‘Up with the American Flag in All the Glory of its Stainless Honor’: Anti-Imperial Rhetoric in the Chicago Citizen, 1898–1902

Abstract

The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898 did more than mark the beginning of the Spanish-American War.1 It represented a key historical moment in US history when citizens were forced to come to terms with what would become a loosely defined and divisive imperial agenda after the Spanish surrender in Cuba and the integration of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as ‘unincorporated territories’. These overseas conquests appeared to position the USA alongside the imperial regimes of Europe, occupying territory without the consent of the governed and, as Paul Kramer stated, racializing the USA as Anglo-Saxons while ‘tribalizing’ the occupied.2