Gretchen Murphy - Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

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Shadowing the White Mans Burden

America and the Long 19th Century

GENERAL EDITORS
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young

Neither Fugitive nor Free:
Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong

Shadowing the White Mans Burden:
U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy

U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Gretchen Murphy

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2010 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murphy, Gretchen, 1971
Shadowing the white mans burden : U.S. imperialism and
the problem of the color line / Gretchen Murphy.
p. cm. (America and the long 19th century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 9780814795989 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0814795986 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 9780814795996 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0814795994 (pb : alk. paper)
1. American fiction19th centuryHistory and criticism.
2. American fiction20th centuryHistory and criticism.
3. Race in literature. 4. Racism in literature. 5. Imperialism in
literature. 6. United StatesRace relationsHistory19th century.
7. United StatesForeign relations19th century. I. Title.
PS374.R32M87 2010
813.4093552dc22 2009046690

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A number of people and institutions helped me complete this book. Thanks to Eric Zinner at New York University Press; Shelley Streeby and the other anonymous reader who offered suggestions; and the series editors, David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald, with special thanks to Priscilla for believing in my work. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas provided travel expenses and financial support. Many librarians helped with this project along the way, including staff at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library, the British Columbia Archives at the Royal BC Museum, the Oregon State Supreme Court Library, and Special Collections at the University of Calgary, Washington State University, and Fisk University; the incredibly resourceful interlibrary loan office of the University of MinnesotaMorris; and the University of Texass Harry Ransom Center and wonderful library system.

Colleagues at the University of MinnesotaMorris were influential in the early stages of conceptualizing this manuscript; thanks to Roland Guyotte for team-teaching an interdisciplinary course on the Spanish American War with me, and to Brad Deane for so many smart insights on Kipling, literature, and empire. Colleagues at the University of Texas read drafts and provided crucial feedback during the later stages; thanks especially to Phil Barrish, Coleman Hutchison, John Gonzales, Martin Kevorkian, Evan Carton, Ann Cvetkovich, Jos Limn, the American Literature Interest Group, and the Women and Gender Studies New Faculty Colloquium. Heather Gardner, Kathryn Hamilton, and Tekla Schell provided research support, and students at both institutions helped by providing new perspectives on texts that I discuss here. Ive also benefited from John Cullen Gruesser sharing my enthusiasm for recovering Stewards writing. Thanks to Julia Lee and Argie Manolis for personal support and friendship, and to Rich Heyman for being there through it all: my personal geographer, proofreader, and best friend, he has truly been a partner in this endeavor.

In a 1901 essay for the Overland Monthly titled Red, Black and Yellow, John T. Bramhall noted a timely coincidence marking the 1899 publication of Rudyard Kiplings poem The White Mans Burden. Originally subtitled The United States and the Philippines and published in a popular U.S. magazine, Kiplings poem urged Americans to take up the burden of joining Europe in what the poem represents as the thankless task of colonial administration. But for Bramhall, the poem spoke to more than just the question of overseas expansion; it was also a statement about U.S. race relations. Bramhall rhetorically asks, When Rudyard Kipling wrote The White Mans Burden, was it a coincidence that the Americans were just going into the Philippines, and that we were confronted at the same time with the necessity of furnishing employment to our red men, and of solving the negro problem in the South? For Bramhall, the simultaneity of these two momentsof becoming a world power and at the same time having to work out new political and social relationships among white, African, and Native Americansprompted a new application of Kiplings poem. As Bramhill explains, if the white mans burden is his dark-skinned brother, that duty takes on a different form in the multiracial United States than it would in Kiplings England.

Bramhalls comment about interpreting Kipling in the United States introduces a cultural phenomenon that I set out to explore in this book: the ways in which U.S. Americans reexamined domestic racial conflicts in light of a newly perceived global mission of overseas commercial, military, and cultural expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. If empire was viewed as a white mans burden, or more generally justified with reference to notions of racial inferiority or superiority, then what role should the the red, black, and yellow peoples inhabiting the United States play And yet, his proposal raises an ambivalent but clear challenge to the notion that the United States acting as an imperial world power could be identified as a force of whiteness. The white mans burden in the United States could not entirely remain the white mans burden.

In this book I examine cultural debates surrounding the relationship between whiteness and empire, highlighting the literary responses of four multiethnic U.S. writers: Frank R. Steward, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Ranald MacDonald. These writers used literary forms such as novels and personal narratives to complicate the popular association of whiteness with national mission or global progress. On the surface, their literary strategies for doing so may look like Bramhalls argument, because each writer describes a racially ambiguous figure who could be defined as nonwhite (such as a mixed-blood African American, American Indian, or Japanese man) taking up the project of furthering U.S. world power. In their writings, nonwhite soldiers, scientists, explorers, and diplomats travel abroad, altering the racial scripts of empire by revealing the U.S. national mission for global power and leadership to be, instead of white, potentially multiracial. And yet, in ways that are more complicated and interesting than Bramhalls, these writers also detach race from empire by challenging whiteness itself as a social, scientific, and legal category.