Bulletin of the Comediantes

RICHARD KAGAN’S latest book realizes the ambition disclosed in the author note to his 1996 essay, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain” (The American Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 2, 1996, pp. 423–46): to produce a volume that documents “the image of Spain and its culture in the United States” (446). Achieving this goal was certainly not an easy task. Not only is the subject—more than a century and a half of Anglo-American interactions with and attitudes toward Spain and its overseas territories—vast, but any attempt to trace a history of beliefs and biases, fads and fashions is treacherous work. Opinions change, and change again, and there often is no accounting for taste. To produce a coherent narrative from such complex material, Kagan employs the metaphor of a “Spanish fever” (with attendant associations of contagion, infection, and epidemic) to explain the “seemingly insatiable appetite for the art and culture of Spain” (3) among foreigners and focuses his discussion on what he designates “the Spanish craze,” a period of roughly forty years stretching from 1890 to the early 1930s during which North American interest in Spain was at its peak. (While the Spanish-American War certainly fomented anti-Spanish feeling across North America, the United States’ decisive victory encouraged rapid rapprochement with its former enemy.) The scope of Kagan’s investigation is wide-ranging, encompassing history and historiography, literature and memoir, tourism and travel writing, art and collecting, architecture and real estate speculation. What emerges from his analysis is a picture of the United States as a young country forming its identity in part through the construction of a national character antithetical to its own; as Kagan neatly observes, “the Spanish craze was not so much the United States’ discovery of Spain but America’s discovery of itself” (132).

Chapter 1, “Rival Empires,” surveys the relations between the United States and Spain from the Revolutionary era to the war of 1898 and considers the racial stereotyping that inflected Anglo-Americans’ ideas about their political rivals. Anti-Spanish sentiment, shaped by territorial and trade disputes and fanned by differences in political culture and religion, was rife among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North Americans. One example [End Page 127] is Henry Adams, whose first volume of the History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889) includes a negative sketch of the court of Charles IV (1788–1808) and description of what he perceived as the fundamental differences between Spain’s national character and that of the United States. Drawing on the Black Legend (Protestant propaganda originating in the mid-sixteenth century that represented Spaniards as bigoted, backward, and cruel), Adams concluded that Anglo-Americans and Spaniards are so different as to be “natural enemies” (29). Therefore, it is surprising to learn that Adams enjoyed an 1879 visit to Andalusia, which he pronounced “first-class” in one of his letters (31). Such ambivalence is central to Kagan’s account and defines many North American responses to Spain—a mixture of antipathy and condescension, enchantment and admiration, colored by a romantic response to Spain’s landscape, customs, and art.

These shifting attitudes are delineated in the following two chapters. Chapter 2, “Sturdy Spain,” chronicles the rehabilitation of Spain’s reputation among Anglo-Americans, primarily the inhabitants of regions that had previously been controlled by the Spanish: Florida, New Mexico, and California. The concept of “Sturdy Spain” celebrates Spain’s imperial legacy, which, according to its proponents, bestowed the “gifts of civilization, learning, and religion” to the Americas (131), and casts the United States as the heir to this legacy. Historical connections between Spain and the United States were further strengthened in the public imagination by popular events such as Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and monuments such as the tribute to Christopher Columbus outside Union Station in Washington, D.C. Chapter...