Paul A. Kramer: The Philippine-American War as Race War
Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation-building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the Cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism." Roosevelt acknowledged and expressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimed that for every American atrocity, "a very cruel and very treacherous enemy" had committed "a hundred acts of far greater atrocity." Furthermore, while such means had been the Filipinos' "only method of carrying on the war," they had been "wholly exceptional on our part." The noble, universal ends of a war for civilization justified its often unsavory means. "The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity," he asserted, but “from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses [1]
President Theodore Roosevelt addresses a vast Memorial Day crowd at Arlington Cemetery in May 1902 before assembled veterans and a journalist. In his “indignant” speech, he defended the U. S. Army against charges of “cruelty” in the ongoing Philippine-American War by racializing the conflict as one being fought between the forces of “civilization” and “savagery.” (Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.)
As did Roosevelt, this essay explores the Philippine-American War as race war:
a war rationalized in racial terms before U.S. publics, one in which U.S. soldiers
came to understand Filipino combatants and non-combatants in racial terms, and
one in which race played a key role in bounding and unbounding American violence
against Filipinos. My concern with race is far from new in and of itself. Most
of the war’s historians—whether writing the more traditional, campaign-driven
U.S. literature or more recent and more nuanced local and social histories of
the war—make passing reference to the racism of U.S. soldiers without
thorough exploration. [2] Stuart Creighton Miller, in his critical account of
the war, places racism at the center of U.S. troop conduct. [3] This essay begins
from Miller’s starting assumption—that race was essential to the
politics and conduct of the war—but also emphasizes the contingency and
indeterminacy of the process by which these racial ideologies took shape, against
the assumption that these ideologies were reflexive “projections”
or “exports” from the United States to the Philippines. Rather,
as I will show, while race helped organize and justify U.S. colonial violence,
imperial processes also remade U.S. racial formations. [4]
Exploring this contingency requires attention to two dynamics which have up
to now been largely ignored in existing literatures. The first of these is the
contested character of race during the war. By 1898, Filipinos had been engaging
the Spanish colonial racial precepts that undergirded the Philippine colonial
state for at least two decades; they would continue to do so, in different ways,
from the prewar Republic into the war’s conventional phase and ultimately
in guerrilla struggle. These engagements often took the form of elite quests
for recognition, especially the affirmation of civilizational status as the
criteria first for assimilation and political rights and, ultimately, for political
independence. As I suggest, similar Filipino campaigns for recognition from
Americans—before, during and after the war—fundamentally shaped
both U.S. racial ideologies and Filipino nationalism.
The second source of contingency is the war itself. Racial ideologies and changing
strategies and tactics moved together in a dark, violent spiral. Within both
Filipino and Euro-American political cultures, patterns of warfare were themselves
important markers of racial status. “Civilized” people were understood
to wage “conventional” wars while “savage” people waged
guerrilla ones. Filipino guerrilla warfare eventually marked the entire population
as “savage” to American soldiers: rather than merely a set of tactics
undertaken for military purposes, guerrilla war was the inherent war of preference
of “lower races.” This racialization of guerrilla war raised the
central question of whether Filipinos, in waging a “savage” war,
were owed the restraints that defined “civilized” war. Ultimately,
I will suggest, many U.S. soldiers and officers answered this question negatively.
In many parts of the Archipelago, the war in its guerrilla phases developed
into a war of racial exterminism in which Filipino combatants and non-combatants
were understood by U.S. troops to be legitimate targets of violence. [5] The
heart of the emerging U.S. imperial racial formation was rich in contradictions:
the people of the Philippines did not have sufficient “ethnological homogeneity”
to constitute a nation-state, but possessed enough to be made war upon as a
whole.
Questions of Recognition
By 1898, Filipino elites had been struggling against
Spanish racism, as a key element of Spanish colonialism, for at least two decades.
[6] An expatriate propaganda movement in Europe had help up Hispanicized “civilization,”
advanced education and bourgeois sophistication as arguments for greater rights
within the Spanish colonial system. [7] A common editorial stance in the pages
of expatriate journal La Solidaridad faulted some Spaniards—especially
the Philippine friars—for relentlessly denigrating Filipino “advancement”
along these lines. [8] This was the strategy of a cosmopolitan, ilustrado elite
with cultural capital to spare, one that reached its consummation with the triumph
of the Philippine Revolution under Emilio Aguinaldo and the installation of
the Philippine Republic in mid-1898. When the Malolos Congress formed, it was
done in the name of an emerging “civilization” finally capable of
expressing itself as an independent state. The more radical, millenarian politics
that had animated mass participation in the revolution’s Katipunan societies
were marginalized in Aguinaldo’s Republic. [9]
The taking of Manila by U.S. troops following the Battle of Manila Bay introduced
a tense six-month period characterized by Filipino-American interaction and
competitive state-building, in which the stakes of recognition had never been
higher. On the ground, relations between Filipinos and American soldiers in
and around Manila during this transitional period were varied. U.S. soldiers
found themselves in an enticing, disturbing and incomprehensible Filipino urban
world; Filipinos unsure of the invading army’s status were wary of the
Americans but eager for their business. Americans and Filipinos encountered
each other in commercial interactions, especially those involving liquor and
sex. As U.S. soldiers consolidated military control over Manila and its municipal
government—from sanitation to law enforcement—and Filipino soldiers
extended the Republic’s control in the wake of Spanish defeats, they also
met as members of rival states-in-the-making. [10]
During this period, colliding interests, failed translations, mutual suspicions
and questions of jurisdiction easily boiled into animosity and conflict, especially
where U.S. soldiers became drunk and disorderly or failed to pay their debts.
Soldiers commonly characterized Filipinos as a whole as filthy, diseased, lazy
and treacherous in their business dealings, sometimes applying the term “nigger”
to them. One anonymous black soldier reflected back on this period that the
subsequent war would not have broken out “if the army of occupation would
have treated [Filipinos] as people.” But shortly after the seizure of
Manila, white troops had begun “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 whatever suited
their fancy, and kick the poor unfortunate if he complained…” [11]
At the same time there was a striking amount of mutual recognition in the interval
between wars, as U.S. soldiers came to know individual Filipinos or their families
and visited their churches and homes. Up until the very brink of war, American
soldiers frequented Filipino concerts, dances, ceremonies and dinners, often
recording their admiration for Filipino grace, hospitality and artistic achievement
in their diaries and letters. One striking example was a poem presented at a
Thanksgiving dinner thrown by the 13th Minnesota in Manila in November 1898,
which recalled the recent fall of Manila and expressed the soldiers’ thanks:
We’re thankful that the City’s ours, and floats the Stars and Stripes;
We’re thankful that our cause is one that from these Islands wipes
The degenerate oppressors of a brother human kin
Who now—beneath ‘Old Glory’—a nation’s place may
win. [12]
To be sure, there were dark signs here: the U.S. flag as the sole guarantor
of liberty; passive Filipinos as objects of U.S. redemption; the sense that
Filipinos still had a “nation” to win ahead of them “beneath
‘Old Glory.’” What was striking in light of future developments
was that Filipinos were still “brother human kin.”
In the last months of 1898, as the Treaty of Paris was being negotiated, Filipinos
sought recognition by launching legal and historical arguments for the sovereignty
of the Philippine Republic and the impossibility of the Islands’ legitimate
transfer from Spain to the United States. These claims were subtly and forcefully
expressed by Felipe Agoncillo, representative of the Philippine Republic sent
to the United States to lobby on behalf of Philippine independence before U.S.
politicians and the general public. As expressed in his January 30, 1899 “Memorial
to the Senate of the United States,” Agoncillo’s claim was that
U.S. formal recognition of the Philippine Republic had already been established
by U.S. consular and naval dealings with Emilio Aguinaldo’s government.
The army of the Philippine Revolution had advanced sufficiently against Spanish
forces by the time of the U.S. declaration of war, he claimed, that Spain had
no legal title or right to cede Philippine territory to the United States. Indeed,
Christian Filipino rebellions against Spain had broken out “continuously
with greater or less fury for the past hundred years,” while “a
large number of my countrymen,” namely Muslims and animists, had “never
been subdued by Spanish power.” Agoncillo also appealed to U.S. history
and political institutions, inviting American attention “to several notable
and exact American precedents” and urging “the Republic of America”
to “adhere to the teachings of international law as laid down by some
of its founders.” [13]
At the same time, the Republic sought recognition for its sovereignty in “civilizational”
standing. This brand of argument was particularly common in the Republic’s
official newspaper, La Independencia, itself meant to be a concrete and mobile
representation of the Philippine Republic’s “civilization”
and sovereignty before imagined audiences both within and outside the archipelago.
[14] In their first issue, the editors described "Our Program" as:
“demonstrating the ideal and the supreme aspiration of the country; publicizing
the priorities of our government; requesting recognition of our independence
from other nations, grounding ourselves in the capacity of the race, in the
deeds that outwardly reveal our culture and in the vitality that we demonstrate
in governing 26 provinces with more than 3 million inhabitants...” [15]
Advertising correspondents in “all the provinces of the Archipelago, London,
Paris, Madrid, Singapore, Hong-Kong and Saigon,” its pages in late-1898
and early 1899 highlighted erudite treatises on “modern” government,
including civil service reform, municipal budgeting, public instruction, moral
reform, public hygiene and “the spirit of association.” [16]
One fascinating window onto Filipino efforts at recognition and their reception
was the inland expedition of Luzon taken by two naval officers, William Wilcox
and L. R. Sargent, in November and December 1898. While the two men's task was
"of a very indefinite nature," it was fundamentally a project of recognition:
to determine whether the institutions controlling the Filipino countryside constituted
a state and, if a state, whether it was hostile or not to two wandering U.S.
naval officers. As Sargent put it, they were "to proceed as far to the
northward as the character of the country and the attitude of the natives would
permit, and to return only when forced to do so." [17]
If border control was a state's measure, then the Philippine Republic was up
and running. Aguinaldo offered the two friendship and verbal consent but no
written passports. As a result, the two relied on local presidentes, who provided
them passports, carriers and safe passage between towns, although at least one
had hesitated to give assistance in fear that "any incident" might
"create a wrong and injurious impression of the good faith of the Philippines…"
[18] Some members of the rural elite may have seen great advantage in winning
over two naive Americans; others may have seen in them only the opening wedge
of an invasion. At one town they might be greeted "by the ringing of the
church bells and the music of the band, and at the next by the critical cross-questioning
of the local authorities." [19]
In either case, local officers of the Republic lost no chance to represent to
visiting Americans their authority and popular support. Wilcox and Sargent were
regularly treated to elaborate Filipino patriotic celebrations, stirring declarations
of independence, and impressive military drills. "At that time the enthusiasm
of the people was tuned to the highest pitch," reported Sargent. "In
every village, every man was training in arms. Companies were formed of boys,
from eight years of age upward." A new civil governor "declared the
purpose of the people to expend the last drop of their blood, if necessary,
in defending the liberty thus gained against the encroachments of any nation
whatsoever." Many times villagers had gathered in the large room of the
Presidencia, where they were quartered, and "put their whole hearts into
the songs in which their patriotism found vent." [20] When asked about
the Philippines' status, "leading townspeople" had answered in unison
that they would "accept nothing short of independence." [21]
This photograph of soldiers of the Philippine Republic shows the efforts of the newly inaugurated state to convey the uniform, organized, “civilized” character of the republic’s army and its warfare. Wilcox and Sargent encountered many such forces on their late 1898 trip through Luzon (From Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippines (Garden City, NY, 1961)), photographs after p. 49).
But even as Wilcox and Sargent worked their way across Luzon, the unstable political
window through which they were traveling began to close. As steamers and telegraph
lines brought word of the Treaty from Hong Kong newspapers, Wilcox and Sargent
faced stiffer restrictions. “Already the hope was fading that freedom
from Spain meant freedom of government,” wrote Sargent. “The feeling
toward Americans was changing, and we saw its effect in the colder manner of
the people, and in their evident desire to hustle us along the most direct road
to Manila.” [22] As they reached the Western coast of Luzon, and the U.S.
Commissioners at Paris moved towards formal acquisition of the Philippines,
the party came under greater scrutiny and was detained or forced back. They
were subject to a new regulation that travelers not "carry arms, nor approach
within 200 meters of a fortification, not make any plans, or take photographs
of them." [23] Their final report, written upon their return in December,
contained tactical data appropriate to war but also recognized the fervor of
Filipino revolutionary aspirations and the varied capacities of the Filipino
people. Perhaps on these latter merits—perhaps due to bureaucratic inertia—it
was issued into the public record as a Senate Document only in 1900, a year
and a half after it was originally filed.
Even as they lobbied abroad and performed locally, Filipinos were highly suspicious
of American capacities to recognize them in light of circulating rumors of race.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, one of the chief Filipino suspicions of Americans
had been their reputation for racial oppression. "One of the stories that
received universal acceptance," reported General McReeve of the pre-war
interlude, "was that ever since the Americans had liberated their negro
slaves they had been looking around for others and thought they had found them
at last in the Philippines." [24] Filipinos that Wilcox and Sargent encountered
had been “prejudiced against us by the Spaniards," charges "so
severe that what the natives have since learned has not sufficed to disillusion
them." [25] Two points in particular had stood out regarding "our
policy toward a subject people”:
... that we have mercilessly slain and finally exterminated the race of Indians
that were native to our soil and that we went to war in 1861 to suppress an
insurrection of negro slaves, whom we also ended by exterminating. Intelligent
and well-informed men have believed these charges. They were rehearsed to us
in many towns in different provinces, beginning at Malolos. The Spanish version
of our Indian problem is particularly well known. [26]
Correspondent Frederick Palmer blamed the outbreak of war on these suspicions.
“All prominent Filipinos” that Palmer had spoken with had agreed:
“If the status of the negro, as they understood it, was to be theirs in
the new system, they would have to leave the islands anyway, and they had concluded
to make a fight before going.” [27]
While Wilcox and Sargent traveled in the Luzon highlands, U.S. and Spanish commissioners
at Paris settled the disposition of the Philippine Islands, on December 10,
1898. McKinley had at first supported only the acquisition of coaling stations
and naval bases, but had been persuaded over time to press for the entire archipelago.
While the politics of recognition had been ambiguous in Manila and its environs,
they would be stark and definitive at Paris, where Filipinos had been excluded
from treaty negotiations. McKinley effectively closed the first chapter in the
recognition debate in his statement of December 21, with Wilcox and Sargent
scarcely out of the woods. Authored by Elihu Root and later known as the “Benevolent
Assimilation” proclamation, it narrated the American destruction of the
Spanish fleet and the Treaty of Paris and laid a claim to U.S. sovereignty over
the entire archipelago. The proclamation was a sketch of bare-bones military
government, laying out improvised ground rules for the maintenance of property
rights, taxation and tariffs. McKinley seemed most concerned, however, with
the Filipino recognition of U.S. sovereignty. In an effort to extend U.S. power
“with all possible despatch,” U.S. military commanders in place
were to announce “in the most public manner” that the Americans
had come “not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the
natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious
rights.” It should be the military’s “paramount aim”
to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines
by assuring them in every possible way that they would enjoy a full measure
of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and
by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent
assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary
rule. [28]
Most significantly, however, the proclamation was a formal derecognition of
the Philippine Republic and established the relationship between the U.S. and
Filipinos as sovereign state to passive, individual subjects. The term “assimilation,”
by which the address would come to be known, held more than a hint of malice:
the very fact that it required the adjective “benevolent” to soften
it implied that there were kinds of “assimilation” that were not.
Race-Making and Colonial Warfare
The much-anticipated outbreak of war in early February 1899, just before the
U.S. Senate’s confirmation of the Treaty of Paris, did not end the Filipino
struggle for recognition. Long into the fighting, Filipino spokesmen revealed
a continued preoccupation with promoting Filipino “civilization”
to the wider world as a central rationale for claims to independence. “We,
the Filipinos, are a civilized, progressive and peace-loving people,”
stated Galiciano Apacible in the Spanish-language pamphlet, “Al Pueblo
Americano” [To the American People] translated into English and published
by the Anti-Imperialist League. The pamphlet praised Filipinos’ education,
literacy, art and political and religious leadership, urging Americans to “weigh
our statements against the misrepresentations under which Imperialism seeks
to conceal its designs.” Following its defeat of Spanish forces, the Republic,
rather than giving in to revolutionary excess, had established an orderly governing
infrastructure, one whose hallmarks of science, technology and education conveyed
its “civilization.”
[T]hey reorganized the administrative machinery which had been disturbed by
recent struggles: telegraphs, railroads, and means of communication began to
work regularly; we had adopted the electric light in some of our towns; and
we had established a new university, four high and several primary schools.
In brief, the new nation had entered upon a path of progress which already promised
a bright future. [29]
Along with demonstrating their “civilization,” some Filipino leaders
conceived of their struggle as explicitly anti-racial. One anonymous address
“To the Filipino People,” captured by the U.S. Army in pursuit of
Aguinaldo in March 1900, affirmed Filipino bravery and sacrifice and laid claim
to divinely-granted freedoms. “We are living on one planet under the same
celestial vault,” it stated, “and if we differ in color, it is because
of the distant latitudes in which we are, and this difference in no way signifies
any superiority of the one over the other.” [30]
From its start, the war was challenged by U.S.-based anti-imperialist societies
that had organized together into the Anti-Imperialist League in November 1898.
The organization, which organized in Boston, Washington, Chicago and many smaller
cities, drew on diverse political roots, many of them in earlier reform movements,
from civil service reform leagues to single-tax leagues to abolitionism. In
party terms anti-imperialism leaned toward independents and reformers, but brought
together a loose coalition of conservative and white-supremacist Democrats with
an older generation of liberal Republicans. Their initial hope was to turn U.S.
public opinion against Philippine annexation in negotiations with Spain, using
extensive lobbying and educational campaigns; following the outbreak of war
in February 1899, they criticized the U.S. invasion as unjust in both ends and
means. [31]
Not all anti-imperialist argument hinged on the recognition of the Philippine
Republic in national terms (as a state) or Filipinos in racial terms (as civilized).
Indeed, many anti-imperialist claims, especially prior to outbreak of war, had
been “internal,” focusing on the negative consequences of “empire”
for the United States itself, especially the erosion of domestic republican
virtue and freedom through imperial corruption, tyranny and militarism. [32]
Many of these concerns were explicitly racial: annexation of the Philippines
would lead to the “corruption” of the U.S. body politic itself through
Filipino citizenship and the “degrading” of U.S. labor by additional
waves of “Asiatic” immigrants. [33]
This anti-imperialist cartoon by Charles Nelan seeks to illustrate the risks of “incorporating” the Philippines into the U. S. republican body politic by casting the Philippine population as a whole as “savage” and incapable of exercising political rationality. It suggests that because of Filipinos’ “incapacity for self-government,” imperialism could threaten the United States’ own political institutions. (Charles Nelan, Cartoons of Our War with Spain, New York, 1898)
But
some anti-imperialists recognized the Philippine Republic, even after the outbreak
of the war. Embracing a transnational strategy described by Jim Zwick, they
assisted representatives of the Republic lobbying in the United States, translated
and published their articles in the United States; and eventually carried out
investigations into the conduct of the war. [34]
McKinley’s strategy to counter anti-imperialist claims of authority was
to appoint the first of two “Philippine Commissions,” the first
arriving in the Islands in early 1899. Also operating on a transnational political
terrain, the Commission had two primary goals. First, within the Philippine
context, it was to serve as the crux of the War Department’s “policy
of attraction,” the effort to draw ilustrado and principal elites away
from the Republic. Once settled into the Audiencia, former home of the Spanish
supreme court, the Commission’s daily sessions became the central ritual
of urban, wartime collaboration, where informants exchanged testimony favorable
to U.S. sovereignty for political patronage. [35] As early as May, this arm
of the Commission’s work was showing results. There were key ilustrado
defections and political placements—especially those of Benito Legarda,
Felipe Buencamino, T. H. Pardo de Tavera and Cayetano Arellano--the inauguration
of Pardo de Tavera’s pro-annexation newspaper La Democracia and the displacement
of Mabini’s irreconcilable faction within the Republic by Pedro Paterno’s
more conciliatory one. The Commission’s second project, however, was aimed
at the domestic U.S. public: to produce an authoritative record of events in
the Islands that would justify U.S. aggression and undermine anti-imperialist
argument.
The task of rationalizing the war in its ends and means before the American
public led to the active production of a novel, imperial racial formation by
the war’s defenders. This formation had a dual character, simultaneously
and reciprocally racializing Americans and Filipinos in new ways. Its first
half racialized the U.S. population as "Anglo-Saxons" whose overseas
conquests were legitimated by racial-historical ties to the British Empire.
[36] Opponents of the Treaty and war frequently argued that while U.S. continental
empire had involved the legitimate unfolding of republican institutions into
empty (or emptied) space, the Philippine annexation constituted a disturbing
“imperial” departure from the U.S.'s exceptional and exemplary traditions,
one that would ultimately undermine the nation's moral and political foundations.
This apparent violation of U.S. historical laws was answered with extra-legal
claims of racial essence. Specifically, the war's advocates subsumed U.S. history
within longer, racial trajectories of "Anglo-Saxon" history which
folded together U.S. and British imperial histories. The Philippine-American
War, then, was a natural extension of Western conquest, the organic expression
of the desires, capacities and destinies of "Anglo-Saxon" peoples.
Americans, as Anglo-Saxons, shared British genius for empire-building, a genius
which they must exercise for the greater glory of the "race" and to
advance "civilization" in general. [37] Unlike other races, they “liberated”
the peoples they conquered, indeed, their expressions of conquest as “freedom”,
proliferated as the terrors they unleashed became more visible. Anglo-Saxonist
racial-exceptionalism was given its most resonant expression in February 1899,
when, Rudyard Kipling published "The White Man's Burden.” The poem
condensed race and humanitarian martyrdom, recasting Americans as a "race"
with an inevitable imperial destiny. [38]
If the first half of the double-sided imperial racial formation “Anglo-Saxonized”
Americans, its second half “tribalized” Filipinos. Contemporary
social evolutionary theory held that societies, in evolving from “savagery”
to “civilization,” moved in political terms from “tribal”
fragmentation to “national” unity.” [39] Successfully identify
“tribes”—marked by language, religion, political allegiance—and
one had disproven a nation’s existence. Enumerate a society’s fragments,
and what might otherwise have looked like a nation became merely the tyranny
of one “tribe” over others; what might have appeared a state became
a problem of imperial “assimilation.” The “tribalization”
of the Republic would rhetorically eradicate the Philippine Republic as a legitimate
state whose rights the United States might have to recognize under international
law. [40]
This argument was forcefully advanced by the Philippine Commission’s Report,
its first installment issued in January 1900, which represented the most influential
effort to reduce the Philippine Republic to what came to be called the “Single
Tribe” of the Tagalogs. The Report’s section on “The Native
Peoples of the Philippines,” written by zoologist Dean C. Worcester, began
by admitting disputes over the “civilization” of the Filipino people.
The most diverse and contradictory statements are frequently met with concerning
the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, at present collectively known as
‘Filipinos.’ Some writers credit them with a high degree of civilization,
and compare them to the Pilgrim Fathers or the patriots of ‘76, while
others regard even the more highly civilized tribes as little better than barbarians.
[41]
The Commission set out to “reconcile views which are apparently contradictory”
based on their investigation of Philippine conditions. After a brief review
of opposing views, they presented their conclusions: the Philippine population
consisted of “three sharply distinct races,” the Negrito, the Indonesian
and the Malayan. Early migrations by the Negritos, a group “near the bottom
of the human series,” had been displaced by invasions of Indonesians and
Malayans with superior racial constitution and civilization. Out of these three
races had sprung “numerous tribes, which often differ very greatly in
language, manners, customs, and laws, as well as in degree of civilization.”
[42]
The argument of “tribal” pluralism became the centerpiece of arguments
against Filipino self-government. “The most striking and perhaps the most
significant fact in the entire situation,” began the Commission’s
report on “Capacity for Self-Government,” “is the multiplicity
of tribes inhabiting the archipelago, the diversity of their languages (which
are mutually unintelligible), and the multifarious phases of civilization--ranging
all the way from the highest to the lowest--exhibited by the natives of the
several provinces and islands.” [43]
While Worcester admitted it was “extremely difficult to arrive at anything
approaching a correct estimate of the numbers of even the more important civilized
tribes,” the report was a powerful representation of the Commission’s
ability to encapsulate the Philippine population by scientific means, one that
gave birth to one of its most widely-employed “facts”: the number
“84” as the total number of Philippine “tribes.” [44]
In future debates, the figure, meant to convey impossible plurality, would echo
through imperial argumentation in defense of the Commission’s central
ethnological and political conclusion: “The Filipinos are not a nation,
but a variegated assemblage of different tribes and peoples, and their loyalty
is still of the tribal type.” [45]
Worcester would be followed quickly into the “tribes” question by
anti-imperialist and Filipino nationalist publicists. In 1900, for example,
Filipino nationalist Sixto Lopez was asked by the New England Anti-Imperialist
League to produce “a brief statement of the facts” on the “tribes”
question, “as a native of the country, and as one who has given some attention
to the ethnography of the Archipelago, both by personal research and by a study
of the best works on the subject...” For Lopez, the Commission’s
findings had been “entirely incorrect.” The number eighty-four had
been the product of ”imagination, bad spelling, translation, subdivision,
and multiplication.” The Commission had badly transcribed already inaccurate
Spanish records, mistaken the mountain peoples for lowland villagers, confused
racial groups for language groups, and exaggerated the differences between these
languages. “It would be just as absurd to regard the Americans as one
tribe and the ‘Yankees’ as another,” he wrote, “and
then to increase these two tribes into four or more by misspelling the word
‘Americans,’ or by translating it into French.” He claimed
that the “so-called ‘tribes’” were actually a small
minority of the Philippine population, analogous to “the uncivilized or
semi-civilized remnants of the Indian tribes still inhabiting certain parts
of the United States.” [46]
Even as the administration “tribalized” Filipinos in its campaign
to rationalize the war at home, U.S. soldiers on the ground racialized their
opponents with striking speed and intensity. In the war’s early months,
what had been diffuse and fragmented pre-war animosities quickly congealed into
novel racial formations at the very center of U.S. soldiers’ popular culture,
capable of defining a wartime enemy and organizing and motivating violence against
that enemy. "A lively hatred of our newly declared enemy was the one enthusiasm
of the camp," wrote a corporal in the Montana regulars in July 1899. [47]
This race-making process is vividly illustrated by terminological shifts in
the diaries and letters home of U.S. volunteers during the early months of the
war. Although the linguistic starting-points and end-points differed, many soldiers
progressively racialized their terms for the insurgents specifically, and Filipinos
generally, although in few cases did these terms entirely replace other terms
like “insurgent” or “native.”
Andrew Wadsworth, for example, a twenty-eight year old sergeant in the First
Nebraska Volunteers, had observed shortly upon arrival in Manila that “the
natives are bright and intelligent as the average run of people," and admired
their art, musicianship and industriousness. [48] Writing home from "the
Field" two weeks after the beginning of the war, he wrote that "it
was a hot time going over some of the ground... [it] swarmed with the indians
but we didn't do a thing to them..." [49] Within another two weeks, his
racism was more matter-of-fact. "[H]ave forgotten whether I have written
any of you folks since we commenced to chase niggers," he wrote off-handedly,
"have no doubt read in the papers what we are doing..." [50] Despite
rising tensions, Earl Pearsall of the same unit had recorded in his diary on
January 5th, with some regret, that “the insurgents have not been as friendly
lately as they have been for they have not visited our camp for three or four
days.” [51] The day war broke out, he imagined that “the dusky fellows
don’t care for any more of this warfare with the Americano.” [52]
Less than three weeks later, however, he thrilled that U.S. artillery had “put
the black rascals over the hills.” [53] Early in March, he reported being
“attacked by the ‘Gugos’” on the Mariquina road. [54]
South Dakota volunteer Louis Hubbard, a leader in his unit’s regimental
band, had accepted the gift of a sword from “one of Aguinaldo’s
sergeants” in December 1898 and recruited a Filipino musician, “the
finest clarinetist I ever heard in my life.” [55] Two weeks into the combat,
he wrote that it was “lots of sport to hunt these black devils.”
[56] Angered by reports of Filipino atrocities against U.S. troops, he wrote
that “[t]hey are just like any savage.” [57] In mid-March he recorded
the hope for a speedy charge on Malolos, “for the quicker we get there
and get these ‘gugos’ of [sic] the face of the earth the quicker
we will be ready to start for home.” [58]
Photographs of dead Filipino soldiers lying in trenches were often taken by U. S. soldiers and journalists and included in commemorative albums. Albert Sonnichsen wrote in his memoir of the “heaps of dead and dying natives… photographed by our people, and exhibited with such mottoes as: ‘Can the __d Regiment boys shoot? You bet they can. Count the dead niggers.’” (F. Tennyson Neely, Fighting in the Philippines: A Photographic Record of the Philippine-American War (London, 1899); Sonnichsen, quoted in Russell Roth, Muddy Glory: America’s “Indian Wars” in the Philippines, 1899-1935 (West Hanover, MA, 1981)
This racialization process attracted the attention of U.S. journalists and soldiers
on the ground. Some understood rising pre-war hostility as the inevitable surfacing
of latent “race differences” on all sides. “After the first
glamour which surrounded our troops,” soldier-correspondent John Bass
reported to Harper’s in mid-October 1898, “a glamour due to an exaggerated
and almost childish idea of the liberty and freedom we were bringing to the
Philippines, the race differences have made themselves felt, which antagonize
the natives and exasperate our men.” [59] Many journalists were struck
by increasingly widespread use of the term “nigger” by U.S. troops.
“Our troops in the Philippines… look upon all Filipinos as of one
race and condition,” wrote Henry Loomis Nelson, “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.”
[60] Frederick Palmer, sympathetic to the war effort, was amused by the soldiers’
“good-natured contempt” toward “the little brown man,”
but regretted the use of the term “nigger,” which “too often”
included groups that were above it, however marginally:
If a man is white; if he speaks English; if he knows his lines as we know them,
he is as good as anybody on earth. If he is white and yet does not understand
our customs, we insist that he shall have equal rights with us. If he is any
other color too often we include him in one general class called ‘nigger,’
a class beneath our notice, to which, as far as our soldier is concerned, all
Filipinos belonged. [61]
H. L. Wells similarly noted that U.S. troops saw the enemy in racial terms.
“Undoubtedly, they do not regard the shooting of Filipinos just as they
would the shooting of white troops…” he wrote in mid-1900. “The
soldiers feel that they are fighting with savages, not with soldiers.”
[62]
The race-making process of the early phases of the war was revealed in the U. S. press in changing images of Emilio Aguinaldo. The first, from May 1898, is in the nature of a portrait; the caption refers to Aguinaldo as “the president of the republic of the islands,” and calls him “brainy,” “patriotic,” and “self-sacrificing,” while the image notably Europeanizes his features. The second, from March 1899, is a cartoon that represents him as a childish, ostentatious dictator being crushed by U. S. force; his skin tone is darkened here and his features are distinctly “Orientalized.” (Left image from Bonnie Miller, “The Spectacle of War: A Study of Spanish-American War Visual and Popular Culture,” Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2003, 368; right image from Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco, 2005), 125.
This "lively hatred" was not, however, simply a "projection"
or "export," but a new racial formation developing on the ground.
[63] Its novelty was evidenced by the consistency with which reporters—imperialist
and anti-imperialist--felt compelled to explain it to their domestic readerships.
It was strikingly illustrated by the appearance of a new term, "gu-gu"
or "goo-goo," in U.S. soldiers' discourse, almost certainly the linguistic
ancestor of "gook." [64] Veteran Charles A. Freeman, writing in the
1930s, noted that "[o]f recent years the world [sic] has been shortened
to gook, but gu-gu persists in Philippine fiction and fact written by Americans,
and applies to the lower class Filipino." [65] If the term had a sinister
future, its origins remain speculative. The first of two plausible explanations—far
from incompatible with each other—roots the term in local dynamics: the
term came from the Tagalog term for a slippery coconut-oil shampoo, pronounced
gu-gu, which may have caught on a sense of the enemy's elusiveness. [66] A second
account suggests the term was born at the intersection of immediate sexual tensions
and racialized U.S. popular culture, as older idioms were reworked to suit volatile
new surroundings. According to Freeman, among the songs sung by U.S. troops
on the long voyage from San Francisco had been a minstrel tune "'Just because
she made ‘dem goo-goo eyes.'" When American soldiers first "gazed
into the dark orbs of a Filipino dalaga" 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." [67]
Whatever its specific origins, "gu-gu" formed part of a distinctive,
new Philippine-American colonial vocabulary that focused hatreds around a novel
enemy and lent American troops a sense of manly, insider camaraderie. The newness,
immediacy and localism of U.S. 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, especially early
in the conflict. On occasion, soldiers explained these terms to what they imagined
to be befuddled family members at home. Peter Lewis, for example, promised in
November 1900 to write home again about his "fights with the 'Guggoes'
as the Filipiones [sic] are called." [68] Race-making and colonial warfare
were developing together as intimately linked projects.
Racializing Guerrilla Warfare
If one way to rationalize a war of aggression was to declare the enemy state
a “tribe,” one way to end it was simply to declare it over by fiat.
November 1899 saw the war’s first end by U.S. proclamation. General MacArthur
reported that there was “no organized insurgent force left to strike at,”
and declared that all future resistance be characterized as outlawry and the
killing of U.S. soldiers murder. [69] General Otis cabled Washington stating
that the revolutionaries had been dispersed and that “claim to government
by insurgents can be made no longer under any fiction.” [70] In fact,
Filipino tactics had undergone a dramatic shift toward a guerrilla strategy.
Disbanding the regular army in the wake of defeats, Aguinaldo divided the country
into military zones each under a guerrilla commander, preparing for a regionally
dispersed set of smaller campaigns through locally-raised sandatahan units.
It was hoped that in these new settings, tropical disease, impassable roads
and unfamiliar conditions would weaken the American advance, while geographic
knowledge and village-level support would sustain guerrilla ambushes and surprise
attacks against isolated American patrols. [71]
This guerrilla campaign, in turn, altered the command structure, tactics and
knowledge requirements of the U.S. Army. General Otis decentralized his forces
to match the Filipino army, splitting the army into four departments, his plan
to advance outward into the hinterlands, fighting back Filipino rebels and garrisoning
the towns that supported them. [72] In these regional settings (eventually over
600 scattered posts), often cut off from Manila contacts, local commanders would
by necessity take on greater autonomy, and be forced to adapt their tactics
to local crises.
Guerrilla war involved not merely a set of tactics but a set of understandings:
about the meanings of combat, about the means to victory, about oneself as a
combatant, about the nature of the enemy. Although each side perceived it as
a radical break, it held different meanings for Filipino and American troops.
For Filipino officers, schooled exclusively in European conventional warfare,
guerrilla warfare was largely unfamiliar, although at least some Filipino soldiers
had encountered it first-hand while collaborating with the Spanish army against
Muslims and animists. Filipino strategists were compelled to explain it using
anti-colonial guerrilla struggles elsewhere. Filipino commanders, for example,
took inspiration (most likely, unreciprocated) from the struggle of the Boers
against the British Empire. Juan Villamor, advising General Antonio Luna in
Ilocos, claimed to have taken his guerrilla model from the war in South Africa,
probably learned through Hong Kong newspapers. In a speech to raise troops in
February 1900, Villamor apparently noted that this warring style, "such
as we are starting today," was "characteristic of a small nation when
fighting a big one," and had produced "the most surprising successes"
in South Africa. [73]
One possible explanation for Aguinaldo’s delay in adopting guerrilla strategies
and tactics may be the symbolic politics of war and preoccupations with expressions
of “civilization.” But there were other political reasons for the
delay in adopting guerilla warfare. As the Republic’s officials knew well,
guerrilla war was a decentralized war that empowered local commanders at the
expense of the center; it could also involve mobilizing the energy of, and handing
power to, a rural base. This base was largely mistrusted by Aguinaldo's cadre
and was itself often ambivalent about the question of whether Republican “independence”
and kalayaan were the same thing. [74]
But it was particularly difficult to relinquish the quest for recognition. In
its bid for international esteem and recognition, the Republic's self-representations
to the world had nervously held itself to a standard of "civilization"
in which war played a significant part. Officials of the Republic agreed with
the Americans that, among many other things, “civilized” societies
adhered to the laws of "civilized" warfare. The military drills witnessed
by Wilcox and Sargent had drawn on a vocabulary of republican martial order
imbued with notions of a “civilized” fighting force; Republic newspapers
of 1898 had foregrounded the organized, hierarchical character of the Filipino
army and the favorable condition of its Spanish prisoners as advertisements
for its broader "civilization.”
Guerrilla warfare, by contrast, meant scattered organization, loosely-disciplined
troops little distinguishable from "savages," the securing of rural
supplies inseparable from looting, a reliance on concealment and deception that
violated European-American standards of masculine honor in combat. [75] Emilio
Concepción, for example, a captain fighting in Namatay, later recalled
that he "was vacillating for some time" before he reorganized his
troops into guerrilla units, for reasons of honor. "In reality, when I
took that step, I had thought about it well for some days before, because in
principle I believed that if I made myself a guerrilla fighter, I would stop
being a revolutionary, and at that time for me the title of revolutionary was
much more glorious." [76] By winning a conventional war, the Philippine
Army would win the world’s support for independent Philippine statehood;
victory in guerrilla battle, however, might mean losing the war for international
recognition.
If on the Filipino side, guerrilla war was international politics by other means,
on the American side, guerrilla war was both novel and disturbing. It meant
dispensing with hopes for gallant rushes at the enemy and hunkering down for
a protracted campaign that was both boring and anxious, with soldiers isolated
from other units, in unknown terrain, unable to recognize the line between "amigos"
and hostile peoples. It was little surprise that the term the war introduced
furthest into American English was “boondock,” drawn from a Tagalog
term for mountain or remote area. [77]
For U. S. troops, guerrilla-style warfare in tropical settings was unfamiliar and disturbing, subjecting them to exposure and disease and making it impossible to tell the “enemy” from “amigos.” The term “boondock” in American English would emerge from this disorientation. Filipino villagers and revolutionaries took advantage of American ignorance and their own local knowledge in prolonging resistance. (Library of Congress.)
"Uncle Sam's cohorts, set down in the Philippines at the beginning of the
century, saw in everything something new, strange and utterly incomprehensible,"
recalled one veteran years later. "The enemy existed unseen in the dripping
jungle, in the moldering towns and in the smoky clearings on the hillsides,
and since a natural prudence bade him not risk any open encounter, the enemy
was not to