The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture 0674009134, 9780674009134

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1 Manifest Domesticity
2 The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain
3 Romancing the Empire
4 Black and Blue on San Juan Hill
5 Birth of an Empire
6 The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

Convergences: Inventories o f the Present Edward W. Said, General Editor

AMY KAPLAN

The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

HARVARD UNI VER SIT Y PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2002

Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows o f Harvard C ollege A ll rights reserved Printed in the U nited States o f Am erica

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubücation Data Kaplan, Amy. T h e anarchy o f em pire in the making o f U.S. culture / Am y Kaplan, p. cm. — (Convergences) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-00913-4 (alk. paper) 1. U nited States— Foreign relations— 1865-1921. 2. U nited States— Foreign relations— 1783-1865. 3.

U nited States— Territorial expansion.

4.

N ational characteristics, Am erican.

5. Popular culture— U nited States— H istory— 19th century. 6. Popular culture— U nited States— H istory— 20th century. 7.

Im perialism — Social aspects— U nited States— History. 8. 9.

Im perialism in literature.

Im perialism in m otion pictures. I. T itle.

II. Convergences (Cam bridge, Mass.) E661.7 .K37 2002 327.73'009'034— dc21 2002027254

For Rose

Contents

Introduction

1

1

Manifest Domesticity

23

2

T h e Im perial Routes o f Mark Twain

51

3

Romancing the Empire

92

4

Black and Blue on San Juan H ill

121

5

Birth o f an Empire

146

6

The Im perial Cartography o f W. E. B. Du Bois

171

Notes

215

Acknowledgments

247

Index

249

The Anarchy o f Em pire in the M aking o f U .S. C ulture

Introduction

T h e neatly ordered kitchen in Catharine Beecher’s household manual seem ed rem ote from the battlefields o f M exico in 1846— as far afield as Mark Twain’s Mississippi was from the p ort o f H onolulu in 1866; as far as the vaudeville houses showing the new m oving pictures were from the shores o f Cuba and the Philippines in 1898; and as far as the East S t Louis race riots were from the colonization o f A frica in 1917. The Anarchy o f Empire in the M aking o f U.S. Culture contends that these dom estic and foreign spaces are closer than we think, and that the dy­ namics o f im perial expansion cast them into ja rrin g proximity. I in­ tend my tide, taken from a poem by W. E. B. Du Bois, to challenge the traditional understanding o f im perialism as a onew ay im position o f power in distant colonies, and to call attention instead to am biguities and contradictions o f im perial relations in the form ation o f a national culture. In this book I explore how international struggles fo r dom ina­ tion abroad profoundly shape representations o f Am erican national identity at hom e, and how, in turn, cultural phenom ena we think o f as dom estic o r particularly national are forged in a crucible o f foreign re­ lations. T h e idea o f the nation as hom e, I argue, is inextricable from the political, econom ic, and cultural movements o f em pire, m ove­ ments that both erect and unsettle the ever-shifting boundaries be­ tween the dom estic and the foreign , between “at hom e” and "abroad.”

T h e entanglem ent o f the dom estic and the foreign was articulated in particularly revealing ways in a Supreme Court case o f 1901, Downes v. 1

2 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE BidwelL This case contributed to the constitutional underpinning o f U.S. im perialism at a pivotal juncture in its history, when the U nited States shifted from continental expansion to overseas em pire, from absorbing new territories into the dom estic space o f the nation to ac­ quiring foreign colonies and protectorates abroad. I argue that the language o f this case demonstrates the slipperiness o f these distinc­ tion s and expresses anxiety and ambivalence about the nature o f the Am erican Em pire at the turn o f the twentieth century. T h e court’s de­ cision played a key role in determ ining the political status o f Puerto Rico, which, along with the Philippines and Guam, Spain ceded to the U nited States at the end o f the Spanish-American War o f 1898, the same war in which Cuba achieved nom inal independence under U.S. occupation and subsequent dom ination.1W hile the U nited States waged a subsequent brutal war against the Philippine struggle fo r in­ dependence, Congress in 1900 installed a tem porary civilian admin­ istration with lim ited powers to govern Puerto Rico, including the power to levy duties and taxes. In response to one o f these laws, the business firm o f Downes & Co. sued the collector o f the P ort o f N ew York to recover the duties exacted on a shipm ent o f oranges Downes had im ported from the p ort o f San Juan. Downes claim ed that the tax was illegal because, as a territory, Puerto Rico was covered by the Con­ stitution and therefore subject to its revenue clause mandating uni­ form taxation throughout the U nited States. Ruling against the plain­ tiff, the Court determ ined that Puerto R ico was a possession o f the U nited States and therefore not im m ediately included within the juris­ diction o f the Constitution without a specific act o f Congress. Resolved by a narrow m argin, the decision produced five d ifferen t opinions, none o f which was signed by a majority, but which together reveal the contested and com plex issues that the case raised. In his influential assenting opinion, signed by three other members, Justice Edward Douglas W hite concluded: “whilst in an international sense Porto [sic] R ico was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty o f and was owned by the U nited States, it was foreign to the U nited States in a dom estic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the U nited States, but was m erely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”2 In the im m ediate case at hand, the Court ruled that Puerto R ico lay outside the province o f the revenue clauses o f the Constitution and was therefore taxable as “foreign ,” in contrast

Introduction • 3 to the '‘dom estic” status o f the states and territories within the Consti­ tution’s dom ain. Although Puerto R ico could be taxed as an exporter o f foreign goods, it had no claim to the sovereignty o f an indepen­ dent nation, a status that would make it foreign in the "international sense.” T h e broader im plications meant— paradoxically— that fo r in­ ternational purposes the Court included Puerto R ico within the do­ mestic sphere o f the Am erican nation. Yet in terms o f the rights and privileges con ferred by the Constitution, the court excluded Puerto R ico from that same sphere and thus deem ed it foreign in a "dom estic sense.” T o be dom estic in the dom estic sense would have m ade it a part o f the nation, on parity with the states, and to be foreign in the foreign sense would have m ade Puerto Rico an autonomous nation. T h e court went to great rhetorical length to avoid both alternatives. This Supreme Court decision had far-reaching consequences be­ yond the fine-tuning o f ta riff laws. A lon g with other related decisions that came to be known as the Insular Cases, it legislated the juridical and political terrain o f Puerto R ico as a dependency o f the U nited States. These cases constructed the foundation o f an im perial regim e and a social reality that still underlie the current status o f Puerto Rico as a Com m onwealth today.3 This status hinged on W hite's discursive creation o f a new legal category o f the "unincorporated territory,” a classification that m eant that Puerto R ico could not becom e a part o f the nation without a separate act o f Congress to incorporate i t This new doctrine positioned Puerto R ico in a lim inal space both inside and outside the boundaries o f the Constitution, both "belonging to” but "n ot a part” o f the U nited States. T h e Insular Cases thereby rele­ gated the peop le o f Puerto R ico to a state o f lim bo in space and time, where they were neither citizens at hom e nor aliens from another nation.4 M y interest in this case lies in the cultural connotations o f "foreign to the U nited States in a dom estic sense,” an ambiguous phrase that ar­ ticulates an unstable paradox at the heart o f U.S. im perial culture. W hat does it mean to be "foreign ” in the "dom estic sense”? "Dom estic” and "foreign ” are, o f course, not neutral legal and spatial descriptions, but heavily weighted m etaphors im bued with racialized and gendered associations o f hom e and family, outsiders and insiders, subjects and citizens. W hen the Supreme Court em ployed m etaphors o f the nation as a household and a corporeal human form , it was drawing on and

4 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE contributing to a vast reservoir o f contradictory meanings that ac­ crued over tim e and space, and it deployed them to create new discur­ sive and social realities. My reading o f this case introduces a mayor them e o f this book, that dom estic metaphors o f national identity are intim ately intertwined with renderings o f the foreign and the alien, and that the notions o f the dom estic and the foreign mutually consti­ tute one another in an im perial context. Locating Puerto Rico legally and spatially was not only the work o f judges and cartographers, but also the work o f culture in im buing geography with m eaning, in defin­ ing such common-sense notions as near and far, inside and outside, here and there. T h e Supreme Court justices in 1901 were participating in im perial culture’s broader project o f m apping the boundaries be­ tween the dom estic and the foreign. I show this project at work in d if­ feren t cultural form s and historical periods, from dom estic manuals and novels o f the 1840s to Citizen Kane in 1941. Reverberating throughout the Court’s deliberations were urgent questions not only about the ambiguous status o f Puerto Rico, but also— i f not m ore so— about the ambiguous status o f the U nited States as a nation, a republic, and an em pire. W hile drawing the juridical boundaries o f Puerto Rico, the justices seem ed prim arily concerned with securing the conceptual and political borders o f the U nited States and the integrity o f its national identity. I f Puerto R ico was deem ed foreign in the dom estic sense, then where did that place the Am eri­ can nation? A t stake fo r the justices was the fundam ental m eaning o f “U nited States.” Justice W hite raised the recurrent question o f what “the words ‘U nited States’ signified at the tim e o f the adoption o f the Constitution.”5 Does this name include all territories as w ell as states? Does the Constitution automatically extend to all people and territo­ ries conquered o r acquired by the U nited States? T o answer these questions, the justices engaged in an enorm ous am ount o f interpretive and discursive work. They revisited the constitutional history o f ex­ pansion from the Northwest O rdinance (1787) to the annexation o f Florida (1819), from the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the Treaty o f Guadalupe H idalgo (1848), from debates over the expansion o f slav­ ery in the territories leading to the C ivil War, to the current status o f N ew M exico and Arizona. T o map the ambiguous space o f Puerto Rico in 1898, their discussions also ranged across the glob e to other con­ tem porary locations o f the U.S. em pire from Cuba to the Philippines, Guam and Samoa, Alaska and Hawaii.

Introduction • 5 Justices on both sides referred to C h ief Justice Marshall’s character­ ization o f the U nited States in an 1820 case, Loughborough u Blake. In this case about taxation in the District o f Colum bia, the C h ief Justice asked, “Does this term designate the whole, o r any particular portion o f the Am erican Empire? Certainly this question can adm it but o f one answer. It is the name given to our great republic, which is com posed o f States and territories.”6 For Marshall the “U nited States” were coex­ tensive with the Am erican Em pire and both were constituted as a re­ public. Sixty years later, however, in Downes, Justice H enry Billings Brown found that this statement had “occasioned some embarrass­ m ent in other cases,” and that it did not apply to the current con­ text o f new territorial acquisitions.7 Instead, Brown contended that “in dealing with foreign sovereignties, the term ‘U nited States’ has a broader m eaning than when used in the Constitution."8 For him, “U nited States” had a double reference in which the terrain o f the Am erican Em pire exceeded that o f the Am erican republic. In other words, in the international context, the m eaning o f the “U nited States” as a nation becam e broader and m ore inclusive, while within the dom estic dom ain o f the Constitution, the m eaning narrowed in its reference and becam e m ore exclusive. Thus the protean defin ition o f the U nited States shifted in d ifferen t national and international con­ texts, when viewed from within and from w ith ou t It is not hard to see that these questions o f legal precedent were also ridden with anxiety about the grounding o f Am erican national iden­ tity. T o the consternation o f dissenting C h ief Justice M elville Weston Fuller, “the occult m eaning” o f the “unincorporated territory” gave Congress the unrestricted power to keep any newly acquired territory “like a disem bodied shade, in an interm ediate state o f ambiguous existence fo r an indefinite period.”9Justice John Marshall Harlan ex­ pressed concern fo r the deathly consequences o f the “unincorporated territory” that would leave Puerto Ricans floatin g in a spatial and tem­ poral lim bo. T h e other justices also repeatedly conjured an im age o f Puerto R ico as a “disem bodied shade” that lurked around the edges o f the em bodied nation. T h e concept o f “unincorporated territory” was supposed to lay this ghost to rest in a zone outside o f statehood and thereby bury the contradictions between the Am erican Em pire and Am erican republic, contradictions that the annexation o f Puerto Rico kept bringing to life. As “occult,” the “unincorporated territory” cast a dark shadow across the geographic and constitutional bonds o f the in­

6 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE corporated nation. As “foreign ” in “the dom estic sense,” “belonging to but not a part o f,” the ambiguous space o f Puerto R ico both con­ founded and shored up the international boundaries o f the U nited States. It unsettled the “dom estic sense” o f the Am erican nation as hom e and threatened to turn it into a haunted house. T h e great irony o f this case is that from the perspective o f Puerto Rico, the U nited States was the foreign object casting its shadow across every aspect o f political, econom ic, and social life o f the island; it was the foreign body that Puerto R ico had to incorporate.10 Yet the lan­ guage o f the court inverted this relationship and rendered the an­ nexation o f Puerto R ico as a violation o f the integrity o f the U nited States. M enace infuses the legal discourse o f Doumes v. Bidwell. Justice Brown warned that “a false step at this tim e may be fatal to the devel­ opm ent o f what C h ief Justice Marshall called the Am erican Em pire,” and Justice W hite repeatedly used the phrase “fraught with danger.”11 T h e C ourt’s conclusion presented three distinct positions that did not draw clear lines fo r o r against im perialism , but all three shared the sense that the annexation o f Puerto R ico could threaten the coher­ ence o f Am erica as a nation. W hat dangers m ight the justices have perceived in a case about the im port o f oranges, a product most likely to be “incorporated” only in the dining room s o f the m iddle classes? O f course the case was not pri­ m arily about keeping Puerto R ico at bay, but about bringing it closer by m aking it accessible to the circulation o f Am erican capital and trade. Obviously, it was n ot oranges that constituted the problem , but the people o f Puerto Rico. Many o f the threats articulated by the C ourt clustered around the perceived identity o f the Puerto Ricans as an “alien and hostile peop le,” in W hite’s terms.12Even though “the an­ nexation o f distant possessions [m ay b e] desirable,” w rote Brown, the problem was that these possessions were “inhabited by alien races, d if­ ferin g from us in religion , customs, laws, m ethods o f taxation, and m odes o f th ou gh t”19 T h e pursuit o f im perial desire risked absorbing aliens into the dom estic sphere, and the resulting racial and cultural interm ixing threatened ultim ately to make the U nited States inter­ nally foreign to itself. T o ward o ff this threat, Justice Brown advocated annexing Puerto R ico as a colony with qualitatively d ifferen t legal sta­ tus from the U nited States. For the dissenting justices, however, this solution o f annexation

Introduction • 7 without incorporation posed an even greater danger: it would make the U nited States foreign to itself by turning the Am erican republic into a European form o f absolutism. “A ction taken outside o f the con­ stitution,” wrote Justice Harlan, may “engraft upon our republican in­ stitutions a colonial system such as exists under m onarchical govern­ ments.”14 T h e dissenting justices thereby argued that fo r Am erica to rem ain a republic, the Constitution must im m ediately follow the flag.15 Both sides im plicitly revived in an international scope the Enlighten­ m ent poles o f anarchy and tyranny as twinned threats to democracy. T h e incorporation o f alien races would introduce a kind o f anarchy into the unity o f the nation, according to the majority, while unin­ corporated annexation would turn the republic into a tyrannical em­ pire, according to the minority. Each im agined scenario would turn the U nited States into a monstrous hybrid creature, either a m ixture o f alien races o r a foreign form o f governm ent “engrafted” on the re­ public. Justice W hite offered the category o f “unincorporated territory” as a com prom ise o f sorts, but rather than resolve contradictions, this solu­ tion proliferated them. T h e “unincorporated territory” turned the space o f Puerto R ico into a bu ffer zone, a blurred borderland between the dom estic and the foreign on to which W hite could project these threats o f hybridity which the others envisioned within the nation. H e claim ed that without this buffer, the alternative o f im m ediate incorpo­ ration would do irrevocable dam age to the same republican institu­ tions that the dissenting justices wished to uphold. By deem ing Puerto R ico as “foreign to the U nited States in a dom estic sense”— neither a European-style colony nor a fully fled ged territory on the way to state­ hood— W hite rhetorically protected the Am erican republic from be­ com ing foreign to itself. T o make his case fo r the doctrine o f incorporation, W h ite’s m ajor rhetorical strategy was hyperbole; he dram atized catastrophic scenar­ ios that could hypothetically annihilate the integrity o f the U nited States i f the opposing argum ent held sway. H e rendered the “evils o f im m ediate incorporation” as a hydraheaded peril to the state, the body politic, citizenship, and the family. “M illions o f inhabitants o f alien territory,” warned W hite, “if acquired by treaty, can, without the desire o r consent o f the people o f the U nited States speaking through Congress, be im m ediately and irrevocably incorporated in the U nited

8 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE States, and the whole structure o f the governm ent be overthrown.”16 Reversing the trajectory o f im perial power outward, he depicted the acquisition o f Puerto R ico as a phantasmic invasion o f the U nited States. W ho are those m illions he feared, a num ber far exceeding the population o f Puerto Rico? His exam ples included both Cuba and the Philippines, though one was nom inally sovereign and the other was figh tin g the U nited States fo r its independence. A t the same tim e, his rhetoric echoed nativist fears o f immigrants at the turn o f the century, which im agined foreigners as the bearers o f revolution and anarchy with the power to overthrow "the whole structure o f governm ent.” In­ deed, contem poraneous debates about both im perialism and im mi­ gration revolved around the perceived incapacity o f nonwhites fo r selfgovern m en t W hite rendered this innate lack as excessive power, as the desire to rule others and to destroy the governm ent o f the U nited States. T h e expansion o f the Constitution would lead to the dem ise o f the very nation-state it brought into being and paralyze all branches o f governm ent, fo r “although the House o f Representatives m ight be un­ w illing to agree to the incorporation o f alien races, it would be im po­ tent to prevent its accom plishm ent”17 Ultimately, argued W hite, Con­ gress would be stripped o f its capacity to guard the people o f the U nited States from these “evil consequences,” an im potence that ex­ tends hyperbolically in tim e as w ell as space “beyond all future control o f or rem edy o f the Am erican p eop le.”18 . W hite im agined the “evil o f im m ediate incorporation” not only as underm ining the structure o f the national governm ent, but also, in even m ore intim ate terms, as dam aging the body politic, as the word “incorporation” connotes. H e rendered the U nited States as a body (presumably m ale) made vulnerable and im potent by the assertion o f its im perial power on others. Ironically, this same force was heralded at the tim e as the em bodim ent o f masculine prowess (as I discuss in Chapter S). W hite claim ed, on the contrary, that “fo r the purpose o f incorporating foreign territory into the U nited States dom estic terri­ tory must be disincorporated. In other words, that the U nion must be, at least in theory, dism em bered fo r the purpose o f m aintaining the doctrine o f im m ediate incorporation o f alien territory.”19 T h e U nited States here appears as a distended body that could be hacked apart, that could im plode internally from its ingestion o f foreign bodies. T h e appeal to the dism em bered body o f the U nion would have evoked im­

Introduction • 9 ages from the Civil War, as though the absorption o f alien territory threatened to maim again the recendy healed body sutured together in the afterm ath o f that c o n flic t As we shall see in Chapter 4, the 1898v war with Spain was popularly viewed as an external anddote to this in­ ternal divisiveness. Yet in W hite’s evocation, the fruits o f this war in the annexation o f foreign territory could dism em ber the U nion again. Thus in turning to historical precedents, the justices not only adapted new form s o f im perial conquest to a narrative teleology o f national ex­ pansion and unification, but they also evoked past threats that could unravel this narrative. T h e basis o f Am erican citizenship itself would be underm ined, claim ed W hite, if Puerto R ico were incorporated as dom estic territory. T o include Puerto Ricans as citizens would im ply “that all citizenship o f the U nited States is precarious and fleetin g, subject to be sold at any m om ent like any other property. That is to say, to protect a newly ac­ quired people in their presumed rights, it is essential to degrade the w hole body o f Am erican citizenship.”20W hile disinterring the dismem­ bered body o f the Civil War, W hite also resurrected the m em ory o f slavery. Yet rather than see the “possession” o f Puerto R ico and its “newly acquired p eop le” as rem iniscent o f chattel slavery, he im plied that i f the Constitution automatically granted citizenship-to Puerto Ri­ cans, then Am erican citizenship m ight be dismantled and the people o f the U nited States enslaved. I f the expansion o f the Constitution could turn aliens into citizens, then this expansion in turn threatened to alienate the inalienable right o f the Am erican citizen. Furtherm ore, the language o f physical degradation suggests a m oral and racial taint­ ing, thereby rendering the body o f the Am erican citizen incapable o f citizenship. Significantly, this case was decided only five years after Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation and endorsed Jim Crow laws that revoked African Am erican rights achieved under Reconstruc­ tion. A t the same m om ent that form er slaves and their descendants were stripped o f full citizenship at hom e, the inclusion o f nonwhite cit­ izens from abroad was rendered as the enslavement and darkening o f white Am ericans, thereby placing them outside the dom ain o f the proper citizen. Thus according to W h ite’s logic, the notion o f “for­ eign ” in “a dom estic sense” maintains Puerto Rico as a “possession” and its people as quasi-slaves “acquired” to differentiate U.S. citizen­ ship from the degradation o f slavery.

10 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE In conjuring these images o f slavery and im m igration, the justices were engaging in a fundam ental and o ft repeated U.S. practice o f viewing foreign people through the lenses o f racial categories at hom e. This is another way in which Puerto Ricans becam e “foreign to the U nited States in a dom estic sense”; they were rendered racially other through fam iliar and recognizable stereotypes o f nonwhite non­ citizens at hom e, who were seen as foreign within the dom estic space o f the nation. T h e justices insisted that, legally, the treatm ent o f Indi­ ans in conquered territories did not provide a precedent fo r the status o f Puerto Ricans, who were prior subjects o f Spain. Yet the language o f Downes u. Bidwell resonates with the landmark decision o f Cherokee N a­ tion v. the State o f Georgia in 1831, which rendered Indians as members o f “dom estic dependent nations,” foreign to the rights guaranteed by states and territories, but dom estic fo r federal purposes. As “alien races,” Puerto Ricans were rendered “foreign ” in the “dom estic sense” by their perceived resem blance to alien races deem ed to be incapable o f self-governm ent at hom e. T h e threat o f m illions o f aliens incorpo­ rated by the U.S. em pire was thus both am plified and m uted through the dom estic analogies o f Indian-white relations, slavery, and im migration. This interplay am ong racial discourses across international bor­ ders did not work like an iron grid that was simply m oved from the U nited States to the outposts o f em pire. Rather, as I w ill argue, the racialized analogies that em pire deployed at hom e and abroad created dissonance as well as resonance, as they mutually defined and destar bilized one another.21 I f Justice W hite represented the “evils o f im m ediate incorporation” as a racial menace to the body politic, he also perceived such incorpo­ ration as dangerous to the U nited States in its aspects o f fam ily and hom e. H e w orried that incorporation would make “Am erica hapless in the fam ily o f nations”22 and linked this crippled capacity to act in the w orld to the internal lineaments o f the fam ily weakened by the pres­ sure o f newcomers. Leading up to his final opinion, he used fam ilial language to restore the “dom estic sense” o f the nation. “Incorporation does not arise,” he averred, “until in the wisdom o f the Congress it is deem ed that the acquired territory has reached the state where it is proper that it should enter into and form part o f the Am erican fam­ ily.”29 H e did not com pletely wall o ff the Am erican fam ily in an insu­ lar state, but left its boundaries somewhat perm eable. T h e category o f

Introduction • 11 the "unincorporated territory” held out the possibility o f absorbing new m em bers into the fam ily while d eferrin g this possibility to the in­ d efin ite future. W hite thereby left the im age o f the Am erican fam ily floatin g somewhat tenuously between the dom estic and the foreign , a key im age I explore in Chapter 1. Yet he m aintained these boundaries as both firm and flexib le by reasserting a hierarchy in the authority o f Congress, which, like a father, has the "wisdom ” to guard the gates o f the fam ily hom e and to determ ine who can enter. T h e ambiguous cat­ egory o f the "unincorporated territory” kept Puerto R ico safely out­ side the Am erican family, yet close enough to control in a dependent position, like a ward o r pupil. President M cKinley m ade a similar pa­ ternalist argum ent when he referred to the colonization o f the Philip­ pines as "benevolent assimilation.”24 Justice W hite acknowledged that his opponents m ight find "all the confusions and dangers above indicated . . . m ore im aginary than real.”25 W hile he raised this objection to dismiss it, I claim that the work o f im agining these "confusions and dangers” is central not only to constructing the legal jurisdiction o f Puerto Rico, but also to legiti­ m ating the project o f Am erican im perialism. Inverting the role o f col­ on izer and colonized, the Court im agined a nightm are scenario that turned the acquisition o f Puerto R ico and other territories into the foreign colonization o f the U nited States, an act that could undo its sovereign governm ent, dism em ber its body, enslave its citizens, and dissolve its fam ilial bonds. This im age turns U.S. aggression abroad into a defensive protection o f the hom e in view o f the peril o f Am erica becom ing foreign and unrecognizable to itself. I f Puerto R ico were deem ed dom estic in "a dom estic sense,” that is, a part o f the nation, it would have even greater power to harm the U nited States than i f it were foreign in a foreign sense, that is, an independent sovereign na­ tion. T h e ambiguous space o f Puerto R ico as "unincorporated,” as "foreign to the U nited States in a dom estic sense,” both em bodies and allays these fears. It maps a desirable space where the border o f the U nited States can expand and contract; where Am ericans can go out into the w orld without bearing the foreign into the hom e. Yet the dis­ course o f the C ourt also heightens the very confusion it is meant to al­ lay. Its attem pt to disentangle the m eaning o f the dom estic and for­ eign, to draw clear boundaries between them, only further entangles them by creating a hybrid lim inal space that is neither fully outside the

12 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE U nited States nor com fortably a part o f i t T h e foreign both remains lodged within the “dom estic sense” o f the Am erican nation and casts a dark shadow across its unstable borders. T h e production o f these elaborate fears and anxieties and the need to control and manage their disruptive potential is a key cultural pro­ cess that interests me in this book. T h e language o f Downes dem on­ strates that underlying the dream o f im perial expansion is the night­ mare o f its own success, a nightm are in which m ovem ent outward into the w orld threatens to incorporate the foreign and dismantle the do­ mestic sphere o f the nation. T h e justices represented a double vision o f U.S. im perialism as both expansive and contracting, on the one hand, constitutionally capable o f boundless expansion, and on the other, narrowly protective o f its own borders. As this Supreme Court case makes evident, im perialism does not emanate from the solid cen­ ter o f a fully form ed nation; rather, the m eaning o f the nation itself is both questioned and redefined through the outward reach o f em pire.

This confounding o f the borders between the foreign and the dom es­ tic lies at the heart o f what I mean by my title, The Anarchy o f Empire in the M aking o f U.S. Culture. “The Anarchy o f Em pire” com es from a poem by W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Hymn to the Peop le,” on the last page o f his book entitled Darkwater: Voicesfrom W ithin the Veil, the subject o f my final chapter.26O n the occasion o f the Universal Congress o f the Races in 1911, Du Bois com posed the poem as a recasting and com m entary on K iplin g’s “Recessional” (1897), a hymn seeking m oral sanction fo r the British Empire. For Du Bois ‘T h e Anarchy o f Em pire, the dolefu l Death o f L ife !” refers to the violen t destruction and havoc wreaked on the peoples and lands subject to colonial conquest and dom ination. In his poem , “T h e Anarchy o f Em pire” breaks down national boundaries to connect peoples subject to racial exploitation all over the globe, “Foreshadowing the union o f the W orld.” In rew riting K ipling, Du Bois contested a com m on im perial trope that posits anarchy abroad as the prim e cause o f im perial intervention. “Anarchy” has often been used by im perial powers as a euphemism fo r revolution or independence struggles in order to justify their sup­ pression by m ilitary intervention and colonial subjugation. In “Recesr sional,” anarchy is em bodied in the “lesser breeds without the law,”

Introduction • 13 like the Puerto Ricans in Downes, whose perceived chaotic qualities generate the need fo r the iron law o f em pire. W hile Du Bois saw em­ pire itself as the prim e cause o f anarchy throughout its dom inion, K ipling and other imperialists believed that the anarchic qualities o f nonwhite peoples called forth the need fo r im perial rule. Indeed, K ipling dedicated T h e W hite M an’s Burden” to Th eod ore Roosevelt, to urge the U nited States to annex the Philippines. In advocating that the U nited States annex the territories acquired from Spain in 1898, T h eod ore Roosevelt warned that “i f we had driven out m edieval tyr­ anny only to make room fo r savage anarchy, we had better not have be­ gun the task at all.”27 Roosevelt’s discourse, like that o f the justices in Downes, produced the threat o f “savage anarchy” to justify U.S. dom i­ nance, a role he also differentiated from the tyranny o f O ld W orld em ­ pires. T h e exceptional quality o f the Am erican Empire, in this way o f thinking, transcends the ancient polarity between anarchy and tyr­ anny. Both Roosevelt and Du Bois posit a direct cause-and-effect relation between anarchy and em pire, albeit opposing ones. I am interested in “the anarchy o f em pire” as an oxym oron o f sorts, a contradiction in terms. T h e O xford English Dictionary defines “em pire” as a “supreme and extensive political dom inion,” and “anarchy” as a “state o f lawless­ ness due to the absence o r inefficiency o f the supreme power; politi­ cal disorder.” I f em pire is identified with “an extensive territory,” the m eaning o f anarchy is rarely rooted in geographic locations; instead, it conveys a sense o f spatial dispersion and dislocation. Anarchy is also defin ed as a state o f “absolute liberty,” as the “non-recognition o f m oral law” and as “unsettledness o r con flict o f op in ion .” T h e oxym o­ ron “the anarchy o f em pire” thus suggests the breakdown o r defiance o f the m onolithic system o f order that em pire aspires to im pose on the world, an order reliant on clear divisions between m etropolis and col­ ony, colon izer and colonized, national and international spaces, the dom estic and the foreign . I am interested in the way anarchy becomes an integral and constitutive part o f em pire, central to the representa­ tion o f U.S. im perialism in dispersed locations and at d ifferen t histori­ cal moments. Anarchy is conjured by im perial culture as a haunting specter that must be subdued and controlled, and at the same time, it is a figure o f em pire’s undoing. T h e “anarchy o f em pire” thus suggests ways o f thinking about im pe­

14 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE rialism as a network o f power relations that changes over space and tim e and is riddled with instability, ambiguity, and disorder, rather than as a m onolithic system o f dom ination that the very w ord “em­ p ire” im plies. I f “the anarchy o f em pire” refers to the destruction and exploitation in flicted on the colonized world, it also suggests the inter­ nal contradictions, ambiguities, and frayed edges that unravel at im­ perial borders, where binary divisions collapse and fractured spaces open. In this understanding o f im perialism , I am indebted to the in­ sights o f anthropologists and historians o f em pire as w ell as to post­ colonial theorists who have radically challenged the traditional notion o f im perialism as a unilinear assertion o f power in rem ote colonies. In highlighting what Frederick C ooper and Ann Stoler have called the “tensions o f em pire,” scholars have rem apped im perial spaces as con­ tact zones and sites o f encounter. They have shown how im perial rela­ tions entail not only violent force but also conflict, negotiation, dis­ cipline, and fantasy, which together reshape the colonized w orld and the im perial m etropolis.28 These engagem ents, they insist, occur within political and social structures o f power and dom ination that both form and are transform ed by these colonial encounters. In the arena o f representation, critics have shown how stereotypes do not simply im pose hierarchies between the civilized and the savage, the colonizer and colonized, but how stereotypes themselves becom e un­ stable sites o f am bivalence that distort and challenge the bedrock divi­ sions on which they are founded.29 My work has also built on theories o f em pire and culture elaborated by Edward Said and m ore recently by M ichael H ardt and A n ton io N egri. I depart from their approaches, however, where they im plicitly contribute to a paradigm o f Am erican exceptionalism by rendering im perialism a distinctly European phenom enon. Said’s Culture and Im ­ perialism powerfully demonstrates how the treasures o f European high culture bear the traces o f their foundation in the rem ote geographies o f colonial violence and exploitation.30 His title comments directly on Matthew A rn old ’s Culture and Anarchy, to contest the English w riter’s notion o f culture as an autonomous sphere that transcends and ame­ liorates the anarchy o f class co n flic t O n the contrary, argues Said, this concept o f culture becam e a lethal weapon in abetting the power o f the nation-state both at hom e and in the colonies, where A rn o ld ’s cul­ tural canon took shape through the educational institutions o f the

Introduction • IS British Empire. In Said’s revision o f A rnold, the anarchy inflicted on colonial subjects bestows coherence and aesthetic value upon the or­ d er o f European culture, thus masking its im perial origins. Said’s ap­ proach emphasizes the distance, both geographic and conceptual, be­ tween Europe and its colonies, a m odel that cannot take into account the history o f U.S. im perialism , where colonialism and anticolonial­ ism, nation-building and em pire-building jo in e d together in geo­ graphic dom inion over Native Am ericans, and where slavery and im­ m igration brought people subject to im perialism to settle inside national borders. Furtherm ore, overseas expansion, as I have shown, relied on the creation o f ambiguous spaces that were not quite foreign nor dom estic, and it also created vast deterritorialized arenas in which to exercise military, econom ic, and cultural power divorced from polit­ ical annexation. W hile my m ethod borrows much from Said’s reading o f im perial culture, I emphasize the collapse o f boundaries between here and there, between inside and outside, and the incoherence as much as the coherence that the anarchy o f em pire brings to the mak­ ing o f U.S. culture. M y idea o f the anarchy o f em pire has m ore in com m on with H ardt and N eg ri’s description o f Em pire than with their description o f im pe­ rialism, even though they use “Em pire” fo r our contem porary world ord er o f globalization, where “in contrast to im perialism Em pire es­ tablishes n o territorial center o f power and does not rely on fixed boundaries o r barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing appa­ ratus o f rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”31 According to the authors, this new system has its basis in the U.S. Constitution, a foundation radically d ifferen t from that o f European im perialism. They therefore regard T h eod ore Roosevelt as pursuing an old-style European im perialism, and W oodrow W ilson with his League o f Nations as foreshadowing the em ergence o f today’s postm odern regim e, in which the sover­ eignty o f the nation dissolves in the borderless w orld o f Empire. I would argue that these two tendencies are not as distinct as H ardt and N egri contend, but that both are at work in varied configurations throughout the history o f U.S. im perialism. T h e Am erican Em pire has lon g follow ed a double impetus to construct boundaries and patrol all m ovem ent across them and to break down those borders through the desire fo r unfettered expansion. T o separate Em pire from im perialism

16 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE is to foreclose the history o f Am erican im perialism and breathe new life into the b e lief in Am erican exceptionalism .32 A key paradox inform s the ideology o f Am erican exceptionalism : it defines Am erica’s radical difference from other nations as som ething that goes beyond the separateness and uniqueness o f its own particu­ lar heritage and culture. Rather, its exceptional nature lies in its exem ­ plary status as the apotheosis o f the nation-form itself and as a m odel fo r the rest o f the world.3* Am erican exceptionalism is in part an argu­ m ent fo r boundless expansion, where national particularism and in­ ternational universalism converge. T h e cultural expressions I analyze reveal an anxiety about the anarchic potential o f im perial distension underlying this exceptionalist ideal. I f the fantasy o f Am erican im peri­ alism aspires to a borderless w orld where it finds its own reflection ev­ erywhere, then the fruition o f this dream shatters the coherence o f na­ tional identity, as the boundaries that distinguish it from the outside w orld prom ise to collapse. The Anarchy o f Empire in the M aking o f U.S. Culture sets these varied ap­ proaches in dialogue with the field o f Am erican studies to contribute to the current e ffo rt to rem ap that field from broader international and transnational perspectives. My focus, however, is less on the con­ tact zones themselves than on what Lora R om ero has called the “hom e fronts” o f im perial culture.34 A “hom e fron t” im plies a line that seals o ff dom estic space from a foreign battlefield, but as a front, it also pro­ vides a form idable line o f attack and engagem ent. I am interested in how dom inant representations o f national identity at hom e are in­ form ed and deform ed by the anarchic encounters o f em pire, even as those same representations displace and disavow im perialism as some­ thing rem ote and foreign to U.S. nationhood. T h e chapters that fo l­ low are all guided by a central question. H ow can the fram ework o f the “anarchy o f em pire” challenge and decenter the national focus o f some o f the key paradigms that have shaped the study o f U.S. cul­ ture? H ow m ight the contours o f these fields o f inquiry change, when viewed not solely from within the confines o f U.S. borders, but from an international context o f im perial encounters? Historically, the exam ples I have selected range over a hundred years, from Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy to Orson W elles’s Citizen Kane, from John O ’Sullivan’s concept o f “M anifest Des­ tiny” to H enry Luce’s designation o f the “Am erican Century.” T h e par­

Introduction • 17 adigms central to Am erican studies that I address include the “cult o f dom esticity,” the national identity o f authorship, the crisis o f masculin­ ity in the 1890s, the rise o f Jim Crow segregation, the history o f Am eri­ can film , and Du Bois’s critique o f Am erican racism in the early twenti­ eth century. Although my essays do not aspire to provide historical coverage, a new periodization, o r a developm ental narrative, they are linked by com m on concerns about the historiography o f U.S. culture and im perialism. I challenge the way the history o f U.S. im perialism has often revolved around a central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion and overseas em pire, and the related, yet not identical, division between territorial annexation and deterritorialized form s o f global dom ination. This spatial splitting often takes the tem­ poral form o f a developm ental narrative that moves from continental national expansion in the nineteenth century to form al colonial an­ nexation at the turn o f the century to the neo-im perial exercise o f mil­ itary and econom ic m ight in the twentieth. This overarching narrative has defined the so-called Spanish-American War o f 1898 as a water­ shed o r turning point, as either a leap from the dom estic continental fron tier to sites overseas, o r a radical shift to a new stage o f the “O pen D oor” policy o f econom ic expansion.** My own project started as a study o f im perial culture in the 1890s in ord er to counter the denial o f em pire that structures the discourse o f Am erican exceptionalism . Yet I found that this focus im plicitly upheld an old er exceptionalist histori­ ography, which viewed 1898 as an aberration, as the only tim e that the U nited States became— inadvertently— a proper im perial power, and the only tim e im perialism was a subject fo r public consumption and debate. Thus the 1890s now appear as an episode in the m iddle chap­ ters o f this book, situated in relation to m ultiple historical trajectories o f the anarchy o f em pire that include the massive and violent conti­ nental conquests o f the 1840s and the Am erican colonization o f Ha­ waii in the Pacific, lon g before it was form ally annexed in 1898. N or do I end my story in 1898, but instead exam ine its m ixed and contradic­ tory legacy in the twentieth century, in the developm ent o f the early film industry and in Du Bois’s articulation o f the global color line. Whereas some scholars have emphasized the break between conti­ nental expansion and overseas em pire, others have underlined the continuity between the two through the export o f policies and symbols o f Indian wars and the "metaphysics o f Indian hating” to new fron-

18 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE tiers.36Although this approach has generated pow erful and influential studies, it risks reproducing the teleological narrative that im perialism tells about itself, the inexorable westward march o f em pire. Further­ m ore, by taking as foundational the confrontation between white set­ tlers and Native Am ericans, this approach also overlooks how inti­ mately the issues o f slavery and em ancipation and relations between blacks and whites were intertwined with each stage o f U.S. im perial expansion. In each o f my chapters I explore how the representations o f U.S. im perialism were m apped not through a West/East axis o f fron tier symbols and politics, but instead through a North/South axis around the issues o f slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segrega­ tion. T h e conquest o f Indian and M exican lands in the antebellum pe­ riod cannot be understood separately from the expansion o f slavery and the struggle fo r freedom . As historian Thom as H ietala has argued about M anifest Destiny in the 1840s, "expansionist policies took place under the shadow o f the unwanted black.”37 My first chapter shows how dom estic ideology in the same period represented hom e and na­ tion in relation to both westward expansion and debates about slavery and African colonization. Similarly, in Chapter 2 , 1 demonstrate how Mark Twain’s depiction o f the colonization o f Hawaii was intertwined with his m em ories o f slavery and his ambivalence about emancipation. W hen I turn to the wars in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn o f the last century, it is not to explore the exp ort o f the Western fron tier overseas, but to highlight the relation o f im perialism abroad to the as­ sault on Reconstruction at hom e, and the way some African Am ericans seized war abroad as an opportunity to claim citizenship in an im perial nation. Thus I am interested in tracing not only the ways in which im­ perial relations abroad were rendered through the lenses o f black/ white relations at hom e, but the way these two arenas were intermeshed. T h e racial politics o f The B irth o f a N ation were inextricable from the birth o f an Empire. Chapter 1, “M anifest Domesticity,” introduces the double m eaning o f “dom estic” as both the space o f the nation and o f the fam ilial house­ hold and shows how these notions are inextricably intertwined with shifting notions o f “foreign .” T h e chapter opens with a paradigm that may seem rem ote from the arena o f em pire: the discourse o f domestic­ ity and the ideology o f separate gendered spheres in the 1830s-1850s. I argue that the fem ale realm o f dom esticity and the male arena o f

Introduction • 19 M anifest Destiny were not separate spheres at all but were intimately linked. T h eir ideologists reim agined the nation as hom e during a pe­ riod o f massive and violent expansion into M exico and Indian lands, which raised the volatile question o f the expansion o f slavery. In an analysis o f household manuals, w om en’s magazines, and popular d o­ mestic fiction, I demonstrate that the rhetoric o f em pire both suffused and unsettled the representation o f the hom e to produce a dom estic sphere o f em pire that ranges from the R io Grande to Africa. T h e hom e is a m obile space that becam e in one way encompassed and in another expelled the foreign within, and the ideology o f separate gendered spheres reinforced the e ffo rt to separate races by rendering freed black slaves as foreign to the nation. T h e chapter ends by rem apping the terrain o f wom en’s novels in the 1850s to show how the representa­ tion o f dom esticity and fem ale subjectivity simultaneously contributed to and were enabled by narratives o f nation and em pire building. In Chapter 2, “T h e Im perial Routes o f Mark Twain,” I turn to an au­ thor whose name has lon g been synonymous with Am erican culture. O nce perceived as the quintessential Am erican author, Mark Twain has most recently been the locus fo r debates about racism and blackwhite relations that pervade the Am erican literary tradition. In this chapter I argue that his international travels in the routes o f em pire profoundly shaped both the iconic stature o f Twain as an Am erican writer and his com plex representation o f race. Specifically, I show how Twain’s trip to Hawaii in 1866 as a young journalist was pivotal in launching his career as a national figure. His newspaper letters reveal conflicts between the colonial preconceptions he brought with him to Hawaii and the tumultuous social changes he found there that over­ flow ed and unsettled the im perial fram ework o f his writing. In Ha­ waii’s transform ation to a sugar-based econom y in the im m ediate af­ termath o f the Am erican Civil War, Twain found uncanny parallels to slavery at hom e, a connection that fueled his greatest fiction about race in Am erica twenty years later. T h e m em ories o f this form ative im­ perial encounter, I argue, would haunt his writing throughout his ca­ reer. Twain is w ell known fo r his outspoken condem nation o f im perial­ ism at the end o f his life. I am interested not only in how Twain viewed Am erican im perialism abroad, but also in how his earliest voyage through the anarchic routes o f em pire helped to create an Am erican Mark Twain.

20 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE T h e next chapter begins with Twain’s anti-imperialist writing against the annexation o f the Philippines in 1901. W hen turning to the 1890s in Chapters 3 - 5 ,1 do not posit a radical break between continental and overseas expansion, nor do I endorse a teleological narrative that em pire tells about itself, the westward march o f em pire. Instead, I show how popular novelists and politicians were wresding with these very questions about rupture and continuity in their representation o f Am erica as an em pire or a republic, as were the Supreme Court justices in Downes u Bidwell. I show how the Spanish-American War was portrayed not only as the export o f Indian wars to new fron­ tiers abroad but also as a resolution o f the internal divisions o f the Civil War. Chapter 3, “Rom ancing the Em pire,” explores a double discourse o f Am erican im perialism in the 1890s, which redefined im perial power as disem bodied— that is, divorced from contiguous territorial expan­ sion— and relocated it as em bodied in the figure o f Am erican man­ hood. I read popular historical romances o f the period in conjunction with works about masculinity and political debates about im perialism, to show how these novels created cognitive and libidinal maps o f the world on which they projected fantasies o f unlim ited expansion. M ore than neat political allegories that transpose international con flict into chivalric tales, these novels represented the em pire as a site where Am erican masculinity could be rescued from

threatening social

changes at hom e. I argue that the spectacle o f m anhood and the nos­ talgia fo r an im agined heroic past worked to enlist Am erican wom en as spectators o f the im perial project as they denied agency and visibil­ ity to Cubans and Filipinos struggling fo r independence against both the Spanish and Am erican empires. Chapter 4, “Black and Blue on San Juan H ill,” turns from fictional fantasies about overseas adventures to journalistic accounts o f the war in Cuba to fin d striking parallels between them. I argue that the con­ struction o f im perial masculinity was challenged by the presence o f A f­ rican Am erican soldiers who troubled the clear racial divisions be­ tween colonizer and colonized and the assumed affiliations between race and nationhood. W hen w riting about Cuba in The Rough Riders, Th eod ore Roosevelt anxiously differentiated his im age o f Am erican masculinity not only from Cubans and Spaniards but also from African Am erican troops who were figh tin g alongside him. In letters to the

Introduction • 21 black press, African Am erican soldiers criticized the exp ort o f Jim Crow segregation to im perial outposts abroad, while they saw these sites as opportunities to claim a form o f im perial citizenship and m ili­ tant m anhood at hom e. T h e representation o f em pire at the turn o f the century functioned both as an external catalyst and as a m edium fo r the resolution o f dom estic racial co n flic t This com plex interaction underlies one o f the most enduring cultural icons in U.S. m em ory o f the Cuban-Spanish-American war. W hile the “yellow press” has lon g been identified with jingoism at the turn o f the century, less w ell known is the role o f the new medium o f film in m ustering support fo r the first Am erican war to be recorded in “m oving pictures.” In Chapter 5, “Birth o f an Em pire,” I explore how closely the developm ent o f this new m edium was tied to the spec­ tacle o f im perialism in 1898, and how echoes o f that connection rever­ berated in Am erican film s w ell into the twentieth century. Early “m ov­ ing pictures” made the w orld accessible to a diverse public at hom e while they celebrated Am erican m obility abroad. I argue that these war film s played a pivotal role in the developm ent o f film ’s capacity to tell stories in the first decade o f the twentieth century. I then exam ine veiled allusions to this im perial heritage in later landmark Am erican films, D. W. G riffith ’s The B irth o f a Nation (1915), Oscar M icheaux’s W ithin O ur Gates ( 1920), and Orson W elles’s Citizen Kane (1941). T h ere I argue that traces o f U.S. im perial history surface at key moments o f cinem atic innovation and threshold periods o f international crisis, to reim agine the global role o f Am erica on the brink o f entering the two W orld Wars. T h e chapter on film concludes with a look at H enry Luce’s essay, “The Am erican Century,” which, in urging the U nited States to enter W orld W ar II, coined a phrase that would renam e the twentieth cen­ tury. T h e next chapter turns to W. E. B. Du Bois’s vastly d ifferen t de­ scription o f that same century: “T h e problem o f the twentieth century is the problem o f the color line,— the relation o f the darker to the lighter races o f m en in Asia and Africa, in Am erica and the islands o f the sea.”38 In “T h e Im perial Cartography o f W. E. B. Du Bois,” I show how Du Bois represents the com plex interconnections am ong domes­ tic and foreign spaces that im plicitly inform the paradigms I explore in the other chapters. This chapter poses the question o f the relation be­ tween Du Bois’s Pan-African internationalism and his views o f Am eri-

22 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE can im perialism. Du Bois not only condem ned the U nited States as an im perial force in the world, but used the fram ework o f em pire to decenter Am erica as a product o f broader global forces, and at times to recenter his own international authority. T h e analysis focuses on Darkwater: Voicesfrom W ithin the Veil (1920), on e o f Du Bois’s most ambi­ tious and form ally innovative efforts to rem ap racial conflicts within the U nited States through transnational networks o f im perial power. T h e im perial cartography o f Darkwater, I argue, renarrates the histo­ ries inscribed in and erased from conventional maps o f the world, maps that were ripped up and redrawn during the cataclysm o f W orld War I. Through seismic shifts o f perspective, Darkwater expands the geographical terrain o f "world war” to encompass the colonization o f A frica and Asia, post-Reconstruction Am erica, and the U.S. em pire abroad. In Darkwater, Du Bois redefines the m eaning o f "war” to in­ clude conflicts over representations o f space and tim e. From vantage points along the global color line, he reconceives the m eaning o f "peace” to project alternative futures beyond the anarchy o f em pire. M apping the overlapping terrain o f the foreign and the dom estic in­ volves contests over the w riting o f history. I am interested not only in how we write the history o f im perialism , but also in how the partici­ pants and critics o f the im perial projects historicized em pire in their own time. As the opening exam ple suggests, legislating the status o f the newly acquired territory o f Puerto R ico involved the justices in renarrating the history o f the U nited States as em pire and republic. They were not the only ones to have questions about the disjuncture o r continuity o f current im perial ventures with received histories o f the Am erican past. Each cultural response, I w ill show, involved a com ­ plex process o f both rem em bering and forgettin g the inextricable connections between national identity and im perial expansion.

CH A PT ER 1

Manifest Domesticity

T h e A p ril 1847 issue o f Godey’s Lady's Book opened with an article entitled "L ife on the R io Grande” that starts: “There they are pic-nic-ing in real gipsy style, enjoying the life o f freedom [w hich] dwellers in the pent-up city would find so delightful— fo r a few days.”1This picnic re­ fers to the accom panying illustration o f a white pion eer fam ily in a small clearing surrounded by a dense, towering forest. T h e m other stands at the center o f the picture, with her husband at her side hold­ in g his rifle, and her children at her feet, staring at a freshly killed deer. A n open cooking fire, a crude lo g cabin, and a few stalks o f corn com plete the scene. This fam ily tableau evokes a larger dom estic sphere to show that Texas, once a “M exican province,” is now “a mem­ b er o f the great fam ily o f free states that form the Am erican U nion.” In Godey’s vision o f M anifest Destiny in this new state, “cities are appear­ in g as by the rubbing o f the A laddin’s lamp, dwellings and villages dot­ ting the wide prairies, and the school house and church rising side by side, as on our New England hills they stand.” This idyllic sketch was published in the midst o f a year-long war be­ tween the U nited States and M exico, only a m onth after General Tay­ lo r’s heralded victories not far from the R io Grande. Godey’s strikingly made no m ention o f the war, which was provoked in part by the annex­ ation o f Texas in 1845, o r o f the fact that the R io Grande was a dis­ puted boundary between the two nations. N eith er did it acknowledge that Texas entered the “great fam ily o f free states” as a slave state. T h e absence o f this violen t political context is m irrored in the illustration

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24 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE by the lack o f any defin ing characteristics that would identify the land­ scape o r settlers as specific to the region. Instead, this generic picture o f pion eer dom esticity could appear anywhere from Kentucky to O re­ gon in that amorphous shifting terrain known as “the frontier.” “L ife on the R io Grande” represents U.S. im perialism not through war and conquest, but through a narrative o f progress measured by how “highly the influence o f the sex is valued in this new state o f Texas.” As evidence, the article quotes at length a speech delivered by General H . M cleod at the occasion o f the opening o f the public school system in Galveston. “T h e civilization o f every age has been the re­ flection o f fem ale influence,” he proclaim ed, and then proceeded to narrate w orld history as wom an’s progress from the position o f m an’s slave and hireling to that o f the lady worshipped by the m edieval chiv­ alrous k n igh t Both roles, however, were “as far from wom an’s true sphere as were the purchased beauties that filled the harem o f his M os­ lem enemy.” O nly in the homes o f Am erica today has woman found her “true sphere” in her role as mother. W om en have an especially im­ portant mission on the frontier, where “liberty is ever degenerating into license and man is prone to abandon his sentiments and follow his passions. It is woman’s high mission, her prerogative and duty to counsel, to sustain, ay, to control him .” Godey’s happily concluded that i f these “sentiments o f a Texan” are “acted upon . . . that state (o r states) w ill soon be am ong the brightest in our galaxy.” Adherence to wom an’s sphere guarantees adhesion to the larger fam ily o f the Union. T h e general’s speech epitom ized the well-known nineteenth-cen­ tury “cult o f dom esticity” o r ideology o f “separate spheres,” which held that wom an’s hallowed place is in the hom e, the site from which she wields the sentimental power o f m oral influence. Scholars have ex­ plored in depth the m ultiple political uses and contexts o f domesticity; they have amply deconstructed the perm eable boundary between pu­ tatively separate spheres; and they have shown how the extension o f fe­ m ale sympathy across social classes worked to uphold the very racial and class hierarchies that sentim entality claim ed to dissolve.2 Yet few have noted what “L ife on the R io G rande” clearly demonstrates: that the discourse o f dom esticity was intim ately intertwined with the dis­ course o f M anifest Destiny in antebellum U.S. culture. T h e “em pire o f the m other” developed as a central tenet o f middle-class culture be­

Manifest Domesticity • 25 tween the 1830s and 1850s, at a tim e when the U nited States was vio­ lently and massively expanding its national dom ain across the conti­ n en t T h e spatial representations o f dom esticity and M anifest Destiny seem to exem plify the divisions between fem ale and male spheres: the hom e as a bounded and rigidly ordered interior space as opposed to the boundless and undifferentiated space o f an infinitely expanding frontier. T h e ideology o f separate spheres configures the hom e as a stable haven o r fem inine counterbalance to the m ale activity o f territo­ rial conquest Godey’s article suggests, however, that these gendered spaces were m ore com plexly interm eshed; that "woman’s true sphere” was in fact a m obile and m obilizing outpost that transform ed con­ quered foreign lands into the dom estic sphere o f the fam ily and na­ tion. A t the same tim e, the focus on dom esticity could work to efface all traces o f violent conflict, as the foreign qualities o f the R io Grande m agically disappeared into the fam iliar landscape o f New England. T o understand this spatial and political interdependence o f hom e and em pire, it is necessary to consider rhetorically how the m eaning o f the dom estic relies structurally on its intim ate opposition to the no­ tion o f the foreign. Domestic has a double m eaning that links the space o f the fam ilial household to that o f the nation, by im agining both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual bor­ der o f the hom e. T h e earliest m eaning o f foreign, according to the Ox­ ford English Dictionary, refers to the physical space "out o f doors” o r to concerns "at a distance from hom e.” Contem porary English speakers refer to national concerns as dom estic in explicit o r im plicit contrast with the foreign. T h e notion o f dom estic policy makes sense only when distinguished from foreign policy, and, uncoupled from the for­ eign, national issues are never labeled domestic. T h e concept o f for­ eign policy depends on the idea o f the nation as a dom estic space im­ bued with a sense o f at-homeness, in contrast to an external world perceived as alien and threatening. Reciprocally, a sense o f the foreign is necessary to erect the boundaries that enclose the nation as hom e. Domesticity, furtherm ore, refers not to a static condition, but to a pro­ cess o f dom estication, which entails conquering and taming the wild. the natural, and the alien. “D omestic” in this sense is related to the im­ perial project o f civilizing, and the conditions o f dom esticity often be­ com e markers that distinguish civilization from savagery. Domestica­ tion im plies that the hom e contains within itself those wild o r foreign

26 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE elem ents that must be tamed; dom esticity m onitors the borders be­ tween the civilized and the savage as it regulates the traces o f savagery within its purview.3 This chapter poses the question o f how the ideology o f separate spheres contributed to creating an Am erican em pire; how the con­ cept o f dom esticity made the nation into hom e at a tim e when its geopolitical borders were expanding rapidly through violent confron­ tations with Mexicans and Native Americans. I argue that dom esticity is a m obile and often unstable discourse that can expand o r contract the boundaries o f hom e and nation, and that their interdependency relies on racialized conceptions o f the foreign . I explore this idea o f traveling dom esticity in the .writings o f Catharine Beecher and Sarah Josepha H ale, whose work, despite their ideological differences as public figures, reveals how the internal logic o f dom esticity relies on, abets, and reproduces the contradictions o f nationalist expansion in the 1840s and 1850s. My reading o f B eecher’s Treatise on Domestic Econ­ omy demonstrates that the language o f em pire suffused the rhetoric o f domesticity, while my analysis o f H ale’s work uncovers the shared racial underpinnings o f dom estic and im perialist discourse through which the separateness o f gendered spheres reinforced the e ffo rt to separate the races by turning blacks into foreigners. T h e chapter con­ cludes by rem apping the terrain of^women s tiction o f the 1850s to suggest how narratives o f fem ale subjectivity are scripted through the im perial reach o f domesticity. Together, these exam ples demonstrate how dom esticity worked as both a bulwark against and em bodim ent o f the anarchy o f em pire, and how images o f the nation as hom e were haunted by “disem bodied shades” who blurred the boundaries be­ tween the dom estic and the foreign.

Empire of the Home Dom esticity dom inated middle-class w om en’s writing and culture from the 1830s through the 1850s, at a tim e when national boundaries were in violent flux. During this period the U nited States increased its na­ tional dom ain by seventy percent, engaged in a bloody campaign o f In­ dian rem oval, fought its first prolon ged foreign war, wrested the Span­ ish borderlands from M exico, and annexed Texas, O regon, California, and New M exico. As Thom as H ietala has shown, this convulsive expan-

Manifest Domesticity * 27 sion was less a con fident celebration o f M anifest Destiny than a re­ sponse to crises o f confidence about national unity, the expansion o f slavery, and the racial identity o f citizenship— crises that territorial ex­ pansion exacerbated.4 Furtherm ore, these movements evoked serious questions about the conceptual border between the dom estic and the foreign . In the 1831 Supreme Court decision on Cherokee Nation u the State o f Georgia, fo r exam ple, Indians were declared members o f “do­ mestic dependent nations,” neither foreign nationals nor U.S. citi­ zens.5 This designation m ade the dom estic an ambiguous lim inal realm between the national and the foreign , as it placed the foreign in­ side the geographic boundaries o f the nation. T h e uneasy relation be­ tween the dom estic and the foreign can also be seen in the debates over the annexation o f new territory. In the m iddle o f the M exicanAm erican War, President Polk insisted that slavery was “purely a do­ mestic question” and not a “foreign question” at all, but the expansion he advocated underm ined that distinction and threatened dom estic unity by raising the question o f slavery's extension into previously for­ eign lands.6 T h e language o f dom esticity perm eated representations o f national expansion. John L. O ’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, fo r exam ple, claim ed in 1847 that the war “unfortunately exists through the anarchy o f M exico,” fo r “when a nation keeps a ’disorderly house’ , it is the duty o f neighbors to intervene.”7 M ilitary invasion is represented here as a form o f good housekeeping. In debates about the annexation o f Texas and later M exico, both sides represented the new territories as wom en to be m arried to the U nited States; Sam Houston wrote o f Texas pre­ senting itself “to the U nited States as a bride adorned fo r her espous­ als”; and President Taylor accused annexationists after the M exicanAm erican War o f trying to “drag C alifornia into the U nion before her wedding garm ent has yet been cast about her person.”8 These visions o f im perial expansion as marital union carried within them the pros­ pect o f m arriage as racial amalgamation. W hile popular fiction about the Mexican-Am erican W ar portrayed brave Am erican m en rescuing and m arrying M exican wom en o f Spanish descent, political debate over the annexation o f M exico hinged on what was agreed to be the im possibility o f incorporating a foreign , racially m ixed people into a dom estic nation im agined as Anglo-Saxon.9 T h e “virtues o f the AngloSaxon Race make their political union with the degraded Mexican-

28 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Spanish im possible,” wrote the Democratic Review to explain the annex­ ation o f Texas. Southerners, such as Senator Calhoun, used the same reasoning to argue against annexing all o f M exico.10In both cases, the language o f political union and marital union m erged in the com m on fear o f racial interm ixing. O ne o f the m ajor contradictions o f im perialist expansion is that while the U nited States strove to nationalize and dom esticate foreign territories and peoples, annexation threatened to incorporate non­ white foreign subjects into the republic in a way that was perceived to underm ine the nation as a dom estic space. T h e discourse o f domestic­ ity was deployed to negotiate the borders o f an expanding em pire and divided nation. Rather than stabilize the representation o f the nation as hom e, this rhetoric heightened the fraught and contingent nature o f the boundary between the dom estic and the foreign , a boundary that broke down around questions o f the racial identity o f the nation as hom e. Domestic discourse, I argue, both redressed and reenacted the anarchic qualities o f em pire through its own double m ovement: to expand fem ale influence beyond the hom e and the nation, and simul­ taneously to contract wom an’s sphere to that o f p olicin g dom estic boundaries against the threat o f foreignness. A t this tim e o f heightened im perial expansion, proponents o f “wom­ an’s sphere” applied the language o f em pire to the hom e and even to wom en’s em otional lives. “H ers is the em pire o f the affections,” wrote Sarah Josepha H ale, influential ed itor o f Godey’s Lady’s Bock, who op ­ posed the w om en’s rights m ovem ent as “the attem pt to take woman away from her em pire o f hom e.”11 T o educational reform er H orace Mann, “the em pire o f the H om e” was “the most im portant o f all em­ pires, the pivot o f all em pires and em perors.”12Writers who counseled wom en to renounce politics and econom ics, “to leave the rude com ­ m erce o f camps and the soul hardening struggling o f political power to the harsher spirit o f m en,” urged them in highly political rhetoric to take up a m ore spiritual calling, “the dom ain o f the m oral affections and the em pire o f the heart.”12 Catharine Beecher gave this calling a nationalist cast in A Treatise on Domestic Economy, when, fo r exam ple, she used Q ueen V ictoria as a fo il to elevate the Am erican “m other and housekeeper in a large fam ily” who is “the sovereign o f an em pire de­ m anding as varied cares, and involving m ore difficu lt duties, than are exacted o f her, who wears the crown and professedly regulates the in-

Manifest Domesticity » 29 terests o f the greatest nation on earth, [yet] finds abundant leisure fo r theaters, balls, horse races, and every gay leisure.”14 This im perial trope m ight be interpreted as a com pensatory and defensive e ffo rt to glorify the shrunken realm o f fem ale agency, in a paradox o f what M ary Ryan calls "im perial isolation,” whereby the m other gains her symbolic sovereignty at the cost o f withdrawal from the outside w orld.15For these writers, however, m etaphor has a material efficacy in the world. T h e representation o f the hom e as an em pire exists in ten­ sion with the notion o f wom an’s sphere as a contracted space, because it is in the nature o f em pires to extend their rule over new domains w hile fortifyin g their borders against external invasion and internal in­ surrection. If, on the on e hand, dom esticity drew strict boundaries be­ tween the private hom e and the public w orld o f men, on the other, it becam e the engine o f national expansion, the site from which the na­ tion reaches beyond itself through the emanation o f wom an’s m oral influence. T h e paradox o f what m ight be called "im perial dom esticity” is that, by withdrawing from direct agency in the male arena o f com m erce and politics, wom an’s sphere can be represented by both women and m en as a m ore potent agent fo r national expansion. T h e outward reach o f dom esticity in turn enables the interior functioning o f the hom e. In her introduction to A Treatise on Domestic Economy, Beecher inextrica­ bly links w om en’s work to the unfolding o f Am erica’s global mission o f "exhibiting to the w orld the beneficent influences o f Christianity, when carried into every social, civil, and political institution” (1 2 ). W om en’s m aternal responsibility o f m olding the character o f m en and children has global repercussions: "to Am erican wom en, m ore than to any others on earth, is com m itted the exalted privilege o f extending over the w orld those blessed influences, that are to renovate degraded man, and ’clothe all clim es with beauty’ ” (1 4 ). Beecher ends her intro­ duction with an extended architectural m etaphor in which wom en’s agency at hom e is predicated on the global expansion o f the nation: The builders o f a temple are o f equal importance, whether they labor on the foundations, or toil upon the dome. Thus also with those labors that are to be made effectual in the regeneration o f the Earth. The woman who is rearing a family o f children; the woman who labors in the schoolroom, the woman who, in her retired chamber, earns with

30 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE her needle the mite to contribute for the intellectual and moral eleva­ tion o f her country; even the humble domestic, whose example and in­ fluence may be molding and forming young minds, while her faithful services sustain a prosperous domestic state;— each and all may be cheered by the consciousness that they are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever was committed to human responsibility. It is the building o f a glorious temple, whose base shall be coextensive with the bounds o f the earth, whose summit shall pierce the skies, whose splen­ dor shall beam on all lands, and those who hew the lowliest stone, as much as those who carve the highest capital, will be equally honored when its top-stone shall be laid, with new rejoicing o f the morning stars, and shoutings o f the sons o f God. (14) T h e political charge o f this m etaphor is contradictory: it unifies wom en o f d ifferen t social classes in a shared project o f construction while sustaining class hierarchy am ong wom en.16 This im age o f social unity depends upon and underwrites a vision o f national expansion, as wom en's varied labors com e together to embrace the entire world. As the author moves down the social scale, from m other to teacher to spinster, her geographic reach extends outward from hom e to school­ room to country, until the "hum ble dom estic” returns back to the "prosperous dom estic state,” an ambiguous phrase whose double m eaning refers at once outward to the nation and inward to the hom e. W om an’s work here perform s two interdependent form s o f national labor; it forges the bonds o f internal unity and pushes the nation out­ ward to encompass the globe. This outward expansion in turn en­ ables the internal cohesiveness o f woman’s separate sphere by making wom en agents in erecting an infinitely expanding edifice. Beecher thus introduces her detailed manual on the regulation o f the hom e as a highly ordered space by fusing the boundedness o f the hom e with the boundlessness o f the nation. H er 1841 introduc­ tion bears a rem arkable resemblance to the rhetoric o f M anifest Des­ tiny, particularly to this passage by one o f its forem ost proponents, O ’Sullivan, in his "T h e Great N ation o f Futurity” o f 18S9: The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era o f American greatness. In its magnificent domain o f space and time, the nation o f many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence o f di­ vine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated

Manifest Domesticity » 31 to the worship o f the most high— the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere— its roof the firmament o f the star-studded heav­ ens, and its congregation an Union o f many Republics, comprising hundreds o f happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but gov­ erned by God’s natural and moral law o f equality.17 W hile these passages exem plify the stereotype o f separate spheres (on e describes work in the hom e and the other the work o f nation b u ildin g), both use a com m on architectural metaphor, a biblical tem­ ple coextensive with the globe. O ’Sullivan’s gram m atical subject is the Am erican nation, which, while it remains unnamed in B eecher’s passage, is the m edium fo r channeling wom en’s work at hom e to a Christianized world. T h e construction o f an ed ifice ordinarily entails walling o ff the inside from the outside, but in these two cases there is a paradoxical effect whereby the distinction between inside and outside is obliterated by the expansion o f the hom e/nation/tem ple to encom ­ pass the globe. T h e rhetoric o f M anifest Destiny and that o f dom estic­ ity share a vocabulary that turns im perial conquest into spiritual re­ generation in ord er to efface internal con flict o r external resistance in visions o f geopolitical dom ination as global harmony. Although in the reaches o f im perial dom esticity a hom e is ultim ately coextensive with the entire world, the concept also continually p ro­ jects a map o f unregenerate outlying foreign terrain that gives coher­ ence to its boundaries and justifies its dom esticating mission. W hen in 1869 Catharine Beecher revised her Treatise with her sister, H arriet Beecher Stowe, as The American Women's Home, they downplayed the earlier role o f dom esticity in harm onizing class differences and en­ hanced dom esticity’s outward reach. T h e book ends by advocating the establishment o f Christian neighborhoods settled prim arily by wom en as a way o f putting into practice dom esticity’s expansive potential to Christianize and Am ericanize immigrants in Northeastern cities and “all over the West and South, while along the Pacific coast, China and Japan are sending their pagan m illions to share our favored soil, cli­ mate, and govern m en t” N o lon ger a leveling factor am ong classes within Am erica, dom esticity could be extended to those perceived as foreign within and beyond Am erican national borders: “Ere lon g colo­ nies from these prosperous and Christian communities would go forth to shine as ’lights o f the w orld’ in all the now darkened nations. Thus

32 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE the Christian fam ily and Christian neighborhood would becom e the grand m inistry as they were designed to be, in training our whole race fo r heaven.”18 Though Beecher and Stowe emphasize dom esticity’s service to “darkened nations,” the existence o f “pagans” as potential converts perform s a reciprocal service in the extension o f dom esticity to single Am erican women. Such Christian neighborhoods would al­ low unm arried wom en without children to leave their work in “facto­ ries, offices and shops,” o r reject their idleness in “refin ed leisure,” to live dom estic lives on their own, in some cases adopting native chil­ dren. Dom esticity’s im perial reach allows the wom an’s sphere to in­ clude not only the heathen but also the unm arried Euro-American woman, who can be freed from biological reproduction to rule her own m aternal em pire. I f writers about dom esticity encouraged the extension o f fem ale influence outward to civilize the foreign , their writings also evoked anxiety about the opposing trajectory that brings foreignness into the hom e. Analyzing the widespread colonial trope that com pares colo­ nized people to children, Ann Stoler and Karen Sânchez-Eppler have each shown how this m etaphor can work not only to infantilize the col­ onized but also to portray white children as young savages in need o f civilizing.19This m etaphor at once extends dom esticity outward to the tutelage o f heathens and inward to regulate the threat o f foreign ­ ness within the boundaries o f the hom e. For Beecher, this internal savagery appeared to endanger the physical health o f the mother. Throughout her Treatise, the vision o f the sovereign m other with im pe­ rial power is countered by the description o f the ailing invalid mother. This contrast can be seen in the titles o f the first two chapters, “Pecu­ liar Responsibilities o f Am erican W om en” and “D ifficulties Peculiar to Am erican W om en.” T h e latter focuses on the pervasive invalidism that makes Am erican wom en physically and em otionally unequal to their global responsibilities. In contrast to the ebullient tem ple building o f the first chapter, Beecher ends the second with a quotation from Tocqueville describing a fragile fron tier hom e centered on a lethargic and vulnerable mother, whose children cluster about her, full o f health, turbulence and energy; they are true children o f the wilderness; their mother watches them from time to time, with mingled melancholy and joy. To look at their

Manifest Domesticity » 33 strength, and her languor one might imagine that the life she had given them exhausted her own; and still she regrets not what they cost her. The house, inhabited by these emigrants, has no internal partition or lo ft In the one chamber o f which it consists, the whole fiunily is gathered for the night The dwelling itself is a little world; an ark o f civi­ lization amid an ocean o f foliage. A hundred steps beyond i t the pri­ meval forest spreads its shade and solitude resumes its sway. (24) T h e m other’s health appears drained less by the external hardships in­ flicted by the environm ent than by her own “children o f the wilder­ ness,” who violate the border between hom e and prim eval fo rest This boundary is partially reinforced by the im age o f the hom e as an “ark o f civilization” whose internal order should protect its inhabitants from the “ocean o f foliage” that surrounds them. Yet the undifferentiated inner space, which lacks “internal partition,” replicates rather than de­ fends against the boundlessness o f the wilderness around i t T h e rest o f Beecher’s Treatise, with its detailed attention to the systematic orga­ nization o f the household, works to “partition” the hom e in a way that distinguishes it from an external wilderness.20 Although the infirm ity o f Am erican m others is a pervasive con­ cern throughout Treatise, its physical cause is difficu lt to locate. P oor health afflicts middle-class wom en in Northeastern cities as much as wom en on the frontier, according to Beecher, and she sees the cause in geographic and social m obility: “everything is m oving and chang­ in g” (1 6 ). This m ovem ent affects wom en’s health most directly, claims Beecher, by depriving them o f reliable dom estic servants. W ith “trained” servants constantly m oving up and out, middle-class wom en must resort to hiring “ignorant” and “poverty-stricken foreigners,” with whom they are said in American Woman’s Home to have a “mission­ ary” relationship (3S2). Though Beecher does not label these foreign ­ ers as the direct cause o f illness, their presence disrupts the orderly “system and regularity” o f housekeeping, leading Am erican wom en to be “disheartened, discouraged, and ruined in health” (1 8 ). Through­ ou t her Treatise Beecher turns the lack o f good servants— at first a cause o f infirm ity— into a rem edy; their absence gives middle-class wom en the opportunity to perform regular dom estic labor that w ill re­ vive their health. By im plication, their self-regulated work at hom e w ill also keep “poverty-stricken foreigners” out o f their homes. Curiously,

34 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE then, the m other’s ill health stems from the unruly subjects o f her do­ mestic em pire— children and servants— who bring uncivilized wilder­ ness and undomesticated foreignness into the hom e. T h e fear o f dis­ ease and o f invalidism that characterizes the Am erican woman also serves as a m etaphor fo r anxiety about foreignness within. T h e m other’s dom estic em pire is at risk o f contagion from the very subjects she must dom esticate and civilize, who ultim ately infest both the hom e and the m aternal body.21 B eecher’s concept o f the dom estic thus generates and is constituted by images o f the foreign . O n the one hand, dom esticity’s whabits o f sys­ tem and ord er” appear to anchor the hom e as an enclosed stable cen­ ter against a fluctuating alien w orld o f expanding national borders; on the other, dom esticity must be spatially and conceptually m obile to travel to the nation’s far-flung frontiers. Beecher’s use o f Tocqueville’s ark m etaphor suggests the rootlessness and the self-enclosed m obility necessary fo r the efficacy o f middle-class dom esticity to redefine the m eaning o f habitation, to make Euro-Americans fe el at hom e in a place where they are initially the foreign ones. Dom esticity inverts this relationship to create a hom e by rendering prior inhabitants alien and undomesticated and by im plicitly nativizing newcomers. T h e em pire o f the m other thus em bodies the anarchy at the heart o f the Am erican em pire; the two em pires follow a d o u b le c o mpulsion l b ^ domesticate—^to controljm d incorporate— the foreign within the bor­ ders o f the hom e and the nation.

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Domesticating the Empire T h e im perial scope o f dom esticity was central to the work o f Sarah Josepha H ale, throughout her half-century editorship o f the influen­ tial Godey’s Lady’s Book and in her fiction and history writing. H ale has been viewed by some scholars as advocating a wom an’s sphere m ore thoroughly separate from m ale political concerns than the one Beecher prom oted.22 This withdrawal seems confirm ed by the refusal o f Godey’s even to m ention the Civil War throughout its duration, much less take sides. Yet when H ale conflates the progress o f wom en with the nation’s M anifest Destiny in her history writing, other schol­ ars have ju d ged her as inconsistently m oving out o f the woman’s sphere into a conventional male political realm .29H ale’s conception o f

Manifest Domesticity » 35 separate spheres, I argue, is predicated on the im perial expansion o f the nation. Although her w riting as editor, essayist, and novelist fo ­ cused on the in terior spaces o f the hom e, with am ple advice on house­ keeping, clothing, manners, and em otions, she gave equal and related attention to the expansion o f fem ale influence through her advocacy o f fem ale m edical missionaries abroad and the colonization o f A frica by form er black slaves. Even though H ale seem ed to avoid the issue o f slavery and race relations in her silence about the Civil War, in the 1850s her conception o f dom esticity took on a decidedly racial cast, exposing the intim ate link between the separateness o f gendered spheres and the e ffo rt to keep the races apart in separate national spheres. In

1847, in the m iddle o f the Mexican-Am erican War, H ale

launched a campaign on the pages o f Godey’s Lady's Book to declare Thanksgiving Day a national holiday, a campaign she avidly pursued until Lincoln m ade the holiday official in 1863.24 This e ffo rt typified the way in which H ale’s map o f wom an’s sphere overlaid national and dom estic spaces; Godey’s published detailed instructions and reci­ pes fo r preparing the Thanksgiving feast, while it encouraged wom en readers to agitate fo r a nationwide holiday as a ritual o f national ex­ pansion and unification. T h e power o f Thanksgiving Day stemmed from its center in the dom estic sphere; H ale im agined m illions o f fam­ ilies seated around the table on the same day, thereby unifying the vast and shifting space o f the national dom ain through simultaneity. This dom estic ritual would “unite our great nation, by its states and fam i­ lies” from “S t John’s to the R io Grande, from the Atlantic to the Pacific border,” and it should therefore becom e an official holiday “as lon g as the U nion endures."25 I f the celebration o f Thanksgiving unites individual fam ilies across regions and brings them together in an im agined collective space, Thanksgiving’s continental scope en­ dows each individual fam ily gathering with national m eaning. Further­ m ore, the Thanksgiving story com m em orating the founding o f N ew England— which in H ale’s version makes no m ention o f Indians— could create a com m on history by nationalizing a regional myth o f ori­ gins and transposing it to the territories most recently wrested away from Indians and Mexicans. H ale’s campaign to transform Thanks­ giving from a regional to a national holiday grew even fiercer with the approach o f the C ivil War. In 1859 she wrote, “I f every state would jo in

36 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE in U nion Thanksgiving on the 24th o f this m onth, would it not be a re­ newed pledge o f love and loyalty to the Constitution o f the U nited States?”26 Thanksgiving Day, she hoped, could avert the com ing civil war. As a national holiday celebrated prim arily in the hom e, the cross­ country Thanksgiving celebration serves to write a national history o f origins, to colonize newly acquired Western territories, and to unite N orth and South. T h e dom estic ritual o f Thanksgiving could expand and unify the na­ tion, provided its borders were fortified against foreignness; fo r H ale, the nation’s boundaries not only defined its geographical lim its but also set apart nonwhites within the national dom ain. In H ale’s fiction o f the 1850s, Thanksgiving polices the dom estic sphere by making black people, whether free o r enslaved, foreign to the dom estic nation and homeless within Am erica’s expanding borders. In 1852 H ale reis­ sued Northwood, the novel which had launched her career in 1827 with a highly publicized chapter about a New Ham pshire Thanksgiving din­ ner, showcasing the values o f the Am erican republic to a skeptical Brit­ ish visitor. For the 1852 version H ale changed the subtitle from “A Tale o f N ew England” to “L ife N orth and South,” to highlight the new ma­ terial she added on slavery.27 Pro-union yet against abolition, H ale ad­ vocated sending all black people to settle in A frica and Christianize its inhabitants. C olonization in the 1850s had a two-pronged ideology: to expel blacks to a separate national sphere, and to expand U.S. power through the civilizing process; black Christian settlers would becom e both outcasts from and agents fo r the Am erican em pire.28 H ale’s 1852 Northwood ends with an appeal to use Thanksgiving Day as an occasion to collect m oney at all Am erican churches “fo r the purpose o f educating and colonizing free people o f color and eman­ cipated slaves” (408). This annual collection would contribute to "peaceful em ancipation” as "every obstacle to the real freedom o f Am erica would be m elted before the gushing streams o f sympathy and charity” (408). W hile "sympathy,” a sentim ent associated with wom an’s sphere, seems to extend to black slaves, the goal o f sympathy in this passage is not to free them but to em ancipate white Am erica from their presence. Thanksgiving fo r H ale thus celebrates national cohe­ siveness around the dom estic sphere by simultaneously rendering blacks within Am erica foreign to the nation. For H ale, colonization would also transform Am erican slavery into a

Manifest Domesticity • 37 civilizing and dom esticating mission. O ne o f her N orthern characters explains to the British visitor that “the destiny o f Am erica is to instruct the world, which we shall do, with the aid o f our Anglo-Saxon brothers over the w ater.. . . Great Britain has enough to do at hom e and in the East Indies to last her another century. W e have this country and A f­ rica to settle and civilize” (167). W hen his listener is puzzled by the ref­ erence to Africa, the Am erican explains “that is the greatest mission o f our Republic, to train here the black man fo r his duties as a Christian, then free him and send him to Africa, there to plant Free States and organize Christian civilization” (168). T h e colonization o f A frica be­ comes the goal o f slavery by making it part o f the civilizing mission o f global imperialism. C olonization thus not only banishes blacks from the dom estic union, but, as the final sentence o f Nortkwood proclaims, it proves that “the mission o f Am erican slavery is to Christianize A f­ rica" (408). In 1853 H ale published the novel Liberia, which begins where N orthwood. ends, with the settlem ent o f Liberia by freed black slaves.29 Seen by scholars as a retort to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it can also be read as the un­ told story o f Stowe’s novel, starting where she concludes, with form er black slaves m igrating to Africa.30Although the subtitle, “Mr. Peyton’s Experim ent,” places colonization under the aegis o f a white man, the narrative turns colonization into a project em anating from wom an’s sphere in at least two directions. In its outward trajectory, the settle­ m ent o f Liberia appears as an expansion o f fem inized dom estic values. Yet dom esticity is not only exported to civilize native Africans; the fram ing o f the novel also makes African colonization necessary to the establishment o f dom esticity within the U nited States as exclusively white. W hile H ale writes that the purpose o f the novel is to “show the advantages Liberia offers to the African,” in so doin g it construes all black people as foreign to Am erican nationality by asserting that they must rem ain homeless within the U nited States. A t the same tim e, H ale paints a picture o f Am erican im perialism as the em bodim ent o f the fem inine values o f domesticity: “What other nation can poin t to a colony planted from such pure motives o f charity; nurtured by the counsels and exertions o f its most noble and self-denying statesmen and philanthropists; and sustained, from its feeb le com m encem ent up to a period o f self-reliance and independence, from pure love o f justice and humanity?” (iv ). In this passage Am erica is figured as a

38 » THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m other raising her baby, Africa, to maturity, the vocabulary o f “purity,” “charity,” “self-denial” represents colonization as an extension o f the values o f wom an’s separate sphere. T h e narrative opens with a scene fraught with danger to Am erican domesticity. T h e last male o f a distinguished V irgin ia fam ily is on his deathbed, helpless to defend his plantation from a rum ored slave in­ surrection. T h e wom en o f the family, led by his w ife, Virginia, rally with the loyal slaves to defend their hom e from the insurrection that never occurs. Thus the novel’s separate spheres have gone awry, with the man o f the fam ily abed at hom e, while white wom en and black slaves act as protectors and soldiers. T h e ensuing p lot to settle Liberia overtly rewards those slaves fo r their loyalty by giving them freedom and a hom eland; it also serves to reinstate separate spheres and rees­ tablish Am erican dom esticity as white. W hen the narrative shifts to Africa, the black colonizers, now de­ prived o f Am erican nationhood, have the task o f Am ericanizing that continent through domesticity. A key figure in the settlem ent is the slave Keziah, who has nursed the white plantation owners. She is the one most responsive to Peyton’s proposal fo r colonization, because o f her desire to be free and to Christianize the natives. H er future hus­ band, Polydore, m ore recently arrived in the U nited States as a slave and thus less “civilized,” is afraid to return to A frica because o f his m em ory o f native brutality and superstition. This couple represents two faces o f enslaved Africans central to the white im agination o f colo­ nization: the degenerate heathen represented by the man, and the re­ deem ed Christian represented by the woman. Keziah, however, can only becom e a fully dom esticated woman at a geographic rem ove from Am erican domesticity. W hen Keziah protects the plantation in V ir­ ginia, her m aternal impulse is described as that o f a w ild animal— a “fierce lioness.” O nly in A frica can she becom e the dom estic center o f the new settlement, where she establishes a hom e that resembles Beecher’s Christian neighborhood. Keziah builds a private hom e with fence and garden, and civilizes her husband while she expands her do­ mestic sphere to adopt native children and open a Christian school. Keziah’s dom estication o f herself and her surroundings in A frica can be seen as part o f the m ovem ent in the novel (n oted by Susan Ryan) in which the freed black characters are represented as recogniz­ ably Am erican only at the safe distance o f Africa.91 O nce banished

Manifest Domesticity » 39 from the dom estic sphere o f U.S. nationality, they can be resurrected as Am erican in a foreign terrain. T h e novel narrates the founding o f Liberia as a story o f colonization, but H ale’s storytelling also colonizes Liberia as an im itation o f Am erica, replete with images o f the frontier, the Mayflower, and the planting o f the Am erican flag. A double narra­ tive m ovem ent at once contracts U.S. borders to exclude blacks from dom estic space and simultaneously expands those borders by re-creat­ in g that dom estic space in Africa. Thus the novel ends with a passage that com pares the Liberian settlers to the Pilgrim s and represents them as part o f a global expansion o f the Am erican nation: I do not doubt but that the whole continent o f Africa will be regener­ ated, and I believe the Republic o f Liberia will be the great instrument, in the hands o f God, in working out this regeneration. The colony o f Liberia has succeeded better than the colony o f Plymouth did for the same period o f time. And yet, in that little company which was wafted across the mighty ocean in the May Flower, we see the germs o f this al­ ready colossal nation, whose feet are in the tropics, while her head re­ poses upon the snows o f Canada. Her right hand she stretches over the Atlantic, feeding the millions o f the Old World, and beckoning them to her shores, as a refuge from famine and oppression; and, at the same time, she stretches forth her left hand to the islands o f the Pacific, and to the old empires o f the East (303) In H ale’s view, both slavery and dom esticity are necessary to the im­ perial mission; African slaves are brought to Am erica to becom e Chris­ tianized and dom esticated, but they cannot com plete this potential transform ation until they “return" to Africa. H ale’s writing makes race central to woman’s sphere. Nonwhites are excluded from dom estic nationalism; m oreover, the capacity fo r dom esticity becom es an innate d efin in g characteristic o f the AngloSaxon race. Reginald Horsman has shown how in political thought by the 1840s the m eaning o f Anglo-Saxonism had shifted from a his­ torical understanding o f the developm ent o f republican institutions to an essentialist defin ition o f a single race that possesses an innate and unique capacity fo r self-governm ent92 His analysis, however, lim­ its this racial form ation to the traditionally male sphere o f politics. H ale’s Woman’s Record (1853), a massive com pendium o f the history o f women from Eve to the present, establishes wom an’s sphere as central

40 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE to the racial discourse o f Anglo-Saxonism. T o H ale the em pire o f the m other spawns the Anglo-Saxon nation and propels its natural inclina­ tion toward global power. In her introduction to the fourth part o f her volum e on the present era, H ale represents Am erica as m anifesting the universal progress o f women that culminates in the Anglo-Saxon race. T o explain the Anglo-Saxon “mastery o f the m ind over Europe and Asia,” she argues that if we trace out the causes o f this superiority, they would center in the moral influence, which true religion confers on the female sex. . . . There is still a more wonderful example o f this uplifting power o f the educated female mind. It is only seventy-five years since the Anglo-Sax­ ons in the New World became a nation, then numbering about three million souls. Now this people form the great American republic, with a population o f twenty-three millions; and the destiny o f the world will soon be in their keeping! Religion is free; and the soul which woman always influences where God is worshipped in spirit and truth, is un­ trammeled by code, or creed, or caste. . . . The result before the world—a miracle o f advancement, American mothers train their sons to be men.*3 H ale here articulates the im perial logic o f what has been called “re­ publican m otherhood,” which ultim ately posits the outward expansion o f m aternal influence beyond the hom e and the nation’s borders.34 T h e M anifest Destiny o f the nation unfolds logically from the im perial reach o f wom an’s influence em anating from her separate dom estic sphere. Dom esticity makes manifest the destiny o f the Anglo-Saxon race, while M anifest Destiny becom es in turn the condition fo r AngloSaxon domesticity. For H ale dom esticity influences national expan­ sion in a double manner: it casts the im age o f the nation as a hom e de­ lim ited by race, and the im age o f the nation as propelled outward through im perial fem ale agency. Advocating dom esticity’s expansive m ode, Woman’s Record includes only those nonwhite women who contributed to the spread o f Chris­ tianity to colonized peoples. In the third volum e, H ale designates Ann Judson, a white Am erican missionary to Burma, as the most distin­ guished woman to 1830 (152). T h e fourth volum e o f Woman’s Record focuses predom inantly on Am erican women as the apex o f historical

Manifest Domesticity • 41 developm ent. In contrast to the aristocratic accom plishm ent o f Eng­ lish wom en, “in all that contributes to popular education and pure re­ ligious sentim ent am ong the masses, the wom en o f Am erica are in ad­ vance o f all others on the globe. T o prove this we need only exam ine the list o f Am erican fem ale missionaries, teachers, editors and au­ thors o f works instructive and educational, contained in this ‘R ecord’ ” (564). W hile Anglo-Saxon men m arched to conquer new lands, fem ale influence had a com plem entary outward reach from within the d o ­ mestic sphere. T h e argum ent fo r African colonization can be seen as part o f the broader global expansion o f wom an’s sphere. In 1853 H ale printed in Godey ’s Lady ’s Book “A n Appeal to the Am erican Christians on B ehalf o f the Ladies’ M edical Missionary Society,” in which she argued fo r the special need fo r wom en physicians abroad because they would have unique access to foreign w om en’s bodies and souls.35 H er argum ent fo r training fem ale m edical missionaries both enlarged the field o f white w om en’s agency and fem inized the force o f im perial power. She saw fem ale m edical missionaries as not only curing disease but also raising the status o f wom en abroad: “A ll heathen people have a high reverence fo r m edical knowledge. Should they find Christian ladies ac­ com plished in this science, would it not greatly raise the sex in the esti­ m ation o f those nations, where one o f the most serious im pedim ents to m oral im provem ent is the degradation and ignorance to which their fem ales have been fo r centuries consigned?” (185). Though su­ p erior to heathen wom en in status, Am erican wom en would accom­ plish their goal by taking gen der as a com m on ground, which would give them special access to wom en abroad. As wom en they could be m ore effective imperialists, penetrating those interior colonial spaces, sym bolized by the harem, that remain inaccessible to m ale mission­ aries: Vaccination is difficult o f introduction among the people o f the east, though suffering dreadfully from the ravages o f small-pox. The Ameri­ can mission at Siam writes that thousands o f children were, last year, swept away by this disease in the country around him. Female physi­ cians could win their way among these poor children much easier than doctors o f the other sex. Surely the ability o f American women to learn

42 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE and practice vaccination will not be questioned, when the more dif­ ficult art o f inoculation was discovered by the women o f Turkey, and in* troduced into Europe by an English woman! Inoculation is one o f the greatest triumphs o f remedial skill over a sure loathsome and deadly disease which the annals o f Medical Art record. Its discovery belongs to women. I name it here to show that they are gifted with genius for the profession, and only need to be educated to excel in the preventive de­ partment Let pious, intelligent women be fitly prepared, and what a missionfield for doing good would be opened! In India, China, Turkey, and all over the heathen world, they would, in their character o f physicians, find access to the homes and harems where women dwell, and where the good seed sown would bear an hundredfold, because it would take root in the bosom o f the sufferer, and in the heart o f childhood. (185) In this passage the connections am ong wom en branch out in many di­ rections, but H ale charts a kind o f evolutionary narrative that places Am erican wom en at the apex o f d evelopm en t Though inoculation was discovered by Turkish wom en, it can only return to Turkey to save Turkish children through the agency o f English wom en transporting knowledge to Am ericans, who can then g o to Turkey as missionaries and save wom en who could not save themselves o r their children. T h e needs o f heathen women allow Am erican fem ale missionaries to con­ quer their own dom estic em pire without reproducing biologically. In­ stead, Am erican wom en are m etaphorically cast as men in a cross-ra­ cial union, as they sow seeds in the bodies o f heathen wom en who w ill bear Christian children. Through fem ale influence, wom en physicians w ill transform heathen harems into Christian homes. Thus the concept o f fem ale influence in H ale’s writing, so central to dom estic discourse and at the heart o f the sentimental ethos, was un­ derwritten by and abetted the im perial expansion o f the nation. W hile the em pire o f the m other advocated retreat from the world-conquer­ ing enterprises o f men, this renunciation prom ised a m ore thorough kind o f w orld conquest Both the em pire o f the m other and the Am eri­ can Em pire sought to encompass the entire w orld outside their bor­ ders, yet this same outward m ovem ent contributed to and relied on the contraction o f the dom estic sphere to exclude persons conceived o f as racially foreign within those expanding national boundaries.

Manifest Domesticity » 43

Imperial Subjectivity T h e im perial reach o f dom esticity extended not only to racially for­ eign subjects inside and outside the hom e, but also to the interiority o f fem ale subjectivity, the m ajor focus o f popular wom en’s fiction in the 1850s. W h ile critics such as G illian Brown, Richard Brodhead, and Nancy Arm strong have taught us how dom estic novels represent wom en as m odel bourgeois subjects, these novels also produced a radalized national subjectivity in contested international spaces.36 Un­ derstanding the im perial scope o f dom esticity and its relation to the foreign should help us map the broader international and national contexts in which unfold narratives o f fem ale developm ent that at first glance seem anchored in local dom estic spaces. These narratives con­ struct dom estic locations in com plex negotiation with the foreign. T o take a few well-known exam ples from the 1850s, Susan W arner’s The Wide Wide World sends its heroine to Scotland, while the w orld o f M aria Cummins’s The Lam plighter encompasses India, Cuba, the Am erican West, and Brazil. T h e geographic coordinates o f Uncle Tom’s Cabin ex­ tend to H aiti, Canada, and, most notably, Africa; in E.D.E.N. Southw orth’s The Hidden Hand, the resolution o f m ultiple dom estic plots in V irgin ia relies on the participation o f the male characters in the M exican-American War.37This rem apping involves m ore than seeing the ex­ ternal settings anew; it means turning inward to the privileged space o f the dom estic novel— the interiority o f the fem ale subject— to find traces o f foreignness that must be dom esticated o r expunged. T h e im­ perial struggle to control foreignness within "wom an’s sphere” shapes the representation o f fem ale subjectivity, the em pire o f the affections and the h ea rt Many dom estic novels open at physical thresholds— such as windows o r doorways— to problem atize the relation between interiors and exte­ riors. As we have seen in H ale’s Liberia, they introduce the sphere o f dom esticity as fragile and under siege. The Wide Wide World opens at a window, with the heroin e’s "thoughts traveling dream ily . . . perfectly regardless o f all but the m oving w orld without” (9 ). The Lam plighter starts at the stoop o f an unwholesome tenem ent, while The Hidden Hand opens with a view o f the ancestral mansion battered by tempestu­ ous winds. Unde Tom’s Cabin politicizes this boundary between inside and outside, where the slave trader violates the dom estic stability o f

44 . THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE the slave and the master. T h e plots o f these novels are propelled in part by the e ffo rt to reconstitute the dom estic sphere, both by enlarg­ ing its dom ain beyond the narrow definition o f fam ilial bloodlines and by purging it o f the foreign bodies this expansion incorporates. These novels explore the breakdown o f the boundaries between in­ ternal and external spaces, between the dom estic and the foreign , as they struggle to renegotiate them. This struggle takes place not only within the hom e but also within the “em pire o f the heart,” within the interior subjectivity o f the heroine. W here the dom estic novel turns inward into the private sphere o f fem ale subjectivity, we often find that subjectivity scripted by narratives o f nation and em pire. In con­ trast to its title, The Wide Wide World, fo r exam ple, presents a heroine who appears narrowly closeted in dom estic interiors. Jane Tom pkins has viewed Ellen M ontgom ery’s paradoxical achievem ent o f à fem ale self through Christian self-abnegation as the paradigm o f sentimental power, while Richard Brodhead has shown how the activity o f reading functions as a m ethod o f disciplining the bourgeois self.38 H e does not note, however, that E llen’s favorite book is Parson Weems’s Life o f Washington. In rereading and m em orizing this story, “whatever she had found in the leaves o f the book, she had certainly lost herself” (329). I f reading creates individual subjectivity, at the core o f the fe­ male self we find a national narrative about the fathering o f the na­ tion. Weems’s popular biography contributed to a shift in the repre­ sentation o f Washington: from a public statesman to a private man em bodying dom estic virtues, the hither o f his nation whom Weems portrayed as a loving son to his mother.39Thus E llen’s turn inward not only breaks down the boundary between separate spheres, but also in­ corporates the father o f the nation into the em pire o f the mother. Critics have debated whether the sentim ental heroine submits o r in­ directly rebels against patriarchal dictates o f wom an’s sphere. I am ar­ guing that E llen’s submissive and rebellious acts are both underwrit­ ten by im perial narratives. She escapes from confining dom estic labor, “seated on a little bench in the chim ney corner, when the fire blazed up well, before the candles were lighted. T o forget the kitchen and the supper and her bustling aunt and sail around the w orld with Captain C ook” (336). Reading about im perial adventures also sanctions the kind o f self-indulgence that defies the dictates o f domesticity, allowing her to read “like an epicure . . . she would be lost in her book, per­

Manifest Domesticity » 45 haps hunting the elephant in India o r figh ting N elson’s battles over again.” T h e m ore inward she turns and self-abnegating she becomes, the m ore expansive and adventurous her reading sphere. In the final test o f self-discipline, Ellen brings her reading into the world, where she reenacts the Am erican struggle fo r independence against the British Empire. She is forced to leave Am erica to live with her newly discovered Scottish relatives, who first tease her fo r being an Am erican “rebel,” “on e o f those who makes a saint o f G eorge Washing­ ton.” H er uncle then m ore seriously demands that she renounce her national identity and exchange her national patrim ony fo r her blood­ line: “Forget that you were Am erican, Ellen— you belong to me; your name is not M ontgom ery any m ore— it is Lindsay;— and I w ill not have you call m e ‘uncle’— I am your father, you are my own little daughter, and must do precisely as I tell you” (510). Ellen vows to obey, to submit to authority. Like the heroine o f a captivity narrative in reverse, where Scotland is the site o f the rem oval from hom e, she maintains her mem­ ories and affectionate ties to hom e while she submits to the foreign power around her. In this dialectic between submission and rebellion, Ellen’s achievem ent o f a Christianized fem inized self is scripted as an enactm ent o f national independence through the fem ale virtues o f self-sacrifice and submission rather than revolution. By submitting to a foreign yet fam ilial authority, she finally achieves a hom e in Am erica. It is w ell known that dom estic novels end with m arriage and the prom ise o f a future state o f dom estic bliss. In many dom estic novels written in antebellum Am erica, that m arriage has an incestuous qual­ ity as it often unifies the heroine with her adopted “brother,” usually a childhood playmate or m entor figure. In Wide Wide World, fo r exam­ ple, when Ellen com es o f age, she chooses fraternity— her allegiance to her Am erican “brother” John, over paternity— the authority o f her Scottish “father.” This symbolic incest p lot m ight be understood as a disavowal o f adult fem ale sexuality by representing m arriage as a return to childhood. In addition, this near incest has racial connota­ tions— it answers the question o f how to break with parental blood­ lines o f the O ld W orld, to create a new fam ily and nation, while keep­ ing that new fam ily untainted by racial interm ixing in the N ew W orld. This union between adopted brother and sister may enact the desire fo r a dom estic space in which the fam ily members are as alike as possi­ ble without violating the taboo o f incest. Yet i f the bloodlines o f Euro­

46 ‘ THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE pean aristocracy are rejected in the figu re o f the cruel despotic father, then the capaciousness o f the new adopted fraternal fam ilies can po­ tentially include anyone— the orphan, the half-breed, the savage. Mar­ riage with a symbolic brother counterbalances this promiscuous m o­ bility and keeps foreign bodies out o f the dom estic union.40 T h e w ider and m ore foreign the w orld is in the novel, the m ore ex­ cessive these near incestuous marriages. The Lamplighter, a popular re­ writing o f Wide Wide World, flirts with m ultiple incestuous relation­ ships. W hen the heroine, Gerty, meets her unknown father, everyone treats their relationship as a courtship. T h e old er sister figure, Emily, who adopts Gerty, is already the adopted sister o f her father and is re­ united with him at the end. Gerty, o f course, m arries her childhood playmate and "brother,” W illiam . T h e novel avoids father/daughter in­ cest by ending with a double m arriage between adopted brother and sister in two generations. The Lam plighter references a much w ider global geography than does W arner’s Wide Wide World to map the sepa­ rateness o f male and fem ale spheres in international dimensions, as the most im portant m ale characters spend most o f their lives traveling the globe. Gerty’s father, in despair at his violent separation from his adopted sister/lover, travels to Brazil, the Am erican West, and Asia, where he runs across W illiam in Calcutta, working fo r a N ew England firm . These male travel narratives are told indirectly and are subordi­ nated to the focus on wom en characters trying to maintain fragile d o­ mestic spaces at hom e. Indeed, Gerty’s m ajor stand against her des­ potic adopted father takes the form o f choosing to stay hom e to care fo r W illiam ’s ailing parents, rather than take her much anticipated op ­ portunity to travel to Havana with her wealthy adopted family. Although Cummins seems to reject and displace the m ale adven­ ture narrative with fem ale domesticity, a closer look shows m ore pro­ foundly how they are intertwined. W illiam ’s im perial enterprise in In­ dia is econom ically necessary to support his m other and to sustain the dom estic sphere in Am erica.41 Furtherm ore, dom esticity has the role o f protecting m en abroad from the allure and the threat o f for­ eign domains. W hen Gerty turns down the trip to Cuba, her guardian taunts her with the claim that W illiam has been seduced: "I dare say he’s m arried to an Indian.” Although no Indian, Cuban, o r Brazilian men o r wom en enter the novel, the threat o f these colonized spaces and foreign wom en m erges with that o f a decadent European aristoc­

Manifest Domesticity > 47 racy. Thus W illiam is tem pted not by the wom en o f India, where he spends eleven years, but by the glitter o f Parisian high society, where he spends a few weeks, and from which only the m em ory o f his m other saves him. T h e “em pire o f the m other” thus reaches beyond the grave to rescue m en from the foreign influence that may break their “ties which bound the exile to his native hom e.” H om e here refers both to fam ily and nation. W om en in The Lam plighter do not wait passively at hom e. I f m en must prove their masculinity and national allegiance by rem aining im­ mune to foreign influence, wom en have the work o f purging both themselves and their homes o f foreignness. In fret, the narrative o f dis­ ciplining the fem ale subject, so central to the dom estic novel, can be viewed as a kind o f civilizing process in which wom en play the roles o f both missionary and heathen. G erty first appears in the novel as a god­ less uncivilized street urchin, filled with rage and vengeance. Fem ale anger is often figured as darkness and savagery, an assault on dom es­ ticity and the civilized self. G erty literally breaks a window— the border between the hom e and the outside— with her rage. Emily vows to cure Gerty o f her “dark infirm ity,” which positions her as a little heathen whose “unruly nature” must be tamed (6 3 ). In a scene that recalls Sunday schoolbooks depicting pagan children, Gerty looks at a picture o f the young Samuel praying and asks, “why is he kneeling?” “what’s praying?” “who is god?” W e later find out that Gerty herself was born in a foreign clim ate to the daughter o f a ship captain in Brazil, sur­ rounded by disease, by the “inhospitable southern disease, which takes the stranger fo r its victim ” (321). T h e fragile dom estic bond between her parents could not withstand such a hostile foreign environm ent Thus G erty’s conversion into an exem plary Christian woman enacts a civilizing narrative wherein she must purge herself o f her origins in a dark, diseased, uncivilized terrain, and o f the savage fem ale anger as­ sociated with those foreign realms. This internalized split between the colonizer and colonized within a single heroine appears racially exter­ nalized in Unde Tom's Cabin on to Eva and Topsy.42 Fem inist approaches to Unde Tom's Cabin have shown how, fo r Stowe, the em pire o f the m other extended beyond the hom e into the national arena o f antislavery politics. This expansive m ovem ent o f fe­ m ale influence, I have been arguing, has an international dim ension that helps the separate gendered spheres coalesce in the im perial ex­

48 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE pansion o f the nation by redrawing dom estic borders against the for­ eign. Read in relation to H ale’s Liberia, Stowe’s delineation o f dom es­ tic space, as both fam ilial and national, can be seen as relying upon and forw arding the colonization o f A frica by the novel’s free black characters. Rather than just an afterthought at the end o f the novel, there is what Ton i M orrison calls an “Africanist presence” throughout the te x t43A frica appears as both an im perial outpost and a natural em ­ bodim ent o f wom an’s sphere, a kind o f fem inized utopia that is strate­ gically posed as an alternative to Haiti, which hovers as a m enacing im­ age o f black revolutionary agency. T h e idea o f African colonization does not simply em erge at the end as a racist failure o f Stowe’s politi­ cal im agination; rather, colonization underwrites the racial politics o f the dom estic im agination. T h e “Africanist presence” throughout Uncle Tom's Cabin is intim ately bound to the expansionist logic o f dom esticity itself. T h e extension o f wom an’s sphere to A frica through debates about slavery within the U nited States can be understood as part o f the im pe­ rial reach o f the ideology o f separate spheres, what I have been calling M anifest Domesticity. As noted in the beginning o f the chapter, de­ bates about westward expansion into the lands o f Native Am ericans and Mexicans were inseparable from conflicts about the spread o f slav­ ery and the future o f slaves and free blacks. These interconnections between outward national expansion and inward divisiveness both in­ form ed and m enaced the images o f the nation as hom e. These over­ lapping spheres o f M anifest Dom esticity converge in Southworth’s The Hidden Hand. Published on the verge o f the Civil War, the novel tells a tale about reconstituting dom esticity on a V irginia plantation during the Mexican-American War. T h e high-spirited and rebellious heroine o f the novel, Capitola Black, is constantly in need o f the dom estication she defies. H er guardian rescues her from the foreigner-ridden streets o f N ew York City, where she is disguised as a boy and raised by a mulatto woman. W hen she returns to Virginia, she continues to test his authority and the boundaries o f woman’s sphere through her adventurous esca­ pades and lack o f fem ale sensibility: she “abhorred sentim ent” (108). Toward the end o f the novel, the M exican-American War irrupts as a seem ing reinforcem ent o f the separate m ale/fem ale spheres, as all the m en g o o ff to war and the wom en rem ain at hom e. Transgressing

Manifest Domesticity • 49 those boundaries, Capitola rescues the traditional fem inine heroine o f the novel from a coerced m arriage by disguising herself as the bride; she thereby substitutes fem ale rebellion fo r acquiescence. A t the m o­ m ent she triumphantly reveals her identity and thwarts the wedding, Capitola’s real fiancé enters to tell her about the outbreak o f war with M exico. H e im m ediately announces his plan to enlist, as though he were determ ined to repossess the narrative o f rescue fo r the sphere o f m anhood. But the war at first has the effect o f fem inizing m en, fo r Southworth does not represent the m ajor con flict during the war as a m ilitary engagem ent with the enemy; instead, it is a form o f class war­ fare between Am erican men. T h e aristocratic villain, L e N oir, abetted by his working-class sergeant, gangs up on the aspiring middle-class private, Traverse, the most fem inized hero in the novel— and most connected to his mother. Southworth restages the war as a triumph o f dom estic values over L e Noir, him self a com posite figure o f the cor­ rupt O ld W orld aristocracy and degenerate Mexicans (and as his name obviously im plies, a figure o f blackness). Thus she turns a foreign war o f im perial conquest into a triumph o f fem inine dom estic values. Even though Southworth includes comments critical o f the U.S. m ilitary en­ gagem ent with M exico, the war intercedes as a deus ex machina that re­ constitutes the im perial dimensions o f domesticity. Meanwhile, on the hom e front, the m ock-heroic voice o f the narra­ tor keeps drawing our attention away from the battlefield to “our little dom estic heroin e,” Ma N apoleon in petticoats.” W hile the m en are away fighting on foreign territory, Capitola protects the integrity o f the hom e from threats o f the foreign that com e from within the interior o f the dom estic sphere and the em pire o f the h eart A ll along Capitola has been attracted to the b an d it Black Donald, the henchman fo r the villain, L e Noir. In one o f the final clim actic scenes, Black Donald sneaks into her bedroom to rape her. Capitola tries to dissuade him with an uncharacteristically lofty and sentim ental hom ily about the baseness o f his attem pted seduction as opposed to the manly courage she admires in him. W hen he does not yield to her m oral suasion, she reluctantly pulls a lever that opens a trapdoor on to a deep p it dug un­ der the house. She thereby protects the sanctity o f her own body and her private dom estic space and also expels that part o f her rebellious self identified with him (though she does help him escape from prison at the en d ).

50 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE T h e trapdoor at the foundation o f the hom e collapses the distinc­ tion between gendered spheres, as the heroine reenacts the founding story o f the original plantation in the conquest o f Indian lands. T h e colonial owner had tried to buy land from Indians, but they refused to sell. H e then built the pit and invited the obdurate Indian chiefs to the house under the guise o f a feast, at which he prom ptly dropped them into the p it and stole their land (6 7 ). W hile other Indians burned down the original house in revenge, the property rem ained in the hands o f the white owner, who built a new house over the p it that re­ m ained. It is striking that Capitola repeats that founding gesture o f im­ perial violence to protect the borders o f her dom estic em pire and the inviolability o f the fem ale body. W h ile the men are prom oting Mani­ fest Destiny in M exico in an on going narrative o f the conquest, the woman reproduces that narrative in the em pire o f the hom e. O n the threshold o f the Civil War, Southworth turned to the M exican-American War to expose and to expel the threat o f Indians and blacks as for­ eigners within the intim ate recesses o f wom an’s sphere. T h e pit expands m etaphorically beyond the literal foundation o f the dom estic estate in Southworth’s V irginia plantation; it represents the hidden foundation, the gaping h ole upon which the ideology o f mid­ dle-class dom esticity was constructed and reinforced. U nder the selfcontained orderly hom e lies the anarchy o f im perial conquest N ot a retreat from the masculine sphere o f em pire building, dom esticity both reenacts and conceals its origin in the violen t appropriation o f foreign land. Buried in the p it closely accessible to the dom estic space, ghosts from prior im perial encounters haunt the self-enclosed house­ hold o f the fam ily and the nation. “M anifest Dom esticity” turns an im­ perial nation into a hom e by producing and colonizin g specters o f the foreign that lurk inside and outside its ever-shifting borders.

CH A PT ER 2

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain

O ne o f the best-known moments o f Am erican literature occurs at the end o f The Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn, when Huck declares his in­ tention to “ligh t out fo r the T erritory ahead o f the rest” to escape from Aunt Sally and her plan to “adopt m e and sivilize m e.” In the context o f “M anifest Domesticity,” Huck appears as the savage child who revolts against the colonizin g impulse o f wom an’s sphere rather than internalize its discipline, and in eschewing domesticity, he join s the masculine arena o f territorial conquest. This fligh t from dom estic­ ity has been viewed in literary history as a hallmark o f Mark Twain’s writing; his rugged vernacular realism was seen to em erge from his rejection o f the sentim ental and gen teel w riting o f the dom estic tradi­ tion. H is rejection o f the dom estic sphere, m oreover, has character­ ized Twain as “dom estic” in another sense o f the word, that is, as a representative national author, an “Am erican” writer by virtue o f em­ bracing the fligh t from civilization to the freedom o f the unfettered wilderness. Though this particular paradigm o f the Am erican author has been amply debunked, Mark Twain has lon g been considered the quintes­ sential Am erican author, from W illiam Dean H ow ells’s nom ination o f him as “the Lincoln o f our Literature” to Jonathan Arac’s critical as­ sessment o f The Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn as a “hypercanonized” novel.1 Twain’s iconic stature has often relied on a paradigm o f dou­ bleness: homespun Southwestern vernacular versus the Eastern liter­ ary establishment; a pre-Civil War slave-holding culture versus post­

51

52 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE war N orthern com m ercial society; a white author drawing on African Am erican sources o f oral culture.2 In these critical paradigms, division itself characterizes Twain’s resonance as the author who em bodies the splits that constitute the nation. W hat this internal bifurcation omits, however, is that Twain’s career, writing, and reception as a national au­ thor were shaped by a third realm beyond national boundaries: the routes o f transnational travel, enabling and enabled by the changing borders o f im perial expansion. Twain wrote about an internally di­ vided Am erica in his most famous fiction o f the 1880s and 1890s only after w riting about Hawaii, Europe, and the N ear East; he wrote about travel on the Mississippi only after crossing the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. His famous "hom espun” qualities were thus woven from the tangled threads o f im perial travel. I propose that the national identity o f Mark Twain, his “Am ericanness,” was forged in an international context o f im perial expan­ sion. Twain is w ell known fo r his vocal opposition to U.S. annexation o f the Philippines in the last decade o f his life, when he turned his keen sense o f injustice at hom e to the violent oppression o f im perial conquest abroad.3 Yet his passage between the dom estic and the for­ eign was neither linear nor unidirectional, fo r he first engaged with the reality o f im perialism early in his career as a journalist traveling across the continent and abroad. I contend that his first overseas trip to Hawaii in 1866 had a form ative and lasting effect on Twain’s ca­ reer as a public lecturer and writer; that Hawaii in fact Am ericanized Mark Twain. In his im perial encounter with Hawaii, Twain honed the lenses— and blind spots— that he later turned on the legacy o f slavery and race relations within the U nited States. W hile Mark Twain’s status as a "national treasure” has been recently com plicated by réévaluations o f his am bivalence toward race in Am erica, it is equally im portant to understand how this national treasure was derived from international plunder. Rather than focus on Twain’s views o f U.S. im perialist actions abroad, the question here is how the anarchy o f em pire created an Am erican Mark Twain.

Imperialist Melancholia A t the beginning o f his last travel book, Follow ing the Equator (1897), Mark Twain tells a story about a young Am erican fam ily he m et in Ha­

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain « 53 waii in 1866. "They had am ong their belongings,” he writes, “an attrac­ tive litde son o f the age o f seven— attractive but not practically com­ panionable to me, because he knew no English. H e had played from his birth with the litde Kanakas on his father’s plantation, and had pre­ ferred their language and would learn no other.”4T h e fam ily soon left Hawaii fo r upstate N ew York, where the boy learned English: “by the tim e he was twelve he hadn’t a word o f Kanaka left; the language had wholly departed from his tongue and his com prehension.” W ith the swimming skills he learned as a child in Hawaii, the boy grew up to be­ com e a professional diver. W hen Twain visited the fam ily some years later, he found the twenty-one-year-old son bedridden from a recent underwater accident. H e had been investigating a sunken passenger boat that had just gone down in a storm, when something touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and found a dead man swaying and bobbing about him and seemingly inspecting him inquiringly. He was paralyzed with fright. His entry had disturbed the water, and now he discerned a number o f corpses making for him and wagging their heads and swaying their bodies like sleepy people trying to dance. His sense forsook him, and in that condition he was drawn to the surface. He was put to bed at home and was soon very ill. During some days he had seasons o f delirium which lasted several hours at a time; and while they lasted he talked Kanaka incessantly and glibly; and Kanaka only. (48-49) As in their first encounter in Hawaii, Twain did not understand a word the diver was saying to him, although he was intrigued by the return o f the forgotten Hawaiian tongue. Twain concludes his story by recom ­ m ending that doctors study cases like the diver’s “and find out how to m ultiply them. Many languages and things get mislaid in a person’s head, and stay mislaid fo r lack o f this rem edy” (4 9 ). T h e diver’s break­ down becom es at once an em blem o f and cure fo r forgetting. Although Twain and the young diver never interact in a com m on language, the story communicates an im age o f the treacherous routes o f memory. T h e diver’s jo b presumably was to retrieve the corpses fo r proper burial so that they could be m ourned and laid to rest Instead, his entry into the water rouses the corpses to cross the line between the living and the dead, as they beckon him to dance. This paralyzing encounter with the unburied dead rouses internalized corpses from

54 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE his own past, buried m em ories o f his original hom e and his m other tongue. For the diver these unassimilated traces o f traumatic loss break the surface o f the present, and his past returns to him as a for­ eign language that divides him from him self and others. Twain recounts this haunting story o f dancing corpses and mislaid languages just as he was about to revisit a form ative location from his own past: his six-month trip to Hawaii in 1866. Alm ost thirty years later, H onolulu was his first scheduled stop on the worldwide lecture tour he described in Follow ing the Equator. O n a ship anchored a m ile offshore, he eagerly anticipated a triumphant and nostalgic return to the islands he had toured as a journalist at the start o f his career. H e was shattered to find the p ort quarantined because o f an outbreak o f cholera, and “thus suddenly did my dream o f twenty-nine years g o to ruin” (4 6 ). In lieu o f his physical return to Hawaii, he dedicated a chapter o f Follow­ in g the Equator to revisiting m em ories o f his earlier encounter. Twain’s depiction o f his own m em ories contrasts m arkedly with the diver’s traumatic descent underwater. Lou nging on deck, Twain gazes longingly at the inaccessible shore and lets his thoughts float dream ily on the sea’s luminous surface. In contrast to the diver, gazed at and touched by dancing corpses, Twain must maintain his distance in tim e and space as a spectator; his m em ories appear as “an enchanting procession” o f the “pictures— pictures— pictures” that pass before his eyes. These pictures highlight scenes o f unchanging natural beauty, vi­ sions o f “Paradise” that m erge the present and the past by transcend­ ing historical time. Twain briefly acknowledges that in thirty years “change has com e” to the islands, but those changes are “political and not visible from the ship.” His nostalgic pictures contribute to the in­ visibility o f political change over tim e and keep him afloat on the sur­ face o f his m em ories. Yet the irresistible pressure o f change inevitably disrupts the calm surface as Twain im plicitly links his aborted return to Hawaii in 1895 to deeper historical movements that undercut his dreams o f paradise. W hile Twain was anchored offshore during the cholera epidem ic, H a­ waiian Q ueen Liliuokalani was im prisoned in a H onolulu ja il fo r lead­ ing the struggle to maintain the last traces o f Hawaiian sovereignty. Am erican residents would achieve their goal o f annexation three years later, in 1898. T h e epidem ic that prevented Twain’s entry into H on o­ lulu was only the latest outbreak o f devastating diseases inflicted on

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain « 55 Hawaiians by successive waves o f colonial incursions. Reviewing the history o f Hawaii in his chapter, Twain ends with statistics from cen­ suses that starkly record the decim ation o f the native population from the arrival o f Captain C ook in 1788 to the present H e specifically notes that in the tim e between his two visits the population was re­ duced by half. Disease and death thus im plicate Twain’s return to the islands as inseparable from this violen t lineage o f colonial encounters. Im m ediately after num erating the Hawaiian dead, Twain recounts the tale o f the diver, which evokes a deeper and m ore unsettling narra­ tive o f his first visit to Hawaii than do his enchanted pictures o f a tim e­ less paradise. Sugar brought both Twain and the young boy to Hawaii. T h e boy grew up on a sugar plantation at a tim e when the burgeon­ ing industry, dom inated by Am ericans, was radically transform ing the econom y and the social and political landscape o f the Hawaiian King­ dom . T h e boy’s childhood took place during the Am erican C ivil War, which opened vast new markets fo r Hawaiian sugar in the N orth and West when these regions were cut o ff from Southern producers. The Sacramento Union, a pow erful C alifornia newspaper, hired Twain im m e­ diately after the war to rep ort on the sugar industry fo r investors and consumers in California. H e wrote twenty-six letters to the newspaper that faithfully prom oted the sugar trade and U.S. econom ic and politi­ cal interests in Hawaii. T h e letters also catered to readers’ taste fo r the exotic in descriptions o f the landscape, people, and culture he saw in his travels across three o f the islands. T h e swaying corpses o f the diver’s tale recall Twain’s fascination in those letters with the hula, which he saw perform ed at a royal funeral fo r a Hawaiian princess and which intrigued him with the m erging o f dancing and death. Twain’s six-month trip provided him with his first sustained writing assignment and with the m aterial fo r his first highly successful lecture tour. Yet just as the boy could not sustain both languages simulta­ neously, Twain had trouble writing about his m em ories o f Hawaii to which he so often referred. H e planned to collect his Sacramento Union letters as a travel book but could not find a publisher. Instead, he tacked, on selections from the letters to the end o f R ough in glt (1872), a section which is less w ell realized than the rest o f the book and never fully incorporated into the Western fron tier narrative that precedes i t 5 In 1884, between writing The Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn and A Con­ necticut Yankee in K ing Arthur's Court, Twain worked on what he called

56 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE his "Sandwich Islands N ovel” but never com pleted i t Although he re­ ferred to Hawaii with increasing nostalgia in his later writing, this re­ peated return to a subject that so eluded him points to the unsettling presence, o r telling absence, o f Hawaii in his corpus, as a text that can­ not be written o r a forgotten language that m ight possess him only at the risk o f breakdown. In the story o f the diver Twain offers a compressed and poignant an­ alogue fo r his own career as a writer. As a young man, Twain was cut o ff from his original language in the slave-holding South by the Civil War, and soon after from his Southwestern vernacular by his m ove East and m arriage into a genteel N ew York family. As the diver’s encounter with dancing corpses reawakened his childhood language and led to his breakdown, Twain’s encounter with Hawaii in 1866 disinterred m em ories o f his own childhood in prewar Missouri. In his best-known fiction o f the 1880s and 1890s, Twain endured treacherous self-divi­ sions to dive into the pre-Civil W ar past and to stir up the shallow-bur­ ied and mislaid corpses o f slavery and the war. Furtherm ore, the story o f the diver would have resonated with Twain’s deep personal g rie f fo r the traumatic losses in his own family. In 1858, his brother H enry was killed in a steamboat explosion, an accident fo r which Twain blam ed him self, and which dramatically altered his relation to his m em ories o f Mississippi as profoundly as the Civil War would do. Alm ost forty years later, when he sat down to write Follow ing the Equator, his daughter Susy had just died o f m eningitis while he was on the last leg o f his world­ wide lecture tour that started at the p ort o f H onolulu. Twain wrote the story about the diver from Hawaii under the shadow o f enorm ous loss and unresolved grief, and these losses becam e linked in his imagina­ tion to the im perial site o f Hawaii. Twain’s recollections o f Hawaii m ight be understood as an expres­ sion o f what Renato Rosaldo has called "im perialist nostalgia,” the lon gin g to salvage an im agined pristine pre-colonial culture by the same agents o f em pire— missionaries, anthropologists, travel writers— who have had a hand in destroying i t 6 Im perialist nostalgia disavows the history o f violence that yokes the past to the present, as in Hank M organ’s lon gin g fo r the "Lost Land” o f Cam elot, which he destroys at the end o f Connecticut Yankee. Yet in Twain’s efforts to write about Ha­ waii, m em ories o f colonial violence erupted through his nostalgia, like dancing corpses tapping him on the shoulder. Twain expressed what

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain • 57 we m ight call "im perialist m elancholia,” a form o f blocked m ourning fo r both the victims o f im perial violence and the lost privileges o f im­ perial power, which fo r him were intertwined with the loss o f slavery. As m elancholia feeds on unresolved am bivalence toward the lost ob­ ject, Twain kept revisiting m em ories o f Hawaii he could never fully em­ brace and realize in his w riting o r relinquish and lay to rest in the his­ torical past. Like the diver, Twain was seized by the lost language o f colonial origins he could neither consciously rem em ber nor fo r g e t7 Twain's encounter with Hawaii represents a "m islaid” language that links im perialism abroad with slavery at hom e, a m em ory Twain bur­ ied and never fully assimilated when he came to write about Am erica as a nation. As he delved into his own past in his writing o f the postReconstruction era, the forgotten discourses o f em pire and emancipa­ tion threatened to shatter the coherence o f his national idiom , just as the boy needed to forget Hawaiian when he learned English. A t the same tim e, however, those forgotten languages also enabled that na­ tional idiom . Hawaii, fo r Mark Twain, becam e a site o f what Ernest Renan called the necessary forgettin g, which is a "crucial factor in the creation o f a nation.”8For Twain and his nation, it was necessary to for­ get the interconnections between slavery and im perialism — that is, to rem em ber to forget— in the re-creation o f Am erican national identity in the afterm ath o f the C ivil War.

The Sandwich Islands and the Americanization of Mark Itoaln M ost scholars agree with Twain’s own assessment o f his six-month trip to Hawaii in 1866 as a m ajor turning poin t in his career.9 A fter several years as a journalist and humorist in Nevada and C alifornia under his recently m inted pen name, he returned to San Francisco from H on o­ lulu to launch a new phase o f his career as public lecturer, and he spoke exclusively about his trip to the islands. Catapulting him into the national lim elight, his "Sandwich Islands Lecture” appealed to fu ll houses in C alifornia and Nevada, and Twain repeated it to break into the Eastern lyceum 'circuit in New York.10 Success there gave him ac­ cess to the highly publicized Quaker tour to Europe and the H oly Land, which becam e the basis fo r his first best-selling book, The In ­ nocents Abroad (1869). U pon returning from that trip with new lec­ ture m aterial, Twain continued to give his "Sandwich Islands Lecture,”

58 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE which he also revived fo r his im mensely popular tour to England in 1873. O n both sides o f the Atlantic, the press called upon him as an authority on the current crisis o f political accession to the throne in Hawaii and the possibility o f U.S. annexation. Thus Mark Twain made his well-known transition from the Western fron tier to Am erica’s East­ ern literary center and on to Europe by pursuing the less well-known course o f em pire in the Pacific. Twain refashioned him self from a re­ gional journalist to a national figure o f international renown by lectur­ ing about the islands he called “so far away from any place and in an out o f the way locality.”11 Yet Twain’s jou rn ey there belied its rem ote­ ness, as Hawaii put his name on the map at a tim e when the U nited States, turning outward after the C ivil War, was increasingly drawing Hawaii into its econom ic and political o rb it W hen Twain began lecturing in San Francisco, he found that “pub­ lic lectures were almost an unknown com m odity in the Pacific mar­ ket.”12 H e m arketed this new com m odity by turning the m aterial culled from the Sandwich Islands into a form o f cultural capital that could also sell his new public persona. By assuming authority about a “prim itive” people abroad, he contradicted his early reputation as an­ other kind o f “prim itive” at hom e. H e had gained that after the publi­ cation o f his first story in N ew York, the year before traveling to H on o­ lulu. A t that tim e the N ew York press hailed him as a budding celebrity, identifying him with his provincial subject m atter as a local exotic, a rough-hewn journalist, “the wild humorist o f the Pacific Slopes.”19 Twain com plained about this characterization in a letter to his m other and sisten *To think that after w riting many an article a man m ight be excused fo r thinking tolerably good, those N ew York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to com plim ent me on !— ’Jim Sm iley & his Jum ping Frog’— a squib which would never have been written but to please Artem us W ard.”14His postscript to that letter also expressed disappointm ent that he could not afford to accept an invita­ tion to travel to H onolulu on the inaugural trip o f the ocean steamer Ajax, along with “the cream o f the town— gentlem en & ladies both” (329). Travel abroad appeared to him as an opportunity to raise his class status and gain literary cach et H e pursued those goals a year later, finally m aking the trip to H onolulu on the Ajax. His strategy worked; on his return, newspapers consistently applauded his lecture debut in

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 69 San Francisco as superior even to the popular lectures o f Artemus Ward. They praised Twain’s delivery as m ore natural and unpolished with less straining fo r e ffe c t They also com m ended him fo r com bin­ ing hum or with edification and inform ation, fo r conveying first-hand knowledge o f the Sandwich Islands unavailable in books, calling him the “future historian” o f the islands. Given his reputation as a humor­ ist, reviewers were surprised and delighted by his “eloqu ent descrip­ tion o f the volcano o f Kilauea, a really m agnificent piece o f word paint­ ing.”19 A paper in his hom e state o f Missouri applauded him fo r trum ping the recent visit o f Emerson and other “literary magnates” by the way “he interested and amused a large and promiscuous audi­ ence.”16 Although Twain’s Am erican voice has lon g been identified with Southwestern vernacular, it is striking that he did not achieve this public speaking voice by tellin g tall tales in the tradition o f Ward. Rather, he displayed his homespun vernacular by m erging the colonial discourse o f the educated traveler with the “western character o f ludi­ crous exaggeration and audacious statem ent”17 Mark Twain becam e audible as an “authentic” Am erican voice w hile speaking as an author­ ity about those whom he called “O ur Fellow Savages.” Critics have lon g stressed the im portance o f Twain’s lecture style in developing his writing and his public persona, but none has linked this developm ent to the Hawaiian subject m atter o f his lectures. Randall K noper has recently analyzed his deadpan style as a m ode o f negotiat­ ing the increasing divisions o f gender, class, and race in the form ation o f middle-class taste. H is lectures could appeal to newly established conventions o f the respectable theater, often associated with a bour­ geois domesticity, while playfully evoking the specter o f m ale subcul­ tures from the “tavern and the minstrel hall.”18 These negotiations take place, I contend, through the routes o f im perial travel. By lectur­ ing about “savage” Hawaiians on stage, Twain could playfully cross the line between the civilized and uncivilized, perform in g both sides o f that divide. H e m erged the persona o f the rough-hewn frontiersm an with that o f the educated traveler through their shared difference from his nonwhite subjects. Twain’s lecture rendered native Hawaiians as both exotic and fam iliar in their unspoken resem blance to stereo­ types o f black slaves at hom e: “rich, dark brown, a kind o f black and tan. T h e tropical sun and easy goin g ways inherited from their ances­ tors have m ade them rather id le.”19 H e called the Hawaiians liars o f

60 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE “monstrous incredible” proportion, thereby curiously m irroring his own tall tales while distinguishing his own lies as self-conscious p erfor­ mance and ultim ately as purveyors o f truth (278). Twain’s lectures thus positioned him in an im plicitly racialized discourse o f national identity where he could perform as a civilized white Am erican by vir­ tue o f his travels am ong prim itive peoples. In his celebrated “word painting” o f the volcano o f Kilauea, Twain describes the eruption as a “carnival o f destruction,” a phrase that m ight be applied to his own treatm ent o f his subject m atter (281). H e turns the anarchy wreaked by colonialism into the carnivalesque, a w orld turned upside down where Hawaiians “do everything differently from other p eop le” (281). T h e hum or in Twain’s lectures erupts from the incongruous juxtapositions o f colonial encounters, in which he takes local history, customs, and culture out o f context and recasts them in an Am erican idiom . Twain’s double-edged hum or also desta­ bilizes the fam iliar ground o f those “other p eop le” by which the exotic Hawaiians are measured. T h e strange Hawaiian custom o f eating dogs becom es funny, fo r exam ple, when com pared to “otur cherished Am er­ ican sausage” (279). O n a darker note, Twain summarizes the enor­ mous num ber o f Hawaiian lives lost to diseases brought by white men, using the incongruous language o f econom ics: T o speak figuratively, they are retiring from business pretty fast” (277). Twain’s hum or also works to m ock his own civilized stance and to tease his audience with their colonial fantasies. H e parodies his listeners’ expectations o f find­ ing cannibals in the South Seas by claim ing that he only found one foreign cannibal with an office in H onolulu, and by offerin g to dem­ onstrate cannibalism with an infant volunteered from the audience (280). Using humor, Twain titillated his audience with his backwoods bawdiness, yet reassured them with his worldly knowledge. In 1867 a young Welsh im migrant, H en ry M orton Stanley, enthusias­ tically covered Mark Twain’s St. Louis lecture on the Sandwich Islands as a reporter fo r the Daily M issouri Democrat. Twain was less enthusiastic about the fact that Stanley printed the lecture nearly verbatim and thus deprived the lecturer o f the value o f repeating i t T h e two, how­ ever, would becom e good friends and m eet five years later in London, where each arrived to great fanfare, Twain fo r his exotic Am erican hum or and Stanley fo r his dauntless expedition to A frica fo r the New York Herald. Years later Twain introduced Stanley on a lecture tour in

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 61 Boston, with praise fo r his ‘In trep id Am ericanism ,” as a “product o f in­ stitutions that exist in no other country on earth.” T h e name H enry Stanley may be as synonymous with European im perialism in A frica as is Mark Twain’s with Am erica. But the two first crossed paths neither in England nor the C ongo, but right near the Mississippi, where Twain lectured about his trip to Hawaii.10 In d ifferen t ways, they each built their national and international reputations by traveling in m ultiple directions on the transnational routes o f em pire. Both clim bed the so­ cial scale to becom e famous white m en and national heroes by lectur­ in g and writing about their exploits am ong nonwhite peoples. I f his trip to Hawaii helped Am ericanize Mark Twain, it also introduced him into an international circle o f other travelers and writers, who were serving and selling the rapidly expanding em pires to their audiences at hom e.11

Dancing Corpses I f Twain could confidently package the Sandwich Islands fo r the lec­ ture platform , writing about the islands during his travels proved less m anageable and m ore unsettling. The Sacramento Union hired him with clearly defin ed goals to prom ote C alifornia’s econom ic interest in the grow ing sugar industry and to m arket the islands as accessible to Am erican travel and business and equally available to popular knowl­ edge and fantasy. O n the one hand, Twain enthusiastically pursued this task to o ffe r representations o f Hawaii as palatable as the sugar that was shipped to mainland ports. O n the other, the letters ex­ pressed am bivalence and irony toward his own participation in the im­ perial p ro ject His representations o f the colonial violence o f the past and the present overflow and destabilize the fram ework that under­ wrote his travels. H is letters from Hawaii reveal how his position as traveler and journalist becam e inextricably enm eshed in the “carnival o f destruction,” which his lectures may have safely contained in the fram e o f a “word painting.” In both public and private venues, Twain used im perial metaphors to refer to his writing about Hawaii. O n the eve o f his departure, he wrote to his m other and sister that he was headed to “ransack the is­ lands, the great cataracts & the volcanoes com pletely, & write twenty or thirty letters to the Sacramento Union— fo r which they pay m e as much

62 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m oney as I would get i f I staid at hom e.”22 H e here equates travel writ* ing with lootin g— o f questionable econom ic p rofit— a them e he would develop in the im age o f the “Am erican Vandal,” the title o f a lecture based on his travels fo r The Innocents Abroad.** R ight before leaving H o­ nolulu he wrote to a frien d there to apologize fo r stealing a copy o f James Jarves’s History o f the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands: “I ‘cabbage’ it by the strong arm, fo r fear you m ight refuse to part with it i f I asked y o u . . . T h e honesty o f the transaction may be doubtful, but the policy o f it is sound— sound as the foundation upon which the im perial greatness o f Am erica rests.”24Twain ironically renders Am erican im pe­ rialism as the theft o f both land and history and positions his own writ­ ing within that display o f power. In his published letters he quotes extensively from Jarves, a w riter from Boston, and uses his book as an authoritative guide to Hawaiian history, which Jarves renders as a narrative o f redem ption from ancient savagery and feudal cruelty to an enlightened Christian civilization. W hile Twain both parodies and praises missionary work throughout his letters, upon his return to San Francisco he referred to him self irreverently as “S t Mark, Missionary to the Sandwich Islands” in publicity fo r his lecture tour.25I f these pub­ lic references playfully identified him with the m ajor im perial agents in Hawaiian colonial history, in his jou rn al on the way there he made a m ore om inous connection between his trip and prior histories. W hen he fe ll sick on his voyage, he wrote: “I suppose I am to take a new dis­ ease to the Islands 8c depopulate them , as all white men have done heretofore.”26T h e metaphors o f pillage, strong-arming, and depopula­ tion powerfully script Twain’s jou rn ey through prior narratives o f vio­ lent colonial encounters. Twain’s ambivalence about his role in this script surfaces in his let­ ters, which show him trying to dissociate his position as a traveler and w riter from these overt assertions o f im perial force. In one o f his first encounters in H onolulu with a resident not identified as either native o r foreign , he goes to great length to explain that he is not a mission­ ary, a whaler, a governm ent official, o r a navy officer but instead “only a private personage— an unassuming stranger— lately arrived from Am erica.”27 Distinguishing him self from these entrenched roles o f co­ lonial governance, Twain is w elcom ed lavishly by on e resident as noble and unthreatening. Twain then characteristically debunks his own as­

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 63 sumption o f Am erican innocence by concluding, “I then took what small change he had and 'shoved'” (4 3 ). T o understand the representation o f cross-cultural encounters, it is im portant to analyze the process o f travel itself—the poin t o f depar­ ture and the experience o f transit— as m aterial and symbolic practices that m ediate the contact between cultures.28Twain’s perception o f H a­ waii was fram ed by his voyage out, which had the purpose o f reporting on the new steamship service between H onolulu and San Francisco. Like his m ore celebrated trip to Europe and the H oly Land on on e o f the first organized middle-class tours, his writing from Hawaii did not only report on a foreign land, but also advertised a new form o f travel. His first letters from the ship described in laudatory details the speed, efficiency, power, and com fort o f the steamship Ajax. Twain also advo­ cated governm ent subsidies fo r an extensive steamship line that would make Hawaii m ore im m ediately accessible to Am erican business and link it to w ider trading networks across the Pacific to China. Steamship technology, he argued, would make it possible to “populate the islands with Am ericans and loosen French and English grip ” (1 2 ). By rendering Am ericanization as liberation from the stranglehold o f O ld W orld em pires, Twain represented Hawaii as a passive arena and lucrative reward fo r the contest between Am erican and European pow­ ers in the Pacific. O n board ship, fo r exam ple, he underm ines the ex­ pectations made by a young man reared on European discovery nar­ ratives by criticizing Balboa, "that infatuated old ass,” fo r misnaming the ocean "Pacific” and "christening this sleeping boy-baby by a g irl’s nam e” (1 1 ). Against this effem inate misnaming, Twain proposes the m ore virile names "W ild ” and "Untam ed,” in the im age o f the Am eri­ can frontier. Masculine renam ing reflects Twain’s e ffo rt to clear a space fo r him self as an Am erican w riter against prior European narra­ tives. I f he represents European colonialism as a form o f maternalism that fem inizes its conquests, Am erican paternalism, by contrast, prom ­ ises to awaken the "sleeping boy-baby,” and bestow masculinity on the inhabitants o f the Pacific. A t the tim e o f Twain’s trip, Hawaiian leaders had lon g been playing o ff the interests o f im perial nations against one another in order to preserve a measure o f autonomy. Throughout his letters, however, Twain characterizes Hawaiian opposition to increas­ in g Am erican control as the result only o f British o r French manipula-

64 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE tion. Thus in advocating Am erica's masculine liberation o f Hawaii from Europe, Twain contributes m etaphorically to depopulating Ha­ waii and clearing space fo r repopulating the islands with Americans. H is representation o f a dyadic contest between a masculine Am erica and fem inized Europe has the effect o f voiding Hawaiian actors as agents in their own history. As much as Twain distances his Am erican jou rn ey from European narratives, he structures his scene o f arrival through a well-known myth o f origins: the first colonial contact between Captain C ook and the Hawaiians. W hen Twain’s ship enters the p ort o f H onolulu on a Sunday, he hears the peal o f church bells over lands "which were p eo­ pled by naked, savage, thundering barbarians only fifty years agol Six Christian Churches within five m iles o f the ruins o f a pagan tem ple, where human sacrifices were daily offered up to hideous idols in the last century! We were within pistol shot o f on e o f a group o f islands whose ferocious inhabitants closed in upon the doom ed and help­ less Captain Cook and m urdered him, eighty-seven years ago; and lo! their descendants were at church! Behold what the missionaries have w rought!” (2 7 ). Twain frames his first glim pse o f Hawaii through a well-worn grid that divides ancient savagery from Christian civiliza­ tion, but his hyperbolic language describing the profusion o f churches points to the unstable ground on which this hierarchy is b u ilt W hen Twain disembarks from the ship, he feels disoriented walking on "solid ground”: "it was unpleasant to lean unconsciously to an antic­ ipated lurch o f the w orld and fin d that the w orld did not lurch, as it should have don e” (2 9 ). In this com ic reversal, being at sea feels m ore com fortable than walking on land, because the foreign terrain o f Ha­ waii does not "lurch” in ways that fu lfill his unconscious expectations. Instead, its continually shifting ground unsettles the fram ework he brings with him. M ore than just a description o f sea legs, Twain’s walk through the city dislodges the conceptual solid ground he could main­ tain at sea. T h e binary grids o f colonial discourse he brought with him im m ediately break down as he makes his way, with a profound sense o f dislocation, through a "m ixed crowd” (2 6 ). Instead o f viewing clear de­ marcations between savage and civilized, Am erican and European, fem inine and masculine, he finds him self jostled by m en and wom en o f m ixed races and m ultiple nationalities in d ifferen t sorts o f dress, styles o f com portm ent, and deference, representing a com plex class

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain « 68 system illegib le to Twain’s preconceptions o f racial and gendered cate­ gories. This them e o f physical discom fort and m ental disorientation recurs throughout his travels whenever he com es into closer proxim ity with the people and the land, whether ridin g horses o r sleeping on small boats packed with native travelers. W hen he first leases a horse to see m ore o f the island, fo r exam ple, he returns with blistering saddle b oil and blames his uncom fortable ride on the “shrewd Kanakas” who sell crippled and unusable horses to white tourists (4 8 ). This stereotype o f the conniving native inadvertently acknowledges the traveler’s foreign* ness and vulnerability, and his dependence on native knowledge and resources to gain access to the landscape. Even Twain’s innocent hag­ glin g over hiring a horse takes place within the colonial struggle over the possession and dispossession o f the land. T h e sense o f dislocation Twain conveys in his letters may stem not from his perception o f the uncivilized and exotic qualities o f Hawaii, but from his unexpected recognition o f its m odern and cosm opolitan qualities that seem ed uncom fortably close to hom e. Rather than sav­ age heathens in a tropical paradise, Twain found a struggling inde­ pendent nation in the midst o f profound political turbulence and so­ cial change. T h e developm ent o f capitalist plantations, which replaced a form erly lucrative whaling trade with a new sugar-based economy, was in the process o f transform ing the social landscape o f Hawaii. Its dem ography was also changing dramatically through devastating dis­ eases, im m igration o f white settlers, and the im portation o f contract labor from China to work on the plantations. O nly twenty years before Twain’s visit, the Hawaiian land, which had been held fo r generations by the King and chiefs, was legally transform ed into private property. T h e “Great M ahele”— the division o f land, allowed foreigners to own land fo r the first tim e. Am erican missionaries as w ell as businessmen encouraged this “land reform ” on the grounds that it would teach the com m on people the values o f work and private property and alter tra­ ditional kinship relations and sexual practices under a new regim e o f domesticity. W hile the Great M ahele only led to greater dispossession o f the Hawaiian people, it had a m ore successful effect on the mission­ ary fam ilies, whose children amassed huge plots o f land and led the way in establishing the plantation system. Politically, the Kingdom o f Hawaii in the 1860s was also in upheaval.

66 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE In a constitutional m onarchy that included foreign residents and na­ tive Hawaiians in its legislature, Am erican settlers were figh ting fo r universal suffrage in a stronger constitution, which would give them even greater control over the governm ent and enable closer ties to the U nited States. T h e Hawaiian monarchy was struggling to center power in its own sovereignty rather than the constitution. T h e monarchy at that tim e sought closer alliances with a British religious and political presence on the island to distance Hawaii from Am erican missionary control and fend o ff the threat o f annexation.29 T h e same year Twain arrived in H onolulu on the Ajax, Hawaiians protested the presence o f an Am erican man-of-war assigned to the harbor o f H onolulu “fo r an indefinite period o f tim e” and com m anded by a well-known advocate o f annexation.90 Thus as Twain traveled through Hawaii, he crossed an unsettling terrain that refused to “lurch” to his preconceived rhythms. His letters jock ey back and forth between registering jolts o f dislocation and seek­ ing strategies to relocate him on solid ground. Searching fo r spaces outside the turbulence o f the political present, Twain repeatedly turns his gaze on Hawaiian wom en and on funeral rites and burial sites, as if sex and death could anchor him in a reality untouched by the very so­ cial transformations that brought him to Hawaii. Throughout his let­ ters, Twain curiously associates native wom en with death and repre­ sents their sexuality as em bodying remnants o f a dying ancient culture that occasionally comes alive again. I w ill argue that he turns both the bodies o f native wom en and the remains o f the dead into exotic sites fo r the projection o f colonial desire, sites apparently frozen in tim e and divorced from the historical struggles over colonization in which his jou rn ey is enmeshed. Twain’s eroticization o f Hawaii renders colo­ nial desire as a kind o f necrophilia. In constructing these timeless ex­ otic spaces, however, Twain’s letters also expose them as tense arenas fo r political con flict and struggles over the production o f meaning. In a com m onplace colonial trope, Twain voyeuristically focuses on the eroticized fem ale body in various degrees o f nudity: native women bathing “promiscuously with the opposite sex,” dancing the “lascivious hula,” ridin g bareback through the streets both underdressed and over-perfum ed with oils and flowers. Twain reproduces two related ste­ reotypes, drawn from colonial discourse o f missionaries and travelers in the Pacific, that linked Hawaiian wom en with a pre-Christian uncivi­

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 67 lized past W om en becom e the yardsticks fo r measuring the barbarism o f traditional Hawaiian society and the ancient system o f “tabu.” In his lecture Twain claim ed that “away down at the bottom o f this p ile o f tyr­ anny and superstition, came the wom en, and they were abject slaves o f all; they were degraded to the level o f beasts, and thought to be no better” (238). Related to this social degradation was the stereotype o f Hawaiian wom en as excessively sexual, dem onstrated by their actively taking m ultiple sexual partners and their apparent disregard o f mar­ riage and domesticity. Missionaries blam ed unrestrained fem ale sexu­ ality fo r spreading the venereal disease brought by sailors and traders, and they held wom en responsible fo r the decline o f the population, claim ing that in their native licentiousness wom en abjured their ma­ ternal duties to bear and raise children.91 In this discourse, w om en’s uncivilized sexuality becom es the source o f disease and death, and the spread o f disease by civilizing forces is projected on to the native fe ­ male body. O ne o f Twain’s letters suggests how the control o f fem ale sexuality is central to the colonial regim e. T h e w riter contrasts the current mar­ ket days in H onolulu with a grand gala day o f the past, when “white folks had to stay indoors” as Hawaiians from all over the countryside thronged into the city. T h e day’s festivities culm inated with “the lascivi­ ous hula-hula,” perform ed by a “circle o f girls with no raim ent upon them to speak o f” (7 0 ). H e notes that “this weekly stampede o f the natives interfered too much with labor and the interests o f the white folks, and by sticking in a law here, and preaching a sermon th e re . . . they gradually broke it up.” T h e dem oralizing hula-hula “was forbid­ den to be perform ed, save at night, with closed doors, in presence o f few spectators, and only by perm ission duly procured from the author­ ities and the payment o f ten dollars fo r the same” (7 1 ). T h e hula changes venue from a public practice o f Hawaiian culture to a con­ fined spectacle regulated by business, religion , and law. In his charac­ terization o f the hula as lascivious and dem oralizing, Twain adopts the missionary narrative o f the civilizing process, but also reveals the way that narrative is intertwined with the needs o f business and colonial­ ism to regulate the m ovem ent o f bodies and labor. In the figu re o f Hawaiian wom en Twain may have expected to fin d a com forting exoticism , but instead was disturbed by discom fiting ex­ cess. H e could not simply position wom en at bottom o f the social hier-

68 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE archy, because he learned that they w ielded form idable political pow er in the monarchy, chiefdom , and Protestant church, and that they were active agents in breaking the system o f tabus.32 Yet he continually tries to relegate them to the sphere o f the erotic and the dying past In his lectures we can hear echoes o f this past, when he jok es about a planta­ tion where a w orker claim ed to have a plethora o f m others and there­ fo re d id not com e to work regularly because he had to attend all their funerals.53 T h e excess o f mothers, even in their graves, works against incorporating Hawaiian m en into the plantation system. Yet who has the last laugh? In Tw ain’s jo k e, dead m others— real o r otherwise— have an authority that contests that o f the plantation overseer. Throughout his travels Twain was obsessed with death and its traces, as though death were a signature o f Hawaiian culture. H e attributed to Hawaiians a special intimacy with death, repeating often that they would just decide to d ie and d o so, as though the peop le as a whole had w illed their own dem ise. As a tourist, Twain collected bones scat­ tered through the landscape, explored ancient burial sites where he im agined human sacrifices, and searched fo r the exact location where Captain C ook was eaten. This obsession both exposes and disavows the colonial violence that linked the history o f conquest to the present o f his own journey. In a trip in the countryside with other Am erican tourists, Twain par­ odies their activity o f collecting bones: Presently we came to a place where no grass grew—a wide expanse o f deep sand. They said it was an old battleground. A ll around every­ where, not three feet apart, the bleached bones o f men gleamed white in the m oonlight We picked up a lot o f them for mementos. I got quite a number o f arm bones and leg bones— o f great chiefs, maybe, who had fought savagely in that fearful batde in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood.. . . All sorts o f bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said, irreverently, that there had been an unusual number o f “skull hunters” there lately. . . . A gendeman said: “Give me some o f your bones, Miss Blank; I ’ll carry them for you.” . . . “Mr. Brown, will you please hold some o f my bones for me a min­ ute?” And, “Mr. Smith, you have got some o f my bones; and you have got one too, Mr. Jones; and you have got my spine, Mr. Twain. Now

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain * 69 don’t any o f you gendeman get my bones all mixed up with yours so that you can’t tell them apart” (59-60) This has a macabre and promiscuous quality: promiscuous in the obvi­ ous sense o f sexual innuendo, where bones o f native chiefs serve as the m eeting ground fo r the bodies o f white m en and wom en. But also pro­ miscuous in the sense o f dissolving boundaries that collecting is m eant to maintain, turning the Am erican tourists into cannibals and head­ hunters. Twain concludes that “nothing whatever is known about this place — its story is a secret that w ill never be revealed” (6 0 ). Yet he still tries to excavate that history and finds m ultiple interpretations from d iffer­ ent sources: the legends o f the “oldest natives” who have seen the bones there since th eir childhood; his historian guide Jarves, who writes about native warfare; a source that suggests the bones may be a mass burial from a terrible epidem ic o f 1804. Twain leaves the site without an explanation, overw helm ed by the sheer am ount o f unbur­ ied bones, as he rode “considerable distance over ground so thickly strewn with human bones that the horses’ fe et crushed them , n ot occa­ sionally, but at every step” (6 2 ). C ollecting the bones as souvenirs may be a way o f m aking the traveler com fortable on these violen t grounds, by divorcing these remains from their historical context and mak­ in g them instead evidence o f the traveler’s presence when he returns hom e. T h e collection o f bones, specimens, talismans, o r souvenirs does not simply com m em orate o r refer to a known place o r historical event; rather, collections manufacture their own referen ce as a way o f m aking tourists at hom e by both representing and disavowing the co­ lon ial violence that links the history o f conquest to the present jo u r­ ney. Tw ain’s obsession with relics turns the com plexity o f the historical present into a m ere overlay o f a deeper dead past by rendering what appears as authentic native culture as necessarily dead o r dying. A highlight o f Twain’s trip to Hawaii was the royal funeral fo r Prin­ cess V ictoria Kamamalu, which fascinated him and which he repre­ sented as an event where loss and sexuality m erged. Although Twain was in H onolulu only toward the end o f the four-week m ourning pe­ riod during which her body lay in state, he filled three letters with ac­ counts o f the cerem onies (th e only other subjects to which he gave

70 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE so much attention were sugar and the shipwreck o f an Am erican ves­ sel). Sister o f the current K ing Kam eham eha V, and the last fem ale de­ scendent o f K ing Kam eham eha I, Princess V ictoria would have been h eir apparent to the throne when she d ied at the young age o f 27. H er death represented the end o f an era o f a royal lineage that had founded the Hawaiian Kingdom , and her youth evoked the hundreds o f thousands o f prem ature deaths to disease am ong all classes. Follow ­ in g the early death o f her brother K ing Kam eham eha IV three years before, Princess V ictoria’s funeral would have been an overdeter­ m ined occasion fo r m ourning in Hawaii, fo r her as a popular leader, fo r the link she represented between the past and the continuity o f a Hawaiian future, and fo r countless oth er deaths. Twain, in contrast, saw the funeral as an opportunity to escape from the present into a "Glim pse o f the H eathen Ages” (164). H is letters repeatedly referred to the funeral rites as a “funeral orgy,” a "wild scene” where "un­ bounded license prevailed.” H is w riting transform ed unbounded ex­ pressions o f g rie f into enticing spectacles o f sexual excess, as he looked forw ard to seeing the "forbidden hula,” on e part o f the Hawai­ ian m ourning ritual, which in his eyes served as a m etonym y fo r native sexuality.94 Twain was disappointed at first, however, to fin d that access to the site and sight o f m ourning had becom e the grounds fo r political ten­ sion. T h e K ing restricted foreign ers from entering the palace gates un­ til the last night, at the same tim e that he gave unrestricted entry to crowds o f native Hawaiians traveling from all over the islands. Twain com plained that all "this tim e we strangers have been consumed with curiosity to look within those walls and see the pagan deviltry that was goin g on there. But the thing was tabu (forb idd en — we get our w ord "taboo” from the Hawaiian languages) to foreigners— haoles” (161). O nly when barred from access to Hawaiian space was Twain com pelled to translate the w ord "haoles,” thereby designating him self as "foreign ” through the Hawaiian language and its influence on English. T h e po­ litical contest over access to cultural space and to the position o f insid­ ers was tied to the con trol o f representation. W hen Kamehameha IV d ied three years earlier, the new King did invite foreign spectators on to the palace grounds. T h ey used the occasion both to satisfy their scopic desire and then to deride the im m orality o f Hawaiian religious customs in the press and from the p u lp it As Twain notes, "the p erfor­

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 71 mances at the palace at the tim e the corpse o f the late K ing lay there in state were criticized and com m ented upon too freely” by “scribblers like m yself” (127). This struggle over seeing and representing m ourning continues throughout the letters. Locked out o f the palace grounds, Twain goes to look at the coffin bein g built and raves about its w ood and elegant craftsmanship: “It produces a sort o f ecstasy in m e to look at it, and it holds m e like a m esm eric fascination” (128). O nly w hile gazing at the unfinished walls o f the coffin does Twain unabashedly expresses his own desire to look at the dead and the bereaved. H e expresses a rapturous sense o f his own unboundedness, as though the bounded em pty space o f the coffin could safely contain him. W hen he witnesses, in contrast, Hawaiian p eop le m ourning through chants, dances, vigils, cries, and prayers, his feelin gs shift between the poles o f attraction and repulsion. W hen Twain is allowed to see the last night o f funeral rites along with a few privileged haoles, his vision is both con fin ed and protected by his assignment to a space from a verandah overlookin g the palace grounds. O n the on e hand, this placem ent positions them as outsiders, as an audience in a theater balcony. O n the other, they can im agine the rituals p erform ed fo r their own pleasure, as they safely survey the crowd below. For Twain the anticipated highlight o f the cerem ony is the “famous hula-hula we had heard so much about and so lon ged to see— the las­ civious dance that was w ont to set the passions o f m en ablaze in the old heathen days, a century ago.” H is expectation o f an erotic display seems close to fu lfillm en t when about thirty buxom young Kanaka women, gaily attired . . . formed themselves into half a dozen rows o f five or six in a row, shook the reefs out o f their skirts, tightened their girdles and began the most un­ earthly caterwauling that was ever heard, perhaps; the noise had a marked and regular time to it however, and they kept strict time to it with writhing bodies; with heads and hands thrust out to the left; then to the right; then a step forward, and the right hands all projected si­ multaneously forward, and the right hands placed on the hips; then the same repeated with a change o f hands; then a mingling together o f the performers— quicker time, faster and more violently excited mo­ tions more and more complicated gestures— (the words o f their fierce

72 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE chants meantime treating in broadest terms, and in detail, o f things which may be vaguely hinted at in respectable newspaper, but not dis­ tinctly mentioned)— then a convulsive writhing o f the person, contin­ ued for a few moments and ending in a sudden stop and a grand cater­ waul in chorus. (168) Twain tries to contain the hula in the fram e o f an erotic spectacle w hile the sights and sounds overflow and unsettle that framework. W hat he hears as noise becom es an unexpected rhythm, and he watches m ovements that are not m eant to rouse "passions” o f the for­ eign m ale spectator. T h e wom en instead are attuned to on e another, "m ingling togeth er” in unison as a collective body. Instead o f a line o f buxom showgirls, passive objects o f display, the wom en m ove violendy and chant fiercely, and their hula actively creates m eanings that Twain cannot understand. W hen he cannot com prehend their "com plicated gestures” from within his vantage on the verandah, he tries to control their m eaning by translating it into the sexual innuendo o f the "re­ spectable newspaper.” T h e hula seems to arouse and then thwart his erotic anticipation by producing a bodily excess o f sight and sounds that seem m ore sinister than enticing. Twain im m ediately distances him self from the scene he "so longs to see”— but watches with such discom fort— by launching into a diatribe against the Anglican L ord Bishop Staley fo r resurrecting these "hea­ then orgies.” Since Twain represents his own desire as a regressive glim pse into ancient rites, he seems unsettled by the active agency o f the m ourners and th eir production o f m eanings in the im m ediate p resen t H e displaces his own am bivalent feelin gs o f desire and fear on to excoriation o f the white man whom he blames fo r sponsoring these rituals as "a sort o f master o f cerem onies”: It is reported that the King has said: "The foreigners like their reli­ gion— let them enjoy i t and freely. But the religion o f my fathers is good enough for me.” Now that is righ t A t least I think so. And I have no fault to find with the natives for the lingering love they feel for their ancient custom. But I do find fault with Bishop Staley for reviving those customs o f a barbarous age at a time when they had long been aban­ doned and were being forgotten—when one more generation o f faith­ ful adherence to the teaching o f the American missionaries would have buried them forever and made them memories o f the past— things to

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain • 73 be talked o f and wondered at, like the old laws that made it death for a plebeian to stand erect in the presence o f his King, or for a man to speak to his wife on tabu day—but never imitated. (169) By positioning the Bishop as the master puppeteer, Twain disavows the purpose o f those Hawaiians in the present; they solicited the support o f the British church with its m ore lenient view o f Hawaiian tradition, as a part o f a com plex struggle against Am erican missionary dom i­ nance o f religious and cultural life. Twain also cannot acknowledge the hybrid nature o f these rituals, which would have com bined ele­ ments o f traditional Hawaiian religion with Am erican Calvinism and practices o f the British high church. By excoriating Bishop Staley fo r reviving ancient rites, Twain thereby tries to reinscribe the Hawaiian present as a m ere echo o f a dying past H e represents the Hawaiian in­ terest in traditional religion as a harmless and natural recidivism , a lin­ gerin g affection fo r quaint outdated customs. T o the bishop, in con­ trast, he attributes active political agency working to underm ine the progress o f the Am erican missionaries. By using the fram e o f the na­ tionalist struggle o f the U nited States against Europe, pre-colonial Ha­ waii disappears into a m irror o f tyrannical European m onarchies. Ha­ waiians in the present are rendered only capable o f im itating their own past As in the scene o f the hula, the overw helm ing im pression Twain conveys o f the funeral is o f the pow erful sounds o f m ourning perm eat­ in g the streets o f H onolulu. H e expresses irritation at the "nightly wail­ in g” perform ed by "a m ultitude o f com m on natives [w h o] howl and wail and w eep and chant the dreary funeral songs o f ancient Hawaii” (160). These sounds o f g rie f overflow and dissolve the boundaries o f the visual spectacle he expects to enjoy. Just as he tries to reduce the physical expressions o f m ourning to excessive sexuality, he renders the music o f m ourning as sublingual noise-making, referrin g to the sounds as "caterwauls,” as "harrow ing,” “extravagant lam entations,” "dismal howls,” and "distressing noises.” Throughout his trip Twain was puzzled by the Hawaiian expression o f em otion: "they w ept and chanted their distressing songs and wailed their agonizing wails; fo r jo y at the return o f a loved on e and sorrow at his death are expressed in precisely the same way with this curious p eop le” (126). This am biguity fo r Twain deconstructs the binary oppositions that construct m eaning

74 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE in his cultural grammar. Twain could only interpret these sounds as the meaninglessness o r incom prehensibility o f Hawaiian culture. Yet the unassimilated sounds o f m ourning resonate through his letters to suggest m eanings that exceed his own understanding o r capacity fo r translation. D uring the final funeral procession, Twain seems to regain solid ground as a spectator who can parody the ornate pageant o f social rankings. Yet there too the wails o f m ourning disrupt his parody: “T h e slow and measured tread o f the m arching squadrons; the m ournful music o f the bands; the chanting o f the virtues o f the dead and the w arrior deeds o f her ancestors, by a gray and venerable woman here and there; the w ild wail that rang out at times from some bereaved on e to whom the occasion brought back the spirit o f the buried past— these com pleted the effect* (179). T h e “wild wail* disrupts Tw ain’s de­ sire to gaze at the procession fo r its visual effects. T h e sounds disinter “the spirit o f the buried past* while m ourning in the present opens a conduit to innum erable past losses o f colonization. A t the arrival o f the procession to the mausoleum, Twain com plains that the “multi­ tude set up such a dismal heartbroken wailing as I hope never to hear again.” Unable to let g o at the conclusion o f the cerem onies, Twain then quotes five pages from Jarves’s History about the death o f Kamehameha I. H e both keeps alive and tries to bury the present scene o f m ourning in the colonial narrative o f an ancient past, as though the “dismal heartbreaking w ailing” o f the m ultitude could be translated and silenced by the superabundance o f an English te x t Throughout Twain’s w riting about Hawaii, however, these sounds o f g rie f return to haunt him, breaking through the semantic fram e o f his nostalgic pictures. Though he approaches the funeral with voyeuristic curiosity about “ancient deviltry,* the sounds that he wishes never to hear again revive the spirit o f the unburied past that rises in the pres­ e n t Like the diver, Twain returns from Hawaii with resurfaced corpses o f forgotten languages, corpses that keep turning their gaze upon him and inviting him to dance.

Hawaii and the Reconstruction of the Old South A t the end o f Roughing It, Twain fram ed his trip to Hawaii as an exten­ sion o f his fron tier narrative. T h e last leg o f his jou rn ey west, the Sand-

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain « 75 wich Islands, appealed to his "vagabond spirit” as an escape from the routine o f his work as a daily correspondent in San Francisco. Yet this jou rn ey further westward across the Pacific also led in another direc­ tion that confounded this fantasy o f escape; it took Twain hom eward into the Am erican South to explore the m eaning o f slavery and free­ dom . In the culture o f the sugar plantation Twain found striking paral­ lels between the colonization o f Hawaii and the changes convulsing the slave-holding South. T h e remnants o f im perial violence that would n ot stay buried in the Hawaiian landscape evoked uncanny echoes o f the on goin g violence o f slavery, which was n ot laid to rest by emancipa­ tion. Traveling in the im m ediate afterm ath o f the C ivil War, Twain brought to Hawaii unspoken questions and assumptions about slavery, em ancipation, and race relations at hom e, and in the islands he found them refracted back to him from the apparently rem ote colonial con­ te x t It is w ell known that the outbreak o f the C ivil W ar severed Twain from his own past, the loss o f which becam e a rich repository o f mem­ ories that would fuel his greatest fiction. Yet critics rem ain puzzled that Twain did n ot write about slavery and race relations until twenty years after the war’s end. I am arguing that his trip to Hawaii in the im m edi­ ate afterm ath o f the war led him to the m em ories o f the prewar past, both the nostalgia fo r and the nightm are o f slavery. It th erefore al­ low ed him to d efer these m em ories and offered a form fo r their dis­ placed expression. R eferences to the C ivil W ar fill T ra in ’s depiction o f his voyage from San Francisco to H onolulu. O ne o f his first letters proudly notes that the A jax was built as a pow erful warship and was in its present service p iloted by veterans o f both the C ivil War and the M exican-Am erican W ar (1 9 ). T h e refurbishing o f this warship suggests that the m ilitary force deployed in an internecine con flict could be turned outward to­ ward building a com m ercial em pire, on e that extends farther west o f the lands conquered from M exico in 1848. Twain’s depiction o f this same voyage in Roughing //focuses on a boisterous retired captain o f a whaling ship. Dubbed by Hawaiians with the hon orific “A dm iral,” he was revered by the “sim ple natives,” who “regarded him as children re­ gard a father. It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the roar­ ing Adm iral was around” {Roughing It, 332). T h e same fierce attach­ m ent to the underdog turned the “frantic and bloodthirsty U nion man” into a “rampant and inexorable secessionist” when he saw the

76 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE South losing the war (3 3 ). T h e Adm iral also has a passion fo r political argum ent that he bases on what Twain calls “m anufactured history.” H e argues that the war was started in retaliation against two N orth­ ern clergym en who tarred, feathered, and burned alive two visiting Southern ladies. A n oth er passenger outwits him by taking his “man­ ufactured history” fo r real and rem inding him that these atrocities avenged even worse atrocities against wom en and children com m it­ ted by two Southern clergym en. M ost directly, this anecdote parodies Southern narratives o f chivalry that Twain would target throughout his writing. Furtherm ore, by ridiculing these narratives o f historical causation, Twain im plicitly calls attention to the omissions out o f which such stories are “m anufactured”: the history o f slavery and the struggle fo r em ancipation. T h e passengers on the A jax may be sailing far away in space and tim e from the batdefields o f the C ivil War, but the unspoken issue o f slavery resurfaces in the A dm iral’s paternalistic protection o f the Hawaiians. T h e depiction o f childlike loyal natives echoes the pro-slavery position o f the prewar South and the racist ar­ guments against the capacity o f nonwhite peop le to govern them­ selves. Thus w hile Twain may have retrospectively structured his voy­ age to Hawaii in Roughing It as a fligh t west to freedom , what he found instead was that the colonial hierarchies o f the islands conjured m em ­ ories o f the prewar South and its racial hierarchies o f slavery. W hen Twain arrived in H onolulu, he heard echoes o f the Am erican C ivil W ar all around him . C om plaining in a letter about the “popularsong nuisance that follow s us,” he exclaims: at the very outpost and fag-end o f the world, o f a little rock in the mid­ dle o f a limitless ocean, a pack o f dark skinned savages are tramping down the street singing it with a vim and vigor that makes my hair rise!— singing it in their own barbarous tongue! They have got the tune to perfection— otherwise I never would have suspected that “Waikiki lantani oe Kaa hooly hooly wahoo” means “While we were marching through Georgia.” I f it would have been all the same to General Sher­ man, I wish he had gone around by the way o f the Gulf o f Mexico, in­ stead o f marching through Georgia. (65) T h e jo k e here erupts from the incongruous transposition o f both lan­ guage and geography that ricochets from the boundaries between the foreign and the dom estic. T h e fam iliarity o f the tune stems n ot only

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 77 from the music, but also from the sight o f “dark-skinned savages.” Like the funeral dirges that defy Tw ain’s com prehension, he translates the “barbarous tongue” into the once fam iliar language o f race at hom e. W h ile Twain represents Hawaii geographically as the epitom e o f re­ moteness, a rock devoid o f human history, his m apping o f Hawaii through the grid o f the Am erican N orth and South produces em p­ tiness, but ironically brings Hawaii closer to hom e. By turning the Hawaiian language he does not understand into a translation o f an Am erican song, Twain remains d ea f to the history that preceded him. Yet his im position o f a North/South grid does not rem ain stable on this shifting ground. H is m ultilayered parody also places the Hawaiian singers in the position o f the translator and parodist that Twain can­ n ot hear, and suggests uncanny echoes o f m arching fo r conquest and m arching fo r freedom at hom e and abroad. In wishing that Sherman had taken a m ore indirect route, it is Twain him self who has taken a circuitous path to the Am erican South. O n his voyage out, Twain m editates on the m eaning o f labor and em ancipation. T h e ocean voyage in his first letter gives him a “strange new sense o f entire and p erfect em ancipation from labor and respon­ sibility com ing strong upon m e,” which he parodies as the “tranquil d eligh t in that kind o f labor which is such a luxury to the enlightened Christian— to wit, the labor o f other p eop le” (5 ). A fter he returns hom e in Roughing It, he refers to his trip as “h a lf a year’s luxurious va­ grancy in the islands” (414). I f em ancipation in the U n ited States had recently abolished the luxury o f oth er p eop le’s labor in the South, Twain represented the sugar plantation in Hawaii as a replacem ent fo r the loss o f slave labor at hom e. H e claim ed that sugar in Hawaii was much m ore lucrative than in Louisiana. N o t only was the land m ore fertile, but the “fre e ” labor o f “Kanaka m en and w om en” was much cheaper: “T h e hire o f each laborer is $100 a year—just about what it used to cost to board and cloth e and d octor a N egro— but there is no original outlay o f $500 to $1,000 fo r the purchase o f the laborer” (260). Thus the cultivation o f sugar in plantations in Hawaii prom ised to recover the econom ic value o f slave labor at hom e by replacing black slaves with native Hawaiian workers. For Twain, the social relations o f colonialism in Hawaii may have in addition recovered the racialized cultural value o f slavery. Throughout his journey, he continually com pared his impressions o f native Hawai-

78 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE ians to m em ories o f black slaves at hom e. W hen he took a schooner between the islands, fo r exam ple, he described Hawaiians lying on the deck as “thick as N egroes in a slave p en ” (195). W hen he read about a Hawaiian custom o f praying an enem y to death, he com pared it in his jou rn al to “sim ilar superstitions in the south.”35 O n the lon g sail hom e from H onolulu, he jo tte d notes fo r what would turn in to his later fiction about his boyhood. T h e Pacific evoked fo r him m em ories o f the Mississippi, and his cursory know ledge o f Hawaiian customs brought up fragm ented m em ories o f slave culture from the summers he spent as a child on his uncle’s farm . In his jou rn al he m ade a list o f “superstitions” he recalled from his ch ildh ood and included the fo l­ lowing: “niggers tie w ool up with thread to keep the witches from rid­ in g them ” (160). This thread o f m em ory would becom e the story that introduces Jim in Huckleberry Finn, when Jim expresses his desire fo r freedom in a story about witches ridin g him “all over the w orld.” If, on the on e hand, Hawaii seem ed a throwback to his childhood m em ories o f slavery, on the other hand, its grow ing sugar industry m ade its social landscape m ore sim ilar to the South in 1866, in the im ­ m ediate afterm ath o f the war. Despite Hawaii’s physical distance, the C ivil W ar had a m ajor im pact on the Hawaiian econom y. T h e dem and fo r new sources o f sugar to replace those from the South gave a m ajor boost to sugar production in Hawaii and drew it into even closer eco­ nom ic and political ties to the U n ited States by the war’s end. A nd sugar in Hawaii was indeed a big business, concentrated in the hands o f a few landowners— fo r the m ost part sons o f Am erican missionar­ ies— who also con trolled banking, m arketing, and the exp ort business. This boom required disciplined workers, who would submit to the conditions o f sugar production that was a unique “synthesis o f field and factory.”36 T h e relatively new class o f planters in Hawaii faced a problem fam iliar to Southern planters after the war: how to create and control a “fre e ” labor force o f nonwhite workers in an evolving cap­ italist econom y. W hereas Southern U.S. planters, like those in the post­ em ancipation Caribbean, w ere concerned with turning form er slaves in to free labor, Hawaiian planters were contending with new laborers freed not from slavery— but “freed ” from the land that sustained them through subsistence farm ing, and cut o f f from kinship networks and relations to chiefs and priests. W h ile m ost planters in Hawaii were dis­ placed N ew Englanders who supported the U nion during the war,

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain * 79 som e also lon ged fo r what they im agined to be the m ore produc­ tive conditions o f slavery; they com pared th eir own plantations “unfa­ vorably with those in the Caribbean— not, they hastened to add, be­ cause they wanted slavery in the Hawaiian kingdom , but because they wanted to show what m ight be d on e with a disciplined work force.”37 Hawaiian planters, along with their U.S. counterparts, were involved in a broader international struggle to coerce “fre e ” workers in a slave­ like system o f labor under the conditions o f capitalist agricultural pro­ duction.38 Hawaiian workers actively resisted the slave-like conditions o f the plantation system through a variety o f strategies o f recalcitrance, sub­ version, and outright refusals to work. In response, the governm ent aided the planters with harsh vagrant laws and anti-em igration laws de­ signed to control Hawaiian m obility.39 As Twain notes, “the contract with the laborer is in w riting and the law rigidly com pels com pliance with it; i f a man shirks a day’s work and absents him self, he has to work fo r two days fo r it when his tim e is o u t I f he gets unmanageable and disobedient, he is condem ned to work on a re e f fo r a season” (270). A t the tim e Twain w rote this from Hawaii, Southern states righ t after the war were legislating the “Black Codes” regulating vagrancy, labor con­ tracts, and apprenticeship to keep freed peop le as close to the status o f slaves as possible.40 Though Radical Reconstruction voided these laws, the paradoxical e ffo rt to im pose a coercive system o f free labor contin­ ued. Twain found Hawaii and Am erica closer than he im agined geo­ graphically, on a m ap o f an international struggle that linked em anci­ pation and im perialism in creating a coercive system o f nonwhite free labor. A lon g with the legal system, changing representations o f the Hawaiians were m obilized to discipline labor as well. T h e dom inant stereo­ type that early missionaries held o f Hawaiians as heathens and savages shifted to focus prim arily on native idleness and laziness.41 In 1869, fo r exam ple, The Pa d fic Commercial Advertiser wrote-, “i f only we could com ­ p el our idlers, loafers o r vagrants . . . to work fo r their own good and fo r the good o f the kingdom , we would have at once a supply o f per­ haps 5,000 able-bodied m en and w om en.”43 Active resistance to the tim ew ork discipline o f the plantation was rendered as the deficiency o f the civilized qualities o f individual am bition, hard work, and collec­ tive responsibility. Sim ilar to the language characterizing blacks in the

80 ' THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE South and the N orth, "idleness” was increasingly viewed as an innate racial characteristic. A D em ocratic Party circular against Reconstruc­ tion in Pennsylvania, fo r exam ple, o ffered a picture o f a stereotyped N egro happily resting on his back w hile a white man chops w ood in the background. T h e caption reads: ‘T h e Freedm an’s Bureau: an agency to keep the N egroes in idleness at the expense o f the white m an.”43 In Hawaii, Twain at times presents an ironic view o f this defin i­ tion o f civilization as paid labor. H e parodies the missionary narrative o f braving a “thousand privations” to teach the Hawaiians “what rap­ ture it is to work all day lon g fo r fifty cents to buy fo o d fo r the next day, as com pared with fishing fo r pastime and lollin g in the shade through eternal summer, and eating o f the bounty that nobody labored to pro­ vide but nature” (5 3 ). Thou gh he mocks the Protestant work ethic, he also contributes to the discourse o f Hawaiian idleness. Twain could not im agine a way o f life b efore colonialism as involving productive la­ bor, but only as a prelapsarian form o f harm ony with nature. This sheds interesting ligh t on the hackneyed but dom inant im age o f Hawaii as paradise, on e that Twain prom oted throughout his writ­ in g and which has continued in the tourist trade today. As Hawaiians were forced into a postlapsarian capitalist system o f com m odified la­ bor, the im age o f Hawaiian paradise as a place without labor or history becam e increasingly available as a com m odity to attract foreign settlers and tourists. Racial discourse splits the same qualities o f a labor-free Eden into opposing values. T h e reputed indolence o f Hawaiians de­ rided as a form o f racial degradation becom es lauded as a natural lux­ ury, as leisure o r vacation, fo r white residents and travelers. Although Twain arrived in Hawaii to work as a journalist, he contrasted H on o­ lulu to the “place o f the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion o f San Francisco,” as “I m oved in the m idst o f a summer clim e as tranquil as dawn in the Garden o f Eden.”44 W hen Twain returned to his nostalgic m em ories o f Hawaii, he increasingly recalled it as a paradise, a place without labor, where he enjoyed his “luxurious vagrancy” without be­ in g subject to the legal system against vagrancy. H is letters suggest how this im age o f Hawaii as a natural paradise outside o f history was histor­ ically produced by capitalist developm ent that dispossessed Hawaiians o f land to turn them in to “free labor.” In 1866, at an early stage o f the “Sugar K ingdom ” in Hawaii, Twain glim psed the ironic m eaning o f “paradise” that Stannard Baker Ray would spell out in 1911: “Hawaii

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 81 has been c a lle d . . . the Paradise o f the Pacific. But it is also a paradise not only o f natural beauties and wonders; it is also a paradise o f m od­ e m industrial com bination.”45 T h e flip side o f that paradise, the myth o f Hawaiian laziness, was strangely held responsible in colonial discourse fo r their dwindling numbers. Twain noted that no m atter how draconian the discipline o f Hawaiian labor, the “sugar product is rapidly augm enting every year, and day by day, the Kanaka race is passing away” (270). T h e represen­ tation o f Hawaiians as incorrigibly id le also contributed to what was be­ com ing the econom ic mainstay o f the sugar industry in Hawaii: the im­ p ort o f contract labor, from China during the tim e o f Tw ain’s visit, and extending over the century to Japan, Portugal, Norway, Korea, Puerto R ico, and the Philippines. Twain heartily endorsed the im port o f in­ dentured labor from China, and he advocated the em ploym ent o f “coolie labor” in the C alifornia businesses o f m ining, mills, and rail­ roads. H e viewed Chinese labor at this tim e not as a threat to Am eri­ can workers, but instead as a means to em ancipate them from the “dru dgery which all white m en abhor and are glad to escape from ” (272). Chinese labor, argued Twain, would create an elite white work­ in g class: “all the best class o f the working population who m ight be em ancipated from the pick and shovel would fin d easier and m ore profitable em ploym ent in superintending and overseeing the coolies” (272). Chinese laborers allowed Twain to im agine restoring the role o f plantation overseer, lost with the abolition o f slavery. Thus in Hawaii Twain found not only an opportunity fo r Am erican investors and planters, but also a m odel fo r the form ation o f a white working class. Just as he escaped from the dru dgery o f San Francisco to the Garden o f Eden in Hawaii, he im agined m en working in his old jo b o f min­ in g to be liberated by the im port o f Chinese labor and thereby free to becom e white m en. Twain ends this letter on sugar in Hawaii with a paean to the rise o f an Am erican em pire in the Pacific, an em ­ pire that relies n ot only on the extension o f Am erican enterprise and pow er abroad, but also on the im portation o f foreign labor at hom e to whiten the Am erican working class. In what he saw as the rem ote iso­ lated locale o f Hawaii, Twain learned a lesson in the transnational di­ mensions o f whiteness that em erged from the m ovem ent o f labor, cap­ ital, and racial discourses across the globe. T h e international im age o f nonwhites as naturally indolen t and in­

82 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE capable o f self-discipline supported a related im age o f the same peo­ p le as childlike and incapable o f self-governm ent I f Twain’s depiction o f the problem o f free labor in Hawaii echoed that o f post-emancipa­ tion Am erica, so did his representation o f the Hawaiian govern m en t A t a tim e o f intense struggle over the possibilities and extent o f black citizenship at the beginning o f Reconstruction, Twain reported on Ha­ w aii’s interracial legislature with fascination and repulsion. T h e first thing he noticed when he walked into the legislature was its racial com position: “h a lf a dozen white m en and som e thirty o r forty natives. It was a dark assembly” (107). H is com ic picture o f the legislature’s ac­ tivities derives from the incongruity he highlights between the foreign , uncivilized nature o f the Hawaiians and their enacting a fam iliar role o f citizens at hom e. H e goes to great length to maintain this distinc­ tion, even as he blurs the boundary between the civilized and savage. Thus when he describes the 80-year-old president as noble and w ell dressed, he thinks to him self: “This man, naked as the day he was born, and war club and spear in hand, has charged at the head o f a horde o f savages. . . worshipped w ooden im ages. . . seen hundreds o f his race offered up in heathen tem ple as sacrifices to hideous id o ls . . . and now look at him; an educated Christian . . . a man practiced in holding the reins o f an enlightened g o v e rn m e n t. . . L ook at him sit­ ting there presiding over the deliberations o f a legislative body, am ong whom are white m en” (10 8-9 ). Thou gh Tw ain’s ostensible purpose is to em phasize how far the president has risen up the ladder o f civiliza­ tion, the focus on the contrast between past and present has the effect o f m aking the present look like window-dressing on an unyielding sav­ age past, which can burst out at any m om ent. Twain spends a lo t o f tim e describing the president’s clothing, which serves to emphasize his nakedness underneath. Twain intrigues his readers with a back and forth m ovem ent here, describing how the savage has becom e remark­ ably civilized yet em phasizing his savage past Tw ain’s double-edged parody often uses his m ockery o f the Hawai­ ian legislature to ridicule legislatures at hom e as well. U nder the head­ in g “Fam iliar Characteristics,” he describes a Kanaka m em ber “who paddled over here from some barren rock o r other out yonder in the ocean— some scalawag who wears nothing but a pair o f socks and a plug hat when he is at hom e, o r possibly is even m ore scantily arrayed in the popular m all— g o t up and gravely gave notice o f a b ill to autho­

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain * 83 rize the construction o f a suspension bridge from Oahu to Hawaii, a m atter o f a hundred and fifty m iles! . . . U p came H on orable Ku and Luluiaui and Kowkow and Kiwawhoo and a lo t o f other clacking geese” (112). W h ile Twain renders the procedures as play-acting, as the trap­ pings o f decision-m aking overlaying nakedness and ignorance, he cau­ tions his readers: “d o not d o an unjust thing now and im agine Kanaka legislators d o stupider things than oth er sim ilar bodies.” H e then tells a story about a Wisconsin legislature, in the midst o f affixin g a penalty to the crim e o f arson, when “a m em ber g o t up and seriously suggested that when a man com m itted the dam ning crim e o f arson they ought to make him m arry the g irl” (112). W h ile describing here the universal stupidity o f legislatures, Twain makes the Wisconsin legislature look all the m ore absurd because its ignorance outstrips that o f naked savages. H is description o f the Hawaiian governm ent has the overall effect o f portraying children at play m im icking adults: “we see in this little land o f fifty thousand inhabitants the com plete m achinery in its m inute details o f a vast and im posing em pire don e in m iniature” (180). En­ tranced by the costumes o f governance, Hawaiians, im plies Twain, are incapable o f true democracy. Tw ain’s m ockery o f Hawaiian citizens govern ing themselves would resonate at hom e with the postwar debates about the capacity o f black p eop le fo r participating in govern m en t W hat may have looked com ic abroad appeared m ore threatening at hom e to many white peop le in the N orth and South. Twain was in Hawaii the same year that Congress passed the landm ark C ivil Rights bill, which President Andrew John­ son vetoed and which would later becom e the Fourteenth Am end­ ment. In his third annual message to Congress, Johnson stated that “in the progress o f nations negroes have shown less capacity fo r self-gowem m en t than any oth er race o f people. N o independent governm ent o f any form has ever been successful in their hands. O n the contrary whenever they have been le ft to th eir own devices they have shown an instant tendency to lapse into barbarism.”46 I am not arguing that Tw ain’s depiction o f the Hawaiian nation would have been read as di­ rectly endorsing o r negating this stereotype o f blacks in the U nited States, but rather that his com ic rendering o f Hawaiian self-govern­ m ent would have had resonance and dissonance fo r those debates at hom e. W h ile Twain brought stereotypes o f blacks to fram e his repre­ sentation o f Hawaiians, his depiction o f Hawaiians also refracted back

84 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE on racial politics at hom e when both were in upheaval. H ow would Am erican readers o f Twain in 1866 have perceived the im age o f darkskinned Hawaiians presiding over white men? Racial discourses d o n ot m ove in a unidirectional way with the outward course o f em pire, but they circulate am ong d ifferen t im perial sites to build, reinforce, and contest m eanings in relation to on e another. N o t only white Am ericans transported their experiences and dis­ courses o f race back and forth across the Pacific. As m em bers o f the Hawaiian royalty traveled to the U n ited States and Europe, th eir sense o f Am erican racism in their hom e was rein forced by th eir experience o f racism abroad. W hen the current King, then Prince Lot, and his brother Prince L ih olih o Alexander visited the U n ited States as young m en in 1850, a conductor threw them o ff a train bound fo r Baltim ore because they were not white. O n a Hudson River boat in N ew York they were refused entry to a dining salon fo r the same reason. In his jou rn al on the way hom e, Twain referred to this trip as the reason fo r the current K in g’s purported irrational disdain fo r Am ericans: “It riles m e to hear an Am erican . . . stand up and pay titular adulation to this heathen blackam oor— to this man who rem em bers to this day, 8c grieves over a triflin g unintentional offense offered in the U.S. years ago to his private individuality, not to his official rank— 8c who hates Am erica and Am ericans fo r it y e t ”47Twain could not see the K ing as a credible observer o f Am erican racism, which the m onarch contrasted with his favorable reception in Europe. Instead, Twain portrayed the Hawaiian leader as a puppet m anipulated and m isled by the British and French, from whom he lapped up “gew-gaws o f cheap adulation.” Twain cast Hawaiian opposition to Am erica as a childish grudge against “the strong and steadfast < Am erican > hands that have lifted her up . . . Dam! Royalty!— I d on ’t think much o f Hawaiian royalty!”48 Twain claim ed not to blam e the princes fo r feelin g insulted at the tim e, but accused them o f not forgettin g o f refusing “to wipe out o f their minds the m em ory o f the a ffro n t. . . the king has never forgotten that triflin g stab at his little vanity” (149-50). W h ile Twain blam ed the King fo r still grieving and not forgettin g an incident that occurred twenty-six years before, the w riter was the on e who could n ot let go. H e repeated the story twice in two pages with such vitriolic denunciation and rhetorical overkill that his own responses appear raw and presen t In his retellin g, Ttoain com bined the two incidents and m isplaced

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 85 them in a location he would w ell rem em ber: a Southern steamship. In trying to bury the Hawaiian response to Am erican racism as a “triflin g” from the past, Twain him self brought to life the unburied corpses o f racism and im perialism dancing across the routes o f his Pacific travel. Anxieties about the self-governm ent o f nonwhites at hom e and abroad— the legacy o f slavery and im perialism — com e together in Twain’s account o f a visit to the governm ent prison on his first tour o f H onolulu. T h ere he is introduced to another traveler who has taken a strange, circuitous course from the U nited States to Hawaii, General George Washington, or, at least, to an aged, limping Negro man, who called himself by that honored name. He was supposed to be seventy years old, and he looked it He was as crazy as a loon, and some­ times, they say, he grows very violent He was a Samson in a small way; his arms were corded with muscle, and his legs felt as hard as if they were made o f wood. He was in a peaceable mood at present and strongly manacled. They have a hard time with him occasionally, and some time or other he will get in a lively way and eat up the garrison o f that prison, no doubt The native soldiers who guard the place are afraid o f him, and he knows it (75) T h e history o f this man, concludes Twain, is a “sealed book.” H e is said to have set o ff on a ship o f black sailors from a N ew England port twenty years ago, but he is fon d o f rem iniscing in his “dreamy, incoher­ ent way, about the Blue R idge in V irginia, and seems fam iliar with Richm ond and Lynchburg. I d o n ot think he is the old original Gen­ eral W .,” concludes Twain. Twain ends the letter by praising “a m odel prison fo r the western h a lf o f the w orld”— a m odel that centers on a chained black man. In a prison recendy designed to im pose colonial discipline am ong nadve Hawaiians, Twain locates a pow erful and contradictory im age o f Am er­ ican nationhood in the afterm ath o f the C ivil War. Though harmless and powerless, this black man appears dangerous and m enacing, capa­ ble o f tearing down the prison walls like Samson. His origins are myste­ rious, though they seem to include both the N orth and the South. O n a ship o f black sailors, he was once free to travel outside national borders b efore the war, w hile its end finds him im m obilized and mana­ cled on a Pacific island. H is lunacy lies in his fantasy o f sovereignty, im agining him self as G eneral W. leading a war fo r independence. H e

86 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE seems to represent both the im prisonm ent o f nonwhite p eop le at hom e and abroad and their struggle fo r independence. A lso symbolic o f Am erican im perial power, G eorge W ashington would devour the native guards i f he were free. Lik e M elville’s description o f Q ueequeg as “G eorge W ashington cannibalistically developed,” this description both acknowledges and ridicules the desire fo r independence by non­ white peoples, and it renders U.S. force as cannibalistic. Twain was visiting the prison in H onolulu at a tim e when prisons in the Am erican South were being restructured to reproduce the condi­ tions o f slavery in the afterm ath o f em ancipation. In the colonial prison o f Hawaii, Twain may have discovered a com forting reconstruc­ tion o f the Am erican South, a m odel o f a black nation reenslaved in an im perial setting. O r he may have seen a prophetic im age o f the post­ war South, not as an im perial occupation by the N orth, as Southerners claim ed, but as em ancipation that would recolonize African Am eri­ cans. Twain may have later rewritten this scene as the nightm are o f Jim m anacled in the cabin from which Tom Sawyer stages the freein g o f a free man. As a photographic negative o f the foun ding hither, this en­ chained black G eorge W ashington suggests the enfeeblem ent and lim ­ its o f Am erican independence and freedom built upon the corrosive foundations o f slavery and em pire. Thus, behind the bars o f a H on o­ lulu prison, Twain discovered both the consoling reconstitution o f slavery and the threatening figu re o f a black man about to break his chains and brin g down the entire ed ifice with him.

Forgotten Languages W h ile G eneral G eorge W ashington dropped out o f Tw ain’s later work, the w riter repeatedly returned to another figu re he m et in Hawaii: B ill Ragsdale, the translator who m esm erized Twain with his voluble and skillful perform ance in the Hawaiian legislature. Twain describes him in a letter as “h a lf w hite,” adding parenthetically “ (h a lf white and h a lf Kanaka).” H is biracial character introduces his extraordinary bilingual fluency: Bill Ragsdale stands up in front o f the Speaker’s pulpit, with his back against it, and fastens his quick black eye upon any member who rises, lets him say half a dozen sentences and then interrupts him and re-

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain * 87 peats his speech in a loud, rapid voice, turning every Kanaka speech into English and every English speech into Kanaka, with a readiness and felicity o f language that are remarkable.49 Twain applauds Ragsdale’s facility at publicly perform in g his transla­ tions, at nim bly crossing back and forth between the two languages and cultures. A n d Ragsdale indeed played an im portant role in a tension-ridden legislature "fille d with white m em bers who refused to learn Hawaiian and native m em bers who refused to speak English,” which at a poin t in 1866 broke out into a fistfight between the two sides.50 Ragsdale, however, attracted Twain n ot fo r his facilitation o f sm ooth com m unication, but fo r the way his fluency seem ed to yield him subversive pow er to channel the flow o f that com m unication. Twain calls attention to the spice o f deviltry in the fellow’s nature, and it crops out every now and then when he is translating the speeches o f slow Kanakas who do not understand English. Without departing from the spirit o f the mem­ ber’s remarks, he will, with apparent unconsciousness, drop in a litde voluntary contribution occasionally in the way o f a word or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous. (113) Portraying Ragsdale as trickster, a master o f parody who subversively skews his translation with "apparent unconsciousness,” Twain seems to fin d in his style a m irror o f his own writing, o f what would becom e his renowned deadpan style. W e have seen throughout his letters and lec­ tures how Twain translates elem ents o f Hawaiian culture into an Am er­ ican idiom , which makes them look ridiculous. Yet what Twain could n ot hear, but what his description im plies, was that Ragsdale was prob­ ably translating English speeches with the same parodie effect that m ade them look ridiculous as well. Translation can g o both ways. In­ deed, Twain’s response to Ragsdale m irrors his own w riting from Ha­ waii. H e translates Hawaiian culture and society into a racialized Am er­ ican idiom that does not rem ain stable and unilinear, but unleashes echoes o f counter-translations that Twain him self cannot understand. Twain returned to Ragsdale in 1884 as the hero fo r his unfinished "Sandwich Islands N ovel,” a novel he worked on between com pleting Huckleberry F in n and beginning A Connecticut Yankee in K in g A rth u r’s Court. From the few fragm ents o f the manuscript and his letters, it ap>

88 * THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE pears that Twain planned to write a historical novel that starts with Ragsdale’s fiction alized birth during the period the first Am erican mis­ sionaries arrived in the 1820s. It includes his rom ance with another “half-caste” young g irl and a p lot to kill the K ing by stealing his spit­ toon and praying him to death, and it ends with a fiction al account o f Ragsdale’s actual death o f leprosy in the 1870s.51 Although Twain d id not com plete the novel, many o f its elem ents were incorporated into Connecticut Yankee, where Hank M organ violently translates the prem odern English o f Cam elot into the language o f nineteenth-cen­ tury Am erican capitalism, as Twain ridicules both. Hawaii returned to his m ind at a tim e when he was con fron ting the legacy o f slavery in post-Reconstruction Am erica and the history o f im perialism and cap­ italist developm ent abroad. For his hero he sought a vibrant biracial and bilingual translator who m oved with such facility between two languages and two races, just after Twain had translated African Am er­ ican oral culture into the idiom o f a vernacular fiction in the voice o f a young white boy. H e turned to a half-caste figu re in Hawaii who crossed racial boundaries at a tim e when segregation was drawing stricter boundaries am ong racial hierarchies in Am erica. H e chose to highlight Ragsdale’s voluntary segregation in a lep er colony ju st be­ fo re he w rote about the threat and im possibility o f crossing bound­ aries o f race and language in Pudd’nhead Wilson. But it is Connecticut Yankee that came closest to his Sandwich Islands novel in its superim­ position o f Reconstruction in the Am erican South with im perialism abroad. T h e w ord “Yankee” itself was shifting geographically at the tim e, referrin g n ot only to N ortherners in relation to Southerners but also to the nation as a w hole in international locations o f im perial in­ tervention. O n a page o f notes fo r his Sandwich Islands novel, Twain twice m en­ tions a figure who traveled between Hawaii and the Am erican South to play an active role in Reconstruction: Samuel Arm strong.52 T h e name is listed with n o identifying context o r connection to the rest o f the novel. Although Twain would not have m et Arm strong in Hawaii in 1866, he would have at least heard of, i f not m et, m em bers o f his pow­ erfu l fam ily there, and by 1884 he would have recognized his name as that o f the fou n der o f H am pton Institute, renowned fo r its program o f industrial education fo r blacks.55Samuel was born in Hawaii, where his missionary father, Richard Arm strong, was the first m inister o f “public

The Imperial Route» of Mark Twain » 89 instruction”; in this capacity he developed schools fo r Hawaiian youth that relied heavily on a program o f manual labor, a system that would prepare them fo r work on plantations and ranches. Samuel worked with his father until he went to W illiam s C ollege in 1860 and soon af­ ter enlisted in the U nion Army. H e led a black regim ent and then worked fo r the Freedm en’s Bureau, b efore he founded H am pton In­ stitute. I can only speculate on why Twain m entioned him in his notes fo r the novel. Twain wrote to H ow ells in 1884 that he had a large stack o f books fo r his novel, which m ight have included Arm strong’s Lessons from the Hawaiian Islands, published that same year. Twain certainly would have heard o f Arm strong’s work in H am pton, as he traveled ex­ tensively in the 1880s to publicize and raise m oney fo r the Institute. Perhaps Arm strong em bodied fo r Twain, however unconsciously, precisely the dynamic I have been charting in his work, whereby he found both dissonance and resonance between the representations o f race in Hawaii and the U n ited States. W h ile Twain would learn how to write about black-white relations in Am erica in part through the ex­ perience o f w riting about colonial relations in Hawaii, Arm strong is a figu re fo r whom these connections were much m ore pronounced. W e tend to think o f U.S. im perialism as the exp orter o f racial id eologies abroad in a one-way linear direction, pursuing new Indians on new frontiers abroad, o r exportin g black stereotypes to the plantations o f Cuba and Puerto R ico. A n d indeed I have been arguing that Twain represented Hawaiians through the lenses o f race relations at hom e. But this route is not linear as it criss-crosses the globe. Arm strong is an exam ple o f a Hawaiian-born Am erican who transposed his im ages o f nonwhite p eop le and institutions fo r educating them from the im perial site o f Hawaii to the Reconstruction landscape o f Virginia. Arm strong grouped Polynesians, Africans, and Indians as peop le lack­ ing “true m orality” and self-control. A n d he proposed the same meth­ ods o f education fo r the “n egro” and “Polynesian”: “O f both it is true that n ot m ere ignorance, but deficiency o f character is the c h ie f dif­ ficulty, and to build up character is the true objective o f ed u cation . . . conditioned very largely on a routine o f industrious habit. M orality and industry g o together. Especially in weak tropical races, idleness like ignorance breeds vice.”54 My purpose is not to argue that Twain and Arm strong simply took fully form ed im ages o f Hawaiians and superim posed them on Am erican blacks o r vice versa, but that these

90 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE im ages evolved, solidified, and fractured in relation to on e another. Thou gh Hawaii obviously had a much greater influence on Arm strong than on Twain, both m en follow ed parallel routes to the postwar South, Arm strong in his building o f institutions, and Twain in his travel and writing. W hen Twain turned to write fiction about race rela­ tions and the legacy o f slavery in Am erica, he had fo r many years been engaged in a global im perial conversation with m en such as Samuel Arm strong, Anson Burlingam e, H en ry Stanley, and Rudyard K ipling about the incapacity o f nonwhite p eop le to govern themselves, and the pow er o f international capitalism to transform them into a m od­ ern labor force. This is n ot to say, by any means, that all toed a com ­ m on id eological lin e as a solid block o f im perialists, but to argue that we need to rethink Mark Twain as an “Am erican” w riter through these transnational routes o f em pire. Ragsdale, a local character who lived his life in ever narrowing cir­ cles and ended up con fin ed to a lep er colony, was a very d ifferen t fig­ ure from Arm strong, who traveled from Hawaii to brin g his ideas o f colonial education to the Am erican South. But it was Ragsdale, not Arm strong, whom Twain had planned to feature in his uncom pleted novel. M oreover, Twain returned to Ragsdale once m ore in 1896 in the chapter o f Follow ing the Equator that includes the story o f the diver. Twain concluded that chapter o f his aborted return to Hawaii with an elegy fo r Ragsdale that recalls his brilliance as a translator and laments his untim ely death o f leprosy. Though Twain had known o f his death years b efore, he m ourns him as i f hearing the tragic news fo r the first tim e, disinterring Ragsdale’s m em ory to lay it to rest once again. In ex­ pressing such an im m ediate sense o f loss, Twain may have been identi­ fying with Ragsdale’s exile and lam enting the prohibition against revis­ itin g the island he first encountered thirty years b efore and could now only see from afar. Ragsdale makes a striking contrast with the bilin­ gual diver, a figu re who can neither translate n or mourn. English dom ­ inates his psyche through an im perial ord er in which his original Hawaiian language resurfaces as anarchy, as a delirious breakdown. Ragsdale, conversely, thrives on translation as parody, as a means o f subverting the bifurcated hierarchy o f im perial translation. In m ourn­ in g Ragsdale, perhaps Twain was grieving over his own efforts to write a novel as a form o f translation between languages, cultures, and geog­ raphies that seem ed at once so rem ote and so uncannily close.

The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain » 91 In his jou rn ey to Hawaii in 1866, Twain both displaced and discov­ ered the origins o f his own divided national identity at the intersecting glob al routes o f slavery and em pire. In the colonization o f Hawaii he saw the irony o f freein g free m en that would fu el his best-known fiction and his pow erful anti-im perial w riting later in his life. Although Twain never com pleted his novel about Hawaii, the insistent m em ories o f that im perial encounter continue to haunt the corpus o f his w riting about Am erica, like corpses tapping him on the shoulder inviting him to dance.

C H A P TER 3

Romancing the Empire

In his well-known anti-im perialist tract o f 1901, “T o the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Mark Twain claim ed: “T h ere must be two Am ericas: one that sets the captive free, and on e that takes a once-captive’s new free­ dom away from him and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to g et his land.”1O n e Am erica had rushed to the aid o f Cuban independence in the war against Spain in 1898, when it was “playing the usual and regular American gam e.” T h e other Am erica annexed the Philippines at the end o f that same war and was currently conducting a brutal war against its p eop le’s struggle fo r in­ dependence. Twain saw this Am erica as n ot acting Am erican at all, but as slavishly im itating the European gam e o f colonial conquest His pow erful condem nation o f im perialism works here in part by disavow­ ing its centrality to U.S. identity, by representing im perialism as a foreign activity, an aberration from the national com m itm ent to free­ in g the captive. Splitting Am erica in two does not acknowledge how the narrative o f liberation legitim ated the exercise o f im perial power. W hat Tw ain’s anti-imperialism had in com m on with im perialist argu­ ments was the representation o f U.S. intervention as a narrative o f res­ cue: o f Cuba and the Philippines from the tyranny o f an O ld W orld em pire on the on e hand, and from the anarchy o f revolution and selfrule on the other. Proponents o f im perialism m erged Tw ain’s two Am ericas through another narrative o f liberation? they saw im perial warfare as an oppor­ tunity fo r the Am erican man to rescue him self from the threatening

92

Romancing the Empire * 93 forces o f industrialization and fem inization at hom e. In a 1900 speech urging the U n ited States to annex the Philippines, fo r exam ple, Sena­ tor A lb ert Jerem iah B everidge asked: "W hat does all this m ean fo r ev­ ery on e o f us?” and then readily answered: “It means opportunity fo r all the glorious young m anhood o f the republic— the m ost virile, am­ bitious, im patient, m ilitant m anhood the w orld has ever seen.”2 W ith­ out specifying the opportunities fo r particular actions, B everidge im­ p lied tautologically that the em pire o ffered the arena fo r Am erican m en to becom e what they already were, to enact th eir essential man­ h ood b efore the eyes o f a global audience. In subduing the P h ilip­ pines, asserted another im perialist, a man could escape the thrall o f m odem life and be rejuvenated as a “free, glorious man, the real sin­ ews o f the republic in the days when too many o f us are city bred.”9 By figh tin g abroad, this logic held, an Am erican man could return hom e to his republican origins. A sim ilar rescue mission was conducted on the pages o f the popular historical rom ance, where heroes whose Am erican identity was thinly veiled pursued chivalric adventures in bygone eras. In the open in g scene from the 1898 bestseller, When Knighthood Was in Flower, the hero­ ine, catching her first sight o f the hero in the m idst o f figh tin g a duel, declares passionately: “For once I have found a real live man, fu ll o f manliness.”4 In these novels, mythical kingdom s in historical settings function as the fictional equivalent o f the Philippines fo r Beveridge, as the site where a man can reassert his “m ilitant m anhood.” In these ro­ mances, a woman serves both as the damsel in distress fo r the hero to rescue and as the eyes o f the w orld fo r which masculinity is perform ed. Many contem porary readers linked the jin goistic clam or fo r for­ eign wars to what W illiam Dean H ow ells called the “horrid tumult o f the swashbuckler swashing on his buckler” in “the new historical ro­ mances” in the 1890s.5 Look in g back at his youth, H en ry Seidel Canby w rote in 1934, “Scott and the near-Scotts and the school-of-Scotts w ere such real determ inants o f inner life fo r readers brought up in the eighties and nineties that no on e w ill ever understand the Am erica o f that day without reading and pon dering upon not only Ixtanhoe but also To Have and To H old and Richard Carvel and M onsieur Beaucaxre and Under the Red Robe.”6 These novels, fo r Canby, linked the private psyche o f the reader to the public enthusiasm fo r the Spanish-American War: “I cannot separate in my own m em ory the bands and cheerin g o f ’98,

94 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE H obson, Dewey, and m anifest destiny in an expectant world, from the extravagant rom anticism o f the shallow, unphilosophical, unpsychological novels we had all been reading. O ne carried over into the other, and the same color was infused through both” (205). O ver­ look ed by later critics in their characterization o f the period as the A ge o f Realism, historical romances, in fact, were the m ajor bestsellers on the earliest published lists from 1895-1902.7 Popular journalism has lon g been accorded a m ajor role in galvaniz­ in g public support fo r U.S. entry in to war against Spain. T h e yellow press o f Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst rapidly built its circula­ tion by rallying support fo r Cuba Libre, underw riting filibustering ex­ peditions, excoriating the treatm ent o f Cuban civilians by the Spanish regim e, and fanning the flam e o f patriotic outrage at the explosion o f the M aine. Less w ell known is the contribution o f popular fiction to creating this jin goistic atm osphere that Canby recalled. Yet many jo u r­ nalistic narratives follow ed the script o f the historical rom ance, ren­ derin g Am erica as a manly hero rescuing a foreign princess and her land from a tyrannical master. Critics, however, have lon g dismissed the popular rom ance as a nostalgic escape from m odernity to the heartier life o f the chivalric warrior; as a collective form o f blow ing o ff steam. Reproducing the terms o f im perialist discourse itself, this ap­ proach ignores how nostalgia can abet m odern im perial force, and how an outworn gen re can be refurbished to represent a new political c o n tex t8 T h e nostalgia fo r a lost wholeness in the distant past expressed in the swashbuckling rom ances o f the 1890s created fanciful realms on which to project contem porary desires fo r unlim ited global expan­ sion. These novels o ffe r a cognitive and libidinal map o f the geop oliti­ cal shift from continental expansion to overseas em pire, m arked by the heralded close o f the frontier. Through the m edium o f the white m ale body, they work to close the gap between Twain’s two Am ericas, to m erge the narratives o f liberation and dom ination, to narrate the new em pire as consistent with the history o f the republic, to map over­ seas colonies as contiguous to continental expansion, lik e the Su­ prem e C ourt justices in Downes u Bidwell, the novelists were in search o f historical continuity to suture the gaps between the present im pe­ rial m ovem ents abroad and an understanding o f p rior U.S. history as anticolonial. T h ey figu red the w orld outside the U n ited States as both a new fron tier and a return to the lost past o f the Am erican nation.

Romancing the Empire » 95 By transposing international con flict in to tales o f chivalric heroism , these novels com bat im agined threats to masculinity on the hom e fron t as w ell as abroad, and they contribute to refigu ring the relation between m anhood and nationhood in a changing international con­ te x t T h e rom ance hero asserts his virility in m ore com plex form s than the im agined sim ple violence o f the self-reliant frontiersm an. T h e chi­ valric rescue narrative makes him dependent on the liberation and subjugation o f the w illing heroine, who serves as a com posite figu re fo r the N ew W oman at hom e and the subjects o f the new em pire abroad. In contrast to the dom estic novels o f the 1850s, heroines o f the 1890s rom ances escape from the hom e to participate in im perial adventures. Furtherm ore, in staging the spectacle o f masculinity fo r the fem ale gaze, the rom ances liberate wom en readers from the con­ fines o f dom esticity to re-dom esticate them as spectators enjoying the "pleasures o f im perialism .”9 T h e heroine in these novels also repre­ sents the supposed desire o f colon ized peoples to be liberated from their backward traditions and to subject themselves to m odern form s o f power. T h e novels render resistance to em pire as anarchy, as they dram atize, in Twain’s terms, how Am erica sets the captive free by sub­ jectin g him to im perial power.

The Double Discourse of American Imperialism N ation hood and m anhood have lon g been intim ately related in the representation o f the dynamic o f territorial expansion. T h e fron tier where Frederick Jackson Turner located the form ation o f Am erican individualism becam e fo r later historians the site o f con flict with Na­ tive Am ericans, which forged the ideology o f white masculinity. W hat happened to the link between nationality and masculinity when U.S. expansion shifted course from the continent to an overseas em pire in the 1890s? T h e traditional explanation finds both nationalism and masculinity physically revitalized by im perial conquest. C ongruence between the body and the state underlies the characterization o f the period by the title o f T h eod ore Roosevelt’s speech, "T h e Strenuous L ife ,” and the com m onplace phrase "national m uscle-flexing,” which deploys the body as a m etaphor fo r international aggression. For revi­ sionists, the contradictions that inhere in masculine regeneration on the fron tier are exported and reproduced at the turn o f the century in the confrontation with new "Indians” abroad. These explanations,

96 . THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE however, dem and reconsideration, because they assume both a contin­ uous history o f expansion and a natural connection between the iden­ tification o f the nation with the land and with the m ale body.10 A

m ore com plex double discourse o f Am erican im perialism

em erged in the 1890s: politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen on both sides o f the debate were redefin in g national pow er as disembod­ ied— that is, divorced from contiguous territorial expansion. In the same period, and often in the same breath, masculine identity was reconceived as embodied— that is, cultivated— in the muscular robust physique. T h e disem bodim ent o f Am erican nationalism can be seen in the m uch-heralded close o f the frontier, which was inseparable from the call fo r open doors abroad. W ith the end o f continental expansion, na­ tional pow er was no lon ger measured by the settlem ent and incorpora­ tion o f new territory consolidated into a united state, but rather by the extension o f vaster yet less tangible networks o f international markets and political influence. Even the annexation o f Hawaii and the Phil­ ippines was valued prim arily as providing way stations to the fabled China markets, ju st as Cuba becam e the gateway to the Caribbean, it­ self the key to the isthmus that would becom e a canal and open the d oor to worldwide shipping. W e have seen how the ambiguous status o f Puerto R ico as ‘‘unincorporated territory” expressed this tension be­ tween em bodim ent and disem bodim ent. These islands, despite their bounded nature, becam e projections o f the desire fo r an ever-growing expansion that seem ed directed at noncorporeal goals. Disem bodi­ m ent m ight describe the cultural fantasy underlying what historians have called the econom ically determ ined “inform al em pire,” the de­ sire fo r total con trol disentangled from direct political annexation.11 In fact, Am erica’s “N ew Em pire,” as Brooks Adam s dubbed it, de­ fin ed itself ideologically against the territorially based colonialism o f the o ld European em pires. W h ile the fron tier environm ent may have characterized the exceptional nature o f Am erica’s past fo r Tu rner and his follow ers, the spatially unbounded quality o f the N ew Em pire prom ised to reconstitute national uniqueness. Thus, as M yra Jehlen has shown, i f M anifest Destiny “rests its case on the integrity o f the continent,” what she calls “incarnation,” then the shift from continen­ tal to global expansion in the 1890s can be seen as a form o f “disin­ carnation.”1* In this light, the representation o f U.S. nationhood m ight be seen to

Romancing the Empire » 97 undergo a “reincarnation” in the im age o f the Am erican man. T h e culture at large was in the process o f red efin in g white middle-class masculinity from a republican quality o f character based on self-con­ trol and social responsibility to a corporeal essence id en tified with the vigor and prowess o f the individual m ale body.19 Im perialist discourse drew on and rein forced this process, as novelist and critic M aurice Thom pson testified: T h e war has m ade startlingly clear how great a thing is physical health and strength. Probably no army and navy since the best days o f the Rom an Em pire ever equaled ours man fo r man in the best results o f athletic training.”14 Despite the evidence o f war’s physical ravages, caused by disease as much as com bat, Thom pson con­ tinued: “In lookin g at our soldiers and sailors I was filled with admira­ tion o f their lithe and muscular form s and their show o f virile health.” This view reduces the em pire to on e am ong other rugged settings— the playing field , the boxin g ring, the newly discovered wilderness— and relegates the war to such vigorous activities as athletics, bicycling, w eight liftin g, hiking. V irility is less the means to the end o f em pire­ building than is em pire the occasion fo r body-building, an inversion which id eologically effaces the violen t con flict with foreign bodies on alien terrain. T h e discourse o f U.S. im perialism is th erefore double, because it delineates national pow er that is simultaneously disem bod­ ied from territorial boundaries and em bodied in the Am erican man. T h e question remains, however, what links geographic disem bodi­ m ent and masculine em bodim ent in this double discourse? Elaine Scarry’s analysis o f war suggests that an ideological spotlight on the in­ dividual body m ight concretize an otherw ise abstract political strug­ g le.15 I f the political and territorial ends o f John H ay’s “splendid little war” seem ed murky, the m ale body could thus provide an smchor o f m eaning in a sea o f distended w orld power. T h e problem o f conceptu­ alizing Am erican im perialism , however, lay less in its abstract political nature in the present than in its rupture with a vision o f the past. Anti­ im perialists opposed the forced annexation o f noncontiguous islands as a radical departure from what they considered the organic growth o f the nation, an unnatural act that Justice H arlan warned would “en­ graft upon our republican institutions a colonial system such as ex­ ists under m onarchical governm ents.”16Furtherm ore, anti-imperialists like Twain protested such conquest as antithetical to A m erica’s repub­ lican anticolonial tradition. “E ngrafting” the im age o f the Am erican m ale body on to the disem­

98 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE bodied em pire im plicidy addressed the question o f whether im perial­ ism was continuous with U.S. history, the problem facing the Supreme C ourt in Downes u Bidwell in 1901. In the introduction to his book De­ mocracy and Empire, sociologist Franklin G iddings explicitly posed and resolved this contradiction: ‘T h e w orld has been accustomed to think o f dem ocracy and em pire as antagonistic phenom ena. It has assumed that dem ocracy could be established only on the ruins o f em pire, and that the establishment o f em pire necessarily m eant the overthrow o f liberty by a trium phant reign o f absolutism. Yet in our day we are wit­ nessing the simultaneous developm ent o f both dem ocracy and em ­ p ire.”17W hat G iddings saw as a distinctly m odern developm ent, others envisioned through the lens o f nostalgia, which located the em pire as the site fo r recuperating a prim itive corporeal virility. W riters such as Frank N orris represented a historically changing construction o f mas­ culinity as simply the return to a m ythical origin: “som ewhere deep down in the heart o f every Anglo-Saxon lies the predatory instinct o f his V ikin g ancestors— an instinct that a thousand years o f respectabil­ ity and tax-paying have not quite succeeded in elim inating.”18 This in­ stinctual self could only be recovered, paradoxically, on an external­ ized fron tier rem ote from the U n ited States, whose internal national identity appeared threatened by the in flu x o f non-Anglo-Saxon im m i­ grants. I f the idea o f an international em pire seem ed discordant with U.S. democracy, the representation o f that em pire in the prim itive m ale body figu red reassuringly as a return to a fundam ental Anglo-Saxon heritage. In a p eriod o f the N ew Woman, the N ew N egro, the N ew South, and the N ew Em pire, the N ew W hite Am erican Man was in­ vented as a tradition, to use Hobsbawm’s term (and unlike the others, as a tradition it remains tellingly un labeled), as nothing new at all, but rather a figu re from an enduring recoverable p a st19 Thus in the revi­ talized m ale body, geographic distension and overseas conquest figu re as a tem poral return to origins, literally as nostalgia, nostos, the return hom e. As we have seen through M ark Twain’s m em ories o f Hawaii, “im pe­ rialist nostalgia” fo r the indigenous form s o f life destroyed by em pire also entails nostalgia fo r an im agined past o f the im perial nation, a lon gin g n ot only fo r the “way they w ere,” but the “way we w ere.”80 W hereas Tw ain’s nostalgia was disrupted by the m elancholic return o f

Romancing the Empire » 99 colonial violence, in this discourse the em pire is where you can be all that you can n o lon ger be at hom e— a "real live m an”— where you can recover the autonom y denied by social forces o f m odernization, often aligned in this way o f thinking with fem inization. In the 1890s the la­ m ent fo r the close o f the fron tier loudly voiced such nostalgia fo r the form ative crucible o f Am erican m anhood; im perial expansion over­ seas o ffered a new frontier, where the essential Am erican man could be reconstituted in his escape from m odernity and domesticity.*1 Yet i f the em pire appeals to an antim odern desire to retrieve prim i­ tive origins, there is a counter-dynamic at work as well. Rather than an untouched wilderness, the em pire is represented as the setting where the prim al man is staged as a highly theatrical spectacle by deployin g the technologies o f mass destruction and mass m edia he fle d from at hom e. H e proves his virility not in a bloody contest with a native other, but by acting b efore the eyes o f a dom estic audience. This double dy­ namic o f recovering the prim itive and staging it as a high-tech specta­ cle, o f what E lliott G om in another con text has called "con trolled ata­ vism,” was epitom ized by T h eod ore Roosevelt, whose foray in to the West to recover his health— literally to restore his body— and whose later adventures figh tin g in Cuba and hunting in A frica w ere manifestly theatrical. H e highlighted his bodily vigor by purchasing customm ade "authentic” costumes from the tailors o f N ew York, and he relied on the m od em technology o f photography to publicize his prim itive virile im age back hom e.22As his case suggests, the prim itive m ale body proves to be as disem bodied as the em pire it represents; it becom es a carefully constructed simulation. Rather than a bedrock reality under­ lying the veneer o f corporate civilization, the prim al m ale body be­ com es another layering o f veneers. O n e well-known b iological m etaphor justifying territorial expansion in the nineteenth century com pared national growth to an organic body, which must continue to grow o r die.** But the stable part o f this m etaphor— the body— was bein g destabilized in this period as an arti­ ficially com posed spectacle. Thus the analogy between nationhood and m anhood in the 1890s ultim ately relies on th eir spectacular na­ ture rather than on their rooted physical organicism . Furtherm ore, the tension between the disem bodied em pire and the em bodied Am erican man is reproduced within the figu re o f masculinity itself, be­ tween nostalgia fo r the body and the spectacle o f its display.

100 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE

Reviving the Romance T h e return to rom ance,” argued Thom pson, uis simply a young, strong, virile generation pushing aside a flabby one. T h e little war we had with Spain did not d o so much fo r us: the thing was already done by our schools, churches, gymnasiums, out-door sport; the war acted simply as a faucet through which our vigor began to a c t”24 T o the ath­ letic field and battlefield, Thom pson added the revival o f the historical novel, with its “distinction o f large masculine power.” W hereas How ells and Canby treated this revival as a collective regression into “the fever­ ish exuberance o f an unhealthy child,” a view seconded by later critics, Thom pson welcom ed the historical romances, with their “virile ances­ try,” not as antim odern regression but as part o f a progression suitable to A m erica’s new global role, “signs in the air o f great w orld changes.” T o him , the return to the rom ance represented a step into the future: “I f the map o f the w orld and the atm osphere o f civilization are chang­ in g radically, a corresponding change in art should n ot be surprising.” T h e revival o f the rom ance turns a potential rupture with tradition into cultural and political continuity, a return to a healthier, m ore au­ thentic Am erican past T h e form ulaic p lot o f the rom ance uncannily parallels the popular narrative o f the Spanish-American W ar as a chivalric rescue mission that in turn rejuvenates the liberator. T h e historical rom ance opens with its own lam ent fo r the closed frontier, as the hero m opes, discon­ tented with the dwarfed opportunities o f his contem porary society. H e then seeks adventure on a prim itive fron tier abroad, where he falls in love with a beautiful aristocratic woman, often the ru ler o f a kingdom and sometimes a gen teel Am erican. T h e hero, usually a disinherited o r “natural” aristocrat, saves the kingdom from fallin g to its barbaric enem ies and thereby m odernizes it, and liberates the heroin e from outdated class constraints by m arrying her. T h e heroin e o f the novel, an athletically daring N ew W om an (often a Gibson girl in the illustra­ tions), actively abets her own liberation by rescuing the hero and then em bracing him in m arriage. A t the end, the hero returns hom e with his bride, after relinquishing political con trol o f the realm he has freed. This form ula is strikingly pliable to radically d ifferen t settings and eras, from Richard H arding Davis’s Soldiers o f Fortune (1897),25in which

Romancing the Empire » 101 an Am erican m ercenary saves a fictional Latin Am erican dictatorship from revolution and m arries an upper-class Am erican g irl whose fa­ ther owns m ines there; to Charles M ajor’s When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), in which Brandon wins the heart o f M ary Tu dor and wrests her away from the pow er o f the monarchy; to G eorge Barr M cCutcheon’s Graustark (1901 ),*• set in a mythical kingdom which a footloose Am erican rescues from hostile neighbors to m arry its prin­ cess; to M ary Johnston’s To Heme and To H old (1900) ,v in which a colo­ nist o f Jamestown, Virginia, saves a fem ale ward o f the K ing from the evil designs o f L ord Carnal, while simultaneously defeating the last In­ dian attack on the colony. These fou r bestsellers, from which m ost o f my exam ples are drawn, are characteristic o f hundreds o f novels which fit into fou r main categories: (1 ) the fewest, set in contem porary ex­ otic arenas o f the colonized world; (2 ) many m ore, which enact a kind o f cultural im perialism by rew riting scenes from European history with identifiable ( i f anachronistic) Am ericanized heroes, from the fall o f Rom e to nineteenth-century Italy; (S ) a num ber o f others that simi­ larly insert overt Am erican heroes into the revision o f a popular Brit­ ish gen re set in m ythical kingdom s, based on Stevenson’s Prince Otto and Anthony H o p e’s Prisoner o f Zenda; (4 ) a proliferation o f rom ances about Am erican history, largely revolutionary and colonial, but also in­ cluding the C ivil W ar and Reconstruction. T h e m odern W estern, initi­ ated with Owen W ister’s The Virginian, finds its im m ediate genealogy in this genre, which reclaim s the Am erican West through the course o f overseas em pire.28

The Disembodied Empire and the Closed Frontier N o t surprisingly, critics have viewed the historical rom ance prim arily as a nostalgic retreat to a sim plified past away from contem porary so­ cial strife at hom e and abroad. As H ow ells put it, “the tarraddidles o f the historical rom ancers” o ffered ua re lie f from the facts o f the odious present” (9 3 6).29 T o call these novels escapist, however, is to show n ot their avoidance o f contem porary political discourse, but their repro­ duction o f i t In the decade b efore the wars in Cuba and the P h ilip­ pines, a politics o f regulated escape was propounded by advocates o f U.S. expansion, who believed that social and psychic pressures atten­ dant upon the close o f the fron tier and the 1893 depression could be

102 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE relieved by open in g new frontiers abroad. Frederick Jackson Turner, fo r exam ple, endorsed overseas expansion as an inevitable solution to T h e Problem o f the West": For nearly three hundred years the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement o f the Pacific Coast and the occu­ pation o f the free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these energies o f expansion will no longer operate would be a rash pre­ diction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an oceanic canal, for a revival o f our power upon the seas, and for the extension o f American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are in­ dications that the movement will continue.30 Em bedded in the discourse o f closed space is the rhetoric o f surplus energy that describes the overproduction o f goods and the oversaving o f capital as a physical pressure in need o f release. Frank N orris com ­ pared this national surplus hem m ed in by geographic boundaries to the undirected physical energy o f "the boy shut indoors who finds his scope circum scribed and fills the w hole place with the racket o f his ac­ tivity.”31 Such destructive excess found an ou tlet historically, according to N orris, only in the pursuit o f m ore distant frontiers, either westward o r in the eastern Crusades. T h e recent war in the Pacific and ensuing response to the B oxer R ebellion in China, he claim ed, jo in e d both tra­ jectories in fu ll circle around the globe. A n oth er ideologu e o f expansion, the R everend Josiah Strong, re­ vealed that Am erican anxiety about the closed West may have had global dim ensions that expressed fear o f belatedness on the im perial stage, o f the absence o f those white spaces on the map im pellin g Mar­ low in H eart o f Darkness. Strong warned that "there are no m ore new worlds. T h e unoccupied arable lands o f the earth are lim ited and w ill soon be taken."32 Yet in contrast to Lenin, who later foresaw inter­ national con flict as a result o f a w orld that could only be "divided and subdivided," Strong turned crowded space into em pty space, as he proclaim ed that the Anglo-Saxon race (in its highest form in the U nited States) would yet transcend this geographic obstacle and, "to impress its institutions upon mankind, w ill spread itself over the earth” through its religious, cultural, and econom ic institutions. A ccordin g to Strong, an escape fo r the excess "energy" galvanizing the Anglo-Saxon

Romancing the Empire » 103 race was still available fo r a w orld infin itely m alleable, i f geographically lim ited, to be rem ade in the im age o f the U nited States. T h e new historical rom ance direcdy addressed this anxiety about a w orld closed to expansion by rem apping the w orld overcrow ded with contesting powers to create new worlds out o f old, which o ffe r them­ selves fo r the taking. H owells, in fact, com pared the novelist to the em ­ pire-builder: “im aginary thrones, principalities and powers in a map o f Europe which the novelist changed with m ore than N apoleon ic ease, becam e the ready, the eager prey o f English and Am erican soldiers o f fortu n e” (9S7). Most o f these rom ances begin by announcing the close o f the fron tier in the tem poral form o f the h ero’s lam ent fo r the lack o f opportunity fo r heroic adventure. This lam ent introduces the second Crusade o f Via Cruets, fo r exam ple, which, in its com m er­ cialism and lack o f nobility, seems a pale shadow o f the first. This same com plaint is directed against the Quaker father o f H ugh Wynne, whose com m ercial bent, tim id uprightness, and pacifism suffocates the young man, who welcom es the Am erican Revolution as a return to the heroic valor o f his Welsh ancestors. Even a novel set in colonial Jamestown starts with a sense o f closed fron tier as the hero daydreams o f the good old days o f D ale’s laws, starvation, and bloody Indian bat­ tles. T h e present, by contrast, is hem m ed in by peace with the Indians and the threat o f dom estication, in the form o f a boatload o f fem ale settlers im ported from England fo r m arriage.93 I f the novels as a genre offered a nostalgic retreat from the late nineteenth-century U nited States, they each open by reenacting this retreat, rendering the pres­ ent o f the novel as a closed space, lon gin g fo r boundlessness in the form o f an even m ore distant virile past. T h e m ost popular Am erican version o f this them e, Graustark, starts on a train hom e to the nation’s capital from the clearly unrom antic West. T h e upper-class hero, bored with his routine life in Washington, has failed to fin d excitem ent in a w orld where duels are outlawed and a stagecoach ride to save the heroin e from missing her train devolves into a botched chivalric deed that appears to him as a parody o f a dim e novel. O nly his pursuit o f a mysterious Germ anic princess reopens the possibilities o f adventure foreclosed in the W est O n e o f the first things L o rry learns upon arriving in Graustark, from another foot­ loose Am erican, is that the native m en “fou ght like Sam Patch” (100); that they act like real cowboys on horseback. This sounds like the real

104 ‘ THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE West, rather than the self-conscious parody which, as Frank N orris noted, the Am erican West had becom e. Part o f the criticism o f these romances as escapist is that they reflect Am erica’s provincial lack o f interest in geopolitics.34 T h e novels, how­ ever, often present the same critique, and thus o ffe r themselves as cor­ rective lessons in w orld geography. Lorry, a w orld traveler, initially flaunts his ignorance o f other lands: “his ideas o f geography were jum ­ bled and vague— as i f he had g o t them by studying labels on his hatb ox” (1 3 ). This myopia, however, im pedes his pursuit o f the mysteri­ ous princess, when he tries to follow her to “on e o f those many infer­ nal little kingdom s and principalities” som ewhere east o f Paris (9 1 ). A fter he finally locates Graustark on a Baedeker map, he is dismayed yet tantalized to fin d it “away o ff to the east,” fo r “on e would think bar­ barians existed there and not such p eop le” as those “refined, culti­ vated, smart, rich” ones he m et on the train (9 5 ). But such a duality is precisely the allure o f Graustark, which in its m edieval setting— com ­ plete with castle, tower, and dungeon— turns out to be attractively backward, with swarthy peasants in turbans, ridin g on horseback and brandishing swords. Yet like Twain’s Cam elot, Graustark also has the grace o f an aristocratic civilization in its “air o f antiquity,” and its “guys are great on gallantry” (103). T h e mythical kingdom o f Graustark is typical o f the settings o f the historical rom ance, and, as an escape from the geopolitics o f the 1890s, reveals the triadic structure shaping Am ericans’ cognitive map o f the w orld. Graustark has the overcivilized qualities o f the European powers with which the U nited States was com peting and the barbaric characteristics o f the peoples it was trying to save and subdue. T h e ro­ mance conflates and makes exotic the threatening poles in contem ­ porary political rhetoric, o f O ld W orld “tyranny”— em pire— and N ew W orld “anarchy”— revolution— against which the U n ited States inter­ venes and defines itself as unique. In this respect the m onarchy o f Graustark resembles the republic o f O lancho, “on e o f those little re­ publics down there” in South Am erica, in Richard H arding Davis’s Sol­ diers o f Fortune. In O lancho a gallant young Englishman dies defen din g his Spanish lady— the w ife o f the would-be dictator— against rebellious Olanchan nationalists. As these noble but pathetic residues o f the Spanish and English em pires m ove offstage, the Am erican hero, Clay, a civil engineer and abundantly decorated mercenary, single-handedly

Romancing the Empire « 105 defeats the revolutionaries. T h e historical rom ance thus remaps a new w orld out o f the ruins o f a decayed em pire and a thwarted revolution, and often m erges the two in a single threat, as in the federation o f In­ dian tribes referred to as a “Southern Em pire” in the colonial V irgin ia o f To Have and To Hold. T o rebuild these ruins, the Am erican hero is offered the antiquated position o f dictator o r king, a jo b he laughingly declines, thus sig­ nifying the excess rather than absence o f power. By m arrying the hero­ ine and bringing her hom e, he asserts a less direct and m ore com plete control over the realm he has liberated. L o rry abandons the throne o f Graustark to return to W ashington; yet, in a gesture anticipating W oodrow W ilson, he bestows a dem ocratic future on the m onarchy by having its ancient noblem en vote to allow the princess to m arry him; they conclude that in the absence o f a masculine scion o f the noble family, “why not the bold, progressive, rich Am erican” (396). A fter sim­ ilarly declin in g the dictatorship o f O lancho, Clay m arries the daughter o f the ow ner o f the Am erican m ining com pany who em ployed him , on whose b eh alf he preserved the republic. Soldiers o f Fortune ends on board ship, with the hero returning to becom e a respectable “engi­ neering e x p e rt” Triu m phant he points out lights on the distant hori­ zon to his fiancée: “over there is the coast o f A frica.” In both cases, by refusing direct political power in favor o f m arriage, the heroes secure an even stronger hold overseas as they return hom e to the com m ercial corporate w orld they seem ed to escape in foreign adventures. Just as political pow er is rein forced abroad by being renounced, the main character can best prove his masculinity outside his national boundaries. T h e hero o f Soldiers o f Fortune becom es the ideal Am erican man by virtue o f his homelessness; his sentim ental attachm ent to a hom e is really to the grave o f his filibustering father. H e divides the work m onths o f the year between construction (as en gin eer) and d e­ struction (as m ercenary) in the outposts o f the European em pires, and then takes his vacation in Vienna, where he goes to im bibe high civilization. W hen Clay is saluted by an Am erican m arine at the end, he says proudly, “I have w orn several uniform s since I was a boy, but never that o f my own country” (335). It is striking that this representa­ tive Am erican never lives there. Yet this absence, this refusal o f na­ tional dress o r place, makes him m ore authentically Am erican than the uniform ed m arine by ren dering his nation’s qualities universal

106 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE and self-evident in his own body. T h e m ale h ero’s escape from dom es­ ticity makes the entire w orld a potential hom e and quells its m enacing foreignness. In these novels o f the 1890s, masculinity has a function sim ilar to the “m anifest dom esticity” we saw in Chapter 1. T h e self-con­ tained white m ale body is delineated by its rejection o f fem inization and racial otherness, but it is m obile and flexib le enough to make it­ self at hom e anywhere in the world. O nly in the release from geographic bounds can the U n ited States secure the borders o f its own identity. A n d this escape to a distant fron­ tier is nostalgic in that it allows the Am erican man to return hom e by becom ing m ore fully him self. I f O lancho and Graustark are escapes, they m agically reopen that w orld which Strong sees closing down, a com posite w orld o f old and new, o f barbarism and civilization, an “ex­ pectant w orld,” in Canby’s words, awaiting an influ x o f U.S. m igh t Fantasies indeed, these novels enact the desire fo r infin ite expansion without colonial annexation, total con trol through the abdication o f political rule, the detachm ent o f national power from geographical boundaries.

The Embodied Man and the New Woman Masculinity freed o f national boundaries at first glance appears a purely corporeal identity, m aterialized through the im m ersion in pri­ mal violence, as Jackson Lears has argued.35 T h e heroes’ actions in these novels, however, juxtapose violen t dem onstrations o f brute strength and a chivalric dedication to wom en, a com m itm ent that som etimes leads to the renunciation o f figh tin g in favor o f love. W hen the hero o f Soldiers o f Fortune rides o ff with his beloved during a battle, he remarks, “I had forgotten. T h ey have been having a revolution h ere” (306). H e asserts his manliness through this nonchalance to­ ward the m ale sphere o f war, just as he asserts his Am ericanness by disavowing a uniform . Furtherm ore, this renunciation enhances his con trol by ren dering the indigenous revolution as insignificant back­ ground to his declaration o f love. Many o f these novels im plicitly tell the story o f defeating a national­ ist revolution by displacing this con flict on to the m ore overt p lot o f rescue, in which the hero saves the heroin e from her own environ­ m ent. T h e rom ance splits the subjects o f im perial pow er into gen­

Romancing the Empire « 107 dered positions in which the heroin e plays the part o f the good In­ dian, siding with the forces o f progress, w hile her m ale counterparts resist as brutal savages. In fact, the measure o f their barbarism, like that o f the ancient Hawaiians in Twain’s writing, lies in their mistreat­ m ent o f wom en. Both the backwardness and the allure o f exotic cul­ tures stem from th eir worship o f wom en as objects o f chivalric adora­ tion on the on e hand, and the w om en’s role as chattel to be m arried o ff fo r political alliances on the other. T h e liberator frees the heroine from her outdated role as item o f exchange fo r a barbaric institution that makes “m arriageable wom en but com m odities in statecraft,” as M ajor put it (148). T h e hero underm ines the feudal ord er and sup­ plants it with his own chivalry by liberating the heroine from this bondage. H e enacts the poin t T h eod ore Roosevelt m ade in 1910, fo r exam ple, when he lectured to Egyptian M oslems about the Christian respect fo r wom en as a mark o f superior civilization.36 Roosevelt was echoin g a long-standing im perial trope we saw voiced by Sarah Josepha H ale as w ell, that civilization— o r its absence— can be mea­ sured by the dom estic status accorded wom en. T h e wom en who are liberated in these novels have already in a sense saved themselves; by virtue o f their love fo r the hero they have proven themselves ahead o f their tim e. Cast in the role o f the N ew Woman— independent, self-reliant, and adventurous— they often disguise them ­ selves as m en to p lot the escape scenes, which the heroes obediently act o u t T h e heroine o f Richard Carvel saves the hero from death in a British prison by disguising h erself as a beggar. Even the heroine o f The Virginian, a N ew England schoolm arm , rescues the self-reliant hero from the wilderness, where he is le ft wounded after a figh t with Indians. T h e h eroin e’s strong-willed passion, individualism , and activ­ ism show her out o f place in her feudal o r gen teel environ m en t M ary T u d or o f Knighthood is described sim ilarly as a self-willed “g irl pitted against a body o f brutal m en, two o f them rulers o f the two greatest na­ tions on earth— rather heavy odds, fo r on e wom an” (137). But M ary does beat the odds and m arries Brandon through her own machina­ tions, with which he passively com plies. Yet rather than run away togeth er to N ew Spain, as she had planned, her m ale disguise is ex­ posed, and this “sweet w illful M ary” voluntarily “dropped out o f his­ tory; a sure token that her heart was her husband’s throne; her soul his em pire; her every wish his subject, and her w ill, so m asterful with oth­

108 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE ers, the m eek and lowly servant o f her strong but gen tle lord and mas­ ter” (248). M arriage is described here not simply in the rhetoric o f political conquest, as we m ight expect, but in the language o f p oliti­ cal collaboration, the language o f desire. Voluntarily chosen by the woman, rather than forcibly im posed, m arriage represents the m od­ ern alternative to both em pire and revolution. T h e N ew W oman thus becom es a figu re fo r im perial subjects o f the N ew Em pire. T h e heroines prove their own m odernity by at once free­ ing themselves from traditional hierarchies and voluntarily subduing themselves to some "real live m an,” ju st as im perial subjects, like the loyal Olanchan general in Soldiers o f Fortune, prove their capacity fo r liberation through their alliance with Am erican power. T h e rom ance heroin e plays a role like that described by Frantz Fanon: T n the colo­ nialist program , it was the woman who was given the historic mission o f shaking up the A lgerian man.”97 T h e rom ance heroines g o on e step further in im perialist fantasy; they eclipse and supplant their c o lo ­ nized m ale counterparts. In Am erican m ythology, this fem ale role replays the Pocahontas myth, which was undergoing a revival in the popular culture o f the 1890s.98 In To Have and To H old, Pocahontas is a constant allusive pres­ ence (after her death); her husband, R olfe, is a com panion o f the hero, and her brother, a noble savage gracefully em bracing his own doom , aids the British settlers in the final destruction o f Indian resis­ tance and thus the founding o f the colony. In the figures o f Poca­ hontas and the white heroines, these novels represent the fem ale de­ sire to be liberated from feudal and traditional bonds as the desire to be subjugated to m odern power. T h e 1899 Schurman Com mission in the Philippines noted a sim ilar desire in eroticized terms: "T h e very thing they yearn fo r is what o f all others our G overnm ent w ill naturally desire to give them .”99 Such a p erfect fit is im agined between con­ qu eror and conquered to erase any trace o f c o n flic t Yet in the novels, this fem ale desire to be liberated contains a potential threat to the man who saves her. “Such a woman as M ary” in Knighthood is called “dangerous, except in a state o f com plete subjection— but she was bound hand and fo o t in the silken meshes o f her own weaving” (248). I f these meshes are self-designed, can they be torn at will? That is the lurking threat in this fantasy o f im perial collaboration; the position o f

Romancing the Empire » 109 the hero as chivalrous rescuer makes him curiously dependent on m aintaining the desire o f his fem ale subject. T h e heroine, as a com posite figure, has at least a double function: she fem inizes colonial subjects and masculinizes Am erican wom en. In the first case, the p lot o f rescue may shed ligh t on a phenom enon of­ ten noted by historians, the abrupt shift in the Am erican im age o f the Cubans and, to a lesser extent, the Filipinos, from heroic revolutionar­ ies (b efo re the U.S. entry into the war against Spain) to bedraggled “unmanly” bandits unworthy o f their Am erican allies.40 W hen gen der is taken in to account in the narrative o f rescue, this shift seems less ex­ trem e. Tales abounded in the popular press o f outrages perpetrated by the Spanish against Cuban wom en, as in the alleged strip searches on the U.S. ship, Olivette, o r in the celebrated case o f Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, the “Cuban Joan o f A rc,” a m em ber o f a prom inent Cuban fam ily who was im prisoned on suspicion o f aiding the revolutionar­ ies.41 T h e press virtually scripted the case as a rom ance novel, claim ing that she had been im prisoned fo r resisting the lustful advances o f a Spanish officer. Hearst’s New YorkJournal launched an extensive letter­ w riting cam paign on her b eh alf and then sent reporter Karl Decker, in the role o f knight errant, to rescue her (h e staged it as a prison break, but accom plished it behind the scenes through bribes). This case en­ listed the support o f many readers from w om en’s organizations; one w rote to the Journal that the episode rem inded her “o f the chivalry o f the knights o f old, who rescued damsels in distress.”42 As the Journal noted in its book-length history o f the case, “As in old Romances, there is no uncertainty as to which way our sympathies should turn.”43 T h e rescue o f a captive Cuban woman served as a symbol fo r the entire Cuban nation— a connection m ade explicitly in the press: “We have freed on e Cuban girl— when shall we free Cuba?”44 I f the entry into the war was viewed as a chivalric rescue mission, then it is unsurprising that the Cubans and Filipinos could n ot be rep­ resented as m en acting with autonom ous agency o r that they were viewed by Am ericans as lacking the “qualities which make fo r man­ h ood.”45 N o t only d id the conditions o f gu errilla warfare shatter the im age o f the heroic soldier Am ericans expected to find, as historians have argued, but the fem in ized view o f the Cubans as w elcom ing dam­ sels in distress did n ot allow the Am ericans to represent them as sub­

n o ‘ THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE jects acting on their own behalf. In a related context, President M cKin­ ley ju stified the war against the Filipinos by chastising them fo r not acquiescing to the role o f the rescued: uIt is n ot a good tim e fo r the lib ­ erator to submit im portant questions concerning liberty and govern­ m ent to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.”46 T o be liberated, according to McKinley, meant, as it does in romances, to submit to being rescued, n ot to make claims fo r selfgovernm ent. W h ile the heroin e is an ideal im perial subject by virtue o f her com ­ bined rebellion against tradition and submissiveness to the m od em or­ der, she is similarly a m odel N ew W oman. Many o f the novels position the heroine against a m ore dom estic o r gen teel counterpart, who, though attractive, is clearly an outdated and unsuitable match fo r the hero. Yet the "newness” o f the heroin e is often represented as a return to a m ore prim itive and heroic past, as it is also fo r the hero. Even Thom pson, who applauded the historical rom ance as a masculine re­ vival o f an old er epic m ode against the dom estic novel, starts A lice o f Old Vincennes with a prototypical N ew W oman represented as a type from hardier fron tier days. Several novels, such asJanice Meredith, open with heroines reading rom ances illicitly, not to debunk a Bovary-like romanticism, but to fu lfill their dreams with even m ore rom antic ad­ ventures. T h e evidence o f a fem ale readership may prove H ow ells cor­ rect in his view that just as wom en were entering the arena o f athletics and spectator sports, the rom ance was claim ing the fie ld o f im perial adventure fo r wom en as readers. T h e appeal o f the historical rom ance to both fem ale and m ale read­ ers may suggest a way o f reconsidering the representation o f gen der relations at the turn o f the century. Advocates o f masculine rejuve­ nation, such as Roosevelt, usually responded to the threat o f the N ew W oman by urging a concom itant return o f wom en to their traditional roles as homem akers and childbearers. In T h e Strenuous L ife ” Roose­ velt called not only fo r m en to be m ore manly, but also fo r wom en to be m ore womanly by resum ing their allegedly feared and rejected work o f m otherhood.47 These novels suggest a m ore com plex pattern o f recuperation— namely, that wom en are invited to im agine them ­ selves participating in the adventures o f em pire as a means o f rejecting traditional roles. T h e novels elicit the desire fo r liberation from do­ mestic constraints through adventure and athletic activity, even as they

Romancing the Empire * 111 channel that desire into the support o f im perial con quest By conclud­ in g with m arriage, these works suggest that the hom e too can be recu­ perated by the em pire, which channels w om en’s dissent in to reaf­ filiatin g them with their m ale counterparts. Roosevelt and his peers may have wished to send the N ew Woman straight hom e to bear m ore Anglo-Saxon children, but the rom ance offers a m ore circuitous— and perhaps m ore efficacious— route, via the course o f overseas em pire.48

The Spectacle of Masculinity In the chivalric rescue narrative, the hero must violently subdue a bar­ baric oppressor, whether treacherous Indians, British loyalists, Eastern Cossacks, o r Latin Am erican revolutionaries. V iolen ce in the rom ance, however, is always fram ed by the theatrical display o f the hero in con­ spicuously staged scenes, where the heroine serves as the c h ief specta­ tor. O n this fiction al new frontier, renewal does not em erge from bloody contests with a native other; the novels instead o ffe r regenera­ tion through a spectacle before the fem ale gaze. This perform ance en­ gineers the final defeat o f the native insurgent by effacin g his contest­ in g agency. M ost violen t acts in the novels are self-consciously perform ed fo r a fem ale audience. T h e openin g duel o f Knighthood, the last act o f violence in the book, focuses less on purgative b loodlettin g than on M ary’s love-struck stare. Even the clim actic battle against the infidels in the rem ote H oly Land o f Via Cruds takes place in fron t o f fem ale Crusaders, whose queen declares to her knight, in the m idst o f the fray, “O h what a man you are! W hat a man.”49 Both cases relegate con­ flict with an enem y to a backdrop fo r the wom an’s act o f witness, one that validates the h ero’s virility. In som e cases, the spectacle o f masculinity preempts, and displaces the necessity to engage directly in violence. Although L orry leaves W ashington exhausted and neurasthenic, he and his frien d arrive in Graustark m agically transform ed in to “two handsome, smooth-faced young Am ericans [w h o] were as m en from another world, so utterly unlike their com panions were they in personal appearance. T h ey were taller, broader, and m ore pow erfully built than the swarthy-faced m en about them , and it was no w onder that the wom en allowed adm iration to show in their eyes. . . . T h e two strangers were over six feet tall,

112 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE broad-shouldered and athletic. Th ey looked like giants am ong these Graustark m en” (106-107). W ithout any physical exertion, the Am eri­ can m en autom atically recover th eir prim al virility in a relation o f d if­ ference, in contrast to the native m en around them. This d ifferen ce, however, is realized n ot through con flict with those m en, but through the observation o f the native wom en “who were eyeing them and com ­ m enting quite freely.” A t the end o f the novel, L orry luckily avoids a clim actic duel (th e on e he was disappointed n ot to fin d ou t W est), as his barbaric enem ies conveniently plunge knives into on e another. But he still saves the kingdom by unveiling the plots o f conspiracies and declaring his love in a verbal pageant b efore a packed c o u rt50 T h e theatrical quality o f prim itive nostalgia perm eated other areas o f contem porary physical culture as well. In "M odern Survivals o f Prowess” Thorstein Veblen described (qu ite sardonically) n ot ju st the atavistic qualities o f sportsmanship, but also its m arked histrionic ap­ peal, the extravagant gestures o f the white man hunting in his return to wilderness, where m ake-believe and perform ance b efore a real o r im agined audience becom e the focal point, rather than the k ill itself.51 Theatricalized chivalry was in fact advocated by G. Stanley H all, a psy­ chologist and educator. For him , on e o f the m ost im portant elem ents o f athletics fo r adolescents was the attention o f fem ale spectators: "T h e presence o f the fair sex gives tonicity to youth’s muscles and ten­ sion to his arteries to a degree o f which he is rarely conscious.”52 T h e youth exerts him self physically through contest with his peers in re­ sponse to a teenage girl, "who perform s her best service in the true role o f sympathetic spectator rather than as fellow player” (104). T h e fem ale spectator unleashes the brute in the man yet holds him in check. In Lew W allace’s im m ensely popular novel BenrHur, dram atized on stage and in lavish ou tdoor spectacles, Ben H u t ’s beloved also fig­ ures as the audience fo r whom prim itive violence is perform ed. She re­ sists turning away from the chariot figh t when she realizes: "An idea o f jo y there is in doin g an heroic deed under the eyes o f a m ultitude came to her, and she understood ever after how, at such times, the souls o f m en, in the frenzy o f perform ance, laugh at death o r fo rget it utterly.”55 T h e perform ative quality— rather than im m ersion in prim i­ tive violence— saves the actor from the fear o f death, and redeem s his masculinity, and the mass audience before whom he perform s is repre­ sented by the fem ale spectator.

Romancing the Empire » 113 ‘Jingoism is m erely the lust o f the spectator,” w rote J. A . H obson, in on e o f the first mayor studies o f im perialism .54 H e com pared the em o­ tions o f the spectator aroused at a sporting event to those o f the jin gois t T h e athletic arena, in which Veblen, H all, and W allace viewed the spectacle o f masculinity, was often interchangeable with the im pe­ rial battlefield in contem porary discourse. T h e historical rom ance ap­ pealed to what H obson called “spectatorial lust” by positioning wom en in the role o f the jin g o is t W hen the heroines o f these novels are n ot actively rescuing the hero, they are watching him figh t o r perform . By turning wom en into spectators, the rom ance posits an additional col­ laborative relation with wom en in the constitution o f masculinity and the establishment o f em pire. M oreover, i f the heroine/spectator is a figu re fo r the fem ale reader, she suggests a redefinition o f dom esticity in relation to im perialism , from a retreat from public space to a win­ dow o r lens focused on masculine exploits abroad.55 Furtherm ore, the presence o f dom estic viewers in the rom ance links these mass-mar­ keted bestsellers to the strategic role o f the mass-circulation newspa­ pers in the culture o f im perialism . By circulating im perial adventures into the Am erican hom e, the novels incorporate dom estic space into that im perial network and work with the press, which, according to Josiah Strong, “transforms the earth into an audience room .”56 In addition, these novels enact not just the lust o f the spectator but the lust fo r a spectator, as described by Stephen Crane, another jo u r­ nalist o f turn-of-the-century im perial warfare. “W hen they g o away to the fighting-ground,” he wrote, “ou t o f the sight, out o f the hearing o f the w orld known to them and are eager to perform feats o f war in this new place they fe e l an absolute lon gin g fo r a spectator. . . . N on e wanted to conceal from his le ft hand that his righ t hand was perform ­ in g a manly and valiant thing.”57 T h e reference to hands splits the figh tin g m ale subject in two— the actor and the spectator, who takes the form o f the journalist, as panderer in the arousal o f spectatorial lust: T h e war correspondent arises, then, to becom e a sort o f cheap telescope fo r the peop le at hom e; further still, there have been fights where the eyes o f a solitary man were the eyes o f the world; on e specta­ tor whose business it was to transfer, according to his ability, his visual impressions to oth er m inds.”58T h e focus o f this passage shifts from the soldier and his enem y on the battlefield to the audience at hom e. W hile manliness may be p erform ed against the backdrop o f rem ote

114 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE frontiers, this spectacle does not frilly m aterialize until it is broadcast by the m edia to a dom estic audience. This “absolute lon gin g fo r a spectator” is dram atized in Soldiers o f Fortune during the full-scale battle against the revolutionaries, which takes place, significantly, in the national theater. T h ere a young A m eri­ can college boy’s first experience o f war reveals the im portance o f spectatorship on the battlefield. Although he first approaches the bat­ tle as an amusing collegiate football gam e, when he finds him self out front, “he fe lt neglected and very much a lo n e .. . . [I ]t struck him as bein g m ost absurd that strangers should stand up and try to k ill on e another, m en who had so little in com m on that they d id n ot even know on e another’s names. T h e soldiers who were figh tin g on his own side were equally unknown to him ” (326). Rather than release the bur­ ied “predatory V ikin g” in the heat o f the battle, his dislocation and loss o f identity are m irrored in the anonym ity o f the soldiers on both sides. W hen the Am erican enters in to the thick o f fire, he is described as “continually winking and dodging, as though he were bein g taken by a flash-fight photograph” (327). T h e fantasy o f turning gunfire into the flash o f a photograph recuperates his masculine identity, which is threatened by the violent, inscrutable political affiliations o f the im­ perial battlefield. Like H all’s adolescent athlete, whose muscles are strengthened by the gaze o f his girlfrien d, this soldier’s sensation o f bein g “shot” in a photograph recom poses a reassuring position as a figh tin g subject This heightened dependence o f the im perial adventurer on his d o ­ mestic audience— the jin g o — both enables and undercuts the im age o f the self-reliant white man alone in the wilderness, by divorcing and sheltering him from the context in which he is fighting. H obson notes a blindness in the spectator, who gloats “over the perils, pains, and slaughter o f fellow-m en whom he does n ot know, but whose destruc­ tion he desires in a blind and artificially stimulated passion o f hatred and revenge. In the Jingo all is concentrated on the hazard and blind fury o f the fray.”99 H obson’s repetition o f the w ord “blind” emphasizes (alb eit in a rom anticized view o f figh tin g) that “respect fo r the person­ ality o f the enem ies whose courage he must adm it and whom he com es to realize as fellow-beings” is elim inated. Thus “spectatorial lust” ef­ faces the agency o f the enem y in battle by reorien tin g the terms o f the

Romancing the Empire * U S con flict from the political struggle on the im perial battlefield to the relation between the im perial soldier and his dom estic audience. T h e spotlight on the spectacle o f Am erican masculinity triangulated with the rep orter and the dom estic audience denies the existence o f political resistance to im perialism , even in the act o f war against those resisters. A n oft-heard com plaint in newspapers about the battlefields o f Cuba and the Philippines was the invisibility o f indigenous sol­ diers— both allies and enem ies— who were literally hidden from view by their “unconventional” gu errilla tactics. This invisibility also had to be produced ideologically, to deny Cubans and Filipinos representa­ tion as equal contestants in political struggle. T h e rom ance suggests that the spectacle o f Am erican masculinity in the eyes o f the fem ale spectator contributes to the disem bodim ent o f the colon ized soldier, by denying him political agency and, by extension, masculinity. H is in­ visibility is also produced, paradoxically, by incorporating him as actor into the spectacle o f com bat T h e theatricalization o f the chivalric w arrior in these rom antic nov­ els was in some sense literally enacted on the battlefields o f Cuba and the Philippines. In a scene that m arked the end o f the battle with Spain fo r M anila and the begin ning o f the three-year war against the Filipinos, the Am ericans faced a dilem m a o f how to enter the city. T h e issue was not how best to figh t the forces o f Spain, whom they had al­ ready defeated at sea, but how to occupy M anila without having to share the fruits o f victory with A gu inaldo’s forces, who had been bat­ tling the Spanish fo r years and had jo in e d with the Am ericans in ex­ pectation o f independence. So the U.S. o fficer in com m and arranged secretly with the Spanish governm ent o f M anila to stage a m ock battle, com plete with the raising o f the white flag (to be postponed in case o f bad w eather), in which the Spanish would surrender and the Am eri­ cans would march into the city unaccom panied by th eir F ilipin o allies. As a m ilitary essayist explained, “our reason fo r this elaborate stage m anagem ent seems obvious. It would keep the insurgents out o f the city.”60 T h e Am ericans and Spanish colluded (as they did in the entry to Santiago, Cuba) in a theater o f conquest and capitulation to ex­ clude the Filipinos, who had been figh tin g fo r independence. H ere the theatricalization o f U.S. pow er worked to render ineffectual Fili­ pino opposition to Spain and the U nited States. Yet an ironic conse­

116 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE quence was that several F ilipin o troops “m istook” the theater fo r a real battle, and their shots generated rounds o f shooting on both sides that gave unexpected reality to the “Battle o f M anila.” N o w onder then that a reporter noted with surprise that the Filipin o insurgents g o t their parts wrong, that they threw up trenches opposite the Am erican out­ posts and “acted as i f they were besieging us instead o f being our ‘friends.’ ”81 T h e historical rom ance exposes the desire fo r unlim ited control m otivating such scenes o f staged conquests, which are disrupted by the actions o f im perial subjects who d o not voluntarily adopt their allotted roles. T h e novels enact the U.S. fantasy o f global conquest w ithout co ­ lonial annexation, what A lb ert M em m i called the ultim ate im perial desire fo r a colony rid o f the colonized.62 This disem bodied em pire projects im perial con flict as the dram atization o f the m ale self b efore a dom estic audience without the challenge o f a m ilitary o r political contest. It strives to reim agine conquest by effacin g any elem ent o f conflict. I f the spectacle o f Am erican m anhood has the political im port o f denying national agency to the conquered, this repression can never be com plete, fo r the theater itself is open to contest, to im provisation, as it was in Manila. H om i Bhabha has attributed a quality o f m im icry to the colonized subject, which leads him to im itate his conquerors, yet yields a space fo r maneuver and m ockery to subvert that identity.63 In the Battle o f M anila, the Filipinos indeed m im icked their assigned the­ atrical roles by playing them fo r real. T h e im perialist agent, however, also engages in a form o f m im icry in which he does not retrieve an em­ bodied prim al self but assumes shifting theatrical roles which under­ m ine his own agency. H is need to turn gunfire into flashing camera lights fixes, destabilizes, and resocializes the identity o f the “real live man,” by m aking him contingent on the w illing collaboration o f the native actor playing a supporting role, and o f the dom estic spectator validating his im age. W ith the close o f the W estern frontier, Am erican masculinity turned to the N ew Em pire to recuperate its Anglo-Saxon origins. But this same arena underm ined that identity and retrieved the em bodied m ale not in the lon ged-for prim itive wholeness, but through fragm ented spectacles in the gaze o f the dom estic audience. Thus the sight o f T h eod ore Roosevelt on San Juan H ill may be viewed as a highly theatrical and contingent spectacle produced by m odern

Romancing the Empire » 117 weapons and mass m edia, both m ore effective and m ore vulnerable fo r that dependence on the technologies the Anglo-Saxon warriors were m eant to escape.64

Back to the Future T h e spectacle’s effacem ent o f im perial subjects in the 1890s m eant m ore specifically the denial o f their revolutionary agency and national aspirations. T h e U nited States belatedly entered the international im­ perial arena on a double front: against European com petitors and the revolutionary anticolonial nationalists in Latin Am erica, the Pacific, and China. T h e revival o f the rom ance registered this com plex histori­ cal m om ent by culm inating in a proliferation o f novels about the Am erican Revolution, which revive the notion o f the anticolonial ori­ gins o f the republic as the birth o f future em pire. Furtherm ore, they redefin e and d elim it the m eaning o f revolution to make it inaccessible to others. T h e historical rom ances o f the 1890s “de-revolutionize” the Revolution, in M ichael Käm m en’s terms, not only to m itigate social con flict at hom e, as he argues, but also to repossess and neutralize the symbols o f the Am erican R evolution that served as a usable past fo r contem porary revolutions abroad.65 T h e novels ren der revolution on the part o f nonwhite p eop le as anarchy in need o f im perial salva­ tion. B efore the U n ited States intervened in the Cuban W ar o f Indepen­ dence, on e o f the m ajor rhetorical figures deployed by Am ericans and Cubans to enlist support fo r the uprising against Spain was the anal­ ogy with the Am erican Revolution. T h e Cuba Lib re m ovem ent was legitim ated as a reenactm ent o f the Am erican Revolution, as its gen­ eral, M axim o G om ez, was com pared to W ashington, and its diplom at, Tomas Estrada Palma, to Ben Franklin. In the words o f Congressman Sulzer, “Why they are just like usl” in em ulating our Revolution.66 In the im m ediate reaffiliations during and follow in g the war, this analogy was rapidly dism antled in the U nited States, where it becam e m ore pressing to emphasize differen ce and show that “they,” unlike “us,” were incapable o f self-governm ent to which revolution aspires. A fter the war, only anti-imperialists com pared Aguinaldo o f the Philippines to G eorge W ashington, a trope tantamount to treason in its betrayal o f the Am erican past, according to im perialists like Senator Beveridge.

118 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Thus i f the historical novels addressed an internal crisis o f “cultural in­ d irection ” and social con flict, as Kämmen argues, they also entered a contested terrain in international political culture, to dispossess other national m ovements o f the language o f revolutionary aspirations. A m ajor tool in this e ffo rt o f dispossession was the representation o f race.67 W h ile politicians ridiculed the notion o f a black o r brown G eorge W ashington, as did M ark Twain in Hawaii, the novels white­ washed the R evolution as an indisputably Anglo-Saxon heritage. In novels by W inston Churchill and S. W eir M itchell, W ashington makes cam eo appearances as the epitom e o f natural aristocracy and virility (dem onstrated in on e novel through his beating o f a black slave out o f spontaneous passion and an ger). Yet m ore effective a weapon than the direct representation o f race in these novels is the nostalgic narrative o f R evolution as return to a fundam ental Anglo-Saxon past Revolu­ tion is recast as devolution, a recovery o f origins in the figu re o f the masculine hero rather than a radical break with the past These ro­ mances revile the British less fo r their tyrannical governm ent than fo r their degenerate profligacy, and the few glimpses o f alternative p oliti­ cal struggles— such as the Indian reb ellion in To Have and To Hold, o r Latin Am erican revolution in Soldiers o f Fortune—are always conflated with the degeneracy o f the British o r Spanish em pires. Thus revolu­ tionary Am ericans are represented as simply restoring a purer A n gloSaxon fam ily strain that stays clear o f the twinned taints o f tyranny and anarchy. T h e culm ination o f the Am erican Revolution in som e novels results in the restoration o f an inheritance. In Richard Carvel, fo r exam ple, the hero retrieves his fath er’s estate in M aryland. In Hugh Wynne, how­ ever, the problem atic ownership o f the ancestral estate in Wales— with which the novel opens— is never resolved; the question o f land is m ade secondary to the recovery o f m anhood— H ugh W ynne’s true heri­ tage— from his com m ercial and pacifist Quaker father and degenerate British cousin. T h e R evolution as recovered heritage is thus at once di­ vorced from European notions o f landed inheritance and invested in the Am erican man as the natural aristocrat Revolution, in these nov­ els, thus becom es a uniquely Am erican heritage lod ged firm ly in the past, safe from the grasp o f m inorities and im m igrants at hom e and anticolonial nationalists abroad. I f the historical rom ance rewrites the Am erican Revolution through

Romancing the Empire » 119 the lens o f nostalgia fo r prim itive origins, its recuperative potential is m ost fully realized in the figu re o f the W estern cowboy. In his essay T h e Evolution o f the Cow-Puncher,” Owen W ister portrays this quint­ essential Am erican m ale as the atavistic reawakening o f “slum bering untam ed Saxon.”68 Contrary to his tide, W ister traces no evolution but instead a return to an essential identity, as “the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon o f d ifferen t environm ents” (8 1 ). In this essay, originally entitled T h e Course o f Em pire,” W ister draws a continuous line between the knight and the cowboy, as w ell as between the West, now on the decline, and the dawning Am erican interests in the Pacific. W ister finds the same kernel o f the Saxon man, who “has ruled the waves with his ship from that V iking tim e until yesterday at Samoa . . . from the tournam ent at C am elot to the round-up at A bi­ len e” (8 1 ). W hen W ister w rote The Virginian seven years later, the h ero’s lineage was already in place.68 T h e m odern W estern— initiated by The Virginian in 1902— has an im m ediate genealogy in the popular historical novels o f the 1890s and their rom ance o f em pire. By im agining contem porary Am erican im pe­ rialism as the return to an original virile past, the historical rom ance reopens the closed fron tier and reinvents the West as a space fo r fictional representation. W ister in his introduction explicitly labels his novel a “colonial rom ance,” com pares it to Hugh Wynne, and in tro­ duces it as a m ore realistic colonial rom ance than the früher ones with their “C hippendale Settees” (ix ). M oreover, The Virginian recapitu­ lates each feature o f the rom ance delineated in this essay, substituting the W yom ing fron tier fo r the mythical Graustark, the Latin Am erican O lancho, o r the H oly Land o f the Crusaders. W ister’s rom ance opens with its own nostalgia fo r the closed frontier, a “vanished w orld” where the world-weary Eastern narrator seeks rejuvenation. T h ere the hom e­ less and nameless V irginian em bodies the national essence in his mus­ cular beauty and animal prowess. Yet as L ee M itchell has poin ted out, this hero does n ot engage in the sharp-shooting violence we have com e to expect from the genre.70 Rather, he defeats a rebellion in a staged theatrical perform ance b efore an Eastern audience o f travelers, and his physical vigor is com posed in the narrator’s fem inized gaze. T h e V irginian also asserts his virility through his chivalrous atten­ tion to M olly, the gen teel Verm ont schoolteacher, who, like the other heroines, proves h erself both as spectator and actor, rescuing the hero

120 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE from Indians. In choosing the V irginian fo r a mate, she liberates her­ self from the traditional m orality expecting her to m arry to save her fam ily financially, and she thereby proves h erself worthy o f her own m ore ancient revolutionary heritage. H er old er aunt knowingly ex­ plains the h eroin e’s attraction to the Am erican hero, defin in g him tain tologically, as does Senator Beveridge: “She wants a man that is a m an" (163). T h e W estern neither banishes the woman from a ru gged m ale terrain, n or simply tames her;71 rather it co-opts her desires and in­ cludes her in its pleasures o f rom ancing the em pire. I f the historical rom ance starts with a nostalgic lam ent fo r the closed frontier, the revival o f the gen re collectively reopens that space o f the W est Soon after the publication o f The Virginian, the revival was on the wane, though not without injecting life into the m odern Western. W e are accustomed to think o f certain ways in which the W estern fron tier was violently exported to the N ew Em pire in Cuba and the Philippines (and in later im perial wars o f the twentieth century): in the form o f soldiers (m any o f whom were veterans o f Indian wars) ; as social policy (th e resettlem ent o f native Filipinos according to the plans o f Indian reservations); and in vibrant symbols— Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Just as im portant, however, has been the way in which Am erican im perial­ ism reclaim ed and galvanized the m eaning o f the West as the site o f origins. T h e quintessential twentieth-century symbol o f Am erican na­ tionhood— the lon e self-reliant cowboy on the fron tier— has endured parasitically by feed in g on new outposts o f the Am erican em pire. As the precursor o f the m odern Western, the historical novel o f the 1890s rom ances the em pire with a poten t nostalgia that renders im perial conquest and the struggle fo r pow er over others as nothing m ore than the return hom e to the em bodied Am erican man.

CHAPTER 4

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill

I f the historical rom ance reopen ed the W estern fron tier through the route o f overseas em pire, the same gen re also contributed to brin gin g the South back in to the new im perial nation. In novels about the Civil War and Reconstruction, m edieval kingdom s abroad were replaced by the phantom tyranny o f freed slaves at hom e, from which chivalric Southern heroes rescued th eir white heroines. Through sentim ental m arriage plots, these novels enacted the reconciliation o f N orth and South in what N ina Silber has called the “rom ance o f reunion.”1 In some o f these romances, the resolution o f the dom estic p lot relies on the pivotal eruption o f a foreign war. In on e popular exam ple, Thom as D ixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance o f the White M a n ’s Bur­ den, the Spanish-American W ar intervenes like a deus ex machina to unify white m en in chivalrous rescue o f white wom en from black m en and o f the white nation from black Reconstruction.2 For D ixon, the war against Spain finally puts to rest the question re­ peated like an anxious refrain throughout the novel: “Shall the fu­ ture Am erican be an Anglo-Saxon o r a m ulatto?” T h e answer is pro­ vided by two clim actic events: the alleged rape o f a white g irl by a black man, and U.S. intervention in the Cuban Independence War. T h e war does fo r the entire nation what the im agined rape does fo r the small town: “in a m om ent the white race had fused into on e hom o­ geneous mass” out o f form er secessionists and unionists, rich and poor, Protestant and C atholic” (368). A ccordin g to D ixon, “almost ev­ ery problem o f national life had been illum ined and m ade m ore hope-

121

122 . THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE fiil by the searchlight o f war— save one— the irrepressible con flict be­ tween the African and the Anglo-Saxon in the developm ent o f our civilization. T h e glare o f the war only made the blackness o f the ques­ tion the m ore apparent” (506). Yet the war also provides a white an­ swer, when the m enacing presence o f arm ed black soldiers— the final affron t o f Reconstruction— provokes and em powers the white m en o f the town to declare th eir second Independence (th e town’s nam e)— this tim e from black occupation. D ixon casts the im perial war as a new war o f independence, fought n ot by Cubans and Filipinos, but by Southern whites against a black em pire. Freed from federal control, the whites banish all politically pow erful blacks and use the threat o f lynching to subdue the rest to pre-Civil W ar submissiveness. T h e dom estic consequence o f the for­ eign war in The Leopard’s Spots is that the “Anglo-Saxon race had been reunited. T h e N egro was no lon ger the ward o f the R epublic” (407). In the clim actic chapter entitled “T h e N ew Am erican,” the war with Spain transforms white supremacy overnight from an outdated re­ gional identity to a defin ition o f m odern Am erican nationhood in the global arena. W hat V irgin ia W o o lf w rote o f books, that they “continue each other,” can also be said o f wars: wars continue each other.3Wars gener­ ate and accumulate sym bolic value by reenacting, reinterpreting, and transposing the cultural m eanings o f p rior wars. The Leopard’s Spots dramatizes a popular representation o f the Spanish-American W ar as a continuation and resolution o f the C ivil War, as its purgative final battle. Politicians and journalists represented the war with Spain as a nostalgic recovery o f the heroism o f an earlier generation, and as an antidote that could heal the wounds and divisiveness o f the interne­ cine war. I f the hundred-day brevity o f the later con flict counteracted the interm inable length o f the earlier one, the international war also prom ised to reunify the nation by brin gin g together the N orth and the South against a com m on external enemy. M oreover, new battlefields abroad reputedly restored health and vigor to the m ale body, so mas­ sively dism em bered in the war between the states. As the preface to a C ivil W ar novel published in 1898 states: “on the heights o f Santiago we see m en o f the South standing shoulder to shoulder with m en o f the N orth, m ingling their b lood victoriously under the o ld Flag, while the w orld looks on with adm iration not unm ixed with fear.”4T h e m ale

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill ♦ 123 body becam e the symbolic m edium fo r national restoration, as “the heritage o f Am erican m anhood” represented the com m on ground be­ tween previously w arring factions. As D ixon’s rom ance makes evident, in ord er to continue figh tin g the C ivil W ar on the “road to reu nion” as the final destination, rep­ resentations o f the Spanish-American W ar had to collapse the thirtyyear history separating the two conflicts by waging a discursive battle against Reconstruction.5 T h e im agined continuity between the two wars was disrupted by Reconstruction’s con flicted legacy: by the fo r­ m er slaves’ struggle fo r freedom and fu ll citizenship on the on e hand, and on the oth er by the white supremacist reaction that im posed disfranchisem ent, legal segregation, and lynching as a way o f life in the South. D uring the era o f Jim Crow, white supremacists did battle on two related fronts: the foreign wars against Spain and its colonies aspiring fo r national independence, and the dom estic struggle against African Am ericans figh tin g to achieve civil and political rights. W hat then is the position o f African Am ericans in relation to the U nion reconfigu red by the Spanish-American W ar and to the newly colonized subjects o f the U.S. em pire? W ould these Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos be assimilated into a post-Reconstruction m odel o f race rela­ tions at hom e, and would the em pire abroad facilitate the subjugation o f blacks as colon ized subjects at home? W ould African Am ericans identify the figh t fo r civil rights and national identity at hom e with anticolonial struggles fo r national independence abroad? O r would they figh t fo r citizenship at hom e by aligning themselves with the U.S. im perial p roject abroad? These questions were addressed in 1899 by African Am erican au­ thor Sutton Griggs in his rom ance, Imperium in Im perio: A Study o f the Negro Problem.6 W h ile the Spanish-American W ar ties togeth er D ixon ’s p lot o f national reconciliation, the eruption o f that same war in Impe­ rium unravels the narrative o f black national unity and leaves African Am ericans homeless, in a no-man’s-land between nation and em pire. Griggs tells the story o f the creation o f an underground black nation, the Im perium , fou n ded to redress the gaps in the Am erican Constitu­ tion to protect and enfranchise African Am ericans and to “unite all N egroes in a body.” A t the height o f the Im perium ’s organizational success, two events radically disrupt it: the sinking o f the M aine, and the lynching o f a federally appointed postmaster and his fam ily in

124 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE South C arolina (based on the actual m ob m urder o f Postmaster Frazier Baker in 1898). These two crises throw the Im perium into dis­ cord about whether or not to jo in the U nited States in the figh t fo r Cu­ ban independence, which most m em bers saw as a black m ovem ent, “as the Cubans were in a large measure N eg ro ” (210). T h e radical voice o f the fou n der prevails and convinces the Im perium to side with the for­ eign enem ies o f the U n ited States in ord er to seize the state o f Texas as a separate black nation. T h e heinous lynching fuels his characterizar tion o f African Am ericans as colonial subjects within the U n ited States, where the “N egro finds him self an unprotected foreign er in his own hom e” (182) and where whites “have chosen our race as an em pire, and each Anglo-Saxon regards him self as a petty K ing and som e gang o r com m unity o f N egroes fo r his subjects” (218). T h e m ore m oderate President o f the Im perium rejects this revolutionary course, however, and rnges his constituency to rem ain within the U nion to figh t fo r fu ll citizenship and equal rights. T h e President demonstrates his double allegiance to the “im perium in im perio” by w illingly subm itting to his own execution fo r the treason he com m itted by rejecting the decision o f the Im perium to secede, and by wanting to be buried with an Am er­ ican flag. T h e narrator o f the book, we later discover, is on e o f the exe­ cutioners, who, h orrified by the possibility o f an unleashed race war, betrays the Im perium in the interest o f peace and lives lon g enough to tell the tale as a “traitor,” the first w ord o f the book. Thus fo r Griggs and D ixon alike, the advent o f an im perial war abroad narrowly averts another civil war at hom e, this tim e a race war between whites and blacks. In this trade-off, African Am ericans serve as the m edium o f exchange to pay the cost o f national reunion: in D ixon's novel by their expulsion and subordination, and in G riggs’s by their paralyzing and unresolved double allegiance in which patriotism and treason are intertwined. In these fiction al fantasies, the representation o f em pire functions both as an external catalyst that intensifies dom estic racial conflicts and as a m edium fo r th eir resolution. A sim ilar dynamic is at work in popular journalistic accounts o f the U.S. role in the Cuban W ar fo r Independence. Focusing on con flictin g accounts o f the famous battle o f San Juan H ill, I argue that the spectacle o f im perial masculinity was challenged by the presence and writings o f African Am erican soldiers,

who troubled the racial divisions between colon izer and colon ized and the assumed identification between race and nationhood. W hen writ­ in g about Cuba in The Rough Riders, T h eod ore Roosevelt anxiously d if­ ferentiated his im age o f Am erican masculinity not only from Cubans and Spaniards, but also from African Am erican troops who were fight­ in g alongside him . In letters to the black press, African Am erican sol­ diers criticized the exp ort o f Jim Crow segregation to im perial out­ posts abroad, and also saw these sites as opportunities to claim a form o f im perial citizenship and m ilitant m anhood at hom e. In projecting U.S. racial anxieties on to the battlefield o f Cuba, writers fou gh t m ulti­ p le skirmishes over the claims o f nonwhite peoples fo r self-govern­ m ent at hom e and abroad. T h e trium phal narrative o f national re­ union was predicated on the anarchy o f em pire: on the dissolution o f the boundaries between the foreign and the dom estic that im perial battlefields were m eant to reinforce.

The Showdown T h e charge up San Juan H ill can easily be debunked o r dem ystified, and it has been since the earliest reports o f the war: it was n ot heroic, but a m ilitary fiasco; n ot a massive orderly charge, but a straggling lin e o f desperate soldiers, pitilessly exposed to enem y fire; not even the ro­ mantic San Juan H ill, but the m ore m undane “K ettle H ill” (its e lf an apocryphal nam e). By now it is m ore useful to understand how the battle o f San Juan H ill was produced as an icon, precisely because it processed, contained, and crystallized m ultivalent and contradictory political m eanings into a m onum ental frieze. In lookin g closely at the representations o f this legendary battle in the white and black press ac­ counts o f the tim e, we can see a battle raging over the interconnected representations o f race, m anhood, nation, and em pire. N o Am erican has rem ained m ore visible and virile in the icon ogra­ phy o f San Juan H ill than T h eod ore Roosevelt, leading his Rough Riders. In Richard H arding Davis’s words, “he was without doubt, the most conspicuous figu re in the charge . . . m ounted high on horse­ back, and charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, [h e ] m ade you fe e l that you would like to cheer.”7 In contrast to his own conspicuousness, in his account o f the battle (which first appeared in

126 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Scribner’s in A p ril 1899 and later in The Rough Riders), Roosevelt com ­ m ented that it was “astonishing what a lim ited area o f vision and expe­ rience on e has in the hurly-burly o f a battle.”8 In fact, so lim ited was his vision that he only killed on e Spanish soldier, whom he could see at point-blank. H e did it with a revolver from the sunken batdeship M aine, given to him by a brother-in-law in the navy. In m arked contrast to this blurred vision is the rem arkable clarity with which Roosevelt notes the presence o f black Am erican soldiers, “com pletely interm ingled” with his own troops. “Such m ixing,” he ex­ plains, “was inevitable in m aking repeated charges through thick ju n ­ g le,” but was in need o f “reform in g” under his com m and (135). As the U.S. troops entrenched themselves on the top o f San Juan H ill, Roose­ velt’s narrative retrenched along racial lines. T h e batde concluded w ithout a cathartic shootout with Spanish soldiers, but with a sustained confrontation with African Am erican soldiers that caps the horizontal narrative, throughout the report, o f the increasing interm ingling o f blacks and whites. A n em blem o f this happening is the figu re o f the color sergeant o f the black Tenth Regim ent, who ended up bearing his own colors and those o f the white T h ird R egim ent as w ell (whose flag bearer was k ille d ). Toward the end o f the batde, Roosevelt notes that neither white reg­ ulars n or volunteers were weakening, in contrast to the “strain o f the colored infantrym en” whose white officers had been killed, and who were le ft as masterless m en in vague affiliation with Roosevelt’s troops. W hen the black soldiers started to d rift to the rear to jo in their own regim ent o r transport the wounded, Roosevelt perceives them as “de­ p letin g my lin e” and confronts them violendy and theatrically: “So I ju m p ed up, and walking a few yards to the rear, drew my revolver, halted the retreating soldiers, and called out to them that I appreci­ ated the gallantry with which they had fou gh t and would be sorry to hurt them , but that I should shoot the first man, who on any pretense whatever went to the rear” (138). W hen he vows to keep his word, all o f his m en watched with “utmost interest”; his “cow-punchers, hunters, and m iners solem nly nodded th eir heads and com m ented in chorus, exacdy as i f in a com ic opera, ’H e always does, he always does!’ ” (138). Roosevelt claims that his show worked when the black soldiers, the “’smoked Yankees’— as the Spaniards called them ,” played th eir own

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 137 m instrel parts. Th ey “flashed their white teeth at on e another, as they broke into broad grins, and I had n o m ore trouble with them ” (139). Roosevelt concludes this confrontation with a paean to racial harm ony and national unity: “they seem [ed ] to accept m e as on e o f their of­ ficers,” and the Rough Riders, with their “strong color prejudice, grew to accept them with hearty good-w ill as com rades, and were entirely w illing, in their own phrase, ‘ to drink out o f the same canteen’ ” (139). A t this p oin t in the narrative, with racial trenches dug deeply and na­ tional unity thus affirm ed, Roosevelt can return to the battle in a roll call that nam ed and praised the gallantry o f the individual Rough Riders, as though their individual integrity had been protected by his confrontation with African Am erican troops. This showdown on San Juan H ill, which serves as both the clim ax to and digression from the narrative o f the battle, raises several interest­ ing questions. W hy did the presence o f African Am erican soldiers loom so large to Roosevelt as to disrupt the uphill thrust against the Spanish troops, and why the counter-narrative about the racial inter­ m ixing o f Am erican soldiers? W hy did the potential absence o f the A f­ rican Am ericans in returning to their regim ents appear even m ore dis­ turbing? In addition, why is the scene at once so startlingly violen t and yet so com ically theatrical? T h ere is a fam iliar trope in war fiction and journalism o f dislocation and loss o f vision on the battlefield, in response to which a visual an­ chor must be found— a com rade, a flag, a feature o f the landscape— to reorien t the soldier and reader. For Roosevelt, black and white inter­ m ingling provided an em blem o f chaos as w ell as a fam iliar foo tin g or anchor. Roosevelt’s confrontation with the black troops reestablished the reassuring ord er o f the dom estic color line in a foreign terrain, as their heightened visibility displaced and com pensated fo r the oc­ cluded vision o f the Cuban political landscape. Interm ixin g was not the only challenge to R oosevelt’s order, posed by black soldiers in blue uniform s. T h eir presence raised white fear o f arm ed insurrection and o f national self-representation, which African Am erican soldiers pur­ sued in their printed rebuttals o f R oosevelt’s accou n t This double threat o f revolt and representation resonated with the struggle fo r in­ dependence o f the Cuban revolutionaries, whom the U.S. soldiers were sent to liberate and to subdue at the same tim e. W h ile the U nited

128 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE States sought the unification o f a white nation in the clearly dem ar­ cated lines o f the im perial battlefield, Roosevelt instead found evi­ dence o f anarchy in the blurring o f racial boundaries.

“Alone in Cuba”' This scene o f dom estic racial confrontation in The Rough Riders cannot be separated from its international context o f shifting alliances and conflicts between Am ericans and Cubans. T h e U n ited States entered a war in which the Spanish colonial regim e was losing ground b efore the Cuban insurgent army that had been figh tin g the W ar fo r Indepen­ dence since 1895. This war was the culm ination o f three anticolonial wars that had started in 1868. O ne o f the turning points o f the m ost re­ cent war occurred at the end o f 1895, when the insurgent army, which had been m ore pow erful in the east, succeeded in invading the west­ ern provinces o f Cuba, with the help o f many o f the civilian inhabit­ ants. A m ajor factor in the success o f the insurrection, according to A da Ferrer, was the widespread acceptance o f a m ultiracial army— fif­ teen years after the abolition o f slavery— as the agent and symbol o f Cuban nationhood. T h e white Cubans’ fears o f black insurrection in a slave-holding society had doom ed the earlier anticolonial struggles fo r independence.10 Although the army rem ained ridden with racial and class conflicts and tensions that would inform the new nation as well, the reality and im age o f m en o f all races figh tin g together were crucial to the m ilitary and political m ovements fo r Cuban independence. T h e U n ited States entered the war n ot only to “liberate” Cuba from Spain, but also to have con trol over what happened in Cuba in the afterm ath o f that war. In tandem with the m ilitary and political m aneuvering to exclude Cuban soldiers from participating in the surrender o f Spain in Santiago, race becam e a m ajor tool in representing them as un­ manly and cowardly, and Cuba itself as incapable o f self-governm ent and national sovereignty. In their reports o f the war, U.S. journalists were rem apping the political coordinates o f the Cuban battlefield to erase and supplant Cuban narratives o f their lon g revolutionary struggle against Spain. A repeated them e that em erges from the reports o f the Cuban bat­ d efield is the contrast between the invisibility o f the Cuban allies and Spanish enemy, and the alm ost suicidal conspicuousness o f the U.S.

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill « 129 troops. As many reporters com m ented, in contrast to the Spanish who hid in trenches o r sniped from behind trees, and the Cuban insur­ gents who cow ered behind th eir putative liberators, the Am erican sol­ diers m arched out into clear view. Th ey o ffered an inviting target m ade even m ore obvious by their outdated sm oking guns, in contrast to the m odern smokeless weapons o f the Spaniards. In addition, re­ porters noted the large lum bering observation balloon sent up ahead o f the troops, which proved n ot only im potent in surveying enem y p o ­ sitions, but even worse, drew dramatic attention to the position o f the U.S. soldiers and turned them into open targets.11 T h e lack o f overarching surveillance presented a problem o f rep­ resentation as w ell as o f m ilitary strategy. As on e photographer fo r Harper's Weekly explained, “Although I was thus on the first firin g line, and many m en were wounded and killed all about m e, as you w ill see by my photographs___ I found it im possible to make any actual ‘battle scenes,’ fo r many reasons— the distance at which the figh tin g is con­ ducted, the area which is covered, but chiefly the lon g grasses and thickly w ooded country.”12This absence o f a “scene,” a fram ed context fo r the wounded bodies, is due to m ore than the hindrance o f the landscape; it is the result also o f a kind o f political myopia. W hereas Elaine Scarry has argued that wounded bodies in warfare give mean­ ing to an otherwise abstract political con flict, I would suggest the re­ verse here; the spotlight on wounded bodies effaces the political con­ text by fetishizing those bodies as the only m eaningful focal p o in t19In other words, the conspicuousness o f Am erican bodies and the corre­ sponding invisibility o f all oth er combatants had to be produced id eo­ logically as subject positions, n ot ju st perceived as m ilitary maneuvers. T h e positions w ere plotted in part by a narrative that located the U.S. entry into the war as the p oin t o f historical origin and effaced all p rior history o f the Cuban struggle against Spain. Although the exposure o f the U.S. soldier was lam ented as strategi­ cally suicidal, it had the im portant discursive e ffe c t o f defin in g Am eri­ can masculinity itself. R eport after rep ort praised officers fo r need­ lessly yet gallantly standing up in fu ll view under fire, and the charge was portrayed as a kind o f grandstanding conspicuousness o f sheer bodies hurling themselves up the h ill against im pregnable trenches. Pictorial representations depict the battle from the poin t o f view o f the artist look in g up the h ill behind the troops and drawing their backs.

130 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE But a figu re usually breaks this perspective by turning around frontally to the spectator, even when he is shooting ahead o f him . Rather than confiront the enemy, he turns to pose fo r an audience at hom e.14 T h e spectacle o f the Am erican m ale body rem apped the coordi­ nates o f the batdefield to wrest away political agency from the Cubans figh tin g fo r independence, a process put in m otion as soon as the U.S. troops landed in Cuba. R oosevelt’s first im pression o f the insurgents was that o f a “crew o f as utter tatterdem alions as human eyes ever looked on, arm ed with every kind o f rifle in all stages o f dilapidation.” T h eir appearance d id not lead him and many others to think o f the dire m aterial context in which the Cuban insurgents had been figh tin g fo r three years, only to expect “that they would be no use in serious fighting, but it was hoped that they m ight be o f service in scouting” (7 1 ). W hen the battle began, however, Roosevelt was disappointed (bu t n ot surprised) to fin d that the Cuban guide at the head o f the col­ umn ran away at the first sign o f fighting. H e contrasts this figu re with two Am ericans who rem ained, “who though noncom batants— newspa­ per correspondents— showed as much gallantry as any soldier in the fie ld ” (8 2 ). T h e replacem ent o f Cuban scouts with U.S. newspaper re­ porters is apt; better guides in rem apping the coordinates o f the bat­ tlefield to foregrou n d the spectacle o f Am erican m anhood, they sup­ plant the Cuban map o f the com plex political terrain that antedated U.S. intervention. This triangulation o f the soldier with the jou rnalist and dom estic audience recuperates an im age o f Am erican masculinity by denying masculinity and political agency to the Cubans, whose lon g revolutionary struggle is m ade to disappear.15 T h e im perial desire to write out the role o f Cubans in th eir own rev­ olu tion may explain the im portance o f journalistic heroics in the cul­ tural representations o f what had been dubbed T h e Correspondents’ War.” Earlier, the yellow press o f Hearst and Pulitzer captured the pub­ lic eye by its sensationalist coverage o f Spanish atrocities and its call fo r U.S. intervention. T h e papers becam e known fo r staging many o f the spectacles they reported, as in the fam ous apocryphal story about Frederick Rem ington and Randolph H earst W hen in 1896 the illustra­ tor com plained that nothing was happening in Cuba, Hearst report­ edly responded, “You furnish the pictures and I ’ll furnish the war.” T h e pivotal western invasion by the Cuban insurgent forces apparently did not fit the b ill o f “war.” T o keep his prom ise o f selling the ‘jou rn al­

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 131 ism that acted,” Hearst filled his fron t pages with Spanish atrocities at the same tim e that he started the m od em sports age. Both Hearst and Pulitzer m ade the news they reported by sending reporters on special spy missions, by leading rescue campaigns o f Cuban ladies (as we saw in the Cisneros case), o r by using their own yachts— transporting their journalists— to capture Spanish refugees. These spectacles often fea­ tured the rep orter him self as the c h ie f actor, at a tim e when interna­ tional im perial warfare gave birth to the “foreign correspondent” as a professional w riter with a public persona. Bylines changed “from ou r own correspondent” to personal names, and headlines som etimes in­ cluded the name o f the reporter as a celebrity; fo r instance, “Stephen Crane at the Front fo r the W orld.” Reporters often m ade themselves o r their colleagues the heroes o f their stories, and depicted the act o f reportin g as the main p lo t This focus turned w riting into a strenuous activity, and the reporter into a virile figu re who rivaled the soldiers. By dram atizing the exploits o f the reporters, newspapers transform ed com plex political and m ilitary conflicts with lon g histories into rom an­ tic adventures in exotic landscapes. This displacem ent is starkly visible in the case o f Stephen Crane, who both played and parodied the heroic correspondent by theat­ rically exposing him self to bullets under fire and by “capturing” a Puerto Rican town in a m ock invasion.16 H is own rep ort o f the bat­ tle fo r San Juan H ill, aptly titled “Stephen Crane’s V ivid Story o f the Battle o f San Juan,” works to rem ove Cuban participants from the figh t he turns in to a spectacle o f Am erican virility.17 Crane represents the charge as a sporting event, referrin g to the absent audience who “would give an arm to get the th rill o f patriotic insanity that coursed through us,” as w ell as to the international audience o f foreign dip­ lomats who were shocked and impressed by such foolish gallantry (158). O n a populist note, Crane also views the figh t as a “grand pop­ ular m ovem ent” led by the “gallantry o f the Am erican private sol­ d ier” whose officers were le ft behind (155). Yet when the Am ericans reach the top o f the h ill to entrench themselves fo r the night, Crane abruptly interrupts his narrative and shifts from the upward battle for Santiago to the horizontal struggle with U.S. allies, the Cuban insur­ gents. “It becom es necessary to speak o f the m en’s opin ion o f the Cu­ bans,” pauses Crane. “T o put it shortly, both officers and privates have the m ost lively contem pt fo r the Cubans” (16S). Class divisions within

132 * THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE the U.S. army between privates and officers— which Crane previously celebrated— are healed in their com m on disdain fo r th eir allies. Crane’s article never returns to the continuation o f the batde, but instead backtracks to review the same events in terms o f Cuban non­ participation. W h ile the Am ericans “sprinkled a thousand bodies in the grass,” n ot a single Cuban was visible. O nce an “efficien t body,” the insurgents have now becom e “n o m ore useless body o f m en any­ w here,” dem oralized and emasculated by Am erican aid (163). W hile the Am ericans fight, the Cubans are only interested in stuffing them­ selves with U.S. rations. Thus the end o f Crane's narrative o f the charge up San Juan H ill is neither the conquest o f Santiago nor com ­ bat with Spanish soldiers, but the appropriation o f the Cuban uprising as a N orth Am erican popular m ovem ent and the displacem ent o f lazy, inefficien t, hungry Cubans with the spectacle o f aggressive Am erican m anhood. Crane's rep ort has the e ffe c t o f excising the Cubans from the battle in which th eir figh tin g was essential.18 Although the U.S. army com ­ mand forcibly excluded the Cuban com m and from participating in the decisive events and decisions o f the war, the journalistic represen­ tations o f the Cubans as cowardly, undisciplined, and unsoldierly— in short, unmanly— blam ed them fo r their disappearance from the scene. Even Crane’s depiction o f Cubans and N orth Am ericans fight­ in g side by side in an earlier battle underm ines th eir alliance by turn­ in g the Cubans into a backdrop o r fo il against which the erect “strong figures” o f the Am ericans are com posed. In contrast to the “business­ lik e” marines, fo r exam ple, the Cubans are described as “a hard-bitten, under-sized lot, most o f them N egroes, and with the stoop and gait o f m en who had at on e tim e labored at the soil. T h ey were in short peas­ ants— hardy, tireless, uncom plaining peasants— and they viewed in ut­ ter calm these early m orning preparations fo r battle.”19 W h ile these peasants show n o capacity to reflect on their position, “contrary to the Cubans, the bronze faces o f the Am ericans were n ot stolid at all” (135). W hen they fight, Crane com m ents on the “rock-like beautiful poise” o f the marines taking aim, which “on e noticed the m ore on ac­ count o f the Cubans who used the L ee as i f it were a squirt gun.” In the m idst o f fighting, “toilin g, sweating m arines” stand out against “shrill ju m p in g Cubans” (138). Finally, when a Cuban is hit, he is described as “a great hulking N eg ro ” who “seem ed in no pain; it seem ed as i f he

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 133 were senseless b efore he fe ll.” A n d when a fellow soldier carries him , they appear n ot as com rades in arms, but “the procession that m oved o ff resem bled a grotesque wheelbarrow” (138). Thus while the overt narrative trajectory o f these reports pits the U.S. army against the Spanish, the detailed representation pits Am erican bodies against Cu­ ban ones to disaffiliate them as allies. W hether stolid o r hysterical, the Cubans relinquish control to the U.S. troops and becom e a passive yardstick fo r m easuring their prowess. By the end o f the battle fo r San Juan H ill, Crane sees the dependency o f the Cuban on the Am erican as a de facto abdication o f his righ t to independence: “I f he stupidly drowsily rem ains out o f these fights, what w eight is his voice to have later in the fin al adjustments?” T h e Cubans themselves are “the worst thing fo r the cause o f an independent Cuba that could possibly exist” (164). In a battle showcasing Am erican masculinity, the Cubans fo rfe it their identity as m en in the eyes o f U.S. journalists: “the m ore our com m anding officers see o f the Cubans the less they appear to think o f them as soldiers o r as m en.”20 T h e pivot fo r this differentiation is often linked to their perceived racial identity, as another reporter notes: “I have seen degradation in N egro slaves, but never have I seen such degradation as a Cuban exhibits in everything that means man­ h ood .”21 It is a short leap from their absence from the fron t lin e to their insufficiency as m en, to their racial identity as N egro (which visu­ ally loom s large fo r C ran e), to the im possibility o f their nationhood. As on e correspondent concludes, “I ask where is the Cuban nation. T h ere is no Cuba. T h ere is n o Cuban people. T h ere are n o freem en here to whom we could deliver this m arvelous land.”22 In reportin g on the war, U.S. journalists m obilized the post-Reconstruction discourse o f race to represent the m ultiracial insurrection force o f Cuba as n ot only incapable o f self-governm ent, but as incapable o f even figh tin g fo r independence in the first place.23

Racing the Empire We can now juxtapose the clim ax o f Crane’s narrative atop San Juan H ill— the disaffiliation from the Cubans— with that o f Roosevelt’s story— disciplining African Am erican troops. In both cases, the narra­ tive shifts from con flict with an external enemy, Spain, to internal

134 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE struggles with reputed allies. These breaks signal a disruption not only in political alliances but also in the links am ong representations o f na­ tional, racial, and gen dered identities. I f Crane’s narrative renders Cu­ bans invisible as m ilitary political agents, in what ways m ight Roosevelt have displaced them with the heightened visibility o f African Am eri­ can troops in need o f control? Roosevelt, after all, claims that he forced the “smoked Yankees” not to run away as the Cubans did, but to stay and be m en under his com mand. Yet i f Cubans are dismissed as unmanly and incapable o f nationhood partly on the basis o f racial identity, how m ight the black soldiers in blue uniform s rein force, un­ derm ine, o r further com plicate this dismissal? A n d what does their presence mean fo r the constitution o f U.S. nationhood in the m ale body? W hat then is the relationship between the forced abdication o f Cubans from the m ilitary and political battlefields and the representa­ tion and forced placem ent o f African Am erican soldiers in the fron t lin e under Roosevelt’s command? Consider that Roosevelt did not simply relate a tale o f battle but that he was im plicitly engaged in unspoken debate with counter-narratives in several overlapping contexts. Thou gh published less than a year af­ ter the war, Roosevelt’s narrative was on e o f the docum ents involved in a struggle over w riting the history o f that war, a struggle in part against an African Am erican narrative o f black heroism that had gained some currency. For a b rie f m om ent after the war, black regim ents w ere acknowledged fo r their heroism by the black and white press, hom e­ com ing parades, and congressional medals, evidence which African Am ericans used to bolster the case fo r black com m issioned officers.24 Accounts o f several battles took on legendary stature in which black troops preceded the Rough Riders up San Juan H ill by cutting through barbed wire, rescued the Rough Riders from a Spanish am­ bush, and launched the charge with the shout o f a black trooper. Even a m em ber o f the Rough Riders conceded, “i f it had not been fo r the N egro Cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterm inated.”25 These stories first circulated in the black press through the publica­ tion o f letters from black soldiers serving as foreign correspondents, whom African Am erican newspapers could n ot afford to hire. T h e let­ ters often aim ed at correctin g the omissions or distortions o f the white press. An unsigned letter to the Illin ois Record, fo r exam ple, contends that “it was never m entioned how at the famous charge o f the 10th

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 135 Cav. and the rescue o f the Rough Riders at San Juan H ill, the yell was started by a single trooper o f G T roop , 10th Cavalry and was carried down the lin e . . . W ill it ever be known how S g t Thom as G riffith o f T roop C cut the wire fen ce along the lin e so the 10th Cav. and Rough Riders could g o through?”*6 O th er letters contrasted the heroic figh t at San Juan H ill waged by black and white troops together, with the "hellish” treatm ent o f black troops at hom e: "Both were under the same flag, both w ore the blue, and yet these black boys, heroes o f our country, were n ot allow ed to stand at the counters o f restaurants and eat a sandwich and drink a cup o f coffee, w hile the white soldiers w ere welcom ed and invited to sit down at tables and eat free o f cost.” Black soldiers also related the current war to the C ivil War, less to em phasize sectional reunion than to continue the batde fo r freedom at hom e and claim the legacy o f black militancy, to show that "the coolness and bravery that characterized ou r fathers in the 60s have been handed down to their sons o f the 90s."*7 African Am erican newspapers repeatedly lambasted the white press fo r never m entioning the names o f individual black soldiers and fo r ig­ norin g th eir contributions. Roosevelt’s account o f San Juan H ill raised special outrage fo r its blatant distortions o f accomplishments that had entered the public lim elig h t African Am erican soldiers and corre­ spondents regarded Roosevelt’s account, and the white press coverage in general, as a national con flict over the public narration o f history, a con flict with as vital political consequences at hom e as those o f the in­ ternational war abroad. As John R. C onn underscored in the ending o f his letter on the battle to The Evening Star, "the sword rested while the pen fo u g h t”*8 Presley H olliday, a m em ber o f the Tenth Cavalry, ended his detailed rebuttal o f Roosevelt’s account in a letter to the New York Age: "I could give many other incidents o f our m en’s devotion to duty, o f their determ ination to stay until death, but what’s the use? C olon el Roosevelt has said they shirked, and the reading public w ill take the C olon el at his w ord.”*9 H olliday thus situates R oosevelt’s account in a rigged contest over public words, in which R oosevelt’s narrative over­ rides the words with which H olliday ends his letter: "N o officers, no soldiers.”30 O n e political stake in this struggle was the cam paign fo r the ap­ pointm ent o f African Am erican com m issioned officers, a cause which the m ilitary successes o f the black regim ents were used to bolster.31

136 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Roosevelt’s account explicitly contributed to the argum ent against black officers, which he based on com m on stereotypes: the natural ser­ vitude o f blacks, their lack o f discipline, and their incapacity fo r selfgovernance. Describing his “m ixed fo rce” on the San Juan heights, which included black infantrym en without white officers, Roosevelt in­ sisted at length that the troops were “peculiarly dependent on their white officers” (1S7); in contrast to the white regulars and his Rough Riders, who could figh t on their own even i f their officers were killed, “with the colored troops,” he asserted, “there should always be some o f their own officers” (137). A fter the showdown with the “smoked Yan­ kees,” he praised the white officers o f the N inth and Tenth, under whose leadership “the colored troops did as w ell as any soldiers could possibly d o ” (139). In an unsigned letter a black soldier insisted, on the contrary, that the white Southern o fficer o f the Tenth never led his regim ent, fo r which he only showed racist contem pt, but instead stayed behind while they faced death. In the correspondent’s words, “who showed cowardice, the gallant colon el o r his regim ent?”** Roose­ velt’s threat to shoot the black troops thus forced them into a sub­ missive role to prove his poin t retrospectively, since in fact many o f the white officers were either killed o r lagged behind and the black soldiers did indeed figh t independendy. T h e initiative taken by white privates ahead o f their officers, which Crane praised as a popular m ovem ent, Roosevelt found intolerable on the part o f black privates. They must have conjured up the anarchic specter o f arm ed blacks out o f control, o f racial interm ixing as political insurrection, an im age equally incendiary at hom e and abroad. In establishing him self as their accepted officer, Roosevelt im plicitly linked the political fate o f African Am ericans in the U n ited States to that o f Cuban nationalists. An argum ent sim ilar to that about the need fo r white officers to discipline black soldiers was m ade about the need fo r U.S. governm ent to discipline the Cubans by radically circum scrib­ in g their sovereignty as a nation. T h e Platt Am endm ent, forced on the Cuban constitution in 1901, gave the U nited States unlim ited right to intervene in the new nation, m ilitarily and econom ically. As the m ilitary Com m ander Leonard W ood w rote to his frien d Roosevelt, “Th ere is, o f course, little o r n o independence le ft Cuba under the Platt A m en d m en t”** T h e Cubans’ perceived racial identity as N egro was used as an argum ent about their incapacity fo r self-governm ent

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 137 and th eir need fo r supervision. R ecogn izing this link between racism at hom e and abroad, the African Am erican press protested W ood’s im­ position o f Jim Crow segregation on Cuba. Filipinos at the same tim e were sim ilarly portrayed as stereotypically “N eg ro id ” in popular writ­ ing and political cartoons, and their racial in feriority was used as an ar­ gum ent fo r annexation.94 This interchangeability o f colon ized subjects m arked by hom olo­ gous racial identity becam e a contested signifier, however, open to con flictin g political interpretations. As in the 1848 argum ent against annexing M exico, Southern Dem ocrats deployed their b e lie f in the unfitness o f in ferior races fo r self-governm ent as an argum ent against colonial annexation o f the Philippines, to keep these nonwhites out o f the republic.99 This negative identification o f Cubans, African Am eri­ cans, and Filipinos as “colored ” found contradictory political interpre­ tations am ong African Am ericans. Som e argued fo r the efficacy o f in­ corporating black Am ericans into the im perial project because o f their ability to m ediate between the U nited States and its nonwhite colonies. Several African Am erican soldiers w rote from Cuba and the Philip­ pines encouraging blacks to em igrate there and take advantage o f eco­ nom ic opportunities relatively free o f the color prejudice entrenched at h o m e ." M ore often , this identification contributed to an adamant political position against Am erican im perialism . Many editorials in the black press took the side o f the “m en o f our own hue and co lo r” and decried the exportation o f post-Reconstruction disfranchisem ent, seg­ regation laws, and the resurgence o f violen ce and viru lent racism to the new outposts o f em pire.97 T h e Washington Bee, fo r exam ple, excori­ ated W ood ’s e ffo rt to lim it suffrage in m unicipal elections in Cuba as worthy o f the m ost racist politicians in Mississippi and Louisiana: In other words, the men who have furnished the brawn and sinew o f the many wars which have been fought fo r Cuban independence must accept under the benign influence o f Am erican policy to be relegated to the rear and denied the privilege o f participating in a governm ent to secure that which cost the blacks so many lives that they had to o ffer upon the sacred altar o f liberty. Th e excuse that the blacks are illiterate is the same blarney that comes from the South today."

This editorial m obilizes im ages o f black heroism fo r an anti-im perialist argum ent on b eh alf o f Cuban independence, which echoes the claims

138 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m ade fo r the fu ll rights o f citizenship earned by black soldiers from the U nited States. T h e links between disfranchisem ent in occupied Cuba and the Jim Crow South poin t to im perialism as the exp orter o f the dom estic color lin e and recontextualize racism at hom e as part o f a global im perial strategy o f rule. W hen Roosevelt published his account alm ost a year after the battle, the events on San Juan H ill had already becom e less im portant than their refraction through the lenses o f their consequences: the postwar debates about the viability o f U.S. im perialism and the fitness o f non­ whites at hom e and abroad fo r self-governm ent Roosevelt’s account was published during the U.S. war against F ilipin o nationalists, whom he viewed as n o m ore capable o f nationhood than were black troops capable o f figh tin g alone. W h ile confronting and subordinating A fri­ can Am ericans within the national body, Roosevelt was simultaneously m aking a place fo r newly colon ized subjects in the disem bodied U.S. em pire. It would be historically inaccurate and theoretically simplistic to col­ lapse the relations o f the im perial U nited States to Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and African Am ericans into a m onolithic m odel o f colon ized and colonizer. Such a m odel not only assumes a false coherence in the identity o f the colonizer, but also ignores the historical and global differences am ong colon ized subjects and their relation to em pire. Roosevelt, fo r instance, suffered a double vision: on the on e hand identifying African Am ericans with, and on the other hand d ifferen tiatin g them from , the im agined unassimilable Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans. I f the Cubans could be “given” nom inal independence, Puerto Ricans relegated to “disem bodied shades,” and the Philippines annexed as a colony, African Am ericans posed m ore o f a problem fo r the Republican R oosevelt H e had to represent them within the national body, a problem m agnified by their presence in uniform abroad. In its anarchic m ixture o f races, the im perial battlefield may have m irrored to Roosevelt the dom estic urban site he had recently le ft as police com m issioner o f N ew York City, and he would have brought his experience with non-Anglo-Saxon im migrants from the city to bear on the heights o f San Juan H ill. In a revealing letter to Frederick Jackson Turner, Roosevelt com plained he d id n ot have tim e to work on his his­ tory o f the West because o f his duties as police com missioner.39 H is du-

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill * 139 ties at that tim e included a controversial and ultim ately unsuccessful e ffo rt to en force the excise tax and blue laws in a struggle against Tammany H all, which would have shut down saloons on Sunday and regulated drinking laws in the im m igrant com m unities— especially the Germ an and Irish. For Roosevelt these laws would have accom plished what the fron tier did, according to Türner: create individual Am eri* cans. Blue laws would have contributed to the Am ericanization o f im­ migrants by restricting their cultural practice o f gathering at the beer garden o r the pub. In disciplining African Am erican troops on San Juan H ill, Roosevelt was exercising the regulatory pow er o f Am erican­ ization that eluded his grasp on the streets o f N ew York. (Politically, he would have viewed Tammany H all as form idable opposition and A fri­ can Am ericans as traditional clients o f the Republican Party.) Roose­ velt’s narrative on San Juan H ill disciplined African Am erican troops in a subordinated integration to deny them the autonom y and equality they sought within the army. H e forced them into the body p olitic at gun point, and Am ericanized them by keeping them in their place— si­ multaneously in the lin e o f fire and in the colo r line. In a rebuttal o f Roosevelt in The New York Age, Presley H olliday o f the Tenth Cavalry explained that the African Am erican soldiers who broke the lin e found racial “interm inglin g” intim idating because it already em bodied the hierarchical social ord er Roosevelt was trying to assert: It is a well known fret, that in this country most persons o f color feel out o f place when they are by force compelled to mingle with white persons, especially strangers____Some o f our men (and these were all recruits with less than six months’ service) felt so much out o f place that when firing lulled, often showed their desire to be with their com­ mands . . . White soldiers do not as a rule, share this feeling with col­ ored soldiers. The fact that a white man knows how well he can make a place for himself among colored people need not be discussed here.40 W hat H olliday om its from the discussion points to the violen t e ffo rt in m aking this “place” fo r the white man by subduing the potential o f au­ tonom ous black agency. Roosevelt was trying to incorporate and to Am ericanize black soldiers in a racially “m ixed lo t” by forcin g them to stay within the national lin e o f defense, reasserting the color line at the same tim e to fo rge the bond o f national unity. A ccordin g to him ,

140 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE only by rem aining in line, under white com m and, could black troops achieve entry into the ranks o f Am erican nationhood. In positioning African Am ericans in a nationalist hierarchy, Roose­ velt was also constructing what H olliday called the unique place o f the white man am ong nonwhites, to protect the special connection between white m anhood and Am erican nationhood. T h e phrase “smoked Yankees” im plicitly defines “real Yankees” as Anglo-Saxon and contributes to the popular understanding o f that term in its dou­ ble m eaning as a b iological racial category and a political historical category, denoting the exclusive originating pow er and present capac­ ity fo r self-governm ent T h e designation “sm oked Yankees” aligns the volunteer Rough Riders, often derided in the press fo r their theatrical playacting, with the white regulars, professional soldiers, against the black regulars o f the Tenth Cavalry, who had gained the nickname B uffalo Soldiers fo r th eir figh tin g in the Indian wars. T h e visual im age o f “smoked Yankees” suggests whites figh tin g in blackface and im plic­ itly relegates these professional soldiers to the role o f com ic actors, mimics, o r masked perform ers with no agency o f th eir own. In A New Negro, B ooker T. W ashington speculated that Roosevelt was anxious about having his Rough Riders linked with black troops by the press, which was m ost interested in the novelty o f how both the “colored ” troops and Roosevelt’s flam boyant volunteers would perform under fire.41 Roosevelt’s fear that the amateur Rough Riders would not be taken seriously as soldiers is projected on to the theatrical im age o f the grin ning blackface soldiers. In this realignm ent, which makes black regulars dependent on white volunteers, Roosevelt also defends the virile im age o f the Rough Riders against the stories circulating about black troops rescuing the Riders from ambush o r abetting their charge. Such narratives would have severely com prom ised the im age o f the Rough Riders’ autonom y— cowboys on a new fron tier— as well as their role as chivalric liberators o f the Cubans; in fact, they would then play the passive fem inized role o f the rescued to the active male role o f the black troops. T h e role o f the chivalric rescuer, used so pervasively in im perial dis­ course, was itself subject to contested meanings. African Am erican sol­ diers not only deployed the chivalric m ode in w riting o f their m ili­ tary experience in relation to the Cubans o r to their fellow soldiers; they also brought that im age back hom e to the South. Soldiers en­ cam ped in the Southern bases took a chivalric attitude toward local

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill • 141 African Am ericans; soldiers cut down trees where blacks had been lynched, protected local com m unities from white brutality, and d efied Jim Crow laws with the force o f th eir numbers, arms, and authority o f their blue uniform s. Lauded in the black press, these incidents w ere decried in the white press as form s o f anarchic m isrule, o f black m en out o f control.4* In the contest over the uses o f chivalry, Roosevelt can be seen as at­ tem pting to rescue the chivalric m ode itself from black counter-narra­ tives and preserve it as an exclusively Anglo-Saxon possession. In Cuba R oosevelt may have rediscovered the W estern fron tier he abandoned in the city; yet the nostalgia m otivating the Rough Riders to act like cowboys and seek new Indians in a W ild West abroad was realized in confrontation with African Am ericans in a foreign terrain where black and white threatened Mto interm ix.” In Rough Riders, it is only after his confrontation with "sm oked Yankees” that Roosevelt goes on to sum­ m arize his account o f the battle, nam ing his individual m en and their gallant deeds as though he has rescued their im age as soldiers from some kind o f m ale m iscegenation.

Reuniting the Nation Roosevelt’s protection o f the white m ale subject contributed to the purgative discourse with which this chapter opens, o f the SpanishAm erican W ar as the final antidote to Reconstruction, healing the conflicts o f the C ivil W ar by bringing together blue and gray on distant shores. T h e Rough Riders have been understood as a unifying cultural symbol— between N orth and South, West and East, working class and patrician, cowboy and Indian, and this unity is grounded in the notion o f manliness, in the physicality o f the m ale body that transcends o r un­ derlies social difference. In the words o f a popular poem about the Rough Riders, Let them know there in the ditches Blood-stained by the swells in the van And know that a chap may have riches And still be a man.49 Com m on graves, com m on streams o f blood, bodies strewn in the Cu­ ban grasses all sanctify a dem ocracy o f m anhood to which som e were even w illing to add African Am ericans. As Lieutenant Pershing, officer

142 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE o f a black regim ent, stated: “W hite regim ents, black regim ents, regu­ lars and Rough Riders, representing the young m anhood o f the N orth and South, fou ght shoulder to shoulder, unm indful o f race o r color, unm indful o f whether com m anded by an ex-Confederate o r not and m indful only o f their com m on duty as Am ericans.”44 Roosevelt's con­ frontation on San Juan H ill baldly exposes the ground o f hierarchy and violence in which this national unity was em bedded. Although white and black regim ents could be seen to m erge in their “com m on duty as Am ericans,” black and white m ale bodies had d iffer­ ent symbolic resonance, a d ifferen t signifying function in the political landscape. O n e o f the rationales fo r organizing federal regim ents o f African Am erican volunteers (when many individual states balked at organizing m ilitias) was the Lamarckian argum ent that they were im­ mune to the diseases o f the tropical environ m en t These troops came to be known as the Im m une Regim ents, as though they were physically closer to the terrain, m ore like “natives” than like white Am ericans. This attribution allowed them to be assigned the m ost loathsom e du­ ties, but also positioned them ideologically. Im m une, they could serve as a bu ffer between the white soldiers and the contagious environm ent and allow the restored white m ale body to em erge unscathed from for­ eign physical and political perils. This recuperation was especially im­ portant given the pervasive presence at hom e o f dism em bered veter­ ans o f the C ivil W ar and, m ore im m ediately, given that m ore m en died o f dysentery, malaria, and fo o d poisoning from army rations in Cuba than they did figh tin g on the battlefield. T h e presence o f the black body, im m ersed in yet allegedly invulnerable to the physical contagion o f the battlefield, elevates the figu re o f the white m ale to the level o f political abstraction, but makes him dependent on that very presence. T h e foundation fo r the construction o f the white m ale body as a fig­ ure fo r Am erican nationhood lies in the subjugation o f black m ale bodies at hom e and abroad. Consider the follow in g passage by Rich­ ard H arding Davis, describing an early stage o f the battle fo r San Juan H ill. Davis was outspoken in his support o f African Am erican soldiers and their contribution to the war e ffo rt and in his harsh criticism o f the U.S. com m and in its in ept conduct o f the war: I came across Lieutenant Roberts o f the Tenth Cavalry, lying under the roots o f a tree beside the stream with three o f his colored troopers

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 143 stretched around him. H e was shot through the intestines, and each o f the three men with him was shot in the arm or leg. They had been over­ looked or forgotten, and we stumbled upon them only by the accident o f losing our way. They had no knowledge as to how the battle was go­ ing or where their comrades were, or where the enemy was. At any mo­ ment, for all they knew, the Spaniards might break through the bushes about them. It was a most lonely picture, the young lieutenant, half na­ ked, and wet with his own blood, sitting upright beside the empty stream, and his three followers crouching at his feet like three faithful watch-dogs, each wearing his red badge o f courage, with his black skin tanned to a haggard gray, and with his eyes fixed patiently on the white lips o f his officer. When the white soldiers with me offered to carry him back to the dressing station, the negroes resented it stiffly. “I f the Lieu­ tenant had been able to move, we would have carried him away long ago,” said the sergeant, quite overlooking the fact that his arm was shattered. “Oh, don’t bother the surgeons about me," Roberts added, cheerfully. “They must be very busy. I can w ait”49 O n the surface, this is a tableau o f national consolidation between whites and blacks, bonded by shared wounds and self-sacrifice. In fact, the bloody wounds im aged through Crane’s popular “red badge o f courage” bleach everyone on e shade whiter. T h e troopers turn less black, a “haggard grey," w hile the lieutenant turns even whiter, with his “white lips.” Yet this tableau reinscribes the racial hierarchy out o f which national unity is forged , not only in the exp licit racist images o f the blacks as “watch-dogs” or the fact that they, in contrast to the white officer, rem ain unnamed, but in the way in which the heroic white body is intim ately constructed out o f black bodies in several hybrid configurations. In describing im m obilized bodies, Davis vividly invokes and quells the im plicit sexual quality o f racial “interm ingling,” which Roosevelt confronts in the upheaval o f the battle. From on e angle, they appear as on e grotesque body— white on top and black on the bottom : the upright white lieutenant wounded in the m iddle is the torso and the black troopers form the limbs o r low er body. T h eir com ­ m on wounds jo in them together in a symbolic castration. From an­ other angle, these figures are ambiguously sexualized and gendered, with the lieutenant an upright phallus and the black privates crouched ready to receive him . From yet another perspective, the black soldiers

144 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE act as chivalric knights protecting their lady as they gaze lovingly at his lips. W hen they resent the interference o f the white soldiers offerin g to touch their officer, they “stiffen ” and thereby assert th eir virility, for­ getting the symbolic castration inherent not only in th eir wounded limbs, but in their social inability to touch him , in th eir racial d iffer­ ence. These African Am erican soldiers, wounded on the periphery o f their own bodies, stand at the periphery o f the body politic, o r at the bottom o f a representational hierarchy. T h ey pledge their allegiance to their white officer; he, however, is capable o f a higher allegiance to the cause, which he displays in his cheerfu l “d on ’t m ind m e.” They represent their officer, their master, w hile he represents the w hole na­ tion, Am erica. T h e upright white m ale body, rooted in his black coun­ terparts, also differentiates them , as he becom es a m ediator between the crouched black masses— the unnam ed soldiers— and the nation, which they cannot represent directly. Thus Davis’s tableau o f unity on San Juan H ill has the same violently differentiatin g effect as R oosevelt’s m ore overtly violen t form o f postReconstruction politics. Both are acting against the political and sym­ bolic demands o f black soldiers. Davis sheds ligh t on the debate about African Am erican officers, who m ight not only take on leadership roles and bear weapons, but also represent the nation directly, un­ m ediated through their allegiance to white officers. T h e challenge o f black officers to white authority lay in their capacity to represent Am erican nationhood abroad, when society required that their black­ ness be subsumed into a white nation. Black officers would challenge the coherence o f im perial boundaries that align masculinity, white­ ness, and nationhood against the anarchy o f black m isrule. Just as R oo­ sevelt and others supported the black troops as lon g as they were led and represented by white officers, the white m ale pictured alone in the wilderness o f em pire on San Juan H ill com es to displace, appropriate, and incorporate the agency o f nonwhites in the em pire and at hom e. Black troops in blue on San Juan H ill threatened to destabilize this hierarchy, however, by occupying a range o f possible positions. As G riggs’s novel suggests, arm ed African Am erican soldiers may betray the U.S. em pire through their realignm ent with outside forces. O r even m ore destabilizing may be their challenge to the internal coher­ ence o f that em pire by dem anding participation and representation as equals. Many black soldiers in the afterm ath o f the Cuban cam paign

Black and Blue on San Juan Hill » 145 preferred to figh t the war in the Philippines rather than face the rac­ ism encircling the army encam pments o f the South. In a few well-pub­ licized cases, black soldiers switched sides to figh t on b eh alf o f Philip­ pine independence.46 O th er soldiers sought im perial citizenship at hom e by figh tin g foreign wars. Black soldiers in blue uniform s raised the whites' fear that the im perial war m eant to heal the rifts o f the Civil W ar would continue to heighten that con flict by recasting it as a global race war. T h e threat o f black soldiers in blue uniform s, like that o f the "colo red " colo r bearer, lies in their direct representation o f Am erican nationhood in lands d efin ed as inhabited by those u n fit fo r self-gov­ ernm ent, those who cannot represent themselves, and who are thus in need o f the discipline o f the Am erican em pire. As Roosevelt attests to on San Juan H ill, blacks in blue represent the fears and potential un­ d oin g o f the anarchy o f em pire.

CHAPTER 5

Birth of an Empire

In a scene from Citizen Kane celebrating the success o f the ow ner’s newspaper, Kane twice poses a rhetorical question to his journalists: "W ell gentlem en, are we goin g to declare war on Spain?” H is frien d Leland wryly responds: "The Inquirer already has,” to which Kane re­ torts: "you long-faced, overdressed anarchist” D uring this repartee, Kane as the host welcom es in the evening entertain m ent a chorus line o f wom en spottily clad in stars and stripes and toting toy rifles, led by a m arching band o f black musicians. T h e shooting script o f the film originally called fo r a lon ger debate between Leland and Kane about the im pending U.S. intervention in Cuba.1 Kane proposes sending Leland to Cuba as special correspondent to com pete with Richard H arding Davis, but Leland rejects the o ffe r and challenges the paper’s com m itm ent to w arm ongering. This debate was cut from the final ver­ sion o f the film when the setting was changed from a brothel to a ban­ quet hall to pass the production code. In the final screen version, traces o f war talk and illicit sexuality from the shooting script lin ger on the costum ed fem ale bodies o f the chorus line. This referen ce to con flict about the Spanish-American W ar links O rson W elles’s landm ark film o f 1941 to the earliest history o f cin­ em a in the late 1890s. That war was on e o f the first to be shot on film , at a m om ent when the "m oving picture” first em erged as a novel form o f entertain m ent Despite its participation in the birth o f U.S. cinem a, the war then disappeared as a subject from later films. N o mayor film s have chronicled the three-m onth-long war in Cuba o r the subsequent

146

Birth of an Empire » 147 three-year-long war in the Philippines, although film s have been m ade about virtually every oth er war in U.S. history.2 This chapter is about that duality, about the form ative presence and tellin g absence o f this pivotal war in the history o f U.S. cinem a. M oving pictures about the war in Cuba and the Philippines were central to the organization o f m ovie-m aking as a viable business and to the capacity o f film s to tell stories in the first decade o f the twentieth century. I f the SpanishAm erican W ar then disappeared from the screen, its evocation o f an Am erican em pire continued to in form the genealogy o f Am erican cin­ ema. V eiled allusions to the war inform D. W. G riffith ’s landm ark film , The B irth o f a N ation (1915), and Oscar M icheaux’s response, W ithin O ur Gates (1920). T h e war is m entioned several times in Citizen Kane (1941), which was based on the career o f W illiam Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who built his career on his incitem ent o f war hysteria in the yellow press. R eferences to the Spanish-American War, I argue, appeared both at m om ents o f cinem atic innovation and at threshold periods o f international crisis, when the question o f Am eri­ can involvem ent in European wars was under intense debate and the global role o f the U nited States was hanging in the balance. B irth o f a N ation came out at the beginning o f W orld W ar I and Citizen Aitm* dur­ ing W orld W ar II, as debates were raging about entering each war. I f “race m ovies,” as M ichael R ogin argues, “provide the scaffolding fo r Am erican film history,”3 im perial film s, I contend, provide the sub­ m erged foundation on international terrain fo r a history that charts n ot only the internal bonds o f national unity but also the changing re­ lations between the dom estic and the foreign .

Imperial Mobility As we have seen in the last two chapters, popular enthusiasm fo r the war against Spain has lon g been linked to the rise o f the mass m edia in the U nited States and its pow er to m obilize public opinion, particu­ larly to the yellow journalism o f W illiam Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. T h e newfound popularity o f “m oving pictures” also played a significant, i f less w ell known role in rousing support fo r the war and fo r the p roject o f im perial expansion. D uring the Cuban W ar fo r Inde­ pendence, b efore the U.S. declaration o f war against Spain, camera­ men fo r Edison and Biograph m ade their way to Florida where troops

148 * THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE were amassing, and they jo in e d Hearst’sjournalists on the yacht he dispatched from Key West to the Caribbean. In urban theaters and travel­ ing exhibitions throughout the country in 1898 and 1899, crowds flocked to see the novelty o f war scenes shot in Florida and Cuba. These b rie f film s, less than a m inute each, showed batdeships at sea, the wreck o f the M aine and the funeral o f its victims, panoramas o f H a­ vana Harbor, troops in m arching form ation, soldiers em barking on trains and ships, the Rough Riders riding, generals in conference, and trium phant victory parades leaving Havana and w elcom ing Adm iral Dewey hom e to N ew York and W ashington. T h e film s also captured the m ore inform al m om ents o f war— soldiers washing dishes, loung­ ing in camps, d iggin g paths, and loading their gear on trains and mules. T h ere were views o f battleships with laundry hanging from the decks, o f troops disem barking offshore at D aiquiri, tossing their mules overboard to sink o r swim, and d iggin g roads through the brush.4 Be­ cause o f the w eight and size o f the cameras, “actuality” shots o f battles were alm ost im possible to take, though some cam eram en did try to cart their equipm ent to the battlefields o f Cuba. Filmmakers com pen­ sated by staging famous battles in the N ew Jersey countryside and shooting naval conflicts that were fou gh t in the harbors o f M anila and Havana in bathtubs with toy ships and cigarette smoke. As soon as the war began between Am ericans and Filipinos, a rep ertoire o f battles in the Philippines was enacted as well, though n o Am erican cam eram en were present there. Audiences were, fo r the m ost part, n ot troubled by the com bination o f “real” and “reenacted” film s, a distinction we would make today, since both equally provided the th rill o f im m ediacy in view ing the oth­ erwise rem ote experience o f war. T h e exhibition o f war film s provided public occasions fo r the expressions o f nationalist sentim ent, as view­ ers hissed the Spanish crown, cheered Dewey’s victory, sang patri­ otic songs, and saluted the oft-repeated raising o f the Am erican flag against the painted scenery o f M o n o Castle in Havana Harbor. A t the height o f the war, these film s were so popular that they were repeated every hour around the clock in urban theaters, where the spectacle o f war was not contained on the screen but suffused every aspect o f at­ tending the theater. T h e projection machines, an early attraction in themselves, such as Edison’s Kinescope, were renam ed War-Graph, or W arscope. T h e Eden Musee was rem odeled as the in terior o f an arse-

Birth of an Empire • 149 nal battleship fo r the celebration o f Adm iral Dewey’s return in Sep­ tember. Soldiers disem barking in N ew York harbor would g o to that theater both to watch themselves on screen and be hailed by spec­ tators.5 These early war film s seem to fu lfill J. A . H obson’s observation (see Chapter 3) that ’jin goism is the lust o f the spectator,” wherein the desire to observe the spectacle o f war with the im m ediacy o f a sport­ in g event overtakes any interest in the political context o r narrative.6 This notion o f jin goism as spectatorial lust dovetails interestingly with Thom as G unning’s analysis o f early film as a “cinem a o f attractions.” Early film s, he argues, exhibited their pow er as spectacle to surprise, shock, and d eligh t the curious spectators, with n o attem pt to subordi­ nate the spectacle to a coherent narrative.7These audiences had m ore in com m on with crowds at a fair o r carnival than with the later voyeur­ istic spectator o f classical film .8 T h e war film s indeed highlighted the experien ce o f spectatorship, by placing the viewers in the position o f the crowds watching parades o f soldiers and waving to them as they em barked on ships, o r in the position o f m ourners and curiosity seek­ ers as the coffins o f the M aine victims rolled by on carts. In battle scenes, the audience watched Rough Riders rushing at them o r sol­ diers shooting toward them , as the actors faced the cam era head on, o r the audience was positioned behind the Am erican soldiers follow ­ in g the flag and m arching directly into enem y fire. In an Edison cata­ logue fo r exhibitors entitled “W ar Extra,” the “m agnificent spectacle” o f a warship was enhanced by the sense that “her death-dealing guns seem to poin t directly at our cam era.”9 Som e theaters heightened the im m ediacy o f war with the accom panying sound o f guns and fillin g the theater with smoke. As on the pages o f the historical rom ances and newspaper reports, the charged visual relation on screen appeared to be prim arily not that between U.S. troops and th eir enem ies o r their allies, but on e that took place between the spectacle o f Am erican troops abroad and their dom estic audience at hom e. As Paul V irilio notes about the intim ate connection between war and cinem a, “W ar can never break free from the m agical spectacle because its very pur­ pose is to produce that spectacle.”10 O n e o f the m ajor attractions o f these war film s lay in the exhibition o f Am erican m obility itself, rather than in the rarely visible display o f foreign lands and peoples. A m ajority o f film s showed Am ericans in

150 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m otion: m arching, riding, sailing, em barking on ships, and returning hom e. A n ch ored warships could even be m ade to appear in m otion, as the cam era m ounted on a sm aller vessel circled the larger ship fo r a panoram ic view. W hether the m ovem ent is o f m en, horses, vehicles, o r ships, the act o f m oving matters m ore than either the poin t o f de­ parture o r arrival. Scholars have associated the developm ent o f early cinem a with m odern transform ations o f the experien ce o f m otion through space and tim e, and have thus linked the rise o f film to rail­ road travel and to the experien ce o f walking through the m odern m e­ tropolis.11 Ella Shohat has suggested that early film also developed hand in hand with im perial expansion around the glob e.12T h e specta­ cle o f the battleship, rather than the railroad, may best represent this im perial mobility. I f shots o f trains dram atized the cam era's mastery o f continental travel, the pictures o f ships at sea enacted global m obility. T h e year b efore the war broke out, cam eram en fo r Edison em barked on a Pacific jou rn ey through the routes o f Am erican political and com ­ m ercial interests: M exico, Japan, H on g Kong, Hawaii, and M anila. Traveling on warships and m erchant vessels, and underwritten finan­ cially by Am erican transportation com panies, the cam eram en contrib­ uted to op en in g the w orld to the exp ort o f Am erican com m erce and m ilitary m igh t M oving pictures helped make the w orld accessible to Am erican pow er abroad and to the gaze o f audiences at hom e by exh ibiting the reach o f the cam era itself. T h e film s both enacted and celebrated the capacity o f m ilitary pow er and the ability o f the cam era to encompass the globe. As U.S. m ilitarism and com m erce subjected new arenas to im perial intervention, film had a com plem entary goal as a force that open ed the w orld to the survey o f the Am erican gaze. T h e m obility o f film was a fittin g accom plice to the disem bodied discourse o f Am eri­ can im perialism , in which territories abroad were viewed as stepping stones to further expansion divorced from bounded spaces, rather than as desirable ends in themselves (see Chapter 3 ). As foreign sites becam e m ore accessible to the cam era’s eye and thus visible to the au­ dience at hom e, these sites becam e paradoxically blurred and unreal; m ere interchangeable settings fo r the exercise o f Am erican power. If, as V irilio claims, “weapons are tools not just o f destruction but also o f perception ,” then the reverse may also be true, that cameras are n ot just tools o f perception but also o f destruction. T h ere was an inti-

Birth of an Empire » 151 m ate connection between arms and cameras, on e which V irilo dates to W orld W ar I, but that can be seen in the origins o f film in the 1890s: “the history o f batde is prim arily the history o f radically changing fields o f perception .”15T h e em ergence o f film as a new field o f percep­ tion went hand in hand with the m ost extensive period o f European and Am erican expansion in what has been called the A ge o f Em pire. Films about the Spanish-American W ar can be seen as part o f the arse­ nal o f the new Am erican em pire. T h e association o f the m oving pic­ ture with the m obility o f m en and weapons, however, was by n o means a uniquely Am erican phenom enon. In fact, the early film industry was international in scope, in its production and m arketing. B efore 1898, U.S. audiences would have likely seen the Lum ière film s, which por­ trayed tourist scenes from around the w orld, as w ell as shots o f m ilitary troops from d ifferen t countries m arching, charging, and enacting bat­ tles. Am ericans were also n ot the only ones to make film s about the Spanish-American War: G eorges M éliès m ade several film s o f the ex­ plosion o f the batdeship M aine, along with other im perial themes. Also popular am ong U.S. audiences were film s about the B oer W ar and the B oxer R ebellion in China.14 W ell b efore the U.S. declaration o f war against Spain, film s adver­ tised the power o f the m edium to m obilize m en and images. Edison's War Correspondents, fo r exam ple, displayed newspaper correspondents in Key West racing to the telegraph o ffic e .15 T h e film dram atized the speed with which journalists could transport the news but also im plied that the new m edium o f film could com pete with and supersede the newspaper in terms o f verisim ilitude. T o advertise a panoram ic view o f M orro Castle/Havana Harbor, the War Extra from the Edison Com ­ pany’s catalog noted that “in view o f probable bom bardm ent, when the old fashioned masonry w ill m elt away like butter under the fire o f 13-inch guns, the view is o f historic value.”16 "H istoric” because the film in g anticipates and almost precipitates the destruction that the ac­ tual bom bardm ent would wreak. Shooting film here precedes shoot­ in g guns and thereby creates "historic value.” T h e m obility o f Am erican m en was also enhanced by the contrast with im m obilizing shots o f Cubans and Spaniards. Several film s show Cubans standing o r squatting passively in lin e waiting fo r rations from the Am erican army, a com m on stereotype o f Cuban dependency and lack o f self-reliance.17 O n e popular reenactm ent, Shooting Captured In ­

152 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE surgents, shows b lin d fold ed Cubans standing to be shot by a firin g squad, and in Cuban Ambush, the Cubans rem ain hidden w hile atten­ tion is drawn to the heroic death o f a Spanish soldier.18 D epiction o f Cuban inertia echoes the depiction o f African Am erican boys and m en standing by idly and watching white soldiers march and work. A War Extra describes Cruiser Marblehead as a “busy scene” on the docked ship, which had bom barded San Juan, Puerto Rico: “coal passers, ste­ vedores, sailors and officers all seem im bued with a spirit o f hustle. A ll except the coons on the wharf, watching the work. O ne o f them slowly gets up, stretches and yawns.”19This juxtaposition im plicidy associates Am erican m obility with whiteness, in contrast to both Cubans abroad and African Am ericans at hom e. In on e o f the few film s o f black sol­ diers, Colored Troops Disembarking, the War Extra glosses: “it is laughable to see the extrem e caution displayed by the soldiers clam bering down. T h e com m anding o fficer struts on the w h arf urging them to hurry.”20 Shots o f white soldiers disem barking just as slowly appear in many film s with n o com m en t T h e textual cues here seem necessary to dis­ tinguish the m ovem ent o f black troops as missteps— “clam bering” or “strutting,” a racialized distinction not clearly visible on the screen. W h ile these exam ples suggest how film s may have boosted the war effort, film historians have also shown that the war played a crucial role in boosting the business o f film . T h e popularity o f the war film s financially revived a fled glin g industry whose initial novelty was begin­ ning to fade. In addition, the serious appeal o f the content helped to make film s m ore palatable to religious and gen teel middle-class groups throughout the country who were suspicious o f film as a lowerclass form o f am usem ent21 As an early reporter on film wrote, “An elaborate argum ent could be based on the prem ise that the only im ­ portant contribution o f the Spanish-American W ar to the history o f the U nited States lay in the impetus it gave to the work o f Smith and Blackton in placing the foundation blocks fo r the m otion picture in­ dustry.”22 As in accounts o f yellow journalism , acknowledging the im ­ portance o f the m edia downplays the im portance o f th eir ideological content and the political context o f the war. W h ile recent film histori­ ans would n ot agree with this exaggerated assessment, they have im­ plicitly follow ed a sim ilar line o f argu m ent Many historians routinely refer to the Spanish-American “war film craze” as the main attraction o f the pre-nickelodeon era and as a key catalyst in the developm ent o f

Birth of an Empire « 153 early cinem a: “n o gen re o f program m ing could be developed to match the consistent drawing pow er o f the images o f the Spanish-American War."25 Yet most scholars take the patriotic attraction o f these film s fo r granted and treat them as a catalyst fo r oth er cinem atic developm ents, without fully exp lorin g how the film s worked to produce patriotism in a particular historical context. Charles Musser has argued that the exhibition o f war film s played a pivotal role in the developm ent o f narrative in film . B efore the war, m oving pictures were fo r the most part displayed in a vaudeville for­ m at o f disparate subjects interspersed with oth er entertainm ent acts, with little attem pt at them atic unity o r narrative continuity. W h ile ex­ hibitors also included Spanish-American W ar film s in this form at, ac­ com panied by songs, slides, and lectures, now fo r the first tim e they organized the film s around a unifying them e and follow ed the chrono­ logical narrative o f the progress o f the war. Th ey m ight start, fo r exam ­ ple, with the staged explosion o f the M aine, g o on to divers in the wreck, to the on-site funeral fo r its victims, and then m ove on to scenes o f troops em barking fo r Cuba, a staged battle fo r the Am erican flag, a victorious bom bardm ent o f Havana Harbor, and end with the raising o f the Am erican flag. O r they m ight have a segm ent solely on the battles at sea in the Pacific, culm inating with Dewey’s hom ecom ing pa­ rade. This singular focus was advertised outside the theater o r trav­ elin g exh ibition as “War Show." Such them atic and chronological co­ herence, suggests Musser, contributed to the developm ent o f the story film , which would becom e the dom inant m ode o f classic H ollyw ood cinem a.24 Thus the capacity o f film s to tell stories arose as much from a p oliti­ cal desire to project national narratives o f im perial conquest and geo­ graphic m obility as from technological o r aesthetic innovation. T o un­ derstand this connection between story film s and war, it is n ot enough to assume that the exhibitors and spectators could draw on a straight­ forw ard m ilitary teleology o f com bat, victory, defeat, treaty-signing, and the cedin g o f territory. These linear narratives were constructed out o f fields o f contention, subject to con flictin g interpretations, as were the m eanings o f the m ultiple wars o f 1898 and their political re­ sults in Cuba, Puerto R ico, and the Philippines. T h e celebration o f Dewey’s uncontested victory over the Spanish fle et in M anila Bay, fo r exam ple, and the official closure his hom ecom ing gave to the war, de-

154 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE trac ted public attention from the begin ning o f a vicious Am erican ground war against the Filipinos’ struggle fo r national independence. I f the changing scope o f im perial warfare did not fit a closed narra­ tive structure, neither did patriotism o r jingoism provide autom atic sources o f affective cohesion. Jingoism does not simply express a pre­ existing unity, just as visual im ages are n ot transparently legib le refer­ ences. Both fo rge m om ents o f public unity by m obilizing m ultiple and often con flicted fantasies and anxieties. N arrative construction o f the war’s m eaning as w ell as o f the new experien ce o f view ing film s had to be exerted through an abundance o f interpretive materials that ac­ com panied the film s, such as catalogs, lectures, advertising, and news­ paper notices. Together, these schooled an audience in how to see im­ perial warfare in foreign arenas newly visible on screen. H ow then d o spectacles o f foreign wars and im perial m obility on film becom e stories with recognizable plots? H ow at this early m om ent o f cinem atic history did film start to narrate im perial warfare, and how d id war provide an opportunity fo r film to tell stories? Spectacles o f foreign warfare becam e stories in relation to the dom estic sphere and to the creation o f a “hom e fr o n t” Films fram ed the foreign war in rela­ tion to dom estic space to make Am erican viewers fe el at hom e abroad. By “dom estic” I refer to the double m eaning o f the term as the mutu­ ally d efin in g spheres o f the household and the nation (see Chapter 1). These early film s o f m en m arching and figh tin g abroad were not only about wars overseas but also about redrawing the boundaries between hom e and abroad, between the dom estic and the foreign , boundaries that were both threatened and reconstructed by im perial expansion. T h e new m edium o f film contributed to the cultural process o f negoti­ ating these boundaries, to make distant lands both accessible and “foreign in a dom estic sense.” Just as film brought the w orld into the dom estic space o f the theater, representations o f Am erican m obil­ ity abroad w ere intim ately involved in reconfigu rin g the nation as home.*8 O n e early story film set during the war in the Philippines suggests how film m obilized the trope o f dom esticity to generate a narrative o f im perial con qu est B illy B itzer m ade The American Soldier in Love and W orin the Biograph studio, and it was released in 1903 (th e same year as Edwin P orter’s Unde Tom’s Cabin and The Great Train Robbery).96 A ccordin g to the Biograph B ulletin, the film was set in the Philippines at

Birth of an Empire » 185 a tim e when Am erican colonial rule was b ein g established there, at the end o f a brutal three-year war o f con quest T h e brutality o f Am erican troops at the tim e was openly debated in congressional investigations, testim ony o f soldiers, and the pages o f newspapers, which even printed im ages o f massacred Filipinos. The American Soldier conveyed a very d if­ feren t view o f the war. W h ile the title refers to separate fem ale and m ale spheres o f the hom e and the battlefield, the film does m ore than send the soldier away from his love at hom e to figh t a foreign war. It further enlists the fem ale sphere o f dom esticity to p roject a colon ial regim e overseas and to tell the story o f em pire. T h e Biograph Com pany m arketed this three-scene film , along with two other war film s in its catalog, with a clear concern about creating a narrative out o f disparate footage: These three scenes are to be used in connection with war views, to make a complete story in one film for projection. The first scene shows the young American officer parting with his sweetheart and starting for the Philippines. The second shows the regiment leaving its post to em­ bark on a transport— then comes a fight in the brush, then the wound­ ing o f the young officer; his capture and rescue by a Filipino girl, and finally his meeting the sweetheart and her father in the Filipino hut, where he has been nursed back to life.27 Rather than simply describe the film , the bulletin instructs the exhibi­ tor how to display the disparate scenes as a continuous and coherent story. This narrative weaves togeth er fou r heterogeneous spatial regis­ ters: m oving from a three-dim ensional theatrical bourgeois in terior to actual footage o f real soldiers, to a reenacted battle scene (both film ed ou tdoors), and to two patently unreal two-dimensional exotic back­ drops. These juxtapositions im plicitly contrast the hom e as real and the foreign as artificial and unreal spaces, bridged by the presence o f the Am erican soldier and by the experience o f the viewer.28 T h e Bulle­ tin relates a narrative that would be fam iliar to its audience and was soon to becom e dom inant in early story film s— the tale o f a rescue. T h e film enacts the popular narrative o f the war as a rescue mission, at the hands o f a virile Am erican man, o f Cubans from decadent Span­ iards, and Filipinos from their own barbarism. Yet this film , like the contem porary historical romances, suggests a counter-narrative that turns im perial adventure into the rescue o f Am erican masculinity.

156 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Scene on e opens with a white, well-dressed woman seated in a threedim ensional set o f a middle-class drawing room . A soldier enters and embraces the woman in a repeated tearful farew ell. T h e realistic bour­ geois in terior represents the dom estic sphere o f fem ale sentim ent that correlates with the subjectivity o f the crying woman, who is com forted by the soldier. Although war enters the hom e as a disruption o f dom es­ tic relations, the dom estic sphere also appears as the site from which the war is launched. In a film m ade by Edison in 1899, Love and War, the fam ily in a sim ilar in terior is reading the newspaper and follow in g the course o f the war.29 This film ends with Red Cross nurses rushing into a fie ld hospital to tend to the wounded son o f the family. T h e hom e in both film s thus appears analogous to the theater as the site fo r watching the spectacle o f foreign wars, and the battlefield hospital appears as a venue fo r wom an’s sphere abroad. A ccordin g to the B ulletin, the next scene is an “actuality,” that is, the real footage o f m en em barking fo r war. In fact this film was recycled from a shot o f m en em barking fo r Cuba from G overnor’s Island fou r years earlier, which makes the sites o f em pire interchangeable. T h e soldiers could presumably be m arching anywhere in the world. T h e scene follow in g that on e is a reenacted practice battle, also in an unspecified location.90 Scene two is set in the proscenium o f a stage against a painted twodim ensional ju n g le ” scene. T h e Am erican soldier enters, falls to the ground, and is im m ediately assaulted by a gen eric “native” in blackface and black leotard. Just as the enem y is about to beat the soldier to death, a native woman appears, to grab the club and plead on her knees fo r the soldier’s life. This scene is interesting fo r its portrayal o f race and masculinity. A d­ vocates o f em pire saw the annexation o f the Philippines as a crucible fo r restoring prim al vigor to an enervated white masculinity by subdu­ in g prim itive m en (see Chapter 3 ).91Yet in this scene the Am erican sol­ d ier falls im mediately, with no visible p rior struggle; only then does this caricature o f a prim itive man with a club prepare to k ill him . T h e native demonstrates cowardliness by attacking an already fallen man. T h e native woman then proves h erself m ore civilized than her m ale counterpart by rescuing the Am erican in a gesture evocative o f Poca­ hontas rescuing Captain John Smith (a popular figu re in the 1890s). H er appearance splits the colon ized subject into a fem in ized nurtur-

Birth of an Empire • 157

Figure 1.

TheA m erican Sold ier in Love an d War, 1903, Museum o f M odern

Art/Film Stills Archive.

158 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE ing accepter o f colonial rule, and a cowardly, brutish, aggressive m ale resister. Scene three takes place against a painted backdrop o f an unspeci­ fied tropical island. T h e soldier, with a bandage around his head, is sit­ ting outside the hut, while the woman who saved him fans him , and a younger wom an offers him a bowl o f food . T h e white woman o f the first film arrives with an old er man sporting a pith helm et and white beard. She embraces the soldier and then gives her necklace to the na­ tive woman, while the old man shakes hands all around. W e return here from war to love, to a dom estic fram e, the exterior o f a prim itive hut, which contrasts with the openin g bourgeois inte­ rior. Instead o f the soldier returning hom e from war, the dom esticity associated with the white woman goes abroad to rescue the white man from the proliferation o f native wom en, who, in a harem -like setting, nurture and feed him . T h e second woman replaces the native man; the aggressor gives way to this twin im age o f the colon ized as the fe­ m ale nurturer and server— the mammy figure— and the orientalized and eroticized younger woman. Like Pocahontas and the heroines o f the historical romances, these fem ale figures represent the desire to serve as the desire fo r subjugation. "T h e very thing they yearn fo r is what o f all others our G overnm ent desires to give them ,”32 w rote the 1899 Com mission on the Philippines in sim ilarly eroticized language (see Chapter 3 ). This dom estic fram e, with a wounded soldier at its center, effaces any trace o f the bloody con flict o r conquest which brought the Am erican soldier to the Philippines. H e— rather than the Filipinos— is the wounded victim . Yet this portrayal o f the soldier also conveys a destabilized and m ore vulnerable im age o f masculinity, as he never stands erect in the film but falls im m ediately and remains either prone o r seated. T h e catalogue says that the soldier is “captured and rescued by the Filipin o girl.” T h e im plicit threat may be on e o f the Am erican soldier “goin g native” by taking a local concubine, both a re­ ality and fear o f colonial administrations. I f Roosevelt found m en o f d ifferen t races interm ingling in the im perial battlefield, this film raises the fearfu l o r enticing potential fo r m iscegenation with native women. T h e symbolic threat carries through the logic o f expansion; that is, the expansion o f borders may undo the m en sent abroad and ultim ately challenge the racial coherence o f national unity. I f the native woman rescues the Am erican soldier from the native

Birth of an Empire » 159 man, in the final scene the white sweetheart arrives to rescue the Am erican soldier from a surfeit o f native wom en. T h e fam ily rom ance represents the restoration o f ord er that is at once dom estic and im pe­ rial, with the white couple reunited on foreign terrain. As the soldier remains im m obilized, the white woman gives beads to the Filipina as a sign o f gratitude but also bondage.” T h en what is the old man d oin g there? T h e catalogue says he is the white wom an’s father, accompany­ in g her as a chaperone. H e would also be recognized from political cartoons as U ncle Sam. I f the white woman rescues her man under the aegis o f U n cle Sam, she may then leave the old man with the native wom en. In the coupling at the end, the ambiguous fam ilial figu re o f “U n cle” replaces the native man am ong the native wom en. T h e film thus evokes, settles, but then revives the threat o f im perial expansion as m iscegenation: the incorporation o f racial foreign ers within the dom estic nation. The American Soldier in Love and War fiâm es a foreign war in part through gen der and racial anxieties at hom e. In a context in which Roosevelt advocated im perial conquest as the expansion o f separate gen dered spheres to global dimensions, that is, o f wom en tending the hom e w hile m en take up the white m an’s burden abroad, this film shows how those spheres becom e intertwined. Im perial conquest ap­ pears as the restoration o f white Am erican dom esticity on foreign ter­ rain. Biograph m arketed the film along with other film s about adul­ tery, divorce, and wom en who kill their adulterous husbands. This film m ight be viewed as an instrum ent fo r putting the white N ew W om an under con trol by showing her the m odel o f w illing submissive native wom en and by leashing her new m obility to an im perial order. T h e dem arcation o f the separate spaces o f hom e and war is a gen­ dered one. Fem inist film historians, building on the work o f M iriam Hansen, have shown that early cinem a o ffered wom en access outside the hom e into an alternative public sphere, “a space where wom en were free to enjoy the pleasures o f voyeurism and active spectatorship otherwise denied them .”34Contem poraries were surprised that wom en m ade up a large portion o f the audience fo r the popular m oving pic­ ture o f the Corbett-Fitzsimmons boxin g match in 1897. These same venues w elcom ed wom en spectators to war films. O n e theater, fo r ex­ am ple, courted a fem ale audience by offerin g souvenir pictures o f the battleship M aine, specifically to the “ladies.”35 M y p oin t here can only

160 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE be speculative— that wom en viewers, like wom en readers o f rom ance novels, were w elcom ed into this public sphere o f spectatorship, where the desire fo r freedom from dom estic restraints could be satisfied and channeled through the routes o f em pire abroad. View ing war film s o ffered a release from dom esticity and a reconfiguration o f the dom es­ tic sphere in to what Josiah Strong called an "audience room fo r the w orld.” I f the spectacle o f war provided a safe way fo r wom en to enter a public sphere o f global m obility, in turn the oppositional potential o f this public sphere m ight have been harnessed and disciplined by the activity o f watching war films. In the portrayal o f F ilipin o characters as gen etically "black” and prim itive, we can also see how early im perial film s m obilized marks o f racial d ifferen ce in an international arena. Although these figures would n ot be recognized ethnographically as Filipino, they would be identifiable from popular contem porary political cartoons that con­ flated Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians as stereotypically black. Blackness on the screen was a m obile signifier, transfer­ able to a variety o f d ifferen t colon ized groups. W h ile film was put to use early on fo r ethnic docum entation— to make prim itive peoples m ore real and particular to the W estern view er— it also had the effect o f m aking them generically interchangeable and thus unreal.96 In a trade jou rn al’s anecdote about shooting the famous battle o f San Juan H ill, fo r exam ple, African Am ericans were hired to play the Spanish soldiers: A photographer for a moving picture machine had hard luck at Orange NJ, recently in his attempt to depict an engagement on San Juan Hill. He engaged eighteen Negroes to represent Spaniards . . . and costumed them appropriately. He paid the Negroes 75 cents each in advance, gave them some beer, in order that they might be in fight­ ing trim, and then adjusted his photographic apparatus. When ready the Vitascope man found that the "Spaniards” had disappeared, taking with them 200 rounds o f blank cartridges. The police found a number o f the pseudo Spaniards later engaged in a game o f craps, but as they fled no arrests were made.97 H ere the threat o f arm ed black m en— some o f whom actually fought on San Juan H ill— is evoked and ridiculed by costum ing them as Span­ iards. T h eir com ic mutiny is associated with Spanish cowardice and

Birth of an Empire « 161 decadence: both refuse to act like "real” m en. But ultim ately the pho­ tographer becom es the butt o f the jo k e, when the black actors escape and he loses his vision behind the very apparatus m eant to control this representation.

The Birth of a Nation at Home and Abroad T h e first m ajor war film in the history o f Am erican cinem a is o f course not about the Spanish-American War, but about the Am erican Civil War: D. W. G riffith ’s landm ark epic from 1915, The B irth o f a N ation. In a m ovie about the C ivil W ar and the rise o f the Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s, the war o f 1898 obviously cannot appear directly. But this ab­ sence, I argue, is a symptomatic one, as the film is inform ed by the Spanish-American W ar from at least two sources: the p rior history o f war on film , and the Thom as D ixon novels on which G riffith based his film , The Clansman (1905) and The Leopard's Spots (1902). Scholars have suggested that G riffith ’s fam ous shots o f the C ivil War battlefields reproduced Mathew Brady’s photographs. I would suggest that they were also shaped by the m ore recent m ode o f representing warfare on film . Billy Bitzer, G riffith ’s cameraman fo r B irth o f a N ation, earlier had traveled on Hearst’s yacht to shoot film s o f troops in Cuba. It was B itzer too who m ade The American Soldier in Love and War. In The B irth o f a N ation, views o f the clim actic ride o f the Klan echo on a grander scale film s m ade o f the Rough Riders on their way to rescue Cuba. In addition, the shots o f trench warfare in that film are staged quite similarly to the reenactm ents o f battles in the Philippines (as w ell as those o f another colonial war extensively film ed, the B oer W ar). In The B irth o f a Nation the m ost striking scenes o f visual m enace on the screen are those o f black soldiers in Federal uniform s exerting their authority as an occupying force. It was the Spanish-American W ar that most recently brought this threat to the visual foreground, in films, photographs, and stories o f black soldiers in national uniform s (see Chapter 4 ). This is n ot to say that G riffith and B itzer directly cop ied o r were in­ fluenced only by the Spanish-American W ar films. Yet when they came to stage and shoot historical battles from the C ivil War, the representa­ tional field m ost im m ediately available to them and their audience would have included not only Brady’s photos and European epic film s,

162 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE but also the only Am erican war extensively and recently shot on film . Furtherm ore, the Spanish-American W ar was interpreted as a political and sym bolic resolution to the dom estic disunity o f the C ivil War, a so­ lution which G riffith o ffered in the rise o f the Klan. I f G riffith claim ed that the Klan gave birth to the “real nation [th at] has only existed in the last 15 o r twenty years,” he placed its birth in the 1890s, in the era o f Progressivism and its related m ovem ent o f im perialism abroad.38 This connection between the dom estic and foreign , the C ivil W ar and the Spanish-American War, is explicitly drawn in a novel we have exam ined above, The Leopard’s Spots, on e o f D ixon ’s novels on which G riffith based his film . In this novel, a black m an’s alleged rape o f a white g irl has the same unifying e ffe c t on a Southern com m unity that the Spanish-American W ar has on the entire nation. Both events, the dom estic and the foreign , cause “the white race” to “fuse into a hom o­ geneous mass” out o f d ifferen t regions, classes, and religions.39G riffith portrayed this white fusion o f the nation in the Klan in response to an im agined rape, hence a dom estic tale, rather than in response to the overseas war. In fact, in revising D ixon’s novels o f Reconstruction, G riffith excises the war o f 1898 and replaces it with the C ivil War. Yet im perialism is n ot absent from The B irth o f a N ation, where G rif­ fith, like D ixon, narrates the history o f Reconstruction as a N orthern occupation o f the South. Silas Lynch, the N orth ern m ulatto, tells the white wom an he wants to marry, “I w ill build an em pire and you w ill be my queen.” T h e ride o f the Klan, known as the “invisible em pire,” makes the m en look like an insurgent force ridin g in rebellion against an African em pire. T h e first shot in the film figures slavery as an inva­ sion by blacks, an original threat to the proto-national unity o f white Puritan settlers. T h e original version o f the film ends with L in coln ’s vi­ sion o f sending all blacks to Africa, and the final version ends with a Christian G od o f peace defeating a god o f war, who looks like an A fri­ can icon. T h e Christian god thus purges the white nation o f black sol­ diers, w ho have been collapsed into the figu re o f the black rapist Thus The B irth o f a N ation takes place on a broader international ter­ rain than the focus on the internal dom estic con flict o f the C ivil W ar and racial violence overtly suggests. Viewers at the tim e understood part o f this international im plication: at the begin ning o f the war in Europe, the Klan ridin g to the rescue at the clim ax o f the film offered a potential figu re fo r the white Am erican nation ridin g to the rescue o f

Birth of an Empire • 163 the w orld.40 N o t surprisingly, G riffith was the only civilian invited to the batdefields o f the G reat W ar to make a propaganda film urging U.S. entry. As Billy B itzer explained, "the w orld’s forem ost director was the on e man who could tell a story that all— Am ericans especially— would understand.”41 O ne film m aker did understand the relation o f The B irth o f a N ation to the Spanish-American W ar and to W orld W ar I: African Am erican film m aker Oscar M icheaux, whose 1920 m elodram a, W ithin O ur Gates, has been seen as a direct critique o f the earlier film . W hereas in G rif­ fith ’s film black m en in uniform represent anarchy and the Klan order, in W ithin O ur Gates the flashback to the lynching o f the h eroin e’s fos­ ter fam ily shows a spectacle o f chaos and personal trauma. This pow er­ fu l lynching scene, in which a fam ily is hanged and a b on fire built to burn them , cuts back and forth to the scene directly echoin g the black m an’s threat to white wom en in the cabin o f The B irth o f a N ation. In M icheaux’s film , though, a white man is trying to rape the black hero­ ine, until he discovers through a mark on her body that he is her father. T h e resolution o f these threatened rapes is telling. T h e pow erful flashback to the lynching is contained by cutting to the fin al scene o f courtship o f the heroin e by a N orthern m ulatto doctor. In the intertitle, his first words in response to her visibly sad m em ories are n ot “m arry m e," but “We should never fo rget what our p eop le did in Cuba under Roosevelt’s com m and.” H e goes on to rem ind her o f black par­ ticipation on the battlefields o f M exico and W orld W ar I, and finally: “We w ere never immigrants. Be proud o f our country always.— A n d you, Sylvia, have been thinking deeply about this, but your thoughts have been warped. In spite o f your misfortunes, you w ill always be a patriot and a tender w ife.”4* A n d so she m arries him. W h ile M icheaux here claims that A frican Am ericans are m ore Am erican than foreign immigrants, they can only prove their national identity as im perial citizens by their participation in wars abroad. T h e story o f foreign warfare enters the dom estic field as a m arriage proposal, as the m ale suitor displaces the m em ory o f white violence on to the wom an’s unhealthy obsession with the past H e asks her to fo rget that dom estic violence by another kind o f dis­ placem ent, by rem em bering m ilitary ventures abroad and m arrying into im perial citizenship. Cinematically, however, her flashbacks to d o­

164 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m estic racial violen ce rem ain searing on the screen, overflow ing the fram e and fin al prom ise o f a patriotic im perial m arriage.43 Thus M icheaux in W ithin O ur Gates reveals som ething disavowed yet im plicit in G riffith ’s The B irth o f a N ation: that the dom estic unity o f the nation depends on the violen t subordination o f blacks at hom e to fo rge a whiteness capacious enough to include im migrants; equally, it depends on the violen t assertion o f U.S. pow er abroad, a site from which D ixon and G riffith exclude African Am ericans, and which M icheaux, like black soldiers who fou gh t in foreign wars, turns into an opportunity to achieve both dom esticity and citizenship.44

Imperial Citizenship A quarter o f a century after The B irth o f a N ation, references to the Spanish-American W ar appear in another landm ark Am erican film , O rson W elles’s Citizen Kane. Although better known fo r its cinem atic innovation than fo r its treatm ent o f national identity, the title itself highlights the issue o f citizenship, and W elles had thought o f nam ing the film ‘T h e Am erican.” A n early scene from Kane’s childhood shows him playing at figh tin g a C ivil W ar battle with snowballs, declaring, “the terms are unconditional su rren d er. . . T h e U n ion forever.”43As in G riffith ’s film , the projection o f national identity on the screen took on heightened dim ensions from the international crisis o f w orld war, at a tim e when the question o f Am erican entry into a European war had extrem e urgency. In both film s, allusions to the earlier im perial war o f 1898 underscore the reconfiguration o f Am erica’s global iden­ tity at these threshold m om ents o f international c o n flic t I am not ar­ guing fo r a reading o f these film s as veiled allegories o r outright p ro­ paganda fo r foreign policy. Rather, I suggest that they both participate in and com m ent on the crucial work o f film in creating and circulating im ages o f Am erican national identity at hom e and abroad, and they screen im ages o f the foreign in ord er to dom esticate them . In focusing on the life o f W illiam Randolph H earst W elles hearkens back to the intertwined histories o f Am erican m edia and Am erican em pire build­ in g at the turn o f the twentieth century. T h e name “Hearst” has lon g been iden tified with the w ord “em­ p ire.” T h e film repeats the well-known story o f Hearst pushing the U n ited States in to an im perial war in Cuba by w hipping up public hys­

Birth of an Empire » 165 teria in his yellow press. Beyond his support fo r the war, H earst’sjo u r­ nalism syndicate and political aspirations are themselves often labeled a “m edia em pire.” T h e film reenacts on e o f the m ost fam ous apocry­ phal scenes from H earst’s career in the form o f a telegraph exchange with a fiction alized Frederick Rem ington: “Food m arvelous in Cuba— girls delightful— could send you prose poem s about scenery. T h ere’s no war in Cuba,” to which Kane responds, “You provide the prose po­ ems— I ’ll provide the war.” W elles links the building o f Kane’s m edia em pire at hom e to his capacity to deploy these m edia to incite an in­ tervention into a foreign war. In this view, Cuba is a tropical blank slate fo r the projection o f Kane’s im perial ambitions. T h e pow er o f Kane’s m edia to create reality— to “provide the war”— links him not only to Hearst but also to W elles’s renowned showmanship and to the im pe­ rial pow er o f film itself. Orson W elles showed an interest in staging im perial dramas several years b efore m aking Citizen Kane. T h e radio show “War o f the W orlds” enacted a colonial invasion o f earth by beings from a foreign planet, and is famous fo r having im m ediately convinced listeners o f the reality it simulated. R ight b efore starting Citizen Kane, W elles em barked on an am bitious project (u n der contract to R K O ), which he never com ­ pleted, to make a film o f Joseph C onrad’s H eart o f Darkness. Critics have exp lored the rich aesthetic connections between Conrad and W elles and between his plans fo r the incom plete film and his com ­ pleted execution o f Citizen Kane. Yet none have asked how C onrad’s im perial narrative m ight have structured W elles’s representation o f Am erica. Does Citizen Kane evoke a notion o f im perial citizenship in which the 1890s o f Conrad and Hearst resonate through the present o f the film in 1940? In the search fo r the m eaning o f Kane’s fam ously elusive final w ord “Rosebud,” was W elles rew riting Kurtz’s m ore re­ sounding last words, “the horror, the h orror”? Formally, Citizen Kane is divided into two parts: the first focuses out­ ward on Kane’s highly public rising career, in which he uses the war as a m ajor stepping stone, and the second turns inward to the dom estic sphere and his collapsing m arriage. James N arem ore describes this shift as a turn “to private life rather than the public structuring o f an em pire.”46 T h e film blurs this distinction, however, as Kane’s im perial qualities are reproduced in the dom estic sphere o f his m arriage to a working-class singer. Dom esticity becom es a site o f em pire-building, in

166 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE the opera hall Kane builds fo r his w ife’s singing debut and in Xanadu, which he constructs as their hom e. These are fruits o f Kane’s em pire in the outside w orld, as they both reproduce and unravel his im perial am bitions. Kane’s creation o f his w ife’s career out o f nothing parallels his incitem ent o f the Spanish-American War. She provides a m ediocre talent; he provides the career. Kane crosses the gap between the m ale sphere o f war and mass m edia and the fem ale sphere o f the hom e and high culture, fo r war and opera alike serve as testim onies to his im pe­ rial willfulness at hom e and abroad. In both cases, Leland, Kane’s clos­ est frien d and colleague, objects to Kane’s im perious projects. W hile in the film their first disagreem ent about the war is reduced to a b rie f lighthearted repartee, in the shooting script the argum ent concludes with Kane o fferin g Leland a regular colum n to write his dissenting opinions about the war. Kane’s em pire at first seems capacious enough to contain even its opposition. In the final version, the two m en com e togeth er to watch the spectacle o f the fem ale bodies dressed in the Am erican fla g and carrying guns. In the second h a lf o f the film , Iceland’s m uted resistance to Kane’s political em pire em erges full­ blown over the spectacle o f a woman on stage, just on e this tim e. A t on e o f the turning points o f the film , which shows the beginning o f Kane’s decline, Leland starts to write a negative review o f Susan’s op ­ era debut, thereby refusing to endorse Kane’s im perial am bitions in the dom estic sphere. By com pleting and publishing the review him ­ self, Kane gives Leland the voice o f dissent he prom ised him about the war. Yet he also underm ines the basis o f his own dom estic em pire and in firin g Leland from the newspaper, Kane weakens his m edia em pire as well. Kane’s im perial project also shows up in his obsessive collectin g o f statues, art, buildings, and animals, first from Europe and then from “the lo o t o f the w orld.” H e im ports “the very stones o f many other places from every corn er o f the earth.” His voracious appetite fo r col­ lection rem oves all objects from their contexts yet never even unpacks them from their crates. In the film we never see Kane abroad (excep t in the open in g new sreel); instead, he m obilizes his power beyond U.S. borders to create the spectacle o f global lo o t brought hom e. As Kane becom es physically im m obilized in the orientalized dom estic sphere o f Xanadu, he brings fragm ents o f the entire w orld into his hom e in a way that makes the hom e uncannily foreign and gothic. U ltim ately the

Birth of an Empire « 167 boundaries between private and public, dom estic and foreign , col­ lapse in the final scene o f the film , as the intim ate answer to the mys­ tery o f "Rosebud” appears on the p ile o f burning stu ff along with the “lo o t o f the w orld.” M ichael D enning and Laura M ulvey have situated Citizen Kane in the political context o f popular fron t struggles against fascism and N ew Deal arguments against Am erican isolationism .47 Both readings acknowledge the international dim ensions o f a film that appears al­ m ost claustrophobically enclosed within the dom estic spheres o f na­ tion and hom e, yet both also overlook the com plex relation o f the film to Am erican im perialism . M ulvey sees the references to the SpanishAm erican W ar as evidence m erely o f Kane’s “willingness to play on vul­ gar jin goism .”48 D enning claims that in goin g from H eart o f Darkness to Citizen Kane, W elles recast the im perial gen re o f civilization versus the ju n gle into an antifascist narrative o f civilization versus fascism.49 Yet that form ulation preserves an im perial fram ework by equating fascism with the “uncivilized” colon ized world. I suggest that the dem ocratic C itizen Kane is inseparable from the Im perial Kane, as he aggressively pursues his representative Am erican status by building em pires in both the public and private spheres with the “lo o t”— news as w ell as objects— he appropriates from around the globe. T h e isolationism M ulvey sees in Kane goes hand in hand with his im perial desires. As D enning has shown, W elles based Kane in part also on H enry Luce. Luce had built a m odern m edia em pire by founding Life, Time, and Fortune magazines and by prom oting popular and innovative form s o f photojournalism and newsreels, techniques that W elles drew on in his film m aking. W elles also worked fo r Luce, and D enning has shown that W elles’s progressive M ercury Theater had many ambiva­ len t dealings with the Luce com panies.50 Citizen Kane opens with a newsreel o f Kane’s life narrated through the rhetoric o f em pire, in a parody o f Luce's popular series, “T h e M arch o f T im e.” W elles thus in­ troduces his own cinem atic in-depth investigation o f Kane’s life from m ultiple perspectives, by d efin in g it against the official images and lin­ ear narrative o f Lu ce’s newsreels. Throu gh his con trol over the m edia, Luce becam e an influential id eologu e in red efin in g an im perial global role fo r the U n ited States, namely, to lead what he fam ously dubbed “T h e Am erican Century.” H e published an essay under that title in L ife Magazine several months

168 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE b efore the release o f Citizen Kane. E xhorting the U n ited States to enter the war in Europe, Luce aim ed also to con trol the terms o f its repre­ sentation, to "give this war its p rop er nam e,” and to “brin g forth a vi­ sion o f Am erica as a w orld pow er which is authentically Am erican.”51 Such authenticity m eant projecting a global pow er fo r the U nited States that would free it from geographic boundaries. Luce argued that territorial defense could not provide a strong enough rationale fo r entering the war, n or could appeals “to figh t fo r dear old Danzig or dear old D ong D ang” (2 0 ). Equally dissatisfied with abstractions such as “Dem ocracy and Freedom ,” he asked: “is there nothing between the absurd sound o f distant cities and the brassy trum peting o f majestic words?” (2 1 ). H is answer d efin ed an “internationalism ” that would make Am erican interests synonymous with the “world environm ent in which she lives” (24) and that would efface the irritating otherness o f foreign lands, peoples and cultures with strange names. Through­ out the essay, Luce envisioned Am erican w orld pow er as anti-im perial and deterritorialized, in direct contrast to the im perial dom inions o f Rom e, the Vatican, G enghis Khan, the Chinese, and m ost recently the British. “Am erican internationalism ,” in contrast, was already taking hold through the circulation o f “Am erican jazz, H ollyw ood movies, Am erican slang, Am erican machines and patented products [w hich] are in fact the only things that every com m unity in the w orld, from Zanzibar to Ham burg, recognizes in com m on” (3 3 ). As opposed to the m ilitary and political dom ination by the O ld W orld em pires, the U nited States would use Am erican culture and com m erce— backed, o f course, by weapons and the state— as the conduits and em bodim ents o f its w orld power. Luce saw no tension between nationalism and inter­ nationalism; instead, Am erican culture and consum er goods provided the only com m on ground o r universal language across the globe. In­ deed, his own m edia em pire did much both to foster the om nipres­ ence o f Am erican products and values and to bring hom e to a dom es­ tic audience a w orld stripped o f its discom fiting foreignness. Orson W elles later w rote that “i f Lu ce’s prediction o f the Am erican Century w ill com e true, G od help us all. It w ill make Germ any’s bid fo r w orld supremacy look like amateur n ig h t”52 H is theatrical m etaphor used the terms o f showmanship fo r the rivalry over global power; the Am erican Century would o ffe r a m ore professional and thorough per­ form ance o f w orld supremacy than the amateurism o f fascism. A l­

Birth of an Empire « 169 though Citizen Kane was com pleted ju st b efore “T h e Am erican Cen­ tury” was published, it is possible to see the Kane character n ot only as a warning against isolationism and fascism, but also as a grotesque em ­ bodim ent o f Lu ce’s internationalism — an enactm ent and a critique o f im perial citizenship. W elles’s aesthetic innovations in Citizen Kane have been open to vari­ ous political interpretations. A n dré Bazin saw his acclaim ed use o f deep focus and the lon g take as dem ocratic, in allow ing freedom fo r the view er to interpret the scene, w hile D enning has related W elles’s showmanship and m agician-like con trol to his turning o f N azi propar ganda techniques against fascism.53 It would be im portant to investi­ gate further the relation between W elles’s form al innovations and the im perial them es o f his films. Bazin notes, fo r exam ple, that W elles’s use o f low angles and ceilings makes us fe e l that “Kane’s lust fo r pow er crushes us, but is itself crushed by the décor. Through the camera, we are capable in a way o f perceiving Kane’s failure at the same tim e we experien ce his power.”54 M igh t the innovative cam era work, with its deep focus and showmanship, have created an im perial gaze fo r the Am erican Century, in its capacity to penetrate deeply into unknown spaces and at the same tim e reflect back its own image? W ould W elles both deploy and challenge this im perial gaze when he traveled to Brazil under the auspices o f the O ffice o f Inter-Am erican A ffairs to make I t ’s A ll True?W hen he sailed his characters through the Panama Canal in The Lady o f Shanghai? W hen he exp lored the violen t im perial relations o f the M exican-U nited States border in Touch o f E vil? W elles’s cinem atic innovations com bine facets o f Lu ce’s photojour­ nalism with the earliest techniques o f film m aking b efore G riffith. C iti­ zen Kane, in both form and content, hearkens back to the turn o f the twentieth century, when the capacity o f the new “m oving pictures” to tell stories arose in part out o f the im perative to narrate the spectacle o f U.S. m obility and m ilitary pow er abroad. G riffith further developed this form o f storytelling, which, I have argued, relied on enlisting the dom estic sphere as a fram e fo r em pire building. M icheaux used this fram e to reconfigu re the relations o f race, nationhood, and em pire. W elles later challenged the relation between film ’s storytelling capac­ ity and im perial narratives, w hile H en ry Luce in “T h e Am erican Cen­ tury” was seeking the “p rop er nam e” fo r a partly new, partly old ver­ sion o f this story. T h e desire to tell this story has surfaced at key

170 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m om ents in the intersecting developm ent o f U.S. cinem a and U.S. fo r­ eign policy to renegotiate the relation between the dom estic and the foreign , between the nation at hom e and the nation abroad. Like Luce in his project o f internationalism , Kane re-creates the w orld in his own im age, which is at once m obile and elastic, yet claus­ trophobic and im m obilized. As Kane’s em pire im plodes in the hom e, W elles’s film exem plifies the anarchy o f em pire, the nightm are under­ lying Lu ce’s dream o f Am ericanization. I f Am erica sees reflections o f itself everywhere and strives to encompass the glob e, then it risks los­ ing the boundaries between the dom estic and the foreign that d efin e the nation as hom e, as unique and separate from the outlying world. As Kane amasses the lo o t o f the w orld, his own body appears en gorged and distended with the objects he has ingested. H e tries to turn the entire w orld into hollow references to his own power, w hile he be­ com es im potent and im m ured in the hom e he creates as his castle, Xanadu. In the character o f Kane, the outward reach o f im perialism and the self-enclosure o f isolationism are twinned. T h e film depicts a grotesquely representative Am erican citizen who so identifies him self with the “w orld environm ent” that he never has to leave his house, though his last words express nostalgia, the desire, in the etym ological sense o f nostos, to return hom e. In accum ulating fragm ents o f the out­ side w orld into the dom estic sphere, C itizen Kane turns the space o f his Am erican hom e into som ething hauntingly foreign .

CHAPTER 6

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois

In 1915 W. E. B. Du Bois published his m agisterial essay, “T h e African Roots o f War.” Throu gh a seismic shift o f geographic and historical perspectives, Du Bois located in A frica the origins o f the war in Eu­ rope: There are those who would write world history and leave out this most marvelous o f continents. Particularly today most men assume that Af­ rica lies far afield from our present problem o f World War. Yet in a very real sense Africa is the prime cause o f this terrible overturning o f civili­ zation which we have lived to see; and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply o f war to-day but o f the menace o f wars tomorrow.1 T h e essay moves A frica from geographic periphery and historical backwater into the central vantage poin t from which to rewrite the his­ tory o f the present and rem ap the terrain o f the “W orld War.” T h e es­ say offers m ore than the causal econom ic argum ent fo r which it is known. By grounding his inquiry in A frica, Du Bois exposes the way the representations o f space and tim e have been structured by im pe­ rial maps and narratives o f the w orld, and from this location he draws alternative maps and writes new historical narratives. T h e war did n ot originate in 1914 in the Balkans, argues Du Bois, but at least thirty years earlier in the violen t “scram ble” fo r A frica and the spiraling com petition to “possess the materials and m en o f the darker w orld.” T h e im portance o f rew riting this history lies in the fu­

171

172 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE ture. W orld war can only conclude in a real peace, he predicts, by end­ ing colonialism , fo r it is “directly in this outer circle o f races, and not in the inner European household, that the real causes o f the pres­ ent European figh tin g are to be fou n d” (103). Du Bois uses dom estic language to overturn the divisions o f inside and outside, hom e and abroad, and he offers a critique o f nationalism not only as the cause o f em pire but also as its consequence. That same year, closer to hom e, Du Bois was on e o f the few Am eri­ cans to condem n the U.S. invasion o f H aiti, which was largely eclipsed by news o f the European war. O n the pages o f The Crisis, the maga­ zine he edited fo r the N ational Association fo r the Advancem ent o f C olored P eople, he refuted the rationale that internal chaos within H aiti warranted outside intervention: T h e anarchy in H aiti is no worse than the anarchy in the U n ited States at the tim e o f C ivil War, and n ot as great as the anarchy today in Europe. T h e lynching and m urder in Port-au-Prince is no worse than, i f as bad as, the lynching in G eorgia. H aiti can and w ill work out her own destiny, and is m ore civi­ lized today than is Texas.”2 T h e repetition o f the w ord “anarchy” relo ­ cates H aiti from its status as an island isolated in its own discord on to a global map o f im perial violen ce that extends from Europe and its colo­ nies to the Am erican South. From the perspective o f H aiti, Du Bois overturns the conventional boundaries between civilization and barba­ rism, ord er and anarchy, the dom estic and the foreign . A longside reports from H aiti that year in The Crisis, Du Bois pub­ lished a running account o f the N A A C P protests against D. W. G rif­ fith ’s The B irth o f a N ation. Du Bois lambasted the film fo r rew riting the history o f em ancipation and Reconstruction as an “orgy o f th eft and degradation.”3 Look in g back at 1915 in his autobiography, Dusk o f Dawn, he linked the m ilitary invasion o f H aiti to the film , which he called an even “m ore insidious and hurtful attack” because o f its global scope. T h e film ’s racist spectacle, claim ed Du Bois, “m ade great” the “new technique o f the m oving picture” and expanded its appeal throughout “Am erica and the w orld.”4 M ovie theaters in the U n ited States in 1915 may seem as far afield from colonial A frica as does the Caribbean republic o f H aiti from the theaters o f war in Europe. I argue, however, that Du Bois represented these arenas as inextricably linked by the anarchy o f em pire. T h e erup­ tion o f W orld W ar I exposed the violently shifting grounds on which

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 173 he could rem ap the com plex interconnections am ong such rem ote ge­ ographies and renarrate their intersecting histories. Du Bois saw these sites con joined n ot only by econom ics and m ilitary m ight, but also by struggles over representation. T h e U.S. invasion o f H aiti deployed on an international scale the national script o f G riffith ’s film ; they both rendered the struggle fo r black self-governm ent as anarchic and de­ structive misrule. *The African Roots o f W ar” o ffered a counter-narra­ tive o f Am erican origins that located the birth o f the m odern nation in the anarchic dislocations o f im perial exploitation. B uilding on the insights o f “A frican Roots” at the end o f the war, Du Bois brought togeth er these interconnected geographies and histories in a rem arkable book, Darkxoater. Voices from W ithin the Veil (1920). A l­ though overlooked by later critics, Darkxoater is on e o f Du Bois’s most am bitious and form ally innovative efforts to represent racial conflicts within the U n ited States through transnational networks o f im perial power. M y chapter focuses on a reading o f Darkwater as a linguistic form o f im perial cartography that uses language to draw overlapping maps o f the em ergin g postwar w orld. Darkxoater expands the mean­ in g o f “world war” beyond the battlefields o f Europe to encompass and interlink the colonization o f A frica and Asia, the struggles o f the post-Reconstruction U n ited States, and the overseas propulsion o f the U.S. em pire. Darkxoater also looks inward at the dom estic spaces o f the hom e, schoolroom , factory, and city, to place these apparently lo ­ cal spaces at the crossroads o f m ovements o f vast global change. Map­ ping social space involves a struggle over representation, to renarrate the histories inscribed in o r erased from conventional maps o f the world. As Du Bois’s im perial cartography charts the way that the anar­ chy o f em pire dissolves the boundaries between the dom estic and for­ eign, he also reim agines form s o f transnational collectivity that g o beyond the boundaries o f colony and em pire. It is w ell known that Du Bois drew a pow erful link between “segrega­ tion at hom e and colonialism abroad,” and that he connected these spheres through the com m on denom inator o f the color line.5 This double focus was encapsulated by the double trajectory o f Du Bois’s career: his national figh t against racism in his leadership o f the NAAGP, and his international struggle against colonialism in his orga­ nization o f the Pan-African m ovem ent This form ulation, however, runs the risk o f separating as much as bringing together; it im plicitly

174 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE upholds a logic o f Am erican exceptionalism that projects im perialism as a foreign issue o f European colonialism and thereby disavows the dom estic reality o f U.S. em pire-building. By lim iting Du Bois’s treat­ m ent o f em pire to the European colonization o f A frica, scholars o f Du Bois often overlook the international role o f the U n ited States in de­ m arcating and policin g the global color line, as w ell as the way global im perial dynamics affect race relations within the U n ited States. A n analysis o f Du Bois’s com plex representation o f Am erican im perialism , I contend, can enrich our understanding o f how his internationalism deconstructs the bifurcation between racism at hom e and colonialism abroad. Num erous scholars have studied Du Bois from m ultiple interna­ tional perspectives: his involvem ent in the Pan-African m ovem ent, black nationalism, and international socialism, and, m ore recently, in the transnational contexts o f the African Diaspora o r the Black Atlan­ tic.6 These studies focus on Du Bois’s political opposition to W estern colonialism and racism and his transnational reconfiguration o f black identities, yet they rarely take account o f Du Bois’s relation to Am eri­ can im perialism , especially in the first h a lf o f his career. Paul G ilroy posits a useful distinction between the notion o f “roots” as an essentialist d efin ition o f identity anchored in a hom eland, and “routes” as a flu id concept o f hybrid identities and affiliations that em erge from travel and change.7 1 am interested in how Du Bois links these two m eanings to im perial dynamics across the globe. “Roots” in ’T h e A fri­ can Roots o f W ar” refers n ot simply to an organic ancient identity but to the historical crossroads o f im perial con flict and violen t dislocation. Like Mark Twain, Du Bois remains on e o f Am erica’s m ost outspo­ ken critics o f im perialism worldwide. Yet in contrast to Twain, his anti­ im perialism has been better known outside the U n ited States and is still m ost often associated with the p eriod o f decolonization after W orld W ar I. In addition to Du Bois’s overt condem nations o f im peri­ alism, I am interested in the way his writing, like Tw ain’s, both charted and was em bedded in the transnational routes and networks o f im pe­ rial power. From his earliest w riting at the turn o f the century, a shift­ in g conception o f em pire was central to his understanding o f race rela­ tions within the U nited States. Du Bois saw U.S. im perialism n ot as an isolated phenom enon but as part o f a broader global system. I f he de­ cried the im position o f im perial force on the w orld, he also saw the U nited States as a product o f im perial relations acted upon by forces

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 175 beyond its boundaries. For Du Bois, im perialism did m ore than p ropel U.S. dom ination abroad; it also struck at the heart o f the dom estic nation. Thus rather than ju st condem n the U n ited States as a center o f w orld power, Du Bois used the fram ework o f em pire to decenter Am erican pow er and destabilize its national boundaries. Yet at times, as I w ill show, Du Bois also recentered his own international author­ ity by enlisting the exceptionalist logic o f Am erican im perialism . T o ­ gether, these com plex— and often contradictory— views locate U.S. im perialism itself in a broader international fram ework that goes be­ yond the lim its o f national geographies and histories. Darkwater power­ fully enacts fo r readers what W orld W ar I brought violently to the fo re­ ground fo r Du Bois: that “the U.S. was living not to itself, but as part o f the strain and stress o f the w orld.”8

Empire and the Color Line B efore turning to Darkwater, it is useful to have a sense o f Du Bois’s rep­ resentation o f U.S. im perialism in his earlier writing. His global map­ p in g o f the color lin e follow s the trajectories o f em pire. In 1906 he wrote that “the tendency o f the great nations o f the day is territorial, political and econom ic expansion, but in every case this has brought them in contact with darker p e o p le .. . . T h e policy o f expansion then simply means the w orld problem s o f the C olor lin e . T h e question en­ ters European im perial politics and floods our continents from Alaska to Patagonia.”9A c h ief feature o f his approach here is that he does n ot separate racism at hom e from colonialism abroad, but views both as part o f a broader international dynamic o f em pire. In his earliest his­ torical writing, Du Bois narrated U.S. history as a product o f im perial forces. In his 1897 dissertation, ‘T h e Suppression o f the African Slavetrade to the U n ited States o f Am erica, 1638-1870,” Du Bois recast the story o f Am erican origins within the sweeping narrative o f European colonialism and the African slave trade. H e also recast m ajor events in Am erican national history in a broader hem ispheric context, by decentering the national fram ework in which history is written and re­ tellin g that story from the perspective o f H aiti: The role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L ’Ouverture played in the history o f the United States has seldom been fully appreciated. Representing the age o f revolution in America, he rose to the leader-

176 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE ship through a bloody terror, which contrived a Negro “problem” for the Western hemisphere, intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one o f the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally through the interworking o f all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition o f the slave-trade by the United States in 1807.10 Key here is n ot simply the chain o f a causal argument; as in “African Roots,” it is the vast shift o f geographic perspective that grounds the narrative o f “the interw orking o f all these effects.” View ed from the vantage p oin t o f H aiti, the history o f U.S. expansion does not arise from its self-generated com pulsion— the “frontier,” the “errand into the wilderness,” o r “m anifest destiny”— but develops in relation to the anti-im perial and antislavery struggles o f the Caribbean revolution. This perspective goes beyond the perim eter o f national history to place the U nited States within a w ider im perial network tied to Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. T h e m ultiple dim ensions o f em pire are central to Du Bois’s earliest articulation o f his famous pronouncem ent: “the problem o f the twen­ tieth century is the problem o f the color line,— the relation o f the darker to the ligh ter races o f m en in Asia and A frica, in Am erica and the islands o f the sea.” This statem ent is m ost often cited from the sec­ ond chapter o f The Souls o f Black Folk, where it fram es Du Bois’s history o f the Freedm en’s Bureau during Reconstruction.11 It is often noted that Du Bois first m ade this statem ent in a slightly d ifferen t form at the m eeting o f the Pan-African C onference o f 1900 in Lon don , in his ad­ dress “T o the Nations o f the W orld.”1* These two settings seem to ex­ em plify his double vision o f “racism at hom e and colonialism abroad.” Few scholars note, however, that Du Bois also m ade this statement ear­ lier that same year in Washington, D.C., in an address to the Am erican N egro Academy, “T h e Present O utlook fo r the Dark Races o f Man­ kind."1* T h ere he set forth his project to “consider with you the prob­ lem o f the colo r lin e n ot simply as a national and personal ques­ tion but rather in its larger w orld aspect in tim e and space” (7 3 ). H e claim ed that “yet a glance over the w orld at the dawn o f the new cen­ tury w ill convince us that this is just the beginning o f the problem — that the color line belts the w orld and that the social problem o f the twentieth century is to be the relation o f the civilized w orld to the dark

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 177 races o f m ankind” (7 3 ). As the essay sweeps w orldw ide from past to present, its pivotal point, where local and global m eet, hinges on Am erican em pire-building started in 1898: But most significant o f all at this period is the fact that the colored pop­ ulation o f our land is, through the new imperial policy, about to be doubled by our own ownership o f Porto [sic] Rico, and Hawaii, our protectorate o f Cuba, and conquest o f the Philippines. This is for us and for the nation the greatest event since the Civil War and demands attention and action on our part What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses o f dark men and women who inhabit them? (77) Thus in 1900, when Du Bois first articulated the "problem o f the twen­ tieth century,” he spoke from two im perial centers, W ashington, D.C., and London , and he m apped the global color lin e in relation to both European and Am erican im perialism . In his answer to the question above, he deploys the discourse o f Am erican exceptionalism — em pire fo r freedom , m anifest destiny— as a strategy fo r eradicating the very color lin e that em pire has constructed: Manifestly it must be an attitude o f deepest sympathy and strongest alli­ ance. We must stand ready to guard and guide them with our vote and our earnings. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, all must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom o f its opportunities. We must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty millions o f brown and black people under the protection o f the Ameri­ can flag, a third o f the nation, and that on the success and efficiency o f the nine millions o f our own number depends the ultimate destiny o f Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Indian and Hawaiians, and that on us too de­ pends in a large degree the attitude o f Europe toward the teeming mil­ lions o f Asia and Africa. (78) Du Bois’s evocation o f 1898 has a double-edged e ffe c t O n the one hand, it decenters the U.S. "race question” as part o f a global im perial co n tex t O n the oth er hand, it centers "we black m en o f Am erica” as leaders o f the darker w orld, fo r which the U nited States serves as a m odel. "N o nation ever bore a heavier burden than we black m en o f Am erica” (7 8 ). Du Bois turns the white m an’s burden into the black

178 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m an’s burden, and im agines within the Am erican Em pire an imperium in imperio as a utopian vision o f w orld change. T h e question here is n ot whether Du Bois was fo r o r against Am erican im perialism . H e both enlists its discourse and turns it against itself. I f in previous chapters we noted racist arguments against im perial expansion, Du Bois here makes an im perial argum ent against racism: im perial expansion has the potential to break down national borders and racial divisions and to prom ote m ultiracial affiliations across the globe. Du Bois im agined the utopian potential in im perial expansion fo r unraveling the boundaries o f nations and colonies. From the anarchy o f em pire, he envisioned the rise o f new form s o f collectivity that over­ flow those borders. Im perialism in 1898, according to Du Bois, invited African Am ericans in W ashington, D.G., to reim agine th eir future in relation to other nonwhite subjects o f the Am erican em pire world­ wide. A shared experience o f em pire brought a “congress o f m en and wom en o f African b loo d ” into “the m etropolis o f the m odern w orld” in Lon don in 1900. In Souls Du Bois also m apped this contradictory m ovem ent o f em pire to divide and unite, as he looked backward in tim e at the “shim m ering swirl o f waters” where the first slave ships ar­ rived in Jamestown. From there, he envisioned the potential o f a “new human unity, pulling the ends o f the earth nearer, and all m en, black, yellow, and w hite.” W hen Du Bois came to fram e his chapter on Re­ construction in Souls by the proposition that “the problem o f the twen­ tieth century is the problem o f the color lin e,” this statem ent reso­ nated from the im perial capitals where he had first articulated the problem atic in 1900. In Souls he thus introduced the uncom pleted work o f Reconstruction in Am erica by linking it to im perial locations around the glob e, as he projected into the im m ediate future the ur­ gen t need fo r new form s o f reconstruction on a global scale.

Paris and Fodunk T h e eruption o f W orld W ar I violently pulled “the ends o f the earth nearer” by exposing the destructive foundation o f European civiliza­ tion in colonialism and by spurring the em ergence o f new anticolonial alliances. A t the war’s end Du Bois traveled to Paris, where the story has often been told o f his organization o f the Pan-African Congress. T h e Congress had a wide-ranging sym bolic and political im pact fo r

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The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 179 years to com e, but this m eeting in 1919 was politically ham pered by its dependence on French colonialism and by the fact that few African representatives attended.14 W h ile in Paris, Du Bois was equally con* cem ed with another forum , the Peace C onference, where he wished to represent the “N eg ro w orld ” and link the struggle fo r civil rights in the U n ited States to the struggle fo r independence in postwar Africa. H e tried futilely, however, to gain a hearing from W oodrow W ilson, and he also faced m ounting skepticism from African Am ericans at hom e. In May 1919 Du Bois w rote a letter to The Crisis in which he de­ fen d ed his presence in France in the im m ediate afterm ath o f W orld W ar I, at a tim e o f escalating violence against African Am ericans in the U n ited States: I went to Paris because to-day the destinies o f mankind center there. Make no mistake as to this, my readers. Podunk may easily persuade itself that only Podunk matters and that nothing is going on in New York. The South Sea Islander may live igno­ rant and careless o f London. Some Americans may think that Europe does not count, and a few Negroes may argue vociferously that the Ne­ gro problem is a domestic matter, to be settled in Richmond and New Orleans. But all these careless thinkers are wrong. The destinies o f mankind for a hundred years to come are being settled to-day in a small room o f the H otel Grillon by four unobtrusive gentlemen who glance out speculatively now and then to Cleopatra’s Needle on the Place de la Concorde.15 Du Bois insists on view ing the “dom estic m atter” o f Am erican racism in an international network o f im perial relations. H e describes the vic­ tors o f the w orld war ironically as “unobtrusive gentlem en” ensconced in a deceptively small room . From this enclosed center they w ield the power to redivide and rem ap the globe, buttressed, he writes, by th eir vast control o f “armies and navies, the w orld supply o f capital and the press.” Du Bois gives a subtle gloss to the view outside their Paris hotel room . W hen they glance outside their window, their gaze is repeatedly drawn to a m onum ent celebrating the colonial conquest o f northern Africa. T h e tow ering obelisk in the busy streets o f Paris dwarfs and ac­ centuates the enclosure o f the hotel room , while exposing it to the out­ side. Locating the colonial spoils o f A frica in the heart o f the European

180 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE m etropolis has the e ffe c t o f collapsing the very boundaries that the participants in the peace conference were redrawing and reinforcin g. Like the needle o f a compass, the obelisk points toward alternative perspectives and directions from which to rem ap the postwar world. Du Bois’s letter goes on to list an extraordinary array o f organizations in attendance representing nations, peoples, races, religions, labor and political groups from all over the w orld, as though proliferatin g the potential sites m arked by Cleopatra’s N eed le. G iven the global sig­ nificance o f this international gathering, he resents that “som e Am eri­ can N egroes actually asked why I went to help represent the N egro w orld in A frica and Am erica and the Islands o f the sea?” (187). H e an­ swers hyperbolically, “i f the N egroes o f the w orld could have main­ tained during the entire sitting o f the Peace C onference a central headquarters . . . they could have settled the future o f A frica” (187). This rhetorical bravado indicates the im portance to Du Bois— and his anxiety— o f staking out literal and figurative space from which to map counter-geographies o f the postwar world. C om pleted after his return from Paris, during the summer o f 1919, Darkwater is suffused with the turm oil Du Bois found there, o f old em ­ pires, nations, and colonies crum bling in the m idst o f struggles over new configurations o f social and political space around the globe. In Darkwater Du Bois appropriates and transforms the cartographic power he found concentrated in the hands o f the im perial nations. In contrast to the centralized perspective o f the im perial gaze, Darkwater maps the w orld from m ultiple decentered vantage points; not Paris, Lon don , and W ashington, but C ongo, Port-au-Prince, and East S t Louis. Cartography does n ot ju st reflect established boundaries be­ tween fixed geop olitical units, but discursively produces new aggre­ gates o f social space that can be policed, contested, and transform ed. Darkwater focuses on m ovem ent around the glob e that destabilizes fixed borderlines; cartography is an activity where fantasy and pow er m eet. Darkwater reconfigures the geographical terrain o f "w orld war” beyond the battlefields o f Europe, from the colonies o f A frica and Asia to Jim Crow Am erica to sites o f U.S. intervention abroad. Cartography in Darkwater is inseparable from history and language. It is a strategic device through which Du Bois narrates those pasts that dom inant w orld maps overlay and erase. H e redefines the m eaning o f the word "war” to include conflicts over representations o f space and tim e, and

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critiques the contem porary defin ition o f peace as he im agines alterna­ tive futures. T h e Paris Peace C onference posed fo r him the question o f how to represent a w orld that was becom ing increasingly intercon­ nected by centralized form s o f im perial power. It posed the equally pressing question o f d efin in g anticolonial alliances and decentralized em ergin g collectivities. I f Du Bois’s aspirations fo r the Peace C onference filled the pages o f Darkwater, the work also bore the marks o f his controversial endorse­ m ent o f the U.S. war e ffo r t T h e war had catapulted Du Bois into on e o f the m ost controversial and contradictory periods o f his career, where his national and international perspectives clashed and inter­ m ingled w ithout resolution.16 (T h e controversies resonate in the de­ fensive tone o f the letter from Paris.) In a notorious Crisis editorial o f July 1918, “Close Ranks,” he advocated that Am erican blacks “forget our special grievances” to jo in the war e ffo rt in a segregated army with segregated training camps fo r officers.17 In the tradition o f im perial citizenship we have seen during the Spanish-American W ar and in M icheaux’s film , Du Bois im agined black soldiers “standing shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens” in a m ilitarized na­ tional body, ready through the m edium o f a com m on enem y abroad to “inaugurate the U n ited States o f the W orld.” In this international con­ text, Du Bois recuperated a vision o f the U n ited States as the “hope o f m ankind and o f black m ankind” by representing Germ any as the em ­ bodim ent o f racial oppression. O nly a year earlier he wrote that G er­ man colonialism was on a continuum with that o f the French and Eng­ lish and with Southern racism in the U nited States.18 Despite heated opposition from many African Am erican quarters, Du Bois would never fully relinquish the position o f “Close Ranks.”19Throughout the war, Du Bois continued to advocate that African Am ericans pursue overseas what D. L. Lewis has called “citizenship through carnage,” even though his “T h e African Roots o f W ar” had decried the origins o f that carnage in colonial oppression.20 Yet during his trip to France at the war’s end, Du Bois also docum ented both the pow er and dismal lim its o f im perial citizenship in his research fo r an uncom pleted threevolum e history o f black troops in the war, which he planned to title ‘T h e W ounded W orld.”21 From Paris Du Bois brought these uncom pleted and controversial projects into the pages o f Darkwater, where he turned the discourse o f

182 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE war from abroad to back hom e, as he did in another influential Crisis editorial, wR eturning Soldiers.” It concludes: We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France and by the GreatJehovah, we will save it in the United States o f America or know the reason why.22 T h e conspicuous absence o f the w ord “hom e” is supplanted by “fight­ in g” to shatter the distinction between a foreign battlefield and a hom e front. T h e im perial discourse o f the rescue mission abroad shifts direction into the heart o f the undom estic nation. T h e “return fight­ in g” from Europe and Pan-Africa to an unwelcom ing hom e is on e o f the m ajor narrative trajectories that inform Darkwater. Du Bois com ­ pleted it during the “Red Summ er” o f 1919, a h orrific nationwide conflagration o f antiblack violence countered by the m ilitancy o f re­ turning black soldiers. Darkwater can be read as Du Bois’s contribution to that struggle, both as a weapon o f war and a search fo r peace, which recasts dom estic racial violen ce within a global im perial con text It is tem pting to understand the war as a watershed in Du Bois’s ca­ reer, when he turned from a nationalist and patriotic support o f Am er­ ica’s entry into the war to a m ore internationalist and antinationalist vision. Yet this narrative does n ot d o justice to the m ultiple positions at play fo r Du Bois during the war, when he was simultaneously and con­ tradictorily at his m ost national and international. These positions were by no means polar opposites with inherent political valences; in­ stead, they were constitutive o f on e another. Du Bois was n ot simply choosing sides but engaged in im plicit debates and dialogues with vari­ eties o f internationalism across the political spectrum: socialist revolu­ tion and pacifism , W ilson’s League o f Nations, Garvey’s black nation­ alism, Pan-Africanism , All-Asia m ovements, anticolonial nationalism, the red scare in the U n ited States that blam ed black dissent on Bolshe­ vik infiltration, and white supremacist panic about worldwide race war. This list o f course cannot d o justice to the range o f m ovements and discourses engaged in rem apping the w orld and in redrawing connec­ tions and boundaries between nations, colonies, and what Du Bois called the “inter-nation.”

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 183 W h ile Du Bois tried fruitlessly to achieve a m eeting with W oodrow W ilson in Paris, others did pay attention. W hite Supremacist Loth rop Stoddard in The R ising Tide o f Coior quoted Du Bois’s "African Roots” as dangerous evidence that the nonwhite w orld, from Japan to Am erica to India, saw the war as an occasion fo r worldwide uprisings to seize pow er from the white w orld. Stoddard too had a cartographic im agina­ tion, starting with an atlas o f the w orld in 1914 and including m ulticol­ ored maps o f the w orld along racial lines, with on e next to his quotas tion o f Du Bois, T h e Distribution o f the Prim ary Races. ”** W h ile Darkwaterdoes not include actual maps, it perform s a sim ilar act o f car­ tography in im aging a glob e encircled by “dark waters” o f black m igra­ tions around the world. Stoddard was n ot the only on e to criticize Du Bois. Marcus Garvey in a speech in 1920 declared, “You cannot advo­ cate ‘close ranks’ today and talk ‘dark water’ tom orrow.”*4 But Du Bois d id ju st that in Darkwater. H e did not stake out a single international position but put in play m ultiple maps that collid e, m erge, and com ­ pete with on e another in dizzying com binations.

Darkwater M arketed as a com panion to The Souls o f Black Folk and resem bling it in form and content, Darkwater was widely reviewed and read as on e o f Du Bois’s m ost im portant books at the tim e.8 Yet w hile Souls has achieved a canonical literary status, critics have neglected Darkwater.:*• Both are com posite m ultigenre texts that brin g togeth er essays, autobi­ ography, poem s, and parables, often in elusive com binations. Dark­ water m oves through an even m ore ja rrin g juxtaposition o f discontinu­ ous spaces, divergen t histories, and clashing literary styles. It can be read as an internationalist revision o f Souls. T h e two books share a sim­ ilar three-part structure, starting with autobiography and m oving to the history o f war— C ivil W ar in on e and W orld W ar in the other, then postwar Reconstruction and the question o f black leadership. T h e first fou r chapters o f Darkwater leap breathlessly from Du Bois’s N ew Eng­ land birthplace to the battlefields o f Europe to the postwar settlem ent o f A frica to industrial East S t Louis. T h e next fou r chapters turn to so­ cial conditions in the U n ited States, focusing on the hom e, the status o f black wom en, labor, the franchise, and education. In each case these putatively dom estic spheres open up to vast m ovements o f global

184 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE change. T h e third part o f the book looks to the future through m ore lyrical and personal pieces, which are also m ore global in sweep. T h e elegy fo r young black m en at the end o f Souls is echoed by the chapter “T h e Im m ortal C hild” about the African-British com poser, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, best known fo r his operatic version o f Hiawatha. T h e book ends with an apocalyptic science fiction fable in which N ew York City is destroyed by a co m et M ost o f the chapters start with an autobio­ graphical fragm ent, and in place o f the double epigraphs o f Souls, Du Bois punctuates each chapter with a highly condensed poem o r para­ ble drawing on the m ythology o f Ethiopianism o r the figu re o f a black C h rist In spite o f these form al similarities, Darkwater diverges from Souls significantly in abandoning the latter’s well-known national paradigm o f double-consciousness— “O ne ever feels his twoness, an Am erican, a N egro.”27 Instead, the transnational scope o f Darkwater explores multi­ p le form s o f consciousness, not delineated solely by nation and race though inform ed by both, and routed instead through the dispersed locations and dislocations o f em pire. W h ile Souls enacts a jou rn ey on a N orth/South axis o f the U nited States, the jou rn ey o f Darkwater takes place through worldwide networks that encompass Europe, A frica, the industrial U n ited States, and the “colonies that b elt the glob e.” Darkwater collapses far-flung distances into ja rrin g proxim ity, and bursts open the enclosed space o f hom e and factory to far-ranging global tra­ jectories. Even the lyrical interludes between chapters blur the bound­ aries between heaven and earth, cosm ology and history. W hereas The Souls o f Black Folk has found a m ajor place in the liter­ ary canon, Darkwater has rem ained curiously overlooked by critics o f Am erican and African Am erican literature, even though several chap­ ters have been repeatedly anthologized. I think this neglect has two sources: Darkwater does not neatly fit into the narratives o f Du Bois’s career, n or in to dom inant literary categories o f m odernist aesthetics and African Am erican writing. Scholars have often follow ed Du Bois’s own account o f his intellectual autobiography in Dusk o f Dawn, where he saw him self progressing toward an enlightened international view o f em pire through a M arxian perspective on labor and capital. T h e chapter “Science and E m pire” traces with irony his own ignorance o f im perialism as he lived through it, and he concludes that only in retro­ spect did “em pire” provide a conceptual fram ework fo r w riting the

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois * 18S “history o f our day”: “T h a t history may be epitom ized in on e w ord— Em pire; the dom ination o f white Europe over black A frica and yellow Asia, through political pow er built on the econom ic con trol o f labor, incom e and ideas. T h e echo o f this industrial im perialism in Am erica was the expulsion o f black m en from Am erican democracy, their sub­ jectio n to caste con trol and wage slavery.”18 This fram ework o f “Em­ p ire” in Dusk o f Dawn, however, has its own blind spots. For one, it in­ cludes the U n ited States in a w orld system only by relegating racial oppression at hom e to an “ech o” o f the dom inant m odel o f European im perialism . Furtherm ore, throughout Dusk o f Dawn, em pire appears as a totalizing and m onolithic system that ultim ately explains every­ thing— a horizon o f all social knowledge that remains elusive and static in itself and in the last instance defies defin ition . Darkwater, by contrast, offers a m ultidim ensional and m ultivocal ac­ count o f what Du Bois calls on its last page “the Anarchy o f Em pire.” In contrast to “E m pire” in Dusk, “the Anarchy o f Em pire” cannot be sum­ m arized in on e w ord o r categorized as a coh erent system o r political theory, but instead em erges through experim ents with form . T h e dis­ junctive qualities o f the text in tim e and space, its vertiginous m otion, ja rrin g and fragm ented juxtapositions, and cacophonous dialogues, all o f which seem to have n o rational connections, togeth er chart the anarchic routes and irrational workings o f em pire. I f Darkwater does n ot fit neatly into narratives o f Du Bois’s career, neither does it fit m ajor paradigm s o f literary m odernism .29 Building on the work o f Raymond W illiam s, Edward Said and Fredric Jameson have argued that the form al elem ents we associate with European m odernism register the severance o f the m etropolis from its colo­ nies.30 This rupture m aterially inform s the lived experien ce o f Euro­ pean m odernity, fo r which the production o f everyday life takes place in faraway colonies. These critics view the form al innovations o f m od­ ernism — fragm entation, encyclopedic m apping, prim itivism — as aes­ thetic strategies that embody, cloak, o r com pensate fo r this deep fis­ sure and sense o f loss and dislocation resulting from the sense that reality is always elsewhere. Darkwater, in contrast, deploys m odernist form s o f incongruity, fragm entation, and discontinuity fo r the op p o­ site effect: to collapse distances and overturn the hierarchy between m etropolis and periphery. In Darkwater the m odernist discontinuities and disjointed textual effects work to map the interconnectedness o f

186 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE these bifurcated spheres, to show how distant locations collid e with on e another and enclosed spaces are w renched apart by the im perial m ovem ents o f capital, persons, weapons, and ideology. Rather than striving to reconstitute a lost wholeness at the heart o f Euro-Am erican m odernity, Du Bois in his m odernist aesthetics im agines alternative m odernities from m ultiple vantages along the color lin e that "belts the w orld.” A guide to the m odernist aesthetics o f Darkwater can be found in on e o f the m ost elusive chapters o f the book, "O f Beauty and D eath.” Du Bois opens with a dialogue between an autobiographical persona and a white frien d who claims that Du Bois is too sensitive to racial in­ sults and exaggerates them out o f fear. H e tries fruitlessly to explain how acts o f racial discrim ination cannot be quantified in tim e and place but occur "now and then— now seldom , now, sudden; now after a week, now in a chain o f awful minutes; n ot everywhere, but anywhere — in Boston, in Atlanta. T h at’s the h ell o f i t ”31 For exam ple, at a m ovie theater showing a C harlie Chaplin film , he is forced to buy a ticket to the sm oking gallery. In choosing to protest, he experiences a range o f em otions, from m ilitant pride in figh tin g fo r the future o f “unborn children” to hum iliation at elevating a "cheap and tawdry” entertain­ m ent into a battleground fo r rights. In a search fo r an alternative form o f beauty and pleasure, the author then presents a cinem atic m ontage that breathlessly juxtaposes scenes from black participation and dis­ crim ination in the war, descriptions o f sublime natural beauty (from the M aine coast to a Jamaican sunset to the Grand C anyon), scenes o f Jim Crow trains in the South, ships returning from Europe to N ew York Harbor, and street scenes in H arlem . This m ontage presents the m obile com position o f Darkwater as alternative to the fixed claustro­ phobia o f the m ovie theater. In Chapter 5 above we saw how the cine­ matic eye developed ou t o f an im perial gaze that could survey the w orld and com pose it in to an im perial narrative. Du Bois may be seen as appropriating the pow er o f cinem atic m obility fo r an alternative aesthetic. In ‘T h e African Roots” he notes that "in the minds o f yellow, brown, and black m en, the brutal truth is clearing: a white man is priv­ ileged to g o to any land where advantage beckons and behave as he pleases: the black o r colored man is bein g m ore and m ore confined to these parts o f the w orld where life fo r clim atic, historical, econom ic

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 187 and political reasons is m ost d ifficu lt to live and m ost easily dom inated by Europe.

This p rivilege o f w hite m en is the m obility o f em pire,

which Du Bois sees as a question o f representation as well. T h e white man is able to m anipulate the cam era’s gaze and im m obilize black m en in its fram e and also to redirect the black gaze. Du Bois in Darkwater was seeking a counter-m obility— m odes o f representation that could com pete with the m obile containm ent o f film .

Transient Tenants lik e many o f Du Bois’s books, Darkwater starts with autobiography to legitim ate the narrative that follows. W ritten on his fiftieth birthday, the first chapter, ‘T h e Shadow o f Years,” presents a fam ily epic that sweeps across continents from past to p resen t It opens with a descrip­ tion o f his childhood hom e in rural Massachusetts. It was a conven­ tional dom estic abode: “quaint, with clapboard running up and down, neatly trim m ed, and there were five room s, a tiny porch, a rosy fron t yard, and unbelievably delicious strawberries in the rear” (485-86). This idyll o f dom estic stability totters, however, in the next line, w here we read that “a South Carolinian, lately com e to the Berkshire H ills owned all this,” which m ade the Du Bois fam ily “transient tenants fo r the tim e.” T h e trope o f “transient tenants” resonates throughout Darkwater, it uproots the organic m eaning o f hom e and links it to m ovem ent through tim e and space, exposing its foundation in un­ equal econom ic transactions. Du Bois then narrates his fam ily geneal­ ogy; it connects generations less through place than through tran­ sit, even though he traces his ancestry to this same locale fo r two hundred years. Du Bois recounts Tom Burghardt’s arrival in the re­ gion ; brought as a slave by his Dutch “captor,” he achieved freedom by figh tin g fo r the R evolution and had a son who fou gh t in the war o f 1812. W h ile T om ’s Bantu w ife clung to her m em ories o f A frica and “never becam e reconciled to this strange land” (486), Tom established a lineage o f m ilitant m anhood that turned servitude into freedom through m ilitary service to the nation (a legacy that may reflect Du Bois’s choice in W orld W ar I ) . O n the oth er side o f his family, he charts the routes o f transient tenants from France and the Bahamas to his grandfather’s m ove from Connecticut to H aiti, from there to work on

188 * THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE a passenger boat in N ew York, and finally to retire in the p ort o f N ew B edford. Du Bois even rom anticizes his absent father as the “B eloved Vagabond” (487). H e summarizes his fam ily history with a m ock epic flourish: “So with som e circumstance having finally gotten m yself born, with a flo o d o f N egro blood, a strain o f French, a b it o f Dutch, but, thank G od! no ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ I com e to the days o f my ch ildh ood” (488). Much scholarly debate has taken place about Du Bois’s reliance on b iological definitions o f race.“ H ere his references to b lood have a com ically ironic effect; the im precise measurements o f “flo o d ,” “strain,” “bit” parody the scientific and legal discourse o f his tim e in which “one drop o f b loo d ” determ ined racialized identity, as w ell as the white su­ prem acist hysteria about the “rising tide o f color.” In contrast, Du Bois narrates a genealogy com posed n ot o f bloodlines but o f vectors o f transnational m igrations. This narrative fashions an international self at the confluence o f routes that tie the landlocked N ew England town o f his birth to sites in A frica, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Am eri­ can South; locations o r dislocations on the m ap o f what Paul G ilroy has called the Black Atlantic. In fact, the title Darkxoater extends m ore w idely on a global scale be­ yond the Black Atlantic. “Dark” includes colon ized peoples around the w orld, and water relates to m oving, turbulent, and flu id bodies circu­ lating around the glob e, what Du Bois calls “the human sea” that beats against and changes the shores o f continents, colonies, and nations w hile it is contained by them . Darkwater also refers to the turbulent m ovem ents o f em pire around the globe. T h e title im plicitly com ments on the liqu id m etaphors o f racial m obility em ployed by white suprem­ acist hysterics, as Du Bois turns on its head the discourse o f “the rising tide o f co lo r” from the threat o f w orld destruction to a utopian poten­ tial fo r w orld peace. In his first chapter, Du Bois proceeds to narrate his education as a form o f transient tenancy that challenges the discreet boundaries o f town, region , and nation, and the way these localities are traditionally linked to com m unal and individual identity. W hen he graduates from high school with the goal o f attending Harvard, he finds instead that white town leaders have arranged a scholarship fo r him at Fisk U niver­ sity. O n his jou rn ey in to the South, he notes the “curious irony by which I was n ot looked upon as a real citizen o f my birthtown with a fu­

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 189 ture and a career, and instead was bein g sent to a far land am ong strangers who w ere regarded as (and in truth w ere) ‘m ine own p eo­ p le’ ” (490). This irony relies on several inversions that divorce citizen­ ship from habitation, as Du Bois becom es foreign to his own birth­ place and finds a collective identity with strangers in a foreign place. H is overuse o f lexicographic marks in this passage to nam e “m ine own p eop le” both underscores this sense o f connection and points to the linguistic work necessary to construct a sense o f p eopleh ood, rather than just discover a preordained natural affinity. This m ovem ent away, wherein the dom estic becom es foreign and Du Bois finds him self at hom e abroad, is repeated in his trip to Europe after college. H e travels there on a Dutch ship, reversing the route o f his ancestor Tom . A n ocean away from the U nited States, he finds another form ulation o f collective identity that redefines “m ine own p eop le” and overturns the geographic contrast o f O ld W orld constric­ tion and N ew W orld boundlessness. A t a tim e when W oodrow W ilson touted “A m erica” as the universal standard o f freedom and democracy, Du Bois rem apped this space o f Am erican “boundlessness” as an en­ closed sphere o f “narrowness and color prejudice.” Europe in contrast becom es an open space, where “N eg ro ” refers not only to a particular­ ized racial identity but also to a “greater, broader sense o f humanity and world-fellowship” (491). Thus the first chapter o f Darkwater poses a challenge to the text that follows: to dislodge the fixed borders o f local dom estic spaces (hom e, town, region, nation) and to rem ap them as transient sites traversed by global m ovem ents o f people, power, and capital. This first chap­ ter links autobiography to cartography, a connection that continues through the autobiographical fragm ents that fram e m ost o f the chap­ ters in the book. These fragm ents, selected from d ifferen t arenas o f Du Bois’s private and public life, d o not progress in chronological or­ der to build a coherent representative self. Instead, they construct a porous self in m otion that accretes dissonant layers o f identity from disparate times and places. Autobiography in Darkwater fashions an in­ ternational self linked to the trajectories o f transient tenants that wind their way across the glob e and the text: from Africans struggling fo r in­ dependence, to southern black migrants seeking industrial work in East S t Louis, to an African-British com poser seeking inspiration in N egro spirituals and L on gfellow ’s poem s, to African Am erican soldiers

190 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE seeking U.S. citizenship on the far-flung battlefields o f France. T h e trope o f transient tenants does not celebrate m obility and hybridity against fixed identities, but instead charts the struggle to transform both forced m ovem ent and confinem ent in to m ovem ents fo r social change.

America’s Belgium T h e eru ption o f W orld W ar dram atically alters the geography o f Darkwater’s op en in g chapter. From tracing the m ovem ent o f transient ten­ ants across geopolitical borders, the author registers, in the next three chapters, tectonic upheavals that shift from the European battlefields to the postwar reconstruction o f A frica to the race riots o f East S t Lotus in 1917. In repeating his youthful jou rn ey from Am erica to Eu­ rope, Du Bois no lon ger seeks a civilized escape from Am erican racism but instead yokes the continents togeth er in the construction o f im pe­ rial whiteness. T h e poem “Litany fo r Atlanta” bridges his autobio­ graphical introduction to the triptych o f war chapters. T h e poem de­ cries G od’s silence about lynching as “white terror,” and it serves as a segue from Am erica to Europe through the international circuits o f ra­ cial violence. In the chapter ironically entitled “T h e Souls o f W hite Folk,” Du Bois transforms the dislocation o f transient tenants into m ultiple vantage points from which to make visible the im perial and racial dimensions o f the w orld war that are om itted from European and Am erican maps. Though whiteness is the ostensible subject o f this chapter, it focuses on the international em ergence o f a black anticolonial gaze, which ren­ ders whiteness visible. Emphasizing the act o f seeing as much as the object seen, Du Bois explores the construction o f race, both black and white, from points o f view that are geographically em bedded in loca­ tions o f im perial con flict, what he calls in a 1924 essay an “external vantage ground— or, better, ground o f disadvantage. ”M T h e chapter opens with the figu re o f Du Bois in a tower high above the “human sea.” From there, he wields a kind o f im perial overview that telescopes into an intim ate view o f “the souls o f white fo lk ”: O f them I am singularly clairvoyant I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points o f vantage. N ot as a foreigner do I come, for

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 191 I am native, not foreign, bone o f their thought and flesh o f their lan­ guage. Mine is not the knowledge o f the traveler or the colonial com­ posite o f dear memories, words and wonder. N or yet is my knowledge that which servants have o f masters, or mass o f class, or capitalist o f arti­ san. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working o f their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furi­ ous. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags o f facts and fancies to hide their nakedness they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,— ugly, human. (497) In this passage, Du Bois appropriates colonial discourse to dismantle the hierarchy that renders the colon izer as the knowing and all-seeing subject and the colon ized as a corporeal object devoid o f reflection . A clairvoyant has the g ift o f seeing the invisible. I f whiteness entails the privilege o f disem bodim ent, as current theories hold, the clairvoyant gaze reem bodies whiteness to make it hypervisible and grotesque. Du Bois insists that his “unusual points o f vantage” cannot be reduced to the binary oppositions o f known social hierarchies. In repeating that he is n ot “foreign ” but “native,” he challenges the distinction between near and far, hom e and abroad, and renders whiteness as foreign . “Na­ tive” in this context im plicitly links the African Am erican claim to citi­ zenship at hom e to a colon ized p eop le’s struggle fo r independence from a foreign rule. In the allusion to the Garden o f Eden, Du Bois o f­ fers a counter-myth o f origins, as the corporeal black body is aligned with Eve’s. Instead o f bein g created out o f Adam ’s rib, however, black­ ness becom es a projection o f his “thought and language.” As white souls are cast out o f their colon ial paradise, they try to cover th eir ex­ posed bodies with myths o f superiority. In a parallel to the colonial trope o f conquest as penetration, the clairvoyant gaze does n ot just passively observe but actively strips souls and pierces the skin to p eer into “the w orking o f th eir entrails.” In his appropriation o f colonial discourse, Du Bois turns the act o f seeing into a pow er struggle that takes place in spaces o f intim ate proxim ity and also expands across the globe. As Du Bois descends from his tower, he allies his sole clairvoyant

192 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE gaze with a collective international anticolonial gaze. T h e text moves rapidly from scenes o f lynching and racial hatred “righ t here in Am er­ ica” to the carnage o f W orld W ar I. As his focus shifts, he changes his use o f pronouns significandy. H e starts by sharing his vision with ra­ cially unmarked Am ericans: “We have seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable lust o f b lood .” H e suddenly turns on “you,” who becom es visible as white in this unanswered ques­ tion: “ask your own soul what it would say i f the next census were to re­ p ort that h a lf o f black Am erica was dead and the other h a lf dying” (499). Du Bois then moves beyond the national borders depopulated by this im aginary census. Expanding the m eaning o f “m ine own peo­ p le” o f the first chapter, here he changes the referen t o f “we” to “the Darker w orld” and refers to him self fo r the first tim e in the book as T in my blackness”: “In the awful cataclysm o f W orld War, where from beating, slandering and m urdering us the white w orld turned tem po­ rarily aside to kill each other, we o f the Darker Peoples looked on in m ild am aze” (500). T h ey gaze at a scene o f vast destruction that ech­ oes Du Bois’s clairvoyant vision o f the “entrails” o f white souls: “As we saw the dead dim ly through rifts o f battle-smoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations o f b lood brothers, we darker m en said: ‘This is not Europe gon e mad, this is n ot aberration o r insanity; this is Eu­ rope; this seem ing T errib le is the real soul o f white culture— back o f all culture,— stripped and visible today’ ” (502). T h e pow er o f the dark gaze to strip the skin o f white souls is here m agnified on global dim en­ sions to pierce the veneer o f European civilization. “T h e Great W ar is the lie unveiled,” Du Bois w rote in the Crisis; Darkwater shows how the cataclysm o f war opened prospects fo r anticolonial alliances that could further undo the lie that white culture was the source o f civilization. This lie, Du Bois claims further, conceals the foundation o f European civilization n ot only in its colonial violence, but also in the appropria­ tion o f earlier, flourishing nonwhite civilizations. From the vantage o f the “darker w orld that watches” (507), Du Bois argues historically that whiteness is a recent social phenom enon with origins in im perialism : “the discovery o f personal whiteness am ong the w orld’s peoples is a very m odern thing— a nineteenth and twenti­ eth century matter, in d eed ” (497). Inverting the discourse o f colo­ nial exploration, he contends that Europeans did not “discover” an­ cient darker peoples, but instead invented their own identity as white.

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 193 Throughout the chapter, Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes the m oder­ nity o f whiteness, a tem porality that is inseparable from the vast g e o ­ graphic span o f em pire: “the im perial width o f the thing,— the heaven defying audacity— makes its m odern newness” (504). H e calls white­ ness a “new religion ” that unites Am erica and Europe in a b e lie f that “whiteness is the ownership o f the earth forever and ever, A m ent” (498). C ontem porary studies o f whiteness have been heavily influenced by David R oed iger’s Wages o f Whiteness, a concept taken from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935).39 R oed iger argues that nineteenth-century w orking classes in the antebellum U n ited States adopted the privileges o f whiteness to distinguish them from degraded black labor and thus align themselves with capital. Yet R oed iger overlooks the international con text in which Du Bois form ulated this argum ent at least twenty years earlier, when he analyzed the racial form ation o f class in Am erica as part o f the global anarchy o f em pire. Skilled workers in both Eu­ rope and the U nited States, argued Du Bois, em braced the econom ic, social, and id eological benefits o f whiteness, which were m ade possible only through im perial exploitation at hom e and abroad: T h e white workingm an has been asked to share the spoil o f exp loitin g ‘ chinks and niggers.’ It is n o lon ger simply the m erchant prince, o r the aristo­ cratic m onopoly, o r even the em ploying class, that is exp loitin g the world: it is the nation; a new dem ocratic nation com posed o f united capital and labor.”36 In this im perial crucible o f econom ics and race, Du Bois found not only the roots o f war but also the birth o f the m od­ e m nation: “such nations it is that rule the m od em world. T h eir na­ tional bond is no m ere sentim ental patriotism , loyalty or ancestor wor­ ship.”37 T h e same colonial spoils that allow fo r the form ation o f the m od em nation lead to violen t com petition over the colonies in w orld war. T h e exclusion and exploitation o f dark labor w orldw ide explains the paradox at hom e: that the advance o f dem ocracy goes hand in hand with lynching and violen t racism in post-Reconstruction Am er­ ica. This international triangle that unites labor and capital through the bond o f whiteness against dark labor at hom e and abroad connects Am erica to oth er im perial nations, rather than position it as an excep­ tion to them. In the cartography o f Datrkwater, the extended lines o f this triangle lead in two interrelated directions, represented respectively in the

194 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE next (w o chapters. Chapter three, “T h e Hands o f Ethiopia,” focuses on the postwar settlem ent o f A frica, where Du Bois foresees the om inous im port o f new kinds o f industrial slavery. T h e next chapter, “O f W ork and W ealth,” moves back to the wartim e industrialization o f East S t Louis, where white workers battled against black m igrant labor and thereby aligned themselves with the industrialists against whom they were striking. For Du Bois, such alliances cast ironic ligh t on the inter­ nationalist claims o f the socialist m ovem ents in the U n ited States as w ell as Germany, whose m em bers, he argues, have been bribed by the prom ises o f em pire: “W ere they not lord ly whites and should they not share in the spoils o f rape? H igh wages in the U n ited States and Eng­ land m ight be the skillfully m anipulated result o f slavery in A frica and o f peonage in Asia” (507). Du Bois contends that the wages o f white­ ness are paid from an international econom ic system that consolidates the m od em nation and conjoins post-Reconstruction Am erica to the African roots o f war. T h e international perspective on whiteness in Darkwateris inextrica­ bly tied to its im perial cartography. In rem apping global geography from the “unusual points o f vantage” o f an em ergin g anticolonial gaze, Du Bois also challenges the m eaning o f language and the w riting o f history to show how language perpetuates and reflects the injustices and oppressions inscribed in the lines o f maps. Just as he redefines the m eaning o f race and the m od em nation from the vantage o f the colonies, geographic shifts throughout Darkwater entail red efin in g the available lexicon fo r describing the international scene, through such basic words as “w orld,” “war,” and “peace.” T h e wages o f white­ ness also include the righ t to own and circum scribe this vocabulary. As T on i M orrison writes, “definitions b elon g to the definers— n ot the de­ fin ed .”98 W e have already seen how Du Bois am ply expands the mean­ in g o f the “w orld” in w orld war. From the vantage o f A frica, the “w orld” does n ot stop at the battlefields o f Europe, but takes root in a global struggle to con trol colonies that “belt the w orld”— in “H on g K on g and Anam , in B orneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra L eon e and N igeria, in Pan­ ama and Havana” (5 0 5-6 ). This redefin ition o f the “w orld” expands outward to encompass the earth, and inward to include black labor within the U n ited States. In charting the perim eters o f the w orld, Du Bois also redefines and

The Imperial Cartography o f W. E. B. Du Boi» » 195 expands the m eaning o f war. H e condem ns pacifists fo r lim iting their protests to battles involving white Europeans. Has war “ju st becom e horrible, in these last days,” he asks, when under essentially equal conditions, equal armaments, and equal waste o f wealth, white men are fighting white men, with surgeons and nurses hovering near? Think o f the wars through which we have lived in the last decade: in German Africa, in British Nigeria, in French and Spanish Morocco, in China, in Persia, in the Balkans, in Tripoli, in Mexico, and in a dozen lesser places—were not these horrible too? Mind you, there were for most o f these wars no Red Cross funds. (502) Excluded from the nom enclature o f “war,” brutal m ilitary incursions becom e invisible from the perspective o f Europe and the U nited States. In w ithholding the use o f the w ord “war” from violen t colonial conflicts worldwide, pacifists efface both the agency o f colonial com­ batants and the lon ger history o f conquest that, according to Du Bois, caused the Great W ar in Europe. Darkwater rewrites the past to expose the im perial histories em bed­ ded in yet d eleted from European and Am erican versions o f the world. This geographic, linguistic, and historical rem apping converges in his repeated references to Belgium . From the vantage o f Europe, Belgium stood at the center o f the war; the “rape o f Belgium ” was a rallying cry against Germ an invasion o f a neutral country. This m etaphor ren­ dered Belgium fem ale and put the A llies in the role o f chivalric rescu­ ers. Du Bois turns this rhetoric o f rape against Belgium itself, by exam­ in in g it from the vantage o f K ing L eo p o ld ’s Belgian C ongo. H e turns an enclosed national space inside out by undoing the historical amne­ sia about the econom ic foundation o f Belgium ’s civilization: “B ehold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the w orld forgotten Congo? W hat Belgium now suffers is n ot half, n ot even a tenth, o f what she has don e to black C ongo since Stanley’s great dream o f 1880” (502). A target o f Germ an aggression when viewed from within Eu­ rope, Belgium becom es aligned with Germ any as agents o f aggressive expansion and violen t exploitation o f Africa. Du Bois further extends the boundaries o f Belgium beyond the dyadic relation between Europe and its African colonies, to locate Bel­ gium m etaphorically in the cities o f the U n ited States:

196 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Conceive this nation, o f all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to make the “World Safe for Democracy”! Can you imagine the United States protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and S t Louis; what is Louvain com­ pared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg, and Estill Springs? In short what is the black man but America’s Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders? (500) T h e rape o f Belgium here becom es a figu re fo r the lynched black bod­ ies hanging throughout the cities o f the U n ited States that n ot only redefines the m eaning o f Belgium , but also radically underm ines the position o f Am erica in the world. T h e detailed nam ing o f Am erican cities draws a counter-map o f the U n ited States through lines that con­ nect the locales where the atrocities against black p eop le were com m it­ ted, and Du Bois rewrites the history o f the present from that perspec­ tive. N o lon ger a m oral arbiter o f other nations, the U n ited States is ju d ged by the dark w orld it professes to lead. Thus Du Bois collapses the physical and m oral distances that appear to separate Am erica, G er­ many, Belgium , and the C ongo to show how they are inextricably interm eshed. In DaikwaUr he shows that nations as w ell as colonies are not autonomous entities lim ited by territorial boundaries, but are themselves transient tenants o f sorts, form ed by the networks o f im pe­ rial violence and conflicts that traverse the globe. In radically red efin in g the m eaning o f "w orld war” by means o f its im perial scope, Du Bois sim ilarly redefines the m eaning o f "peace.” This involves a tem poral shift that extends the war in tim e beyond the official armistice. Rather than call it the "war to end all wars,” Du Bois recasts it as a "prelude to the arm ed and indignant protest o f these de­ spised and raped p eop le” (507) who are preparing to revolt, from Ja­ pan to China, India to A frica, the West Indies to the U nited States. A war o f com petition over colonial exploitation cannot be resolved in the narrow space o f a Paris h otel room , but rather "in this outer circle o f races, and not in the inn er European household,” as he argues in "African Roots” (103). R edefinin g the m eaning o f war and peace in­ volves collapsing the conceptual boundary that protects European na­ tions as dom estic spaces in contrast to foreign subjects o f colonialism .

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 197 T h e threat o f a truly worldwide war hovers over the entire text o f Darkwater and fuels the urgency o f its tone. Du Bois oscillates back and forth between drawing the color lin e to fram e the new fron t o f a global race war, and drawing it to delineate a site fo r the em ergence o f anticolonial alliances and the potential o f “w orld fellow ship.”

African Routes A com prehensive peace fo r Du Bois could only be negotiated from the vantage o f A frica, the prim e cause o f w orld war. In the chapter on T h e Hands o f E thiopia,” Du Bois offers a plan fo r the postwar recon­ struction o f A frica that com bines a revision o f “African Roots” with proposals from the Pan-African Congress o f 1919. This chapter has two uneasily related goals: to dism antle the colonial map o f A frica and to avert the threat o f a w orldw ide race war. It thus anxiously strives to con­ tain the potential violence that this crum bling o f old maps would un­ leash. Renarrating the history o f the G reat W ar opens urgent ques­ tions about the future. H ence Du Bois asks whether the reconstruction o f A frica w ill lead toward independence and autonomy, o r like postReconstruction Am erica, to reenslavem ent by unfettered capitalism. W hat was A frica to Du Bois at the tim e o f w riting Darkxvater? Scholars have criticized Du Bois fo r rom anticizing the continent in colonial exoticized im ages, both at the Pan-African Congress and on his trip to Lib eria three years la ter." Eric Sundquist sees Darkwater m ore posi­ tively as an anticolonial critique in which A frica becom es a psychic or spiritual hom eland, an em bodim ent o f a Pan-African Soul, o r a “racial fo n t o f identity.”40 Yet both views overlook the m ore secular and m od­ e m dim ension o f A frica that serves as a critical leverage in Du Bois’s writing. “Hands o f Ethiopia,” like “African Roots,” starts with a quota­ tion from Pliny, “Semper novi quid ex Africa, cried the Rom an consul” [Som ething new always com es from A frica ]. T h e newness o f A frica paradoxically lies both in its antiquity, as the source o f early civiliza­ tion, and its m odernity in relation to the history o f em pires: “Nearly every human em pire that has arisen in the w orld, m aterial and spiri­ tual, has found som e o f its. greatest crises on the continent o f Africa, from G reece to G reat Britain” (511). As this flash poin t o f em pire, A f­ rica is where the anarchy o f em pire im plodes and where som ething

198 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE new can em erge. Du Bois thus links the m odern crisis o f war to A frica’s antiquity, though n ot as a mythic space outside o f tim e but as a geogra­ phy that is historically em bedded in em pire and w ill be its undoing. I f in “Souls o f W hite Folk” Du Bois adopts a global anti-colonial per­ spective from which to deconstruct whiteness, in “Hands o f Ethiopia” he sets the im perial grounds on which to reconstruct postwar Africa. H e condem ns the ravages o f European colonialism and presents a plan fo r African independence o f “a new African W orld state, a Black A frica” (516). Yet he also maps A frica through a colonial grid as a backward continent in need o f enlighten ed m odernization, and he sees African Am ericans in the civilizing role o f “missionaries o f culture fo r their backward brethren in the new A frica” (518). In the rhetoric o f colonial paternalism , A frica becom es an infant state in need o f guidance and tutelage by the Am erican black elite necessary to lead a program o f m odernization and to protect the land and populace from capitalism ’s im position o f industrial slavery on Africa. I f the critical vantage o f A frica exposes the war as the “lie o f civilization,” then Du Bois sees an enlightened m odernization o f A frica as a way to recuper­ ate this same civilization. Critics have connected Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism to the civilizationist discourse o f European colonialism .41 O verlooked, however, is how Du Bois enlists, o r is enlisted by, a specific logic o f Am erican im perial­ ism. H is vision o f Pan-Africa uncannily resem bles W oodrow W ilson’s internationalist cartography in the afterm ath o f W orld W ar I. W ilson advocated an anticolonial im perialism in opposition to European co­ lonialism , but even m ore vehem ently he opposed anticolonial revolu­ tionary m ovements as anarchic. It was this logic that underw rote his occupation o f H aiti. In his internationalism he saw the U n ited States not as a colonial pow er ru ling specific territories, but as the redeem er, lawgiver, and m odel fo r a universal global system, the antecedent o f Lu ce’s Am erican Century. H e concluded his proposals fo r “Peace with­ out V ictory” in his resounding 1917 speech this way; "These are Am eri­ can principles, Am erican policies. W e could stand fo r no others. A n d they are also the principles and policies o f forw ard lookin g m en and wom en everywhere, o f every m odern nation, o f every enlightened community. T h ey are principles o f m ankind and must prevail.”42 For W ilson, U.S. nationalism was consonant with internationalism ; to him Am erican principles were universal and represented all o f humanity.

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 199 Du Bois im agined African Am ericans in a sim ilar representative and redem ptive role in relation to Africa. In DarkwaUr he dismantles the colonialism that led to war, but conceives o f peace under the m antle o f Am erican exceptionalism as an anticolonial force that can allay the double threat o f ram pant industrial exploitation and the revolution­ ary agency o f African nationalism. H is rhetoric o f redem ption also echoes W ilson’s rhetoric o f the redeem er nation. Du Bois figures edu­ cated Am erican blacks as an international “talented tenth” w orking to u plift Africa. A frica thus becom es an inverse im age o f Am erica— the low liest rather than the m ost pow erful, purged o f im perial pow er and thus capable o f uplifting the w orld. In his jou rn ey to the concept o f Pan-Africa, Du Bois appears at his m ost Am erican. H e im plicitly reproduces the logic o f im perial citizen­ ship, though n ot as an African Am erican soldier figh tin g abroad, but in close ranks nonetheless, standing shoulder to shoulder with other Am ericans to forw ard a peace plan fo r Africa. Thus what A frica is to Du Bois at this poin t o f his career is inseparable from the question: what is Am erica to Du Bois? H e does not simply rom anticize eith er A f­ rica as hom eland o r the pom p and circumstance o f French colonial­ ism, as Lewis claims.48 Instead, he im plicitly engages in a rom ance o f the Am erican em pire. Like the rom ance heroes we have seen in Chap­ ter S o f this book, the author o f Darkwater can act with m ore agency and freedom abroad than he can at hom e, as he seeks to rescue his black brothers from the tyranny o f industrial im perialism . His con­ struction o f A frica as a critical vantage also has some qualities o f the im perial rom ance, wherein conflicts at hom e can be resolved m ore clearly abroad. T h e discourse o f Am erican im perialism as anticolonial redeem er o f the w orld from the shackles o f em pire underwrites his vi­ sion o f a redeem ed and redeem ing A frica as the site fo r projecting fu­ ture w orld peace. Du Bois often represents A frica as passive; it must be freed by others and cannot quite redeem o r represent itself. By om it­ ting an autobiographical speaking voice in “Hands o f E thiopia,” he adopts a kind o f W ilsonian universalism in which Am erica is the unlocatable and om nipresent prototype o f w orld progress.44 Du Bois by n o means backed W ilson’s aim to rebuild the w orld on “Am erican principles.” A fter throwing his support behind W ilson fo r the election, he often turned the President’s rhetoric against itself. Rather than hold Am erica as a standard bearer fo r the rest o f the

200 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE w orld, Du Bois poin ted out that the U n ited States lagged behind the standards o f countries it purported to lead: "Russia has abolished the ghetto— shall we restore it? India is overthrow ing caste— shall we up­ build it? China is establishing dem ocracy— shall we strengthen ou r Southern oligarch y?.. . . N o on e that loves to lynch niggers can lead the hosts o f the Alm ighty G od.”45 Throughout his w riting during the war he underm ined the U.S. claims to "make the w orld safe fo r dem oc­ racy”: "W ilson may love the idea o f dem ocracy in Poland and Ireland, but fo r 12 m illion N egroes silence. Distance from W ashington cer­ tainly adds enchantm ent to Dem ocracy.”46 O verturning the W ilsonian map o f the w orld— with the U nited States as a center o f dem ocracy em anating outward— Du Bois exposes how Am erica makes dem ocracy foreign at its center and can only fu lfill its m eaning by projecting it abroad. lik e oth er anticolonial leaders o f the tim e, Du Bois did not simply reject W ilson but wanted to take his rhetoric o f self-determ ina­ tion to its logical extrem e to expand it beyond the peoples o f Europe. Despite his direct critiques o f W ilson's hypocritical policies, Du Bois’s Pan-African map shares with W ilson a com m on fram ework o f nationally sponsored internationalism . A frica, in Du Bois eyes, cannot redeem itself but must rely on higher powers o f enlightened blacks, ju st as the self-determ ination o f new nations relies on follow in g an Am erican m odel. I f Du Bois’s international perspective destabilizes and decenters Am erican borders, at the same tim e he relies on Am er­ ica as a tem plate fo r w orld governm ent, fo r what he calls "supra-na­ tional power.” H is m ap o f a reconstructed A frica coincides with an Am erican desire fo r a borderless w orld, ruled by U.S. law and exam ­ ple, and supporting a w orld m arket W h ile Du Bois criticized W ilson at hom e, he continued into the 1920s to support the League o f Nations as a forum that could turn his critique into practice; as a tribunal fo r racial injustice at hom e and abroad. A t a tim e when many anticolonial leaders derided the League fo r its hypocrisy in relation to m ovem ents fo r "self-determ ination” by nonwhite peoples, Du Bois averred that "the worst inter-nation is better than the present anarchy.”47 Thus, on the on e hand, Du Bois decentered W ilson’s vision o f Am erica by locat­ in g the U n ited States in the pantheon o f im perial powers ju d ged by the w orld’s tribunal. O n the other, even when he returned from war m ost disillusioned by W ilson’s hypocrisy at hom e and abroad, his idea o f the Pan-African leadership resem bled W ilson’s projection o f the

The Imperial Cartography o f W. E. B. Du Bois » 201 U n ited States as w orld savior. T h e Hands o f Ethiopia” thus holds out com peting perspectives on the potentials o f “w orld citizenship”: a W ilsonian vision o f “the U n ited States o f the W orld,” and A frican routes em ergin g from the colonial “grounds o f disadvantage.”

Home Fronts In chapter fou r o f Darkwater, “O f W ork and W ealth,” Du Bois brings the “return figh tin g” scenes o f w orld war to the streets o f Am erican cit­ ies, and calls fo r social change within the U n ited States as part o f the postwar global reconstruction. Fighting on the hom e fron t involves ranks o f m en and wom en who were not clothed in the uniform s o f m il­ itant m anhood: migrants, workers in factories, teachers and students in schoolroom s, servants in white homes, and black wom en in their com munities. T h e fear o f industrial slavery in postwar A frica erupts on the bloody streets o f East St. Louis in 1917, and Du Bois’s proposal to educate m illions o f Africans boils down to a single lesson in his class­ room . T h e “penetrating” and “all seeing eyes” o f his black students force him to question the ways that pedagogy can perpetuate the lies o f progress and m odernization. U n der th eir gaze, he searches fo r an alternative to the “scholarly aloofness and academ ic calm o f m ost white universities” (532). H e changes his lesson to the “concrete social problem o f which we all were parts” (524) and breaks down the walls o f the classroom to relocate it in a global analysis o f the violen ce that shapes the lives o f his students. Du Bois’s alternative pedagogy sim ilarly bursts open the dom estic boundaries o f an industrial city in the heartland o f the U n ited States. H e teaches a “concrete social problem ” by narrating in epic language a saga o f m od em industrial violence. Drawing on his earlier article fo r The Crisis, “T h e East S t Louis Massacre,” he describes how whites w ent on a h orrific citywide ram page, killing and lynching blacks who had m igrated there from the South fo r job s in the war-driven factories. T h e industries em ployed them at low er wages to break the strikes o f white unions, which would not include them . In “O f W ork and W ealth” Du Bois recasts the dom estic racial strife as an international narrative and remaps East S t Louis as a juncture o f far-reaching routes o f global eco­ nom ic change. Both wartim e Europe and postwar A frica converge in East S t Louis, “where m ighty rivers m eet,” and Du Bois goes on to

202 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE show how these rivers convey human m igrations o f capital, labor, and racial prejudice across the nation and across the globe. O n the streets o f East S t Louis he views scenes indistinguishable from the battlefields abroad: ‘‘yesterday I rode in this city past flame-swept walls and over gray ashes; in streets alm ost w et with b lood and beside ruins, where the bones o f dead m en new-bleached peered out at m e in sullen w onder” (525). T h e unblinking gaze o f his students is m atched by the m ocking stare o f the dead, which locates East S t Louis as a site in the "W ounded W orld,” Du Bois’s incom plete volum e about black troops in the war. It is a short distance from figh tin g in East S t Louis to figh tin g in Europe: "we rush toward the Battle o f M arne and the W est from this dread Bat­ tle o f the East” (532). Du Bois’s account ties East S t Louis to A frica through many points o f confluence; a shared racial identity takes shape through the paral­ le l experien ce o f violen t dislocations and exp loited labor in the eco­ nom ic and political cauldron o f the anarchy o f em pire. T h e war in Eu­ rope, with its econom ic origins in A frica, halted im m igration from Europe to U.S. factories, while it created the n eed fo r labor in a war­ tim e economy. This international circuit spurred the black m igration from the South fo r war work in northern factories. T h e race riots in East S t Louis cannot be seen only as a legacy o f southern history and slavery, but as part o f the w orld history o f a global econom ic system. T h e violen ce o f East S t Louis stemm ed from the e ffo rt o f white work­ ers to maintain their international wages as part o f the deadly birth o f m od em nations out o f the exploitation o f dark labor worldwide. W hen Du Bois retells the story here, he adds a scene o f black m en he­ roically figh tin g back, which d id not appear in his earlier journalism . Thou gh the race rio t took place in 1917, he rescripts the story o f East S t Louis from the vantage o f the “return figh tin g” after the war. H ere Du Bois can im agine a black m ilitancy that he could n ot quite recog­ nize on the part o f Africans. Just as Du Bois im agines the colonial devastation o f A frica as an op ­ portunity fo r future w orld peace, he projects a sim ilar scenario em erg­ in g from the ruins o f East S t Louis. A fter tellin g his students about this exam ple o f globalized racial violence, Du Bois concludes with the sur­ prising lesson that “there are n o races” but only global groupings relat­ in g to the international division o f labor and capital. His students con­ clude with him that “disinherited darker peoples must either share in

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 203 future industrial dem ocracy o r overturn the w orld” (534). T o circum­ vent a future w orld war requires nothing less than the “reorganization o f work and redistribution o f wealth, n ot on ly in Am erica, but in the w orld” (535). Du Bois and his students thus extend "w orld war” n ot only geographically via the colo r lin e to the colonies, but also econom ­ ically to a redistribution o f the wealth o f the world. In DarkuxUer, the battlefields o f East S t Louis, A frica, and Europe lead inward to the hom e and the nation, as the violen t upheaval o f war leads to an analysis o f everyday social issues o f work, family, the fran­ chise, and education. In exp lorin g these traditional dem arcations be­ tween hom e and factory, fam ily and the ballot box, private and public, Du Bois breaks down these boundaries to m ap the dom estic spaces o f the hom e and the nation as crossroads o f international m ovem ent and change. In the next chapter he reaches into the intim ate recesses o f the Am erican hom e, where he finds an outdated form o f dom estic la­ bor. “T h e Servant in the H ouse” opens with the vignette o f a white woman who asks Du Bois, after hearing his lecture on the franchise and politics, “D o you know where I can g et a good colored cook?” (538). Du Bois counters this by look in g into the inn er workings o f the bourgeois hom e through the eyes o f a servant, in a way that echoes the “unusual vantage points” o f the open in g o f “Souls o f W h ite Folk.” Thereby he shatters the view o f the middle-class hom e as a haven from the w ider w orld. Instead, as in the earlier chapter, he looks in to its en­ trails to fin d white dom esticity founded on a “‘m anure’ th eory o f so­ cial organization” (543). T h e hom e is not separate from the market­ place, but it relies on the labor o f black wom en and m en excluded from organized labor and forced in to the “m udsill” as the “unskilled o ffa l o f a m illionaire industrial system” (541). This labor underm ines the distinction between private and public spheres, fo r bourgeois life is dependent upon black servitude as much in the m ost cherished inti­ macy o f child-rearing as in the m od em anonym ity o f Pullm an cars. I f the discourse o f dom esticity holds that the hom e shapes young citizens fo r democracy, Du Bois turns it around to show that dem ocracy is built on the foundations o f exclusion, the relegation o f blacks to the realm o f servants and noncitizens. This “manure th eory o f social organization” im plodes the hom e and links it to the w orld outside. In the next chapter, “O f the R uling o f M en,” Du Bois seems to leap from the private dom estic sphere to the

204 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE public sphere o f political governance to argue fo r extending the vote to wom en and blacks. But rather than simply include new mem bers in a narrow defin ition o f the political sphere, he extends this arena to the factories and beyond the bord er o f the nation. Du Bois explains that a m ore inclusive franchise would not simply add new m em bers to a pre­ conceived social whole. Instead, each group would brin g new knowl­ ed ge from its own experience, needs and desires and “new points o f view” that would radically reshape the social w hole through “disar­ rangem ent and confusion to the old er equilibrium ” (556). Du Bois starts these far-reaching arguments literally close to hom e. M en, he ar­ gues, claim that wom en d o not need the vote because their husbands and fathers can speak fo r them in the political sphere. H e contests the notion that spatial and social proxim ity breeds knowledge; in fact it breeds distortion and silence, and only wom en can speak with knowl­ ed ge o f their own experien ce and interests. H e extends this argu­ m ent to N egroes o f the South, who are similarly denied the vote on the grounds o f proxim ate knowledge and paternalism. Proxim ity in the South does n ot lead to paternal benevolence: “instead o f lovin g guardianship, we see anarchy and exploitation ” (556). Du Bois rejects the dom estic m odel o f “benevolent guardianship fo r wom en, fo r the masses, fo r the N egroes,” and sees it as no d ifferen t from the colonial rationale in K ip lin g’s claim that the white man must oversee “lesser breeds w ithout the law” (553). Thus in arguing fo r an expanded fran­ chise Du Bois does not stop at the borders o f hom e, region, o r nation, but covers the entire colon ized w orld: “So, too, with the darker races o f the world. N o federation o f the w orld, n o true inter-nation— can ex­ clude the black and brown and yellow races from its counsels” (556). Rather than see the hom e as a workable fam ilial m odel fo r w orld gov­ ernance, he links hom e, region , nation, and w orld through the dis­ equilibrium o f “new points o f view.” I f far-flung spaces around the glob e converge in Darkwater through the turbulence o f em pire and war, dom estic spaces are w renched apart by the intim ate upheavals o f gen der and race. Du Bois notes that “none have m ore persistently [an d] dogm atically insisted upon the in­ herent in feriority o f wom en than the m en with whom they com e in closest con ta ct. . . So, too, it is those peop le who live in closest contact with black fo lk who have m ost unhesitatingly asserted the utter im pos­ sibility o f living beside N egroes who are not industrial o r political

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois « 206 slaves o r social pariahs. A ll this proves that none are so blind as those nearest the thing seen, while, on the other hand, the history o f the w orld is the history o f the discovery o f the com m on humanity o f hu­ man beings am ong steadily increasing circles o f m en” (557). “N ew points o f view” from those excluded from the political sphere would counter the blindness supporting intim ate systems o f dom ination. D e­ m ocracy and citizenship must spread beyond the perim eters o f g eo ­ graphical proxim ity— hom e, town, region , nation. This echoes his openin g autobiographical chapter, in which he confides that he was not recogn ized as a real “citizen o f my birthtow n” but had to travel far South to fin d “m ine own p eop le” and overseas to fin d “w orld fellow ­ ship.” I f a sense o f belon gin g cannot be found close to hom e, it must be reconceived from a global perspective that reaches out in tim e as w ell as space. In tim e, “H ow astounded the future world-citizen w ill be to know that as late as 1918 great and civilized nations were m aking desperate endeavor to con fin e the developm ent o f ability and individ­ uality to on e sex,— that is, to one-half o f the nation; and he w ill proba­ bly learn that sim ilar e ffo rt to confine humanity to on e race lasted a hundred years lon ger” (560). This utopian notion o f future w orld citi­ zenship depends on turning dom estic spaces o f the hom e and the na­ tion inside out, as inadequate sites o f social belonging, and positing the new perspective o f an im agined global community. Black wom en, claims Du Bois, are at the nexus o f these “widening circles o f humanity” that he charts from hom e to nation to “inter-na­ tion ,” from wom en to Southern blacks to the colon ized world. In T h e Dam nation o f W om en,” black wom en provide the linchpin fo r the double m ovem ent o f dem ocracy beyond the nation, further out into the w orld and d eep er into the hom e. This chapter poses the question: “W hat is today the message o f these black wom en to Am erica and to the world? T h e u plift o f wom en is, next to the problem o f the colo r lin e and the peace m ovem ent, our greatest m odern cause. W hen, now, two o f these m ovem ents— woman and color— com bine in one, the com bination has deep m eaning” (574). T h e m eaning is fraught and contradictory throughout Darkwater, as it expresses the disequilibrium out o f which new viewpoints em erge. Du Bois represents the labor o f black wom en as the inequitable foundation o f domesticity, at the same tim e that their race excludes them from the privileges and fetters o f domesticity, from the id eology o f true wom anhood. This double ex­

206 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE elusion, according to Du Bois, gives the black wom an a representa­ tional vantage— and advantage. H er labor challenges the boundaries between hom e and workplace. T h e necessity o f her w orking outside the hom e gives her access to the m odern econom ic system and facili­ tates a revolutionary stance. T h e Dam nation o f W om en” echoes a poem in Darkwater that links the history o f black wom en under Am erican slavery to the violen t his­ tory o f colonization in Africa. T h e R iddle o f the Sphinx,” strategically placed between the chapters T h e Souls o f W hite Folk” and T h e Hands o f Ethiopia,” was first titled T h e Burden o f Black W om en.” A scathing critique o f the “white m an's burden,” the poem exposes K ip lin g’s justification o f colonial rule as a cover fo r the rape o f black wom en: “but the burden o f white man bore her back / and the white w orld stifled her sighs” (509). Black wom en play a role in Darkwater sim ilar to that o f Africa. Just as Du Bois turns A frica, conventionally m arginal to w orld events, into the central poin t from which to re­ map w orld geography, he turns the oppression o f black wom en into the vantage from which to red efin e the m eaning o f hom e and nation. Both A frica and black wom en are represented as the avatars o f m oder­ nity and future social change. Yet in both cases Du Bois also expresses anxiety about their revolutionary agency and a n eed to control it through his assertion o f m ilitant m anhood and by givin g voice to their “stifled sighs.”48 W h ile he shows that black wom en are violently ex­ cluded from the em pire o f the m other in the Am erican hom e, he retrieves an em pire fo r them in A frica and H aiti, cultures that he be­ lieved w orshipped the figu re o f the black m other, “based on old A fri­ can tribal ties and beneath it was the m other-idea” (567). H e thereby links black wom en to an ancient, prem odern status where they, like the continent o f A frica, are in need o f vigilant black Am erican m en to protect, lead, and u plift them. In contrast, Du Bois also represents wom en as soldiers “returning figh tin g” from the battlefield as they lead the figh t on m ultiple hom e fronts.

The Anarchy of Empire T h e dom estic and international violen ce that pervades Darkwater erupts in the last chapter in a science fiction fable, “T h e C om et,” which tells the story o f the destruction o f N ew York City by the im pact

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 207 o f a com et releasing deadly gases. "T h e C om et” follow s the chapter “O f Beauty and D eath,” which incorporates scenes o f black soldiers figh tin g in the war in Europe and ends with their return to N ew York H arbor and H arlem . T h e ligh t across the sky and the release o f nox­ ious gases conjure im ages o f the batdefields o f W orld W ar I. External­ ized as a cosm ic o r natural disaster, the explosion represents the inner com bustion o f the social tensions and global conflicts that in form the anarchy o f em pire. This apocalyptic violence works as a m etaphor that m erges the carnage o f European “civilization,” the “R ed Summ er” across the U n ited States, the m ilitancy o f the black soldiers who “re­ turn figh tin g,” and the threat o f anticolonial revolts at hom e and abroad. T h e com et brings the war hom e into the m od em m etropolis and into the heart o f the black and white fam ilies. T h e story starts with the chance survival o f a black man, Jim, who works as a m essenger at a bank; he escapes the destruction “in the bowels o f the earth, under the w orld,” in the underground vaults o f the bank where he was sent to fin d missing docum ents (611). W h ile driving through the rubble up to H arlem in search o f his family, he finds a wealthy white woman, unnamed, who survived in the shelter o f her darkroom developin g pictures o f the c o m e t Assuming everyone else in the w orld is dead, they are about to consummate their survival in a semi-mystical union between “prim al woman; m ighty m other o f all” and “som e m ighty Pharaoh lived again” that promises the creation o f a new human race. Suddenly the wom an’s fiancé and father arrive in a m otor car. W hen she asks, “is the w orld gone?” they respond, “only N ew York,” and then clam or to lynch the man fo r violating the white woman he had rescued (621 ). As a crowd amasses, Jim ’s fantasy o f him ­ self as an ancient king is debunked by the reim position o f Jim Crow re­ ality, “well what d o you think o f that, o f all N ew York, ju st a white girl and a nigger.” H e then escapes to fin d his own w ife alive, cradling the corpse o f their “dark baby” (622). In his descent into the bowels o f the earth, the black w orking man from H arlem evokes the work o f colonial laborers and links them to the financial center o f N ew York. In assuming the lineage o f Ethiopian kings, he represents the darker w orld as a harbinger o f the future. As a photographer, the white woman has access to culture, the tools o f rep­ resentation. T h e return o f the father— the white banker— and the threat o f a lynch m ob restore Jim Crow ord er after the war to recon­

208 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE struct N ew York City. In “T h e C om et” the N orthern father and fiancé deploy a fam iliar Southern narrative that renders and punishes black agency as the rape o f white wom en. In his investigation o f the treatm ent o f black troops during the war, Du Bois docum ented the way the U.S. arm y exported this narrative to the battlefields o f Europe, at the same tim e that it was screened as na­ tional history in G riffith ’s popular The B irth o f a N ation (1915). In his reports fo r ’T h e W ounded W orld,” published in 7Tie Crisis, Du Bois sin­ gled out on e o f the m ost insidious pieces o f U.S. propaganda against African Am erican troops. T h e army published classified circulars warning the French to avoid black soldiers, who were alleged to rape white wom en; on e o fficer referred to them as “the rapist division.”49 This official army policy recast a dom inant national narrative as a weapon o f international warfare to com bat the struggle fo r black citi­ zenship at hom e by exportin g racism abroad. I f black soldiers sought im perial citizenship by figh tin g foreign wars, the im perial nation op ­ posed them by redrawing the lines o f battle abroad. Du Bois explained that the army was responding to new possibilities fo r international af­ filiations encountered by black troops in Europe. H e praised the warm gratitude o f the French p eop le toward black soldiers and the official recognition from th eir govern m en t In France blacks found them­ selves standing n ot “shoulder to shoulder” with white Am ericans, as he encouraged in “Close Ranks,” but rather alongside French soldiers as w ell as black Africans figh tin g in French colonial regim ents. Du Bois deploys a fam iliar chivalric narrative when he applauds the black troops fo r rescuing France in their heroic figh t against the Ger­ man invasion at the M arne.50T h e army propaganda attempts to trans­ form black soldiers from agents o f rescue to agents o f rape. This is pre­ cisely what happens to the black man in “T h e C om et”; the white m en im m ediately assume that he has violated the white woman, who cor­ rects them : “H e dared— all, to rescue m e” (621). T h e woman, like the French peop le who reject this narrative on the basis o f their own con­ tact with black soldiers, remains powerless to change it fo r the national fathers.51 Like the Klan ridin g in B irth o f a N ation, the white northern banker returns in a m otorcar from the suburbs to “rescue” his daugh­ ter. Contesting G riffith ’s dom inant national narrative that renders equal contact between whites and blacks as the threat o f rape, Du Bois reim agines the union between a black man and a white woman as the

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois » 209 aborted conception o f a new interracial inter-nation. In the parable o f ‘T h e C om et,” Du Bois im plicitly places the national m ythology o f the black rapist in an international context where the m etaphor o f rape has contested political uses. Throughout Darkwater he turns the accu­ sation o f rape against the accusers: he redirects the battle cry o f the “rape o f Belgium ” to the “rape o f Ethiopia” as the central m etaphor fo r the colonization o f Africa. H e redefines K ip lin g’s “white m an’s bur­ d en ” as the rape o f black wom en within the U n ited States and across the colonies, and represents the lynched black body as “Am erica’s Bel­ gium .” Du Bois connects the arm y’s designation o f black soldiers in W orld W ar I to the history o f black service in the C ivil War, Reconstruction, and the Spanish-American War. W riting about black troops in Houston in 1917, who violently rebelled against th eir brutal treatm ent by white officers, he rem inds us that “the nation, also, fo rgo t the deep resent­ m ent m ixed with the pale ghost o f fear which N egro soldiers call up in the breasts o f the white South. It is n ot so much that they fear that the N egro w ill strike i f he gets the chance, but rather that they assume with curious unanim ity that he has reason to strike, that any other person in his circumstance o r treated as he is would reb el” (602). Du Bois sug­ gests that precisely because o f the white South’s im plicit acknowledg­ m ent o f the righ t to rebel, lynching reconfigures the rational “reason to strike” as the irrational lust fo r white wom en. “T h e C om et” concludes Darkwater with a question: what new social form ations could arise from the destruction o f the world? T h e reasser­ tion o f white supremacy through the threat o f lynching raises dire questions about the future in the figu re o f a black child. Jim is joyfu lly reunited with his silent black w ife, but they em brace across their baby’s corpse. Darkwater earlier expresses urgency about the future o f black children in T h e Im m ortal C h ild” (581-95). This elegy fo r Samuel C oleridge-Taylor celebrates his work and life as a Pan-African artist and links his art to the poetry o f Paul Laurence Dunbar. But it also mourns a potential lost future in which “there is n o place fo r black children in this w orld” (585). T h e dead baby at the end o f T h e C om et” em bodies this fear, as it hearkens back to Du Bois’s elegy fo r his son in Souls o f Black Folk, a figu re who represents both despair and hope fo r change. I f the im age o f the dead baby at the end o f T h e C om et” looks back toward Souls, it also looks forw ard to the end o f Du

210 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE Bois’s novel Dark Princess. In it a boy is born to a Southeast Asian woman and an African Am erican man, who returns from C hicago to his roots in V irgin ia to rejoin his m other and his w ife and constitute a new family. In a geography based on the cartography o f Darkwater, Du Bois maps this birthplace at “the ed ge o f a black w orld. T h e black belt o f the C ongo, the N ile, and the Ganges reaches by way o f Guinea, H aiti and Jamaica, like a red arrow up in to the heart o f white Am er­ ica.”52 In Dark Princess the boy is born as a m essenger to lead the colo­ nized w orld, continuing the work o f the black m essenger o f ‘T h e C o m e t” Darkwater concludes with a final poem , “A Hym n to the Peoples,” which prays fo r the “union o f the W orld” to overcom e the “Anarchy o f Em pire” (622). W hy d id Du Bois choose to end Darkwater by goin g back to a poem , based on K ip lin g’s “Recessional,” that he first wrote fo r the First Universal Races Congress o f 1911?53 Du Bois never lost his enthusiasm fo r this conference and w rote in several autobiographies that this gathering o f m en and wom en o f all races around the w orld “would have m arked an epoch in the cultural history o f the w orld, i f it had n ot been follow ed so quickly by the W orld War.”54 This statement has been ridiculed as an exam ple o f Du Bois’s arrogance in inflatin g the im portance o f his own international endeavors.55 Yet what mean­ in g does this form o f self-quotation take in 1920? Darkwater concludes with a gesture from the prewar past to project into the future an alter­ native untold story o f what m ight have been and still m ight be. Du Bois devises an as yet uncharted map o f the glob e as a site o f “world cit­ izenship,” fo r m em bers o f collectivities n ot bound solely by nation­ states o r colonies n or dislocated by the anarchy o f em pire. Darkwater connects the problem o f global reconstruction after the “awful cataclysm” o f W orld W ar I to the u n fu lfilled legacy o f Recon­ struction in the afterm ath o f the C ivil War. In the earlier period, wrote Du Bois, white opposition to the experim ents o f a new dem ocratic rule based its objection on the color line, and Reconstruction became in history a great movement for the self-assertion o f the white race against the impudent ambition o f degraded blacks, instead o f the rise o f a mass o f black and white laborers. The result was the disfranchisement o f the blacks o f the South and a world-wide attempt to restrict demo­ cratic development to white races and to distract them with race hatred

The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois « 211 against the darker races. This program, however, although it undoubt­ edly helped raise the scale o f white labor, in greater proportion put wealth and power in the hands o f the great European Captains o f In­ dustry and made modern industrial imperialism possible. (552) H ere Du Bois begins to reconstruct a chapter o f national history by placing it in a broader transnational context o f the w orldw ide expan­ sion o f em pire. In this revision, he im agines counter-histories to the rise o f Jim Crow, histories that gesture toward alternative futures o f what m ight have been and m ight yet be, an epoch o f global interracial dem ocracy as opposed to the African roots o f war. Du Bois would take up this challenge to rew rite history in Black Re­ construction, which ends with “T h e Propaganda o f H istory,” a scathing critique o f historians fo r w riting and teaching history as a means o f “inflatin g ou r national ego .”96 M isrepresenting Reconstruction as a massive mistake, they based their historiography on the racist b e lie f in black in feriority and refusal to credit black p eop le as active agents in a revolutionary m ovem ent fo r freedom and social change. In Du Bois’s view, this distortion o f national history also had international reper­ cussions, as his conclusion shifts abruptly from quoting a historian’s approval o f the trium ph o f white supremacy in reuniting the nation to the follow in g vision: “Im m ediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the b lood o f the lash; in India, a brown g irl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabam a, seven darkies are m ore than lynched; while in Lon don , the white limbs o f a prostitute are hung with jew els and silk.”97 This depiction o f simultaneity across geographic boundaries is the aesthetic analogue o f the anarchy o f em pire, which cannot be rep­ resented in the linear narratives o f national history. Du Bois claims here that these narratives perpetuate the intim ate dom ination o f em ­ p ire in flicted on colon ized bodies across the globe, and he calls fo r al­ ternative histories and pedagogies that change the form s o f represen­ tation as w ell as their con ten t H is challenge remains with us today to develop the kinds o f transnational historiographies and cartographies that can interlink what have traditionally appeared as disparate spaces and histories at the turn o f the twentieth century: Black Reconstruc­ tion, the colonization o f A frica and Asia, and U.S. im perialism in Latin Am erica and the Pacific. Du Bois also challenges us to create new criti­ cal vocabularies that can represent current rearticulations o f global

212 • THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE pow er and the em ergence o f dispersed collectivities that g o beyond the lim its o f the anarchy o f em pire.

I have been arguing that the anarchy o f em pire in its convulsive reach across the glob e both erects and destabilizes the geop olitical bound­ aries o f nation-states and colonies and the conceptual borders be­ tween the dom estic and the foreign . Thus to analyze the culture o f U.S. im perialism it is necessary to cross these same borders and chal­ len ge the interpretive fram ework o f national paradigms, which use his­ tory fo r “inflatin g our national ego .” Du Bois demonstrates ways o f de­ flatin g that ego by turning to “unusual points o f vantage” from which to map the anarchy o f em pire, ju st as O rson W elles turned the camera on C itizen Kane from below to make the view er simultaneously fe el the force o f his pow er and perceive its undoing. In these chapters I have tried to convey this double perspective: to analyze the creative force o f em pire in the m aking o f a national culture, and to trace the anarchic workings o f em pire in unraveling the coherence o f this cul­ ture and op en in g it to the outside. W e have seen how cultural repre­ sentations o f the anarchy o f em pire can shore up national borders against perceived external threats, o r can decenter the nation with the recogn ition still vital today, “that the U n ited States was living not to it­ self, but as part o f the strain and stress o f the w orld.”

NOTES A CK N O WLED GM EN T S IN D E X

Notes

Introduction 1. The name “Spanish-American War* is a contested political term that only presents a U.S.-centered perspective on the three-month war de­ clared against Spain in 1898. It obscures the preceding Cuban War for Independence in which the United States intervened, as well as subse­ quent U.S. intervention in Cuba. Thus some call it the “Spanish-CubanAmerican War.” Furthermore, Spanish-American War does not refer to the three-year Philippine-American War that followed. In this book, my usage varies. I often refer to the traditional name when I am discussing the contemporary images o f that war in popular culture and political discourse. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, my analyses show how cultural rep­ resentations contributed to legitimating that name by rendering the wider imperial wars in which the United States was engaged invisible to the contemporary public and later histories. 2. Downes u RidweU, 182 U.S. 244 (1901) at 341-42. I am indebted to Priscilla Wald for originally pointing out this case to me, and to her own work in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Dur­ ham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 224. 3. Efrén Rivera Ramos, T h e Legal Construction o f American Colonial­ ism: The Insular Cases, 1902-1922,” Revista Juridica de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 65 (1996): 227-328.1 am indebted to this article for my un­ derstanding o f the legal and political contexts and ramifications o f this case. For a collection o f legal essays on the Insular Cases (which unfortu­ nately came out after I completed this Introduction), see Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense:

215

216 « Notes to Page» 3-11 Puerto Rico, American Expansion and the Constitution (Durham: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 2001). For an important argument about how the project o f mapping and imagining Puerto Rico in this period does not fit into a rigid binary between the colonizer and the colonized, and a gloss on the misspelling “Porto Rico” in this period, see Luis Garcia Gervasio, “I Am the Other: Puerto Rico in the Eyes o f North Americans, 1898,”Jour­ nal o fAmerican History, 87 (June 2000): 39-64. 4. Rivera Ramos, T h e Legal Construction,” p. 264. 5. Downes 182 U.S. at 320. 6 . Quoted in ibid, at 262 by Brown, and by Fuller at 357. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

Ibid, at 262. Ibid, at 263. Ibid, at 373. On the impact o f U.S. colonial rule on Puerto Rico, see Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “Subject People” and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transforma­ tion and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898-1947 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); and Eileen J. Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics o f Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Doumes, 182 U.S. at 287 and 315. Ibid, at 308. Ibid, at 288. Ibid, at 381. On the question o f the Constitution following the flag in this case see Brook Thomas, “A Constitution Led by the Flag: The Insular Cases and the Metaphor o f Incorporation,” in Duffy and Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense, pp. 82-103. Downes, 182 U.S. at 313. Ibid, at 314. Ibid. Ibid, at 327. Ibid, at 316. On these interactions see Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: H ill and Wang, 2000). Downes, 182 U.S. at 306. Ibid, at 340. Vicente L. Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization o f the Philippines,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures o f U.S. Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 185. Downes, 182 U.S. at 315.

Notes to Pages 12-18 » 217 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater Voicesfrom Within the Veil (1920), rp t in Eric Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W K B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford, 1996), p.623. 27. Theodore Roosevelt, T h e Strenuous Life,” in The Works o f Theodore Roo­ sevelt: The Strenuous Life (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), p. 11. 28. See Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions o fEmpire: Co­ lonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1997) ; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and theEducation o fDesire: Foucault's History o f Sexuality and the Colonial Order o f Things (Durham: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 1995); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel W riting and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Jean Com aroff and John Comaroff, O fRevelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Con­ sciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1991); Gayan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encoun­ ters o f Empire: W riting the Cultural History o f U.S-Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 29. See, for example, Hom i Bhabha, The Location o f Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Cul­ ture and Race (London: Roudedge, 1995). 30. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). See also Garni Viswanathan, Masks o f Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 31. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xii. 32. On the relation between exceptionalism and imperialism, see my intro­ duction in Kaplan and Pease, eds., Cultures o f United Südes Imperialism. 33. Similar arguments about American exceptionalism in two different his­ torical periods are made by Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: Ameri­ can Expansion and the Empire o f Right (New York: H ill and Wang, 1995); and Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age o f Democracy,” American Quarterly, 50 (1998): 471-522. 34. Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 35. On this historiography, see Edward P. Crapol, “Coming to Terms with Empire: The Historiography o f Late-Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History, 16 (Fall 1992): 573-97; and the essays in “Special Section: Imperialism: A Useful Category o f Analysis?” Radical History Review, 57 (Fall 1993): 4-84. 36. This approach can be seen in the following important works on the

218 » Note» to Pages 18-24 study o f U.S. culture: Richard Drinnon, Fadng West: The Metaphysics of IndiartrHating and Empire-Building (New York: New American Library, 1980); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979); Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environ­ ment: The Myth o f the Frontier in the Age o f Industrialization (New York: Atheneum, 1985); Gunfighter Nation: The Myth o f the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Atheneum, 1992); Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics o f Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: O xford University Press, 1991). 37. Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 10. 38. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls o fBlack Folk (1903), rp t in Sundquist, The Ox­ ford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, p. 107.

1. Manifest Domesticity 1. “Life on the Rio Grande,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, 32 (April 1847): 177-78. 2. Influential studies o f this paradigm by historians and literary critics in­ clude Barbara Welter, T h e Cult o f True Womanhood,” American Quar­ terly, 18 (1966): 151-74; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Nancy Cott, The Bonds o f Womanhood: "Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 17801835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ann Douglas, The Femi­ nization o f American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 18201870 (Ithaca, N .Y: Cornell University Press, 1978); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Empire o f the Mother American W riting about Domesticity, 1830-1860, special issue o f Women and History (New York: Haworth, 1982); Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: O xford University Press, 1984); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work o fAmerican Fiction, 1790-1860 (O xford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also the useful review essay by Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric o f Women’s His­ tory,” TheJournal o fAmerican History (June 1988): 9-39; Hazel Carby, Re­ constructing Womanhood: The Emergence o f the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: O xford University Press, 1987); Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Angjo-Hispanie Frontier in the Amer­ ican Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: O xford University Press, 1987); Peggy Pascoe, Relations o f Rescue: The Search fo r Female M oral Authority

Notes to Page» 26-27 » 219

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) ; Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Selfin NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1990); the es­ says in The Culture o f Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nine­ teenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1992); Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories o f Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn o f the Century (New York: O xford Univer­ sity Press, 1992); Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age o f U.S Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 2000). On “domestic” in relation to colonialism, see Karen Hansen, ed., A fri­ can Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 2-23; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3136. On imperial contexts, see Jean and John L. Comaroff, “Homemade Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity and Colonialism in South Africa” in Hansen, African Encounters; Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Mother­ hood” in Frederick Cooper and Anna Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions o fEm­ pire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University o f Cali­ fornia Press, 1997): 87-152; Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures o f Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Jane Hunter, The Gospel o f Gentility, American Women Missionaries in Turn o f the Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Vicente Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines,” American Literature, 67 (December 1995): 63966 ; Ann Stoler, Race and the Education o fDesire: Foucault’s History o f Sexual­ ity and the Colonial Order o f Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Chris­ tian Temperance Movement in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (Chapel H ill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1991). Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in LateJack­ sonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). Cherokee Nation v. the State o f Georgia, in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., M ajor Problems in American Foreign Policy: Documents and Essays., 2 vols. (Lexing­ ton, Mass: Heath, 1989), vol. 1, p. 202. See Priscilla Wald’s reading o f this case in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Force (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 23-35. Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad (New Y>rk: Norton, 1989), p. 112. Democratic Review, 20 (February 1847): 101.

220 « Notes to Pages 27-33 8 . Quoted in George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological

Interpretation o f Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 107108. 9. See Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls o f the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New \brk: Oxford, 1984), pp. 175-204; Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 2002). 10. Hietala, Manifest Design, pp. 161-63. 11. Sarah Josepha Hale, “Editor’s Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, 44 (January 1852): 88 . 12. Quoted in Ryan, Empire o f the Mother, p. 112. 13. From T h e Social Condition o f Woman,” North American Review, 42 (1836): 513, quoted in Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience o f the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel H ill: Univer­ sity o f North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 166. 14. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1841), p. 144. Subsequent page references are cited parenthetically in text. 15. Ryan, Empire o f the Mother, pp. 97-114. 16. Sklar on Catharine Beecher is one o f the few scholars to consider Beecher’s domestic ideology in terms o f nation-building. She analyzes Treatise vs appealing to gender as a common national denominator, and as using domesticity as a means to national unity to counterbalance the mobility and conflicts based on class and region. She overlooks, how­ ever, that this vision o f gender as a fulcrum for national unity is predi­ cated upon a vision o f that nation’s imperial role. Jenine Abboushi Dallai analyzes the imperial dimensions o f Beecher’s domestic ideology in contrast to the domestic rhetoric o f M elville’s imperial adventure narratives in her T h e Beauty o f Imperialism: Emerson, Melville, Flaubert, and Al-Shidyac” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996), ch. 2. 17. John L. O ’Sullivan, ‘T h e Great Nation o f Futurity,” in Paterson, M ajor Problems in American Foreign Policy, vol. 1, p. 241. 18. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, American Woman’s Home (Hartford, Conn.:J. B. Ford, 1869), pp. 458-59. 19. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Raising Empires like Children: Race, Nation and Religious Education,” American Literary History, 8 (Fall 1996): 399425; Stoler, Race and the Education o fDesire, pp. 137-64. 20. Although the cleanliness and orderliness o f the home promises to make American women healthier, Beecher also blames the lack o f out­ door exercise for American women’s frailty, as though the problematic space outside the home, the foreign, can both cause and cure those “difficulties peculiar to American women.”

Notes to Page» 34-37 » 221 21. This generalized anxiety about contamination o f the domestic sphere by children may stem from the circulation o f stories by missionaries, who expressed fear o f their children being raised by native servants or too closely identified with native culture. These stories would have cir­ culated in popular mission tracts and in middle-class women’s maga­ zines, such as Godey's and Mother's Magazine. See, for example, Stoler, and Patricia Grimshaw, Paths o fDuty: American Missionary Wives in NineteenthrCentury Hawaii (Honolulu: University o f Hawaii Press, 1989), pp. 154-78. The licentiousness o f men was also seen as a threat to women’s health within the home. In general, domesticity is usually seen as an ideology that develops in middle-class urban centers (and, as Sklar shows, in contrast to European values) and then is exported outward to the frontier and empire, where it meets challenges and adaptations. It remains to be studied how domestic discourse might develop out o f the confrontation with colonized cultures in what has been called the “con­ tact zone” o f frontier and empire. 22. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, p. 163; Douglas, TheFeminization o fAmerican Cul­ ture, pp. 51-54. 23. Nina Baym, “Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale’s History o f the World,” New England Quarterly, 63 (1990): 249-70. 24. Sarah J. Hale, “Editor’s Table,” Godey's Lady's Book, 34 (January 1847): 53. 25. Godey's, 45 (November 1852): 303; Godey's, 34 (January 1847): 52. 26. Ruth E. Finley, The Lady o f Godey's, Sarah Josepha Hale (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1931), p. 199. 27. Sarah J. Hale, Northwood, or, Life North and South (New York: H. Long and Brother, 1852). See her 1852 prefree, “A Word with the Reader,” on revisions o f the 1827 edition. 28. On the white ideological framework o f African colonization, see George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the W rite M ind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 6-22,110-17; Susan M. Ryan, “Errand into Africa: Col­ onization and Nation Building in Sarah J. Hale’s Liberia,,” New England Quarterly, 68 (1995): 558-83; Bruce Dorsey, “A Gendered History o f Af­ rican Colonization in the Antebellum United States,” Journal o f Social History (Fall 2000): 77-103; Timothy B. Powell, “Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Question o f the American Colonization Soci­ ety,” in Ruthless Democracy: A M ulticultural Interpretation o f the American Re­ naissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 103-30. 29. Sarah J. Hale, Liberia; or Mr. Peyton’s Experiments (1853: reprint, Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968). 30. On Liberia as a conservative rebuff to Stowe, see Thomas F. Gossett, Un-

222 « Notes to Pages 38-48

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

de Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist Uni­ versity Press, 1985), pp. 235-36. Ryan, “Errand into Africa,” p. 572. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins o fAmerican Ra­ cial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 62-81. Sarah J. Hale, Woman ’s Record (New York: Harper, 1853), p. 564. Linda Kerber, Women o f the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1980). Sarah J. Hale, “An Appeal to the American Christians on Behalf o f the Ladies’ Medical Missionary Society,” Godey’s Lady's Book, 54 (March 1852): 185-88. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History o f the Novel (New York: O xford University Press, 1987); Brown, Domestic In ­ dividualism; Richard Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and fic ­ tion in Antebellum America,” in Philip Fisher, ed., The New American Studies: Essays from Representations (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1991). Susan Warner, The Wide Wide World (1850; rp t, New York: Feminist Press, 1987) ; Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (1854; rp t, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Hidden Hand; or, Capitola The Madcap (1859: rp t, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Unde Tom's Cabin (1852: rp t, New York: Viking Penguin, 1981). Jane Tompkins, Sentimental Designs: The Cultural Work o f American Fic­ tion, 1790-1860 (New York: O xford University Press, 1985), pp. 160-65; Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod,” pp. 153-57. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided, pp. 35-49. On the connections between incest and race see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke Univer­ sity Press, 1995), pp. 5-12; and Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations o f Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 10. On the male characters’ involvement in imperial enterprises in India in The Lamplighter, see Susan Castellanos, “Masculine Sentimentalism and the Project o f Nation-Building” (paper presented at the conference on Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, Trinity College, June 1996). On this split see Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women's W riting and the American C ivil War (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 30-47. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 6 .

Notes to Pages 51-58 » 223

2. The Imperial Routes of Mark IWaln 1. Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions o f C riticism in Our Time (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1997). 2. This paradigm o f doubleness is as old as Twain eriticimi, since as early as Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain, a Biography, S vols. (New York: Harper’s, 1912) and Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain’s America (Boston: Little, Brown, 19S2). For more recent major examples see Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966); Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1989); Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black t Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York: O xford University Press, 1993). 3. For a collection o f Twain’s anti-imperialist writing see Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons o f Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the PhilippineAmerican War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992). 4. Mark Twain, Following the Equator, A Journey Around the World (New York: Harpers, 1903) vol. 1, p. 47. Subsequent page references cited paren­ thetically in the text 5. Mark Twain, Roughing It (1871; rp t New York: Harper and Row, 1962), chs. 62-78. 6 . Renato Rosaldo, Im perialist Nostalgia,” Representations, 26 (1989) : 107-

22. 7. My understanding o f melancholia builds on Sigmund Freud’s influen­ tial formulation in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) in Philip Rieff, ed., Freud: General Psychological Theory (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 164-79. 8 . Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Hom i K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 11. 9. See Twain’s “My Debut as a Literary Person,” in The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900); and “The Turning Point o f My Life,” Harper’s Bazaar (Feb. 1910). 10. For detailed accounts o f Twain’s lecture tours and extant texts o f his lectures, see Walter Francis Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1947), pp. 164-216, 421-59; Frederick William Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968), pp. 23-52, 271-84. 11. Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii, p. 431. 12. Twain, Roughing It, p. 418. 13. Louis J. Budd, ed., Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews (New \brk: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 55. 14. Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853-1866, vol. 1, eds. Edgar M. Branch, Michael

224 » Notes to Pages 59-66

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

B. Frank, Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988), p. 327. Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii, p. 437-41. Ibid., p. 441. Bret Harte quoted in Lorch, The Trouble Begins, p. 32. Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture o fPerformance (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1995), p. 65. Lorch, The Trouble Begins, p. 277. Subsequent page references cited par­ enthetically in text

20. On Twain and Stanley see Kaplan, M i: Clemens, pp. 31,151-154; Martin Green, Dreams o f Adventure, Deeds o f Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 258-63. 21. In Hawaii, Twain also met the American minister to Japan and, what is o f more significance, became close friends with Anson Burlingame, the American minister to China, who would two years later represent China in negotiating the Burlingame Treaty with the United States. While bi­ ographers credit Burlingame with encouraging Twain to climb the so­ cial ladder o f gentility in the United States, they have not considered the way in which Burlingame also introduced Twain into an interna­ tional circle o f diplomats, travelers, and writers. H e invited Twain to China, a trip Twain intended to make but never did. See Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii, pp. 32,112,166, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, p. 81. 22. Mark Twain ’s Letters, p. 333. 23. Lorch, The Trouble Begins, p. 284. 24. Mark Twain's Letters, p. 349. 25. Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii, pp. 449-50. 26. Mark Twain’s Notebooks and foumals, 1855-1873, vol. 1, eds. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: Univer­ sity o f California Press, 1975), p. 189. 27. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, ed. A. Grove Day (Honolulu: Univer­ sity o f Hawaii Press), p. 42. Subsequent page references cited paren­ thetically in text 28. See James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96-112. 29. This brief historical overview relies on the following sources: Gavan Daws, Shoal o f Time: A History o f the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Univer­ sity o f Hawaii Press, 1968), pp. 124-206; Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plan­ tation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (Honolulu: University o f Hawaii Press, 1983); Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992); Sally Engle Merry, C ol

Notes to Pages 66-89 » 225 (mixing Hawaii: The Cultural Power o f Law (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 2000). 30. Daws, Shoal o f Time, p. 187. 31. Merry, Colonizing Hawaii, p. 238. 32. On the changing roles o f Hawaiian women during the colonization o f Hawaii, see Jocelyn Linnekin, Sacred Queens and Women o f Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands (Ann Arbor: Uni­ versity o f Michigan Press, 1990). 33. Lorch, The Trouble Begins, p. 279. 34. On the politics o f the hula as a spectacle for tourists in the past and present see Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics o f Culture and History in H aw aii (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 35. Notebooks andJournals, pp. 154ff. 36. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power The Place o f Sugar in Modem History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985) p. 47. 37. Daws, Shoal o f Time, p. 178. 38. Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). 39. Takaki, Pau Hana, pp. 127-52. 40. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, pp. 49-53; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: Amer­ ica’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 199-201,208-15. 41. Merry, Colonizing Hawaii, pp. 128-31. 42. Quoted in Takaki, Pau Hana, p. 22. 43. Foner, Reconstruction, illustration following p. 194. 44. Mark Twain’s Lettersfrom Hawaii, p. 31. 45. Quoted in Takaki, Pau Hana, p. 21. 46. Quoted in George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White M ind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 190. 47. Notebooks andJournals, pp. 149-50. 48. Ibid., p. 150. 49. Mark Twain’s Lettersfrom Hawaii, p. 112. 50. Daws, Shoal o f Time, pp. 186-87. 51. For an excellent analysis o f the remaining manuscript fragments see Stephen H. Sumida, And the Viewfrom the Shore: Literary Traditions o f Ha­ waii (Seattle: University o f Washington Press, 1991), pp. 38-56. 52. The reference appears on the last page o f fragments o f the manuscript, “Hawaiian Story,” in the Bancroft Library o f the University o f California at Berkeley: The Mark Twain Papers, January 1884. 53. On Samuel Armstrong see Robert Francis Engs, Educating the Disenfran­

226 * Notes to Pages 89-94 chised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893 (Knoxville: University o f Tennessee Press, 1999). 54. Samuel Armstrong, Lessons from the Hawaiian Islands (Hampton, Va.: Normal School Printing Office, 1884), quoted in Engs, Educating, p. 174.

3. Romancing the Empire 1. Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), rp t in Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons o f Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippinc-American War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), pp. 33-34. 2. “Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s Salute to Imperialism, 1900” in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., M ajor Problems in American Foreign Policy: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 389-91. 3. Quoted in Kristin Hoganson, Fightingfo r American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 151. 4. Charles Major, When Knighthood Was in Flower (Indianapolis: Bowen and M errill, 1898), p. 27. 5. William Dean Howells, T h e New Historical Romances,” North American Review, 171 (December, 1900): 936. 6 . Henry Seidel Canby, The Age o f Confidence: Life in the Nineties (New York: Farrar, 1934), pp. 191-92. 7. Many novelists identified as naturalists and realists also wrote historical romances; e.g., Edith Wharton, The Valley o fDecision; Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover; Frank Norris, Yvemelle; Booth Tarkington, Monsieur Beaucaire; and o f course Twain’s parodie romance, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and his more romantic Joan o fArc. Stephen Crane at his death was contemplating a conventional historical romance about the American Revolution. A literary history o f these interpenetrating genres remains to be written. 8 . This approach is almost too commonplace to docum ent For an influ­ ential formulation, see Richard Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” in Daniel Aaron, ed., America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Epi­ sodes in American History (New York: Knopf, 1952), pp. 173-200. John Higham includes imperialist adventure as one more form o f anti­ modern muscularity in T h e Reorientation o f American Culture in - the 1890’s” in his W riting American History: Essays on Modem Scholarship (Bloomington: University o f Indiana Press, 1973), pp. 73-100. This is a good example o f an influential cultural history that relegates imperial­

Note» to Pages 95-97 » 227

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

ism to the margins, as does T. J. Jackson Lears in No Place o f Grace: Antimodemism and the Transformation o f American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 97-139.1 argue against his view o f the support for imperialism as an inadvertent consequence o f the chivalric revival. For a rebuttal o f the approach to American imperialism as antimodern nostalgia instead o f modern rationalized force, see David Axeen, “‘Heroes o f the Engine Room’: American ‘Civilization’ and the War with Spain,” American Quarterly, 36 (1984): 125-38. Edward Said, “Kim: The Pleasures o f Imperialism,” Raritan, 8 (1987): 27-64. On masculinity and westward expansion see Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation o f the American Indian (New York: Random House, 1975); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology o f the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) and The Fatal Environment The Myth o f the American Frontier in the Age o f Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985); Richard Drinnon, Faring West: The Meta­ physics o f Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York: New American Library, 1980); and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nine­ teenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979). All four analyses work within a common framework based on a model o f repression that joins its political and psychoanalytical meanings. In these accounts white masculinity is constituted by denying its threatening features and pro­ jecting its “primitive” desires onto the colonized “others” who are con­ quered and destroyed in the process o f expansion. Drinnon and Takaki extend their analyses from westward to overseas expansion at the turn o f the century and find the same dynamics at work in the later period. The notion o f an “informal empire” based on economic rather than territorial expansion has been propounded most thoroughly by W il­ liam Appleman Williams, The Contours o f American History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966), pp. 343-478, and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation o f American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1963). Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 5. On the shift in the meaning o f masculinity in this period see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History o f Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1995); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modem Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Joseph Rett, Rites o fPassage; Adolescence in America, 1790 to

228 • Notes to Pages 97-99

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

the Present (New \brk: Basic, 1977); Joe Dubbert, A Alan’s Place: Mascu­ linity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice, 1979); and Elliot Gorn, The Manly A rt: Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cor* nell University Press, 1986). For an important interpretation o f the Spanish American War in terms o f these changing conceptions o f mas­ culinity, see Hogan son, Fightingfo r American Manhood. Maurice Thompson, “Vigorous Men, a Vigorous Nation,” The Indepen­ dent, 50 (September 1898): 609-11. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 60-157. Downes u Bidweü, 182 U.S. at 301. Franklin Henry Giddings, Democracy and Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1900), p. 3. Quoted in Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Time o f a Lost Genera­ tion (Lincoln: University o f Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 265. On the meaning o f this term, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention o f Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 1, and on the late nineteenth-century context in which the historical romance takes its place, see ch. 7. Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations, 26 (1989): 107-

22. 21. The popular romance draws on a long tradition o f this form o f nostal­ gia in British and American literature from Prospéra recuperating his authority while marooned on an island, to Robinson Crusoe acquiring his island estate, to Twain’s mechanic in Connecticut Yankee becoming “Boss” o f King Arthur’s England, to Kurtz regressing to an atavistic hor­ ror in Heart o fDarkness. In Rosaldo’s account o f his own first encounter with the Ilongots, the subject o f his anthropological fieldwork, he com­ ments self-critically that he represented them in his journal as H olly­ wood Apaches in the W ild West 22. On Roosevelt’s theatricality see George Black, The Good Neighbor; How the United States Wrote the History o f Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 3-5. This relation between nostalgia and spectacle links other case studies o f the period and merits study as a general cultural phenomenon: Roderick Nash’s influential study o f the Wilderness Cult centers on an example o f an individual survival in the wilderness staged as a media event, Wilderness and the American M ind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 141-60; Emily Rosenberg has shown that Buffalo Bill’s international W ild West shows exported nostalgic values through technologically sophisticated productions in Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion,

Notes to Pages 99-101 » 229

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

1890-1945 (New York: H ill and Wang, 1982), pp. 35-37; and Donna Haraway has shown how the restoration o f a vanishing Africa in the Mu­ seum o f Natural History and o f the great white hunter as a figure in that landscape was produced by the technologies o f the gun and the cam­ era, T ed d y Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden o f Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text, 11 (1984-85): 20-64. For different national formulations o f this analogy see, for example, Stephen Kern, The Culture o f Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 224-40. Maurice Thompson, T h e Critics and the Romancers,” The Independent, 52 (August, 1900): 1919-21. Richard Harding Davis, Soldiers o f Fortune (1897; rp t New York: Scrib­ ner’s, 1928). George Barr McCutcheon, Graustark (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1901). Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold (Boston: Houghton, 1900). In addition to these four novels, I draw on a number o f novels chosen, for the most part, from the bestseller lists reconstructed by Alice Payne Packett, Seventy Years o f Best Sellers, 1895-1965 (New York: Bowker, 1967); and by Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story o f Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947). Additional sources can be found in James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History o f America’s Literary Taste (New York: O xford University Press, 1950), chs. 11 and 12; and Grant C. Knight, The Strenuous Age in American Literature (Chapel H ill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1954), pp. 1-20, 6165. This list is representative and by no means exhaustive, not only be­ cause it excludes non-American authors (the popular Quo Vadis, for ex­ ample, by Polish author H. Sienkiewicz, typifies the genre) nor because o f the great numbers o f such romances, but because this genre overlaps with so many others: regionalism, the Southern plantation romance, the costume romance, the adventure tale. The fewest examples o f the first category, the exotic contemporary romance, occur in this period, an absence that needs consideration: Davis’s The King’s Jackal (1899) and his story T h e Reporter Who Would be King.” By the 1910s, how­ ever, many popular adventure tales (and movies) were set in imperial arenas, like the Tarzan tales and Frank Merriwell novels. In the second category are Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur (1880), The Prince o f India (1893); Francis Marion Crawford, Vta Cruris (1898); S. Weir Mitchell, The Ad­ ventures o fFrancis (1898); Booth Tarkington, Monsieur Beaucaire (1899); Bertha Runkle, The Helmet o fNavarre (1901). In the third are Davis, Prin­ cess Aline (1895); Harold McGrath, Arms and the Woman (1897) and The

230 » Notes to Page» 101-109

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

Puppet Crown (1900); McCutcheon, Beverly o f Graustark (1904); Gertrude Atherton, Rulers o f längs (1904). In the last category are Mitchell, /fugft Wynne: Free Quaker (1898); Paul Leicester Ford, Janice Meredith (1899); Winston Churchill, Richard Carvel (1898); Maurice Thompson, Alice o f Old Vincennes (1900). Page references to these novels will be cited par* enthetically in the text See also Hart, The Popular Book; Knight The Strenuous Age; Mott, Golden Multitudes. The revival o f Scott and o f the martial ideal at large have been analyzed more acutely by Lears as part o f the patrician rebellion against the roudnization and weightlessness o f bourgeois commercial life, a search for a primal authenticity by immersing the self in violence. Lears’s antimodem argument however, fits into a familiar paradigm o f escape and nostalgia. Frederick Jackson Turner, T h e Problem o f the W est” Atlantic Monthly, 78 (September 1896): 296. Frank Norris, T h e Frontier Gone at Last” (1902), rp t in Frank Norris; Novels and Essays (New\brk: lib rary o f America, 1986), p. 1184. Josiah Strong, Our Country (1886; rp t Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1963), p. 213. Johnston, 7b Have and To Hold, ch. 1. Knight The Strenuous Age, pp. 60-61. Lears, No Place o f Grace, pp. 119-24. David H. Burton, Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1969), p. 190. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, 1965), p. 39. On the revival o f Pocahontas as a national founding figure, see Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 492-494. Pocahontas is also the name o f the American hero’s canoe in Atherton’s Rulers o f Kings; the name represents his early sentimental attachment to a maternal na­ tive wilderness, which he leaves behind to become ruler o f Europe. Quoted in James Thompson, et al., Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper, 1981), p. 117. See Louis A. Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, 1878-1902 (Pittsburgh: Uni­ versity o f Pittsburgh Press, 1983), chs. 10 and 11, and Gerald Linderman, The M irror o f Wan American Society and the Spanish-American War (Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan Press, 1974), ch. 5. Charles Brown, The Correspondents' War: Journalists in the Spanish-Ameri­ can War (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), pp. 95-102. Hoganson, Fighting fo r American Manhood, pp. 58-61. Quoted in Hoganson, Fightingfo r American Manhood, p. 61.

Notes to Pages 109-113 « 231 43. Ibid., p. 59. 44. Quoted in ibid., p. 61. 45. Quoted in Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, p. 204. For a brief view o f this image o f Latinos in general as feminized and light-skinned, see Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 58-62. Hoganson shows how Cubans were also portrayed as models o f manly chivalry before the U.S. entered the war, pp. 434-67. 46. Quoted in Robert C. Hilderbrand, Power and the People: Executive Man­ agement o f Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897-1921 (Chapel Hill: Uni­ versity o f North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 44-45. 47. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Scribner’s, 1906), p. 6 . 48. I am suggesting that women readers (and writers) o f the romance may have assumed roles analogous to those o f female missionaries, reform ­ ers, anthropologists, and photographers at the time, who found new liberating social roles beyond the confines o f domesticity by engaging in various imperial arenas and activities. See Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Tum-ofthe-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Louise Michelle Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins o f Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in An Age o f U.S Imperialism (Chapel H ill: University o f North Carolina Press, 2000). 49. Francis Marion Crawford, Via Cruris (New York: American News Com­ pany, 1899), p. 363. 50. An important narrative inflection o f this theatricality can be found in tfugft Wynne. Writing in the first person as a legacy for his heirs, the hero o f the title quotes from his best friend's journal whenever he writes o f his own duels or other belligerent acts, so that he can be seen by another in these poses. And this friend, uncommonly handsome, gende, and unwarriorlike, is referred to throughout the novel as a "girlboy.” Here too masculine feats are given substance by the observation o f a feminized figure, rather than narrated as an act o f con flict 51. Thorstein Veblen, Theory o f the Leisure Class (1899; rp t New York: Pen­ guin, 1981), pp. 246-75. 52. G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (New York: Appleton, 1906), p. 103. 53. Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale o f the Christ (New York: Harper, 1880), p. 359. 54. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; rp t Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan Press, 1972), p. 215.

232 • Notes to Pages 113—119 55. The role o f the woman as spectator has not yet been studied, I believe, in recent accounts o f the representation o f women and modern war­ fare, from which they most often are rendered separate— as bene­ ficiaries o f more freedom at home, victims o f aggressive fantasies, or emblems o f patriotic nationalism. See Sandra Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” in Margaret Ran­ dolph Higgonet et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 197-226, and Banta, Imaging American Women, ch. 12. Susan Jeffords has powerfully analyzed the construction o f the male body as spectacle in representations o f Vietnam in The Remasculinization o f America: Gender and the Vietnam War

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Since she argues that these representations exclude women, blame them, or appropriate their powers, she does not consider their potential role as spectator or collaborator. Strong, Our Country, p. 117. Stephen Crane, The Third Violet and Active Service, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University Press o f Virginia, 1969), pp. 171-72. Ibid., p. 172. Hobson, Imperialism, p. 215. Walter Millis, The M artial Spirit: A Study o f Our War with Spain (Boston: Houghton M ifflin, 1931), p. 357. Quoted in Brown, The Correspondents' War, p. 427. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon, 1965), p. 66 . Hom i Bhabha, “O f Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence o f Colonial Discourse,” October, 28 (1984): 125-38. For a wide-ranging article on spectacle and the post-World War II Amer­ ican empire, see Rogin “‘Make My Day!’, Spectacle as Amnesia in Im pe­ rial Politics,” Representations, 29 (1990): 99-123. Michael Kämmen, A Season o f Youth: The American Revolution and the His­ torical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 211 and chs. 5 and 6 .

66 . Quoted in Perez, Cuba Between Empires, pp. 197-199.

67. Beverly Seaton, “A Pedigree for a New Century: The Colonial Experi­ ence in Popular Historical Novels, 1890-1910,” in Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 278-93. 68 . Owen Wister, “The Evolution o f the Cow-Puncher,” in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, ed., My Dear Wister. The Frederick Remington-Owen Wister Letten (Palo Alto: American West, 1973), pp. 77-96. 69. Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902; rp t New York: New American Li­ brary, 1979).

Notes to Pages 119-129 » 233 70. Lee Clark Mitchell “‘When you call me that. . Tall Talk and Male H e­ gemony in The Virginian,” Publications o f (he Modem Language Association, 102 (1987): 66-77. 71. These are the arguments o f Jane Tompkins, “West o f Everything,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 86 (1987): pp. 357-78; and Mitchell, “‘When you call me that’ .”

4. Black and Blue on San Juan Hill 1. Nina Silber, The Romance o fReunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel H ill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1993). 2. Thomas Dixon, The Leopard ’5 Spots: A Romance o f the White Man ’s Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1902). Page references are cited parenthetically in the text. 3. Virginia Woolf, A Boom o f One’s Own, and Three Guineas (London: Chatto 8c Windus, 1984), p. 75. 4. Seymour Dodd, The Song o f the Rappahannock (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898), preface. 5. Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (Boston: Little Brown, 1938). 6 . Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio; A Study o f the Negro Race Problem, a Novel (1899; rpL New York: Arno Press, 1969). Page references are cited parenthetically in the text 7. Richard Harding Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns (New York: Scribner’s, 1898), p. 217. 8 . Theodore Roosevelt The Rough Riders: A History o f the First United States

Volunteer Cavalry (New York: Scribner’s, 1899), p. 133. Page references are cited parenthetically in the text 9. This is the title humorist Finley Peter Dunne suggested that Roosevelt use for his book on the Spanish-American War. Quoted in Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth o fAmerican Imperial­ ism, 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), vol. 2, p. 339. 10. Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Cha­ pel H ill: University o f North Carolina Press), chs. 6 and 7. On the Cu­ ban War for Independence and U.S. intervention see also Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War; Louis A. Pérez, The Spanish-Cuban-American War, 1878-1902 (Pittsburgh: University o f Pittsburgh Press, 1983). 11. Each o f these features can be found in accounts o f the battle by Crane and Davis cited below; many more examples are brought together in Charles H. Brown, The Correspondents ’ War:Journalists in the Spanish Amer­ ican War (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), ch. 15.

234 » Note» to Page» 129-133 12. James Burton, “Photography Under Fire,” Harper’s Weekly (August 6 , 1898): 774. 13. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking o f the World (New York: O xford University Press, 1985), pp. 60-157. 14. For a pictorial example, see the illustration by H. L. V. Parkhurst, “The Charge at San Juan H ill,” in Roosevelt, The Rough Riders, p. 132. 15. For an analysis o f Roosevelt in juxtaposition with the Cuban perspective from the testimony o f an ex-slave insurgent, see José David Saldivar, “Looking Awry at 1898: Roosevelt, Montejo, Paredes, and Mariscal,” American Literary History, 12 (Fall 2000): 386-406. 16. On Crane’s theatrical involvement in the war, see Brown, The Correspon­ dents’ War, p. 363; John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New \brk: Meridian Books, 1962), p. 78; Amy Kaplan, T h e Spectacle o f War in Crane’s Revision o f History,” in Lee Clark Mitchell, ed., New Essays on The Red Badge o f Courage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 77-108; and Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amuse­ ment, Stephen Crane and the Economics o fPlay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19% ), ch. 3. 17. Stephen Crane, “Stephen Crane’s Vivid Story o f the Battle o f SanJuan,” New York World, July 14,1898. Reprinted in Fredson Bowers and James B. Colvert, eds., Stephen Crane: Reports o f War (Charlottesville: University o f Virginia Press, 1971), pp. 154-65. Subsequent page references are cited parenthetically in the text. 18. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War, vol. 2, pp. 358-61. 19. Crane, T h e Red Badge o f Courage Was His Wig-Wag Flag,” in Bowers and Colvert, Stephen Crane, p. 135. 20. George Kennan, quoted in Perez, The Spanish-Cuban-American War, p. 204. 21. New York Times (August 9,1898): 2. 22. New York Times (August 7,1898): 2. 23. According to Ferrer, the U.S. racial arguments for disarming Cuban sol­ diers and excluding them from the formal surrender o f Spain, and more generally denying them self-rule, echoed an age-old Spanish claim that Cuban independence would degenerate into a race war. She also shows how this fear inform ed some o f the leaders o f the insurrec­ tion as well, who were at pains to portray the Cubans through the lens o f an implicitly white model o f civilization, pp. 188-201. Ferrer’s work challenges scholars o f U.S. imperialism to explore how U.S. representa­ tions o f race were not simply exported wholesale and imposed on Cuba, but interacted with and were also form ed in response to the complex Cuban negotiations o f racial identity.

Notes to Page» 134-141 « 238 24. Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and the W rite M an’s Burden, 18981903 (Chicago: University o f Illinois Press, 1975), pp. 41-65. 25. Quoted in Gatewood, Mack Americans, p. 59. 26. Willard Gatewood, ed., ‘Smoked Yankees’ and the Strugglefa r Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902 (Fayetteville: University o f Arkansas Press, 1987), p. 79. 27. G atew ood, Black Americans, p. 59. 28. G atew ood, ‘Smoked Yankees,’ p. 71. 29. Ibid., p. 96. 30. In his A New Negrofo r a New Century (1900; rp t Miami: Mnemosyne Pub­ lishing, 1969), which depends heavily on the demonstration o f black military heroism, Booker T. Washington not only reprints Holliday’s re­ buttal o f Roosevelt (pp. 54-62), but also an earlier election speech Roo­ sevelt gave at a political rally in Harlem, in which he praises the heroism o f the Tenth and their harmony with the Rough Riders (pp. 50-52). 31. See the collection o f editorials on this subject in George Marks, ed., The Black Press Views American Imperialism, 1898-1900 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), ch. ID. 32. Gatewood, ‘Smoked Yankees, ’ p. 73. 33. Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 197. 34. Vicente Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization o f the Philippines,” in Cultures o f United States Im­ perialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 185-218. 35. Christopher Lasch, T h e Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the In­ equality o f M an,” Journal o f Southern History, 25 (August 1958): 319-31. See also Walter Benn Michaels, “Anti-Imperial Americanism," in Cul­ tures o f United States Imperialism, pp. 365-91. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Gatewood, ‘Smoked Yankees’, pp. 231-32,270-71. Ibid., p. 248. See Marks, Black Press, chs. v^vii. Quoted in Foner, Spanish-Cuban-American War, vol. 2, p. 529. The Letters o f Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting Morison et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 564. 40. Gatewood, 'Smoked Yankees’, pp. 95-96. 4 L Washington, A New Negro, p. 56. 42. Gatewood, Black Americans, chs. 4-5; Gatewood, ‘Smoked Yankees, ’ chs. 2-3. 43. Quoted in G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Ex­ perience: The West o fFrederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 155.

236 » Notes to Pages 142-149 44. Lieutenant John I. Pershing cited in Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), p. 173. 45. Davis, The Cuban and Porto Kean Campaigns, pp. 210-11. 46. On the famous case o f black desertion by David Fagen, see Gatewood, Black Americans, pp. 288-89; and Stephen Bonsai, “The Negro Soldier in War and Peace,” North American Review, 186 (June 1907): 321-27. Bonsai laments the fact that black soldiers got along too well with their “little brown brothers” and learned their native languages. H e notes that white soldiers deserted the army out o f laziness, whereas black sol­ diers deserted out o f principle, to join the insurgents in sympathy with their struggle against white racist colonial policies.

5. Birth of an Empire 1. Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Litde, Brown, 1971), pp. 181-86. 2. It is surprising how few Hollywood films have been made about the Spanish-American War, given how much media attention it com­ manded at the time. I am aware o f one film about the war in Cuba, The Rough Riders (1927). More recently, Mario Van Peebles started Posse (1993) with a scene o f black soldiers in Cuba during the war. The Real Glory (1939) is the only Hollywood film I know about U.S. colonial oc­ cupation o f the Philippines. Several World War II films were made about battles in the Philippines, such as The Bugle Sounds (1942), Bataan (1943), Badı to Bataan (1945), American Guerilla in the Philippines (1950). On these films see Charles Hawley, “‘You’re a Better Filipino Than I Am, John Wayne’; World War II, Hollywood, and U.S.-Philippines Rela­ tions,” Padfic Historical Review (August 2002). 3. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood M elting Pot (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1996), p. 75. 4. This paragraph summarizes my viewing o f the collection o f SpanishAmerican War films in the Paper Print Collection o f the Library o f Con­ gress. Some o f these films can now be viewed on the lib rary o f Con­ gress American Memory website. 5. This overview relies on Charles Musser’s magisterial research in The Emergence o f Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), pp. 225-62; Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1991); and High-Class M oving Pictures: Lyman H Howe and the Forgotten Era o f Drawling Exhibition, 1880-1920, in collaboration with Carol Nelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also the wealth o f ex­

Notes to Pages 149-152 * 237

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

cellent material available on the website The Spanish-American War in U.S. Media Culture, by James Castonguay; see http://chnm.gmu.edu/ aq/war/. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; rp t Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan Press, 1972), p. 215. Thomas Gunning, “The Cinema o f Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spec­ tators and the Avante Garde,” Wide Angie, 8 (Fall 1986): 63-70. Early motion pictures did not emerge in a vacuum but often borrowed from other media, such as the magic lantern show, theater, political car­ toons. The Spanish-American War films share many features with 3-D stereoscopic cards, a medium in which the war was a very popular sub­ je c t See William C. Darrah, The World o f Stereographs (Nashville, Tenn.: Land Yacht Press, 1977), and Jim Zwick, Stereoscopic Visions o f War and Empire, http://www.boondocks.com. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: A Filmography (Wash­ ington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1998), p. 541. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics o f Perception (London: Verso, 1989), p. 5. See Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Dur­ ham: Duke University Press, 1997); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1993). Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism

and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 100-101. 13. Virilio, Wear and Cinema, pp. 6 , 7. 14. See Charles Musser, "Nationalism and the Beginnings o f Cinema: The Lumière Cinématographe in the U.S., 1896-1897,” HistoricalJournal of Film, Radio and Television, 19 (June 1999): 149-76. 15. War Correspondents, Edison Company, 1898: Paper Print Collection, Li­ brary o f Congress. 16. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900, p. 414. 17. See Cuban Refugees Waitingfo r Rations and Cuban Volunteers Marchingfo r Rations, Edison Company, 1898: Paper Print Collection, Library o f Con­ gress. 18. Edison Company, 1898: Paper Print Collection, Library o f Congress. 19. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, p. 418. See also the description o f Tenth U.S. Infantry, 2nd Battalion, Leaving Car, where “real soldiers” marching with their equipment are contrasted with a “comical looking nigger dude” watching them (p. 423). 20. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, p. 426. 21. Musser, High-Class M oving Pictures, pp. 86-90.

238 * Notes to Pages 152-159 22. Basil Courtney, writing for Motion Picture News (1925), quoted in An­ thony Slide, The Big V: A History o f the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976), p. 10. 23. Quoted in Castonguay, the section on Film Studies. See n5 above. 24. Musser, The Emergence o f Cinema, pp. 258-61; on the question o f narra­ tive in early film, see Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990). 25. On the relation between political and domestic spheres in early film, see Jonathan Auerbach, “McKinley at Home: How Early Cinema Made News,” American Quarterly, 51 (Dec. 1999): 797-832. 26. The American Soldier in Love and War, #1, 2, 3, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1903, Paper Print Collection, lib rary o f Congress. 27. Kemp R. Niver, ed., Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), p. 90, my italics. Three fictional films were made together under the title The American Soldier in Love and War, which I will refer to as scenes 1, 2, 3. The Bulletin recommended that the exhibitors intersperse them with two “actualities” made previously, one o f real soldiers embarking for war and the other o f a staged battle scene. 28. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 47. 29. Love and War, Edison Company, 1899, Paper Print Collection, Library o f Congress. Similar to these films is a parallel six-card set o f stereoscopic cards, which all take place in the same parlor from which the soldier de­ parts, where his love faints, and to which he returns. The same cards were marketed as the Battle o f Manila or o f Santiago, with only a slight change o f captions. See the cards and commentary on Zwick, http:// www.boondocksnet.com/stereo/victorious3. 30. Musser, Emergence o f Cinema, p. 342. 31. Theodore Roosevelt, T h e Strenuous Life,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1899; rp t New York: Scribner's, 1906). Kristin Hoganson shows how this project unraveled against the reality o f the American conduct o f brutal warfare against the Philippines in Fightingfo r American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American & PhilippineAmerica Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), ch. 5. 32. Quoted in James Thompson, et al. Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New fork: Harper, 1981), p. 117. 33. Oscar Campomanes, “Casualty Figures o f the American Soldier and the O th er Post-1898 Allegories o f American Imperial Nation-Building as 'Love and War’,” in Angel Shaw and Luis Francia, eds., Vestiges o f War:

Notes to Pages 159-165 « 239 The Phiüppine-American War and Its Aftermath (New York; New York Uni­ versity Press, forthcoming 2002). 34. Quoted in Castonguay, the section on The Female Spectator. See n5. 35. Ibid. 36. On early ethnographic uses o f film see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 19% ), pp. 21-73. 37. “‘Spaniards’ Would not Fight: Vitascope Man Badly Treated by Men H e H ired to Mimic the Battle o f SanJuan,” The Phonoscope (April 1899): 15. 38. Quoted in Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’ : D. W. Griffith’s The Birth o f a Nation," in The Birth o f a Nation, ed. Robert

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

Lang (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 252. Ac­ cording to his biographers, Griffith viewed his first films in 1898; given their popularity, he most likely would have seen some o f the war films. Thomas Dixon, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance o f the White M an’s Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1902), p. 368. The Birth o f a Nation is most often seen as a film version o f Dixon’s The Clansman (the film ’s name at first and the name o f a play version as w ell), but the sec­ ond half o f the film, which focuses on Reconstruction, draws more from The Leopard's Spots. Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,’ ” p. 289. G. W. Bitzer, Bitty Bitzer: His Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 180; my italics. Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates (1919; reissued in series, The Li­ brary o f Congress Video Collection; v. 1, The African American Cin­ ema, 1995). Jane Gaines, “The Birth o f a Nation and Within Our Gates: Two Tales o f the American South,” in Richard H. King and Helen Taylor, Dixie De­ bates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 177-92. Micheaux’s differentiation o f African Americans from immigrants may also have been a way to claim a place in the world o f film, a world identi­ fied with immigrants as both producers and consumers. Scholars have shown how the medium o f film worked to Americanize immigrants, in part, as Michael Rogin has claimed, by teaching them antiblack racism and thus whitening them as well. I thank Elizabeth Young for calling this scene to my attention and for first suggesting that I write about Citizen Kane in the context o f empire. James Naremore, The Magic World o f Orson Welles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 291.

240 » Notes to Pages 167-173 47. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring o fAmerican Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 374-95; Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane (London: British Film Institute, 1992). 48. Mulvey, Citizen Kane, p. 56. 49. Denning, The CulturalFront, p. 375. 50. Ibid., pp. 388-92. 51. Henry R. Luce, The American Century (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1941), p. 16. Subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text 52. Quoted in Denning, The CulturalFront, p. 394. 53. On Bazin, see Mulvey, Citizen Kane, p. 20; Denning, The Cultural Front, p. 392. 54. André Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 75.

6. The Imperial Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bols 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, T h e African Roots o f War” (1915) in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1982), vol. 2, p. 96. 2. Du Bois, “Hayti,” The Crisis, 10 (September 1915): 291. 3. Du Bois, T h e Clansman,” The Crisis, 10 (May 1915): 33. 4. DuBois, Dusk o fDawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography ofa Race Concept (1940: rp t New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 239. 5. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making o fAmerican Litera­ ture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 540-625. This is such a commonplace that it is hard to pinpoint Sundquist for example, often makes use o f this assumption to structure his fine read­ ing o f Darkwater ( “the rigid racial hierarchy supporting racism at home and colonialism abroad,” p. 540; see also pp. 543, 547). This bifurca­ tion also structures the views o f Cornel West,' The American Evasion o f Philosophy: A Genealogy o f Pragmatism (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Adolph L. Reed, W. E. B. Du Bois and American Politi­ cal Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Although it is a cliché to say that Du Bois was interested in the national and international, scholars often emphasize one over the other. Ross Posnock, for example, discusses Du Bois’s pragmatism without even mentioning the international content and context o f the works he analyzes, such as Dark Princess, in Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making o f the Modem Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Har­ vard University Press, 1998). For an especially useful analysis o f the con­ junction o f Du Bois’s national and international concerns see Wilson

Notes to Page» 174-179 « 241

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

Moses, The Golden Age o fBlade Nationalism, 1850-1925 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978). See also Adam Lively, “Continuity and Radicalism in American Black Nationalist Thought, 1914-1929,” Journal o f American Studies, 18 (August 1984): 207-35. For a Marxist critique o f Du Bois’s in­ ternationalism see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making o f the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983), and his essay “W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty” in Imagining Home: Culture, Class and Na­ tionalism in the African Diaspora, eds. Sidney Lemelle, Robin Kelley (Lon­ don: Verso, 1994), pp. 145-57. For a collection that addresses Du Bois’s international and national concerns, though in separate essays, see Ber­ nard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, James B. Stewart, eds., W. E. B. Du Bois On Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, Poetics (New York: Routledge, 19% ). In addition to those mentioned in the previous note see, for example, Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Con­ sciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Richard Cullen Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism o f W. E. B. Du Bovs,” Journal o f American History, 84 (September 1997): 461-95. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, pp. 112-15. Du Bois, Dusk o fDawn, p. 222. Du Bois, T h e Color Line Belts the World” (1906), in David Levering Lewis, ed., W .E.B.Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Holt, 1995), p. 42. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression o f the African Slave-Trade to the United States o fAmerica, 1638-1870 (1897), rpL in W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library o f America, 1986), p. 74. Du Bois, The Souls o f Black Folk (1903), rp t in Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (New York: O xford University Press, 1996), p. 107. Du Bois, T o the Nations o f the World,” in Sundquist, ed., The Oxford Reader, p. 625. Du Bois, T h e Present Outlook for the Dark Races o f Mankind” (1900), in Aptheker, ed., Writings byW.E.B. Du Bois, vol. 1, pp. 73-82. On Du Bois’s involvement in the Pan-African Congress o f 1919 see Da­ vid Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography o fa Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Holt, 1993), pp. 561-78; Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 99-105; Du Bois, T h e Pan-African Congress,” The Crisis, 17 (April 1919), in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Selections from the Crisis (Millwood, N .Y: KrausThomson Organization, 1983), vol. I, pp. 182-85; Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History o f Pan-Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa (New York: Africana Publishing, 1974), ch. 12.

242 * Notes to Pages 179-183 15. Du Bois, “My Mission” (1919), in Aptheker, ed., Selectionsfrom the Crisis, p p .186-88. 16. On Du Bois and World War I see Lewis, Du Bois: Biography, pp. 52534, 551-80; and Mark Ellis, “‘Closing Ranks’ and ‘Seeking Honors’: W. E. B. Du Bois in World War I,” Journal o f American History (June 1992): 96-124. For a good analysis o f Du Bois’s changing attitudes dur­ ing the war, see Julia Liss, “Diasporic Identities: The Science and Poli­ tics o f Race in the Work o f Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois, 18941919,” Cultural Anthropology, 13 (1998): 146-53.1would only qualify her sense o f Du Bois’s progression from nationalism to internationalism as a result o f disillusionment during the war. I see these positions o f his as much more entangled and at play. 17. Du Bois, “Close Ranks” (1918), in Lewis, ed., W .E .B .D u Bois: A Reader, p. 697. 18. Du Bois, “World War and the Color Line,” The Crisis, 9 (November 1914): 28-30. 19. Although Du Bois reports in Dusk o f Dawn that he has “difficulty in thinking clearly” about his decision over twenty years earlier, he does explain: “I felt that for a moment during the war that I could be without reservation a patriotic American” (252-53). H e then reprints parts o f “Close Ranks” as well as an editorial responding to his critics only to conclude, “I am less sure now than then o f the soundness o f this war at­ titude” (255). 20. D. L. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford, 1979), p. 13. 21. Du Bois did publish several essays containing part o f this research in The Crisis. See his “An Essay Toward a History o f the Black Man in the Great War” (1919) in Lewis, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, pp. 698-733, and the May 1919 issue o f The Crisis. 22. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers” (1919), in Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W.E. B.Du Bois Reader, pp. 380-81. 23. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide o f Color Against White WoridrSupremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), p. 15. 24. Quoted in Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 116. See also William Ferris’s scathing review o f Darkwaterfor its elitism in '‘Darkwater, ”African and O ri­ ent Review (June 1920) in Theodore Vincent, ed., Voices o f a Bloch Nation; Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1973), pp. 342-48. 25. For reviews o f Darkwater see Herbert Aptheker, The Literary Legacy o f W. E. B. Du Bois (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International Publications, 1989), pp. 143-63. 26. The only full-length studies o f Darkwater l have found are by Aptheker,

Note» to Pages 184-188 « 243

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

Sundquist, Arnold Rampersad, The A rt and Imagination o fW .E .B .D u Bois (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 170-83, and John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (O xford: O xford University Press, 2000), pp. 197-215. My reading differs from both Rampersad and Sundquist, who emphasize the more spiritual and philosophical aspects o f the figure o f the Black Christ in Du Bois’s PanAfricanism; they both gloss over the centrality o f World War I and his representation o f empire that goes beyond the dichotomy between rac­ ism at home and colonialism abroad to explore the international di­ mensions o f American race relations. My reading also differs from Rowe, who extracts from Du Bois’s writing his changing political views o f imperialism; I explore how the framework o f empire shapes his tex­ tual as well as his political practices. Sundquist suggests that the form and philosophy o f Darkwater viere in­ fluenced b y j. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911) in To Wake, pp. 610-12. Casely Hayford, a West African journalist and educator, at­ tacked Du Bois’s notion o f double-consciousness as a limited and debili­ tating parochial American paradigm that ran contrary to a Pan-African vision. In drawing on the multigenre form o f his book, Du Bois may have also been responding to this critique; J. E. Casely Hayford, Ethio­ pia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation (London: Frank Cass, 1969), pp. 179-82. On the national paradigm that informs Souls, see Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), ch. 1. Du Bois, Dusk, p. 96. Darkwater does not fit the discussions o f modernism in the African American literary tradition, in George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renais­ sance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1987); or Henry Louis Gates, T h e Trope o f the New Negro and the Reconstruction o f the Image o f the Black,” in Philip Fisher, ed., The New American Studies: Essay from Representations (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1991), pp. 319-45. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Modernism and Imperial­ ism (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1990). Du Bois, Darkwater Voices From Within the Veil (1920) in Sundquist, ed., The Oxford Reader, p. 595. Subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text Du Bois, T h e African Roots o f War,” p. 101. Much o f this debate has responded to Anthony Appiah, T h e Uncom­ pleted Argum ent Du Bois and the Illusion o f Race,” in Henry Louis

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•

Notes to Page» 190-206

Gates, Jr., cd., *Race, ” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University o f Chi­ cago Press, 1986), pp. 21-38. 34. Du Bois, '‘Worlds o f Color” (1924) in Aptheker, ed., Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, vol. 2, p. 241. 35. David Roediger, The Wages o f Whiteness: Race and the Making o f the Ameri­ can Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). I am not aiguing that Du Bois originated his idea o f the wages o f whiteness in Darkwater rather than in Black. Reconstruction, which itself took root in an essay o f his in 1910; rather, I believe that there are important international dimensions to this concept used by Roediger and others to analyze the relations be­ tween class and race within the United States. 36. Du Bois, “African Roots,” p. 98. 37. Ibid., p. 99. 38. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 190. 39. See, for example, Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, and Robinson, Black Marxism. 40. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 555-81. 41. See Moses, The Golden Age, and Robinson, who focuses on Du Bois’s complicity with American policy in Liberia in “Du Bois and Black Sover­ eignty.” 42. “President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Peace without Victory’ Speech, 1917,” in Thomas Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., M ajor Problems in American Foreign Relations, 2 vols. (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1995), vol. 1, p. 534. 43. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography, pp. 566-67. 44. Du Bois found it difficult to attribute political agency to Africans throughout his work o f the 1920s. The novel Dark Princess (1928), for example, which is based on the geography o f Darkwater, imagines an in­ ternational anticolonial organization composed o f representatives from Asia, Egypt, India, and the Caribbean. Yet there are no black Africans in it, and the council enlists the black American hero for leading the Afri­ can struggle. In examining Du Bois’s relation to Liberia from 1923 through the 1930s, Robinson has excoriated his blindness to the Libe­ rian imperial posture, supported by the United States, toward its own people. I suggest that this issue be reconsidered not only in relation to Du Bois’s class status and elitism, but also to the components o f his internationalism that were consonant with American internationalism and imperialism. 45. Du Bois, “Awake America,” The Grisis, 14 (Sept. 1917): 216-17. 46. Du Bois, “A Letter to the President,” The Crisis, 13 (April 1917): 284. 47. Du Bois, “The League o f Nations,” The Crisis, 18 (May 1919): 10-11. 48. There is more evidence o f Du Bois’s ambivalence toward the political

Notes to Pages 208-211 » 245

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

agency o f black women in "The Damnation o f Women": while he pays homage to women o f the past whom he names, such as Phillis Wheatley, Mary Still, Harriet Tubman, Mary Shad, and Sojourner Truth, when he quotes at length a contemporary leader, Anna Julia Cooper, he does not name her. It is not clear to me whether he assumed that her state­ ment "when and where I enter” was so well known as to require no name, or whether he subsumed as his own both her words and her claim to represent the race as a woman, "then and there the whole N e­ gro race enters with me” (569-70). Du Bois’s complex representation o f black women and his treatment o f gender unfortunately goes beyond the scope o f this chapter. See Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "The Margin as the Center o f a Theory o f History: African-American Women, Social Change, and the Sociology o f W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Bell et al., eds., W. E. B. Du Bois on Race, pp. 111-39; JoyJames, T h e Profeminist Politics o f W. E. B. Du Bois, with Respect to Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. WellsBarnett,” in ibid., pp. 141-60. Du Bois, "Rape” (1919), in Aptheker, ed., Selections from the Crisis, pp. 186-188; "An Essay Toward a History o f the Black Man in the Great War" (1919), Lewis, ed., W .E.B.Du Bois: A Reader, p. 731. Du Bois, “Viva La France,” The Crisis, 17 (March 19): 215-16. When the woman first realizes that she is alone with a black man, she too expresses a terror o f rape that is followed by her realization o f Jim’s humanity and their common pligh t It is interesting that she experi­ ences this fear when she looks at the mouthpiece o f a telephone that gets no response from the outside world: "it was wide, black, pimpled with usage, in ert dead, almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves” (616). This phallic rendering suggests the importance o f technologies o f com­ munication in producing racial stereotypes that have the power to shape social relations. Du Bois, Doth Princess: A Romance (1928; rp t Millwood, N .Y: KrausThomson Organization, 1974), p. 286. Lewis, Biography, p. 440. Du Bois, Dusk, p. 230. Lewis, Biography, p. 441. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; rp t New York: Adieneum, 1992), p. 714. Ibid., p. 728.

Acknowledgments

Completing a book this long in the making has helped me realize concretely what I have always known in the abstract, that the production o f knowledge is truly a social practice. More colleagues and students have contributed to this project than I could possibly acknowledge, through their questions at lectures, their participation in seminars, and their own scholarship. I am grateful to the people who have read or heard parts o f the manuscript in dif­ ferent stages and offered their valuable advice: Jonathan Arac, Jonathan Au­ erbach, Nancy Bentley, Brenda Bright, Richard Burt, Rob Corber, Cathy Davidson, David Eng, Jenny Goodman, Robert Gregg, Gordon Hutner, Leslie Moore, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Dana Nelson, Donald Pease, Vince Rafael, José David Saldivar, Michelle Stephens, Shelley Streeby, Brook Thomas, Donald Weber, Laura Wexler, Elizabeth Young. Chris Wilson and Matt Jacobson were ideal readers o f the entire manuscript and helped the book cohere at the final stages. I am indebted to Edward Said, whose worldly scholarship has always been a model, and to Lindsay Waters, my edi­ tor at Harvard University Press, for their patient yet persistent commitment to this project I would like to honor the vibrant memory o f Mike Rogin, his intellectual generosity and enthusiasm, and the inspiration o f his work. I wish to thank the following presses for permission to reprint revised ver­ sions o f earlier essays: Duke University Press for an earlier form o f Chapter 1 in American Literature (1998) and o f Chapter 4 in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures o f U.S. Imperialism (1993); O xford University Press for a version o f Chapter 3 in American Literary History (1990); and the Modern Language Association for a part o f Chapter 5 in PM LA (1999). Thanks to Charles Musser for giving me a copy o f his still print o f The American Soldier

247

248 » Acknowledgments in Love and War and permission to reprint it An NEH fellowship helped launch this project, and leave time and research funds from Mount Holyoke College helped to keep it going. I had the opportunity to teach some o f the material discussed in the book at Dartmouth College, University o f Califor­ nia, San Diego, University o f Massachusetts at Am herst and Yale University, where students and faculty provided me with challenging new perspectives. I am fortunate to have dear Mends, near and far, who have seen me through this project from beginning to end. They have taught me as much from their own work as from their careful reading and spirited conversation about mine. Mary Renda has shared the journey o f writing her book on im­ perialism and culture, which has deeply inform ed my thinking. Priscilla Wald has been indefatigable in her willingness at a moment’s notice to dis­ cuss, read, and e d it Their insights helped give shape to incipient ideas and expressions throughout the process o f writing and revising. Susan Gillman has brought her unflagging enthusiasm and knowledge to our parallel tracks through the turn o f two centuries. Carla Kaplan has walked me through countless versions o f the argument on long walks at the Cape, where she generously opened her home to me. Day by day, with wit and grace, Judith Frank has taught me about the life o f the writer, and much more. I thank Becca Leopold for her gentle sarcasm and bedrock sup­ port, Nina Gerassi Navarro for her high-spirited team teaching, Kavita Kory for Scrabble and sushi breaks, Liz Garland for traveling and coming home, and Ken Talan for his wisdom and compassion. This extended family has sustained me in mind, body, and soul. I would like to thank my parents, Sol and Eunice Kaplan, for trying not to ask me, “are you almost done yet?” and for always believing that I would be. This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to my daughter, Rose Kaplan Weiss, who at a young age once came to hear her mother lecture and bravely raised her hand to ask the question: “what does utopia mean?”

Index

1 4 1 -1 4 2 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 7 ,1 8 9 -1 9 0 ,

Adam s, B rooks, 96 The Adventures o f Fronds, 229n28

198-199,208; in P h ilip p in eA m erica n

The Adventures o f Huckleberry Fin n , 5 1 ,5 5 ,

war, 1 4 5 ,236n46; in W orld W ar I,

7 8 ,8 6 ,8 7 ,8 8

1 8 1 -1 8 2 ,1 8 9 -1 9 0 ,2 0 7 ,2 0 8 ,2 0 9 ; m i­ gra tio n fro m th e South, 201-202; A fr i­

A frica : E u ropean co lo n iza tio n o f, 1,

can A m erican w om en , 203-206,

171-1 7 2 ,1 7 3 ,1 9 5 -1 9 6 ; and W orld

245n48

W ar 1 ,1 7 1 -1 7 3 ,1 7 6 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 6 -

T h e A frica n R oots o f W ar," 171-173,

187,1 9 6 ,1 9 7 ; Pan-A frican C ongress

1 7 6 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 6 -1 8 7 ,1 9 6 ,1 9 7

o f 1900,176,178; Pan-A frican C on ­

A gu in a ld o , E m ilio, 115,117

gress o f 1 919,178-180,197; attitudes o f D u B ois tow ard A frican s, 199,206,

A jax, 5 8 ,6 3 ,7 5

244n44

Alaska, 4

A frica n Am ericans: and Plessy u Fergu­

A lexan d er, P rin ce L ih o lih o , 84

son, 9; w h ite attitudes tow ard, 9 ,1 7 ,

A lice o f O ld Vincennes, 1 1 0 ,230n28

1 8 ,2 0 ,2 1 ,2 6 ,3 5 , 3 6 -4 0 ,4 1 ,4 8 ,5 0 ,

T h e A m erican C en tu ry," 1 6 ,2 1 ,1 6 7 1 6 9,170,198

7 5 ,7 9 -8 0 ,8 5 -8 6 ,8 9 -9 0 ,1 2 1 -1 2 8 ,

A m erican excep tion alism , 1 4 -1 6 ,1 7 ,

1 3 3 -1 3 6 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 -1 4 2 ,1 4 3 ,1 4 4 ,1 4 5 , 1 6 0 -1 6 1 ,1 7 2 -1 7 5 ,1 7 6 -1 7 8 ,1 7 9 -1 8 0 ,

1 7 4 ,1 7 5 ,1 7 7 -1 7 8 ,1 9 8 -1 9 9 ,244n44

1 8 1 -1 8 3 ,1 8 5 ,1 8 8 -1 8 9 ,1 9 1 -1 9 3 ,1 9 5 -

Am erican Guerilla in the Philippines, 236n2

1 9 7 ,2 0 0 ,2 0 1 -2 0 6 ,2 0 7 -2 0 9 ,2 1 0 -2 1 2 ,

A m erican R evolu tion , 1 0 1 ,1 1 7 ,1 1 8 1 1 9 ,226n7

2S5n30,239n44,240n5,243n26, 245n51; Jim C row legisla tion regard ­

The Am erican Soldier in Lave and War,

in g, 9 ,1 7 ,1 8 ,2 1 ,1 2 3 ,1 2 5 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 ,

1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 ,1 6 1 ,238n27

1 4 0 -1 4 1 ,1 4 5 ,1 7 3 ,2 0 7 -2 0 8 ; d u rin g

The Am erican W omen's Hom e, 31-43

R econ stru ction , 9 ,7 9 -8 0 ,8 2 ,8 3 -8 4 ,

anarchy, relation sh ip to A m erican im p e­

8 6 ,8 9 -9 0 ,1 2 1 -1 2 3 ,1 7 2 ,2 0 9 ; in Span-

rialism , 1 2 -1 5 ,2 6 ,2 7 -2 8 ,2 8 ,5 0 ,1 2 5 ,

ish-Am erican W ar, 1 8 ,2 0 -2 1 ,1 2 4 -

1 7 0 ,1 7 2 -1 7 3 ,1 8 5 ,1 9 8 -1 9 9 ,2 1 1 -2 1 2

1 2 5 ,1 2 6 -1 2 8 ,1 3 3 -1 4 5 ,1 5 2 ,1 6 1 ,1 6 3 ,

A p th ek er, H erb ert, 242n26

1 8 1 ,2 0 9 ,235n30,236n2; co lo n iza tio n

A rac, Jonathan, 51

o f A fric a by, 3 5 ,3 6 -4 0 ,4 1 ,4 8 ,1 6 2 ; im ­

A rizo n a , 4

p eria l citizen sh ip sou gh t by, 134-136,

A rm stron g, Nancy, 43

249

250 » Index A rm stron g, Sam uel, 88-90

Cherokee N ation u State o f Georgia, 1 0,27

Arm s and the Woman, 229n28

Christianity, 162; nonw hites as p oten tia l

A rn o ld , M atthew, Culture and Anarchy, 14-15 A th erto n , G ertru d e, 230nn28,38

con verts to, 3 1 -3 2 ,3 7 ,3 8 -4 1 ,6 2 ,6 4 , 6 5 ,6 6 ,6 7 ,7 2 -7 3 ,7 9 ; m issionaries in H aw aii, 6 2 ,6 4 ,6 5 ,6 6 ,6 7 ,7 2 -7 3 ,7 8 79; and w om en , 107

Back to Bataan, 236n2

Baker, Frazier, 124 B alboa, Vasco N u n ez d e, 63 Bataan, 236n2

C h u rch ill, W in ston , Richard Carvel, 93, 1 0 7 ,1 1 8 ,230n28 C inem a: A m erican im perialism in , 1 ,1 7 , 2 1 ,1 4 6 -1 6 2 ,1 6 3 -1 7 0 ,1 8 6 ; Citizen

B azin, A n d ré, 169

Kane, 4 ,1 6 ,2 1 ,1 4 6 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 4 -1 7 0 ,

B eecher, C atharine: Treatise on Domestic

212; Spanish-Am erican W ar in , 21,

Economy, 1 ,1 6 ,2 6 ,2 8 -3 4 ,2 2 0 n l6 ; on

1 4 6 - 1 6 2 ,1 6 3 -1 6 5 ,1 6 6 ,1 6 7 ,236n2,

d om esticity and im perialism , 28-32,

237n8; W ithin O u r Gates, 2 1 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 3 -

2 2 0 n l6 ; The Am erican W omen's Hom e,

1 6 4 ,1 6 9 ,1 8 1 ,239n44; The Birth o f a

31-43; on in firm ity o f A m erican

Nation, 1 8 ,2 1 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 1 -1 6 4 ,1 7 2 -1 7 3 ,

m others, 32-34, 220n20; vs. H a le, 34

2 0 8 ,239n39; Edison film s, 147-148,

B elgiu m , 195-196,209

1 4 9 ,1 5 1 ,1 5 6 ,238n29; B iograp h film s,

BenrHur, 1 1 2 ,229n28

14 7 -

B everid ge, A lb e rt Jerem iah , 9 3,117,

actu alities in , 1 48,151,156; as cin em a

120 Beverly o f Graustark, 230n28

1 4 8 ,1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 7 -1 5 9 ,238n27;

o f attractions, 149; and m obility, 149150,151 -1 5 2 ,1 8 6 -1 8 7 ; M éfiés film s,

Bhabha, H o m i, 116

151; W ar Correspondents, 151; L u m ière

B iograp h film s, 1 4 7 -1 4 8 ,1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 7 -

film s, 151; W ar Extra, 151,152; Shoot-

1 5 9 ,238n27 The Birth o f a Nation, 1 8 ,2 1 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 1 -

1 6 4 ,1 7 2 -1 7 3 ,2 0 8 ,239n39

trig Captured Insurgents, 151-152; Colored Troops Disembarking, 152; Cruiser Marblehead, 152; Cuban Am ­

B itzer, Billy, 154,1 6 1 -1 6 2 ,1 6 3

bush, 152; d evelo p m en t o f narrative

Black Reconstruction, 193,211-212,

in , 1 5 3 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 ,1 6 9 ,1 8 6 ; The

244n35

Great Train Robbery, 154; U nde Tom 's

Blacks. See A frica n A m erican s

Cabin, 154; P h ilip p in es in , 154-156,

B lackton, J. Stuart, 152

158-

B o er W ar, 151,161

dier in Love and War, 1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -

1 5 9 ,1 6 1 ,236n2; The Am erican Sol­

Bonsai, Steph en , 236n46

1 5 9 ,1 6 1 ,238n27; Love and War, 156;

B ox er R eb ellio n , 102,151

film o f C orbett-Fitzsim m ons b o x in g

Brady, M athew, 161

m atch, 159; w om en as spectators o f,

B rodh ead, R ich ard, 4 3 ,4 4

159-

B row n, G illia n , 43

Shanghai, 169; Touch o f E vil, 169; Am er­

160; It's A U True, 169; The Lady o f

B row n, H e n ry B illin gs, 5 ,6

ican Guerilla in the Philippines, 236n2;

The Bugle Sounds, 236n2

Back to Bataan, 236n2; Bataan, 236n2;

B u rghardt, T om , 187

The Bugle Sounds, 236n2; Posse, 236n2;

B u rlin gam e, A n son , 9 0 ,224n21

The Real Glory, 236n2; The Rough Riders, 236n2; vs. stereoscopic cards,

C alh ou n , Joh n C ., 28 C a lifo rn ia , 2 6 -2 7 ,2 7 ,5 5 ,6 1 ,8 1

237n8,238n29; and race relation s, 239n44

Canby, H e n ry S eid el, 9 3 ,1 0 0 ,1 0 6

C isneros, E van gelin a C osio y, 109,131

C apitalism , 65, 7 8 -7 9 ,8 0 ,8 8 ,9 0 ,1 9 8

Citizen Kane, 4 ,1 6 ,2 1 ,1 4 6 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 4 -

C asely H a yford , J. E., 243n27 Catherine Beecher. A Study in Am erican D o mesüäty, 2 2 0 n l6

170,212 C ivil W an and slavery, 4 ,1 9 ,5 1 -5 2 ; rela­ tion sh ip to Spanish-Am erican W ar, 8 -

Index • 251 9 ,2 0 ,1 2 1 -1 2 5 ,1 4 1 -1 4 2 ,1 4 5 ,1 6 2 -

D aily M issouri Democrat, 60

165; and Godey's Lady's Book, 5 4 ,5 5 -

D allai, J en in e A bbou sh i, 2 2 0 n l6

56; and Tw ain, 5 1 -5 2 ,5 6 ,7 5 -7 7 ; and

Dark Princess, 2 1 0 ,240n5,244n44

sugar m arket, 5 5 ,7 8 ; in h istorical r o ­

Darkw ater Voicesfrom W ithin the Veil, 12,

m ances, 101,121. See also R econstru c­ tion ; Slavery The Clansm an, 1 6 1 ,2S9nS9

“C lose Ranks,” 1 8 1 ,1 8 5 ,2 0 8 ,2 4 2 n l9

2 2 ,1 7 5 -1 7 5 ,1 8 0 -2 1 2 ,240n5,242n26, 245n27 Davis, R ich ard H a rd in g, 146; Soldiers o f Fortune, 1 0 0 -1 0 1 ,1 0 4 -1 0 6 ,1 0 8 ,1 1 4 ,

C olerid ge-T aylor, Sam uel, 184 ,1 8 9 ,2 0 9

118,119; on battle o f San Juan H ill,

C olon ialism , E u ropean: in A frica , 1,

125,142-144; The K in g's Jackal,

1 7 1 - 1 7 2 ,1 7 5 ,1 9 5 -1 % ; vs. A m erican

229n28; Princess A line, 229n28

im perialism , 7 ,1 5 ,1 4 -1 6 ,5 7 -5 8 ,6 5 -

D ecker, K arl, 109

6 4 ,8 4 ,9 2 , % , 9 7 ,1 1 8 ,1 6 8 ,1 7 4 ,1 9 0 -

Democracy and Empire, 98

1 9 7 ,1 98-199,211-212; D u B ois on ,

D en n in g, M ich ael, 167,169

1 72- 1 7 4 ,1 8 0 -1 8 1 ,1 8 4 -1 8 5 ,1 8 6 -1 8 7 ,

Dewey, A d m ira l G eo rg e, 9 4 ,1 4 8 ,1 4 9 ,

1 9 0 -1 9 8 ,2 0 4 ,2 0 6 ,2 0 7 ,2 0 9 ,2 1 0 -2 1 1 , 240n5,245n26,244n44 Colored Troops Disembarking, 152 A Connecticut Yankee in K ing A rth ur's Court, 5 5 ,5 6 ,8 7 ,8 8 ,1 0 4 ,226n7,

155-154 D ixon , Th om as, 164; The Clansm an, 161, 259n59; The Leopard's Spots, 121-125, 1 2 4 ,1 6 1 ,1 6 2 ,259n59 D om esticity: bou n daries betw een th e dom estic and th e fo re ig n , 1 -4 ,9 ,1 1 -

228n21 C on n , Joh n R., 155

1 2 ,1 5 -1 4 ,1 5 ,1 8 -1 9 ,2 1 ,2 5 -2 6 , 27,

C on rad, Joseph, H eart o f Darkness, 102,

28-29, 51-52, 5 4 ,5 6 -4 0 ,4 1 -4 2 ,4 5 -

1 6 5 ,1 6 7 ,228n21

4 7 ,5 0 ,5 2 ,7 6 -7 7 ,1 0 6 ,1 2 5 ,1 4 7 ,1 5 4 ,

C ook , Jam es, 6 4 ,6 8

1 5 5 .1 5 8 - 1 5 9 ,1 6 2 ,1 6 4 ,1 6 5 -1 6 7 ,1 6 9 -

C oop er, A n n a Julia, 245n48

1 7 0 ,1 7 2 ,1 7 5 ,1 7 4 -1 7 5 ,1 8 5 -1 8 4 ,1 8 9 ,

C oop er, F red erick , 14

1 9 1 ,1 9 6 -1 9 7 ,2 0 5 ,2 0 4 -2 0 5 ,2 1 2 ,

C rane, S teph en , 1 1 5 -1 1 4,151-154,156,

2 2 0n 20,221 n21; as fem a le sph ere, 17,

1 4 5 ,226n7

1 8 -1 9 ,2 4 -2 5 ,2 8 -5 0 ,5 4 -5 5 ,5 7 ,4 0 -

C raw ford, Francis M arion , Via Cruds, 1 0 5 ,1 1 1 ,1 1 9 ,229n28 The Crisis, 1 7 2 ,1 7 9 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 2 ,1 9 2 ,2 0 1 ,

208

4 2 ,4 4 -4 5 ,4 7 -4 9 ,5 0 ,5 1 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 0 1 1 1 ,1 6 6 ,2 0 5 -2 0 4 ,2 0 5 -2 0 6 ,2 2 0 n l6 , 221n21; A m erican im perialism and cu lt o f, 2 4 -2 5 ,2 6 , 2 7 -4 2 ,4 5 ,4 4 -4 5 ,

Cruiser Marblehead, 152

Cuba, 1 ,2 ,4 ,8 ,1 8 ,1 5 5 ; A m erican atti­

4 6 -5 0 ,5 1 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 0 -1 1 1 ,1 1 5 ,1 5 4 1 5 6 .1 5 8 -

1 6 0 ,1 6 5 -164,165-166,

tudes tow ard Cubans, 2 0 ,8 9 , % , 109-

2 2 0 n l6 ; and class h ierarch y am on g

1 1 0 ,1 1 5 ,1 1 7 -1 1 8 ,1 2 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 2 5 ,1 2 7 -

w om en , 29-50, 51; exten sion to sin gle

1 2 9 .1 5 0 -

w om en , 51-52; and in firm ity o f A m er­

1 5 4 ,1 5 6 -1 5 8 ,1 5 1 -1 5 2 ,1 5 5 ,

1 6 0 ,1 7 7 ,2S4n2S; W ar o f In d ep en ­

ican m others, 52-54; and ch ild ren ,

d en ce against Spain, 9 2 ,1 0 9 ,1 1 7 ,

5 4 ,221n21; relation sh ip to race rela ­

1 2 1 -1 2 2 ,1 2 7 -1 2 8 ,1 2 9 ,1 5 6 -1 5 1 ,1 4 7 -

tions, 5 5 ,5 6 -4 0 ,4 1 ,4 2 ,4 5 -4 6 ; in n ate

1 4 8 ,2 1 5 n l; A m erican occu p ation o f

capacity o f w hites for, 59. See also For­

Santiago, 115,128; as in capable o f self-govern m en t, 1 2 5 ,1 5 5 ,1 5 4 ,1 5 6 -

eig n , th e D om estic novels, 4 ,1 9 ,2 6 ,4 5 -5 0 ,9 5 ,

1 5 8 .1 5 1 - 152; race relation s in , 128,

110; U nde Tom 's Cabin, 5 7 ,4 5 -4 4 ,4 7 -

254n25; and P latt A m en d m en t, 157

48; Liberia, 5 7 -4 0 ,4 5 ,4 8 ; The W ide

Culture and Anarchy, 14-15

W ide World, 4 5 ,4 4 -4 6 ; The Lamplighter,

Culture and Imperialism, 14-15

4 5 ,4 6 -4 7 ; The H idden H and, 4 5 ,4 8 -5 0

Cum m ins, M aria, The Lamplighter, 45, 46-47

Downes u Bidwell, 1 -1 2 ,1 5 ,2 0 ,2 2 ,9 4 ,

9 7 ,9 8

252 • Index D rin n on , R ich ard, 2 2 7 n l0

182; and M arxism , 184-185; an d m od ­

D u Bois, W . E. B., 171-212; on A m eri­

ern ist aesthetics, 185-186; as relia n t

can im perialism , 1 ,1 2 -1 3 ,2 1 -2 2 ,

o n b io lo g ic a l d efin itio n s o f race, 188;

1 7 3 -1 7 5 ,1 7 6 -1 7 8 ,1 8 0 -1 8 1 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 5 ,

o n w hiteness, 1 9 0 -1 9 4 ,1 9 8 ,244n35;

190-197,198-201, 2 1 2 ,243n26; “A

Black Reconstruction, 193,211-212,

H ym n to th e P e o p le ,” 1 ,1 2 ; on East

244n35; on lan gu age, 194; o n socialist

S t Lou is race riots, 1 ,1 8 9 ,1 9 0 ,1 9 4 ,

m ovem ents, 194; on B elgiu m , 195-

2 0 1 - 203; Darkwater, 1 2 ,2 2 ,1 7 3 -1 7 5 ,

196,209; o n ro le o f A frica n A m e ri­

1 8 0 -2 1 2 ,240n5,242n26,243n27; and

cans in A frica , 1 9 8 -1 9 9 ,2 0 6 ,244n44;

U n iversal Races C ongress o f 1911,12,

vs. W ilson , 198-201; attitudes tow ard

210; on glo b a l c o lo r lin e, 1 7 ,2 2 ,1 7 3 -

A frican s, 1 9 9 ,2 0 6 ,244n44; o n A frica n

1 7 4 .1 7 5 - 1 7 8 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 6 -1 8 7 ,1 9 6 -1 9 7 ,

A m erican w om en , 2 0 3 -2 0 6 ,244n48;

205,210-211; o n A m erican racism ,

Dark Princess, 2 1 0 ,240n5,244n44

1 7 ,1 7 2 -1 7 5 ,1 7 6 -1 7 8 ,1 7 9 -1 8 0 ,1 8 1 -

D unbar, Paul Lau ren ce, 209

1 8 3 ,1 8 5 ,1 8 8 -1 8 9 ,1 9 1 -1 9 3 ,1 9 5 -1 9 7 ,

Dusk o f D ow n, 1 7 2 ,1 8 4 -1 8 5 ,2 4 2 n l9

2 0 0 ,2 0 1 -2 0 6 ,2 0 7 -2 0 9 ,2 1 0 -2 1 2 , 240n 5,243n26,245n51; PanA frican ism o f, 2 1 -2 2 ,1 7 3 -1 7 4 ,1 7 6 , 1 7 8 -1 8 0 ,1 8 2 ,1 9 4 ,1 9 7 -2 0 1 ,243n26, 244n44; o n W orld W ar 1 ,2 2 ,171-173,

East S t L ou is, race riots in , 1 ,1 8 9 ,1 9 0 , 194,201-203 E dison film s, 1 4 7 -1 4 8 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 1 ,1 5 6 , 2S8n29

1 8 0 -1 8 2 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 7 ,1 9 2 ,1 9 5 -1 9 7 ,2 0 1 -

E m erson, R alph W ald o, 59

2 0 3 ,2 0 8 ,242n n l6,19,243n 27; on

Estrada Palm a, Tom âs, 117

p eace, 2 2 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 8 ,1 9 6 -1 9 7 ,1 9 9 ,

T h e E volu tion o f th e C ow -Puncher,”

2 0 2 - 2 0 3 ,2 0 5 ,2 1 0 -2 1 1 ; ‘T h e A frica n

119

R oots o f W ar," 1 7 1 -1 7 3 ,1 7 6 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 3 , 1 8 6 -1 8 7,196,197; and N A A C P, 172,

Fanon, Frantz, 108

173-174; articles in The Crisis, 172,

Fascism, 167,168-169

1 7 9 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 2 ,1 9 2 ,2 0 1 ,2 0 8 ; Dusk o f

F errer, A d a, 1 2 8 ,234n23

Daw n, 1 7 2 ,1 8 4 -1 8 5 ,2 4 2 n l9 ; on Birth

Film . Set C in em a

o f a Nation, 172-173; o n H a iti, 172-

F lorid a , an n exation o f, 4

1 7 3 .1 7 5 -

176,206; o n E u ropean c o lo ­ Follow ing the Equator, 5 2 -5 5 ,5 6 ,9 0

nialism , 172-174 ,1 8 0 -1 8 1 ,1 8 4 -1 8 5 ,

F ord , Paul L eicester, 230n28

1 8 6 -1 8 7 ,1 9 0 -1 9 8 ,2 0 4 ,2 0 6 ,2 0 7 ,2 0 9 ,

F o reign , the: bou n daries b etw een th e

2 1 0 -2 1 1 ,240n5,243n26,244n44; and

dom estic and, 1 -4 ,9 ,1 1 -1 2 ,1 3 -1 4 ,

A frica n D iaspora/B lack A tla n tic, 174,

1 5 ,1 8 -1 9 ,2 1 ,2 5 -2 6 ,2 7 ,2 8 -2 9 ,3 1 -

188; and A m erican excep tion alism ,

3 2 ,3 4 ,3 6 -4 0 ,4 1 -4 2 ,4 3 -4 7 ,5 0 ,5 2 ,

1 7 5 ,1 7 7 -1 7 8 ,1 9 8 -1 9 9 ,244n44; T h e

7 6 -7 7 ,1 0 6 ,1 2 5 ,1 4 7 ,1 5 4 ,1 5 5 ,1 5 8 -

Suppression o f th e A frica n Slave-trade

1 5 9 ,1 6 2 ,1 6 4 ,1 6 5 -1 6 7 ,1 6 9 -1 7 0 ,1 7 2 ,

to th e U n ited States o f Am erica,** 175-

1 7 3 ,1 7 4 -1 7 5 ,1 8 3 -1 8 4 ,1 8 9 ,1 9 1 ,1 9 6 -

176; T o th e N ation s o f th e W orld,**

1 9 7 ,2 0 3 ,2 0 4 -2 0 5 ,2 1 2 ,220n20,

176; and Pan-A frican C ongress o f

221n21; as racialized , 3 ,2 6 ,2 7 -2 8 ,3 5 ,

1900,176,178; The Souls o f Black Folk,

3 6 -4 0 ,4 1 ,4 2 ,4 5 -4 7 ,5 8 -6 0 ,7 6 -7 7 ,

1 7 6 ,1 7 8 ,1 8 3 -1 8 4 ,2 0 9 ; T h e P resen t

106,162; as th reat, 6 ,7 -9 ,1 1 -1 2 ,1 3 ,

O u tlo o k fo r th e D ark Races o f M an­

2 7 -2 8 ,3 2 -3 4 ,4 3 -4 4 ,4 5 -4 8 ,4 9 -5 0 ,

kind,** 176-177; and Pan-A frican C on ­

9 8 ,1 0 6 ,1 2 3 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 ,1 6 2 ,1 7 0 ,

gress o f 1 919,178-180,197; and im ­

221n21

p eria l cartography, 180-181,183,

F ou rteen th A m en d m en t, 83

193-194; “C lose Ranks,** 181,183,

France, 208

2 0 8 ,2 4 2 n l9 ; “R etu rn in g S old iers,”

Franklin, B en, 117

Index » 253 Freud, Sigm und, 223n7 Fuller, M elv ille W eston, 5

6 7 ,6 9 ; C hristian m issionaries in , 62, 6 4 ,6 5 ,6 6 ,6 7 , 72-73, 78-79; C aptain C o o k in , 6 4 ,6 8 ; G reat M ah ele in , 65;

G arvey, M arcus, 182,183

p olitics in , 6 5 -6 6 ,8 2 -8 5 ,8 6 -8 7 ; death

G erm any, 1 8 1 ,1 9 4 ,1 9 5 ,1 9 6 ,2 0 8

and fu n eral rites in , 6 6 ,6 8 -7 4 ; sexual­

G iddin gs, Franklin, 98

ity in , 6 6 -6 8 ,6 9 , 70, 71-72; w om en in ,

G ilroy, Paul, 174,188

66-68, 7 0 ,7 1 -7 2 ,1 0 7 ; tabu system in ,

G lob a liza tion , 15

6 7 ,6 8 ,7 0 ; th e hula in , 6 7 ,7 0 ,7 1 -7 2 ;

Godey’s Lady’s Book, 2 3 -2 5 ,2 8 ,3 4 , 35-36,

Princess V icto ria Kam am alu, 69-70;

4 1 -4 2 ,221n21

K am eham eha IV, 70; K am eham eha I,

G ôm ez, M axim o, 117

70, 74; K am eham eha V, 7 0 -7 1 ,8 4 -8 5 ;

G o m , E llio tt, 99

A n glica n C hurch in , 72-73; vs. th e

Graustark, 1 0 1 ,1 0 3 -1 0 4 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 1 -1 1 2 ,

A m erican South, 7 4 -8 0 ,8 1 ,8 3 -8 4 ,

119 G reat B ritain, Q u een V icto ria , 28-29 “T h e G reat N a tio n o f Futurity,** 30-31

8 6 -8 7 ,8 9 -9 0 ; as paradise, 80-81; im ­ p o rt o f C h in ese la b o r to, 81; P rin ce L ih o lih o A lexan d er, 84

The Great Train Bobbery, 154

Hay, Joh n , 97

G riffith , D . W ., 169; The Birth o f a Nation,

H earst, W illia m R an dolph , 9 4 ,1 0 9 ,1 3 0 -

1 8 ,2 1 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 1 -1 6 4 ,1 7 2 -1 7 3 ,2 0 8 ,

1 3 1 ,147-148,161; and Citizen Kane,

239n39

164-165

G riggs, Sutton, Im perium in Im perio, 123124,144

H eart o f Darkness, 1 0 2 ,1 6 5 ,1 6 7 ,228n21 The Helm et o f Navarre, 229n28

G uam , 2 ,4

The H idden H and, 4 3 ,4 8 -5 0

G u n n in g, Th om as, 149

H ietala, Th om as, 1 8 ,2 6 -2 7 H istorica l rom ances: and A m erican im ­

H a iti, 4 8 ,1 7 2 -1 7 3 ,1 7 5 -1 7 6 ,1 9 8 ,2 0 6

perialism , 2 0 ,9 3 -9 5 ,1 0 0 ,1 0 3 -1 0 5 ,

H a le, Sarah Josepha, 26, 2 8 ,3 4 -4 2 ,1 0 7 ;

1 0 6 ,1 0 8 ,1 0 9 -1 1 1 ,1 1 3 ,1 1 6 ,1 1 7 -1 1 8 ,

vs. B eecher, 34; and C ivil W ar, 3 4 ,3 5 -

1 2 0 ,1 5 5 ,1 9 9 ,231n48; A Connecticut

36; co lo n iza tio n o f A fric a by fo rm e r

Yankee in K in g A rth ur’s Court, 5 5 ,5 6 ,

slaves advocated by, 3 5 ,3 6 -4 0 ,4 1 ; and

8 7 ,8 8 ,1 0 4 ,226n7,228n21; Under the

T h an k sgivin g Day, 35-36; Northwood,

Red Robe, 93; To H a ve and To H old, 93,

36-37; Liberia, 3 7 -4 0 ,4 3 ,4 8 ; W oman’s

1 0 1 ,1 0 5 ,1 0 8 ,1 1 8 ; When Knighthood

Record, 39-41

H a ll, S. Stanley, 112 ,1 1 3 ,1 1 4

Was in Flower, 9 3 ,1 0 1 ,1 0 7 -1 0 8 , 111; Richard Carvel, 9 3 ,1 0 7 ,1 1 8 ,230n28;

H am p ton In stitu te, 8 8 ,8 9

M onsieur Beaucarre, 9 3 ,226n7, 229n28;

H ansen, M iriam , 159

and Spanish-Am erican W ar, 93-94,

Haraway, D on n a, 229n22

100; as n ostalgic/escapist, 9 4 -9 5 ,1 0 1 -

H ard t, M ich ael, 14,15

1 0 4 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 0 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 0 ,230n29; Sol­

H arlan , Joh n M arshall, 5 ,7 ,9 7

diers o f Fortune, 100-101,104-106,

H art, Jam es D ., 229n28

1 0 8 ,1 1 4 ,1 1 8 ,1 1 9 ; Graustark, 101,

H aw aii: H on olu lu , 1 ,5 4 ,6 4 , 73, 7 6 ,8 6 -

1 0 3 -1 0 4 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 1 -1 1 2 ,1 1 9 ; and th e

87; A m erican attitudes tow ard H awai-

W estern , 1 0 1 ,107,119-120; R econ ­

ians, 4 ,5 9 -6 0 ,6 3 -6 4 ,6 5 ,6 6 -6 8 ,6 9 ,

stru ction in , 1 0 1 ,1 2 1 -1 2 3 ,1 2 4 ,1 6 1 ,

7 0 ,7 1 -7 4 ,7 5 -7 8 ,8 0 -8 8 ,9 0 -9 1 ,1 0 7 ,

1 6 2 ,239n39; Via Cruris, 103, 111, 119,

118,1 6 0 ,1 7 7 ; A m erican co lo n iza tio n

229n28; H ugh Wynne, 1 03,118,119,

o f, 1 8 ,5 4 -5 5 ,5 8 ,6 1 -6 4 ,6 5 ,6 6 ,6 7 ,

230n28, 231n50; w om en in , 106-114,

6 9 ,7 5 , 7 7 -8 0 ,8 4 -8 5 ,9 1 ,9 6 ; sugar

158; m arriage in , 107-108, 111; Alice

plan tation s in , 1 9 ,5 5 ,6 1 ,6 5 ,6 8 , 77,

o f O ld Vincennes, 1 1 0 ,230n28; Janice

7 8 -8 0 ,8 9 ; diseases in , 5 4 -5 5 ,6 2 ,6 5 ,

M eridith, 1 1 0 ,230n28; Ben-H ur, 112,

254 • Index H istorical rom ances: (continued)

1 2 9 -1 3 0 ,1 3 3 ,1 3 4 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 1 -1 4 3 ,1 5 4 -

1 1 3 ,229n28; A m erican R evolu tion in ,

1 5 6 .1 5 8 -

117,118-119; The Leopard's Spots, 121-

2 2 7 n l0 ,2 3 8 n 3 1 ; d isem b od ied dis­

1 2 3 ,1 2 4 ,1 6 1 ,1 6 2 ,239n39; Im perium

cou rse o f, 8 ,2 0 ,9 6 -9 9 ,1 4 9 ,2 2 7 n ll;

inlm perio, 123-124,144 \Joan o f Arc,

226n7; The Tory Lover, 226n7; The

Voir

1 6 0 ,1 63-164,165-166,

relation sh ip to slavery, 9 -1 0 ,1 5 ,1 8 , 57, 78-79; and race relation s, 9 -10,

ley o f Decision, 226n7; YvemeUe, 226n7;

1 7 -1 8 ,1 9 ,2 0 -2 1 ,2 7 -2 8 ,1 1 8 ,1 2 1 -

The Adventures o f Fronds, 229n28; Arm s

1 2 5 ,1 2 8 -1 2 9 ,1 3 0 -1 4 5 ,1 5 1 -1 5 2 ,15S-

and the Woman, 229n28; Beverly o f

1 5 9 ,1 6 0 -1 6 1 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 7 2 -1 7 5 ,1 7 6 -

Graustark, 230n28; The Helm et o f

1 7 8 ,1 7 9 -1 8 0 ,1 8 1 -1 8 3 ,1 9 3 ,2 0 0 ,

Navarre, 229n28; The K in g's Jackal,

234n2S, 243n26; and N ative A m e ri­

229n28; The Prince o f India, 229n28;

cans, 1 0 ,1 5 ,1 7 -1 8 ,2 0 ,1 2 0 ,1 4 1 ; rela ­

Princess Aline, 229n28; The Puppet

tion sh ip to anarchy, 1 2 -1 5 ,2 6 ,2 7 -2 8 ,

Clown, 229n28; Quo Vadis, 229n28;

2 8 ,5 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 7 0 ,1 7 2 -1 7 3 ,1 8 5 ,1 9 8 -

Rulers o f Kings, 230nn28,30

199,211-212; and R oosevelt, 13,15,

H istory o f the H aw aiian or Sandwich Is­ lands, 6 2 ,6 9 ,7 4

1 5 6 ,1 5 9 ,238n31; relation sh ip to A m erican excep tion alism , 1 4 -1 6 ,1 7 ,

H ob son , J. A ., 1 1 3 ,1 14-115,149

1 7 4 ,1 7 5 ,1 9 8 -1 9 9 ,244n44; and W il­

H ogan son , K ristin, 238n31

son, 15; as M an ifest Destiny, 16,18,

H ollid ay, Presley, 1 3 5 ,1 3 9 -1 4 0 ,235n30

2 4 -2 5 ,2 6 ,2 7 -4 0 ,3 0 -3 1 ,3 4 ,4 1 -4 2 ,

H o p e , A nthony, 101

4 3 .4 4 - 4 5 ,4 6 -5 0 ,9 4 ,1 7 6 ; and Tw ain,

H orsm an, R egin ald , 39

1 8 ,1 9 -2 0 ,5 2 ,5 6 -5 7 ,6 1 -6 2 ,6 6 -6 7 ,

H ou ston , Sam , 27

6 9 ,8 0 ,8 1 ,8 5 -8 6 ,8 8 ,8 9 -9 0 ,9 1 ,9 2 ,

H o w elb , W illia m D ean, 8 9 ,9 3 ; on

9 4 ,9 5 ,9 7 ,9 8 -9 9 ,1 7 4 ; and nostal­

Tw ain, 51; on h istorical rom ances,

gia, 2 0 ,5 6 -5 7 ,9 4 ,9 8 -9 9 ,1 4 1 ,1 7 0 ,

1 0 0 ,1 0 1 ,1 0 3 ,1 1 0

228nn21,22; and h istorical rom ances,

H ugh W ynne: Free Quaker, 1 03,118,119,

230n28, 231n50

2 0 ,9 3 -9 5 ,1 0 0 ,1 0 3 -1 0 5 ,1 0 6 ,1 0 8 , 1 0 9 -1 1 1 ,1 1 3 ,1 1 6 ,1 1 7 -1 1 8 ,1 2 0 ,1 5 5 ,

“A H ym n to th e P e o p le ,” 1 ,1 2

1 9 9 ,231n48; as spectacle, 2 0 ,9 5 ,9 9 ,

Im m igra tion , 8 ,1 0 ,1 5 ,9 8 ,1 3 9 ,1 6 3 ,

1 5 6 .1 5 9 -

1 1 1 -1 1 2 ,1 1 9 -1 2 0 ,12& -130,149,154, 1 6 4 ,2 0 2 ,239n44 Im p erialism , A m erican : relation sh ip to

1 6 0 ,1 6 9 ,232n55; w om en as

spectators o f, 2 0 ,9 5 ,9 9 ,1 1 1 -1 1 5 , 119-120,159-160; relation sh ip to

n ation al identity, 1 ,4 -9 ,1 1 -1 2 ,1 6 ,2 2 ,

cu lt o f dom esticity, 2 4 -2 5 ,2 6 ,2 7 -4 2 ,

27-28, 3 0 -3 1 ,5 7 ,5 9 -6 0 ,9 1 ,9 2 ,9 5 -

4 3 .4 4 -

9 6 ,9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 6 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 9 -1 4 0 ,1 4 1 -

1 1 3 ,1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 6 0 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,

4 5 ,4 6 -5 0 ,5 1 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 0 -1 1 1 ,

1 4 4 ,1 5 8 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 8 1 ,2 1 2 ,2 2 0 n l6 ;

1 6 5 -1 6 6 ,2 2 0 n l6 ; as m arital u n ion ,

D u Bois on , 1 ,1 2 -1 3 ,2 1 -2 2 ,1 7 3 -1 7 5 ,

27-28; and close o f th e fro n tier, 94,

1 7 6 -1 7 8 ,1 8 0 -1 8 1 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 5 ,1 9 0 -1 9 7 ,

9 6 ,9 9 ,1 0 0 ,1 0 1 -1 0 3 ,1 1 6 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 0 ,

1 9 8 -2 0 1 ,2 1 2 ,243n26; in d n em a , 1,

176; and jin g o ism , 113,114-115,

1 7 ,2 1 ,1 4 6 -1 6 2 ,1 6 3 -1 7 0 ,1 8 6 ; and

149,154; and A m erican m obility, 149-

Downes u BidweU, 1 -1 2 ,1 3 ,2 0 ,2 2 ,9 4 ,

150,151-152. See also Cuba; H aw aii;

9 7 ,9 8 ; vs. E u ropean colon ialism , 7,

P h ilip p in es; P u erto R ico ; Spanish-

1 3 ,1 4 -1 6 ,3 7 -3 8 ,6 3 -6 4 ,8 4 ,9 2 ,9 6 , 9 7 ,1 1 8 ,1 6 8 ,1 7 4 ,1 9 0 -1 9 7 ,1 9 8 -1 9 9 , 211-212; as m ale sph ere, 8 ,1 7 ,1 8 -1 9 ,

A m erican W ar Im p erialism , B ritish, 1 4 -1 5 ,2 8 -2 9 ,3 7 , 6 3 -6 4 ,8 4 ,1 8 1 ; and K ip lin g, 12-13,

2 0 ,2 5 ,2 8 -2 9 ,3 4 -3 5 ,4 7 -4 8 ,4 8 -4 9 ,

204,206; B o er W ar, 151,161. See also

5 0 ,5 1 ,6 3 -6 4 ,9 2 -9 3 ,9 4 -1 0 0 ,1 0 5 -

C olon ialism , E u ropean

1 0 6 ,1 1 3 -1 1 5 ,1 1 6 -1 1 7 ,1 2 0 ,1 2 2 -1 2 3 ,

Im perialism , Fren ch , 6 3 -6 4 ,8 4 ,1 7 9 ,

Index • 255 181,199. t e also C olon ialism , E u ro­

Lew is, D avid L everin g, 181,199

pean

Liberia, 3 7 -4 0 ,4 3 ,4 8

Im p erialism , G erm an , 181. t e also C o lo ­ nialism , E u ropean

Life o f Washington (W eem s), 44

LU iuokalani, Q u een , 54

Im p erialist nostalgia, 5 6 -5 7 ,9 8 -9 9

L in co ln , A braham , 35,162

Im perium m Im perio: A Study o f the Negro

Liss, Julia, 2 4 2 n l6

Problem, 123-124,144 The Innocents Abroad, 5 7 ,6 2

Loughborough u Blake, 5

Lou isian a Purchase, 4

Insular Cases, 3

Love and War, 156

Isolation ism , 167 ,1 6 9 ,1 7 0

L u ce, H en ry, T h e A m erican C en tu ry,"

It 9 s A ll True, 169

1 6 ,2 1 ,1 6 7 -1 6 9 ,1 7 0 ,1 9 8

Ivanhoe, 93

L u m ière film s, 151

Jam eson, F red ric, 185

M aine, 9 4 ,1 2 3 -1 2 4 ,1 2 6 ,1 4 8 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 1 ,

Janice M eridith, 1 1 0 ,230n28

Jarves, Jam es, H istory o f the H aw aiian or Sandwich Islands, 6 2 ,6 9 ,7 4

J effo rd s, Susan, 232n55

153,159 M ajor, C harles, When Knighthood Was in Flower, 9 3 ,1 0 1 ,1 0 7 -1 0 8 , 111

M an ifest Destiny, 1 8 -1 9 ,9 4 ,1 7 6 ; and

J eh len , M yra, 96

O 'S u lliva n , 1 6 ,3 0 -3 1 ; relation sh ip to

Jew ett, Sarah O rn e, 226n7

cu lt o f dom esticity, 2 4 -2 5 ,2 6 ,2 7 -4 0 ,

Jim C row legisla tion , 9 ,1 7 ,1 8 ,2 1 ,1 2 3 ,

4 1 -4 2 ,4 3 ,4 4 -4 5 ,4 6 -5 0 ; as m ale

1 2 5 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 ,1 4 0 -1 4 1 ,1 4 5 ,1 7 3 ,2 0 7 208

sph ere, 2 4 -2 5 ,3 4 . See also Im p eria l­ ism , A m erican

Jin goism , 1 1 3 ,1 1 4 -1 1 5 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 4

M ann, H ora ce, 28

Joan o f Arc, 226n7

M arriage: co lo n iza tio n as, 27-28; in d o ­

Johnson, A ndrew , 83 Johnston, M ary, To H a ve and To H old, 93, 1 0 1 ,1 0 5 ,1 0 8 ,1 1 8 Judson, A n n , 40

m estic novels, 45-46; in h istorical ro ­ m ances, 107-108, 111 M arshall, Joh n , 5 ,6 M asculinity: A m erican im perialism as as­ sertion o f, 8 ,1 7 ,1 8 -1 9 ,2 0 ,2 5 ,2 8 -2 9 ,

Kam am alu, Princess V icto ria , 69-70

3 4 -3 5 ,4 7 -4 8 ,4 8 -4 9 ,5 0 ,5 1 ,6 3 -6 4 ,

K am eham eha 1 ,7 0 ,7 4

9 2 -9 3 ,9 4 -1 0 0 ,1 0 5 -1 0 6 ,1 1 3 -1 1 5 ,

K am eham eha IV , 70

1 1 6 -1 1 7 ,1 2 0 ,1 2 2 -1 2 3 ,1 2 9 -1 3 0 ,1 3 3 ,

K am eham eha V, 7 0 -7 1 ,8 4 -8 5

1 3 4 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 1 -1 4 3 ,1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 6 0 ,

Käm m en, M ich ael, 117,118

1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 6 5 -1 6 6 ,22 7 n l0 ,2 3 8 n 3 1 ;

The K in g's Jackal, 229n28

th e m ale body, 8 ,2 0 ,9 4 ,9 5 -9 9 ,1 2 0 ,

K ip lin g, Rudyard, 9 0 ,2 0 4 ; “R eces­ sion a l," 1 2 -13,210; T h e W h ite M an's B u rd en ," 1 3 ,2 0 6 ,2 0 9 K n igh t, G ran t C ., 229n28 K n op er, R an dall, 59

1 2 2 -1 2 3 ,1 2 9 -1 3 0 ,1 3 4 ,1 4 1 ,1 4 2 -1 4 3 ; as spectacle, 2 0 ,9 5 ,9 9 ,1 1 1 -1 1 2 ,1 1 9 1 2 0 ,1 2 9 -1 3 0 ,1 3 1 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 4 ,1 6 9 , 232n55; threats to, 9 2 -9 3 ,9 5 ,9 9 ,1 0 6 , 110; relation sh ip to nationalism , 9 5 9 9 ,1 0 5 -1 0 6 ,1 4 1

The Lady o f Shanghai, 169

M cC u tch eon , G e o rg e B a m Graustark,

The Lamplighter, 4 3 ,4 6 -4 7

1 0 1 ,1 0 3 -1 0 4 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 1 -1 1 2 ,1 1 9 ;

L ea gu e o f N ation s, 1 5 ,1 8 2 ,2 0 0

Beverly o f Graustark, 230n28

Lears, Jackson, 1 0 6 ,230n29 The Leopard's Spots: A Romance o f the W rite

M cG rath, H a ro ld , 229n28 M cK inley, W illia m , 11,110

M a n 's Burden, 1 2 1 -1 2 3 ,1 2 4 ,1 6 1 ,1 6 2 ,

M cleo d , G en . H ., 24

239n39

M éliès, G eorges, 151

256 • Index M elville, H erm an , M oby Dick, 86

N on w h ites, w h ite p ercep tion s o f, 14,27,

M em m i, A lb e rt, 116

4 1 ,1 3 0 -1 4 5 ,1 5 6 ; as in capable o f self-

M exican -A m erican W ar, 1 ,1 8 ,1 9 ,2 3 -2 5 ,

govern m en t, 8 ,1 0 , 7 5 ,8 2 -8 4 ,8 5 ,9 0 ,

26-28, 75,163; T rea ty o f G uadalupe H id a lg o , 4; in A ction , 4 3 ,4 8 -5 0 M ich eau x, Oscar, W ithin O u r Gates, 21, 1 4 7 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 6 9 ,1 8 1 ,239n44 M itch ell, L e e , 119 M itch ell, S. W eir: H ugh Wynne, 103,118, 1 1 9 ,230n28, 231n50; The Adventures o f Francis, 229n28 M oby Dick, 86

1 0 9 -1 1 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 2 8 -1 2 9 ,1 3 3 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 6 1 3 8 ,1 4 5 ,1 5 1 ,1 7 3 ,234n23; as anar­ ch ic, 1 2 -1 3 ,2 7 ; as p o ten tia l con verts to C hristianity, 3 1 -3 2 ,3 7 ,3 8 -4 1 ,6 2 , 6 4 ,6 5 ,6 6 ,6 7 ,7 2 -7 3 ,7 9 ; as ch ild lik e, 32, 7 5 ,8 2 ; as fre e laborers, 7 8 -8 0 ,8 2 , 91; as lazy, 7 9 -8 0 ,8 1 -8 2 ,8 9 -9 0 ,1 3 2 , 151-152. See also A frica n A m erican s, w h ite attitudes tow ard; Cuba, A m eri­

M onsieur Beaucam , 9 3 ,226n7,229n28

can attitudes tow ard Cubans; H aw aii,

M orrison , T o n i, 48 ,1 9 4

A m erican attitudes tow ard

M other's M agazine, 221n21

H aiw aiians; P h ilip p in es, A m erican at­

M o tio n pictures. See C in em a

titu des tow ard F ilip in os; R ace rela ­

M ott, Frank Lu ther, 229n28

tions; W hiteness

M ulvey, Laura, 167

N o rris, Frank, 9 8 ,1 0 2 ,1 0 4 ,226n7

Musser, C harles, 153

N orth w est O rd in a n ce o f 1787,4

N A A C P. See N a tion a l A ssociation fo r th e

N ostalgia, 2 0 ,5 0 -5 7 ,9 4 ,9 0 -9 9 ,1 4 1 ,

Northwood, 36-37

A d van cem en t o f C o lo re d P e o p le

1 7 0 ,228nn21,22

N a rem o re, Jam es, 165 N ash, R od erick , 228n22

Olivette, 109

N a tion a l A ssociation fo r th e A dvan ce­

O reg o n , 26-27

m en t o f C o lo re d P e o p le (N A A C P ), 172,173-174 N a tion a l identity, A m erican : rela tion ­

O 'S u llivan , Joh n : and M an ifest Destiny, 1 6 ,3 0 -3 1 ; Democratic Review, 27-28; T h e G reat N a tio n o f Futurity," 30-31

ship to A m erican im perialism , 1 ,4 -9 , 1 1 -1 2 ,1 6 , 2 2 ,2 7 -2 8 ,3 0 -3 1 ,5 7 ,5 9 -

Packet, A lic e Payn, 229n28

6 0 ,9 1 ,9 2 ,9 5 -9 6 ,9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 6 ,1 3 4 ,

Pan-A frican C o n feren ce o f 1900,176

1 3 9 -1 4 0 ,1 4 1 -1 4 4 ,1 5 8 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 8 1 ,

Pan-A frican C ongress o f 1919,178

2 1 2 ,2 2 0 n l6 ; o f authorship, 17,19,

Persh in g, Joh n J., 141-142

51-52; as racialized , 1 9 ,5 9 -6 0 ,9 8 ,

P h ilip p in es, 1 ,4 ,1 8 ,1 5 3 ; w ar against

1 3 9 -1 4 0 ,1 4 1 -1 4 4 ,1 5 8 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ; and cin em a, 147,158 N a tive A m erican s, 3 5 ,5 0 ,8 9 ; and A m er­

U n ited States, 2 ,8 ,2 0 ,1 1 0 ,1 1 5 ,1 1 7 1 1 8 ,1 3 8 ,1 4 5 ,1 4 8 ,1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 , 2 1 5 n l, 236n46,238n31; co lo n iza tio n

ican Im p erialism , 1 0 ,1 5 ,1 7 -1 8 ,2 0 ,

by U n ited States, 1 1 ,1 3 ,2 0 ,5 2 ,9 2 -9 3 ,

120,141; wars against, 1 5 ,1 7 -1 8 ,1 9 ,

9 4 ,9 5 ,9 6 ,1 0 8 ,1 0 9 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 ,1 4 5 ,

2 0 ,2 6 -2 7 ,4 8 ,9 5 ,1 1 8 ,1 4 1

1 5 4 -1 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 ,236n2; A m erican

N e g ri, A n to n io , 14,15

attitudes tow ard, 2 0 ,8 9 ,1 0 9 -1 1 0 ,1 1 5 ,

N ew M ex ico , 4 ,2 6 -2 7

1 1 7 -1 1 8 ,1 2 0 ,1 2 3 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 ,1 5 5 ,1 5 6 ,

N ew spapers, 113-114,151; accounts o f Spanish-Am erican W ar in , 2 0 -2 1 ,9 4 ,

1 5 8-159,160,177; in cin em a, 1541 5 6 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 ,1 6 1 ,236n2

1 1 5 ,1 2 4 -1 2 5 ,1 2 8 -1 3 5 ,1 3 6 ,1 3 7 ,1 4 0 ,

P la tt A m en d m en t, 137

147-148 ,1 5 2 ,1 6 4 -1 6 5 ; accounts o f

Plessy vs. Ferguson, 9

P h ilip p in e-A m erican w ar in , 155

Pocahontas, 1 0 8 ,1 5 6 ,1 5 8 ,230n38

New York Herald, 60

P olk , Jam es K ., 27

Index • 257 P orter, E dw in, The Great Than Bobbery, 154 Posn ock, Ross, 240n5

A frica n A m erican s du rin g, 9, 79-80, 8 2 ,8 3 -8 4 ,8 6 ,8 9 -9 0 ,1 2 1 -1 2 3 ,1 7 2 , 209; in h istorical rom ances, 1 0 1 ,1 2 1 -

Posse, 236n2

1 2 3 ,1 2 4 ,1 6 1 ,1 6 2 ,239n39; and Birth

T h e P resen t O u d o o k fo r th e D ark

o f a Nation, 1 6 1 ,1 6 2 ,239n39; D u B ois

Races o f M an kin d,” 176-177 The Prince o f India, 229n28

o n , 1 7 2 ,1 7 6 ,1 7 8 ,2 1 0 -2 1 2 . See also C ivil W ar, Slavery

Prince Otto, 101

R em in gton , F red erick , 130,165

Princess Ahne, 229n28

R enan, E rnest, 57

Prisoner o f Zenda, 101

Richard Carvel, 9 3 ,1 0 7 ,1 1 8 ,2S0n28

Pu d d ’nhead W tlson, S8

The R ising Tide o f Color, 183

P u erto R ico , 8 9,153; and Doumes u

R obin son , C ed ric J., 244n44

BidweU, 1-12; as u n in corp orated terri­

tory, 2 -3 ,5 -8 ,9 -1 2 ,2 2 ,9 6 ; and Insttr

R o ed iger, D avid, Wages o f Whiteness, 193, 244n35

lo t Cases, 3; as th reat to U .S. n ation al

R o gin , M ich ael, 1 4 7 ,2 2 7 n l0 ,2 3 9 n 4 4

iden tity, 6 ,7 -9 ,1 1 -1 2 ,1 3 ,1 2 3 ; A m eri­

R om ero , L o ra , 16

can attitu des tow ard P u erto Ricans, 6,

R oosevelt, T h e o d o re : and im perialism ,

7 -9 ,1 1 -1 2 ,1 3 ,1 2 3 ,1 3 8 ,1 6 0 ,1 7 7

1 3 ,1 5 ,1 5 6 ,1 5 9 ,238n31; attitudes to ­

P u litzer, Joseph , 9 4 ,1 3 0 -1 3 1 ,1 4 7

w ard Spaniards, 20,125; The Rough

The Puppet Clown, 229n28

Riders, 2 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 2 6 ,1 3 0 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 5 -

1 3 6 ,1 3 8 ,1 3 9 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 1 ,1 4 3 ,1 4 4 ,1 4 5 , Q uo Vadis, 229n28

1 5 8 ,235n30; attitudes tow ard A frica n A m erican soldiers, 2 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 2 6 -1 2 8 ,

R ace relation s: and A m erican im p eria l­ ism , 9 -1 0 ,1 7 -1 8 ,1 9 ,2 0 -2 1 ,2 7 -2 8 ,

1 3 3 -1 3 6 ,1 3 8 -1 4 2 ,1 4 3 ,1 4 4 ,1 4 5 , 235n30; attitudes tow ard Cubans, 20,

1 1 8 ,1 2 1 -1 2 5 ,1 2 8 -1 2 9 ,1 3 0 -1 4 5 ,1 5 1 -

1 2 5 ,1 3 0 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 8 ; o n b o d ily vigor, 95,

1 5 2 ,1 5 8 -1 5 9 ,1 6 0 -1 6 1 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 7 2 -

9 9 ,1 1 0 ; T h e Strenuous L ife ,” 95,

1 7 5 ,1 7 6 -1 7 8 ,1 7 9 -1 8 0 ,1 8 1 -1 8 3 ,1 9 3 ,

1 1 0 ,238n31; th eatricality o f, 9 9 ,1 1 6 -

2 0 0 ,234n23,243n26; D u B ois on , 17,

1 1 7 ,228n22; on w om en , 107,110,

2 2 ,1 7 2 -1 7 5 ,1 7 5 -1 7 8 ,1 7 9 -1 8 0 ,1 8 1 -

111,159

1 8 3 ,1 8 5 ,1 8 6 -1 8 7 ,1 8 8 -1 8 9 ,1 9 1 -1 9 3 ,

R osaldo, R en ato, 56-57

1 9 5 -1 9 7 ,2 0 0 ,2 0 1 -2 0 6 ,2 0 7 -2 0 9 ,2 1 0 -

R osen b erg, Em ily, 228n22

2 1 2 ,240n5,243n26,245n51; and

Roughing It, 55, 74-75, 75-77

Tw ain , 1 8 ,1 9 ,5 2 ,5 7 ,5 9 -6 0 ,6 3 -6 5 ,

The Rough Riders (film ), 236n2

7 5 ,7 6 ,7 7 -7 8 ,8 1 ,8 2 -8 6 ,8 8 -9 0 ,9 1 ;

The Rough Riders (R o o sevelt a ccou n t),

relation sh ip to dom esticity, 3 5 ,3 6 -4 0 ,

2 0 ,1 2 5 ,1 2 6 ,1 3 0 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 5 -1 3 6 ,1 3 8 ,

4 1 ,4 2 ,4 5 -4 6 ; and Spanish-Am erican

1 3 9 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 1 ,1 4 3 ,1 4 4 ,1 4 5 ,1 5 8 ,

W ar, 121-125 ,1 2 8 -1 2 9 ,1 3 0 -1 4 5 ,

235n30

1 5 1 -1 5 2 ,1 6 1 ,234n23; in Cuba, 128,

R ow e, Joh n C arlos, 243n26

234n23; and cin em a, 239n44. See also

Rulers o f Kings, 230nn28,38

N on w h ites, w h ite p ercep tion s o f;

R u nkle, B ertha, 229n28

W h iteness

Ryan, M ary, 29

R agsdale, B ill, 8 6 -8 8 ,9 0

Ryan, Susan, 38

Ram persad, A rn o ld , 243n26 Ray, Stannard Baker, 80-81

Sacramento Union, 5 5 ,6 1 -6 2

The Real Glory, 236n2

Said, Edw ard, 185; Culture and Im perial­

“R ecession al,” 12 -1 3 ,2 1 0 R econ stru ction , 1 8 ,7 4 -8 0 ,8 8 -9 0 ,1 4 1 ;

ism, 14-15

Sam oa, 4

258 • Index Sanchez-Eppler, K aren, 32

1 2 8 -1 3 5 ,1 3 7 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 7 -1 4 8 ,1 5 2 ,1 6 4 -

San Juan H ill, battle o f: A frica n A m e ri­

165; b attle o f San Juan H ill, 20-21,

can troop s at, 2 0 -2 1 ,1 2 4 -1 2 5 ,1 2 6 -

1 1 6 -1 1 7 ,1 2 4 -1 3 0 ,1 3 1 -1 4 5 ,1 6 3 ,

1 2 8 ,1 3 3 -1 4 5 ,1 6 3 ,235n30; R oosevelt

235n30; in cin em a, 2 1 ,1 4 6 -1 6 2 ,1 6 3 -

at, 116-117 ,1 2 5 -1 2 8 ,1 3 3 -1 3 6 , IS O -

1 6 5 ,1 6 6 ,1 6 7 ,236n2,237n8; and h i*

142, 158,163; new spapers accounts

to rica l rom ances, 9 3 -9 4 ,1 0 0 ; and th e

o f, 1 2 4 -1 2 5 ,1 2 8 -1 2 9 ,1 3 1 -1 3 5 ,1 3 6 ,

M aine, 9 4 ,1 2 3 -1 2 4 ,1 2 6 ,1 4 8 ,1 4 9 ,

140; as icon , 125-126.

afro Spanish-

A m erican W ar

1 5 1 ,153,157; occu p ation o f Santiago d u rin g, 115,128; occu p ation o f M a­

Scarry, E lain e, 9 7 ,1 2 9

n ila du rin g, 115-116,153-154; and

Schurm an C om m ission o f 1899,108,

race relation s, 121-125,128-129,

158 Scott, S ir W alter, Ivanhoe, 9 3 ,230n29 S egregation , racial, 9 ,1 7 ,1 8 ,2 1 ,1 2 3 ,

1 3 0 -1 4 5 ,1 5 1 -1 5 2 ,1 6 1 ,234n23. See also Cuba; Im p erialism , A m erican ;

P h ilip p in es; P u erto R ico

1 2 5 ,1 3 7 ,1 3 8 ,1 4 0 -1 4 1 ,1 4 5 ,1 7 3 ,2 0 7 -

Staley, Th om as N ., B ishop, 72-73

208. See also R ace relation s

Stanley, H e n ry M o rto n , 6 0 -6 1 ,9 0

Shad, M ary, 245n48

Stevenson, R o b ert Lew is, 101

Shohat, E lla, 150

S till, M ary, 245n48

Shooting Captured Insurgents, 151-152

S toddard, L o th ro p , The R ising Tide o f

Sien kiew icz, H ., 229n28

Color, 183

Silber, N in a, 121

Stoler, A n n , 14,32

Sklar, K athryn Kish, 220n l6,221n 21

Stow e, H a rrie t B eech er, 31-32; Uncle

Slavery: expan sion o f, 4 ,1 9 ,2 3 , 27,

Tom ’s Cabin, 3 7 ,4 3 -4 4 ,4 7 -4 8

48; relation sh ip to im perialism , 9 -

T h e Strenuous L ife ," 9 5 ,1 1 0 ,238n31

1 0 ,1 8 ,5 7 , 78-79; and Tw ain , 1 8 ,5 1 -

S tron g, R ev.Josiah, 1 0 2 -103,106,113,

5 2 ,5 7 ,7 5 ,7 6 ,7 7 ,8 1 ,8 5 -8 6 ,8 8 ,9 0 ,

160

91; and A frica n A m erican co lo n iza ­

Sundquist, E ric, 1 9 7 ,240n5,243nn26,27

tio n o f A frica , 3 5 ,3 6 -4 0 ,4 1 ,4 8 ,1 6 2 ;

T h e Suppression o f th e A frica n Slave-

A frica n slave trade, 175-176. See also

trade to th e U n ited States o f A m er­

A frica n A m erican s; C ivil W ar; R econ ­

ica ," 175-176

stru ction

S u prem e C o u rt o f th e U n ited States:

Slotkin , R ich ard, 2 2 7 n l0

Doumes u Bidwell, 1 -1 2 ,1 3 ,2 0 ,2 2 ,9 4 ,

Sm ith, A lb e rt E., 152

9 7 ,9 8 ; Justice W h ite, 2 -3 ,4 ,6 ,7 - 8 ,9 ,

Sm ith, C a p t Joh n , 156

10-11; C h ie f Justice Fuller, 5;

Soldiers o f Fortune, 100-101,104-106,

Loughborough u Blake, 5; C h ie f Justice

1 0 8 ,1 1 4 ,1 1 8 ,1 1 9 The Souls o f Black Folk, 1 7 6 ,178,183-184,

209 Southw orth, E. D. E. N ., The H idden

M arshall, 5 ,6 ; Justice B row n, 5 ,6 ; Jus­ tice H arlan , 5, 7 ,9 7 ; Plessy u Ferguson, 9; Cherokee Nation u State o f Georgia, 10, 27

H and, 4 3 ,4 8 -5 0

Spanish-Am erican W ar, 2 ,1 0 9 ,1 2 0 ,

Takaki, R on ald , 2 2 7 n l0

2 1 5 n l; relation sh ip to C ivil W ar, 8 -9 ,

Tam m any H a ll, 139

2 0 ,1 2 1 -1 2 3 ,1 4 1 -1 4 2 ,1 4 5 ,1 6 2 -1 6 3 ;

T ark in gton , B ooth , M onsieur Beaucaire,

sign ifican ce o f, 17; relation sh ip to In ­

9 3 ,226n7,229n28

dian wars, 1 7 -1 8 ,2 0 ,1 2 0 ,1 4 1 ; A frica n

Taylor, Zachary, 2 3 ,2 7

A m erican sold iers d u rin g, 1 8 ,2 0 -2 1 ,

Texas, 2 3 -2 5 ,2 6 -2 7 ,2 7 -2 8

1 2 4 -1 2 5 ,1 2 6 -1 2 8 ,1 3 3 -1 4 5 ,1 5 2 ,1 6 1 ,

T h an k sgivin g Day, 35-36

1 63,181,209, 235n30,236n2; newspa­

T h om p son , M au rice, 9 7 ,1 0 0 ; A lice o f O ld

p e r accounts o f, 2 0 -2 1 ,9 4 ,1 2 4 -1 2 5 ,

Vincennes, 1 1 0 ,230n28

Index * 259 T o cq u eville, A lex is d e, S2-3S, 34

72; o n H aw aiian w om en , 6 6 -6 8 ,7 0 ,

To H oue and T oH old, 9 3 ,1 0 1 ,1 0 5 ,1 0 8 ,

7 1 -7 2 ,1 0 7 ; and th e H aw aiian hula,

118

6 7 ,7 0 ,7 1 -7 2 ; on im p o rt o f C h in ese

Tom pkins, Jane, 44

la b o r to H aw aii, 81; o n H aw aiian p o li­

T o d ie N ation s o f th e W o rld ," 176

tics, 8 2 -8 5 ,8 6 -8 7 ; on Ragsdale, 8 6 -

T o th e Person S ittin g in D arkness," 92

8 8 ,9 0 ; Pu d d ’nhead W ilson, 88; T o the

The Tory Lover, 226n7

Person S ittin g in D arkness," 92; rela­

Touch o f E vil, 169

tion sh ip w ith A n son B u rlin gam e,

Toussaint L ’ O u vertu re, 175-176

224n21; Joan o f Arc, 226n7

Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1 ,1 6 ,2 6 ,

2 8 -3 4 ,2 2 0 n l6 T reaty o f G u adalupe H id a lg o , 1 ,4 T ru th , S ojou rn er, 245n48

Uncle Tom 's Cabin (61m ), 154 U nde Tom 's Cabin (n o v e l), 3 7 ,4 3 -4 4 ,4 7 -

48

Tu bm an, H a rriet, 245n48

Under the Red Robe, 93

Turkey, 42 ,1 9 6

U n ited States. See Im p erialism , A m eri­

T u rn er, F red erick Jackson, 9 5 ,9 6 ,1 0 2 , 138-139 Tw ain , M ark: and H aw aii, 1 ,1 8 ,1 9 ,5 2 -

can; N a tion a l identity, A m erican U n iversal Races C ongress o f 1911,12,

210

9 1 ,1 1 8 ; and race relation s, 1 8 ,1 9 ,5 2 , 5 7 ,5 9 -6 0 ,6 3 -6 5 ,7 5 ,7 6 ,7 7 -7 8 ,8 1 ,

The Valley o f Decision, 226n7

8 2 -8 6 ,8 8 -9 0 ,9 1 ; and A m erican im p e­

Van P eeb les, M ario, 236n2

rialism , 1 8 ,1 9 -2 0 ,5 2 ,5 6 -5 7 ,6 1 -6 2 ,

V eb len , T h orstein , 112, U S

6 6 -6 7 ,6 9 ,8 0 ,8 1 ,8 5 -8 6 ,8 8 ,8 9 -9 0 ,

Via Cruds, 103, 111, 1 1 9 ,229n28

9 1 ,9 2 ,9 4 ,9 5 ,9 7 ,9 8 -9 9 ,1 7 4 ; and

V icto ria , Q u een , 28-29

slavery, 1 8 ,5 1 -5 2 ,5 7 , 7 5 ,7 6 ,7 7 ,8 1 ,

V ietn am W ar, 232n55

8 5 -8 6 ,8 8 ,9 0 ,9 1 ; as qu intessential

The Virginian, 1 0 1 ,1 0 7 ,1 1 9 ,1 2 0

A m erican author, 1 9 ,5 1 -5 2 ; The A d ­

V irilio , Paul, 149,150-151

ventures o f Huckleberry F inn, 5 1 ,5 5 ,7 8 ,

8 6 ,8 7 ,8 8 ; and th e South, 5 1 -5 2 ,5 6 ,

Wages o f Whiteness, 193

7 4 -8 0 ,8 2 ,8 3 -8 4 ,8 6 ,8 8 -9 0 ; and C ivil

W allace, Lew : Ben-H ur, 1 1 2 ,1 1 3 ,229n28;

W ar, 5 1 -5 2 ,5 6 ,7 5 -7 7 ; and E u rope,

The Prince o f India, 229n28

52; and N ea r East, 5 2 ,5 7 ; on annex­

W ar Correspondents, 151

ation o f P h ilip p in es, 5 2 ,9 2 ,9 4 ,9 5 ,9 7 ;

W ard, A rtem u s, 5 8 ,5 9

Follow ing the Equator, 5 2 -5 5 ,5 6 ,9 0 ; A

W ar Extra, 151,152

Connecticut Yankee in K in g A rth ur's

W arner, Susan, The W ide W ide World, 43,

Court, 5 5 ,5 6 ,8 7 ,8 8 ,1 0 4 ,226n7,

44-46

228n21; lectu re tours o f, 5 5 ,5 7 -6 1 ,

W ash in gton , B o o k er T ., 1 4 0 ,235n30

62, 67; and Sacramento Union, 5 5 ,6 1 -

W ashington, G eo rg e, 117,118

62; Roughing It, 55, 7 4 -7 5 ,7 5 -7 7 ;

W eem s, Parson, L ife o f Washington, 44

"Sandw ich Islands N o v e l," 5 6 ,8 7 -8 9 ,

W elles, O rson : Citizen Kane, 4 ,1 6 ,2 1 ,

90; The Innocents Abroad, 5 7 ,6 2 ; atti­

1 4 6 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 4 -1 7 0 ,2 1 2 ; "W ar o f th e

tudes tow ard H aw aiians, 5 9 -6 0 ,6 3 -

W orld s," 165; It's A ll True, 169; The

6 4 ,6 5 ,6 6 -6 8 ,6 9 , 7 0 ,7 1 -7 4 , 75-78,

Lady o f Shanghai, 169; Touch o f E vil,

8 0 ,8 1 -8 8 ,9 0 -9 1 ,1 0 7 ,1 1 8 ; rela tion ­ ship w ith Stanley, 6 0 -6 1 ,9 0 ; and Jarves’s H istory o f the H aw aiian or Sand­

169 W est, C o rn el, 240n5 W h arton , E dith , 226n7

wich Islands, 6 2 ,6 9 ,7 4 ; on d eath and

W heatley, P h illis, 245n48

fu n era l rites in H aw aii, 6 6 ,6 8 -7 4 ; on

When Knighthood Was inFlower, 9 3 ,1 0 1 ,

H aw aiian sexuality, 6 6 -6 8 ,6 9 ,7 0 ,7 1 -

107-108, 111

260 • Index W h ite, Edw ard D ouglas, 2 - 3 ,4 ,6 ,7 -8 , 9 ,1 0 -1 1

1 1 5 ,1 1 9 -1 2 0 ,231n50,232n55; class h ierarch y am on g, 2 9 -3 0 ,3 1 ; as fra il,

T h e W h ite M an ’s B u rden ,” 1 3 ,2 0 6 ,2 0 9

3 2 -3 4 ,2 2 0n 20,221n21; an d civiliza ­

W hiteness, 1 9 0 -1 9 4 ,1 9 8 ,244n35. See

tio n , 3 7 -4 2 ,1 0 7 ; in H aw aii, 6 6 -6 8 ,7 0 ,

also N on w h ites, w h ite p ercep tion s o f;

7 1 -7 2 ,1 0 7 ; in h istorical rom ances,

R ace relation s

106-114,158; R oosevelt on , 107,110,

The W ide W ide World, 4 3 ,4 4 -4 6

111, 159; as spectators o f d n em a ,

W illiam s, R aym ond, 185

159-160; D u B ois o n , 203-206,

W illiam s, W illia m A p p lem a n , 2 2 7 n ll

244n48; A frica n A m erica n w om en ,

W ilson , W oodrow , 1 0 5 ,1 7 9 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 9 ;

2 0 3 -2 0 6 ,245n48

and L ea gu e o f N ation s, 15,182; and

W ood , L eo n a rd , 136-137

im perialism , 15,198-201

W o o lf, V irg in ia , 122

W ister, O w en : The Virgm ian, 101,107, 119,120; T h e E volu tion o f th e C ow Pu n ch er,” 119-120 W ithin O u r Gaus, 2 1 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 3 -1 6 4 ,1 6 9 ,

1 8 1 ,239n44

W o rld W ar 1 ,1 ,1 4 7 ,1 5 1 ,1 6 2 -1 6 3 ; D u B ois o n , 2 2 ,1 7 1 -1 7 3 ,1 8 0 -1 8 2 ,1 8 3 , 1 8 7 ,1 9 2 ,1 9 5 -1 9 7 ,2 0 1 -2 0 3 ,2 0 8 , 2 4 2n n l6,19,243n 26; and A frica , 1711 7 3 ,1 7 6 ,1 8 1 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 6 -1 8 7 ,1 8 9 -1 9 0 ,

W om an’s Record, 39-41

1 9 6 ,1 9 7 ,2 0 7 ,2 0 8 ,2 0 9 ; P eace C on fer­

W om en : fic tio n fo r, 4 ,1 9 ,2 6 ,4 3 -5 0 ; d o ­

en ce after, 179,181; A frica n A m erican

m esticity as sph ere o f, 1 7 ,1 8 -1 9 ,2 4 2 5 ,2 8 -3 0 ,3 4 -3 5 ,3 7 ,4 0 -4 2 ,4 4 -4 5 ,

troop s in , 181-182 W o rld W ar II, 1 ,2 1 ,1 4 7 ,1 6 8 ,236n2

4 7 -4 9 ,5 0 ,5 1 ,1 0 6 ,1 1 0 -1 1 1 ,1 6 6 ,2 0 3 0 4 ,2 0 5 -2 0 6 ,2 2 0 n l6 ,2 2 1 n 2 1 ; as spectators o f m ales, 2 0 ,9 5 ,9 9 ,1 1 1 -

Yvem dle, 226n7

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