>> Sarah Duke: My name is Sarah Duke,
and I'm a
curator of
popular and applied graphic art
in the Prints and
Photographs Division of the
Library of Congress.
Before we get started, please
humor me and tell me
where you are joining from,
where you are joining us
today, and whether you've ever
used the collections of the
Library of Congress, either
virtually or in
person. Please put your answers
into the
chat. Today's
program is sponsored by the
Prints and Photographs Division,
which has hosted the Swann
Fellowship Program for
25 years.
It is my pleasure to introduce
the Speaker today,
but before I do permit me to
say a few words about
the Swann Foundation Fellowship.
The Swann Fellowship is one of
the programs in the United
States dedicated to funding,
graduate and
postgraduate research in
caricature
and cartoon.
There is no limitation
regarding the place or
time period covered.
The Swann Board encourages
research in a
variety of academic
disciplines, so long as the
fellows focus on the art form.
Swann Fellows must spend at
least two weeks at the
library and consult the
caricature
and cartoon collections.
They must donate to the Library
of Congress one
copy of any publication that
arises from their
research. This event
is being recorded for future
broadcasts.
Neither the chat nor the Q&A
will be part of the
subsequent broadcast.
Please use the Q&A function to
pose questions
to Ms. Mize.
The Swann Board when awarding
when awarding
fellowships selectively invites
individuals
to speak at the library and
present their work in
progress. We are very fortunate
to
have Ramey Mize with us today.
Ms. Mize is a PhD candidate in
art
history at the University of
Pennsylvania and
assistant curator of American
Art at the
Portland Museum of Art in
Maine.
She earned her B.A.
from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel
Hill before heading across the
pond to
earn her M.A.
from London's Courtauld
Institute of Art.
Her presentation today,
Imperial Projections: “Witnessing”
the War
of 1898 in American Visual
Culture,
is based on her PhD
dissertation.
Battlegrounds Painting War and
witness
in American Visual Culture from 1861
to 1901, in which she
examines the role of popular
press, cartoons,
illustrations and prints played
in shaping
artists major battle paintings.
My predecessor, Martha Kennedy,
who shepherded
many Swann fellows through their
research, retired
last year and turned over the
administration of the
program to me.
One of my delights earlier this
month was sharing
oversized print collections
with Ms. Mize,
and I know you're going
to get to see one
example this evening.
I turn. I look forward to
hearing her work in
progress. And I know you do,
too.
Ms. Mize, I turn the program over
to you.
>>  Ramey Mize: Hi. Good evening, everyone.
Or afternoon depending on where
you're joining from.
Thank you so much for tuning in
to
this virtual presentation.
I'd like to begin by offering
my deepest
gratitude to the Swann
Foundation for making this
fellowship possible and to
Sarah Duke and her
colleagues in the Prints and
Photographs Division of the
Library of Congress, who were
truly intrepid
in their willingness to pull
the widest variety of source
materials for me from delicate
warfront
field sketches to gigantic film
and circus
posters, as you see
here. This was quite the epic
moment
in the in the reading room.
And a special thank you to John
Acre for connecting me
with Robert Henshew, photo
curator of the National Museum
of the US Navy, who in turn
connected me with
Hydren Peres of the Navy
Department Library.
They all provided essential
research support that has
offered important insight that
I'll share in this
presentation. Thank you also to
scholars.
Too many to count, but several
who bear
mentioned who have indelibly
shaped and
inspired this research,
including Stephanie
Erdrich, Sylvia Yent, Dana
Byrd, Katelyn May
and so many others.
Finally, I am deeply indebted
to my dissertation
to my dissertation committee
members Mike Elijah,
Janet Barlow, and especially
Dr.
Gwendolyn Dubois Shah, who
first took me to
Cuba as her research assistant
back in
2018 and has continued to
encourage
this research from there.
That trip was an experience
that was life changing on so
many levels, and for which I
will always be grateful.
The first part of my talk will
examine broader challenges and
patterns of representation of
the War of
1898, as exhibited in Works of
Art by
William Watkins and Frederick
Remington.
The second part will perform a
deep dive, so to speak,
into a painting by Winslow
Homer that holds these
issues in dynamic tension.
Just a few weeks after
President William McKinley
declared war on Spain, artist
reporter William
Glackens departed New York at
the behest of McClure's
magazine. Bound for the Cuban
theater of the
War of 1898.
He and Stephen Bonsall, a news
correspondent, also working
for McClure's first chronicle
at the embarkation of
the US Army in Tampa, Florida,
and followed them from
there to Daquiri, a small
village some 14
miles east of the Spanish
stronghold in Santiago de
Cuba. Glackens and Bonsall
continued to
capture the war on the island,
working under a joint
remit to tell the story of the
fights of the
US troops in Cuba through
illustrations and
text. Several months
later, they produced the first
of two illustrated articles for
the monthly periodical
published under the enticing
title, The Fight for Santiago.
The Account of an Eye Witness,
though
Bonsall's words promise an
unfettered firsthand
view. The frontispiece that
Glackens contributed
to the essay suggests
otherwise.
In it, the artist has portrayed
a single forlorn
figure surrounded by towering
bamboo,
dense grasses and snaking
vines.
Rather than a soldier who casts
a commanding gaze across
an accessible and pliable
landscape,
Glackens’ subject is hunched
and hapless in a dark
jungle. His gun stock propped
precariously on
the earth, his eyes and facial
features
obscured. Though the half tune
process
undoubtedly reduced the clarity
of Glackens’ striking
original inkwash drawings, the
man's inscrutable
expression and diminished form
are nevertheless
telling. Instead of channeling
American
victory in Cuba, this
counterintuitive image
reflects the dislocation felt
by many US
troops and volunteer companies
who fought there.
Engendered in part by the
tropical environments,
claustrophobic verdure and
oppressive heat.
Early in his essay, Bonsall
also addresses the
palpable unease that these
conditions fostered,
describing an impenetrable
jungle that
soldiers looked at anxiously
and often
comprised of quote, “thousands of vines
and trailing
plants through which even the
Cuban scouts with their ready
machetes, could not cut a path,” end quote.
The title image parallels its
impenetrable
impenetrability, submerging the
trooper in wild
luxuriates that threatens to
swallow him whole.
Glackens’ surrogate eyewitness
to the war's events
is anything but.
The conspicuous dissonance
between Bonsall’s eyewitness
claims and the visual
circonscription and the
accompanying drawing events is
a paradox the
characterized many of the
images made in response
to the conflict.
Like Glackens, other US artists
who travel to the warfront in
Cuba, such as Frederic
Remington, George Lucas and
Howard Chandler-Christie,
asserted a privileged,
incontrovertible vision of the
war's events,
but one that was ultimately
couched in unstable
compositions where both Spanish
enemies
and Cuban allies rarely appear.
Consider another one of Glackens’ illustrations from the
same McClure’s eature.
El Paso was a small village
located on the
village along the hills excuse
me, of the southern
edge of the plains, east of the
San Juan Heights.
Offering a clear view of the
ground that the US
Army had to cover to access the
city of
Santiago. This scene situates
the
viewer at the base of a looming
incline during the battle of
San Juan Hill, immersed within
the besieged ranks
of the first United States
volunteer Cavalry,
better known for their
nickname, the Rough Riders, who
are famously led by Theodore
Roosevelt.
Glackens was present for this
particular charge, which took
place on July 1st, 1898, and
culminated in the
most significant US land
victory of the Santiago
campaign. His image reflects
the heavy
casualties that the US forces
sustained.
Several men at the Vanguard
have fallen face down on the
ground, while others grip their
hats, duck, grimace
and reload their rifles.
A third looks back, engaging
the viewer
eyes wide and brow furrowed
with fear.
The fortified house they
struggle towards just visible at
the summit, bears no hint of
Arsenio Linares y
Pombo's soldiers who are
responsible for the artillery
fire raining down on them.
Remington, who was in Cuba at
the same time as Glackens,
spoke to the experience of an
invisible Spanish
adversary made possible by
newly long range
and lethal weapons.
Quote, “The modern soldier may go
through a war,
be in a dozen battles, and
survive a dozen wounds
without seeing an enemy.
All our soldiers of San Juan
were, for the most part of a day,
under fire. Subject to wounds
and death
before they had even a chance
to know where the enemy was
whom they were opposing,” end
quote.
In his 1898 canvas, the Scream
of Shrapnel at San Juan
Hill, infantrymen flounder and
crouch,
cued by the warning shriek of
incoming shells launched
from an unseen source.
Their stooped, uncertain
postures
recall Glackens’ frontispiece
figure,
soon to be engulfed here by
enemy fire in much the
same way that the lone trooper
was surrounded by encroaching
undergrowth. Bonsall similarly
cinches
this association in his
McClure's article, when he
verbally conflates the Spanish
enemy with this threatening
vegetation, describing it as,
quote,
“hedged with cactus and Spanish
bayonet.”
Spain's presence has been
displaced in both of these works
by Remington and Glacken,
permeating the pictures as
artillery fire in the former
and sharp fronds
in the latter rather than human
forms.
Another painting by Remington
from this time, the Charge of
the Rough Riders, evokes a
similarly eerie image of
dismounted cavalry members
beset by imperceptible bullets
fired from
technologically superior
smokeless Mauser rifles
carried by the Spanish.
The celebrated charge of the
Rough Riders is curiously
underwhelming, scrambling
across a field in a manner that
art historian Alexander Nemerov
has likened to a
football play, but with no
visible opponent.
Adding to the awkwardness is
the absence of their namesake
steeds, with only Roosevelt
astride a horse in the middle
distance. As Nemerov also
notes, the
glory and convenient pictorial
device of a cavalry
charge had been denied to both
the Rough Riders and
Remington. The majority of
volunteer cavalry men were
converted to infantry due to
the space
limitations on the naval
vessels that conveyed them from
Tampa to Cuba.
The muddled pictorial language
in these illustrations by
Remington and Glackens attest to
the ways in which
challenges of military strategy
in Cuba also
presented a problem of
representation.
Not only did the form of
physical combat evade
conventional compositional
formulae, especially when
rifles were rarely seen at
close range, but
issues of terrain and climate
were also at play.
As one photographer for
Harper's Weekly confessed,
echoing the unexpected visual
conundrum of Glackens’ title
image, quote, “I found it
impossible to make any
actual battle scenes for many
reasons.
The distance at which the
fighting is conducted, the area
which is covered, but chiefly
the long grasses and thickly
wooded country.”
If the Spanish were invisible,
so was Cuba's
Liberation Army.
Literary scholar Amy Kaplan has
recognized this
phenomenon as a hallmark of the
war's coverage,
stating, quote, “A repeated
theme that emerges from the
reports of the Cuban
battlefield is the contrast
between the invisibility of the
Cuban allies and Spanish
enemy and the almost suicidal
conspicuousness
of the US troops,” end quote.
US correspondents wrote
repeatedly and with obvious
bias, that the Spaniards
employed guerrilla like
tactics, sniping from behind
trees and
trenches, while Americans
advanced in plain sight,
liberating Cubans who cowered
behind them.
For example, upon the
disembarking of the American
Expeditionary Force at Daquiri,
an event
Glackens also recorded, as seen
here,
Admiral William Sampson
declared Spain's lack of
defense, quote, “a mystery.”
With this comment, the famed US
naval commander enacted a
wholesale erasure of the great
lengths taken by the Cuban
Liberation Army to support this
critical landing.
Samson's omission is all the
more striking in light of the
fact that both he and US
General William Rufus
Schafer, had personally
orchestrated this invasion,
along with Cuban General 
Callisto Garcia
whose forces proceeded to
successfully subdue Spanish
units along the coast in
advance of the fifth Army Corps
arrival. The move on the part
of Sampson and other
US observers to obliterate the
essential contributions of their
Cuban allies mirrors the
broader suppression of
Cuban agency and US narration
of the war at
large. Today, most historians
agree
that Cuban revolutionary forces
had committed enough
decisive damage to all but
guarantee their own
victory against Spain.
US intervention simply
accelerated the result.
Central to the concerns of my
argument is Amy
Kaplan's observation that the
overwhelming prominence of
US troops over other combatants
in Cuba and
campaign accounts was not only
a result of physical and
logistical difficulties, but
also,
quote, “ideologically necessary
to the
fabrication of a white imperial
republic,” end quote.
Indeed, this was a
calculated
erasure that US commentators
manufactured to
elevate the heroic white male
body above all others,
as seen in quite literal terms
in this Puck magazine cover
by cartoonist Dododge Kepler,
where a
miniaturized Spanish inventory
tumble and flee before
gargantuan Rough Riders.
This verbal and pictorial
inflation of white troopers
sidelined black soldiers of the
24th and 25th
Infantry, who ultimately
secured US victory in
the famed battle of San Juan
Hill, but were simply
effaced in favor of the
supremacist image of
Roosevelt and the Rough Riders
charge, as well as
the multiracial Cuban coalition
who had been fighting a
series of liberation wars
against Spain for 30
years before U.S.
intervention, only to be
excluded even at the
level of the conflict's
nomenclature in the United
States, where we more commonly
refer to it as the
Spanish-American War.
allied in
 Cuba, altogether.
In Kaplan's words, which conjure
the Glackens frontispiece to
an uncanny degree,
quote, “The white male pictured
alone in the wilderness
of empire on San Juan Hill,
comes to
displace, appropriate and
incorporate the agency
of non-whites in the Empire and
at home,” end quote.
This paper contends
that the effort
to write out the Cubans from
their own
revolution was not only a
discursive effort,
but also an emphatically
pictorial one.
In an 1899 painting in print
titled The Night
Patrol, Remington featured a
lone white US
soldier traversing a deserted
street in Havana.
His subject supplies a kind of
urban counterpart to Glackens’
remote trooper, in this
case, charting well-lit
cobblestones rather than the
jungle's gloom.
The man strides forward while
casting a civilian gaze at
whom? The Cubans he allegedly
guards are
barely visible. Fugitive
shadows on the fringes of this
corridor, their presence more
spectral than real
Remington's phantasmic allusion
to supposedly
liberated Cuban people
parallels what literary
scholar John Patrick Leary has
identified as
a, quote, “persistent trope in
US
written accounts,” the treatment
of Cubans as mere
apparitions, if not altogether
absent in their
own country.
Though the popular press
originally circulated specific
and laudatory portraits of
Cuban revolutionary leaders,
among them Garcia, as well as
others like Antonio,
Maceo and Jose Marti, as seen
in the
souvenir promo lithograph from
the Grand Cuban American Fair
held in Madison Square Garden
in May of 1896.
This approach was largely
abandoned as US eminence in the
region became more and more
clear. In the years prior to
the US Declaration of War
against Spain,
most American cultural
producers frame the
revolutionary movement in Cuban
nationalist
terms, propelled on the one
hand by the Junta, an
organization that represented
the interests of the Cuban
revolution in the US.
And on the other, the long
standing US interest in
annexing the island for itself.
At this earlier moment, the Cuba
Libre, or
Free Cuba movement, was
widely
likened to the American
Revolution, with military
commander Maximo Gomez, painted
as a Cuban
George Washington and Junta
leader and diplomat
Tomas Estrada Palma as a
modern Ben
Franklin. Increasingly,
however,
as Cuban historian Luis Perez
has
detailed, Cubans appeared in
the popular press
less as revolutionary equals
and more often in
the form of virulently racist
caricatures of
children or inept and lazy
soldiers who
required the oversight of white
US officers
casting Cuban citizens as
incapable of self
government. Indeed Glackens’
own
sketches skirt meaningful
representation of the Cuban
Liberation Army's role in their
own revolution,
opting instead to show them in
more passive positions.
This drawing from the Library
of Congress
exemplifies this tendency.
The Cuban soldier on the far
left looks out with a vacant
expression, while his analog on
the far right
stands with mouth open,
shoulders slouched
and arms hanging limply at his
sides.
Their companions file
submissively in line, awaiting
the scrutiny of three US
commanders at center.
As historian Barney Miller and
others explain, the
paternalistic popular
iconography that championed US
intervention in Cuba's plight
ranged
from melodramatic rescue
imagery, often involving Uncle
Sam coming to the aid of
oppressed white women and
children, to a racialized
spectacle of
colonialism that propped up
Rudyard Kipling's
warped moral logic of the white
man's burden.
What ultimately unites these
manifold visual metaphors is
their construction of Cuba's
defenselessness and dependency on
US salvation.
As indicated earlier, equally
instrumental to the
Legitimation of US Empire,
however, was the
distancing or disappearance of
Cuba
altogether. By August of 1898,
the
weekly magazine Truth suggested
that the Cuban nation
itself was more ghost than
country,
joking that, quote, “When the
war is over, a searching
party will have to be organized
to go over Cuba and find enough
patriots to organize a
government with,” end quote.
My research takes that
alleged
absence seriously, especially
when the War of 1898
transpired at a kind of
testimonial apex in the US.
Popular press, often hailed as
the first media
war 1898, witnessed media
makers
clamoring for credibility with
readers and viewers
touting their war coverage as
transparent realities
and laying claim to unsurpassed
levels of authenticity for their
cultural production.
Descriptions of accounts from
government officials and
military personnel were couched
in judicial terms,
framed as expert testimony and
evidence.
Even if the journalistic
context was often
sensationalized, if not fully
manufactured.
These eyewitness assertions
peppered not only what became
known as yellow journalism, but
also any number of cultural
forms from re-enactments at
world's fairs to vaudeville
houses. And they were
buttressed by the unprecedented
range of visual technologies
employed to capture the
conflict. Perhaps most notably, 1898
marks the first war to be
captured on motion picture film.
Firms like the Edison
Manufacturing
Company sent film crews to Cuba
and the Philippines to
appease what Edison called,
quote, “the craving of the
general public for absolutely
true and accurate details of the
US war effort,” end quote. And yet their
products,
stymied by technical
limitations more frequently
relied on reenactments which
were then advertised as
actual war footage.
This is a blank slide, so don't
panic.
The fact that Cuba could be so
omnipresent in the
US cultural imagination while
at the same time cloaked
in anonymity, speaks to what
Cuban cultural critic
Perez Fermat has identified as
a construal
of Cuba as, quote, “atmosphere
rather than
place.” The word atmosphere was
repeatedly
deployed to characterize the
island in the years during and
after the war in popular
songs, literature,
world's fairs, tours, accounts
and advertisements.
This descriptor served a
broader project of its
ostracization in framing the
island as foreign yet
familiar, not as an emerging
nation warranting
serious consideration, but
rather a shimmering,
immaterial idea that served to
soften the sharp
reality of colonial power
dynamics.
As Fermat puts it, quote, “The
notion of atmosphere is
a powerful tool in the
assimilation of foreignness and
another mode of intimacy a
means of cultural
appropriation that has the
further advantage of keeping the
appropriate appropriated object
at bay,” end quote.
Powering these US
imposed
atmospherics is the notion of
projection.
The pleasant veil of Cuba's
exotic essence
belies the ways in which the
island also functioned as a
refraction of the United States
itself.
In this way, Cuba's position is
further complicated
not simply some
straightforwardly exotic other,
but rather a kind of reflected
self channeling
aspects of US society and
identity that were
simultaneously desired and
feared,
as literary scholar Yvonne
Garcia has written.
Indeed, Cuba, a racially
diverse, resource rich island
just over 90 miles from Key
West bore many
similarities to the United
States, not least in its quest
for independence from the
colonial writ of a European
nation. However,
Cuba's revolution was built
around what historian
Ada Ferrer. Ferrer describes as
a
multiracial movement that was
explicitly
anti-racist. Cuban nationalism,
as
espoused by one of its foremost
thought leaders, Jose
Marti, championed championed
the country's
multicultural heritage and
diverse population.
This stance grew across all
three rebellions from the
ten year war to the little war
and the final war of
independence, taking firm root
following the legal
end of slavery in 1886 and
giving rise to a
Cuban Liberation Army that was
integrated across all
ranks. In other words, in a
moment that historians
call the nadir of us racial
racial politics,
Cubans proclaimed racial equity
a central pillar of their
revolution and amassed a
diverse
army, where nearly 60% of
soldiers and
40% of commissioned officers
were men of color.
This included Antonio Maceo, a
mixed race foot
soldier who joined the
insurgency in 1868
and emerged as one of the most
celebrated generals of the Cuban
nationalist movement
immortalized in works such
as La Morte de Maceo by Cuban
artist and veteran
Armando Garcia Monical that you
see here.
Maceo amassed a national
multiracial following
something that, as Ferrer
notes, quote, “would have been
rare in local contexts and
unthinkable at the national
level in the United States,” end quote.
While the US steadily and
violently dismantled the gains
of reconstruction, Cuban
insurgents championed a
vision of, quote, “the world's
first raceless nation,”
a vision that US
intervention aimed to
undercut by effectively
rendering the would be
independent country a
protectorate following the war.
Moving to part two.
As I will demonstrate
with my remaining time, these
aspects I've emphasized of
absence, atmosphere and
projection
coalesce in a quietly,
enigmatic painting that the
artist Winslow Homer completed
several years after
the US wrested control of Cuba
from Spain
titled Searchlight on Harbour
Entrance Santiago de
Cuba. This brooding nocturne
emblematizes the
issue of American empire
through a layered pictorial
interplay of obscurity and
disclosure, as I will describe.
Homer based this canvas on
earlier sketches he had made of
Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, also
known colloquially as
Morro Castle while visiting
Santiago de Cuba in
1885, 13 years before the U.S.S
Maine
exploded in Havana Harbor,
providing President
McKinley with the desired
pretext to declare war on
Spain. The artist was inspired
to revisit these
drawings several years after
the war of 1898, when
two US naval commanders, Rear
Admiral
Winfield Scott Schley and
Acting Rear Admiral William
Sampson, argued over who
deserve credit for defeating
Spain in the naval battle of
Santiago.
And you see how that played out
in popular culture and
cartoons in this book cover.
This heated controversy over
the climactic event that brought
Spain's colonial rule in Cuba
to an end received
expense extensive press
coverage, especially once it
culminated in a court of
inquiry in the fall of
1901. The court reported its
opinion in
mid-December and the debate
continued to animate newspaper
accounts for some time.
On December 30th, for example,
Homer noted in a letter to
his art dealer Ann Knoedler
that he was keen to ship and
exhibit the picture,
explaining, quote, “This is just
the time to show that picture
as a subject is now before the
people,” end quote.
Interestingly, the subject that
Homer features
is not the decisive naval
engagement that took place on
July 3rd, 1898, but instead an
imagined
scene from the action that
precipitated it.
A month long vigil mounted by
the US squadron, which
sealed the Spanish fleet led by
Admiral
Severa within Santiago Harbor.
The blockade period featured
heavily in the court
proceedings, and it was this
topicality that apparently
piqued Homer's interest.
According to another letter
from the artist to Knoedler
quote, “That Santiago de Cuba
picture is not intended to
be beautiful. There are certain
things, unfortunately for
critics, that are stern facts
but are worth
recording as a matter of
history, as in this case.
This is a small part of Morro
Castle and immediately
over the harbor entrance, which
is only about 400 feet
wide. And from this point,
we're seeing all the stirring
sights of June and July, 1898.
I find it interesting,” end quote.
If he was interested in the
stirring sights, as he states here,
of this naval engagement,
Why did he, in fact, omit them?
His picture starkly deviates,
for instance, from other, more
typical images of the battle
and period print and popular
culture, such as this one
showing
the egress of the Spanish fleet
and
the US Navy in hot pursuit.
Homer privileges, objects over
heroes, spaces over
action and the mere implication
of the US
fleet rather than the full
extent of its formidable
scope. It is striking that
here atop one of Morro's
parapets, Homer
shows nothing of the ship's
wider formation
rendered so clearly in a
diagram, diagrammatic
illustration that accompanied
Samson's article, The
Atlantic Fleet in the Spanish
War for Century Magazine.
He also shows nothing of the
electric theme
source as documented here in a
photograph of the
Searchlight apparatus from the
U.S.S Massachusetts.
This compositional choice is
all the more provocative when we
recall that Homer includes a
sketch in a letter to one of
his patrons, Thomas B Clarke,
that elaborated the scene's
full context, pointing to the
picket boats clustered
around the harbour's
mouth.
And you can see his inscription
point
of view picture with a
little hand pointing towards
it, framed in a
little rectangle. And then the
ships surrounding.
To lean around this point,
the picture seems in fact to
stage the inverse of
the US blockades function.
All we are given to see is a
rampart, literally a
stone wall across which mute
cannons stand
sentry. In other words, it is a
Spanish
stronghold that barricades the
presence of the United
States, swallowing up the
majority of
compositional space and
obstructing our view with
shadows rather than blinding
light.
There is a pronounced dynamic
of vision and concealment in
Homer's painting, especially
since the illumination
promised in the picture's
title, Searchlight on Harbour
Entrance ultimately appears
limited.
Just what does this powerful
technology championed as
an integral variable to the
United States imperial success
actually reveal?
And just where is Cuba in this
version of events?
Certainly these electric rays
do little to
irradiate the small section of
human shoreline shown at far
right, which is nearly
invisible through a milky
gleam. And it takes your eye a
moment, for instance, to
register that the coast is
bedecked with small,
silvery palm trees.
For the remainder of my time 
today, I'd like to hone in on
the painting's three primary
components:
the Morro Fortress, the searchlight, and
the island, in the hopes that a
deeper understanding of their
geopolitical contexts,
cultural and technological
import, and visual and
literary representation in US
popular media may
begin to further elucidate this
picture.
Designed in the early 1600s by
Milanese military engineer
Battista Antonelli, Morro Castle
has stood watch over
Santiago de Cuba Bay since
1638.
Today, a World Heritage site,
the structure was built into the
steep cliffs of a rocky
promontory in a series of
terraces linked by stairways.
Originally intended as intended
as a defence against
raiding pirates. It looms
impressively above sea level
and frequently absorbed the
attention of travelers to the
southeastern end of the island.
Notably US tourists in the 19th
century who
fixated on its hulking stature
and picturesque
qualities. As early as
1885, the same year of Homer's
visit to the port
city, American visitors
marveled at its
size, age and impressive
appearance while
simultaneously pondering what
they viewed as its inevitable
demise in the face of
encroaching US interests.
One tourist devoted extensive
language to his encounter
with the structure in a New
York Times article published in
March of that year.
Quote, “There is nothing on this
side of the Atlantic as far as
I have seen, to compare with
the harbor of
Santiago or the rare old Morro
Castle at its
entrance. One of the oldest
fortifications in the new
world. It shows its age and its
discolored and time,
beaten walls and the obsolete
style of its
construction. But it is still
far from being a
ruin. The one cannot help but
think in passing.
What a shock two or three shots
from a modern
cannon would give it.
It is so piled up in odd shapes,
so different from anything
we see in America. So old, so
picturesque.
I doubt whether anything short
of a paintbrush could convey
much of an idea of it,” end
quote.
The comparison of US and
Spanish arms that
this author muses on
also
preoccupied the popular press.
As demonstrated in this
newspaper article, An
Hour in the City of Havana,
published in January of
1898 and The Age Herald.
And here you see that
comparison being staged of
American and Spanish guns, and
also a similar kind of
viewpoint of cannons facing off
ramparts
in Havana's version of a Morro 
Fortress.
This romantic trope of Morro’s
inevitable, though regrettable
obsolescence had staying power
and was often
rehashed for the purpose of
casting Spain as an impotent
colonial rival, one that was
certainly grand but no
match for growing US power.
Indeed, another traveller
account published over a decade
later in the Washington Post
in 1897, is worth quoting at
length.
“I have seen the medieval
architecture of Veracruz and the
Aztec pyramids, but I can
recall nothing quite as
aged and gray and gnarled as
the Morro.
The distant tomb palaces and
thoroughfares of Pompeii would
seem to be giddy, frisking
light young things in
comparison. The castle stands
there upon an
abrupt eminence of rock, worn
smooth and shiny by the eternal
procession of the waves, a
wrinkled and decrepit
sentinel, a reminder to the
spic and span Yankee that
he is about to enter the old
world, wearing always an
air of protest against having
had to live so long and
grow so weak and helpless.
It seems impossible that we
should be within a musket
shot of this monument of
antiquity,
The Morro.
Here, amid these relics of antiquity,
the drama of the present day is
enacting. It is like
introducing the
telephone and the electric
light into Tibet.
But the fact remains,
expectation, doubt,
anxiety, fill every mind.
And strange to say, they all
refer to matters as
modern as the vitascope,
resolving the problem of
autonomy, of new forms of
government, political
emancipation and individual
responsibility.”
With this hyperbolic prose, the
writer recapitulates the
conflicted fantasy of Morro's
destruction and, by
extension, Spain's own fall.
As Cuban cinema scholar Dylan
Lamar Robbins has observed,
quote, “This ambivalent movement
both to destroy and
to possess, is unambiguously
representative of the
contradictions of the US, of
the United States’
project in Cuba and in Puerto
Rico and the
Philippines, where its
ostensible goal of safeguarded
democracy and self government
frequently manifested
in the form of prolonged
political dependency,
violations of sovereignty and
economic subservience,”
end quote.
In this passage, we also see
the trope of old and new
worlds mapped onto
technological criteria
with a fortress and aged mode
of medieval
architecture suddenly pierced
by electric light,
which readers are expected to
align symbolically with spick
and span Yankee.
Together, these narratives and
other period literature
are helpful in establishing the
fact that Homer’s Searchlight
picture trades in well-worn
tropes that
would have been culturally
legible to US audiences.
However, Homer pushes on these
symbols, expanding and
repurposing them beyond their
more superficial
valances. Why else, for
example, would he take
us inside the castle,
presumably within
enemy Spanish lines?
But of this can we even be
sure?
Compare Homer's watercolor
detailing another section of the
ramparts made in 1885 with a
subsequent
photograph of possibly the same
location
taken after US victory.
Here we see perhaps the same
cannon base in sentry box,
though a section of the wall
has been reduced to rubble.
Besides this damage, the only
other distinguishing factor
between the two images is the
US flag raised at
left, the uncanny presence of
Homer's
watercolor made over a decade
earlier,
as well as the swift
application of these elements
in his post War Canvas by a
Searchlight
seem to make a visual argument
for the swift transference
and indeed near
interchangeability of these
imperial powers in Cuba.
Keeping in mind that Homer's
picture was completed in
1901 after the Platt Amendment
amendment was
forcibly incorporated into the
Cuban constitution,
ushering in an era of US
neocolonialism.
Suddenly, our position within
the Spanish bulwark is
destabilized, especially
knowing that old glory had
long flown in that very spot by
the time Homer
completed the Searchlight
painting.
In this sense, Homer's Nocturne
appears to linger on the
oscillating power dynamics,
blurring imperial
chapters without offering a
clear
distinction. As art
historian Catherine Manthorne has
emphasized, the final
composition of Searchlight
invokes not only subsequent
photography of the site
bedecked with US colors,
but also specific and widely
popular films
such as Edison's Raising Old
Glory over Morro Castle
of 1899 that you see a still
of at the top.
And another stereograph of
that image below.
Morro was very much on the
minds of US audiences at this
time as a central protagonist
across mediums and
genres. The motifs
pervasiveness bespeaks the
depths to which Homer's image
was steeped in a multilayered,
transmedia, visual environment,
notably the
world of war films, as the next
section will
explore.
Returning to the salience of
electric light in the
technological dichotomy that US
forces endeavor to strike in
this imperial context, it is
important to stress how
impactful the searchlight was
in this naval battle, a
fact that Homer was well aware
of as our historians Nikolai
Tchaikovsky, Natalie Spassky
and
Ellen Valance have argued, among
others.
Indeed, his painting seems to
directly reference and meditate
on an evocative and oft quoted
passage from Admiral
Sampson's retrospective account
of the blockade and
battle that I showed earlier
from Century
Magazine. Samson writes,
quote, “It was a week after my
arrival at Santiago before the
Searchlight Service was
thoroughly established.
Every night when the ship came
up to her position and turned
the light on and I saw the
harbour illuminated, I felt
entirely secure.
I looked at it many times during
the night, always with the same
feeling. And there it was,
night after night, with no
variation. After we arrived, we
had the friendly
aid of a brilliant moon, and as
the moon waned, we became
very anxious. But after we had
the searchlight revile the
moon because really we could
not see as well with the moon
as without it,” end quote.
The searchlights brilliant
succeeded in preventing the
Spanish Royal Navy from
slipping away undetected in the
night, as this diagram reveals.
But its brilliance was a double
edged sword, sometimes
flaring up to a blinding
intensity.
As Samson also noted,
elaborating the layout of this
diagram, quote, “We found after
one or
two trials that where the beam
of one light was intersected by
the beam of the next, we could
see nothing.
Moreover, the slightest
movement of the pivot of the
light made the beam changed so
rapidly that
little could be made out.
We therefore restricted the
service to a single light
at any given time, keeping it
stationary
and pointed exactly up the
harbor,” end quote.
It is interesting to bring this
observation to bear on Homer's
composition, in which there
appears two
intersecting beams of light,
presumably resulting
in the very blown out effect
that Samson and his fleet wish
to avoid taking this into
account.
What if we were to consider the
possibility that Homer
was using on the potential
pitfalls rather than
triumph of a visual tool, one
whose
electric projection teetered
between clarity and total
obfuscation? To continue with
this
idea of protection and to
recall the earlier newspaper
article on Morro Castle, which
spoke of Electric
Light and the electrically
powered film projector called
The vitascope in the same
breath,
the Searchlight's role in this
picture also conjures an
awareness of its technological
adjacency to film.
Along with the Searchlight,
film was a new technology
and both were intended to
visualise the war in some way.
The searchlight on the front
and the film for audiences at
home. Indeed.
As mentioned earlier, the war
of 1898 was the first
war whose events were
represented in moving pictures.
The resulting films were met
with wild popularity in the US,
often shown every hour in urban
theatres.
As Kevin points out, quote, “The
spectacle of war was
not contained on screen but
suffused every aspect of
attending the theatre.
The projection machines were an
early attraction in
themselves.” and you can see
that highlighted here.
I apologize. It's a bit blurry,
but featuring
the actual apparatus in these
advertisements as a part of the
attraction. And they were often
renamed
Warcraft or War Scope, as you
see in this ticket.
In these early movies, US
troops are shown emphatically on
the move marching, charging on
horseback,
taking sail, disembarking.
Whereas unsurprisingly, Cubans
are more often
omitted altogether when they
are shown, however,
they are framed as immobile,
passive and reliant on
US aid. Like the searchlight in
Homer's
painting. These war graphs are
significant just as
much for what they obscure and
conceal as for what they
illuminate. For all they
purport to
reveal. Early war films
constructed and
re-enacted the majority of
their footage and their
projections were just that
visions that mainly
disclosed the project of US
Empire and ultimately
very little, if not nothing of
Cuban
liberation and autonomy.
Homer was not present for the
blockade and wouldn't
have encountered the deployment
of electric light in that
military context.
He did, however, as several
scholars have pointed out,
travel to an exhibit at the
World's
Columbian Exposition in
Chicago, where electric
spectacles were on full display
at places like the Court of
Honor, conveying to audiences
the
greatness and technological
power prowess of the
United States. As we've seen
already,
electric light was intimately
bound with and a potent
metaphor for cultural visions
of US
ascendancy, as well as an
integral tool in
violent efforts towards that
end.
As the author of this article
in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer writes,
quote, “For six or
eight miles, the searchlight
throws a blinding flash,
which is dazzling and reveals
everything which the
telescope is able to find.
It makes a blinding flash that
might confuse the enemy by its
tremendous brilliancy.
But if the United States leads
in the matter of searchlights,
it is also at the front in the
quality of
projectiles which will be
hurled against the enemy's
ships as soon as the latter
shall have been spied
out by the keen eye of the
battleship,” end quote.
In this article, the
light
is described as piercing the
darkness and clearing the path
for deadly aim.
An auxiliary provision.
To be sure, the searchlight and
artillery were
indelibly intertwined and often
visualized
together, as this one
photograph shows.
Theorist Paul Virgilio has
elaborated the nexus
of this nexus of vision and
violence,
memorably observing, quote,
“weapons are
tools not just of destruction,
but also of
perception,” end quote.
Cultural producers further
reappropriated this
association to other visual
technologies like
photography. In an 1898
cartoon,
Uncle Sam points a cannon that
has been labeled US
instantaneous camera at a
demeaning
caricature of a Spaniard who is
told to keep his
eyes on an image of the sinking
U.S.S Maine
while looking pleasant.
The title, A Snapshot collapses
the
taking of an image with the
firing of a shot.
The two actions here are one
and the same.
By the onset of World War One,
the
illusion of the Searchlight and
War films was rendered
all the more explicit, as
illustrated in these two
posters from the Library of
Congress collection.
Here, the Searchlight Emanation
acts as a stand in
for filmic light.
Visual strategies for the
representation of the
searchlights’ rays evoked those
used for the film
projector, supplying another
formal reference that Homer
may have called upon for his
searchlight canvas.
Frequently, the description of
the searchlights projected
light mirrors that of film or a
magic
lantern projector.
As one article noted, quote,
“The new
telescopic lens is a triumph of
modern
photography. It is possible to
obtain accurate
pictures at very long range,” end quote.
The long range of
illumination
and picture making was also a
common
subject of discussion in
Searchlight manuals.
And then here's an image.
Another image of the searchlight.
A formal reference.
With these dense associative
connections between
instruments of vision, violence
and image making in
mind, I propose that Homer's
search light
painting expressively delves
into this heady
ferment of visual culture, a
pictorial
amalgam of the diffused
propaganda and
destructive perception at work
in US
mass media and military at this
time.
Finally moving towards my
conclusion.
Homer's decision to include in
the searchlight painting a tiny
outcrop of the Cuban coast,
distinct by virtue of its
royal palms, brings forth
further notions of the
country's erasure.
Cubans had been fighting their
series of liberation wars for
decades, and the US only
arrived in the final three
months of their ongoing
independence efforts.
We know that Homer was aware of
this longer history of
Cuban insurgency since his
visit in
1885 fell within the midpoint
of these
struggles. In a letter to his
brother points to the
palpable tension on the island,
which he memorably
described as, quote, “red hot
and full of
soldiers.” We even catch a small
glimpse
of the Spanish military
presence in this watercolor
through the Customs House
arcade. And we also
understand from that same
correspondence that Homer is
original visit to Morro
Castle was spurred by another
topical news event, that of the
execution
of several Cuban insurgents.
But as Homer also knew, Cuba's
own hard won
freedom was ultimately eclipsed
in this historical
narrative and the historical
narrative of
this imperial power struggle,
to quote from Kaplan
once more, “But this
invisibility had to be
produced ideologically to deny
Cubans
representation as equal
contestants and political
struggle,” end quote.
Recent scientific examination
of the searchlight
painting by Dorothy Mann,
painting's conservator and
Evan Reed, manager of technical
documentation,
along with Stephanie Hardwick's
input as associate curator
of paintings and sculpture at
the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
This examination revealed pintiminti that
suggests that Homer originally
featured a
human form facing or perhaps
peering
over the wall to the left of
the turret
at Morro. This is perhaps
intended for a
Spanish soldier glimpsing the
US blockade
below. However, Homer later
painted
over this form, accentuating
the absence of
any human actors in this
confrontation and
issuing the surrogate witness
form that
Glackens provided in the
frontispiece with which I
began this talk.
In many ways, this is an image
of not
seeing of light that glints off
hard
stone edges while rendering the
fuller context
opaque projected rays dissolve
rather
than lay bare the island of
Cuba, rendering it
pure atmosphere hidden in plain
sight.
Thank you.