True to character, Johannsen has done a full measure of research here, most of it in the widely read books and periodicals of the United States-Mexican War period. His focus is on what the people of the time imagined, but he also includes substantial interpretations of his own. He claims for the war with Mexico the following firsts: [1] the first exposure of large numbers of North Americans to a different culture; [2] the first war reported in the popular press; [3] the first significant use of war correspondents; [4] the first real impact in war of national symbols, for example, the flag; [5] the first real outpouring of war books, many of them paperbacks; [6] the first pictorial journalism; [7] the first large-scale entry of war into U. S. homes; and [8] the first war in which music was an important influence. A few of these might be challenged, but not without extensive research.
Interpreting further, Johannsen claims that the United States was searching for national identity (whatever that means), and that many of its citizens found it during this conflict. In addition, the war modified North American parochialism. It also supplied national heroes. Least likely of them, yet the quintessential one according to the author, was Zachary Taylor. His Battle of Buena Vista captured the public imagination more than any other action, and his dispatches came through so clearly that contemporaries urged him to write the definitive history of the war. They apparently did not know how little control he actually exercised at Buena Vista or that his chief staff officer, Major William W. S. Bliss, was responsible for the lucid prose.
North Americans of that time were convinced that the Mexican War strengthened republican government worldwide because the United States had proved that it could simultaneously win a war and retain its republican institutions. They believed, too, that Mexico had started the war, and that the United States conducted it in a remarkably humane manner. They judged the Mexicans to be an inferior race, which, without U.S. help, was incapable of governing itself. Mexican scenery was grand, but the people were not. Catholicism, which most of the volunteers observed for the first time, was judged to be a contributing agent to the degradation of the Mexicans. God was using the United States to drag Mexico into the modern world. Many of these convictions have not stood up well under historical scrutiny, but they were honestly held. If the people were fooling themselves, Johannsen says, they did not know it.
The author’s sources demonstrate incontrovertibly that the war was popular with a majority of North Americans. Three noted Harvard professors, Morison, Merk, and Freidel, presented a minority position in a small book they published in 1970 entitled Dissent in Three American Wars. They chose the three because of the bitterness of dissent, and one of the wars was the war with Mexico. Johannsen writes very little about the outrage of the dissenters, who believed that their country was doing not God’s but the Devil’s work, bullying a weak neighbor and making a blatant land grab. In spite of this, the book is an important addition to our knowledge of the era.
