It evoked both the fact that the bulk of the U.S. force was made up of units from the Midwestern states. In The Pigtail Has Got to Go, a white-robed goddess wears a star that radiates over a Chinese mandarin. Ugly and shocking scenes of violence in 19th-century American life are ironically captioned as refined and elegant to challenge the self-image of a nation contributing cash to save the heathen of foreign lands while ignoring its own barbarity. Source:Library of Congress. England has governed her colonies whether they consented or not. Expansionism promulgated under the banner of civilization could not escape being carried out in global military campaigns, referred to as the savage wars of peace in the third stanza: Such avowed paternalism towards other cultures recast the invasion of their lands as altruistic service to humankind. The human and financial cost of these extended conflicts was large. The argument follows Englands example, as spelled out on the blackboard, that By not waiting for their consent, she has greatly advanced the worlds civilization. An African-American washes windows. The book on the desk reads: U.S. Columbia Studies in the Social Sciences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). These more critical graphics did not exist in a vacuum. Presence of a German fleet lent evidence to one of the justifications the U.S. gave for war with Spain, that is, to protect the Philippines from takeover by a rival major power. 730-735 (2008). Harpers Weeklylater echoed the classroom scene with a cover captioned Uncle Sams New Class in the Art of Self-Government. The class is disrupted by revolutionaries from the new U.S. territories of the Philippines and Cuba, whose vicious fight brands them as barbarously unfit for self-rule. In May 1900, for example, artist William Bengough scathingly debunked a speech by President McKinleyonce again justifying the U.S. actions in taking of the Philippines by forceby depicting him as a parson standing on the face of a dead Filipino. One was the second Boer War of 18991902 that pitted British forces against Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa and their black supporters. Backed by the formidable Royal Navy, Britain could maintain a policy of splendid isolation independent of European alliances for much of the century. She may be red-handed, and at times drunk, but she is there for business. Our Christmas Tree. Udo Keppler,Puck, December 27, 1899. A number of critical cartoons of the time addressed the unsavory behavior of the civilizers themselves, and the disparity between doctrine and actions. When applied to people and cultures, the survival of the fittest doctrine gave wealthy, technologically-advanced countries not only the right to dominate backward nations, but an imperative and duty to bring them into the modern world. The imperialist rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism that took root during these years was reinforced in both the United States and England by a small flood of political cartoonscommonly executed in full color and with meticulous attention to detail. The laudatory rhetoric and imagery of a white mans burden and civilizing mission received a sharp rejoinder in a cartoon published byLifein April, 1901 under the title March of the Strenuous Civilization. In this sardonic rendering of the realities of imperialist expansion, a missionary leads the charge holding a Missionary Ledger. Immediately behind him march a sword-brandishing sailor carrying loot and a rifle-bearing soldier carrying booty. Science comes next, clutching lyddite, a high explosive first used by the British in the Boer War. 62, Issue 4,pp. Seated around them (left to right) are a feminized Russia, Turkey, Italy, Austria, Spain, and France. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). China peeps over the wall. Historical perspective. The black-and-white drawing by William H. Walker captured the harsh reality behind the ideal of benevolent assimilation, depicting imperialists Uncle Sam, John Bull, Kaiser Wilhelm, and, coming into view, a figure that probably represents France, as burdens carried by vanquished non-white peoples. British armies had difficulty stopping mounted Boer commandos spread out over large areas of open terrain. The conspicuously larger size of Britannias big guns inPucks cartoon reflects Englands leading role in imperial conquest. The Great Rapprochement describes a shift in the relationship of the U.S. and Great Britain that, in the 1890s, moved from animosity and suspicion to friendship and cooperation. The violence applied to these aims both in bodily harm and cultural ruin was only part of the hypocrisy. Fears that China would descend into chaos and xenophobia justified intervention to safeguard the spread of modernity, civilization, and trade. XII, No. The caption reads Think It Overa phrase that also appeared later in Mark Twains To the Person Sitting in Darkness essay. Vignette-style graphics placed an array of smaller scenes around the central image. Long-standing personifications and visual symbols for countries were used by cartoonists to dramatize events to suit their message. As the cartoon record of these turn-of-the-century years repeatedly demonstrates, moreover, it was taken for granted by the imperialists that the people on whom they were bestowing the light of civilization were literallyand often grotesquelyof various shades of darker complexion. Source:The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. All are erstwhile British soldiers. Source:Library of Congress, This rueful cartoon places Confucius and Jesus side-by-side and laments the failure of all parties to practice what they preach. Klein, Thoralf. Are our teachings, then, in vain? is the caption of a cartoon by Pucks Udo Keppler in which Confucius and Jesus Christ look down on the warring Boxers and missionaries. Kipling was a white supremascist and wrote The White Mans Burden urging the United States to take up the burden of civilizing savage peoples alongside other European powers. Source:The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library. In mid 1899,Lifepublished this chilling view of the war in the Philippines that was to drag on for several more years. Source:Library of Congress, Left: John Bull gapes at a new American steamer. The artist George Benjamin Luts offered an exceptionally scathing rendering of the linkage of conquest, commerce, and censorship in an 1899 cartoon titled The Way We Get the War News: The Manila Correspondent and the McKinley Censorship. Published in a short-lived radical periodical,The Verdict, the cartoon shows a war correspondent in chains, writing his story under the direction of military brass. Partnership with Great Britain brought the advantage of shared technology to the U.S., but the new American-made ships represented competition for the British shipbuilding industry. Silence). America in the China Relief Expedition(Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly publishing company, 1903). Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like White Man's Burden, East India Company, Opium War and more. He is greeted with open arms by a mandarin and Wanted signs articulating prodigious opportunities for business. The And the political cartoons of the timesubjective, emotional, ideological, highly politicized and at the same time, politically diversifiedconvey this complexity with unparalleled sophistication and intensity. Cohen, Paul A. Stark images such as these helped make public a subject that was generally suppressed. Shortly after Kiplingspoemappeared, the consistently anti-imperialist Life fired back with a decidedly different view of the white mans burden on its March 16, 1899 cover: a cartoon that showed the foreign powers riding on the backs of their colonial subjects. And the third was the anti-foreign Boxer Uprising in China in 18991901, which led to military intervention by no less than eight foreign nations including not only Tsarist Russia and the Western powers, but also Japan. Because those in Asia, Africa, and parts of the Americas lived different lives, Europeans felt that it was their duty to civilize them into western culture and society. Two years ago the main street of Manila did not possess a single saloon. The Stranger: How long have you been civilized? Udo Keppler, a Puck cartoonist who was still in his twenties at the time, was more benign in his rendering of the great rapprochement. Civilization warns Chinas passive emperor to stop the Anarchy, Murder, and Riot spread by Boxer insurgentsvisualized as a dragon crawling over the city wallattacking missionaries, Chinese Christians, and Westerners. as early as 2000, in blowback: the costs and consequences of american empire, johnson predicted that the american empire was going to face considerable resistance around the globe in the form of terrorism and social unrest. Several of these graphics fromPuckcommented on Americas problems at home while accusing others of being barbarians. The graphics include pillage, rape, and wanton executions. 301-314 (2010). The caption, titled The First Duty, carries this subtitle: Civilization (to China)That dragon must be killed before our troubles can be adjusted. Contemporary wars in the Philippines and Transvaal (the Boer War) comprise the foreground of the Think It Over battlefield. Cartoons endorsing imperialist expansion depicted a beneficent West as father, teacher, even Santa Clausbearing the gifts of progress to benefit poor, backward, and childlike nations destined to become profitable new markets. Twitter. Barbarism lies at the base of the mountain to be climbed by Uncle Sam and John Bullwith civilization far off at the hoped-for end of the journey, where a glowing figure proffers education and liberty. The fifth stanza of Kiplings poem refers to an ascent toward the light: Barbarisms companion attributes of backwardness, spelled out on the boulders underfoot, include oppression, brutality, vice, cannibalism, slavery, and cruelty. Initially, the camps were conceived as shelters for women and children war refugees. The banners of both side pronounce fidelity to the golden rule., Boxer banner (Chinese forces flags): Do not do unto others what you would not that others should do unto you. The Poet, the President & The White Mans Burden, Rudyard Kiplings poem that begins with the line Take up the White Mans burden was published in the United States in the February, 1899 issue ofMcClures Magazine, as the American war against the First Philippine Republic began to escalate. On February 15, 1898, the battleshipU.S.S. Within a barred room, its walls painted blood-red, a cohort of five army officers headed by a sword-wielding Major General Elwell Stephen Otis (1838-1909), military governor of the Philippines, forces a manacled war correspondent to write only approved dispatches. Uncle Sam and his English cousin have the world between them. Here, the United States has ingested Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Uncle Sams New Class in the Art of Self-Government. W. A. Rogers,Harpers Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, August 27, 1898. That dragon must be killed before our troubles can be adjusted. But by the 1890s, emerging industrial powerhouses like the U.S. and Germany reduced Britains industrial dominance. This belief was strengthened with literary works such as The White Mans Burden written in 1899 by British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling. (doi:10.1017/S0021875810000046). English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). This unit examines cartoons from the turn-of-the-century visual record that reference civilization and its nemesisbarbarism. By contrast, with the exception of Sudan, the burden Britain bears reflects backward older cultures that look forward to civilization or back, condescendingly, at those people, cultures, and societies deemed even closer than they to barbarism. Both visually and textually, the white mans burden was steeped in derision of non-white, non-Western, non-Christian others. In an unprecedented alliance, the second expeditionary force was comprised of (from largest troop size to smallest) Japan, Russia, Great Britain, France, U.S., Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Native: Ever since my home was burned to the ground and my wife and children shot. Frederick Thompson Richards,Life, October 18, 1900. Source:Bibliothque nationale de France, British soldiers laugh at the spectacle of Boer prisoners of war being shocked by an electric fence. May 26, 2022. The synergy of piousness and power is the subject of a Keppler cartoon, The Advance Agent of Modern Civilization, in the January 12, 1898, issue ofPuck. Periodicals likeLifein the U.S. (predecessor to the later famous weekly of the same title), as well as French and German publications, printed both poignant and outraged visual arguments against the imperialist tide, often with acute sensitivity to its racist underpinnings. Case Study: The Boxer WarThe Boxer Uprising.Online Encyclopediaof Mass Violence(July 23, 2008). Invading foreign lands was a relatively new experience for the U.S. Who, they asked, was the real barbarian? Source:Library of Congress, In this 1902 cartoon, Britains Boer War and goals on the African continent are identified with the march of civilization and progress against barbarism. Boxers practiced spirit-possession rituals, often meeting in Buddhist temples, and attacked Christian missionaries and Chinese converts. Uneasiness over the idea of using force to govern a country was overcome by tracing the issue of consent back through recent history. As Twain saw it, the U.S. war against the nascent Philippine Republic amounted to little more than mimicry of Britains bloody war of conquest in South Africa. The anti-imperialistLifemagazine was similarly attuned to the hypocrisy of cloaking military violence in pious rhetoric. Imperialists Uncle Sam, John Bull, Kaiser Wilhelm, and, in the distance, probably France are borne on the backs of subjugated people in the Philippines, India, and Africa. '. The penetration of missionaries into the interior of China, for example, destabilized rural economies and incited anti-foreign sentiments. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. Jesus, In an 1899 cartoon, Ren Georges Hermann-Paul attacked the hypocrisy of spreading civilization by force by juxtaposing the words Barbarie and Civilisation beneath Chinese and French combatants who alternate as victor and victim. Raising money to Save the Foreign Devils recurs in the visual record. In the West, China was often characterized as befuddled and archaic under the rule of an inscrutable crone, the Empress Dowager. William!! Hawaii and Porto Rico are model female students. The full sardonic irony of the rendering, however, resides in the dead occupants of the graves. Robert L. Gambone in his 2009 book,Life on the Press: The Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks, describes the cartoon as follows: The Way We Get Our War News (The Verdict, August 21, 1899, front cover) excoriates military press censorship, a supremely ironic development given the appeals to freedom used to justify the war. Probably the oldest perspective on Mans Burden, emphasized its hypocrisy. If you dont do it I shall have to. Udo Keppler,Puck, August 8, 1900. Leonhard, Robert R.The China Relief Expedition: Joint Coalition Warfare in China,Summer 1900(Laurel, MD: Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University). Moral clarity aside, the parallel between America's pursuit of manifest destiny a century ago and its new global sense of mission has a lot to teach us. It was feared that the mystical rituals and xenophobic violence of the Yi He Tuan (Boxer) secret society would overwhelm Chinas ineffectual rulers, cast the country into chaos, and hinder the trade and profits anticipated by the great powers. Source: Widener Library, Harvard University. Civilization and barbarism were vividly portrayed in the visual record. An iron railing through which an electric current runs is the healthiest and safest of fences. Source:Library of Congress. Allied troops departed Tianjin for Beijing on August 4. The eight-nation military intervention during the Boxer Uprising in China in 1900 amounted to a global case study of how nations with superior technology wreaked violence abroad in the name of bringing about peace and civilization. SHARE. Tuffnell, Stephen. In these details, the headlight of a modern vehicle (Judge, 1900) and starlight from a goddess of civilization (Puck, 1898) illuminate demeaning caricatures of China. In contradiction to the western white mans burden narrative, both Bush and Blair presided over torture programs victimising Muslim people-of-colour. On May 1a month before the celebratory second magazine cover reproduced here was publishedCommodore George Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines. Along with his burden of steel, trains, sewing machines, and other industrial goods, Uncle Sam carries a book titled Education, Religion in a nod to the rhetoric of moral uplift that accompanied the commercial goals of the civilizing mission. Kipling is referring to British colonization and the necessity of sending people to those colonized areas So, if we do our duty aright in the Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest and finest part of national life, will greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in the great work of uplifting mankind. Un treillage de fer travers par un courant lectrique est la plus saine et la plus sre des cltures. The humanity of our soldiers is admirable and does not tire despite the ferocity of the Boers (Official Report to the War Office. In September 1901, the French artist Jean Veber used the pages ofLAssiette au Beurreto call attention to one of the often-forgotten ironies of the mystique of the white mans burden. His cartoon, depicting a vast field of flat stone grave markers, carried the simple caption United Kingdom (Le Royaume-Uni). Of cloaking military violence in pious rhetoric Paul A. 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