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3. The Story-Paper Empire

The subject of war, diplomacy, and high politics frequently comes up when traditional political historians question the utility of gender in their work. But here, too, we need to look beyond the actors and the literal import of their words. Power relations among nations and the status of colonial subjects have been made comprehensible (and thus legitimate) in terms of relations between male and female. The legitimizing of war—of expending young lives to protect the state—has variously taken the forms of explicit appeals to manhood (to the need to defend otherwise vulnerable women and children), of implicit reliance on belief in the duty of sons to serve their leaders or their (father the) king, and of associations between masculinity and national strength. High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power, the reasons for and the fact of its highest authority, precisely in its exclusion of women from its work. Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. It refers to but also establishes the meaning of the male/female opposition.

—Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”

[My concern here is to] locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national ideas are all ostensibly grounded in “natural” heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts at midcentury. Romantic passion, on my reading, gave a rhetoric for the hegemonic projects in Gramsci's sense of conquering the antagonist through mutual interest, or ‘love,’ rather than through coercion. … It will be evident that many romances strive toward socially convenient marriages and that, despite their variety, the ideal states they project are rather hierarchical.

—Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions

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One of the major contradictions of imperialist expansion was that while it strove to nationalize and domesticate foreign territories and peoples, annexation incorporated nonwhite foreign subjects in a way perceived to undermine the nation as a domestic space.

—Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity”

Issues of gender, sexuality, and race were clearly at stake in political debates about imperial expansion and in popular sensational adventure literature published during the 1840s and 1850s. This was so, first of all, because both champions and critics of imperial expansion appealed to ideologies of manhood. In the 1840s, the “volunteer”—the virtuous citizen-soldier who defended the nation out of a love for his native land—was often championed as a manly ideal and as a symbol of the United States in the popular press. But other men, including the large numbers of immigrants and propertyless men in the U.S. military forces and in the nation, as well as Mexican men of all types, were frequently viewed as threats to such conceptions of manhood and national identity. The war literature displays intense anxieties, moreover, about whether Irish and other immigrant men can be subordinated within U.S. military hierarchies or whether they will instead turn out to be weak links in the chain of imperial manhood.^[1] On the other hand, although a few U.S. writers idealized international bonds between elite U.S. and Mexican men, Mexico was generally subordinated to the United States within such visions of inter-American reconciliation.

Eligibility for such subordination crucially depended on how the boundaries of whiteness were constructed; in other words, on whether various types of working-class, immigrant, and Mexican men were thought to be white. These were often real questions during the 1840s, for during those years the place of the Irish and especially of Mexicans within emerging racial (re)classifications was by no means clear. Although writers of popular adventure fiction occasionally imagined elite Mexican men who might enter into political or business relationships with U.S. men or, more rarely, who might marry white U.S. women, Mexican men were more often viewed as racially other and as either excessively

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or inadequately manly. Immigrant Irishmen were represented in similar ways, but some of the war literature, as we shall see, emphasized the assimilation of the Irish into white America through military service. Finally, native-born, working-class men were sometimes idealized in popular novels, but they were more usually subordinated to the merchants' sons and other elites who were often the heroes of imperial adventure fiction. Although the most influential accounts of entanglements of ideologies of U.S. manhood and empire focus on the late nineteenth century, all of these examples suggest that mid-nineteenth-century U.S. conceptions of manhood were tried and recast in the crucible of empire.^[2]

Mid-nineteenth-century imperialism also crucially affected women and engaged ideologies of womanhood. The U.S.-Mexican War dramatically and violently transformed the lives of the women who lived where battles were fought and where military forces were present. Many women followed men to the battlefields, and some, according to popular legend, even fought in the war. Women also labored in the camps, foraging, cooking, doing laundry, and nursing the wounded. Although some U.S. women, notably Irish immigrant women, followed the army to Mexico, for many U.S. observers the visible presence of women in Mexican military camps was apparently a remarkable sight.^[3] When in the early 1840s the relatively privileged and comfortable Frances Calderón de la Barca, a Scottish-born Chilean diplomat's wife who migrated to the United States in the 1830s, encountered women in a Mexican army unit during the early 1840s, she scathingly described them as “masculine women” and as “mounted Amazons, who looked like very ugly men in a semi-female disguise.”^[4] From Calderón de la Barca's elite perspective, these soldaderas unsettled the boundaries of gender, so much so that they “looked like” men.

On the other hand, during the war some U.S. writers depicted Mexican women as models of womanhood who selflessly nurtured men on both the U.S. and Mexican sides. In John Greenleaf Whittier's popular poem “The Angels of Buena Vista,” for instance, “holy” Mexican women minister with “tender care” to wounded soldiers left on the battlefield after the fight has ended.^[5] But if this image of Mexican women as ministering angels mirrored influential U.S. domestic ideals of womanhood, many popular authors of story-paper literature depicted Mexican women, as Calderón de la Barca did, as blurring the boundaries of gender. Indeed, many of their novels feature Mexican women who disguise themselves as men in order to participate in the war. And yet, although

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Calderón de la Barca viewed the crossing of gender boundaries as threatening and disgusting, sensational story-paper novelists, as we shall see, more often suggested that the exploits of boundary-crossing heroines were thrilling and heroic, even though the endings usually emphasized the heroine's return to a more stereotypically feminine role.

As these examples suggest, besides directly involving women, the war also significantly involved ideas about women. Indeed, relations between the United States and Mexico were often imagined as relations between male and female. In a wide range of discourses, U.S. national strength was metaphorically aligned with manhood, and Mexico was figured as a woman.^[6] In this case, too, ideologies of womanhood were inseparable from those of race and empire. That is, questions about the boundaries of gender, about what type of “woman” Mexico was, and about whether “she” was an appropriate romantic partner for the United States were inseparable from debates about the boundaries of race and the significance of empire for the white republic.

These debates focused on sexuality as well as gender. When relations between the United States and Mexico were recast as erotic relations, narratives of sexuality were also involved, for the key question in many wartime discourses was whether a “feminine” Mexico could be “married” to the implicitly male United States.^[7] Although advocates of empire struggled to ground imperial relations in male/female desire, anti-imperialists were more interested in showing why a marriage between nations was impossible, ill advised, or unnatural. Both sides, however, appealed to a complex of ideas that we might associate with emergent conceptions of heterosexuality in order to legitimate their positions on international relations.^[8] But in this period, which directly preceded the late-nineteenth-century codification of a “homosexual” identity in medical and legal discourses, ideas about the boundaries of sexuality were in flux. And yet, even though what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “the crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” did not at this moment, as it would soon, structure “the major nodes of thought and knowledge” of Western culture, U.S.–Mexican War literature certainly marked an “impending crisis” in discourses of sexuality as well as in sectional relations between North and South.^[9]

Although war literature often reasserted the legitimacy and naturalness of male/female desire, however, it also registered nonnormative forms of desire and intense affective bonds between men. In a similar context, Ann Laura Stoler has argued that if “the colonies were construed as sites where European virility could be boldly demonstrated it

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was because they were also thought to crystallize those conditions of isolation, inactivity, decadence, and intense male camaraderie where heterosexual definitions of manliness could as easily be unmade.”^[10] During the U.S.-Mexican War, relationships between men, as well as the pull of the military hierarchies that structured many of these relationships, were dramatically intensified. Moreover, though Mexico was not a colony, it was often imagined as an exotic space teeming with alternatives to middle-class U.S. ideals of gender and sexuality.^[11] So as Stoler suggests, it would be a mistake to assume that dominant ideals of gender and sexuality were “merely confirmed” by imperial projects, not only because imperial activity was sometimes thought to threaten these ideals but also because imperial “discourses of sexuality were productive of class and racial power, not mere reflections of them.”^[12] These sexual dynamics were of course overdetermined by imperial hierarchies: U.S. empire-building in Mexico was one of the fields within which the boundaries of an emergent heterosexuality as well as its excluded alternatives were elaborated. In what follows, I examine how authors of sensational story-paper fiction reconstructed the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality that the U.S.-Mexican War both unsettled and reinforced.

During the late 1840s and 1850s, producers of story papers and cheap pamphlet literature helped to organize a new sphere of sensational mass culture by publishing adventure fiction written mostly by “native” authors. Even as literary entrepreneurs and Young Americans such as John O'Sullivan promoted a cultural nationalism that was conjoined to ideologies of Manifest Destiny, so too did these early purveyors of popular literature.^[13] In the second half of the 1840s, the Boston-based weekly story paper the Flag of Our Union dominated the field of cheap literature; the publishers, Frederick Gleason and Maturin Murray Ballou, offered prizes to prospective authors, and, according to Henry Nash Smith, “pioneered the development of a national system of distribution” and “developed the standard procedures of the popular adventure story.”^[14] As one of the most important early forms of mass culture, these story-paper adventure novels reveal the intimate relationships between U.S. empire-building in the American 1848 and (re)constructions of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the mid–nineteenth century and beyond.

Alexander Saxton has suggested that the extension of white male suffrage in the early part of the century, along with improvements in print technology and literacy rates, inaugurated a new era of mass political culture in which the Democrats and the Whigs competed for the allegiance of potential voters with smaller parties such as the many nativist

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organizations that intermittently flourished during the late 1840s.^[15] In other words, the new mass culture of which the story paper was an important part helped to mobilize the changing coalitions that congealed tenuously at election time. Although the story papers claimed to be politically independent or neutral and tried to appeal to a diverse audience, during the late 1840s they included many stories, editorials, and reports about the war and engaged questions about the extension of slavery, the annexation of all or part of Mexico, and the incorporation of foreigners and nonwhite people into the nation. The story papers also presented models for relationships among different types of U.S. men, and developed the conventions of what I am calling international race romance—stories that try to “reconcile the irreconcilable” and transform U.S. force into Mexican “consent” by recasting violent inter-American conflicts as romantic melodramas.^[16]

Story papers such as Gleason's and Ballou's Flag, Justin Jones's Star Spangled Banner, and the Williams Brothers' Uncle Sam and the Flag of the Free, which claimed circulations of up to forty thousand during the years of the U.S.-Mexican War, carried fewer news items than did the labor newspapers or the mass dailies, devoting most of their space instead to serialized sensational stories such as The Secret Service Ship, The Volunteer: or, The Maid of Monterey, and The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main.^[17] These papers were very different from Lippard's Quaker City weekly, which I discussed in the previous chapter, or Ned Buntline's Own, another story paper that, as we shall see, juxtaposed serialized novels with articles and editorials that articulated working-class struggles to the nativist cause. Although the Flag of Our Union, for instance, declared itself the friend of the laboring classes, it rarely reported specifically on workers' issues, organizations, and conflicts.^[18] Instead, it praised the dignity of labor as well as the importance of Yankee trade and manufactures, and generally aimed to accommodate a mass audience composed of multiple classes. It was advertised, after all, as a paper “published for the million, and at a cost, and in a shape that places them within the reach of all” (7 October 1847). The Williams Brothers' Flag of the Free, which was more Whiggish in tone than Gleason's and Ballou's Flag and even ran ads for a Whig paper in its columns, also claimed to be “Uncontaminated by party politics” and to exclude “all offensive subjects.”^[19] Although the set of beliefs circulating in story-paper literature cannot be reduced to the platform of one or the other of the political parties, the papers discuss many of the important political issues of the day even as they strive to convert the latter into the terms of romantic

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melodrama. These papers were irresistibly drawn to scenes of empire-building in the U.S. West and Mexico, and their efforts to attract the “million”—a mass audience made up of diverse constituencies—resembled and overlapped with the attempts of the political parties to assemble cross-class and translocal coalitions of white male voters.

But if a new mass political culture sought to win the allegiance of a heterogeneous group of white men, the audience for story-paper literature extended beyond the boundaries of that internally divided group, for the “million” clearly included women as well as men. The Flag of Our Union assured its female readers that it had “too many friends among the fair sex, not to heed well their interest, and to chronicle all valuable matters for their notice” (2 October 1847). “Unless we please the ladies,” another editorial reported, “we shall feel that we are working in vain” (23 October 1847). The papers were widely distributed in Northeastern cities, where they were often issued under the imprint of local news agents, as well as in New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Detroit.^[20] Apparently they followed in the tracks of empire: a soldier who corresponded with the Flag during the war assured the editors that “even into the heathen darkness of Mexico does the ‘Flag of Our Union,’ both literal and typical, penetrate” (18 September 1847). At a price of three or four cents an issue, the relative affordability of these papers would have made them accessible to many working-class readers.^[21]

Many patriotic serialized thrillers (along with other similarly sensational stories that did not first appear in the story papers) were also published by these firms as pamphlet novelettes selling for twelve and a half or twenty-five cents. The novelettes circulated in even greater numbers than did the story papers. In October of 1847, Gleason claimed to have supplied “enormous editions” of up to fifty thousand for the public, and he also noted that the stories were being republished in England “by responsible houses and in large editions” (2 October 1847). For Gleason, one of the selling points of this literature was its cheapness and disposability: “Especially to those travelling on railroads or in steamboats they are capitally adapted, being so cheap that one can afford to leave them by the way after reading,” read an advertisement featured in an 1847 issue of the Flag (27 November 1847). But according to one literary historian, “Gleason's most important boast about the Flag was its Red-Blooded Americanism.” He claimed to print only the work of “Ameri-can” authors rather than reprinting contributions to British publications, and he preferred “American heroes and heroines or, failing that, working-class protagonists in foreign countries who overcame aristocratic villains.”

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^[22] Although the story papers included an occasional selection from writers such as Eugene Sue and Alexander Dumas and although the Williams Brothers in particular reprinted many French and English favorites, the story papers overwhelmingly featured the work of U.S. writers, especially after 1845. These story-paper entrepreneurs thereby promoted a popular version of cultural nationalism as they supported a mass sensational literary culture that had as its focus the romantic adventure story, and during the next ten years or so, they developed its basic genres, conventions, and settings.^[23] While John O'Sullivan coined the term “Manifest Destiny” and, as Priscilla Wald argues, “fashioned” an influential “narrative of literary nationalism” in the Democratic Review, the imperial fantasies distributed by cultural nationalists such as Gleason in the Flag of Our Union were aimed at a mass audience that was also interested in reading national literature devoted to resolving and obscuring “the contradictions and representational and political difficulties of an imperial nation.”^[24]

After he joined forces with Gleason in 1845, Maturin Murray Ballou, a Harvard dropout and the son of the famous New England minister Hosea Ballou, became one of the most important innovators in the field of mass-produced adventure literature. Ballou, who with Frank Leslie would go on to produce the first illustrated weekly (Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion) as well as several other cheap magazines, became the “guiding hand” at the Flag and eventually took over from Gleason in 1854.^[25] He was also one of the firm's most popular authors. His Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain (1845) sold eighty thousand copies in a few weeks, and he wrote many other adventure stories for the paper, including The Adventurer, or, The Wreck on the Indian Ocean (1848); Red Rupert, The American Bucanier (1845); and The Spanish Musketeer (1847).^[26] During the late 1840s, Gleason's Publishing Hall issued the work of more established authors, such as Ann Stephens, whose Malaeska would be revised and reprinted as the first dime novel in 1860; it also promoted new writers who soon became famous, such as Ned Buntline and Charles Averill, author of Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) and many other hugely successful novels.^[27] The novels promoted by the Flag often focused on foreign spaces, sometimes in Europe but more often in the Americas, and frequently with an emphasis on “Spanish fantasy”: there were stories about the Spanish Inquisition; the era of Ferdinand and Isabella; Caribbean pirates; Cuba; Panama; and many, as we shall see, about Mexico. The Flag also exploited what we might call the foreign-within-the-domestic, which

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encompassed the mysterious city (Boston, New York); as well as Indian territory, which was claimed as part of “native” America yet represented as exotically other; and the liminal spaces of the U.S. borderlands, such as Texas, which were only insecurely or recently annexed to the nation. In all of these cases, the geopolitical relations of the period—notably including urbanization, increased immigration to the United States, the violent displacement of Indians by U.S. settlers and soldiers, rivalries with Spain and England in the Caribbean, and the war between the United States and Mexico—shaped the ideas about the foreign and the domestic that appeared in the pages of story papers such as the Flag. In October of 1848, when Gleason announced a new prize competition, he elaborated on his criteria for judging these stories: “We wish for such contributions as shall be strictly moral in their tone, highly interesting in their plot, replete throughout with incident, well filled with exciting yet truthful description, and, in short, highly readable and entertaining. Domestic stories, so-called, are not exactly of the class that we desire; but tales—of the sea and land—of the stirring times of the revolution—or of dates still farther back, are more in accordance with our wishes.”^[28] Although Gleason specifically requested stories set in the past, however, during the late 1840s story-paper heroes were often sent off to Texas and Mexico in popular romances featuring side-switching soldiers, aristocratic Mexican creole or Spanish villains, and cross-dressed Mexican fighting women. Along with their competitors, the Williams Brothers in New York City and Justin Jones in Boston, Gleason produced the bulk of the war novels in this emerging field of mass culture.^[29]

Why does Gleason distinguish this “exciting” literature from a “class” of “domestic stories”? Does he mean to suggest a certain distance from the mass-produced sentimental fiction, a good deal of which was written by women, which was also popular during this period? Not entirely, for sentimental literature and sensational fiction are not completely separate spheres during this period, though as Richard Brodhead observes, “domestic fiction had its audience centered among people (often women) already possessing, or newly aspiring to, or at least mentally identifying with, the leisured, child-centered home of middle-class life,” while story-paper literature also incorporated other groups such as “farmboys, soldiers, German and Irish immigrants, and men and women of a newly solidifying working class.”^[30] But the Flag, which called itself a family paper, often endorsed middle-class (“strictly moral”) values, sometimes featured female writers, and appealed to female as well as male readers. This does not mean that the audience for story-paper

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literature must be assimilated to that often nebulous catchall category, middle-class culture; Michael Denning's sense that this fiction also registers the “mechanic accents” of working-class audiences is more responsible to the complexities of the material.^[31] And as Brodhead argues, very soon within emerging literary hierarchies domestic fiction would come to be identified with a female “middlebrow world of letters,” while story papers would usually be assigned to “the ‘low’ one that came to exist ‘below’ it,” a sphere which, particularly with the proliferation of male-authored dime novels after the Civil War, would increasingly, though often wrongly, be viewed as monolithically male.^[32] This some-what anachronistic hierarchy, however, which was promoted by many twentieth-century literary critics, conceals the considerable overlap between the two worlds in the 1840s, including not only the partial convergence between audiences but also the interdependent relationship between notions of the domestic and the foreign in the sensational story-paper literature of the period.

In an article entitled “Manifest Domesticity,” Amy Kaplan has argued that in the 1850s, “narratives of domesticity and female subjectivity” were “inseparable from narratives of empire and nation-building.” We should understand the domestic, she suggests, not as “an anchor, a feminine counterforce to the male activity of territorial conquest,” but rather as “more mobile and less stabilizing … expand[ing] and contract[ing] the boundaries of home and nation… to produce shifting conceptions of the foreign.”^[33] While the sensational story-paper literature that I consider in Part 2 moves outside the boundaries of the domestic sphere, it also foregrounds the entanglement of the foreign and the domestic and produces racialized and gendered conceptions of the foreign in response to the events of 1848 and after.

Even when they are set in traditionally male-dominated spaces, such as the ship and the battlefield, issues of gender and sexuality are central to the plots and the imaginative work of these novels. Most feature female characters, frequently cross-dressed pirates or soldiers, such as Ned Buntline's Edwina Canales in The Volunteer: or, The Maid of Monterey, who dresses as a man and fights for Mexico. When the story was reprinted as a cheap novelette, the publishers singled out as a special selling point the illustrated cover, which featured a “spirited engraving of the heroine of the tale, Edwina Canales, gallantly encouraging her men to the charge” (2 October 1847). The pervasiveness of cross-dressed heroines in these novels suggests that sensational adventure literature was an important site for elaborations of the female picaresque; that is, the episodic

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stories about the travels and adventures of “female criminals, adventuresses, soldiers, and spies” that were popular throughout the nineteenth century.^[34] Although Cathy Davidson is right to point to the “conditional and temporary” nature of the freedoms allowed to the picara in the early U.S. novel, it is also the case that, as Elizabeth Young has argued, stories of military masquerade in particular could function “as a metaphorical point of exchange for intersections between individual bodies and the national body politic,” thereby opening up questions of gender, sexuality, race, region, and nation.^[35]

Particularly during the years of the war with Mexico, as debates about the annexation of all or part of Mexico intensified, and then after 1848, when the national “home” was remodeled to accommodate vast new territories, definitions of the foreign and the domestic, as well as ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, region, and class, were pressured and reconstructed. For the dispute over the boundary between foreign and domestic space, as well as the ensuing discussions about how much, if any, of Mexico's territory should be incorporated into the United States, engendered intense anxieties about internal political divisions, anxieties that sensational story-paper literature attempted to manage. And although in almost every case it would be difficult to argue that the story-paper novels wholeheartedly endorse the war and the annexation of Mexico, in the international race romances of 1848 the boundaries of gender and sexuality are central to debates over the politics of empire-building and the incorporation of “foreign” territories and peoples.

One of the ways that international race romances tried to manage these anxieties was by appealing to and popularizing an ideology of imperial U.S. American manhood that promised to transcend internal divisions such as class and region. This story-paper fiction that circulated so widely among emergent middle-class and working-class audiences frequently appealed to an ideal of manhood embodied by a white U.S.-American soldier-hero whose manliness is defined in contrast to various “unmanly” villains, usually rapacious Mexican officers who try to force unwilling heroines into marriage. But story-paper fiction exposed U.S. domestic divisions even as it tried to bridge them, and it thereby registered, as we shall see, not only antagonisms of class, gender, and sexuality but also conflicts between so-called natives and immigrants, the shifting place of the Irish within white America, and the looming battle over slavery that would culminate in the Civil War.

Although these divisions also surfaced in other columns of the story papers, the papers generally rallied around a white egalitarian patriotism

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fortified by the emotional intensities generated by the dynamics of empire-building. In addition to publishing patriotic war stories, for instance, story-paper entrepreneurs almost immediately integrated events and heroes from the Mexican War into their elaborate illustrated mastheads. In 1848, the Flag of the Free carried three illustrations under the title: the central engraving depicted a battle scene and the words “Buena Vista” (one of the most famous battles of the war), and on each side of this illustration pictures of Indians were paired with the words “Rio Grande” and “Aroostook,” two places where boundary disputes had taken place.^[36]

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The representations of Indians could reference the many armed disputes over land that had taken place between whites and Indians, or they might simply indicate an appropriation of Indianness in the service of white nationalism, with the pictures of Indians confirming the “natural” boundaries of “native” America and serving as an emblem of the cultural nationalism that the paper promoted. An Indian also appears prominently on the Star Spangled Banner's masthead in 1848, along with two illustrations of U.S. soldiers and a series of small drawings of U.S.-Mexican War heroes Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, as well as Washington, Hancock, Franklin, Lafayette, and Jackson. In the Banner's title, each letter also contains the name of a famous battle, from Lexington and Concord to U.S.–Mexican War battles such as Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, ending with the word “Mexico” inside an exclamation mark. Not to be outdone, in addition to its illustrations of George Washington and two U.S. soldiers, the Flag of Our Union positioned each letter of the paper's title on a small sign that also included the names of all of the U.S. states, notably Texas. All of these mastheads represent the story-paper title as itself a flag, and the references to the Revolutionary War, the U.S.-Mexican War, Indians, and the names of all of the states wed U.S. nationalism to empire-building and military models of manhood.

Although the papers declared themselves neutral or independent and tried to please a mass audience, they all ultimately supported the war effort. Their positions on expansionism, however, were somewhat different. The Flag of Our Union was probably the most unequivocally and enthusiastically imperialist of the group. During 1846 and 1847, it included several articles in support of the war, including one that celebrated the new territory “acquired by Anglo-Saxon valor” (11 July 1846), a laudatory biographical sketch of Zachary Taylor (10 July 1847), a short piece applauding the military performance of republican citizen-soldiers (24 July 1847), and an article praising the capture of Mexico City as “an event, that in the days of Roman greatness would have indeed put the capstone to a pyramid of glorious conquests” (23 October 1847). The paper generally seemed to favor the addition of new Mexican territories to the nation, perhaps because of its “firm belief that five years from this time, Mexico will be settled largely by Yankees, and trade, and manufacture will prosper there” (15 May 1847). When the war ended, the Flag declared that the “United States, by virtue of its power and position, is the natural umpire of the North American continent” (13 May 1848). And just two years later, the editor advocated the annexation of Cuba, claiming that the “‘gem of the American archipelago’ will be a

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bone of contention until it is joined to this country, and probably powder will be burnt before this is done” (20 July 1850).

Other papers, such as the Williams Brothers' Flag of the Free, however, expressed more reservations about the annexation of new territories. Although in 1847 the paper urged the energetic prosecution of the Mexican War (2 January 1847) and crowed that the “immense region of California will fall into our hands like a ripe peach” (13 February 1847), after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 the editors rejoiced that more of Mexico had not been taken, claiming that this “moderation” showed that Americans were not as “tyrannical and unprincipled” as Europeans. Deeming the war “a glorious conquest,” the paper claimed that the treaty also represented “a conquest over those dangerous passions which the intoxication of successful war has aroused in all nations, republics as well as monarchies. It saves us from the horrors incident to a standing army of sixty thousand men in the heart of a sister republic” (17 June 1848). When a war between Indians and creoles in Yucatán led some to advocate the U.S. occupation of the area, the writer of an editorial for the paper objected: “Permanent occupation implies colonial government and interminable expenses. England's colonies have been a constant drain upon her treasury, and the source of great abuses” (20 May 1848). Some of the same concerns no doubt caused the paper to denounce “the absurd project” of annexing Cuba to the United States” (10 June 1848).

If the views about race expressed in another Williams Brothers publication, the Uncle Sam, are any indication, however, other worries about the annexation of new territories also probably motivated this writer for the Flag of the Free. At the outset of the war with Mexico, the Uncle Sam expressed fears of the “mixed breed” troops of Mexico invading the U.S. South, freeing all of the slaves, and enlisting the support of “people of color” to fight the United States:

When we consider the peculiar population of the South, we confess we are not without our fears of impending evil. The troops of Mexico are of a mixed breed; they are mulattos, and so declining into the African. But little if any Spanish blood is to be found among them. Mexico is an “Anti-Slavery State”—she wars with all who hold the black race in subjection. There are three millions of slaves in our Southern country;—and the approach of a numerous body of foreigners proclaiming liberty to the people of color, and promising plunder and rapine as inducements to favor the advancing armies, is not a matter to be considered lightly. (23 May 1846)

Although story-paper editors sometimes expressed the hope that slavery would gradually end, they certainly did not advocate abolitionism (the

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Flag of Our Union even called Frederick Douglass a “blackguard” and “pet of the ultra abolitionists” [2 June 1849] for denouncing the war), and statements such as this one suggest that both antislavery and anti-annexationist sentiments were often motivated more by fears of racial contagion than idealistic concerns about republicanism.^[37] “One reason why we deprecate a Mexican invasion is this,” the Uncle Sam concluded. “The Mexicans are the nastiest race of modern times” (23 May 1846). The explicitness of the racial invective is unusual for editorials in the story papers of the time, but many similarly negative representations appear in story-paper novelettes.

The story-paper empire was more ambivalent, however, about the place of Irish immigrants within white America. Although Gleason and Ballou published two novelettes, Harry Halyard's The Chieftain of Churubusco and Charles Averill's The Mexican Ranchero, in which Irish deserters from the U.S. army join forces with the Mexicans, editorials and articles in the paper were generally fairly sympathetic toward the Irish. In part, that was because the Flag was virulently anti-British. The paper repeatedly attacked England for its imperialist policies in different parts of the world while denying that the United States was involved in a similar venture in Mexico. “[We] fight for right, not for conquest,” one editorial announced, “therefore we have an actuating motive that never influences the British soldier” (31 October 1846). When the English criticized the United States for bombing Vera Cruz and injuring large numbers of non-combatants, the Flag replied that British conduct in China was much worse and that if the city been taken by the British they would have utterly destroyed it, just as they had burned and razed Washington during the War of 1812 (4 December 1847). And in response to news of military encounters between British and Indian troops, the Flag asked, “Who, in all Christendom, sympathizes with the British in this unexampled war of incursion and conquest, upon a foreign soil, separated from them by thousands of miles of ocean?” (7 April 1849). While the United States was involved in its own war of incursion and conquest in Mexico, the Flag repeatedly searched for ways to pin the charge of imperialism on Britain and thereby to make U.S. empire-building seem different—in this case on the implicit grounds that Britain sought overseas empire, “separated from them by thousands of miles of ocean.” Noting that Irish emigrants fiercely hated Britain, one writer concluded, “[S]uch is British colonization” (25 December 1847). On the other hand, the paper guardedly welcomed the immigrants and implied that the United States would do a better job of ruling them than England had: “Give us

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good, stringent laws to govern these people, and we care not how many come” (7 July 1849).

But this equivocal editorial position on immigration was not always endorsed in the stories the Flag ran, which sometimes presented much less sympathetic views of the immigrant Irish who were coming to the United States in increasingly large numbers during the famine years. From the summer of 1845 through the early 1850s, the massive and repeated potato crop failures in Ireland forced the immigration of more than a million Irish to North America. These new immigrants were decidedly unwelcome to the nativists who organized political parties and participated in destructive riots during the 1840s and 1850s in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Irish laborers in Eastern U.S. cities generally received low wages, lived in substandard housing, worked at unskilled jobs, and tended to be concentrated in trades such as weaving that were being transformed by industrialization.^[38] It is not surprising that many joined the U.S. Army and went to Mexico, where some watched Protestant soldiers destroy Catholic churches, others switched sides and fought with the Mexicans, and most completed their terms of service and returned to the United States. Although U.S. victories in battle were used to argue for the superiority of republican Anglo-Saxon America, immigrant soldiers constituted about half of the recruits in the regular army.^[39] War service would in many ways help to facilitate the incorporation of the Irish into white America, but in sensational story-paper literature the Irish soldier condenses an array of anxieties about the boundaries of whiteness, about the distinction between the foreign and the domestic, and about empire and American exceptionalism.

All of this suggests that the battlefields of the U.S.-Mexican War, as represented in sensational story-paper fiction, were important theaters for stagings of a white “native” American identity. But these massproduced imperial race fantasies have rarely been factored into accounts of mid-nineteenth-century popular culture. Michael Denning's influential study of popular literature during this period, for instance, moves from the late 1830s and early 1840s (the birth of the story paper, most notably with Park Griswold's and Park Benjamin's Brother Jonathan) to the mid-1850s (Bonner's New York Ledger and Street and Smith's New York Weekly), thereby skipping over the story papers and pamphlet novels of the late 1840s, the years of the U.S.-Mexican War.^[40] As I suggested in the introduction, Denning rightly contends that an overemphasis on Westerns and tales of Indian fighting and the frontier within studies of popular fiction has made it difficult to appreciate how significant urban

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themes were in the literature of the 1840s.^[41] But the omission of the story-paper literature of the late 1840s from this account makes it hard to comprehend the many connections between city and empire in this period, or to understand how inter-American conflict and U.S. imperial policies also shaped the early forms and genres of mass culture.

In the rest of Part 2, I argue that the story-paper literature of this period engendered racialized constructions of the foreign that are an important part of the story of nineteenth-century popular culture and that were subsequently recycled and transformed in dime novels and Western pulp fiction and films. In chapter 5, I consider the connections between city and empire, as well as between mass culture and working-class culture, by exploring intersections of nativism and imperialism in the work of Ned Buntline. Buntline wrote adventure fiction for the story papers during the U.S.–Mexican War years, just before he moved to New York and refashioned himself as the author of mysteries-of-the-city novels, the cultural representative of the white working-class B'hoys and G'hals of New York, and a proselytizer for nativist organizations such as the Order of United American Mechanics. Although critics tend to focus either on Buntline's literary adventures in New York or on his later role in developing the legend of Buffalo Bill, the imperial race fantasies that he elaborated in the story papers significantly shape the popular forms of nativist working-class protest that he produced in his urban reform literature, and these imperial romances both express and displace class antagonisms by recasting them in national, racial, and gendered terms.

I have suggested that Buntline's The Volunteer was one of many sensational Mexican War stories featuring cross-dressed female soldiers that were published as story-paper novels. In many of these romances, cross-dressed Mexican heroines lead troops heroically into battle and fight effectively, but ultimately fall in love with U.S. soldiers. As in the Latin American foundational fictions described by Doris Sommer, in U.S.–Mexican War stories the language of romantic passion provides a “rhetoric for the hegemonic projects in Gramsci's sense of conquering the antagonist through mutual interest, or ‘love,’ rather than through coercion.” These popular U.S.–Mexican War romances try, in other words, to turn force into consent by reimagining the U.S. invasion as an international romance in which the force of erotic passion could, as Sommer puts it, “bind together heterodox constituencies.”^[42] These representations often imply that the crossing of gender boundaries is symptomatic of a larger crisis in Mexican national identity, a crisis that is sometimes said to justify U.S. intervention. But because these romances focus on

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empire-building and international warfare rather than intranational consolidation, and because the possibility of incorporating Mexico through annexation raises fears of race mixing, the conclusions to these novels project a variety of possible outcomes rather than simply endorsing political union. In some, a marriage between a Mexican woman and a U.S. soldier anticipates a more intimate postwar relationship between nations; in others, heterosexual union must be deferred until the war ends; while in still other cases, marriage is prevented by the violence of the war or by other factors. But in each instance, plots that foreground the crossing of gender boundaries and frustrated or successful international romances manifestly display fears about the boundaries of the white republic and U.S. expansion into Mexico. Insofar as they both foreground tensions within ideologies of whiteness and expansionism, sensational representations of cross-dressed Mexican women and side-switching Irish soldiers oddly mirror each other. Although the cross-dressed Mexican female fighter is often an idealized, albeit exceptional, figure who is deemed assimilable into white America, representations of Irish soldiers who switch sides and fight for the Mexicans raise doubts about whether the Irish can truly be incorporated into the white nation. These negative representations of Irish soldiers in stories that also frequently feature heroic Yankee yeomen and merchants' sons suggest how stepped-up immigration rates, the market revolution, and early industrialization were transforming Northeastern cities, political life, and alliances between classes during this period.^[43]

Saxton argues that although “American workingmen during the Jacksonian era, skilled and unskilled, East and West, were more likely to be Democrats than Whigs,” there were notable exceptions: the Whigs gained significant support from “native-born Protestant workers in cities where recent immigrants, especially if they were Irish or German Catholics, became prominent in Democratic politics.”^[44] Even though the Whigs were traditionally considered the party of the merchant classes, in this new age of mass culture they tried to appeal to nonelite voters by arguing that the tariff they championed would protect workers from foreign competition and by sometimes joining forces with the nativists to support restrictions on immigration and naturalization. The divisions between Irish and Yankee soldiers in the story papers correspond in part, then, to divisions between “the new and old working classes,” as Amy Bridges puts it. In New York City, support for nativism and the Whigs came, she argues, from “the least proletarianized workers,” especially artisans in trades that had not yet been transformed by industrialization.

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Focusing on the immigrant Irish as scapegoats, many native-born Protestant workers hoped to keep the transformation of work at bay by keeping immigrants out of the republic. But while nativism could, as Bridges suggests, convey a sense of class identity, it was also often the case that “Whiggish, republican, and nativist mutualist politics insisted on the primacy of American interests and the subordination of class divisions.” Although working-class nativism responded to the peculiar pressures of industrialization and market revolution, the mutualist politics embraced by many nativists sought to efface class antagonisms by emphasizing ethnic solidarities, the common bonds of Protestant nationalism, equal opportunity, and “master-journeyman cohesion.”^[45] In chapter 5, we will see how nativism limited the version of working-class protest promoted by Ned Buntline. In the next chapter, however, I will consider how the combination of nativism in Northeastern cities and U.S. imperialism encouraged some members of the new working-classes—that is, immigrant soldiers—to construct solidarities with Mexicans rather than the Whigs or the Democrats.