Where Did the Black Rough Riders Go?

Abstract

The Spanish-American War was a key moment in the development of U.S. imperialism and the popular western. Its iconic figure was Roosevelt's rough rider—the Anglo-Saxon gentleman cowboy par excellence—who yoked frontier heroism to overseas militarism, in the process justifying American extra-continental expansionism and extending the ideological reach of the western. The black military presence in Cuba—and, subsequently, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—threatened that process by challenging white superiority on the western frontier and the imperial battlefield. When white myth makers suppressed this story of black heroism, they drove it deep into the western's creative fabric. By following the fortunes of black soldiers, in print and in society, we can recognize how deeply the western formula is motivated and shaped by the blackness it denies and to what different ends African-American writers yoked western adventure, military action, and meanings of manhood in the United States.