[lbo-talk] Wikipediia Monkey Business

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Jul 18 18:57:40 PDT 2011


Here is part of the Wikipedia entry on Senator Hoar. I have looked at this entry before, and it seems to me that the note at the end of it has been changed. Unless my memory (or my reading at the time) is quite faulty, the words were addressed to President Roosevelt. Perhaps not. I don't know now.

Anyone have better information.

Carroil

" You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives-the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe-nay, I know-that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.

Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.

-Senator George F. Hoar, From a speech in the United States Senate in May, 1902, chastising the Philippine-American War and the three Army officers, who were court-martialed.



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