The Spanish American War’s ‘Most Durable Hero’: Admiral Pasquale Cervera and Popular Heroic Values in the United States, 1898–1909

Abstract

The United States honored a host of military heroes during the Spanish American War including Pasqual Cervera y Topete, the enemy admiral who had experienced a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Santiago Bay, Cuba (3 June 1898) at the hands of US naval forces. Over the course of the war and in the year that followed, American public opinion of the admiral became positive and increasingly laudatory. By late 1899, Life Magazine, followed by other popular publications, claimed that Cervera was a better war hero then Admiral George Dewey and other American officers who had been wildly celebrated for their wartime heroics. The enemy admiral’s heroic rise was possible because of a fundamental change in the relationship between the press and the nation’s war heroes that sped up each champion’s ultimate decline. In the late nineteenth century Americans sought chivalrous, selfless men of action for their heroes. As journalists began covering each war hero’s daily life as they did other celebrities, however, they discovered character flaws in the nation’s homegrown champions. This examination of Cervera’s gradual rise as an American hero through his death in 1909 includes an overview of the American hero-making process and lifecycle and how celebrity journalism shortened the reign of most war heroes. After identifying the complicated set of values the nation sought in its war heroes at the end of the century, this study will also explain why journalists considered naval heroes as better representatives of those cherished ideals than those from the Army (including volunteer Theodore Roosevelt) until well after the end of the war. Roosevelt was honored as a hero during the war and won the 1899 New York gubernatorial election largely because of his wartime popularity, but was not considered selfless because of his clear political ambitions. American hero-worship of Cervera developed slowly, was considerably more subdued than the public enthusiasm displayed for America’s native-born champions, and was undoubtedly bestowed, in part, as a criticism of the failure of American heroes to live up to the heroic narrative created for them by reporters and biographers. Cervera’s ranking as Life’s ‘most durable hero’ of the war, while seemingly nonsensical, begins to make more sense when the Spanish admiral is reconfigured as a national cultural hero instead of an American military champion. Despite his enemy status, Cervera came to epitomise important military values of the day, because of the rapid decline of the nation’s American-born war heroes brought about by celebrity journalism.