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Kipling,
the ‘White Man’s Burden,’ and U.S. Imperialism
Although imperialism has remained a reality over the last century, the term
itself was branded as beyond the pale within polite establishment circles for
most of the twentieth centuryso great was the anti-imperialist outrage arising
out of the Philippine-American War and the Boer War, and so effective was the
Marxist theory of imperialism in stripping the veil away from global capitalist
relations. In the last few years, however, “imperialism” has once again
become a rallying cryfor neoconservatives and neoliberals alike.
by
The Editors
Monthly Review
Reposted by Bultlat.com
We
are living in a period in which the rhetoric of empire knows few bounds. In a
special report on “America and Empire” in August, the London-based Economist
magazine asked whether the United States would, in the event of “regime
changes...effected peacefully” in Iran and Syria, “really be prepared to
shoulder the white man’s burden across the Middle East?” The answer it gave
was that this was “unlikely”the U.S. commitment to empire did not go so
far. What is significant, however, is that the question was asked at all.
Current U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have led observers to wonder whether
there aren’t similarities and historical linkages between the “new”
imperialism of the twenty-first century and the imperialism of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. As Jonathan Marcus, the BBC’s defense
correspondent, commented a few months back:
It
should be remembered that more than one hundred years ago, the British poet
Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem about what he styled as “the white
man’s burden”a warning about the responsibilities of empire that was
directed not at London but at Washington and its new-found imperial
responsibilities in the Philippines. It is not clear if President George W. Bush
is a reader of poetry or of Kipling. But Kipling’s sentiments are as relevant
today as they were when the poem was written in the aftermath of the
Spanish-American War. (July 17, 2003)
A
number of other modern-day proponents of imperialism have also drawn connections
with Kipling’s poem, which begins with the lines:
Take
up the White Man’s burden
Send
forth the best ye breed
Before
discussing the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in Kipling’s “White
Man’s Burden,” it is necessary to provide some background on the history of
U.S. imperialism in order to put the poem in context.
From the Spanish-American War to the Philippine-American War
In the Spanish-American War of 1898 the United States seized the Spanish
colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, emerging for the first time as a
world power.*
As in Cuba, Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines had given rise to a
national liberation struggle. Immediately after the U.S. naval bombardment of
Manila on May 1, 1898, in which the Spanish fleet was destroyed, Admiral Dewey
sent a gunboat to fetch the exiled Filipino revolutionary leader Emilio
Aguinaldo from Hong Kong. The United States wanted Aguinaldo to lead a renewed
revolt against Spain to prosecute the war before U.S. troops could arrive. The
Filipinos were so successful that in less than two months they had all but
defeated the Spanish on the main island of Luzon, bottling up the remaining
Spanish troops in the capital city of Manila, while almost all of the
archipelago fell into Filipino hands. In June, Filipino leaders issued their own
Declaration of Independence based on the U.S. model. When U.S. forces finally
arrived at the end of June the 15,000 Spanish troops holed up in Manila were
surrounded by the Filipino army entrenched around the cityso that U.S. forces
had to request permission to cross Filipino lines to engage these remaining
Spanish troops. The Spanish army surrendered Manila to U.S. forces after only a
few hours of fighting on August 13, 1898. In an agreement between the United
States and Spain, Filipino forces were kept out of the city and were allowed no
part in the surrender. This was the final battle of the war. John Hay, U.S.
ambassador to Britain, captured the imperialist spirit of the time when he wrote
of the Spanish-American War as a whole that it was “a splendid little war.”
With the fighting with Spain over, however, the United States refused to
acknowledge the existence of the new Philippine Republic. In October 1898 the
McKinley administration publicly revealed for the first time that it intended to
annex the entire Philippines. In arriving at this decision President McKinley is
reported to have said that “God Almighty” had ordered him to make the
Philippines a U.S. colony. Within days of this announcement the New England
Anti-Imperialist League was established in Boston. Its membership was to include
such luminaries as Mark Twain, William James, Charles Francis Adams and Andrew
Carnegie. Nevertheless, the administration went ahead and concluded the Treaty
of Paris in December, in which Spain agreed to cede the Philippines to the new
imperial power, along with its other possessions seized by the United States in
the war.
This was followed by a fierce debate in the Senate on the ratification of the
treaty, centering on the status of the Philippines, which, except for the city
of Manila, was under the control of the nascent Philippine Republic. On February
4, 1899, U.S. troops under orders to provoke a conflict with the Filipino forces
ringing Manila were moved into disputed ground lying between U.S. and Filipino
lines on the outskirts of the city. When they encountered Filipino soldiers the
U.S. soldiers called “Halt” and then opened fire, killing three. The U.S.
forces immediately began a general offensive with their full firepower in what
amounted to a surprise attack (the top Filipino officers were then away
attending a lavish celebratory ball), inflicting enormous casualties on the
Filipino troops. The San Francisco Call reported on February 5 that the moment
the news reached Washington McKinley told “an intimate friend...that the
Manila engagement would, in his opinion, insure the ratification of the treaty
tomorrow.”
These calculations proved correct and on the following day the Senate ratified
the Treaty of Paris officially ending the Spanish-American War ceding Guam,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, and putting Cuba under
U.S. control. It stipulated that the United States would pay Spain twenty
million dollars for the territories that it gained through the war. But this did
little to disguise the fact that the Spanish- American War was an outright
seizure of an overseas colonial empire by the United States, in response to the
perceived need of U.S. business, just recovering from an economic downturn, for
new global markets.
The United States immediately pushed forward in the Philippine-American War that
it had begun two days beforein what was to prove to be one of history’s more
barbaric wars of imperial conquest. The U.S. goal in this period was to expand
not only into the Caribbean but also far into the Pacificand by colonizing the
Philippine Islands to gain a doorway into the huge Chinese market. (In 1900 the
United States sent troops from the Philippines to China to join with the other
imperial powers in putting down the Boxer Rebellion.)
Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” subtitled “The United States and the
Philippine Islands,” was published in McClure’s Magazine in February 1899.*
It was written when the debate over ratification of the Treaty of Paris was
still taking place, and while the anti-imperialist movement in the United States
was loudly decrying the plan to annex the Philippines. Kipling urged the United
States, with special reference to the Philippines, to join Britain in the
pursuit of the racial responsibilities of empire:
Your
new-caught sullen peoples,
Half
devil and half child.
Many
in the United States, including President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt,
welcomed Kipling’s rousing call for the United States to engage in “savage
wars,” beginning in the Philippines. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana
declared: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic
peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation
and self-admiration....He has made us adept in government that we may administer
government among savage and senile peoples.” In the end more than 126,000
officers and men were sent to the Philippines to put down the Filipino
resistance during a war that lasted officially from 1899 to 1902 but actually
continued much longer, with sporadic resistance for most of a decade. U.S.
troops logged 2,800 engagements with the Filipino resistance. At least a quarter
of a million Filipinos, most of them civilians, were killed along with 4,200
U.S. soldiers (more than ten times the number of U.S. fatalities in the
Spanish-American War).*
From the beginning it was clear that the Filipino forces were unable to match
the United States in conventional warfare. They therefore quickly switched to
guerrilla warfare. U.S. troops at war with the Filipinos boasted in a popular
marching song that they would “civilize them with the Krag” (referring to
the Norwegian-designed gun with which the U.S. forces were outfitted). Yet they
found themselves facing interminable small attacks and ambushes by Filipinos,
who often carried long knives known as bolos. These guerrilla attacks resulted
in combat deaths of U.S. soldiers in small numbers on a regular basis. As in all
prolonged guerrilla wars, the strength of the Filipino resistance was due to the
fact that it had the support of the Filipino population in general. As General
Arthur MacArthur (the father of Douglas MacArthur), who became military governor
of the Philippines in 1900, confided to a reporter in 1899:
When
I first started in against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo’s troops
represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population
of Luzonthe native population that iswas opposed to us and our offers of aid
and good government. But after having come this far, after having occupied
several towns and cities in succession... I have been reluctantly compelled to
believe that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which
he heads.
Faced
with a guerrilla struggle supported by the vast majority of the population, the
U.S. military responded by resettling populations in concentration camps,
burning down villages (Filipinos were sometimes forced to carry the petrol used
in burning down their own homes), mass hangings and bayonetings of suspects,
systematic raping of women and girls, and torture. The most infamous torture
technique, used repeatedly in the war, was the so-called “water cure.” Vast
quantities of water were forced down the throats of prisoners. Their stomachs
were then stepped on so that the water shot out three feet in the air “like an
artesian well.” Most victims died not long afterwards. General Frederick
Funston did not hesitate to announce that he had personally strung up a group of
thirty-five Filipino civilians suspected of supporting the Filipino
revolutionaries. Major Edwin Glenn saw no reason to deny the charge that he had
made a group of forty-seven Filipino prisoners kneel and “repent of their
sins” before bayoneting and clubbing them to death. General Jacob Smith
ordered his troops to “kill and burn,” to target “everything over ten,”
and to turn the island of Samar into “a howling wilderness.” General William
Shafter in California declared that it might be necessary to kill half the
Filipino population in order to bring “perfect justice” to the other half.
During the Philippine War the United States reversed the normal casualty
statistics of warusually many more are wounded than killed. According to
official statistics (discussed in Congressional hearings on the war) U.S. troops
killed fifteen times as many Filipinos as they wounded. This fit with frequent
reports by U.S. soldiers that wounded and captured Filipino combatants were
summarily executed on the spot.
The war continued after the capture of Aguinaldo in March 1901 but was declared
officially over by President Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1902in an attempt
to quell criticism of U.S. atrocities. At that time, the northern islands had
been mostly “pacified” but the conquest of the southern islands was still
ongoing and the struggle continued for yearsthough the United States from then
on characterized the rebels as mere bandits.
In the southern Philippines the U.S. colonial army was at war with Muslim
Filipinos, known as Moros. In 1906 what came to be known as the Moro
Massacre was carried out by U.S. troops when at least nine hundred
Filipinos, including women and children, were trapped in a volcanic crater on
the island of Jolo and shot at and bombarded for days. All of the Filipinos were
killed while the U.S. troops suffered only a handful of casualties. Mark Twain
responded to early reports (which indicated that those massacred totaled six
hundred rather than nine hundred men, women and children as later determined)
with bitter satire: “With six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen
men killed outright, and we had thirty-two woundedcounting that nose and that
elbow. The enemy numbered six hundredincluding women and childrenand we
abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead
mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the
Christian soldiers of the United States.” Viewing a widely distributed photo
that showed U.S. soldiers overlooking piles of Filipino dead in the crater, W.
E. B. Du Bois declared in a letter to Moorfield Storey, president of the Anti-
Imperialist League (and later first president of the NAACP), that it was “the
most illuminating thing I have ever seen. I want especially to have it framed
and put upon the walls of my recitation room to impress upon the students what
wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.”*
President Theodore Roosevelt immediately commended his good friend General
Leonard Wood, who had carried out the Moro Massacre, writing: “I congratulate
you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms
wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.” Like
Kipling, Roosevelt seldom hesitated to promote the imperialist cause or to
forward doctrines of racial superiority. Yet Kipling’s novels, stories and
verses were distinguished by the fact that they seemed to many individuals in
the white world to evoke a transcendent and noble cause. At the same time they
did not fail to reach out and acknowledge the hatred that the colonized had for
the colonizer. In presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to Kipling in 1907
the Nobel Committee proclaimed, “his imperialism is not of the uncompromising
type that pays no regard to the sentiments of others.”*
It was precisely this that made Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and other
outpourings from his pen so effective as ideological veils for a barbaric
reality.
The year Kipling’s poem appeared, 1899, marked not only the end of the
Spanish-American War (through the ratification of the Treaty of Paris) and the
beginning of the Philippine-American War, but also the beginning of the Boer War
in South Africa. These were classic imperialist wars and they generated
anti-imperialist movements and radical critiques in response. It was the Boer
War that gave rise to John A. Hobson’s Imperialism, A Study (1902), which
argued “Nowhere under such conditions”referring specifically to British
imperialism in South Africa“is the theory of white government as a trust for
civilization made valid.” The opening sentence of Lenin’s Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1915, stated that “especially since
the Spanish-American War (1898), and the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the
economic and also the political literature of the two hemispheres has more and
more often adopted the term ‘imperialism’ in order to define the present
era.”
Kipling’s Message to Imperialists After One Hundred Years
Although imperialism has remained a reality over the last century, the term
itself was branded as beyond the pale within polite establishment circles for
most of the twentieth centuryso great was the anti-imperialist outrage arising
out of the Philippine-American War and the Boer War, and so effective was the
Marxist theory of imperialism in stripping the veil away from global capitalist
relations. In the last few years, however, “imperialism” has once again
become a rallying cryfor neoconservatives and neoliberals alike. As Alan
Murray, Washington Bureau Chief of CNBC recently acknowledged in a statement
directed principally at the elites: “We are all, it seems, imperialists now”
(Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2003).
If one were to doubt for a moment that the current expansion of U.S. empire is
but the continuation of a century-long history of U.S. overseas imperialism,
Michael Ignatieff (Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government) has made it as clear as day:
The
Iraq operation most resembles the conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and
1902. Both were wars of conquest, both were urged by an ideological elite on a
divided country and both cost much more than anyone had bargained for. Just as
in Iraq, winning the war was the easy part....More than 120,000 American troops
were sent to the Philippines to put down the guerrilla resistance, and 4,000
never came home. It remains to be seen whether Iraq will cost thousands of
American livesand whether the American public will accept such a heavy toll as
the price of success in Iraq (New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003).
With
representatives of the establishment openly espousing imperialist ambitions, we
shouldn’t be surprised at the repeated attempts to bring back the “white
man’s burden” argument in one form or another. In the closing pages of his
prize-winning book, The Savage Wars of Peace, Max Boot quotes Kipling’s poem:
Take
up the White Man’s burden
And
reap his old reward:
The
blame of those ye better,
The
hate of those ye guard
Boot
insists that Kipling was right, that “colonists everywhere, usually received
scant thanks afterward.” Nevertheless, we should be encouraged, he tells us,
by the fact that “the bulk of the people did not resist American occupation,
as they surely would have done if it had been nasty and brutal. Many Cubans,
Haitians, Dominicans, and others may secretly have welcomed U.S. rule.”
Boot’s main implication seems clear enoughthe United States should again
“Take up the White Man’s burden.” His book, published in 2002, ends by
arguing that the United States should have deposed Saddam Hussein and occupied
Iraq at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. That task, he implied, remained to be
accomplished.
Boot is former editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal, now Olin
Senior Fellow in National Security Studies with the Council on Foreign
Relations. The title of The Savage Wars of Peace was taken straight from a line
in Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” Boot’s 428-page glorification of
U.S. imperialist wars received the Best Book of 2002 Award from the Washington
Post, Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times and won the 2003
General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for the best nonfiction book pertaining to
Marine Corps history . Boot contends that the Philippine War was “one of the
most successful counterinsurgencies waged by a Western army in modern times”
and declares that, “by the standards of the day, the conduct of U.S. soldiers
was better than average for colonial wars.” The U.S. imperial role in the
Philippines, the subject of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” is thus
being presented as a model for the kind of imperial role that Boot and other
neoconservatives are now urging on the United States. Even before the war in
Iraq, Ignatieff remarked: “imperialism used to be the white man’s burden.
This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary
because it is politically incorrect”a point that might well be read as
extending to the “white man’s burden” itself (New York Times Magazine,
July 28, 2002).
The Philippine-American War is now being rediscovered as the closest
approximation in U.S. history to the problems the United States is encountering
in Iraq. Further, the United States has taken advantage of the September 11,
2001 attacks to intervene militarily not just in the Middle East but also around
the globeincluding the Philippines where it has deployed thousands of troops
to aid the Philippine army in fighting Moro insurgents in the southern islands.
In this new imperialist climate Niall Ferguson, Herzog Professor of History at
the Stern School of Business, New York University, and one of the principal
advocates of the new imperialism, has addressed Kipling’s poem “The White
Man’s Burden” in his book Empire(2002). “No one,” Ferguson tells us,
would dare use such politically incorrect language today. The reality is
nevertheless that the United States haswhether it admits it or not taken up
some kind of global burden, just as Kipling urged. It considers itself
responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but
also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just
like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the
name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost.
Despite
Ferguson’s claim that “no one would dare” to call this “the white
man’s burden” today since it is “politically incorrect,” sympathetic
references to this term keep on cropping upand in the most privileged circles.
Boothardly a marginal figure since affiliated with the influential Council on
Foreign Relationsis a good example. Like Ferguson himself, he tries to
incorporate the “white man’s burden” into a long history of idealistic
intervention, downplaying the realities of racism and imperialism: “In the
early twentieth century,” he writes in the final chapter of his book (entitled
“In Defense of the Pax Americana”), “Americans talked of spreading
Anglo-Saxon civilization and taking up the ‘white man’s burden’; today
they talk of spreading democracy and defending human rights. Whatever you call
it, this represents an idealistic impulse that has always been a big part in
America’s impetus for going to war.”
Today’s imperialists see Kipling’s poem mainly as an attempt to stiffen the
spine of the U.S. ruling class of his day in preparation for what he called
“the savage wars of peace.” And it is precisely in this way that they now
allude to the “white man’s burden” in relation to the twenty-first
century. Thus for the Economist magazine the question is simply whether the
United States is “prepared to shoulder the white man’s burden across the
Middle East.”
As an analyst of as well as a spokesman for imperialism Kipling was head and
shoulders above this in the sense that he accurately perceived the looming
contradictions of his own time. He knew that the British Empire was
overstretched and doomedeven as he struggled to redeem it and to inspire the
rising United States to enter the imperial stage alongside it. Only two years
before writing “The White Man’s Burden” he wrote his celebrated verse,
“Recessional”:
Far-called,
our navies melt away;
On
dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo,
all our pomp of yesterday
Is
one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge
of Nations, spare us yet,
Lest
we forgetlest we forget!
The
United States is now leading the way into a new phase of imperialism. This will
be marked not only by increased conflict between center and peripheryrationalized
in the West by veiled and not-so-veiled racismbut also by increased
intercapitalist rivalry. This will likely speed up the long-run decline of the
American Empire, rather than the reverse. And in this situation a call for a
closing of the ranks between those of European extraction (Samuel Huntington’s
“clash of civilizations” argument or some substitute) is likely to become
more appealing among U.S. and British elites. It should be remembered that
Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” was a call for the joint exploitation of
the globe by what Du Bois was later to call “the white masters of the world”
in the face of the ebbing of British fortunes.*
At no time, then, should we underestimate the three-fold threat of militarism,
imperialism, and racismor forget that capitalist societies have historically
been identified with all three. Reposted by Bultlat.com
November 2003
========================
Notes
* The following brief historical treatment of the Philippine-American War draws
mainly on the these works: Henry F. Graff, ed., American Imperialism and the
Philippine Insurrection: Testimony Taken from Hearings on Affairs in the
Philippine Islands before the Senate Committee on the Philippines1902 (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1969); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, Vestiges of War:
The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999
(New York: New York University Press, 2002); Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or
Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman,
1972) and “How the Philippine-U.S. War Began,” Monthly Review, September
1999; Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American
Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990) ; and Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines
Reader (Boston: South End Press, 1987).
* The poem is often reproduced without the subtitle. For a correct version see
Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1940).
* Although a quarter of the million is the “consensual” figure of
historians, estimates of Filipino deaths from the war have ranged as high as one
million, which would have meant depopulation of the islands by around one-sixth.
* Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse
University Press, 1992), p. 172. For information on the Moro massacre and the W.
E. B. Du Bois quote see www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ail/moro.html.
Jim Zwick’s boondocksnet.com website is a crucial source for materials on the
Philippine-American War, contemporary responses to Kipling’s “White Man’s
Burden,” and Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist writings.
* The Nobel committee was, however, mainly impressed by Kipling’s sympathy for
the Boers in South Africaanother population of white colonizers.
* This call upon white elites to divide the world evoked a response beyond
Britain and the United States. The admiration of Kipling among the ruling
classes at the center of the capitalist world was more general. As Hobsbawm
tells us: “When the writer Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the Indian empire, was
believed to be dying of pneumonia in 1899, not only the British and the
Americans grievedKipling had just addressed a poem on ‘The White Man’s
Burden’ to the USA on its responsibilities in the Philippinesbut the Emperor
of Germany sent a telegram.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York:
Vintage, 1987), p. 82.
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