Presenting America's World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine (review)

The publication of Philip J. Pauly's 1979 American Quarterly essay "The World and All That Is in It: The National Geographic Society, 1888–1918," and of Reading National Geographic (1993) by Jane Lutz and Catherine Collins, initiated scholarly study of this popular cultural icon. Lutz and Collins in particular inspired numerous critiques: of the magazine's imperialist ideology in Julie Tuason's "The Ideology of Empire in National Geographic Magazine's coverage of the Philippines, 1889–1908" (1999); of the society's promotion of male explorers in Lisa Bloom's Gender on Ice (1993); of its production and distribution of maps in Susan Schulten's The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (2001); and of its portrayals of Middle-Eastern women in Linda Steet's Veils and Daggers (2003). As with Howard S. Abramson's National Geographic:Behind America's Lens on the World (1987)—a scathing account of faked photographs and institutionalized anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism—criticism of the institution runs counter to the celebratory tomes about the National Geographic Society (NGS) written by insiders. Now, Tamar Rothenberg's Presenting America's World (2008), while taking a similarly critical view of the magazine, builds on this previous scholarship by examining the magazine's earliest decades, thereby broadening our understanding of its place in geographic history.

Rothenberg's analysis of National Geographic's formative period, 1888–1945, combines two theoretical models: Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" and Mary Louise Pratt's analysis of travel narratives (Imperial Eyes, 1992) that deploy multiple "strategies of innocence" promoting U.S. imperialism. The book's thesis, however, will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with scholarship on the magazine: National Geographic manufactured consent through editorial policies that concealed political questions behind aesthetically-pleasing images and non-controversial subjects. Its photographs and texts, Rothenberg argues, distilled human subjects into representatives of a timeless cultural essence and promoted U.S. moral and technological supremacy abroad.

The book's first two chapters situate the magazine's birth and its visual aesthetics within the late-nineteenth-century rivalry between geography's professionals and its popularizers. They effectively trace its shift from dry academic journal to popular illustrated monthly following the 1898 Spanish-American War, and chronicle its increasing visibility as a semi-official organ of the federal government following the First World War. In Chapter 3, Rothenberg focuses on photographs of racial "types," an aesthetic mainstay in the magazine's portrayal of non-Westerners, but unfortunately fails to provide extended readings of individual photographs or to illuminate the relationship of photographs to the articles in which they appear.

The book's final two chapters, focusing on the intrepid explorer Harriet Chalmers Adams and the prolific photographer Maynard Owen Williams, offer more penetrating insights into the gendered politics at work within the institution. Williams and Adams were insiders whose private correspondence with editor Gilbert H. Grosvenor and work on behalf of the magazine illuminates the pervasive gender dynamic of what Rothenberg calls the magazine's "macho paternalism" (53). Both contributors, interestingly, sometimes resisted institutional policy that stereotyped non-Westerners as "primitives" or eschewed politics to promote only the sunny side of life.

Rothenberg's book contributes to the scholarship on National Geographic by turning a critical gaze on the institution's formative years. In this way it might serve as a kind of "prequel" to Reading National Geographic, for the arguments of the two books are essentially the same: National Geographic was complicit in disseminating imperialist ideology and perpetuating stereotypes of non-Westerners at home, thus helping to manufacture public consent to U.S. hegemony abroad.