War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront. Tom Reilly, edited by Manley Witten. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 335 pp.
From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-1848) is easy to overlook. It was a relatively short war, after all, pitting the nascent power of the United States against a divided Mexico and its irrepressible leader, Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.
Yet the Mexican War looms large in the history of American war reporting as the first U.S. foreign conflict covered by an enterprising band of professional journalists and amateur correspondents. As documented by the late Tom Reilly, a journalism historian at California State University-Northridge, Mexican War reporting was an important test of American journalism’s newfound energy and its fraught relations with the military, issues that would surface in later U.S. wars.
Reilly’s goals here are straightforward and descriptive: “to reconstruct the efforts, methods, lifestyles, achievements, and failures of the individual American correspondents and, to a lesser degree, the journalistic system in which they functioned.” In this, he is largely successful, providing a detailed chronicle of an enthusiastically imperialistic era in American war reporting.
Reilly’s subjects include such reporting stars as George W. Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune and James L. Freaner—known as “Mustang”—of the New Orleans Delta. Both men were fearless, dedicated, and well organized, employing multiple couriers to elude Mexican guerillas and carry their dispatches from the front lines to Veracruz, where U.S. ships carried them to New Orleans.
New Orleans was front and center in Mexican War news. As the nation’s fourth largest city at the time, and the principal port for ships arriving from Mexico, New Orleans had a highly competitive newspaper scene. The New Orleans papers, Reilly concludes, “provided the tone, direction, and content for the reporting of the conflict—and in the journalism style of the day, most of the nation’s press followed their lead.”
Reilly also unearths the war reporting of several lesser-known correspondents, including William C. Tobey of the Philadelphia North American. In the aftermath of the U.S. victory at Cerro Gordo, Tobey described the terrible cost of combat: “While the fight is raging men can look upon death and shrink not from his bloody features; but to walk coldly over hundreds of human bodies, blackened and bloated in the sun…sickens the senses and the soul; strips even victory of its gaudy plumage and stamps the whole with an unspeakable horror.”
Another notable journalist was the outspoken Jane McManus Storms, the only woman war correspondent. Writing for the New York Sun, Storms reported from Veracruz, where she criticized one of her favorite targets, the U.S. Navy, for its “deplorable inefficiency.” She also slam-med Santa Anna and other Mexican generals for inflicting on their citizens “more burdens and outrages than the Americans dare impose.”
Many correspondents, Reilly found, advocated Manifest Destiny and were openly contemptuous of Mexico and Mexicans. Storms and other journalists argued for the annexation of Mexico as a way to bring democracy and order to the land. For his part, Tobey described Mexicans as “ignorant, barbarous, treacherous and superstitious; given to thieving, cheating [and] lying….” The Picayune’s Kendall, who had been a Mexican prisoner before the war, hated Mexicans, a fact evident in many of his reports.
Unofficial correspondents and letter writers served as another significant source of Mexican War news. Publishing under pseudonyms such as “Hombre” and “Cactus,” these writers—junior officers, former journalists, and printers—were quick to criticize their officers, the lack of equipment, and poor rations. Like the military bloggers of the recent Iraq war, these reports frustrated Army leaders and caused headaches for the Polk administration. Even some in the press criticized the outpouring of unofficial reports: “The public has no means of judging the truth or falsehood of these statements and erroneous opinions are necessarily formed,” the New Orleans Tropic complained.
Back in the States, Mexican War reports had important political consequences because of the presidential ambitions of its leaders, including Gen. Winfield Scott. In the three elections following the war, Reilly writes, “four of the six leading candidates were Mexican War officers, and two, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce, were elected president.”
The torrent of stories and letters raised other controversial topics, too, including U.S. mistreatment of Mexican civilians. After the battle of Buena Vista, for instance, Picayune correspondent John E. Durivage reported that U.S. volunteers deliberately murdered twenty-four Mexicans in retaliation for the murder of an Arkansas volunteer. In fact, many reports documented the unruly behavior of the volunteers, soldiers who were poorly trained and often resentful of—and resented by—the regular Army and its officers.
With his focus on the war and its journalism, Reilly says too little about the causes of the conflict and its complex moral dimensions. Reilly’s short chapter on anti-Mexican stereotypes is also inadequate. Although he catalogues a number of anti-Mexican attitudes and ethnic insults, he offers little explanation of the origins and consequences of these ideas.
Nevertheless, Reilly’s years of research on Mexican War journalists and their reporting make this book a valuable addition to the history of U.S. war reporting. As Reilly makes clear, Mexican War correspondents demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity to get first-hand reports to their readers, pioneering the best tradition of U.S. war reporting. Reilly’s War with Mexico! is worthy achievement and a credit to Manley Witten, a former Reilly student who edited this volume.
JOHN M. COWARD
University of Tulsa