Courtesy of the University Press of Mississippi
James W. Miller's "King of the Gun Runners"
By the 1890s, the once gargantuan Spanish empire was a reduced, rickety rump of its former glory. The American mainland from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego was now a constellation of independent states, leaving Spain with only a few little nibbles of Africa and some far-flung islands. Cuba—rich, fertile, and conveniently placed—attracted attention from the United States: its fruit and tobacco enriched American shippers, its struggles for independence tugged at American heartstrings… and many hoped that, the next time Spain stumbled, the island would fall into Uncle Sam’s hand like a ripe apple. Americans interested in shaking this metaphorical tree, usually with the mixed motives of excitement and enrichment, could help funnel guns, exiles, and supplies to rebels on the island, dodging both American and Spanish patrols on the way out and returning with innocent faces and cargoes of Caribbean or Central American fruit, ripe for the market. This couldn’t last—and didn’t, with the uneasy situation exploding into the Spanish-American War in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines did drop into the reaching American hand; Cuba, famously, took another path.
James W. Miller’s King of the Gun Runners brings this slice of the Gilded Age to rambunctious life. Using the life and careers of John D. Hart—intermittently successful fruit importer by day, arms supplier to Cuban revolutionaries by night—Miller makes the countdown to the war with Spain real, filling in the gaps left by timeline-focused American history classes. (“Reconstruction ended in 1877, everyone rested, and then the war with Spain in 1898.”) The bustle of commerce, journalism and migration bristles through the text. If Hart himself is occasionally overshadowed by the many, many big personalities competing for the reader’s attention, this does not rise to the level of a weakness of the work: gunrunners, freedom fighters, and those who work with and against them tend to be action-oriented—and to invite the spilling of some ink. Anchoring Hart as both a central actor but also an example of the kind of person who got involved in supporting the Cuban rebels allows Miller to shape his text and give the whole busy period of misadventure and derring-do a greater coherence.
Miller takes obvious pleasure in his topic, writing with swashbuckling verve: running for office is “the seductress of the vainglorious” and gunrunning is “an exclusive club whose entry fee was courage and whose success was measured in survival.” This elan can lead him to be uncritical—do we really think Jamaican dockworkers loaded eighty-pound bunches of bananas through “sweat and good humor”?—but on the whole the reader will have the pleasure of joining an author who is clearly having fun. Miller’s digressions are well chosen to build context and atmosphere, a hallmark of the best historical writing. Imagine a world in which a banana is a rare delicacy, and in which the bold but naïve souls who scavenge fallen fruits from the dock don’t know to peel them; think of the brave and optimistic African Americans who abandoned the tightening fist of Jim Crow to try to improve their lot in resettlement schemes in Liberia, even as Europe poured immigrants into the United States. The story will captivate readers, but it’s this setting and detail that most compelled me—what one would call “world-building” if it were fiction. To read King of the Gun Runners is to escape into an exciting and deftly illustrated era of the American past and to better understand how this chapter forms the prologue of the country’s subsequent complicated relationships with the “banana republics” we would fail to remake in our own image.
Find King of the Gun Runners at the University Press of Mississippi, upress.state.ms.us.
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