Blood, Class and Empire
Page 9
As an envoi, it might be noted that in late 1988 Walter Annenberg sold his massively circulated TV Guide to Rupert Murdoch. In 1972, Annenberg had offered to place this great resource at the disposal of Nixon’s “misunderstood” Vietnam policy. Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, had become an American citizen and had asked Richard Nixon to become a columnist for his London Sunday Times. Between them, the two arrivistes had acquired a share in the prestige of the royal family and the Times newspaper—no light matter in the status business, especially for men with direct memories of how their own fortunes had been gained in the first place.
In the case of Wister, Anglophilia took the form of admiring a country and a culture because it was strong. In the case of Annenberg, Anglophilia took the form of an annexation of prestige, made possible because Britain was now weak. The scratches on the mind remain intact: a hoard of imagery and potential cachet made more accessible by the relegation of the United Kingdom to the second class. This consideration has even mellowed the once irreconcilable Fenians. To take an amusing case in point, the Irish Republican sympathizer Peter Maas wrote, in The Nation of March 28, 1987, that there was insufficient American protest at London’s policy of repression in the Six Counties of Ulster. Among the reasons he cited for this betrayal was:
Our love affair, from jurisprudence to Princess Di, with Ireland’s conquerors—the Brits. It makes you wonder why Adams, Jefferson and Washington went to all that bother.
Broadening the attack to take in the so-called liberals, Maas went for Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who had once rather grandly written that a policy of “enlightened colonialism” would be best for Northern Ireland:
I can only think that Tony Lewis, whom I otherwise admire, is infinitely more at home lunching in the gracious surroundings of an exclusive London club than he would be, say, knocking down a Guinness in a Gaelic Athletic Association hangout in West Belfast.
Mr. Maas is a writer of best-sellers, and finds no difficulty in summoning the trusty images of effete Englishness to the keyboard. One year later, though, I chanced to notice a letter from the same Mr. Maas in the rather different pages of the Condé Nast Traveler, a magazine for the well-heeled cosmopolitan. This letter, too, was a protest:
How could you run a piece on Jermyn Street and not mention Foster and Son? The first time I peered at its window display I went in and asked how long it would take for a pair of boots, and they said four months. I said that was a little long for me.
However, Mr. Maas tells us, his promotion of Serpico and The Valachi Papers took him back to London and indeed back to Jermyn Street, and one day he nerved himself to enter Foster and Son once again:
“I not only want boots in the style of those in the window, but the same leather with its marvelous patina.” They protested. “But, sir, these boots have been there for one hundred fifty years, and they have been polished every day . . .”
Of course, I’ve been getting all my boots there ever since. I recently stopped in, not having been in London for at least three years. “Good morning, Mr. Maas,” they said, as if I’d been in just a few days before. Wonderful!
Immunity to “class” temptations is evidently hard to acquire, even for those who know how to deplore the temptation in others. Not for nothing is hypocrisy known as an English vice.
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The Bard of Empires
In her celebrated essay “Imperialism,” Hannah Arendt had some words of reproof for Rudyard Kipling’s best-known poem, or at least for the best-known single phrase of his poetry, which is “The White Man’s Burden.” As if determined not to give any impression of approval, she confined herself to the most obvious and familiar judgment, which was to say:
The fact that the “White Man’s burden” is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.
In America, as Joan Didion once pointed out, there is always a danger that when people say, “No man is an island,” they think they are quoting from Ernest Hemingway. Yet the difficulty in Kipling’s case—his famous verses are still almost universally assumed to apply to Colonel Blimp and the Union Jack—does not arise from any confusion between the original author and the later employment of a memorable line. “The White Man’s Burden” was finished on November 22, 1898, in Rottingdean, Sussex, and sent straight off across the Atlantic to Theodore Roosevelt. It was, in every sense, addressed to the United States. Its explicit purpose was to nerve Roosevelt in particular, and American opinion in general, to take an unabashed advantage of the conquest of the Philippines.
“Teddy” had just been thrust into power as governor of New York State after a showy and successful performance in Cuba—the local counterpart to the Filipino triumph. Like a number of President McKinley’s supporters, he thought that what was worth fighting for was worth holding on to. But he did not have the language in which to express this imperial yearning. It was one thing to deliver two bully knockout punches to the decrepit edifice of the odious Spanish Empire, and quite another to seize control of its territories and their inhabitants. The stanzas, therefore, came to him at the right place and the right time:
THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
The United States and the Philippine Islands
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
It was proposed to publish the poem in order to influence the Senate debate on a treaty that would take over the governance of the Philippines. This treaty was meeting with halfhearted objection from William Jennings Bryan, and with more decided misgivin
gs from those who feared the high cost of empire or who dreaded the word itself. On January 12, 1899, Roosevelt forwarded “The White Man’s Burden” to Henry Cabot Lodge, with a covering note: “I send you an advance copy of a poem by Kipling which is rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist viewpoint.” Roosevelt had found an ingenious word for it. “Expansionist” did not then carry its later aggressive connotations. It signified the idea of an America unwilling to endure indefinite confinement and restriction, surrounded as it was by open seas and the vacant possessions of declining European empires. After all, it need have meant no more than “outward-looking.” “Expansive”—a term altogether generous in its implications, just as Kipling himself strove to be in his. Cabot Lodge also found himself stirred by the prevailing generosity of spirit. He replied: “Thanks for the advance copy of Kipling’s poem. I like it. I think it is better poetry than you say, apart from the sense of the verses.”
Neither Lodge nor Roosevelt, then, mistook the poem for a paean to British imperialism. Indeed, apart from going to the trouble of subtitling it “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” Kipling had taken other precautions to make his meaning plain. For one thing, the injunction at the head of each stanza would by 1898 have been supererogatory in the case of a British audience. For another, despite his presumable distaste for the Spanish monarchy, it is unlikely in the extreme that he would have written “No tawdry rule of kings” if his intended audience had been the London Times. In point of fact, and with Roosevelt’s help, “The White Man’s Burden” was first printed in the New York Sun on February 5, 1899, the day before the Senate yielded to McKinley’s urgings about the treaty which took the archipelago under American protection. Kipling’s lines were often used by Cabot Lodge and Roosevelt in articles and addresses favoring the “expansionist” cause. Roosevelt, who was already friendly with other young British imperialists like Cecil Spring-Rice, kept up a correspondence with Kipling on military and diplomatic and colonial matters for the rest of his life and was rewarded at his death with a valedictory poem entitled “Great-Heart.” Elected President at least partly on the credit he had won in Cuba by the “storming” of San Juan Hill, and succeeding to a McKinley who had been slain by a distinctly “foreign” type of anarchist whose name nobody could pronounce, he wrote to Kipling at the close of his first term on November 1, 1904:
I have done a good many things in the past three years. . . . It is natural that some people should have been alienated by each thing I did, and the aggregate of all that have been alienated may be more than sufficient to overthrow me. Thus, in dealing with the Philippines I have first the jack-fools who seriously think that any group of pirates and head-hunters needs nothing but independence in order that it may be turned into a dark-hued New England town-meeting, and then the entirely practical creatures who join with these extremists because I do not intend that the islands shall be exploited for corrupt purposes.
I have accomplished certain definite things. I would consider myself a hundred times over repaid if I had nothing more to my credit than Panama and the coaling stations in Cuba. So that you see my frame of mind is a good deal like that of your old Viceroy when he addressed the new Viceroy.
This letter is more or less a prose version of stanzas five and six of “The White Man’s Burden.” It seizes the sense of thankless responsibility that is so gratifying to the colonial mind, and couples it with that sense of pride in selfish achievement that is likewise inseparable from the enterprise of conquest. Note, in particular, that whether or not Roosevelt realized that the word “viceroy” meant “deputy king,” he already quite liked the sound of it.
There were three distinct peculiarities in Kipling’s approach to the United States. The first was that, unlike every other visiting English writer of the nineteenth century, he landed on the West Coast and made his way east. The second is that he felt hostile to, and wrote against, the principles of the American Revolution and the principles of democracy. The third is that, British super-patriot though he undoubtedly was, he liked the United States more and more as it decided to move outside its own borders. Some combination of these experiences and attitudes gave him a powerful apprehension of the strength of the country, and an intense feeling that it must be enlisted on the British side.
In 1889, Kipling took ship from India and landed at San Francisco. He had promised to send back dispatches to that distinguished British-Indian journal The Allahabad Pioneer, and the result is a sketchbook travelogue entitled “From Sea to Sea.” It is a racy, semi-serious narrative, full of commingled admiration for, and reservations about, the size and vitality of the United States. Already a devotee of Bret Harte, he was slightly discouraged to learn that his fellow San Franciscans thought him to be too Anglicized:
A reporter asked me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was hallowed ground to me because of Bret Harte. That was true. “Well,” said the reporter, “Bret Harte claims California, but California doesn’t claim Bret Harte. He’s been so long in England that he’s quite English. Have you seen our cracker-factories and the new offices of the Examiner?”
Matters did not improve with any speed on the journey eastward. Like Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, who began to roll their eyes, at each other whenever an American introduced one of his fellows as “one of the most remarkable men in the country” or (an irritating variant) “perhaps as remarkable a man as any in our country,” and who had to endure the baiting of the British lion at the imperishable dinner of the Watertoast Association, Kipling was easily roused to scorn. Whether or not he had read Martin Chuzzlewit, he observed sarcastically of an acquaintance made at a Fourth of July festivity that “he trampled upon the British Lion generally. “ At the same occasion he recorded drily that an American introduced his fellows by saying: “They include very many prominent and representative citizens from seven states of the union, and most of them are wealthy. Yes, sir. Representative and prominent.” And, like Martin and Mark, he had a low threshold for being bored while traveling:
Some of the persons in the coach remarked that the scenery was “elegant.” Wherefore, even at the risk of my own life, I did urgently desire an accident and the massacre of some of the more prominent citizens.
Kipling was writing for an audience in the Raj that was quite prepared to consider the idea of America a joke in itself. But his condescension masked a certain unease. Americans might be laughable, but they could be treacherous and even threatening. As he put it in his poem “The American Rebellion (1776),” even the title of which was intended to debase:
’Twas not while England’s sword unsheathed
Put half a world to flight,
Nor while their new-built cities breathed
Secure behind her might;
Not while she poured from Pole to Line
Treasure and ships and men—
These worshippers at Freedom’s shrine,
They did not quit her then!
Not till their foes were driven forth
By England o’er the main—
Not till the Frenchman from the North
Had gone with shattered Spain;
Not till the clean-swept oceans showed
No hostile flag unrolled,
Did they remember what they owed
To Freedom—and were bold!
Lexington and Concord appear, in this cosmology, as a stab in the back, of the sort a silky Pathan or cruel Afghan might have delivered. But Kipling had a saving shrewdness about the value of his own propaganda and the appeal of his own emotions. Back in the United States in the mid-1890s, and considering long residence, and married to an American woman as well as possibly infatuated with an American man, he began to take a more considered view. It was a great shock to him to see the blaze of animosity that arose in 1895, when Britain and the United States almost went to war over the Venezuelan border dispute. President Grover Cleveland was under attack for being in the pay of British interests (a common
gibe in those times) and had responded with extremely minatory speeches and promises. Cecil Spring-Rice took Kipling to hear some of the debates in Congress during a visit to Washington, and the effect was a shaking one. A critic, Louis Cornell, has speculated:
Without the soothing influence of a common enemy, America and the British Empire maintained a friendliness that was at least precarious. If Kipling’s occasional trumpet calls on behalf of Anglo-Saxon unity now seem a bit shrill, we must remember that they sounded above the rumblings of Anglo-American rivalry. “So far as I was concerned,” Kipling wrote forty years later, “I felt the atmosphere was to some extent hostile.”
There was not immediately a common enemy in sight, though Kipling dropped a broad hint about this when Venezuela came up again and in a poem he alluded to the impossibility of cooperating “with the Goth and the shameless Hun.” Still, there could be a common cause. Before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, but when the idea of a “shattered Spain” had ceased to be a British historic monopoly, he wrote, in early 1898, “The Song of the White Men”:
Now, this is the cup the White Men drink
When they go to right a wrong,
And that is the cup of the old world’s hate—