March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Spanish-American War Story > Author says 1898 conflict served to establish U.S. as world power

Ron Ziel may well define himself as an anachronism. Although he likes computers, microwave ovens and push-button telephones, he will tell you, “Everything I came to love disappeared just after I discovered it. My biggest regret was that I wasn’t born 60 years earlier.” That would push Ziel’s birthdate back to 1880 and his life into the age of steam, Queen Victoria and the Spanish-American War.

Artist, photographer, writer, editor, historian, Ziel, 58, loves trains, particulalry steam-powered locomotives, his wedding cake Queen Anne Victorian house on Long Island, N.Y., and the war that he says is the second-most-important conflict, after the Revolutionary War, in the history of the United States.

Invited to Bangor to participate in the centennial observance of the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor Feb. 15, 1898, Ziel, a former newspaper and magazine editor and author of 15 books on railroads, will be at Jeff’s Catering in Brewer on Saturday with copies of his “Birth of the American Century, Centennial History, Spanish-American War.”

Ziel became interested in the Spanish-American War at 13. Inspired by copies of Harper’s pictorial histories of the Spanish-American War (the jacket of Ziel’s book carries a Harper’s illustration), he began to cultivate a lifelong interest in the conflict, eventually deciding “this was the second-most-important war in our history,” a contention that he allows gets Civil War buffs upset.

But Ziel doesn’t shy from controversy. He’ll tell you he’s opinionated. “You don’t judge the importance of a war by casualities or expense,” he says. “I mean, those are very important, but the long-range effects are what’s important.” He argues that because the Spanish-American War, won at the cost of comparatively few American lives in so short a time and at relatively little expense, served notice that the United States was a major world power, it should be celebrated as a seminal event leading into the 20th — the American — century. The National Review’s William F. Buckley Jr. agrees with him that it is the “unobserved” war.

Acknowledging the political incorrectness of labeling ethnic groups negatively, he says, “The Spaniards were the worst mass murderers in all of human history. They made Hitler look like a Sunday school teacher.” Documenting his contentions using Spanish sources, he says, “I had to show that even in 1898 there was mass genocide in Cuba,” noting that in a Cuban insurrection in 1868-68, the Spaniards captured and killed 40,000 political and military prisoners, and in another revolt beginning in 1895, Spanish authorities instituted a system of concentration camps.

“It could be ranked as the most noble war in our history,” he says. “In the Spanish war, it was a righteous indignation of the genocide in Cuba. … Castro is a democratic leader compared to what the Spaniards were.”

Ziel’s chapter on the sinking of the USS Maine recognizes that the evidence gives no clear indication of what or who might have caused the explosion, but challenges Hyman Rickover’s idea of a coal fire igniting the blast, championing the original investigation of 1898. He dismisses any idea that the Spanish government was responsible, and notes that the last thing President William McKinley wanted was a war.

In the card catalog at the Bangor Public Library, the keys used to describe the war resonate: “the great patriotic war,” “road to empire,” “the martial spirit of the U.S.,” “the splendid little war.” It is the war of the yellow journalists, of William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer and his New York World, of the expansionists in the McKinley administration, of Frederic Remington, the artist of the American West, of Stephen Crane, author of “The Red Badge of Courage,” of an American populace ready to demonstrate its strength and vigor.

The war came at a time when the Manifest Destiny of an earlier era had ended at Wounded Knee, when the West was no longer a frontier and when Americans were looking beyond their borders to the Caribbean and the Pacific, to Cuba and the Far East.

Ziel’s history is sympathetic to the age, not critical of it, and argues its justifications, the reasons the Spanish-American War is called a splendid little war. “We were spoiling for a fight,” he says, adding he would rather have taken the photographs that document the war then be the one to compile them. Indeed, the photographs and art that illustrate the volume are its primary strength, complementing well the prose thick with detail and laced with the historian’s opinions.

Ziel takes pleasure in describing the reception the great powers gave the United States after its victories over the Spanish, particularly the responses of Great Britain, which began a long and mutually beneficial friendship with the United States, and Germany, which challenged the upstart while acknowledging its power.

If there is a negative result to the outcome of the Spanish-American War, “It made us the world’s policeman amd that’s why taxes are high,” he says with a grin.

For Ron Ziel, however, the centennial celebration has no down side. It will keep him busy attending seminars and observances from Maine to Florida throughout the coming months. If his contentions engage him in argument, that’s a plus. For Ron Ziel, history is a dynamic pursuit and not a rehashing of dead material.

Proceeds from the sale of Ron Ziel’s book at the Battleship USS Maine Centennial Committee office, Main Street, Bangor, will help fund the committee’s work. Ziel will be at Border’s Books, Music and Cafe at the Bangor Mall 5-7 tonight for a book signing.


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