Kipling's "the white man's burden" and its afterlives

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 172-191

  Brantlinger, Patrick ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650578510     PISSN: 00138339     EISSN: 15592715     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2487/r7g5-jr21-m041-0112     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Pinney, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1990), II: 350
2. Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918, Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles Redmond, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), I: 384-85
3. Peter Keating, Kipling the Poet (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1994), 119
4. Hannah Arendt, Imperialism. Part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Har-court, Brace and World, 1968), 63-64
5. Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches, Louis Auchinloss, ed. (New York: Library of America, 2004), 123. Also see John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George Bash Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004), 60
6. H. Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1963), 387-88
7. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Sax-onism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
8. Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and- Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 72
9. Ann Parry, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1992), 87
10. The "platform" of the American Anti-Imperialist League, October 1899, reads in part: "We condemn the policy of the present national administration in the Philippines. It seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands. We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors.... We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror. We protest against the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods" (Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire, John Nichols, ed. [New York: Nation Books, 2004], 117)
11. See George P. Marks, The Black Press Views American Imperialism (1898-1900) (New York: Arno Press, 1971)
12. and Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975)
13. Quoted in Morgan, 388
14. William J. Pomeroy, American Neo-Colonialism: Its Emergence in the Philippines and Asia (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 97
15. Andrew Bacevich, "White Man's Burden," The Nation, 261:9 (16 August 2005), 38
16. Luzviminda Francisco, "The First Vietnam: U.S.-Philippine War of 1899," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 5.4 (December 1973), 8
17. Arguing that Bell and other Americans may have had reason to exaggerate the number of Filipino deaths as a sign of military effectiveness, Richard Slotkin offers "estimates based on army records ... [of] between 16,000 and 20,000 rebels killed in action and ... an additional 200,000 civilian deaths...." See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 119
18. Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 360
19. Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, Jim Zwick, ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 22-39
20. Michael Adas, "Improving on the Civilizing Mission?: Assumptions of United States Exception-alism in the Colonization of the Philippines," The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-in on U.S. Foreign Policy. Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds. (New York: The New Press, 2005), 155
21. Moorfield Storey and Marcial P. Lichauco, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898-1925 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1926), 126
22. Quoted in Storey, 139
23. Russell Roth, Muddy Glory: America's Indian Wars' in the Philippines 1899-1935 (W Hanover, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1981), 11 and passim
24. Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 180
25. Theodore Roosevelt, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, II: 571
26. Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches, 247
27. Albert G. Robinson, The Philippines: The War and the People (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901), 229
28. Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches, 357
29. David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 252
30. Also see Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990)
31. On Forbes, see Peter Stanley, "William Cameron Forbes: Proconsul in the Philippines," Pacific Historical Review, 35 (1968), 285-301
32. Quoted in Gilmour, 240
33. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, Thomas Pinney, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 114
34. Rudyard Kipling, Complete Verse: Definitive Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1890), 322
35. Quoted in Gilmour, 125-26
36. John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling's Fiction of the Native-Born (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 22
37. J. Dallas Bowser, 'Take Up the Black Man's Burden," The Colored American, 8 April 1899 (boon-docksnet.com)
38. Louis R. Harlan writes that Washington "so thoroughly subscribed to the 'White Man's Burden' of leadership and authority that, in seeming forgetfulness that he was Negro, he actually took up the burden himself." See Harlan, "Booker T. Washington and the 'White Man's Burden,'" American Historical Review, 71:2 (January 1966), 442
39. X-Ray, "Charity Begins at Home," The Colored American. 8 April 1899 (boondocksnet.com)
40. Nichols, ed., Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire, 118
41. Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2003), 185
42. That was, indeed, the view of the first American officials to govern the Philippines, which include Forbes, William Howard Taft, and such "humanitarian imperialists" as David Prescott Barrows. Thus, though Barrows considered the Filipinos to be "civilized," they were at such a low level of civilization that they could not be trusted with self-government. Before going to the Philippines, Barrows had taken an interest in the ethnography of American Indians in California, and he held that the Filipinos were inferior to those Native Americans "who had developed extensive tribal organization and even confederacies" (Clymer 502-503). As Kenton Clymer notes, humanitarian imperialism and the idea of "the white man's burden" in some measure ran counter to the social Darwinism that Barrows and many others also accepted (507). See Clymer, "Humanitarian Imperialism: David Prescott Barrows and the White Man's Burden in the Philippines," Pacific Historical Review, 45 (1976)
43. For Taft, see Oscar M. Alfonso, "Taft's Early Views on the Filipinos," Solidarity, 4 (June 1969), 52-58
44. Zwick, www.boondocksnet.com
45. Quoted in Morgan, 434
46. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Burden of Black Women," W. E. B. Du Bois:A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 291-93
47. Quoted in Gilmour, 131-32
48. Henry Labouchère, 'The Brown Man's Burden," Literary Digest, 18:8 (25 February 1899), 219
49. E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), 3
50. And there are also Boris Asoian's 1988 Apartheid, "The White Man's Burden" (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988)
51. See also Ruth Smith, The White Man's Burden: A Personal Statement (New York: Vanguard Press, 1946)
52. Peter Travers, "White Man's Burden," Rolling Stone, 723 (14 December 1995), 92
53. Raymond A. Cook, Thomas Dixon (New York: Twayne, 1974), 68-69
54. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "A White Man's Burden: Rudyard Kipling's Pathos and Prescience," Harper's Magazine, 305:1828 (September 2002), 5
55. John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, eds. Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 20
56. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 126-28
57. Michael Ignatieff, "The American Empire: The Burden," New York Times Magazine, 152:52354 (5 January 2003), 23
58. Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), 9-10
59. Still another text that quotes "The White Man's Burden" in support of American imperialism is Ernest W. Lefever, America's Imperial Burden: Is the Past Prologue? (Boulder: West-view Press, 1999), 22
60. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 304
61. Harry Harootunian, The Empire's New Clothes: Paradigm, Lost, and Regained (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 107
62. Paul Krugman, "The White Man's Burden," The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 389
63. Sharon Jumper, "Powell, Wisdom, and the White Man's Burden," Daily Kos, 7 January 2006 (http://www.dailykos.com). Accessed 27 January 2006