4 - The Spectacle of War in Crane's Revision of History

Summary

The year that saw the publication of The Red Badge of Courage to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic was reviewed as a time of “wars and bloodshed” by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. The newspaper's year-end survey of 1895 recalled that “from Japan westward to Jackson's Hole, bloodshed has encircled the globe,” and it listed some examples of contemporary wars:

When the year 1895 dawned the Italians were engaged in a bloody war with the Abyssinians; Haiti was overrun by rebels, who had burned the capital, Port-au-Prince, and slaughtered many people; the French were preparing for their disastrous if victorious war in Madagascar; the Dutch were slaughtering the natives of Lombok, one of their dependencies in southeastern Asia; and rebellions were in progress in several of the South American countries.

To newspaper readers in 1895, these outbreaks of international violence may have seemed remote from America's geographical borders and even more distant in time from the historic battlefields of America's last major conflict, the Civil War. Yet as the decade progressed, the United States ventured more boldly into international disputes; after verging on military engagements with Italy, Chile, and Britain in the early 1890's, America fought a war against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. Mass-circulation newspapers like the World, which had already made exotic battles in European colonies a staple for American consumption, had an enthusiastic audience feasting on the spectacle of the Spanish-American War.