The Red Badge of Courage

This identification supported -248- contradictory positions: the imperialist acceptance of Rudyard Kipling's position in his poem "A White Man's Burden" (which was written to urge the United States annexation of the Philippines); the Southern opposition to imperialism in order to keep nonwhites out of the republic; and African American identification of revolutionary anticolonial struggles abroad. W. E. B. Du Bois linked domestic and colonial racial oppression in his prescient declaration in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), originally written for the first Pan-African Congress: "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Theodore Roosevelt, whose The Strenuous Life (1900) bequeathed a title for the decade, subordinated race to manliness as the common bond of national restoration. Proven on the battlefield and tried in the assumption of colonial rule, American manhood forges the bond that transcends social conflict and turns a former divided nation into a reunited global power. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) links the cultural interpretation of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War as two stages in the plot of national reunion ...»