English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

"The White Man's Burden has been sung. Who will sing the Brown Man's?"

—Mark Twain, "The Stupendous Procession"

In November 1898, Rudyard Kipling sent his poem "The White Man's Burden" to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who had just been elected Governor of New York.¹ Kipling's aim was to encourage the American government to take over the Philippines, one of the territorial prizes of the Spanish-American War, and rule it with the same energy, honor, and beneficence that, he believed, characterized British rule over the nonwhite populations of India and Africa. In September he had written to Roosevelt: "Now go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears."²

"The White Man's Burden" repeated this advice, adding a more abstract message about the white race's superiority and responsibility to the Filipinos and the other nonwhite peoples of the world. Sending Kipling's verses on to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt opined that it was "poor poetry," but that it made "good sense from the expansion standpoint." Lodge responded that it was "better poetry than you say," while apparently agreeing about its "standpoint."³ Only later, in February 1899, was the poem published simultaneously in the London Times and McClure's Magazine in the U.S.⁴

Few poems have been more frequently cited, criticized, and satirized than "The White Man's Burden." It has served as a lightning rod for both the supporters and the opponents of imperialism, as well as of racism and white supremacy. After reviewing the main context of [End Page 172] Kipling's poem—America's colonization of the Philippines—I examine some of the uses to which "The White Man's Burden" has been put from 1898 to the present. As Henry Labouchère's 1899 poem "The Brown Man's Burden" attests, parodies and citations began to appear almost immediately. "The Black Man's Burden" was the title of many parodies and more serious poems in the African-American press. While the Philippines was still an American colony, Edmund Morel's 1920 book The Black Man's Burden stood Kipling's message on its head by arguing the case against empire, and other works with similar titles criticized racism in the U.S. between the World Wars.

Until recently, most works that invoke Kipling's poem have been parodic or critical in some fashion. But in response to America's "new imperialism" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, there have been a number of attempts to refurbish Kipling and "The White Man's Burden." Thus, for the title of his prizewinning book, The Savage Wars of Peace (2002), Max Boot chose a line from the poem, which he cites more fully and with explicit approval in the text itself. Though Boot and other current proponents of American imperialism deny or ignore this obvious fact, Kipling's poem strongly suggests that imperialism and racism are inseparable. "Whatever the avowed justification," writes Peter Keating, "there can be no doubt that the poem is profoundly racist in sentiment."⁵ Perhaps with Kipling in mind (she cites him later in the empire portion of her famous study of totalitarianism), Hannah Arendt writes that imperialism "would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible … excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world."⁶ Unless one wears a white blindfold while reading it, Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" makes the question of the relationship between imperialism and racism inescapable.

Whether or not Kipling's poem had any influence on public opinion, it is unlikely that it affected what the United States government decided to do about the Philippines. Kipling may have flattered himself that Roosevelt in particular listened to his advice. But Roosevelt was pushing for war with Spain well before 1898; as leader of the "Rough Riders," he had helped win the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba (1 July 1898); and by then he was already advocating the annexation of the Philippines.⁷ Though President McKinley was waffly about colonizing the archipelago—he confessed that, before the Spanish-American War, he didn't even know where the Philippines were⁸ —Roosevelt, Lodge, [End Page 173] and many other American politicians were already of "the expansionist point of view."

The doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" arose at the time of the war with Mexico in 1846–1848, which led to the additions of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California to the U.S., and in the 1890s it seemed logical to many Americans to keep right on expanding into the Pacific and beyond. "Manifest Destiny" was often also expressed in terms of race—it was the destiny of the white, Anglo-Saxon race to conquer and civilize the American West and perhaps the entire uncivilized world.⁹ After the Civil War, along with social Darwinism the idea that Anglo-Saxons around the world formed a unity in racial dominance suggested to many a reuniting, at least informally, of the British Empire with the United States, and this also is at least implicit in Kipling's poem. "Kipling hoped that the growing strength of the United States could be harnessed to the existing British Empire," writes Christopher Hitchens, and "Race was the natural cement…."¹⁰

In The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Ann Parry claims that "the response of the US public" to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War "was to reject imperialist adventures as alien to their political traditions,"¹¹ but that notion is belied by the actions of the government and opinions in the mainstream press. Though an anti-imperialist minority, which included such prominent figures as Mark Twain, William James, Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie, spoke out against the American seizure of the Philippines, it was never more than that—a minority.¹² The black press, too, was generally anti-imperialist, often siding with the dark "races" of the world, including the Filipinos, against white colonization.¹³ (In the late 1890s African-Americans were conflicted, however, because it was the Republican party—the party of Lincoln—that was pro-empire, while the Democratic party was still remembered for its pro-slavery stance.) There was also an isolationist position whose advocates argued that precisely because Filipinos did not belong to the white race the U.S. had no business taking over their territory and trying to civilize them: unlike Texas or California, the Philippines never could or should be turned into a state. That view was influenced by the fantasy of the "Yellow Peril," triggered by the migration of Chinese goldminers and railway workers into the West. But the war fever aroused by the conflict with Spain, the euphoria over the easy victories against its forces, the argument that if the United States didn't take over the islands then some other imperialist power would do so, and the general belief that anything Britain, [End Page 174] France, or other nations could do America could do better overwhelmed both anti-imperialism and isolationism.

The "splendid little war," as Secretary of State John Hay called it, ended in 1899 with easy, total victory over Spain, but it was followed by the Philippine-American War. The Filipinos were already engaged in a revolution against Spanish rule, and once American forces took over Manila the revolutionaries discovered that they had to fight on—this time against their new colonial overlords. After Admiral Dewey defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila harbor in 1898, the U.S. could have allowed the Filipino revolutionaries, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, to establish the republic that they had already proclaimed. Privately McKinley said: "If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us."¹⁴ Instead, for a variety of reasons—strategic, economic, racist—the U.S. Army arrived to take control of Manila, with the collaboration of the defeated Spaniards themselves. Aguinaldo and his forces were shut out from their capital city, and were inevitably thrust into the long conflict that ended in their defeat and the recolonization of the Philippines by the U.S.

A prelude both to World War II and to the Vietnam War, combat in the Philippines meant that American troops for the first time found themselves fighting in Asia. It proved to be a far longer, bloodier struggle than the one against Spain. Though Roosevelt claimed in 1902 that American forces had defeated the "Tagalog insurrection," as he insisted on calling it, the warfare didn't end then. He and other American officials labeled the post-1902 fighting "banditry" instead of either war or "insurrection,"¹⁵ but on Luzon some conflict continued until at least 1911,¹⁶ and anti-imperialist resistance persisted even beyond that date in Mindanao and the other southern islands—indeed, down to the present. The Moro National Liberation Front is only the latest version of what has been called a "perpetual insurgency."¹⁷ U.S. troops are right now trying—this time with the good wishes of Philippines President Gloria Arroyo—to track down and capture or exterminate the supposedly Al-Qaeda-linked members of the Abu Sayyaf group, which on 14 February 2005 detonated bombs in the cities of Davao, General Santos, and Manila, killing at least twelve people and wounding many more.

During the Philippine-American War, on Luzon alone as many as one million Filipinos may have been killed either in combat or as "collateral damage."¹⁸ General J. Franklin Bell put the figure at 616,000, still enormous.¹⁹ The official body count for American troops was 4,234 dead and buried in the Philippines; "scarcely any bodies were ever brought [End Page 175] home," though "hundreds more later died in America of service-related diseases, 2,818 had been wounded, and the dollar cost came to six hundred million."²⁰ What Kipling made of the bloody American conquest of the Philippines is unclear. He wrote "The White Man's Burden" before the fighting turned into a major guerilla war, and besides he became much more concerned about the Anglo-Boer War.

As the fighting extended through the archipelago, however, plenty of evidence emerged that might have turned Kipling against what the American army was doing, as it did Mark Twain, for example, whose "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" is only the best known of his critiques of U.S. empire building.²¹ "The devastation and hundreds of thousands of casualties wrought by American efforts to crush the so-called insurgency," writes Michael Adas, "… made a mockery of … Kipling's celebration of the Americans as the latest of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to take up the 'white man's burden.'"²² Filipino POWs were frequently tortured or murdered; the "water cure"—or as it is now called by the Pentagon, "water boarding"—was a standard practice.²³ After the Balangiga massacre of U.S. soldiers by Filipino insurgents, the orders were to turn the entire island of Samar into a "howling wilderness" by killing everyone capable of bearing arms, including women and children aged ten years and up.²⁴ Far more Filipinos were killed than wounded, reversing the normal pattern of warfare.²⁵ What McKinley told Congress about the brutality of the Spanish troops trying to crush the anti-colonial rebellion in Cuba applies just as well to the American troops in the Philippines: "It was not civilized warfare…. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave."²⁶

Torture and other brutal practices were rationalized by claims that the Filipinos were savages who fought like savages. Many of the American officers and troops had fought in the Indian wars in the West, and a lot of them behaved as if the only good Filipino was a dead one.²⁷ White soldiers called their Filipino adversaries "googoos" and "niggers," but the Spaniards had called them "Indios," and comparisons between Filipinos and Native Americans cropped up everywhere in the press.²⁸ The Filipinos were erroneously said to be divided into eighty-four separate "tribes," and "tribal" peoples were supposedly unfit for self-government. Newly elevated to the presidency after McKinley's assassination, Roosevelt told Congress on 3 December 1901 that "Encouragement … to [the Filipino] insurrectos stands on the same footing as encouragement to hostile Indians in the days when we still had Indian wars."²⁹ Elsewhere he compared Aguinaldo to Sitting Bull.³⁰ In his 1901 book The [End Page 176] Philippines: The War and the People, Albert Robinson declared that the Filipino "presents a strong resemblance to the American red man."³¹ Furthermore, "Some tribes [of Filipinos] may be friendly, but it is quite probable that the hatchet will be buried in a very shallow place and very near at hand. Much will depend upon the vigor displayed by the nation and the missionary societies in efforts to civilize and Christianize them. The process will not prove locally popular."³² Robinson was right that "the process" did not prove "locally popular." But civilizing and Christianizing was difficult in part because, as the 1903 census indicated, the vast majority of Filipinos were already civilized and Christianized, albeit Roman Catholic rather than Protestant.

Kipling did not trouble himself any more than did McKinley, Roosevelt, or Robinson about what the Filipinos were actually like. As far as he was concerned, they were a "new-caught, sullen" people, "half devil and half child," and like "natives" elsewhere in need of the strong hand and tutelage of the white man. Whether he was disturbed by or even aware of press reports regarding torture, concentration camps, and massacres of Filipino civilians by American troops is unknown. But his friendships with Roosevelt and later with William Cameron Forbes, who served as governor of the Philippines from 1909 to 1913, ensured that he viewed the results in a positive light. He no doubt commiserated when Roosevelt wrote to him on 1 November 1904 about those who opposed American policy in the Philippines: "Thus, in dealing with the Philippines I have first the jack fools who seriously think that any group of pirates and head-hunters needs nothing but independence in order that it may be turned forthwith into a dark-hued New England town meeting, and then the entirely practical creatures who join with these extremists because I do not intend that the islands shall be exploited for corrupt purposes."³³ And David Gilmour writes that Forbes convinced Kipling that American "imperialism was flourishing in the Pacific."³⁴ In turn, Kipling assured Forbes that it was a "glorious experience" to see the progress British rule was making in Egypt and the Sudan. Kipling added: "My fear (not that it's any of my business but we're all white men together) is that some fool Democratic spasm may land your people with a full-blooded modern constitution…. May Allah preserve your land [the Philippines] from this fate and enable you to continue your works in peace."³⁵

It was not exactly "some fool Democratic spasm" but Woodrow Wilson who in 1913 removed Forbes from the governorship of the Philippines—abruptly [End Page 177] and unfairly, according to Kipling. In Something of Myself, Kipling says of Forbes:

There was an ex-Governor of the Philippines, who had slaved his soul out for years to pull his charge into some sort of shape and—on a turn of the political wheel in Washington—had been dismissed at literally less notice than he would have dared to give a native orderly. I remember not a few men whose work and hope had been snatched from under their noses, and my sympathy was very real. His account of Filipino political "leaders," writing and shouting all day for "independence" and running round to him after dark to be assured that there was no chance of the dread boon being granted—"because then we shall most probably all be killed"—was cheeringly familiar.³⁶

Both Roosevelt and, more obviously, Forbes exemplified one of Kipling's primary fantasies throughout his fiction and poetry, that of the white colonial administrator whose labors receive little or no thanks from those he serves, both at home and abroad:

Take up the White Man's burden—
    And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
    The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
    (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
    Our loved Egyptian night?"³⁷

It isn't clear why Kipling qualified "night" with the adjective "Egyptian" instead of Filipino, Asiatic, or Oriental, but he clearly did regard 1898, in large measure because of the Spanish-American War, "a grand year for the White Man." Besides "The White Man's Burden," earlier in the year Kipling had penned "The Song of the White Men," extolling the good that "the White Men" do "When they go to clean a land":

Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread
    Their highway side by side! …
Oh, well for the world when the White Men join
    To prove their faith again!

At last the (white) Americans were beginning to see the light and to do as Britain had been doing for centuries. "Thank God" the Americans, Kipling wrote, were "on the threshold of the White Man's work, the business of introducing a sane and orderly administration into the dark places of the earth."³⁸ [End Page 178]

The idea that the majority of Filipinos were savages, "half devil and half child," in need of civilizing by the United States or some other branch of the white race, is an obvious instance of the standard justification for imperial expansion used from the Renaissance to the present situation of "nation-building" in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kipling may or may not have believed in some version of biological essentialism, according to which the white race was innately superior to all others. But he clearly believed that the white race was charged with the responsibility of civilizing—or trying to civilize—all of the dark, supposedly backward races of the world. "Throughout his life," writes John McBratney, "Kipling believed that white men … had for a time a special—in some moments, providential—responsibility as latter-day Romans to uphold the law and keep the peace throughout the world."³⁹ Roosevelt and other American "expansionists" such as Senator Albert Beveridge obviously agreed.

Many, however, found Kipling's preaching to Americans, and particularly "The White Man's Burden," offensive. In Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, Willard Gatewood writes: "Dozens of poems entitled 'The Black Man's Burden' appeared in the months immediately following the publication of Kipling's work."⁴⁰ Gatewood quotes as an example these verses by H. T. Johnson, "a well-known black clergyman and editor of the influential Christian Recorder":

Pile on the Black Man's Burden.
    'Tis nearest at your door;
Why heed long bleeding Cuba,
    Or dark Hawaii's shore?
Hail ye your fearless armies,
    Which menace feeble folks
Who fight with clubs and arrows
    And brook your rifle's smoke….⁴¹

Gatewood also notes that there was even an organization, the Black Man's Burden Association, founded by J. H. Magee late in 1899 to advocate for rights for Blacks at home and Filipinos and other "brown people" abroad.⁴²

J. Dallas Bowser's "Take Up the Black Man's Burden," which was published in the 8 April 1899 issue of The Colored American, recognizes that racism at home and imperialism abroad are inseparable, but [End Page 179] is less a mocking of Kipling's poem than an expression of the theme of "black uplift" or self-improvement:

Take up the Black Man's burden,
    "Send forth the best ye breed"
To serve as types of progress,
    To teach, to pray, to plead….⁴³

As Booker T. Washington was advising them to do, African-Americans, according to Bowser, should shoulder their own "burden" for the betterment of the world.⁴⁴ A month earlier, however, The Colored American had published a poem under the pseudonym "X-Ray," "Charity Begins at Home," that more directly confronts both white racism and Kipling's poem:

To h——with the "White Man's Burden!"
To h——with Kipling's verse!
The Black Man demands our attention:
His condition is growing worse.
Why lose sleep over his burden?
All mortals have their share,
The black man's growing hardships
Are more than he can bear.⁴⁵

This barb is closer than Bowser's verses to the editorial position of The Colored American, which on 18 March 1899 declared: "With all due respect for the alleged genius of one Rudyard Kipling, his latest conglomeration of rot about the 'white man's burden' makes us very, very tired. It has ever been the dark races who have borne the world's burdens.…"⁴⁶

It is not always clear that the parodists of "The White Man's Burden" were critiquing either its politics or its racism; they were sometimes just mocking the effrontery of an Englishman presuming to advise America about how to conduct its business. There were also parodies with such titles as "The Poor Man's Burden" and even "The Old Maid's Burden."⁴⁷ American labor leader George E. McNeill, champion of the eight-hour day, published "The Poor Man's Burden" in 1903; the poor were of all races. And E. A. Brininstool's feminist barb "The White Woman's Burden" appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 6 March 1899; it reads in part:

Ring off on the "White Man's Burden,"
    And talk of a woman's right;
Tell of the jawing she has to stand [End Page 180]
    From early morn till night.
If the "white man's" burden is heavy,
    What do you think 'twould be,
If he had to cook and dig and scrub,
    And never from work be free?

William Jennings Bryan, who had taken a "devious" stance toward McKinley's Philippines policy during the election campaign of 1899,⁴⁸ entitled the Independence Day speech he gave in London on 4 July 1906 "The White Man's Burden." Though he was unhappy about the colonization of the Philippines by the U.S., Bryan nonetheless agreed that "the white man" had a "burden" or responsibility to civilize the colonized.⁴⁹ If America was going to have an empire, then it had better be a humane one, Bryan contended: "There is a white man's burden—a burden which the white man should not shirk even if he could…."⁵⁰ However, the very idea of "the white man's burden" was anathema to those who found it impossible to reconcile the American ideal of liberty with any version of either imperialism or racism. The gist of most of the early parodies is distinctly anti-imperialist, as in this bit of newspaper doggerel: "We've taken up the white man's burden of ebony and brown; / Now will you tell us, Rudyard, how we may put it down?"⁵¹

In 1907, leading African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois entered the lists with a poem entitled "The Burden of Black Women." Therein, the "dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern sea" grieves because "… the Burden of white men bore her back, / and the white world stifled her sighs…." "The White World's vermin and filth," writes Du Bois, include

… conquerors of unarmed men;
Shameless breeders of bastards
Drunk with the greed of gold.
Baiting their blood-stained hooks
With cant for the souls of the simple,
Bearing the White Man's Burden
Of Liquor and Lust and Lies!

Matters will not change until "the Black Christ be born!"

Then shall the burden of manhood
Be it yellow or black or white,
And Poverty, Justice and Sorrow—
The Humble and Simple and Strong
Shall sing with the Sons of Morning
And Daughters of Evensong.⁵² [End Page 181]

Besides Kipling's poem, perhaps Du Bois was also recollecting the African-American spiritual, in which the oppressed—indeed, all humanity—look forward to a time when we can lay our burdens down.

Kipling also had his British anti-imperialist critics and parodists. Wilfred Scawen Blunt declared that the true "white man's burden" was "the burden of his cash," and Richard Le Gallienne seemed to echo Robert Buchanan's earlier "Voice of the Hooligan," which was mainly an attack on Kipling's schoolboy novel Stalky & Co., by declaring that "The White Man's Burden" expressed "the Englishman as brute."⁵³ In the journal Truth, radical M. P. Henry Labouchère published "The Brown Man's Burden," a parody that is simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-racist. It was republished in the 25 February 1899 issue of the Literary Digest, side by side with Kipling's poem and with still another parody by Ernest H. Crosby. The first stanza of Labouchère's parody reads:

Pile on the brown man's burden
    To gratify your greed;
Go, clear away the "niggers"
    Who progress would impede;
Be very stern, for truly
    'Tis useless to be mild
With new-caught, sullen peoples
     Half devil and half child.

Later on (stanza 5), Labouchère writes:

Pile on the brown man's burden,
    Nor do not deem it hard
If you should earn the rancor
    Of those ye yearn to guard.
The screaming of your Eagle
    Will drown the victim's sob—
Go on through fire and slaughter.
    There's dollars in the job.⁵⁴

Kipling's poem continued to be echoed, mocked, and critiqued during and after World War I. Roger Tracy published his "satirical forecast," The White Man's Burden, in 1915, while William Paton gave a "public service" lecture using the same title in 1939. Edmund Morel's 1920 The Black Man's Burden begins: "The bard of a modern Imperialism has sung of the White Man's burden," which Morel interprets musically: "The notes strike the granite surface of racial pride and fling [End Page 182] back echoes which reverberate through the corridors of history, exultant.…"⁵⁵ But "what of that other burden," he goes on to ask, that of the black man? Morel's book is an exposé "of the atrocious wrongs which the white peoples have inflicted upon the black" particularly in Africa.⁵⁶ Morel had been a leader in the campaign to expose atrocities in the Congo, and had published such earlier works as King Leopold's Rule in Africa and Red Rubber. In The Black Man's Burden, Morel offers a history of European imperialism in various parts of Africa, from the earliest days of the slave trade to the devastating effects of industrial, capitalist exploitation:

But what the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has failed to do; what the mapping out of European "spheres of influence" has failed to do; what the maxim [gun] and the rifle, the slave gang, labour in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do; what even the oversea slave trade failed to do, the power of modern capitalistic exploitation, assisted by modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in accomplishing.⁵⁷

Imperialist exploitation, Morel goes on to argue, may accomplish the destruction of the entire continent of Africa, including the total extinction of its inhabitants—not a completely fanciful prognostication, in light of the near extinctions of indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia.⁵⁸

Besides Willard Gatewood's 1975 Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, other works critical of racism in America that have made use of Kipling and his famous or infamous title include B. F. Riley's The White Man's Burden: A Discussion of the Interracial Question with Special Reference to the Responsibility of the White Race to the Negro Problem (1910), Louis R. Harlan's "Booker T. Washington and the 'White Man's Burden'" (1966), Matthew Holden's The White Man's Burden (1973), and Winthrop Jordan's White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (1974), the latter a condensed version of Jordan's magisterial 1968 study, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812.⁵⁹ More recently, a film entitled White Man's Burden (1995), directed by Desmond Nakano and starring John Travolta and Harry Belafonte, critiques both white racism and classism in the U.S. by reversing the standard roles of race and class domination. Travolta plays a downtrodden white worker, and Belafonte his wealthy, overbearing boss. Reviewing the film for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers calls it a "noble experiment" that, however, "only fitfully hits home."⁶⁰ [End Page 182]

In contrast to the many parodic and critical treatments of Kipling's poem, there were a few early responses to it that accepted its message with evident approval. These include American novelist Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots (1902), which is subtitled A Romance of the White Man's Burden. Dixon also penned The Clansman (1905), and it is on these two novels, together with the play based on the second one, that D. W. Griffith based his racist cinematic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was originally entitled The Clansman. In Dixon's novels and Griffith's film, the KKK "is glorified for its work in bringing order from the chaos that followed" the Civil War.⁶¹ Though some bad white men who claim to be KKK members terrorize and occasionally lynch Blacks in Dixon's stories and Griffith's movie, the true Klansmen are heroic fighters for justice and a chivalric version of white supremacy. Dixon's and Griffith's KKK heroes, shouldering "the white man's burden" in South Carolina rather than India or the Philippines, aren't much different from Kipling's heroic but underappreciated colonial administrators.

Since 9/11, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Kipling has resurfaced, and not just because of his lines about fighting on the Afghan plains."⁶² "The White Man's Burden" in particular is being invoked by the defenders of America's "new imperialism" in Iraq and elsewhere. In Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire, the editors write:

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.⁶³

They have Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace in mind as one prominent instance of American neoimperialism. Boot believes that the U.S. military succeeded in the Philippines, in contrast to its later failure in Vietnam, and that the record of American colonial rule in the archipelago, though a bit marred by racial arrogance, was generally constructive.⁶⁴ "Benevolent assimilation" was, McKinley announced, the policy the U.S. would pursue in the Philippines, and Boot thinks it actually did so. But like (white) "colonialists everywhere," Boot claims, the U.S. administrators of the Philippines "received scant thanks," a phenomenon that leads to one of his several quotations from Kipling:⁶⁵ [End Page 184]

Take up the White man's burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.

For both Boot and Kipling, these lines express an interesting reversal of blaming the victim: there is nothing like conquest and empire, it seems, for making imperialists feel sorry for themselves.

What America did in the Philippines, Boot claims, is pretty much what it should be doing in Iraq. So, too, Michael Ignatieff believes that the invasion and occupation of Iraq will follow the pattern of the Philippines from 1898 to 1946.⁶⁶ Like Boot, Ignatieff thinks the resemblance is a salutary one, because (he believes) America's impact on the Philippines was largely positive. But the U.S. can do even better in Iraq:

America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy.⁶⁷

The main difference between Boot and Ignatieff appears to be that the former is happy with the idea of "the white man's burden," while the latter attributes it to an earlier, unlite and perhaps unenlightened version of empire. Like Boot rather than Ignatieff, Robert Kaplan has no trouble embracing Kipling. In his review of Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, Andrew Bacevich points out that its author is "bullish" on America's new global empire: "The events of September 11, 2001, inaugurated what Kaplan calls America's 'Second Expeditionary Era'—the first had begun with the expansionist surge of 1898—in which US forces once again sally forth to take up 'the white man's burden,' a phrase that he employs without irony or apology."⁶⁸ Kaplan praises historian Francis Parkman and western painter Frederic Remington as the "Kiplings" of "American imperialism."⁶⁹ And he believes that Kipling got it right in regard to the Philippines, India, and Afghanistan.⁷⁰

Among neoimperialist admirers of Kipling, Niall Ferguson is more circumspect than either Kaplan or Boot when it comes to citing Kipling and "The White Man's Burden." In Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, his highly favorable survey of the mighty British Empire, Ferguson notes many of its destructive aspects, but insists that it grew increasingly humane, [End Page 185] that it promoted democracy, and that ultimately more good than evil came from it.⁷¹ The "lessons" it holds for the new American empire are also, he thinks, good ones, although he believes Americans may not have sufficient pluck or Britishness or something-or-other to be very good imperialists. He doesn't quite say that America should now "Take up the white man's burden," as Kipling advised the U.S. to do during the Spanish-American War: "No one would dare," he writes, "use such politically incorrect language today."⁷² Obviously he is tempted to use that language, but doesn't for fear of being accused of the racism that Kipling and other British imperialists expressed. In any event, Ferguson argues that "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."⁷³ Given America's record of subverting democratically elected governments such as Allende's in Chile while supporting dictators such as Pinochet—or for that matter, Sadam Hussein in the 1980s—the notion that it "unfailingly acts in the name of liberty" is either naive or disingenuous. I agree with Harry Harootunian, who in The Empire's New Clothes writes that Ferguson's pontificating—his "lessons" for America—are "sophomoric,"⁷⁴ as was Kipling's earlier advice to the U.S. about the Philippines.

According to Max Boot: "The majority of Filipinos became reconciled to U.S. rule or at least not violently opposed to it, and they were granted increasing autonomy by Washington, far ahead of any comparable movement in European colonies."⁷⁵ This is just the way President Bush and his supporters want to interpret the record of America's colonization of the Philippines, with an eye to how they would like things to go in Afghanistan and Iraq (and no doubt elsewhere). In The Folly of Empire, John Judis notes that on 18 October 2003, while paying a brief visit to Manila, Bush praised the United States for transforming the Philippines into "the first democratic nation in Asia": "America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule. Together we rescued the islands from invasion and occupation."⁷⁶ And now, according to Bush, America is doing the same favor of bringing liberation and democracy to Iraq.

While it has often been held that America liberated and brought democracy to the Philippines, the actual record is rather different. Instead of freeing that nation from colonialism, "our soldiers" turned it into an American colony. I have already described the prolonged, bloody quagmire that is nowadays called the Philippine-American War. In its aftermath, [End Page 186] the new colonial masters of the islands worked hard to Americanize the Filipinos—short of giving them any genuine power. Though the United States granted the Philippines independence in 1946, the American military presence meant that there would be no serious challenge to America's ultimate authority after that date. The rulers of the Philippines have continued to come from the privileged elite who, so long as they support U.S. policies, are supported in return. In 1941, the Huk (or Hukbalahap) rebellion began as an uprising against Japanese rule; after the war, it continued as an anticolonial, communist insurgency, like the Vietminh in Indochina. The U.S. did everything it could to suppress the Huks, until the movement ran out of steam in the 1950s. But, as noted earlier, other forms of rebellion have continued, in large measure because democracy in the Philippines has never been more than a "veneer." That is the term employed by John Judis, who writes: beneath the "veneer … a handful of families, allied to American investors and addicted to payoffs and kickbacks, [have] controlled Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke down in 1973 when Ferdinand Marcos had himself declared president for life. Marcos was finally overthrown in 1986, but even today Philippine democracy is more dream than reality."⁷⁷

In one of his columns for the New York Times, a piece entitled "The White Man's Burden," economist Paul Krugman notes that Bush and other neoconservatives who regard America's conquest and colonization of the Philippines as a model for what will hopefully transpire in Iraq might learn something if they paid attention to history. No evidence exists, Krugman says, to suggest that "control of the Philippines made us stronger" in strategic terms. And "the economic doctrines that were used to justify Western empire-building during the late 19th century … turned out to be nonsense. Almost without exception, the cost of acquiring and defending a colonial empire greatly exceeded even a generous accounting of its benefits."⁷⁸ The moral that Bush and other neoconservatives draw from the example of the Philippines, Krugman contends—namely, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq will be good for the Iraqis and good for us—is a mirage. Calling "The White Man's Burden" "the perfect epitaph for the Bush administration," blogger Sharon Jumper adds: "Bush is such a neanderthal, however, that were he to read the poem, he would likely think it laudatory of his current policies."⁷⁹ [End Page 187]