"It Makes a Fellow Feel Responsible!": Anglo-American Imperial Vistas and "The White Man's Burden" in McClure's Magazine, 1898–99

While Rudyard Kipling's immeasurably famous poem "The White Man's Burden" generally is seen as an example of British imperial literature, looking at the material context of its publication in American periodicals also illustrates how it contributed to and mirrored American discourse about empire just after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. First published in the February 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, advertised on the cover and replacing the customary frontispiece, "The White Man's Burden" also appeared in newspapers across the United States within a few days.¹ In the poem, the de facto literary voice of the British Empire, speaking directly to the American public, encouraged the United States to annex the Philippines after expelling Spain from the islands less than a year earlier.² Kipling—a transnational figure with powerful connections in the American political and media landscape—and his poem energized this conversation while also reflecting rhetoric that was already pervasive in the U.S., and in mass-market magazines like McClure's in particular.³

The six issues of McClure's volume twelve (November 1898 to April 1899) offer a portrait of the milieu into which an influential English author and a powerful American publisher inserted this imperialist poem. As we will see, the poem and its famous author-as-cultural-symbol were very much at home in the pages of McClure's, reifying a collection of ideas about manifest destiny, Anglo-American identity, and the realities of white imperialism abroad.

Examples throughout this volume of the affordable and advertisement-laden McClure's suggest a large readership that envisioned a beneficently Anglo-American and Christian global future while the nation—which had recently realized its first "manifest destiny" across much of North America—began expanding into spaces disconnected from the mainland. In this paper, I sift through these unexplored primary sources, thickening our description of the poem's provenance by reconstructing the conversation of a segment of culture that participated—publishing, writing, reading—in one side of the debate over American imperial expansion.⁴

Combining a transnational perspective with scholarship on the cultural impacts of turn-of-the-century publishing and American Anglo-Saxonism after the rapprochement, this extended case study adds to a growing collection of inter-imperial histories of the United States and Great Britain.⁵ Ian Tyrrell's important work on American empire encourages the "study of the transnational spaces—mental and material—that individuals and groups created outside of nation."⁶ McClure's is just such a space. The selected 1898–99 volume provides a convenient boundary since the poem, the only part that has received attention so far, appeared virtually in the middle of the volume and within a week of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. Thus, volume twelve provides a partial snapshot of American culture—insofar as one magazine can portray it and convey it—at a moment that has, for so many historians, marked the beginning of US overseas imperial history.

Though the significance of the McClure's magazine context for "The White Man's Burden" has not been well explored, recent discussions of how imperial literature in English was circulated and received and of Kipling's role in global opinion-making provide a critical backdrop. John Lee's 2014 article "King Demos and His Laureate" uses newspaper archives to clarify an important point for scholarship, that the poem was initially published in McClure's and a few other American newspapers on the first day of February, several days before it was reprinted in England.⁷ Lee is concerned with Kipling's calculated use of the newspaper poem as a transatlantic medium, but his discussion of the magazine's national reach and enormous circulation of about 369,000 copies—as well as his use of recent biographical scholarship to discuss Kipling's presence in America—help to establish the poem's influence in American culture and its essentially American identity.⁸ For my purposes, this matters because McClure's is so often mentioned as a secondary...