"Seeing the Elephant / Riding the Mule: Satire and the Mexican-American War

Aaron Winter

My talk will examine the role of newspaper propaganda during the Mexican-American War (1846-48), more specifically the way that writers and cartoonists in both the American and Mexican presses relied on political satire as a resource for criticizing war policy. 

I argue that satire serves a regulatory function in the mid-century U.S., confining political dissent within the boundaries of what Sacvan Bercovitch has called the liberal "concordia discors."  Its rhetoric is overtly populist and nationalist, almost to the point of exaggeration; practitioners even prefer to call their work "humor" because the term "satire" is associated with British snobbery.  Because "Mr. Polk's War" is justified to the public as a jocular exercise of American bravado by writers like C.M. Haile and T.B. Thorpe, its critics turn to satire in the penny dailies, and in more specialized "humor" publications like Yankee Doodle, Judy, and The Elephant, as a means to contest the administration's version of masculine identity and nationalist common sense.  "To see the elephant" means to be disillusioned, to realize the gap between a Barnum-esque fantasy and a shabbier reality.  I also show how more radical U.S. anti-war writers like James Russell Lowell appeal to the vernacular voice of humor in an attempt to drag the much larger elephant of slavery into the political mainstream.

I then argue that satire in mid-century Mexico serves a more iconoclastic function; the masthead to Mexico City's "ultra-liberal" newspaper Don Simplicio depicts a smiling peasant riding backwards on a mule and thrashing priests and aristocrats with a whip.  In the absence of a U.S. style liberal consensus, Mexican satire struggles to project a rhetorical identification between bourgeois intellectuals and the wider public to whom they are as yet only tenuously connected.  When war against the "norteamericanos" commences, liberal satirists like Don Simplicio's Ignacio Ramirez and Guillermo Prieto and La Calavera's Vicente Segura are eager to prove their nationalist credentials by supporting it.  But they nonetheless risk life and limb to print criticisms of conservative strongmen like Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Mariano Paredes, whom they accuse of mismanaging the war and squandering Mexico's resources in a shortsighted bid for personal aggrandizement.

Although these two satiric discourses were seldom in direct dialogue, my paper places them in comparison because they are engaged with the same broader debates over race, nation, and democracy that pervade North American and European political thought in the years leading up to 1848.