Stephen Crane War Correspondent

Stephen Crane, War Correspondent: An intellectual’s Reaction to The Spanish-American War

        Introduction

     The United States intervention in Cuba in 1898 marked the beginning of her participation in world affairs as a great power. Some fifty years later America’s vast worldwide commitment had become a source of constant concern to many individuals. It is, perhaps, for this reason that there has been a renewed interest in the Spanish-American War. Beginning with Howard K. Beale’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956) fundamental questions concerning United States intervention have been reexamined. This trend has continued with Frank Freidel’s The Splendid Little War (1958), Margaret Leech’s In the Days of McKinley (1959), Ernest May’s Imperial Democracy (1961), and Wayne Morgan’s America’s Road to Empire. For the most part, these studies have examined the political and diplomatic aspects of the problem, and much is now known concerning these questions. An analysis of an intellectual’s reaction to the war will provide insight into other significant aspects of the problem.

    This thesis will examine Stephen Crane’s reaction to the Spanish- American War. Crane’s reaction is an appropriate subject of study for two reasons. In the first place, he is a major American author who has made a lasting contribution to American literature. In addition, Crane was an active participant in the war serving as a war correspondent in both the Cuban and the Puerto Rican campaigns. An examination of his interpretation discloses the views of a sensitive and intelligent observer who witnessed much of the conflict and the subsequent Cuban reaction to independence.

     Structurally this study will be divided into three parts. The first will present a discussion of the basic attitudes that Crane held prior to his Cuban experience. In the second part, Crane’s war dispatches and stories are reviewed. Here an obvious ambivalence between Crane’s pre-Cuban attitudes and his reaction to the war appears. The major purpose of this thesis is to explain this ambivalence. This will be accomplished in the third part where Crane’s comments on the war are thoroughly analyzed.

    In this series of Hubs, I will give the original writing with minimal changes. The original thesis is laced with copious footnotes, as many as a half dozen per page. For readability, I will not include the footnotes. At the end of each Hub I will present comments from the present day to show how my views presented in this thesis have change in the past forty some years.

    By the time I began this work in 1966, my views on war had changed from those of an Air National Guard enlisted man to those of an anti- war demonstrator who was a member of a local peace center. Growing up, I loved war movies, and would play war games with my friends where we fought against the Japs and Germans. I joined the Guard during my senior year in high school, and dreamed about being a jet fighter pilot who would shoot down North Korean jets, and strafe enemy ground troops. I romanticized war thinking that it was the stuff that made heroes. By 1966 I was convinced that the war in Vietnam was an illegitimate war and that we were fighting with the wrong side.

     In looking for a topic for my master’s thesis, I ran across an article that spoke of Steven Crane as a war correspondent. Having read Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, I felt that he would surely have anti-war views in his articles on the Spanish-American War. Most critics agree that The Red Badge of Courage is an anti-war novel. The protagonist of the story, like so many young people, glorified war and felt that it would give him a chance to show off his heroic qualities. He soon learns of the reality of war and how it brings only pain and death to its participants. General Alexander McClurg said of the Red Badge of Courage, “The book is a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies. The hero of the book … betrays no trace of the reasoning being. No thrill of patriotic devotion to cause or country ever moves his breast, and not even an emotion of manly courage.”

    As I began my research on Crane’s war writings, I soon discovered that he supported the war and the liberation of Cuba from the Spanish. Instead of writing a thesis that would add to the anti- war literature of the sixties, I found that the main trust of my thesis would be to explain how Crane’s view on war changed.

    My own views on war have changed since I began this thesis in 1966. At that time I was convinced that the war in Vietnam was wrong and unjust. However I was not a full pledged pacifist. I still felt that some wars could be justified.

    A year after my thesis was finished I began teaching and met a teacher, Herb, who was a conscientious objector during World War Two. Herb was in R.O.T.C. at the University of California, Berkeley when he read All Quiet On the Western Front. He explained that the protagonist, a German solider felt the very same things about the war that the American solider felt. The German solider felt that he was doing his duty to his country. He felt that God was on their side. After reading the book, he quit R.O.T.C. and became a conscientious objector. When he refused to make bandages saying that his doing so would free some one to take part in the war effort, he was sent to a concentration camp in Montana. When the war ended he was freed from the camp, and allowed to go into teaching.

   After reading the book myself, I became a full pledged pacifist believing that all wars are wrong. A few years later after reading works from Krishnamurti and the Gurdjieff school I realized that violence is always wrong. And, as Gurdjieff says war is the ultimate form of violence, legalized murder. A Gurdjieff student J.G. Bennett states, “War is the supreme manifestation of human helplessness.”