‘‘What Mark Twain Said Regarding
Regime Changes and Other Righteous American
Foibles’’
Peter Schmidt
Department of English Literature, Swarthmore College
Alumni Reunion Lecture
Swarthmore College, June 3, 2005, 8pm
Adapted from my book manuscript
Brier-Patch: Fictions of Race and Nation in the U.S. South,
1865-1920
1
egardless of what position we take on the U.S.
R
intervention in Iraq, we all ought to be
interested in what kind of record the United
States has in fostering democracies abroad.
For such a goal is almost always our stated intention during
inventions, military and otherwise.
We rightly congratulate
ourselves with enabling democracy and economic growth to
thrive in Germany and Japan after World War II, and selected
other areas, perhaps including the Balkans.
But what about
the many other interventions we made in the late nineteenth
and the twentieth centuries ---in Hawaii, Latin America, the
Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the South Pacific?
How would
the majority of Puerto Ricans, or Filipinos, for example,
evaluate the successes and failures of our democratization
projects?
Progressivist foreign policies at the turn to the
twentieth century are greatly admired by the policy-makers
driving the current Administration, who count Presidents
William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt among their heroes---conspicuously leaving out Woodrow Wilson, who, while never
hesitant to use American military force, also conceded that
the U.S. had to cede some of its sovereignty to an
international deliberative body that could mediate disputes
between nations.
President Howard Taft is less famous
today, but also is quite relevant for contemporary debates,
for his positions anticipate those of today’s traditional
2
conservatives, who are skeptical that military interventions
in countries that do not directly threaten us should be a
moral or practical imperative of our foreign policy.
We were all moved by TV images of Iraqi families voting
in the first elections held there in generations.
Driving
was banned (to cut down on bombing), whole families turned
out in their best clothes to watch the elders vote, and
afterwards voters proudly held up their purple-stained
finger-tips to the cameras.
But was massive military
intervention really the best way---the only way---to initiate
democracy in Iraq or support pro-democracy movements there?
Military occupation and massive reconstruction programs---or
perhaps we should call them ‘‘extreme makeovers’’---often
provoke violent reactions and a unified culture of
opposition---as
the historian Edward Ayers pointed out just
last week in The New York Times Magazine, in an essay about
lessons to be learned from ‘‘America’s first attempt to
transform a defeated society through a sustained military
occupation’’---federal
Reconstruction in the South between
1867 and 1876.
Could it be that Germany and Japan are the
exceptions, and that our record of fostering democracies has
succeeded best when we have strategically aided homegrown
democratic movements that were already working for change?
In citing the history of Reconstruction, or our
adventures in the Philippines or Puerto Rico, I risk
embarrassing us all, including myself.
These histories are
indisputably relevant if we would learn from the mistakes of
3
the past, if mistakes they were.
Yet how many of us know
anything, really, about Hawaii or the Philippines, or our
various interventions in Latin American and Caribbean
countries?
Not to mention, say, the fate of British rule in
Iraq after the 1920s, when they too sought to ‘‘modernize’’
and ‘‘democratize.’’
The complicated history of
colonization projects is rarely taught in schools.
To ask
an even more dangerous and disturbing set of questions--could it be that we don’t worry about history because we
believe we are so exceptional that its lessons don’t apply
to us?
Is this why we often assume that our motives must be
innocent and virtuous, allowing us almost always to
intervene successfully where others have failed?
Why do we
assume that our interventions have nothing to do with
empire, and everything to do with being ‘‘on the right side
of history,’’ to use President Clinton’s phrase?
How
compatible is republican democracy with an empire, after
all?
When is it morally necessary to use our power to
intervene, and when is it an ethical imperative to argue
against such interventions?
If we want to learn from figures other than politicians
and talking heads in the media try to answer such questions,
to whom should we turn?
I say pay attention to our
imaginative artists---our
poets, novelists, playwrights,
movie-makers, and others.
exclude them.
Not only to them, but do not
I teach American literature at Swarthmore,
including many classes in American fiction.
4
If there is any
single way in which the teaching of literature has changed
over the last thirty years or so, for better or for worse,
it is this:
literature departments across the country now
teach a much broader range of works under the rubric of
‘‘literature,’’ and we tend not to treat literary or other
cultural works as parallel universes with their own
beautiful internal logic.
We do pay close attention to
matters of form, but we also teach our students to explore
how cultural works have a dynamic, even dialectical,
interaction with the history of the times in which they
live.
In creating imaginary worlds, writers and others
engage with all kinds of narratives that pass for ‘‘true’’
in the ‘‘real’’ world---sometimes
to try to justify them,
other times (whether consciously or not) to reveal how full
of tension and contradiction are the explanations we give
ourselves for why we do what we do.
Fictive worlds can
transform both our understanding of the past we think we
know and the future we try to imagine.
And these spaces
sometimes make room for voices that are not well represented
in other public forums.
(Think of the debate George Lucas’
last Star Wars installment has started, for instance, on
where the real threat to democracy lies.)
Fiction published
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century played a
crucial role in how Americans understood themselves, for in
those long-ago days literature was read and discussed
seriously by almost all literate people, even American
presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt.
5
In this talk I will focus on four writers at the
beginning of the twentieth century who in very different
ways tried to influence how Americans understood their
country’s use of power in its foreign and domestic spheres.
Near the end, I will discuss a Mark Twain essay, part of his
work against the U.S.’s occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
the Philippines in 1898 and after.
This occupation was
enormously controversial, as well as costly in both monetary
and human terms.
After evicting Spain, the U.S. drew up
ambitious plans to install limited democratic governments,
voting and other civil rights, improved education and
financial systems, and other reforms.
From the start,
especially in the Philippines, U.S. troops faced armed
guerrillas fighting in favor of complete independence from
any colonial power, even one wielding the rhetoric of
democratization.
Although the insurgents were eventually
defeated and rudimentary political and educational changes
accomplished, the U.S.’s main success in its new colonies
was building state-of-the-art military bases and subjugating
their economies to the control of U.S. corporations,
particularly their need for raw materials and cheap labor.
In the Philippines vast numbers of the population remain
steeped in poverty today and many have emigrated to other
countries, including the U.S., in search of more lucrative
work.
If you speak to contemporary Filipinos, over one
hundred years after Admiral Dewey’s fleet steamed into
Manila Bay to the strains of a Navy band playing John Philip
6
Sousa, you will hardly get an unambiguous endorsement of the
U.S.’s influence there.
Consider the volume Vestiges of
War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an
Imperial Dream, edited by Angel Shaw and Luis Francia in
1999---which
just so happens to reprint the Twain essay that
I will comment on today.
I’ve chosen three other imaginative writers who, with
Twain, will give you a representative sampling of the wide
range of opinion in the early twentieth century in the U.S.
and the Philippines regarding U.S. foreign policy.
The
first writer, Thomas Dixon, [SLIDE] was an unabashed proexpansionist notorious for his novel The Clansman, a bestseller in 1905 that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and was
later made into the single most influential American movie
of the early film era, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
7
Both Dixon and Griffith suggested that the postwar
Reconstruction South was a colonial nightmare in which, with
help from ignorant outsiders, natives of color overthrew
their legitimate white rulers and instituted a regime of
terror and corruption.
As well mounting a defense of
lynching and Jim Crow on the home front, Dixon also argued
in favor of U.S. imperial adventures abroad---Reconstruction
done right.
White Southerners’ experiences during
Reconstruction, he implied, showed what could go wrong if
U.S. rule abroad were not backed by overwhelming military
8
force.
The true birth of the nation, according to Dixon,
came not in 1776 but in the 1880s, when the rise of the
white South showed the nation the way to establishing an
Anglo-Saxon empire to rival Britain’s and Germany’s.
Dixon’s historical fictions were consistent with the
theories of many academics, who developed elaborate
‘‘scientific’’ theories of what made certain races and
civilizations destined to rule.
Other writers were less confident about U.S. motives
and methods in its new territories[SLIDE].
Now relatively
unknown, Marietta Holley was a satirist almost as popular as
Mark Twain.
She gave an account of the Philippines exhibit
at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair that led her many readers
to explore the Fair vicariously, while pondering the
contrast between the unfulfilled and rejected promises of
federal Reconstruction in the South and the high ideals used
to justify U.S. rule over its new colonies after 1898.
After discussing Dixon, Holley, and Twain, I will then give
you a brief sketch of a play by a Filipino playwright,
Aurelio Tolentino, voicing first idealism and then
disillusionment regarding U.S. motives in the Philippines.
This play met a revealing fate during its opening night
performance in Manila.
Thomas Dixon first. [SLIDE] The classic example of an
intellectual who gravitates toward the powerful by giving
them an image of themselves that they yearn for, Thomas
9
Dixon tried to embody in his first novel the main ideals of
Progressivist imperialism then taking shape.
Subtitled A
Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900, The Leopard’s
Spots (1902) casts the white South as America’s new imperial
visionaries, while its Northerners and others merely know
how to manufacture wealth.
The climax of the novel comes at the Democratic convention,
when the hero, inspired by the victory over Spain, expounds
on the ‘‘world mission’’ of an Anglo-Saxon America in
language that is half Hegelian, half Teddy Rooseveltian:
[SLIDE]
‘‘The Old South fought against the stars in their
courses---the
resistless tide of the rising
consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission.
The young South greets the new era and glories
in its manhood. He joins his voice in the cheers
10
of triumph which are ushering in this allconquering Saxon.
supremacy.
globe.
Our old men dreamed of local
We dream of the conquest of the
…We believe that God has raised up our
race, as he ordained Israel of old, in this
world-crisis to establish and maintain for
weaker races, as a trust for civilisation, the
principles of civil and religious Liberty and
the forms of Constitutional Government….’’
(439)
The Leopard’s Spots has generally been disparaged by
literary critics, but Dixon has a cult following on the
Internet and elsewhere, and his novel has been treated to a
new paperback edition, March 2005.
One example of how widespread such rhetoric was in U.S.
discourse in the early twentieth century is an editorial
cartoon that appeared in a Detroit newspaper, depicting the
U.S. civilizing mission in the Philippines.1 [SLIDE]
11
This cartoon is meant to be a comically literal racial
uplift narrative.
The native faces backward, a spear in one
hand and a look of terror or incomprehension on his face as
he is carried uphill to school.
of racial signifiers.
Note the hallucinatory mix
Spear, grass (?) skirt, earring and
bracelet, and dark skin denote tropical ‘‘native,’’ but
except for the U.S. presence these could all be signs of
Africa, not the Asian Pacific or the Caribbean.
The wild-
eyed, uncomprehending stare and wide lips are stereotypes
straight out of racist blackface minstrel shows popular at
the time.
One set of plantation histories merges with
another, U.S. South into South Pacific, as any variety of
‘‘colored’’ difference always in the white U.S. imagination
tends to revert back to the black Other.
12
The typical Dixonian hero is as resolute as the soldier
in the cartoon.
But the language with which his task is
described in Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots---most markedly,
‘‘In this hour of crisis, our flag has been raised over ten
millions of semi-barbaric black men in the foulest slave pen
of the Orient’’ [439])---suggests immense anxieties swirling
amidst all Dixon’s paeans to colonial uplift projects as a
‘‘trust for civilisation.’’
Though pro-imperialist, the
novel fears that the vexing racial conflicts that bedeviled
both the Old and the New South will now be re-enacted on a
global stage.
Dixon well captures the righteous rhetoric of
altruism, development, and democracy that governed the proimperialist camp.
But even more vividly dramatized by his
novel is the U.S. national unconscious, so hysterical with
uncertainty that it may be swayed ‘‘from laughter to tears
in a single sentence’’ (443) by a demagogue posing as a
democrat.
Most contemporary rhetoric involving terroristic
threats and the clash of civilizations drops Dixon’s overt
racial references, in favor of praise-songs to multicultural
democracy and ‘‘Freedom’s Burden,’’ not the ‘‘White Man’s
Burden.’’
But could Dixon’s racist assumptions still be
present in contemporary U.S. rhetoric and actions, encoded
in more subtle ways?
Regardless of how we answer such a
disturbing question, Dixon’s imperial messianism---especially
his melodramatic oppositions between good and evil, safety
and threat, civilized and barbarian---has a long history
13
leading to the present.
It is no endorsement of terrorist
violence to ask how well our own counter-measures against
terrorism live up to the democratic and non-racist ideals we
proclaim.
How often do we succumb to the kind of
demagoguery that sways the crowds in Dixon’s novels, or the
Abu Ghraib-like scenes of humiliation and torture that fills
his books when the villains are caught?2
Marietta Holley. [SLIDE]
At the beginning of the
twentieth century in the U.S., Marietta Holley was famous
for inventing a proto-feminist character named Samantha.
She traveled widely and had opinions about everything,
presented with humor, plain language, and common-sense
reasoning.
She often also made her points at the expense of
her lumbering husband and other male authority figures.
Yet
overall, this narrator is very much meant to be an American
Everywoman, not a feminist satirist in disguise.
To make
Samantha’s independence non-threatening for a wide audience,
her author always credited Samantha’s books as being
authored by ‘‘Josiah Allen’s Wife,’’ not Samantha Allen,
much less Marietta Holley.
Samantha was rarely openly
rebellious against male authority, only covertly so.
And
her opinions were always counterbalanced by an urge to
reconcile all opinions together into one happy consensus.
Like Samantha, her creator used laughter and pathos to urge
reform, but her strongest drive was towards accommodation.
14
In 1904 Holley published a little book called Samantha
at the St. Louis Exposition, by Josiah Allen’s Wife.
Chapter Fourteen featured a trip by the narrator and her
family to the Philippines exhibit, which proved to be the
most popular in the entire fair.
Like previous fairs, St.
Louis’ celebrated domestic progress in the arts and
sciences, but the 1904
extravaganza was the first to
incorporate spectacular representations of the new tropical
colonies and the new American imperialism as the latest
example of the march of civilization.3 [SLIDE]
15
St. Louis’ ‘‘Philippine Reservation’’---revealing term---was
the largest exhibit in the fair, covering forty-seven acres
of re-created jungles, lagoons, and native villages complete
with huts, costumes, and live villagers. [SLIDE] It also
included a life-sized replica of part of the walled city of
Manila.
The entire exhibit was meant to illustrate the
16
civilizing triumphs of U.S. colonial policies abroad, plus
the basic principles governing the new
science of
anthropology, as described by Louis Henry Morgan and other
academics.
According to Morgan, all human societies
displayed one of the four stages of human progress:
barbarianism (with no ability to progress), savagery,
civilization, and enlightenment.
The Fair's Philippine Reservation included villages for the
Negritos, who represented the hopeless lowest group;
,
three Igorot groups
who represented primitives with some limited ability to
rise;
and finally the villages of the Visayan, who were thought to
have the most fully developed culture and optimistic future.
In the Philippines the Igorots, which means ‘‘Mountain
People,’’ were farmers and miners.
While in St. Louis,
several Igorots showed an interest in the American
presidential election of 1904 and asked to cast ballots.
[SLIDE]
In response, two polling places were established in
the reconstructed Igorot village.
Photographs of the two
candidates, Theodore Roosevelt and Alton B. Parker, were
placed over Igorot gongs, and beans served as ballots.
In
case you missed CNN’s coverage, I have the results for you:
17
Roosevelt won, 83 to 2.
An Igorot election in the midst of a Fair on the banks
of the Mississippi was meant to be a display of colonialism
bringing democracy and civilization to the islands---yet in
1904 in the rest of the U.S., apart from this ‘‘Philippine
Reservation,’’ people of color were mostly completely
disenfranchised and unable to vote, for Jim Crow policies
were taking over the land and within a decade would become
de facto national policy as well.
(Not just in the South:
Swarthmore, PA, for instance, segregated its schools in
1913.)4
18
Marietta Holley’s account of the Fair slights the
voting episode but focuses on many other fascinating
details.
Her approach is part satire and part boosterish
tour brochure.
Accompanied throughout by her more quizzical
Samantha revels
and dour husband, [SLIDE]
both in narratives of progress and those of noble or not-sonoble savagery. [SLIDE] Sometimes she admires how like
‘‘they’’ can be to ‘‘us,’’ while at other times she makes
nervous jokes about cannibalism.
She celebrates blow guns
and native crafts, yet also the Native Boy Scouts who
marched as ‘‘smooth and even’’ as modern machinery.
She is
very much a Progressivist, a believer in progress and that
virtuous motives must govern what her country does abroad.
Holley’s representative American family also fully
understood that in order for colonial projects to sell
themselves on the home front, they must turn the U.S.’s new
possessions into a spectacle in which the unknown and the
new can be safely known and made ‘‘ours’’ at home.
‘‘What
wuz the use of travelin’ so far to see our new possessions’’
in the South Pacific, the narrator says, when samples of
19
them can be exported right to St. Louis?
Throughout, Holley
expertly translates elite Progressivist imperial rhetoric
into familiar, down-home do-goodism. [SLIDE]:
I thought it a first rate idee to show off to
the world the almost limitless wealth as well as
the hard problems that face Uncle Sam in his new
possessions, for like a careful pa he will see
that they learn how to take care of themselves
before he sets ‘em up in independent
housekeepin’.
…
The big … school building in Manila is
handsome enough for any American city, and the
smaller district and industrial schools are
doing jest as good work.
Our Government sent
five hundred and forty teachers there in 1901,
and now we have about seven hundred there.
I
took comfort in seein’ the great work they have
done….
Holley’s comic country colloquialisms may gently satirize
U.S. imperial ambition, but they also domesticate it and
make it as familiar in motive and method as a housewife’s or
school-teacher’s drive for cleanliness and order.
When
Americans feel uneasy about colonial adventures, they turn
to voices that can make such ambitions seem not dangerous
20
projects invented by elites but uncomplicated, commonsensical, ‘‘just folks’’ behavior motivated by doing good
works.
Sound familiar?
Halfway through Josiah Allen’s wife’s meditations,
though, the tone changes.
Holley contrasts this colonial
uplift agenda for Uncle Sam’s new ‘‘step-children”
with a
previous obligation: the narrator says Uncle Sam should ‘‘do
as well by his steal children, the dark complexioned ones
stole away from their own land to be slaves and drudges for
his white children.’’
Holley’s narrative tries to end on a
comic and positive note, as the narrator marches to ‘‘the
music of the future’’ only she can hear.
But mixed into her
Progressivist parade are ‘‘louder’’ discordant notes and
memories that, despite her assurances about a free
conscience, cannot be blended to make the last chord of her
chapter sound harmonious.
I quote from Holley again:
[SLIDE]
It sings of an ignorant, oppressed race changed
into an enlightened prosperous one, this great
work done by our own country, this song comes
floatin’ into my ears over the wide Pacific.
And another louder strain comes from nigher by
made tender and pathetic by years of oppression
and suppressed suffering that could find
expression in no other way than this heart
searching pathos.
And blending with it, ringing
21
over and above it, triumphant happy echoes
telling of real freedom of mind and conscience,
the true liberty.
Such moments in Holley’s book are evasive.
But if we listen
carefully, we can also hear them courageously asking this
question:
do we promote democracy abroad when our home
institutions are functioning best, or when those
institutions are in crisis and democratic reforms have been
betrayed, as Reconstruction was?
To leap away from 1904 for
a moment, consider the interventions we made in the1980s, or
the 1960s.
But as you debate this issue amongst yourselves,
don’t forget to look at the so-called Progressive Era in the
early twentieth century, when the discourse justifying U.S.
nation-building abroad was first constituted.
If you are so foolhardy as to read U.S. newspapers and
policy journals from the early twentieth century, you will
immediately notice a vigorous debate whether conquering and
governing other nations would endanger U.S. democracy or
strengthen it.
Which brings me back to Mark Twain
[SLIDE].
If Marietta Holley is a perfect example of a satirist who
tries to have it both ways---who points out contradictions
and hypocrisies yet also embeds these within a narrative
that assumes all shortcomings will be overcome by good
intentions---Mark
Twain is a different matter entirely.
In
Twain’s ending to Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer frees Jim, an
22
already freed slave, through elaborate rituals that do
little more than torture and humiliate Jim in the name of
‘‘comedy.’’
These notorious episodes are now frequently
read and taught as Twain’s satire of U.S. hypocrisy, its
betrayal of promises made to ex-slaves during Reconstruction
and the post-Reconstruction era.
Twain’s later satiric work
became even darker, as in Pudd’nhead Wilson, or his scathing
parables of the ‘‘damned human race’’ such as ‘‘The Man Who
Corrupted Hadleyburg,’’ his retellings of Biblical stories,
or the sulfuric Letters from the Earth.
In his late career
Twain morphed into someone far different from the genial
comic in a white suit so beloved by the American public,
then and now.
That contrast tormented him.
The U.S.’s new ambition to compete with Germany and
England and other countries for the right to share the
‘‘White Man’s Burden’’ of empire also gave Twain fits, in
part because he was struck by the hypocrisy of promoting
democracy abroad even as it was being eviscerated at home.
After 1898 he became an active participant in the AntiImperialist League organized out of Boston.
His most
complex and disturbing anti-imperialist tract from this
period is entitled ‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness,’’
published in The North American Review, February 1901.
This
would be the equivalent of publishing in Foreign Affairs or
another major policy journal today.
But of course Twain’s
essay would never be accepted by such a ‘‘serious’’ journal
today---though
he might be hired as one of the satiric
23
commentators on Jon Stewart’s TV show.
Twain’s opinions
proved controversial even among the Massachusetts liberals
who were his friends.
‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’’ might be so fiery
because Twain was a rather late convert to anti-imperialism.
As recently as 1898, despite doubts about colonialism
expressed in his book Following the Equator, Twain admitted
to a friend that he believed the U.S.’s war with Spain was
exceptional:
freedom.
man’s.
‘‘It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s
It is another sight finer to fight for another
And I think this is the first time it has been
done’’ (quoted in Zwick, ‘‘Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist
Writings’’ 40).
‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness,’’
however, was written in 1901 and seethes with Twain’s fresh
sense of betrayal, including his horror at the spectacle of
the U.S. Army in the Philippines killing Philippine
insurgents who proclaimed they were fighting for
independence from any colonial ruler, Spanish or American.
Twain zeroed in on published arguments justifying
recent massacres of Filipinos as unfortunate necessities
when civilization-building is attacked.
Well before George
Orwell invented the term doublespeak to characterize how
those in power lie, Twain used the art of parody and collage
to skewer clichés like those Dixon used about the White
Man’s Burden.
These clichés, Twain shows, are promulgated
by elites whom he calls the ‘‘Blessings-of-Civilization
Trust,’’ which functions more as a corporation operating for
24
profit than government policy created by the consent of the
governed.
Twain also parodies American exceptionalism
(including the self-assured belief that U.S. traditions and
ideals ensure that ‘‘our’’ actions abroad will inevitably be
mostly progressive, selfless, and successful) as the latest
American patent invention proving our unmatched ability to
delude ourselves and harm others in the name of progress.
quote
[SLIDE]:
Shall we … go on conferring our Civilization
upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall
we give those poor things a rest?
…Would it not
be prudent to get our Civilization-tools
together, and see how much stock is left on hand
in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and
Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade-Gin and
Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patentadjustable ones, good to fire villages with,
upon occasion), and balance the books, and
arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may
intelligently decide whether to continue the
business or sell out the property and start a
new Civilization on the proceeds?
(60-61)5
The target of all this imperial altruism enforced by
violence, the ‘‘Person Sitting in Darkness,’’ is portrayed
in Twain’s essay not an uncivilized barbarian but a sober
25
I
truth-teller. [SLIDE] Quietly shadowing all imperial
gestures, this colonial---unlike his colonizers---doubts
rather than believes, speaks in plain English rather than
fancy self-justifying rhetoric---and yet of course supposedly
remains in darkness rather than ‘‘light.’’
Twain marks his
opinions as hypothetical, something guiltily imagined and
then suppressed by colonialist discourse.
The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to
say: ‘‘There is something curious about this--curious and unaccountable.
Americas:
There must be two
one that sets the captive free, and
one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away
from him, and picks a quarrel with him with
nothing to found it on; then kills him to get
his land.’’
(64)
[SLIDE] The imperialist response, according to Twain, is
‘‘We must arrange his opinions for him’’ (64).
Twain ends
his satire with the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust speaking
in a frenzied first-person plural monologue, desperate to
erase all doubts about the ‘‘Game’’ and the ‘‘Business’’ of
freedom on the march:
‘‘There have been lies; yes, but they
were told in a good cause’’ (67).
is twofold.
Twain’s final acid irony
First, the real person in darkness is the
colonizer who thinks his motives are always ‘‘enlightened.’’
Second, no matter how skeptical of imperial discourse Twain
26
is, he cannot find a way to step ‘‘outside’’ the prisonhouse of its assumptions and rhetoric; this is why the
person sitting in darkness in his satire remains in the
shadows, and speaks only hypothetically.
I must pause here and emphasize that Twain’s diatribe
against hypocrisies and violence in the Philippines and
other colonies must not be applied to our present situation
in any literal-minded or simplistic way[SLIDE].
Neither
literature nor history provides us with exact models or
clear answers for future dilemmas.
But both do give us
cautionary tales, and also profiles in courage.
[SLIDE] First, you must notice that Twain focuses his
criticism not on the soldiers called to suffer and do the
dirty work, but on the elites themselves---their plans, drawn
up safely from a distance, for the spreading of
civilization. [SLIDE] Further, Twain’s text is not an attack
on democracy as an ideal, though by this late, post-Huck
period in Twain’s life Twain had pretty much convinced
himself that the invisible hand governing human history,
especially when ‘‘good intentions’’ were concerned, was the
Devil’s, not God’s.
The energy that drove Twain’s diatribes
was not solely acidic and negative.
His passion suggests a
residual faith in democracy, if only hypocrisy and cant can
be exposed and all the voices ‘‘in darkness’’ that this
nation suppresses will be allowed to emerge and speak.
Second, [SLIDE] we can easily enumerate many
differences between the Spanish-American and Philippine-
27
American Wars and the current events in Iraq. [SLIDE] The
explosion of the battleship Maine, for instance, is hardly
the same as the attack on the World Trade Center---though if
you read articles on both disasters in the newspapers you
will be struck by the similarities in how they were covered.
[SLIDE] The Iraqi insurgents do not have the broad-based
support that the Philippine insurgents did. [SLIDE] U.S.
policy is now also pointedly anti-racist and religiously
egalitarian in theory, though our practice on the ground and
in our media may be another matter entirely.
TV images from
other countries, even the BCC, make it obvious how much is
being screened out for U.S. viewers, how little most
Americans know or care about the daily hell that life in
Iraq has become in the war between the U.S. and the
insurgents, the Shiites and some Sunnis.
Who is indeed
‘‘the one sitting in darkness’’ here when it comes to
contemporary events?
[SLIDE] The most important way we must be careful not
to apply Twain’s essay directly to the present involves
Twain’s assertions that in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and
other colonies we took away a ‘‘once-captive’s new freedom”
and killed him to get his land.
The new forms by which the
First World’s global capitalism dominates the Third World
are not really colonial in the old sense; both ‘‘free
market’’ economists and leftists might agree on that.
But
what is the difference between how corporations and the
military operated with politicians and academics to
28
formulate U.S. foreign policy after the Spanish-American
War, vs. now?
What mistakes should not be repeated?
What
moral principles should guide our military and economic
policies?
Citizens in a democracy need to hold such a
conversation, not have the conclusions dictated to them.
Twain’s essay can help us begin that discussion, especially
for those uneasy with the dominant consensus shared by many
Democrats and Republicans regarding our right to use
weaponry to impose what we call ‘‘democracy’’ on others---at
least those who have oil or other commodities we want.
[SLIDE] Remember this:
thousands upon thousands of images
of Iraq have bombarded us, yet there are hardly any pictures
of the permanent military bases we are now constructing in
that nation, just as we did in the Philippines a hundred
years ago.
And Paul Bremer’s ‘‘100 Orders’’ of 2003 include
provisions allowing U.S. corporations to assume control of
Iraqi businesses and assets as part of the reconstruction
process, with the exception of oil and gas.
How dominant
will U.S. corporations be in Iraq’s economy a decade from
now?
[SLIDE] One counterpart to either Dixon’s frenzy of
belief and amnesia or Twain’s imprisoned rage is what
postcolonial scholars such as Sarita Echavez See have called
colonial melancholia, a persistent, haunting sense of ennui,
bodily injury and dismemberment, displacement, memory-loss,
and mourning mixed with anger.
29
I think Iraqis today know
exactly what she is describing.
Twain’s satanic text might
be profitably read contrapuntally [SLIDE] with the
Philippine playwright Aurelio Tolentino’s Kahapon, Ngayon at
Bukas (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), which criticized the
U.S. occupation and was closed down by angry Americans in
the audience the very night it opened in Manila in 1903.6
The play, though censored, was collected and translated soon
after by a U.S. government bureaucrat and incorporated into
a volume entitled The Filipino Drama (1905)---a singular
example of how the discourses of colonialism try to absorb
and contain even the most critical comments about their
enterprise, at once censoring and preserving and translating
them.
Here is a photo of Tolentino [SLIDE], along with a
U.S. colonial bureaucrat’s annotation, [SLIDE] ‘‘Aurelio
Tolentino y Valenzuela, ‘Blue,’ the greatest of the presentday Filipino dramatists, now in Manila Penitentiary for his
seditious plays’’:
30
And here is the title page [from the reprint edition] of the
colonial anthology that published the banned but translated
play [SLIDE]:
31
Until Tolentino’s text is read not just as an example of
Philippine literature but also as a transnational or
postcolonial constituent of the literary history of the
United States, it will remain a hidden wound, a person
sentenced to sit in darkness in the midst of the ‘‘canon’’
that is American literature.
This play is neither available
in McCabe nor in print in English by a U.S. publisher.
32
To
read it, I had to use McCabe's InterLibrary Loan system and
borrow it from the Philippine Embassy Library in New York
City, and to read the 1905 colonial translation, not a
modern English translation.
What conclusions do you think
we should draw from these facts?
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow presents the Spanish
colonialists as ‘‘blind with the eyes open’’ and the
Americans as distinctly untrustworthy liberators.
The
Americans appear in the final act, immediately after an
episode in which Spain is vanquished by Filipino fighters
after forcing some natives to be buried alive.
The
Americans insist that the Filipinos not form a Republic now,
but must be protected until they may earn their independence
at some unspecified future date.
Neither a display of the
miraculous powers of the Philippine army, nor the pleas of
children on their knees, nor even the American leader’s
nightmare of a dying eagle and ghosts rising from their
graves are enough to stop the Americans from claiming the
Philippines as war booty.
At the play’s climax, a character
representing the Philippine people gives an impassioned
speech that reads in translation like a medley of U.S.
Revolutionary, abolitionist, and Radical Reconstructionist
rhetoric.
(Note:
the stilted translation below is by the
U.S. bureaucrat, not Tolentino.
come through.) [SLIDE]
33
But the revolutionary ideas
[T]he liberty which I long for thou didst also
long to obtain from him who was thy master.
…Canst thou deny to us that which thou didst
desire so much?
That which is bad for thee thou
shouldst not do to another.
…[God] has created
men to be free, and he who voluntarily enslaves
is an executioner of the rights of his fellowman.
…Think and do not forget the sorrow of our
people …
We love thee dearly.
Why doest thou
then disturb us and interfere with our desired
rights?
(Tolentino 332)
After this speech, Philippine children reappear and kneel
before an American leader presenting a large book, ‘‘the
record of our unhappy people.’’
The American refuses the
book and drops it, but out of it a huge banner swirls and
fills the stage---the
flag of the free Philippine Republic
(332).
It was at this point that Americans in the audience
stormed the stage (Riggs, Filipino Drama 332-33n38; Manila
Cable News, Dec. 9, 1903).
Tolentino was soon tried and
convicted of sedition under Act No. 292 (1901), which made
advocating Philippine independence a crime.
The Philippine
Sedition Act became a legal precedent for the later U.S.
Sedition Act of 1918, the first anti-sedition legislation
applied to residents of the U.S. since the 1790s.
pattern:
Note the
sometimes extraordinary legal measures to restrict
34
civil rights in the name of security are tried out in
colonies or occupied territories first, then later
‘‘imported’’ as security measures to be applied
domestically.
If you are skeptical about the relevance of
this to the present, try Googling ‘‘REX 84,’’ which will
lead you to information about a network of detention centers
that were constructed throughout the U.S. in the 1970s and
1980s capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people.
They are fully operational, and the barbed wire faces
inward.7
In gathering a translation of this and other plays in a
volume sponsored the next year by the U.S. government, the
editor, Arthur Stanley Riggs, meant his work both to show
Tolentino’s and others’ indisputable guilt and to
demonstrate the enlightened beneficence of U.S. rule.8
A
further irony is that the final scene of the play---never
performed because the Americans shut it down---contains the
speech that puts the U.S. in the best light, as she finally
relents and gives the Philippines the freedom it has asked
for.
(333).
The play ends with a chorus of praise for the U.S.
[SLIDE] Tolentino’s Filipina heroine says America
will be her ‘‘mirror’’ as she realizes liberty and wealth.
But the play demonstrates more forcefully that the
Philippines are, rather, a mirror for the U.S.---when it
accedes to Filipino desires for freedom, the U.S. will
rediscover its original ideals and valor as if in the glass
of contemporary colonial history, now corrected and
35
redeemed.
Neither Twain’s focus on U.S. hypocrisy and
Filipino silence, nor contemporary postcolonial studies’
emphasis on colonial melancholy---important as both are---tell
the full story unless other voices, including Aurelio
Tolentino’s, are added to an expanded archive of our
cultural memory.
[BLANK SLIDE] In conclusion, think about the sense of
history embodied in Tolentino’s title in English:
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
Like many contemporary
activists, Twain demanded that his country have an honest
discussion about whether our actions abroad and at home
enact the values of democracy and fairness rather than
simply invoking them.
(Again, let me stress I’m focusing
mostly on the effects of the policies of our leaders, less
so on the actions of the brave men and women put into harm’s
way in the field.)
Twain once believed that if a satirist could expose how
consent may be manufactured and brutality justified, people
would come round and refuse to be hoodwinked.
the liberating power of laughter.
He trusted in
And he died disappointed.
But I’ll end with this hope, expressed to any ‘‘Person
Sitting in Darkness’’ at the center of so-called
Civilization.
What Mark Twain and others said long ago
against our righteous American foible of self-praise may
still help us hear and face our own lies.
36
The four writers I’ve discussed from one hundred years
ago give you a representative range of opinions about U.S.
actions abroad, so that you may do what today’s corporate
media encourages you not to do, which is compare and
contrast past motives and results and responses with
today’s.
What writers today might be performing equivalent
roles to those played by Dixon, Holley, Twain, and
Tolentino?
How do you think our venture in Iraq will be
portrayed by writers from Iraq or the U.S. a generation or
more from now?
Or portrayed by our soldiers themselves, as
they create rap lyrics and other songs now and memoirs in
the future?
Many contemporary novelists and other artists focus on
the actions of U.S. power abroad and at home.
I mentioned
George Lucas earlier, and will just cite four others to
finish.
You’ll see they have widely different takes on
recent and current events. [SLIDE]
37
Tom Clancy’s latest best-seller in the Jack Ryan series
is The Teeth of the Tiger, this one featuring not Ryan but
his son, also known as Jack, as well as two of his cousins,
fraternal twins Dominic and Brian Caruso, the former an FBI
agent, the latter a Marine. In the words of Publisher’s
Weekly, ‘‘all three are recruited to a privately funded
vigilante organization, Hendley Associates, that aims to
strike at America's enemies ---particularly, Islamic
terrorists---when
the Feds can't or won't.”
One climax
involves fight scenes in shopping malls in mid-America.
Am
I suggesting that he has a little of Thomas Dixon in him?
You bet---Clancy
and a host of other best-selling creators of
38
‘‘action’’-adventure fiction and films and the “ firstperson shooter’’ computer games that copy them. [SLIDE]
39
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America imagines what
might have happened if the pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh had
won the Presidency in 1940.
Roth is one writer we have with
something like Twain’s satiric energy and moral authority.
Roth has denied that his parable of fascism happening here
has anything to do with current events, but Swarthmore alums
can probably figure out whether or not he is bluffing.
[SLIDE]
40
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible portrays a
family of missionaries changing their idea about what their
‘‘mission’’ is in the Congo in the 1960s, in the midst of
the CIA’s assassination of the Congo’s newly elected
President, Patrice Lumumba.
Kingsolver has absorbed
invigorating influences from Twain, Eudora Welty, and many
other writers, then crafted a voice and vision distinctly
her own, and completely contemporary.
[SLIDE]
41
Edwidge Dandicat’s The Dew Breaker is the latest among
her many novels and stories that explore complicated
interrelations between the nightmare that is Haiti (a
history in which the U.S. is deeply implicated) and Haitian
Americans trying to make a fresh start in the U.S. and
hoping to change U.S. policies toward Haiti.
She should be
on everyone’s list of important writers under 40.
42
Handout for ‘‘What Mark Twain Said Regarding
Regime Changes and Other Righteous American Foibles,’’ June
2005
Some questions asked during the talk; others that might have
been asked:
What have been the long-term results of the many regime
changes we have made---in
Latin America, in the Caribbean, in
Africa, Europe, and the South Pacific? How would the
majority of Puerto Ricans, or Filipinos, for example,
evaluate the successes and failures of our interventions in
their history in the name of democracy and economic
development? How well were these events debated then,
compared to now?
Does democracy succeed best when the U.S. can aid homegrown
movements in non-military ways? When is military
intervention absolutely imperative?
How compatible is republican democracy with an empire?
Could Dixon’s racist or colonialist assumptions still be
present in contemporary U.S. rhetoric and actions, encoded
in more subtle ways?
Why is Tolentino’s play pretty much unavailable in the U.S.,
even though it was once translated as part of our colonial
project in the Philippines?
Do we promote democracy abroad most intensely when our home
institutions are functioning best, or when those
institutions are in crisis? Why?
Who is indeed ‘‘the one sitting in darkness’’ (in Twain’s
sense) when it comes to contemporary events?
What is the difference between how corporations and the
military operated with politicians and academics to
formulate U.S. foreign policy after the Spanish-American
War, vs. now? What mistakes should not be repeated? What
moral principles should guide our military, economic, and
other policies, given our history?
Which contemporary writers and other artists best embody the
points of view represented by Dixon, Holley, Twain, and
Tolentino? What role should the arts play in our
discussions and debates about contemporary events? In what
way is our current debate better, or more impoverished, than
debates about American foreign policy a hundred years ago?
How would you explain the differences you see?
43
How well do we Americans learn from our own history, much
less the history of other countries? To what degree do we
assume that our own motives must be innocent and virtuous,
allowing us to intervene successfully where others have
failed?
Do you think it is a mistake to study literature and
politics together, or is this one invaluable way to explore
why art is important and how it functions? Are there
reading and discussion groups in your area you would like to
join?
OVER
44
Selected Bibliography
Ayers, Edward L. ‘‘The First Occupation: what the Reconstruction period
after the Civil War can teach us about Iraq.’’ The New York Times
Magazine. 29 May 2005. 20-21.
Boeckmann, Cathy. A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the
Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama
P, 2000.
Dixon, Thomas. The Leopard’s Spots; A Romance of the White Man’s
Burden---1865-1900.
New York: Doubleday Page, 1902. Rpt.
Kessinger Publishing, 2005.
Dixon. Thomas. The Clansman; An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.
New York: Doubleday Page, 1905.
Dizon, Alma Jill. ‘‘False Vision in Two Plays by Aurelio Tolentino.’’
Philippine Studies 43.4 (1995): 666-80.
Dougherty, Jack. ‘‘When Swarthmore Desegregated Its Schools.’’ The
Swarthmorean 76.20 (14 May 2004): 1, 5.
Fernandez, Doreen G. ‘‘Introduction: In the Context of Political
History and Dramatic Tradition.’’ The Filipino Drama. Ed. Arthur
Stanley Riggs. Manila: Ministry of Human Settlements, Intramuros
Administration, 1981.
Holley, Marietta. Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition, by Josiah
Allen’s Wife. 1904. Excerpted and edited by Jim Zwick at
www.BoondocksNet.com/expos/wfe_samantha_pv.html.
Riggs, Arthur Stanley, ed. The Filipino Drama. 1905. Rpt. Manila:
Ministry of Human Settlements, Intramuros Administration, 1981.
St. Louis Public Library. Virtual Exhibits. ‘‘Celebrating the
Louisiana Purchase: the 1904 World’s Fair.’’
http://exhibits.slpl.org/lpe/intro.asp [.]
See, Sarita Echavez. ‘‘An Open Wound: Colonial Melancholia and
Contemporary Filipino/American Texts.’’ Vestiges of War: The
Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream.
Ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia. New York: NYU P,
2002. 376-400.
Shaw, Angel Velasco, and Luis H. Francia, eds. Vestiges of War: The
Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream,
1898-1999. New York: NYU P, 1999.
Tolentino, Aurelio. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. In Filipino Drama.
Ed. Arthur Stanley Riggs. 607-51.
Twain, Mark. ‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness.’’ 1901. Rpt.
Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of
an Imperial Dream. Ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia.
New York: NYU P, 2002. 57-68.
Zwick, Jim, ed. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist
Writings on the Philippine-American War. Syracuse: Syracuse UP,
1992.
Zwick, Jim. ‘‘Mark Twain and Imperialism.’’ A Historical Guide to Mark
Twain. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.
227-56.
Zwick, Jim. ‘‘Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist Writings in the ‘American
Century.’’’ Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the
Aftermath of an Imperial Dream. Ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis
H. Francia. New York: NYU P, 2002. 38-56.
OVER
45
Notes
1
The cartoon received national publication in The Literary Digest 18.7 (Feb. 18, 1899), as part of an
article on “The Third Battle of Manila,” 179-81.
2
For a fine recent reading of Dixon’s Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman
as inadvertently reenacting the crises of ‘‘scientific’’ racism, see
Cathy Boeckmann’s chapter on Dixon in A Question of Character.
3
For an expert recent analysis, see Paul Kramer, ‘‘Making Concessions:
Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 190105’’; and Clevenger. Good study has been done on the matters of fairs
or ‘‘world expositions,’’ empire, industrial capitalism, and the uses of
spectacle, including well known books by Robert Rydell and Alan
Trachtenberg, but here I would like to make special note of Timothy
Mitchell’s ‘‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’’; and Vergara’s
article focusing on the display of Filipinos in photography as part of
the colonial regimen. See also Rydell, ‘‘Rediscovering,’’ who
reproduces a stereoptic photograph of the Igorot Filipino village
dismantled and reconstructed for the St. Louis fair (58-59). Such
photos were widely sold as Fair souvenirs. In this one, ten Filipino
men stand in the foreground wearing loincloths, while behind them on a
row of benches sit white women spectators in voluminous skirts, blouses
and hats.
4
Sources for my facts about the Philippine Reservation in St. Louis in
1904 include an on-line site set up by the St. Louis Public Library;
Rydell; and Clevenger. Also relevant is Vergara’s broader history of
representations of the Philippines in colonial discourse. For
information on Swarthmore’s own version of Jim Crow segregation, see
Dougherty.
5
I quote from Twain’s ‘‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’’ as
reproduced in the anthology Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War
and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, edited by Angel Shaw and Luis
Francia in 1999, in order to underline the continuing presence Twain’s
satire has in contemporary postcolonial activism and cultural studies.
6
All quotations from Tolentino’s play are from Riggs’ Filipino Drama,
reissued in 1981. Many of the standard historical studies of the U.S.’s
colonization of the Philippines are infected with Orientalism. As
antidotes, I especially recommend Vicente L. Rafael’s article and book;
Oscar Campomanes, ‘‘1898 and the Nature of the New Empire’’ and ‘‘The
New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens’’; Ambeth R. Ocampo,
‘‘Bones of Contention,’’ part of a special issue of Amerasia Journal on
the U.S. and the Philippines (1998); Kimberly Alidio, ‘‘‘When I Get
Home, I Want to Forget’’’; Sarita See, ‘‘An Open Wound: Colonial
Melancholia and Contemporary Filipino/American Texts’’; and Epifanio San
Juan, Jr., After Postcolonialism. Rafael has a excellent brief reading
of Tolentino’s censored play, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, along with
the colonial compilation The Filipino Drama by Arthur Stanley Riggs
(1905), which features plays in both Tagalog and translated into
English, citations from the Supreme Court sedition ruling, and Riggs’
comments on the threats to U.S. rule that the plays posed (Rafael,
‘‘White Love’’ 208-09 and 217-18n6). For two more contemporary works
treating Tolentino’s play in its historical context, see Bonifacio et
al; Doreen Fernandez; and Dizon, ‘‘False Vision.’’ For further work on
race, loss, and melancholia, see David Eng.
Colonial melancholia as defined by See is the set of symptoms
suffered by the victims of colonialism. It should be distinguished from
imperialist melancholia, i.e., the guilt, shame, and other feelings held
46
by some (not all) of those allied with colonizing powers. Elites may
be troubled with such feelings regardless of whether they are pro- or
anti-imperialist, foreigners or natives. Amy Kaplan well defines
imperialist melancholia in the complicated case of Mark Twain: ‘‘a form
of blocked mourning for both the victims of imperial violence and the
lost privileges of imperial power, which for [Twain] were intertwined
with the loss of slavery’’ (Anarchy of Empire 57; see also 51-91). For
the foundational discussion of this phenomenon, which he calls
‘‘imperialist nostalgia,’’ see Renato Rosaldo 68-87.
7
REX 84 and many other issues are treated in Thomas Pynchon’s
brilliant novel, Vineland (1990), which depicts as a tragic farce the
Nixon and Reagan era’s revision the meaning of the 1960s. The novel is
not without hope, however, nor does it idealize the 1960s or the aging
Boomer generation.
8
Both Riggs’ introduction and his sometimes contentious footnotes seek
to prove contradictory claims about Tolentino---that
he was both a
dangerous subversive and impossibly naïve when it came to the craft of
playwrighting. Riggs’ claims, like the larger U.S. colonial enterprise
of which he is a part, are replete with ironies, however. Riggs
asserted that Tolentino’s play bored its Philippine audience because it
was too political and untraditional, yet elsewhere his footnotes record
spirited Filipino participation, including hissing the American figures
and cheering the rebels (cf. 325n34, 332n38). A long footnote from the
sedition trial proves beyond a doubt how dangerous the Americans found
the play’s effects, yet also preserves an eloquent speech by the play’s
author at his trial on the virtues of liberty (327-28n35).
47