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

1. The Burden of Whiteness

29 1 The Burden of Whiteness In February 1899, a query was posed to “Chappy,” the persona of a news columnist who served as resident expert for readers of the Milwaukee Journal: Dear Chappy, Please state in your column what is the real meaning of the poem of Rudyard Kipling, entitled The White Man’s Burden, published in McClure’s Magazine for February, 1899. Does it refer to expansion or to the ills of our present social system? It may seem strange to you, but many people of intelligence are divided on this subject, and it has caused considerable discussion. Please give us your idea as to which meaning is intended by the poet. Yours very truly, T. F. H.1 This particular question is one that literary critics today seldom puzzle over—when Kipling scholars write about this poem, they generally treat it as one of Kipling’s simpler works, important as a reference point for comparison with the author’s other works but not complex enough to merit its own analysis.2 In short, literary critics seem inclined to agree with the interpretation given by Chappy, who answers T. F. H.’s question with a quick gloss of some of Kipling’s lines and concludes with some chiding condescension: “It is clearly an ‘expansion poem,’” which “seems to me to be quite clearly the meaning of the highly polished verses and I quite fail to understand how the other meaning in your letter could possibly be associated with them.”3 Kipling’s familiar and frequently cited poem is rarely the object of serious literary analysis, but the story of how “The White Man’s Burden” was received in the United States demonstrates that the poem’s meaning and 30 part i effect are more complicated than often supposed. Historians have long held that Kipling’s poem offered to the United States a key formulation of expansion as selfless duty, a moral justification based on idealism and racial mission for empire in the newly acquired Philippine islands.4 More recently, scholars of U.S. imperialism have interpreted the poem, subtitled “The United States and the Philippines,” as a representative articulation of transatlantic imperial identification.5 But by taking seriously T. F. H.’s question about interpretation and looking for its echoes throughout U.S. political and literary discourse, we see much more. As I contend in this chapter, the reception of Kipling’s poem in the United States reveals the poem’s important role in channeling anxieties about the definition of whiteness and its relationship to U.S. empire and American “social ills.” Following this trail of interpretive uncertainty, we see the productive confusion that arises when a poem enters into the public sphere as a political document, a confusion that points us back to some of the classic concerns of interpretive method: Where is the “real meaning” of a poem? What does a poem do in the world? For wondering what Kipling’s poem in fact meant and did became one way that readers in the United States pondered some of their most pressing questions of national and racial identity. As a reception study, this chapter suggests that the meaning of Kipling’s poem derives not only from authorial intention or formal features but also from the interpretations made by readers of the poem in particular sociohistorical contexts.6 While I am primarily interested in using reader response as a window onto the turn-of-the-century U.S.’s vexed ideas about race and imperialism, “The White Man’s Burden” also provides an interesting case study in literary reception, one in which readers’ interpretations range widely, due in part to a conscious perception of the literary work as also a political document, a sort of mixed genre that readers experienced as unprecedented. During the three-year period of the Filipino American War following the poem’s release, commentators often spoke of Kipling as a writer whose importance transcended “merely literary” concerns. Frederick Laurence Knowles published a Kipling Primer, a guidebook intended to help the common American reader understand the poet’s importance; it introduces “The White Man’s Burden” as “more widely read, discussed and parodied than any other poem of the time” and affirms another critic ’s claim that the poem is “an international document of the first order of importance.” Walter L. Sheldon chose Kipling as his topic for an essay in the series “Ethical Addresses,” stating the poet’s reputation to be not “a...