GAZING UPON THE GOO-GOO LAND: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE FILIPINO IDENTITY IN U.S. NEWSPAPERS, 1898–1904

GAZING UPON THE GOO-GOO LAND: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE FILIPINO IDENTITY IN U.S. NEWSPAPERS, 1898–1904

BY SHANE DONGLASAN

A Thesis

Submitted to the Division of Social Sciences New College of Florida

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences

Under the sponsorship of Brendan Goff

Sarasota, Florida May, 2014

Acknowledgments

ii

Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge my committee members Brendan Goff, Maria Vesperi and Charla Bennaji to whom I owe a great deal of gratitude for their support and wisdom. I would also like to thank Dr. David Harvey and Thomas McCarthy of the New College History Department who have been instrumental in helping shape my academic interests. I would also like to thank my family and friends, especially: Taylor Meredith, Kyle Larson, Annie Carter, Chelsey Lucas, Andrea Ortiz, Eva Gray, Melayna Schiff, Luis Gomez, Michael Wicker, Arielle Scherr, Tyler Whitson, Mike Towler, Dustin Juengel, Janie Ray, Kristen Castillo and my family back in the islands and abroad. Thank you all. Dedication: For my Lola Denise, in whose memory I will strive to never stop learning and never stop exploring.

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GAZING UPON THE GOO-GOO LAND: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE FILIPINO IDENTITY IN U.S. NEWSPAPERS, 1898–1904

Shane Donglasan

New College of Florida, May 2014

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the relationship between print culture and American imperial endeavors

in the Philippines. Specifically, it investigates articles in daily newspapers – the saliency of the

American newspaper created a way for the public to encounter the Filipino native through

representations formed by colonial actors and observers. The thesis’ individual chapters

explore three distinct contexts in which discourses of an emerging imperial-racial framework

were translated into the narratives of reportage. The degree to which the medium of the

newspaper can replicate ideas, sounds and images created a shared experience and produced

widespread stereotypes. Ultimately, these accounts surveyed shaped American expectations

and attitudes about the Filipino identity.

________________________________

Dr. Brendan Goff

Division of Social Sciences

Table of Contents

iv

I. Introduction 1

II. Chapter One: An Identity Under Question 8

III. Chapter Two: A Wilderness in Human Form 22

IV. Chapter Three: From Savage to Subject 42

V. Conclusion 60

VI. Index of Images 64

VII. Bibliography: Primary Sources 67

VIII. Bibliography: Secondary Sources 69

Introduction

1

“Who live there? Now you’ve got me . . . I don’t believe there can be found such a mixture of races anywhere else in the world.” - Isaac M. Elliott, U.S. Consul in Manila (1898) The American colonial period in the Philippines inspired a proliferation of visual and textual

discourses on the islands and their inhabitants, introducing the American public to bodies,

cultures, languages, and geographies unlike their own. In their quest for imperial dominance,

colonial authorities produced images of the Filipino subject that would suit their political needs.

At the same time, anti-imperialists reconstructed the very same images in their fight against

empire. Inextricably linked to these colonial depictions and the modes in which they were

translated to the American public were the narratives constructed in the U.S. press. In his study

about Filipino nationalism and imagery, Vincent Rafael summed up well the problem of

representation in relation to colonialism in his research question: “Who has the right to speak for

whom and under what circumstances?”1 The perspectives presented in this thesis will attempt to

further explore this question through interpretations that shaped American attitudes and

expectations about the Filipino identity.

The end of the nineteenth century saw the convergence of two crucial events in modern

American history: the quest for an overseas American empire and the unprecedented influence of

the newspaper. The nation came onto the global stage as a world power, eager both to expand its

geographic and economic boundaries. Journalism bounded forward as well, motivated by a desire

to reach the surging population. An explosion of various printed materials occurred during the

mid-to-late 1890s that was driven by new technologies, increased literacy, concerns with market

1 Vicente Rafael, “Nationalism, Imagery, and the Filipino Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth Century,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 592.

Introduction

2

share, and the efficacy of advertising.2 At this time, the daily newspaper – a cultural product for

domestic consumption – was a popular forum among the rising urban middle classes, the

representative audience of the growing mass media.3 Two publishing visionaries in particular

dominated the era and ultimately changed the profession: Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph

Hearst. The circulation war between Pulitzer and Hearst resulted in reporting that

sensationalized (and sometimes manufactured) events. Known as “yellow journalism,” this type

of reporting played out prominently during the Spanish-American War – the excitement

surrounding war fed the American public’s desire for media coverage about those parts of the

world understood as exotic.4

In this thesis, I will explore how the medium of the newspaper interacted with imperial

identities through the lens of race. While many scholars have examined the intertwined nature of

race and U.S. imperialism, the recent works of Paul Kramer have contributed a provocative

explication of the ways in which race shaped the United States’ understanding of its role in the

Philippines, as well as the ways in which encounters with the Filipinos shaped American notions

of race. He argues that recent studies of race and imperialism assume race as essentially a static

category instead of a “a dynamic, contextual, contested, and contingent field of power.”5 Central

to one of Kramer’s analyses is that the Philippine-American War – the “foundational moment”

in Philippine American history – was a “race war.”6 Also colliding with racial formations of the

“Other” in the midst of expansionist foreign policy was the formation of a modern American 2 Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 73. 3 John William Tebbel, The Compact History of the American Newspaper (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), 127. 4 Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012), 82. 5 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2. 6 Ibid., 28.

Introduction

3

identity. Matthew Jacobson has provided a thorough investigation of how the “world’s peoples”

provided the international context within (or against) which native-born white Americans forged

their national identity. He examines how highly racialized American anxieties proliferated

through political documents, travelogues, academic treatises, and visual imagery. Foreign peoples

both at home and abroad, he contends, became the “barbaric” foils to idealized, virtuous

American citizens. Contributing to Kramer’s work, I have surveyed news articles published in

major American newspapers across the country from June 1898, a month after the U.S. became

involved in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war, until 1904, a year after the

declared end of the Philippine-American War.

Ideas of racial inferiority sustained prominence within the expanding medium of the

newspaper. It created a way for the public to encounter the Filipino through the reconstruction

of various images of natives in its images and text. The production of photography and

illustrations were essential and effective for the presentation and justification of colonialist

ideology. Benito Vergara notes in his investigation of the history of photography during the

American colonial period in the Philippines that the medium emerged as “a privileged mode of

obtaining knowledge and expressing reality.”7 Laura Wexler, Abe Ignacio and David Brody have

also contributed crucial works about visual culture and how it was employed in the press during

7 Benito M. Vergara Jr., Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 4.

Introduction

4

the American imperial age.8 However, I have chosen to focus strictly on the narrative of text and

written reportage as a way observers “gazed” upon the colonial subject. I argue that this was a

“transitory gaze,” in which Filipino images and stereotypes predicated on race were constructed,

retooled and transformed in ways that supported both the imperial and anti-imperial agenda

throughout the events of this period.

In the three chapters that comprise this thesis, I examine this transitory gaze through

three different contexts that played a defining role in shaping particular intersections and

configurations of race, identity and colonial power. I argue that it was these contexts that

determined the underlying logics, which would filter the importation and non-importation of

U.S. racial discourses that would be reflected in the press.

The first context, covered in the first chapter, was a Spanish colonial racial state in the

Philippines that distributed rights and powers on the basis of an interlaced set of hierarchies,

within which Filipino elites would struggle in the late-nineteenth century in their search for

reform and, eventually, national independence. This first chapter begins by briefly tracing the

ethnic and cultural origins of the islands’ diverse inhabitants and how these cultures confronted 8 Laura Wexler’s Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism weaves together the history of photography, cultural history and literary analysis through the narrative of war in the Philippines. She analyzes of how the first American female photojournalists contributed to a “domestic vision” that reinforced the imperialism and racism of turn-of-the-century America. Abe Ignacio’s The Forbidden Book examines political cartoons from the U.S. popular media of 1896-1907 that represent a range of viewpoints from both sides of the imperial debate. David Brody’s Visualizing American Empire argues that images most influenced Americans’ early perceptions of the Orient, and that they created a space for a dialogue about empire that words alone could not nurture. His chapter, “Disseminating Empire: Representing the Philippine Colony,” is a close reading of how Americans visually consumed the spectacle of its new colony.

Introduction

5

and merged themselves with Spanish culture. Spanish colonial society brought with it a multi-

layered racial system which placed the European-born (peninsulares) over the Philippine-born

(criollos or españoles filipinos); the racially pure above those “mixed” (mestizo) with Chinese or

indios [natives]; and Hispanicized, Catholic groups above the unconverted (infieles) of all kinds:

the Chinese, animists and Muslims.9 The complex racial layers of Spanish colonialism reflected

the diverse assemblage of natives. This was the environment that Americans encountered when

they first arrived in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century. When debates over

annexation of the archipelago arose, this racial plurality became a complicated matter in defining

these possible colonial subjects. Descriptions of the islands’ peoples came from various and,

often, ambiguous sources that ranged from zoologists to Spanish friars. The uncertainty of who

inhabited the islands was made clear in news articles, and when colonial authorities did attempt

to represent natives, it was underscored by racially charged discourse.

The Philippine-American war provided the next context in which Filipino images were

formed. For the first three years of the war (1899-1902), news about the military campaign in

the Philippines graced the front pages of American newspapers almost daily. “The American

public eats its breakfast and reads in its newspapers of our doings in the Philippines,” said the

New York World.10 This chapter looks at the devastating effects of racial beliefs on the behavior

of soldiers and policy makers alike, allowing Filipino revolutionaries and civilians to be easily

dehumanized and turned into “savages.” While ambiguity pervaded the initial image of the

natives, reporters relied on the narratives of military leaders and soldiers to define the Filipino

9 Marya Svetlana T. Camacho, “Race and Culture in Spanish and American Colonial Policies,” in Mixed Blessing: the Impact of the American Colonial Experience On Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed. Hazel M. McFerson (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 51-55. 10 Abe Ignacio, The Forbidden Book: the Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T-Boli Publishing, 2004), 1.

Introduction

6

“Other.” It was through their understanding and treatment of the enemy that developed the

images of the enemy for domestic consumption. I begin this chapter by explaining how war

censorship and propaganda effected reporting from imperial borders. I also investigate how

common stereotypes originally attributed to African-Americans and Native Americans were

reproduced in emerging imperial-racial frameworks. Defining the enemy also became crucial in

justifying the violent and extreme tactics used against it. A growing number of U. S. soldiers and

officers came to understand themselves as engaged in a war not against an army or even an

insurgency, but against a “savage” population. The restraints on tactics and targets, which

characterized “civilized” warfare no longer applied in the Philippines. To ensure a swift and total

victory, violent acts were committed against insurgents as well as civilians. I investigate how

these atrocities, animated by a racialized language, were translated in news articles, shaping

Americans’ opinions of a people they were fighting to control.

At the war’s end, however, media coverage on the Philippines and its people declined

drastically. The image of the violent, savage Filipino was replaced as colonial officials tried to

convince the public that the islands had been pacified. Within the context of the St. Louis

Exposition, the third chapter will examine the new images of the Filipino that emerged during

the beginning process of colonial state-building. The exposition was an elaborate spectacle that

was virtually a theme park of American progress and imperialism – a site for both education and

entertainment. A key exhibit at the exposition was the Philippine Reservation, where exposition

planners assembled more than 1,100 representatives of various Filipino ethnic groups.

“Scientific” ethnological displays of Filipino tribes were arranged in a racial hierarchy and

accompanied by imperial pageantry that promised Anglo-Saxon-led progress. The exhibit

revealed the necessity for American stewardship over Filipinos incapable of governing themselves

Introduction

7

or developing their natural resources; and that the classification of the various nations of the

world in an evolutionary hierarchy from “primitive” to more “advanced” races. While Kramer

This chapter explores the press descriptions of three of these tribes that were brought to St.

Louis and also delves into depictions of assimilation in progress.

Together, I hope my observations in these chapters convey the extent to which imperial-

racial discourse pervaded daily newspapers during the first years of the Philippine-American

colonial encounter. I maintain that the constructions of Filipino identities provided a pretense

through which the American public confronted their developing relationship with the nation’s

newest colonial subjects.

Chapter One

8

An Identity Under Question: Colonial Influence in the Philippine Islands

The first chapter of this thesis seeks to explore the context from which colonial influence emerged in

the Philippines and how this influence shaped colonial-racial frameworks that were imposed upon

the islands’ natives. I aim to showcase the islands as an assortment of tribes, without a central

authority, a single language or common religion, and how Spanish and American imperial powers

developed this condition for their own means. While the later chapters of this thesis more

thoroughly examine the images of the Filipino through the narratives of the U.S. press that began

during the Philippine-American conflict, this chapter explores the emerging nationalist identities of

the Filipino educated and elite and how imperial-racial discussions were deployed in news articles at

the end of the Spanish-American War. During the war with Spain, imperial ambitions brought the

country in contact with those beyond their borders, thus, cultivating tensions between foreigners and

Americans who tried to characterize them. To the American audience, there lacked a clear,

authoritative definition of who inhabited the Philippine islands. Nevertheless, ambiguous racial

narratives constructed from various sources underpinned the arguments of both expansionists and

those against annexing the islands.

Before 1898, the Philippines remained largely vacant from American minds. When political

interests in the islands emerged, there were no reliable American experts for officials to turn to.

However, a young zoologist named Dean C. Worcester would soon take the opportunity to fill that

void and offer the first comprehensive glimpse of the islands to the American public. Worcester, who

had been on a collecting expedition in the Philippines from 1887 to 1890, used his experiences to

publish articles about the islands in major American magazines soon after Commodore George

Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay. After just six weeks of editing, descriptions of the islands based on

Chapter One

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his letters home were refashioned and published into a travelogue, The Philippine Islands and their

People. His experiences were translated into expertise and would eventually be used to establish

colonial authority when he became a part of the Philippine Commission.

On January 1899, just before the Philippine-American War broke out, Cornell president

Jacob Gould Schurman was chosen to head the commission of five individuals to study the

“commercial and social problems” of the Philippines. The work of the initial Commission was

investigative and advisory, but it would later be charged with legislative and executive functions

towards the war’s end. Their first report was published a year later, in which Worcester underlined

the diverse and sharply distinct races of the islands: “Here man presents himself with the greatest

variety of characteristics conceivable . . . for, beginning with the Negrito and ending with the

Chinese and European mestizos, all the races are represented in the islands.”1 According to

Worcester, the Filipinos did not constitute a nation or a people as a result of this racial plurality.

However, he concluded that the majority of the inhabitants of the Philippines “possess a

considerable degree of civilization.”2 His reports would be used to support arguments from both

sides of the annexation debate, but they also sparked the discussion over who exactly occupied these

distant islands.

Pre-Hispanic Philippines

Over the last thousand years in multiple migrations, various ethnic groups including Negrito, Malay,

Indonesian-Malay, Sinitic and Chinese peoples arrived in the islands. Some of them were frequenters

                                                                                                                         1 United States Philippine Commission. Report of the Philippine Commission, Volume Three (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1901), 331. 2 United States Philippine Commission. Report of the Philippine Commission, (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1900), 12.

Chapter One

10

of the coastal fringes, migrants or refugees from mainland zones of conflict. Still others may have

been sea traders exploring the area to establish short-term bases at harbors from which to conduct

commerce, piracy, shipping, fisheries and casual exploitation of useful land products. According to

Frederick L. Wernstedt and J.E. Spencer’s survey of the Philippine islands, records of pre-historic

movement, regional and ethnic relationships, territorial control and local settlement history of the

Philippines remain vague and incomplete as of 1967.3

It is clear, however, that the later migrants brought settled living patterns, complex

technologies and mixed patterns of culture into the islands and established different living systems

long before Europeans arrived. As economic systems developed, sociopolitical systems also evolved

with a common pattern. In the pre-Spanish period, Muslim immigrants brought political structures

that began the formations of the territorial state, but elsewhere the basic political units were

immature and essentially formed within small kinship groups called barangays. The barangay chief

acted as a political leader for the group in a specific locality. Social structuring generally followed a

three-level pattern best expressed as nobility, freeman and dependents, with varying subdivisions of

each category. Social structure carried integrated economic implications, labor service and

commodity delivery, particularly from the dependent classes to the nobility and to the barangay

chief. Thus, social and political structures were interconnected. The physical geography of the

archipelago, which is made up of thousands of islands sprinkled through the western Pacific, along

with this low-level of sociopolitical institutionalism made for regional separatism, local autonomy

and interregional hostility. (See Figure 1) The absence of a stable inter-barangay structure north of

                                                                                                                         3 Frederick L. Wernstedt and J.E. Spencer, Philippine Island World: a Physical, Cultural, and Regional Geography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 116-117.

Chapter One

11

the Muslim territories, argue Wernstedt and Spencer, would make a united reaction against the

Spanish-takeover impossible.4

Collision of Cultures

When the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, only a few hundred islands were

permanently populated by approximately a half-million people from all parts of southern and eastern

Asia. By this point, a base for economic, demographic and cultural development had emerged in the

islands. Coming at such a critical point in regional development, the Spanish impact could create the

process of turning the Filipinos toward Westernization in their development of a regional culture.

The Spaniards began colonization of the islands in 1565, transplanting their social, economic, and

political institutions.

Rather than the Spanish forcefully implanting their systems and traditions upon the islands

to replace the whole of native culture, however, Wernstedt and Spencer have claimed that the

Filipinos adopted Spanish culture to their own ends. The meeting of these two cultures was not a

one-sided process in which the Spaniards remade Filipino society into an exclusively Hispanic image;

the two processes became essentially one in the creation of a native culture.5 Rebellions to overthrow

political controls sprung up in the late nineteenth century, but there was never a mass effort made to

overthrow Spanish cultural traditions.

                                                                                                                         4 Ibid., 118. 5 For more on the tensions and conflicts that emerged from the Spanish-American encounter, see John Leddy Phelan’s The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700. Phelan constructs an overarching view of the sociopolitical and economic transformations generated in the archipelago by the Spanish conquest. Without denying the brutality of the conquest, he highlights the agency of the natives during the development of indigenous Filipino and Spanish societies into a sociopolitical reality.

Chapter One

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To administer the Philippines, the Spaniards extended their royal government to the

Filipinos. This highly centralized governmental system was theocratic, in which the Roman Catholic

Church was equal to and coterminous with the State. Therefore, the cross as well as the scepter held

sway over the archipelago. While the State took care of temporal matters, the Church handled

spiritual matters and preoccupied itself with the conversion of Filipino inhabitants from their primal

religions to Roman Catholicism. This program of evangelization was accepted with considerable

enthusiasm by the main lowland Malay population, and many elements of Catholic belief, ritual,

social procedure and “national custom” were gradually connected to corresponding elements in

native culture. The religious unity did much to establish a new cultural continuity throughout the

lowland, coastal and valley sectors of the Philippines. The Negritos, native inhabitants of the

mountains, and the southern Muslims remained outside this growing cultural continuity.

The impact of the Roman Catholic faith upon the Filipino population permanently

influenced the culture and society of the Philippines. Spanish friars who undertook the immense task

of evangelizing the Filipino natives looked at their missionary work and endeavor as involving more

than simple conversion. By Christianizing the Filipinos, the Spanish Catholic missionaries were in

effect transforming Filipino culture and society according to the Hispanic standard. In the process of

Hispanicizing the Filipinos, they would be taught the trades, manners, customs, language and habits

of the Spanish people.

As with other Spanish colonies, Filipino society consisted primarily of two classes: a small,

powerful ruling group and everyone else outside the ruling order—the poor, weak, uneducated, and

economically dependent. At the top of the ruling class were the Spaniards or peninsulares and their

Philippine born descendants, insulares. Far below were the non-Spanish native-born Filipinos or

Chapter One

13

indios. A Chinese minority made up of merchants, artisans and moneylenders occupied a central

position in the Filipino cash-crop economy at both the provincial and local levels. They constituted

a special part of the Filipino elite who owned land, lent money, and received special respect from the

Spanish. For the poor, however, a strict patron-client relationship existed. They worked as farm

hands, tenant farmers, or day laborers. The quality of their existence—family, social, economic,

physical—depended on the relationship with their patron. Social mobility for most Filipinos was

minimal.6

The majority of the growing Filipino population remained rural and illiterate (until very late

in Spanish times). Most had relatively little contact with the Spanish except for the clergy, and the

preference of the Spanish for living in the larger poblaciones or in the few urban centers deprived the

Filipinos of significant exposure to the Spanish language. The failure of the Spanish to complete a

thorough installation of Spanish culture led the Filipinos to adapt what they received as their cultural

choices. The growing Filipino population proved thoroughly able to adjust Spanish institutions to

Filipinos values, while retaining large sectors of its own basic body of culture.

The sociocultural structures set up by the Spanish were established on predominantly racial

grounds. Colonization originated a new framework in which groups would be divided along ethnic

lines: Spaniards, Christian and non-Christian natives, and Chinese formed a social hierarchy. Both

the premise and the result were a distinctive pattern of relationships and values that underpinned

Filipino society.7 Politics played an important role as the primary ordering principle of community

life. If race was an intrinsic articulating factor, it could only be intimately connected to political

                                                                                                                         6  Robert D. Ramsey III, Savage Wars of Peace: Case Studies of Pacification in the Philippines, 1900–1902 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2007), 5.  7 Marya Svetlana T. Camacho, “Race and Culture in Spanish and American Colonial Policies,” in Mixed Blessing: the Impact of the American Colonial Experience On Politics and Society in the Philippines, ed. Hazel M. McFerson (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 44.

Chapter One

14

organization and participation partly predicated on race. From the 1830s onward, even as Spain

underwent political upheavals and liberal challenges, the islands continued to be ruled by an

oppressive politico-military state and the reactionary friar orders. Unlike Puerto Rico and Cuba, its

inhabitants were denied representation within the Spanish government. By the late nineteenth

century, however, the Philippines’ isolation from liberal currents would be challenged by the

ilustrados (enlightened). This group, made up of members of the educated elite, embraced

liberalism, reform and greater involvement of natives in the governing of the Philippines. They

became the pioneers of what came to be known as “the Propaganda movement,” and would seek

Spanish and broader European recognition of Philippine sociocultural development in ways that

both undermined and confirmed Spanish colonial-racial hierarchies. Where Spaniards saw lazy,

primitive savages in need of military repression, Catholic evangelization, and coercive labor control,

they should instead recognize the Philippines’ people as “overseas Spaniards,” their “civilization

illustrated by their education, artistic achievement, eloquence in Spanish, and loyalty to Spain.8

However, this critique of Spanish imperial racism would also exclude certain Philippine peoples

from an “assimilated” Philippines. In other words, the ilustrados, in their quest for Spanish

recognition, controlled the boundaries of who would ultimately be recognized as “Filipino.”

History was the key to identity for the ilustrados who sought to establish a Filipino

nationhood. Amid Spanish colonial racism, they would define this collective pride by searching the

past for dignified roots. Nationalist Filipino revolutionary José Rizal, articulated “the ilustrado

nostalgia for lost origins” by constructing “a flourishing, pre-colonial civilization, the lost eden to

                                                                                                                         8 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 37.

Chapter One

15

reconstitute the unity of Philippine history.”9 Because the ilustrados believed that there were no court

chronicles, manuscripts, temples, or monuments that could illumine their past, Rizal relied on the

world of science to construct history and define an identity. The period’s dominant paradigm of

“positive science” gave rise to the belief that peoples of distinct races moved into territories in

discrete waves of migration. Each successive and progressively more advanced wave pushed the

earlier arrivals into the interior. In 1882 this migration-waves theory was advanced by the Austrian

anthropologist and close friend of Rizal, Ferdinand Blumentritt.

Rizal, with a political goal in mind, posed a question different from that of Blumentritt’s

concerning the classifying and ordering of the races that occupied the islands. From the ethnologist’s

implied question of “What races are found in the Philippines?” Rizal drew and transposed the

information to answer the question with which he grappled: “Who are we?” Like an adopted child

who grew up in another culture, but is now in quest of his own cultural roots – reared by mother

Spain but now in search of inang bayan, or “the motherland” – Rizal was in search of a narrative of

nationhood. Mediated by the modernist discourse of European science, he laid the epistemological

foundations of the Philippines history and identity. He sought for an idyllic past prior to Spanish

conquest. Selectively using science as memory, he portrayed “the ancient Filipinos” as possessing a

civilization of which one could be proud, in some aspects even superior to that of Europe. This

exalted past was his response to Spanish taunts and insults about the racial inferiority of indios,

Spanish colonial subjects.10

                                                                                                                         9 Filomeno Aguilar Jr., “Tracing Origins: ‘Ilustrado’ Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves,” The Journal of Asian Studies, August 2005, 606. 10 A seminal work on racial questions in the Philippines is Domingo Abella’s essay “From Indios to Filipinos.” Abella treats race as inseparable from the formation of national identity. He traces the development of racial groups under Spanish rule and illustrates racial attitudes and practices that helped shaped the “Filipino.”

Chapter One

16

But who were these ancestors? The ilustrados did not see the descendants of all peoples in the

archipelago as ancestors, nor did they consider all natives to be indios. The ancestors were not found

in the first migration wave comprising Negritos and were also not found in the second wave, which,

although composed of “Malays,” had taken to the mountains. The “ancient Filipinos” with whom

Rizal and other ilustrados deciphered a racial and cultural affinity with were found in the third

migratory wave of “Malays,” who settled in the lowlands. In conformity with the prevailing ideas of

the time, the plot underpinning the migration-waves theory was one of progress, with the last wave

as the bearer of civilization. The last-wave “Malays” were the ancient Filipinos with whom Rizal

identified.11 Colonial participation in this regard was the practical manifestation of ideas crystallized

in attitudes of historical experiences.

In effect, the history of the formation of Filipino national consciousness revolved around the

question of race and culture. To ilustrados, “Filipino” stood for the internally superior and dominant

“race” led by an “enlightened class,” whose members, although charged as inferior by racist outsiders,

were equal to Europeans as being civilized and civilizable, deserving liberty and, indeed, their own

independent nation. Ultimately, the preoccupation with civilization expressed the aspirations of

social class. The ilustrados attempted to carve out a collective Filipino identity, but it would not be

long until the Americans would intervene and attempt to shape Philippine identities in order to

understand them within their own colonial borders.

The Philippine Problem

Indeed, the Philippines that Americans encountered at the turn of the century had been wrought by

the forces of race and empire for centuries. The question that loomed throughout 1898 was whether                                                                                                                          11 Aguilar Jr., “Tracing Origins: ‘Ilustrado’ Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves,” 612.

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the United States would annex the Philippines. If not annexation, the U.S. could give the islands

back to Spain or let the Filipinos govern themselves. Both imperialist and anti-imperialist arguments

were expressed in the press, but a sense of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority played a central role on

both sides. As American encounters with the Pacific became increasingly commercialized and

industrialized, both economic and racial factors became entangled in the push for imperialism. The

late-nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the Progressive Era, which brought about the

consolidation of national unity, the concentration of domestic wealth, the quest for foreign market

overseas and the militant assertion of an overarching American racial identity.12 By 1898 Americans

wanted foreign lands not for the sake of the lands themselves, but for the path they laid toward a

grandly conceived and devoutly wished China market. To most expansionists the Philippine

archipelago was a stepping-stone to something more significant.13

In the Treaty of Paris of 1898, Spain relinquished Cuba and Puerto Rico to the United

States. Consideration about what to do with Philippines began soon after news of Dewey’s victory

arrived, but in those first days and weeks, few newspapers saw much reason to keep the islands. The

Springfield Republican warned that “what to do with the Philippines” was “not so simple a question

as may at first appear.” They could not go back to Spain because its rule over the islands had been

“even more cruel and oppressive than in Cuba.”14 The Republican was adamant on one point: “to

keep them for ourselves is utterly out of the question.” Acquisition, it said, would sink the U.S.

“head, neck and breeches into old world affairs, compel us to abandon our policy of comparative

isolation and confinement in the western hemisphere, and force the nation to become a great naval                                                                                                                          12 Mark S. Weiner, Americans Without Law: the Racial Boundaries of Citizenship (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 55. 13 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: the United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 7. 14 As quoted in Eric T.L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 160.

Chapter One

18

and military power in the Pacific and far east.” Moreover, the Republican declared, by taking the

Philippines the country would have to govern “a population the farthest degree removed from

American standards and ideal.” To secure the point, the newspaper provoked its readers with a

description of the population: “On some 400 islands of the group are from 7,000,000 to 10,000,000

people,” composed of “Negritos, an almost savage race, the remnant of the aboriginal population . . .

Malays, Chinese, and Chinese mestizos.” One “would only have to consider for a moment the

character of the inhabitants of the Philippines to see that permanent possession is not to be thought

of.” The Chicago Inter-Ocean agreed: “There is no part of the globe less suited to form a part of the

United States than these Philippine Islands.”15

Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Philippine Revolution, also struck racial chords in his

arguments against annexation in a statement originally published in the North American Review:

You have been greatly deceived in the personality of my countrymen. You went to the Philippines under the impression that their inhabitants were ignorant savages, whom Spain had kept in subjection at the bayonet’s point . . . We have been represented by your popular press as if we were Africans or Mohawk Indians. We smile, and deplore the want of ethnological knowledge on the part of our literary friends. We are none of these. We are simply Filipinos.16

The New York Times covered a meeting of the People’s Institute, a group that was overwhelmingly in

favor of giving the islands back. They argued that the “civilized” and “non-civilized” were incapable

of co-existing and the country’s only hope was to leave “the half-naked savage a chance to be a

man.”17

Anti-imperialist voices also questioned what would be the relationship between Americans

and the peoples of this potential colony. Was citizenship applicable? Could Filipinos be ever seen as

                                                                                                                         15 Ibid., 161. 16 North American Review, Aguinaldo’s Case Against the United States, September 1899, 425-32. 17 “The Philippines Problem,” New York Times, December 24, 1898.

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19

American? John Sharp Williams, a Mississippi Democrat in the House of Representatives, argued

that the islands would prove to be a great disappointment and would offer no home or opportunity

for American citizens. They were thickly populated with peoples of heterogeneous races that would

have to be granted citizenship under the Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment. He asked, “if

Mississippi had been able to deal with the race question, why could not the U.S. be able to do so in

the Philippines?” To Williams, direct control by Americans was essential in making that possible:

“There must be white supremacy.”18 If “white supremacy” was not guaranteed, there was no future

for the Americans in the Philippines.

Others emphasized the dangers of being distracted by the premise of glory and riches abroad.

Former U.S. Consul General of Egypt Simon Wolf claimed that the happiness of seventy million

free and cultured Americans mattered more than the well being of eight million “nude and ignorant”

savages. For Wolf, the country had their own “white savages to reform and educate.”19

Race also underlined the arguments of those who wanted to keep the islands. Under proper

rule, “the islands although consisting of several different races, would be tractable.”20 Instead of seen

as a problem, annexing the islands was part of the American duty, thus perpetuating the long held

colonial tradition of the Anglo-Saxon civilizing mission. In an interview with the Times, General

Wesley Merritt described the moral obligation resting upon the nation to protect the natives.

According to Merritt, Filipinos were willing and ready to accept annexation and dismissed

Aguinaldo and his rebels. He described the insurgent element as insignificant and could be easily

suppressed. It would be “unjust to turn them adrift, where they would be at the mercy of

                                                                                                                         18 “Philippines in the House,” New York Times, December 21, 1898. 19 “Philippines Not Desirable: Former Consul General, in an Address Before B'nai Jeshurun Congregation, Opposes Expansion,” New York Times, November 25, 1898. 20 “Gold in the Philippines,” New York Times, June 10, 1898.

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unscrupulous politicians.”21 The guiding hand of Uncle Sam would transform the islands from a

land of despotism, of corrupt Spanish government into an enlightened republic.

The Times reinforced this opinion when they asked Spanish friars if Filipinos were capable of

becoming civilized, in which they described natives as good, quiet people, but “the small number of

their leaders were the cause of the turmoil in the islands.”22 The Salt Lake Herald argued that the

attitude of the natives showed no objection to annexation by the United States. According to

conversations “with a considerable number of natives,” the Filipino people failed to disclose “the

existence of any perceptible anti-American feeling.”23 They lacked interest in governing themselves

and their principle desire was for a peaceful reality. The article ignored the well-established political

ideologies of Aguinaldo and the educated elite, as well as their pleas for establishing their own

republic.

Two-thirds of the population would gladly accept American rule and acknowledged, “any

form purely native government would constitute a reign of terror,” said the Honolulu Independent.

However, natives were careful not to oppose Aguinaldo who was backed by his army, claimed the

paper.24 The Scranton Tribune delved more deeply into the Aguinaldo problem arguing that there

were no “people” in the organized, political sense in the islands, and never had there been.

Aguinaldo’s government was not a political organism, but an individual enterprise that failed to

represent the inhabitants of the islands. Aguinaldo was an “imposter who had success in poisoning

the minds of the Filipinos who were full of joyous recognition of Americans as their liberators.”25

                                                                                                                         21 “Merritt For Expansion,” New York Times, December 18, 1898. 22 “Friars Talk of Filipinos,” New York Times, January 10, 1899. 23 “Attitude of Natives: No Objection Annexation By the United States,” The Salt Lake Herald, July 21, 1898. 24 “American Prestige Damaged,” The Honolulu Independent, January 24, 1899. 25 “Aguinaldo’s Individuality: Some Facts as to the Personal Life, Manners, and Traits of Filipino Leader,” The Scranton Tribune, October 13, 1900, 4.

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21

Conclusion

On May 19, 1898, President William McKinley issued an order – known today as the

“Declaration of Benevolent Assimilation” – that stated the mission of the United States was one of

benevolence “substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.”26 Intended primarily

for the U.S. Senate, this order was kept from the Filipinos who became aware of the declaration only

by accident. The declaration may be blamed as the one event that got the U.S. embroiled in a war

across the Pacific.27 The actions McKinley took, though, reflected a widespread public belief among

Americans backed up an energetic nationalism that the country was destined for empire. The

conflict between Filipino and American forces began on the evening of February 4, 1899; afterwards

as fighting intensified so did the racialization of the islands’ natives. During the ensuing war –

officially labeled as an “insurgency” instead of a “war” – the racial and cultural plurality of natives

would be lost within a narrative that constructed all Filipinos as “barbarous savages.” In the context

of war, tribal distinctions were erased, and the colonial-racial hierarchies formed by Spanish rulers

and the ilustrado elite were blurred. “Civilized” came to define the Anglo-Saxon and “wild” came to

describe the Filipino enemy.

                                                                                                                         26 Abe Ignacio, The Forbidden Book: the Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T-Boli Publishing, 2004), 16. 27 Ibid., 18.

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A Wilderness in Human Form: Reporting from the Philippine-American War

In 1901, two years into the Philippine-American War, a correspondent of Philadelphia’s

Public Ledger presented it as a “bloody engagement,” in which American soldiers had

been relentlessly killing insurgents, prisoners, women and children with the “idea

prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile, in

some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap.”1 He justified these

atrocious acts as derived from the intrinsic violence of the Filipinos themselves: “the only

thing they know is force, violence, brutality, and we give it to them.”2 The rules of

civilized warfare could be ignored when the enemy was not a civilized people. Thus,

civility became a contingent term and violence, under the sanction of American

imperialism, became manifest in various forms throughout the war. This chapter will

provide an account of the war and the brutal events that accompanied it as it was

circulated through the narrative of the press. It will explore how violence on the part of

Americans was presented to the public as hard but necessary acts of “benevolent

assimilation” and how dehumanized images of the Filipino “Other” were expressed in

military and press discourse. The racial understandings of the islands’ peoples ultimately

would be driven by and intertwined with the process of colonial war-making itself.

Before hostilities broke out between U.S. and Filipino soldiers, President William

McKinley ordered the army to win the confidence, respect and affection of the

inhabitants by its good conduct. “Forcible annexation,” according to McKinley in an

                                                                                                               1 “Philippine Impressions: Some Problems Which Confront Our Government,” The Indianapolis News, November 23, 1901. 2 Ibid.

Chapter Two

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address to Congress, would be “criminal aggression” by America’s code of morals.3 What

actually pursued the day fighting broke out on between U.S. and Filipino insurgents on

February 5, 1899, was a “Pandora’s box” of events. The outbreak of conflict surprised and

horrified domestic American observers, who believed U.S. army reports of Filipino

assault as its trigger.4 The Filipinos’ status as allies of the United States against Spain

quickly eroded when insurgent leaders made it clear that they intended to proclaim an

independent republic.

The insurgents in question were representatives of a newly independent state, the

Philippine Republic, declared by the revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo in June 1898.

Just a few months into the war, Aguinaldo waged a guerilla campaign in which the U.S.

Army found itself trying to fight a hostile population and guerilla fighters.5 Guerilla

warfare dragged on until the spring of 1902 and most Americans were shocked by the

resilience of what they originally assumed to be an outmatched enemy.6 “We meet these

people now not as pupils at school,” the New York Times observed, “but as armed rebels

in the field.” Nonetheless, the military’s task was, “with all needed firmness” and “force

proportioned to the degree of resistance,” to educate Filipinos, who must be “made to

understand that they must recognize our authority and obey.”7 By the time the war was

declared over in 1902, around twenty thousand Filipino combatants were killed in action

                                                                                                               3 As quoted in "Republic or Empire with Glimpses of Criminal Aggression” by Edwin Burritt Smith, 1900, Liberty Tracts, Vol. 9, Chicago: American Anti-Imperialist League. Box 1, Anti-Imperialist League papers, Swarthmore Peace Collection, Swarthmore College. 4 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 111. 5 Joel Shrock, The Gilded Age (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 23. 6 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: the United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 243. 7 As quoted in Kramer’s Blood of Government.

Chapter Two

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compared to just over four thousand Americans. The number of civilians killed has been

more difficult to determine ranging between 250,000 and 600,000. The popular tactics

adopted by zealous American commanders to counter the revolutionary struggle

contributed to the reasons for such a massive death toll.8 Under pressure from

Washington for a swift and total victory, U.S. soldiers were ordered to destroy homes,

food supplies and animals, torture captives and kill prisoners and civilians. The most

notorious form of torture used to obtain intelligence was the “water cure,” in which

victims had large volumes of water forced down their throats while interrogators knelt or

jumped on their distended abdomens.9 (See Figure 2) In some areas of continuing

resistance, U. S. officers ordered a war on rural society through the “reconcentration” of

village populations into crowded, disease-ridden camps.10

War censorship

Military commander in the Philippines Major General Elwell Otis understood

the effects of the growing sophistication of mass media on warfare, “in which impressions

back home would be as crucial as the reality of the battlefield, and in which a good public

relations officer is as important as a good field commander.”11 Accordingly, he imposed a

strict press censorship in the months leading up to the war that included control of the

                                                                                                               8 Phillip Ablett, “Colonialism in Denial: Us Propaganda in the Philippine-American War,” Social Alternatives 23, no. 3 (July 2004): 25. 9 Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 244. 10 On the investigation of atrocities, see Richard E. Welch, Jr., “American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1974): 233-53. 11 As quoted in Stuart Creighton Miller’s Benevolent Assimilation: the American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903.

Chapter Two

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one telegraph line out of Manila.12 President McKinley and Secretary of War Russell A.

Alger authorized the censor and left the matter to Otis’s discretion and judgment.13 At

first, censorship was seen as legitimate means of denying the enemy military intelligence

and correspondents unquestioningly followed the whims of the censor. There were,

however, a few “trouble makers” for Otis especially Robert M. Collins of the Associated

Press, who tried to wire “numerous baseless rumours [which] circulate here tending to

excite the outside world.” What Collins had wanted to report was that Aguinaldo was not

an isolated “looter,” but a popular and effective leader. As the situation on the battlefront

worsened, Collins claimed press reports “were sending rose-colored pictures of successful

war and inhabitants flocking to the American standard.”14

Otis asserted to the War Department that with the exception of Collins, all

correspondents were satisfied with present censors.15 However, it was not long until the

majority of reporters discovered the censor’s role in covering military blunders.

Exaggerated claims of military success were launched in press releases while

correspondents were well aware of military failures.16 They accused Otis of doctoring

casualty reports, overrating military accomplishments, and underestimating the Filipinos’

commitment to independence. When correspondents began bootlegging stories about

more accurate accounts of the war via the Hong Kong cable, Otis demanded that

Washington outlaw the use of the cable by correspondents in the Philippines, as it was                                                                                                                12 Susan Brewer, “Selling Empire: American Propaganda and War in the Philippines,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 11, no. 40 (October7, 2013): 1, accessed January 14, 2014. 13 Jeffery A. Smith, War and Press Freedom: the Problem of Prerogative Power (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1999), 123. 14 Ibid. 15 Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: the American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 83. 16 Ibid.

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the source of all the “detrimental reports alarming the country.”17 It became apparent to

American reporters back home that Otis could not have passed off all “his fiction”

without censorship and demanded for the truth. Eleven correspondents, encouraged by

editorial support back home, came together to sign a collective statement accusing the

commander of deliberately misrepresenting the reality in the Philippines. According to

their statement printed in major American newspapers, the public was only getting an

“ultra optimistic view that is not shared by the general officers in the field.” Some refused

to support the correspondents’ protest, but Public Opinion’s survey of newspapers revealed

heavy criticism of Otis’s use of censorship in order to cover his own failures.18

Otis worked desperately to repair his battered public image as the first year of

battle came to a close. He tried to win new allies among the correspondents to help

launch a new propaganda campaign aimed at highlighting Filipino atrocities. The

campaign included press releases describing the torture of American prisoners who were

buried up to their necks in anthills to be slowly devoured and the slaughter of natives who

refused to support Aguinaldo. Otis was also able to capitalize on the narratives of General

Joseph Wheeler, who spun daily stories for the press about “Aguinaldo’s Dusky Demons,”

who had “No Respect for the Usages of Civilization.” Wheeler went so far as to insist

that it was the Filipinos who had mutilated their own dead, murdered women and

children, and burned down villages solely to disrepute American soldiers.19

In order to counter Otis’s propaganda, Aguinaldo suggested that neutral parties –

foreign journalists or representatives of the International Red Cross – observe his military

                                                                                                               17 Ibid. 18 Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 84. 19 Ibid., 92-93.

Chapter Two

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operations. He managed to smuggle reporters through American lines who returned to

Manila to report that American captives were “treated more like guests than prisoners.”20

Aguinaldo had even released a few captives so they could tell their own stories. One

example was Paul Spillane who described his fair treatment as a prisoner to the Boston

Globe.

Overall, Otis failed in his propaganda effort and General Douglas MacArthur

took over as commanding general in January 1900, but continued Otis’s tight grip on war

correspondents. In a proclamation dated December 20, 1900, any person, including

journalists, residing in an occupied area and engaging in tactics that were “inimical to the

interest of the occupying army” would be reprimanded “at the discretion of the tribunal of

the occupying army.” Any article published in a “martial environment” that could be

“classed as seditious” by its intention to “injure the army of occupation” would subject its

authors to “such punitive action as may be determined by the undersigned.”21

From natives to negros

The “truth” that most correspondents were committed to reporting was a reflection of not

just correspondents’ experiences, but of military leaders and soldiers in the field whose

depictions of Filipinos informed those back home. These images, as part of the

production of new imperial-racial formations, would come to define the wartime enemy

and motivate the violence against natives and insurgents. One of the more notable

aspects of soldiers’ experience is the shift in their racial characterization of Filipinos.

                                                                                                               20 Ibid., 93. 21 Kramer, Blood of Government, 136.

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When the mission of U.S. troops changed from fighting the Spanish to fighting

Philippine nationalists, their notion of the Filipinos’ racial identity altered to meet the

demands of the new war.22 Their experiences demonstrate how quickly structures of racial

classification can be formulated and altered within the battlefield.

At first, American soldiers called insurgents “natives” or “Filipinos,” but these

words would later be replaced with terms like “negro” or “black rascals.”23 The other

common term assigned to the enemy by U.S. troops was “nigger.” It became so prolific

that soldiers used the term to signify not just insurgents but all Filipinos according to

journalist Frederick Palmer. Boston Herald correspondent Henry Loomis Nelson

reiterated this racial categorization by describing that Americans “look upon all Filipinos

as of one race and condition, and being dark men, they are therefore ‘niggers,’ and

entitled to all the contempt and harsh treatment administered by white overlords to the

most inferior races.”24

Correspondence observed in William B. Gatewood, Jr.’s “Smoked Yankees” and the

Struggle for Empire shows the extent to which white soldiers placed African Americans

and Filipinos in the same racial category. It also demonstrates that racial beliefs so

dictated American culture that black soldiers, like white soldiers, sought to understand

the Filipinos in reference to race within American society.25 A letter from a black soldier

in the Cleveland Gazette explained:

I feel sorry for these people and all that have come under the control of the                                                                                                                22 Sean McEnroe,“Painting the Philippines with an American Brush: Visions of Race and National Mission Among the Oregon Volunteers in the Philippine Wars of 1898 and 1899,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104, no. 1 (2003): 27. 23 As quoted in Kramer’s Blood of Government, 124. 24 Ibid., 128. 25McEnroe, “Painting the Philippines,” 54.

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United States. I don’t believe they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is the “Nigger” and the last thing at night is the “Nigger.” You have no idea the way these people are treated by the Americans here.26

Explicit comparisons between racial prejudice at home and in the war were common in

letters from black soldiers. A letter to the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate described the shared

characteristics of both environments:

. . . the Americans, as soon as they saw . . . native troops . . . began to apply home treatment for colored peoples: cursed them as damned niggers, steal [from] them and ravish them, rob them on the street of their small change, take from the fruit vendors . . . and kick the poor unfortunate if he complained. . . . They [white soldiers] talked with impunity of “niggers” to our soldiers, never once thinking that they were talking to home “niggers.”27

A few African-Americans defected to the Philippine army, but most continued to serve

the United States. After completing their military service, several hundred members of

the black regiments remained in the Philippines.

Despite their anger over the racism of white soldiers, black soldiers shared some

mutual assumptions with their white counterparts. Both sought to categorize and

characterize the people of the Philippines in reference to the racial taxonomy of the

United States. Another in the Cleveland Gazette shows one black soldier’s attempt to

understand Luzon’s different ethnic groups:

I should class the Filipinos with the Cubans. They are intelligent and industrious . . .There are here some of the best mulatto people I have ever seen in my life. A good deal of the business is done by the Filipinos but the major part is done by the Chinese. The United States has lots of trouble catching the wily Cheno. He is prone to steal and smuggle.28

References relating to the savage American “Indian” also had been adopted into

                                                                                                               26 As quoted in McEnroe’s “Painting the Philippines,” 55. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

Chapter Two

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colonial discourse to describe native Filipinos. As some historians have argued, this

transfer of racialized images of Native Americans corresponded to the colonization of the

Philippines as an extension of its westward expansion to the “Pacific frontier.”29 Edward

E. Kelly, a volunteer serviceman from Oregon, provided an explanation of why soldiers

associated Filipinos with American Indians in a special feature in the Chicago Sunday

Chronicle. His understanding of U.S.-Native American relations gave him a blueprint for

understanding the war in the Philippines, and his description of the enemy might just as

easily have been applied to Indian adversaries of previous decades. “The Tagalogs are

warlike,” he told reporters, “but they are also primitive and have had enough of us.” He

was confident that America was winning the war but cautious about the prospects for

stable peace. Kelly “is of the opinion,” the writer reported, “that the backbone of the

uprising has been broken, but . . . He looks for years of predatory warfare like those

which formerly raged on the borders of the United States with the Red men.”30 Kelly

understood the Philippines as a frontier territory of the United States and the inhabitants

as primitive Indians, resistant to the inevitability of American sovereignty and too

uncivilized to trust or enfranchise.

Both conflict with American Indians and African slavery and had shaped

Americans’ definitions of race since the early seventeenth century. Accordingly, the use of

terms like “nigger” and “savage” may imply the transfer of domestic U.S. racial formations

into the colonial vernacular, but Paul Kramer stresses that these exchanges about race

outlined an ongoing process of negotiation; they were not a mere exportation of

                                                                                                               29 Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 49. 30 As quoted in McEnroe’s “Painting the Philippines.”

Chapter Two

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American racial views. To illustrate, he has examined the ways in which “nigger” was

being adapted and retooled to characterize the Filipino.31 When Peter Lewis of New

York was sent in January 1902 to supervise a thousand Filipino women allowed out of a

detention camp to collect palay [rice], he compared what he saw to “the American

niggers picking cotton.” Lewis felt compelled to modify “nigger” with “American”

suggesting that, without it, he was afraid his family might mistakenly think he was

referring to Filipinos and not Americans.32 Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina Senator,

also felt the need to clarify the term in regard to the “race question” in the Southern

states: “the ‘nigger’ of the south and the ‘nigger’ of the Philippines are two very different

individuals, and obey the influences of radically different environments.”33 The term

underlined the racial intersections of African-Americans and Filipinos: it connected the

African-American fight against domestic racism to the Filipino struggle against U.S.

imperialism. At the same time, the expression was also becoming detached from its

traditional moorings and reframed within the colonial paradigm.

Colonial warfare encouraged the reframing of terms such as “nigger,” but it also

created an environment for the birth of a new term used in the imperial-racial discourse:

“gu-gu,” or “goo-goo.” The term derived from two plausible sources, one of which was

rooted in local dynamics. The Tagalog term for a slippery coconut oil shampoo,

pronounce gu-gu, may have been adopted by U.S. soldiers as a derisive term to allude to

the enemy’s elusiveness. The other possible origin suggests the term evolved from the

                                                                                                               31 Kramer, Blood of Government, 127. 32 Ibid., 128-129. 33 “The South and the Philippines,” Washington Evening Star, July 4, 1899.

Chapter Two

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convergence of immediate sexual tensions and racialized pop culture. According to

veteran Charles A. Freeman, among the songs sung by U.S. troops on the voyage from

San Francisco had been a minstrel tune with the chorus “Just because she made dem goo-

goo eyes.” When American soldiers first “gazed in to the dark orbs of a Filipinos dalaga

[young woman]” on arrival, they had commented to each other, “Gee, but that girl can

make goo-goo eyes.” Filipino men had taken the term as an insult; when American

soldiers learned this, “it stuck, and became a veritable taunt.”34 Whatever its specific

origins, “gu-gu” formed part of a distinctive Philippine-American colonial vernacular that

focused hostilities around a novel enemy and lent American troops a sense of an inclusive

manly camaraderie.35 The newness, immediacy, and localism of American soldiers’ racial

formation were suggested by the quotation marks and parenthetical explanations soldiers

commonly included near terms like “gu-gu” in their letters and diaries. These letters and

diaries provided images for their families and those back home, many of these letters were

reprinted in local newspapers. In a response to those who were opposed to the violence

and killing of Filipinos, the mother of a fallen soldier described that one “couldn’t find

another race that are as contemptible as the Goo-Goos.” She even compares them to the

Apache Indian who was a “smiling babe” compared to the Filipino “brutes.”36

Another common stereotype represented the Filipino as an ignorant and petulant

child in need of America’s stern but benign tutelage. This image of colonial paternalism

found its way into many cartoons and comics of the period and featured the dynamics of

                                                                                                               34 Kramer, Blood of Government, 127. 35 On martial masculinity during the Spanish-Cuban American War and Philippine-American War, see Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for Manhood. 36 “A Honolulu Woman Gets News from the Philippines,” Hawaiian Gazette, November 5, 1901.

Chapter Two

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visual power interplaying with each other. The childlike native contained the “seed of

condescension and arrogance from which popular justification for colonization would

grow.”37 The stereotype of the childlike Filipino paralleled long-standing images of

African-Americans as children who were seen as too incompetent and immature to

participate in government, and of Native Americans who were simply “wards of the

state.” By challenging the intellectual and emotional development of the “Other,” the

American press generally implied that foreigners of other races could some day become

as ”developed” as Europeans and Americans. Unlike the “savage,” “gu-gu,” or “nigger,”

the childlike native provided a more reassuring argument for imperialism. A

correspondent of the Public Ledger writing from Manila supported the “doubtless truth”

that Filipinos were treacherous, cruel and dishonest, but he attributed that to the legacy

of Spanish imperialism. He believed they were capable of enlightenment, education and

productivity, “but it will take twenty years of careful kindergartening as a wise, prudent,

just and kind ruling can find.”38

The constructions of the Filipinos as savages and children within the new

imperial-racial formation, while underlining Filipinos’ incapacity for self-government,

also emphasized imperialists’ desire to cast themselves and a nation as a great power. In

this sense, the formations of the Filipino subject were crucial to the larger project of

nation-building. American press discourse, as a privileged medium for producing the

“truth” about the “tropics,” operated to establish racial identities, naturalizing the power

                                                                                                               37 Espiritu, Home Bound, 51. 38 “Philippine Impressions: Some Problems Which Confront Our Government,” Indianapolis News, November 23, 1901.

Chapter Two

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and legitimacy of American colonial agents to appropriate, command and contain the

islands and its people.

Collapsing into violence

The use of physical violence had become a crucial way to contain and dominate the

Filipino enemy. Civility was a contingent term as colonial definitions of Filipino

“civilization” became central to justifying brutalities committed by American soldiers. A

growing number of U. S. soldiers and officers came to understand themselves as engaged

in a war not against an army or even an insurgency, but against a “savage” population.

The restraints on tactics and targets, which characterized “civilized” warfare no longer

applied in the Philippines. The American torture of Filipino prisoners that initially

appeared in newspaper accounts was often explained as a means of gathering intelligence.

It was not until the middle of 1902 that the U.S. press – particularly Democratic and

independent newspapers – became more emboldened to discuss the cruelties of war,

especially after editors had learned of General Franklin Bell’s “reconcentration” policy in

Batangas. The reconcentrado camps were aimed at isolating Filipino guerillas by rounding

up all the natives into detention camps. The overcrowded conditions of the camps and

lack of proper food and clothing resulted in the spread of infectious diseases; one

correspondent described the prisoners as “ . . . a miserable-looking lot of little brown rats

. . .utterly spiritless.”39 By the end of Bell’s campaign, at least a hundred thousand people

had died in Batangas. Some of this critical press attention was due to the energetic efforts

                                                                                                               39 Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Shalom, eds., “Conquest,” in The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Cambridge: South End Press, 1987), 18.

Chapter Two

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of anti-imperialists like Herbert Welsh who sent agents to interview returning soldiers

firsthand.40 As charges of abuse circulated freely back home, the War Department denied

the charges, or in cases where evidence was indisputable, they were countered with

examples of Filipino barbarity. According to Secretary of War Elihu Root,

the war on the part of the Filipinos has been conducted with the barbarous cruelty among uncivilized races . . . The Filipino troops have frequently fired upon our men from under protection of flags of truce, tortured to death American prisoners who have fallen into their hands, buried alive both Americans and friendly natives, and horribly mutilated the bodies of the American dead.41

On the American side, Root claimed that troops were acting with “scrupulous regard for

the rules of civilized warfare, with careful and genuine consideration for the prisoner and

the noncombatant, with self-restraint, and with humanity never surpassed, in any

conflict, worthy only of praise.”42 By underlining that the tactics adopted by the Filipinos

were indicative of “the barbarous cruelty common among uncivilized races,” Root

reminded American readers that the conflict of the Philippines matched civilized

Americans against uncivilized Filipinos.

Many considered the presumed civilization gap as adequate explanation for the

various excesses American troops committed; some even blamed the Filipinos for

Americans’ misconduct. In questioning Commissioner Taft on the issue of American

brutality, Senator Thomas Patterson put the matter bluntly: “When a war is conducted by

a superior race against those whom they consider inferior in the scale of civilization, is it

not the experience of the world that the superior race will almost involuntarily practice

                                                                                                               40 Kramer, Blood of Government, 145. 41 “Cruelty Charge Denied: Secretary of War Root Refutes Reports from the Philippines,” New York Times, February 20, 1902. 42 Ibid.

Chapter Two

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inhuman conduct?” Taft replied, “ There is much greater danger in such a case than in

dealing with whites. There is no doubt about that.”43

Between January and June of 1902 leading anti-imperialist Senator George Hoar

of Massachusetts spearheaded a Senate investigation to examine the conduct of war in

the islands. In both these Senate hearings and the press, the army’s defenders repeatedly

held that atrocities were rare; that when they occurred soldiers were swiftly and

thoroughly punished; and that testimony to the contrary was exaggerated, partisan,

cowardly and traitorous. But racialized arguments were crucial to defending the war’s

means. One of those arguments claimed that the Filipinos’ guerilla war, as a “savage” war,

was entirely outside the legal and moral standards and structures of “civilized” war. It was

argued that those who adopted guerilla warfare conceded all claims to bounded violence

and mercy from their opponent.44

The “degeneration” of American soldiers was another argument and claimed that

violence committed by white Americans was an expected by-product of civilization

meltdown. Anxieties of tropical heat, disease, exhaustion and contact between races were

common in the discourse of war and came to play a key role in rationalizing atrocities.45 It

was the human and physical environment that contributed to their moral breakdown, and

by placing Filipinos in the realm of nature and thus outside the industrialized world of

the United States, writers provided another way to compare the new “Other” to the

Native American. The Filipino was constructed as a barbaric savage through a

                                                                                                               43 H.W. Brands, Bound to Empire: the United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1992), 47. 44 Kramer, Blood of Government, 146. 45 Ibid., 149.

Chapter Two

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comparative stereotype that claimed racial inferiority predicated on the possibility of a

similar bloodline.46

Jacob Gould Schurman from the New York Independent wrote an article against

the imperial take over of the islands arguing for Americans to “look not the Filipinos as

Sioux or Apache Indians but as Christianized and civilized brown men.” However, he

also attempted to rationalize the violent acts Americans committed as a result of

“degeneration”:

You cannot have war without inhumanity, and the practice of inhumanity deadens feeling and brutalizes character. When it is a race war, particularly a war of Anglo-Saxons against a colored race, the white man’s moral deterioration is facilitated by contempt, by arrogance and by injustice. On the other side of the globe, irritated by a bad climate, confronted by great difficulties and exposed to great temptations without the home restraints that keep men steady, galled and exasperated by the machinations of an elusive foe, whose color and stature make it impossible for the Anglo-Saxon to treat with respect, some Americans at least have been guilty of conduct which evokes horror and detestation of mankind.

Schurman instilled that the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon degeneration and moral decay

as not limited to bloodlines, but embraced environment, climate and terrain. “The torrid

zone is a belt of semi-barbarism,” declared the Indianapolis Journal. “Its inhabitants resist

the civilization of the temperate zones instinctively, because they know they have not the

mental and moral fiber to uphold it . . . Climate and costless sustenance have made these

people what they are, and no great intellectual and industrial advance can be expected

until the conditions are changed.”47

                                                                                                               46 David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010), 66. 47 Christopher Vaughan, “The ‘Discovery’ of the Philippines by the U.S. Press, 1898–1902”, Historian 57, no. 2 (December 1995): 305-06.

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But the narrative of degeneration did not go unchallenged. It was parodied, for

example, in Poultney Bigelow’s poignant and ironic mid-1902 essay, “How to Convert a

White Man into a Savage.” In the piece Bigelow described a conversation he had with a

young soldier who recently returned from the islands. The soldier maintained the U.S.

military must make war upon a whole population and employ brutal tactics, if they don’t

they are “guilty of military insubordination.” Bigelow’s point was that that it was not a

Philippine environment that “converted” white men into savages but U.S. military tactics

in a brutal, unjust war.48 The Philippine environment and its “savage sites” produced a

type of behavior that Americans at home could never have comprehended. The media

had constructed the islands as a landscape where maladies inherent to the native

population could have infected innocent American soldiers. Savagery, in short, became

contagious and justified.

By 1902, General Smith had ordered the summary death, not of actual Filipino

combatants, but of “all persons . . . who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities

against the U.S.” When asked by a marine commander where the line should be drawn

between mere children and potential combatants, Smith replied, “ten years of age.” In

reporting Smith’s new orders for the conduct of the war, American newspapers in April

of that year blared the headline “Samar to Be Made ‘A Howling Wilderness.’” Echoing

generations of pioneers who had waged war against “savages” across North America, one

veteran of the Philippine war later explained, “The only good Filipino is a dead one. Take

no prisoners; lead is cheaper than rice.”49

                                                                                                               48 Kramer, Blood of Government, 150. 49 Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 244.

Chapter Two

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As the Filipinos resistance to American expansionism became more determined,

some publications responded with outright endorsements of violence. The Detroit News

had acknowledged the transformation of the Filipino from “patriots” to “ savages to be

treated after the manner of savages.” The editors of New York’s Evening Post approved of

the massacre of the arrow-shooting Igorot tribe and asserted that American “troops had

to cut them down like wild beasts."50 Frederick Funston, a decorated officer from his time

in the war with Cuba, had supposedly ordered the execution of Filipino prisoners.

Funston denied it, although in a manner indicating he considered the charge almost

frivolous. As he explained to an American reporter,

I am afraid that some people at home will lie awake nights worrying about the ethics of this war, thinking that our enemy is fighting for the right of self-government. The word independent, which these people roll over their tongues so glibly, is to them a word, and not much more. It means with them simply a license to raise hell . . . They are, as a rule, an illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency.51

For Funston, liberty was defined in racial terms and belonged to those recognized as a

civilized people. Filipinos must be taught obedience and be forced to observe, even if they

could not comprehend the practices of civilization. Press correspondents quickly

recognized that Funston provided good copy and followed him closely. His illustration of

the American objective “to rawhide these bullet-headed Asians until they yell for mercy”

echoed Smith’s violent call to make Samar a “howling wilderness.”

One of the more insightful contemporary analyses of the response of the

American soldier in the Philippines was that of newspaper correspondent H.L. Wells,

                                                                                                               50 Vaughan, “The ‘Discovery’ of the Philippines by the U.S. Press,” 310. 51 Brands, Bound to Empire, 58.

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who had no doubts about their savage contempt for the enemy:

There is no question that our men do ‘shoot niggers’ somewhat in the sporting spirit, but that is because war and their environments have rubbed off the thin veneer of civilization...Undoubtedly, they do not regard the shooting of Filipinos just as they would the shooting of white troops. This is partly because they are “only niggers,” and partly because they despise them for their treacherous servility . . .The soldiers feel they are fighting with savages, not with soldiers.”52

For newspaper readers, it became apparent that Filipinos did not belong to a civilized

community and, thus, were not protected by the political ideology or the military

conventions that applied to American citizens. A front-page headline in March

pronounced the Filipinos “Worse Than Indians.”53 Such stories confirmed the belief that

the war against the Filipinos should be carried out with a brutality previously reserved for

Indian uprisings. Editorials embraced the wholesale application of America’s past military

and political approach to Indians to its treatment of Filipinos.

Some anti-expansion publications, however, used racial difference to put

advocates of empire on the defensive. Newspaper reports of stunning Filipino victories

alternated with political claims that the war was over. Editors of the Leader, a Republican

paper in Cleveland, praised the “courage and natural prowess of the Filipinos” and

remarked “few natives of semi-civilized or savage countries would have stood their

ground so well.”54

                                                                                                               52 Richard E. Welch Jr., “American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 2 (May 1974): 241. 53 Vaughan, “The ‘Discovery’ of the Philippines by the U.S. Press,” 311. 54 Ibid.

Chapter Two

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Conclusion

On July 4, 1902, the Philippine-American War was declared officially over in a

proclamation issued by President Theodore Roosevelt, even though armed resistance

continued until 1913.55 An English journalist present at Manila in 1898 observed

sardonically “the Filipinos are insurgent, although they never have been subjected to the

Yankee domination which they are fighting and, therefore, are no more insurgents than

were the Spaniards.”56 The designation “insurrection” was transparently designed to

encourage the disputed U.S. claim to sovereignty and erase from history the Filipino

struggle for independence. By May 1902 the pro-imperialist editors were reaffirming

their views of justifying the war to a relatively prosperous, complacent and forgetful

public. As time went on they would soon forget this costly and unpleasant “insurrection,”

which was never declared a “war.”

With little knowledge about the islands, American audiences back home relied on

the accounts of military leaders and experiences of soldiers on the battlefront whose

racialized portrayals of the Filipino provided an ideological framework for annexation. It

placed the Filipino in the company of Native Americans and African-Americans whose

violent treatment was justified on account of their uncivilized nature. By their conduct in

the war, Filipinos had showed themselves to be wild and barbarous. The stereotypes

exploited by colonial discourse tended to associate the notions of degeneracy, savagery

and backwardness with skin color, one of the most obvious marks of colonial difference

that conditioned the conducts of war.

                                                                                                               55 Kramer, Blood of Government, 152. 56 Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 266.

Chapter Three

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From Savage to Subject: the Philippine Exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition

From April to December of 1904, approximately a thousand Filipinos from various tribes

were presented to the American public as living exhibits. Women weaving cloth sang

“barbaric chants” while others danced “their curious old thousand-year old dances to the

boom of tom-toms and the wail of reed instruments.” As one reporter described it, at the

Philippine Reservation, one “can get an interesting idea of the serious business and fun of

a Filipino community much better than you could get it by reading about it in a hundred

books.”1

These were the images of Filipino natives that the American public became

exposed to during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This chapter will examine the

various constructions of the “Filipino” at the Philippine Reservation through media

representations in newspapers in order to show how the first major physical encounter

between the mass American audience and the Filipino tribes was an elaborately crafted

spectacle tailored to promote the United States’ emergence as an imperial power.

The islands had been featured in domestic U.S. newspapers and public debate

most intensely during the war, when the racialization of Filipino warfare and justification

of American brutalities had led to military representations of the Philippine population as

wholly savage.2 At the declared end of the war, however, the U.S. government tried to

counter the savage image by instead establishing two distinct racial formations –

“civilized” and “wild”– in order to convince the American public that Filipinos were

                                                                                                               1 “A Million Dollar Show Given by Uncle Sam,” New York Sun, July 3, 1904. 2 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 262.

Chapter Three

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capable of assimilating.3 Indeed, the colonial context produced transient stereotypes. The

“wild savage” stereotype constructed during the Philippine-American War became

deconstructed into the ignorant “primitive” who could only be raised to civilization by

“enlightened” benevolent white men.

In 1903 General P. Sanger directed the first official census report of the

Philippines under American rule. The census served as a medium for Filipinos to be

represented as well as represent themselves as subjects of colonial order.4 Sanger reiterated

in the census the possibility to shape colonial natives in the American image, conceived as

a “homogeneous English-speaking race.”5 Through the process of tutelage, existing

“tribal distinctions” could be erased, but their differences had to be produced and

reassembled within the newly formed colonial context in order to transform the various

races into a single governable people. Their difference, however, initially had less to do

with their material culture than with their religious characteristics due to the uneven

impact of Spanish colonial rule. The “civilized” tribes were those who shared a common

Christian culture, while those who were “wild,” whether Muslim or animist, were clearly

outside of the Christian order.6

The census assumed that the “civilized” natives, who compromised the majority of

the island’s natives, owed their civility to the influences of Spanish rule. The “wild” or

“uncivilized” natives, whether “pagan” headhunters in the mountains, nomads in the

forests, or Muslim peoples in the southern islands, had steadfastly resisted Spanish                                                                                                                3 Ibid. 4 Vincent Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Philippines,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 188. 5 Ibid.,196 6 Ibid.

Chapter Three

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conquest and were thought to live in “stages between almost complete savagery and

dawning civilization.”7 The distinction between civilized and wild peoples was regarded

as relative and transitional. Uncivilized natives owed their ‘‘barbarous’’ state to the failure

of Spain to conquer them, a condition that could be remedied under the more rigorous

rule of the U.S. Indeed, colonial accounts regarded “wild men” as ideal colonial subjects

because they were free from the corrupting influence of Catholic Spain and lowland

mestizo elites, and would be more receptive to the “firm, straight-talking, tough love of

white men.”8

The following year, President Theodore Roosevelt would reaffirm these

distinctions and continue to promote McKinley’s policy of benevolent assimilation by

calling on the Philippine Commission to introduce Americans to the nation’s newest

colonial subjects at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a definitive event for the United

States as the world’s newest colonial power. An estimated 19 million people – one out of

every four Americans – would attend the fair, which provided a medium for imperial

desires to display technological and racial progress at the turn of the century.9 The print

media reported that the 1904 World’s Fair would have long-lasting effects on visitors.

Colorado College President William F. Slocum proclaimed that it would open visitors to

“new standards, new means of comparison, new insights into the condition of life in the

world” and help them “discover a new sense of purpose in America’s rapidly changing

society.”10 International expositions, which had become important and popular

                                                                                                               7 Rafael, “White Love,” 196. 8 Ibid. 9 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 2. 10 Ibid.

Chapter Three

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institutions for Western cultures since 1851, offered fairgoers an opportunity to ease

anxieties and reaffirm their collective national identity within a context of progress and

racial supremacy.11

According to exposition publicists, the fair would benefit natives through

Americanization. The Filipinos’ extensive stay in St. Louis would put them in such close

contact with Americans that they would appreciate and emulate American customs. At

the same time, the American public would become familiar with the Philippines’ “various

and incongruous” tribal populations who differed in race, language, and religion.12

Secretary of War William Howard Taft gave his full support in the participation of the

Filipinos at the fair because it would have “a very great influence in completing

pacification” and help Filipinos “improve their condition.”13 What resulted was the

Philippine Reservation, the most costly and widely visited exhibit at the exposition,

designed to showcase the evolutionary array of indigenous groups advancing toward

twentieth-century American civilization. It attempted to promote the success of the

government as a benevolent guardian of native peoples in its care.

Unlike the fair’s forty-three other foreign exhibits, the Philippine Exhibition was

an operation of the U.S. government.14 While the exhibit intended to educate the

American public about the islands’ diverse native peoples, its more hidden agenda was to

serve as a propaganda tool to convince the American people of the nation’s positive role                                                                                                                11 Christopher Vaughan, “Ogling Igorots: The Politics and Commerce of Exhibiting Cultural Otherness,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York City: New York University Press, 1996), 227. 12 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 165. 13 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 168. 14 Sharra Vostral, “Imperialism on Display: The Philippine Exhibition at the 1904 World's Fair,” Gateway Heritage: The Magazine Of The Missouri Historical Society 13, no. 4 (Spring 1993), 7.

Chapter Three

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as a colonial power. In its portrayals of Filipinos in newly established reform and

educational programs, the Philippine Commission hoped to convince the public that the

Philippine insurrections against American rule had ended and that the U.S. government

had the benevolent intention of civilizing its “little brown brothers.”15

Through analyzing news coverage of the exhibit, this chapter will look at how the

discipline of anthropology was used at the exhibit to validate the Philippines’ need for

American rule. Secondly, this chapter will explore how fair organizers attempted to

showcase assimilation in process. The reportage offered, through their treatment of

foreign peoples, indirect commentary on the theme of American “progress.” The Filipino

“Other” was rendered in a narrative of blended exoticism and savagery that implicitly

posed the hierarchic or evolutionary scale. Coverage of the fair, disseminated “not only

the substance of evolutionary thinking but its moral: movement along the revolutionary

path was not merely onward, it was most decidedly – and portentously – upward.”16

Imperialism meets anthropology

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition featured the most extensive Anthropological

Department of any world’s fair. Fair organizers selected American geologist,

anthropologist and ethnologist W. J. McGee to be in charge of the department. The

exhibits became an exemplum of his theory of racial progress: McGee’s goal was to

“represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from

savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism,” a theory that paralleled

                                                                                                               15 Ibid., 1. 16 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: the United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 143.

Chapter Three

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imperialists’ arguments of benevolent assimilation.17 Colonial subjects lent authenticity to

the displays of the Reservation.18 Their presence implied that they were playing a

cooperative role in America’s so-called civilizing mission, with its fundamental notions of

cultural hierarchy. For the general public imbued with ideas of social Darwinism, the

visual appearance of exotic peoples was the most obvious way of placing them on a scale

between wild and civilized.19

At the Philippine Reservation, this spectrum of human progress began with the

“savage” Negrito tribe and ended with the “enlightened” Visayan people. ( See Figure 3)

McGee intended to display his understanding of racial hierarchies “so that both white

American visitors and Native participants would understand and accept it as truth.” In

particular the ethnographic villages served as an anthropologically calibrated yardstick for

measuring the world’s progress and projected racial notions and justifications of the

emerging American overseas empire.20 Human progress was a major theme in exposition

rhetoric and interpretive displays celebrated the assumed racial and cultural superiority of

Anglo-Saxon nations. Working at expositions gave anthropologists a public forum in

which to assert their claims to be experts on, and interpreters of, the physical, linguistic,

and cultural similarities and differences of exotic peoples seen in relation to white

Americans. Anthropologists, working closely with colonial administrators, arranged and

interpreted official exhibits, the most public venue for them to claim anthropology as a

distinctive profession with a unique body of knowledge, methods and subject matter.                                                                                                                17 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 162. 18 Ibid. 19 David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 214. 20 Danika Medak-Saltzman, “Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking Global Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition,” American Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2010): 608.

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Turn-of-the-century anthropological science not only responded to, but also

intensified the signification of racial categories.21 Albert Jenks, a biologist turned

ethnologist, conducted ethnological research in the Philippines from 1900 to 1903 and

classified native peoples for the Philippines’ first census that divided tribes into separate

“civilized” and “wild” groups. Jenks included the Igorots, Moros, Bagobos and Negritos

as part of this latter group. He stressed, however, that they represented only about one-

seventh of the entire population of the islands.22

Jenks used this same reductionist construction to organize tribes at the fair.

Within the Reservation, the individual villages were arranged in an evolutionary sequence

designed by anthropologists. The order began with the “lowly and anthropoid-like”

Negritos from the forests of Luzon, and then to the more highly developed but still

“primitive” headhunting and spirit-worshiping Igorot tribes. Next were the “more

intelligent” Bagobo and Lanao Moros, “fierce Mohammedan fighters who have caused so

much trouble in the Mindanao country.” They were separated from the politically neutral

Samal Moro, “unexcelled pirates and slave traders, treacherous and unreliable to the last

degree,” and then the beautiful, cultured and civilized Visayan, the “highest type” of tribal

peoples who dressed like Europeans.23 The diverse assemblage of Negrito, Igorot,

Visayan and Moro tribes, who represented heathens, Christians and Muslims,

demonstrated the need for a common culture and American education to erase tribal

hostilities and transform them into a harmonious and vigorous nation.

                                                                                                               21 Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 54. 22 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 172. 23 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 170.

Chapter Three

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The exposition provided anthropologists with a venue in which to popularize their

concepts. They created a context through which the “civilized” world could interact with,

understand and interpret the “non-civilized” world. The contrast was planned not only to

exhibit how far America had progressed in industry and culture, but more importantly, to

demonstrate the need to rescue America’s newly acquired subjects from the darkness of

savagery. As a result, the Department of Anthropology emerged as a cornerstone for the

most elaborate world’s fair to date.

An exposition within an exposition

Visitors entered the Philippine Reservation by crossing a reconstruction of the Bridge of

Spain. The bridge led them into the Walled City, a replica of the fortification around

Manila, where they could witness the recent military triumphs by the United States.

Beyond the Walled City were three cultural spheres depicting the civilizing influence of

the Spanish past, the current ethnological state of the islands, and the beneficent results

that Filipinos and Americans alike could expect from America’s annexation of the

islands.24 At the center of the reservation was a “typical” Manila plaza, surrounded by

four large Spanish-style buildings that reminded visitors of the Spanish legacy on the

islands. The capital of the islands, Manila, was the most modern of Philippine cities, and

as such represented the “civilized” portion of the country.

Surrounding the Walled City was the display of tribal villages that strengthened

the idea of America as the bearer of civilization. Living in villages and huts constructed in

traditional style, wearing indigenous clothing, and holding customary ceremonies, the                                                                                                                24 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 170.

Chapter Three

  50

exhibited tribes were to appear just as if they were in their native homeland. I will focus

on the three main tribes that were featured most prominently in news articles: the

Negritos, Igorots and Visayans.

The Negritos

The Negrito village was placed on the Reservation’s eastern edge and housed about thirty

individuals described as the Philippines’ real aboriginal inhabitants.25 They were distinct

in their “superstitious pagan beliefs,” language, tribal customs and physical

characteristics.26 Reporters emphasized their bushy hair, short stature and very dark skin.

The press also mentioned their shyness and eating habits, which were considered

indications of a relative lack of intelligence, while their impressive tree-climbing abilities

associated them with primates. Throughout most articles, their physical appearance was

described in terms such as “gorilla-like” and “curiously inhuman.”27 In an article about

anthropological research conducted at the fair, Negritos were determined inferior to the

many types of peoples represented in St. Louis: “In fact, they are the lowest in the human

scale.”28

Some reporters argued, however, that they were the native group most ready to

adapt to civilized ways by highlighting their extreme cleverness and skillfulness: “You

may see a dwarfish Negrito woman, sitting in the doorway of her bamboo hut sewing

with an American needle, a pair of American scissors at her side.” They were

                                                                                                               25 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 188. 26 “Teaching Day School,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), September 3, 1904. 27 “Philippine Exposition,” Monroe Democrat, August 25, 1904. 28 “Scientists Complete Work of Investigating the Relations, Origin and Racial Characteristics of Primitive Tribes at World’s Fair,” St. Louis Republic, December 4, 1904.

Chapter Three

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entrepreneurial. “They wander about the village shooting sparrows or practicing at marks.

[One] little fellow [age 7] . . . can knock a nickel unerringly at twenty-five paces.

Without a smile he picks up the coin that he has won by his prowess, and awaits the next

chance.”29 The Negrito represented the “before” of the “before and after” vignette that the

fair attempted to portray. However, most news reports asserted, “all efforts to civilize

them have apparently failed.”30 The Negrito tribe, in these different ways, was presented

as a problem of imperial ‘‘assimilation” and proved to be difficult to establish within the

new colonial order. Their presence also touched on American anxieties of the foreigner.

Increasing contact with diverse peoples, including immigrants, threatened the American

way of life. In popular views, immigrant workers “shared a niche” with the overseas

“natives” and “savages.”31 The foreigner – illustrated and reiterated by the Negrito – was

cast as an inferior whose customs were relics of an earlier age, inexplicably evading the

natural laws of progress.

The Igorots

The Igorots were mountain peoples from northern Luzon32 and three distinct Igorot

tribes were represented at the fair: sixty-nine Bontocs, thirty-five Suyocs and eighteen

Tinguianes.33 It would be a central goal of the exhibit to broadcast Jenks’ sense of the

Igorots’ manly, warlike spirit and assimilability, over and above their “savagery.”

However, of all the misrepresented images of the Philippine exhibit displayed for

                                                                                                               29 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 188. 30 “Philippine Exposition,” Monroe Democrat (Monroe City), August 25, 1904. 31 Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 96. 32 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 178. 33 Mark Bennitt, History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (New York: Ayer, 1976), 464.

Chapter Three

  52

American consumption, none proved to be more popular or more difficult to control than

that of the Bontoc Igorots.

Throughout the articles I surveyed, reporters could not describe the Igorot

without attaching the terms “head-hunting” or “dog-eating.” They were also “barbarous”

and “probably no tribe in the Archipelago can produce such splendid specimens

physically.”34 “Savage” became a synonym for the Igorot:

The savage of Luzon does not know why he on earth, or does not care particularly where his soul goes after he leaves it . . . The greatest achievement of a Luzon savage is to decapitate an enemy, and until he meets a foes in mortal combat he is not all that he should be in the eyes of the unwritten laws and the ancient customs of the savage Luzon. The savage who returns to his village, carrying in his belt the head of an enemy felled in battle, is hailed as a conquering hero, and is feted and lionized much as the conquering hero of war in a civilized community.35

The display of the Igorot tribe provided an example of the Philippine Commission’s

greatest challenge, namely how to alter the Filipinos’ customs to suit American ideals.

Alfred Newell reported that “the Igorot wears no clothes,” which was possibly the single

most common assertion used to describe them.36 It referred to the fact that the Bontoc

men undressed to honor special visitors in official receiving lines, the exact opposite of

middle-class American principles.37

There were numerous newspaper accounts of their hourly dance performances and

physical appearance, but few about their other cultural accomplishments. The danger of

fairgoers perceiving the natives as utterly backward and incapable of progress threatened

the goal of portraying natives’ ability to assimilate. The Philippine Exposition Board

                                                                                                               34 Philippine Exposition,” Monroe Democrat (Monroe City), August 18, 1904. 35 Stephen O’Grady, “Filipino Exhibits at the Fair,” St. Louis Republic Sunday Magazine, May 1, 1904, 6. 36 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 177. 37 Ibid.

Chapter Three

  53

attempted to solve this threat by “driving an ethnological wedge between the Igorots and

Neritos.”38 The Igorots can be saved, while the Negritos will soon become extinct. An

article in the Monroe Democrat upheld this theory: “Scientists have declared that with

proper training, they are susceptible to a high state of development and unlike the

American Indian, will accept rather than defy the advance of civilization.”39

Nothing, however, was more sensationalized by the press than the dog-eating

ceremonies performed by the Bontocs. The Igorot dog feast was not intended to be

performed several times a week, but was a one-time event to celebrate their safe arrival

and to dedicate their shrine. Before the Igorots arrived, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

printed an article describing their traditional dog feasts, including a discussion of their

inhumane clubbing of dogs.40 One headline read, “Dog Gone — Happy Are Igorrotes.

Old Time Feasts in Luzon Repeated, with Canine Steak as Piece de Resistance. Biggest

Crowds for a Year.”41 The Igorot village became completely identified with the spectacle

of dog slaughter, producing a durable and damaging stereotype that survives to this day.

Instead of portraying a people ripe for reform, these images proliferated the barbarism of

these island people, which undermined the carefully constructed narrative of assimilation.

The Visayans

While the images of the Negritos and Igorots proved problematic, the depictions of the

Visayan tribe supported a view of Filipinos as a cooperative and pacified people atop the

                                                                                                               38 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 71. 39 “Philippine Exposition,” Monroe Democrat, August 11, 1904. 40 Vostral, “Imperialism on Display,” 5. 41 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 177.

Chapter Three

  54

racial hierarchy. The Visayans numbered ninety-eight individuals selected to represent

Christian natives. “Visayan” was actually an ethno-linguistic term used to refer to any

Roman Catholics. Those in St. Louis were probably Cebuano cultivators and fisherman

from the densely populated mountains in the Bisaya Island group. They were

characterized as serene, even-tempered, industrious, and polite people who wore modest,

white cotton clothing.42

While “savage” became a synonym for the Negritos and Igorots, reporters used

language that related the Visayans as part of a higher culture. A “tall and handsome” race,

they were described as skilled in weaving, dying, basket making, hat making,

woodcarving and other handicrafts.43 The Visayan woman was compared to white

American standards of domesticity: “The average Christian woman of the Philippines is a

good cook, an expert in the needle, and a person of high morals.”44

Reporters consistently underlined Visayans’ Christianity. One article

acknowledged the unparalleled popularity of the Igorot village, but claimed that the

Visayans were “best representative of the Filipino,” defining the true “Filipino” as the

Spanish-influenced Christian.

Assimilation in progress

While the need for American intervention was illustrated through the representations of

various tribes, exhibit planners also wanted to highlight the result of American rule. The

model school and Filipino Constabulary and Scouts were crucial to this goal.

                                                                                                               42 Ibid., 191. 43 “Philippines at World’s Fair,” New Ulm Review, September 7, 1904. 44 O’Grady, “Filipino Exhibits at the Fair,” 6.

Chapter Three

  55

The Philippine Model School

Press coverage of the model school reinforced imperialist ideologies: “the U.S. was not

oppressing but “tutoring” Filipinos, imparting American ways and moving them forward

in evolutionary time.”45 The Philippine Model School drew over 2,000 observers in a

single day. Visitors watched as children from the various tribes received an American

education in a nipa and bamboo structure.46

While the tribal villages propagated the distinctions of the Filipinos tribes, the

model school brought them together, and illustrated the way tribal antagonisms and

backwardness could be erased under American rule:

The Moro child seemingly forgets the teaching of his religion . . . The proudly courageous Igorrote puts aside his disdain for the more civilized Filipino, the Visayan; and the timorous dwarf Negrito of the jungles who seeks safety at home behind the protection of his poisoned arrow, forgets to look with fearful eyes upon his fellow inhabitants of the Philippines.47

These images transformed natives into proper colonial subjects. Indeed, their most savage

features are reinforced, but within a context that attempts to highlight their readiness for

colonial rule. A St. Louis Republic article described Igorots as next to the lowest type of

Filipinos, but “that does not argue that they are stupid.”48 In articles discussing the

education of Filipinos at the model school, “which has created the greatest enthusiasm

among the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands now at the fair,” reporters accentuated

the “wonderful progress and advancement on the part of eager students.” The Igorot

                                                                                                               45 Kramer, Blood of Government, 260. 46 Ibid. 47 “Teaching Day School,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), September 03, 1904, 8. 48 “Forty Filipino Tribes at the World’s Fair,” St. Louis Republic, August 28, 1904, 5.

Chapter Three

  56

within the classroom countered all the other images of the Igorot, yet still distinguished

his savagery:

The savage does not tire of school, as does the American boy. School is the talk of the native villages. The Igorote throws aside the tom-tom of his exuberant dance and comes just as he is – with a single loin clothe and a ridiculous basket-woven cap used for a pocket on his head.

Through these accounts, this “happy, guileless race [was] capable of rapid development”

when Uncle Sam lent a helping hand.49 Igorots’ were featured as capable of cultural uplift,

but only through the tutelage of colonial rulers. At the same time, the Igorots’ savage

features remain prominent, underpinning the imperialists’ argument for the need of

American benevolence.

The model school became a symbol for the positive results of colonial rule.

Reporters extolled the results of imparting an American education on the Filipinos: the

“successful educational institution . . . resulted in wonderful progress and advancement on

the part of eager students; the latter are deeply appreciating, as they have no other

undertaking by United States government in their behalf.”50 These descriptions created

an image of a Filipino willing to accept the American way and its the sincere intentions

of uplift through colonial rule. Several articles I surveyed featured the twelve-year-old

Antaero, the only Igorot who spoke English on the reservation. In an article in the

Dessert Evening News, Antaero is juxtaposed against his two environments, the model

school and the tribal village. In the village, Antaero “joined in the spirit-dance with the

vehemence of the oldest head hunter, and chants the raucous refrain of his tribe with

                                                                                                               49 “Teaching Day School,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), September 3, 1904. 50 Ibid.

Chapter Three

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apparent relish.”51 However, within the schoolhouse, “he is quiet tractable and

courteous.”52 In another article, when Antaero is asked if he wants to go back to school in

the islands, he answered “yes.” When asked what he wants to do as a man, the reporter

described Antaero’s hesitation while the “people of his tribe were beating their brass

instruments as they whirled about in their wild dance.”53 The experiences of the young,

malleable Antaero reinforced the possibility of propelling the Filipino forward, leaving

their backwardness behind. However, the representation of Antaero also highlighted the

tensions between American ideals and Filipino traditions.

The Scouts and Constabulary

The presence of the Scouts and Constabulary continued the underlying message of

progress. However, reporters’ accounts proliferated representations of racial inferiority

that refuted the narrative of progress. The Philippine Scouts and Constabulary were

collaborationist police forces enlisted by the American military to aid in suppressing the

ongoing insurrections in the islands against the United States.54 A battalion of 431

Philippine Scouts and a battalion of 300 Philippine Constabulary were present at the

fair.55 The ethnically organized Scouts who were brought to St. Louis were made up of

four companies from the Macabebe, Ilocano, Visayan and Tagalog tribes.56

                                                                                                               51 “An English Speaking Igorot,” Deseret Evening News (Great Salt Lake City, UT), September 10, 1904, 18. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 171. 55 Bennitt, History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 464. 56 Kramer, Blood of Government, 246.

Chapter Three

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While the problematic representations of the Igorot undermined the goal of

showcasing the potential of assimilation, the display of the Scout and Constabulary

would embody the process of assimilation itself. The Scouts’ placement next to the

Igorots and Negritos showed the significant changes possible under colonial rule. One

article highlighted this division:

A long stockade . . . divides the village of the Igorots from the Model Camp of the Scouts; one side of the fence, the savage Head hunter in the copper beauty of his magnificent physique, circles around and about to the beating of his tom-tom; outside the stockade, the blue-clad Scout Soldiers of the U.S. Army and the khaki dressed men of the Constabulary, as they perform their rifle drill to open the eyes of visitors to a realization of what the U.S. has done for the Philippines.57

In this sense, the racial hierarchy established by anthropologists became secondary to

imperialists’ concern for the display of rapid progress, a progression that began with the

“savage head hunter” and ultimately ended with the disciplined Scout soldier. The Scouts

were described as “models of politeness, and accept readily the cordial advances of

Americans.”58 Reporters praised the troops’ accomplishments and wrote about the similar

reactions of fair-goers. One woman expressed that she “didn’t know they could be taught

so much.”59 After witnessing the Scouts march during a dress parade, one sightseer said

that “[the Scouts] didn’t go through with it a bit better than these niggers.”60 Such

responses were often based on racial surprise and skepticism. Despites these

advancements made by the Filipinos under colonial rule, the American public, like the

soldiers in the Philippine-American War, accepted these advancements on their own

racial terms.

                                                                                                               57 “Philippine Exposition,” Monroe Democrat, August 25, 1904. 58 “Filipino Scouts on Tour of Inspection,” St. Louis Republic, May 2, 1904, 8. 59 Viskniski, Guy, “Filipino Conquest of America,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 17, 1904. 60 Ibid.

Chapter Three

  59

Conclusion

The images of the various Filipinos sustained ideas of racial inferiority in newspaper

articles covering the Philippine Exhibit and exemplified some of the many conflicting

ways Americans deployed discourses of civilization to construct race. The Philippine

Reservation ultimately constituted an ambivalent project. On the one hand, American

colonial officials hoped to present Filipinos as colonized subjects with a bright future.

They emphasized the developmental character of their own regime - colonial rule as a

distinct form of development aid. It required, however, that the American public was

convinced that Filipinos would actually live up to their civilizational expectations. In St.

Louis and in press coverage of the fair, however, sensationalism, voyeurism, and racism

took the driver's seat. In the end, exposition produced mixed results and projected

ambivalent images. While it turned out to be a highly popular exposition, members of the

indigenous, co-opted Filipino elite repeatedly complained of their colonial classification

as savages. Voyeuristic reporting about the exposition had projected and re-enforced

stereotypes which both contradicted and undermined the colonial strategy of “benevolent

assimilation.” Ultimately, they provided their audiences with notions, ideas and

prejudices that readers might have deployed as part of their understanding of race,

imperialism and their own national identity in the world.

Conclusion

60

To conclude this study I would like to affirm that the American colonial experience in

the Philippines was one full of contradictions – colonial officials sought simultaneously to

control Filipinos and to engage and uplift them. Crucial to these dueling efforts were

how officials controlled representations of native subjects, and underpinning their

depictions was an emerging racial-imperial framework. American press observers

followed these images closely under a “transitory gaze.” In this thesis, I have examined

three distinct contexts in which the Filipino evolved under the colonial eye. The first

chapter introduces the crucial role of racial formation during the Spanish colonial period

in setting the terrain for U.S.-Philippine race relations, illustrating how the archipelago

was not a blank slate on which Americans imposed their vision of racial hierarchy.

Instead, Filipino nationalists established ideologies of race and nation that U.S.

policymakers needed to accommodate. The challenges of confronting and governing a

diverse archipelago further transformed U.S. race thinking. This diversity proved

problematic in shaping definitive images of the Filipino subject to the American public.

However, the context of the Philippine-American War proved more significant in

creating colonial images that were attuned with the expansionist agenda. Military

authorities and soldiers on the battlefield became the image-makers for those back home.

Their experiences in a violent “race war” disseminated familiar terms – such as “Indian”

and “negro” – that operated in new ways under colonial discourse. It also created new

terms such as “goo-goo” and insurgents’ “uncivilized” war tactics deemed them as savages.

Still, all of these images came together to define a novel enemy. The third and final

context, the St. Louis Purchase Exposition, arrived a year after the declared end of the

Philippine-American War. The exposition contained with it the allegory of benevolent

Conclusion

61

assimilation that effaced the violence of conquest by constructing colonial rule as the

most precious gift that “the most civilized people” can render to those still caught in a

state of barbarous order. The “savage enemy” became pacified “wards of state” capable of

assimilation. American attempts at knowing, possessing, and restructuring the

Philippines were also expressed via the racial classification schemes of the emerging field

of anthropology. At the exposition, colonial authorities relied on the on the theories of

anthropologists to support and rationalize their imperialist acts. Yet ethnographically-

based representations appealed to both imperialists and anti-imperialists. While one

reader might have looked at the Filipino as “prospective citizens . . . of the great

republic,” others recognized the Filipino mind-set and bloodline as a cultural deformity

unsalvageable by benevolent assimilation.1 In the end, narratives about the islands and its

peoples from all three colonial mediums fed both sides of the annexation debates.

I have explored all of these contexts in order to elucidate the wide-ranging

relationships between race, empire and print culture, specifically through the medium of

the daily newspaper. The ways these contexts were presented and consumed by the public

through narratives of the newspaper brings to light how Americans engaged with

colonialism and viewed its colonial subjects. Newspapers, through which racial

formations emerged, functioned as sites of mass consumption and commercial capitalism.

A prevalent theme in press reports sought to define the roles of Filipinos and their new

colonial masters through a metaphorical power relationship. In portraying the new

“Other,” newspapers presented a narrow spectrum of images that excluded news of actual

1 “Savage Igorrotes at World’s Fair Wear No Cloths and Dine On Dogs,” Tacoma Times, May 3, 1904.

Conclusion

62

Filipinos, their opinions about the United States, and their own leaders. Reportage

reflected representations that ultimately operated to deprive Filipinos agency as legitimate

actors in the colonial sphere.

Although I have focused my study solely on the textual narratives found in U.S.

newspapers between1898 to 1904, there are still other forms of textual mediums to be

examined more thoroughly, specifically newsmagazines, which by the 1890s were

becoming more accessible to the American middle-class and, like the newspaper, were

“growing as vehicles of popular culture that cemented the ideas and values of the nation's

political, financial, and intellectual elite to the middle and working classes.”2 Overall,

these bodies of text were crucial to formations of colonial identities that were perceived

by an American audience that was mediating its own identity at a time when growing

contact with foreign “Others” heightened racial anxieties.

These popular newspapers created a catalog of America’s new Oriental possession

by inventing what Edward Said describes, through the words of André Malraux, as a

“museum without walls, where everything gathered from huge distances and varieties of

Oriental culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured

from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by [reporters,] explorers,

expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical,

departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense.”3 This ambiguous “museum” helped

familiarize Americans with both the complicated machinations of empire and the striking

2 Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 73. 3 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 166.

Conclusion

63

differences that pervaded the archipelago. The daily newspaper reinvented and

disseminated information, documenting what became a type of open-ended display

where knowledge about cultural customs could be deployed to sell newsprint through

competing ideological tenets about American overseas power. This construction of

knowledge through written text became the vehicle that helped Americans grapple with

the idea of colonizing the Philippines in the wake of 1898.

Index of Images: Chapter I

  64

Figure 1:

A map of the Philippine Islands from 1890 showing the geographical distribution of different ethnic groups.

Map by Ferdinand Blumentritt reproduced in Filipiniana Reprint Series (1985)

edited by Renato Constantino.

Index of Images: Chapter II

  65

Figure 2:

Cartoon on the cover of Life magazine’s May 22, 1902 issue shows colonial European powers chortling, “Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more” as they watch Americans apply the water cure to a Filipino captive. Torture by water cure was widespread during the Philippines-American War.

Cover of Life magazine courtesy of www.executedtoday.com.

Index of Images: Chapter III

  66

Figure 3:

A brochure of the Philippine Exposition at the 1904 St. Louis Purchase Exposition. The left side of the image depicts an “assimilated” Filipino Scout and the right side shows a “savage” Igorot tribesman.

Brochure reproduced in the October 1994 issue Filipinas Magazine.

Bibliography  

  67

Primary Sources

Deseret Evening News (Great Salt Lake City, UT), “An English Speaking Igorot,”

September 10, 1904, 18.

Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), “Teaching Day School,” September 3, 1904.

Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu, HI), “A Honolulu Woman Gets News from the

Philippines,” November 5, 1901.

Honolulu Independent, “American Prestige Damaged,” January 24, 1899.

Indianapolis News, “Philippine Impressions: Some Problems Which Confront Our

Government,” November 23, 1901.

Monroe Democrat, “Philippine Exposition,” August 11, 1904.

———. “Philippine Exposition,” August 25, 1904.

New Ulm Review (New Ulm, Minnesota), “Philippines at World’s Fair,” September 7,

1904.

New York Times, “Cruelty Charge Denied: Secretary of War Root Refutes Reports from

the Philippines,” February 20, 1902. ———.“Friars Talk of Filipinos,” January 10, 1899.

———.“Gold in the Philippines,” June 10, 1898.

———.“Merritt For Expansion,” December 18, 1898.

———.“Philippines in the House,” December 21, 1898.

———.“Philippines Not Desirable: Former Consul General, in an Address Before B'nai

Jeshurun Congregation, Opposes Expansion,” November 25, 1898.

———.“The Philippines Problem,” December 24, 1898.

Bibliography  

  68

North American Review. Aguinaldo’s Case Against the United States. September 1899. O’Grady, Stephen. “Filipino Exhibits at the Fair.” St. Louis Republic Sunday Magazine,

May 1, 1904.

Salt Lake City Herald, “Attitude of Natives: No Objection Annexation By the United

States,” January 24, 1899.

Scranton Tribune, “Aguinaldo’s Individuality: Some Facts as to the Personal Life,

Manners, and Traits of Filipino Leader,” October 13, 1900, 4.

St. Louis Republic, “Filipino Scouts on Tour of Inspection,” May 2, 1904, 8.

———.“Forty Filipino Tribes at the World’s Fair,” August 28, 1904, 5.

———.“Scientists Complete Work of Investigating the Relations, Origin and Racial

Characteristics of Primitive Tribes at World’s Fair,” August 28, 1904, 5.

Tacoma Times, “Savage Igorrotes at World’s Fair Wear No Cloths and Dine On Dogs,”

May 3, 1904.

Viskniski, Guy. “Filipino Conquest of America,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 17, 1904. United States Philippine Commission. Report of the Philippine Commission. Washington,

D.C.: United States Government Printing Office), 1900. United States Philippine Commission. Report of the Philippine Commission, Volume Three.

Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office), 1901.

Bibliography

      69    

Secondary Sources

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