The Spanish Craze: America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939 by Richard L. Kagan (review)

Abstract

richard Kagan’s latest book realizes the ambition disclosed in the author note to his 1996 essay, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain” ( The American Historical Review , vol. 101, no. 2, 1996, pp. 423–46): to produce a volume that documents “the image of Spain and its culture in the United States” (446). Achieving this goal was certainly not an easy task. Not only is the subject—more than a century and a half of Anglo-American interactions with and attitudes toward Spain and its overseas territories—vast, but any attempt to trace a history of beliefs and biases, fads and fashions is treacherous work. Opinions change, and change again, and there often is no accounting for taste. To produce a coherent narrative from such complex material, Kagan employs the metaphor of a “Spanish fever” (with attendant associations of contagion, infection, and epidemic) to explain the “seemingly insatiable appetite for the art and culture of Spain” (3) among foreigners and focuses his discussion on what he designates “the Spanish craze,” a period of roughly forty years stretching from 1890 to the early 1930s during which North American interest in Spain was at its peak. (While the Spanish-American War certainly fomented anti-Spanish feeling across North America, the United States’ decisive victory encouraged rapid rapprochement with its former enemy.) The scope of Kagan’s investigation is wide-ranging, encompassing history and historiography, literature and memoir, tourism and travel writing, art and collecting, architecture and real estate speculation. What emerges from his analysis is a picture of the United States as a young country forming its identity in part through the construction of a national character antithetical to its own; as Kagan observes, “the Spanish craze not so much United States’