(Image: CHS)
The huge stone remains blank.
Saturday, a panel at the Seattle Asian Art Museum will discuss the offensive plaque removed from Volunteer Park and the history of the wars that inspired it six decades ago in a community discussion brought together by the Volunteer Park Trust, UW’s Southeast Asia Center and the Center for Global Studies.
Volunteering for Empire: The Wars of 1898 and Seattle’s Volunteer Park
Saturday, May 7th 3:00 to 4:30 PM
Seattle Asian Art Museum and online
CHS reported on the sudden removal of the plaque last August. The large stone monument has stood in Volunteer Park since the 1950s when it was placed to honor the soldiers of the Spanish-American War but came under new scrutiny amid increased concern over anti-Asian hate during the pandemic.
The stone still stands near the museum but the bronze plate and its jingoistic 30 words of historically inaccurate memorial to the war’s volunteer soldiers is long gone.
Seattle Parks said it removed the plaque in consultation with community groups and the Volunteer Park Trust said it was planning a wider community discussion including an option of “adding-to, rather than removing” the plaque to provide “an opportunity to understand the social/cultural history of the park and the park system” and was hoping to form a coalition of groups to represent the city’s communities.
(Image: CHS)
Saturday’s discussion will include UW Department of History professors Vicente Rafael and Ileana Rodriguez-Silva will discuss the wars in a panel moderated by Professor Christoph Giebel of the Jackson School of International Studies. The discussion is expected to “examine the intersections of race, colonialism and national identity” in addition to the tensions around the plaque and is being co-hosted by the Capitol Hill Historical Society, El Centro de la Raza, Filipino American National Historical Society, Friends of the Conservatory, and the Wing Luke Museum.
Organizers say the program will discuss issues related to the history of the Spanish-American War, its aftermath, and how subsequent generations viewed the conflict. It will also examine broader questions related to racism, U.S. foreign policy, and the consequences of American wars.
You can register here to attend the event at SAAM in Volunteer Park or watch a stream of the session on the Volunteer Park Trust’s Facebook page.
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I’ve been wishing that plaque wasn’t there for years, ever since I heard the author of Lies Across America talking about the plethora of misleading monuments to the Spanish-American war.
The 200,000 Spanish troops that had set up concentration camps on Cuba? Unlike the Cubans at the time, they certainly did not appreciate the US dislodging them.
Our followup to the war was the Platt Amendment; it is worth reading for yourself. There is good and bad in it; the document was written at a time where there was a fear that Cuba might fall right back into the hands of Spain or some other European power ( which had been happening in the Americas; a country would free itself only to then be handed back over to a foreign power once a loyalist dictator rose to power ).The Amendment is heavy handed.The American textbooks that I have seen always go into some details about how we mismanaged the peace after the war.Those monuments to our dead?They died in the service of removing a foreign power that had brutalizing the Cubans.
Hello, complicated past. Luckily for you, the video from this event is available online:
https://www.facebook.com/volparktrust/videos/553376606216907/. I’d recommend watching the whole thing (I attended it live). History flatly contradicts the myth of the Volunteer Army as a liberatory force. The Spanish-American War was a war of imperial expansion. Once freed from Spanish rule, the people of the Philippines and Cuba sought to govern themselves, not to be absorbed in another empire. Particularly in the case of the war the U.S. waged on the Philippines, the people of the Philippines had largely won their fight for independence from the Spanish empire. But the U.S. had purchased the colonial rights to the Philippines for $20 million (as if that were a commodity to be bought and sold), and so the U.S. entered a four-year war against Filipino independence as soon as the Spaniards made their exit. The result of that brutal war was the American subjugation of the Filipino people for decades to come.
Spain was the original colonial imperial power. Have a bit of proportion and perspective. We all know that US motives were not always as pure as we claimed, particularly when ideals came into contact with political reality and the greed of individuals. E.g. Puerto Rico was also part of the war and not only were they given the opportunity to be independant, which they rejected. But every resident was made a US citizen in 1917, and has rejected independance on multiple occasions by democratic vote. Spain obviously had no interest in treating any of its previous imperial possessions in a similar way. Not making Puerto Rico a full blown state is obviously shameful, but there’s no comparison between our not making it a state and Spain’s attempt to make it a subject colony.
The earlier sins of the Spanish empire don’t excuse those of U.S. empire. The reading list from the event (https://volunteerparktrust.org/volunteering-for-empire-bibliography/) would give you appropriate proportion and perspective if that’s what you’re looking for. Your Puerto Rico example omits the fact that the U.S. has outlawed and violently repressed the independence movement–it’s colonialism with a different shape than in other places, but colonialism nonetheless.
I immediately regretted my post after making it. It’s equally obvious to me how silly and counter-productive the activist oriented railing against the Spanish American war is and how pointless it is to try and argue with activists over it. Consider my original comment withdrawn.