Charles W. Chesnutt and the Anti-Imperialist Matrix of African-American Writing, 1898-1905 - Critical Essay
With this succinct and courageous formulation, Chesnutt discerns the intertwining not only of "colossal wealth and world-dominion" as national objectives-the "rampant commercialism and dreams of empire" with which he would soon reproach the Republican Party in "Peonage, or the New Slavery"--but also of a third, equally powerful impulse. If "[t]he racism which caused the relegation of the Negro to a status of inferiority" at home, as one historian puts it, "was to be applied to the overseas possessions of the United States,"(37) so, too, the nation's imperialist doctrine would have the corresponding effect of further reinforcing its domestic racial policies, with all the more destructive consequences for those Americans linked by race to the inhabitants of recently acquired territories abroad.
In a sign of its menacing elasticity in this respect, and of the potentially global reach of white supremacist ideals, Major Carteret--who is earlier said to be "absorbed in schemes of empire"--chooses to see Jerry Letlow's attempt to "bleach his skin and straighten his hair" as "an acknowledgment ... that the negro was doomed, and Analytical Essays that the white man was to inherit the earth and hold all other races under his heel," leaving him "firmly convinced that there was no permanent place for the negro in the United States, if indeed anywhere in the world, except under the ground" (MT, 141, 244-45). In such passages, Chesnutt cogently renders an insight shared by someone like Edward H. Clement, the Evening Transcript editor who published "The Future American," who "of all the white anti-imperialists in Boston ... was one of those most concerned as the plight of the American black reached its nadir in the days of William McKinley," and who grasped the reciprocal nature of the forces at work in harrowing events like those dramatized in The Marrow of Tradition: "If imperialism abroad bolstered white supremacy at home, ... white supremacy at home was an aid to imperial expansion abroad."(38) It is a transaction captured with considerable acumen in Chesnutt's novel, which boldly describes the impact of expansionist zeal in ratifying and perpetuating, throughout the United States, the very racial beliefs that helped galvanize American expansionism in the first place. As he. evokes at one and the same time the racist overtones of imperialism and the imperial ramifications of domestic Analytical Essays racism, Chesnutt exposes the malevolence of the bond that fundamentally connected imperialism with racial subjugation, presenting the two phenomena as complementary and mutually validating, each a sustaining reflection of the other.
Articulated in a novel "attempting to sketch ... the whole race situation," as he put it to a friend, and one that he considered "by far the best thing I have done" (TBAA, 156, 159), this underlying symbiosis between the nation's recent emergence in world affairs and the provocation of events like those at Wilmington thus places itself at least as close to the center of Chesnutt's concerns in The Marrow of Tradition as the many adjoining issues that have understandably commanded the interpretive response to the novel.(39) Its disclosure of such an interrelationship differentiates The Marrow of Tradition rather sharply, in fact, both from the standard historical accounts of the Wilmington coup d'etat and from a competing novelistic treatment like David Bryant Fulton's Hanover; Or the Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre (1900), in which no attempt is made to associate the incident with the nation's "giant strides toward ... world-dominion."(40) Presumably it was with these "giant strides" in mind that Chesnutt sent copies of the novel not only Analytical Essays to William H. Moody, secretary of the navy in the Roosevelt administration, but to Roosevelt himself, the chief architect and avatar of American expansionism at the turn of the century. And one is tempted to see in its vision of race and empire, and in the prescience with which he had unearthed the congruities between them, a chief source of the novel's lukewarm reception at the time, helping to account for the equivocal review of even a critic as friendly to Chesnutt, and as staunchly anti-imperialist, as William Dean Howells, who clarified his famous assessment ("The book is, in fact, bitter, bitter") in highly revealing terms in a letter to Henry B. Fuller: "I have been reading Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition. You know he is a Negro, ... and he writes of the black and white situation with an awful bitterness.... Good Lord! How such a Negro must hate us. And then think of the Filipinos and the Cubans and Puerto Ricans whom we have added to our happy family."(41) One might argue that the literary and critical orthodoxy was unprepared to entertain an analysis with such disconcerting implications, from which Chesnutt himself conspicuously withdrew in the next (and last) novel that he published. Analytical Essays As he reverted to the Reconstruction-era settings of his earlier work, The Colonel's Dream (1905)--appearing in the year customarily taken to mark the demise of an organized anti-imperialist movement in the United States--once again involves a white-supremacist campaign pledged to the disfranchisement of blacks and to ending "the nightmare of Negro domination,"(42) but now shorn of the imperialistic subtext that so broadened the scope of Chesnutt's argument in The Marrow of Tradition.
What such an argument makes clear, both in that novel and in so much of his other prose, is the extent to which a responsiveness to American imperial conceit, and an understanding of the racial perils that it inescapably entailed, may be said to have permeated Chesnutt's awareness after 1898, when the nation's leap into empire represented a challenge far too urgent and immediate to be restricted to the historical background of his writing.(43) And, in that respect, his awareness embodies an equally crucial and neglected pattern in the imaginative work of Chesnutt's African-American contemporaries in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, a motif generated more specifically by the cultivation of empire at home (as opposed to the durable European heritage of colonialism) than one might guess from the prophetic and frequently quoted Analytical Essays declaration in which W.E.B. Du Bois characterized "It]he problem of the twentieth century" as "the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."(44) The familiarity of such a remark has perhaps distracted us from noting the reaction to American expansion in particular, or the eloquence even of Du Bois's own judgments along these lines elsewhere in his early writing--as when he excoriates "[t]he tendency ... here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends," or when he laments "the recent course of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines,--for where in the world may we go and be safe from lying and brute force?"(45) Equally prompt in comprehending the impact of such developments was the young James Weldon Johnson, who later remembered collaborating with his brother in 1898 on "a comic opera satirizing the new American imperialism" and composing, several years later, some of the lyrics and dialogue Analytical Essays to The Shoo-Fly Regiment, a play set during "the outbreak of the Spanish-American War" and consisting of a scene "in the Philippine Islands" flanked by two scenes "in a Negro industrial school in the South."(46) One observes, in addition, the perhaps weightier concern that Pauline Hopkins registered in such works as "Talma Gordon" (1900), to say nothing of the more inflammatory Sutton E. Griggs, whose protagonist in a novel like Unfettered (1902), the black politician Dorian Warthell, advocates the formation of a new, separate political organization on the grounds that he is "thoroughly displeased with the policy of the Republican party toward the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands."(47) Indeed, the very title of an earlier novel, Imperium in Imperio (1899), in which Griggs envisions the revolutionary creation of an independent black nation within the United States, reflects the value that African-American writers of the fin de siecle invariably attached to the image of an America now evidently bent on imitating the perennial European zest for empire.
Chesnutt was scarcely alone, therefore, in recording his anxieties at the prospect of empire, which rapidly came to dominate both his own evolving thought on race relations in the United States and the imaginations of other alert and reflective Analytical Essays African American writers. Entirely characteristic of their response along these lines, his allusions to the nation's twin pursuits of "colossal wealth" and "world-dominion," in an atmosphere of continuing racial subjugation in the South and elsewhere, should have the salutary effect of complicating our understanding not only of Chesnutt's accomplishment but also of the scope of African American writing on the whole, in a period that has infamously come to represent the "nadir" of black experience in the United States.(48) Even a brief survey of their work at the turn of the century would find very few American writers of African descent among Chesnutt's contemporaries who did not explore the interconnection uncovered in a novel like The Marrow of Tradition, or did not promptly include some critique of imperialism in their challenge to apartheid in the United States, or failed to see in the advent of empire the worldwide dissemination of racially oppressive conditions at home.(49) Part of what endows his own work with such lasting resonance is the way in which it illuminates this fundamentally anti-imperialist thrust of African-American literary production during the very period in which colonial proclivities on the part of the United States began to be exhibited on a large scale. Analytical Essays Its function in this respect makes it possible to acknowledge Chesnutt's substantial, unheralded role in shaping such a response, in censuring America's drift toward colonialism, and in awakening others like him to the racial dynamics of empire--to what Du Bois so forcefully deplored, around the same time, as "the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead."(50)
California State University, Long Beach
Notes
(1.) "The Future American: What the Race Is Likely to Become in the Process of Time," in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 122. Material quoted from this volume is hereafter cited parenthetically as E&S.
(2.) As for his third "broad" racial "type," Chesnutt does not hesitate, in the opening essay, to consider it "the fault of the United States Indian himself if he be not speedily amalgamated with the white population" (E&S, 124). For useful analyses of the ambiguities and paradoxes of his argument in the series, see SallyAnn Ferguson, "Rena Walden: Chesnutt's Failed 'Future American,'" Southern Literary Journal 15 (fall 1982): 74-82; and Arlene A. Elder, Analytical Essays "'The Future American Race': Charles W. Chesnutt's Utopian Illusion," MELUS 15 (fall 1988): 121-29.
(3.) Chestnutt, Frederick Douglass (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899), 121; hereafter cited parenthetically as FD. In recounting such a moment in the career of an illustrious predecessor, even as "more recent annexation schemes" were aggressively under way at the time, Chesnutt had to have been aware of the fact that "the anti-imperialist case in the 1890s," in the words of one historian, "incorporated most of the arguments used against President Grant's schemes of Caribbean expansion a generation before"; see David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 213.
(4.) Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 267, 167. A later, apparently conflicting remark ("Our Spanish-American War was an unselfish war for the most part, and it resulted in the emancipation of Cuba from the tyranny of Spain") occurs in an address that Chesnutt delivered to a regiment of black soldiers soon after the United States entered the First World War, and thus would have been intended--along with, say, his reminder of "[t]he valor of the colored troops in the Spanish-American war at San Juan Analytical Essays Hill"--to inspire and reassure an audience likely to be skeptical of the nation's motives for joining the conflict (E&S, 450, 453). On Holt's editorship, under which the Independent "approved the expansion of the United States beyond its territorial limits," see Warren E Kuehl, Hamilton Holt: Journalist, Internationalist, Educator (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960), 19.
(5.) E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 108, 151, 152. Tompkins stresses ".the constant connection in the minds of the League's leaders between the erstwhile anti-slavery crusade and the present anti-imperialist crusade" (245-46), while "[t]he importance of the anti-slavery and Civil War experience as motivation for the New England anti-imperialist leadership" is underscored by another historian: "Most of the men who stepped forward to organize the anti-imperialist movement in Boston had been ardent supporters of the anti-slavery struggle and the Union cause" (Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War [Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1972], 7).
(6.) Thomas Wentworth Higginson, American Orators and Oratory (Cleveland: Imperial Press, 1901). "Reported by Charles W. Chesnutt," according to the title page, Higginson's three lectures were delivered at Western Reserve University as part of a brief midwestern tour in Analytical Essays January 1901; given the political climate at the time, neither of them could have missed the irony of the publisher's name.
(7.) Such remarks have produced, perhaps unavoidably, some imprecisions and confusions regarding Chesnutt's views not only of Roosevelt and of the Republican Party but of the Progressives generally at the turn of the century. One scholar's recent contention, for example, that "Chesnutt was not an extreme imperialist, as Roosevelt was accused of being," implying that he shared Roosevelt's imperialism to a milder degree, is obviously belied by the novelist's condemnation of the Republican surrender to "dreams of empire" (Ernestine Williams Pickens, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement [New York: Pace University Press, 1994], 12). Despite Roosevelt's efforts to eradicate the system of peonage that had succeeded slavery in the South, his handling of the Brownsville riot of 1906 and his overt conciliation of the "lily-whites" among Southern Republicans would leave Chesnutt sadly disenchanted with his presidency, in any event, by the end of its second term. Moreover, no African-American commentator as observant as Chesnutt could have been blind to the chief paradox of American Progressivism--its racially oriented collaboration, for the most part, with the new self-assigned imperial mission of the United States. Representative Analytical Essays scholarship on this constellation of issues would include William E. Leuchtenberg, "Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (December 1952): 483-504; Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., "The Progressive Movement and the Negro," South Atlantic Quarterly 54 (1955): 461-77; Seth M. Scheiner, "President Theodore Roosevelt and the Negro," Journal of Negro History 47 (July 1962): 169-82; and Gerald E. Markowitz, "Progressivism and Imperialism: A Return to First Principles," Historian 37 (1975): 257-75.
(8.) Quoted in Keller, An American Crusade, 240.
(9.) It was primarily for that reason, in fact, that Chesnutt was not above approaching, on a personal matter, at least one agent of the new imperialistic American entrepreneurial interests abroad. To a Cleveland friend, Virgil P Kline ("counsel for the Standard Oil Company and Mr. Rockefeller," as Chesnutt described him to Booker T. Washington), he wrote in 1905 asking "[i]f we could command your friendly offices with the Standard Oil Company with its world-wide ramifications" in the hopes of arranging a position for his son: "I would like to have him secure employment, if he can, in some civilized country where the color line does not run; ... for instance, some healthful part of Latin America, like say Analytical Essays the Argentine Republic or Southern Brazil" ("To Be an Author": Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.. and Robert C. Leitz III [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 219, 221; hereafter cited parenthetically as TBAA). By then, in fact, one could no longer make such a claim about at least some areas of Latin America (thanks, in part, to actions by the sort of foreign corporate entity that Kline represented), as one would have been able to do before 1898, when "the color line," in the words of one historian, "was held to be largely absent in the islands under the Spanish regime.... This situation began to change following the war, however, as American values supplanted Spanish influence" (Philip W. Kennedy, "Race and American Expansion in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1895-1905, "Journal of Black Studies 1 [March 19711: 308).
(10.) Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 75; hereafter cited parenthetically as MT.
(11.) Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 71; hereafter cited parenthetically as HBC.
(12.) In "A Solution for the Race Problem," a speech delivered in 1916, Chesnutt first observed that the occupation "is regrettable, but seems to have been inevitable, tho I have Analytical Essays no doubt the island, tho less free, will be more peaceful and prosperous under American rule" (E&S, 386). By 1922, as American troops were again dispatched to Haiti, he had toughened his position, signing a legal brief in support of the withdrawal of military forces, persuading others to sign, and fruitlessly petitioning one of Ohio's senators on a matter that no longer seemed quite so auspicious or benevolent: "The United States ought to be able to help the Haitians out of the rut without entirely depriving them of their hard-earned and long maintained independence" (quoted in Keller, An American Crusade, 268).
(13.) For a representative selection, see The Black Press Views American Imperialism (1898-1900), ed. George P. Marks III (New York: Arno Press, 1971); additional samplings, intermittently overlapping, may be found in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 750-826; and in volume one of The Anti-Imperialist Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States, ed. Philip S. Foner and Richard C. Winchester (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984), 143-81. On the role in particular of the Voice of the Negro, the editors of which "kept constantly before their readers a Analytical Essays concern for nonwhite people throughout the world, for they believed that the destinies of all these people were interrelated," and which published an essay by Chesnutt in its first issue, see Penelope L. Bullock, The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838-1909 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 125. Traditionally, historians have dispensed with this wealth of African-American journalistic commentary on America's rising imperizalism, as in Tompkins's study or in the chapter on the anti-imperialist movement in Healy's (U.S. Expansionism, 213-31); no black American figure appears, moreover, among Robert L. Beisner's Twelve against Empire: The Anti-imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), or in a standard earlier treatment like Fred H. Harrington, "The Anti-imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898-1900," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22 (September 1935): 211-30. Even where one finds a sharp awareness of the relationship between race and empire, the response of African Americans themselves is only fleetingly noted (Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 146, 172, 200-2, 214-15). For a brief exception in literary scholarship, see Amy Kaplan, "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 228.
(14.) Page's role in shaping his career has generated much important recent Analytical Essays scholarship on Chesnutt, although without reference to these surrounding political circumstances. See, especially, Kenneth M. Price, "Charles Chesnutt, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Intersection of African-American Fiction and Elite Culture," in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 257-74.
(15.) The editorial is reprinted by Burton J. Hendrick, accompanied by relevant excerpts from Page's correspondence, in a sympathetic account of the editor's pro-expansionist views (The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 1855-1913 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928], 255-72). For a more critical and balanced analysis, focussing on Page's mobilization of the Atlantic Monthly, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 125-36, 135-39.
(16.) To what extent he merited such confidence may be gauged from the fact that, during his "southern trip," according to one biographer, "Page addressed students at Chapel Hill on 'the Greater Republic,'" which "meant, he insisted, not 'simply an extension of territory, but of language, institutions, and in brief civilization."' Earlier, responding to a letter in which Chesnutt expressed his disgust at the recent North Carolina white-supremacy campaign soon to provide Analytical Essays the donnee of The Marrow of Tradition, Page admitted that "occurrences there have given me also very deep concern," only to comment far more equivocally on those developments, a month later, in an "imperialist speech" in which "he informed an audience at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn that acquiring colonies posed the same question as preserving the Union had in 1861" (Cooper, Walter Hines Page, 136, 146, 136).
(17.) Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 34, 2-3, 4.
(18.) Chesnutt, "To the Grand Army of the Republic," Cleveland Leader (8 September 1901): 12 (11. 8-11, 17-20).
(19.) On Nicaragua's role in American enterprises along such lines during this period, see, for example, Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 218-29; David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898-1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 24-27, 81-82; and, especially, Craig L. Dozier, Nicaragua's Mosquito Shore: The Years of British and American Presence (Auburn: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 123-80.
(20.) See Paul J. Scheips, "United States Commercial Pressures for a Nicaragua Canal in the 1890's," The Americas 20 (April 1964): 333-58; and Lawrence A. Clayton, "The Nicaragua Canal in the Nineteenth Analytical Essays Century: Prelude to American Empire in the Caribbean," Journal of Latin American Studies 19 (November 1987): 323-52. Regarding one of its effects along these lines, Chesnutt himself observed, in 1916, that "the construction of the Panama canal, and certain naval and military exigencies resulting therefrom.., has led the U.S., on one pretext or another, to intervene, very recently, in Hayti and practically take over the government" (E&S, 386).
(21.) Clayton, "The Nicaragua Canal," 328-29. On the region's attractiveness to the post-Reconstruction South generally, see also Tennant S. McWilliams, "The Lure of Empire: Southern Interest in the Caribbean, 1877-1900," Mississippi Quarterly 29 (winter 1975-76): 43-63.
(22.) Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 195. Although it refers only in passing to Chesnutt, my reliance on Gatewood's exhaustive and illuminating survey of African-American opinion on expansionism will be obvious in the discussion that follows.
(23.) Ibid., 21.
(24.) Ibid., 199. As borne out by the ironies of Dr. Miller's traincar experience in The Marrow of Tradition, "predictions that America's crusade in Cuba would involve a Jim Crow war and result in a Jim Crow empire appeared by early 1899 to have been remarkably accurate" (ibid.) among African Americans, institutionalizing Analytical Essays in the Caribbean the sort of humiliation inflicted upon Chesnutt's protagonist as he reads a sanctimoniously pro-colonialist editorial. As for the nation's other recent territorial acquisitions, "The government's treatment of the 'brown peoples' of the Philippines," according to one black clergyman, "was a logical extension of its policy toward Black Americans," while Harry C. Smith, crusading editor of the Cleveland Gazette (an outspoken weekly once lauded by Chesnutt as "second to no Afro American organ" [TBAA, 62]), warned that "the brown people of the Hawaiian Islands would forfeit their freedom by submitting to American rule because they would be subjected to precisely the same discriminatory treatment accorded colored people already living in the United States" (Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979], 110; Gatewood, Black Americans, 15). Consequently, as Chesnutt's own remarks on such issues would attest, African Americans were "quick to emphasize their racial kinship with a large segment of the Cuban population," say, and easily identified and sympathized," in Gatewood's words, "with the struggles for national existence by the oppressed colored peoples of Hawaii, Cuba, and other islands" (Black Americans, 17-20).
(25.) Gatewood, Black Americans, 16, 197, Analytical Essays 223,207-8. For a thorough consideration of such matters with regard to McKinley's reelection, see Philip W. Kennedy, "The Racial Overtones of Imperialism as a Campaign Issue, 1900," Mid-America 48 (July 1966): 196-205.
(26.) "Contemporaneously with our excursion into imperialism," as another historian puts it, "came the systematic segregation of the Negro through Jim Crow laws. The two events were not unrelated; exclusion was the binding theme" (James P Shenton, "Imperialism and Racism," in Essays in American Historiography: Papers Presented in Honor of Allan Nevins, ed. Donald Sheehan and Harold C. Syrett [New York: Columbia University Press, 1960], 233). Such events would have appeared more or less indissolubly bound in the eyes of Chesnutt and other African-American observers--making it no accident that, in the words of C. Vann Woodward, "At the very time that imperialism was sweeping the country, the doctrine of racism reached a crest of acceptability and popularity among respectable scholarly and intellectual circles" (The Strange Career of Jim Crow [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966], 74).
(27.) Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 85-86; Tompkins, Anti-imperialism in the United States, 50. In one example cited by Richard Welch, "Clifford Plummer, a Boston attorney and secretary of the National Colored Protective League, ... stressed the connection between the Analytical Essays worsening condition of the blacks at home and McKinley's war in the Philippines," while even "[a] minority of white anti-imperialists saw a connection between the exhibition of racial contempt abroad and the present and future status of the American Negro at home." Especially vehement among public figures was Senator George F. Hoar, who "expressed his fear that tyranny over colored peoples abroad would increase racial animosities at home and lead to the further subjugation of the American Negro," and who "saw a parallel between the new wave of lynchings in the South and our 'lynching of a people' in the Philippines" (Welch, Response to Imperialism, 111, 106).
(28.) Gatewood, Black Americans, 197; Rubin Francis Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on American Foreign Policy, 1893-1946 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 21, 29. Welch, Response to Imperialism, 111; Gatewood, Black Americans, 198.
(29.) Welch, Response to Imperialism, 111; Gatewood, Black Americans, 198.
(30.) Quoted in Gatewood, Black Americans, 115. As Gatewood adds, the underlying parallel was signalled also in the title, "Santiago de Wilmington," of a poem that an African-American pharmacist published around the same time in the Indianapolis Freeman (115).
(31.) Quoted in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the Analytical Essays United States, 813, 815.
(32.) Quoted in Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 101-2.
(33.) A.J. McKelway, "The Race Problem in the South: The North Carolina Revolution Justified," Outlook 60 (31 December 1898): 1059.
(34.) "Our Duty in Cuba," Collier's Weekly 22 (26 November 1898): 3. Waddell's lead article appears on pp. 4-5.
(35.) Harold Martin, "Puerto Rico Changes," and Charles Francis Bourke, "`The Committee of Twenty-Five,'" Collier's Weekly 22 (26 November 1898): 10-11; 5, 16.
(36.) Quoted in Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism, 13. John Haley adds that, as a result, "Democrats ... more effectively placed disfranchisement within a context of U.S. imperialism and pseudo-scientific theories of black racial inferiority" during the intervening 1899-1900 elections; see "Race, Rhetoric, and Revolution," in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, ed. David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 218.
(37.) Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism, 15.
(38.) Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 84, 88.
(39.) In a magisterial recent study, for example, Eric Sundquist's unusually full reading of the work treats The Marrow of Tradition as "the most astute political-historical novel of its day, both for its recapitulation of the 1898 'race riot' . . . in Wilmington, North Carolina, and for its cunning Analytical Essays extrapolation from the causal issues of the riot to a complex meditation on post-Reconstruction reunion politics, genealogy and the New South, Jim Crow cultural forms, intraracial 'racism,' and the rise of a black middle class," but not the overlapping phenomenon of empire (To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 13). Elsewhere, scattered, indirectly contextual references to the issue characterize, for the most part, the scholarship on Chesnutt's novel: see John M. Reilly, "The Dilemma in Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition," Phylon 32 (1971): 34; Cary D. Wintz, "Race and Realism in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt," Ohio History 81 (spring 1972): 130; Arlene A. Elder, The "Hindered Hand": Cultural Implications of Early African American Fiction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 199-200; and Marjorie George and Richard S. Pressman, "Confronting the Shadow: Psycho-Political Repression in Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition," Phylon 48 (1987): 293 and n. 19.
(40.) For illuminating comparisons of the two novels, if without reference to the issue of empire, see William Gleason, "Voices at the Nadir: Charles Chesnutt and David Bryant Fulton," American Literary Realism 24 (1992): 22-41; and Richard Yarborough, "Violence, Manhood, and Black Heroism: The Wilmington Riot in Two Turn-of-the-Century African Analytical Essays American Novels," in Democracy Betrayed, 225-51. The classic study of the Wilmington riot, Helen G. Edmonds's The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), is silent on the larger context of expansionism, which figures only peripherally in the more recent account by H. Leon Prather, Sr., We Have Taken a City: Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 55, 181.
(41.) Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells, 2 vols. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1928), 2:149. Howells's remarks on the novel occur in "Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction," North American Review 173 (December 1901): 882. For an astute reference to The Marrow of Tradition as "a portent of a new or perhaps hitherto unrecognized militancy among Afro-Americans, ... which Howells found acutely disquieting in that day of American imperial expansion," see William L. Andrews, "William Dean Howells and Charles W Chesnutt: Criticism and Race Fiction in the Age of Booker T. Washington," American Literature 48 (November 1976): 336-37.
(42.) Chesnutt, The Colonel's Dream (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905), 193.
(43.) As it is, for the most part, in numerous valuable treatments of Chesnutt's work; see, for example, Russell Analytical Essays Ames, "Social Realism in Charles W. Chesnutt," Phylon 14 (1953): 201, 203; John Wideman, "Charles W. Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition," American Scholar 42 (1972-73): 128; J. Noel Heermance, Charles W. Chesnutt: America's First Great Black Novelist (Hamden: Archon Books, 1974), 17; and Sylvia Lyons Render, Charles W. Chesnutt (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 45-46, 81-82, 107.
(44.) The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), 10.
(45.) Ibid., 66, 38. Already by 1900, an earlier essay by Du Bois begins by observing, with wry understatement, "The Spanish war and its various sequels have gravely increased some of our difficulties in dealing with the Negro problems," and concludes on a more characteristically acerbic note: "For half the cost of an ironclad to sail about the world and get us into trouble we might know instead of think about the Negro problems." The same spending discrepancies and dearth of funding are invoked in an essay four years later, as Du Bois assails the shortsightedness with which the United States "can go to the South Sea Islands half way around the world and beat and shoot a weak people longing for freedom into the slavery of American color prejudice at the cost of hundreds of millions" ("The Twelfth Census Analytical Essays and the Negro Problems" and "The Atlanta Conferences," in W.E.B. Du Bois: On Sociology and the Black Community, ed. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 65, 69, 55). Within a month, another of his essays argues that "[t]he ideals of human rights are obscured" as "the nation has begun to swagger about the world in its useless battleships looking for helpless peoples whom it can force to buy its goods at high prices" ("The Parting of the Ways," in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis [New York: Holt, 1995], 329). An uncompromising anti-imperialism thus informed Du Bois's consciousness well before the Niagara Movement and the Pan-Africanism so closely associated with later phases of his career; among the reasons for his support of the Democratic party, rather than the party of Lincoln, in the election of 1908, Du Bois later cited "its denunciation of imperialism, especially as this affected the brown and black people of the West Indies and the Philippines" ("From McKinley to Wallace: My Fifty Years as an Independent," in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, 484).
(46.) Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (London: Penguin, 1990), 149, 222. Regarding the eventually Analytical Essays rejected opera, Toloso, Johnson further opined that "nothing of the sort had yet been produced on the American stage" and judged it "possible that the managers ... may have thought that audiences would consider a burlesque of American imperialism as unpatriotic" (149, 151). The extent to which the same atmosphere surrounded Johnson's work on The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (of which two chapters had been drafted by 1905, and which he completed during his consular appointments in Venezuela and Nicaragua) has yet to be specifically addressed in literary scholarship. For a rare, illuminating consideration of this aspect of his career, see William E. Gibbs, "James Weldon Johnson: A Black Perspective on `Big Stick' Diplomacy," Diplomatic History 8 (fall 1984): 329-47.
(47.) Sutton E. Griggs, Unfettered. A Novel (Nashville: Orion Publishing Co., 1902), 86.
(48.) Strangely, the racial impact of American expansionism during this period goes unmentioned even in a wide-ranging survey like Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). One suspects that the inattentiveness to such an element as it occurs in Chesnutt's work is symptomatic of this sort of broader omission, and of a persistent blind spot Analytical Essays on the issue of empire despite an ongoing heterodox revisionism in critical scholarship and literary history. In a rare exception, A. Robert Lee observes that "Chesnutt very carefully links imperialism with the growth of domestic racism in The Marrow of Tradition," while Samuel Sillen juxtaposes the two crucial passages (the description of the editorial read by Dr. Miller in the segregated train-car, and the later invocation of the nation's "giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-dominion") in one of the earliest reconsiderations of Chesnutt's career: "The Marrow of Tradition is in fact the first novel to deal with the Negro question in the specific setting of imperialism" ("'The Desired State of Feeling': Charles W. Chesnutt and the Afro-American Literary Tradition," Durham University Journal 35 [1974]; 168; "Charles W Chesnutt: A Pioneer Negro Novelist," Masses and Mainstream 6 [February 1953]: 12). It seems not insignificant that a scholar writing in an English journal and a maverick American academic like Sillen, "a New York University English professor who resigned his faculty position in anticipation of the anti-Communist purge," according to Alan M. Wald (Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics [London: Verso, 1994], 89), should be alone among Chesnutt's readers in explicitly Analytical Essays noting the presence of such a motif in his most substantial novel.
(49.) For scattered remarks on the treatment of racism and imperialism (and of their intersection with patriarchal structures of power) in the work of writers such as Anna Julia Cooper and Pauline E. Hopkins, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 96, 97, 101-2, 114, 133-42 passim. Another informative appraisal of Hopkins's fluctuating positions along such lines may be found in Kevin Gaines, "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as `Civilizing Mission': Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, 433-55. As with the coinciding journalistic and polemical response, traditional scholarship on imperialism and the opposition of American literati has tended to pass over the contributions of imaginative writers among African Americans at the time. The classic studies remain those of Fred Harvey Harrington, "Literary Aspects of American Anti-Imperialism, 1898-1902," New England Quarterly 10 (December 1937): 650-67, and of William M. Gibson, "Mark Twain and Howells: Anti-Imperialists," New England Quarterly 20 (December 1947): 435-70; see also, more recently, Peter Conn's brief remarks on anti-imperialist writing of the period in The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (Cambridge: Analytical Essays Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8-9,296-98.
(50.) The Souls of Black Folk, 104.
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