Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  Cruel and strained and strong.

  We have drunk that cup—and a bitter, bitter cup—

  And tossed the dregs away.

  But well for the world when the White Men drink

  To the dawn of the White Man’s day!

  Now, this is the road that the White Men tread

  When they go to clean a land—

  Iron underfoot and levin overhead

  And the deep on either hand.

  We have trod that road—and a wet and windy road—

  Our chosen star for guide.

  Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread

  Their highway side by side!

  Now, this is the faith that the White Men hold

  When they build their homes afar—

  “Freedom for ourselves and freedom for our sons

  And, failing freedom, War.”

  We have proved our faith—bear witness to our faith,

  Dear souls of freemen slain!

  Oh, well for the world when the White Men join

  To prove their faith again!

  Rather as the Northern and Southern states had composed their differences by combining in the “expansionist” cause, so Kipling hoped that the growing strength of the United States could be harnessed to the existing British Empire. Race was the natural cement, and the idea of “their highway side by side” was an increasingly popular one in the speeches of Senator Albert Beveridge and others, such as Andrew Carnegie.

  This brave new style involved the Kipling faction in America in a direct confrontation with a man Kipling himself professed to admire above all others. During the course of his “From Sea to Sea” expedition, Kipling had endured the longueurs of the trip by consoling himself with the thought of Mark Twain. At length he ran him to earth in Elmira, New York, and was almost too fulsome in his approbation. To the readers in Allahabad he wrote back:

  You are a contemptible lot, over yonder, Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V.C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar—no, two cigars—with him, and talked with him for more than two hours!

  Much of the talk concerned international copyright, in which both men were very much interested because of the lack of an agreement between London and New York, but Kipling was evidently afraid of being a bore. He heard Twain out while the latter explained that he never really read any fiction. He asked the inescapable question “whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher’s daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.” And he strained somewhat for effect when he depicted the growth of intimacy between them: “Once, indeed, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was an investiture of the Star of India, blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-studded jewels, all complete.” When Kipling aimed for the sublime, he always stuck at the imperial. This was a form of temptation which Twain, as it turned out, was well able to resist. When, a decade or so later, Kipling became the semi-official laureate of the Roosevelt-Lodge set, with his verses urging white solidarity and the conquest of the Philippines, Twain emerged as the greatest and most scornful opponent of the new imperialism. Striking at the very point that Kipling had made his own—the emulation by Americans of the trailblazing British—he wrote witheringly that his fellow countrymen should “let go our obsequious hold on the rear-skirts of the sceptered landthieves of Europe.”

  Twain was very quick to identify a connection that had also occurred to Kipling—the collusion between British and American war aims in the colonial world. Unlike other European states, Britain had taken a benign view of the Philippine war. In return, the United States government resisted pressure, particularly but not exclusively pressure from Irish- and German-Americans, to disown British policy in South Africa. In his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain ridiculed the imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, who married May Endicott, the daughter of President Cleveland, and who was very fond of making speeches about “the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes”:

  Mr. Chamberlain manufactures a war out of materials so inadequate and so fanciful that they make the foxes grieve and the gallery laugh, and he tries hard to persuade himself that it isn’t a purely private raid for cash, but has a sort of dim, vague respectability about it somewhere. . . . And by and by comes America, and our master of the game plays it badly— plays it as Mr. Chamberlain was playing it in South Africa.

  Even Kipling in the end was to give up the Boer War as a bad job, and to write “No End of a Lesson.” But by then the tacit understanding between London and Washington was well developed. One area of its development in particular, as also noticed by Twain, was China. Nothing made him laugh more than the Anglo-American scramble for that country, combined as it was with a simultaneous campaign against Chinese immigration. In the New York Herald for December 30, 1900, he published “A Greeting from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century”:

  I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched and dishonest, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-glass.

  In other and later comments, when it was announced that American troops in the Philippines would adopt “Kitchener” tactics against the stubborn rebels, Twain was mordant about the imitation of the British style. In a letter to Frank Doubleday in 1903, Kipling still wrote that “I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens.” Perhaps he had not heard of Twain’s activity in the Anti-Imperialist League, or perhaps he could afford to be magnanimous. The sorts of attitudes embodied by Kipling were by then in the ascendant over the sorts of attitudes symbolized by Twain. When Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan published his book Lessons of the War with Spain, he argued that the American empire ought to proceed à l’anglaise, with a concern for native welfare uppermost. But he could have been quoting directly from “The White Man’s Burden” when he warned that “the inhabitants may not return love for their benefits—comprehension or gratitude may fail them.” This entirely unironic observation is followed by what must be a semi-conscious quotation, when Mahan speaks of “alien subjects, still in racechildhood” (see lines 6-8).

  There is evidence that Kipling’s self-pitying interpretation of the race question was not lost on those whose main concern was the domestic front. D. W. Griffith’s sinister film masterpiece Birth of a Nation was based on a racist novel by Griffith’s friend Thomas Dixon, a Baptist ranter from North Carolina whose tale The Leopard’s Spots was published in 1902. Its subtitle was A Romance of the White Man’s Burden. Evidently, the apple did not fall very far from the tree.

  I began by describing “The White Man’s Burden” as Kipling’s most celebrated poem, and I did so in spite of the claim of “Recessional” to that high eminence. As so often, Kipling is accused of the most reflexive racialism when he is innocent of it, and treated leniently when he is guilty. Those who regard him as a jingo thug are thus many times more likely to cite “lesser breeds” than any of the “White Man” poems, and to be indifferent in any case to what Kipling meant by “burden.” To him, quite explicitly, the lines of “Recessional” were an admonition against hubris and almost a satire upon imperial self-regard. With at least a part of himself, Kipling saw that there was a term set to the dominion of the English, if not to that of the “White Men” tout court. So there is a useful irony in the letter that Kipling received shortly after the publication of “Recessional” in the London Times on July 17, 1897, for the edition marking Queen Victoria’s Jubilee:

  I thank you for the high pleasure we all had in reading your noble “Recessional.” It has touched everybody—not merely the critical people—as the one utterance of the year worth while.

  The writer was John Hay, ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James’s. It is diff
icult at this distance to be certain of his motives and feelings, but it is certain that in the premonitory period before the actual outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Hay had been enlisting actual and potential sympathy for an American “expansionist” program. He may simply, as an admirer of English letters, have responded to the fierce modesty of Kipling’s verse, which celebrated empire even as it warned against its demise. He may have caught the edge of the lines:

  Far-called, our navies melt away,

  On dune and headland sinks the fire . . .

  Or he may, like other American envoys to London before and since, have felt the need to have a foothold in the literary camp. But the sheer fact that Kipling’s first major poem after the world-weariness of “Recessional” should have been addressed to Americans, and should have begun every verse with the injunction “Take up,” would not escape a man like Hay, who had dined long and often with Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt and who, in 1898, was taken by Kipling to dinner at the Savoy in order to be introduced to Cecil Rhodes. Kipling was, in this sense, John the Baptist to the age of American empire.

  Reasonably satisfied as he was that the United States had found an alternative to republican and democratic illusions, and fairly sure as he became that no American fleet was ever likely to challenge a British one, Kipling still did not like the Anglo-Saxon cousins all that much. His appeal to them had a purely instrumental aspect, which was the making of a common cause against imperial Wilhelmine Germany. His most energetic hour therefore struck when Britain and Germany went to war.

  Within a few weeks of the conflict’s inauguration, Kipling was writing fervently to Theodore Roosevelt. The tone of the correspondence tends to give the lie to those who argue that Kipling became unhinged about the Germans only after he lost his son John (no body ever being recovered) at the battle for Mons in 1915. He appears to have been in a state of racial and national excitement from the start. As he put it to Roosevelt (who was also to lose a son in the carnage) on September 15, 1914:

  I wish you could spend half a day with the Belgian refugees as they come into Folkestone. The look on their faces is enough, without having to hear their stories which are like tales from Hell. When people congratulate each other that So and So’s womenfolk were shot outright one realises a bit about German culture.

  Nothing, not even the propaganda horror fiction about Prussian factories for making corpses into soap, was beneath Kipling’s contempt or hatred. Yet he remembered his political manners when addressing “Teddy” and did not forget to couch the appeal in seductive terms:

  For once I agree with the advanced Germans (they have left the Pan-German school behind) who say that with England out of it, Germany holds the US in the hollow of her hand. I needn’t point out to you that the Monroe Doctrine would become a scrap of paper not worth tearing up.

  Roosevelt was pressing the British case in speeches and articles, and Kipling urged him to be even tougher in his attacks on neutrality. “As I see it, the US, for existing Teutonic purposes, is practically English. . . . The Allies are shedding their blood (and the butcher’s bill is a long one) for every ideal that the United States stands for by the mere fact of her Constitution, not to mention her literature, press and daily life.” In 1916 Kipling made one of his more sonorous efforts at short-term influence with his poem “The Question,” which sought to prick the American conscience:

  Brethren, how shall it fare with me

  When the war is laid aside,

  If it be proven that I am he

  For whom a world has died?

  If it be proven that all my good,

  And the greater good I will make,

  Were purchased me by a multitude

  Who suffered for my sake?

  That I was delivered by mere mankind

  Vowed to one sacrifice,

  And not, as I hold them, battle-blind,

  But dying with open eyes?

  That they did not ask me to draw the sword

  When they stood to endure their lot—

  That they only looked to me for a word,

  And I answered I knew them not?

  If it be found, when the battle clears,

  Their death has set me free,

  Then how shall I live with myself through the years

  Which they have bought for me?

  Brethren, how must it fare with me,

  Or how am I justified,

  If it be proven that I am he

  For whom mankind has died—

  If it be proven that I am he

  Who, being questioned, denied?

  He and his American wife had little but contempt for Wilson, whom Kipling termed “the Schoolmaster.” After Wilson’s equivocal response to the Lusitania (he had asked Germany for guarantees against a repetition), Caroline Kipling wrote to her mother: “This morning we have the news that Germany has had her note accepted by America about the Lusitania, and all Americans of our generation and upbringing, undiluted by European dregs, must feel bitterly and lastingly ashamed.” When Frank Doubleday wrote to Kipling in encouraging tones in May 1916, suggesting that an “important person should be sent out to the USA on a mission of friendship and goodwill,” Kipling replied with contempt: “That is the talk of the old world which died on August 4, 1914. Men do not prove their friendship and goodwill now by their mouth but by their lives. You chose, after due thought, to commit moral suicide. “

  A little later, he wrote to another friend that “I almost begin to hope that when we have done with him there will be very little Hun left.” Some of this sort of enthusiasm seems to have communicated itself to Roosevelt. In the summer following the sinking of the Lusitania, he began to speak demonstratively about “hyphenated Americans.” This extremely base appeal, which at least stopped short of suggesting that Germans were racially inferior, seemed to be a direct response to a letter from Kipling in which he had asked:

  Has it ever struck you that if the game goes our way, the largest block of existing Germans may perhaps be the eight million within your Borders? And precisely because, to please this Contingent and to justify his hereditary temperament, Wilson did not protest against the invasion and absorption of Belgium, Wilson will not be able to save for them the sentimental satisfaction of having a Fatherland to look back upon from behind the safety of the United States frontier. It seems a high price to pay for “domestic politics.”

  Though Wilson duly joined in the Roosevelt-inspired “hyphenation” campaign, and played his part in the “preparedness” hysteria, and eventually took the United States into war with Germany, Kipling never felt Wilson had done the right thing for the right reasons. He had nothing but cold contempt for Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points for a peace settlement, and shortly before the Armistice wrote to “Teddy,” sulfurously:

  To put it bluntly the USA which has grown up and thriven for 142 years under the lee of the British Fleet would have gone down with the rest of us into oblivion two years ago.

  An ape looking down under the palm tree on which he sits is reasonable compared to—but I needn’t tell you. Simultaneous as to indemnities. The 14 Ps have no word about those. All earth, it seems, must bear the cost of the war that was forced upon it, or if begun would have ended in a few weeks if the US had entered with the rest after the Lusitania was sunk.

  The cadence of the last sentence echoes a frightening line in Kipling’s poem The Children: “Not since her birth has our earth seen such worth loosed upon her.” But it was a bit much for Roosevelt, combining as it did a slightly raving syntax and a distinct tone of ingratitude. He wrote back with a combination of reassurance and reproof, reminding Kipling that, after all, there had been German and Irish-Americans among the crews of Captains Courageous and saying:

  I am stronger than ever for a working agreement between the British Empire and the United States; indeed I am now content to call it an Alliance.

  Granted this, proportion should not be lost:

  But now, friend, do not overstat
e your case. It is strong, and it needs no overstatement. You say that “the United States existed for 142 years under the protection of the British Navy.” As a matter of fact for the first ninety years the British Navy, when, as was ordinarily the case, the British government was more or less hostile to us, was our greatest danger. I am not condemning Great Britain. In those good old days the policies of the United States and Great Britain toward one another, and toward much of the outside world, were sufficiently alike to give a touch of humor to the virtuous horror expressed by each at the kind of conduct of the other which most closely resembled its own. [Italics mine.]

  Roosevelt understood this reciprocal self-righteousness exceedingly well, having often turned it to his own account. As late as the last decade of the nineteenth century, he had himself called for a greater American navy in order to counter the threat of the British fleet. Now he was calling for a greater American navy in order to counter the threat of the German Grand Fleet. Soon the United States would propose to Britain that there be an international naval treaty in which for the first time in history the size of the British fleet be limited. It would also be mentioning (to Kipling’s cousin Stanley Baldwin among others, in his capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer) the outstanding matter of Britain’s gigantic war debt and the obligations imposed by same. There was, therefore, nothing to be gained by sentimentality.

  By the time of the Armistice, the Russian Revolution had triumphed. Kipling was not among those who viewed this with indifference. In his poem “Russia to the Pacifists” he declared against Bolshevism, and put heart into the Winston Churchill faction in the British government who favored armed intervention. The cause of anti-Soviet crusading was another opportunity for the British to enlist the United States in a front of common interest, and Wilson was persuaded, not without misgivings, to send an American Expeditionary Force to Russia. This was not a happy or fruitful collaboration. The American troops, and their officers, considered themselves used and subordinated by the British and made repeated complaints to Washington about the fact. Their commander, Major General William S. Groves, wrote a very bitter memoir of the campaign, which helped decide a future generation of American military men that second fiddle to the British was not a noble or desirable position. (General Pershing had come to a similar conclusion on the Western Front.) Another illuminating book on the intervention came from Ralph Albertson, who coordinated the relief efforts of the American YMCA and was the last U.S. citizen to leave Archangel when the campaign was abandoned. His book Fighting Without a War recounts numerous telling examples of British arrogance and high-handedness. The chapter in which these are laid out is entitled “The White Man’s Burden.” In spite of the general reaction against English guile and condescension that set in, particularly among writers and intellectuals but also among politicians and businessmen, in America between the wars, Kipling himself did uncharacteristically well. The irony is that he did well as an unintended result of the battle over Imperial Preference. The United States was seeking to penetrate the British and colonial markets but was meeting with stiff resistance. A special area of contestation was the world of film. Acts of Parliament were passed insisting on arbitrarily high levels of “domestic content” in films to be screened in England. Tory ministers and backbenchers inveighed regularly against screen-borne “American rubbish” and worried about the effects of Hollywood fantasy upon the sturdy British public. They also wondered how to retaliate. Kipling was consulted by the Empire Marketing Board in 1926, and urged the idea of propaganda films, in documentary and dramatic form.