The Rough Riders at Home and Abroad: Cody, Roosevelt, Remington and the Imperialist Hero

THEROUGH RIDERS AT HOME AND ABROAD: CODY, ROOSEVELT, REMINGTON AND THE IMPERIALIST HERO Christine Bold Inthe late nineteenth century, America displayed a new imperialistic mood and a heightened desire to impress her independence upon Europe when she embarked upon a number of military adventures in the Caribbean and Pacific. During the sameperiod, there appeared a new popular hero - the "Rough Rider" - who derived from the Western frontier but expanded the field of heroic action well beyondthe shores of America. The creation of this hero and the scene in which he wasset demonstrates how popular culture of the period not only embodied but facilitated crucial developments in the nation's growth. The process of creation also shows how commercial agencies - popular circuses, yellow newspapers, massmagazines - became prime movers in the formation of America's international image. The Uhited States' military involvement in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippineswas a major historicai development, taking the nation into aggressive extracontinental expansion for the first time. Although historians disagree about precise causes, they generally interpret this imperialistic venture as a response to thedomestic ills besetting the country's process of modernization: the economic depression, the flood of "new" immigrants, the uncontrolled urbanization, the industrial over-production and the violent strikes which all converged in the 1890s.One factor repeatedly cited is the news - delivered first by the census of 1890,then by Frederick Jackson Turner's interpretation of that document in 1893 - that America's frontier was closed. 1 The free Western lands seemed to have filledup~thus, America had lost both her safety-valve for surplus labour and her 322 Christine Bold distinctive national badge. In this context, the move into overseas lands canbe interpreted as an attempt to find a substitute frontier for the landed one: new spaces to fill, new resources to exploit, new markets to supply and new savages to conquer. One aim of the expansionists, then, was to resurrect the westward movement which seemed to account for the nation's past successes. However, as an antidote to cultural crises, the imperialistic ventures contained one obvious problem: they looked dangerously similar to the European modelof colonization, which was supposed to be anathema to the Jeffersonian republic. A major theme of public rhetoric in the post-Civil War period was America's independence from and superiority to Europe, and one major stimulant to public support for the Spanish-American War was the promise of America's stnkinga blow against a corrupt, Old World colonizer. With the debate of 1899-1900 over annexing the Philippines, however, it became clear that America, too, was bent on colonization. The anti-imperialists were quick to identify the paradox and upbraid annexationists for betraying the nation's principles. 2 In the context of a problematic imperialism, the force of popular formulas becomes clear. Of course, the politicians bent on imperialism developed their own rhetoric to combat the accusations of the anti-imperialists. But they were also helped in their wooing of public opinion by a number of formulists who identified the same westward movement as Turner and set about prolonging it in fiction. The popular productions which resulted aligned the new imperialistic purpose withthe established imagery of the heroic frontier. 3 By the 1890s, the iconography of the mythic frontier had been firmly embedded in the popular imagination by dime novels, Indian captivity narratives and heroic biographies. In The FatalEnvironment , Richard Slotkin shows how the frontier operated as a public metaphor throughout the nineteenth century to explain problems in the Reconstruction South and in the congested, strike-torn Northern cities, as well as in the West.4 Now, at the end of the century, the essentially domestic frontier myth was adapted once more, to create a heroic image of America's role on the international scene Thus American imperialism became part of the heroic tradition stemming from her unique landed frontier, and thus her imperialism was defined as distinctively indigenous and decidedly different from Old World movements. At least in rhetorical terms, the mass media smoothed over a contradiction at the heart of the imperialistic urge. Popular culture of the late nineteenth century also aided the cause of overseas imperialism by turning it into a game...