Drawing a Glorious Past,Picturing an Uncertain Future

By the end of July 1898, the prospects for Spanish victory in the war with the United States were bleak. The Spanish fleet had suffered catastrophic losses in the Battle of Manila Bay in May; US marines had landed on Cuban soil in early June; and in the following month Spain lost its entire Caribbean Squadron in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba. While the fighting continued, the Spanish press was beginning to realize and report that a defeat at the hands of the United States and, more importantly, the consequent loss of the colonies was imminent. An artist for the illustrated Spanish weekly Blanco y Negro vented his frustration by drawing a mock painting he satirically insisted was bound for the 1900 World Exposition in Paris. The print is a heart-wrenchingly melancholic depiction of destruction, disaster, depression, and defeat. At its center stands a large Spanish castle facing imminent destruction from almost every side and in several forms. Large threatening cannons sit armed, aimed, and ready; from far off in the distance a fleet of ships fires a barrage of artillery shells into the castle's crumbling walls; and throngs of soldiers carrying rifles and gasoline cans rush through every blasted crack. In the foreground two frantic maidens – one marked Cuba, the other Philippines – are being violently dragged away upon the backs of several dark, menacing figures. In the three short paragraphs below the image, the artist explains how he intends it to be a dramatic allegorical representation of the destruction of Spain and its empire. The destruction the drawing satirizes, he claims, is a masterpiece of the modern world. It is a ‘synthesis’ of science, ‘mechanics’, ‘chemistry’ and ‘metallurgy … put to the service of the genius of destruction’. ¹ It is not solely the ‘yanqui’ that is to blame, the artist contends; the entire modern world has contributed to the destruction of Spain ‘because all have put their hands to this end’. The ‘stupendous machines of war’ have sown ‘death, destruction and annihilation in the name of progress’. ² It is progress itself – in the form of a blind, destructive march toward modernity – which has brought about Spain's downfall.

This bleak vision of the looming disaster is a reflection of much more than the frustrations of a single artist. The imagery he uses and the threats he identifies reveal how many fin-de-siglo Spaniards understood the conflict. Spain was a victim of modernity, American perfidy, and European disregard. The nation was beset on all sides by injustice and wickedness. Save for the two white-dressed maidens being assaulted on the periphery of the action and carried away by small figures representing rebellious Cubans and Filipinos, the image hardly hints at the contemporary colonial struggle at all. The absence is telling, and the caption appropriate. As this and a wealth of other images produced over the course of the Cuban revolt and the Spanish American War make clear, Spaniards did not assess the war in terms of the loss of colonies and empire. In fact, Spain's enemies were not physical at all, but ideological. These images argued that in defending the Spanish empire Spain was upholding tradition and traditional values like honor and truth in the face of the onslaught of corruption, modernization, and progress. As the artist explains, the empire was engaged in a pitched battle with the forces of a ‘quintessential progress that gives man no value’. ³

The constitution of the enemy is clear, defined by what it seeks to destroy: Spanish tradition, spirituality, and cultural brotherhood. What constitutes the victim, however, is more ambiguous. The artist of the sketch described above defined Spain as the opposite of that which sought its destruction, a bulwark standing against these modern movements. This overt rejection of modernization was a byproduct of two competing historical trends: the emergence of a Spanish nationalism baptized in the spirit of imperial retrenchment, and the development of a more modern trading relationship that inevitably drew Cuba more firmly into the orbit of the United States. The former embraced Spain's colonial history as an integral part of Spain's national history. The latter challenged Spain's ties of history, language, culture and brotherhood to its current and former colonies as it constructed new bonds based on trade, material interest, and consumerism.

The sense of anxiety and despair reflected in this 1898 graphic and caption represents a great departure from the general feeling of security and optimism felt throughout the nation just six years earlier. By 1892, Spain had experienced nearly fifteen years of peace and stability as a consequence of the conclusion of the decade-long war in Cuba and by way of the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy in 1875 and the adoption of a new constitution in 1876. Together, these developments brought an end to the decades of internal divisiveness, civil wars, revolutions, and repeated military-led coups that had marked the Spanish nineteenth century. ⁴ The midwife overseeing the birth of this period of political and military steadiness was Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, despite his relative youth the dominant Spanish politician of the era. The genuine stability Cánovas created, however, was largely built upon an illusion of liberal representative democracy. On paper, the Spanish constitution of 1876, followed by the establishment of universal male suffrage after 1890, made Spain one of the most politically liberal countries in all of Europe. In practice, the democracy Cánovas conceived was carefully channeled through the caciques (local political bosses) and their patronage networks so as to ensure the regular and peaceable transfer of power between the two dominant monarchist political parties, the Liberal-Conservatives of Cánovas and the Liberals of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta. This system of alternation, the turno pacífico, fostered stability and predictability by making it seem that the ruling party maintained democratic support until scandal or political impotence forced dissolution of the Cortes and elections in which the opposing party would be ‘voted’ into office. ⁵

A prominent feature of the Restoration period was heightened intellectual interest in Spanish colonial history and hispanoamericanismo, or the belief in a transatlantic Hispanic community with its cultural foundation in Spain and transmitted through colonization in the Americas and the Pacific. This was not necessarily a coincidence. Cánovas del Castillo himself, in his 1882 speech in the Ateneo in Madrid, Discurso sobre la nación, considered by historian Ada Blanco to be the founding text of the ideology of the Restoration, drew bold lines of connection between the nation of Spain and its identity as an imperial power. ⁶ The four hundredth anniversary of the American discovery just ten years later, declared by Cánovas to be a national holiday, generated increased attention to the relationship between Spain and Spanish America. Longtime preachers of hispanoamericanismo like the realist novelist Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano, or republican politician Emilio Castelar y Ripoll (fourth president of the short-lived first Spanish republic) waxed poetic in the years following 1892 about the notion of a ‘Spanish essence’ that they believed pervaded the spirit of Spanish America and tied it to the metropole. With regard to Cuba, this insistence upon a Spanish essence was particularly strong. As a then bitter Castelar made clear in May of 1898 on the eve of the Disaster, ‘The sun will disappear from the heavens before the Spanish essence disappears from the spirit of Spanish America. America will be Spanish eternally’. ⁷

In recent years, a number of historians have made great strides in recognizing the importance of the empire in the language of emergent Spanish nationalism in the nineteenth century. ⁸ These scholars have aptly noted the powerful significance that the Antillean colonies in particular held for elites participating in the nationalization process like Castelar, Valera, Ángel Ganivet, and Cánovas del Castillo. In the writings and pronouncements of these nineteenth-century thinkers, the illusion of a glorious colonial past reverberated through the rhetoric of an emerging nationalist discourse. Partly as a rational response to Spain's declining influence in Latin America and partly as a convenient delusion fashioned to ameliorate feelings of inadequacy and fin de siècle decadencia, these elites preached a self-gratifying history of Spain's mission civilisatrice conceived as the essence of Spanish colonialism and the defining feature of Spanish nationalism. They emphasized the bonds between Spain and its past and present colonies: language, culture, religion, and history. Spain, they contended, had built a lasting civilization that transcended oceans and political boundaries and could withstand the trauma of revolutions and independence. Indeed, through the process of colonization, Spain had recreated itself in the colonies. These elites succumbed to and disseminated the alluring illusion that Spain had followed a great world-historical destiny to break the geographic bonds of its small corner of Europe and baptize the world in catholic civilization.

… the Spanish culture, so very splendid, could not remain hemmed in between the Pyrenees, the mouth of the Tagus, and the Strait [of Gibraltar]; but it had to extend itself, and in order to do so, while Portugal was finding the lost [East] Indies, we conjured up America between the two oceans, in the providential hour when conscience was being renewed by the religious revolution, thought was being redeemed and was broadly disseminated through the medium of the press, Art was reviving, and History was fulfilled in the Renaissance. ⁹

The process of nation building, therefore, was tied to the process of imperial retrenchment. As historian Christopher Schmidt-Nowara makes clear, ‘empire shaped the very contours of the nation's “imagined community” in the nineteenth century’. ¹⁰ The empire was Spain, Spain the empire.

Nineteenth-century nationalist Spanish histories helped to popularize this idea. In part responding to Anglo-American histories that emphasized the Black Legend, these new histories explained how Spanish civilization in conquering the New World had defeated and supplanted the defective cultures of earlier peoples. ¹¹ These nationalist histories propounded a narrative of Spanish colonial exceptionalism predicated on the centrality of Spain's civilizing efforts in the New World. They advocated the idea that Spanish settlers had brought the gifts of Catholicism and culture to backward Native Americans just as they continued to do for the Cubans. ¹² Where other colonial powers had displaced natives, Spain had embraced them; where other empires had exploited the indigenous population, Spain had sacrificed itself to civilize them. Spain, they argued, had made a genuine and noble effort to unite colony and metropole with the unbreakable ties of culture. As Emilio Castelar grandiloquently explained:

… In two years Cortés brought to Mexico the culture developed by the human spirit from Abraham to Columbus. Think of the painful transition from nomadic to stable states; the enormous battles of peoples aspiring for independence with the Pharaohs of all times and countries; … In politics we brought about modern states fresh from the feudal chaos; in administration, the permanent tribunals and chancelleries, which generate a great and profound knowledge of Roman law; in the military, the organic armies, in great opposition to the old armed retinue; in the sciences, a philosophy that begins their emancipation from Aristotle, and an astronomy that begins their emancipation from Ptolemy; in art, the architecture and the sculpture of the Renaissance; in writing, a young inspiration expressed by way of a language as sonorous as our national tongue, and fixed by eminent writers like Garcilaso; in religion, Christianity; in industry, gunpowder and printing; in means of locomotion, the boat and the horse and the ox; in food, bread and wine, as well as all the ideas of human rights and all the congenital hopes and splendid dawning of the modern spirit. ¹³

This line of argument could and should, of course, be read as partial compensation for Spain's lack of success in the late nineteenth-century race for empire. The ambitious United States was making the move to decisively join in the imperialist adventurism then common in Europe, and it was doing so at Spain's expense. The humiliation of which could hardly have been lost on proud Spaniards who watched as Britain, France, and Germany carved up sub-Saharan Africa, established outposts in Asia, and remade the world in their image. Excepting the flailing attempts to more firmly secure and expand their long-standing foothold in North Africa, Spaniards could counterpose only the alleged spiritual and cultural conquests of their then much-reduced Empire to the contemporary global expansion of European colonizing competitors.

Despite the many recent histories attesting to the dual process of imperial retrenchment and nation building in nineteenth-century Spain, the popular dissemination of this nationalist/imperialist conflation is a topic that has remained largely untouched. ¹⁴ Historians have tended to approach the subject from the perspectives of educational reform, literature, the generation of ’98, and so on. In this way, the nationalization of the masses, to borrow a phrase from George Mosse, is reduced to an elitist experiment, wherein Spain's great thinkers discuss and debate among themselves the origin and essence of the Spanish nation. Historians, however, have largely ignored the role of the burgeoning Spanish press in this process. This article seeks to begin filling this void. Through an examination of the metaphors and anxieties encoded in editorial cartoons and other graphic ephemera published during the 1895–1898 conflict in Cuba and ultimately with the United States, I argue that the contours of Spanish nationalism that emerged in the pressure cooker of war and were projected through the Spanish press conflated Spanish nationalism and Spanish empire through an open rejection of the modern world. Anxieties over ‘degeneration’ in fin-de-siècle Spain manifested themselves as an arrangement of dueling metaphors pouring from the cartoonists’ pens. In these caricatures, the form and essence of Spanishness could be discerned as a bulwark against industrialization, modernization, and liberalization.

The emergence of the liberal nation state in Spain coincided with the golden age of Spanish journalism, a period of great expansion in the Spanish press. Notwithstanding occasional repression directed against the press, the number of periodicals in Spain grew steadily from the 1830s through the century's end and the disastrous war with the United States. In the years following the 1868 revolution, when a number of professional journalists were incorporated into the provisional government, the press experienced a veritable explosion of production, with a host of new publications going in and out of print almost daily. ¹⁵ The passage of the celebrated 1883 ley de imprenta, a law that reinforced Article 13 of the 1876 constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and of the press, further stimulated this growth. ¹⁶ Between 1879 and the end of the century there was an increase of over 240 percent in the number of periodicals in circulation, increasing from 544 to a total of 1347. ¹⁷

As one might expect, this late nineteenth-century surge in periodical productivity reflected the complex political and ideological currents of the pre-Disaster Restoration period. The widely circulated mouthpieces of the two dominant parties of the Restoration were La Época for Cánovas's Liberal-Conservatives and El Imparcial for Sagasta's Liberal party. By voicing the positions of the two parties, these papers largely set the tone of political debate in the capital and the country as a whole. As monarchist publications, however, they were but two of over three hundred periodicals that encompassed traditionalist, conservative, liberal, democratic, independent, and other varieties of monarchist sentiment. The broadly defined republican press was equally diverse, including well over a hundred titles representing federalist, moderate, and radical positions. More on the fringe of the political debate were a handful of socialist and anarchist publications. ¹⁸

Notwithstanding the cacophony of political and ideological perspectives echoed by the great diversity of Restoration-era publications, editorial postures on the United States and Cuba were remarkably uniform. The monarchical and republican press spoke seemingly with one voice in condemning Cuban separatism and American dishonesty. Publications issued by both right and left espoused support for aggressive action in Cuba, extolled the virtues of Spanish nationalism, and decried the presumptuousness and injustice of ‘a nation of chicken-farmers’ and ‘barbarians’ challenging Spain's position in Cuba. ¹⁹ Yet, as historian Sylvia Hilton has demonstrated, embedded in the overtly nationalist and imperialist republican position is a more subtle, though distinctly perceptible, challenge to the institution of monarchy. The republican press, Hilton argues, wielded the symbols of Spanish indignation at US intervention in Cuba – dismissing the US as a land of pigs and money-worshiping thieves – as a tool to emphasize the inherent weaknesses of the monarchy and to call for its dissolution. ²⁰

These subtle distinctions aside, the only clear exceptions to the apparent uniformity of opinion with regard to Spain's conflict with the upstart US were views expressed in the anarchist, socialist, and federalist press. In characteristic disorganized fashion, the Anarchists, while uniformly opposing Spanish involvement, only gradually coalesced around the idea that armed Cuban rebellion could itself be enough of a revolutionary spark to merit Anarchist support. Socialist publications were seemingly more uniformly pacifist, even if the Socialist party itself struggled to find a consistent message. ²¹ Federalist publications urged peace for far more interesting reasons. Leading federalists like Francesc Pí y Margall had for years made it clear that the federalists' unwavering support for democracy and federal republicanism dictated a stance in favor of autonomy for Cuba. Indeed, during his short tenure as president during the first Spanish republic, Pí y Margall attempted to implement reforms that would have granted Cuba autonomy. But the reluctance of federalist publications to join the cavalcade of condemnation against the United States arose from an open appreciation of the United States as the quintessential federal republic. Spanish federalists and their publications routinely praised the secularism, economic strength, progressivism, and anti-imperialist rhetoric of the United States. These lonely and quixotic federalist voices consistently registered their disapproval of the growing Spanish anti-Americanism that echoed so resoundingly in so much of the rest of the press. ²²

The focus of this article, however, is not on the position of the Spanish press in general, nor even the infinitely interesting if subtle variations and intricacies of the nearly universal condemnation of the United States over the course of the Cuban rebellion as represented in the press. Instead, this article looks exclusively at the Spanish illustrated press, which in the late nineteenth century was incorporating a number of technological innovations that effected a revolutionary transformation in image production for illustrated magazines. The increasing use of methods like xylographic engraving, lithography, halftone, and heliogravure in Spain made it possible to duplicate and print images faster and cheaper than ever before. The ability to more easily reproduce images on the printed page attracted new readers, increased the circulation of major respectable illustrated weeklies like El Museo Universal and La Ilustración Española y Americana, and ultimately triggered a boom for artists and caricaturists. ²³ Whereas in the early nineteenth century images in any form had been relatively rare in print media, by the end of the century technological advances had made it possible to bombard readers with illustrations in an effort to keep pace with the ever increasing demand for visual culture. ²⁴ By the 1880s and 1890s, new and cheaper image reproduction technologies like zincography were allowing for the emergence of a new generation of illustrated periodicals. This leaner and meaner cohort included a great range of illustrated weeklies from the widely popular middle-class literary review Blanco y Negro to more irreverent and satirical weeklies like Don Quijote and Gedeón. ²⁵ It is from the illustrated pages of this gang of magazines – born in the politics of the Restoration and reaching maturity and in many cases the height of their readerships on the eve of the Disaster – that I primarily draw in this article. ²⁶

Within the pages of the illustrated press of this period, the neat political divisions of the Spanish press referred to earlier become somewhat more murky. Certainly, many of these illustrated weeklies espoused clear political positions, whether republican and anti-clerical like El Motín ²⁷ and La Campana de Gracia, or more conservative like Gedeón or Blanco y Negro. But the illustrated character of this new generation of periodicals necessitated a considerable amount of crosspollination across different segments of the press. This occurred because illustrators typically contributed to a number of different and diverse publications simultaneously. For example, one of the more prolific and influential caricaturists of the era, Ramón Cilla, drew for Blanco y Negro, Madrid Cómico, Gedeón, and Barcelona Cómica. Likewise, Apeles Mestres, a similarly prolific Catalan caricaturist, published cartoons in La Campana de Gracia, Barcelona Cómica, Madrid Cómico, and others. Nor were these two artists unusual. Other caricaturists of the period, such as Joaquín Xaudaró, Pedro Antonio Villahermosa ‘Sileno’, Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa ‘Mecachis’, and Eduardo Sojo ‘Demócrito’, published frequently in a variety of illustrated weeklies. During the years of the Cuban revolt and war with the United States, this cross-pollination, combined with the apparent coalescence of styles and metaphors used by these artists to depict the conflict, resulted in the production of a portfolio of editorial cartoons propounding a similar, largely uniform, presentation of the conflict. ²⁸ Moreover, this increasingly uniform image of Spain and its adversaries drew on a suite of connections between Spain and Cuba that far more commonly reflected a traditional and conservative interpretation of this relationship. Rather than emphasizing more characteristically liberal qualities such as economic progress, the emancipation from authoritarianism, and religious toleration, the need to distinguish Spain from the United States generated illustrations that appeared to dismiss not only these liberal characteristics but even the notion of modernity itself.

The technological advances that both allowed for the economical mass reproduction of printed imagery and gave birth to this turn-of-the-century generation of illustrated periodicals comported with and catered to a generalized late-nineteenth-century yearning for all things modern. The illustrated magazines tapped into this desire by churning out volumes of images the proprietors and contributors believed their bourgeois readership would pay to consume. ²⁹ The pictorial language encoded into the wealth of caricature and editorial cartoons produced by the Spanish illustrated press during the ultimate phases of Cuban revolt, therefore, represents something of a contradiction. While the new media for reproducing illustrations might well evoke a sensation of technological progress and modernity, many of the caricatured images themselves tended to champion a far more traditional conception of Spain, often one that actually eschewed or denigrated the recognizable characteristics of modernization: industrialization, economic Liberalism, and mass consumption. I contend that this seeming contradiction represents a latent anxiety brought on by the more threatening aspects of industrialization and modernization in fin-de-siècle Spain: urbanization, working-class migrations and demonstrations, a dramatic increase in socialist and anarchist membership, and the increasingly apparent commercial dominance of northern European and North American economic power. This anxiety is encoded in many cartoon metaphors and is distinctly perceptible. The three pillars of Spanish identity commonly depicted in wartime caricature – civilization, culture, and legitimacy – however worthy, appeared increasingly defenseless against the vulgar power of the opposition. What is culture against unlimited wealth? How can legitimacy prevail against iron and steel? How strong are the bonds of linguistic brotherhood when confronted by the violence of war or the corrosive blandishments of materialism? These anxieties appear at times to reveal deep-seated confusion and inconsistency. Repeatedly the ostensibly liberal press ridiculed the US for being successfully liberal; ³⁰ defenders of Spanish empire lambasted the imperial ambitions of the United States; the illustrated magazines encouraged consumption through advertisements and other suggestive devices while at every turn presenting commercialism as the antithesis of Spanishness. This medley of submerged anxiety and overt hypocrisy demonstrates, at least in the embedded iconography of wartime cartoons, that the US was merely a symbol of a much larger threat to Spain – the threat of an ascendant and vulgar modernity.

Editorial cartoons provide a unique glimpse into the immediate, contemporary, and emotional ways that Spaniards understood the war. By drawing metaphors as tangible reality, cartoonists appealed to the natural tendency to reduce the complexities of war to the far more abstract and subjective notions of good versus evil, right against wrong, honesty over deceit, us versus them, virtue confronting vice. ³¹ Cartoonists can do much more than say the enemy is evil; they show their readers that he/she/it plainly is. Spanish cartoonists did not simply declare that rebels were violent; they showed their blood-stained swords, their sharp menacing teeth. These cartoons did more than explain that the US was greedy and covetous; they flooded the readers' imagination with star-spangled, rampaging pigs and money-hoarding gluttonous Uncle Sams. Spanish cartoonists went far beyond merely warning that the nation was threatened by the forces of modernity; they flooded the pages of magazines with weeping maidens, firebombed castles, torn flags, and endless ranks of heavily armed invading soldiers.

For the historian, cartoons and other forms of constructed graphic imagery are especially useful in fleshing out these abstractions because they are both prescriptive and descriptive. Cartoons invite and encourage the reader to acknowledge a particular assessment of the situation or the characters they describe. Yet the method is effective precisely because the cartoonist utilizes a symbolic language redolent of values and judgments that the reader already recognizes and accepts. In the Spanish case, cartoons communicate intricate narratives and explanations about the origins of the conflict, the state of the war, and the price of defeat. These complex ideas, however, are conveyed through a graphic signification of readily identifiable and easily communicable beliefs about everything from race and gender to chaos and stability. While the prescriptive elements are impossible to avoid, it is the caricatures' descriptive qualities, the ways in which they mirror and utilize a culturally accepted system of symbols and counter symbols, which interest me most. Collectively these symbols constitute a window into the popular cultural values and psychological needs of the time. For the late nineteenth-century urban Spaniard, the specific normative value judgments cartoons relayed were a cultural bridge to the more complex prescriptive idea depicted in the cartoon. For the twenty-first-century historian, those selfsame normative values provide access to contemporary cultural reactions to the war.

By interpreting cartoons that describe the enemy as intrinsically anti-Spanish I propose to identify what nineteenth-century Spaniards recognized as the ideal Spanish nation, the ideal Spanish empire. This is to say that encoded in the negative image of a duplicitous Uncle Sam or a treasure-belching pig is the positive ideal of Spanish fairness and piety. And implied in the images of violent illegitimate rebellion is a strong statement about stable Spanish colonial legitimacy. Take for example a 27 May 1897 Gedeón cartoon. The cartoon depicts an unlikely marriage: the bridegroom, a jovial and jaunty black Cuban; the bride, a portly, lumbering star-stamped pig. But for the drawn veil and ring of holly, the round pig is entirely naked. The Cuban – barefoot, holding a bag of US dollars, and sporting a straw hat and a broad smile – walks arm in arm with the large grotesque pig. Just as the pig is a common metaphor for shameless greed and commercialism, the caricatured Cuban, drawn deep black and grotesquely apelike, represents the illegitimacy of rebellion. The bag of money he holds demonstrates that his fidelity has been bought. And the title, ‘Matrimonio Morganático’, indicating that Cuba has agreed to accept the inferior position of an unequal relationship, tells the reader that this solitary bag of gold constitutes the full extent of his payment.

Clearly, this cartoon offers a statement about the essence of US imperialism and the motives of rebellion in Cuba. Yet, because the artist constructed it to represent the inversion of Spanish empire, it also speaks to Spain, Spaniards, and Spanish identity. By assigning to Cuba the subordinate position in this ‘morganatic’ relationship, the cartoonist makes the point that Cubans are thus destined to remain perpetual outsiders in the empire the US is making. The US, the cartoonist insists, is not offering what Spain has traditionally and gladly given: cultural brotherhood, linguistic unity, and legal parity. The cartoon, then, should be understood as an allegory about the perversion of empire. If the US Empire is based on unequal trade ties and colonial subservience, the Spanish empire embraces the colony as an extension of the metropole. If a marriage to the US Empire is a shameful marriage to materialism, Spain represents the wholesome spirit that rejects it. If the marriage of pig to rebel seems unnatural, the cultural relationship between Spain and Cuba is normal, stable, consistent, timeless.

Intentionally or not, cartoonists projected the internal tensions in Spanish culture between tradition and modernity onto the international stage. The patterns and symbolic relationships encoded into wartime cartoons represent an effort to resolve the very real problem of defining the nation and the empire. Through a process of graphic binary opposition, cartoonists sketched the features of an idealized Spain that was plainly and necessarily the anti-US. Spain was civilization because the US was barbarism; Spain legitimately possessed Cuba because the US was a usurper; Spain was cultured and pious because the US was neither. The burgeoning US, as the nouveau riche epitome of vulgar materialism and mindless innovation, symbolized the threat of a global future of commercialism and limitless capitalist exploitation. As the proud standard bearer of modernization, the United States seemed the physical manifestation of all that jeopardized traditional Spain: glorified modernity, unabashed materialism, shameless duplicity. Its growing power threatened to spread godlessness and depravity through Spain's former and current colonies. For Spaniards struggling to maintain the last vestiges of the empire, the North American behemoth, with its clear advantage in size, resources, population, and capital, constituted a perpetual and uncomfortable challenge to Spanish control of Cuba. Through the imagery of editorial cartoons, the war of bullets, blood and battlefields merged seamlessly with the internal struggle for the soul of Spain between the modern and the traditional. Consequently, the imagery of editorial cartoons drew Manichean distinctions between the two opponents. Spain was steeped in tradition, the US awash with novelty. Spain was proud and firm, the US wily and deceitful. Spain stood on centuries of history and convention, while the US hid behind mountains of cash. To confront the US was not only to confront all that Spain abhorred, it was to confront the modern world itself.

Consistent with the role assigned to the Americans, metaphors for the US demonstrated fleetingness and cowardliness, an absence of culture, and a preponderance of corrupting wealth. Animal metaphors exhibiting these supposed national traits were especially common. The nearly ubiquitous symbol for the US in Spanish wartime editorial cartoons, a fatted pig, was an image that focused Spanish contempt. Illustrated magazines and newspapers decorated the borders of political cartoons with silhouettes of marching pigs; figures of healthy pigs were stamped over American flags; iron-clad pigs sailed from Tampa toward Cuba; large upright pigs emblazoned with stars and stripes accosted women on the streets; tall threatening pigs wore three-piece suits and stovepipe hats; artistic pigs whispered into the ears of poets composing odes to war; congresses of pigs wrote laws and passed war declarations; American leaders arrogantly built pyramids from the carcasses of bleeding pigs as testaments to their vanity. In one cartoon, a group of gleeful pigs, purportedly representing those lobbying in support of US intervention in Cuba, even danced around a large sack of money as though delirious with insatiable greed. In another, a herd of pigs running wildly in all directions trampled over Don Quixote and Sancho – the powerful and popular metaphor for Spain and Spanish empire. ³²

As a symbol of US imperial ambitions, pigs were the perfect antagonistic device. The image of the pig – filthy, vulgar, and insatiably greedy – contrasted sharply with the traditional image of Spain accepted and reflected in Spanish caricature. ³³ As a persistently recurring feature of Spanish cartoons, pigs reinforced the association between the rising US Empire and insatiable aggrandizement. Like American greed and Liberalism gone wild, pigs consumed ravenously. Unchecked, they ate everything within reach. Commonly reveling in their own excrement, pigs exemplified an absence of morals, tradition, decency, loyalty, and shame. They were unremittingly ravenous, barbarous, belligerent, irreverent, and ubiquitous. To nineteenth-century Spaniards viewing these cartoons, the image of the pig was also an unmistakable image of food. Cartoons evoked this connection by depicting pigs hanging in butcher shops or branded with the American star. Also, the image of the pig, popularly recognized as a dull animal, represented mental weakness – pigs think with their stomachs, not with their heads. The power of their voracious appetite was thus offset by their absence of intelligence. Pigs, it seemed, were led by the basest desires to feed, defecate, and reproduce. By contrast, Spaniards were intellectual beings – cultured, with refined tastes, a long history, and a richly-deserved sense of accomplishment. The Spanish empire as projected in cartoons was stable and consistent. By heaping ridicule on the pig, editorial cartoons emphasized the positive qualities inherent in an idealized Spain. If warship-like pigs, clad in iron and belching smoke, were industrial and corrupted, Spain was pastoral and pure; if pigs were over-sexed, disruptive, and offensive, Spaniards were dignified, demure, and respectful; where pigs indulged in chaotic feeding frenzies, Spanish rule was orderly and stable. Thus, Spanish morality was the countervailing force to perverse US ambitions.

The very ubiquity of the pig metaphor, however, belies a sense of anxiety about the threat itself. As elements of cartoon scenes, pigs almost never appeared alone; instead, they typically gathered in menacing packs or conspired in evil congregations. Nor did cartoons ever show pigs as sickly or unhealthy. Pigs were the embodiment of the gluttonous desire to amass wealth as well as the quintessence of that wealth itself – the greed and the gold. Without fail, caricatured pigs were fat with riches, stuffed with money. Often, cartoons presented these symbols of US power as existing alongside depictions of a defeated US in ways that seem to ignore the obvious contradiction. To give one example: a cartoon in the short illustrated weekly Gedeón depicts a rather gruesome scene in which Gedeón, the wild-eyed cartoon personification of the magazine, has butchered two pigs. The lifeless animals hang by their hind legs with their abdomens torn open and mouths gaping as blood drips over their carcasses and into the buckets hanging beneath them. The buckets are marked with labels: one oro, the other plata. ³⁴ Gedeón stands proudly between them holding a knife marked hierro. On the surface, the scene is a mostly light-hearted dismissal of the recent US presidential election – an election where the Democratic nominee, William J. Bryan, had trumpeted his proposal to switch from a gold to a silver monetary standard. The message was clear: let the pigs argue over gold and silver; we will butcher them with our steel. At a slightly deeper level, however, the scene is unmistakably a projection of Spanish power and eventual Spanish military success. Just as iron is stronger than either silver or gold, so too is Spanish might more powerful than American treasure. ³⁵ Yet, well below the surface, and despite the indication that the pigs and the corresponding American threat have been rendered harmless within the cartoon, the significance of the scene is mildly disquieting from a Spanish point of view. As Spaniards surely understood, wars are waged with money, the more the better. Facing an enemy from whose very wounds bleed wealth could not have been a very settling prospect for Spaniards considering the eventuality of war with the United States.

Porcine wealth constituted the soulless essence of modernity and its most immediate representative, the United States. Not unlike the ubiquitous pig, the greedy, marauding Uncle Sam of wartime cartoons exemplified materialism and stood as a constant reminder of the logical, ineluctable outcome of unchained Liberalism. Typically presented as a tycoon, merchant, or peddler, his many duties included stealing, counting, holding, offering, resting upon or hiding behind bulging bags of money. Where he stands, coins spill out at his feet; where he sits, bags of treasure lie strewn about the floor. ³⁶ These cartoons tell readers that Uncle Sam is deceitful and uncouth; that he excels at graft and bribery; that he is a dishonest broker, a ruthless competitor, and a merciless victor. Symbolically bound to commercialism, he personifies the wave of unscrupulous modernization and money worship that threatened to crash over the nation and wash away virtuous Spanish tradition. Used as a foil, his presence in caricatures accentuates the honor and history inherent in the idealized Spanish nation. Where Uncle Sam's goals are questionable, Spain's are sound; where his interests are monetary, Spain's are spiritual; and where he personifies the parvenu, Spain emits a noble, historical presence that spans both continents and centuries.

In one Gedeón cartoon, the artist has made the core of his scene the threat represented by Uncle Sam and his manifest contrast with Spanish ideals. In it, Uncle Sam – chubby, disproportionate, over-dressed, and insecure – sits upon a crate of his own goods. His right hand holds a rolled-up document; his left hand is draped over a container labeled ‘sugar syndicate’; his back rests against a package of Chicago meat; and at his feet spill hundreds of thousands of dollars in coins. Facing him is the proud lion of Spain, his paw protecting a burning Cuba, and his hostile attention directed menacingly at his opponent. In contrast to the ostentatious Uncle Sam, the lion is not surrounded by stocks of goods and piles of coins; strength, pride and national fidelity are his weapons. ³⁷ Similarly, in another cartoon scene Uncle Sam stands facing a proud Spaniard and upon a tower built entirely with bags of money. Yet while the tower of the money-hoarder appears strong and solid, there is no meaningful substance underneath, no core of integrity or conviction within. It is money from soup to nuts – Liberalism absent tradition, wealth without worth. ³⁸

Cartoonists used the image of the rapacious and covetous Uncle Sam to undermine the legitimacy of Cuba's financial ties to the United States, and by extension to emphasize Spain's laudable historical and cultural ties with the island. Depicting Uncle Sam as a common street peddler, as was done in one Blanco y Negro cartoon, was an effective way of relaying this message. As he stands near his display, a large-nosed, sharp clawed, grotesque-looking Uncle Sam smiles and gestures toward his goods. ³⁹ The boxes, marked ‘shame, honor, dignity, patriotism, uprightness’, have been stacked neatly on a table behind him. The sign on the display table proclaims ‘all is for sale’. The shocking dénouement to the allegorical scenario is displayed to the right of the scene in an additional cartoon bubble. There, a stooping President McKinley dangles a large bloody knife in one hand and holds up a large serving platter in the other. Upon the platter sits McKinley's gory offering: Uncle Sam's severed head. Waving over McKinley's head is the American flag; and emerging from outside the borders of the scene is a large mysterious hand holding out an equally large sack of money. The cartoonist's point is emphatic; in a world of capitalism-gone-wild, all things, even the most sacred, have their price.

Metaphors for Spain and Spanish power were hardly as monotonous as the consistently reappearing groups of ravening pigs and rapacious Uncle Sams symbolizing the United States. Spanish imagery came in the form of proud lions (a traditional symbol of Spanish regality and an allusion to the medieval kingdom of León), maidens, matadors, castles and a host of others. The sheer variety of the symbolic representations of Spain and Spanish interests added nuance and complexity to the Spanish cause. The types of symbols – lions for pride and warlike tradition, maidens for purity, and matadors for virility and martial spirit – were traditional and reassuring. So too did these symbols of Spanish might and glory emphasize the sharp differences between Spain and its enemies. Money, power, and extravagance were immediate but fleeting and culturally valueless. Spain's worth – mined from centuries of history, tempered by defeat, sacrifice and eventual salvation – was strong and eternal. Popular national symbols like Don Quixote were perfect vehicles for the dissemination of these powerful themes. ⁴⁰ Not only was he indicative of a long Spanish literary tradition, but for many Cervantes's bumbling yet well-intentioned knight exemplified Spain's noble intentions in the New World, while tacitly acknowledging the failures. Cartoons that evoked his kind, loyal heart made the treachery of the rebellious colonists more acute. Castles, often depicted in the background of cartoons, were another important reminder of the rich history of Spain. On the surface, just as depictions of lions recalled the kingdom of León, castles were associated with the kingdom of Castile, which was by extension associated with the empire. As features of cartoon iconology, however, they symbolized much more. The remnants of ages past, they represented a foundation of tested institutions and history. They were built to stand the test of time, not to appeal to the expediency of the moment. Americans built with money, Spain built with tradition. ⁴¹

To emphasize this difference, cartoons sometimes juxtaposed symbols of Spanish empire and the dissemination of civilization with symbols of American empire and the spread of materialism. One cartoon, printed in the 17 December 1896 issue of Gedeón (notably a full year and a half before US military intervention in Cuba) demonstrates, through dramatic graphic imagery, the convergence and contrast of these two ideas of empire. The cartoon, entitled ‘Columbus and the Pig’, shows a statue of Columbus carrying the standard of Castile and standing next to a small globe atop a decorated column. At the base of the column, standing on its hind legs and wearing a top hat, is the fat American pig. Columbus – venerable, pious, and accomplished – wears an expression of astonishment on his face. The pig – filthy, greedy and threatening – offers Columbus a document refuting the legitimacy of Spain's relationship with Cuba. The contrast in symbolism could hardly be stronger. It had been through the use of the image and memory of Columbus that late-nineteenth-century defenders of the Spanish empire had been re-conceptualizing the empire. Images, statues, and commemorations celebrating the Genoese-born explorer abounded in the years leading up to and during the 400th anniversary of his voyage in 1892. Beginning in the 1860s, a number of statues of the Admiral were erected in Spain and the Antilles: in the Ministry of Ultramar in Madrid, in the patio of the captain general's palace in Havana, and on the Ramblas in Barcelona, to name a few. While Columbus's foreign origins were in some ways problematic for those Spaniards hailing him as a symbol of ‘Spanish’ nationalism, he was also a convenient and useful symbol of Spanish colonialism during this period of increased imperial retrenchment. Unlike Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cortés or Pizarro, reflections of Columbus at the turn of the century did not carry the heavy baggage of colonial mismanagement or violent conquest. Rather, the image and memory of Columbus had the effect of casting a complimentary cloak of religion, civilization, reason, and improving mission over Spanish claims of imperial legitimacy. ⁴²

The statue depicted in the cartoon is a likeness of the statue of Columbus atop the large heavily decorated pillar in the Plaza de Colón (formerly the Plaza de Santiago) in Madrid. Erected in 1885 to commemorate the marriage of Alfonso XII to Maria Cristina, it is an excellent example of Restoration-era attempts to officially sanction a new historical understanding of Spanish colonialism, of which the memory of Columbus was an integral part. The symbolic relationship between official Spanish attempts to encourage pan-Hispanic brotherhood and the statue in the cartoon would have been obvious to contemporary Spanish readers. The glorification of Columbus is apparent in the vertical organization of the cartoon, an explicit expression of hierarchy. Columbus – a symbol of the civilizing force of empire, its purest expression in fact – appropriately occupies the uppermost portion of the cartoon. The American pig – an equally obvious symbol of the materialist basis of debased modern empire – stands unnaturally on two legs, a poor imitation of a defining human characteristic, at the bottom of the picture. Spain's historic relationship with its colonies is plain – it is built on centuries of tradition, it is as strong as the stone of the statue. By contrast, the United States' relationship with Cuba consists of a quasi-legal bureaucratic maneuver scrawled on a piece of crumpled paper and proffered by pigs.

Other caricatured scenes, especially those where symbol and counter-symbol meet face to face, were often drawn in a much more confrontational pattern. A typical representation of such scenes appeared on the cover of the 18 April 1896 edition of Barcelona Cómica. It shows a crowned lion guarding a bone marked Cuba from a pack of hungry pigs. The crown, a symbol of tradition and sovereignty, empowers the lion with legitimacy. The pigs, though branded with the star of American empire, are illegitimate by comparison. Scattered, running in several different directions at once, and lacking any sense of organization, they symbolize chaos, immediacy, and instability. Their movement is not prompted by caution, certainty, or natural right; rather, they seem to emerge from nowhere and return to nothingness. They offer only the promise of insatiable consumption. In another cartoon, Uncle Sam, dressed in an apron and armed with a butcher's knife, locks swords with a Spaniard, possibly a depiction of Cervantes himself, dressed in sixteenth-century garb replete with a flowing cape and feathered hat. ⁴³ The Spaniard, appearing comfortable and certain, points accusingly at his opponent with his left hand, while his right hand is tightly grasping the engraved handle of his scabbarded rapier. Uncle Sam, conversely, has a look of fear and indecision. Also, unlike his more confident adversary, he seems weak and sickly, with a drooping mouth, a set of uneven gapped teeth, and a frayed hat tilted just enough to one side so as to reveal his balding head.

Yet again, despite the obvious reminders of Spanish superiority clearly evident in both cartoons, the messages sent are not necessarily those of Spanish strength. The roving bands of pigs may be illegitimate, but they threaten to overwhelm the lion by brute force and superior numbers. So too is the sickly Uncle Sam unexpectedly maintaining an advantage. His teeth may be rotten, his hair may be falling out, and his expression may be one of shock and uncertainty; but his knife is both larger and drawn first. As the encoded symbolism in these cartoons seems to indicate, the real battle is a symbolic contest between civilization and materialism. By transforming the war from the clash of ships and steel to a conflict of values, Spanish propagandists successfully ignored as irrelevant the likelihood of defeat. Civilization, Spanish readers likely understood, is always preferable to barbarism, culture always preferable to culturelessness. The mere contrast between the two implies a Spanish victory regardless of how the actual conflict is resolved. In this way too these cartoons help Spaniards re-conceptualize the war. The very real and practical concerns of colonies and colonials, borders and bullets become submerged under a sea of abstractions that serve to encourage associations between Spain and honor, the United States and unscrupulousness.

Similar themes emerge from other cartoons published at this time. A Madrid Cómico cartoon of June 1898 – after the start of hostilities but before the decisive defeat at Santiago Bay – uses a comparable organizational pattern to relay a perception of the conflict with the US as a battle between civilization and materialism. To one side is a Spanish matador. His arms are folded in defiance; his chin is held high and proud. He is standing on and amongst large blocks of stone with the names of several great battles scrawled across them: Pavia, San Quintin, Lepanto, Trafalgar, and Zaragoza. On the opposite side is Uncle Sam standing at the base of a large tower built entirely of money. He appears distressed as his two out-stretched arms offer bags of money to the Spaniard. The crossed arms and straight posture of the Spaniard make it clear that his dignity is not for sale. The caption above reads, ‘The Only Strength of the Yankees’. The clear message is that Spain's strength is rooted in pride, antiquity, and past battles, while the US has only the fleeting comfort of gold for protection.

This cartoon, however, makes a bold statement about the type of threat Spaniards faced. There are no weapons of war in the scene, no ships, no guns, no cannons, not even a sword; neither of the two characters are military men; nor does either character threaten the other with physical violence. That this cartoonist understood the threat from the US to be more than merely martial seems clear. But what, then, is the threat? A close inspection of the cartoon reveals that, once again, it is Spanish culture that is under a modern assault. In the background to the right of the Spaniard is a large tower, the decaying remnants of a castle. While the Spanish flag still waves proudly from its summit, one side of the structure has clearly crumbled to the ground. Indeed, the blocks around and beneath the matador are the strewn-about pieces of the broken wall. Confronting the crumbling relics of past Spanish glories is the sound and flawlessly constructed American tower of wealth. Its bags of treasure are solid. There are no obvious structural defects. The fact that it rises out of the borders of the drawing demonstrates that its size, power and grandeur are such that the boundaries of the cartoon are unable to contain it. Within the image, the cartoonist has pitted culture against consumption, wealth against worth.

In much the same way as has already been recognized in a number of other drawn scenes described above, the conflict seems heavily weighted in Uncle Sam's favor. Spanish culture and valor may be old and venerable; but American-style materialism seems destined to topple the crumbling walls of the Spanish fortress of history and tradition. Indeed, the battle names scrawled across the blocks at the Spanish figure's feet and repeated in the caption are hardly a list of proud victories; two, Trafalgar and Zaragossa, constitute undisputed ‘Spanish’ losses. In emphasizing the disparity between the shameless Uncle Sam, who secures his victory with ‘mountains of gold’, and the honorable Spaniard with his record of glorious if sometimes losing battles, the artist has, intentionally or not, made a tacit admission that Spanish power is overmatched in the contest with the United States. Yet, inasmuch as this may represent a foreshadowing of inevitable defeat, it also reminds readers that the only things standing in the way of wanton commercialism are the proud Spanish people, their belief in the glory of their past, and a healthy nationalism symbolized by the large waving flag. As this cartoon suggests, the war with the US was much more than a conflict over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In fact, the cartoon gives no indication that the struggle involves colonies at all. Nor is there any indication that the conflict with the US is a byproduct of ongoing colonial rebellions. The narrative of symbols conveyed in this cartoon is an alarming one, in which Spanish culture and tradition are in danger of being violated by a modern materialistic barbarism. Civilization itself was threatened by an American capitalism spread by American belligerence.

The Spanish civilization under threat, as defined through the iconographic language of the wartime editorial cartoon, was unmistakably pastoral. Indeed, industrialization was typically depicted as the countervailing force to Spanish civilization. At a cursory glance, considering that Spain was then undergoing a marginally successful process of industrialization (at least in some regions and economic sectors), this rejection of industrialization seems odd. However, for artists expressing themselves in a graphic language that eschewed modernity and its attributes, the rejection of industrialization was only natural. Consider a Blanco y Negro cartoon published in May 1898. The cartoon shows Cuba and the US separated by a narrow channel of water. On the Cuban side, under a large Spanish flag, stands ‘the Cuban soldier’. On the US side squats Uncle Sam, balancing three armed and rioting black Cubans on a large paddle as he sends them over to Cuba. Next to him is a basket filled with more ‘visiting insurrectionists’ and draped with the American flag. The obvious contrast couldn't be stronger. The Spanish flag flies boldly over the island; the American flag lies low to conceal the insurrectionists. The Cuban soldier stands proud and erect; Uncle Sam squats low and cautiously. Most significantly, Cuba, with its palm trees and empty spaces, is pastoral and pure; the US, with the towering capitol dome and projecting smokestacks, is urban, industrialized, and contaminated.

Images and symbolism illustrating Spain or Spanish territories, especially when the scenes depicted conflict, were typically drawn against backgrounds devoid of any mechanization or any identifiable signs of industrialization. Shorelines dotted only with palm trees and mothers and wives crying on an empty beach emphasized the expressed contrast with industrialization and modernization. Indeed, as the images of Don Quixote, Cervantes, Columbus and others demonstrate, ideal Spanish symbols were drawn from the distant, pre-industrial past. Uncle Sam and his horde of pigs, however, commonly sported the accoutrements of industrialism: lit bombs, steaming ships, smoke-belching factories, exploding cannons, or the capitalist wardrobe of top hats and tail coats. This conflation of Spanish civilization with a non-industrialized, pastoral environment served to emphasize a dramatic divergence of imperial motivations. Cartoonists were projecting and promoting the idea that industrialization was a delegitimizing process. Spain was defending a community whose bonds were cultural, linguistic, and historical. The United States, on the other hand, was engaged in an aggressive, brutal, modernist expansion; its very brutality was a defining characteristic of its modernity. ⁴⁴ The extent to which American expansionism was aided by modern technological innovation only served to accentuate its inherent illegitimacy. A 21 May 1898 Madrid Cómico cartoon demonstrates this dichotomy well. Entitled ‘Yankee Puritanism’, it shows a female Spanish musician indignantly resisting a tall gaunt man – perhaps a Protestant divine – attempting to strip her of her musical instrument, her clothes, and her dignity. In the background, a cowboy-like Uncle Sam sits, with his pistol and his bible, upon bags of money and amidst a herd of pigs watching the spectacle before them. Behind them are the black zigzag streaks of power lines, an Indian dangling by his neck from the gallows, and an American flag waving in the wind. In general, it is a rather frightening scene. With her enemies so dark, threatening and unforgiving, the woman is doomed to suffer abuse. The iconography, however, is easily recognizable. The cartoonist has craftily utilized nearly every common symbol of vulgar modernity – the brutality of expansion embodied in the hanging Indian and the armed Uncle Sam of American empire, the false religion of the dark preacher, and the corruption of modern industry and materialism symbolized by the power lines. By contrast, the woman representing Spain is clothed in a traditional Andalusían dress and armed only with a navaja, a traditional folding Spanish knife.

Cartoons demonstrated in graphic form and through easily recognizable symbols and counter symbols exactly what Spaniards could expect from an American victory. The ‘Yankee ideal’, one poorly-drawn Nuevo Mundo cartoon claimed to demonstrate, will overturn civilization and unleash materialism. The cartoon, divided into three frames, presents Uncle Sam as a magician and Cuba as the unsuspecting volunteer standing in a barrel. The caption below the first frame describes the volunteer as ‘a civilized person’. In the second frame both man and barrel are draped with an American flag. In the final frame, Uncle Sam stands holding the flag and proudly presenting a pig installed in the space left vacant by the now absent ‘civilized’ man. ⁴⁵ Consistent with the common use of pigs in other wartime cartoons, this pig represents the modern threats of greed and mindless consumption. It is the defining characteristic of the modern empire – expansion fueled and supported by materialism. Civilization, the object of Spanish colonialism, has been supplanted by consumerism, the object of US intervention. The ties of language, culture, and history that Spain believed bound the colonies to the metropolis were threatened by an advancing and menacing pseudo-culture of enterprise. The civilized denizens of Spain's empire were to be transformed into the rooting pigs of American materialism.

But, as this cartoon indicates, civilization was not threatened by a superior system of organization and belief; instead, because the American materialist behemoth was aware of its own moral inferiority, it had to rely on a process of trickery and sly dealings. As in the cartoon, the US could only effect the cultural degeneration it desired through misinformation and graft perpetrated upon an unsuspecting victim. Other cartoons threatened this same process of incremental degeneration. A 2 May 1896 Madrid Cómico cartoon shows how the proud Spanish civilization could be transformed into a nightmare if Spain failed to respond appropriately to the rebellion in Cuba. In the first of the eight cells making up this long two-page cartoon, sits a proud roaring lion over a caption that reads ‘this is a lion upon hearing the first rumors of war’. Through each of the following seven cells the lion undergoes a process of degenerative transformation effected by a systematic refusal to combat the rebellion with an appropriate show of force. It morphs from a lion to a dog, then to a cat and a seal, to a lamb and a boar, and, finally, into a pig. ⁴⁶ Without vigilance, this cartoon explains, civilization can be lost; without strength, weakness will reign; and without tradition, depravity creeps in.

As cartoons that merged the concepts of Liberalism, modernity and Americanization showed, to be possessed by rabid commercialism was to be entirely unmoored from tradition and sanctity. Spanish cartoonists drew American intervention in Cuba as the logical extension of an absence of morals, culture, or tradition. As a country infected with ethical depravity, the US could only be expected to act duplicitously. In one full-page cartoon, American motivations are reduced to their basest and most hypocritical essentials. The cartoon, divided into two columns of four frames, attempts to expose US rhetoric surrounding intervention in Cuba as the hollow ranting of a shamelessly exploitative empire. The left-hand column shows Uncle Sam lynching blacks, ruthlessly slaughtering Indians, making inspirational nationalist speeches and proudly waving the American flag. The right-hand column, appropriately labeled ‘reverso’ presents him shaking the hands of black Cubans, supplying them with weapons, and deceptively sailing under the Spanish flag. The passage under the first two opposing frames explains how ‘without any compassion he lynches thieves in his land. And in Cuba he offers his hand and treats him as a brother’. ⁴⁷ Thematically consistent with other cartoons presenting the US as a merchant, the Uncle Sam drawn here is crafty and ethically loose. His actions demonstrate a moral deficit because he lacks any core of values or tradition. Whereas in the symbology of caricature Spaniards valued pride and unfaltering discipline, the modern obsession with commercialism converted patriotism and self-respect into commodities easily exchanged for advantages in war. The United States, hiding behind an artfully enacted sense of indignation, is corrupt, commercial, industrial, expansionist, and is now violating Spain just as Uncle Sam has violated the native inhabitants of his own land.

The implied contrast in the above cartoon is instructive. If the US was despicable in its role as aggressor, Spain was noble to defend itself; where Uncle Sam was unapologetically cruel, Don Quixote was a paragon of virtue; when pigs ran wild and loose, lions reined them in. This imagery, these symbols, metaphors and other elements of Spanish wartime cartoons defined Spanishness in opposition to the powerful currents of liberalization, materialism, and modernization. More than this, Spanishness conceived of in this way represented the solitary and sometimes self-sacrificing last redoubt protecting civilization from these movements. As these cartoons show, for a brief period of time, the war and its representation in the press exerted a clarifying force on the idea of Spanish nationalism. With the United States positioned as the inversion of Spain, the essence of Spanishness spilled out onto the editors' pages in colorful cartoon arrangements that sharpened the notion of Spain and Spain's historical mission. The end of the war, however, brought an abrupt end to the caricatured metaphors Spanish cartoonists had grown adept at wielding. In a relatively short span of time, national attention shifted from the glories of the past to the problems of the present and anxiety over the future. Editorial cartoons increasingly reflected the uncertainty of the times: if the war had been a Manichean contest of culture and barbarism, the way ahead provided no such clear-cut heroes and villains.

During the war, Spanish caricature evoked and perpetuated a national nostalgia over a perceived historical Spanish greatness. Pavia, Trafalgar, Cervantes, Columbus, and others were the bricks and mortar these caricaturists used to build the edifice of Spanish nationalism. The spirit of regenerationism that emerged in the wake of the defeat, however, rejected this retrospective focus as a malignant delusion. The glorification of the imperial past, so common and integral a part of the iconology of wartime cartoons, was stamped with epithets and contemptuously identified as part of the problem by the priests and prophets of the new and regenerated Spain they argued was possible. Joaquin Costa's oft-cited exhortation to modernize – Escuela, despensa y doble llave al sepulcro del Cid! – speaks directly to Costa's hope for Spain to do away with the historical navel gazing so common before the disaster. Miguel de Unamuno, for his part, warned his readers not to fall prey to the deception of history. And Ramiro de Maeztú suggested to his compatriots that Spaniards should go so far as to ‘forget all our history’. ⁴⁸

In this new environment, the caricaturists of the illustrated press, and especially the satirical weeklies like Gedeón, Don Quijote, and Madrid Cómico, struggled to adapt. Consistent with the ritual rejection of modernity featured in the earlier wartime cartoons, caricaturists in these publications approached regeneracionismo with skepticism or outright rejection. Within months of the end of the war, caricaturists for Madrid Cómico were already ridiculing those advocating regeneration, mockingly calling them ‘quacks’ and depicting them as snake oil salesmen peddling their dubious cures to crowds of men desperate for relief. ⁴⁹ In other instances, the ‘disgraced nation’, depicted as humbled men and children, come lined up with their heads bowed and hats in hand to accept the regenerative remedies offered. ⁵⁰ And in another notable Gédeon cover piece, el ingenioso hidalgo himself is hoisted up into the air by the windmill, his blindfolded horse along with him. The title above reads, ‘the frightful adventure of regeneration’. ⁵¹

Conservative Prime Minister Francisco Silvela y de la Vielleuze, who briefly held office in the years following the war, faced the brunt of the abuse the press leveled against the regenerationist movement. Caricaturists for Don Quijote were relentless in their derisive dismissiveness of his regenerationist policies, not the least of which was his attempt to ‘liquidate the disaster’ through an ambitious tax policy put forward by his minister of finance Raimundo Fernández-Villaverde. ⁵² In the colored illustrations of Don Quijote, Silvela is depicted as a matador being chased out of the bullring, a frustrated school teacher, a star-gazing mystic, and a syringe-brandishing doctor ready to revive his prostrate patient. The victimized taxpayers and merchants, upon whose backs and bodies lay the overwhelming burden of regeneration, are shown dead in the streets, dressed in rags, or as the naked and emaciated victims of a firing squad. ⁵³ The project of regeneration itself is depicted sarcastically as ‘Doña Regeneración’, the fat, corrupt, impertinent, and impatient personification of Silvela's policies and the spirit of national and economic regeneration promoted by Costa, Maeztú, Unamuno, Giner de los Ríos, and others. ⁵⁴

Gedeón, rarely subtle in its satire, was equally aggressive in its wholesale ridicule of the policies of the new Conservative administration. In one two-page cartoon extravaganza, appropriately labeled ‘The Regeneration Nativity’, the artist levels every conceivable charge against the Silvela administration and its regenerationist policies. The cartoon blends the motifs of a nativity scene with the imagery of a carnival game. Gédeon stands throwing balls into the scene, flattening politicians and bouncing off the Cortes. Behind him stand Joaquín Costa and Basilio Paraíso. ⁵⁵ At the center, and directly in the line of fire, is Prime Minister Silvela carrying his budget in a wheelbarrow and looking up pleadingly to Sagasta – the longtime Liberal leader – dressed in a nightgown and holding a candle. Behind Silvela stands Villaverde brandishing a large knife marked ‘taxes’. In front of him is a plump and butchered pig labeled ‘taxpayer’ and hanging from an otherwise undecorated Christmas tree. Hovering above the raucous scene is an exasperated moon looking away from the action. His hands cover his ears; and out of his mouth he cries, ‘dying!!’ ⁵⁶

The iconology in these post-disaster cartoons is familiar – slaughtered pigs, duplicitous public leaders, victimized Spaniards, and a bumbling yet well-intentioned Don Quixote. These symbols and metaphors, however, are assembled in a manner that is far less coherent than the binary organization common in wartime cartoons. In post-Disaster Spain, there was no available prosthesis for the absence of the United States, which for so long had played the role of threatening other. Absent the Uncle Sams and marching pigs, there was no need to marshal the armies of lions and proud Spaniards. Those familiar features that do remain, symbols like the matador, tended to be used in a manner that evoked sensations of shame and self-deprecation. In general, for Spanish caricature the post-Disaster period of experimentation with regeneration was a time of confusion. The forward-facing mood of the regenerationists proved difficult for the caricaturists to adapt to. The result was that as Spain moved out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the image of Spanish nationalism, which just two years before had been projected by Spanish caricature as something clear and consistent, was now muddled and confused. The drawn metaphors that once pitted vice against virtue, tradition against materialism, history against impermanence, now had no such clear divisions. The inevitable conclusion readers surely must have drawn was as clear as it was discouraging. The past may have been glorious, but the future was uncertain and the present brimming with conflict. The Gedeón cartoon described above fits this mood squarely. There are no symbols of Spanish glory, no reminders of cultural intransience, not even the pretense of Spanish superiority. Instead, the scene is one of total loss; all are scoundrels, all is disaster.