From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898

6: Building an Imperial Iconography: Race, Paternalism, and the Symbols of Empire

 187  6 Building an Imperial Iconography race, paternalism, and the symbols of empire  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. pile on the brown man’s burden; and if ye rouse his hate, Meet his old-fashioned reasons with Maxims up to date. with shells and dumdum bullets a hundred times make plain the brown man’s loss must ever imply the white man’s gain. “a brown Man’s burden” (1899), a parody of rudyard Kipling’s poem “the white Man’s burden” In March 1899 a group of New York society women organized a “mid-Lent entertainment” that they called “Uncle Sam’s Annexation Party.” Theyasked gueststocometothepartyin costumeasAmerican colonial subjects. Those arriving as Filipinos wore rings in their noses and ears and “primitive-style” clothing, and the New York Journal noted that the party caused local costume shops to run out of chocolate -colored greasepaint.1 “Blacking up” into colonial caricature enabled these society folks to perform the fantasy of dominating nonwhite peoples at home and abroad, revealing how deeply these imperialistic visions were ingraining themselves into the culture. The United States was an imperial power long before its brief 188  chapter six war with Spain, having taken ownership of large tracts of land from Mexico, Britain, and France, waged a war of extermination and land dispossession against Native Americans, and assumed a position of economic and diplomatic ascendancy in the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish-American War of 1898, however, broke new ground insofar as it presented an opportunity for the United States to acquire overseas territories without the promise of extending the full rights and privileges of statehood. This sparked a national debate that provoked greater opposition than the initial decision to intervene in the Cuban crisis. An anticolonialist movement grew with support from prominent American political and intellectual leaders, including ex-presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland; Republican senators Eugene Hale and George F. Hoar and House Speaker Thomas Reed; Democrat William Jennings Bryan; labor leader Samuel Gompers; activists Jane Addams, Josephine Shaw Lowell, and W. E. B. Du Bois; businessmen Andrew Carnegie and George F. Peabody; writers Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Henry Blake Fuller, and Mark Twain; and Harvard and Yale intellectuals William James, Charles Eliot Norton, and William Graham Sumner. Because such strangebedfellowscametogetherinthisanticolonialistcoalition,their arguments ranged widely in scope. They expressed concerns over the effects of colonization on American values, republican institutions, labor, and free trade, and the incorporation of subjects who were viewed as racial and cultural inferiors. Still, many of them favored the establishment of permanent coaling stations and extension of U.S. trade and cultural dominion, a policy we now call neoimperialism , but without the burdens of formal occupation.2 This chapter identifies the prevailing representations for and against colonial acquisition that appeared in political cartoons and other commercial entertainments during the late war and immediate postwar periods. These images helped Americans to make sense of the shifting meaning of the war and to rationalize an imperialist outcome. In the fall and winter of 1898–99, editorialists, politicians, writers, and other intellectuals produced copious writings and speeches voicing moral, racial, constitutional, political, diplomatic, and economic considerations for and against colonization. Race was a crucial issue in these discussions, but did not necessarily carry the  189 building an imperial iconography most weight. In the visual distillation of this debate in political cartoons , however, race transcended all others factors. Cartoonists’ reliance on certain symbols and stereotypes at the expense of others reduced the stakes of the imperial debate to those idioms that proved most economical for visual expression. As instruments of persuasion, images communicate differently than words do, reach broader audiences , and may or may not be overtly political.3 Even when cartoonists were attempting to articulate a broader array of relevant issues, the act of representing the colonies inevitably positioned race at the center. Marking the colonies with visual distinctions of “race”—skin color, facial features, and hair type—became a delivery system for imperial ideologies. These attributes of colonial subjects deviated from the visual imagery of normative whiteness, the “race” equated with civilization and the competence to self-govern.4 The racial tenor of pro- and anticolonialist arguments hindered the ability of anticolonialist cartoonists to...