“The Peculiar Disease Known as Patriotism”: Observations on Imperialism by an Immigrant US Soldier in the Spanish American War

Kathryn Tucker, University of Montevallo

In April 1898, as the US eagerly plunged toward war with Spain, a young Swedish immigrant miner in the Black Hills of South Dakota “contracted a violent and acute form of the peculiar disease known as Patriotism [a]nd in my eager desire to save my country from ruin and destruction… rushed pell mell to the recruiting office.” In Company M, 1st South Dakota Infantry, Charles Hultberg soon found himself across the world, fighting a war in the Philippines. His unpublished letters to back his sister in Brooklyn demonstrate his growing command of the English language, his intellect, and his patriotism for his new nation. They also expose his often unthinking embrace of the beliefs that drove Western imperialism. His observations on “laziness [being] one of the chief characteristics of the tropics” and on his “dusky foes” and the “unintelligible jargon” they spoke demonstrate the theories of racial and cultural superiority that imperialists used to justify colonization and celebrate their own advanced state of modernity. And yet, Hultberg’s letters also reflect awareness of some of the fallacies of Western superiority, contrasting, for example, the “Revolutionary War” era US weaponry with the “modern artillery” provided by the “rag tag Filipino government.” Ultimately, Hultberg concludes that he and the volunteers had been “shamelessly imposed upon” by “a robber nation [participating in] landgrabbing.” Through both internalizing while also questioning various aspects of imperialism, Hultberg’s writings open a window into the process of conceptualizing and creating Western-centric understandings of society and modernity. My contextualization and historical analysis of this ordinary American and his musings on the theories of modernity provide a valuable lens for understanding how the beliefs of Western modernity and superiority influenced ordinary Americans, and how those people then played a key role in the perpetuation of Western-centric understandings of modernity.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 214. Émigré Regimes, Diaspora Mobilization, and Underground Resistance