American Empire Begins

Here's my review of THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF U.S. CULTURE by Amy Kaplan, which I wrote in May, 2003 on Amazon. The book is particularly resonant nowadays given the current administrations' unilaterialst foreign policy, so reminiscent of America in the late nineteenth as it rushed to take over Spanish colonial possessions to promote the interests of American business.

Installing the Circuits of Empire, May 3, 2003
In THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF US CULTURE Ms. Kaplan has put together a number of illuminating readings of selected American texts as a way to explore the beginnings of empire, its expression in the U.S. in the mid to late 19th century. Her sources range from women's magazine's such as Harper's, works by Twain and W.E.B. du Bois, through "Birth of a Nation" to Welle's "Citizen Kane." She shows how the boundaries of empire were drawn, and how no one was were untouched by its discourse whether they recognized its contours or not.

She begins with a discussion of Mark Twain's first real assignment as a newspaperman: writing "letters" from Hawaii that were published in a San Francisco newspaper intended to promote the island to mainland businessmen and settlers. These letters and his observations later formed the basis of his first lectures and thus served as the springboard to his later career as a novelist. Twain, she notes, in his personal letters to friends and family is drawn to and repelled by the exotic, anxious to witness the rites of the dying Hawaiian people before they pass from history, and at the same time scandalized by their cultural practices, such as their lascivious dancing. Known generally now as an anti-colonialist because of an article he wrote during the Spanish American War(s), she demonstrates how he, knowingly, and with no little anxiety, early on recognized he was implicated in the colonial project.

On the sea voyage to Hawaii, for instance, he comes down with a bad cold, and mordantly writes to a friend that the illness he bears may kill off a few more thousand more Hawaiians. Kaplan maintains that Twain's exposure to empire in the color line in Hawaii and the exploitation of that people, (a quite different experience from how he experienced the color line in Missouri), laid the foundation for his later perspective and production of "Huckleberry Finn" some twenty years later.

Other key readings include the first full-length films produced during the "Spanish-American War Mania" when documentary footage of U.S. soldiers was mixed with some staged battles and scripted domestic scenes drew huge audiences to the movies. She suggests that the public happily participated in the jingoistic pursuit of empire through these films, and that these productions laid the groundwork for not just the war movie genre, but the full-length film.

Prior to these movies, shorts were the order of the day. She notes these films influenced the structure and visual imagery of "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915, which, if you haven't seen it recently, presents African Americans as the lords of misrule in the American South. Encapsulated in all these cultural productions are the portrayals of non-white men as stupid, power-crazed savages who in their grab at power, attempt to deflower the flower of the white womanhood, while non-white women are seen as exotic and erotically destabilizing. The Birth of a Nation casts the Klan as heroic figures who must preserve civilization through lynching, terror and mayhem. The Rough Riders were seen as masculine white heroes who swept away the decadent vestiges of a cruel empire, freeing Filipinos and Cubans who as non-whites and subjugated peoples could not understand or appreciate the boon of freedom that had been conferred upon them.

Orson Welle's "Citizen Kane," the fictionalized life of Henry Luce, is also examined as critique of the circuits of imperial power. She notes that it is one of the few films that even touches on the Spanish American War as a subject, but that this war was central to Luce's creation of his own media empire. Making the point that the yellow press grew to prominence during this era, repeating the story that Hearst started the war in Cuba to sell newspapers, she shows how the media supported the drive toward empire, and in their cultural productions assigned roles to citizens.

Her larger point is that empire is not a one way street, but rather is complex circuit through which the dreams of the imperial power are modified and altered through contact with the Other. Through her examination of W.E. DuBois, she summarizes his view that WWI was not centered in a dispute between European powers but that it grew out of Africa. By decentering the standard narrative, he rewrites the conflict as the history as growing out of the contact of Europe with Africa. This chapter nicely resonates with her introduction She relates through a Supreme Court decision how Puerto Rico was both a possession, and not a possession, holding it through law at arm's length -- a place in which it still resides, in a limbo as both dependent and quasi-independent. A similar judgment was made during the 1830s by the Supreme Court when they ruled that the Cherokee was not a nation in the strict sense, but a dependent population so that they could be uprooted and sent forth on the Trail of Tears. (See the book "1831" Year of Eclipse" by Louis Masur for the history behind that similarly ambiguous decision.

This is a thoughtful book to which full justice cannot be given in a short review. Her location of the Spanish American War as a key node in America's consolidation of its colonial aspirations is important and convincingly done. As a chapter in history, the Spanish American War(s) has always been dismissed as a minor episode, portrayed as the U.S. trying on the role of the colonizer during the colonial era's last gasp, an activity for which as a democracy it was ill suited. What Kaplan shows is that it was a rehearsal for a different kind of imperialism, the stimulation of the American middle-class through narratives of power as presented through the media, and the later colonization of the world through the globalization construct put forth under the rubric of democracy and free trade.