To the halls of the Montezumas by Robert W. Johannsen

¶ … Halls

Johannsen, Robert W. To the Halls of the Montezumas. Oxford University Press, 1999.

The thesis of the book To the Halls of the Montezumas by Robert W. Johannsen is that the Mexican-American War was America's first foreign war, even though Mexico was not the first foreign power America ever fought. Johannsen says that this war defined America's identity as an international power mainly because of the way it was narrated to the American people through the American press. It was the first war that Americans felt like they were engaged in a moral war against a foreign power, rather than simply fighting for their territorial integrity as a nation and their values of freedom, liberty, and self-determination, as was true of the Revolutionary war.

The war officially begin early in February 1846, when Zachary Taylor, the commanding a force of American troops suggested to the American Congress, still bitterly divided over the issue of slavery as it would be for many years hence, that war was the only recourse in terms of the conflict with Mexico. When this idea was first received, according to Johnson, "the press was understandably cautious. Taylor's position on the Rio Grande was known to be precarious, the Mexican force that faced him superior in numbers." (6) Thus, the war was not an immediately appealing proposition, despite the prospect of territorial gain, to the American people.

Yet gradually, the ideal of Manifest Destiny began to be infused throughout the American populace and associated with the war. The idea of the destiny of America to spread its values across the uncharted territory of the frontier was eventually whipped into a frenzied concoction of yellow journalism and sold to the American people by the American media of the day.

First, the war was endorsed in the press as something that would be easy, as one pro-war press wrote that the superiority of American valor would surely "secure us a short war." (6) The Whig National Intelligencer, which only a week before had insisted that the war would be easy, also stressed with the new emphasis of moral authority and freedom and added fuel to the fire in its endorsement. (1-10) And as the Mexican position also moved closer to the belief that war was the only solution, so also did opinion in the United States.

Over the course of the book, Johannsen is less interested in the specific, tactical nature of the conflict than he is in the way the war was portrayed in the media. He notes that "the Mexican War was the first conflict in which war correspondents were employed, another outgrowth of' the penny press," and thus it was the first war that Americans could follow like a captivated populace, waiting in breathless installments for the next chapter of the story. When before Americans wished to stay out of foreign entanglements, the narrative of moral good vs. evil on their own frontier drew them in, and for a time united them and helped them forget some of their ideological divides.

One of the correspondents named Freaner, who signed his dispatches "Mustang," with bravado, integrated his persona into the conflict in his articles, as he became an outraged or patriotic observer, depending on how the war was going. Over and over he stressed that he was the only one to report the war from behind the Mexican lines, thus causing individuals reading his story to identify with him as a truthful and honest eye. Newspapers all over the country had their "special correspondents." (12) In many cases these special correspondents had alias. Many of them were fighting soldier volunteers who had made arrangements with papers. They both fought and wrote, with little concern about journalistic objectivity, or even what 'journalism' was. (13)

Notions of American racial superiority were frequently played up in the press, as perhaps was understandable given the racial turmoil of the nation at the time, and also because of the biased nature of the reporting, written as it was by soldiers fighting for their lives. "It was not the only time that Mexicans were compared unfavorably with slaves in the American South," notes the author. The correspondents sneeringly wrote that even American slaves were better than these foreign fighting powers. (26)

Because of the narrative nature of the journalism, and its biased quality, this war had to have a 'bad guy' and a 'good guy,' and the guises assigned by the Mexicans and the Americans respectively, the correspondence had a quality, Johannsen suggests of a wild west show, and essentially created the conditions of willingness for the war, far more than any real political need. Little attention was given to the complexities of the conflict in the correspondence. Rather, all of the conflict was narrated through the lenses of Manifest Destiny.

The author's focus upon the press more than the fighting makes the book particularly interesting and relevant to a reader who is not a specialist in the period he is narrating. After all, long after the territories being fought over have become an accepted part of the United States, the United States still deals with the question of what makes good journalism, and especially how to report the complexities of foreign conflicts. How loyal must one be to the fighting men (and now women) abroad -- does one take one's status as an American into consideration, or simply relate the facts when one is a journalist. This book provides a persuasive case that partisanship can be damaging to the truth in journalism.

The book is a powerful history of the American press and is valorization of the American citizen-soldier. This common solider became a symbol of American democracy, "perhaps one of the foremost symbols of the Mexican War itself. Any writer or speaker, it was said, who even hinted disparagement of the volunteers ' achievements would be hissed down from any lecture hall. (24) But the assumption of the inherent goodness of American soldiers was not inherent from the inception of the republic, suggests the author but a particular ideological product, the historian says, of this particular conflict.