‘White man’s civilisation’?

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author David Barnes is Lecturer in English Literature at Exeter College, University of Oxford, and is a 2026 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow.

When Americans look at Europe what do they see? For African American and Indigenous American communities, as my research in the British Library collections has explored, the equation of Europe with ‘white’ culture adds complexity. The transatlantic slave trade, imperialism, and colonialist settlement (including the violent displacement of Indigenous people in the Americas) all had their origin in Europe. Looking at African American and Indigenous newspapers published in the U.S. in the early 20th century provide a fascinating record of attitudes to Europe and European ‘culture’. In particular, responses to the First World War (a war that began as a European conflict) demonstrate a globally engaged political outlook among these groups.

For many African American observers, the outbreak of war was the result of European colonial greed. For the writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, editorialising in his Crisis magazine in November 1914, the causes of conflict lay in Europe’s ‘wild quest for Imperial expansion’ in Africa and Asia. Although the Crisis urged its readers to sympathise with ‘the Allies – and England and France in particular’, it did not hesitate to indict Europe’s expansionism. Similar attitudes can be found in other African American magazines and journals found in the collections at the British Library.

Examining the course of this European war gave many of these publications the opportunity to point out the vital contribution of non-white soldiers to the collective war effort – including both Black U.S. soldiers and fighters from French and British colonies. In November 1922, for example, the New York Amsterdam News (one of the oldest African American newspapers in the U.S.) reported the former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau commemorating the ‘100,000 black men’ who ‘fell gallantly fighting on the frontiers of liberty’ (MFM.MA493).

In the same way, Indigenous American newspapers and magazines, which represented a vast number of different peoples and cultures, often attributed the causes of the war to European greed and imperialism. A 1915 cartoon in the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians depicts an Indigenous American figure, facing across the Atlantic to look at dark, war-torn skies. ‘Can this be the light of the east,’ he muses.

The implication is clear: in the face of such violence, Europe’s much-vaunted claims to ‘civilisation’ look fragile. The journal’s editorial goes further, seeing the war as the inevitable consequence of the ‘idea of racial superiority’. The same belief that justified the ‘[extermination]’ of Indigenous Americans, has now led Europe to an ‘unparalleled war’, ‘spilling blood … on a soil built up of human flesh’ (Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians July-September 1915: P.P.3437).

Yet these publications, like their African American counterparts, also highlighted the brave actions of Indigenous soldiers. For example, in 1917 the Indian School Journal reports on ‘Tom Longboat, the famous Indian runner’, recently returned from the European front: ‘a brave soldier’. The School Journal describes Longboat’s laconic response when asked about the rightness of the war: ‘he says that a better way to settle it “would be to chuck a lot of sovereigns in a pit and charge admission to see them fight it out” (Indian School Journal, March 1917: online resource).

Both African American and Indigenous publications saw the war as an opportunity to point out the fragility of European ‘civilisation’ – and the opportunity to build a new world free from racial prejudice. A 1915 article by S.A.R. Brown in the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians, ‘The Indian’s Message’, identifies the ‘European war’ as an illustration of the ‘futility’ of modern civilisation. Europe’s ‘worldwide eminence in music, literature and science have utterly failed to advance the Europeans one step’. In this context, it urges Indigenous Americans to be cautious about adopting the ‘white man’s civilization’, which had ‘failed to solve the problems of the human race’ (Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians July-September 1915: P.P.3437).

But if the ‘civilisation’ of Europe had failed, what would a new world look like? A poem by the Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom, ‘The New Negro’ (published in 1923 in the New York Amsterdam News) has an answer. As ‘Europe and Asia with ebbing tides recede’, the poem declares, a new world of ‘freedom’ and peace would emerge, in which the African American would take the central role (New York Amsterdam News, January 1923; MFM.MA493). My research into these magazines and newspapers at the British Library reveals a fascinating and shifting series of attitudes to Europe and its culture(s), shown in editorials, reportage, cartoons, and literary texts. Reading publics were introduced to a transnational discourse where racial equality was presented as both an American and a global issue.