Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire 9780822386728

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hemispheric imaginings

New Americanists a series edited by donald e. pease

hemispheric imaginings the monroe doctrine and narratives of u.s. empire

gretchen murphy

Duke University Press durham and london 2005

© 2005 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Richard Hendel Typeset in Minion and Meta types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

contents Preface, vii introduction Writing the Hemisphere, 1 chapter one Separate (Hemi)Spheres: John Quincy Adams, Lydia Maria Child, and the Domestic Ideology of the Monroe Doctrine, 32 chapter two Selling Jim Crow from Salem to Yokohama, 62 chapter three Geographic Morality and the New World, 97 chapter four Gringos Abroad: Rationalizing Empire with Richard Harding Davis, 119 conclusion The Remains of the Doctrine, 145 Notes, 159 Bibliography, 171 Index, 185

preface In a February 18, 2003, editorial titled ‘‘America’s Destiny Is to Police the World,’’ journalist Max Boot argued that the imminent war with Iraq was not a break with traditional American foreign policy, but rather its logical extension. The 2002 Bush Doctrine of preemption, Boot explained, merely expanded the Monroe Doctrine to a global scale. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Monroe Doctrine provided the most common terms through which Americans in the United States imagined and articulated their nation’s diplomatic and military place in the world. It described the United States as the leader and protector of the Western Hemisphere, while Europe presided over the rest of the globe. Today this division of the globe into separate hemispheres seems impossible; in an age of compressed distances and global markets, Uruguay seems neither closer nor more important to U.S. security than Iraq. But for Boot, what remains important about the Doctrine is Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1904 Corollary, which made explicit the responsibility of the United States to not only protect the Western Hemisphere but also to police it. Boot quotes Roosevelt’s formulation of the Corollary: ‘‘Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power’’ (Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, 176–77). Then as now, Boot writes, the world needs a police power, and while in the early twentieth century ‘‘the western hemisphere was the only place where the U.S. exercised military hegemony,’’ today the United States exercises ‘‘almost as much power everywhere around the world as it once had only in the Caribbean’’ (Boot, ‘‘America’s Destiny Is to Police the World,’’ 21). Spatial division of the world into hemispheres was only incidental, he implies; what really matters about the Monroe

Doctrine is that it articulates a unilateral responsibility to promote peace and democracy abroad. Here we can observe one of the most striking features of the Monroe Doctrine: its extraordinary flexibility. A statement of protection slips into one of control, and a statement of hemispheric separation evolves into one of global responsibility. This flexibility is even more evident when we compare Boot’s statement to one by Patrick Buchanan, who made ‘‘Reaffirming and Refining Monroe’s Doctrine’’ the first plank of his foreign policy platform during his 2000 bid for the presidency (369). For Buchanan, the Monroe Doctrine signifies not global intervention, but national isolation. In his formulation, the essential Doctrine comes not from Roosevelt’s Corollary, but from John Quincy Adams’s determination to keep the United States out of European conflicts by declaring two separate hemispheres with two separate political systems. Therefore, according to Buchanan, to more accurately follow the Monroe Doctrine would be to avoid assuming the role of peacemaker in conflicts far from home, whether they occur in the Middle East, the Balkans, or Korea. These citations suggest that although the Doctrine still appears to some as a significant historical precedent with the power to interpret, justify, or guide current events, what exactly it stipulates is uncertain. This uncertainty is not only the strained result of applying nineteenthcentury ideas to twenty-first century politics. As I demonstrate in this book, the Monroe Doctrine’s flexibility has always provided its power. Like any lasting ideology, it can be adapted to numerous situations, yet in each it offers an apparently simple narrative to make sense of the most complicated conditions. It brings together the two conceptions of the United States that ground Boot’s and Buchanan’s formulations: America, the empire for liberty, and America, the postcolonial retreat from power. In one conception, the United States has a mission to promote democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond; in the other, it has an obligation to abstain from foreign wars and intrigues. In one, the New World is intended to reform the Old; in the other, its destiny is to escape from history. These two seemingly opposed stories about the United States, which have existed side by side since the nation’s inception, are bound together in the Monroe Doctrine, making it a crucial component of American nationalism and imperialism. Of course, the history of the Monroe Doctrine could hardly lead us to expect precision and unanimity. Never ratified as a law, the Doctrine was declared retroactively through a process of citation and reinterpreviii p r e f a c e

tation that transformed a few disparate paragraphs from Monroe’s 1823 Presidential Message to Congress first into ‘‘principles,’’ then into ‘‘doctrine,’’ and finally into ‘‘Doctrine.’’ It is my argument in this book that this important process occurred in the field of culture as well as politics. The Monroe Doctrine offers a narrative with which to make sense of the place of the United States in the world; understanding the historical development of this narrative requires us to read policy statements for the stories they tell and to read stories for the policies they recommend. Interpreting history in this way reveals that culture and politics—fiction and representation—converged as they referenced and influenced one another. More particularly, in this book I examine how political formulations of the Monroe Doctrine relied on certain stories of the nation and the hemisphere as a family. This domestic story, I demonstrate, was one repeated and adapted in nineteenth-century fiction, which lent the story the emotional force necessary to make compelling the flexible terms of the Monroe Doctrine. I began this project with the intention of researching literary and cultural articulations of nineteenth-century foreign policy more broadly; but the more I read, the more I realized that the Monroe Doctrine drew on and organized many of the era’s most significant ideas about nation and empire. The Monroe Doctrine bound together a variety of powerful cultural referents like domestic virtue, New World difference, and natural democracy, even while it negotiated contradictory ideas about Anglo-American racial superiority and capitalist prerogative. These were the disparate set of ideas with which the Doctrine measured the political distances separating Europe, the United States, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. As I narrowed my focus to the Monroe Doctrine, I found that describing the development of an ideology so fundamental to nineteenth-century national identity requires a broad approach. My chapters thus connect the Monroe Doctrine’s uneasy tension between imperialism and postcolonialism with a number of cultural phenomena not typically associated with U.S. foreign relations—domesticity and Indian removal, slavery and minstrelsy, and labor and global capitalism all find significant places in the chapters that follow. This wide-ranging approach is intended to show that a study of American nationalism and imperialism cannot be sequestered from apparently domestic or nonpolitical concerns. Rather, my project demonstrates that imagining the place of the United States in the world was an ongoing process that occurred in a number of different spheres of life and letters. preface

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Furthermore, linking this cultural process to the development of the Monroe Doctrine offers a new chronology for thinking about U.S. empire. Rather than viewing U.S. empire as a phenomenon that switched its focus at the beginning of the twentieth century from continental expansion to global geopolitical and economic hegemony, my research reveals a nineteenth-century United States in which national identity was continually revised to address competing visions of global connectedness and domestic isolation. The resulting picture of nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism significantly expands current historical and critical emphasis on ‘‘Manifest Destiny’’ and territorial expansion in North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean; we see that from the nation’s inception U.S. writers were actively and uncertainly negotiating a global role. Boot’s and Buchanan’s disagreement over the limits of the Monroe Doctrine and the proper sphere of the United States—in the North American continent, the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia, or the rest of the world— is not an entirely new phenomenon resulting from our current surge of globalization. Rather, the conflict can be traced back to the early days of the republic, where it provided one of the most fundamental ideologies of U.S. nationalism and imperialism. n This project began as a dissertation under the direction of Priscilla Wald, who gave detailed suggestions and sustaining enthusiasm from the project’s formative stages to its completion. Susan Jeffords, Mark Patterson, and Amy Kaplan gave advice for turning the dissertation into a book. Along the way, Marshall Brown, Carlo Bonura, Stuart Burrows, Betsy Klimasmith, and Rodrigo Lazo read portions and offered suggestions for revision and research. Participants at several conferences gave feedback on these ideas; especially generous were the responses offered at the Dartmouth College ‘‘Outside American Studies’’ conference in 2001. Colleagues at the University of Minnesota, Morris, helped me through the final stages of revision: Brad Deane provided references, Sandy Kill and Leann Dean at the Briggs Library of the University of Minnesota, Morris, secured rare sources, John Bowers of the University of Minnesota, Morris, Computing Services helped prepare artwork, and Allison Prusak assisted with Spanish translations when help was needed. My anonymous readers at Duke University Press provided careful readings and excellent advice. My greatest debt is owed to Rich Heyman, my strongest supporter and my work’s toughest critic. From suggesting texts to proofreading, he has truly been a partner in this endeavor. A disserx preface

tation fellowship from the University of Washington allowed me time to do some of the archival research for chapters 2 and 5. A portion of chapter 4 previously appeared in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives, edited by Amelia María de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Gordon (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2004) as ‘‘Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism in Ruiz de Burton’s Europeanized New World,’’ and chapter 5 is a revised version of ‘‘Democracy, Development and the Monroe Doctrine in Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune,’’ which appeared in American Studies 42.2 (2001): 45–66. I am grateful to the editors for their permission to reprint my work.

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introduction writing the hemisphere Talk about globalization is everywhere in American studies these days, but what this means for the field and its traditional national boundaries is still uncertain. What does a global American studies look like, and how do we practice it? According to Carolyn Porter, the historical and geographical frames of U.S. national narratives are collapsing (468), sending Americanists in search of what Lawrence Buell has described as various and fluid ‘‘cultural spheres’’ that have historically traversed, overlapped, or intersected with our nationally circumscribed Anglo-American one (‘‘Circling the Spheres,’’ 479). Even the name ‘‘America’’ bespeaks the crisis; conventionally used to designate the cultural identity of the United States, its implicit erasure of Latin America and Canada is now painfully apparent, leading Buell and others to suggest that one response to this global trend might be the ‘‘refashioning of American studies as a hemispheric project’’ (‘‘Circling the Spheres,’’ 478).1 But if, in the words of Giles Gunn, ‘‘territories of knowledge can no longer be considered as geographically discrete’’ (18), we must also interrogate the construction of the hemispheric frame, and examine the powerful tradition that defines America spatially with reference to ‘‘its’’ hemisphere. While we are questioning the porous boundaries of the nation-state, we must also test the assumptions that allow us to imagine a ‘‘hemispheric’’ relation that links the cultures of the United States and, for example, Bolivia. Arthur P. Whitaker’s 1954 history The Rise of the Western Hemisphere Idea traces both the development of the idea that the globe could be meaningfully divided into eastern and western halves and the decline of that idea after World War II. Whitaker explains that the idea originally came from ‘‘looking at America through a European perspective as it was represented on European maps’’ during the 1400s and 1500s (7). Figure 1 exemplifies this cartographic convention, one that scholars of colonial discourse argue ‘‘invented’’ the New World for European colonization (see O’Gorman and Rabasa). But Whitaker also notes that the ‘‘Western Hemisphere idea’’ was appropriated and redefined during the revolutionary period of 1776–1823, when many of the

newly formed American states perceived and claimed a political and, as Whitaker puts it, ‘‘mystical’’ identification with their hemisphere based on their common revolutionary break from European colonialism. This historical development is clearly a basis for Buell’s conception of a hemispheric American studies that perceives its cultures as ‘‘part of a gradually, irregularly, and transhemispherically constructed combination of anticolonial recoil against and participation in the propagation of Eurocentric institutions globally’’ (‘‘Circling the Spheres,’’ 477). For Buell, however, this construction of a hemispheric history links the New World revolutionary experience of postcolonial nationalism with the simultaneous, ongoing processes of Euro-American imperialism, a move that deliberately challenges notions of exceptionalism that have shaped U.S. history.2 This new framework submerges any one national history as it calls attention to interconnected historical processes of colonization, revolution, nation formation, and the displacement and destruction of natives. Such processes indicate another geopolitical model constructing our current conception of a hemisphere: the economic phenomena of dependency and imperialism. This model of dependency is what José David Saldívar uses to make sense of the dialectic relationship he observes between North and South America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Saldívar’s influential formulation, strict attention to the Old World/New World divide elides the more important power struggle between the United States and Central and South America, a struggle that produced his subject: the postcolonial consciousness of Latin America. Our received notion of a hemisphere is thus formulated along the axis of New and Old Worlds, Eastern and Western Hemispheres, as well as the axis of center and periphery, North and South. As Buell’s and Saldívar’s work points out, these axes are often at cross-purposes. Focusing exclusively on the division between East and West brings to the fore narratives of revolution, anticolonialism, and exceptionalism; focusing exclusively on conflicts between North and South emphasizes a history of cultural, military, and economic domination. How has the United States juggled these contradictions in national identity and hemispheric relations? The Monroe Doctrine, this book argues, is the best example of how these divergent national trajectories were brought together under one narrative. The Monroe Doctrine held in balance New World exceptionalism and the embattled dialectics of the Americas; it suppressed perceived contradictions between anticolonial revolution and imperialist domi2 introduction

figure 1: World map from Gerhard Mercator, Atlas, Or, A Geographike Description of the World (London, 1636); reprint in Rabasa, 187.

nation. Through a cultural analysis of the Monroe Doctrine, I want to better understand how the United States came politically to dominate and culturally to express ‘‘America,’’ and how ‘‘the hemisphere’’ became a meaningful cultural and geopolitical frame for American nationalism. The Monroe Doctrine constructed and mediated the changing relations among the United States, Europe, and Latin America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; by examining key articulations of this relation as well as challenges to its authority, my goal is to understand a formative ideology of U.S. nationalism and empire. By tracing this process, I hope to situate our current scholarly struggle with the geography of American studies in an ongoing effort to locate ‘‘America’’ in the world. James Monroe originally stated the doctrine that would bear his name in two separate sections of his 1823 Presidential Message to Congress, what we today call the State of the Union address. The logical gap between these two sections was crucial to the process of binding together postcolonial and imperialist national identities. The first portion comes at the beginning of Monroe’s Message, among other issues of foreign policy. It takes up the problem of conflicting British, Russian, and U.S. territorial claims on the northwest coast of North America. The Message states a new ‘‘principle’’ that, as Monroe tells Congress, has already been communicated to Great Britain and Russia. The principle is that ‘‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers’’ (328). This principle is a clear claim to manifest destiny, but one searches in vain in this short paragraph for the logical justification supporting the claim: why should the Americas be closed to European colonization? The key phrase that seems to answer this question is ‘‘by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain.’’ Of course most USAmericans would have concurred that the states of the United States, in their ‘‘free and independent condition,’’ were irreclaimable by European powers, but why would one assume the same for an entire pair of continents that were already widely colonized by Europe? And why would this principle apply especially to this northwestern region that was sparsely settled by Canadian and American trappers and Indians, and that in 1823 was neither a state nor a territory? For answers to these questions we need to look to the other portion of the 1823 Message that would comprise the Monroe Doctrine, but this jump is one that we must consider carefully. The two portions 4 introduction

are not linked by any reference made by Monroe either inside or outside of the document. Connections between the two passages were made only in later interpretive processes that perceived in Monroe’s Message a broad statement of foreign policy. This latter portion comes at the Message’s conclusion, after the president has turned Congress’s attention from foreign to domestic policy. In this longer passage, Monroe addresses the relationships among the United States, Europe, and South America, declaring solidarity between the United States and recently independent South American republics such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela, and stating that the United States would strictly oppose any attempt by the monarchical ‘‘Holy Alliance’’ (among Spain, France, and Austria) to recapture and recolonize these new republics. Monroe represents this struggle as one engaging two opposite political systems, democracy and monarchy, yet the binary is also a spatial one. He makes clear that the United States will not interfere with the struggle for democracy and self-determination wherever it arises; for example, Monroe explains, although it is in ‘‘our most ardent wishes’’ that Greece obtain independence from Turkey, that struggle is too distant to warrant U.S. intervention. ‘‘Of events in that quarter of the globe,’’ he states, ‘‘with which we have so much intercourse and from which we derive our origin, we have always been anxious and interested spectators’’ (339). In contrast, ‘‘with movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers.’’ In writing that ‘‘we should consider any attempt on [the allied powers’] part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety’’ (340), Monroe maps the political binary between Old World tyranny and New World democracy to a spatial construct that divides the globe into two hemispheres. This binary, however, was troubled by a number of unspoken contradictions: most obviously, Indian removal and slavery, signs of colonialism and tyranny within the democracies of the New World, and also by the doubt often expressed in the United States that South Americans were racially incapable of democratic self-rule. I will return to these contradictions throughout this study, but for now it is sufficient to suggest that by effacing them, Monroe’s gesture of hemispheric solidarity conceals a gesture of imperialism. When he refers to the South American republics as ‘‘our southern brethren,’’ Monroe puts in place what diplomatic historian Eldon Kenworthy has called the ‘‘America/Américas’’ myth, a myth that introduction

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employed a strategy of ‘‘control through sameness’’ that created a motivated confusion over who or what is American and who speaks for the Western Hemisphere (xiv). As Kenworthy and other critics of the Monroe Doctrine have argued, this statement of protection, through subsequent interpretation and reinterpretation, turned into one of control.3 Here we can begin to see how the meanings of the two portions of the 1823 Message borrowed from each other. When Monroe stated that American continents are not to be considered for future European colonization ‘‘by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain,’’ he seems to be implicitly linking the postrevolutionary independence of the United States and the South American republics to the contested northwest territory. This territory is defined as democratic space through the recent phenomenon of South American political independence; Monroe locates it in a binary between political systems that makes sense only through his configuration of North and South American hemispheric solidarity. Yet by proscribing future European colonization, this logic promoted U.S. expansion. Land closed to European colonization was still open to American colonization, presumably because of an American political difference that would guarantee the democratic independence that was already somehow essential to the land. In short, by binding together the two portions of Monroe’s Message, a statement of anticolonial difference became generalized to an entire hemisphere. And as the statement of solidarity between Northern and Southern ‘‘brethren’’ shifted from one of protection to one of control, the role of the United States as a proprietor of hemispheric democracy came to justify intervention in Latin American affairs. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, made this prerogative explicit in his 1904 ‘‘Roosevelt Corollary’’ to the Monroe Doctrine, which claimed the right of the United States to intervene in intra-American conflicts in South and Central America in order to maintain economic stability and democracy. All of this is to say that the Monroe Doctrine’s geographic construction of a Western Hemisphere and its relative locations of Europe and North and South America were crucial to the formation of an ideology of American exceptionalism that both claimed a radical separation from European colonialism and enabled cultural, military, and economic dominance. This effect is apparent in a popular cartographic representation of separate hemispheres at the turn of the twentieth century. The origin of this convention (previously shown in figure 1) is a 6 introduction

Eurocentric construction of the New World as a region awaiting colonization, but its redeployment in a 1912 political cartoon, ‘‘His Hat Is in the Ring’’ (fig. 2), uses the separation of spheres to assert the exclusive power of the United States over ‘‘its’’ hemisphere. According to critical cartographer J. B. Harley, this convention of depicting the United States in ‘‘its’’ hemisphere exemplifies the power of maps to codify, legitimate, and promote particular worldviews (430). The use of two circles to represent the globe on a flat surface in figure 1 was partly a necessity, because it was a map produced before Mercator developed a method of projection that preserved direction by making latitudinal lines parallel to each other and perpendicular to longitudinal ones. But repeating this archaic convention in figure 2 seems to express a desire to erase a history of transatlantic crossings even while it implicitly suggests that the real divisions are between North and South rather than East and West. The very erasure of all non-European or Anglo-American peoples in the cartoon crudely registers this division between North and South, but the map that the figures inhabit also reinforces the message: the European caricatures look on from a distance even as they occupy the same conceptual space as Uncle Sam—all are in fact standing together on the North Pole, vying for military control over the Panama Canal and economic control of crucial markets, resources, and trade routes. Following J. B. Harley, I argue that the Monroe Doctrine acts as a map in that it uses spatial constructs to build a worldview. I am interested, however, in pursuing this connection not through cartography but through the cultural narratives and rhetorical constructs that sustained the worldview of the Monroe Doctrine. I take as my subject the way these narratives were revised and strengthened in political discourse and fictional narratives as that worldview evolved over the course of the nineteenth century. Literature and narrative played crucial roles in making the Monroe Doctrine a compelling cultural as well as political ideology, and in ‘‘locating’’ the United States in relation to Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and the Pacific. I particularly examine how novelistic romances told stories that reconstituted home and family bonds and linked the past to the present to create narratives of national origin and affiliation. And outside of the world represented in these romances, this location was also expressed through claims to national and racial affiliation and disaffiliation in novelistic framing devices and in the wider literary discourse produced by editors, critics, and authors. For these literary commentators, the Americas’ cultural difference from Europe was necintroduction

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figure 2: ‘‘His Hat Is in the Ring,’’ by Charles ‘‘Bart’’ Bartholomew [?], Minneapolis Journal, 1912; reprint in Johnson, Latin America in Caricature, 55.

essary to justify a policy of political separation, and it provided a crucial expression of the perceived ‘‘distance’’ between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. This perceived distance was never unanimously affirmed, however. The process wherein USAmericans reinterpreted the Eurocentric invention of the New World in figure 1 to produce the perspective reinforced in figure 2 was complex and contested both inside and outside national boundaries. In forums that were both political and literary (widely published political speeches, well-read accounts of government expeditions, review magazines, novels, etc.), USAmericans debated the question of whether national expansion and growth broke with European colonialism or simply extended it. And frequently participating in these debates were Californio, Tejano, and Latin American writers who harshly criticized and offered alternatives to dominant formulations of hemispheric interconnection and difference. The historical verdict of an exceptional, isolated, and anticolonial United States that ultimately triumphed in these debates was neither inevitable nor monolithic. Figure 3, another political cartoon featuring the division of the globe into hemispheres, reveals an anxiety about the slippage in the Monroe Doctrine from protection to control. As in figure 2, we have an allegorization of Great Britain and the United States as John Bull and Uncle Sam, although here the relation between them seems one of partnership or succession rather than competition. John Bull, whose protruding stomach, baggy eyes, and unkempt appearance suggest a lack of power perhaps resulting from exhaustion with proprietary responsibilities, hands off the Western Hemisphere to its new guardian. As John Johnson has commented, this cartoon utterly erases Latin America while naturalizing the United States as custodian of the monolithically imagined Western Hemisphere (36). But a second glance raises more questions and reveals the cartoon’s ambivalence about what this shift in power relations means. If John Bull seems exhausted, even dissipated, by his overextended colonial powers, Uncle Sam has a distinctly sinister appearance. Both have dark shadows over their faces, but the downward angle of Sam’s face creates the deepest shadows around his eyes. Indeed, the room itself is cast in darkness, and Sam, with his outstretched hands about to touch the bowl-shaped hemisphere, might be seen as preparing to devour the gift. This ambiguity in Davenport’s depiction of Uncle Sam is confirmed when we shift attention from the figures in the foreground to those in the wall-hanging behind them. The latter stand back introduction

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to back, each wolfing down a wedge of pie that has perhaps recently been divided. One figure’s head is turned to face the viewer, eyebrows raised in surprise, as if recognizing his own greedy consumption in the diplomatic exchange that parallels him. Compared with figure 2, which casts over Europe the mounting clouds of conflict and war and leaves Uncle Sam alone under sunny skies, figure 3 depicts a shadowy United States carrying on rather than breaking with European colonialism. The unframed picture is hung on the wall as a map or a chart would be, stressing that instead of merely decorating, the picture serves as a tool for measuring transatlantic kinship and proximity. Figure 3 still erases any South or Central American presence in the Western Hemisphere, but it promotes an anxious awareness of the proprietary self-interest that could guide ‘‘division’’ and ‘‘protection’’ of the Western Hemisphere. Such contradictions would need to be continually negotiated in order for the Monroe Doctrine to emerge as a compelling statement of national identity and foreign policy. The texts I examine in this book crucially contributed to this process of negotiation by mapping various conceptions of U.S. global location and kinship. Analyzing and comparing these contested representations of space and affiliation offers insight into a key ideology of U.S. nationalism and imperialism, one with the power to bind together the constitutive stories of revolution and expansion, and to reconcile transatlantic, transhemispheric, and even trans-Pacific crossings with the construct of an isolated, anticolonial United States. n This is an interdisciplinary project. It is guided by the premise that the separation between politics and culture that structures many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences is a false one, and that an understanding of the field of ‘‘American literature’’ (and its recent transformations) demands study of the cultures of nationalism and imperialism that crucially contributed to the idea of an ‘‘American’’ literature. I want to talk explicitly about these interdisciplinary assumptions in this introduction, because while drawing connections between literary and political texts no longer raises eyebrows in an English department, a number of methodological questions about causality and evidence still trouble such historicist attempts. On what grounds can I justify connections that I make, in the chapters that follow, between political speeches and other documents and literary texts? In fact, I want to show that my methodological justification comes largely from the discourse of the Monroe 10 i n t r o d u c t i o n

figure 3: ‘‘Accepting the Monroe Doctrine,’’ by Homer Davenport, Review of Reviews, January 1902; reprint in Johnson, Latin America in Caricature, 37.

Doctrine itself, that a brief look at its status as ‘‘doctrine’’ and its position in the historical narratives of diplomacy reveals the necessity of a cultural approach. Historians have typically contextualized Monroe’s Message in a series of diplomatic exchanges following from an offer made by British foreign secretary George Canning in 1823 to join with the United States against the Holy Alliance. Numerous historians have described Canning’s offer to go ‘‘hand in hand’’ with the United States to prevent the colonial expansion of the Holy Alliance in the Americas, and his cagey proposal that in doing so both countries could agree that neither wanted to possess any portion of Spain’s colonies for themselves—a proposal that if accepted would force the United States to foreswear future interests in colonies like Cuba and Texas. This story of diplomatic relations describes the great surprise that Canning’s invitation caused in Monroe’s cabinet, which, with the exception of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, seemed inclined to accept the offer. It is Adams who typically emerges as the hero of this story, for he seems to have somehow single-handedly convinced Monroe that the United States should make its own proclamation against the Holy Alliance rather than ‘‘come in as a cock boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.’’ He advised Monroe that how it responded to this offer would be an important decision for the United States, and the administration’s reply provided an opportunity to state a ‘‘combined system of policy’’ relating to the larger issue of relations among the United States, Europe, and Latin America (quoted in May, 199–200). As historian Ernest May explains, this proposal raised an underlying question in U.S. foreign policy of the early nineteenth century: ‘‘whether the United States was to be an empire within the European political system or instead the sun of a wholly separate system’’ (11). For Adams, this was a central question around which other issues like territorial claims to the northwestern portion of North America and the role of the United States in the struggle for Greek independence cohered, and to which the 1823 Presidential Message could sweepingly respond. For diplomatic historians, this textbook story still raises unresolved questions and ongoing debates: How exactly did Adams convince Monroe? How much of Monroe’s language in the Message was actually penned by Adams? Did Monroe’s cabinet really perceive the Holy Alliance as an immediate threat, or was the Message more motivated by strategic aims? What role did domestic politics play in its formulation? Putting these questions aside, however, it is my assertion that another 12 i n t r o d u c t i o n

story with different unanswered questions emerges if we place Monroe’s statement not in this narrow context of diplomacy but in the broader context of U.S. cultural identity. Dexter Perkins, whose history of the Monroe Doctrine’s development from 1823 to 1907 remains the most comprehensive account, addresses a question about the Doctrine’s origin that is of great importance to my study, and that puts the problem of causality and culture into relief. Writing in 1927, Perkins asserts that a definitive statement of the authorship of the Monroe Doctrine is impossible; the question of whether John Quincy Adams or John C. Calhoun helped Monroe author portions of the 1823 Message is moot because its power ‘‘lies in the fact that it expressed what many men, great and humble, were thinking, and were to think in the future. The ideas that it set forth were in the air. . . . The American people have, again and again, found something that appealed to their deepest instincts and traditions in its language, and to this fact the words of 1823 owe their influence’’ (103). Perkins’s point is that Monroe’s 1823 Message was hardly a concrete ‘‘origin’’ of the idea of hemispheric difference that Perkins and his readers had received a century later. Implicitly, the historian seems to be granting that a factual, inclusive account of that idea’s origin and development was impossible: how does one describe the expression and propagation of a widespread belief that gains its influence from a reaction between language and an individual’s feelings or ‘‘deepest instincts’’? Yet to maintain the possibility of his historical project, Perkins proceeds, as scholars must do, by limiting his focus according to disciplinary conventions—in Perkins’s case, by tracing a series of statements by policy elites and news commentators (the ‘‘great men,’’ not the ‘‘humble’’ ones) who articulated, cited, reinterpreted, debated, or implemented what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. Perkins’s acknowledgment, however, that much of the policy’s development took place not in these statements but ‘‘in the air’’ suggests the complex causal power of culture that was necessarily excluded in the three-volume opus that he would produce on the subject of the Monroe Doctrine. Working from Perkins’s admission, I want to define the term ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ as a set of discourses through which USAmericans formulated national identity as well as foreign policy. When I use this term, I am gathering together a set of interrelated and contradictory discourses of U.S. nationalism that figured centrally in efforts to legitimate and locate the early republic. Of these efforts, the 1823 Message was only the most famous formulation, the one that provided a name for the linked disintroduction

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courses of hemispheric unity and U.S. imperial destiny, and for the multiple racial identifications and disidentifications required to bind these discourses together. Defined in this way, the Monroe Doctrine was a central concern in American letters long before Canning made his offer to the United States. Some other early formulations of these discourses are certainly found in documents like George Washington’s Farewell Address and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but we must also look for them in literature and in the cultural and historical narratives that bound these discourses to USAmericans’ ‘‘deepest instincts and traditions.’’ As Eric Wertheimer has shown, the early nationalist poetry of Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau indicates that ‘‘the history of the United States’ power is from its earliest moments—before the Monroe Doctrine—a story of imaginings and designs that understood hegemony in terms of the New World, a hemisphere’’ (16). Wertheimer shows that through ambivalent identifications with the epic histories of Inca and Aztec empires, early USAmericans imagined poetically a postcolonial New World that justified U.S. imperialism. John Quincy Adams’s conception of the Monroe Doctrine, as chapter 1 will demonstrate, was in fact embedded in a literary debate raging in journals such as the North American Review and Edinburgh Review. Furthermore, many of the writers whose works I consider in this study, like Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lew Wallace, and José Martí, worked with varying degrees of commitment in movements for literary as well as political nationalism, suggesting that the discourses in which these writers engaged as politicians and literary men overlapped in crucial and sometimes unexpected ways. Other writers I discuss, like Lydia Maria Child and Richard Harding Davis, held no elected or diplomatic posts, but they participated in conversations about politics and nationalism through their journalism as well as their fiction. My research shows not only that both literary and political discourse constructed imagined traditions of national isolation and anticolonialism, but that at times these discourses intersected by responding to and influencing each other. Attempts to define a coherent foreign policy and an original national literature in fact charted together the shifting relations among the United States, Europe, and the rest of the colonized and decolonized Americas. Even the phrase ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ sits uncertainly between politics and culture. It was coined in 1853, when Congress debated a joint resolution to declare as law what had hitherto been referred to as ‘‘the principles of Mr. Monroe’’ or ‘‘the Monroe declaration.’’ But exactly who 14 i n t r o d u c t i o n

coined the term is also uncertain. According to Perkins, the coinage ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ might have first been spoken either in Senate debates or in the newspaper coverage of these debates—it is unclear who was repeating after whom. The resolution to declare as law Monroe’s statement against European colonization was not passed in 1853, nor in 1896 when the question was again brought to Congress, but at both times its public popularity and status as a national tradition played key roles in arguments about the wisdom of making the unofficial policy law. Senator Lewis Cass, the champion of the resolution in 1853, argued that legislation was necessary to show European powers the force of ‘‘public sentiment’’ that backed Monroe’s principle with ‘‘an almost unexampled unanimity’’ (United States, Congressional Globe. Appendix, 91). Yet while Cass argued that popular support justified legislation, others disagreed on the grounds that the Doctrine’s true authority derived from public sentiment, not the words of Monroe or any official legal sanction. Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech on the Monroe Doctrine in 1896, calling it ‘‘a broad, general principle of public policy’’ authorized not by the fact that it was a law, which would be solely the consideration of jurists and statesmen, but by the recognition that ‘‘all good citizens’’ were equally empowered to consider and interpret the unofficial tradition (‘‘The Monroe Doctrine,’’ 114). William Scruggs, a supporter of Roosevelt, affirmed these sentiments in a 1903 North American Review article. For Scruggs, the idea that Eastern and Western Hemispheres should be divided from each other, and that the Western Hemisphere was a space destined for democracy, had existed as a ‘‘settled conviction in the public mind’’ long before it found ‘‘formal, official utterance’’ in Washington’s Farewell Address and Monroe’s 1823 Message (185–86). Therefore, although no legislative body ‘‘ever specifically, in so many words, affirmed it’’ (194), government officials and the public had already sufficiently affirmed it through feelings and actions. Part of my point, then, is that the discourse of the Doctrine was immensely popular by the end of the nineteenth century, and a study of how it came to touch the ‘‘deepest instincts and traditions’’ requires cultural analysis. In 1881, when Congress debated whether or not a private European company’s contract to build a canal through Panama violated the Monroe Doctrine, lawyer John A. Kasson took the occasion to comment on its power in U.S. politics: ‘‘Among the very few political maxims which serve to guide public opinion in our country, this ranks as chief. . . . It may be said to indicate the only established idea of foreign introduction

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policy which has had a permanent influence upon our national administration. It has also taken fast hold on the popular mind. A President of the United States justly appealing to it in an emergency, could not fail of [a] unanimous following of patriotic citizens, even in the presence of a consequently impending war. It touches the instinct of national safety, and of pride in our national institutions’’ (241). Apparent again here is the sense that the Doctrine’s importance comes not only from its meaning for statesmen, but its place in ‘‘the popular mind.’’ While Kasson viewed this immense popularity as evidence of the Doctrine’s lasting relevance, other scholars of foreign policy viewed the popularity as an irrational intrusion. This is the second part of my point about the significance of culture in the history of the Monroe Doctrine: as the Doctrine took ‘‘fast hold on the popular mind,’’ it raised questions, particularly about the role of public sentiment in foreign policy. When after 1895 the Doctrine became more frequently used to justify military intervention, critics began to call it a ‘‘shibboleth’’ or a ‘‘fetish’’ that blocked reasonable judgment. John W. Burgess, an early political scientist, complained in 1896 that it had been elevated ‘‘to the position of a fetich [sic], at the mention of whose name eyes are closed, ears are stopped and tongues rattle with excited gibberish’’ (46). In 1933, Dexter Perkins commented in the second volume of his history that in his age, ‘‘all parties and groups do lip-service, at least, to the principles of 1823. . . . Only cry out ‘Monroe Doctrine,’ and the door to reasonable and orderly discussion is already half-closed’’ (191). By the time Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times on the Doctrine’s centennial that proclaimed, ‘‘I believe in the Monroe Doctrine, in our Constitution and in the laws of God,’’ (‘‘Advertisement’’), skepticism about this trinity had become established in political punditry. The skepticism came in part from the way that cultural influences— the media, public opinion, or ideals of national mission—had begun to be perceived in the professional fields of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic history as they developed in the early part of the twentieth century. By 1950, the main structuring opposition of that field was the distinction between ‘‘realism’’ and ‘‘idealism.’’ The former term indicated a pursuit of rational policy based on reasoned assessment of a nation’s vital interests and security; the latter referred to a misguided pursuit of policies colored by moral idealism, media hype, or mass hysteria. ‘‘Realist’’ policy was of course valorized, but as Amy Kaplan (‘‘Commentary’’) 16 i n t r o d u c t i o n

and Suzanne Clark have pointed out, the divide provided a key disciplinary boundary that allowed scholars of U.S. foreign policy justifiably to define their field and its object by excluding culture. Thus the role of culture in the making of the Monroe Doctrine has often been perceived as an unwelcome and irrational intrusion rather than an important site of the Doctrine’s development (seen, for example, in the tendency to read Monroe’s 1823 Message as the genuine and ‘‘realist’’ statement of national interest, while subsequent interpretations by James K. Polk in 1845 or Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 were seen as ideologically motivated; see Merk as well as LaFeber, ‘‘The Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from Monroe to Reagan’’). The crucial effect here is that the truly ‘‘political’’ could be logically conceived as separate from the merely cultural, resulting in the constitutive fiction of foreign policy: the idea that an objective ‘‘national interest’’ exists for a policy maker to identify rationally and pursue realistically, free from the fetters of public opinion or cultural perspective.4 The past twenty years, however, have seen the demise of the ‘‘realist/idealist’’ binary in the field and the rise of more complicated models that take seriously the role of nonstate actors, cultural perceptions, and domestic conflicts in the conception of foreign policy.5 Indeed, many diplomatic historians have looked to cultural theory for these models, particularly to discourse studies that examine the importance of language as a mediating device that prevents direct access to ‘‘the real.’’ 6 This shift is part of a sea change occurring throughout the humanities and social sciences—the realization that ‘‘idealism’’ (or, alternately, ideology) guides every perception. This crisis in U.S. diplomatic history is in this way related to the above-mentioned demise of nation as a category of knowledge in American studies; in both examples, ways of organizing knowledge and delineating disciplines are being called into question. In the spaces opened up by these changes, my study of the Monroe Doctrine will look very different from that of Dexter Perkins. My trajectory traces the development of the Monroe Doctrine as a cultural ideology rather than strictly as a foreign policy. I look for this development ‘‘in the air’’ of a wider cultural imagination that is expressed through romance novels and other popular entertainments as well as political texts. These intersecting arenas of the cultural and the political were the spaces where the Monroe Doctrine rose to ideological hegemony, a power which, as Raymond Williams writes, ‘‘must be continually renewed, recreated, defended and modified’’ in response to constant introduction

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pressures and challenges (112). Thus literature did not simply reflect this evolving ideology and concomitant struggle; I see literature as a force that tested, modified, and made sense of narratives that would influence the perceptions of both policy makers and ‘‘the popular mind.’’ In other words, we can look to literature not only as a medium that registers dominant national narratives or expresses anxiety and uncertainty about them but also as a causal force that constructed and negotiated bonds of affiliation and national belonging. As Perkins would no doubt agree, these lines of causality are impossible to trace with any degree of empirical certainty. But when empiricism itself is called into question, we are left with the recognition that my cultural analysis and Perkins’s history are merely pieces or possible formulations of the story we both want to tell. Although each of my chapters shows some apparently ‘‘real’’ biographical or historical connection between the cultural and political texts I put into conversation, ultimately my claims about the significance of these connections rely on a theory of discourse. Rather than demonstrating strict causality (wherein popular novel A influenced diplomatic statement B and subsequent action C ), I try to describe ways in which one discursive utterance both relies on and modifies a shared discourse, which can in turn effect subsequent words and actions. Yet I do not want to imply that the most useful way to approach textual study is as a flat terrain of ‘‘discourse,’’ where literature and politics have no societal or formal differences worth considering. A political utterance often has more direct power to influence socioeconomic conditions than does even the most popular of novels. But the complexity of many literary narratives heightens their power to harness the emotional affect and balance the multilayered and often contradictory meanings that sustain lived relations to those social and material conditions.7 These efforts to bring the culture and politics of empire together have already begun in the field of literary criticism. Amy Kaplan’s and Donald Pease’s anthology Cultures of U.S. Imperialism broke new ground in this area, addressing the erasure of culture from U.S. foreign policy as well as the erasure of empire in American culture by Americanists and postcolonialists alike. Even so, few scholars seek to explore U.S. expansion in terms of ‘‘empire’’ before 1898, the year in which the United States won the Spanish-American War, ‘‘liberating’’ Cuba, taking possession of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and claiming its position as a world power with widespread military and economic interests.8 For example, work in colonial discourse analysis, a field that focuses largely on Euro18 i n t r o d u c t i o n

pean colonization, has begun to take the United States into account, but often by comparing French and British colonialisms of previous centuries with U.S. neocolonialism in the twentieth.9 Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, for example, charts this trajectory, justifying his exclusion of the United States in the nineteenth century with a categorical distinction between continental and extracontinental expansion. According to Said, ‘‘imperialism’’ was not a factor for the U.S. culture of the 1800s, which was more interested in westward expansion, ‘‘that extraordinarily obsessive concern in Cooper, Twain, Melville, and others’’ (63). The irony of this choice of authors to support the notion that the United States was unconcerned with extracontinental expansion in the nineteenth century becomes apparent when we consider the body of their works: Cooper’s numerous sea tales, including stories of nautical exploration (The Sea Lions, Miles Wallingford ) and colonization (The Crater), Twain’s accounts of Americans ranging the globe as tourists (Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator) and his anti-imperialist essays (‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’’), and Melville’s intricate commentaries on colonization (in Typee, Omoo, or Mardi). These works, although not the focus of this book, suggest a more complicated picture than Said seems aware of when he writes the United States culturally and historically out of the nineteenth-century geopolitics of imperialism. What Said’s comment crucially shows is that a literary canon has been formed in tandem with this historical perspective. The canon of American literature on which he based his interpretation has been shaped as much by readers’ as by writers’ fixations on the western frontier as a radical break from Europe’s expanding empires and markets. It was these readers who selected and promoted certain themes and settings as distinctly ‘‘American,’’ and who formed a canon that represented American literature and culture as isolated on the North American continent. John Carlos Rowe, in his book Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, corrects Said’s omission, demonstrating continuities between early nineteenthand early twentieth-century empire building, between ‘‘territorial’’ and ‘‘extraterritorial’’ expansion. Rowe rejects the traditional perception of a historical break in 1898 between an era of continental colonization of territory and an era of extracontinental expansion aimed at foreign military, economic, and political domination without the necessary intent of creating permanent settlements. Instead, he argues that from its inception, trade routes and markets were goals of U.S. expansion, citing as evidence the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Jacob Astor’s 1809 Astointroduction

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ria venture, and efforts to claim islands in the Pacific during the War of 1812. However, in describing the ways that literature registered and commented on ‘‘the shifting boundary between internal and external forms of imperialism’’ (15), Rowe overlooks the important ways that U.S. nation building and empire were both impelled and concealed by the very spatial constructs that enabled this imaginary divide between ‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’ expansion. Rowe notes that the distinction between territorial and extraterritorial expansion is ‘‘the great paradox of American history’’ (78) because it ignores that the United States was from its beginnings ‘‘extraterritorial’’ to European expansion, but he spends little time examining the ideologies that would enable this distinction to survive the nineteenth century. Certainly we must acknowledge the differences between expansion inside and outside North America or the imagined boundaries of the Western Hemisphere, at least as they stood in the minds of many Americans during this century. One of my major points is that invested in these spatial distinctions is a highly contested and fraught expression of national identity. The vision of a compact and coherent continental empire that annexed ‘‘empty’’ territory as states equal within its union made sense only by virtue of its inverse conception: far-flung, mismanaged, and racially debased colonial empire. As Rowe and I both demonstrate, this binary opposition was continually belied throughout the nineteenth century, in debates on subjects ranging from the many tyrannies that remained at home in the union, to the contradictions of the Mexican-American War, to the arbitrariness of ‘‘the continent’’ or ‘‘the hemisphere’’ as a limit for empire, to the various movements that kept expansion beyond the Western Hemisphere a fantasy and a goal for many well before 1898. But the interpretation that a crisis point was reached in 1898, that the United States had previously been isolated and inwardly absorbed, was a result of an exceptionalist ideology that was imagined spatially. Figure 4, an 1898 cartoon by William Rogers exemplifies this ideology in its representation of a ‘‘new’’ U.S. imperialism. Published in Harper’s Weekly, this cartoon again allegorizes nations as persons, infantilizing the newly acquired U.S. possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Philippines. By depicting colonial possession as education and Uncle Sam as an instructor using his pointer to maintain schoolroom order, the cartoon implicitly supports the recent taking of these territories. Yet the cartoon also seems mildly satirical; the out-of-control classroom might 20 i n t r o d u c t i o n

figure 4: ‘‘Uncle Sam’s New Class in the Art of Self-Government,’’ by William Allan Rogers, Harper’s Weekly, August 27, 1898; reprint in Johnson, Latin America in Caricature, 217.

also suggest that Uncle Sam has his hands full and is embarking on an impossible mission to ‘‘educate’’ unruly and unreceptive children, most of whom are visibly darker and thus perhaps racially incapable of learning these lessons in self-government—a widespread anti-imperialist argument of the day. Most interesting for my purposes, however, is the map on the classroom wall. The map depicts the entire globe—why is it then divided according to the archaic convention of hemispheres? We might return to J. B. Harley’s analysis to answer that this convention only further justifies the right of the United States to exert power over the squabbling Cubans in the front row. And yet, the map clearly reminds the reader that the United States has surpassed the limit of the Western Hemisphere—flags mark possessions not only in ‘‘its’’ hemisphere but also in the Pacific, next to the Philippines. As Emilio Aguinaldo, Filipino freedom fighter, stands sullenly on a stool in the corner, wearing a dunce’s cap, we are faced with the possibility that if this classroom is out of control, it may be because certain limits to the way the United States had been spatially imagined have been crossed. According to the map’s title, it shows the United States and ‘‘Neighboring Countries,’’ but what does it mean to place the entire globe in this neighborly relation to the United States, and what civic duties will be required in relation to these neighbors? The map suggests that the disorderly action in the foreground must be read as the result of a change in the global role of the United States, from quiet protection to active discipline, from national expansion to extracontinental imperialism, from hemispheric isolation to global mission. And yet again I must insist that this ‘‘breaking point,’’ this sense of transgressed limits, is misleading. Cuba and Puerto Rico had been actively desired as U.S. possessions since the early days of the republic, and in chapter 2 I will examine a discursive battle over the limits of U.S. empire sparked by the ‘‘opening’’ of Japan in the 1850s. To perceive an 1898 breaking point required a crucial process of forgetting—forgetting Indian removal, forgetting the Mexican-American War, forgetting the uncertainty that haunted the opening of Japan. In order to imagine that westward expansion across the North American continent was exceptional and part of an American tradition of anticolonial difference, USAmericans needed to ignore such conquests and the racism that sustained them. The idea that imperialism was a new choice, a break with traditions of U.S. foreign policy, was in essence a false choice between incoherent imperialism and self-contained isolation. Industrialist and 22 i n t r o d u c t i o n

anti-imperialist Andrew Carnegie indicates this false choice in one of his many articles protesting U.S. possession of the Philippines by asking the key question, ‘‘Shall we remain solid, compact, impregnable, republican American?’’ (162). Carnegie’s rhetorical question expresses a need to maintain the tradition of isolation in the Western Hemisphere that the Monroe Doctrine had come to express, a tradition that was more mythic than actual. For the ‘‘solid’’ and ‘‘compact’’ United States he hearkens back to connote a racially homogenous and ‘‘pure’’ space where one cannot find the sort of unruly nonwhite students who exhaust Uncle Sam in Rogers’s Harper’s Weekly cartoon. This tendency to figure contradictions of racial inequality and struggle as foreign problems was crucial to the Monroe Doctrine’s claim about America’s ‘‘free and independent condition.’’ 10 In its very organization, Monroe’s original 1823 Message structurally displaces the contradictions of slavery and Indian removal. Following what was then the convention, Monroe begins with a discussion of foreign relations, then moves to domestic issues, breaking with this form to conclude with his proclamation of solidarity with the South American republics. He places his only allusions to slavery early, in the section on foreign relations, and then again in his discussion of the status of the U.S. Navy, speaking in both places only of the African slave trade, ‘‘an odious and criminal practice’’ (329) which he vehemently opposes. In one section he mentions efforts to collaborate with European powers in fighting the illegal slave trade by setting its punishment at the level of piracy; in the other he confidently states that the U.S. Navy has found no U.S. ships engaged in the slave trade over the past year, suggesting that ‘‘our flag is now seldom, if at all, disgraced by that traffic’’ (335). That Monroe does not mention slave trade within national borders is perhaps unsurprising in a carefully worded, traditionally optimistic presidential message, but it is interesting that two years after the Missouri Compromise, the contested place of slavery within national expansion is safely removed to the position of a foreign problem, reifying the fictive sense of the United States as homogenous and unified in opposition to a foreign other. Native presence is similarly displaced, again by positioning it as an external threat against which borders must tighten. Structurally, Monroe brings up Native Americans as a concern related to the army’s funding and arms manufactures, in a segment that is the transition between foreign policy and domestic issues. In this section, Monroe describes an attack by the Ricarees near the westernmost fort on the Missouri River introduction

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and the army’s subsequent counterattack. Although this account depicts Indians as a threatening foreign force, they are crucially disconnected from pressing issues of foreign policy like European colonization and the defense of a democratic Western Hemisphere. U.S.-Amerindian relations are structurally placed to preclude the troubling line of thought leading from Indian ‘‘hostilities’’ to the supposedly ‘‘free and independent condition’’ assumed by the American continents. By discussing Native Americans between domestic and foreign issues, Monroe foreshadows the logic of the Supreme Court in the Cherokee Nation decision of 1831, which labeled American Indians as neither citizens nor aliens. Monroe’s Message manages these contradictions of slavery and Indian removal by suppressing and structurally displacing them, but the interpretive process whereby his words became a compelling cultural ideology over the course of a century would continually need to renegotiate those contradictions according to new national concerns and crises. In this process, ‘‘the Monroe Doctrine’’ came to express a mythic tradition of spatial and racial coherence that was always under siege and in need of affirmation. Figure 5, a satirical anti-imperialist cartoon from Life, suggests this concern while at the same time revealing contradictions internal to Carnegie’s homogenous, ‘‘compact’’ nation. The cartoon represents the Monroe Doctrine as a floating boundary marker being surpassed by Roosevelt’s ‘‘White Fleet,’’ which in 1907 sailed around the world in a display intended to garner new enthusiasm and international respect for U.S. naval power. One sign of the cartoon’s many uncertainties about the spatial and racial boundaries of empire is the placement of this marker just before an excluded and racially othered Hawai’i— contrast this with figure 4, where Hawai’i is located within the Western Hemisphere and is personified as an orderly and ladylike student of Uncle Sam. The cartoon associates Roosevelt’s trespass of these boundaries with a widespread loss of social equity and cultural purity symbolized by the tableaux in the pageant, linking spatial progress beyond the Western Hemisphere with the dubious ‘‘progress’’ of modernity. The American culture being exported by Roosevelt is riddled with its own weaknesses and frayed edges. On what might have been Carnegie’s own floats of ‘‘Benevolence,’’ ‘‘Industry,’’ and ‘‘Prosperity,’’ men are exploited and women and children taint the workplace, while on other floats American ‘‘Progress’’ toward European social circles, discovery, and technological mobility are revealed as ridiculous and hasty efforts to transgress authentic traditions—or to surpass national borders already 24 i n t r o d u c t i o n

figure 5: Roosevelt’s White Fleet. Life (December 12, 1907), 726–27.

besieged from the outside by the dangerous immigration underscored by the presence of social reformer Jacob Riis. According to the caption, these floats show ‘‘how great we really are,’’ but their staging of ‘‘modern’’ problems such as industrial monopoly, women in the workplace, marriage into European aristocracy, train wrecks, and college football suggest that ‘‘we’’ are really not this way at all, that in 1907 an authentic tradition of American culture had been transgressed, just as U.S. military power was transgressing the limits of the Western Hemisphere on a warship called the Mayflower. (Mayflower was actually the name of Roosevelt’s famously well-appointed and expensive presidential yacht.) Thus, what appears as a satirical criticism of U.S. domestic and foreign policy also communicates a mythic sense of the past that is productive as well as prohibitive. The cartoon decries imperialism and exhibits racial, gendered, and class anxieties even as it encourages a nostalgic version of American history in which the nation expands solely as part of a virtuous mission to safeguard freedom and democracy. My subject, then, is not strictly the cultural, economic, and political relations among the Americas in the nineteenth century. That crucial project has been ably begun in groundbreaking work by Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Rodrigo Lazo, José Limón, José David Saldívar, and Doris Sommer. Rather, it is the development of an ideology that impelled and concealed U.S. imperialism inside the imagined confines of the Western Hemisphere and beyond. My chapters follow a trajectory from British disaffiliation, moving through domination of the Americas, to the conflict between the ideas of hemispheric division and global U.S. hegemony. This book features several but not all of the major events usually described in the standard histories of the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century: its early conception by John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s 1823 Message, its use in the congressional debates of 1853, the French intervention in Mexico in 1865, and the Venezuela border conflict of 1895. Lesser attention is given to the role of the Monroe Doctrine in the competition for railroad and canal space in the Central American isthmus beginning in the 1880s and in the struggle for Cuban independence. The only major event in the early history of the Monroe Doctrine that I do not discuss in the following chapters is Polk’s citation of the Doctrine in his 1845 Presidential Message to Congress. That event bears brief mention here, not only because it was the first time a president cited ‘‘the principles of Mr. Monroe’’ (Polk, 14), but also because it demonstrates 26 i n t r o d u c t i o n

why my trajectory begins, in the next chapter, with cultural narratives of disaffiliation from Great Britain and expansion of the United States in North America rather than with the substantial pre-1823 history of inter-American contact and rhetorical unity. After 1823, no one made formal mention of Monroe’s words as a precedent until 1845, when Polk cited Monroe’s principles to defend the rights of the United States to the Oregon territory. There he warned Congress that the European conception of a ‘‘balance of power’’ in the Americas could not be permitted. The phrase ‘‘balance of power’’ had recently been used by Great Britain and France to disapprove of the United States’ becoming the only dominant power in North America—preferable would be a balance of power with a strong Mexico, an independent Texas, a strong British North America including a substantial portion of the Oregon coast, and perhaps even an independent California (Merk, 40–64). Polk announces that European plans to support any of these, but especially Britain’s claim to the Oregon territory, are inconsistent with Monroe’s principles because ‘‘the American system of government is entirely different from that of Europe’’ (14). Monroe’s principles, he says, apply ‘‘with greatly increased force’’ (14) in North America, a geographic narrowing that is inconsistent with Monroe and with later citations of the Doctrine, and that suggests Polk was more interested in strategically securing continental expansion than in making sense of Monroe’s message as an enduring foreign policy. While Polk does not use the Doctrine in this message or in later statements to justify war with Mexico, he does interestingly cite the annexation of Texas, finally ratified in 1845, as support for Monroe’s hemispheric division. The union of the United States and Texas was ‘‘a bloodless achievement’’ (4), an example from which ‘‘European governments may learn how vain diplomatic arts and intrigues must prove upon this continent, against that system of selfgovernment which seems natural to our soil, and which will ever resist foreign interference’’ (5). Oregon, Polk suggests, will be like Texas, another peaceful conquest: already it is filled with settlers clamoring to have American laws and institutions extended over them. For my purposes, this example clarifies why a story of the Monroe Doctrine must begin politically with competition for North American territory and culturally with the suppression of transatlantic bonds, two fundamental ideas associated with the Doctrine. Chapter 1, ‘‘Separate (Hemi)Spheres: John Quincy Adams, Lydia Maria Child, and the Domestic Ideology of the Monroe Doctrine,’’ examines these two ideas in introduction

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early articulations of the doctrine in Adams’s 1821 Fourth of July speech and Child’s 1824 novel Hobomok. Both texts tell stories that suppress bonds with Great Britain, and both reveal an ambivalence that arises repeatedly in narratives of New World destiny: the slippage between identifying with peoples of the Americas and paternalistically speaking for them as ‘‘America.’’ The story of colonialism that emerges in these texts, like Polk’s use of the Monroe Doctrine, makes no explicit pretensions to hemispheric destiny, but it does reveal the crucial ways that racial identification and the language of domesticity operated both in political discourse and novelistic romance to make the Monroe Doctrine a compelling statement of foreign policy and national identity. Beginning with the national origin story implied by the Monroe Doctrine enables us to see how it could be used to assert U.S. exceptionalism even as it justified U.S. expansion in North America and later political domination of South America and the Caribbean. Particularly important in this chapter is the way that Adams’s ideas about domesticity informed his articulation of the Monroe Doctrine. I demonstrate the development of these ideas in Child’s Hobomok in chapter 1, and in later chapters continue tracing the way that romances used domestic relations and heterosexual love to define the limits and interests of the American ‘‘home’’ through fictional narrative. These ideas about domesticity were still associated with the Doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century, as can be seen in the political cartoon in figure 5. There transgressions of gendered space produce a sense of lost tradition, compromised cultural isolation, and tainted purity. One American woman in the workplace and another marrying a titled European (apparently against her own will) are both in a sense contaminates in this cartoon who have escaped (or been forced out of ) domestic containment to the detriment of national purity. The tangle of gendered, cultural, and spatial transgressions marked in this cartoon by a buoy called the Monroe Doctrine has origins in John Quincy Adams’s writing. In this way, my research links recent work by Amy Kaplan (‘‘Manifest Domesticity’’), who argues that figurative associations between home and nation were crucial to nineteenth-century conceptions of Manifest Destiny, to that of Doris Sommer, who argues that nineteenth-century Latin American fictions also used family romances to tell national stories. When rendered through narrative, the domestic discourse of the Monroe Doctrine justifies nationalism and imperialism simultaneously, reconciling the conflicting traditions of anticolonial resistance and imperial expansion. The 28 i n t r o d u c t i o n

drama of creating and protecting a self-determined and impermeable domestic space was, in the narratives I examine, a crucial way to chart and rechart the location of the United States in relation to Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific.11 My second chapter, ‘‘Selling Jim Crow from Salem to Yokohama,’’ describes U.S. imperial design in the Pacific, far beyond the imaginary confines of the Western Hemisphere. This geographic departure from the hemisphere in 1853 might seem like a strange leap, but I do it to demonstrate the dissonance between the developing logic of the Monroe Doctrine and other, alternative ways of mapping U.S. influence and expansion after the Mexican-American War. Following the United States to Japan at midcentury is necessary to belie figure 5’s production of an American history contained by hemispheric limits, and to demonstrate the ways that the spatial limits of U.S. empire were actively debated during the 1850s. Chapter 2 examines the anxiety that potential Pacific expansion generated by bringing together Francis Hawks’s official 1856 account of Commodore Matthew Perry’s ‘‘opening’’ of Japan and a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author whom Perry initially chose to write that account. I argue that while Hawks’s explicit call for global empire optimistically touts the modernizing and democratizing potential of U.S. commerce and culture, The House of the Seven Gables envisions a compromise between reform and stasis firmly grounded in the domestic. By focusing on the figure of the slave that appears in both texts, I show that Hawthorne’s vision of compromise reaffirmed American exceptionalism and stasis in North America, updating American ideals of virtuous domestic isolation to contend with expansive and troubling fantasies like Hawks’s. In chapter 3 I compare literary mappings of the New World in the writings of José Martí, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Lew Wallace. While in ‘‘Our America’’ (1890) Martí imagines a radically oppositional New World that resists the colonizing influences of both Europe and the United States, Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) represents the New World as a space of transatlantic cosmopolitanism and renders meaningless the division of the globe into Eastern and Western Hemispheres. I show that while both writers specifically contend with and criticize the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary isolation of the Western Hemisphere, the racial, political, and cultural destinies that they offer in their alternative mappings differ radically. I also contrast Ruiz de Burton’s and Martí’s configurations of America with those introduction

29

in popular novelist Lew Wallace’s The Fair God (1873), which tells the story of the defeat of the Aztec empire by the Spanish conquistadors. Wallace’s novel links Anglo-American democracy with the destiny of the Aztecs as the true people of Mexico, but his ambivalent racialization of his Aztec heroes exhibits the hypocrisy that Ruiz de Burton identifies so aptly in the logic of the Monroe Doctrine. By contrasting the versions of America created by these three writers, my third chapter, ‘‘Geographic Morality and the New World,’’ highlights multiple efforts to address the contradictions of the postbellum United States’ growing imperial power. Questions of U.S. empire and its ambivalent identification with Latin America were again raised at the turn of the century. With the Venezuelan border conflict of 1895 and the Spanish-American War, imperialists and anti-imperialists clashed not only over future policy but also over the meaning and authority of precedents such as the Monroe Doctrine. The essential questions were whether the United States really had a tradition of anti-imperialism and, if so, whether it was bound to adhere to it. In my fourth chapter, ‘‘Gringos Abroad,’’ I examine a resulting reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine between 1895 and 1904 to show that it was facilitated by certain formulations of these questions in the emerging discourse of foreign policy studies and in popular narratives such as Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune (1897). I am particularly interested in how Soldiers links commerce and democracy as forces of progress that the United States was bound to protect through paternal control of a racially inferior Latin America. Davis helped prepare the way for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 ‘‘Corollary,’’ which finally made explicit the Monroe Doctrine’s internal contradiction, that the United States was entitled not only to protect but also to control the Western Hemisphere. Beginning in the 1930s, the power of the Monroe Doctrine to compel U.S. public opinion began to wane, although presidential administrations have continued to cite it as justification for either intervention in Latin America or isolation from or involvement in global conflict, a paradox that indicates the enduring power of the Monroe Doctrine to mediate questions about the place of the United States in the world. My concluding chapter explores this paradox by tracing the contradictions of hemispheric imagining through the 1919 debate about the League of Nations, Américo Paredes’s 1940 novel George Washington Gómez, the Reagan administration’s Cold War rhetoric, the platform of Pat Buchanan during his 2000 presidential campaign on the Independence Party ticket, and, most recently, the so-called Bush Doctrine of 30 i n t r o d u c t i o n

2002. This concluding chapter also examines the possibilities that the Western Hemisphere idea offers to the project of globalizing American studies. Considering the status of the hemisphere as a concept that from its inception denied, and even prohibited, global interconnectedness, I suggest that scholars writing a hemispheric American studies should proceed cautiously, keeping in mind the set of cultural and political investments that defined the concept of the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century and enable it to endure in the twenty-first. And to scholars more broadly interested in remapping American studies on a global scale—especially those who are looking for historical narratives to link with the past our contemporary sense of a shrinking world— my research reveals that since the early days of the nineteenth century, Americans have wondered about the nation’s proper sphere of influence. We have a long history of ambivalently locating the United States within the uncertain boundaries of the nation, the continent, the hemisphere, and the globe.

introduction

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chapter one separate (hemi)spheres john quincy adams, lydia maria child, and the domestic ideology of the monroe doctrine For months after delivering a Fourth of July speech for the citizens of Washington, D.C., Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was irate about inattentive critics. In an 1822 letter to Edward Everett, the editor of the prestigious North American Review, Adams expresses his frustration that critics failed to notice the most significant points of his Fourth of July Address. He complains that while the spoken address made a favorable impact on its audience, its subsequent printings (in newspapers and miscellanies as well as in pamphlet form) garnered much unfairly prejudiced and trifling criticism that failed to notice the ‘‘most noticeable thing in it’’—the point that Adams considered ‘‘a new but demonstrated axiom’’ on ‘‘a question in political morality transcendently important to the future of this country’’ (Writings, 200, 202). The axiom demonstrated, according to Adams, that because of ‘‘the moral and physical nature of man[,] . . . colonial establishments cannot fulfill the great objects of government in the just purpose of civil society’’ (200; emphasis in original). Adams enumerates to Everett the overlooked significance of this axiom: it proved the rightness of struggles for independence in North and South America, it looked forward to the downfall of the British empire elsewhere in the world, and it anticipated a question in the Union’s future: ‘‘Whether we too shall annex to our federative government a great system of colonial establishments’’ (200). Adams would perhaps be pleased to know that his axiom was not lost to posterity. Most references to his Address in twentieth-century biography and political history attribute its significance to its early articulation of the anti-imperialist principles Adams would later develop as one of the authors of the Monroe Doctrine.1 The twentieth-century diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis claimed in 1949 that Adams was the statesman primarily responsible both for the Monroe Doctrine and for

‘‘the foundations of American foreign policy.’’ In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, this assertion has taken on a double meaning, for just as Bemis argued that Adams was the statesman who first codified and adapted a systematic foreign policy that would endure into the twentieth century, Bemis is currently known to diplomatic historians as an influential figure in the founding of what is called ‘‘American foreign policy’’ or ‘‘American diplomatic history’’ as an academic discipline.2 His representation of John Quincy Adams and the tradition of American foreign policy shaped the early discipline. Adams, Bemis wrote, ‘‘more than any other man of his time[,] was privileged to gather together, formulate, and practice the fundamentals of American foreign policy—self-determination, independence, noncolonization, nonintervention, nonentanglement in European politics, Freedom of the Seas, freedom of commerce—and to set them deep in the soil of the Western Hemisphere. On that solid ground they stood and prospered for a century to come’’ (567). Implicit in all these ‘‘fundamentals,’’ argued Bemis, is anti-imperialism, which Adams practiced and ‘‘laid down’’ without ever even using the term: ‘‘If one defines imperialism as dominion or control over alien peoples,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the United States as an exponent of Manifest Destiny in North America can scarcely be said to have been an imperialistic power until the close of the nineteenth century; and even then it was so only temporarily, for a quarter of a century,’’ after which time it returned ‘‘to the classic fundamentals of its foreign policy as laid down in their aggregate by John Quincy Adams’’ (570). Historians like Bemis could envision an essentially anti-imperial United States because the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine reconciled contradictions, such as the one above in Bemis’s attempt to demonstrate anti-imperialism through Manifest Destiny. The Doctrine’s ideological power to balance such contradictions comes in part from a loophole that Adams places at the center of his axiom. As expressed in the letter to Everett, the axiom states that ‘‘colonial establishments cannot fulfill the great objects of government in the just purpose of civil society.’’ But in the Address itself the axiom is qualified: ‘‘the tie of colonial subjection is compatible with the essential purposes of civil government only when the condition of the subordinate state is from its weakness incompetent to its own protection’’ (12). This loophole uses the model of domestic paternalism to grant that the protection of subordinates is one instance when colonial subjection is justified. Revisionist historians have noted the contradictions in these formulations, arguing that if Adams was the s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 33

father of American foreign policy, he was also the champion of ‘‘American global empire,’’ 3 and they have begun asking why such formulations were compelling to their authors and to the academicians and policy makers in their audiences. As a cultural critic, however, I seek to reveal connections between Adams’s speech and popular literature of the day, to show how his answer to the question of U.S. colonialism responded to both political and literary debates. Both Adams’s speech and Lydia Maria Child’s 1824 historical romance Hobomok use common images and ideas to reconcile ‘‘anticolonialism’’ with national expansion; furthermore, these images and ideas were drawn by both authors from a debate occurring in literary journals like the North American Review and the Edinburgh Review. Thus the relationship I see is not only one of parallelism, where literary and political forms mirror each other by using similar linguistic, thematic, or rhetorical strategies; Adams in fact saw his speech as responding to literary questions as well as questions of ‘‘political morality.’’ Putting Adams’s speech and Child’s novel side by side reveals a crucial intersection of national debates about the literature and foreign policy that informed Monroe’s 1823 statement, demonstrating that, from its earliest enunciation, the Monroe Doctrine was concerned with cultural as well as diplomatic conceptions of U.S. identity. n Adams claims that the ‘‘most noticeable thing’’ in his Address was his new axiom on colonialism, but he writes in another letter that he was also responding in the speech to a more topical question about the diplomatic and cultural relations between the United States and Britain less than a decade after the War of 1812. There Adams explains that his speech was in part provoked by the ‘‘pestiferous exhalations of [the British] periodical press’’ which was ‘‘showering down torrents of false and malignant defamation upon America,’’ spurring Adams to conclude it was ‘‘high time we should be asking ourselves, where we were in our relations with that country’’ (Writings, 123). This phraseology is appropriate because what is at stake for Adams in the Address is the location of the United States politically and culturally in relation to Britain and the rest of Europe, and that distance is measured by Adams and his interlocutors in gendered, economic, and racial terms. Immediately after delivering his Address, John Quincy Adams sent Philadelphia newspaper editor Robert Walsh a copy, along with a letter explaining that he intended portions to respond directly to British criti34 c h a p t e r o n e

cisms of Walsh’s recent book (Writings, 117). Titled An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (1819), Walsh’s five-hundred-page polemic had accused the British press of systematic defamation of American history, politics, customs, and literature. It was published in London as well as Philadelphia, and it met with a series of responses from British publications, which typically represented Walsh as paranoid. Interestingly, these responses were in turn often reprinted or discussed in American literary reviews and miscellanies, a sign of the exchange’s significance to American readers.4 Adams told Walsh that in his Address he was particularly answering one British response from the leading liberal Whig journal, the Edinburgh Review (Writings, 117). That review, ‘‘The Dispositions of England and America,’’ argues that Walsh should not have included their journal in his broad accusations, given the Edinburgh Review’s democratic sentiments and goodwill toward the United States. The Edinburgh reviewer takes great pains to prove Walsh mistaken about the journal’s anti-American bias; such accusations, he explains, were not ‘‘a mere personal or literary altercation,’’ but ‘‘a matter of national moment and concernment’’ (‘‘Dispositions,’’ 406). If Walsh’s accusations about the bias of the entire British nation— not just the monarchist Tories—were believed, such accusations might eventually prevent the United States, ‘‘our Transatlantic brethren’’ (406), from joining in the common fight against monarchy throughout Europe. When the ‘‘cause of Liberty’’ is eventually fought on the European continent, the Edinburgh reviewer writes, its success ‘‘will depend on the part that is taken by America; and on the dispositions she may have cultivated toward the different parties concerned’’ (404). While ‘‘the example of America has already done much for that cause’’ in showing that democratic institutions are safe and practicable, ‘‘her influence will be wanted in the crisis which seems to be approaching’’ (405; emphasis in original). For the United States to be a distant city on a hill is not enough for the Edinburgh reviewer. He hopes that when this time comes the United States would act ‘‘as a mediator or umpire, or, if she take a part, as an auxiliary and ally,’’ but fears that Walsh’s work increases the likelihood that the United States will ‘‘stand aloof, a cold and disdainful spectator; and counterfeiting a prudent indifference to scenes that neither can nor ought to be indifferent to her’’ (404). The reviewer is concerned, in short, about a question many Americans in the 1820s were also asking: Where did the United States stand in s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 35

relation to diplomatic and political conflicts or alliances between Great Britain and the rest of Europe? This is of course the question that Monroe answered in his 1823 Message to Congress, when he accepted Adams’s counsel and declared that the United States would stand apart from European conflicts and protect democracy only in the Western Hemisphere. Adams was developing these ideas in his Address, where his response to the reviewer’s attempt to place the United States within the system of European diplomacy was also a response to Henry Clay and other American statesmen who claimed that the United States should aid revolutionary struggles in South America, Greece, Spain, or wherever the ‘‘cause of liberty’’ arose. Adams countered, in the most famous quotation from his Address, that ‘‘wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has or shall be unfurled, there will [the United States’] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example’’ (29). As Adams later explained in a letter to Walsh, he intended the passage as a ‘‘reply to both Edinburgh and Lexington’’ (Lexington, Kentucky, being where Clay lived), which would challenge the idea of America’s supposed ‘‘duty to take an active part in the future political reformation of Europe’’ (Writings, 117). Instead of activity or influence, the nation remains pure in exemplary domestic isolation. This rhetoric of domestic purity bears closer examination, however, especially when Adams’s conventional use of the feminine pronoun for the nation begins to personify the United States as an embodied female figure with a voice. Through this personification, Adams invokes discourses of feminine behavior and propriety, implying that this woman will have influence not by going abroad or seeking direct argumentation, but by the tone of her voice and the gentle example she sets. Debates about women in the public sphere were beginning to be a topic of broad interest in the 1820s, as popular writers like Catherine Sedgwick became household names and women began organizing for temperance and abolitionist causes.5 Adams draws from these debates to underscore the unnaturalness of influence rather than example. He implicitly concludes that like a woman, the nation is most effective at home, improving the world through her prayers and sympathy. Adams strengthens his personification of the nation in the following 36 c h a p t e r o n e

lines, where the female figure has not just a voice, but distinctly feminine dress as well. Here he emphasizes the danger of imprudent sexuality that was metonymically associated with women taking public roles. Were the United States to join foreign wars, he argues, the nation would implicate itself in avarice and ambition that can ‘‘usurp the standards of freedom’’: ‘‘The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit’’ (Address, 29; emphasis in original). Actively pursuing the cause of liberty threatens to change angelic, passive ‘‘sympathy’’ into aggressive competition for colonial power. The ‘‘murky’’ and ‘‘tarnished’’ royal jewelry of the imperial dictatress hints that colonial competition results in an unnatural and impure femininity. Looking back on the Edinburgh reviewer’s use of the feminine pronoun for the nation when he hopes that the United States will not ‘‘stand aloof, a cold and disdainful spectator; and counterfeiting a prudent indifference to scenes that neither can nor ought to be indifferent to her,’’ it seems that Adams’s reply brings out that statement’s more subtle rhetorical reliance on discourses of female propriety. The reviewer implicitly compares the ‘‘aloof ’’ and ‘‘disdainful’’ United States to a ‘‘cold,’’ selfish woman unwilling to express charity to stricken neighbors, or perhaps, a haughty lover feigning prudence and indifference to her suitor. Adams responds to the reviewer’s representation of a falsely prudent lover or unfeeling spectator of suffering by recasting such indifference as the silent influence of the angel in the home, loathe to sacrifice purity by involving herself in the base matters of the world. Despite the Edinburgh reviewer’s insistence that the issue at hand was not merely literary, the national rivalry in which Adams engaged was partly about the respective value of British and American literature. Walsh’s book devoted over one hundred pages to demonstrating that British publications were maliciously biased against U.S. literature, prompting his Edinburgh reviewer to complain that ‘‘although we are the friends and well-wishers of the Americans . . . we are not their stipendiary Laureates or blind adulators’’ (‘‘The Dispositions of England and America,’’ 409). After all, it certainly was undeniable, the reviewer continues, that ‘‘the Americans have scarcely any literature of their own s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 37

growth—and scarcely any authors of celebrity’’ (416). Yet rather than casting this lack as a serious national deficiency, the Edinburgh reviewer tries to mitigate it by expressing the situation in terms of supply and demand, region and sector. The reviewer admits that, as Walsh pointed out, passages such as the following had indeed appeared in the pages of their journal: ‘‘Literature was one of those finer manufactures which a new country will always find it easier to import than to raise’’; and ‘‘Native Literature, the Americans have none: It is all imported. And why should they write books? When a six weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science and genius, in bales and hogsheads?’’ (410–11; emphasis in original). But such statements, the reviewer insists, did not mean to imply the Americans were ignorant of or indifferent to literature. Instead, they only suggested that the United States is ‘‘in the condition of any of our great trading or manufacturing districts at home, where there is no encouragement of authors to settle, though there is as much reading and thinking as in other places’’ (411). This rationale serves both as an apology and as another location of America, this time on the periphery of the European-centered markets of the early nineteenth century, a periphery that supplied raw materials and imported ‘‘finer manufactures.’’ 6 Despite political independence, such a characterization locates the United States as a ‘‘district’’ within the British Empire’s system of production. The implication is not only economic dependence; receiving ideas in ‘‘bales and hogsheads’’ further suggests a cultural dependence that would bind together ‘‘Transatlantic brethren.’’ Adams’s Address disputes this location of the United States as well. He accepts that the United States is indeed deficient in national literature, but balances the importation of literature and science with the nation’s most significant export or contribution to the world: its discovery of political truth. ‘‘Let our answer be this,’’ he proposes: ‘‘America, with the same voice with which she spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of human government’’ (28). Here Adams is able boldly to challenge British cultural superiority without claiming the superiority or equality of American art, literature, or science: ‘‘Stand forth, ye champions of Britannia, ruler of the waves! . . . Ye mighty masters of the palette and brush! Ye improvers upon the sculpture of the Elgin marbles! Ye spawners of fustian romance and lascivious lyrics! Come and enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind!’’ 38 c h a p t e r o n e

(29–30). Instead of praising American literature and learning, Adams criticizes the harmful effects of British advances like Congreve rockets and morally corrupt, ‘‘lascivious lyrics.’’ Such a strategy again figures the United States as chaste and pure, and explicitly challenges British moral and sexual virtue through a criticism of British literature. In his letter to Robert Walsh, Adams explains that his ‘‘deliberate epithets’’ toward British literature were justified by the ‘‘philters’’ (aphrodisiacs) that the poet Thomas Moore ‘‘so long administered to our youth of both sexes,’’ and by the corruption ‘‘of taste and morals’’ in America resulting from Byron’s ‘‘Don Juan’’ (Writings, 133–34). By defending chaste America against these immoral influences, Adams inverts fully the Edinburgh reviewer’s representation of the United States as a woman without charity or sensitivity, or as a cold and disdainful lover feigning prudence. The ‘‘aloof ’’ woman is recast as the chaste feminine exemplar resisting seduction away from her domestic retreat by the libertine ‘‘spawners’’ of immoral romance across the Atlantic. These passages strikingly reveal that Adams conceived of the Monroe Doctrine partly in response to a debate about national literature, and in terms of popular narratives about female sexual restraint, seduction, and domestic virtue that were a major focus of British and American literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If so, it is especially interesting that both in his correspondence and his Address, Adams discounts literature as an important criterion for national independence and the breaking of transatlantic bonds. In his letter to Walsh, Adams also explains his objections to British ‘‘fashionable romance,’’ a category which for Adams seems broadly to include both older gothic romance and newer historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. According to Adams, such romances are ‘‘party productions, as much so as the Courier newspaper or the Quarterly Review. They are antirepublican works, written to degrade public opinion, the covenanters, and reformers of other ages, for the sake of a refractive effect upon the radicals, and even the Whigs of the present times’’ (134). Here Adams performs an almost New Historicist reading of Scott’s romances: they are as politically motivated as the Quarterly Review (a conservative British publication to which Scott was a contributor), and they represent political situations of other ages to reflect negatively on liberals of the past and the present. Indeed, Adams’s quibble was very specifically with Scott’s use of history, so much so that he took care not to point his harsh criticism too obviously in the beloved author’s direction: ‘‘Before delivering the Address,’’ he confides s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 39

to Walsh, ‘‘I had at one time the idea of saying instead of fustian [romance,] ‘second sighted romance.’ But I thought this latter epithet might be taken for a national reflection upon Scotland, and therefore avoided it’’ (134). Romances like Scott’s are ‘‘second sighted,’’ he implies, both because they rewrite history as fiction and because they employ elements of the fantastic, promoting immoral superstition. This characterization of romance is much like the one that Nathaniel Hawthorne would defend in his famous preface to The House of the Seven Gables, where he writes that the essence of romance is its ‘‘attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very Present that is flitting away from us. It is a Legend, prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events, for the sake of a picturesque effect’’ (2). But for Adams, who shared with others in his generation a mistrust of romantic fiction and the form of the novel, this ‘‘legendary mist’’ is dangerous to readers who cannot disregard it as easily as Hawthorne would imply. Adams writes that romance gives ‘‘an exaggerated and therefore false picture of human nature,’’ which might encourage the tragic foibles of a Don Quixote who mistakes fiction for reality (Writings, 134). The characters are ‘‘strange, and mysterious, and wonderful, and witty, and generally in good keeping, but they are not men and women’’ (134). Adams’s literary criticism woefully underestimates the power of novelistic romance to narrate the American nation and break bonds with ‘‘Transatlantic brethren.’’ His Address pits the immorality and obfuscation of British literature against the purity of American political truths in a battle of national productions that, according to Adams, the United States has surely won. But he misses completely the role that literature was beginning to play in the construction of national identity and narrativization of American history. Adams’s response to the problem of U.S. literary dependence rests on the idea of fiction as morally dangerous, an idea that was losing currency in his generation, as novelists like James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Catherine Sedgwick adapted Sir Walter Scott’s romances to American settings, rewriting Scott’s political quietism (to varying degrees) as a celebration of liberal democracy and justification for national independence. Indeed, as the century wore on this genre evolved to become the major form for American popular literature. These were versions of the novelistic romance that, as Doris 40 c h a p t e r o n e

Sommer remarks, use depictions of familial relations and heterosexual love to bind individual sympathies to the construct of nation. Despite that fact that Adams fails to recognize fashionable romance’s nationalist potential in the New World, his Address provides a theory about the relationship of the family to land and to place that suggests why such stories would be a major force in making sense of ‘‘the Dispositions of England and America toward each other’’ (‘‘Dispositions,’’ 406). Adams uses family relations to explain the necessary division between colonizer and colony, whose relations are bound only by the ‘‘unnatural connexion’’ of commercial and political transactions: It is a common Government that constitutes our country. But in THAT association, all the sympathies of domestic life and kindred blood, all the moral ligatures of friendship and neighborhood, are combined with that instinctive and mysterious connexion between man and physical nature, which binds the first perceptions of childhood in a chain of sympathy with the last gasp of expiring age, to our spot of nativity, and the natural objects by which it is surrounded. These sympathies belong and are indispensable to the relations ordained by nature between the individual and his country.’’ (Address, 14) Here Adams tells a story about the way that sympathies with land and family bind together a nation, underwriting the merely political ties of statehood. ‘‘The sympathies of men,’’ Adams explains, ‘‘begin with the affections of domestic life. They are rooted in the natural relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, of brother and sister; thence they spread . . . to the broader and more complicated relations of countryman and fellow citizen; terminating only with the circumference of the globe which we inhabit’’ (13). The bonds of nation are closer to familial sympathy than are the bonds of cosmopolitanism or colonialism, and they justify for Adams both why the United States can never have colonies of its own and why the United States exists in a sphere separate from Europe. These passages contest the Edinburgh reviewer’s attempt to locate the United States as a commercial district of Great Britain by denying that there can be such a thing as ‘‘Transatlantic brethren’’ united through commerce. After a generation in the New World has passed, Adams says, the Americans and the British lost ‘‘the natural ties of domestic life’’ and became ‘‘total strangers to each other’’ (15). How this supposed change came to pass was a major theme of novelistic romances s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 41

by Cooper, Child, Sedgwick, Hawthorne, and others. Although Adams failed to realize their potential, these romances would tell a story similar to his own. This chapter will describe marked similarities between one of these romances, Child’s Hobomok, and Adams’s location of the nation ‘‘at home.’’ Both texts construct a sense of national legitimacy and ‘‘nativity’’ through domestic relations and relations with the land. But while they use similar narrative strategies, these texts were of course not identical in their influence. Although they both respond to the same debate about literary nationalism and have similar strategies for depicting a coherent national identity and location, they have very different potentials for influencing U.S. culture and foreign policy. Adams’s speech uses rhetorical and narrative techniques to justify his conception of national identity, but Child’s romance uses the very unreality that Adams disliked to enact the identificatory processes that helped transform Adams’s and Monroe’s ideas into a persuasive cultural ideology. This identificatory process seems especially crucial in making sense of a weak point in Adams’s logic: the loophole that he uses to justify colonialism only when ‘‘the subordinate state is from its weakness incompetent to its own protection.’’ This loophole crucially reconciled the central contradiction of the Monroe Doctrine, between anticolonialism vis-à-vis Europe and imperialism vis-à-vis the Americas. It suggests that the ‘‘naturalness’’ of domestic consanguinity and proximity can be overridden by the need for paternal control. In Adams’s speech, one reason for that loophole might be to address the uncertain place of American Indians in the new republic. In the 1820s, both Monroe and Adams, along with numerous others, were weighing the future of aboriginal tribes in North America and attempting to reconcile anticolonial virtue with what they represented as the impending and inevitable disappearance of Indians from U.S. territory (Maddox, 6). Indeed, Chief Justice John Marshall would write in his 1831 decision of Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia that Indians were ‘‘domestic dependent nations’’ whose relation to the United States ‘‘resembles that of a ward to his guardian’’ insofar as they ‘‘look to our government for protection . . . and address the president as the great father.’’ 7 Adams might also have included this loophole to enable future annexation of Texas and Cuba, two territories that he felt were destined to belong to the United States and that might require protection from the Spanish empire. 42 c h a p t e r o n e

But this is only speculation, because Adams makes no effort to apply his loophole by stating specifically what sort of situation might require the United States to ‘‘protect’’ a subordinate. Instead, he glosses over such examples in what appears to be a strategy to suppress contradictions of his depiction of the United States as a space of anticolonial revolution. This suppression is especially evident in the segment of the Address that retells the history of American settlement and revolution, as was conventional in such Fourth of July speeches. Adams traces the progress of reason through the age of enlightenment, discovery, and religious reformation in Europe, explaining that during these eras this progress was still tied to ‘‘conquest and servitude,’’ a pairing that recurs like a refrain throughout the Address. European civil government was ‘‘founded in conquest, . . . cemented in servitude’’ (8), and ‘‘conquest and servitude were so mingled up in every particle of the social existence of [Great Britain] that they had become vitally necessary’’ (9). By breaking with the Old World, Adams continues, the Declaration of Independence ‘‘demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded on conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude’’ (21). Obvious exceptions here, such as conquest of Indian land and the servitude of chattel slavery, are utterly ignored, although such contradictions of American ideals were certainly part of the debate that Adams addressed; the Edinburgh Review mentions the ‘‘foul blot’’ of slavery on American freedom and prosperity as another reason (besides bad writing) for its previous criticisms of the United States (420). One might employ Adams’s loophole to make sense of these contradictions, but Adams does not bother to do so explicitly. While he avoids this sticky set of arguments by simply not mentioning slavery, Adams does include Indian relations in his story of revolutionary history. This rhetorical move is worth a closer look, as it suggests another way that Adams’s strategy to reconcile anticolonialism with territorial expansion responded to literary as well as political discourse. Adams continues his story of the break from European ‘‘conquest and servitude’’ by describing the new kinds of relations that could develop in the Western Hemisphere. Although legal charters tied the colonies to England, the settlers had ‘‘relations with one another, and relations with the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to which they came, for which no royal charter could provide’’ (9). These ‘‘relations’’ are the Mayflower compact and the ‘‘purchase’’ of ‘‘the right of settlement upon the soil’’ s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 43

from the Indians. Adams proclaims that these interactions ‘‘were formed upon the elementary principles of civil society, in which conquest and servitude had no part. The slough of brutal force was entirely cast off: all was voluntary; all was unbiassed [sic] consent’’ (10). In showing the progress from ‘‘conquest and servitude’’ to voluntary consent, Adams constructs a national history where ‘‘aboriginal relations’’ mark a crucial moment of difference between the United States and Britain. Yet curiously, a few pages later, Adams continues his argument against colonial relations by erasing the Indian presence entirely. Although, as Adams explains, ‘‘the tie of colonial subjection’’ might suit the first settlers of a small and remote island, certainly British intelligence could not imagine that ‘‘the swarming myriads of freemen, who were to civilize the wilderness, and fill with human life the solitudes of this immense continent’’ would accept colonialism (13). Between the two passages— one emphasizing Indian presence, the other erasing it in ‘‘solitudes’’ of wilderness—is a necessary gap in Adams’s logic that marks the difference between, on the one hand, the discursive construction of a revolutionary New World breaking with the Old, and, on the other, the discursive battles waged by the United States to justify its struggle for land and power in the Americas. In each quotation, ‘‘Britain’’ and ‘‘the Indian’’ are played off one another, each having the potential to conceal a problematic aspect of national relations with the other. By triangulating the United States with ‘‘Britain’’ and ‘‘the Indian,’’ the nation is alternately constituted through difference from either a domestic or a foreign other, and the third term is momentarily subsumed under the emphasized binary term. In the former quotation, Adams invokes interaction with ‘‘the Indian’’ as the recipient of an exchange that prefigures independent nationhood. These ‘‘relations with aborigines’’ have some value for Adams as a symbolic moment in the Puritans’ foundation of a distinct, equitable society; they mark a transaction that is somehow removed from British-centered systems of diplomacy and colonial government. In the latter quotation, ‘‘Britain’’ is used to make ‘‘aboriginal relations’’ disappear. The reason that Adams does not need to explain where the aborigines went after the ‘‘purchase’’ in order to make coherent his latter supposition of continental emptiness is the rhetorical power that Britain’s colonial oppression has to make Indians disappear. The rhetorical power of ‘‘Britain’’ here stems from what Amy Kaplan has called the ‘‘enduring assumption’’ that ‘‘the American struggle for independence from 44 c h a p t e r o n e

British colonialism makes U.S. culture inherently anti-imperialist’’ (‘‘Left Alone with America,’’ 12). A new kind of relation with Native Americans and the North American continent exists side by side with the inevitable expansion of American empire. This strategy, I argued in the introduction, is structurally embedded in Monroe’s 1823 message. There the supposed ‘‘free and independent’’ nature of the Western Hemisphere, constructed through the notion of solidarity with recently independent Latin American republics, both explains why there can be no future European colonization and makes an implicit claim to U.S. supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. Adams’s 1821 Address makes even more evident the simultaneous and interdependent production of anticolonial difference and imperial destiny by casting American Indians as a new ‘‘condition’’ that fosters revolutionary difference yet disappears pages later when Adams explains that the ‘‘empty’’ North American continent itself demanded expansion and independence. Lydia Maria Child also makes use of this strategy in her novel Hobomok. Like Adams’s Address, Hobomok was intended to be a response to the problem of cultural dependence on Britain, and like the Address, its narrative of American history plays ‘‘the Indian’’ and the colonial oppression of Great Britain off each other. That Child’s triangulation of American national identity, British colonialism, and the Native presence resonates with Adams’s and Monroe’s is, however, no extraordinary coincidence; her strategy was inspired by a formula for American literature widely promoted by literary nationalists of the 1820s and 1830s, especially in the North American Review, a periodical to which Adams had close ties through his friendships with the Everetts and other members of the Boston elite. Although Child states through the narrator of her preface that she seeks to follow the example of Sir Walter Scott— the author Adams criticized—in using novelistic romance to narrate national history (3–4), she joins Adams in responding to accusations of national inferiority with a narrative strategy recommended in the North American Review’s promotion of literary nationalism. Critics have pointed out that Child’s inspiration for the novel came from literary essays and editorials in the North American Review that recommended the use of unique, national material in American novels, such as local landscapes, historical events, and especially American Indians (see Karcher and Mills). Child claims to have begun Hobomok immediately after reading John Gorham Palfrey’s review of ‘‘Yamoyden,’’ s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 45

a poem about Native and European conflicts during King Philip’s War. In it Palfrey praises ‘‘the unequaled fitness of our early history for the purposes of a work of fiction’’ and judges the ‘‘attitude of the Indian tribes’’ during the first century of settlement to be a subject matter of ‘‘highly poetical interest’’ (183–84). Other critics, such as William Channing, Rufus Choate, Gerald Knapp, and William Gilmore Simms, made similar recommendations in the North American Review, promoting the historical subjects of settlement among, conflict with, and displacement of American Indians as unique national subject matter qualified to compete with Britain in the realm of cultural production.8 The representational Indians they proposed would serve a narrative purpose similar to that of Adams’s citation of ‘‘aboriginal relations’’— a demonstration of the unique situation of settlers in the New World. One 1815 North American Review article, ‘‘American Language and Literature,’’ regretted that ‘‘the colonial existence’’ opposed literary originality because in all matters literary the colony ‘‘must wait for a decision on its merits or demerits, from the higher authorities in London’’ (Channing, 312). Although the United States was no longer a colony, the article reasons, it would remain subject to such cultural colonialism as long as it maintained the same language as Great Britain. Its one hope for ‘‘genuine originality’’ was in emulating Indian language. The Indian’s language, the article explains, ‘‘is as bold as his unshackled conceptions, and as rapid as his own step. It is now as rich as the soil on which he was nurtured, and ornamented with every blossom that blows in his path’’ (Channing, 313). In its freedom and its ties with nature, this language could be a tool to mark the revolutionary difference from the Old World; it supports the claims that Monroe and James Polk after him would make about the Western Hemisphere’s fundamentally different political system rooted almost mystically in the very soil.9 As a literary commodity, writing about Indians might corner enough of the local market to prevent British books from arriving in ‘‘bales and hogsheads,’’ but, more important, it could provide a symbol for the essential difference of America. While this identification of the United States with the Indian effaces cultural ties to Great Britain, the act of turning the Indian into a racialized commodity also supports a cultural nationalism that justifies U.S. expansion and, ironically, the displacement of actual native tribes. As in Adams’s Address, the narrative use of the Indian to claim a unique cultural situation for American literature simultaneously implies anticolonialism and expansionist destiny. Democratic independence and an 46 c h a p t e r o n e

intimate connection to the land are performed through a fictive identification with ‘‘the Indian,’’ and more specifically through the process of transcribing—ventriloquizing—‘‘Indian speech.’’ Writing ‘‘the Indian’’ proves that Americans are different from the supposedly weaker peoples who would succumb to cultural or territorial encroachments, and who had failed to generate ‘‘proper’’ signs of culture. As a reviewer of Washington Irving optimistically claims, no longer is ‘‘an American writer . . . thought an Indian with a feather in his cap instead of his hand’’ (‘‘Bracebridge Hall,’’ 211). For the interests of literary nationalism and the literary marketplace, one must write the Indian or be the (colonized) Indian. Furthermore, narratives about the history of Indians and American colonists often functioned as premature success stories by writing the ongoing struggle of American Indians out of the present, and by making their disappearance a foregone conclusion. This elegiac power, often noted by readers of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, is implicit but evident in the advice given by an 1818 reviewer in the North American Review to ‘‘hasten’’ in literary use of the Indian because the actual Indian will soon disappear: ‘‘Let us hasten;—for already has the cultivator leveled a monumental mound, that spoke of more than writings might preserve. . . . Already are the hills surmounted, and the rocks violated with a hammer, which the Indian regarded with distant awe’’ (Knapp, 176). The romanticization of ‘‘natural’’ native culture as more articulate than writing does not contradict Knapp’s resignation that the Indian’s ancient and natural expressions were destined to be displaced by an inevitable and ambitious ‘‘cultivator.’’ Child adopted this strategy for Hobomok, and, as I will show, her representation of Native Americans enacted a simultaneous claim to anticolonialism and territorial expansion. Both Child’s and Adams’s histories are fictions that identify the United States with ‘‘the Indian’’ to construct a motivated instability in American national identity, and that rely on the rhetoric of the home to separate the United States from the Old World and grant it domestic authority over subordinates. This process of racial identification and domestic location was a basis for the relationship that future articulations of the Monroe Doctrine would posit between the United States and Latin America. In neither Adams nor Child is Latin America explicitly mentioned or figured; instead, imperial processes are narrated in a story of expansion that reifies AngloAmerican Puritan settlement in New England as the geographic and historical origin of ‘‘America.’’ But these stories in fact organize the key s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 47

tropes and ideas that would impel and conceal U.S. imperialism in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. n Hobomok is centrally concerned with the political and cultural context to which Adams’s Address speaks: the current and future relationships among the United States, Europe, and the North American continent. The narrative tension in Hobomok comes from a marriage plot (will Mary Conant marry her Anglican suitor Charles Brown despite her Puritan father’s disapproval?) and from the uncertain location of that marriage (if they marry, will Mary and Charles return to Britain?). The latter question is raised at moments throughout the novel when Mary and Charles envision their future together on the other side of the Atlantic, back in the aristocratic courts that they remember fondly and prefer to Puritanism’s rigid doctrines, stark culture, and repressive social codes. Charles, picturing their happier future in Britain, sees himself ‘‘invested in the civil gown,’’ hearing ‘‘the applause of princes and nobles,’’ and envisions Mary, ‘‘restored to her original rank’’ in the aristocracy (93). Yet how can they return if the book is to be a ‘‘New England novel’’? The question is a problem because the plot follows the convention in postrevolutionary romance of letting the struggle for companionate marriage function as an allegory for the founding of the United States. Inspired by calls for a national literature, American historical romances of the 1820s typically culminated in a struggle for a ‘‘democratic’’ marriage, pitting the interests of two virtuous young lovers in freely chosen marriage against the interests of their parents in more traditional, hierarchical values of aristocratic family ties or inherited wealth.10 The national household is refounded in the companionate marriage, with the cycle of patriarchal authority broken by domestic consent and affective individualism. Child follows this convention, although Hobomok’s revolutionary marriage plot differs by complicating the generational process of revolt. The story of revolutionary marriage begins not with Charles and Mary but with her mother and father, who as a young couple in England marry in defiance of Mary’s grandfather, the Earl of Rivers, and his concern with aristocratic tradition and inherited wealth. Mr. Conant ‘‘had aspired to the hand of a wealthy and noble lady. Young, volatile and beautiful, . . . she left the magnificent halls of her father, and incurred his lasting displeasure by uniting her fortunes with her humble lover’’ (8). Yet this marriage, understood as revolutionary in its transgression 48 c h a p t e r o n e

of class boundaries, is beset by the ‘‘misfortune and poverty’’ arranged by Mr. Conant’s ‘‘enemies,’’ and these adversities cause his natural religious inspiration to become ‘‘tinged’’ by his pride and resentment (8). Mr. Conant’s resentment of the class structure that excluded him sours his religious inspiration and turns his search for class mobility and liberty of conscience in the New World into a rigid, irrational Calvinism. This failure to keep religious inspiration pure compels Mr. Conant to reproduce the excesses of patriarchal authority in his very attempts to reject Anglican culture. The marriage of Mary and Charles should purify the taint of human pride that has carried down to the second generation and break the cycle of revolt by refounding patriarchal and aristocratic authority as domestic nurture. However, throughout the novel their union risks regression— back to Britain instead of going forward into North America, and back into a replication of Mr. Conant’s proud but irrational revolt. Charles’s and Mary’s occasional angry and rash reactions to Mr. Conant’s tyranny threaten their ability to form a rational egalitarian household in place of the tyrannical fathers of the previous two generations. When Charles is tried and exiled back to England for promoting his religion, he angrily responds from the position of British royal power. He accuses the Puritans of persuading people not to ‘‘march under the King’s colors’’ and ‘‘pretending’’ that their consciences are wounded by ‘‘popish’’ rituals in order to conceal ‘‘traitorous purposes’’ against the king; Charles warns that ‘‘the sceptre can reach you here, and you may yet tremble at its touch’’ (73). This regression leaves religious inspiration tainted by pride, and threatens reactionary alignment with the authority of British aristocracy and the previous generation. Hobomok uses two forces to reorient the young couple’s British identity: domestic affection and, in Adams’s words, ‘‘relations with the aboriginal inhabitants.’’ In the exchange above, it is the maternal influence of the dying, angelic Mrs. Conant that leads Charles away from angry revolt and toward the liberal domesticity that the novel posits as an incipient American value. Mrs. Conant reminds the young lovers of the pain that Mary’s revolt from her father has brought her, and she longs for the scene of forgiveness between father and daughter that emblematizes for Child domestic values and liberal faith. As a result, Charles regrets his angry threat to stir British power against the colonists. Yet because Hobomok’s refounding of the nation must authorize the domestic sympathies of the characters without reconciling American and British interests, the s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 49

novel’s representation of natives is a more crucial force in the couple’s reorientation. ‘‘Relations with the aboriginal inhabitants’’ are used to affix the scene of national refounding to the site of the North American continent, and as a plot device to disrupt the cycle of irrational regression and revolt between Britain and its colonies. This ‘‘disruption’’ is foreshadowed in an early scene featuring a series of interruptions. Mary, saying good-bye to a visitor departing the colony, asks him to pass greetings along to her grandfather and give ‘‘many, many kind wishes to good old England’’ (16). Her father, angry at her wish, interrupts to reinterpret her message typologically: ‘‘Yes, . . . many kind wishes to the godly remnant who are among them. . . . say ye to them that ‘in Salem is his tabernacle, and his dwelling-place in Zion. Here he will break the arrows of the bow, the shield, the sword, and the battle.’ But to them that are yet given to the pride of prelacy . . . say to them that their damnation sleepeth not’’ (17). Mr. Conant’s speech is in turn fiercely interrupted and reinterpreted by the Indian Corbitant, who speaks in his own language. Hobomok translates: ‘‘Your father say Indian arrow be broken at Naumkeak . . .—Corbitant say the feather be first red with white man’s blood’’ (17). This series of disruptions and reinterpretations suggests the role of the Indian in complicating the rivalry between British tradition and its antithesis (and unwitting replication) in the colonies. Corbitant’s interpretation, unconcerned with the homeland to which Mary desires to return or the petty doctrinal battle in which Mr. Conant is absorbed, acts as a third term to complicate the two generation’s insufficient revolts. His disruption of the generational conflict inserts ‘‘the Indian’’ into the bonds between the colonists and the mother country, foreshadowing the plot’s use of the character of Hobomok to disrupt the cycle of transatlantic rivalry and reaction begun with the Earl of Rivers’s first aristocratic prejudices. Hobomok enacts this disruption at the novel’s climax, when the young couple’s return to England is precluded by a final plot twist wherein as a result of her ‘‘partial derangement’’ at the erroneous news of Charles’s death, Mary marries Hobomok, lives with him for two years, and bears their child. When Charles returns, Hobomok conveniently and uncomplainingly chooses to head west, divorcing Mary and disappearing so that she may marry her true love. But, as Mary explains, she cannot return to England with Charles because there her half-Indian boy would disgrace her. As Priscilla Wald and others have argued, marriage with Hobomok and the offspring of that union narratively de-anglicizes 50 c h a p t e r o n e

or ‘‘Americanizes’’ the young couple (Wald, 33–34). I would add that this Americanization functions in part by recasting the familial relationship from patriarchal authority to domestic consent—it teaches Mr. Conant the danger of his authoritarian ways. Earlier in the novel we see Mary’s grandfather, the Earl of Rivers, offer his daughter belated forgiveness after he loses her to the hardships of the colonies and immanent death. Because of Mary’s marriage to Hobomok, Mr. Conant is given an opportunity not to repeat the scene of belated forgiveness; that marriage is cast as a death from which she can return after her father has learned his lesson. The novel devotes the same number of pages to describing Mary’s decision and two years of marriage to Hobomok as it does to describing the devastating effect of the news of Mary’s presumed death and then of her marriage on Mr. Conant, suggesting that the narrative importance of the marriage lies in the effect it has on parental authority. While Mr. Conant first concludes that he would rather have Mary dead than wedded to an Indian, parental affection changes his mind after Hobomok disappears and Charles and Mary return to the Puritan settlement. There Mr. Conant’s religious intolerance and patriarchal authority are transformed into domestic sympathy and consent: he indicates that he shares in the blame for Mary’s ‘‘transgression’’ with Hobomok by asking God’s forgiveness for both his daughter and himself. His own position as the head of the household is displaced when Mary and Charles erect a new house near his, and ‘‘through the remainder of his life, the greater part of his evenings were spent by that fireside. Disputes on matters of opinion would sometimes arise; but Brown seldom forgot his promises of forbearance, and they were always brought to an amicable termination’’ (149). As an irrational act, Mary’s marriage to Hobomok parallels Charles’s angry threat to seek retribution in British authority. Yet unlike the threat to return to Britain, the marriage to Hobomok is a revolt that enables Mary to stay on the continent and enables her father to offer forgiveness without acknowledging British power and without signifying a transatlantic reunification. By reading marriage to Hobomok as a device whereby the union between Charles and Mary is reoriented away from Britain and beyond the cycle of angry revolt and reaction, I offer an interpretation that conflicts with some prevailing arguments about the novel. Some critics have seen Mary’s marriage to Hobomok as the central moment of the novel and argued for its radical antiracist significance, while others have seen the sequence as tangential to Child’s main interests and have argued s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 51

that it serves only to emphasize the extent of trouble that will arise if white women are not given means to make rational decisions and marry whom they wish.11 Carolyn Karcher, a critic who holds the former position, acknowledges that the novel’s closure requires native disappearance—either through Hobomok’s exodus to the west, or in what Karcher calls the ‘‘cultural genocide’’ implicit in the fate of Charles Hobomok Conant, Hobomok and Mary’s son, whose Indian ancestry is quietly forgotten after his adoption by Charles Brown.12 Nevertheless, she argues that the novel contains countering strands of progressive ideology in its representation of the American Revolution as a revolt from patriarchal power, its generally sympathetic portrayal of Hobomok, and its doubling of Mary’s and Hobomok’s religious sensibility. I do not deny that these ‘‘progressive’’ elements exist, nor do I think that they are merely the interested projection of late-twentieth-century feminists, as Karcher’s critics have sometimes argued. Instead I want to suggest that the novel’s valorization of domestic authority and its identification of ‘‘the Indian’’ with privileged feminine positions contribute to, rather than counter, the novel’s fantasy of New World empire. Hobomok, like Adams’s Address, draws on cultural debates about domesticity and woman’s authority to reconcile anticolonialism and imperialism. A crucial difference is that while Adams isolates his domestic exemplar in the home, Child’s comparison of national origins to a woman’s search for self-determination envisions a more active and mobile feminine power. As the female protagonist, Mary is the subject of the reader’s identification and the embodiment of individualism. Her struggle for selfdetermination is mapped onto the marriage plot, making her right to marry Charles Brown emblematic of her right to assert control over her body and her will. Nancy Armstrong has argued that in the late eighteenth century, female protagonists of the Richardsonian model were the fictive embodiment of emergent bourgeois individualism because of their dramatic and frequently repeated struggles to take control of their own bodies and class position in sexual and romantic self-determination. Gayatri Spivak argues that this figure of modern individual-as-female in British literature functioned to represent the national project of imperialism to the British positively. ‘‘Feminist individualism in the age of imperialism,’’ Spivak demonstrates through the case of Jane Eyre, tells the story of a woman’s struggle for control and familial legitimacy achieved through companionate love and social/ religious mission, and harnesses the reader’s desire for this narrative 52 c h a p t e r o n e

movement to the interests of ‘‘the imperialist narrativization of history’’ embedded in these texts (244). Hobomok also uses the textual construct of female individualism to articulate imperialist destiny, but within the anticolonialist identity of the Monroe Doctrine. While the novel’s Puritan characters warn against the danger of too much freedom and ‘‘liberty of conscience,’’ Mary and the other female characters search for freedom of choice in marriage. Sally Oldham’s marriage plot emphasizes the significance that the novel places on female self-determination as a basis for New World difference. For example, when Sally rudely rebukes an unwanted suitor, she and Mary agree that it was fortunate Mr. Conant did not see this female impropriety; Sally says: ‘‘Though he is your father, to my thinking he is ever fond of keeping folks in a straight jacket; and I’m sure our belt is likely to be buckled tight enough by the great folks there in London’’ (19). Sally’s struggle to negotiate the community’s rules and strictures in order to marry the man she loves is represented as the true search for liberty of conscience, and social and patriarchal strictures on her search for companionate love are here compared to the ‘‘tightened belt’’ of colonial determination and forced economic production. Within this framework, Hobomok’s voluntary exodus allows Mary to return to the Puritan community and finally overcome its social strictures to marry the man of her choice. Furthermore, Hobomok’s romantic devotion proves her racial superiority and moral worthiness to inherit the land that he passes on to her. That Mary and Hobomok’s son, little Charles Hobomok Conant, forgets his Indian ancestry and departs to study in Europe underscores the narrative logic that grants stewardship over the New World to virtuous, white authority by doubly erasing the native presence of Hobomok’s son. Yet an argument about the imperialist implications of Mary’s marriage to Hobomok must acknowledge the problem of miscegenation that has absorbed the novel’s critics. How could Hobomok have been effective in the imperialist narrativization of history when much of its criticism was focused on what even today’s readers find to be the novel’s most striking element: its representation of a white woman choosing marriage (and sex) with a nonwhite man? 13 Feminist critics of the 1990s and literary critics of the 1820s have been interested in the novel’s interracial marriage for a similar reason: its transgression of conventional literary representations of white feminine chastity. While reviewers of the 1820s approved of the novel’s contribution to the project of literary nationals e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 53

ism, they disapproved of the miscegenation aspect of the plot, which one critic condemned as a ‘‘revolting train of events’’ (‘‘Hobomok’’ [review]) and another simply called ‘‘in bad taste’’ (Sparks). Because of this critical reaction, it might seem that the construct of white woman’s sexual purity in this case prevented gender from being an effective medium for the cultural ideology of imperialism. Indeed, Child’s formulation might have seemed more compelling and less problematic had she inverted the gender roles of her characters, pairing a male Anglo-American and a female Native American to dramatize the symbolic acceptance by the native of the white man’s superiority in a version of the Pocahontas myth that would remain strong for centuries, or if she had followed the convention of tragically killing off the mother and child of her miscegenated union.14 Acknowledging this complication, however, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the novel is subversive in its refusal to use a less problematic device for the symbolic transfer of land and decolonization of American minds. In fact, what is most crucial to the gendered trope of U.S. imperialism that Hobomok introduces is its feminization of the young nation and infusion of American destiny with domestic virtue. Hobomok aligns Mary and the United States, at one point referring to the colony as ‘‘a daughter, blushing into life with all the impetuosity of youthful vigor’’ (100). This implied metaphor comparing Mary to the nation allows Child to simultaneously naturalize gender and call on that naturalized concept of ‘‘femininity’’ as a basis on which to legitimate nation. The chapter that introduces Sally’s struggle for a companionate marriage and compares patriarchal and colonial ‘‘straight jackets’’ begins with an epigram from Mary Shelly: In court or hamlet, hut or grove, Where woman is, there is love. Whate’er their nation, form or feature, Woman’s the same provoking creature.’’ (15) The verse refers to an essential femininity identified with ‘‘love’’ and with its ‘‘provoking’’ qualities; although this essential femininity is the same everywhere, Hobomok seems to emphasize that it is its most ‘‘natural’’ self in ‘‘nature’’—in other words, in the New World. Like Adams’s Address, which naturalizes national authority and destiny through assumptions about woman and the home, Hobomok depicts a struggle for domestic individualism that is both a return to ‘‘nature’’ and an articulation of the expansive destiny of the United States.15 54 c h a p t e r o n e

All of Mary’s struggles are cast as a struggle to purify custom and nation in ‘‘the natural,’’ whether this be natural religion, woman’s natural religious feeling, or woman’s natural right to self determination. For example, her instinctive, liberal Unitarianesque religion is contrasted with the ritual she secretly performs at the beginning of the novel, a pagan chant linked with pre-Christian witchcraft and with the ‘‘savage religion’’ of Hobomok, who appears a moment later to engage in a similar rite. Resorting to this ritual is meant to suggest the initial insufficiency of her revolt from patriarchal authority and her place within the cycle of irrational reaction; to rebel from her father’s strict religious control, Mary dabbles in witchcraft. Later, however, her and Hobomok’s rituals are superseded when both have experiences coded as true or natural religion—alone in the forest, unencumbered by superstition or ritual, both meditate on nature and God’s power. The narrator explains that Hobomok ‘‘had never read of God, but he had heard his chariot wheels in the distant thunder, and seen his drapery in the clouds. In moods like these, thoughts which he could not grasp, would pass before him, and he would pause to wonder what they were, and whence they came’’ (34). Hobomok’s instinctual Christianity is best explained by Mrs. Conant, whose domestic refounding of the nation is enabled by direct access to religious inspiration through nature. The Bible, she believes, is ‘‘a flaming cherubim, turning every way’’ and subject to misinterpretation, but nature is a more accurate sign of God’s will and presence. ‘‘In creation,’’ she concludes, ‘‘one may read their fill. It is God’s library—the first Bible he ever wrote’’ (76). Her preference for nature reinforces her belief that ‘‘a humble heart was more than a strong mind, in perceiving the things appertaining to divine truth,’’ and that ‘‘to know every thing about religion’’ does little good if one can ‘‘feel little of its power’’ (76). Hobomok’s ability to ‘‘feel’’ religious power derives from his uncivilized state; his close tie with nature seems to align him with Mrs. Conant in her access to a feminine ‘‘feeling’’ posited as superior to the civilized and masculine presumption of ‘‘knowing.’’ 16 Critics have argued that this similarity between Hobomok and the Conant women enriches the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of the title character, because it identifies him with the novel’s most privileged and reader-identified characters. But as much as the scene borrows femininity to create a positive portrayal of Indians, the novel also conversely borrows ‘‘Indianness’’ to validate national claims to domestic authority on the North American continent. As in Adams’s Address, ‘‘relations s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 55

with Indians’’ and with the natural environment of the New World allow for a new kind of civilization. In Hobomok, this new civilization is one where a woman can shape her own destiny, free from the conquest and tyranny that mark the quarrels of Mary’s kinsmen. This is evident in Mary’s parallel moment of ‘‘natural’’ religious inspiration, which like Hobomok’s comes from looking up at the heavens and expressing feelings inspired by nature and unmediated by paternal religious authority. As Mary watches the evening star, she achieves a moment of understanding that creates a signifying chain linking her to the young republic and the vision of a sympathetic God. The star seems to her ‘‘a bright diadem on the brow of some celestial spirit,’’ and she addresses it with admiration: ‘‘Fair planet . . . how various are the scenes thou passest over in thy shining course. The solitary nun, in the recesses of her cloister, looks on thee as I do now; mayhap too, the courtly circle of king Charles are watching the motion of thy silver chariot. The standard of war is fluttering in thy beam and the busy merchantman breaks thy radiance on the ocean. Thou hast kissed the cross-crowned turrets of the Catholic, and the proud spires of the Episcopalian. Thou hast smiled on distant mosques and temples and now thou art shedding light on the sacrifice heap of the Indian and the rude dwellings of the Calvinist. And can it be, as my father says, that of all the multitude of people who view thy cheering rays, so small a remnant are pleasing in the sight of God? Oh, no. It cannot be thus. Would that my vision, like thine, could extend throughout the universe, that I might look down unmoved on the birth and decay of human passions, hopes and prejudices.’’ (48) Critics have noticed in this passage evidence of Child’s cultural relativism and religious tolerance, but it needs to be emphasized that Mary speaks these words as the voice of the young nation. She aspires not only to exert the impartial magnanimity of the evening star, but also to have its range. Continually moving and with a vision that ‘‘extends throughout the universe,’’ the mobile evening star nonetheless remains ‘‘unmoved,’’ that is, unbiased toward individual human races, and unmoved by worldly engagements in war and commerce. The quotation expresses a religious liberalism and democratic egalitarianism that implicitly prove the young republic worthy to ‘‘extend its vision’’ infinitely without involving itself in the ‘‘passions, hopes and prejudices’’ that create human rivalries. In this way, the ‘‘bright diadem 56 c h a p t e r o n e

on the brow of some celestial spirit’’ resembles Adams’s figure of domestic exemplar, whose ‘‘frontlet’’ beams with the ‘‘ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence,’’ and who remains ‘‘the ruler of her own spirit’’ by transcending ‘‘the wars of interest and intrigue’’ that plague Europe. Yet as the novel concludes, the metaphorical relation between the domestic yet transcendent nation and the ‘‘unmoved’’ evening star is layered with a slightly different comparison between the United States and another natural object, a ‘‘mighty tree.’’ The novel’s final line gives us the assurance that ‘‘the devoted, romantic love of Hobomok was never forgotten by its object; and his faithful service to the ‘Yengees’ are still remembered with gratitude; though the tender slip which he protected, has since become a mighty tree, and the nations of the earth seek refuge beneath its branches’’ (150). The slippage between Mary and the ‘‘tender slip’’ in this passage indicates that Hobomok gave faithful service to both Mary and the young nation, and this close association between the two endows the ‘‘mighty tree’’ that the nation had become in Child’s day with her heroine’s domestic virtue and natural authority. But in the context of the 1820s, to what ‘‘nations seeking refuge’’ does this quotation refer? Certainly the phrase in part refers to the idea of Indian tribes seeking paternalist protection and care from the United States, as Hobomok once protected the ‘‘tender slip’’ of his wife Mary. The inversion from protector to protected—husband to child—indicates a transfer of power and ownership, while aligning the United States with the stationary tree locates it permanently and naturally on the territory inherited from Hobomok. But the phrase ‘‘nations of the earth’’ seems to encompass more than just this inversion. The quotation could be using ‘‘nations’’ as ‘‘peoples,’’ indicating that immigrants from western European nations came to the United States to ‘‘seek refuge’’ in religious and political freedoms or economic opportunity. Alternately, it could refer to the controversial 1822 U.S. recognition of newly established Latin American republics and Monroe’s 1823 Message, because both cast the United States as an active protector or older brother to the other independent republics on the American continents, nations that on a map lie literally ‘‘beneath’’ outreaching branches of the United States. Or perhaps instead Child implies for the nation a more global reach than Adams preferred, imagining the nation as simultaneously unmoved by petty rivalries, yet interested everywhere in overseeing liberty. At any rate, casting the United States s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 57

as a ‘‘protector’’ of nations emphasizes the importance of benevolent expansion in the description of the ‘‘unmoved’’ evening star. Just as the star’s vision can justly encompass the various religions and interests because of its impartial magnanimity, the growth of the mighty tree is welcomed as a source of protection. The slippage from the ‘‘unmoved’’ champion of self-determination to the ranging or growing mighty protector replicates the contradiction that Adams justified with the loophole in his anticolonial axiom, through which his anticolonial proclamation was reformulated to state that ‘‘colonial subjection’’ is justifiable only in protective relationships (12). In Hobomok, that loophole allows Child to refound the nation on insular domestic virtue and self-determination while authorizing the young republic’s protective expansion. I have argued that Hobomok uses several of the same rhetorical strategies as Adams does in order to locate the nation and maintain the contradictions suspended in the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine. Both Adams and Child use the implied metaphor of woman-as-nation to draw on a complex tangle of associations like separate spheres, domestic authority of the home, feminine natural and emotional intuition, and individual self-determination. And this tangle of associations helps both writers characterize the new nation as simultaneously isolated in the New World and authorized to virtuously expand. But to what degree was Child actually influenced by Adams’s Address, or Monroe’s Message? This question cannot be answered conclusively. The widespread publication of Adams’s Address and its participation in a debate about American and British literary and political relations suggest that she may have read the speech, especially because of her interest in these issues while writing Hobomok. Furthermore, her residence in Massachusetts and her subsequent marriage to David Lee Child, who was editor of the Massachusetts Journal, a newspaper sponsored by John Quincy Adams, suggest that she may have been more particularly aware of Adams’s career. Presidential messages were widely reproduced and commented on in newspapers, and the U.S. recognition of the Latin American republics was widely debated and discussed in publications read by Child, including the North American Review. However, none of these facts is sufficient to guarantee intellectual influence, and, more important, my model for the influence of culture on the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine does not stand on this sort of proof. The Monroe Doctrine as a ‘‘Doctrine’’ was not created by Monroe or Adams. Their texts, as described in my introduction, built on, reformulated, and harnessed ideas 58 c h a p t e r o n e

already in circulation. Thus my point is not that Child was influenced by the writings of Adams or Monroe; instead I am arguing that whether Hobomok’s similarities to Adams’s Address result from intellectual influence or parallel development, her novel contributed to the refinement, contestation, and authorization of the ideas with which Adams and Monroe were also working, that these ideas were in the process of gaining hegemonic authority in Child’s novel as well as in Adams’s and Monroe’s speeches. Furthermore, Child’s story of familial relations elided the contradictions of simultaneous anticolonial virtue and ‘‘protective’’ imperialism, developing the domestic narrative that would be crucial to the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine. This effectiveness suggests the importance of romance and narrativity in general to making sense of U.S. empire and assumptions of American exceptionalism. I stated above that my argument implies not that Child expressed in literary form the policies advocated by Adams and Monroe, but that she was engaged in a more widespread conversation about national identity and location that crucially intersected with their concerns. My placement of Child in this nationalist project, however, further begs the question of her authorial intention. Am I not reductively presuming, as literary critics have been reluctant to do, that in writing Hobomok Child was merely another of the ‘‘acquiescent mouthpieces of the consensual mythologies of nineteenth-century democracy’’ (Gould, 93)? Child’s later career of dedicated reform offers a reason for critics’ reluctance. As the work of Karcher and Bruce Mills demonstrates, situating Hobomok in Child’s life has required critics to read in her oeuvre a trajectory toward radicalism that was as yet incomplete in that first novel. This trajectory has also been applied to John Quincy Adams—the apparent disjuncture between his ambitious expansionism and his postpresidential career as an antislavery reformer sympathetic to the plight of American Indians has puzzled historians and led them to argue that Adams often sacrificed his personal ethics for his ambition in his early career.17 In 1829 Adams wrote in his diary that ‘‘the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution is morally vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our revolution can be justified’’ (quoted in Weeks, 191), and at other times he expressed distaste for policies of Indian removal. So what do we make of his Address’s deliberate construction of a binary between the anticolonial democracy of the United States, on the one hand, and the ‘‘conquest and servitude’’ of the Old World, on the other? Two conclusions might be that Adams had not yet recognized the ‘‘morally s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 59

vicious’’ bargain at the time of his Address or that he was affirming widely held beliefs to boost his popularity during holiday festivities. Critics have drawn similar conclusions with Child, although she is typically granted more subversive intent. Bruce Mills has argued that Child’s ability to give radical projects cultural influence and authority depended on her tactic of enveloping subversive ideas in conventional beliefs and literary forms, a strategy that he argues was incipient in the limited radical implications of Mary Conant’s marriages. But such attempts to create teleology and trajectory too often depend on the critical assumption that the author is a unified subject and rational being, forgetting the mundane human ability to hold two irreconcilable beliefs at once. My argument, in contrast, depends on the assumption that maintenance of cultural ideologies such as the Monroe Doctrine requires a motivated blindness, an ability at once to recognize a contradiction and to forget its existence. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, such forgetting is in fact the cornerstone of nation. Through romantic fantasy, authors like Child worked through contradictions that troubled political constructs like national identity and foreign policy. Furthermore, while I have emphasized that the seemingly ‘‘subversive’’ elements in Child’s text were crucial to the formulation of what would later be known as the Monroe Doctrine, this does not necessarily deny their subversive role in other cultural conversations. Child’s representation of Mary’s self-determination and the domestic ideology that Child would pioneer undoubtedly opened some paths toward feminist reform, which intersected in the lives of many nineteenth-century women reformers with abolitionist and antiracist politics. Child creates a kind of domestic authority in Hobomok and her later writings that allows for a richer, more active, and more mobile feminine power than the one Adams normalized in his comparison of the nation to the passive angel in the home. Through this revision, however, Child’s more powerful version of domestic authority might even have deepened the appeal of exceptionalist ideology for some middle-class white women. For what is progressive in Child’s work—her construction of feminine individualism, her sympathetic portrayal of an Indian character, her ability to see a fate other than tragic doom after miscegenation—coexists with the seeds of racism and imperialism in her texts. These seeds would flower into the problematics of the female abolitionist movement that Karen SánchezEppler has described, in which middle-class white women used the cause of antislavery to wage a more self-interested battle to increase their own 60 c h a p t e r o n e

societal power without significantly calling racial inequality into question.18 And offshoots of these seeds of racism and imperialism continue to trouble feminism in the late twentieth century, as the feminist scholarship of third-world women and women of color has clearly shown.19 The next chapter continues to examine ways in which writers engaged with and negotiated the split identity of U.S. postcolonialism and imperialism, delving deeper into fiction’s power to express and resolve cultural anxieties about the colonial inheritance of the United States. Adams claimed that the axiom he presented in his Fourth of July Address anticipated the question of ‘‘whether we too shall annex to our federative government a great system of colonial establishments,’’ and this chapter has shown that the answer to this question in Adams’s speech as in Child’s novel was an equivocal ‘‘no.’’ But the next chapter explores ways that this question was more vigorously debated as the United States expanded across the continent, and as some Americans looked toward the Pacific as a future site of U.S. empire. I will examine the debate on U.S. global expansion that arose around the U.S. Navy’s ‘‘opening’’ of Japan, paying attention to how this debate was rhetorically and narratively staged in writing that adhered to and crucially developed Adams’s vision of a virtuous and isolated nation. As in Hobomok, where cross-racial identification provides a mechanism for authorizing the United States as both a nation distinct from European relations and a protective power of the New World, the figure of the slave will be central to this location of U.S. authority and destiny.

s e p a r a t e ( h e m i ) s p h e r e s 61

chapter two selling jim crow

from salem to yokohama

According to the historian Dexter Perkins, ‘‘If words were centrally significant, we should have to date the birth of the Monroe Doctrine from 1853’’ (A History of the Monroe Doctrine, 99). That was the year when what had been called ‘‘Monroe’s principles’’ or ‘‘the words of Monroe’’ became known by their now familiar name, as newspapers for the first time widely used ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ in their coverage of congressional debate over a proposed joint resolution to affirm the 1823 pronouncement. Although they failed to have Monroe’s words declared a legally sanctioned policy, the resolution’s supporters did consolidate them into a linguistic entity, an important step toward the popular recognition and support that the Doctrine would have during the French intervention in Mexico after the Civil War and in early struggles over the building of a transisthmus canal in the 1880s. This consolidation, however, entailed more than just naming; it also required the balancing of several competing visions of American expansion and global influence. The resolution, introduced by Michigan senator Lewis Cass, was most directly a response to Britain’s recent claim to colonial possession of the Bay Islands off Honduras (Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1826–67, 209– 17). But Cass’s resolution added to his restatement of Monroe’s 1823 message a further promise: that while ‘‘the United States disclaim any design on the island of Cuba inconsistent with the laws of nations and their duties to Spain,’’ efforts of any other European powers to obtain Cuba would be taken as ‘‘unfriendly acts . . . to be resisted by all the means in [the United States’] power’’ (United States, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 90). Coming from Cass, a loyal Democrat, this expression of disinterest in possessing Cuba was somewhat disingenuous, as many of his Whig colleagues in the Senate were quick to point out. One opponent decried his proposal as a ‘‘filibustering resolution’’ put forward by ‘‘the

filibustering portion of the Congress’’ (133–34). Comparing the resolution to recent unsuccessful and illegal efforts by American adventurers to conquer Cuba was intended as a criticism, but it was not one that all Democrats resented. Louisiana senator Pierre Soulé, a member of the expansionist ‘‘Young American’’ wing of the Democratic party, took the opportunity to criticize Cass and other ‘‘Old Fogies’’ in his own party for both their failure to recognize the heroism of the Cuban filibusters and their ‘‘supremely fastidious’’ and hypocritical promise to wait passively for Cuba’s liberation instead of actively promoting U.S. annexation of the island. Filibustering, Soulé argued, was a central part of European as well as American foreign policy, and even in Monroe’s 1823 Message ‘‘there might be found some filibustering’’ (121).1 Soulé was not the only senator to take this opportunity to promote his particular expansionist agenda. With only weeks until the inauguration of the new Democratic and keenly expansionist president Franklin Pierce, congressmen vied to make their particular interests the center of attention. John Parker Hale, a Free Soiler from New Hampshire, proposed an amendment to Cass’s resolution that would repeat word for word the section on Cuba, only substituting ‘‘Canada’’ and ‘‘Great Britain’’ for ‘‘Cuba’’ and ‘‘Spain.’’ Hale complained that Democrats sought expansion far from home in the Caribbean when the real threat to American security was to the north: ‘‘Why, sir,’’ Hale asks, ‘‘are we going off the continent? Why are we going abroad? Why are we going to the very islands of the sea, when here at out doors, in our very midst, there is a country that possesses the means of annoying us infinitely more than Cuba ever can?’’ (United States, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 98). New York senator William H. Seward questioned the need for both Cass’s proposal and Hale’s amendment, insisting that while the Monroe Doctrine would inevitably prevail in the Western Hemisphere, the United States was ready to move on to a new field for expansion even further from home: ‘‘You are already the great Continental Power of America. But does that content you? I trust it does not. You want the commerce of the world, which is the empire of the world. This is to be looked for not on the American lakes, nor on the Atlantic coast, nor on the Caribbean sea, nor on the Mediterranean, nor on the Baltic, nor on the Atlantic ocean, but on the Pacific ocean and its islands and continents’’ (127). In the aggressive mood that followed victory over Mexico in 1848 and acquisition of California and the Oregon territory, all of these congresss e l l i n g j i m c r o w 63

men called for expansion, yet their visions differed in rate, direction, and purpose. And behind these different visions were the complicated racial and economic politics of section. While many Southern Democrats looked to the Caribbean for new slave states, a few Northerners discussed further expansion into British Canada, and commercially minded Whigs like Seward saw the future in Pacific trade routes. This tangle of interests in the 1850s was an example of what Amy Kaplan calls ‘‘The Anarchy of Empire’’ in her book by that title, and out of this anarchy emerged a conception of the Monroe Doctrine that in its productive ambiguity would become the dominant narrative for U.S. foreign policy. The Monroe Doctrine did not resolve these interests by deciding clearly in favor of any one of them; rather, it balanced them all behind an appeal to conservative isolation ‘‘at home’’ in the Western Hemisphere. To tell this story, I will focus on the 1850s vision of expansion that this emerging interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine most suppressed: Seward’s vision of Pacific commercial empire. In 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry led a squadron to Japan to force diplomatic negotiations and designate ports where U.S. merchants and whaling ships could buy supplies and seek shelter. This expedition also developed from the optimism of the era; with the newly acquired California coast as a base for trade routes to the fabled China market, schemes for annexing the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i) and forcing trade with Japan were suddenly serious questions. By connecting these two concerns of the Thirty-second Congress—the reification of the Monroe Doctrine and the ‘‘opening’’ of Japan, I want to describe a conceptual rivalry between vying spatial and ideological conceptions of U.S. global influence during this decade. The Monroe Doctrine mapped the relations between Europe, the United States, and the Americas, but its division of Old and New Worlds ignored Asia (as well as Africa) entirely. As the Pacific came into focus as a future site of American diplomatic and commercial influence in the 1850s, the possibilities of Monroe’s message as a meaningful narrative about America’s place in the world were squarely challenged. While John Quincy Adams’s and Monroe’s complex disavowal of imperialism tied the United States to its hemispheric ‘‘home,’’ Commodore Perry imagined a chain of island possession linking California to Asian markets. His negotiations with Japan were primarily to ensure ports for supplies, but Perry went beyond his orders to take possession of some of the Bonin Islands, a cluster of tiny, mostly unpopulated islands to the south of Japan. In a letter explaining his actions to the secretary of the navy, 64 c h a p t e r t w o

Perry reasoned that coming events would soon ‘‘make it necessary for the United States to extend its territorial jurisdiction beyond the limits of the western continent’’ (quoted in Wiley, 348). His superiors never affirmed his claim, and thus Perry’s imperial ambitions represent in this chapter an alternative mapping of American commercial and diplomatic influence that was suppressed just as the Monroe Doctrine came into linguistic existence. This chapter places two texts in the context of 1850s expansionist discourse: Frances Lister Hawks’s official account of Perry’s expedition, titled Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1856), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novelistic romance, The House of the Seven Gables (1851). This strange pairing of texts is not so random as it might at first seem. On his return voyage from Japan in 1854, Perry called at Hawthorne’s cramped office in Liverpool, England, where the celebrated author was serving as U.S. consul, and asked him to recommend a suitable person to turn Perry’s journals and those of the expedition’s officers into an official account of the historic expedition. None of the literary men suggested by Hawthorne appealed to Perry; Hawthorne wrote that he ‘‘spoke of Melville, and one or two others, but [Perry] seems to have some acquaintance with the literature of the day, and did not grasp very cordially at any name that I could think of ’’ (Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, 147–48). Perry had actually wanted Hawthorne himself, but he gracefully gave Hawthorne the opportunity to decline by suggesting that the author’s public duties probably prevented his accepting the task. Hawthorne did decline, but he later mused in his diary that writing the expedition’s narrative ‘‘would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or, for that matter, an old one: for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hacknied theme than Japan’’ (148). Perry’s first choice of Hawthorne was indirectly influenced by the sectional conflicts that fractured and strained expansionist enthusiasm in the mid-1850s. His expedition’s departure in 1852 had been greeted with some reservation but no serious opposition, and its mission to promote commercial relations in the Pacific, although officially kept secret, had been avidly discussed in many U.S. newspapers and journals. He left at a time when the course of expansion seemed manifest based on past experience. Franklin Pierce’s 1853 inaugural speech announced that ‘‘with an experience thus suggestive and cheering, the policy of my administration will not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 65

from expansion,’’ referring specifically to ‘‘certain possessions not within our jurisdiction’’—undoubtedly Cuba—that were essential to U.S. peace, commerce, and security (19). But during Pierce’s administration it also became evident that the rapid expansion of the 1840s, with its optimism and its anxious urge to escape class stratification and a multiplying and increasingly rebellious slave population, had ceased to function as a release valve or a jingoistic distraction. A Civil War would be fought and the power of Northern industrialists consolidated before plans similar to Perry’s and Pierce’s appeared again as real possibilities. And so when Perry returned in 1855 as the first outsider in centuries to negotiate successfully a treaty with the Japanese, he was greeted with less fanfare than had accompanied his departure. His treaty arrived in Washington six weeks after the Kansas-Nebraska Act signaled the inadequacy of the tenuous Compromise of 1850, and the ensuing strife was evidently absorbing the nation’s attention and testing its tolerance for controversial issues of expansion (Wiley, 455–56). As violence erupted over the status of slavery in the territories, Perry’s ambitious vision of Pacific expansion seemed only another troubling quarter from which the slavery question could erupt. Sorely disappointed, he viewed an official narrative written by a well-respected author as an opportunity to promote his vision and call attention to the diplomatic success that he felt was being underappreciated. Hawthorne was thus Perry’s first choice not only because of the writer’s famous romances, but also because of his political works, which included the highly successful campaign biography of Franklin Pierce and the 1845 editing of Horatio Bridge’s Journal of an African Cruiser, a positive account of Bridge’s service under Perry policing the slave trade and resolving conflicts between Africans and recolonized African Americans. Disappointed by Hawthorne, Perry hired Francis Lister Hawks, a historian, editor, and Episcopal clergyman, to publish the congressionally funded Narrative of the Expedition.2 Comparing the text that Hawks would produce with The House of the Seven Gables contributes to historicist efforts to understand the relationship of Hawthorne’s work with the political tensions of the 1850s,3 for the novel outlines a more compelling domestically and racially contained vision of American expansion than Hawks’s narrative. The two books give widely divergent responses to John Quincy Adams’s question about U.S. empire, an issue raised with new urgency after the Mexican-American War. Comparing these answers provides insight into the fractured expansionist interests 66 c h a p t e r t w o

of the 1850s and the ascent of the Monroe Doctrine as a preferred narrative of hemispheric isolation. Read in the context of this turbulent decade, the Narrative of the Expedition appears as a text that tries to promote Perry’s vision of U.S. empire to a sectionally divided audience ambivalent about expansion. On the one hand, expansionist discourses of the 1850s were invested in appealing narratives of westward-moving progress and the power of democracy and commerce to liberate and civilize; on the other hand, anxieties about class stratification, slavery, and racial difference revealed the contradictions in such national narratives, contradictions that would splinter parties along sectional lines. Hawks’s book is thus an ill-fated attempt to revise Adams’s invented tradition of hemispheric, anticolonial isolation into a destiny of progressive and mobile U.S. global power. While Hawks champions narratives of imperial progress that are strained in this divided, uncertain political climate, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables conceals the troubling implications of U.S. empire by composing an imaginary return to insularity and purity. The two texts offer opposing verdicts on the future of commercial progress and the 1840s anodyne of expansion. Like Child’s Hobomok, Hawthorne’s romance uses the figures of family and home to locate the nation; the text advocates a compromise between radical reform and conservatism that is also a turn away from mobile, porous borders. At a time when Adams’s injunction to ‘‘go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’’ was called into question, Hawthorne delineates the true space of U.S. progress inside of a secluded and homogeneous domestic sphere. While I will not speculate what kind of narrative Hawthorne might have written for Perry, I will suggest that in The House of the Seven Gables we see a crucial development in the story of an exceptional America that evaded (rather than extended) cultures of imperialism. n In the spring of 1852, preparations were being made for the departure of the Japan expedition. Perry was traveling the New England coast to procure samples of modern technology to offer as gifts to the Japanese, the navy was preparing steamships, and although no official announcements or explanations of the expedition had been offered by the outgoing Fillmore administration, several newspapers had begun debating its purpose and prospects (Wiley, 72–120). The New York Times lauded the ‘‘mutually beneficial trade’’ that might result from a treaty with Japan, but it supposed better results would come from a ‘‘less bels e l l i n g j i m c r o w 67

ligerent display’’ (‘‘Expedition to Japan,’’ 2). The New York Herald sarcastically reported that the expedition ‘‘is to be merely a hydrographical survey of the Japanese coast. The thirty-two-pounders are to be used merely as measuring instruments for triangulation; the cannonballs are for procuring baselines. If any Japanese is foolish enough to put his head in the way of [these] meteorological instruments, of course, no one will be to blame but himself if he gets hurt’’ (quoted in Gowan, 228). Such newspaper reports expressed ambivalence about the secret mission, and soon sparked rumors on Capitol Hill. Senator Salon Borland, a Democrat from Arkansas, proposed a resolution that Congress request information from the president on the exact purpose of the expedition. What business did the United States have in Japan? Was the confrontation going to be hostile? How much government money was being spent on this expedition? Why was it being kept a secret? The debate that ensued revealed not only apprehension about this American military venture, but also the deep sectional divisions and racial anxieties that undercut Perry’s vision of Pacific expansion. Other members of Congress were quick to respond to Borland’s proposal by countering that even without official notification from the president, the purpose of the expedition was obvious: to promote trade relations with Asia by obtaining a commercial treaty with Japan and securing coal depots on the way to China. Furthermore, all members of Congress were familiar with stories of the mistreatment met by U.S. sailors shipwrecked on Japanese shores, and the mission was also assumed to be an attempt to ensure the safety of these men in the future. Many of those who responded thus to Borland’s resolution were Whigs who feared that a congressional request for information would cast a shadow on the exiting Whig presidency of Millard Fillmore. They reasoned that the president must be keeping the mission a secret to prevent interference from Great Britain, whose monopoly over the China trade was threatened by the new Pacific route to Asia from San Francisco, and that to ask for such information would perhaps ruin his plans. If Congress requested information and the president refused to give it, ‘‘every antagonistic paper in the country’’ would read the expedition’s concealed purpose as ‘‘an open act of war, as a design to make aggressions upon an innocent people’’ (United States, Congressional Globe, 21:943). Borland disagreed, retorting that by keeping the expedition a secret from the American people, the government was imitating the autocratic practices of European nations. After a few days of debate the argument began to devolve into the 68 c h a p t e r t w o

more familiar and enduring subjects of controversy: the role of the United States outside of the North American continent, the acquisition of Cuba, and the propriety of unprovoked intervention in foreign affairs. The debate roughly divided Democrats, who represented mostly Southern and Western agricultural and slaveholding interests, from Whigs, who were more associated with Northeastern industry and the shipping interests with the most to gain from trade with Asia.4 In general the parties disagreed not over expansion itself, but over the direction of expansion into either the slaveholding, agriculturally valuable Caribbean or the fabled China market. Borland, angered by what he viewed as the hypocrisy of the Whigs, pointed out that one Whig newspaper’s unofficial account of the upcoming expedition justified it with the same language of ‘‘indemnity for the past—security for the future’’ that Whigs had condemned during the Mexican-American War and the annexation of Texas. Furthermore, he complained, Whigs were continually blocking Democratic support for filibusters attempting to liberate Cuba from Spain, and yet here they were defending ‘‘a strange crusade against a strange people, of whom we know but little, and against whom we certainly . . . have [no] cause of quarrel’’ (United States, Congressional Globe, 21:1006). Borland complained that when intervention in Cuba was being debated, the mostly Northern Whigs rejected ‘‘what is called the doctrine of ‘intervention’ ’’ and argued that ‘‘theirs is progress in the wrong direction, when it led them beyond our own borders to interfere with another people’’ (1006–7). But when the destination of ‘‘the spirit of progress’’ was Japan, Whigs showed ‘‘a willingness, indeed, a well-defined and fixed purpose, to go abroad, even upon the high seas.’’ Was it not illogical to ‘‘one day denounce those who would connect our country with those nations which are comparatively near our shores, and on the next enter himself upon a crusade against the most distant people on the earth’’ (1007)? By appealing to the issue of proximity, Borland offers a way of understanding the upcoming expedition that was consistent with the Monroe Doctrine, but Whigs were more likely to frame the question as one of intervention versus nonintervention. Senator Willie P. Mangum, a Whig from North Carolina, responded to Borland’s complaint about Whig hypocrisy by explaining that because the goal was commerce—not territorial expansion or agitation for democratic principles—the expedition was not an ‘‘intervention.’’ It would not intervene in existing governments, as would an attempt to liberate Cuba, but instead it would pursue s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 69

U.S. self-interest and the common good of free trade. While the Monroe Doctrine divided the world politically and militarily, this formulation of U.S. commercial influence accepted no such divisions. To spread democracy through commerce was not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy but rather taming monsters with trade. According to Mangum, the United States would only ‘‘intervene’’ in the Japanese government if ‘‘the enemy comes to endanger our safety’’ while the expedition went about its business (United States, Congressional Globe, 21:943). Yet one might imagine that this rhetoric of self-interest and free trade rang falsely with the ‘‘belligerent display’’ of arms with which the expedition was reportedly being fitted. This disagreement over the direction, distance, and purpose of U.S. expansion was one raised repeatedly in the Thirty-second Congress. In less than a year this question would manifest itself in the extended congressional debate that popularized the term ‘‘Monroe Doctrine.’’ It was also a question closely related to the internal contradictions of slavery. Behind these divergent expansionist positions are obvious concerns about either the creation of new slave states or the swelling power of Northern industrialists; also at stake was an anxiety about racial mixing associated with empire. Reginald Horsman has shown that the burgeoning drive toward commercial rather than territorial expansion in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in part from many Northerners’ reluctance to annex the more populous areas of Mexico or the Caribbean. Besides the problem of the extension of slavery and the formation of more slave states, they balked at the uncertain status of nonwhite free citizens of these territories: if these people were allowed U.S. citizenship, some whites felt the democratic process would be ‘‘degraded’’; yet if they were denied citizenship, U.S. anticolonial identity would be jeopardized. Commercial expansion sidestepped this problem, and for Northern Whigs it further offered a politically noninterventionist alternative to colonialism or conquest. For some, however, self-assurance that racial mixing and political tyranny could be avoided through commercial expansion was not enough to resolve the question of U.S. empire. The presence of slavery within the ‘‘empire for liberty’’ was itself a troubling contradiction. Seward, the Whig who would go on to participate in the founding of the Republican Party (uniting Free Soil Whigs and Democrats after the Democratic Party split) and serve as Lincoln’s secretary of state, staunchly supported the expedition to Japan, but he also argued in several public speeches 70 c h a p t e r t w o

that the United States could not expand commercially or territorially if the contradiction of slavery was not first resolved. In an 1853 speech, Seward wrote that U.S. expansion on the American continents and in the Pacific could continue only if new subjects willingly entered into the republic, and only if the United States avoided ‘‘timidity and compromise in responsibility toward the oppressed’’ (140). This reference to the sanction of slavery in the Compromise of 1850 indicates the spreading belief that slavery was an obstacle to expansion, and that the United States risked meeting the tragic end of Rome and other ancient empires if this moral failing remained. However, like most Free Soil advocates, Seward’s opposition to slavery was not motivated by antiracism. The same 1853 speech reveals that Seward premises virtuous expansion on both democratic virtue and racial purity. The United States maintains its integrity as it expands because, Seward explains, it consists of ‘‘a homogeneous people’’ occupying ‘‘a compact and indivisible domain’’ (147). The virtuous expansion that Seward envisions rests on a fantasy of ‘‘compact homogeneity’’ that precludes not only slavery but racial difference itself. In this context of conflict over political and commercial power, the proper rate and direction of expansion, and national and racial identity, one might begin to speculate about the strategy with which Hawks’s Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron would represent Perry’s mission to Japan. Hawks faced a difficult task: Perry was asking him to represent a global and imperial mission to a highly divided audience. His Narrative would of course be at pains to justify military aggression and differentiate the expedition from European colonialist efforts, but one might also expect the Narrative to manage anxieties about internal contradictions like slavery. This process can be understood through Edward Said’s classic formulation of Orientalism, which holds that Western cultures typically pit a modern, progressive, and egalitarian West against a primitive, retrogressive, and despotic East (Said, Orientalism). As Homi Bhabha and Lisa Lowe have argued against Said, however, Orientalist binaries both reflect and suffer from internal tensions. Thus in Hawks’s Narrative, we might expect representations of Western progress to suffer breakdowns and silences at points that unwittingly express anxiety about slavery and other inequalities and contradictions that belie an exceptionalist national identity.5 Indeed, the binary that Hawks creates between East and West does betray anxiety about U.S. colonial aspirations and the domestic presence of slavery. But despite his pains to conceal those contradictions, at cers e l l i n g j i m c r o w 71

tain moments Hawks also asserts American progress by calling attention to, rather than suppressing, the facts of slavery and class inequality within the United States. While both ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘yellow’’ cultures are at times represented in opposition to white American progress, at key points representations of ‘‘blackness’’ and slavery play crucial roles in signifying Americanness to the Japanese and in representing the expedition to Hawks’s American reading audience.6 These performances of ‘‘blackness,’’ I will argue, both enable and jeopardize Hawks’s effort to represent Perry’s mission as a peaceful commercial enterprise consistent with justifications for empire as a spreading of democratic values. The instability of these performances illustrates for my argument the difficulty of envisioning a global role for the United States in the political context of the 1850s, and the ways that visions of American seclusion or intervention intersected with domestic anxieties about tyranny and heterogeneity within the porous and mobile borders of the nation. n In the preface to the Narrative of an Expedition, Hawks anticipates a criticism of the five-hundred-page, richly illustrated volume: it might be found to be ‘‘needlessly minute’’ in describing ‘‘the pageantry of receptions, entertainment, &c.’’ (v). Hawks says his decision to include such detail was based not on his own taste but on his assumption that to satisfy his reader’s curiosity he should err on the side of reporting too much rather than too little. Furthermore, he adds, ‘‘the pageantry was often an important part of the history of the negotiation itself, with a people so ceremonious as the Japanese’’ (v). Indeed, at several points in the Narrative, Hawks pauses to reiterate that pageantry was important because of Japanese—not American—formality, and that the entertainments and pageants that Perry and his men performed were a crucial reason that Perry succeeded where so many before him had failed. Commodore Perry’s strategy was not to represent the United States according to its ideals of equality and egalitarian democracy, but instead to imitate the perceived culture of the Japanese. Previous U.S. squadrons sent to negotiate with the Japanese had been met with ‘‘petty annoyances’’ that Perry would not countenance, and Hawks explains that in order to earn Japanese respect, Perry decided to ‘‘exhibit toward them a little of their own exclusive policy’’: ‘‘if they stood on their dignity and assumed superiority, that was a game at which he could play as well’’ (235). In a country ‘‘so governed by ceremonials of all kinds,’’ populated by ‘‘a sagacious and deceitful people,’’ it was necessary for Perry ‘‘to outHerod 72 c h a p t e r t w o

Herod in assumed personal consequence and ostentation’’ (338). For this reason Perry surrounded himself with ceremony and performance during the fleet’s stay at Japan: refusing to meet with any but the highest of Japanese officials, making bold and uncompromising demands, staging events for the exchange of gifts and exhibition of American culture, and performing elaborate rituals of American pomp and power. Although Hawks does not admit it, Perry’s pageantry thus becomes in the Narrative a sort of diplomatic yellowface, a performance designed to ‘‘teach the Japanese, in the mode most intelligible to them, by stately and dignified reserve . . . to respect the country from which he came’’ (235). However, by detailing Perry’s imitation of perceived Japanese formality, ostentation, and hierarchy, Hawks makes startling and inadvertent references to tensions that disrupt the contrast between Eastern ostentation and Western genuineness and egalitarianism. For this reason, these representations of cultural interchange are multiply determined—they are at once an imitation of the Other and a form of control over the Other, expressing desire for powerful, impressive U.S. military pageantry and anxiety about U.S. national identity. Hawks takes great pains to emphasize that Perry’s ‘‘exclusive policy’’ of meeting personally only with the highest-ranking officials was but a role he was playing. Perry would have been ashamed, Hawks writes, ‘‘to assume a superiority, and affect a dignity, too lofty to stoop to the level of men below him in station. As a man, he did not see himself too elevated to hold communication with any of his brethren in the common heritage of humanity’’ (235). This anxious differentiation of the ‘‘genuine’’ American from his role disavows two national others: the European aristocracy and the ‘‘ceremonious’’ and ‘‘sagacious’’ Japanese. To maintain the exceptionalist myth of difference from European colonialism and diplomacy, Hawks struggles to align this supposed key to Perry’s diplomatic success with his strategy of representing U.S. commercial influence as the spread of democratic progress and freedom. During the first conference with officials at Uraga, the port where the squadron first anchored, Hawks explains that the governor and his interpreter were requested to switch their term for the U.S. president: they should instead use the Japanese word they would use to designate their own emperor. Again Hawks is at pains to explain the negotiation of power through ceremony: ‘‘In a country like Japan, so governed by ceremonials of all kinds, it was necessary to guard with the strictest etiquette even the forms of speech; and it was found that by a diligent attention to the minutest s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 73

and apparently most insignificant details of word and action, the desired impression was made’’ (238). Yet Hawks’s insistent differentiation of the ‘‘genuine’’ United States from Perry’s performance indicates that Hawks also guards the signification of words and takes care that the reference to Fillmore as an ‘‘emperor’’ does not seem an expression of vanity or imperial ambition. To begin negotiations, Perry orchestrated a procession for the delivery of Fillmore’s letter to a representative of the Japanese emperor. Perry’s plans adhered to his strategy of ostentation: the procession consisted of almost three hundred of his squadron’s marines and sailors wearing dress uniform and a band of musicians ‘‘playing our national airs with great spirit’’ (261). Two of the ship’s boys carried the president’s letter, which was bound in blue silk velvet, sealed with solid gold and carried in a lacquered red wooden box with gold hinges and mountings. Enriching this pageantry were Perry’s two escorts. On either side of the commodore ‘‘marched a tall, well-formed Negro, who, armed to the teeth, acted as [Perry’s] personal guard’’ (255): ‘‘The two stalwart Negroes followed immediately in the rear of the boys, and marching up to the scarlet receptacle, received the boxes from the hands of the bearers, opened them, took out the letters and, displaying their writing and seals, laid them upon the lid of the Japanese box—all in perfect silence’’ (256). Hawks explains that ‘‘these blacks, selected for the occasion, were two of the best-looking fellows of their color that the squadron could furnish. All this, of course, was for effect’’ (255). But what were these intended effects, and what unintended effects might such a scene have had on readers of the Narrative in 1856? The procession was meant to signify military power and grandeur to the Japanese, significations that Hawks disavows as false affectation. This disavowal seems necessary to dispel the ways in which Perry’s choreography performed the very racial fetishization and domination that was central to American culture and the institution of slavery. On one level, then, the passage’s emphasis on the ‘‘well-formed’’ bodies of the African Americans casts the fetishization of racial difference as un-American (‘‘for effect’’: part of Perry’s yellowface). The black bodies engaged in this moment of imperialism are what America is not. Ritualized domination is imputed to the Eastern Other whom the procession was designed to impress. But then again, in this scene the desires of American readers invested in Orientalist fantasy are given free play: a masculinized and powerful 74 c h a p t e r t w o

United States strikes fear and amazement in the hearts of the Other, in part through this enactment by ordinary Negro sailors.7 Therefore, the procession has the added effect of creating imperial pleasure. Such pleasure is apparent in Hawks’s descriptions of the impressive spectacle, which insert no performative distance between the procession’s intimidating grandeur and the ‘‘genuine’’ American. In these passages Hawks makes general comments about the strength and order of the American seamen, implicitly aligning the ‘‘well-formed Negroes’’ with the other ‘‘athletic’’ and ‘‘stalwart’’ American men. U.S. imperialist power is not a yellowface ‘‘effect’’ when Hawks reports that the procession was ‘‘composed of very vigorous, able-bodied men, who contrasted strongly with the smaller and more effeminate looking Japanese, . . . [whose] loose order did not betoken any great degree of discipline’’ (254). Here, the Americans are not simply performing an imperial part, for they are also fitted into a seemingly straightforward Orientalist contrast between Western masculine strength and Eastern feminine weakness. The ‘‘well-formed Negroes’’ are therefore not simply props in a show of unAmerican domination and racial fetishization but also signifiers of genuine American military power. Thus Hawks’s language and choice of detail produces multiple meanings for a reader sensitive to the discord over slavery. His emphatic insistence that all was ‘‘for effect’’ might have actually allowed for recognition that the United States was already engaged in only slightly more subtle forms of racial fetishization and domination, exacerbating the sense that slavery was incompatible with imperial expansion. But Hawks’s use of Perry’s escorts in his gendered contrast between East and West additionally suggests that this performance of blackness was part of a compelling vision of U.S. imperial power. In this reading, however, Perry’s escorts are in a sense ‘‘Americanized’’ and masculinized by Hawks’s description, a depiction that is complicated by their actual status as free black men. In all probability Perry’s escorts were not slaves, since slaves had been prohibited from serving on naval ships and in navy shipyards since the War of 1812. They were sailors serving in the U.S. Navy, the only branch of the armed forces that allowed African Americans to serve prior to the Civil War. Jim Cullen has argued that the admission of black men into the army during the Civil War spurred many writers to speak of the black soldier’s newfound access to a degree of respect, national belonging, and ‘‘manhood’’ that they had previously been denied.8 By calling attention to Perry’s escorts as American sailors symbolically participating s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 75

in the ‘‘opening’’ of Japan (a phrase that marks the gendered meanings of the forced treaty), Hawks’s Narrative might be read as similarly conferring masculinity and citizenship on the black sailors. We might imagine the Narrative consequently exacerbating anxiety about either the enfranchisement or the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans, a question of citizenship that would be tested in the Dred Scott decision the year after the Narrative’s publication. Not all of Hawks’s confrontations are so noticeably fraught with contradictions about slavery and imperialism. A more compelling—or less unstable—representation of the progressive power of American expansion into the Pacific is his account of the gift exchanges that occurred during negotiations at Yokohama in March 1854 (after the president’s letter demanding a treaty had been delivered and Perry had returned from wintering in China to receive the Japanese response). For gifts Perry had selected examples of recent manufacturing and mechanical innovation, samples of U.S. commodities, and books describing U.S. history, natural history, and culture (Wiley, 110–11).9 His plan was to let the commodities themselves create in the Japanese a desire for more American goods. Trade with the Japanese was one of Perry’s primary goals, but it was the only goal that Perry did not finally achieve: the Japanese government signed a treaty to accept money for supplying passing U.S. ships with necessities, but not to trade commodities with the United States. Despite this failure of the expedition, Hawks placed great symbolic weight on scenes that demonstrated the effect of the U.S. commodities on the Japanese. Such scenes taught the American audience the fantastic potential of American commerce and technology to regenerate the Pacific, in effect offering a justification for intimidating the Japanese into negotiations. The agreement to supply ships was not just a foot in the Japanese door, however, for trade with all of Asia was at stake. The invention of the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph had created the possibility of securing the shortest and cheapest route to China via the Pacific and beating out the British monopoly on Asian trade. Such a route required coal depots for steamships, and Japan was an optimal location for a depot.10 Commerce was thus a justification for the expedition, but steam power lay behind the commercial need, and this motivating power of technology contributes to Hawks’s sense of the gifts’ importance. For Hawks, they were a part of the commodore’s strategy that did not depend on his yellowface imitation of perceived anti-American behavior; instead, the gifts exemplify a seamless narrative of progress spreading 76 c h a p t e r t w o

across the Pacific. Technology signifies for Hawks a genuine display of progressive U.S. power, uncomplicated by performance and pageantry. The centerpieces among Perry’s gifts were a telegraph and a quartersize railroad complete with engine and tracks. On the day designated for the presentation of American gifts (the Japanese would present their gifts a few days later), Perry rowed ashore with several large boats and the usual pomp: besides those assigned to unload and set up the gifts, there was a company of marines and the omnipresent band of music. But this time Hawks does not dwell on the ‘‘proper ceremonies’’ that took place at the gift exchange. Instead, he describes several times and in great detail the effect of the gifts on the Japanese observers. The Japanese authorities watched the gifts’ assembly with ‘‘an innocent and child-like delight’’ (357), and once the telegraph and railroad were assembled, the Japanese were ‘‘unable to repress a shout of delight at each blast of the steam whistle’’ and ‘‘eagerly beseech[ed] the operators’’ to work them again and again (372). They become like eager little children whose customary reserve dissolves at the sight of irresistible American progress. Although the one railroad car was too small to accommodate a passenger, riding on the roof was possible, and Hawks takes great pleasure in describing the ‘‘spectacle not a little ludicrous to behold’’: ‘‘a dignified mandarin whirling around the circular road at the rate of twenty miles an hour, with his loose robes flying in the wind . . . grinning with an intense interest, and his huddled-up body [shaking] convulsively with a kind of laughing timidity’’ (357–58). Two days later, at the same site, the Japanese presented their gifts. Hawks briefly lists and describes some of the gifts, noting that in general they were of no great value but showed skilled workmanship and were of cultural interest. The focus of Hawks’s account was not a gift, however, but the entertainment offered by the Japanese: a ‘‘disgusting exhibition’’ of giant wrestlers performing feats of strength, holding matches, and having attention called to their huge bodies. Hawks conveys the Americans’ repulsion at this exhibit of ‘‘immense powers and savage qualities,’’ and then with relief reports that from the ‘‘brutal performance’’ of the wrestlers, the Americans proudly turned to the railroad and telegraph, still standing at the site. The Japanese delight at the technologies is detailed all over again: ‘‘In place of a show of brute animal force, there was a triumphant revelation, to a partially enlightened people, of the success of science and enterprise’’ (372). This ‘‘happy contrast’’ (372), unlike the one Hawks made between the masculinized Americans and s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 77

the feminized Japanese during the procession, successfully represses selfcontradictions: modernity faces animal force and childlike innocence, civilization confronts savagery, mind opposes body. Such was not the case in another of the expedition’s performances, however. Twice during the squadron’s stay in Japan, ‘‘an exhibition of Negro minstrelsy’’ is ‘‘got up by some of the sailors, who, blacking their face and dressing themselves in character,’’ gave the Japanese a performance that Hawks states confidently ‘‘would have gained them unbounded applause from a New York audience even at Christy’s’’ (376). The first minstrel show occurred at a banquet given on board Perry’s flagship a few days after the gift exchange and the day before the treaty was agreed on. Minstrelsy was popular enough that its presence at official functions was not an unusual occurrence; minstrels performed at the White House for both Fillmore and Pierce. In Hawks’s account, this exhibition of American culture functions similarly to the railroad and telegraph. The minstrel shows ‘‘produced a marked effect even on their sedate Japanese listeners, and thus confirmed the universal popularity of ‘the Ethiopians’ by a decided hit in Japan’’ (470): ‘‘Even the gravity of the saturnine Hayashi was not proof against . . . the farcical antics and humorous performances of the mock Negroes. It was now sunset, and the Japanese prepared to depart with quite as much wine in them as they could all well bear. The jovial Matsusaki threw his arms around the Commodore’s neck, . . . repeating, in Japanese, with maudlin affection . . . : ‘‘Nippon and America, all the same heart’’ (376). Reminiscent of the genuine American self of Perry, who, as previously quoted, ‘‘would have been ashamed . . . to effect a dignity, too lofty to stoop to the level of a man below him in station,’’ the Japanese abandon their formalities in sentimental and demonstrative reactions to the minstrel show. The minstrel show was a sailor’s initiative, with only occasional direction from some officers. For Hawks, its working-class ‘‘animal spirits’’ (470) and lowbrow popularity enhance its value as a truly American cultural form—one not derived from European influences and tastes—which can dissolve the formal dignity and strict hierarchy of the Japanese officials. This democratizing power is highlighted by a strange digression that Hawks makes in describing the playbill printed for the second minstrel show. This show took place in Hakodate, a port Perry was assessing as a possible supply station for U.S. vessels, where an audience estimated at three hundred Japanese watched. The playbill was printed on a small printing press that Perry had brought with the intention of printing leaf78 c h a p t e r t w o

lets designed to challenge misconceptions of the United States spread among the Japanese by the Dutch (Hawks, 86). The problem that very few Japanese could read English may have occurred to Perry as an afterthought, possibly explaining why Hawks finds no occasion to mention the press being used until the minstrel show. The irony of this being perhaps the only use that the printing press came to, however, does not stop Hawks from waxing on the topic of the free American press: ‘‘Bills of the performance . . . were printed by the aid of the press, which was [on shipboard] and which freely worked within the dominions of the Emperor of Japan, without regarding any censorship that he might possibly be disposed to establish. American-like, our men stuck to the principle of a ‘free press,’ on the ground that the press itself and popular opinion are about the best correctives of the abuse of the press’’ (470). This bizarre digression, unprovoked by any suggestion that the Hakodate officials wished to censor the minstrel show, indicates the significance Hawks lends to the minstrel show as a voice of ‘‘popular opinion’’ empowered to correct Japanese abuses of ‘‘freedom.’’ The minstrel show has the power to democratize because of its popular appeal—as a commodity that the Japanese cannot help but buy. Cultural historians have long recognized the nineteenth-century perception of minstrelsy as both a homegrown American cultural product and a medium for Americanization (see Toll; Lott; Saxton; and Rogin, Blackface, White Noise). The music of minstrelsy, always nationalistic, became closely associated with westward expansion in 1848, when the California gold rush coincided with the height of antebellum minstrel fever. Stephen Foster’s ‘‘O! Susanna,’’ a sentimental minstrel song, became the unofficial anthem for the westward migration. Bayard Taylor, the noted travel writer who served under Perry for the first leg of the Japan expedition, considered the song’s ubiquity in an account of his stay in California published three years before his service with Perry: ‘‘The Ethiopian melodies well-deserve to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America. Their quaint, mock-sentimental cadences, so well suited to the broad absurdity of the words—their reckless gaiety and irreverent familiarity with serious subjects—and their spirit of antagonism and perseverance—are true expressions of the more popular sides of the national character. They follow the American race in all its emigrations, colonizations, and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day’’ (206). Taylor, only present for the first half of the expedition to Japan, unfortunately missed the minstrel shows, but s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 79

his comments might be well applied to Hawks’s accounts of them. Minstrelsy follows American ‘‘colonizations’’ because it expresses the ‘‘national character,’’ but for Hawks the national character leads to colonization because it supposedly embraces qualities of populism, perseverance, and ‘‘irreverent familiarity’’ so central to the Jacksonian perception of democracy. Hawks goes further to represent minstrelsy as a form of ‘‘migration’’ or ‘‘colonization’’ that functions without conquest: it is the irresistible appeal of U.S. culture that Hawks and Perry believe secures U.S. power in the Pacific. The minstrel show not only accompanies colonization, it becomes a site of bloodless and landless victory, one that further justifies the threatened force that Perry used to bring negotiations to that point of cultural contact. But if minstrelsy was so closely associated with American and popular national culture, that association was complicated by its performance of the black body. Many whites read and spoke of minstrelsy as ‘‘a new infusion of ‘blackness’ and black cultural practices into American life’’ (Lott, 98).11 While for some, like Bayard Taylor, this performance of ‘‘blackness’’ was an appropriate expression of national character and taste, others balked at the notion that only by imitating blacks could white Americans claim cultural independence from Europe. In an 1845 article titled ‘‘Who Are Our National Poets?,’’ journalist J. K. Kennard acerbically points to the embarrassment of this situation, mocking the white women who idolize the ‘‘black’’ male icons, the white men who would condescend to steal and capitalize on such songs, and the culture that would require its native poetry to come from its least traveled, worldly, and educated class. Kennard sarcastically mimics those who would take pride in the ‘‘Americanness’’ of this cultural form by borrowing the tone of strident cultural nationalism associated with jingoistic movements like John O’Sullivan’s Young America: ‘‘Let Webster tell of the tap of Britain’s drum, that encircles the world! Compared with the time occupied by Great Britain in bringing this to pass, ‘Jim Crow’ has put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. At no time does the atmosphere of our planet cease to vibrate harmoniously to the immortal songs of the Negroes of America’’ (335).12 What is embarrassing is not only the popularity of minstrelsy but the fact its parochial idealization as an American cultural form has been mapped onto Young America’s visions of limitless expansion. Kennard simultaneously parodies the overwhelmingly Democratic audience of minstrelsy and the discourse of Manifest Destiny that Young America originated in the pages of 80 c h a p t e r t w o

publications like the Democratic Review. Kennard rejects Young America’s cultural association of minstrelsy with westward expansion and cultural independence from Europe. A slave’s song, he chides, will be stolen and ‘‘put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxonism, perhaps of the world,’’ but the ‘‘poor author’’ will still be ‘‘dig[ging] away with his hoe, utterly ignorant of his greatness’’ (340). The ‘‘shameful’’ presence behind the material production of the song makes its expansion through the utmost bounds of the world a hypocritical and simply ludicrous goal. Kennard’s argument might be described as a cultural version of the Free Soil ideology that Seward would help originate; he rejects minstrelsy not out of concern for the slave so much as concern for the culture and national mission degraded by the presence of both the actual slave and this production of ‘‘blackness.’’ In contrast, Hawks enthusiastically describes minstrelsy as a trophy of national achievement; he intends blackface to be another performance of genuine Americanness, in contrast to the yellowface mimicry of the Asian Other. But reading Hawks through Kennard, we see the potential of this strategy to backfire. Just as the ground had shifted beneath Perry on his return to the United States in 1855, leaving his vision of Pacific conquest outside the scope of the inwardly absorbed nation, the meaning of the minstrel show had begun to shift with heightening tensions over slavery. Kennard expresses his distaste for Democratic Party themes of populism, jingoistic nationalism, and the spread of slavery, but minstrelsy raised additional anxieties among a variety of opponents. Despite the performers’ conciliatory intentions, by the mid-1850s their medium had begun to exacerbate sectional division. Minstrelsy was always a singularly Northern form, and its association with westward expansion, Eric Lott argues, resulted in its registering as the voice of specifically Northern ambition. Lott suggests that even the typical program of the minstrel show (consisting, as the Japan expedition’s did, of the performers dressed as ‘‘northern dandies’’ in the first act and as plantation slaves in the second) emphasized sectional division to its audience.13 Hawks, like those minstrel performers who found themselves ‘‘staging a sort of unintended play about the slavery crisis,’’ loses control of the meaning of his Narrative’s performances of ‘‘blackness’’ (Lott, 106). A Southerner who lived in the North but sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, Hawks would hardly have intended to call attention to sectional division through the incendiary issues of slavery and Northern s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 81

cultural nationalism. His Narrative’s ‘‘America’’ was meant to seem homogenous and united in its mission and confrontation with the Japanese. But the meaning of the blackface performance, like that of his account of Perry’s escorts, could not be fixed. Vexed conditions of reception heightened the possibility that the scene of Jim Crow played before the Japanese would be read by an American audience in many different ways: as democracy and energy rejuvenating a stern, ancient ‘‘Oriental’’ culture, as an advertisement for a distasteful lowbrow cultural form being propagated by the grasping Northern shipping interests that backed Perry’s expedition, or as a display of the embarrassing contradiction of slavery that belied exceptionalist narratives of an empire for liberty. While it cannot be proved that Hawks’s accounts of these performances were responsible for the lukewarm reception of his Narrative or that they ruined Perry’s ambitions, my contention is that these accounts of performance—the perhaps ‘‘needlessly minute’’ accounts of gifts, entertainments, and pageants that Hawks apologizes for including in a serious diplomatic text—are central to his rhetorical strategy. These scenes offered a justification for the expedition that suggested economic, cultural, and political influence without military ‘‘intervention’’; they suggest that the Orient could be peacefully rejuvenated without the United States joining a European-centered race for empire. That the democratizing power of U.S. culture and commerce was destabilized in Hawks’s Narrative by his own attempts to use performances of ‘‘blackness’’ as a signifier of Americanness suggests the 1850s’ complicated set of racial and political conflicts. His formulation of U.S. imperialism was ineffective insofar as his negotiation of these conflicts could not sustain American exceptionalism. Perry’s plans to annex islands off the coast of Japan and assert a strong naval presence in the Pacific would wait half a century until such conflicts were, if not resolved, at least managed. Perry died in 1858, never realizing his vision or achieving the fame he felt his accomplishments deserved; but at the turn of the century a number of writers ‘‘rediscovered’’ him as, according to the title of one 1906 article, ‘‘The First American Imperialist’’ (Rossiter). At that time, as many Americans began again to turn outward and imagine a global role for the United States, new cultural narratives emerged to manage ongoing internal and external anxieties about race, commercial expansion, and U.S. imperialism.14 Indeed, one 1904 Cosmopolitan article titled ‘‘The Monroe Doctrine and Perry’s Expedition to Japan,’’ completely dismisses the conflict that the Thirty82 c h a p t e r t w o

second Congress had perceived between the protection of democracy close to home in the Western Hemisphere and Perry’s vision of global commercial influence; according to its author, Monroe’s 1823 Message seamlessly led to westward expansion to the Pacific coast, which led to Perry’s diplomatic mission to Japan, which ‘‘ushered the United States into the field of world politics’’ (W. Davis, 220). How this reinterpretation could occur is the subject of chapter 4, where I describe how the Doctrine came to align conceptually commercial expansion and political control at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this chapter, however, my concern is with the cultural narratives that made sense not of global power but of insularity, compromise, and stasis in the 1850s. That is why I turn now to a more controlled and complex account of the conflict between progress and conservatism, populism and aristocracy, the porous borders of modernity and the rigid walls of tradition: Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. n The action of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables begins with the narrator’s ironic description of a ‘‘bold adventurer’’ about to make the eponymous house ‘‘the scene of his commercial speculations’’ (36). The irony is that this bold adventurer is the meek, comic, and impoverished aristocratic ‘‘spinster’’ Hepzibah Pyncheon, and her ‘‘commercial speculation’’ is merely the reluctant opening of a cent-shop in her ancestral home. It is a mock tragedy wherein the ‘‘patrician lady is to be transformed into a plebeian woman’’ (39). The narrator heightens the ‘‘ludicrous pettiness’’ that characterizes Hepzibah’s endeavor by describing the cheap and trivial items she has stocked, particularly an item that epitomizes the popular consumer culture she is reluctant to join: ‘‘Jim Crow . . . executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread’’ (36). The gingerbread minstrel plays a crucial role in the culmination of this opening scene: Hepzibah’s first sale, an event that her young boarder Holgrave believes will free her from her restrictive ‘‘circle of gentility’’ (30). He is so convinced that opening the shop should not be an embarrassment that he attempts to be her first customer, but Hepzibah refuses his money, giving Holgrave the biscuits he has requested. She repeats this strategy to maintain her ‘‘ladyhood’’ a few moments later when her next customer, the boy Ned Higgins, attempts to buy the gingerbread Jim Crow. Only after Ned, surprised at this generosity, returns to get a second Jim Crow does Hepzibah break down and accept the boy’s coin: ‘‘The new shopkeeper dropped the first solid result of her commercial s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 83

enterprise into the till. It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be washed away from her palm. The little schoolboy, aided by the impish figure of the Negro dancer, had wrought irreparable ruin. The structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as his childish gripe had torn down the seven gabled mansion’’ (51). The ‘‘childish gripe’’ clearly belongs to Ned Higgins, but it might as well refer to the gingerbread Jim Crow (the ‘‘childish Negro’’) that aids him. However, a few moments later, the effect of Hepzibah’s transaction changes. She begins to realize the truth of Holgrave’s advice and feels ‘‘a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment’’ from her first sale: ‘‘It was an invigorating breath of a fresh atmosphere, after the long torpor, and monotonous seclusion of her life’’ (51). In a story where the central problem is how to escape the weight of inheritance and how to break free from the aristocratic convention and pride that the house of the seven gables signifies, the sale might appear to be a momentous occasion of democratization— even Americanization—like the minstrel performance in Hawks’s Narrative. Like the Japanese, Hepzibah is freed from the past and her ‘‘seclusion,’’ liberated by the commerce, commodity culture, and modernity signified by Jim Crow. Of course Hawthorne did not pen this scene with the Japanese or any other nontrading island peoples in mind; rather, the similarity between the two scenes indicates that both Hawthorne and Hawks drew on a broader cultural discourse about the power of minstrelsy and American culture to rejuvenate aristocratic reserve. Noting this common use puts into relief an ideological pattern in Hawthorne’s text that organizes small textual details, like the gingerbread minstrel and the other imperial cookies that Ned Higgins devours (camels, elephants, locomotives—all icons of exoticism and global mobility), and relates them to the classic American romance’s overarching and critically recognized theme of the problem of inheritance. More traditional critics have taken The House of the Seven Gables to be an allegory of New World democracy breaking with the European past. Lawrence Sargent Hall’s 1944 book Hawthorne: Critic of Society describes the novel as championing ‘‘American democratic philosophy as a basis for a social ethic’’ and illustrating the folly of ‘‘undemocratic pride’’ (160). In the New World this pride inevitably expires as Americans ‘‘must slough off the second-hand arrangements of the defunct past and work out their own relation to the world’’ (166). In fact, although Hall does not consider it, the legacy of aristocracy that Hepzibah will 84 c h a p t e r t w o

‘‘slough off ’’ is paired in the novel with an iniquitous familial legacy concerning the appropriation of land—a legacy of what could reasonably be called colonialism. Two acts of appropriation loom in the Pyncheon family history: the displacement of the plebeian Matthew Maule and the claim to the Maine territory. Hepzibah’s aristocratic forefather, the Puritan Colonel Pyncheon, built the house of the seven gables on ‘‘the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away the fallen leaves’’ (9–10). After accusing Maule of being a wizard and ensuring his execution, the colonel and his descendants cling to their birthright of aristocracy and land hunger even as they are haunted by the curse of living over an ‘‘unquiet grave.’’ A major issue dividing the Pyncheons of Hepzibah’s generation is the family’s ancient but unconfirmed claim to a tract of Maine territory that earlier generations thought would form for them a ‘‘Princedom’’ in the New World. The problem posed by the story is thus breaking free not only from aristocracy but from a legacy of colonialism on which the house is built. The family must free itself from the repeating cycle of wrongful displacement and appropriation. In doing so, it seeks in the realm of romance a reformation symbolic of the national one that John Quincy Adams claimed would result from eschewing imperialism, conquest, and tyranny in America. The romantic closure that ensures this freedom seems to be a permutation of the ‘‘revolutionary marriage’’ trope that Lydia Maria Child and other early national writers typically used to narrate the moral and cultural separation of the New World from the Old. Like Childs’s Charles and Mary, Phoebe Pyncheon and Maule’s descendant Holgrave resolve a class-based parental feud by forming an idealized domestic space. In this space, Phoebe is ‘‘an example of feminine grace in a state of society where ladies did not exist’’ (80) and Holgrave’s radical and class-based critique of property, family, and tradition dissipates through his ‘‘natural’’ experience of romantic love and (middle-class) marriage.15 What is more, the marriage between the descendants of the aristocratic colonizer and the wrongfully displaced plebeian relinquishes all claim to the eastern lands, which by that time are inhabited by settlers who ‘‘would have laughed at any man’s asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments . . .—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of Nature by their own sturdy toil’’ (19). Settlers’ rights take precedence in this new order, and the danger of endlessly repeating Colonel Pyncheon’s accursed error is put to rest. Yet the device that secures all of this distance from the aristocratic s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 85

and colonial past, Phoebe and Holgrave’s marriage, safeguards the young couple from more than Old World tyranny (and the suppressed scene of Indian removal). Written almost thirty years after Child’s novel, Hawthorne’s match is additionally threatened by modernity and Holgrave’s extremism. The bachelor Holgrave goes too far in rejecting pride of lineage and family name: ‘‘To plant a family!’’ he rages. ‘‘This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do!’’ (184). In his attempt to escape the familial institution as it preserves the patriarch’s name, blood, and property, Holgrave throws out the baby with the bath water by also rejecting the appeal of a home and family constituted by the gentle influence of a ‘‘nice little housewife.’’ His extremism emblematizes a danger that the characters must wall off once they have escaped the unwholesome shelter of the old house. After he falls in love with Phoebe, Holgrave realizes his mistake and tempers his defiance against the authority of the past. The defunct estate is superseded by a domestic home that becomes a refuge from both the conservative power of the past and the dangerous, overzealous forces of modernity with which Holgrave is identified. This latter threat to the new marriage and the space of compromise that it necessitates bears closer analysis, since it is by meeting this new challenge that Hawthorne reconfigures American exceptionalism to meet the political and moral crises of the 1850s. The exact nature of this threat that I have called modernity is difficult to characterize, since it comprises radical reformism, consumer culture, and a millennial faith in progress. The ‘‘isms’’ associated with Holgrave are a disparate lot. His very rootlessness and shifting of professions and identities make him typical of the stream of Jacksonian young men who left behind traditional social hierarchies to make their fortunes through migrations away from rural villages. Holgrave is at once a salesman whose Cologne water identifies him with commodity culture, a Daguerrotypist whose art is at the forefront of modern technology, a Fourierist who threatens the social order through speeches full of ‘‘wild and disorganizing matter’’ and acquaintance with ‘‘reformers, temperance-lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking philanthropists’’ (84), and a mesmerist whose ‘‘animal magnetism’’ suggests an alternative basis for scientific and spiritual authority. Some of these modern characteristics, like his identity as a mobile, rootless young man or his association with commodities and technology, align him with the evolving culture of capitalism; others, like his temperance, Fourierist reformism, and mesmerism 86 c h a p t e r t w o

align him with movements that cultural historians interpret as modes of resistance to (or, at the very least, evasions of ) capitalist transformation.16 In Holgrave’s extremism, however, they are merged into a perspective that is consistent in its millennial faith in progress and its challenge to past structures of authority. Thus while Holgrave’s futurism is overdetermined, we might say that insofar as it is figured as a kind of forward movement impelled by technology and commerce, it portrays a version of the optimism that Hawks and Perry would express toward American commercial expansion. Of course, Holgrave’s denunciation of property and the patriarchal line is one principle that Hawks and Perry do not share. These criticisms seem to be versions of the moral that Hawthorne professes in his preface: the story should teach the reader ‘‘the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity’’ (2). Other characters at times profess similar versions of this moral, but Phoebe is always opposed to such ‘‘lawless’’ defiance of the past and the conventional home. Old Uncle Venner, a neighbor, reveals ‘‘the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom’’ by explaining the reasoning behind his decision to live without accumulated property and retire to the workhouse: ‘‘It does seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property upon property. . . . I’m one of those people who think that Infinity is big enough for us all—and eternity long enough!’’ (156). Yet although Phoebe agrees that property will carry little weight in the afterlife, she nevertheless insists on its value as a comfort if not as an estate: ‘‘But for this short life of ours, one would like a home and a moderate garden spot of one’s own’’ (156). She expresses the same conviction when Holgrave gives a more extended version of this philosophy in a diatribe against the authority of the ‘‘Dead Men.’’ He envisions a day in the near future ‘‘when no man shall build his house for posterity’’ (183) and when public institutions will be struck down and reformed. The family is of course one of these questionable institutions, and the house of the seven gables the visible symbol of its errors: Holgrave claims that the house should be ‘‘purified by fire,’’ and once every half century ‘‘a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget about its ancestors’’ (184–85). Phoebe is again skeptical of Holgrave’s radical philosophy. Why shouldn’t a family live in ‘‘Dead Men’s houses,’’ she replies, ‘‘so long as we can be comfortable in them?’’ (183). ‘‘It makes me dizzy,’’ she adds in dismay, ‘‘to think of such a shifting world’’ (184). s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 87

By using the physical structure of a house or edifice as the visible symbol of past institutions, Hawthorne sets up a tension between mobility and rootedness, between seclusion within walls and contact with the world. This trope shapes several other scenes that flesh out the problem of modernity faced by the postrevolutionary marriage. Hepzibah, at the far end of the novel’s spectrum of conservatism, is as closely identified with the old house as she is rooted in it. While even in temperament Holgrave is animated by ‘‘a great mobility of outward mood’’ (150), Hepzibah lives ‘‘by imprisoning herself . . . in one place, with no other company than a single set of ideas’’ (174). The house’s thick walls separate her and its inhabitants from the movement of the world, perforated only by two thresholds that bring in this motion: the shop door and the arched window from which Hepzibah’s brother Clifford looks down onto the street. Inside the threshold of the window, Clifford, the artist wounded from his long, wrongful imprisonment, looks down on the motion of nineteenth-century industry. The motion outside the street—the omnibus, the water cart, and the railroad—surpass his ability ‘‘to keep up with the swiftness of the moment’’ (161); for Clifford, ‘‘the most inveterate of conservatives,’’ the ‘‘terrible energy’’ of modern invention is disturbing. These descriptions of the outside world create a tension between the secluded, preindustrial past and the ambiguous forms of progress available in the ever moving present. The window offers Clifford a view of the Italian organ player’s show, its mechanical puppets and monkey communicating the ‘‘acrid’’ moral of a futile society ruled by ‘‘the Mammon of copper coin’’ (164). A political procession that passes by ‘‘with hundreds of flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals’’ reveals the dangerously compelling modernity that threatens to sweep away the characters who dare to abandon the house. From Clifford’s vantage point, the procession turns individuals ‘‘into one broad mass of existence—one great life—one collected body of mankind, with a vast homogenous spirit animating it’’ (165). Caught up in this vision, he is almost compelled to jump from his window by the procession’s ‘‘natural magnetism, tending toward the great centre of humanity’’ (166). Hepzibah and Phoebe arrest his impulsive move to leap from the porch, but the narrator speculates on the wisdom of his instinct: ‘‘He needed a shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself ’’ (166). The instinct seems at one with the advice that Hol88 c h a p t e r t w o

grave offered Hepzibah to join ‘‘the united struggle of mankind,’’ or his desire to see families and fortunes ‘‘merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity’’ (185), but Clifford’s compulsion reveals more vividly the destructive potential of Holgrave’s future vision. Like the organ player’s performance, which complicates the rejuvenation that Hepzibah earns from her sale of the Jim Crow, the procession vividly challenges the wisdom of rushing out of the old house through its potentially dangerous permeations. Yet freedom from the old house is essential, we are reminded, when Hepzibah and Clifford cannot leave its confines even to worship in public. Like Hawks’s account of Perry’s procession to present the president’s letter, Hawthorne’s political procession provides the reader with a dual perspective. In Hawks’s Narrative, the reader may experience the pageant as both artifice and pleasure, disavowing its pretension yet taking pride in its display of a unified and masculine national force. In House, Hawthorne calls the reader’s attention to the difference in the effect of the procession depending on whether it is viewed from the street or the arched window. From below, a spectator feels it to be ‘‘a fool’s play’’ where ‘‘the tedious common-place of each man’s visage’’ and the distracting details of the fit and wear of his clothing make the spectator aware of falseness and preclude his getting swept up in its movement. From above, however, as the procession ‘‘rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city’’ (165), it gains dramatic potential as a symbol of mobile national community. Unlike Hawks’s Narrative, then, House shows the reader the ambivalent attraction of this national ‘‘movement’’—its promise of homogeneity, majesty, and futurity as it streams forward, while ironically reminding them of the artifice of that movement and the danger of getting caught up in its appeal. When Clifford and Hepzibah do break free from the house, they immediately board the railroad in a headlong rush to escape its grim legacy. The train transforms their world into one of uncontrollable motion: ‘‘The spires of the meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations, the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at a whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own’’ (256). His conservatism cast off, Clifford launches into a conversation with a ‘‘gimlet-eyed old gentleman’’ that recapitulates many of Holgrave’s revolutionary notions about the institution and the edifice. When the old gentleman speaks of the pleasure of staying home by the s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 89

parlor fire on such a rainy day, Clifford responds that, on the contrary, ‘‘this admirable invention of the railroad’’ is with further improvement ‘‘destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better’’ (259). Perpetual movement, a new and spiritualized ‘‘nomadic state’’ is the future Clifford sees. Railroads of the future, he claims, ‘‘will give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot?’’ (260). As he warms up to his topic, Clifford turns to the telegraph, another invention that will eliminate distance and turn ‘‘the world of matter’’ into ‘‘a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time’’ (264). Yet when the train stops and Hepzibah and Clifford disembark, the dismal scene that greets them—a dilapidated, deserted church and farmhouse—reminds them that the preindustrial past cannot so easily be escaped. At Hepzibah’s prompting they drop to their knees in prayer, looking for another, less wildly unsound escape from their inheritance. Again House resonates with the Narrative. While Hawks represents technological inventions (and the ‘‘invention’’ of minstrelsy) as vessels of the beneficent influence of U.S. culture and enterprise, Hawthorne interrogates their effect on American salesmen and consumers, criticizing too fervent faith in rapid human progress and futurity.17 This rapid, expansive culture brings Americans into contact with the world and has the potential to unite the nation in a homogenous mass, to annihilate barriers of space and time; but it also has the potential to cheapen, if not entirely dissolve the basis of national community. Hawthorne’s figurative choices of motion and stasis, seclusion and contact, to signify his theme of the errors of conservatism and radicalism by no means make the story an allegory of colonial expansion. But his language and his depiction of a home relocated do suggest that this conflict was imagined spatially. On the railroad, thought to be rushing Americans into a rootless expansiveness that would alter the relation between the nation and the world, Hepzibah and Clifford rush toward a specious modern utopia founded on the Jacksonian discourses of Manifest Destiny and endless progress. Hawthorne depicts their motion not merely as symbolic of ‘‘the process of social and economic change’’ common to Europe and America, as Jonathan Arac argues (Commissioned Spirits, 106–7), but as a figuration of the interrelated ideals of boundless expansionism and populism specifically at issue in an American national identity defined in opposition to Europe. Thomas Hietala, in his analysis of the evolution of 90 c h a p t e r t w o

the ideology of ‘‘American exceptionalism’’ in the 1840s, describes particular arguments that arose to reconcile the acquisitions of Oregon and California with an anti-imperial identity, and to refute the notion that all empires inevitably crumbled under the weight of their own burdens of colonialism and militarism. According to Hietala, one key strategy was ‘‘plac[ing] faith in advances in communication and transportation that rendered obsolete former limitations of time and distance. American political institutions, the rotary press, and the telegraph could bind the entire continent together in a unified yet diverse empire’’ (178). In his critical treatment of the progress symbolized by political pageantry, speeding railroads, and the sale of Jim Crow, Hawthorne ironically rejects modern contrivances thought to facilitate escape from Old World inheritance. Phoebe’s and Holgrave’s marriage creates a new domestic space free from the wrongfully established patriarchal estate and sheltered from an unfixed modernity. In the moment that Holgrave professes his love, he experiences for the first time an appreciation of the house of the seven gables that isolates them: their intimacy with the house’s secrets ‘‘separated Phoebe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other. . . . [It] kept them within the circle of a spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that of an island in mid-ocean’’ (305). Instead of a plunge into the disintegrating, streaming world, the characters are sequestered by the novel’s resolution. When Phoebe protests to Holgrave that their marriage could not work because of Holgrave’s ‘‘pathless’’ nature, he explains that ‘‘the happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment, that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences—perhaps, even, in due time, to build a house for another generation—in a word, to conform myself to laws, and to the peaceful practice of society. Your poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine’’ (307). The space that Holgrave describes clearing and demarcating seems carved out of a frontier, a mythic national space for rejecting old laws and making law and society anew. But his acceptance of ‘‘law’’ is a compromise between runaway revolution and the purification—not rejection—of inherited social forms. The characters depart at the novel’s end in ‘‘a handsome, dark-green barouche,’’ with Holgrave facetiously commenting that he has already turned into ‘‘a conservative’’ and Hepzibah quietly slipping coins to Ned Higgins, her former gingerbread customer, in the spirit of gentility and patronage. They light out not to the territories but to the selling jim crow

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suburbs, and all interest in claiming land—even the Maine territory— is cursorily forgotten. Twentieth-century critics might have been happier with the ending if it had placed the new couple on a frontier far removed from Salem rather than in Judge Pyncheon’s suburban country seat—a property that is part of the cursed family inheritance they are trying to escape. At least then the aesthetic problem of borrowing from the feminized convention of domesticity and the thematic problem of contradicting Hawthorne’s stated moral about inheritance would not have seemed so glaring to so many critics.18 But more recently, Walter Benn Michaels and Gillian Brown have both argued that rehousing the couple in the purified domestic edifice was more than a mere aesthetic failure: it also accomplished cultural work for capitalist hegemony by securing what Brown calls their ‘‘domestic individualism.’’ This domestic retreat, these critics argue, is not so much an escape from an aristocratic past as it is an escape from capitalism into the fictive, classless space of ‘‘natural’’ aristocracy. In this reading, Hawthorne’s domestic retreat is somewhat typical of domestic ideology in the mid-nineteenth century: House provides an idealized space of middle-class virtue that is opposed to the market and transcendent of class divisions and pretensions. The existence of such a fictive space paradoxically eased capitalist expansion by allowing for an imaginary ‘‘escape’’; it defused revolutionary critiques of property relations through its alternative discourse of ultimate self-determination in the home.19 The novel ends with compromise. Phoebe mellows Holgrave’s radicalism, but contact with him matures her, making her prone to ‘‘moods of thought’’ and ‘‘less girlish, more a woman!’’ (175). Hepzibah and Clifford are freed from imprisonment in the past, but not by route of the radical movements or degrading commerce with which they had earlier experimented. Like Mary and Charles in Hobomok, the family finds a new domestic space that symbolizes a new form of democratic community, free from restrictive paternal authority. But in Hawthorne’s romance, this new domestic space is emphatically a site of natural—not man-made— reform. As Jonathan Arac has argued, the ‘‘natural’’ reform of the family in House dissipates class conflict in marriage and ensures the protagonists’ inheritance, all without recourse to institutional change (‘‘Politics of The Scarlet Letter,’’ 254–55). And this resolution, as Arac points out, echoes certain moderate ideas about compromise and reform that were a crucial part of the political discourse surrounding slavery in the 92 c h a p t e r t w o

early 1850s. While earlier in the novel the narrator criticizes Holgrave for his overzealous and self-important mistake ‘‘in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view, whether he himself should contend for it or against it’’ (180), the character learns in the end to say that ‘‘moonlight, and the sentiment in a man’s heart, responsive to it, is the greatest of renovators and reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine’’ (214). The revelation is strikingly similar to the ‘‘wise’’ view of slavery and the Compromise of 1850 that Hawthorne recommends in his biography of Franklin Pierce. There Hawthorne defended (now infamously) his friend’s controversial support for the compromise by explaining that some reforms were too rash in their willingness to tear down what had been built up—to risk national unity. Such men wrongly ‘‘conceive that the world stands still, except so far as [their cause] goes forward,’’ and Hawthorne advises them instead to look ‘‘upon slavery as one of those evils, which Divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream’’ (The Life of Franklin Pierce, 352). But if we expand the context that interested Arac to include not only slavery but also the sectional politics of expansion, we can hear similar echoes between the novel’s appeal to moderation and the debate over the Monroe Doctrine that would divide the Thirty-second Congress. According to Lewis Cass, the author of the resolution, the Monroe Doctrine would yoke and mitigate the extreme tendencies of ‘‘conservatism and progress’’ in U.S. expansionism. Cass explains that conservatism and progress, ‘‘like all other antagonistic elements, which work together, these also may usefully coöperate, without counteracting each other’’ (United States, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 95). By reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine, Cass offered an alternative to the aggressive expansionism of radical Young Americans like Soulé, yet still asserted U.S. hegemony in Central America. His argument, however, was countered by others who, like William Henry Seward, found even an official restatement of the Monroe Doctrine to be too much man-made machination for an end that would come naturally if they would only wait for it: ‘‘The Monroe doctrine was a right one—the policy was a right one, not because it would require to be enforced by arms, but because it was welltimed. It was the sagacious discovery of the tendency of the age. It will prevail if you affirm it. It will equally prevail if you neglect to affirm it. selling jim crow

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As a practical question, it has ceased to be’’ (United States, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 127). Annexing Cuba was merely a matter of time, but officially reaffirming Monroe’s Doctrine interfered too much with the natural processes at work. As South Carolina Democrat Andrew Pickens Butler commented, ‘‘Why sir, all the islands in the Caribbean sea, if under no other influence than the attrition of opinion, cannot maintain for a very long period—I cannot say how long, for I am no prophet—their European connection. . . . [You] might as well try to stop the progress of the Mississippi with a bundle of hay, as to stop the progress of American influence upon this continent. But I say . . . a real issue must be presented before I determine whether I will assert the Monroe Doctrine or not’’ (United States, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 96). If progress is inevitable, it needs no action, and the doctrine that Cass’s opponents wished to affirm was one so natural that it would need no human interference. Cass’s move to pass the Monroe Doctrine into law that year failed because the Doctrine’s application as a law was too vague; its founding slippage between seclusion in the domestic and the promotion of democracy abroad was too visibly contradictory. In the tension created by disagreements about the direction, rate, and justice of American expansion, it seemed safer to some to appeal to domestic seclusion rather than global mission. As John Parker Hale, the author of the Canada amendment, explained by quoting the famous words of Adams: ‘‘We are not to be the knights errant of the world, to go abroad over the continents of the earth and the islands of the sea, proclaiming the gospel of our liberty, and fulminating the penalty of our sword against those who will not be baptized into our faith. That is not our destiny; but our destiny is at home. Our destiny is on our own continent, on our own shores’’ (United States, Congressional Globe: Appendix, 99). The limits of this continental home might have been uncertain (did it include, as it does in Butler’s but not Hale’s statement above, the islands of the Caribbean?), but its rhetorical appeal was unquestionable, especially in the context of internal and ongoing dissent about U.S. expansion. It is this rhetorical imperative to halt the course of forced progress and expansion, to turn rash outward movements inward toward natural domestic occupation that traces Hawthorne’s course for the national family. The House of the Seven Gables concludes with a return to the domestic, a rejection of forced missions for reform and global transformation, and an expression of skepticism about the transformative power of commerce and invention. The story reasserts, in the realm of 94 c h a p t e r t w o

romance, an exceptionalist national identity that was jeopardized in the rush toward various forms of progress—whether in the Caribbean or the Pacific. While Hawks tried to depict a unified national mission in which U.S. culture, technology, and commodities rejuvenate the Pacific, Hawthorne’s narrative mapped concepts of temporal progress onto spatial motion, and it decisively favored stability and stasis in both cases. The novel ratifies the rightful ownership of American land by settlers such as Matthew Maule and the residents of the Maine territory, while deeming further expansion excessive. By encouraging skepticism about ‘‘plunging’’ into the world or rushing toward the ‘‘progress’’ that would dissolve the domestic, Hawthorne contributed to a national identity that turned inward from the futurity of the 1840s to define itself in opposition to colonial expansion. Forty years later, when politicians, scholars, and journalists of the 1890s again brought debates about expansion to the fore, the identity of the United States as traditionally ‘‘domestic,’’ as secluded on the North American continent, as occupying natural boundaries and following a natural course of expansion had solidified as tradition. The identity that House helped to secure was compelling—more so than the one promoted by Hawks or Cass—so compelling, in fact, that it came to enable certain kinds of forgetting. Chapter 4 will explore the challenges to the ‘‘traditional’’ national identity—homogenous, compact, and secluded in its boundaries—touted by anti-imperialists at the beginning of the twentieth century. This representation effaced the expansionism of the Mexican-American War and the failed attempts to expand into the Pacific and Caribbean, as well as the alternative visions of a cosmopolitan and globally connected America discussed in chapter 3. The House of the Seven Gables, as it wrote the national family out of its aristocratic and colonizing inheritances and its modern excesses, renewed an American exceptionalism that could ignore contradictions like slavery and Indian removal while containing national progress inside a purified and secluded domestic space. This fictive containment created a fantasy that reflected and, to some degree, produced a hegemonic way of locating the nation in the 1850s. But, more significant, over the next century that exceptionalist fantasy—the focus of interpretations like Lawrence Sargent Hall’s—secured House’s place in the canon, where it could more powerfully reinforce interpretations of political history and literary tradition that were inwardly absorbed with the struggle to break from European origins. s e l l i n g j i m c r o w 95

And where is the endlessly repeating figure of Jim Crow in this fantasy of homogenous and compact national space? Hawks’s problematic construction of mobile and expanding American culture and commerce fell apart over its ambivalence toward the place of ‘‘blackness’’ in exportable national culture. In Hawks, blackness both constituted and contested the American empire, raising dual anxieties that slavery might contradict democracy and that Americanness might contain blackness. Hawthorne, in contrast, uses the figure of Jim Crow as a symbol of the American progress that he ultimately interrogates. In the scene of Hepzibah’s first sale, Jim Crow is a comic sign of the petty trade she is reduced to, an ironic scene of extreme difference from her aristocratic legacy. Yet Jim Crow’s power to Americanize and refound U.S. culture apart from aristocratic tradition is complicated both by House’s ultimate critique of futile market relations and by Hawthorne’s distancing of his own art from the minstrel show. Scipio, a literary version of Jim Crow who offers comic relief in Holgrave’s magazine story, ‘‘Alice Pyncheon,’’ is one of the only black characters Hawthorne ever created, if it could be said that Hawthorne ‘‘created’’ that standard minstrel type (with his punning conversation, uppity pride, and tendency to show ‘‘the whites of his eyes, in amazement’’). Indeed, the presence of Scipio in Holgrave’s story marks the difference between Holgrave’s authorship and Hawthorne’s. Holgrave boasts, ‘‘In the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion’’ (161), while Hawthorne’s concern with his own unmarketability is well known, and the use of comic slave characters to illustrate this difference would not go unnoticed in a nation swept away by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By using ‘‘blackness’’ as a signifier for the popular commercialism that would be restricted from the new domestic space—banished as Hepzibah graciously hands coins to the voracious Ned Higgins—Hawthorne shelters that mythic new space from the complications of racial difference as well as the stain of commerce. This restriction of the racialized commodity—from the space of the home, and from Hawthorne’s own formulation of American literature—erects a mythic structure to house a national identity in denial of its own racial heterogeneity, porous borders, and conflicted imperial mobility.

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chapter three geographic morality and the new world

In 1889, Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard invited representatives from Latin American nations to attend a congress for the purpose of cultivating peaceful commercial ties among the nations of the Americas. José Martí was skeptical, and wrote a two-part commentary on ‘‘The Washington Pan-American Congress’’ (published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La nación) attacking the duplicity and thinly concealed selfinterest that he believed motivated the United States.1 Sarcastically telling his readers not to overreact to the threat that the United States poses, he writes, ‘‘This powerful neighbor has never desired to incite them, nor has it exerted control over them except to prevent their expansion, as in Panama; or to take possession of their territory, as in Mexico, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, Haiti, and Cuba; or to cut off their trade with the rest of the world, as in Colombia; or to oblige them to buy what it cannot sell, as it is now doing, and to form a confederacy for the purposes of controlling them’’ (341). Much of Martí’s article identifies and opposes the language and reasoning of the Monroe Doctrine as a motivating force behind the congress. ‘‘What is the use,’’ he asks, ‘‘in invoking a doctrine that originated as much with Monroe as with Canning, to extend its domination in America in order to prevent foreign domination there and assure a continent of its freedom? Or must the dogma be invoked against one foreign nation only to bring in another?’’ (364–65). Here he complains that this Doctrine, which in his analysis originates not from the Americas but rather from the British statecraft of Canning, seems to only replace European imperialism with its copy in the United States. He explodes its justification of protecting democracy in the New World, calling the United States ‘‘a nation beginning to regard freedom—the perennial and universal hope of mankind—as its right, and to invoke it for purposes of depriving other nations of it’’ (351).

Martí’s criticisms identify the spatial underpinnings of U.S. imperialism, questioning language and proposed policies that claim for the United States the right, ‘‘by proper investiture, because of a geographic morality, to rule the continent’’ (355). This geographic morality (‘‘moralidad geográfica’’) is the U.S.-centered conception of the Western Hemisphere that grounds the Monroe Doctrine. Much of Martí’s writing, especially his well-known essay ‘‘Our America,’’ opposes that geographic morality, remapping the New World from the perspective of Latin American identity and political unity, creating a vision of a truly democratic space that refuses to be dominated by either European or AngloAmerican interests. In this chapter I examine such remappings, including one provided by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton eighteen years earlier in her novel Who Would Have Thought It? Like Martí, Ruiz de Burton points out U.S. hypocrisy in her writing, attacking specifically the terms of the Monroe Doctrine as an emerging justification for Latin American domination. But unlike Martí, Ruiz de Burton rejects ideals of Latin American unity, positioning herself not in an anticolonial Western Hemisphere but in a cosmopolitan transatlantic social sphere that rejects the concept of New World difference altogether.2 Unlike the Latin American writers José David Saldívar examines as a means to imagine ‘‘a broader, more oppositional American literary history’’ (The Dialectics of ‘‘Our America,’’ 17), Ruiz de Burton decenters Anglo-American culture and politics while simultaneously deconstructing the utopic concept of a New World with radical transformative power. This chapter will compare a number of formulations of geographic morality: Ruiz de Burton’s and Martí’s, as well as those of AngloAmerican writers like Lew Wallace who were struggling in the late nineteenth century to reimagine relations between the United States and Mexico. As with the attempts to think hemispherically that I have already described, all three of these writers are explicitly concerned with racial as well as political relations and identities. While Anglo-Americans like Wallace struggled to reconcile claims to geographic unity with claims to racial superiority, Ruiz de Burton’s highly conservative appeal to European authority rejects both Wallace’s and Martí’s efforts to use race as a figure for New World political difference. n Who Would Have Thought It? most obviously and didactically criticizes the Monroe Doctrine during a scene set in Mexico in which two Mexican characters—father and grandfather to the novel’s heroine Lola 98 c h a p t e r t h r e e

de Medina—discuss the possibility of Austrian archduke Maximilian accepting the newly reestablished Mexican throne, a historical event that marked Mexico’s brief reversion from democracy to monarchy.3 Her grandfather, Don Felipe de Almenara, says that although he is a liberal, he ‘‘will be happy to be the most loyal of subjects’’ to Maximilian. He justifies his loyalty by projecting an alternate history of Mexico wherein monarchy triumphed rather than democracy. Although an election will determine whether it is the will of the people that Maximilian be king, Don Felipe argues that the Austrian has a claim to a throne of Mexico by right of succession. Maximilian, he explains, is not a Bourbon but one of the Hapsburgs, ‘‘the legitimate heirs of the glorious Queen Isabella and the Great Charles the V,’’ and had the Hapsburgs remained in power, Mexico might never have declared independence from Spain in 1824. ‘‘The Mexicans did not want a republic,’’ Don Felipe says, ‘‘they just wanted a good and just prince. . . . Under a different dynasty, we might now have been an independent kingdom’’ (197). This interpretation of Mexican history opposes constructions of the Western Hemisphere as a space of democracy, charting a political future very different from that suggested by the Monroe Doctrine. Further, Ruiz de Burton’s characters make clear that such constructions of democracy as the ‘‘natural’’ and destined mode of government in the Americas were perpetuated by and productive of U.S. domination. ‘‘Of course the ideas of this continent are different from those of Europe,’’ Don Felipe momentarily concedes, echoing the language of the American statesmen, ‘‘but we all know that such would not be the case if the influence of the United States did not prevail with such despotic sway over the minds of the leading men of the Hispanic-American republics. If it were not for this terrible, this fatal influence—which will eventually destroy us— the Mexicans, instead of seeing anything objectionable in the proposed change, would be proud to hail a prince who, after all, has some sort of claim to this land, and who will cut us loose from the leading strings of the United States’’ (198). For Don Felipe and his son, the obvious difference that separates New World from Old, Western Hemisphere from Eastern, is a sham that ‘‘everyone knows’’ results from the dominance of Anglo-American ideas in Hispanic America. These passages have troubled many critics because they raise the question of whether Ruiz de Burton was speaking through her character in this instance to express what might be her own monarchist loyalties. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita sidestep the question by stating that g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 99

‘‘whether Ruiz de Burton herself favored liberal monarchy in Mexico is not clear nor really at issue,’’ insisting that what is more important is the author’s use of the scene to demonstrate that U.S., not European, empire was the greater threat to Mexico (introduction to Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It, lvi). José F. Aranda Jr. builds on their point by arguing that Ruiz de Burton uses this monarchical legacy ‘‘as a subtle reminder of Mexico’s eighteenth-century enlightenment credentials’’ and the possibility of an alternative to the corruption and demagoguery she depicts in U.S. politics (571). Aranda sees in Ruiz de Burton’s novel an indictment of Spanish and Mexican colonialisms ‘‘for failing to secure North America for their white, educated, European elite,’’ and an urgent cry to Americans that it is not too late for them to achieve this ideal (573). The argument of Sánchez and Pita and that of Aranda seem correct: Ruiz de Burton was primarily interested in criticizing the United States rather than in proposing monarchy as a real alternative for Mexico. But reading Ruiz de Burton’s novel in the context of the U.S. debates about the Monroe Doctrine in the 1860s demonstrates that her interest in Maximilian’s right to rule Mexico is not merely an effort to legitimate herself as ‘‘a daughter of the Enlightenment’’ in the New World (Aranda, 573). Instead, by questioning the legitimacy of national narratives of Mexico and the United States, Ruiz de Burton’s novel contends with the specific terms of a powerfully emerging statement of foreign policy and cultural identity, and reveals the hypocrisy of the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary isolation of the Western Hemisphere. Officially the United States did not oppose French intervention in Mexico; Henry Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, never uttered the phrase ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ in his diplomatic correspondence with Napoléon III, and he never threatened to use force to drive the French out of Mexico. But many Americans of the 1860s wished that he would. Their desire for the United States to stand behind the Monroe Doctrine created a widespread and vocal public movement that professed a new, post– Mexican-American War relationship between the two North American countries. The events in Mexico interested Northerners, many of whom wrote articles and attended meetings to promote awareness of the situation. Matías Romero, a Mexican lobbyist and poet assigned to raise support in Washington for his country’s ousted republican government, worked throughout the early 1860s to keep the phrase ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ an active part of public discourse. This was a difficult task, as most Americans were primarily absorbed in the domestic strife of the Civil 100 c h a p t e r t h r e e

War, but Romero succeeded in getting a number of influential Americans, William Cullen Bryant among them, to support U.S. intervention in Mexico.4 As the Civil War neared its end, this support grew; some Northerners even feared that secessionists would join Maximilian’s forces rather than return to the Union. Lew Wallace, the best-selling author and Civil War general responsible for the exotic Zouave costumes that Ruiz de Burton pokes fun at in her novel, took up the cause and was sent by General Ulysses S. Grant in 1865 to explore the possibility of sending U.S. troops into Mexico to fight for the democratic government. That mission failed, but after the Civil War Wallace resigned his post and received a commission in the Mexican army with the assignment of raising support in the United States for Mexican republicanism. He traveled around the Midwest getting men to sign up for service and founding Mexican Aid Societies and ‘‘Monroe Doctrine Committees,’’ and he finally led a mission to bring arms across the border to Juárez’s men.5 Thus during these years the Monroe Doctrine was widely discussed in congressional debates, editorials, speeches, and pamphlets, and the language of these texts reveals an interest in Mexico that slid back and forth between a desire to protect and foster democracy in the New World and a desire to control Mexico’s land and resources. One pamphlet explains that standing up for the Monroe Doctrine is especially important to those who believe that after Southern rebellion is crushed and slavery abolished, the United States will have before it ‘‘a career of greatness and prosperity that may gather to us, not by war and conquest, but by their own accord and the attraction of self-interest, the territories that adjoin us on the North and South, and make us more completely an ocean-girt republic’’ (John Jay, 4). The rhetoric here resembles that of the Manifest Destiny during the Mexican-American War, but many articulations of the Monroe Doctrine during these years differed crucially from such rhetoric. One example of this difference was the new partnership envisioned between the United States and Mexico. Lancelot Everitt, an essayist whose work was published in pamphlet form by one of the Monroe Doctrine Committees, writes that a partnership between the United States and Mexico was logical because the two nations have ‘‘met together in deadly conflict, and each opponent has found the other worthy of his steel; hence the mutual regard and love existing between us, ever ready to expose itself on proper occasions’’ (Everitt, 7). Yet Everitt makes clear in the gendered and sexual language of his g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 101

speech that this new partnership was an unequal one: ‘‘Prostrate Mexico invites us to her aid—to her country—to her gardens—to her table—to her fertile lands—and to her rich inexhaustible mines; and she invites us to associate with her people as brothers and sisters of one common family; to be a mutual protection from fraud—from robbery—from tyranny’’ (6). The two flags will float side by side and offer ‘‘mutual protection,’’ but Everitt’s language clearly naturalizes the inequality of partnership. This partnership will benefit Mexico through racial and cultural influence, Everitt argues: the races will intermingle as the ‘‘energetic American type’’ marries ‘‘the beautiful, chaste, affectionate, truthful Mexican,’’ and as America’s ‘‘superior taste and accomplishments will influence Mexico,’’ creating ‘‘a desire for knowledge and general literature that would destroy [Mexico’s] low condition of society, and engender a wish for higher pursuits’’ (8–9). Everitt makes it clear that this is not simply a matter of the Anglo-Saxon improving the native or mestizo through assimilation; he spends the first few pages of his essay explaining the important evolutions that have taken place in the New World, and especially in the United States, since its settlement. The partnership that Everitt envisions is unique to and expressive of New World freedom and productivity; only in the Americas, he argues, can such a partnership occur. Everitt’s rhetoric exemplifies the wider discourse of New World partnership emerging during these years, a trend of which Ruiz de Burton was undoubtedly aware. The key characteristic of this imagined partnership was not inevitable territorial expansion but political and cultural influence, with the United States as senior partner, husband, or big brother protecting a distinct American ‘‘system.’’ As another pamphleteer writes, the United States’ new responsibility is to ‘‘reassert our highest self-respect as the leading republic of the New World, and the ready representative of the Political System of America, with which European politics had no business to interfere’’ (Leavitt, 48). For Ruiz de Burton, the question was not only by what right the United States declared itself the leading republic, but whether or not there even existed a ‘‘Political System of America.’’ She challenged this bond of democracy frequently in her correspondence with her friend M. G. Vallejo. In an August 26, 1867, letter she writes, ‘‘Con Maximiliano murió nuestra nacionalidad, allí pereció la última esperanza de México. . . . Lo único que la habría impedido habría sido una monarquía en México. Ellos lo previeron y de allí nacío el amor repentino por la ‘Sister Republic’ ’’ (‘‘With Maximilian, 102 c h a p t e r t h r e e

our nationality died, there perished the last hope of Mexico. . . . The only thing that would have impeded [the Yankees] would have been a monarchy in Mexico. They foresaw it and there was born their sudden love for their ‘‘Sister Republic’ ’’; Conflicts of Interest, 271). Here Ruiz de Burton cannily recognizes that the idea of a ‘‘Sister Republic’’ is a convenient new rhetorical device to undermine Mexican nationality. Thus, the conversations Ruiz de Burton stages in the Almenara home are significant not primarily as a blueprint for monarchy in Mexico, but as alternatives to any assumption of geographic morality emanating from the concept of ‘‘America.’’ She does not limit her attack on these assumptions to scenes dedicated to Mexican politics, however. Her narrative strategy is more indirect, and demonstrates her awareness that the idea of New World difference was a feature of cultural as well as political representations of American life. Like Martí, Ruiz de Burton figuratively identifies and locates New and Old Worlds through cultural forms like modes of dress and manners. But while Martí championed the ‘‘natural man’’ of the New World who was unafraid to don hemp sandals and Indian aprons, Ruiz de Burton criticizes mythic American independence and virtue, valorizing instead the manners of civilized cosmopolitanism. The ruthless satire of Anglo-American letters, tastes, and manners in Who Would Have Thought It? has been ably pointed out by previous critics, but my interest is specifically in the novel’s depiction of the United States as a space enmeshed in transatlantic cultural and economic influences, caught in an inferior relation to Europe from which one escapes only through genteel improvement that is not mere imitation (see Sánchez and Pita, introduction to Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?; and Goldman). The myth of New World difference is her target as she represents the Americas as outposts of a European culture that risk chaos, tyranny, and gauche manners in their attempts to turn their backs on the Old World. The novel opens in an unnamed town in New England, a space that seems to its inhabitants to be separate from and superior to the rest of the world. Dr. Norval, his son Julian, and his brother-in-law Isaac Sprig initially appear to be the only members of the community interested in traveling the world, desires that lead Mrs. Norval to worry repeatedly ‘‘that Julian is perfectly ruined by his unfortunate trip to Europe’’ (18) and to decry ‘‘Isaac’s corrupted love for drama and foreigners’’ (87). The narrator, who repeatedly mocks New England characters like the Cackles for not knowing the classical and continental literary allusions that g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 103

pervade the text, makes quite clear that such provincial knowledge and preferences are the result of poor taste; broad-minded Isaac simply prefers ‘‘Havana cigars to a pipe or a chaw of tobacco, and those miserable sour wines to a good drink of whiskey’’ (55). When Dr. Norval proposes to send his daughters to Europe during the Civil War, Mrs. Norval lets ‘‘her buckwheat cakes drop to the floor’’ in shock and protests that she will not send her girls to foreign countries ‘‘when we have a better one of our own—a great deal better one!’’ (51). These scenes set up a binary between agrarian isolation and urbane worldliness that would have been quite familiar to readers. Following in the tradition of the Yankee type popularized in Royall Tyler’s famous play The Contrast (1784) and updated for later generations in countless plays like Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845),6 we see Mrs. Norval as a caricature of the thrifty and uncultured Yankee, one who financially ‘‘minds the main chance,’’ as did Tyler’s Van Rough, and rejects foreign modes of fashion and manners for homespun simplicity. In these stories, foreign contamination threatens to corrupt American virtue, and frequently provincialism is valorized. For example, Colonel Manly, the hero of Tyler’s The Contrast, proudly announces that he ‘‘was never ten leagues from the continent [of North America]’’ and eschews travel as a mode of improvement, preferring ‘‘the laudable partiality which ignorant, untravelled men entertain for everything that belongs to their native country’’ (45). But Ruiz de Burton has inverted this genre by putting Mrs. Norval, one of the least sympathetic characters, in this role. And the superiority of America, and especially New England, that Mrs. Norval professes is tested as the family begins to travel—Ruth and Mattie Norval to Europe and then to New York with their mother, and Julian, Isaac, and his sister Aunt Lavvy to Washington and the front during the war. While Julian, like the other travelers to corrupt Washington, concludes it would be a long time before ‘‘he should again believe that in America there is not as much despotism as in Europe’’ (244), the travelers to New York reveal that virtuous domestic isolation, like the superiority of the American government, is a mythic and self-deluding ideal. Mrs. Norval protests her daughters’ trip to Europe, but Ruth Norval seizes immediately on the opportunity, not because she wants to see the art or history of Europe, but ‘‘because in her two trips to New York she had learned that it was genteel to talk of having been to Europe, and that you were not considered tip-top exactly until you spoke of Paris 104 c h a p t e r t h r e e

and the Coliseum, . . . and of being presented to crowned heads’’ (51). Mrs. Norval gives in, and after the move to New York, they begin a life of conspicuous consumption in which the authority of European culture figures heavily. Ruth attends operas with the cream of New York society, but she finds ‘‘she had seen too many real princes and danced with too many bona fide dukes and counts of aristocratic foundation to care for these whom a tumble in the stocks might dethrone tomorrow’’ (167). Instead of finding foreigners ‘‘horrid,’’ as her New England neighbor Mrs. Cackle had, Ruth is pleased to have Lola’s father Don Luis de Medina stay with them for his ‘‘distingué look which would bring éclat to the Norval mansion’’ (255). Mrs. Norval adapts more hesitantly to the life of conspicuous consumption they lead in New York, finding the opera a ‘‘Chinese din’’ that she attends only to please her lover Major Hackwell. Indeed, the move to New York seems to enact a generational as well as a geographic transition. Ruth becomes more fully the ‘‘power’’ of the family in New York, and Mrs. Norval defers to her daughters on most matters. The ostentatious house they move into offends her thrifty habits, but she considers that her daughters, ‘‘who had been in palaces,’’ must know best: ‘‘The Empress of France had spoken to them, and complimented them on the sweet way they spoke French. They knew all about genteel society’’ (125). Again, these scenes cite and invert the popular genre of nationalist drama. Like the Tiffany family in Fashion and Billy Dimple in The Contrast, the Norvals slavishly worship European ways; but unlike in these plays, there is no redemptive return to the New England countryside for the Norvals at the story’s end. Sánchez and Pita interpret the novel’s move to New York as symbolic of the economic transformation occurring in the United States after the Civil War, when increased industrialization combined with the lands and resources taken from Mexico create wealth for a new generation of capitalists. The Norvals are, after all, quite literally living off of the Mexican Lola’s inheritance. But the change in their household economy also suggests a shift in what could be called the global location of the United States toward the core of production. Thus Ruth Norval ceases to claim postcolonial difference and virtue in agrarian isolation as her mother did and instead works out their own relation to European authority. The narrator ironically describes Dr. and Mrs. Norval’s courtship on the Sprig farm, depicting the young Norval unable to kneel down to propose because his industrious fiancée is surrounded on all sides by apple peelings. But what Ruth’s and to a lesser g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 105

degree her mother’s aspirations in New York most fully reveal is that the provincial thrift and industry of their New England farm life was a mode of economy and rootedness borne out of greed and necessity, not virtue. ‘‘Foreign’’ and extravagant ways—even those of Napoléon III’s French empire—are eagerly accepted once the means to achieve them appears. Indeed, if Ruiz de Burton is inverting a popular nationalist genre that championed provincialism, she is also developing a version of the popular literary figure of the new American abroad, the subject of numerous Gilded Age essays and novels by popular writers like Frank Stockton and Archibald Clavering Gunter as well as canonical writers like Edith Wharton and Henry James. The popularity of this figure was in part merely a reflection of the taste among a growing class of wealthy postbellum Americans for travel abroad, where they encountered (and very rarely married) Europeans. But the figure is also a site where writers struggled to make sense of American identity at a time when the myth of agrarian isolation had lost some of its power to narrativize and represent a rapidly industrializing United States with global economic and political interests. Especially in more popular versions of this story, the traveling American typically proves him or herself by negotiating or rejecting the aristocratic social mores and rules to which they, as ‘‘new’’ Americans, are in some ways superior and opposed.7 In these formulations, the difference of the New World is not compromised by a United States that has lost its agrarian isolation and that traverses the globe as a world power. For Ruth Norval, however, the loss of her mother’s pretense of agrarian isolation and superiority renders the myth of American difference entirely irrelevant. Ruth’s only aspiration is for power in the elite circles of New York, Washington, and Hampton Beach, where European cultural authority is fully recognized but only crudely imitated. Through Ruth’s quest for power, Ruiz de Burton seizes on uncertainty about the shifting identity of the United States vis-à-vis Europe by depicting the change as one from xenophobic and uncultured isolation to laughable imitation. Her parody of these two unsavory options is mercilessly emphasized in the comic relief she provides through her two ex-Zouave characters, Scaly (short for Aeschylus) Wagg and Sophy (short for Sophocles) Head. The two officers assist Major Hackwell in New York, where they occupy their time in different ways. Scaly, an alcoholic besieged by delirium tremens and his love for the octoroon prostitute Lucinda, drowns his sorrows and entertains Sophy with his skills of grunting like a pig, crowing like a rooster, and braying like a don106 c h a p t e r t h r e e

key (185, 223). The gruff Scaly’s crude manners contrast with those of the sentimental Sophy, who attempts to imitate romantic, foreign ways. Sophy pines for Ruth’s French maid Mina, whom he mistakes for one of the Norval sisters, composes songs to her in ‘‘broken French, bruised Spanish and maltreated Italian,’’ and longs to serenade her ‘‘like a good knight of old.’’ Indeed, his error in mistaking Mina for a Norval emphasizes his comic pretensions. When he meets Mina, he decides that ‘‘her lovely foreign accent’’ must have been ‘‘acquired in speaking foreign languages,’’ and he attempts to impress her with his knowledge of French (186). When her true identity is revealed, however, Sophy is at first shocked that he has been courting a maid, but later he decides her class status is unimportant. While Wagg, absorbed in corruption and what Ruiz de Burton represents as lurid affairs with a racially mixed woman, develops what seems to be the uncouth art of barnyard imitations, the pretentious Sophy emulates foreign culture but is unable even to distinguish ladies from maids, a dire mistake in the world of Ruiz de Burton. In fact, because of his romantic pretensions, Sophy bears certain similarities to Lew Wallace, the real-life creator of the Zouave regiment in which Sophy and Scaly fought. Wallace modeled the dramatic uniforms for his regiment of Indiana soldiers after those of the French Foreign Legion, with baggy trousers and kepis. The regiment was famous for its dashing uniforms, which Winslow Homer sketched for Harper’s Weekly in 1861, and for its elaborate and spectacular drilling techniques. Wallace described their drills as ‘‘the rush and tear of a thousand men advancing, retreating, taking and closing intervals, charging front and centre, firing in all positions, and doing anything on the run and double-quick,’’ creating for spectators ‘‘a downright show’’ (Wallace, An Autobiography, 274). Surely this must be the model for Sophy’s elaborate horsemanship, in which he parades in front of the Norval house, ‘‘taking a half-hour to go the length of three blocks,’’ while having his horse go ‘‘sideways like a crab, and [stand] on his hindlegs like a circus bear waltzing’’ (183– 84). Ruiz de Burton seems to use Sophy to satirize a United States that pretended and performed culture without actually having any. In fact, toward the end of the novel she explodes the distinction she had previously set up between Wagg and Sophy by having her narrator relate that Sophy eventually learns to outdo his companion in the skill of barnyard imitations, explaining ironically that ‘‘no discoverer—and I don’t expect Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Newton, or any other of the glorious and immortal host—was ever so proud or elated with his newly-found g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 107

world as Sophy. He would now eclipse Wagg!’’ (260). This equation of Sophy’s skill with a ‘‘newly-found world’’ emphasizes the provincial concerns underlying his shallow admiration for foreign cultures, and perhaps it also hints at a tendency to overestimate the value of ‘‘newly-found worlds,’’ especially as simpletons like Sophy define them. Then what is the New World to Ruiz de Burton? Certainly not a hopeless cultural backwater—her Mexican characters evade New England’s proud isolation and New York’s fashionable imitation, instead embracing transatlantic ties with genuine cosmopolitan urbanity. The Almenara household in Mexico is represented as a space of graceful hospitality and genuine learning. During the conversation about Maximilian, for example, Don Felipe and Don Luis sit ‘‘in the library by a table loaded with paper, books, reviews, pamphlets etc.’’ and read ‘‘with great interest’’ letters composed in Spanish, French, German, and English. They treat their visitor Isaac with the most polite consideration, giving him delicious meals and ‘‘the finest wine he had ever tasted’’ (199). Anne E. Goldman points out that this contrast self-consciously differentiates Ruiz de Burton’s Mexico from stereotypical accounts and corrects ‘‘a literary cartography which fetishized New England and pushed the rest of the Americas off of the map altogether’’ (75). But I would add that Ruiz de Burton is also correcting a cartography that constructed the Western Hemisphere as an isolated and unified space in order to radically separate Europe from the Americas. Mexico is a cultural center insofar as Lola and her relatives recognize, cite, and live up to European cultural authority. When Lola and Julian finally marry at the romantic novel’s conclusion, they demonstrate their allegiance to this authority by heading off to Mexico to live with Lola’s father and grandfather, accompanied by the Norval’s French maid Mina, who ditches the lovesick Sophy, preferring to keep her job and class position as a maid under Lola rather than marry the pathetic Anglo officer. Here Mina’s choice might be read as an expression of Ruiz de Burton’s concept of la raza latina, which bound French and Spanish America in cultural sensibility as well as in the possibility of political union through the empire of Napoléon III.8 Instead of symbolically reforming the nation and the home with their union, as would be typical in the genres of nineteenth-century romance and comedy, Lola and Julian return to the Mexican paternal home, a space that needs no reform because it is already consistent with inherited ideas of class and classiness. Unlike the reconstituted families in Hobomok and The House of the Seven Gables, the union between Julian and 108 c h a p t e r t h r e e

Lola reclaims paternal authority. This symbolic embrace of paternal inheritance is untainted by traumatic New World experience; Lola’s father significantly refuses to take with him to Mexico the money collected by his dead wife during her borderland ordeal in Indian captivity, a fortune for which her father claims he has no need. While captivity narratives in both Anglo-American and Chicano literary traditions often figured a kind of Americanization or Mexicanization, Lola returns to a space purified of the traumatic threat of New World hybridity and syncretism.9 The unmixed European cultural authority that the text authorizes, however, is also racial authority. Examples of racism in Who Would Have Thought It? range from Ruiz de Burton’s dramatic demonstrations of Lola’s ‘‘pure’’ whiteness, to the treatment of Native Americans as savages, to repeated implications that American politicians are ‘‘courting’’ African Americans at the expense of justice to whites. This last miscegenated union is symbolized by corrupt politician Le Grand Gunn’s affair with the prostitute Lucinda, but it is more literally described when Julian asks if by supporting Lincoln he has ‘‘surrender[ed] his freedom to give it to Sambo’’ (241), or when one of the Cackles tries to gain political leverage by exaggerating his outrage at Ulysses Grant’s snubbing of Frederick Douglass (298). By mocking the racial mixing and thin pretensions to racial equality that mark U.S. society, Ruiz de Burton goes beyond merely envisioning an alternate and racially superior colonial destiny for the New World cosmopolitan. She also pointedly protests the cross-racial identifications that structure American national identities. I use the plural ‘‘American national identities’’ because I want to contrast Ruiz de Burton’s cosmopolitanism with both the rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine and Martí’s formulation of ‘‘Our America,’’ both of which ground claims to postcolonial difference on a more ‘‘natural’’ and situated relationship with the land and indigenous peoples of the New World. Martí insists that even Latin Americans of European descent like himself recognize and embrace their Indian mother, a figure for the land that adopts and rebirths them as natural Americans. His championing of the natural American in contrast to the polished European bears a strong resemblance to the U.S. nationalist dramas by Tyler and Mowatt mentioned above, although, unlike Ruiz de Burton, Martí echoes this genre without inverting it. While Mowatt’s libertine impostor Count Jolimaitre brags that once one has ‘‘breathed the exhilarating air of Paris, ate creams at Tortoni’s, [or] dined at the Cafe Royale’’ (Mowatt, 322), he will lose all interest in America, Martí also ridicules in ‘‘Our America’’ the ‘‘weakg e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 109

lings’’ and ‘‘masqueraders’’ who find Europe superior, suggesting that they ‘‘go to the Prado under lamplight, or to Tortoni’s for a sherbet’’ (Martí, ‘‘Our America,’’ 112), and leave behind those willing to sacrifice European authority for the study of American ‘‘nature.’’ When Mowatt’s Tiffany family abandons the count and their life of pathetic European imitation in New York, and under the advice of virtuous patriot Adam Trueman heads off to the country ‘‘to learn economy, true independence and home virtues, instead of foreign follies,’’ and become an aristocracy ‘‘of Nature’s stamp, if not of fashion’s’’ (Mowatt, 365–66), they might very well be taking Martí’s advice in creating an America where ‘‘the natural men have conquered the learned and artificial men’’ (Martí, ‘‘Our America,’’ 87). Jeffrey Belnap has commented on these parallels between U.S. nationalist discourse and Martí’s rhetoric in ‘‘Our America,’’ noting that both rely on binaries between artificial Europe and natural America, and that both figure the American landscape as a site of historical progression from artificial to natural nationhood. Yet he writes that Martí diverges from the discourse of U.S. nationalism in his treatment of Native Americans by calling for ‘‘a thoroughgoing multicultural integration’’ of America (Belnap, 203). In Belnap’s reading, Martí tells Americans to ‘‘invert the Eurocentric hierarchy bequeathed on them by imperialism,’’ and learn to be ‘‘Natural’’ men by conceiving of themselves as ‘‘the cultural kin of Native American civilizations, regardless of the particular facts of biological descent’’ (203). For Belnap, this contrasts sharply with the use of ‘‘natural’’ American space as a legitimizing trope for bourgeois nationalism in the United States, where the empty American landscape simply awaits actualization by the teleological forces of historical progress (202). However, study of the discourse of the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century suggests Belnap may be oversimplifying the stories of U.S. nationalism. While certainly some dominant strands did imagine an empty continent, this construction paradoxically stood beside a history of claiming fictive kinship with Amerindians. One version of this bond appears in symbolic uses of the North American Indians that I described in chapter 1, and another in the early American poetry and prose that critic Eric Wertheimer demonstrates identified the young republic with ancient Aztec and Inca empires. In this trope, American colonists are destined to follow a pre-Columbian tradition by creating ‘‘the preeminent agricultural and political culture of the New World,’’ the survival of which is, ‘‘like the South American civilizations, . . . 110 c h a p t e r t h r e e

profoundly threatened by the meddling of the illegitimate European empires’’ (Wertheimer, 26). Wertheimer suggests that this trope of identification with New World Others lost hold by midcentury, as real transatlantic and hemispheric power made U.S. fantasies about the nativeness of nationalism no longer necessary. In their place fantasies of racial superiority took hold, as ‘‘the story of exceptionalism’’ required New World others ‘‘to emulate and then revile’’ (97). Kirsten Silva Gruesz sees a similar shift wherein articulations of inter-American neighborliness historically give way to forms of rejection and domination between the years 1823 and 1880. In contrast to Wertheimer and Gruesz, I want to suggest that this vacillation between emulation and revulsion did not occur all at once but continued to swing back and forth throughout the nineteenth century and afterward as the discourse of the Monroe Doctrine took hold. Thus The Fair God, a novel written by Lew Wallace, a proponent of the Monroe Doctrine and the object of Ruiz de Burton’s parody, includes strands of identification and disidentification as it attempts to narrate both the nativeness of nationalism and the destiny of Anglo-America to lead the New World. I will now consider Wallace’s novel in order to compare it with Ruiz de Burton’s and José Martí’s geographic moralities, and to distinguish between Martí’s and Wallace’s national fantasies of kinship with the victims of European imperialism. n Besides service as a Civil War general and commissioned officer in the Mexican army, Lew Wallace’s long career included service as governor of the New Mexico territory and foreign minister to Turkey, as well as the writing of several novels and plays, including his most famous work Ben Hur (1880). He began writing his first novel, The Fair God; or, The Last of the ’Tzins: A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico (1872), in Indiana during the 1840s as a young man bored by the study of law and fascinated by William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. In writing the novel, a fictionalization of Hernán Cortés’s invasion of the Aztec empire under Montezuma, Wallace went beyond Prescott’s historical account, as he later wrote, extensively researching Aztec politics, customs, and religion as well as Mexican geography, topography, and vegetation, leading him to annotate sources from the Library of Congress and consult works in Spanish, which he learned to facilitate his project (Morsberger and Morsberger, 18–19). Writing The Fair God was a thirty-year effort inspired by Wallace’s intense and contradictory fascination with Mexico. His avid reading of Prescott’s work as a young man fueled not only his g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 111

imagination but also his enthusiasm for the Mexican-American War. A zealous supporter, he opened a recruiting agency at the war’s outbreak to raise a militia company that elected him second lieutenant. In his Autobiography he recollects his romantic meditations during the journey southward to the front: ‘‘Mexico, the land of Montezuma and Cortés, and its people, and the campaign through palmetto lands and wide pastures—I was to see them—all else faded into commonplace’’ (118). Here his idealization of Mexico’s past seems to erase concern with the living Mexicans his army was about to confront, but in the 1860s he showed more interest in contemporary Mexican politics as he fought to raise money and public support for the ousted Mexican republican government. At this time, however, his concern for the cause of democracy in Mexico was almost inextricable from his notion of Mexico as a legendary land of wealth. His service to the Liberal army ended after the French backed out of Mexico and Maximilian was expelled, but Wallace stayed on in Mexico to claim the full commissioned salary he had been promised. The insolvent republican army never fully compensated him, although he spent a year in Mexico attempting to get his payment in mining, banking, or telegraph concessions from the government. The concessions he attempted to broker with the U.S.-owned companies Atlantic Telegraph and Panama Railroad were never accepted by Juárez because of unfavorable terms (Miller, 42–44). About his efforts in Mexico, his family joked that Wallace hoped to someday be ‘‘Emperor or President’’ of Mexico, a formulation that suggests that Wallace’s view of Mexico as a romantic land of fortune and glory matched his commitment to the cause of New World democracy (quoted in Morsberger and Morsberger, 198). This confusing set of political, cultural, and financial interests was bound together in The Fair God (1872), which clearly rewrites Prescott’s history of Mexican conquest to stress not U.S. Manifest Destiny, but the geographic morality of the Monroe Doctrine. After failing to make his fortune in Mexico, Wallace returned home, retired from military service, and finished the novel that he had begun as a young man. An instant popular if not critical success, it went through sixteen printings in ten years; Ben Hur doubled sales of The Fair God by renewing interest in his earlier work. Published one year after Who Would Have Thought It?, The Fair God identifies Aztecs as the true Americans, authorizing their demise as an originary site of New World democracy. The Fair God is framed as a long lost manuscript written by Fernando de Alva Iztlilzochitl, a real historian of Tezcucan descent who lived in 112 c h a p t e r t h r e e

the early sixteenth century. Wallace pretends to be merely translating this manuscript that de Alva, ‘‘anxious to rescue his race from oblivion,’’ wrote in Spanish as a history of the conflict between Cortés and the Aztecs under Montezuma (xi). This long lost manuscript, Wallace explains in his preface, was found among the dispatches from the viceroy Mendoza to the emperor, possibly sent to him purposely in order to give Charles V ‘‘a completer idea of Aztec civilization’’ (xiii). Thus framed as a text through which colonial subjects write back to the empire, The Fair God ostensibly gives voice to the subaltern. Indeed, while Wallace used Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico as his model, his fictive version of the conflict is far more sympathetic to the Aztecs than was Prescott’s account. Prescott dwells on Aztec practices like human sacrifice, and offers his readers such interpretations as ‘‘in this state of things it was beneficently ordered by Providence that the land should be delivered over to another race, who rescued it from brutish superstitions’’ (1:102). Wallace glosses over human sacrifice and charts another divine plan for Mexico through his hero Guatamozin. Guatamozin was, like many of Wallace’s characters, a historical figure mentioned by Prescott. But while the historian interpreted his leadership in battles against the Spanish invaders as motivated by ‘‘a sort of religious hatred to the Spaniards’’ (Prescott, 2:377), Wallace depicts Guatamozin as a patriot and nascent political theorist. He rises to defend his people from Cortés out of rationalism rather than religion. While Montezuma believes the conquistadors are angry gods come to wreak their revenge, Guatamozin recognizes and stages elaborate demonstrations to reveal their mortality through reason. When Montezuma is captured by Cortés and, paralyzed by fear and self-doubt, encourages his people to accept the conquerors peacefully, Guatamozin learns ‘‘to distinguish between the king and country’’ and convinces the Aztec ‘‘nation,’’ as he repeatedly calls it, to use ‘‘the judgment and will of the many’’ to elect a new king and expel the invaders (246). ‘‘Public Opinion’’ is the weapon that Guatamozin discovers, and several chapters, with titles like ‘‘Public Opinion Makes Way’’ and ‘‘Public Opinion Proclaims Itself—Battle,’’ dramatize its galvanizing effect on the Aztecs. Wallace describes his hero not only as defending the Aztec city of Anahuac, but also as uniting the surrounding tribes, and the narrator repeatedly refers to Guatamozin’s army as the forces of ‘‘the New World.’’ The Fair God ends with their victory over the Spanish in the battle of the Noche Triste rather than with the ultimate defeat toward which Presg e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 113

cott’s history builds. This structural emphasis on the destined triumph of the New World over European invaders is made even more explicit in a prophecy that Montezuma gives before he dies of smallpox. Repenting his betrayal of his people, Montezuma looks eight generations into the future and sees the New World ‘‘tribes newly risen, like the trodden grass, and in their midst a Priesthood and a Cross. An age of battles more, and lo! the Cross but not the Priests; in their stead Freedom and God!’’ (459– 60). As Montezuma dies he tells his daughter, Guatamozin’s betrothed, to remember these words and pass them down, for someday his people will understand their meaning. Like Ruiz de Burton, then, Wallace writes a story that has embedded in it a claim about the destiny of Mexico and its relations with the United States. He dramatizes his vision of democracy and Protestantism in Mexico through an identification that treats race quite differently than did Prescott, whose work announced the racial inferiority of the Aztecs. For Wallace, race is what distinguishes the Aztecs from the Spanish invaders—the Aztec characters think and speak repeatedly about acting to save their ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘nation,’’ and ‘‘country,’’ words that the novel uses interchangeably. Clearly this opposition between Guatamozin’s ‘‘hosts of New World men’’ (440) and the Spanish conquistadors mirrors Wallace’s understanding of the struggle between the Mexican Liberals, led by the indio Juárez, and the European invaders under Napoléon III and Maximilian. As ‘‘Americans,’’ the Aztecs and their descendants have a geographical bond with the United States, a bond that is symbolically emphasized by Montezuma’s prophecy, which foretells not a return to pre-Columbian purity but rather an Anglicization that fully realizes Guatamozin’s nascent nationalism. The invading Spaniards thus both trigger and threaten the development of incipient democracy in the New World. Through his mestizo narrator and many heroic Aztec characters, Wallace seems to promote a bond of identification and historic continuity between his Anglo-American readers and his construction of Aztec culture. But what The Fair God so clearly suppresses is the parallel relationship between the Spanish conquistadors and the European settlers whose descendants govern the United States. Both have sought conquest over Mexico, and both act on assumptions of racial superiority, a parallel that troubles Wallace’s choice to share the Aztec perspective. The fate of cross-racial romance in the novel tellingly reveals his ambivalent alignment of Aztecs and ‘‘Americans.’’ A major point in the plot is 114 c h a p t e r t h r e e

the fate of Nenetzin, one of Montezuma’s daughters, who falls in love with Pedro de Alvarado, Cortés’s lieutenant. Imagining him to be a god of the sun, she is immediately captivated by his blonde hair and blue eyes, and betrays her father and her people by warning Alvarado of a planned attack, which leads to her father’s capture. After warning Alvarado, she moves in with him, where, as she reveals to her heroic Aztec suitor Hualpa, their sexual relations make her ‘‘no longer as pure as snow on the mountain-top’’ (498). It comes as no surprise to readers that after this transgression Nenetzin is punished with death at novel’s end. This plot bears some resemblance to those Mexican ‘‘foundational fictions’’ of the nineteenth century described by Doris Sommer, works that express ‘‘patriotic longings for an indigenous, liberal republic’’ by pairing indio heroes and heroines and punishing characters who choose mates with European-looking features (228). But we must also consider that for Wallace and his Anglo-American audience, Nenetzin’s death is fully in line with conventional treatments of miscegenation. Indeed, her fate is in this way similar to that of Lola’s mother in Who Would Have Thought It?, who after her captivity among the ‘‘rascally Indians’’ (34) seems to have no choice but to die of shame. Thus, on the one hand, Nenetzin’s and Alvarado’s doomed union dramatizes the insurmountable difference between Old and New World, while, on the other, it expresses a racial prejudice central to American literary imagination, one that troubles any familial construction of Indians (or mestizo Mexicans) as brothers, wives, or children. When one is aware of Wallace’s political investment in Mexico, it makes sense to read his historical romance’s ambivalence about Mexican racial difference and its vision of Mexican political destiny as two faces of the cultural ideology of the Monroe Doctrine that he was so active in propagating. The novel’s construction of a New World future encourages both identification and disidentification, emulation and revulsion. With the Monroe Doctrine’s slippage from protection to control, Wallace could reconcile his fictive identifications with Aztecs and his work as governor of the New Mexico territory, where he led military operations against the Mescalero Apaches only a few years after his first novel’s publication (Morsberger and Morsberger, 225). Thus it is through the terms of the Monroe Doctrine’s ambivalent hemispheric identification that we can most clearly distinguish Wallace’s cross-racial New World bonds from Martí’s. Wallace encourages his readers to see themselves not as the heirs to the Aztecs’ legacy but as their executors, g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 115

carrying out Montezuma’s will in a contemporary moment that requires the spread of Anglo-American culture and order. While Martí imagined a ‘‘raceless’’ New World unified through an enlightened attachment to land and nature, Wallace ambivalently uses racial difference to represent the Western Hemisphere as a domain for his post–Manifest Destiny conception of Mexican-American relations. Wallace’s romantic and hypocritical fascination with the Aztecs is precisely the kind of cross-racial identification that Ruiz de Burton attacks in her novel, in the form of Mrs. Norval’s phony abolitionism, or Hackwell’s empty sermons on freedom and democracy. And presciently, through her parody of Wallace’s Zouave pretensions, she moreover reveals the tendency of the United States to culturally imitate the European legacy it nominally and self-righteously rejects. The epigram by Whittier that she selects for her work makes clear this central intention to expose hypocrisy: But by all thy nature’s weakness, Hidden faults and follies known, Be thou, in rebuking evil, Conscious of thine own. The lines are from Whittier’s 1847 ‘‘What the Voice Said,’’ a religious poem in which a speaker, angry at the earthly sins of chattel slavery and economic exploitation, calls down God’s divine punishment on men ruled by ‘‘smooth-faced Mammon / reaping men like grain’’ (Whittier, 214, lines 11–12). A divine inner voice chides the speaker, reminding him to be aware of his own weaknesses, and to temper with love his outrage at earthly sin. The lines that Ruiz de Burton selects thus remind the Northern United States of two sins that it must bear in its conscience before casting stones at slave owners in the South or monarchists in Mexico: its own racism and its own desire for political and economic domination in the guise of liberty. Defining and defending the virtues of the New World requires an exaggerated binary between democracy and tyranny, freedom and oppression, innocence and sin, that Ruiz de Burton devotes her novel to debunking. José Martí’s construction of Our America relies on a symbolic repertoire of hemispheric separation and natural regeneration in the New World that Ruiz de Burton rejects for its associations with U.S. hegemony. Martí, however, relocates the New World by stressing not the provincial isolation of an exceptional political system but the forging 116 c h a p t e r t h r e e

of hemispheric relations based on knowledge rather than self-interest. Through the trope of the villager, for example, Martí specifies that the pursuit of ‘‘natural’’ knowledge in the New World is not a retreat into isolation or nationalism. He warns Latin Americans not to mistake their ‘‘villages’’ for the entire world or to rouse ‘‘what remains of the village in America’’ (84). Going beyond the narrow concerns of the provincial villager entails a wider, international unification of Latin American peoples and knowledge of the natural, political, cultural, and racial conditions of the New World. In contrast to the sleeping villagers of Our America, he casts the United States as a ‘‘giant with seven league boots,’’ and at the end of the essay he makes it clear that it is this giant’s provincialism, not its long reach, that makes it a threat. He calls USAmericans ‘‘an enterprising and vigorous people who scorn or ignore Our America,’’ but who will ‘‘even so approach it and demand a close relation’’ (93). In response, he writes, ‘‘it is our imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect’’ (93). As a solution to the problem of U.S. imperialism—the impending danger that in his essay is even more pressing than that of European imitation—Martí recommends both a unified show of strength and an effort to make the giant ‘‘know’’ its neighbors. Thus Latin America must avoid being a ‘‘villager’’ whose narrow and petty concerns prevent strong international unification of Our America, and produce a ‘‘provincial antipathy to the continent’s fairskinned nation simply because it does not speak our language, or see the world as we see it’’ (94). The potential problem brewing between Our America and the other America is that either one might use faulty knowledge—particularly racial or cultural knowledge—to assume false relationships. Lew Wallace, with his self-interested romanticization of the pre-Columbian past and persistent efforts to forge unequal economic relations between the United States and Mexico, might serve as an example of the giant’s tendency to assume such relationships with limited knowledge. Martí’s geographic morality then requires a strong historical, cultural, and geographic knowledge of oneself and one’s neighbors, carried out with sensitivity to perspectives that ‘‘see the world’’ differently. Like the champions of U.S. nationalism, Martí isolates America from Europe by rejecting the cosmopolitan Creole who longs for café culture and classical learning. But his construction of the Western Hemisphere carefully avoids the geographic moralities of either homogenizing the Americas, g e o g r a p h i c m o r a l i t y 117

emphasizing racial and ethnic difference between the United States and Latin America, or retreating into xenophobic nationalism.10 He calls for ‘‘appropriate study’’ in the spirit of ‘‘tacit and immediate unity of the continental spirit’’ (94). Here Martí could be taken to mean the ‘‘unity’’ of Latin America that he says is necessary to fend off U.S. imperialism, but his choice of the term ‘‘continental’’ (in Spanish continente can refer to the entire hemisphere) leaves open the possibility that this study will be taken up by both Anglo- and Latin Americans, in an effort to forge a relationship based on mutual knowledge. This chapter has differentiated the geographical constructions that ground Ruiz de Burton’s and Martí’s oppositional writings. Both specifically contend with United States’ proprietary isolation of the Western Hemisphere, rejecting its ‘‘leading strings’’ and those who follow those strings in uncritical admiration. While in Who Would Have Thought It? Ruiz de Burton derealizes the Old/New World binary in favor of a transatlantic community of learned, well-mannered, and white elites, Martí champions the radical potential of the concept of a multiracial, democratic America, rejecting provincial isolation, European cosmopolitanism, and the tendency of the United States to unilaterally define hemispheric meaning and destiny. Jeffrey Belnap correctly concludes that Martí imagines a more racially inclusive America than do most nineteenth-century narratives of U.S. nationalism, but reading work of Lew Wallace helps us understand that if U.S. nationalism is partly based on the construction of the Western Hemisphere as an empty theater for U.S. regeneration, it also requires an ongoing vacillation between identification and disidentification with Latin and Native America. Furthermore, as contemporary scholars attempt to decenter the United States and think past the imagined community of nations’ formative symbols and narratives, Ruiz de Burton’s privileging of Mexican elites within a system of European colonial authority crucially emphasizes the importance of keeping race and class in view. Conceptually denationalizing the New World is a process that, as we see in Ruiz de Burton’s work, does not necessarily evade the conventional constructions of race and civilization that propelled European colonialism in the New World and elsewhere.

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chapter four gringos abroad rationalizing empire with richard harding davis

In December 1895, Grover Cleveland unintentionally boosted journalist Richard Harding Davis’s career. Earlier that month ‘‘The Paris of South America,’’ Davis’s article about his visit to Venezuela, appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. In it Davis touched on a fifty-year-old quarrel about the location of the border between Venezuela and British Guiana, recommending that ‘‘there never was a case when the United States needed to watch her English cousins more closely and announce her Monroe doctrine more vigorously than in this international boundary dispute’’ (115). A few weeks later Cleveland’s Presidential Message to Congress brought the Venezuela border conflict to national attention, citing the Monroe Doctrine as justification to prevent British expansion in the Americas. Davis’s article seemed remarkably prescient. The coincidence boosted his status as a pundit of Latin American affairs; he told his brother that ‘‘several of the papers have jokingly alluded to the fact that my article on the Venezuelan border conflict inspired the President’s message’’ (Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, 172). The article, he admitted, ‘‘was a very lucky thing and is greatly quoted and in social gatherings I am appealed to as a final authority’’ (172). It is unlikely that Davis’s article did in fact influence Cleveland’s assessment of the situation; the president and Secretary of State Richard Olney had established the administration’s stance months earlier. Their decision to intervene by threatening war if Britain did not submit the dispute to impartial arbitration was more likely precipitated by the efforts of the Venezuela lobbyist William Scruggs and the U.S. expansionist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Both depicted the British encroachment as the beginning of a general European scramble for colonial territory in South America, which would repeat recent events in Africa.1 Cleveland’s message was initially greeted with expressions of intense national-

ism and willingness to fight in defense of the Monroe Doctrine, although in the subsequent year this enthusiasm cooled, and the border conflict was eventually decided in favor of the British. In spite of the peaceful resolution of the crisis, however, the central question of the Monroe Doctrine’s meaning and relevance remained a popular topic of debate for the next decade. Davis wrote to his brother about the sensation when the crisis broke: ‘‘You never saw anything like the country after [Cleveland’s] war message. . . . Everybody talked of it and nothing else. I went to a dinner of 300 men all of different callings and I do not believe one of them spoke of anything else. Cabmen, car conductors, barkeepers, beggars and policemen. All talked of war and Venezuela and the Doctrine of Mr. Monroe’’ (Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, 172). After 1895 the Doctrine for the first time assumed its status as a sacred national tradition and cherished document, akin to the Declaration of Independence and Washington’s Farewell Address. Popular sentiment of the era overwhelmingly affirmed that the Monroe Doctrine was still relevant, although, as a few skeptics pointed out, no one seemed to agree on exactly what it stated, how it should be applied, or where its jurisdiction should be in the twentieth century. Both Republicans and Democrats affirmed their loyalty to it in their 1900 presidential campaign platforms, making the most correct interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine a major campaign issue at a time when the nation was divided over the question of imperialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The McKinley-Roosevelt platform asserted the Republican’s ‘‘steadfast adherence to the policy announced in the Monroe Doctrine,’’ the key aspect of which seemed to be protecting all Americans (and apparently all Filipinos) from European domination (quoted in Johnson and Porter, 124). But while the Republicans saw in the Doctrine a responsibility to protect weaker peoples by taking their lands and preparing them for democracy, the Democratic platform took issue with this interpretation, calling it ‘‘manifestly insincere and deceptive’’ in its support of a policy that contradicted ‘‘the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine.’’ This spirit, according to the Democrats, prohibited expansion into the Pacific, outside of the nation’s proper home in the Western Hemisphere. Democrats, the platform explains, ‘‘insist on the strict maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine in all its integrity, both in letter and in spirit, as necessary to prevent the extension of European authority on this continent and as essential to our supremacy in American affairs’’ (quoted in Johnson and Porter, 113). The political conflict over post-1898 expansion was often posed in 120 c h a p t e r f o u r

terms of ‘‘imperialist’’ Republicans versus ‘‘anti-imperialist’’ Democrats, but as is evident in the example above, the conflict centered on a much narrower question about the location of U.S. empire: would the United States be confined to the Western Hemisphere according to the tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, or would it break its perceived traditional isolation to become a world power? 2 As my previous chapters have shown, the question of empire beyond the Western Hemisphere was not entirely new, but the rhetoric of the anti-imperialists and their imagined tradition of the Monroe Doctrine constructed it as such. Despite the fact that both platforms imagined the United States as a world leader with ‘‘supremacy’’ over a large portion of the globe, the righteous tone of the Democrats indicates that this question was a deeply experienced crisis about carrying on the ‘‘spirit’’ of a national tradition, the tradition of exceptionalist isolation. This chapter is concerned with the role of the Monroe Doctrine as an ideological touchstone, a sort of objective correlative for the tensions surrounding the construction of a coherent national identity during this crisis over U.S. empire. The Doctrine became incredibly popular during this era because it stood for a traditional mission consistent with mythic origins of anticolonial difference. It testified to the existence of a coherent and meaningful national identity and foreign policy, even in the face of dissensus and contradiction. The writings on the Doctrine by policy makers and early foreign policy specialists that this chapter considers are thus attempts to reconcile the perceived tradition of postcolonial isolation with the beginnings of extracontinental empire. Richard Harding Davis was a crucial voice in this debate. His influence, however, was not primarily in his journalistic writings. His comments on Venezuela in the Harper’s article (and in its revision as part of his 1896 travelogue Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America) in fact said very little to answer the questions of national identity at stake. Arthur Lubow, Davis’s biographer, sarcastically quips that if the article established Davis as an authority at social gatherings, his friends must have had a ‘‘feeble grasp of foreign policy’’ (123). The article’s stance on U.S. intervention was hazy, and this confusion was intensified when he revised the article for Three Gringos. Davis vacillates between recommending, on the one hand, that the United States pursue only its selfinterest and, on the other, that it fulfill its duty to protect weaker powers, revealing his inability to logically describe a consistent role for the United States as a world power. Such weaknesses led a reviewer of his day to gringos abroad

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express regret that Davis had decided to include his discussion of the Monroe Doctrine in his book at all, ‘‘because he evidently has only heard that there is such a thing, and labours patiently to extract some profound thoughts about it.’’ The result, the reviewer remarks dryly, ‘‘is a screed resembling a high school graduating essay’’ (‘‘Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America’’ [review], 369). Davis made a more significant contribution to the public debate on the meaning and application of the Monroe Doctrine in his novel Soldiers of Fortune, which was to become the third best-selling book of 1897. Soldiers had just sold to Scribner’s as a serial when Cleveland issued his message to Congress, and it was the novel that had initially motivated Davis’s journey through Central America and Venezuela, where Davis had hoped to gather local color and detail for his fictional work. As Lubow notes, critics of the novel have been quick to point out its role in ‘‘prim[ing] the national psyche for the collective adventure in Cuba’’ (124), and they read Olancho, the imaginary nation that is the novel’s setting, as loosely based on the island. But Davis’s involvement with the Venezuela border conflict suggests that his work engages not only with the specific question of Cuban independence, but also with the more general one about the status of the Monroe Doctrine. I do not mean to say simply that the novel dramatizes, rather than U.S. intervention in Cuba, U.S. intervention in Venezuela—a nation that like the fictional Olancho is located on the northwest coast of South America. It seems more likely that Olancho, described by a character in the novel as ‘‘one of those little republics down there,’’ is an amalgamation through which Davis constructs a general and mythic relation between the United States and its southern neighbors. My main point, instead, is that the historical context of the Venezuela conflict—the crisis it sparked over the Monroe Doctrine—is at the thematic center of Davis’s novel. Soldiers of Fortune is significant not only for generating enthusiasm for U.S. intervention in Cuba, but also for narratively resolving larger conflicts over imperialism and the global role of the United States inside and outside the Western Hemisphere. n One of the reasons that Cleveland’s message caused such excitement was the exchange of letters he appended to it, a lively correspondence between Secretary of State Olney and British foreign minister Lord Salisbury. Olney’s somewhat swaggering and righteous interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine and Salisbury’s condescending dismissal of it created 122 c h a p t e r f o u r

a dramatic exchange when reprinted in newspapers. As war fever subsided, however, some began to wonder if Monroe’s 1823 Message depended on a hemispheric binary of monarchy versus democracy that was in fact outdated. ‘‘Europe on the whole is monarchical,’’ Olney wrote to Salisbury in one of these letters; ‘‘America, on the other hand, is devoted to exactly the opposite principle’’ (United States, Congressional Record, 194). Olney’s point supports this hemispheric divide through its description of a friendly alliance of North and South America ‘‘by geographic proximity, by natural sympathy, [and] by similarity of governmental constitutions’’ (195). But whether looked at geographically, culturally, or politically, these supposed bonds between the Americas seemed obsolete to many. An examination of Olney’s traditional appeal and the skepticism with which some policy makers, professors, and pundits received it reveals the possible obsolescence of Monroe’s ideas that Davis’s novel would address. Lord Salisbury was quick to note the problems with applying the 1823 policy statement to his day: while he granted that Monroe’s apprehension of the Holy Alliance’s monarchism in 1823 had been valid, Salisbury claimed that Olney was now perceiving ‘‘imaginary dangers’’ (197). He reminded Olney that ‘‘Great Britain is imposing no ‘system’ upon Venezuela and is not concerning herself in any way with the nature of the political systems under which the Venezuelans may prefer to live’’ (197). This statement might not have been entirely accurate for the many Venezuelans inhabiting the large territory in question, but for some USAmericans it seemed quite correct that the Venezuelans were not in danger of losing personal liberties to British government, especially in light of the corruption of Latin American politics that writers like Davis were pointing out. European powers, no longer autocratic monarchies, were seldom thought to be endangering democracy in the New World at the turn of the century. In fact, their interests in South America—to invest capital, extract raw materials, and gain markets— appeared to many as not so different from those of the United States. Rather than viewing the United States and Great Britain as pitted against one another in the clear-cut struggle of democracy versus monarchy, it became more common to view the nations as competing in efforts to secure foreign markets for goods and capital. The fragility of the binary between New and Old Worlds was more readily apparent in 1900 in part because many USAmericans had begun to believe that some version of extracontinental imperialism (whether it gringos abroad

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was merely economic or included varying degrees of territorial annexation) was vital to the prosperity of the United States, if not to the advance of ‘‘civilization.’’ According to Olney, again rehearsing Monroe’s 1823 arguments, the United States was vitally interested in the cause of popular self-government because it believed that democracy was ‘‘the healing of all nations, and that civilization must either advance or retrograde accordingly as its supremacy is extended or curtailed’’ (195). But while here Olney links the advance of ‘‘civilization’’ directly to the advance of democracy, this formulation would be complicated by what had come to be perceived as more immediate racial and economic factors of civilization.3 John W. Burgess responded to Olney’s letter in a Political Science Quarterly article titled ‘‘The Recent Pseudo-Monroeism,’’ in which he charged that fighting the British would be a ‘‘fratricidal war’’ working against the progress of liberty and civilization. Burgess complained that ‘‘public opinion’’ usually perceived the British Empire as ‘‘a gigantic system of land robbery’’ that prospered by stealing the wealth of its colonies, when in fact ‘‘the lands taken were wildernesses, the peoples made subject were barbarians, and the wealth acquired was created by British enterprise and capital employing and paying for labor which had before lain dormant’’ (66). Burgess displaces empathy with the decolonized with contempt for the uncivilized. As Charles Dole, father of the Hawai’i pineapple magnate, explained in an Atlantic Monthly article on the Doctrine, despite past sympathy for liberated Spanish colonies, ‘‘it would be hypocrisy to claim to-day that our people are seriously concerned over the[ir] troubles. . . . We are apt to say that they are unfit to govern themselves’’ (570). From this perspective, Olney’s championing of democracy against monarchy seemed utterly naive in its apparent ignorance of racial and economic ‘‘realities.’’ One writer designated only as ‘‘An American Business Man’’ summed up this objection in the title of his 1903 article in the North American Review: ‘‘Is the Monroe Doctrine a Bar to Civilization?’’ The American Business Man argues that by preventing European political interference in South America, enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine was in effect preventing European capitalists from making the investments necessary to ‘‘civilize’’ the volatile region. Preventing new colonization to protect democracy meant sheltering barbarism. The area’s volatility supposedly resulted from the racial composition of its militaristic ruling class, described by the Business Man as a mixture of 124 c h a p t e r f o u r

Spanish, Indian, and Negro blood. This ruling class exploited the ‘‘docile and easily managed’’ Indian peasantry and extorted foreign capitalists. Both peasants and capitalists would be denied democratic liberties until South American governments were under the strict control of a world power. Whether that world power was Britain or Germany or the United States was unimportant; for the American Business Man, ‘‘civilization’’ was primarily defined by race and economics. Without the intervention of a world power—intervention that the Monroe Doctrine prohibited— capitalist enterprise in South America would fail, and without the civilizing forces of capital and whiteness, its foundering democratic political systems would continue to succumb to corruption. The Business Man warns, ‘‘nothing except capital invested in these countries by American, English, and German business men stands between them and the utter blackness of barbarism’’ (525). Scientific discourses of racism buttressed this newly forged alignment between U.S. and European civilizing missions. Historian Stuart Anderson has recently argued that the Venezuelan border conflict catalyzed the rising movement for Anglo-Saxonism precisely because the notion of taking the side of the Venezuelans against the British offended these emerging configurations of racial identity. Monroe called the newly independent republics of South America ‘‘our brethren’’ in 1823, but in 1898 Anglo-Saxonist and pioneer sociologist Franklin Giddings expressed thanks that ‘‘at last we recognize our [British] kinsmen over sea as our brethren and as our co-workers in the tasks of civilization’’ (601). Monroe had claimed that the safety of the newly formed United States would be protected by preserving democracy in South America, but Dole observed that U.S. liberties would be more secure ‘‘if Germany were by some magic to fill South America as full of sturdy German people as Canada is now full of friendly English’’ (571). This new perception led some to the conclusion that U.S. identification with South American republics had always been misguided: Monroe had simply hoped for democratic behavior and civilized qualities of which South American peoples were racially incapable. The U.S. national identity expressed in these formulations thus shifts from geography to genealogy. Archibald Cary Coolidge, whose 1906 The United States as a World Power was one of the inaugural works of U.S. diplomatic history, elaborated on what might be called a racial relocation: gringos abroad

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Educated Americans know not only that the United States is nearer in almost every way to Europe than to South America, but that the average American has more in common, not with the Englishman alone, but with the German, the Frenchman, or the Russian than with the Mexican, the Peruvian, or the Brazilian. This has, indeed, always been true; but it was less realized at a time when it seemed possible to divide civilized peoples into two categories,—those who were ruled by irresponsible authority and those who enjoyed self-government. Such a division is now out of date, and race feeling, on the contrary, is more active than ever. (108) Coolidge’s racial relocation describes a shift in both spatial and racial perceptions of proximity. Not only does he point out the new primacy of ‘‘race feeling,’’ but he closely links it with a reconsideration of the hemisphere as a meaningful spatial category, which becomes less important in this turn toward genealogy. At the same time, he effaces the actual racial heterogeneity of the United States and South America in this construction of white kinship with Europe. In contrast with Martí’s hope for a raceless Western Hemisphere (and in accord with Ruiz de Burton’s hope for a Europeanized New World), Coolidge sees race as trumping geography, a device that erases the Western Hemisphere. Olney’s 1895 letter to Salisbury claimed that the Monroe Doctrine rests on ‘‘facts and principles that are both intelligible and incontrovertible’’: for example, the ‘‘3000 miles of intervening ocean’’ that separated England from South America, making any cross-Atlantic union ‘‘unnatural and inexpedient’’ (194). This claim echoes Adams’s suggestion that colonial bonds were unnatural because of a lack of proximity and domestic intimacy. But such an appeal to nineteenth-century hemispheric constructions seemed obsolete at the dawn of the twentieth century, when a steamer trip from New York to London took a fraction of the time required for a trip to most parts of South America. This revision of geographic concepts was in part necessitated by changes in industrial commerce. Monroe’s geographical conception of the world in 1823 did not account for U.S. interests in the Pacific or for what Coolidge called in 1906 ‘‘the growing tendency among all nations to be interested everywhere’’ (119). It divided the world into discrete hemispheres, but, as Albert Hart Bushnell, author of The Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1901), concluded, ‘‘there really was no such separation in 1823, and every year draws the ends of the earth closer together’’ (223). This 126 c h a p t e r f o u r

globalizing tendency, these writers would agree, was the result of both economic and technological changes, including what historians have described as a move toward ‘‘informal’’ or commercial empire emphasizing markets and trade routes over political empire requiring the domination of large expanses of territory.4 This shift created in the Monroe Doctrine a new tension between democracy and development. The tension had become explicit in 1880, when a French engineering company obtained a concession from Colombia to build a transisthmian canal under the supervision of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Although Colombia and France promised neutrality and international access to the proposed canal, and although the French company desired no change in Colombia’s democratic government, many in the United States accused France of violating the Monroe Doctrine. Lesseps, the engineer who had just finished overseeing construction of the Suez Canal, felt obliged to promote the project in an 1880 North American Review article, in which he assured readers that the concession did not challenge the Monroe Doctrine, ‘‘because [the Doctrine] can be in no manner applicable to a private enterprise, such as a canal, railway, or other similar undertaking’’ (11). He further emphasized that if the Doctrine’s original purpose was to protect free institutions in the Western Hemisphere, the canal was merely an example of Colombia exercising its freedom to engage in business contracts as it chose (12). This argument made sense to some USAmericans who, like the American Business Man, thought any properly managed canal was better than none at all (see ‘‘Our Policy Respecting the Panama Canal,’’ 273–75). But it inspired one writer to argue a few months later, in another North American Review article, that the primary purpose of the Doctrine had never been to guarantee fraternal democracy in the Western Hemisphere, but rather to protect the United States’ ‘‘interests’’ and ‘‘development.’’ Monroe’s motivation, according to this article, was to create a system that kept ‘‘all the interests of the American Continent’’ free from European domination, thereby enabling the United States to ‘‘live in peace and reasonable equity with weaker American states’’ (‘‘The Monroe Doctrine and the Isthmian Canal,’’ 506–7; emphasis in original). By replacing ‘‘democracy’’ with ‘‘interests,’’ this interpretation reveals the strain that global interconnectedness and economic competition placed on the discourse of the Monroe Doctrine. Lesseps’ effort to build the canal eventually collapsed, but still unresolved were these questions about the Monroe Doctrine’s relevance to private business affairs, gringos abroad

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and its precarious balancing of the interests of New World democracy and U.S. economic and security. In short, while technology and commerce were drawing the ends of the earth closer together at the close of the nineteenth century, these centripetal forces of modernity created divisions as well. The United States was being drawn closer to Europe as well as to South America and Asia, but being drawn into the European political and economic core as an equal and toward the ‘‘weaker’’ South American and Asian periphery as a commercial and military power were different processes, enabled by different forms of racial and national identification and disidentification. The reconfiguration of the capitalist world system and the movement of the United States toward its core required U.S. citizens to revise sympathies that the Monroe Doctrine expressed for South America. In place of Monroe’s radical division between east and west, monarchy and democracy, the turn of the twentieth century brought a more pronounced division in the conceptual location of the United States between north and south, strong and weak, civilization and ‘‘barbarism.’’ Indeed, to cling to the Monroe Doctrine’s ideals of fraternal hemispheric equality in a modern age of steamships and joint stock ventures seemed to some of these critics to be itself a sort of barbarism. As one writer declared, the United States needed to ask ‘‘whether we are going to speak as of this day, as practical men of the beginning of the twentieth century, or whether our voice is going to come out of the distant past’’ (Wellman, 836). Obedience to this distant past was represented not only as abject filiopietism and blind conservatism, but also as the primitive superstition of native peoples. The Monroe Doctrine was described with surprising frequency in these years as the ‘‘Monroe fetish.’’ Journalist William Wellman asked if it had not been placed ‘‘upon a pedestal and made an idol and a fetish of ’’ (840); ex-senator and prolific writer John B. Henderson called it ‘‘a sort of fetish for national worship’’ with ‘‘a weird and enchanting influence on the American intellect. The mind becomes imbued with a vague sense of past traditions resulting in a confusion of sentimental ideas which impair the powers of discrimination’’ (447); William Graham Sumner called the ‘‘Monroe fetish’’ a tactic wherein Monroe’s name was used as ‘‘a club with which to stun us’’ (59). While Lew Wallace created in The Fair God a narrative continuity between ancient Aztecs and contemporary Americans, these writers argued that to adhere to the words of Monroe would be a sort of barbarism, akin to relinquishing the differences that separate Anglo-Americans from savages. 128 c h a p t e r f o u r

Those who continued to embrace the Monroe Doctrine, however, saw in its historical tradition a fantasy of national purity and coherence on the American continent. Andrew Carnegie, for example, the industrial magnate who barraged newspapers and magazines with anti-imperialist articles after the Spanish-American War, described the post-1898 crisis in two of his titles as a ‘‘Parting of the Ways,’’ and a perilous example of ‘‘Americanism versus Imperialism’’ (The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays). ‘‘Shall we remain,’’ he asked, ‘‘solid, compact, impregnable, republican, American?’’ The alternative to this past isolation and coherence was a racially debased citizenry and a future of ever shifting European alliances and wars for colonial domination. Here Carnegie echoes John Quincy Adams’s vision of virtuous abstention from political conflicts, adopting Adams’s gendered trope to appeal to the tradition of the Doctrine: ‘‘To be more powerful at home is the surest way to be more powerful abroad. To-day the Republic stands as the friend of all nations, the ally of none. . . . She is not one of them, scrambling for possessions; she stands apart, pursuing her own great mission, teaching all nations by example. Let her become a power annexing a foreign territory, and all is changed in a moment’’ (162). Carnegie’s words indicate the particular power of the Monroe Doctrine to harness the ideology of domesticity in service of exceptionalist national history. The Monroe Doctrine became enormously popular in these years because of its ability to represent anticolonialism as American tradition and to elide the ways in which the United States had not always been homogeneously ‘‘compact,’’ had not influenced other peoples only by the force of example, and had not abstained from fighting for possessions.5 These elisions are part of the reason why the nation clung to the Doctrine like a ‘‘fetish,’’ and why dismissals of this invented tradition largely fell on deaf ears. Late-twentieth-century critics of the Monroe Doctrine usually described it as a policy that disingenuously claimed absolute power over Latin America, but much of its power to make this claim, I would suggest, came from its construction of an exceptionalist past (see especially Johnson, A Hemisphere Apart, and Kenworthy). And yet to adhere to this past did not preclude imperialism, as Olney revealed in his claim that the United States had the right to intervene in Venezuela because the United States was ‘‘practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition’’ (United States, Congressional Record, 195). The trick for policy makers and commentators longing for a more global role for the United States gringos abroad

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was not to convince USAmericans to reject their fetish, but rather to redefine it to authorize both territorial expansion outside of the Western Hemisphere and political intervention and economic influence over ‘‘unstable’’ Latin American democracies. Theodore Roosevelt played a key role in this reinterpretation. He insisted on the Doctrine’s flexibility in an 1896 speech, which he published when he was elected vice president. There Roosevelt called the Doctrine ‘‘a broad, general principle of foreign policy’’ that could not be outmoded because it articulated the essential interests of the United States. The historical tradition of the Doctrine as a precedent was helpful, he admitted, but its true authority came from an accurate expression of ‘‘national self-interests’’ (111, 119). Thus the Doctrine freed the United States from any strict program of military intervention or isolation in the Western Hemisphere because it could adapt to ‘‘national interests’’ that experts could objectively identify. This idea of adaptability was repeated by historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, a friend of Roosevelt’s, who also endowed the Monroe Doctrine with ‘‘an inherent principle of life, which adapts itself with the flexibility of a growing plant, to the successive conditions it encounters’’ (33). In these articles and in others,6 writers recreated the Doctrine by endowing it with an organic adaptability that would enable it to continue in its traditional role of locating an exceptionalist United States in ‘‘its’’ hemisphere, yet still authorize for the nation a global role. This resignification of the Doctrine might be seen as part of the post-1898 process by which ‘‘imperialists’’ closed the gap between their position and that of the antiimperialists by realigning the discourse of American exceptionalism with an imperial future. Katherine Kinney has argued that although the antiimperialists won the post-1898 rhetorical battle over whether or not the United States was ‘‘imperialist,’’ imperialists won the war, a ‘‘split decision’’ made possible by what Kinney calls ‘‘the language of American exceptionalism’’ (632). The dislocation of the Monroe Doctrine seems a clear example of Kinney’s point about the compatibility of exceptionalist rhetoric and imperial policy; as it was interpreted by Roosevelt, Mahan, and others, the Doctrine implied ‘‘staying true’’ to anticolonial tradition while using that tradition to justify hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Without explicitly mentioning the Doctrine, a political issue that enhanced his early career, Davis’s novel contributes to this process of reinterpretation. Soldiers of Fortune reconstructs a coherent national narrative by linking the supposedly exceptional past with a mobile, pro130 c h a p t e r f o u r

gressive future, and reconciling the tradition of New World unity with racial and economic inequality in the Americas. In other words, his novel updates the ideology of the Doctrine to reconcile perceptions of American tradition with global destiny. While statements by policy makers undoubtedly had more power to affect foreign policy directly, Davis’s imaginative work revised the cultural narratives that made reasoning like Roosevelt’s and Mahan’s possible and compelling. In Soldiers Davis is not constrained by logical arguments. The semiotic systems that he sets up, of tradition versus modernization, New World democracy versus U.S. empire, are bound together by a story of romance and heroic individualism that invited readers to identify with a personal search for coherence and fulfillment. n Soldiers tells the story of Clay, a rugged-yet-dashing engineer hired by an American capitalist named Langham to run the Olancho Mining Company. The plot is romantic, but hardly simple: Clay falls in love with Langham’s eldest daughter, then has a crisis of identity and falls for the younger daughter whom he marries in the end, after an adventure that saves Olancho (the nation and the mining company) from the hands of both revolutionaries and monarchists. Driving both the romance and adventure subplots is Clay’s search for self, which is bounded by two sorts of monuments marking the semiotic systems at work in the novel: Langham’s mines and the statues of Latin American revolutionary heroes in Olancho’s capital. The former monuments, the mines, provide an intersection for the semiotics of capital, class, civilization, and masculinity at the center of Clay’s identity crisis. The mines are crucial to the plot on several levels, but they gain their status as monuments from their deciding role in the transfer of Clay’s romantic interest from Alice Langham to her younger sister Hope. In this romantic plot twist, Alice’s lukewarm opinion of the mines is the catalyst for Clay’s confusion and loss of confidence over his work’s social status and moral value, and it impels his search for a mate who will ‘‘sympathize with his work in the world’’ (137). Alice fails to understand that the mines are monuments to the noble cause of civilization. Indeed, because of her circumscribed conventions, Alice seems unmoved by this great cause: for her, the mines are merely a crude, instrumental business venture, and Clay’s work as their manager and general director is competent but somewhat degrading. ‘‘You should be doing something bigger and more wide-reaching and more lasting,’’ she gringos abroad

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tells Clay; ‘‘Indeed, it hurts me to see you wasting your time here over my father’s interests’’ (140). But while Alice feels that Clay’s work on the mines indicates he is a mere ‘‘salaried servant’’ (145), Clay sees the mines as a testament to his accomplishments as a civil engineer—as, in the words of another character, ‘‘the chief civilizer of our century’’ (13). ‘‘When I come to die,’’ he explains, ‘‘and they ask me what I have done with my ten fingers, I want to feel that I have accomplished something outside of myself—something that will remain after I go. . . . It is the work that will tell’’ (209–10). One critic of the day observed that Clay’s ‘‘hypersensitiveness as to whether he is loved as a man or as an engineer is harder to follow than even his military exploits from the Nile to Peru via Zanzibar’’ (‘‘More Fiction,’’ 54). But as a plot device, this conflict is crucial, and not only because Alice’s failure to recognize the mines’ monumental significance disqualifies her as Clay’s romantic interest. It has a deeper importance for the novel’s negotiation of the cultural narratives of U.S. imperialism: Clay’s identity crisis over the mines’ significance as monuments resolves the contradiction of U.S. national identity that Soldiers of Fortune brings to the fore. This contradiction is apparent in the disjuncture between the signifying missions of the mines, on the one hand, and the statues, on the other. If the mines bear the semiotics of class, capital, civilization, and masculinity, the statues are etched with the semiotics of the Monroe Doctrine and the tradition of New World democracy. Overlooking the presidential palace is a statue of Anduella, ‘‘the treaty maker,’’ the liberator of the republic of Olancho, and out in a forgotten plaza of the city stands a statue of Simón Bolívar, commemorating the liberation of Venezuela, Olancho’s ‘‘sister republic’’ (175). These statues seem marginal to the plot—the first is an object of attention during one of Clay’s and Alice’s tête-à-têtes, and the second overlooks the secret meeting place where Clay and the mercenary Captain Stuart plot against the novel’s villain, General Mendoza. But symbolically they attest to the tradition of revolutionary identification between the United States and Latin America. Davis elaborated on the identificatory significance of such monuments in Three Gringos, where he began his chapter on Venezuela with a tale of two real statues. One of these monuments, an ‘‘odd, bizarre, and inartistic’’ equestrian statue in New York’s Central Park, depicts Bolívar, ‘‘the liberator of Venezuela’’; the other, in a ‘‘pretty little plaza’’ in the capital of Venezuela, depicts George Washington. The parallel monuments 132 c h a p t e r f o u r

symbolized, Davis argues, a parallel history: ‘‘the careers of Washington and Bolívar bear so striking a resemblance, and the histories of the two countries of which they are the respective fathers are so much alike, that they might be written in parallel columns’’ (225). This emphasis on parallelism was clearly what made Davis’s article seem so prophetic when it appeared in Harper’s, just weeks prior to Cleveland’s message. (Its subsequent publication as a chapter in Three Gringos visually reminds the reader of this timeliness with a photo of another statue of Bolívar, this one in Caracas, decorated and draped with U.S. and Venezuelan flags, surrounded by American foreign ministers, and dated December 18, 1895—the day after Cleveland’s message to Congress.) In Three Gringos, the parallel monuments and histories come to signify U.S. support and patronage for Venezuelan independence. In all of Bolívar’s statues, Davis tells us, the Libertador wears a miniature portrait of Washington to which is affixed his prized possession, a lock of Washington’s hair. Davis explains the origin of the miniature: during General Lafayette’s 1824 visit to the United States, in the final year of Monroe’s presidency, Henry Clay stood at a banquet in Washington and ‘‘asked the six hundred Americans before him to remember that while they were enjoying the benefits of free institutions . . . , their cousins and neighbors in the southern continent were struggling to obtain the same independence’’ (Three Gringos, 237). Clay’s speech deeply affected Lafayette, the guest of honor, who asked to send to the Latin American revolutionaries ‘‘some token of sympathy and admiration’’ (237) and subsequently forwarded the picture. Reading Davis’s quotation of Henry Clay, one cannot help but wonder if Davis’s fictional Clay is named for the senator who forcefully countered Adams’s and Monroe’s reluctance to fight for South American and global democracy, and whose name José Martí would associate with the self-interested Pan-American Congress of 1889 (Martí, ‘‘The Washington Pan-American Congress,’’ 339, 343, 350). Davis represents Henry Clay, Washington, and Lafayette as patrons of Venezuelan liberty, a patronage that the reader is encouraged to support empathetically: ‘‘The next time you ride in Central Park,’’ Davis proposes, ‘‘you might turn your bicycle . . . into that little curtain of trees . . . and see if you cannot feel some sort of sympathy and pay tribute to this young man who loved like a hero, and who fought like a hero . . . and whose inspiration was the calm, grave parent of your own country’’ (237). As two types of monuments, then, the statues and the mines emblematize the two conflicting narratives of U.S. foreign policy that I degringos abroad

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scribed in the first section of this chapter. One appeals, along with Cleveland and Olney, to the nineteenth-century construction of New World democracy, the other to the new economic conception of empire described by the American Business Man. Soldiers of Fortune binds these two narratives together by uniting these monuments in the conflict between political factions competing to rule Olancho. Three factions vie for control in the novel, and the fate of democracy as well as the ownership of the mines hangs in the balance. One side is the Royalist Party, headed by the current President Alvarez but driven by his ambitious wife, a Spanish countess who is said to want her husband to declare a dictatorship and turn Olancho into ‘‘a sort of dependency of Spain, as it was long ago’’ (131). The Royalist cause is unpopular; the people believe that Madame Alvarez intends to ‘‘convert the republic into a monarchy, and make her husband king’’ (131). The villain General Mendoza leads the faction that opposes Alvarez’s plans, but he intends to make himself president by force, and the novel makes it clear that under him Olancho would be a dictatorship in all but name. He rallies the people not just against Alvarez’s monarchism but also against the capitalist control that the U.S.-based Olancho Mining Company holds over the republic’s most valuable resource: the five iron-filled mountains. The third faction, led by ‘‘old General Rojas,’’ holds little power, but we are told that he would be the leader chosen by the Olanchan people ‘‘if [they] were ever given a chance to vote for the man they want’’ (132). This conflict is both the central element of the plot and the crux of the Monroe Doctrine: will monarchy be able to reclaim power on the American continents? Yet Davis complicates the conflict by showing the dangerous tendency of ‘‘uncivilized’’ democracy to erupt into revolution and sink into corruption. And because the mines are at risk, Davis’s complication reflects the capitalist concerns of the American Business Man. These concerns seem at odds with the narrative of New World identification. Clay’s work extracting iron from the mines symbolizes to Hope and to himself a mission of civilization that is badly needed in Latin America. ‘‘The people know [the ore] is there, but they have no knowledge of its value, and are too lazy to ever work it themselves’’ (29), Clay explains, in a passage that attempts to convince both Mr. Langham to invest his capital and the reader to suspend any doubt about the fictional corporation’s right to the iron in the Olanchan mountains. Three Gringos also describes the barbaric forfeiture of land. ‘‘The Central American citizen,’’ Davis writes in his travel narrative, ‘‘is no more fit for a repub134 c h a p t e r f o u r

lican form of government than he is for an Arctic expedition, and what he needs is to have a protectorate established over him, either by the United States or by another power, it does not matter so long as it leaves the Nicaragua Canal in our hands’’ (146); such peoples are ‘‘like semibarbarians in a beautifully furnished house, of which they can understand neither its possibilities of comfort nor its use’’ (147). In these passages, Davis seems, like the American Business Man, more interested in development, in advancing capitalism and Western civilization, than in preventing European systems from invading the New World. He comments on the irony of ‘‘protecting’’ Latin America from such European influence by noting that the only time he and his traveling companions enjoyed accustomed freedom and privacy in Central America was ‘‘when we were under the protection of the hated monarchical institution of Great Britain at Belize, but never when we were at any of these disorganized military camps called free republics’’ (146). Thus although Soldiers of Fortune is typically read by contemporary critics in relation to Cuba and the impending Spanish-American War, it is more accurate to say that Davis’s novel was inspired by Cleveland’s citation of the Monroe Doctrine and by the conflicting forms of revolutionary identification or racial disidentification that the Venezuela border crisis provoked. Soldiers resolves the conflict between the three vying political factions by having Clay lead a sort of fourth faction, representing the U.S. interests of the mines, to defeat Mendoza, send Madame Alvarez back to Spain, and place Rojas in the presidency, leaving the mines safely in the hands of the Langhams and Olancho ruled by the forces of democracy. Clay’s heroic intervention on behalf of political and economic freedoms thus suspends the apparent contradiction between the narrative of New World democracy and the economic inequality between North and South. However, this is not to say that Clay directly or allegorically represents the interests of U.S. capital in the novel. As I will show, Clay’s fraught relation to capital is one of the ways Soldiers makes his work compelling. Davis’s biographer, Arthur Lubow, would disagree about Clay’s role in promoting U.S. empire. Lubow insists that while both Three Gringos and Soldiers of Fortune have some imperialist overtones, Davis’s novel is in fact subtly critical of the power U.S. capitalists hold and often use to prevent true democracy (124). Lubow writes that Clay, ‘‘an engineer with no commercial ties,’’ is significantly similar to all of Davis’s heroes in that he is neither a businessman nor a politician, two professions that gringos abroad

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Lubow claims were tainted for Davis by the greed and ambition of U.S. imperialism (124). For Lubow this is evident in the overt contrast that Davis creates between Clay and the novel’s capitalist, Mr. Langham, and in the fact that in Soldiers ‘‘the native politicians and the American capitalists are equally corrupt’’ (124). Lubow clearly exaggerates his point— while it is true that the capitalist Mr. Langham is ineffectual, he is hardly the dishonest, greedy coward that Davis creates in General Mendoza. But even granting Davis’s deliberate contrast between the competent, virile Clay and the genteel, prudent Mr. Langham, Clay’s relationship to capital is more ambiguous than Lubow admits. After all, it is because Alice sees Clay in a subsidiary relation to capital (as a ‘‘salaried servant’’ of her father and his interests) that their romance is doomed. Pace Lubow, Clay’s position as an engineer and as Langham’s manager does not free him from commercial ties. Instead, the nature of those ties is a major factor in both Clay’s character development and the novel’s attempt to reconcile U.S. national identity. When Alice Langham chides Clay about wasting his time looking after her father’s interests, when ‘‘at home’’ he might be a respected statesman, general, or financier, she calls attention to a conflict in the professional identity of the engineer at the turn of the century. On the one hand, engineering was one of the most prestigious careers arising out of the ‘‘culture of professionalism’’ in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a specialist trained in scientific principles, the engineer was distinct from the laboring tradesman and the craftsman as well as from the businessman. ‘‘The professional,’’ writes historian Burton Bledstein, ‘‘did not vend a commodity, or exclusively pursue a self-interest’’ (89). On the other hand, the engineer was closely linked to the rise of corporate culture, as historian David Noble notes when he describes professional engineers who emerged during the late 1900s as both ‘‘the foremost agents of modern technology’’ and ‘‘the agents of corporate capital’’ (xxiii). As a designer of processes of production and, more important, as a manager, the engineer was crucial to the rise of corporate culture and modern business administration. One of Clay’s first acts in Olancho emphasizes his role as manager: after he surveys the job done by his predecessor VanAntwerp and his assistants, he castigates the ‘‘laziness and mismanagement and incompetency’’ that he sees (34). Time and money had been wasted, rusting machinery and unsanitary work conditions had produced nothing, and Clay, after lecturing the men, immediately sets 136 c h a p t e r f o u r

about creating a more efficient workplace. In this light, Clay’s ‘‘rationalization’’ of the mines resembles the ‘‘scientific management’’ of Frederick Taylor, an engineer who was working out his own systems for increasing efficiency in Davis’s native Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As Daniel Nelson observes, the number of articles on techniques for managing workers in professional engineering journals doubled between 1895 and 1900, indicating a trend toward management of which Davis, who attended a university where 90 percent of students majored in engineering, was probably aware (Nelson, Managers and Workers, 48–49).7 While engineers were transforming modern business and technology, they were also creating for themselves a new class identity that differentiated them from both owners and laborers, and we might read Clay’s crisis of identity in this context. In one of his moments of self-doubt, Clay gauges his class position against the old-money Langhams. As an employee of Mr. Langham, was he really only one of ‘‘the thousands of young men who were working all over the United States to please him, to make him richer, to whom he was only a name and a power, which meant an increase of salary or a loss of place?’’ (95). In this scene, as in others like it later in the novel, Clay moves from self-doubt to reassurance by considering his accomplishments as an engineer. He reminds himself ‘‘that he was not in that class [of laborers]; if he did good work it was because his self-respect demanded it of him; he did not work for Langham or the Olancho Mining Company (Limited)’’ (95). According to Bledstein, late-nineteenth-century professionals resisted any representation of themselves as selling a service by a contract; instead they believed that, ‘‘through a special understanding of the universe, the professional person released nature’s potential and rearranged reality on grounds that were neither artificial [nor] arbitrary’’ (54). Getting rich from the business of South American iron is not, as Lubow correctly notes, glorified in the novel; instead, it is Clay’s ability as a manager and his ability to perceive nature’s potential that is glorified. As Clay tells Alice, ‘‘I don’t say, ‘I’m a salaried servant of Mr. Langham’s’; I put it differently. I say, ‘There are five mountains of iron. You are to take them up and transport them from South America to North America, where they will be turned into railroads and ironclads.’ . . . It’s better to bind a laurel to the plow than to call yourself hard names’’ (145). The classed comparison between Clay and Mr. Langham and Reggie King, one of Alice’s blue-blooded suitors, is not mediated solely by gender—Clay is not simply more authentically gringos abroad

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masculine than those wealthy elites. Instead, he is valorized by his professional position; he differs from Mr. Langham and Reggie King in his competence to work rather than to invest or consume. This class conflict, while hardly original, gives new meaning to the title Soldiers of Fortune: the novel poses the troubling question of whether Clay is a mere foot soldier of Mr. Langham’s and other men’s fortunes, doing the bidding of their capital in the four corners of the globe. In this era of trusts and labor organization, when USAmericans were often suspicious of big business and claims to its beneficent expansion, the novel’s response to this troubling question sutured the interests of the new professional classes, the readers who made Soldiers of Fortune a best-seller, to the interests of capital and economic expansion.8 Through this alignment, the novel reinforces the notion of unified national interest while denying a right to dominate based on merely economic grounds or wholly self-interested motives. While the American Business Man promised that capital is the only means to civilization, Clay’s formulation of the civilizing mission emphasizes his own ‘‘work’’ and not merely the capital of Mr. Langham. Ultimately Mr. Langham’s ownership of the mines is not secured by his capital or by brute force, but by Clay’s managerial stewardship. Clay explains to Mendoza that while the mines had always existed, ‘‘there was not the capital to open them up, I suppose, or—and it needed a certain energy to begin the attack’’ (50). That the protagonist falters here (‘‘or—and . . .’’) is unusual in light of Davis’s idealization of the eminently cool and articulate Clay, and the mistake suggests that his uncertainty is not about the question of whether development grants ownership but whether it is ‘‘capital’’ or ‘‘energy’’ that guarantees this ownership. The crisis of Clay’s professional identity resolves this doubt; it is his ‘‘energy’’ as an engineer, not his man power as a laborer bought and controlled by capital, that drives civilization and justifies U.S. ownership of the mines. Indeed, Clay’s ‘‘energy’’ as a manager is what ultimately enables him to defeat Mendoza by securing the loyalty of local soldiers who had been contracted by the mines. When the revolution breaks out, Clay reminds the soldiers ‘‘how much better their condition had been since they had entered the mines’’ and promises them ‘‘an increase of wages if they remained faithful to Mr. Langham’s interests’’ (240). This promise was only valid because of Clay’s recent performance: before he took control of the mines, the native workers had been unpaid, underfed, and housed in an undrained ‘‘fever-camp’’ (35). Clay’s managerial skills thus empower him to bring both democratic 138 c h a p t e r f o u r

liberty and capitalist stability to the Olanchans. Valencia’s monuments to the legacy of republican democracy are all closely identified with Clay; it is Clay who tells Alice the story of Anduella, and Clay who addresses the neglected statue of Bolívar in its forgotten park as ‘‘a great soldier— the greatest this God-forsaken country has ever seen’’ (181), and Clay who jokes that one of his plans follows the military strategy of Bolívar (223). When Clay defeats Mendoza, the Olanchans embrace him and call him the ‘‘Liberator of Olancho,’’ a name the narrator had earlier used to identify the statue of Anduella (111, 330). Yet while this identification links Clay with the historical bonds of the Monroe Doctrine, it is also clear that Clay’s maintenance of democracy is always contingent on his ‘‘energy’’ as a manager. Clay addresses the native soldiers again before the final battle for control of the palace, reminding them that they are fighting Mendoza for two reasons. The ‘‘greater reason,’’ the one that Clay says he believes truly motivates them, is the maintenance of democracy, their ‘‘desire to preserve the Constitution of the Republic.’’ But the ‘‘less worthy and more selfish’’ reason is that if Mendoza were to rule, the mines would be converted into a poorly run monopoly where they would be forced to work without payment (318–19). Clay’s speech to the men places the ideals of ‘‘democracy’’ above their self-interests as workers, but that hierarchy seems somewhat ironic; the reader gets the sense that Clay is deliberately flattering them, that Clay insightfully realizes that the proud men are in fact more motivated by practical ‘‘self-interest’’ (which is linked to the interests of capital) than they are by the ideal of democracy. The reader who gets the joke is meant to grasp that democracy without economic development and foreign intervention to protect investments is untenable. Davis therefore parallels but also prioritizes democracy and development. The rationalizing power of Clay’s managerial energy relieves anxiety not only about the exploitation of South Americans and single-minded corporate greed, but also about the labor unrest that many historians argue was impelling U.S. expansionist policies, and that loomed in the expansionist arguments of men like Secretary of State Olney. Latin American historian Charles Berquist has commented that while revisionist historians have exhaustively demonstrated that fears of economic stagnation drove turn-of-the-century U.S. expansionism, they have insufficiently attended to one aspect of those economic anxieties, what Berquist calls the ‘‘phantasmagoric popular social threat’’ of labor unrest (55). The sense that the frontier had closed was alarming not only because U.S. gringos abroad

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capital would become, in the language of the day, ‘‘congested,’’ 9 but also because declining profits and production would cause layoffs and declining wages, sending laborers into violent protest. Berquist points out that the career of Richard Olney embodied these close relations among U.S. labor unrest, growing corporate power and expanding U.S. empire. Olney, acting as attorney general a year prior to his letter to Salisbury, broke the American Railway Union and Pullman strikes in one of the most violent labor conflicts in U.S. history. Before that he had worked as a railroad corporation lawyer who saw in his experiences battling organized labor the beginnings of a dangerous ‘‘labor revolution’’ (Berquist, 56). Seeing in Olney’s career an overlooked but perhaps significant link between labor and empire, Berquist speculates that this perception influenced the secretary of state’s decision to protect U.S. commercial interests in South America by positioning the United States as ‘‘practically sovereign upon this continent’’ during the Venezuela border crisis. Berquist’s insight into the link between labor unrest and post-1898 U.S. empire offers more evidence that Davis’s Olancho is, as Amy Kaplan has argued (‘‘Romancing the Empire’’), an extension of a Turnerian frontier that releases pressure and regenerates the stultified interior. However, while class lines in general are destabilized among the USAmericans in Olancho, Davis does not cast Clay’s managerial mediation of the narratives of the Monroe Doctrine as an escape into essential or primeval manhood, or into a romantic world where gender wholly subsumes class. Instead, Clay does his work by assuming a certain recognizable construction of a class-bound professional identity. Here I mean to add to and complicate Kaplan’s argument that Soldiers of Fortune, like other historical romances of the time, conventionally enacts in the imperial romance an escape from effete traditions of class and corporate control into essential, rejuvenated gender roles of the ‘‘new man’’ and the ‘‘new woman’’ on the South American ‘‘frontier.’’ In general I would agree, but I would specify that the rejuvenation engineered by Clay escapes the revolutionary threats of labor and Latin American ‘‘barbarism’’ through his mastery of modern, professional rationality. The adventure in Olancho does not strip away a veneer of civilization to reveal a more essentially gendered, essentially American self underneath; instead it emphasizes the need to reject outmoded tradition while embarking on the forwardlooking, heroic project of modern professionalism. The novel’s rejection of outdated ‘‘tradition’’ functions through the romantic triangle among Clay, Alice, and Hope and its representation 140 c h a p t e r f o u r

of traditionally circumscribed U.S. global power. After the fighting in Olancho is over, MacWilliams, Clay’s assistant, warns that marriage to Hope would mean settling down to a safe, domestic, and respectable existence (living on Fifth Avenue and wearing a high silk hat) where his wife and the policemen would control his urges to relive his adventures in Olancho. Pages later, in the novel’s conclusion, we are assured that MacWilliams is not entirely correct; Clay may be giving up management to work as an independent consultant, but this does not mean permanent residence in the confines of conventional domestic life. The novel closes with Clay and Hope fantasizing about their future travels connected with Clay’s career, a closure that suggests that the power of the United States has itself been decentered, made mobile, and freed from the confines of national boundaries. These national boundaries double for Alice’s stratified ‘‘society’’: ‘‘the narrow world she lived in,’’ which had ‘‘crippled her and narrowed her and marked her for its own’’ (314). If Alice’s traditional values are spatially located on Fifth Avenue, the novel’s closure refuses to situate Clay and Hope’s marriage fully within either the confines of ‘‘traditional’’ womanhood or national boundaries. Alice is hardly the domestic angel of John Quincy Adams’s rhetoric, but her tendency to move ‘‘by rules and precedents, like a queen in a game of chess’’ and her final pairing with the safe, ‘‘comfortable’’ Reggie King provide a contrast to Hope, the more mobile and active new woman. While Clay and Hope intend to travel the world on Clay’s business, Alice, Reggie, and Mr. Langham return to New York, a location that emphasizes to us that these characters are fatally ‘‘narrowed’’ by their flaws: Alice’s rules and precedents, King’s passionless courtesy, and Mr. Langham’s ‘‘policy of non-interference’’—which nearly brought about the loss of his mines because of his unpreparedness to fight Mendoza (203). These flaws suggest complacency with staying at home and a blind adherence to doctrine— both flaws with which adherents of the nineteenth-century conception of the Monroe Doctrine were accused. While John Quincy Adams represented the United States as a domestic angel in order to divide more compellingly Eastern and Western Hemispheres, Soldiers of Fortune destabilizes understandings of the domestic home as a source of national identity and insular virtue. Clay and Hope’s mobile, modern marriage suggests a national future released from particular spaces like the home, the North American continent, or the Western Hemisphere. Clay’s identity crisis about the meaning of his work in the world thus crucially connects to his choice of a mate gringos abroad

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with whom he can break from confining domestic conventions and redefine the meaning of home. Alice’s desire that Clay have a more respectable position ‘‘back home’’ criticizes not only his profession but also his self-imposed exile. Davis stresses the significance of Clay’s exile by repeatedly staging conversations in which he and MacWilliams discuss the blightedness of their surroundings in contrast to the genteel society of the Langhams, conversations that show these men to be haunted by a sense of homelessness. We are told that Clay has no home in the United States since his mother died and his father was shot as a filibuster attempting to incite revolution against Spain in Cuba. ‘‘I travel because I have no home,’’ he tells Hope: ‘‘I go to other places because there is no home open’’ (169). This homelessness registers tragically, deromanticizing his adventures and suggesting to the reader that Clay’s absence from the United States might threaten his national identification, making him ‘‘cease to be an American’’ and become ‘‘nothing’’ (22), as Theodore Roosevelt wrote of U.S. expatriates in his 1894 speech on ‘‘True Americanism.’’ The threat resembles the one of which Carnegie warned: that the United States would lose coherence and cease to be ‘‘compact, impregnable, republican, American’’ as it stretched to encompass an extracontinental empire. The loss of his American identity might make Clay like the duplicitous gunrunner Burke, a ‘‘soldier of fortune’’ who will be ‘‘a citizen of my own or any other country’’ (188), or like the tragic Captain Stuart, a dishonored British soldier who pledges his loyalty to President Alvarez because he cannot safely return to his own country. Of course Davis ultimately assures us that his hero Clay remains quintessentially American despite his homelessness. In a final scene, a lieutenant of the U.S. Marines who arrive just moments after Clay and his men have defeated Mendoza and restored Rojas, insists on recognizing Clay as a fellow soldier: ‘‘Even though you haven’t worn our uniform, you’re as good, and better, than some that have, and you’re a sort of commander and chief, anyway, and I’m damned if I don’t give you a sort of salute’’ (336). As Clay rides through ‘‘the massed rows of his countrymen with their muskets held rigidly toward him,’’ the natives on the surrounding housetops cheer, and Clay emerges from the salute with eyes ‘‘wet and winking’’ (336). In this cathartic moment, Clay’s nationality is secured, reinforcing the sense that the home of the nation can be safely removed from its location within boundaries of a space that is domestic in both its meanings. His Americanness has been established by carrying out both his father’s mission to establish democracy in Latin America 142 c h a p t e r f o u r

and his namesake Henry Clay’s injunction to support the cause of South American democracy. Home is thus dislocated in Soldiers of Fortune. When MacWilliams sentimentally sings, ‘‘he never cares to wander from his own fireside,’’ he pointedly expresses this dislocation. The narrator ironically notes that the song was ‘‘especially appropriate coming from a man who had visited almost every spot in the three Americas, except his home, in the last ten years’’ (88). Yet as MacWilliams sings the lines ‘‘With his baby on his knee / He’s as happy as can be / For there’s no place like Home, Sweet Home,’’ it is clear that his ‘‘peculiar sentiment’’ for the song comes from his ability to share the veneration of domestic tradition without impractically residing in it. As the Monroe Doctrine was retained for its affective significance as a supposed tradition bound up with ideas of the domestic, isolated home, MacWilliams’s song suggests that one can keep the tradition of home and family without staying put. Similarly, the enthusiasm with which Clay, MacWilliams, and young Ted Langham build a house near the ore mines for Mr. Langham and his daughters suggests the power that a reconstructed home retains even in the jungles of South America. Americanness and a connection to home and tradition cease to be placebound in Soldiers of Fortune. n Upon Davis’s death in 1916, Theodore Roosevelt said that Davis’s writings ‘‘form a text-book of Americanism’’ (quoted in Davis, Adventures and Letters, 408), a comment that has indicated for many the affinities between Davis’s fictional adventures and Roosevelt’s strenuous foreign policy. If Soldiers of Fortune served as such a textbook, it also instructed USAmericans on their relationship with Americans to the south, reconfiguring U.S. cultural narratives to reconcile the constitutive political divide between Old and New Worlds with emerging patterns of economic inequality between Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Soldiers retains the tradition of New World democracy while justifying the civilizing mission of capital and its production of unequal economic relations of dependency. Written at a time when skepticism about corporate power in the United States was prevalent, Soldiers counters the notion that the colonial imperative to ‘‘civilize’’ was a thin ruse for capitalist greed by aligning economic imperialism in South America with modern professionalism and national traditions of protective democracy. Furthermore, Davis holds onto this past tradition of the Monroe Doctrine while dislocating it. The notion of the Western Hemisphere gringos abroad

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retained its power to justify U.S. domination over Central and South America throughout much of the twentieth century, but Davis’s novel dematerializes the mission of the United States, revising narratives of isolation and domestic tradition to allow for a more mobile, less restricted U.S. sphere of interest—one that could spread to wherever the causes of civilization and democracy arose. We might also say that Davis’s novel paved the way for President Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which used the supposedly ‘‘flexible’’ Doctrine to justify intervening in Latin American affairs even when European powers were not attempting to gain American territory. Claiming that ‘‘our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical’’ (Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses, 177), the Corollary made the Monroe Doctrine a justification for not only keeping Europe out, but also keeping Latin America under control. Roosevelt explained that in order to keep the region stable and prosperous, the United States might be forced to intervene in cases of ‘‘chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in the general loosening of the ties of society’’ (176). According to historian Walter LaFeber, Roosevelt’s citation of the Monroe Doctrine was a key moment of development when its original protective intentions were inverted into a statement of control (‘‘The Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from Monroe to Reagan,’’ 1). As I have argued in previous chapters, however, the vacillation between protection and control had in fact been an integral part of the Doctrine’s power as a framework for imagining U.S. foreign policy and national identity since its first articulation. Roosevelt’s Corollary only made explicit what had been implicit all along. Davis’s novel revises the story of hemispheric unity to reconcile such explicitly imperialist claims with the exceptionalist national narratives of the Monroe Doctrine, but these narratives had themselves already produced a century of continental expansion. By dislocating these narratives, Davis’s novel indirectly helps link Pacific expansion to the tradition of New World democracy. José Martí warned his readers of a giant with seven league boots who would approach Our America to ‘‘demand a close relationship’’ (‘‘Our America,’’ 93) without truly knowing its neighbor. Davis’s novel both authorizes the giant with the seemingly expert knowledge wielded by Clay, and extends the length of the giant’s stride.

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conclusion the remains of the doctrine I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful. —President Woodrow Wilson in a January 1917 speech to the Senate, proposing the creation of the League of Nations; Wilson, 353 If we are to abandon the Monroe Doctrine, this is one way of doing it. The Monroe Doctrine is strictly local in its application; it applies only to the American Hemisphere and is based in the theory that there are two spheres in the world which are entirely separate in their political interests. —Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, arguing against Wilson’s proposal; quoted in Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, 285

This book has described the productive slippages that made the Monroe Doctrine a useful and highly adaptable referent for U.S. foreign policy in the nineteenth century: a statement of protection and of control, the Doctrine both unified the United States with Latin America and aligned it with Europe as that continent’s imperial successor in the Western Hemisphere; it isolated the United States at home in ‘‘its’’ hemisphere yet justified a national responsibility to promote democracy abroad. These slippages continued to function in the twentieth century, as the Doctrine was adapted to interpret and justify new situations where the idea of separate hemispheres seemed increasingly obsolete. After World War I, for example, the vision of a League of Nations called into question again the Doctrine’s model of hemispheric political division. The senators who prevented the United States from joining the League of Nations appealed to the Doctrine in their arguments. For them and for Woodrow Wilson, the architect of the League, the essential question in this matter was one repeated over and over in the history of the Doctrine: what is the relationship of the United States to the world? Wilson anticipated his opposition’s appeal to the Doctrine in his fa-

mous ‘‘peace-without-victory’’ speech quoted in my epigraph, where he states that, rather than depart from any American tradition, the League will make global the Doctrine’s protection of democracy. For Wilson, to globalize the Doctrine was both to make America’s sphere of interest the world and to divide the responsibility for protecting this sphere among the world’s nations.1 This interpretation of the Doctrine met with great opposition from Senator Lodge and others, who insisted that its essential point was not the global promotion of democracy but the maintenance of two separate political spheres. Wilson caved into their insistence on hemispheric division only insofar as he made sure that the Covenant of the League did not appear to contradict the Monroe Doctrine. Article 21 of the Covenant quite vaguely states, ‘‘Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements such as treaties of arbitration, or regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine for securing the maintenance of peace.’’ However, Article 21 was not enough to satisfy Wilson’s opponents in the Senate, who complained that such vagueness left the Monroe Doctrine up to regional compromise instead of unilateral determination. Lodge and others repeatedly insisted that ‘‘the Monroe Doctrine should be interpreted by the United States alone’’ (quoted in Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, 302). Yet to include a specific interpretation of the Doctrine in the Covenant of the League of Nations would have been impossible. So many corollaries and differences over its essential meaning made this an unthinkable task for Congress. That fall, presidential candidate Warren G. Harding successfully campaigned on a platform promising a ‘‘return to normalcy,’’ which he explained in campaign speeches also meant a return to the still vaguely defined Monroe Doctrine. The Doctrine, he claimed in contradiction to Article 21 of the Covenant, ‘‘is not a treaty of arbitration or a regional understanding. It is a plain, square, fearless declaration of the United States, which is a warning to European nations asserting undue influence or applying improper pressure upon the helpless republics of the western hemisphere’’ (quoted in Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine, 303). While Wilson argued that what was essential about the Doctrine was its commitment to self-determination for other nations, Harding, like Lodge, stressed that what was most important was its unilateral statement of American mission in the Western Hemisphere. As this debate over meaning and geographic application was going on, opposition to the Monroe Doctrine heightened in Latin America, where many criticized its hypocrisy.2 Roosevelt’s Corollary had paved the 146 c o n c l u s i o n

way for repeated interventions in Santo Domingo, Nicaragua, and Haiti between 1904 and 1921. By the 1930s, skepticism about the unilateral nature of the Monroe Doctrine was widespread in the United States as well as Latin America. This criticism spurred Undersecretary of State Reuben Clark to retract Roosevelt’s Corollary in the 1930 Clark Memorandum, which stated that the Doctrine should no longer be used to justify U.S. intervention in Latin American affairs. By the late 1930s, when Américo Paredes wrote his novel George Washington Gómez, the title character’s criticism of the Monroe Doctrine would be a common one. In the novel, this character (nicknamed Guálinto) faults the way his high school history lesson represents the U.S. foreign policy of the 1860s. His teacher informs the class that when Napoléon III attempted to reestablish the French Empire in the New World, ‘‘the United States protested to France concerning the invasion of Mexico, basing itself on the Monroe Doctrine,’’ and acted, as the teacher explains, like a big brother who protects his younger sibling from a bully. Guálinto, however, reminds his classmates that everything printed in their history books is not entirely true, and modifies the comparison: ‘‘And after I drive the big bully away I take the candy from the little fellow and eat it myself ’’ (160–61). Such criticisms, especially combined with an increasing tendency to view U.S. political alliances with Europe as a modern necessity, seemed to indicate the Monroe Doctrine’s demise. Writing under the pen name of Gaston Nerval, Bolivian diplomat and journalist Raúl Díez de Medina declared its death in his Autopsy of the Monroe Doctrine (1934). And after World War II, the United States’ new role of global leadership in the U.N. and nato made the mythic separation of hemispheres seem even more a thing of the past. As historian Arthur Whitaker wrote of the Western Hemisphere idea in 1954, ‘‘After 1940 the substance of the Western Hemisphere idea was lost, and its place was taken first briefly by globalism and then by a new twofold division of the globe, not into traditional Eastern and Western Hemispheres, but into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, or more frequently into the communist and noncommunist worlds’’ (154–55). Whitaker spoke too soon, however. The Doctrine’s dialectical discourse of separate hemispheres was nevertheless resurrected during the Cold War to justify attempts to keep Soviet influence out of Latin America. Its language of ‘‘twofold division’’ and its power as a tradition of protecting democracy made it a useful referent in U.S. political discourse regarding military intervention in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1962, and Nicaragua in 1984. Indeed, Frank Donovan concluded his c o n c l u s i o n 147

1963 history Mr. Monroe’s Message by suggesting that if we substitute the phrase ‘‘international communism’’ for the Doctrine’s mention of ‘‘Europe,’’ we can recognize that the Doctrine is alive and well (228). The logic of these Cold War references to the Doctrine, however, was somewhat clumsy. In 1984 Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger chided on the nbc Sunday news program Meet the Press that in the context of Nicaragua, ‘‘we shouldn’t forget that the United States’ policy for many decades has been governed by the Monroe Doctrine’’ with its emphasis on ‘‘the importance of noninterference by other hemispheres into the affairs of [the Western Hemisphere]’’ (quoted in Stuart Taylor). The oddity of Weinberger’s construction, where an indeterminate but plural number of other hemispheres threaten our own, was perhaps a slip of the tongue, although in other TV interviews he repeatedly called to mind the paradox of multiple halves by insisting that the Doctrine prohibited ‘‘military activity in this hemisphere by countries in other hemispheres’’ (quoted in LaFeber, ‘‘The Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from Monroe to Reagan,’’ 125). The proliferation of halves reveals the strained logic of the 1823 hemispheric construct applied to 1984, but it also interestingly suggests that one half of the hemispheric division aged better than its binary other. Weinberger’s multiplication of hemispheres may seem absurd, but even more absurd would have been a statement against ‘‘military activity in this hemisphere by the Eastern Hemisphere.’’ In 1823, the ‘‘Eastern Hemisphere’’ was understood to mean an interconnected European diplomatic system characterized by colonialism and monarchy. In 1984, divisions internal to Europe and Asia made some of those places part of the conceptual ‘‘West’’ rather than part of a single region defined in opposition to the West. By proliferating hemispheres, Weinberger’s statement struggled to conceal what was ill-fitting about the Doctrine while appealing to whatever effect its all-American Western Hemisphere idea still summoned. And what power does it still summon? Its citation by the Reagan administration failed to rouse much support from commentators, many of whom associated the term ‘‘Monroe Doctrine’’ primarily with a century of U.S. imperialism in Latin America.3 Its poor reception may have also resulted from emergent late-twentieth-century conceptions of the globe. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, increasingly globalized economies and identifications called to mind not two superpowers claiming Eastern or Western or Northern or Southern halves, but a plurality of 148 c o n c l u s i o n

spheres and sites where global interests intersect. A new rhetoric not of ‘‘neat twofold divisions’’ but of global interconnectedness was emerging, making the usefulness of even a highly flexible discourse like the Monroe Doctrine increasingly obsolete. Weinberger’s logic strained to apply the Doctrine in 1984, but as my research has shown, the discourse of hemispheric division was always troubled by contradictions. Statements of American exceptionalism in the early nineteenth century—which denied a relation with the interconnectedness of European political alliances and colonial markets, constructing a neat ‘‘twoness’’—were hardly experienced as unproblematic and monolithic truths. Struggles to reconcile that binary twoness with Indian-removal policies in North America, with the slave trade and abolition, with expansion in the Pacific, and with the emerging global division of labor between North and South seem to be, when one takes a long view, earlier moments in the Doctrine’s ongoing denial of global interconnectedness. After a century and a half of attempts to contain such contradictions, the Reagan administration’s strained citation of the Monroe Doctrine demonstrated the latter’s near rhetorical bankruptcy. Perceiving this strain, diplomatic historian Gaddis Smith again announced the demise of the Monroe Doctrine, this time killed off with the end of the Cold War, in his 1994 book The Last Days of the Monroe Doctrine: 1945–1993. But is it really dead at last? While the Doctrine no longer receives much popular support or interest, two recent and even more strained citations of the Monroe Doctrine, by journalist Max Boot and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan (discussed briefly in the preface), suggest that certain elements can still function as viable precedents for interpreting America’s place in the world. In the tension between these two citations we can hear echoes of 1898 and 1919: what can the Monroe Doctrine mean in a world where the political, cultural, and economic separation of hemispheres is obsolete? For Patrick Buchanan, the 2000 presidential candidate of the Independence Party, meeting the conditions of increased globalization calls for not an abandonment of the Doctrine, as Gaddis Smith argued, but a reaffirmation. In his book, A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan echoes John Quincy Adams, a figure who for him embodies America’s anti-imperial past, when the candidate asks, ‘‘Is it our duty and destiny to go out into the world seeking monsters to destroy, or do we instead keep the Founding Fathers’ goal of defending the peace c o n c l u s i o n 149

and freedom of our own country and becoming a light unto nations?’’ (389). In this formulation we see the Doctrine’s enduring appeal as a denial of global interconnectedness. The first plank of Buchanan’s proposed foreign policy was ‘‘Reaffirming and Refining Monroe’s Doctrine’’; the second was ‘‘To Remain One Nation, One People.’’ Combined, these statements draw on the interconnected myths of national isolation, coherence, and homogeneity that the Doctrine came to signify in the nineteenth century. Buchanan’s argument is with those he calls the ‘‘globalists,’’ the elite, transnationalist coconspirators of the Bush I and Clinton administrations who were, in his mind, intent on denationalizing the United States by diffusing its power in global police work and opening its borders to unbalanced trade, illegal immigration, and terrorism. Rather than using the Doctrine as a justification for Pan-American political and economic integration, Buchanan uses it to argue for separation from Latin America. As long as ‘‘no hostile regime creates a bastion in this hemisphere,’’ as he fears might happen with Chinese agents displacing U.S. authorities at the Panama Canal, the United States should be unconcerned with Central and South American government. He wants less political involvement in Latin America, proposing that the United States withdraw from the military alliance of the Rio Pact and asserting that the United States really has ‘‘no vital interest in what kind of regimes rule in the Southern cone of South America’’ (370). In Buchanan’s ‘‘refinement’’ of the Doctrine, the meaning that matters most is not what it says about the Americas as a space of democracy or the United States as a leader of a hemispheric American system, but its association with the imagined tradition of anti-imperialism. The United States belongs at home, he argues, not in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, Korea, or the Pacific Rim. This refinement intersects with Buchanan’s second policy point, ‘‘To Remain One Nation, One People.’’ For Buchanan, the United States should not go abroad largely because the monsters are already among us at home. In a typical right-wing jeremiad against immigrants, hyphenated nationalism, and dying patriotism, he calls for new immigration restrictions and an end to illegal immigration, especially from Mexico. ‘‘The most immediate and serious problem facing the U.S. in this hemisphere,’’ he writes, ‘‘lies in mass immigration’’ (370–71). The United States should oppose the campaign to make Puerto Rico a state and effect a successful transfer of power in Cuba for the same reason it should place U.S. troops along the Mexican border—not because of a 150 c o n c l u s i o n

concern for independence and democracy in the Western Hemisphere, but because of fearsome hordes of refugees, immigrants, terrorists, and hyphenated Americans threatening to contaminate the mythic purity that Buchanan signifies partly through the rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine. It is not duplicitous hemispheric unity he wants, but complete hemispheric division. Reading Paredes’s 1940 novel alongside Buchanan’s 2000 campaign platform puts the symbolism of the novel’s disappointing conclusion into relief. Despite early hopes that he will embody Mexican-American integration and lead his people to equality in the United States, Guálinto ends up guarding the conception of nation that Buchanan associates historically with the Monroe Doctrine. Guálinto’s adolescent courage in protesting the textbook’s misrepresentation of events like the Alamo and the French intervention in Mexico signifies for his peers his potential to lead in the struggle for justice. But the novel’s plot dashes both their hopes and the reader’s when in the final section Guálinto abruptly appears as an adult who aspires to full assimilation. This adult Guálinto imagines the nation as a place that can afford no cultural mixing, where re-visioning U.S. history is another of the ‘‘childish daydreams’’ (282) that grown men must pragmatically leave behind. He works for the fbi on border security, guarding the geographic border from foreign infiltration and the internal border behind which he has stored the love and shame he feels for his Mexicanness. This disappointing ending, in which a self-hating Guálinto fails to imagine and fight for a nation inclusive of Mexican culture, is perhaps meant to inspire readers to begin that work themselves. By emphasizing failure, however, the story dramatically underscores the power of nationalist conceptions of homogeneity, purity, and boundedness to which Guálinto accommodates himself. This is the story of bounded nationhood that Buchanan tells through his appeal to the Doctrine. In Buchanan’s platform as in Paredes’s novel, a certain conception of nation demands that crossings be guarded both along the border and within the space of American culture, where internal differences challenge the fantasy of a homogeneous and isolated America. Putting these two texts side by side gives a glimpse of one trajectory of the Monroe Doctrine after 1930, when its value and relevance shifted away from its role justifying for U.S. imperialism in Latin America, the function that young Guálinto criticizes, that Reagan weakly references, and that Buchanan disregards. The adult Guálinto forces himself to forget his earlier criticisms of the Monroe Doctrine as an aggresc o n c l u s i o n 151

sive foreign policy in order to assert his place within a bounded and pure domestic space that prefigures Buchanan’s conception of nation. Because of the Doctrine’s uncanny flexibility, however, this is not its only post–Cold War trajectory. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Buchanan’s vision of global isolation appeared to be swept away, and the Monroe Doctrine popped up again in a much discussed argument by Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard editor Max Boot. Boot cited Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary of the Doctrine as a historical precedent for the 2002 Bush Doctrine of preemption and for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a position that Boot has taken in prominent editorials and speeches as well as in his earlier book The Savage Wars of Peace (2002), he calls for a globalization of the Monroe Doctrine that actually brings together the contrasting statements of Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge that opened this chapter. He ignores the strident debates over the geographical limits of the Monroe Doctrine in 1898 when he inaccurately states that Roosevelt decided to ‘‘dust off the hitherto largely moribund’’ Monroe Doctrine during his presidency (Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 135). Boot also downplays the Clark Memorandum, instead reaffirming Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary and further explaining that ‘‘when Roosevelt wrote those words, the western hemisphere was the only place where the U.S. exercised military hegemony. In the rest of the world, America could count on the Royal Navy to defend ‘civilised society.’ Today, America exercises almost as much power everywhere around the world as it once had only in the Caribbean. . . . Thus, by Roosevelt’s logic, the U.S. is obliged to stop ‘chronic wrongdoing’ for the simple reason that nobody else will do the job. That is what the U.S. has been doing for the past decade in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq’’ (Boot, ‘‘America’s Destiny Is to Police the World,’’ 21). Like Wilson, Boot proposes to expand the Monroe Doctrine to a global scale, not with the actions of a vital League of Nations but by assuming single-handed responsibility for global peacekeeping. For, like Lodge, Boot seems to believe that what is essential about the Monroe Doctrine is that the United States decides its meaning unilaterally. Especially striking in Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace (unironically titled after a line in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘‘The White Man’s Burden,’’ in which Kipling urged the United States to follow in the path of imperial Britain) is his conclusion that from its inception the United States has always been involved in imperial ventures motivated by commercial or territorial ambitions and the sometimes muddled commitment 152 c o n c l u s i o n

to promoting democracy. In contrast to Buchanan, Boot happily points out many incidents that contradict the myth of past U.S. isolation, concluding that ‘‘America should not be afraid to fight ‘the savage wars of peace’ if necessary to enlarge the ‘empire for liberty.’ It has done it before’’ (Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 352). Rather than escaping into a New World of American innocence, the United States often acted in Boot’s view as a ‘‘junior constable,’’ assisting Great Britain in the task of maintaining freedom of the seas and open markets (xvii). Like the revisionist historian William Appleman Williams and many current literary critics (Amy Kaplan and John Carlos Rowe among them), Boot’s scholarship reveals a fascinating and untold history of U.S. imperialism in the Marquesas in 1813, Korea in 1871, and the Philippines in 1898, but he does so in order to draw a line of continuity with the past that justifies rather than looks critically at present U.S. neocolonialism. This goal leads him to suppress the interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that Buchanan highlights: its supposed mandate to maintain political separation between ‘‘America’’ and the rest of the world. Despite his desire to tell the untold story about America’s diplomatic and military history, Boot misses the record of dissent and ambivalence about the place of the United States in the world that I have featured in this book. Important here is Brook Thomas’s reminder that recognizing the presence of empire in U.S. history should not lead to the construction of a teleological narrative about an ‘‘imperial spirit animating United States history from the start’’ (Thomas, ‘‘A Constitution Led by the Flag’’ 84), but rather recognizing the complex shifts and rhetorical transformations that took place as the nation charted and recharted its global relations. This cultural history leads not to the complacent conclusion that because the United States has always engaged in imperialism, it might as well continue doing so, but rather to the realization that we are still very much engaged in a struggle to locate the nation. The fact that, within the space of a few years, Boot and Buchanan could cite the Monroe Doctrine to justify apparently opposed visions of America’s place in the world perfectly reveals the flexibility of this ideology. From the time when Adams declared that ‘‘the tie of colonial subjection is compatible with the essential purposes of civil government only when the condition of the subordinate state is from its weakness incompetent to its own protection’’ (Address, 12), the Monroe Doctrine held together divergent stories about America: the empire for liberty and the postcolonial retreat from Old World power, U.S. isolation and exc o n c l u s i o n 153

pansion, the American missions to reform the world and to escape from history. This is the tension we saw in chapter 4’s discussion of the 1898 debates over the annexation of the Philippines, when both imperialists and anti-imperialists claimed that their party had the accurate interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. That we see it again in the tension between Boot and Buchanan suggests that as in 1823 and 1898, USAmericans today are still searching for a story to make sense of their location in the world. These citations also indicate that the Western Hemisphere idea holds nowhere near the power that it once did. For Buchanan, the Monroe Doctrine means staying home, and the boundaries of ‘‘home’’ are restricted severely to North America. For Boot, the Western Hemisphere was previously the United States’ sphere of influence only because then it was half as powerful as it is now. If no special destiny, bond of democracy, or essential difference in political system characterized that space in 1904, America breaks no tradition by making the Doctrine global in the twenty-first century. This shared disregard for the spatial construct suggests that perhaps the Western Hemisphere idea finally is dead, although, given the long history of twentieth-century scholars’ prematurely declaring the Doctrine’s demise, it might be safer to say that at this moment, that particular part of the story about the United States’ protecting ‘‘its’’ hemisphere is not a meaningful or useful one to invoke. Interestingly, just as the rhetorical power of ‘‘the Western Hemisphere’’ in politics wanes, scholars in American literature and American studies have renewed their attention to the Western Hemisphere as a cultural frame. As I described in my introduction, some Americanists have recently made persuasive arguments that American literature should be denationalized, possibly by repositioning it as a hemispheric phenomenon.4 By demonstrating that the concept of the Western Hemisphere has been crucial to the construction of U.S. empire, my work on the Monroe Doctrine offers some warnings to scholars engaged in this project. Identifying with Latin American independence and nation building has served particular interests in U.S. nationalism, and this tradition of identification is one reason why ‘‘the Western Hemisphere’’ (but not its Eastern Other) still makes sense geographically. Keeping in mind this vexed history of hemispheric identification is crucial when carrying out efforts to globalize American studies, particularly in efforts to cross critical borders into the cultures of Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Scholarship that attempts to theorize these crossings is largely inspired by the hemispheric conceptions of José Martí and the 154 c o n c l u s i o n

border theory emerging from Chicano studies, and seems highly sensitive to the dangers of reproducing imperialist dynamics by annexing new writers and regions to the study of American literature. But this body of work risks replicating the unequal terms of the Monroe Doctrine in its very unilateralness; these efforts (including my own) are after all located primarily in an English-speaking academy that has limited contact with scholarship written outside the United States. As this movement spreads, scholars must keep in mind the powerful and troubling historical appeal of the Western Hemisphere idea, and take care that the jump to hemispheric scale continues to interrogate rather than merely extend narratives of U.S. nationalism. Many of these national narratives were sustained and brought together in the Monroe Doctrine, and two in particular should make literary critics wary: the natural identity of the hemisphere, and its ‘‘newness’’ existing in opposition to Europe. Rather than replicating the Doctrine’s hemispheric isolation, scholars must look for what John Muthyala calls ‘‘the pan-American dimensions of the social, cultural, and intellectual commerce that link the Americas to the larger, global world’’ (91). Perhaps more broadly, the cultural history of the Monroe Doctrine— a project that my book only partially completes—offers a viable model and arena for scholars pursuing what Paul Giles has called a ‘‘critical transnationalism’’ (65) for American studies. According to Giles, ‘‘to reinscribe classic American literature in a transnational framework is to elucidate the ways in which it necessarily enters into negotiation with questions of global power’’ (72). The Monroe Doctrine, I have argued, provided the terms through which such questions of global power were posed and answered in the spheres of politics and literature. To study it is to make central the issue of space in the conception of America. At stake in the Monroe Doctrine is not only the ‘‘rhetorical malpractice’’ (Chevigny and Laguardia, viii) whereby America the nation comes to stand for America the hemisphere, but the ongoing problem of locating the United States in the world. Ideologically, it separated ‘‘internal’’ expansion from ‘‘external’’ imperialism, and in studying it we can see that the lines demarcating this distinction were under constant interrogation. Recognizing the long history of this negotiation with global power is particularly important for cultural critics who are searching out the origins of postmodern forces of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Without flattening out the differences that distinguish the current stage of global capitalism from past colonialism and geopolitical competition, c o n c l u s i o n 155

we should avoid the tendency that John Carlos Rowe observes ‘‘to alienate new global phenomena from their complex histories’’ (‘‘NineteenthCentury United States Literary Culture and Transnationality,’’ 79).5 As Rowe argues, we should look for histories of thought about globalism at least as far back as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when ideologies of nation were developing. John O’Hara’s claim notwithstanding, doing so does not mean we project our current global and professional insecurities onto the screen of literary history; instead, we must reinterpret the past in light of the present to see what previously ignored connections emerge. The cultural history of the Monroe Doctrine makes visible both a largely overlooked context of literary works—the arena of political discourse about America’s international relations—and the ideological framework of traditional domestic isolation that has made this context invisible, or at least not worth talking about. This aspect of literary and political history is overlooked or oversimplified in a number of recent critical and theoretical works. For example, Thomas Peyser’s excellent study Utopia and Cosmopolis (1998) argues that USAmericans first believed they were at the center of a truly global culture at the turn of the twentieth century. From that moment, ‘‘it was no longer possible to define American civilization, or indeed nationality itself, without reference to the rest of the globe’’ (25). While his account of tensions surrounding globalism at the turn of the century is highly nuanced, Peyser’s argument points further backward even as he argues for the dawn of the twentieth century as the turning point of global consciousness. The earlier history I have outlined here, from Adams’s theorization of the nation’s location at home in the Western Hemisphere to anxieties surrounding expansion near and far at the opening of Japan, suggests that because ‘‘America’’ was popularly defined in opposition to globalism from the early national period, its place in the world was from that time an ongoing political and cultural concern. The nation has always been defined—consciously as well as unconsciously— through reference to what it is emphatically not. Peyser argues that the cosmopolitan outlook develops at the beginning of the twentieth century not in spite of but in tandem with that era’s nationalism; but if nationalism and globalism are so inextricably linked as he argues, this pairing points backward to the origins of nationhood for the origins of global thinking. A cultural history of the Monroe Doctrine supports Peyser’s choice of period by demonstrating that at the outset of the twentieth century, frames of hemispheric isolation were intensely scrutinized and put 156 c o n c l u s i o n

in competition with more global mappings of the place of the United States in the world; but it also shows that this debate echoed earlier ones. More significant, it reveals the Doctrine as the ideology that sustained ‘‘America’s’’ productive vacillation between ideas of national and hemispheric isolation. At stake in the imperative to look for the origins of global thinking is either undoing or affirming this sustaining myth of U.S. nationalism. If we too simply oppose our current era of postmodern globalization to a golden age of past isolation, as Buchanan does, or to a more parochial era of racism, nationalism, and geopolitical and economic division, as some contemporary theorists of a globalized New World Order do,6 we risk inadvertently reinforcing the myth of American exceptionalism that the Monroe Doctrine underwrote. The latter is part of the error that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make in their controversial book Empire (2000), where they argue that in the constitutional origins of the United States, we can find the beginning of a world order of globalism that they call ‘‘Empire.’’ Contrasting this Empire’s origins to Europe’s more ‘‘imperialist’’ ones, they characterize Empire as a ‘‘decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’’ (xii). This, they argue, is how the United States expanded across the continent, with certain imperialist exceptions, such as its lapse into European-style imperialism in the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and battles for Indian removal. They designate the Monroe Doctrine, which represents for Hardt and Negri only its use as a justification for Latin American intervention after 1904, as one of these lapses into European-style imperialism (177–78). Despite such lapses, they argue, the American model of decentered and deterritorialized empire emerged at the end of the Cold War as the model for a new transnational network of social control and subversive possibility, foreshadowed when Woodrow Wilson unsuccessfully described ‘‘an internationalist ideology of peace as an expansion of the constitutional conception of network power’’ (174). As Hardt and Negri seek out the origins of globalization in the early days of nation building, they keep in place one of the most fundamental ideological tenets of U.S. nationalism—its self-differentiation from European imperialism. ‘‘Every time the expansiveness of the constitutional project ran up against its limits,’’ they write, ‘‘the republic was tempted to engage in a European-style imperialism’’ (172). If we take into consideration the construction of space and the varic o n c l u s i o n 157

ous ways that Americans have mapped their global relations, we can see that this chronology, with its binary opposition between internal expansiveness and external imperialism, is inadequate. In their attempt to derive the history of globalization from a history of American expansion, Hardt and Negri unwittingly adopt the spatial ideologies that USAmericans used to divide the world into categories of internal and external, open and closed. The Monroe Doctrine signified not a brief lapse into European-style imperialism but the very cluster of ideas that attempted to differentiate American expansiveness from European imperialism, and that applied this distinction to justify expansion into Oregon in 1846. Hardt and Negri oppose the Monroe Doctrine to Wilson’s efforts to expand decentralized network power, but in fact the Monroe Doctrine provided a rhetorical resource flexible enough to either support or oppose Wilson’s argument that an internationalist network could extend America’s empire for liberty. Hardt and Negri oversimplify the evolution of U.S. expansionism, accepting too readily the story that the United States told itself about its exceptional kind of empire. This is a story that was produced and contested in literary and political texts, and that crucially bound together contradictory ideas about national identity and mission. It combined proprietary isolation of the Western Hemisphere with closely held ideas like natural democracy, spiritual destiny rooted in the soil of the New World, and the virtuous domestic retreat from European excess; at the same time it negotiated conflicting ideas about capitalist hegemony and hierarchies of race and civilization within the Western Hemisphere. Understanding this story and the alternative narratives of New World identity that contested it brings us closer to grasping the full import of the historical precedent of the Monroe Doctrine. If we take a broader and more critical view than Buchanan or Boot, this history enables us to see the ideology that bound together their opposing versions of American isolation and American empire. The Monroe Doctrine cannot provide or legitimate a future direction for contemporary geopolitics, but it can direct us to the origins of a vital ideology for conceptually locating America in the world.

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notes introduction 1 See also Janice Radway’s 1998 American Studies Association presidential address, ‘‘What’s in a Name?,’’ on the move toward what she calls ‘‘Inter-American studies.’’ This problem of naming plagues all Americanists doing work on empire. To avoid referring to U.S. nationals as simply ‘‘Americans,’’ which is conventional but problematic for these reasons, scholars sometimes resort to more awkward substitutes like ‘‘U.S. citizens’’ or ‘‘people of the United States.’’ In this study, rather than invoking the political connotation of citizenship, I will refer to U.S. nationals as ‘‘USAmericans.’’ 2 Buell’s earlier essay ‘‘American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon’’ (1997) was criticized for its too simplistic separation of postcolonial cultural development from what Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease have called ‘‘the cultures of United States imperialism.’’ In her introduction to the groundbreaking anthology of that title, Kaplan takes Buell’s essay to task for its failure to recognize that U.S. nation building and empire building were ‘‘historically coterminous and mutually defining’’ (‘‘Left Alone with America,’’ 17). I read Buell’s complex conceptualization of this hemispheric project in his later work as responding to such criticisms; there he clarifies that a cultural identity based on revolution from colonialism does not preclude simultaneous participation in imperialist practices. Eric Cheyfitz has similarly proposed what he calls an ‘‘Americas Cultural Studies’’ that ‘‘would take as its focus, in an international context, a rigorous theoretical/historical critique of the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the hemisphere, positing this relationship as inherently contradictory, a contradiction that American exceptionalism has typically elided’’ (843–44). This model would avoid the emphasis on parallelism that weakens comparative studies such as that by Fitz. See discussion of similar possibilities in Paul Jay, Gregory Jay, Chevigny and Laguardia, Muthyala, Pérez-Firmat, and Rowe, ‘‘Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies.’’ 3 William Appleman Williams’s 1961 The Contours of American History gave an influential revisionist critique of the Monroe Doctrine, calling it a ‘‘defensive statement of the territorial and administrative integrity of North and South America’’ that conceals a ‘‘positive, expansionist statement of American supremacy in the hemisphere’’ (215). See also Allman and Smith. 4 This realist/idealist divide is one major premise separating my approach from

that of Susan L. Matarese, whose American Foreign Policy and Utopian Imagination (2001) also identifies literature as an important sphere for formulating and promoting past visions of national identity and international relations. Matarese argues that the ‘‘culturally based assumptions’’ of utopianism and global mission that she identifies in both early twentieth-century utopian novels and contemporary political discourse should be identified and replaced with a realist assessment of U.S. national interests as outlined by realists like George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau (Matarese, 90–98). 5 May’s The Making of the Monroe Doctrine is a good example of recent work in diplomatic history that uses more complicated models not heavily influenced by cultural theory. May’s methodology examines voting patterns and the domestic political context as well as international relations and the stated intentions of the administration; he is mostly concerned with the way perceptions and the political climate influenced policy decisions, yet he does not imply that political choices guided by perceptions (rather than reality) are inferior to a more ‘‘realist’’ policy. 6 Indeed, hardly a volume of the journal Diplomatic History goes by without an article either calling for increased vigor in the study of culture or arguing that culture doesn’t matter so much to diplomatic historians after all. See Crapol (‘‘Coming to Terms with Empire’’), Hunt, Leffler, and Rabe. One 1994 special issue on gender and culture even included commentaries by cultural critics Susan Jeffords and Amy Kaplan. Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore’s anthology Close Encounters with Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations contains impressive accounts of this shift to culture; see especially essays by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg. These works are examples of historians of foreign policy turning to the writings of Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault, as well as other theorists of race, gender, and postcoloniality. 7 Here I am drawing on Lisa Lowe’s (Immigrant Acts), Brook Thomas’s (‘‘China Men, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Question of Citizenship’’), and Priscilla Wald’s writings on legal and literary constructs of citizenship, which have suggested that literature can create a more complex and accurate depiction of the lived experience and contradictions of citizenship than formal legal narratives. As Thomas claims, ‘‘works of the imagination can, more extensively than the law, provide a vision of what constitutes active citizenship’’ (691). Similarly, Lowe writes that ‘‘although law is the discourse that most literally governs citizenship, U.S. national culture powerfully shapes who the citizenry is, where they dwell, what they remember and what they forget’’ (2). See also Wald’s comparison of the stories that novels and legal cases can tell (32–40). Although the Monroe Doctrine was not a law per se, I am suggesting that literary and cultural narratives contributed crucially to the ‘‘remembering’’ and ‘‘forgetting’’ neces-

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sary to make the presidential statement a compelling ideology of foreign policy and national identity. Kaplan’s and Pease’s Cultures of U.S. Imperialism focuses mostly on the post-1898 era; only four articles out of twenty-four focus on material written prior to 1900. For another example of this tendency to juxtapose European colonialism before 1900 with U.S. imperialism after 1900, see Spurr. Critics of dependency and world-system theories have warned that to imagine North and South or core and periphery as distinct entities in a bipolar relation is to subsume the differences that internally divide those entities. Essays in the Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore anthology give excellent accounts of these criticisms as well as models for historical work that avoids those errors. Here I significantly depart from Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s account of the gendered implications of the Monroe Doctrine, which describes a trajectory from Monroe’s 1823 concept of fraternal relations among American brothers to the rhetorical feminization of Mexico and Cuba that would be used so often during the Mexican- and Spanish-American Wars to justify U.S. conquest. In this figurative trajectory from equal to unequal gender relations, Gruesz identifies one of the many loopholes in the flexible identifications of the Monroe Doctrine, but she overlooks the important way that narrative and rhetorical representations of the United States as a woman or a family confined to insular domestic space have both impelled and concealed U.S. imperialism.

separate (hemi)spheres 1 On the debate about the authorship of the Monroe Doctrine, see Bemis, 407–8; Hecht, 368–69; and Russell, 199–200. Most historians agree that Monroe phrased and punctuated the document, but that Adams conceived and dictated its significant points. For discussions of Adams’s Fourth of July Address as a precursor to the Monroe Doctrine, see Bemis, 356–57; and Russell, 2–3, 137–41. 2 On Bemis as a founder of the academic discipline of American foreign policy, see Brauer, ‘‘The Great American Desert Revisited,’’ 395; Lawrence Kaplan, 187–88; Paterson, 586; and Neu, 3–6. 3 The phrase is from Weeks’s title, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, which like LaFeber’s John Quincy Adams and American Continental Empire, pointedly revises Bemis’s John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. 4 For example, the Boston North American Review reviewed both Walsh’s book (April 1820) and a response to Walsh’s book from the New London Monthly (July 1821), 20–47. The Philadelphia Literary and Scientific Repository reviewed both Walsh’s book (2.2 [1820]) and reprinted a British response to Walsh’s book (2.3 [1820]). 5 Kelley gives the definitive account of this debate, and includes Sedgwick as the

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earliest of her ‘‘literary domestics’’ (14). See also the essays in Yellin’s and Van Horne’s collection on antebellum women and abolitionist political culture. The United States in the 1820s would actually be classified as ‘‘semi-peripheral’’ in Emmanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory. Although manufacturing was rapidly progressing in the Northeast, from 1821 to 1825 manufactures comprised only 12% of total exports, with the export of raw materials and foodstuffs, mostly cotton to Great Britain, making up the rest. However, this import/export imbalance was mitigated by another national source of income: the carrying trade. U.S. ships often carried foreign as well as domestic goods to and from foreign ports for large profits, and the investment of the capital gained from these shipping and mercantile interests in turn boosted northeastern industrialization from 1820 to 1860 (Brauer, ‘‘Economics and the Diplomacy of American Expansion,’’ 57–58). Quoted in Wald, 33. My argument affirms Wald’s interpretation of Child’s Hobomok as a fictional work that plays out the domestic scenario implied by Marshall in this decision. On the Boston-centered movement for literary nationalism in the early nineteenth century, see Buell, New England Literary Culture; Spencer; and Shrell. Rogin, ‘‘The Two Declarations of Independence,’’ and Maddox offer more recent criticism on the self-conscious promotion of literary nationalism and the practice of constituting national culture out of icons of racial subjugation. This literary institutionalization of ‘‘the Indian’’ extended the revolutionaryera tradition of iconographically representing the United States as an American Indian. Revolutionary political cartoons frequently relied on the symbolic power of the Indian to signify the United States by identifying both with the North American continent. For examples of this practice, see Jones. As Eric Wertheimer demonstrates, the revolutionary-era poetry of Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau used similar identifications with South American Incas and Aztecs to assign this difference more explicitly to the hemisphere as a whole. Shirley Samuels’s Romances of the Republic discusses this convention, especially in fiction set during the revolutionary period. Works like Hobomok and Catherine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie invite us to extend Samuels’s reading to historical romances that staged ‘‘revolution’’ in marriage plots set in other eras. For the former argument see Karcher, Clifford, Romero, Petitjean, and Marshall. For the latter, see Baym and Gould. As Lucy Maddox has pointed out, the fate of these characters mirrors the false choice of ‘‘assimilation or extinction’’ that many writers of this period assumed were the only options for Native Americans. Although I find Mary’s marriage to Hobomok to be a plot device that is itself somewhat marginal to Child’s main interests, the back cover of the American Woman Writers edition proclaims the story as ‘‘the provocative story of an upper-class white woman who marries an Indian chief,’’ and Lora Romero intro-

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duces the novel in her book with the statement ‘‘Hobomok is a tale of interracial marriage’’ (25). Karcher discusses the subversive meaning of Child’s allowing Mary and young Hobomok to survive the union rather than die tragically, as was the convention in other stories of miscegenation. The ‘‘Pocahontas’’ myth was frequently applied in literature of the Mexican-American War, where a white Anglo-American soldier typically won the heart of a Mexican woman who recognizes the superiority of the expanding Anglo-American republic over her own people. See Johannsen on this convention in Mexican-American War literature. ‘‘Domestic individualism’’ is Gillian Brown’s phrase; I borrow it here to place Child’s novel in the tradition of domestic narratives that associated domestic space with liberal constructs of bourgeois individualism. As several critics have noted, Child’s challenge to Puritanism in Hobomok was largely influenced by the emerging dominance of Unitarianism in Boston society. Unitarianism cast God as forgiving father rather than stern judge and held that the unlearned child (or, here, the Indian) in a state of nature was innocent and uncorrupted rather than depraved. In Hobomok, however, Child’s particular emphasis on feeling and on nature goes beyond the Unitarian faith that she personally found cold and unsatisfying. Some critics have seen in these scenes of ‘‘natural’’ religion traces of the Swedenborgianism in which Child dabbled, or the nascent philosophy of Transcendentalism. Instead, I think these scenes develop the apotheosis of feeling that would develop out of Unitarianism and other liberal sects to form part of the ideology of domesticity that Child pioneered throughout her early career. Her interest in alternative religions seems to me part of the intellectual and spiritual searching that would lead her toward domesticity’s spiritualized authorization of bourgeois affective individualism and maternal influence and power. On Child’s dissatisfaction with Unitarianism, see Clifford, 36–38. For an interpretation of these scenes as expressing Unitarianism, see Mills, 16–18; and Baym, 157–58; as expressing Swedenborgianism, see Clifford, 41; and as expressing nascent Transcendentalism, see Karcher, 25. See Weeks, 196–98. Interestingly, the one article I have found that discusses Child and Adams together is Edward Crapol, ‘‘The Foreign Policy of Anti-Slavery,’’ whose topic is their similar and related work in the 1840s to pass legislation both restricting contact with nations engaged in the African slave trade and opening relations with Haiti. Sánchez-Eppler discusses Child’s work in particular in her chapter on the intersecting rhetorics of feminism and abolitionism. Scholarship on racist and imperialist agendas in twentieth-century feminism is vast. For an influential formulation of this critique, see Mohanty.

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1

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selling jim crow Charles Brown (Agents of Manifest Destiny, 107–8) writes about the significance of this debate, and of Soulé’s speech in particular, for filibustering and expansionist politics in the 1850s. ‘‘Filibustering’’ is of course meant here in the sense of promoting insurrection. Hawks was a founder of the New York Review and had written and edited a number of biographies and natural histories on topics as various as Egyptian monuments, ancient Peruvian culture, the settlement of the southern United States, and the adventures of Daniel Boone. He also wrote histories for children that resembled Hawthorne’s Grandfather’s Chair in their use of dialogue between children and an elder relative (in Hawks’s case, ‘‘Uncle Philip’’) to tell national history. The Narrative was the first of three volumes; the later two were compiled by Perry himself and consisted of naturalist, hydrographic, and astronomical information on Japan. This movement challenges the New Critical tendency to take Hawthorne at his word when he represents himself as an artist alienated from politics; instead, it describes his writing’s engagement with political and economic tensions of his time concerning slavery, sectionalism, land rights, and the rise of consumer capitalism. For studies that discuss and deconstruct the binary of the artist and the politician in Hawthorne’s work, see Nissenbaum; Boyd; Fleischner; and Casper. Some of the most influential essays historicizing Hawthorne’s work in such political concerns are by Arac (‘‘The Politics of The Scarlet Letter’’), Gillian Brown (Domestic Individualism), Gilmore, Michaels, and Yellin (‘‘Hawthorne and the American National Sin’’). According to Wiley, the administration was pressured to authorize the expedition by shipping magnate William Aspinwall, whose mail steamers already received government subsidies for service to California, and who planned a shipping line from San Francisco to Shanghai (89). This expectation might also be derived from Shelley Streeby’s argument about popular fictions of the Mexican-American War, which she shows both promote a unified and exceptionalist U.S. national identity and yet also unleash ‘‘uncanny, spectral forms that trouble exceptionalist fantasies of a free soil, a vacant western landscape, and a united American people’’ (2). Especially valuable in Streeby’s argument is her attention to the ways in which class and racial identities were simultaneously formed and negotiated through these nationalist representations of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. empire. These interconnected processes of identity formation are also negotiated in Hawks’s text, which adds to Streeby’s list of suppressed anxieties an additional concern with surpassing the imaginary boundaries of the hemisphere. Movement across the Pacific additionally troubles the exceptionalist fantasy of a compact and domestic empire for liberty. Here the relations I describe among slavery, empire, and race differ significantly from those described by Rowe in Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism. There

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Rowe focuses on texts which conflate racial binaries between white USAmericans and various racial others inside and outside of national borders. In doing so he isolates a strand of imperialist rhetoric and representation in which Africans, Native Americans, and others signified as ‘‘foreign’’ are seen as interchangeable, creating a racial discourse that justified both the ‘‘internal colonization’’ of slavery and the subjugation of native peoples on the North American continent and beyond. By claiming that this formulation of collapsed binaries is ‘‘the prevailing racial ideology of the nineteenth-century United States’’ (60), Rowe overlooks the more complex set of racial identifications and disidentifications I have associated with the Monroe Doctrine. These ambivalent racial identifications, crucial to Hawks’s representations of ‘‘blackness,’’ remind us that slavery and empire were not always understood as related and compatible processes, but rather had a vexed relationship that was the specific subject of debate in Congress and elsewhere. Rowe effaces this debate by asserting that ‘‘commercial motives . . . link the Southern slave economy with the Northern industrial economy and its growing demand in the nineteenth century growing markets’’ (86), ignoring the fact that different spatial and racial conceptions of U.S. empire divided many Northerners and Southerners. By acknowledging the political and economic discord over the place of slavery in U.S. empire, I want to attend to the subtle and often shifting ways that racial difference was used to articulate a national identity that was exceptionalist and imperialist. This fantasy has a conspicuous precedent in the published account of Lewis and Clark’s voyage, which detailed the role of York, Clark’s slave, in amazing and impressing Native Americans who had never before seen a person of African descent. On the role of York in the Lewis and Clark expedition, see Carroll. On the history of African Americans in the navy, see Nalty. Despite resistance from many whites, African Americans were permitted to serve because of the difficulty of recruiting white sailors for the arduous work. Less than 5% of any ship’s crew was black. For a complete list of American and Japanese gifts, see Houchins. Howland calls the invention of the steamship the pretext for the expedition. The question of authenticity and minstrelsy is moribund; recent cultural historians have come to agree that whatever the form’s racist and oppressive purposes, the music and comedy of minstrelsy were derived from (and in turn influenced the cultural development of ) both white and black dance, music, and theater. See also Cockrell and Lhamon on the question of authenticity and minstrelsy. On the convergence of literary nationalism and territorial expansionism in the ideology of Young America, see Stafford; Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 70–76; and Wald, 106–21. A copy of the playbill is reproduced in Morison. For descriptions of these later narratives of race and U.S. empire, see Bederman and Kaplan (‘‘Black and Blue on San Juan Hill’’). n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t w o 165

15 Samuels’s Romances of the Republic discusses the conventional depiction of a young couple whose marriage symbolizes a revolutionary break from European aristocratic class division, and Lang describes the convention of subsuming class under gender in domestic novels, where proper signs of gender rather than inherited ‘‘blood’’ guarantee access to middle-class privilege. 16 See Haltunnen and Smith-Rosenberg on urbanization and the literary figure of the rootless young man. 17 I refer here to ‘‘The Great Nation of Futurity,’’ John O’Sullivan’s 1845 expansionist essay in the Democratic Review, known for its early formulations of Manifest Destiny. 18 Many critics have taken issue with this ending. Some older condemnations of the ending on the grounds of aesthetics and consistency can be found in Matthiessen and Bewley. Gilmore agrees with this criticism but attributes the happy ending’s conventionality to Hawthorne’s acquiescence to the market society that his story condemns. 19 By siding with Michaels and Brown in finding the novel’s politics to be ultimately accommodationist, I am arguing in opposition to recent critics who defend Hawthorne’s novels as efficacious social criticism. Swann, Mizruchi, and Millington all find the marriage between Phoebe and Holgrave to be a device which makes the reader aware of the compromises that are a necessary part of a democratic community while still envisioning a space for partial and strategic resistance. While I concur with these critics that Hawthorne was self-consciously staging relevant social questions and attempting to portray a viable compromise between conservatism and progress, I am also convinced that we must explore the meanings that the novel’s solution of domestic compromise had in the political discourses of the 1850s. geographic morality 1 On Martí’s response to the congress, see Santí; and Foner, 40–45. 2 Here I am complicating arguments made by Sánchez (‘‘Dismantling the Colossus’’), Pita (‘‘Engendering Critique’’), and Saldívar (‘‘Nuestra América’s Borders’’), who emphasize the similarities between Martí’s and Ruiz de Burton’s rhetorical opposition to U.S. empire. By using the term ‘‘cosmopolitan,’’ I do not intend to invoke the new meanings attached to it by contemporary theorists interested in what Cheah calls an ‘‘emancipatory project of global consciousness’’ (291). Rather, I am concerned with older, Eurocentric conceptions of this term as a form of enlightenment universalism enmeshed in the globalizing world market and ‘‘civilizing’’ intentions of nineteenth-century colonial expansion. For discussion of this origin of the term, see Malcomson and Harvey. 3 Maximilian was able to take the throne because of a number of factors. From 1857 to 1860, the Mexican War of Reform widened the divide between the Liberal and Conservative Parties, and this gulf widened when Benito Juárez, the leader 166 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r t h r e e

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of the Liberal Party and a Zapotec Indian, won the 1860 presidential election. A number of Mexican Conservatives thus looked to European intervention and the possibility of monarchy to restore them to power. At the same time, Juárez’s administration was in severe debt and suspended payment on loans to France, Spain, and Great Britain. The three powers invaded Mexico in 1861 to collect these debts by force, but Spain and Great Britain dropped out of the tripartite invasion soon afterward, negotiating other arrangements with Mexico to make up for the postponed payments. French forces, sent by the aggressive Napoléon III, remained, inciting a civil war between Conservatives and Liberals and driving Juárez’s administration from the capital. The French organized a provisional government in Mexico City, and an appointed body of 285 Mexican Conservatives quickly declared that Mexico would be a monarchy with a Catholic prince as emperor. They offered the throne to Maximilian, who agreed to accept only if shown some sign that the Mexican people wished to be governed by a monarch. A plebiscite arranged in the three Mexican states under French control approved of the change, and Maximilian arrived in the new kingdom in 1864. As a close friend of Romero during the years she lived in Washington, Ruiz de Burton was undoubtedly aware of his diplomatic work. Sánchez and Pita speculate that some of her criticism of fawning Mexican subservience to the United States was directed at her friend Romero. See Sánchez and Pita, ‘‘(Shifting) Frames of Reference,’’ 212–15. On Romero, see Schooner. On U.S. support for Juárez, see Miller. On Wallace’s role, see Morsberger and Morsberger. The parallels between Fashion and Who Would Have Thought It? as romantic comedies of New York manners are striking: Mrs. Norval and Ruth clearly resemble the scheming Tiffany women; both plots hinge on libertines’ attempts to trick the heroine into marriage; both include mistaken identity scenes with a French maid; and both sets of characters include a comic old spinster who is sister to a scheming mother. I am referring to James’s Daisy Miller (1877) or Christopher Newman (in The American, 1878); to the St. George daughters in Wharton’s unfinished manuscript for The Buccaneers; to the title characters of Gunter’s wildly popular Mr. Barnes of New York (1887) and Mr. Potter of Texas (1888); and to Stockton’s New England matrons in The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine (1886), as well as his Captain Horn and passengers in the best-selling The Adventures of Captain Horn (1895). The downfall of James’s Isabel Archer is the exception to the popular convention that proves the rule. In her correspondence, Ruiz de Burton describes France under Napoléon III as the only possible provider of a political system suited for la raza latina in Mexico. See ‘‘14 September 1869,’’ in Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts of Interest, 301. Sánchez and Pita discuss the influence Ruiz de Burton’s philosophy of latinidad on her political support for monarchy in Mexico in ‘‘(Shifting) Frames of Reference,’’ 194. notes to chapter three

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9 See especially Marez on the use of Comanche captivity narratives in the construction of identities that are Mexican and Chicano rather than Spanish- or Anglo-American. 10 Martí, both through this content and the scope of his audience, gives a version of the transnational Latino identity that Kirsten Silva Gruesz argues was produced in the Spanish-language periodicals published in the United States after the Mexican-American War. Gruesz calls this transnational scope a ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ one, but her use of the term differs from mine in that I use it to describe a viewpoint that, like Ruiz de Burton’s, rejects any celebration of New World difference and favors a global (high) culture that emanates from Europe. gringos abroad 1 Lodge’s article ‘‘Venezuela, England, and the Monroe Doctrine’’ appeared in the North American Review, and Scruggs’s pamphlet on the subject went through four printings in the United States. See Perkins (The Monroe Doctrine: 1867–1907) and LaFeber (The New Empire) on the influence of these ideas on the Cleveland administration. 2 See Beisner, Twelve against the Empire; Markowitz; and Welch on the antiimperialists. 3 Defining ‘‘civilization’’ as a product of racial or economic advancement was of course not entirely new—Monroe and Adams clearly relied on such assumptions even while positing democracy as the key to New World difference and exceptionalism. See Pike for a study of what he calls the myth of ‘‘civilization versus nature’’ in U.S. discourse about Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, at the turn of the century, justifications for U.S. expansion had largely shifted from a mission to spread free democratic republicanism to one that would spread whiteness and Anglo-Saxonism. This is not to say that previous discourses of ‘‘civilization’’ and U.S. expansionism were not ‘‘racist,’’ but that scientific racism and social Darwinism became explicitly stated rationales in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Horsman, 1–3; and Beisner, From the Old Imperialism to the New, 4–5. 4 On the shift from territorial to ‘‘informal’’ empire, see LaFeber, The New Empire; McCormick; and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. 5 For other anti-imperialist appeals to the Monroe Doctrine, see Charles Francis Adams and Schurz. 6 Kasson and Scruggs make similar arguments. 7 On Lehigh University, which Davis attended, see Lubow, 18–24. On Taylor in Bethlehem, see Nelson, Frederick Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 76–103. 8 On the demographic groups who bought and read best-sellers, see Löfroth, 15–18. 168 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r f o u r

9 The writings of Conant and Strong express this turn-of-the-century argument for Pacific expansion. conclusion 1 On this debate, see Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine; Fleming; and Knock. 2 Felipe Barreda y Laos and Alejandro Álvarez wrote such criticisms of the Monroe Doctrine and its interpretation in U.S. foreign policy in the 1930s. 3 See Allman, 99–103; Smith; Ronfeldt; and Stuart Taylor. Conservative spokesmen like William F. Buckley applauded the president’s resurrection of the Doctrine, but their praise inspired no larger public response. For a detailed discussion of the Reagan administration’s use of the Doctrine, see Smith, 169–230. 4 American studies scholars who have outlined and considered this proposal for a new hemispheric frame include Buell (‘‘Circling the Spheres’’), Cheyfitz, Chevigny and Laguardia, Paul Jay, Gregory Jay, Muthyala, Pérez-Firmat, Radway, and Rowe (‘‘Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies’’). 5 Fredric Jameson gives an outline of some of these differences. 6 Here I am thinking of popular and academic gurus of globalization like Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman, and Kenichi Ohmae.

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index Adams, John Quincy, 12–14, 26–28, 85; as author of Monroe Doctrine, 32–45, 58–61, 94, 129, 161n.1; Lydia Maria Child and, 58–61, 163n.17; Fourth of July 1822 address of, 32– 34, 43, 45, 153, 161n.1; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Francis Lister Hawks’s views of, 66–67; literary criticism of, 39–41 Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, 119–20, 143 Adventures of Captain Horn, The, 167n.7 African Americans, in U.S. armed forces, 74–76, 165nn.7–8. See also minstrelsy; slavery Aguinaldo, Emilio, 22 Álvarez, Alejandro, 169n.2 America/Américas myth, 5–6 American, The, 167n.7 American abroad motif, 103–6 American Foreign Policy and Utopian Imagination, 160n.4 ‘‘American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,’’ 159n.2 American Railway Union, 140 American studies: ‘‘critical transnationalism’’ in, 155; globalization in context of, 1 American ‘‘system’’ of politics, 102–3 ‘‘America’s Destiny Is to Police the World,’’ 152 Anderson, Benedict, 60

Anderson, Stuart, 125 Anglo-Saxonism, 125–26 anticolonialism: American culture and, 46–58; in Child’s Hobomok, 47–48; Monroe Doctrine and, 129; Native Americans and, 42–46 anti-imperialism, 33–34, 42–43 Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America, An, 35 Arac, Jonathan, 90, 92–93 Aranda, José F., 100 Armstrong, Nancy, 52 Aspinwall, William, 164n.4 Atlantic Monthly, 124 Atlantic Telegraphy, 112 Autobiography, An (Lew Wallace), 107, 112 Autopsy of the Monroe Doctrine, 147 Aztecs: U.S. imperialism and, 30; in Lew Wallace’s novels, 111–18 ‘‘balance of power’’ concept, 27 Barlow, Joel, 14, 162n.9 Barreda y Laos, Felipe, 169n.2 Bartholomew, Charles (‘‘Bart’’), 8 Bayard, Thomas Francis, 97 Belnap, Jeffrey, 110 Bemis, Samuel Flagg, 32–33, 161n.2 Ben Hur, 111–12 Berquist, Charles, 139–40 Bewley, Marius, 166n.18 Bhabha, Homi, 71 Blackface, White Noise, 79

‘‘blackness’’ as American characteristic, 79–83, 96 Bledstein, Burton J., 137 Bonin Islands, 64 Boot, Max, vii–x, 149, 152–54, 158 border theory, 155 Borland, Salon, 68–69 Bridge, Horatio, 66 Brown, Gillian, 166n.19 Buccaneers, The, 167n.7 Buchanan, Patrick, viii–x, 30, 149–54, 157–58 Buckley, William F., 169n.3 Buell, Lawrence, 1–2, 159n.2, 169n.4 Burgess, John W., 16, 124 Bush Doctrine (2002), vii, 30–31 Bushnell, Albert Hart, 126–27 Byron, Lord, 39 Calhoun, John C., 13 California, acquisition of, 63–64 Canning, George, 12, 14, 97 captivity narratives, 109, 168n.9 Caribbean, U.S. expansionism in, 94–95, 120 Carnegie, Andrew, 23–24, 129, 142 Cass, Lewis, 15, 64–65, 93–94 Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, The, 167n.7 causality, in foreign policy, 18 Central America, impact of Monroe Doctrine in, 26, 93 Channing, William, 46 Cherokee Nation decisions of U.S. Supreme Court, 24, 42 Chevigny, Bell Gale, 155, 169n.4 Cheyfitz, Eric, 159n.2, 169n.4 Chicano studies, border theory of, 155 Child, David Lee, 58 Child, Lydia Maria, 14, 27–28, 34, 40, 42; John Quincy Adams and, 58–61, 186 i n d e x

163n.17; nationalism in fiction of, 42–61 China trade policies, 68–69 Choate, Rufus, 46 ‘‘Circling the Spheres,’’ 1–2 citizenship, cultural constructs of, 160n.7 civilization, defined, 124–25, 168n.3 Civil War: African American troops in, 75–76; U.S. policy in Mexico and, 100–101 Clark, Reuben, 147, 152 Clark, Suzanne, 17 class identity: in American romance literature, 92–93, 166n.15; cultural theory and, 26; in Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune, 135–44; Latin American policy and role of, 124–25 Clay, Henry, 36, 133 Cleveland, Grover, 119, 122, 135 Close Encounters with Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, 160n.6 Cold War, 147–49 Colombia, 127 colonialism: John Quincy Adams on, 34, 42; in cartoons, 20–22; culture of imperialism and, 18–19; as family relations, 41–42; literature and impact of, 34; Monroe Doctrine and, 28; Who Would Have Thought It? as indictment of, 100 commercial development (U.S.), 75–77, 165n.10 Commissioned Spirits, 90 Common Sense, 14 Compromise of 1850, 23, 66, 71, 93 Conflicts of Interest, 103 congressional filibustering: expansionism in Pacific and, 68–71;

over Monroe Doctrine, 26, 64–66, 93–94, 164n.1 Conservative Party (Mexico), 166n.3 ‘‘Constitution Led by the Flag, A,’’ 153 Contrast, The, 104–5 Coolidge, Archibald Cary, 125–26 Cooper, James Fenimoore, 19, 40, 42, 47 cosmopolitanism, geographic morality and, 98, 109–11, 166n.2 Cosmopolitan magazine, 82–83 Courier newspaper, 39 Crapol, Edward, 163n.17 Crater, The, 19 ‘‘critical transnationalism,’’ 155 Cuba: Richard Harding Davis on, 122–44; feminization of, 161n.11; impact of Monroe Doctrine in, 26; U.S. intervention in, 20–22, 64–69, 147–48 Cullen, Jim, 75 cultural theory: American abroad motif and, 103–6; American minstrel shows and, 78–85; citizenship in context of, 160n.7; foreign policy and, 17–18, 160n.5–6; globalization and, 1; hemispheric ideology in context of, 2, 154–58, 159n.2; impact of Monroe Doctrine on, 2, 4, 7, 9, 16–17, 155–58; imperialism and, 18–20; post-Revolutionary BritishAmerican comparisons of, 37–39; Ruiz de Burton’s satire of American culture and, 102–11 Culture and Imperialism, 19 Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, 18–19, 161n.8 Daisy Miller, 167n.7 Davenport, Homer, 7, 9–10 Davis, Richard Harding, 14, 30, 119– 44

Davis, W. Watson, 83 Declaration of Independence: John Quincy Adams on, 43; as cultural icon, 120 Democratic Party: anti-imperialism of, 120–21; expansionist ideology and, 67–69, 81–82 Democratic Review, 81, 166n.17 dependency model: critics of, 161n.10; hemispheric ideology and, 2 Dialectics of ‘‘Our America,’’ The, 98 Díez de Medina, Raúl, 147 Diplomatic History, 160n.6 ‘‘Dispositions of England and America,’’ 35 Dole, Charles, 124–25 ‘‘domestic individualism,’’ in American literature, 163n.15 domestic space: John Quincy Adams’s concept of national identity in, 41– 42; in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 49–61; in Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune, 141– 44; foreign policy in context of, 36–37; in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, 67, 86– 96; Monroe Doctrine and, 28–29, 47–58 ‘‘Don Juan,’’ 39 Donovan, Frank, 147–48 economic development: in House of the Seven Gables, 90–92, 166n.17, 166n.19; Monroe Doctrine ideology and, 127–44; in post-Revolutionary United States, 38, 162n.6 Eddy, Mary Baker, 16 Edinburgh Review, 14, 34–39, 43, 161n.4 Empire, 157–58 Eurocentrism, impact of Monroe Doctrine on, 6–7, 9, 15 index

187

Everett, Edward, 32 Everitt, Lancelot, 101–2 ‘‘Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from Monroe to Reagan, The,’’ 17, 148 exceptionalism: hemispheric ideology and, 149; in House of the Seven Gables, 86–96; Mexican-American War and, 164n.5; Monroe Doctrine and origins of, 6–7 expansionism: congressional debate on Monroe Doctrine and, 65; definitions of civilization and, 168n.3; geographic morality and, 97–118; hemispheric ideology and, 45–61, 157–58; in House of the Seven Gables, 87–96, 166n.17; minstrel shows as symbol of, 79. See also imperialism Fair God, The, 30, 111–18, 128 family relations: John Quincy Adams on, 41; in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, 94–95; in Ruiz de Burton’s writings, 108–11 Fashion, 104–5, 167n.6 feminism, Lydia Maria Child and, 60–61, 163n.18. See also gender Fillmore, Millard, 67–68, 74 ‘‘First American Imperialist, The,’’ 82 Following the Equator, 19 foreign policy (U.S.): cultural influences on, 17–18, 160nn.5–6; feminization of discourse about, 36–39; realist/idealist division concerning, 17, 160n.4; Samuel Flagg Bemis on foundations of, 32–33, 161n.2; skepticism about Monroe Doctrine and, 16–17, 145–46 Foster, Stephen, 79 ‘‘foundational fiction’’ in Mexico, 115 188 i n d e x

Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 126–27 France: allies with Colombia, 127; intervenes in Mexico, 100, 112, 147, 166n.3 Free Soil Whigs, 65, 70–71, 83 French Foreign Legion, 107 Freneau, Philip, 14, 162n.9 Friedman, Thomas, 169n.6 Fukuyama, Francis, 169n.6 gender: in John Quincy Adams’s political writings, 36–39; in American romance literature, 166n.15; in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 52–58; culture and, 26, 160n.6; interpretations of Monroe Doctrine and, 29, 161n.11; role of, in Pacific expansionism, 77–78; in U.S. policy toward Mexico, 101–2. See also feminism genealogy, racism and, 125–26 geographic morality, 97–118 George Washington Gómez, 30, 147, 151–52 Giddings, Franklin, 125 Giles, Paul, 155 Gilmore, Michael T., 166n.18 globalization: American studies and impact of, 1; Monroe Doctrine in context of, 148–58; U.S. dominance and, 156–58 Goldman, Anne E., 103, 108 Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays, The, 129 Grandfather’s Chair, 164n.2 Great Britain: anti-Americanism in, 35–38; Bay Islands claimed by, 64; Monroe Doctrine and U.S. relations with, 9, 153, 162n.6; relations with Mexico, 166n.3; Venezuela border conflict of 1895 and, 119–44

‘‘Great Nation of Futurity, The,’’ 166n.17 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 26, 111, 161n.11 Guatemala, U.S. intervention in, 147 Gunn, Giles, 1 Gunter, Archibald Clavering, 106, 167n.7 Haiti, U.S. intervention in, 147 Hale, John Parker, 65, 94 Hall, Lawrence Sargent, 84–85, 95 Haltunnen, Karen, 166n.16 Harding, Warren G., 146 Hardt, Michael, 157–58 Harley, J. B., 7, 22 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 119, 121, 133 Harper’s Weekly, 20–22, 107 Hawai’i, expansionism in Pacific and, 64 Hawks, Francis Lister, 29, 65–96, 164n.2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 14, 29, 40, 42, 65–67, 164n.3; House of the Seven Gables by, 83–96, 166nn.18–19; Scarlet Letter by, 92–93 Hawthorne: Critic of Society, 84–85 Hemisphere Apart, A, 129 hemispheric ideology: American exceptionalism and, 6–8; anticolonialism and, 45–46; binary division of Monroe Doctrine and, 5–6, 29– 31; cartoon depictions of, 21–22; cultural theory and, 26–31; evolution of, 1–2; foreign policy in Latin America and, 127–44; imperialism and, 20–23; literature in context of, 15, 154, 169n.4; Mexican history in context of, 99–111; in Ruiz de Burton’s literature, 108; U.S. global leadership and decline of, 147–58 Henderson, John B., 128

Hietala, Thomas, 90–91 History of the Conquest of Mexico, 111–14 History of the Monroe Doctrine, A, 64, 146 Hobomok, 28, 34, 162n.13; anticolonialism and nationalism in, 45–61; domestic space motif in, 67, 92; Priscilla Wald’s interpretation of, 162n.7 Holy Alliance in the Americas, 12–13, 123 Homer, Winslow, 107 Hope Leslie, 162n.10 Horsman, Reginald, 70 House of the Seven Gables, The, 29, 40; U.S. expansionism in Pacific and, 65–67, 83–96 ‘‘idealist’’ foreign policy, 17–18, 160n.5 immigration, 150–51 imperialism: cartoon depictions of, 20–22, 24–26; in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 50–58; culture and politics of, 18–20; feminism and, 61; gender-based interpretation of, 161n.11; hemispheric ideology and, 2, 155, 159n.2; historical examples of, 153; internal expansion and, 20; labor unrest and, 139–40; Pacific expansionism and, 67–96; racism and, 71–73, 164n.6; transnationalism and, 157– 58; U.S. politics and, 120–21. See also expansionism; nationalism Innocents Abroad, 19 isolationism: Monroe Doctrine and, 30–31, 152–58; Monroe’s expression of, 36; U.S. imperialism and, 23 James, Henry, 106, 167n.7 Jameson, Fredric, 169n.5 index

189

Jane Eyre, 52 Japan, ‘‘opening’’ of, 22, 29–30, 64–96 Jay, Gregory, 169n.4 Jay, John, 101 Jay, Paul, 169n.4 Jim Crow metaphor: American expansionism and, 79–83, 96; in House of the Seven Gables, 83–84, 96 Johnson, John J., 129 Journal of an African Cruiser, 66 Juárez, Benito, 101, 112, 114, 166n.3 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 66 Kaplan, Amy, 16–18, 28, 140, 159n.2 Karcher, Carolyn, 52, 59, 163n.14 Kasson, John A., 15–16 Kelley, Mary, 161n.5 Kennard, J. K., 80–81 Kenworthy, Eldon, 5–6, 129 Kinney, Katherine, 130 Knapp, Gerald, 46–47 Korea, U.S. imperialism in, 153 labor unrest, 139–40 Lafeber, Walter, 17, 148 Laguardia, Gari, 155, 169n.4 La nación, 97 Lang, Amy S., 166n.15 la raza latina, 108 Last Days of the Monroe Doctrine: 1945–1993, The, 149 latinadad philosophy, 167n.8 Latin America: definitions of civilization and, 168n.3; geographic morality paradigm and, 97–118; José Martí on, 117–18; Monroe Doctrine and policies toward, 5, 7, 9, 127–44, 157–58; opposition to Monroe Doctrine in, 146–47; postcolonialism in, 2; Roosevelt Corollary to Monroe Doctrine and, vii, 6, 190 i n d e x

30, 144; tribal cultures in, 162n.9; U.S. foreign policy and, 150–58; U.S. imperialism and, 30–31; in U.S. literature, 47–48, 57–58 Lazo, Rodrigo, 26 League of Nations, 30–31, 145–46 Leavitt, Joshua, 102 Lehigh University, 168n.7 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 127–28 Lewis and Clark expedition, 165n.7 Liberal Party (Mexico), 166n.3 Life of Franklin Pierce, The, 93 Limón, José, 26 Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 19–20, 164n.6 literary nationalism, 80–83, 162n.8, 165n.12 literature: John Quincy Adams as critic of, 39–41; British criticize American literature, 37–39; of Great Britain, 39–41; influence of, on Monroe Doctrine, 34–61; national literature in United States, 46–58, 154, 162n.8, 169n.4; transnationality and, 155–56; U.S. foreign policy and, 17–19, 160n.4; U.S. imperialism and, 19–20. See also romance literature Lodge, Henry Cabot, 119, 145–46, 168n.1 Lott, Eric, 79, 81 Lowe, Lisa, 71, 160n.7 Lubow, Arthur, 121–22, 135–36 Maddox, Lucy, 162n.12 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 130 Making of the Monroe Doctrine, The, 160n.5 Mangum, Willie P., 69–70 Manifest Destiny, 166n.17; MexicanAmerican War and, 101; Monroe Doctrine and, x

Mardi, 19 market economy, in post-Revolutionary U.S., 38, 162n.6 Marquesas, U.S. imperialism in, 153 Marshall, John (U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice), 42, 162n.7 Martí, José, 14, 126, 133, 168n.10; geographic morality and work of, 97–98, 103, 109–11, 116–18; hemispheric ideology and, 154; on U.S. imperialism, 29–30; U.S. Latin American policies and, 144 Massachusetts Journal, 58 Matarese, Susan L., 160n.4 Matthiessen, F. O., 166n.18 Maximilian (Archduke), 99, 101–3, 112, 114, 166n.3 May, Ernest, 12, 160n.5 Meet the Press, 148 Melville, Herman, 19 Merk, Frederick, 17, 27 Mescalero Apaches, U.S. expeditions against, 115–16 Mexican Aid Societies, 101 Mexican-American War: literature of, 163n.14; Monroe Doctrine and, 101; U.S. imperialism and, 20, 22, 29, 63–64, 66; U.S. national identity and, 100–101, 164n.5; Lew Wallace in, 111–18 Mexican War of Reform, 166n.3 Mexico: feminization of, 161n.11; ‘‘foundational fiction’’ in, 115; French intervention in, 26, 64; impact of Monroe Doctrine in, 98–111; Lew Wallace fascinated by, 111–18 Michaels, Walter Benn, 166n.19 Miles Wallingford, 19 Millington, Richard H., 166n.19 Mills, Bruce, 59–60 minstrelsy: expansionism in Pacific

and, 78–83; in House of the Seven Gables, 83–84; origins of, 165n.11 miscegenation, in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 53–58, 163n.14 Mr. Barnes of New York, 167n.7 Mr. Monroe’s Message, 148 Mr. Potter of Texas, 167n.7 Mizruchi, Susan L., 166n.19 Monroe, James, 4, 46; presidential message of, to Congress (1823), 4–6, 13–17, 23–24, 26, 36, 45, 57, 83; refers to slavery, 23, 24 Monroe Doctrine: John Quincy Adams and, 32–45, 58–61, 161n.1; American exceptionalism and, 6–7; Anglo-American relations and, 9, 125–26, 153; anticolonialism and anti-imperialism and, 28, 33–34, 42–43, 129; authorship of, 161n.1; ‘‘balance of power’’ and, 27; border theory and, 155; California and, 63– 64; Lydia Maria Child and, 58–61; ‘‘civilization’’ and, 124–25, 168n.3; Clark Memorandum on, 147, 152; as counter to Holy Alliance, 12– 13, 123; cultural analysis of, 2, 4, 7, 9, 13–14, 16–17, 155–58; Richard Harding Davis and, 139–40; demise of, 147–48; domestic space and, 28– 29, 47–58; expansionism in Pacific and, 64–96; flexibility of, viii–ix; geographic morality of, 112–18; globalization and, 148–58; historical background of, 4–5, 12–14, 64; interdisciplinary research about, 10, 12; isolationism and, 23, 30–31, 152–58; labor unrest and, 139–40; League of Nations and, 30–31, 145– 46; José Martí and, 97–98; Mexico and, 98–111; nationalism and national literature and, 14, 46–58, 110–11, 154, 155–58, 162n.8, 169n.4; i n d e x 191

Monroe Doctrine (continued ) opposed in Latin America, 146– 47; origins of name, 15; Panama Canal and, 15–16, 127–44, 150; as political ideology, 120–44; racism and, 24–26, 29–30, 47–58; realist/idealist divide concerning, 17–18, 159n.4; revisionist critique of, 159n.3; Roosevelt Corollary to, vii, 6, 30, 144, 146–47, 152; skepticism concerning, 15–16; in twentieth and twenty-first centuries, 17, 147–49, 152–58, 169n.3; U.S. Congress (1853) and, 26, 64–66, 93–94, 164n.1; Venezuela and, 119–44; world impact of, 5, 6–7, 9, 15, 26, 93, 127–44, 157–58 Monroe Doctrine, The, 64 ‘‘Monroe Doctrine and Perry’s Expedition to Japan,’’ 82–83 Monroe Doctrine Committees, 101 Moore, Thomas, 39 Morsberger, Robert and Katherine M., 115 Mowatt, Anna Cora, 104, 109–10 Muthyala, John, 169n.4 Napoléon III, 100, 106, 108, 114, 147, 166n.3, 167n.8 Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, 65–66, 71, 73, 81–96 national identity: American abroad motif and search for, 106–7; in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 45– 58; domestic location of, 41–42; in Ruiz de Burton’s literature, 109–11 nationalism: family relations in context of, 41–42; feminization of discourse on, 36–37; in minstrel shows, 79–83; Monroe Doctrine and, 14, 110–11, 155–58 192 i n d e x

national literature: ‘‘foundational fiction’’ in Mexico and, 115; Monroe Doctrine and, 46–58, 154, 162n.8, 169n.4 Native Americans: John Quincy Adams on, 42–45; ‘‘assimilation/extinction’’ dilemma of, 162n.12; in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 45–61; institutionalized in literature, 46–58, 162n.9; José Martí’s discussion of, 110–11; James Monroe refers to, 23, 24; in Ruiz de Burton’s literature, 109, 168n.9; U.S. removal policies for, 157–58; in Lew Wallace’s The Fair God, 111–18. See also names of individual tribes ‘‘natural,’’ in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 55–58, 163n.16 Negri, Antonio, 157–58 Nelson, Daniel, 137 neocolonialism, in U.S. foreign policy, 152–54 New Criticism, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work and, 164n.3 New World Order theory, 157–58, 169n.6 New York Herald, 68 New York Review, 164n.2 New York Times, 16, 67–68 Nicaragua, U.S. intervention in, 147–48 ‘‘Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality,’’ 156 North American Review, 14–15, 32, 34, 45–47, 58, 124, 127, 168n.1 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), 147 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 1 O’Hara, John, 156

Ohmae, Kenichi, 169n.6 Olney, Richard, 119, 122–24, 126, 129, 139–40 Omoo, 19 Oregon territory, 27–28, 63–64 Orientalism, 71–75, 82 O’Sullivan, John, 80 ‘‘O! Susanna,’’ 79 ‘‘Our America,’’ 29, 98, 109–11, 116–18, 144 Pacific region, U.S. expansionism in, 29–31, 64–96 Paine, Thomas, 14 Palfrey, John Gorham, 45–46 Panama Canal, 15–16, 127–44, 150 Panama Railroad, 112 Pan-American integration, 150 parallelism, in U.S. foreign policy, 130–32 Paredes, Américo, 30, 147, 151–52 ‘‘Paris of South America, The,’’ 119 paternalism: Nathaniel Hawthorne rejects, 87–88; in Monroe Doctrine, 56–58; in Ruiz de Burton’s literature, 108–11 Pease, Donald, 18, 159n.2 Pérez-Fermat, Gustavo, 169n.4 Perkins, Dexter, 13, 17–18, 62, 146 Perry, Matthew (Commodore), 29, 64–68, 71–96 Peyser, Thomas, 156–57 Philippines, U.S. expansionism in, 120, 153–54 Pierce, Franklin, 63, 65–66, 93 Pike, Frederick B., 168n.3 Pita, Beatrice, 99–100, 103, 166n.2, 167n.4, 167n.8 ‘‘Pocohontas’’ myth in American culture, 163n.14 Political Science Quarterly, 124 Polk, James K., 17, 26–28, 46

Porter, Carolyn, 1 postcolonialism: American fiction and, 61; hemispheric ideology and, 2, 159n.2 Prescott, William, 111–14 presidential message to Congress of 1823 (Monroe), 4–6, 13–17, 26; anticolonialism and hemispheric ideology in, 45, 57; foreign vs. domestic policy in, 23–24; isolation from Europe discussed in, 36; Pacific expansionism and, 83 professional class, evolution of, 137–38 Puerto Rico, 20–22 Pullman strike, 140 Puritanism, in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 47–58, 163n.16 Quarterly Review, 39 Rabasa, José, 1 racism: in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 48–58; feminism and, 61; geographic morality and, 98–118; influence of science and social Darwinism on, 124–26, 168n.3; Latin American policy and, 124– 25; minstrel shows in context of, 80–83, 165n.11; Monroe Doctrine and, 24–26, 29–30, 47–58; in Ruiz de Burton’s literature, 109–11; U.S. imperialism in Pacific and, 29–31, 67–96, 164n.6; in Lew Wallace’s Fair God, 114–18 Radway, Janice, 159n.1, 169n.4 Reagan administration, 17, 148–49, 169n.3 ‘‘realist’’ foreign policy, 17–18, 160n.5 ‘‘Recent Pseudo-Monroeism, The,’’ 124 Republican Party: founding of, 70–71; imperialist ideology in, 120–21 Republic, Not an Empire, A, 149–50 index

193

revolutionary marriage metaphor: criticized, 92, 166n.19; in romance literature, 50–52, 85–86, 162n.10, 166n.15 Rio Pact, 150 Rise of the Western Hemisphere Idea, 1–2 ritual, in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 55–58 Rogers, William Allan, 20–22 Rogin, Michael, 79 romance literature: John Quincy Adams criticizes, 39–41; American Revolution in, 51–52, 162n.10; House of the Seven Gables as, 85–96; nationalism in, 42–61 Romances of the Republic, 162n.10 ‘‘Romancing the Empire,’’ 140 Romero, Lora, 162n.13 Romero, Matías, 100–101, 167n.4 Roosevelt, Theodore, vii, 6, 17; Corollary of, to Monroe Doctrine, vii, 6, 30, 144, 146–47, 152; on Richard Harding Davis’s writings, 143– 44; on Monroe Doctrine, 15, 130; ‘‘True Americanism’’ speech of, 142; ‘‘White Fleet’’ of, 24–26 Rossiter, William S., 82 Rowe, John Carlos, 19–20, 153, 156, 164n.6, 169n.4 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 29, 98–111, 114–18, 126, 166n.2, 167n.4 Said, Edward, 19, 71 Saldívar, José David, 2, 26, 98, 166n.2 Salisbury (Lord), 122–23, 126 Samuels, Shirley, 162n.10, 166n.15 Sánchez, Rosaura, 99–100, 103, 166n.2, 167n.4, 167n.8 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 60–61, 163n.18 Santo Domingo, U.S. intervention in, 147 194 i n d e x

Savage Wars of Peace, The, 152–54 Saxton, Alexander, 79 Scarlet Letter, The, 92–93 Scott, Walter (Sir), 39–40, 45 Scruggs, William, 15, 119, 168n.1 Sea Lions, The, 19 Sedgwick, Catherine, 36, 40, 42, 161n.5, 162n.10 September 11 attacks, Monroe Doctrine and, 152–58 Seward, William H., 65–71, 93, 100 Simms, William Gilmore, 46 slavery: John Quincy Adams opposes, 43; in American literature, 29, 116; Lydia Maria Child opposes, 59–61; expansionist policies in Pacific and, 69–75, 81–82, 164n.6; Nathaniel Hawthorne on, 93; in Lewis and Clark expedition, 165n.7; James Monroe refers to, 23, 24 Smith, Gaddis, 149 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 166n.16 socioeconomic conditions: in House of the Seven Gables, 90–92, 166n.17, 166n.19; in post-Revolutionary United States, 38, 162n.6; rise of professional class and, 137–38, 168n.8 Soldiers of Fortune, 30, 122, 130–44 Sommer, Doris, 26, 28, 39–40, 115 Soulé, Pierre, 65, 93 Spain, Mexico and, 166n.3 Spanish-American War, 30, 129, 157 Spivak, Gayatri, 52 Stockton, Frank, 106, 167n.7 Streeby, Shelley, 164n.5 Sumner, William Graham, 128 Supreme Court (U.S.), Cherokee Nation decision of, 24 Swann, Charles, 166n.19 Swedenborgianism, 163n.16 syncretism, in Ruiz de Burton’s writings, 109, 168n.9

Taylor, Bayard, 79–80 Taylor, Frederick, 137 Taylor, Stewart, 148 technology: class identity and, 137; expansionist policies and, 76– 77, 165n.10; in House of the Seven Gables, 90–91; impact of, on Monroe Doctrine, 128 Thomas, Brook, 153, 160n.7 Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America, 121–22, 132–35 Toll, Robert C., 79 ‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness,’’ 19 ‘‘Transatlantic bretheren’’ metaphor, 37–42 Transcendentalism, 163n.16 transnationalism, Monroe Doctrine and, 55–58 Twain, Mark, 19 Tyler, Royall, 104, 109 Typee, 19 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 96 Unitarianism, 163n.16 United Nations, 147 United States as a World Power, The, 125–26 urbanization, in American romance literature, 86–87, 166n.16 U.S. Navy, African Americans serving in, 75–76, 165n.8 Utopia and Cosmopolis, 156–57 Vallejo, M. G., 102 Venezuela: border conflict of 1895, 26, 30, 119–44; Richard Harding Davis’s articles on, 119, 121 Vietnam War, 157

Wald, Priscilla, 50–51, 160n.7, 162n.7 Wallace, Lew, 14, 29–30, 98, 101, 107, 111–18, 128 Wallerstein, Emmanuel, 162n.6 Walsh, Robert, 34–39, 161n.4 War of 1812, 34 Washington, George, Farewell Address of, 14–15, 120 ‘‘Washington Pan-American Congress, The,’’ 97 Weinberger, Caspar, 148–49 Wellman, William, 128 Wertheimer, Eric, 14, 110–11, 162n.9 Wharton, Edith, 106, 167n.7 ‘‘What the Voice Said,’’ 116 Whig party, expansionist ideology and, 67–70 Whitaker, Arthur P., 1–2, 147 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 116 ‘‘Who Are Our National Poets?,’’ 80 Who Would Have Thought It?, 29, 98–111, 115–18, 166n.2, 167n.6 Wiley, Peter Booth, 65–66, 76 Williams, Raymond, 17–18 Williams, William Appleman, 153, 159n.3 Wilson, Woodrow, 145–46, 157–58 witchcraft, in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, 55–58 world-system theory: critics of, 161n.10; post-Revolutionary United States and, 162n.6 ‘‘Yamoyden,’’ 45–46 Young America movement, 80–81, 93 Zouave regiment, in Civil War, 101, 107

index

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gretchen murphy is assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Morris.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric imaginings : the Monroe Doctrine and narratives of U.S. empire / Gretchen Murphy. p. cm.— (New Americanists) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3484-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-8223-3496-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Foreign relations— Historiography. 2. Nationalism—United States—Historiography. 3. Racism— Political aspects—Historiography. 4. Imperialism—Historiography. 5. International relations in literature. 6. Nationalism in literature. 7. Imperialism in literature. 8. Monroe doctrine. 9. Western Hemisphere—Relations— United States. 10. United States— Relations—Western Hemisphere. I. Title. II. Series. e183.7m87 2005 327.7308—dc22 2004020722