“In the United States, nobody remembers the war against Spain in 1898. It must be said that Americans have a hard time remembering what dates back more than ten years”, Woody Allen once joked. However, it was precisely because of this war that the black Spanish legend lasted until XXth century.
The military campaign which, from April to August 1898, saw the remnants of the Spanish empire confront the nascent American force, was energetically supported by an American propaganda machine which revived the bad reputation of the Spaniards on a world scale. The latter become the recurring enemies of the United States, including in the cinema (before being replaced by the Germans, the Japanese and the Communists).
Mutual distrust
In a scene from Sea Eagle, a 1940 American film directed by Michael Curtiz, Philippe II thus appears as a fascist tyrant, who contemplates a map of the world and plans to invade England. This staging is a barely veiled reference to the new enemy who then stands before Great Britain and the United States: Adolf Hitler.
Spain supported the Thirteen Colonies of North America during the War of Independence against the English (from 1775 to 1783), at the risk of giving autonomy to its own extra-European territories. However, at the end of the XIXcentury, the country becomes the main enemy of America. The ideas of the Enlightenment, which spread to the United States in XVIIIe as well as the sympathy felt for the new