Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [68]
And so it took some gall for Rudyard Kipling, well known to Americans as “the unofficial poet-laureate of the British Empire,” to imagine that a modern imperial army could be a force for public health, rather than an instrument of apocalypse. In his most famous poem, Kipling wrote:Take up the White Man’s Burden
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease.
Published simultaneously in the London Times and the American McClure’s Magazine in February 1899, “The White Man’s Burden” was reprinted in newspapers across the United States. Even Kipling’s friend, New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, judged it “poor poetry” in a letter to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, though the “Rough Rider” added that Kipling’s lines “made good sense from the expansionist viewpoint.”9
At the moment of the poem’s publication, Lodge was exhorting his colleagues in the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Paris, a document that would officially end the Spanish-American War of 1898 and bring the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines under U.S. rule. (In keeping with the Teller Amendment, enacted on the eve of war, Congress forswore annexation of Cuba; U.S. control of the island would end, officially, in 1902.) But even as the senators made their speeches, a new American war with Emilio Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic was beginning in the suburbs of Manila, a city that, as American anti-imperialists pointed out, lay halfway around the world—five weeks’ voyage by steamship—from the U.S. mainland. Kipling appealed to a divided American people, urging them to “take up” their destiny as white colonial rulers in the Philippines. The purpose, he assured them, was noble: to deliver the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization, including freedom from want and disease, to that far-off archipelago and its “new-caught sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”10
A native of British India, Kipling seemed at peace with the glaring ironies of colonial public health, with its frank uniting of idealism and violence. Some of his contemporaries were less untroubled. “It is a bad pedagogy to teach people at the point of a bayonet,” objected G. Stanley Hall, the eminent American psychologist and educator. But according to the expansionist viewpoint—informed by the long record of British colonialism and America’s own experience with westward expansion—sometimes bayonets were exactly what the situation required.11
In a previous story, “The Tomb of His Ancestors,” Kipling paid sardonic tribute to the British compulsory vaccination campaigns in nineteenth-century India. An industrious young British military officer, John Chinn, the latest in his family line to serve the Raj in central India, tricks the Bhil people—who “seemed to be almost as open to civilization as the tigers of [their] own jungles”—to bare their arms to “the vaccine and lancets of a paternal Government.” But it was hard work. The Bhils had kidnapped and beaten the first government vaccinator (an Indian) sent to do the job. The clever Englishman succeeded only by playing on the group’s superstitions. In “The White Man’s Burden,” Kipling cautioned the Americans to expect only heartache for their selfless efforts in the Orient:And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
Vaccinating U.S. troops aboard the Australia, bound for Manila in 1898. From Harper’s Weekly, July 16, 1898. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
The eyes of the Western world were upon the Americans. But the gazes of the Filipinos would haunt them more: those “silent sullen peoples . . . [s]hall weigh your God and you.”12
Whether or not they read Kipling, American leaders