The White Man's Burden


The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands, by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War, which exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.
Kipling originally wrote the poem to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, but it was replaced with the sombre poem "Recessional", also a Kipling work about empire. He rewrote "The White Man's Burden" to encourage American colonisation and annexation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American War. As a poet of imperialism, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire, yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase The white man's burden to justify imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilisation that is ideologically related to the continental-expansion philosophy of Manifest Destiny of the early 19th century.

History

Rudyard Kipling was an English writer who was born in India and lived in the US from 1892 to 1896, before returning to the United Kingdom.
His poem "The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" was first published in The Times on 4 February 1899, and in The New York Sun on 5 February. On 7 February 1899, during senatorial debate to decide if the US should retain control of the Philippine Islands and the ten million Filipinos conquered from the Spanish Empire, Senator Benjamin Tillman read aloud the first, the fourth, and the fifth stanzas of Kipling's eight-stanza poem as arguments against ratification of the Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain ; and that the US should formally renounce claim of authority over the Philippine Islands. To that effect, Senator Tillman addressed the matter to President William McKinley:
He quotes, inter alia, stanzas 1, 4, and 5 of "The White Man's Burden", noting:
Senator Tillman's eloquence was unpersuasive, and the US Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris on 11 February 1899, which ended the Spanish–American War. After paying a post-war indemnification of twenty million dollars to the Kingdom of Spain, on 11 April 1899, the US established geopolitical hegemony upon islands and peoples in two oceans and in two hemispheres: the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Pacific Ocean, Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic Ocean.

Text

Interpretation

The imperialist interpretation of "The White Man's Burden" proposes that the "white race" is morally obliged to "civilise" the "non-white" peoples of planet Earth, and to encourage their progress through settler colonialism:
Kipling positively represents colonial imperialism as the moral burden of the white race, who are divinely destined to civilise the brutish, non-white Other who inhabits the barbarous parts of the world; to wit, the seventh and eighth lines of the first stanza misrepresent the Filipinos as "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." Despite the chauvinistic nationalism that supported Western imperialism in the 19th century, public moral opposition to Kipling's racialist misrepresentation of the colonial exploitation of labour in "The White Man's Burden" produced the satirical essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", by Mark Twain, which catalogues the Western military atrocities of revenge committed against the Chinese people for their anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion against abusive European businessmen and Christian missionaries.
Politically, Kipling proffered the poem to New York governor Theodore Roosevelt to help him persuade anti-imperialist Americans to accept the territorial annexation of the Philippine Islands to the United States. In September 1898, Kipling's literary reputation in the U.S. allowed his promotion of American empire to governor Roosevelt:
As Victorian imperial poetry, "The White Man's Burden" thematically corresponds to Kipling's belief that the British Empire was the Englishman's "Divine Burden to reign God's Empire on Earth"; and celebrates British colonialism as a mission of civilisation that eventually would benefit the colonised natives. Roosevelt sent the poem to senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a firm believer in Western imperialism himself, for his review, and they agreed that it made "good sense from the expansion standpoint." Since the late nineteenth century, "The White Man's Burden" has served the arguments and counterarguments of supporters and the opponents of imperialism and white supremacy.

Responses

In the early 20th century, in addition to "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", Mark Twain's factual satire of the civilizing mission proposed, justified, and defended in "The White Man's Burden'", it was Kipling's jingoism that provoked contemporary poetic parodies that expressed anti-imperialist moral outrage, by critically addressing the white-supremacy racism that is basic to colonial empire; among the literary responses to Kipling are: "The Brown Man's Burden", by the British politician Henry Labouchère; "The Black Man's Burden: A Response to Kipling", by the clergyman H. T. Johnson; and the poem "Take up the Black Man's Burden", by the American educator J. Dallas Bowser.
In the U.S., a Black Man's Burden Association demonstrated to Americans how the colonial mistreatment of Filipino brown people in their Philippine homeland was a cultural extension of the institutional racism of the Jim Crow laws for the legal mistreatment of black Americans in their U.S. homeland. The very positive popular response to Kipling's jingoism for an American Empire to annex the Philippines as a colony impelled the growth of the American Anti-Imperialist League in their opposition to making colonial subjects of the Filipinos.
In "The Poor Man's Burden", Dr. Howard S. Taylor addresses the negative psycho-social effects of the imperialist ethos upon the working-class people of an empire. In the social perspective of "The Real White Man's Burden", the reformer Ernest Crosby addresses the moral degradation consequent to the practice of imperialism; and in "The Black Man's Burden", the British journalist E. D. Morel reported the Belgian imperial atrocities in the Congo Free State, which was an African personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium.
In the historical survey of :s:The Black Man's Burden|The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa, from the Fifteenth Century to World War I, E. D. Morel's critique of imperial-colony power relations identifies an established cultural hegemony that determines the weight of the black man's burden and the weight of the white man's burden in their building a colonial empire. The philosophic perspective of "The Black Man's Burden ", by the social critic Hubert Harrison, describes moral degradation as a consequence of being a colonized coloured man and of being a white colonizer. Moreover, since the late 20th-century contexts of post-imperial decolonisation and of the developing world, the phrase "The white man's burden" communicates the false good-intentions of Western neo-colonialism for the non-white world: civilisation by colonial domination.