Larry Schall:	My name is Larry Schall. I'm Class of '75. Also, I've been a vice president here for 15 years. It's my pleasure to introduce Peter Schmidt to you tonight. Peter is a professor of English here, and has taught for the past 25 years. He earned his bachelor's degree at Oberlin, and his master's as well as his PhD at the University of Virginia where he completed his dissertation entitled William Carlos Williams, the Visual Arts, and Literary Tradition. That dissertation became his first book published in 1988. His second book is entitled The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction. He is currently working on a book entitled Brier-Patch: Fictions of Race and Nation in the US South, 1865-1920.
	At Swarthmore, Peter's general areas of teaching are poetry and American literature. In the realm of poetry, this includes The Lyric Poem in English, Modern American Poetry, and several poetry writing workshops. Upcoming courses in American literature will include surveys of 20th century US fiction from 1900 to World War II and from World War II to 2000. He also has recently taught a course called Blues, Jazz, and American Literature. On campus, Peter is a member of the Black Studies Committee, where he has served as co-chair and chair, the Teacher Education Committee, and the Advisory Committee of the Intercultural Center. I know Peter best as a long-distance biker. It's my pleasure to welcome Professor Peter Schmidt.
Peter Schmidt:	Thank you, Larry. Mic working okay, right? Yeah. Thanks for coming on this gloomy night. I've got some gloomy thoughts for you to match the evening, but there'll be some humor interlaced in between the thoughts as well. I should mention that there'll be lots of politics in the talk tonight, partly because Mark Twain's essay that I'm going to focus on is engaging with American political discourse and is quite angry about it. But politics and literature, and the intersection between the two, is not the only approach that I take to literature, and in some ways, this talk is unrepresentative of things that happen in the class day in and day out.
	It's a combination of the two that interests contemporary students a good deal and many of my colleagues as well as myself. We all want to think about the ways in which imaginative artists have a lot to tell us if we will only listen to them, not just the usual talking heads that appear in the mass media. As Larry also alluded to, some of this material comes from a book I'm working on that looks at representations of US history in imaginative fiction and other things such as essays in the post-Civil War period up through the World War I era.
	Okay. Regardless of what position we take on the US intervention in Iraq, we all ought to be interested in what kind of record the US has in fostering democracies abroad, for such a goal is almost always our stated intention during interventions, military and otherwise. We rightly congratulated ourselves with enabling democracy and economic growth to thrive in Germany and Japan after World War II, but what about the many other interventions that we have made in the late 19th and the 20th 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 programs and progress?
	Now progressivist foreign policy at the turn of the 20th century, those leaders are greatly admired by policymakers driving the current administration who count Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt as among their heroes. They conspicuously do not mention Woodrow Wilson who was never hesitant to use American military power to enforce US hegemony in the hemisphere, but he also conceded that the US had to cede some of its sovereignty to an international deliberative body that could mediate disputes among nations. President William Howard Taft is less famous today. He's also of this early 20th century period. But he's quite relevant for our contemporary debates for his positions anticipate those of today's traditional conservatives who are skeptical that military interventions in countries that do not directly threaten the US are either a moral or practical imperative for our foreign policy.
	We were all moved by TV images of Iraqi families voting for the first time. Driving was banned to cut down on bombing. Whole families turned out in their best clothes so that the elders could participate in voting. Afterwards, the voters proudly held up purple stained fingers 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, perhaps we should call them extreme makeovers, American version, 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, that was federal Reconstruction in the South between 1867 and 1876 more or less, 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, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere, I risk embarrassing us all, including myself.
	These histories are indisputably relevant if we will learn anything from the mistakes of the past, if mistakes they were. Yet how many of us know anything really about US and Hawaii or the Philippines, or our various interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean? Not to mention, say, the fate of British rule in Iraq in the 1920s and afterwards, where they too sought to modernize and democratize. The complicated history of colonization projects is rarely taught in schools. That's starting to change at Swarthmore and elsewhere, but in general, that leaves a dangerous legacy, I think.
	Let me ask a few more disturbing questions to begin with as well. Could it be that we don't worry about history so much, because we believe we are so exceptional that its lessons just 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 the phrase of William Jefferson Clinton? How compatible is representative 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 from the media to try to understand such questions and to answer them, to whom should we turn? I say pay attention to our imaginative artists, our poets, novelists, playwrights, movie makers and others, not only to them, but do not exclude them. I teach American literature at Swarthmore, including many classes in American fiction. If there's any single way in which the teaching of literature has changed over the last 30 years or so, for better or for worse, it's this, that literature departments over the country now teach a much broader range of materials under the rubric of literature. We tend not to treat literary and other cultural works as parallel universes with their own beautiful internal logic.
	We do place close attention to matters of form, but we also teach our students to explore, or we try to, to explore how cultural works have a dynamic, even dialectical, interaction with the history of the times in which they live. In creating imaginative 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 of 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 those spaces sometimes make room for voices that are not well-represented in public forums. Think of the debate George Lucas's latest installment in the Star Wars series, for instance, has started over where the real threat to democracy lies. Fiction and essays published in the 19th and early 20th 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 including American presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt.
	In this talk, I'll focus on four writers at the beginning of the 20th century who in very different ways tried to influence how Americans understood about the use of power in foreign and domestic spheres. Near the end of the talk, I'll focus on a Mark Twain essay, part of his work against the US occupation in 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 US 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, however, especially in the Philippines, US troops faced armed guerrillas fighting in favor of complete independence from any colonial power, even one wielding the rhetoric of democratization. Although the insurgents in the Philippines were eventually defeated and rudimentary political and educational changes accomplished, the US's main success in its new colonies was building state-of-the-art military bases and subjugating their economies to the control of US corporations, particularly their need for raw materials and labor. In the Philippines, vast numbers of the population remain steeped in poverty today, and many have emigrated to other countries, including the US, in search of work.
	If you speak to contemporary Filipinos over 100 years after Admiral Dewey's first fleet first steamed into Manila Bay to the strains of a Navy band playing John Philip Sousa, you will hardly get an unambiguous endorsement of the US's influence there. The volume, Vestiges of War: 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 I'll speak about today, is one example of the ambivalence that I'm talking about.
	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 20th century in the US and the Philippines regarding US foreign policy. The first writer, Thomas Dixon, was an unabashed pro-imperialist or expansionist notorious for his novel, The Clansman, a bestseller in 1905, we're talking a million copies plus sold, that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and was later made into the single most influential American movie of the silent film era called The Birth of a Nation, 1915. This is an early example of a book that's reprinted after a famous movie comes out and actually changes its cover to match the images in the movie. This novel was greatly praised by Woodrow Wilson among others.
	Both Dixon and Griffith suggested that the post-war 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 as mounting a defense of lynching and Jim Crow on the home front, Dixon also argued in favor of US imperial adventures abroad, Reconstruction done right. White Southerners' experiences during Reconstruction, he implied, showed what could go wrong if US rule abroad were not backed by overwhelming military force. The true birth of the nation, according to Dixon, came not in 1776, but in the 1880s with the rise of the white South, which showed the nation the way to establishing, in his view, an Anglo-Saxon empire to rival Britain's and Germany's. His historical fictions were consistent with the theories of many academics who developed elaborate scientific theories of what made certain races and civilization destined to rule.
	Other writers were less confident about the US's motives and methods in the new territories. 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 many of her 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 US rule over its new colonies after 1898. After discussing Dixon, Holley, and Twain, I'll then give you a brief sketch of a play by a Filipino playwright, [Aurelio 00:15:44] Tolentino, voicing first idealism and then disillusionment regarding US motives in the Philippines. This play met a revealing fate during its opening night performance in Manila.
	Thomas Dixon first, the classic example of an intellectual who gravitates towards the powerful by giving them an image that they themselves yearn for. Thomas 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 cast the white South as America's new imperial visionaries while its northerners and others merely know how to manufacture wealth. Whereas the southerners will show what to do with it, the northerners are good at manufacturing it.
	The climax of the novel comes at the Democratic Convention when the hero, inspired by victory over Spain, expounds on the world mission of an Anglo-Saxon America in language that's half Hegelian and half Teddy Rooseveltian. Here's the quote. "The Old South fought against the stars in their courses, the resistless tide of a 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 of triumph which are ushering in this all-conquering Saxon. Our old men dreamed of local supremacy. We dream of the conquest of the globe. 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 civilization, the principles of civil and religious liberty and constitutional government." The Leopard's Spots has generally been disparaged by literary critics, but Dixon has a cult following on the internet and elsewhere. This novel has just been treated to a new paperback edition, March 2005.
	One example of how widespread such rhetoric was in US discourse in the early 20th century is an editorial cartoon that appeared in a Detroit newspaper depicting the US civilizing mission in the Philippines, The White Man's Burden. This cartoon is meant to be a comically literal racial uplift narrative. The native face is backward, a spear in one hand, and a look of terror or incomprehension on his face, as he's carried uphill to school. Note the hallucinatory mix of racial signifiers here. Spear, grass skirt, earring, and bracelet, and dark skin denote tropical native, but except for the US 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 minstrelsy popular in the US at the time. One set of plantation histories merges with another, US South and the South Pacific, as any variety of colored difference almost always in the white US imagination tends to revert back to the black other.
	The typical Dixonian hero is as resolute as the hero in the cartoon, but the language with which his task is described in Dixon's Leopard Spots most markedly in this quotation, "In this hour of crisis, our flag has been raised over ten millions of semi-barbaric black men in the foulest slave pen in the Orient," suggests immense anxieties swirling amidst all of Dixon's paeans to colonial uplift projects as a trust for civilization. Though pro-imperialist, the novel fears that the vexing racial conflicts that bedeviled both the old and the new South will now be reenacted on a global stage. Dixon well captures the righteous rhetoric of altruism, development, and democracy that governed the pro-imperialist camp, but even more vividly dramatized in his novel is the US national unconscious, so hysterical with uncertainty that it may be swayed from laughter to tears in a single sentence by a demagogue posing as a democrat.
	Now most contemporary rhetoric involving terroristic threats and the clash of civilizations drops Dixon's overt racial metaphors and 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 US rhetoric and actions, but 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, have a long history leading to the present. It's no endorsement of terrorist violence to ask how well our own countermeasures 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 in his books when villains are caught? There's a lot of lynching scenes in his novels.
	Now Marietta Holley next. At the beginning of the 20th century in the US, she was famous for inventing a proto-feminist character named Samantha. Samantha traveled widely and had opinions about everything, presented with humor, plain language, and common sense reasoning. She also often made her points at the expense of her lumbering husband and other male authority figures. Yet overall this narrator was 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 with 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.
	In 1904, Holley published a little book called Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition by Josiah Allen's Wife. That's a picture of the cover. Chapter 14 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's celebrated domestic progress in the arts and sciences, but the 1904 extravaganza was the first to incorporate spectacular representation of the new tropical colonies and the new American imperialism as the latest example of the march of civilization. Here's a poster from the fair in French. If you look in the background, you can see a representation of a Native American, kind of with one arm over the figure of the woman in the front.
	Now St. Louis's Philippine Reservation, that's a very revealing name, was the largest exhibit in the fair, covering 47 acres of recreated jungles, lagoon, and native villages, complete with huts, costumes, and live villagers imported for the occasion. It also included a life-sized replica of the part of the walled city of Manila. The entire exhibit was meant to illustrate the civilizing triumphs of US colonial policies abroad, plus the basic principles governing the new science of anthropology as described by Lewis Henry Morgan and other academics. According to Morgan, all human societies displayed one of four stages of human progress, barbarianism with no ability to progress, savagery with some hope, 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 that's a souvenir card from the Igorot village, and finally the villages of the Visayan, who were thought to have the most fully-developed culture and promising future. In the Philippines, the Igorots, which meant 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. In response, two polling places were established in the reconstructed Igorot village. Photographs of the two candidates, Theodore Roosevelt and Alton B. Parker, so much for the fame of losing presidential candidates, they were placed over Igorot gongs and beans served as ballots. In case you missed CNN's coverage of the event, I've got the results of the election for you. Roosevelt won 83 to 2. This is an image from the voting process.
	An Igorot election in the midst of a fair on the banks of the Mississippi was meant to display colonialism bringing democracy and civilization to the islands. Yet in 1904, the rest of the US, 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 be de facto national policy as well, not just in the South. Swarthmore, Pennsylvania desegregated its schools in 1913 after Wilson was elected.
	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 boosterist tour brochure. Accompanied throughout by her more quizzical and dour husband, Samantha revels both in narratives of progress and those of noble or not so noble savagery. 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 as machinery and even as machinery. She's very much a progressivist, a believer in progress and that many 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 US's new possessions into a spectacle in which the unknown and the new can be made safely known and ours at home. What was the use of traveling so far to see our new possessions in the South Pacific, the narrator says, when samples of them can be explored right in St. Louis? Throughout, Holley expertly translates elite, progressivist, imperial rhetoric into familiar, down-home, do-goodism.
	I quote, "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 to it that they learn how to take care of themselves before he sets up in independent housekeeping. The big school in Manila is handsome enough for any American city, and the smaller district and industrial schools are doing just as good work. Our government sent 540 teachers there in 1901, and now we have about 700 there. I took comfort in seeing the great work that they have done."
	Holley's comic country colloquialisms may gently satirize US imperial ambition, but they also domesticate it and make it familiar in motive and method as a housewife's or schoolteacher'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 projects invented by elites, but uncomplicated, common sense, just folks behavior motivated by doing good works. Sound familiar?
	Halfway through Josiah Allen's wife's meditations, however, the tone changes. Holley contrasts this colonial uplift agenda for Uncle Sam's new stepchildren 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 land to be slaves and drudges for the 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, "It sings of an ignorant, oppressed race changed into an enlightened, prosperous one, this great work done by our own country. This song comes floating over my ears over the wide Pacific, and another louder strains comes from nigher by," that's the reference to Reconstruction and afterwards, "made tender and pathetic by years of oppression and suppressed suffering that could find expression in no other way than this heart-searching pathos." Then in the last sentence, she tries to reconcile everything. "And blending with it, ringing over 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 the 1960s or the 1980s. As you debate this issue amongst yourselves, don't forget to look at the so-called progressivist era in the early 20th century when the discourse justifying US nation building abroad was first constituted.
	If you're so foolhardy as to read US newspapers and policy journals from the early 20th century, you will immediately notice a vigorous debate whether conquering and governing other nations would endanger US democracy or strength. That brings me to Mark Twain. 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 gradually overcome by good intentions, Mark Twain's a different matter all together.
	In Twain's ending to Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer frees Jim, an 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 US hypocrisy, its betrayal of promises made to ex-slaves during Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction era. Twain's later satiric work became even darker 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, often which emphasized Eve's rebellious point of view, or the sulfuric Letters from the Earth, a wonderful collection of tales and parables and other writings. 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 US's new ambition to compete with Germany and England and other countries for the right to share the white man's burden of empire gave Twain fits, in part because he was struck by the hypocrisy of promoting democracy abroad even as it was being eviscerated at home. In 1898, he became an active participant in the Anti-Imperialist League organized out of Boston. Where else? His most complex and disturbing anti-imperialist tract in this period is entitled To the Person Sitting in Darkness, published in The North American Review, 1901. This would be the equivalent of publishing it in Foreign Affairs or some other serious journal today. It's unimaginable that this kind of piece would get published then. Twain would probably be hired, I think, as one of the satiric commentators for the Jon Stewart show maybe, if he could get a job at all in that commentary. His opinions proved quite controversial, even to the Massachusetts liberals who were among 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 early 1898, despite doubts about colonialism expressed in his book Following the Equator, Twain admitted to a friend that he believed the US's war with Spain was exceptional. "It's a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom. It's another sight finer to fight for another man's, and I think this is the first time this has been done." To the Person Sitting in Darkness, however, was written in 1901, and it seethes with Twain's fresh sense of betrayal, including his horror at the spectacle of the US 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 may lie, Twain used the art of parody and collage to skewer cliches like those Dixon used about the white man's burden. These cliches, Twain shows, are promulgated by elites whom he calls the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, which functions more as a corporation operating for profit than government policy created by the consent of the governed.
	Twain also parodies American exceptionalism, including the self-assured belief that US 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. I quote from Twain's essay. "Shall we go about conferring our civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give these poor things 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, patented adjustable ones good to fire villages with upon occasion, and balance the books and arrive at the profit and loss so that they may intelligently decide whether to continue the business, or sell out the property and start a new civilization on the proceeds?"
	The target of all this imperial altruism enforced by violence, the person sitting in darkness, is portrayed in Twain's essay not as an uncivilized barbarian, but as a sober truth-teller. 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 in colonialist discourse. The person sitting in darkness is almost sure to say, "There's something curious about this, curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas, one that sets the captive free and one that takes a once-captive new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on, and kills him to get his land."
	The imperialist response, according to Twain, is we must arrange his opinions for him. Twain ends his satire of the Blessing-of-Civilizations Trust speaking in a frenzied, first person 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." Twain's final acid irony is two-fold. First, the real person in darkness is the colonizer who thinks his motives are always enlightened. Second, no matter how skeptical of imperialist discourse Twain is, he cannot find a way to step outside of it, the prison house 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. Neither literature nor history provides us with exact models or clear answers for future dilemmas, but both do gives us cautionary tales as well as profiles in courage. First, you must notice 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.
	Further, his 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 are 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 the nation suppresses will be allowed to emerge and speak. He loved The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a parable.
	Second, we can easily enumerate many differences between the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and the current events in Iraq. The explosion of the Battleship Maine, for instance, which started the Spanish-American War from some points of view is hardly the same as the attack on the World Trade Center, though if you read articles on both disasters in the press at the time, you'll be struck by the differences, the similarities as well as the differences.
	The Iraqi insurgents do not have the broad-based support that the Philippine insurgents did. US policy is also now pointedly anti-racist and religiously egalitarian in theory, though in practice on the ground, I think, in our media, it may be another matter entirely. TV images from other countries, even the BBC, make it obvious how much is being screened out for American audiences, especially about the daily hell that life in Iraq has become in the war between the US and the insurgents, the Shiites and some Sunnis. Who is indeed the one sitting in darkness in Twain's sense when it comes to contemporary events?
	The most important way we must not 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 formulate US foreign policy after the Spanish-American War and the present? 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 its conclusions dictated to them. Twain's essay can help us begin that discussion, especially for those of us 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, especially those who have oil and other commodities that we want. 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.  Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders of 2003 include provisions allowing US 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 US corporations be in Iraqis' economy in a decade from now?
	One counterpart to either Dixon's frenzy of belief or/and amnesia, or Twain's imprisoned rage, is what post-colonial 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. I think the Iraqis today know exactly what she's talking about. Twain's satanic text might be profitably read contrapuntally with the Philippine playwright Aurelio Tolentino’s play Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, which criticized the US occupation and was closed down by angry Americans in the audience the very night it opened in Manila in 1903.
	The play, though censored, was collected and translated soon after by a US government bureaucrat and incorporated into a volume entitled The Filipino Drama, 1905. It's a singular example of how the discourses of colonialism tried to absorb and contain even the most critical comments about their enterprise, at once censoring and preserving and translating these comments. Here's a photo of Tolentino along with the US colonial bureaucrat's annotation which said, "Aurelio Tolentino y Valenzuela, Blue, the greatest of the present-day Filipino dramatists, now in Manila Penitentiary for his seditious plays." Here's the title page of the Filipino drama in 1905 as reprinted in a new edition in 1981 in the Philippines.
	Until Tolentino's text is read not just as an example of Philippine literature, but also as a transnational or post-colonial constituent of the literary history of the US, 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 in the US by a US publisher. To read it, I had to go to McCabe's Interlibrary Loan system, which is great, and borrow it from the Philippine Embassy Library in New York City. I had to read the 1905 colonial translation, not a modern English translation. What conclusions do you think we should draw from those facts?
	Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow presents the Spanish colonists as blind with 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 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 the 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 US revolutionary, abolitionist, and Radical Reconstruction rhetoric. The note in this quote I'll show you in a second, this stilted transition is by the US government bureaucrat. It's not by Tolentino. The play's originally written in Tagalog, but the revolutionary ideas, I think, come through pretty well. "The 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 did 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 fellow man. Think and do not forget the sorrow of our people. We love thee dearly. Why does thou then disturb us and interfere with our desired rights?"
	After the speech, Philippine children reappear and kneel before the 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. It was at this point that the American audience stormed the stage and shut the play down. Tolentino was soon tried and convicted of sedition under Act Number 292. That's a sedition act which made advocating Philippine independence a crime. The Philippine Sedition Act became a legal precedent for the later US Sedition Act of 1918, the first anti-sedition act legislation applied to residents of the US since the 1790s. Note the pattern here. Sometimes extraordinary legal measures to resist civil rights are tried out first in the colonies, and then later imported back to the domestic sphere to apply to threats there.
	In gathering a translation of this and other plays in a volume sponsored the next year by the US government, the editor, Arthur Stanley [Rigg 00:48:37], meant his work both to show Tolentino's and others' indisputable guilt, and to demonstrate the enlightened beneficence of US rule. 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 US in the best light, as she finally relents and gives the Philippines the freedom it has asked for. The play ends with a chorus of praise. 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 US.
	When it accedes to Filipino desires for freedom, the US will rediscover its original ideas and values, as if in the glass of contemporary colonial history, now corrected and redeemed. Neither Twain's focus on US hypocrisy and Filipino silence, nor contemporary post-colonial 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.
	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 policies of our leaders, not the actions of brave men and women that are put in harm's way every day.
	Twain once believed that a satirist could expose how consent is manufactured. People would come around and refuse to be hoodwinked. He trusted in the liberating power of laughter. He also died disappointed. But I'll end with this hope expressed to a person sitting of darkness at the center of so-called civilization. What Mark Twain said, and others said, long ago about our righteous American foible of self-praise may still help us hear and face our own lies.
	Now the four writers I've discussed from a hundred years ago give you a representative range of opinions in the US about US actions abroad, so that you may do what today's media encourages you not to do, which is to compare and contrast motives and results, past and present. What today's writers do you think might be performing equivalent roles to those of Dixon, Holley, Twain, and Tolentino? How do you think our adventure in Iraq will be portrayed by writers from Iraq or from the US a generation or more from now, or portrayed by our soldiers themselves as they create rap lyrics and other songs and memoirs in the future?
	Many contemporary novelists and other artists focus on the US actions and power abroad and at home. I mentioned George Lucas earlier, and I will cite just four others to finish. You'll see they have widely different takes on current events. Tom Clancy, author of the bestselling Jack Ryan series, the latest of which is The Teeth of the Tiger. This one features not Ryan, but his son is also known as Jack, as well as two of his cousins, fraternal twins Dominic and Brian Caruso. One is a former FBI agent, the other is 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 across mid-America. Am I suggesting that he has a little of Thomas Dixon in him? You bet. He's a million plus bestseller, Dixon, Clancy, and a host of other bestselling creators of action adventure films and fiction, and first-person shooter computer games that copy them.
	Philip Roth. The Plot Against America imagines what would 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. He's denied that his parable of fascism happening here has anything to do with contemporary events, but I think Swarthmore alums may be able to figure out or not whether he's bluffing.
	Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood Bible portrays a family of missionaries changing their idea of 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, but she's crafted a voice and vision that's distinctly her own and quite contemporary. This novel was also a bestseller in 1998.
	Edwidge Danticat. There are many writers I could mention, but these four were irresistible. The Dew Breaker is the latest in her many novels and stories that explore the complicated interrelations between the nightmare that is Haiti, a history in which the US is deeply implicated, and Haitian Americans trying to make a fresh start in the US and hoping to change US policies towards Haiti. She should be on everyone's list of important writers under 40, I think. I've gone on too long and will end with that. Thank you for coming today.