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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
UMW HIST300F: Race Over Empire?
Historian Thomas Holt has argued that historically, white men in the United States have made race, but they have not always been able to make it do as they intended. Does Eric Love believe that is the case with those pro-imperial advocates at the end of the nineteenth century? Were you convinced that ideas about race were a hindrance to overseas imperialism?
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In reading Eric Love’s Race Over Empire I think racism works both to shape the view of imperialist and anti-imperialist. On the one hand the anti-imperialist are fueled by some rather racist thinking such as not wanting Hawaii natives to have a say in United States politics for racially motivated reasons. Another example Love mentions that James Bryce made the argument that neither Hawaii or Cuba were not suitable for white colonization (128). This of course is racism motivated by social Darwinism. Yet, part of the reasoning for annexation of Hawaii was motivated by fear that the Japanese would take Hawaii for themselves (137). This coupled with attempts to give Hawaii a white social identity and The Chinese Exclusion Act make race an issue for the imperialist as well. Sereno Bishop, a supporter of the annexation of Hawaii according to Love, “Bishop characterized the revolution as racial, a struggle of whites against a ‘reactionary heathen element’ in which the queen was the main culprit.” (107). Racism being used for and against annexation of Hawaii did make it a hindrance to overseas imperialism.
ReplyDeleteThe opinions or thesis of Love and Holt are similar, but it appears that Holt's argument is more about social identity. On the other hand, Love's entire discussion is that race governed not only questions on social identity, but also decisions on politics, international affairs, war, and expansion. Love argues fairly well that race has been absent in the historiography surrounding the discussion of the imperialism of the United States, but it was race that was the main argument at the end of the 19th century. It was not just race that was a hinderance to overseas imperialism, it was the conflict of race with the Republican virtues or ideals. It was believed at the time that imperialism was bad per se. On the other hand, expansion was acceptable. At the time it was believed that Expansion cannot include inferior races, because it would tarnish the political elite.
ReplyDeleteIn the reading for this week, Love makes it very evident that race is an effective tool in imperial type affairs. There have been several examples already mentioned above my post about the race relations involved in the annexation of Hawaii. Cuba was also brought into the mix. As the post above mine explain, Love does use race as the hinge on which many of the imperialistic decisions were made. Whether race itself as a main factor has been overshadowed or not is another question. However, the topic of racially provoked moves by imperial nations presents a more overarching point. I enjoyed this reading and appreciated the angle Love took in presenting his argument.
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ReplyDeleteI think it is important to reiterate the comment in a post above that imperialism was bad, but expansion was acceptable. Not only was expansion okay, it was craved by congressmen of the time. Love makes a compelling argument that race hindered US imperialism, and I see this most clearly in US attitudes toward native populations. The United States did not want to behave as an imperial power by conquering lands and bringing the natives under colonial rule. Doing so went against American values and, more specifically, the Non-Colonization Principle of the Monroe Doctrine. The United States wants to expand and acquire more territory, but what would it do with the other races inhabiting those lands? Americans certainly did not want the foreigners to join the Union and gain citizenship, thereby tainting society's whiteness. Race was a great roadblock because the United States wanted territories without their peoples. Senator William Henry Seward exemplified this sentiment well, as he "wanted the territories but did not believe in acquiring territory by conquest" (22). Instead, he sought a more natural process whereby over time the US would have a greater "capacity for absorption" and "the inclusion of non-white would have no discernible impact on the prevailing social order" (23).
ReplyDeleteEric Love brings attention to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” on pg. 6 within the first chapter of his book, and uses it as evidence to support his thesis, stating that the poem has been “misused”, given to the public after the U.S. “seized its empire”, and is full of “churning irony and cynicism” in an attempt to warn the United States about the dangers of imperialism. By going out of his element and citing a poem and a man for which he misunderstood, Eric Love has unknowingly shot himself in the foot before he even began to walk.
ReplyDeleteFirst: Although this poem was released publicly in February of 1899, Kipling finished it on November 22nd 1898 and sent it immediately to Theodore Roosevelt. Entitled “The White Man’s Burden”, Kipling sub-titled it “The United States and the Philippine Islands, 1898”, in an attempt to influence Roosevelt in particular, as well as the American public at large, to seize the initiative in the Philippines. Christopher Hitchens article Burdens and Songs: The Anglo-American Rudyard Kipling further explains the effect that this language had on Roosevelt by stating “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”. (1)
Second: Eric Love claims people have “ignored the poem’s churning irony and cynicism”, as well as “ its references to the contradictions of this crusade”. Although Eric Love may have shed some light on Kipling’s subconscious belief in imperialism, it does not go hand in hand with Kipling’s conscious belief in Anglo-Saxonism and Racial Darwinism Being a staunch Anglophile, Kipling not only earnestly believed in the white man’s responsibility to civilize “Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half-devil and half child”, but had the hopes of encouraging America to join Britain in the pursuit of the racial responsibilities of empire”. (2)
In conclusion, Eric Love makes a good point in acknowledging other factors that motivated U.S. foreign policy (i.e. domestic issues, new markets, geopolitical factors), but to downplay its overall effect is inappropriate, for although racism may not have accounted for the success of a foreign policy, it does account for its development … Kipling’s poem was designed to do just that.
Works Cited
1. Christopher Hitchens Burdens and Songs: The Anglo-American Rudyard Kipling Reviewed work(s):Source: Grand Street, Vol.9,No. 3 (Spring, 1990), pp. 203-234.
2. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Nov2003, Vol. 55 Issue 6, p1-11.
For further debate, here is Kipling's "White Man's Burden" (1899):
DeleteTake 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 hopes 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 mark 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 he 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 cloke 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 proferred 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!
I truly believe that Eric love's argument is legitimate. The reason that I say this is because race during this era did indeed, hinder imperialism. For example, the chinese exclusion act prohibited chinese people infiltrating into American soil. The united states people perceived Chinese and other foreigners as enemies, and them being threatened or afraid of these foreigners stopped expansion. Last semester, I took a history class that's relevant to this book, and one of the authors argued that America during the the 19th century should never be considered an empire because the issue of race prohibited them to expand. I don't recall his name, but he cited the Chinese expulsion acts as his arguments. Someone posted above that expansion would tarnish political elites was one of the arguments that the author added in his book as well. I enjoyed this book because it shows how Americans perceived non-white people, and how race has the capability to hinder imperialism in a way.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Last semester I did a project that related to the anti-Chinese sentiment in the US. Yes, Americans discriminated against the Chinese, but the ones who hated the Chinese the most were German and Irish immigrants, Southern and Southeastern European whites who were discriminated against by whites in America. People always search for a scapegoat...the races who face discrimination change constantly.
DeleteLove does make a compelling argument that racism hindered imperialism, though the United States would argue that it only desired to expand its boundaries, not conquer and colonize. As previously mentioned, racism reared its head when the United States sought to acquire territories but not the people within the territories. However, the desire for more land seems to have trumped the loathing of nonwhite people. In the case of Hawaii, the United States tried to make the islands seem more white by proclaiming the Portuguese as white Europeans. The need for more land caused the government to temporarily change the definition of "white". As stated in a previous comment, in the race for land against other nations, the United States wanted Hawaii for itself. Better to have nonwhite people and acquire the territory than to let a nonwhite country, such as Japan, obtain more land instead.
ReplyDeleteFor the pro-imperial advocates, I think that race played a very important role. As Love pointed out several times, pro-imperialists used race to their advantage by exaggerating the “whiteness” of the Hawaiian islands and claiming that because the islands were white, Hawaii could be annexed without the problem of having an abundance of undesirable inferior races. However, I felt that stronger points of imperialist/annexationist arguments were the military advantages of having a Pacific possession and the urge to protect the islands from another foreign power, but necessarily a different race.
ReplyDeleteI was convinced by Love’s argument that race played a prominent role in hindering the annexation of Hawaii and overseas imperialism in general. I felt that he presented good evidence to show that the anti-imperialists used racism to delay annexation by arguing several points: that annexing Hawaii would bring inferior, unwanted races into the United States and that the islands were not even habitable for whites. I found Love’s arguments and evidence interesting because I had always assumed that racism would be used to support imperialism (to assert dominance, superiority, and control over racial inferiors) instead of to detract from it. I felt that a larger, overarching theme that racism falls into that was present in much of Love’s evidence was just the general fear of anything un-American, which of course encompasses race, but it seemed that even the presence other non-American whites, like the Europeans, was extremely regrettable.
One argument of the imperialists involving race that I found very interesting is on page 155, where several congressmen are emphasizing and exaggerating the whiteness of the islands, and in doing so claim that within ten years there would be only “a mere handful of Asians left” and the natives would have died out. I think that emphasizing the whiteness to this extent is interesting because I feel that it would actually detract from earlier/other annexationist arguments: that the island needed to be taken to protect the whites and their interests and prevent the further spread of undesirable races. I wonder if this hindered imperialists’ arguments at all, or if perhaps the ongoing war was too pressing and the nationalistic fervor too great to really punch holes in the argument.
Love presents clear evidence for his position on race and empire: race impeded imperial expansion. It seems clear from the beginning of chapter three, while discussing the treaty to annex Hawaii. In this treaty, there was a special article that ceased all immigration from Asia into Hawaii and from Hawaii into the United States, essentially to uphold the Chinese Exclusion Act while annexing Hawaii. The rhetoric used in policy making clearly involved race and the color of Hawaiians and how to racially address native Hawaiians, whose "whiteness" was emphasized. Love adds complexity to an over-told and simplified narrative of American imperialism as merely a "white man's burden." What I found more important than his idea of race as a hindrance to foreign expansion was the depth of economic, military, and political factors that played a role in policy-making. These are the reasons that overcame the obstacle of race that history too often overlooks.
ReplyDeleteThere is no question that Love believes that pro-imperialists used race as a way of getting what they wanted when it came to their overseas endeavors. One example of this would be that when Love describes how Secretary of State, James Blaine, was informed that 1,700 Chinese immigrants had made their way to Hawaii and 1,500 more were on their way. Blaine’s response was that something needed to be done to try and decrease the Chinese population and his reasoning for that was that although the U.S. was not trying to control Hawaii, they did not want it to fall under East Asian influence. When it became about protecting controlling interests in Hawaii, race was a solid way to do that.
ReplyDeleteThis reading really came to change my whole understanding of this period of history that I have been told to regurgitate throughout high school, that race was in fact the key factor advocating for U.S. expansion. I was not only fascinated but also unaware to the point that Love raises in this reading that race was actually antagonistic to the imperial undertakings by the U.S. in this time. I would say that I do agree somewhat with this notion that Love raises. The U.S. needed to expand for economic reasons as the reading mentioned, and what we talked about in class. More markets for American goods were needed; America, as Love puts it, “was too successful for its own good”. So as American needed to expand race became the main factor in actually hindering that expansion. Racism of the time boiled down to exclusion, exclusion for minorities in all facets of life in America. This exclusion definitely had a relation to people wanting to expand to certain regions or not. Many thought that expansion should be only for the benefit of whites, which when trying to expand to non-white areas become very difficult. In the case of Hawaii many thought that the non-white inhabitants would die off which would make it okay for the U.S. to annex and not have to worry about the intermingling of whites and non-whites politically or socially.
ReplyDeleteI think that Love does make a good argument that race was a hindrance to overseas imperialism. But I also think it was very interesting that at the time one of the big excuses that governments and policy makers used to justify the spreading of their empire, besides for economic gain, were to spread their ideas to these "inferior" cultures. And although these ideas might not have been directly expressed but they were probably in the back of most policy makers heads. It's also interesting to think about the argument that in tropical places white labor wouldn't be very beneficial so it was important to keep the native people around strictly to provide labor for these white businesses.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the assigned reading I would say that Love does believe that race is a factor to pro-imperialist advocates in the nineteenth century. In the reading Love explains the United States annexation of Hawaii, because they feared that the Japanese would take the islands all for themselves. Love states, “The United States must annex Hawaii, they said, for the sake of the islands’ whites, to rescue Anglo-Saxon civilization from creeping Asian hordes” (Pg 135). If that quote does not show an example of segregation involving race, then I do not know what does. Like Holt said the white men have made race, but it wasn’t until the fear of their race becoming a minority that they made the decision to annex Hawaii. So the race “white men” is meant to show power of the United States and it does until they decide that they only wanted the power so they could have the land. The land was intended to be used for agricultural reasons, but it turned into a “racial power” competition to the United States when Japan became interested in Hawaii. I do believe that race was a hindrance to overseas imperialism because nobody wants their race to be the “minority” in the population so they make sure to have an abundant amount of people in the population. I believe that imperialism is manly evolved around race and the need for more power and land. It is natural for everyone to think that their race and country is the “best”, so race is a hindrance to overseas imperialism.
ReplyDeleteLove does argue that race in the pro-imperialist came was important and that yes they could not make it go the way that they wanted it to. In the case of the Hawaiian islands, the growing Asian population, particularly the Chinese made it difficult for the imperialists to argue that the islands needed to be annexed especially with the Chinese Exclusion Act in full swing and tons of anti-Chinese sentiments on the west coast. Idea's about race were a hindrance to overseas imperialism by the United States. The main questions were about what to do with the mostly non-white populations in the proposed territories to annex, especially if these people were given rights, such as voting, that would give them some political power even if the truth of the matter was that the amounts of non-white voters were no where near enough to challenge white dominance. Overall though, these hindrances were but minor nuisances since crafty politicians, such as in the Hawaiian case found ways around them.
ReplyDeleteLove's analysis consistently revolves around two opposing views: the imperialist/annexationist argument that it is necessary to incorporate Hawaii into the United States so that it will not be available to other world powers; and reservations of race and racism that the Constitution is written by and for white men, and giving citizenship to these lesser races would be a dangerous mistake. The main concerns were minority suffrage, upholding the Asian Exclusion acts, and believing the US already had enough problems with other races in their continental territory. Others argued that Hawaii had become "Americanized" and that even though many of its inhabitants were not of Anglo-Saxon descent, they would not blemish the American people and would not necessarily be given citizenship rights anyways.In the end, it was necessary to lump the Portuguese population with the white population of Hawaii to give whites a sizable minority. This compromise of strict race and racist ideals shows that as much as the US wanted to keep its pure, homogeneous culture, the territory was too economically and politically valuable to pass up. In my opinion, the question of imperialism was not as important as race in this case because, as the SAR and Thurston argue, Hawaii had essentially become a colony (135-137).
ReplyDeleteLove agrees with Holt when he writes. "Whiteness had become so vital to the imperialists' cause in 1898 that they would invent it, whereas at another time... the Portuguese would have been cast... as the most debased of peoples and anything but "white."" (146)
Imperialism in the Americas had to be done differently than that of its European counterparts. This was a new nation, a new republican nation, that need to find its own ways of doing things. Now that democracy was in the mix, the state could not do with territories whatever they want. Many people in Congress did not see a reason to annex Hawaii, as pro-imperialists wanted, due to the high asian populations. I agree Love's argument that just because one race is in power, they cannot always gain their will
ReplyDeleteHistorians previously to Love believed that the "White-Man's Burden" was the reason for American Imperialists expansion outward into the non-white world. It was the duty of the American civilized "empire" to spread their culture onto other lesser civilized societies. According to Love, contrary to the original historical belief, imperialism in the United States was antagonistic towards racism. Love states that the American imperialists/Expansionists were racially motivated to maintain the already possessed lands. The fear of nonwhites becoming US citizens was common among natives. One example from Love's argument was President Grant's desire to annex Santa Domingo, not to help the natives emigrate to the US, but for US citizens, more specifically black Americans, to leave the US and move to Santa Domingo. Racial Intolerance created a new desire for US whites to keep the Empire from over extending its racial reach.
ReplyDeleteI found Thorston's method of minimizing the non-white population interesting, as well as his grouping the Portuguese with the whites. He made Hawaii more appealing to America by giving them what they wanted to see in Hawaii: a 22% white population, ruling over kind and generous Natives and a laboring Asiatic population that would soon diminish. This was crucial to the 1898 annexation. Also important was the disenfranchisement of non-whites in Hawaii by the provisional government there. Americans would never allow "barbarous heathens" to decide a presidential election. Hawaii's annexation became an immediate issue when Dole and other prominent whites in Hawaii incessantly appealed to Washington for annexation due to the "yellow peril" of invading Asiatic workers. It is interesting to note how in this case racism acted as a catalyst in favor of imperialism.
ReplyDelete