there was just one voice. We have to declare war on Spain. And so he finally did.

He declared war more slowly than Roosevelt and many of the other expansionists wanted to, but he finally did declare war. He was also a guy that had kind of gotten elected by staving off a populist movement, right? So he kind of understood how to how to combat that. and make it work for him. Right. I mean, there had been, you know, the two previous presidents, two or three previous presidents before him, they'd had to fight off this idea of invading,

invading Cuba or annexing Cuba, making Cuba our territory, you know, for three, four terms before that. And, and one of the things that McKinley did when, the week before his inauguration, his predecessor was Grover Cleveland. And he said to Grover Cleveland, you know, I only hope, Mr. President, that I can maintain peace with Cuba as well as you did, which he did not. But, you know, that was his feeling going in.

He was not a warmonger going into his term. Well, so you've said that he's the one that declared war here. Did Congress play no part in? No, he believed that Congress, he recommended a declaration of war. He at that time believed that it was Congress that could declare war, not the president. And he basically had a war. war address, which was read before Congress, and then Congress officially declared war. Okay. So he, I mean, he definitely juiced it, but it was, Congress did its official duty

as it once used to. As it once used to, yes. Yeah. And it was, it was finally up to Congress. And it was really interesting because there was, it was the scene. I think it was on the Senate floor. It might have been on the House floor. The pro-war representatives and the anti-war representatives, they got into a huge fight. And there was a reporter for the London Guardian, I think it was. was who was watching all of this.

And the two aisles streamed out into the aisle, and they started fighting, and the sergeant arms came out with the American flag, and somebody knocked the flag out of his hand, and the golden eagle on top of the flag, Steph kind of flew off and hit somebody else in the head. and the reporter for the for the guardians said and these are the people who are determining the course of the United States we had robust and vigorous debates

yes we did apologize yeah yeah all right so what is the war like how long does it last how is it fought um it's if the Spanish armor had an army had not been such a disaster by that point. As far as manpower and training and equipment and everything went, we probably would have been destroyed when we tried to land on the South Coast. But the Spanish Army kept drawing back and drawing back,

and we were not well prepared. at all for this war. We were especially not well prepared for the tropical diseases that were going to that were going to decimate the troops. However, the United States believed in the rightness of its cause and they also believed that they had enough, they had enough soldiers, and they certainly had enough naval power off the southern shore, that they would be able to beat the Spanish soldiers in Santiago de Cuba very quickly. They rushed atop San Juan Hill in the famous charge of San Juan Hill, and then it looked like there was. was going to be a stalemate, and if there had been a stalemate, then U.S. soldiers were already starting to die off from hepatitis and an advanced virulent sort of malaria, and it would

have been a huge disaster. But Spain surrendered rather quickly, and the actual war only took about about a month and a half to two months. It's wild how fast wars used to go. Yeah. We just don't make them like that anymore. Right. Decisive battles don't happen. Long protracted bleeding out of the other side is what we've got to do now.

And people still believe that we can overwhelm, you know, the other side. And it's going to be, it's going to be a. over rather, you know, the whole thing is going to be over. I mean, you saw that with, you saw that with Iraq. You, I think you saw that with Afghanistan. I mean, there's this idea that we can just, you know, bomb the enemy into the Stone Age and then it's all going to be over. They don't, they, they, military planners don't look back in history and see that so many of these what are called small wars are long endless wars in which, yeah, in the very beginning, people, you know, the official army of the enemy has defeated and destroyed very fast, but then they become guerrillas and the war goes on for a long, long, long, long time.

You have to hold the territory after you take it, right? And that's what everyone always forgets. That's what everybody always forgets, right. Yeah. That's something that worries me about, this is like a whole other episode, but that worries me about American defense companies are watching Russia and Ukraine fight and watching the drones. And they believe that this overwhelming, I won't even call it air support superiority,

but drone superiority will help them win the next war. And like, it'll be an important factor, but that war's been dragging on a long time. It has. And there's not a lot of people taking and holding territory. No, they're not. That's a big part of it, right?

That's right. And when they get out, when either side gets outside of their, their bunker, I mean, you know, a drone picks them up and they, and it wipes them out almost. immediately, but in order to advance and make headway and maintain the area that you've conquered,

you've still got to have manpower. You can't do it with robots, you know. You could make a very efficient and deadly no man's land, but never end the war. Right. Right. All right, back to Back to the late 1800s. Yeah. Okay, so this, like, this is just one of the, the Spanish-American War is just one of the conflicts that you cover in the book. Because you're kind of talking about the birth of, actually, let me, let me pull it back.

We go to a different route, if I may. So when America, when Spain capitulates, how do America, how do America, you know, how do America, Americans react to this victory? Like, how does it change the national character? What do we say about ourselves after that moment? We say we're winners. And you hear that a lot these days. We say we're winners. And we also say that we're very proud of ourselves. Look at us. We are, we built, we destroyed the Navy of one of the oldest empires on earth, the Spanish Empire. And now we We have territory not only at our doorstep in the Caribbean, which had been, you know, all important in the very beginning, but way out in the Pacific. All of a sudden, we are a Pacific power.

And the Philippines are important because, I mean, they're right there. It's right there situated at the edge of the South China Sea. and so they are strategically, the archipelago is strategically situated for all trading routes into China. So all of a sudden we were even more of a trading giant than we had been before. And, you know, we won in Cuba within a very short time,

But that summer of 1898, it dawned on us that all of a sudden we had all of these worldwide possessions and what were we going to do with it? Should we give it back? The Filipino, the Philippine rebels were already petitioning us saying, you know, why don't you patrol off the coast and be a protector, but let us determine our own fate? but we were debating what do we do what do we do well we're a we're a world empire and all of a sudden you see within the within the U.S. consciousness that there's kind of a pride and possession that we are we are a major player on the world stage now we're no longer being disparaged as a as a younger brother by the European powers.

And you see the American, you see, this might be a little bit too sweeping, but you start to see this change in the American character, where before it was like, we're different. America is different than the rest of the world because we're a democracy,

but we are not an empire. We always defined ourselves by not being an empire. To suddenly, we are an empire. Look how great we are. And that drove us to, you know, a lot of bloodshed and taking over the Philippines, I think. Yeah, I mean, we'd conquered our Western expanse. Yeah. We'd had our little fight about what the country was going to be amongst ourselves.

Right. And then we turned outward for a while. You know, it's interesting for me. There was always a quote that fascinated me by, and I have it in the prologue of the book by T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia at the beginning of seven pillars of wisdom. And he's talking about how the obsession with being liberators turned him into monsters, turned him and his allies into monsters. And I was fascinated by that. And there was a lot of fear about that. I mean, there was, there were basically two fascinating. actions in the United States, there were the people who, the expansionists, you know, Teddy

Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, reluctantly McKinley, who wanted to expand our reach and make us a world power. And then there were the people who called themselves the anti-imperalists. They were a minority, but they were a famous minority, who said, no, we have values. and we don't, we, we don't lord it over the unfortunate of the earth, conveniently forgetting the slave trade and what we had done to the Indians. But at the same time, you know, we're a different sort of people. And Mark Twain was the most prominent voice of those.

And throughout 1898, 1899, 1900, the turn of the century, there was this huge debate about who are we? And there was a real fear of that we were, because of what was happening in the Philippines, we were turning into an extremely brutal people. There's, you had a, you had a segment of a few weeks back about something you call spectacles of cruelty. Yes. And you start to see during the Philippine-American War, you start to see spectacles of cruelty popping up in American. popular culture like you never have before.

Part of it was because of technology. The little portable Polaroid cameras were a lot of the soldiers took them around with them as they were, as they were, you know, going through the jungles and bogs of the Philippines. And they would send these photos back home. And more and more and more, you began to see. see photos of bodies of Philippine soldiers stacked up in trenches like

cordwood just stacked up, stacked way up. And the other photo that you would see a lot of was a type of torture that we engaged in, much like waterboarding of today. it was called the water cure.

Basically, you poured water down the throat of an insurgent until his belly swelled up, and then you jumped on his belly, and the water gushed out. And if that didn't kill him, he talked within one or two applications with this. And these photos kept popping up in the press. and popping up in books that were being sold about the Philippine War, as if it was just a normal thing to do. And it was really rather disturbing. It was these, especially with the giant piles of bodies,

we're being shown them. It's almost as if we're being shown them, because we can do it. And you start to see something that Americans had avowed they would never sink to, which was the idea that might is right. I'm looking right now at a cover for Life magazine from 1902, which is pretty interesting, which depicts the water cure that you're talking about. and in the background there are, there's like a British Raj Colonial officer and like a Spanish officer and a French officer.

And the caption is, those pious Yankees can't throw stones at us anymore. Yeah, that's right. I saw that. I didn't run that in the book, but I saw that. I mean, the Brits were especially vehement about that. Because, I mean, we were already taking them to task because of concentration camps and tortures that was going on in the Boer War. And we would never be like that. And here, you know, right away, yep, we're very much like that.

So why did the Philippines get so ugly? Why were we so ugly there? There's a lot of theories about that. There's, let me. me backtrack a tiny bit. There's a professor of a Cuban-American professor by the name of Lewis Perez who wrote about one of his best-known books was Cuba and the American imagination. And he talks about how the conqueror, more than anything else, wants gratitude. Because gratitude justifies his, quote, civilizing project.

And if you show gratitude, if you're a Cuban Pacifico or if you're a Filipino farmer and you show gratitude, then, you know, the conqueror can say in time, we will raise you up to our status. However, what Perez said was one of the worst things that a conqueror people can do is not to show gratitude. It makes the conqueror as bad as any conqueror throughout history. United States comes to Cuba and the Cuban rebels don't show gratitude. we had already promised and passed laws saying we would not turn Cuba into a into a state or into a territory, but we certainly turned it into an economic territory. But there were no such protections in the Philippines. And in the Philippines, you know, we go there.

We're going to save you from the Spanish conquerors, the Filipinos at our already come up with a Constitution that was as, you know, very much created in the form of European and American constitutions. And yet, and yet they're not backing down. They say, we want to be an independent country. And the United States is saying, no, you are our, you are our possession. And so a very bloody war starts because these ungracious people do not welcome us with open arms. And the Western-style war ended rather quickly.

I mean, you know, we had big guns from our ships and we had artillery, and we wiped out the, we wiped out the Filipino army rather quickly. But then the soldiers that were left melted into the brush and melted into their villages and they became guerrillas. And they dragged the war on until officially 1902. Some people say 1904, 1906. and it was extremely bloody. I mean, American soldiers could not venture outside of their occupied towns without being shot up or captured.

Something like 200,000 civilian deaths, 200, 250,000, right? There are people who think that between the, that between the Filipino social, and the Filipino civilians from direct violence, starvation, but most notably disease that there were anywhere from 600,000 to a million deaths. And what's really interesting is that comes from, when I went over there to do a lot of research. You find things over there that you don't find in the United States. And you have this whole raft of American expatriate history professors over there. I mean, you have Filipino history professors, and they're very good at sussing out the old information. But you have

these American expatriates who probably were over there in the military. and then they decided they were going to leave over there, live over there. And they are, and they write a lot of the Philippine histories too. And they are the, they often come off as the most betrayed. It's like we didn't believe we could do that, you know. And they are, you know, there's a whole branch of history now, statistical history that tries to figure out the numbers beyond the official numbers. And so many of those were trained in America or had come over from America.

It's real interesting, the anger that boils up over there. Just because it's hard to face, I suppose? I think so. I mean, you know, I mean, look, you know, you were talking about the myths that you came up with. I was, my dad was a rocket scientist during Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. I mean, I was a surfer down there when the Apollo rockets were going up. I kind of, I wasn't a very good surfer, but I could bob up and down on my surfboard and watch the rockets go up. I mean, you know, and you were very proud of the United States what they had done.

And you got a lot of, at that time, you were getting a lot of, of shows about the United States during World War II. I mean, there was still a lot of that mythology about us saving the world during World War II.

But it's only slowly that another side to this all comes out. What's your read since we're talking about myths and there's a person

that is driven through all of this stuff that we have not really talked about, and I have to get your read on him. And it's Roosevelt. What is your read on Teddy Roosevelt? How does he come out in your book? Well, I'm pretty harsh on Teddy.

I think that Teddy, I think Teddy did a lot of good things later on in his presidency. I mean, he did. He did become a trust buster. He did, you know, start the Food and Drug Administration. He did, he was kind of the grandfather of the National Park Service. I mean, those are all good things.

But in his young, and Teddy had a tragic backstory. I mean, he was a complex person, you know. His mother and his wife died on the same day. And he runs off to their ranch in North Dakota. And he'd been a sickly child. And he refashions himself into, probably out of his own sense of survival, he refashions himself into an outdoorsman. But the thing he does, part of that is that he believes that

he believes very much in a narrative of conquest, and it's a racial narrative of conquest. He spells it out in black and white in his four-volume history about the settlement of the West. And he basically says that the rude, quote, rude frontiersman is, the world is beholden to the rude frontiersman who takes arms against savages and barbarians. The rude frontiersman is always white or Anglo-Saxon. In this case, the savages and barbarians in this volume,

James case is our American Indians, Native Americans, but it's basically anybody who is not white in Anglo-Saxon. And only through conquering the savage people of the earth can there be universal peace. And so Teddy has a has a deftain a deft racist ideology that, you know, white society, European society has reached its apex in the United States, and the United States is going to civilize and Christianize the world. And the first test of that was our advance across the American West. And the second test of that is, our conquest of the Philippines. So, and to get where he wanted to be,

he told many tall tales. Roosevelt had a pretty loose relationship with the truth. I mean, what is interesting throughout the research that I was doing is how much our history of that time is based upon Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography and his book, The Rough Writers. Few people seem to have, at least until recently, few people seem to have gone back to question the truth of Roosevelt's narrative, and it wasn't always that hard to do. You just had to pick up another book of somebody who participated in the same. five, and you can see that Roosevelt is not telling the truth, but everybody, everybody wanted

to believe him. He had a very forceful personality, and he, and everybody seemed to decide early on that he was going to be a very powerful man, and they basically warped their reality and their vision of the truth to what he said was so. And that sounds a lot like day, doesn't it? It does. There's some resonance there, yeah. Just a touch. Yeah, just a touch.

So I found him really fascinating. And I also found, I mean, just the process of discovery in, you know, picking apart his stories time and time again was

rather surprising. I mean, there were so many, there were so many moments when just a little bit of work, would have uncovered Roosevelt's lies, but people didn't always decide to see that. Sometimes we want to believe a thing, especially if it makes us feel good about ourselves, right? And if you identify somebody with somebody, you know, if somebody is your hero, then, I mean, you know, it's like identifying with a football star, somebody like that, you know. If I can ask you one more before we go, and you teased him up at the top, and I read the Mark Twain.

in defensive piece right before we got on. Tell us about Frederick. Is it Funston? Is that how you said? Fundston. Yeah, Frederick Funston. Funston was a really interesting fellow. He was, he grew up in Kansas.

He was very short. When he became famous, he was known as a little guy. He was only about five feet one or something like that. he had been and he participated in exploratory expeditions to Death Valley and to Alaska. He thought that would make him famous. He desperately wanted to be famous. It didn't. So at that time, there were a number of American adventurers who were joined.

joining the Cuban revolutionary cause. They were called filibusters, and he joined that cause, and he wrote about it, and he kind of started to build a name for himself, although the name he built for himself was probably bigger in Kansas than throughout the rest of the United States. He came back, very sick, close to death,

went off to Kansas, started lecturing about his time in Cuba. And he, and war was declared by, at the same time, war was declared by the United States against Spain. And he volunteered. And he was chosen by his, by the governor of Kansas to lead the, lead the Kansas militia in the Philippines. And he was incredibly brave, and the Kansans were crazy about him, and they charged ahead of our own guns, and they became quite famous. And he also, you know, like many of the, like Roosevelt, and many of the expansion, it's called the Filipino fighters, Indians, and savages and barbarians. And he helped with some quick victories in,

the Philippines. And Roosevelt pretty much tapped him as a running mate somewhere down the line. So he became famous very fast. He was written about very fast, very quickly.

He won the medal, was given the Medal of Honor. He was the subject of five Edison Vitagraph silent movies, which was even more than Teddy Roosevelt during the charge of San Juan Hill. So he was very, very famous at that time.

And he basically became Roosevelt's mouthpiece. But then what happened was really interesting because as the anti-imperialists and and the press started looking into the kind of abuses that were being doled out at the American hands, he becomes very bloodthirsty, and he starts saying, if you don't believe in what the Americans do out there, even if it's harsh at times, then you are not a patriot. and perhaps you should be strung from a light pole. He talks in the press about extrajudicial hangings.

And he is not held back until he says that about one of Teddy Roosevelt's own party members. And at that point, Roosevelt tells him, you better shut up. So he has a quick rise and he has a very well-documented fall. He survives it all after the war. He was the presiding officer on the scene during the San Francisco earthquake and fire. He became a hero again. And if he had not died of a heart attack, an early heart attack, like at 59 or something like that,

he probably would have been the general in charge of the American forces over during World War I. It spent the last couple of his years in Texas and Mexico chasing after Poncho Avia, which is something that we've wanted to do an episode on for a long time and have never quite found the right guest. And then I always find this very, Because I'm a Texan, I find it very interesting, that he lay in state in the Alamo.

In the Alamo. Isn't that great? Yeah. It's so great. It's like somehow so perfect. Although he is also buried in San Francisco, which, I mean, you know, they don't, I mean, they kind of officially think of Funston as a savior in San Francisco during the earthquake because he did bring order. So, yeah, he's a complex individual. He's a very complex individual. I mean, he had a good side, but he just had no guardrails. He just would not back off. That's the country in so many ways.

Yes, it is. Isn't it? We've got a good side and then no guardrails. No guard rails. And then we go nuts. So, yeah, yeah. So. Thank you so much for walking us through this.

The book is Splendid Liberators. Again, it's another one of the pieces of history that's making me feel. The more I learn about the last hundred years of America, the better I'm feeling about everything just right now. I guess the last 150 years, really. Well, I'm glad that I could calm your fears somewhat. It's a complex country with a lot of good, a lot of bad. Right.

And we survive and change. Right. Hopefully. Hopefully. Yes. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Okay.

Well, thank you for having me. All right. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt and Kevin O'Dell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, Angry PlanetPod.com, give us your support. It helps us keep going. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

Stay safe until then.