he compares revealingly to a map — to uncover the 'facts' of racial identity and to right the hierarchy that Roxana threatened. Wilson's legal and professional authority has been likened to the role of the Supreme Court in endorsing the imposition by states of the 'separate but equal' doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. Although set in the prewar South, Twain's plot of national restoration imagines Wilson's incorporation into the community as a reunion between North and South at the expense of selling African American rights down the river, back into slavery. Even the problematic invisibility of race resonates with post-Civil War — rather than antebellum — anxiety about the threat of an interracial community as American nationality. -246-
Registering the same hysteria about racial intermixing, Thomas Dixon resolves Twain's unsettling ambivalence about race as a 'fiction of law or custom' in his unabashedly racist and popular novels, The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), the basis for D. W. Griffith's landmark movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's historical romances reinvent the Civil War and the downfall of Reconstruction as the story of the reunification of a white nation. His first novel plots the end of Reconstruction as a second Revolutionary war (in the town Independence) of whites against black dominance. The novel is punctuated by the repeated anxious refrain: 'Shall the future American be an Anglo- Saxon or a Mulatto.' The obvious answer is offered by the eruption of two events: the threatened rape of a white girl by a black man and the Spanish-American War. The war does for the nation what the rape does for the small town, fusing former secessionists and unionists, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, into one 'homogeneous white mass.' The connection between domestic racial conflict and international imperialism is made clear by the subtitle, 'A Romance of the White Man's Burden.'
Dixon's next novel carries this burden back in time to the Civil War and widens its national scope to imagine the birth of a nation from the rape of a white woman by a black man that spawns the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Dixon's racist caricatures rescue the romance of the white South by a kind of splitting that projects the negative stereotypes of Southern shiftlessness, barbarism, superstition, childishness, and violence (seen in De Forest) onto African Americans. This splitting allows for the national reunion in a double marriage of white couples from the North and the South. As in the The Grandissimes and Pudd'nhead Wilson, the fate of the most threatening character, Lydia, the politically and sexually domineering mulatto mistress of the evil Reconstructionist (who himself is reconstructed as white at the end), remains unresolved. These mulatto figures exiled to the border of the imagined community — but not killed off — represent the 'forgotten' history of slavery founded in the white rape of the black woman that cannot be totally erased from the national plot of reunion.
While the Spanish-American War sews up Dixon's plot of national restoration by bringing together the Gray and the Blue on distant -247- shores, the war has the opposite effect in the plot of black national unification in Sutton Griggs's less well known Imperium in Imperio (1899). Here the presence of the mulatto as the visible history of slavery is as threatening to the romance of black nationalism as it is to Dixon's white supremacism. The novel depicts the organization of an underground black nation, founded to fill the constitutional gaps and to protect and enfranchise African Americans. When the war breaks out, concurrent with heinous cases of lynching, the Imperium is destroyed by discord between those who wish to join the United States in supporting Cuba's 'largely Negro' revolution and those who wish to bring the revolution home. The radical voice of the founder (the son of a white senator) prevails and convinces the Imperium to launch a new Civil War by siding with America's foreign enemies and then claiming Texas as a separate state. The more moderate President of the Imperium, of humble black roots, urges that they remain in the Union to fight for full citizenship with the pen rather than the sword. Overruled, he willingly submits to execution, pledging his double allegiance to the laws of the Imperium and those of the United States and is buried with an American flag. The marriage plots as vehicle to national unity are also thwarted in the novel, as the lover of the radical founder commits suicide rather than marry a mulatto and contribute to the degeneration of the race, while the moderate President leaves his wife when his newborn baby appears to be white, only to discover just before his execution that the baby darkened as he grew. Narrated by a traitor to the Imperium in the interest of averting the violence of a race war, Griggs's novel leaves African Americans in a no-man's-land of national identity between patriotism and treason.
Though both Griggs and Dixon create extreme political fantasies, they highlight an important intersection in the 1890s between domestic racial strife and the acquisition of an overseas empire in Cuba and the Philippines. Dixon voiced a common welcome of the SpanishAmerican War as a final destination on the road to reunion between North and South at the expense of African Americans. In the new frontier of the empire, the nation could be reimagined as AngloSaxon in contrast to the inferior races of Cubans and Filipinos, who were identified with African Americans at home and considered equally incapable of self-government. 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. This might seem strange to say of a novel by a twenty-three-year-old written thirty years after the first war and three years before the next war, which he would report at first hand. Crane's novel is also considered less ideological than iconoclastic, one of 'enormous repudiations,' as H. G. Wells said, which would lead many to agree with Ernest Hemingway that it was 'the only real literature of our Civil War.' Yet Crane is a master of forgetting: the novel radically divorces the Civil War from its historical context by parodying the conventional reinterpretations of the war through the frameworks of reunion, slavery, or romance. Yet this parody of convention does not merely open up the reality of the battlefield but revises the Civil War through the framework of the heightened militarization of the 1890s. The novel looks back at the Civil War to map a new arena in which modern forms of international warfare can be imaginatively projected. Divorced from a prior political context, the novel focuses on the construction of manhood in war, and while it parodies the romance Bildungsroman in which the private, Henry Fleming, reads himself, it reconstitutes manhood on the battlefield as a theatrical performance separate from confrontation with a largely invisible enemy but dependent on the eyes of the spectator. Crane's representation of war as a spectacle both adopts -249- and subverts Roosevelt's interpretation of the battlefield as a crucible for redeeming primal virility; Fleming's constant need for an audience destabilizes the identity of the 'real man' by exposing it as a social construction. The transformation of the representation of war from the narration of conflict into an exotic spectacle was to provide Crane with a lens for reporting real battles in Cuba. It is not surprising that a headline in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World reporting the first major battle of the Spanish-American War read: THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE WAS HIS WIG-WAG. The mass circulation journalism of the 1890s not only created a shared domestic present chronicling the sensations of everyday life (as De Forest and Benedict Anderson would have it) but also made possible the projection of larger-than-life images of a renewed American manhood fighting 'Indian' wars on remote frontiers of what Brooks Adams dubbed the 'New Empire.'
At the end of an annual picnic for the extended family around Dunnet's Landing, in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), the narrator comments: 'Perhaps it is the great national anniversaries which our country has lately kept, and the soldiers' meetings that take place everywhere, which have made reunions of every sort the fashion.' Jewett here links two public arenas often considered separate or even antagonistic, the national and the local. Indeed, it might be difficult to imagine a fictional space more distant from the national drama of men on the battlefield than the isolated, largely female-dominated rural communities of Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Hamlin Garland. Just as these communities appear prenational, they take fictional forms that seem prenovelistic, consisting mostly of collections of short stories often incorporating vernacular storytelling and lacking overarching linear narratives. Yet the provincialism De Forest lamented as blocking a national novel, William Dean Howells celebrated thirty years later as 'our decentralized literature.' Paradoxically, this profusion of literature known as regionalism or local color contributed to the process of centralization or nationalization, as Jewett recognized by linking family and national reunions in the same passage as forms of 'Clanishness,' which she calls 'an instinct, or a custom; and lesser rights were forgotten in the
