The White Man's Burden

After the U.S. victory in the brief Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain ceded control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States. The U.S. decision to annex the Philippines provoked a domestic controversy. Those in favor of the annexation believed that the United States should become a world power with overseas possessions. Acquiring the Philippines would provide the United States with access to the Far East and prevent another imperialist nation, such as Japan or Germany, from taking control. Some of those who favored annexation also believed that the Filipino people could not govern themselves and needed the United States to provide leadership.

Those opposed to the annexation cited several reasons for their position. They claimed that for the United States to rule another people in a distant country did not accord with American ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Some argued that the country should focus on domestic reform rather than foreign entanglements and that the annexation would be too expensive. Still, others mentioned that Filipino troops fought on the U.S. side in the Spanish war and that Filipino leaders already created the First Philippine Republic, which showed their ability to run their country in an orderly way.

Following from England the news of the controversy, Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden” to offer support for the imperialist view. Two months before publication, he sent the poem to Theodore Roosevelt, who was a staunch supporter of an imperial role for America and fought in the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt had just been elected governor of New York. Roosevelt forwarded the poem to U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge, with the comment that he agreed with the poem’s sentiments—he had long supported the annexation of the Philippines—although he thought the poem itself was poor. Cabot Lodge took a more favorable view of the quality of the poem while also agreeing with Kipling’s viewpoint.

In an address to the Senate in February 1899, U.S. Senator Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina opposed the annexation of the Philippines and the ensuing war. Tillman believed that different races should live apart, and he quoted Kipling’s poem to support his position, saying: “[T]wo races […] can not mix or mingle without deterioration and injury to both and the ultimate destruction of the civilization of the higher. We of the South have borne this white man’s burden of a colored race in our midst since their emancipation and before.” Tillman then asked why the nation would “want to incorporate into our citizenship ten million more of different or of differing races, three or four of them?” He also warned that “if we go madly on in the direction of crushing these people into subjection and submission we will do so at the cost of many, many thousands of the flower of American youth” (quoted by the National Humanities Center).