Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War

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June 1, 2006

Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War
Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War

Keywords: Race, the Philippines, colonialism, racism, USA, Spanish-American 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

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 noncombatants 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. soldierswithout 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 pushes beyond it in several ways. Most of all, the present essay 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 before Americans— before, during, and after the war—fundamentally shaped both U.S. racial ideologies and Filipino nationalism.

 

Figure 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.)

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 noncombatants were understood by U.S. troops to be legitimate targets of violence.5 The heart of the United States’ emerging 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 engaged in a struggle against Spanish racism, as a key element of Spanish colonialism, for at least twenty years.6 The Propaganda movement had sought political traction in the apparent contradictions inside Spanish political and racial ideologies: surely Catholicism, advanced education, and bourgeois sophistication—along with loyalty—would constitute a viable argument for greater rights within the Spanish colonial system.7 A common editorial stance in the pages of the expatriate Filipino journal La Solidaridad upheld Spanish criteria for evaluating the political “capacities” of its subjects but faulted some Spaniards—especially the Philippine friars—for relentlessly denigrating Filipino “advancement” along these lines.8 It was the strategy of a cosmopolitan, ilustrado [enlightened] elite with cultural capital to spare, one that reached its consummation with the triumph of the Philippine Revolution under Emilio Aguinaldo and the declaration of Philippine independence 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, and exclusion of Filipino troops from the city, 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 illegible Filipino urban world; Filipinos unsure of the invading army’s status were wary of the Americans but eager for their business. Most social contacts were commercial in nature, with Filipinos and Americans first meeting by haggling over food, transport, liquor, and sex.10 Americans and Filipinos also met as members of rival states in the making, 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.

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 recognition in the interval between wars, as U.S. soldiers came to know individual Filipinos and 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 the capital 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.”

 

Figure 2: Written by a U.S. soldier in the Philippines in late 1898, the short story “Itamo the Insurrecto,” from which this illustration is taken, shows the possibilities for U.S. recognition of Filipinos during the tense period between the U.S. occupation of Manila and outbreak of war. Here the narrator, a U.S. soldier, recognizes a well-dressed Filipino revolutionary Itamo, whom he will befriend, at a Manila café. (Lopez Memorial Library.)

 

Filipino-American sociability and its impact on the politics of recognition can also be found in the short story “Itamo the Insurrecto: A Story of the Philippines,” published in December 1898 in a short-lived U.S. soldiers’ magazine in Manila. At the story’s beginning the narrator, an American soldier stationed near Manila before its fall, is curious about his surroundings. “All things on the Island of Luzon were new and strange,” he relates, especially the mysterious Filipino soldiers outside the city. Making his way to the Filipino lines to explore, he encounters “great disappointment” in the shape of Itamo, an “insurrecto”: short in stature, his uniform “a collection of rags,” his use of a Spanish Mauser sporadic and inaccurate. But after the fall of Manila, the narrator finds himself in the Alhambra Cafe, where he is eagerly greeted by “a handsome native, dressed in the height of eastern fashion… with regular features [H]is bronze skin made a fine contrast to his white clothes, white shirt, collar and tie.” It takes the American a moment to recognize “the dirty, half-fed, native soldier of the trenches, Itamo Laguna—much I marveled at the transformation.” The two strike up a friendship and Itamo introduces the narrator to his family. “Frequently thereafter did we do the city together,” the narrator tells us, “wandering through the narrow, crooked streets sightseeing, and he delighted to show me his own people.”13

The narrator loses track of his friend, and is sometime afterward sent on a mission out into the countryside. By then, a Spanish barber “had transformed me, by trimming my beard ‘a la Español.’” Riding at night, he is overtaken by three armed “natives”; two mistake him for a Spaniard, but Itamo quickly recognizes the American and warns his compatriots away; when they do not, he engages one of them in battle. It is only when they step into the moonlit road that the narrator recognizes “my lost friend, Itamo.” The ensuing battle is “a magnificent exhibition of skill” in which Itamo kills his antagonist, only to be stabbed by another “insurrecto,” whom the narrator shoots and kills. While recognition here was still highly bounded—Itamo’s sacrifice for the American is taken for granted, for example—the narrator’s collegiality with the “insurrecto” is still striking in light of what was to come.14

In the last months of 1898, as the Treaty of Paris between Spain and the United States 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 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 the United States’ own 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.”15

At the same time, the republic sought recognition of 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.16 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.17

Cultural evidence of such “civilization” and self-governing “capacity” poured off the pages of La Independencia. Its banner head promised “Literature, Arts, Commerce, Economic Questions, News from Abroad, Drawings, Chronicles of Art, War Notes, Correspondents in all the provinces of the Archipelago, London, Paris, Madrid, Singapore, Hong-Kong and Saigon.”18 During late 1898 and early 1899, it defended the sovereignty of the Republic through reports of successful rule in the provinces and humanitarian treatment of Spanish prisoners, and exposed suspicious U.S. maneuvers. At the same time, it highlighted erudite treatises on “modern” government, including civil service reform, municipal budgeting, public instruction, moral reform, public hygiene, and “the spirit of association.”19

One fascinating window onto Filipino quests for 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.”20

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.”21 Wilcox noted, of elaborate balls and operas staged in their honor, that he had never “been treated with more kindly hospitality.” Sargent, however, observed that Filipino responses to them varied to a frustrating degree between “the coldest suspicion” and “the most demonstrative hospitality.” 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.”22

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.” He had witnessed the “impressive ceremony” which transferred control from a military officer to an elected official in a “simple and efficient” civil government. The new 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.”23 When asked about the Philippines’ status, “leading townspeople” had answered in unison that they would “accept nothing short of independence.”24

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.”25 As they reached the western coast of Luzon, and theU.S. commissioners at Paris moved toward 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.”26 Their final report, written upon their return in December, was a curious hybrid. On the one hand, it took note of tactical and logistical questions appropriate to war and, on the other, recognized the legitimacy of the republic, 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.

Figure 3: 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 repub- lic’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.)

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 prewar 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.”27 Filipinos that Wilcox and Sargent encountered had been “prejudiced against us by the Spaniards,” with charges “so severe that what the natives have since learned has not sufficed to disillusion them.”28 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.29

One black veteran reported during this period that “[Filipinos] are told of America’s treatment of the black population and are made to feel that it is better to die fighting than to become subject to a nation where, as they are made to believe, the colored man is lynched and burned alive indiscriminately.”30 Correspondent Frederick Palmer blamed the outbreak of the war, in part, on precisely these suspicions. Once Americans had allowed Aguinaldo and his compatriots, who were “familiar… with the position of the colored man in our Southern States,” to become “convinced that their lot was to be that of the ‘nigger,’ ” the Filipinos had begun to isolate U.S. troops.31 “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.”32

While Wilcox and Sargent traveled across Luzon, U.S. and Spanish commissioners at Paris settled the disposition of the Philippine Islands, on December 10, 1898. President William McKinley had at first supported only the acquisition of coaling stations and naval bases on the islands 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 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.33

Most significantly, however, the proclamation was a formal derecognition of the Philippine Republic and established the relationship between the United States 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 suggested more or less directly 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.34

Along with demonstrating their “civilization,” some Filipino leaders conceived of their struggle as explicitly antiracial. 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.”35 Aguinaldo’s adviser Apolinario Mabini urged his countrymen to disbelieve promises of deliverance by the Americans in the name of anti-racism. Even if the U.S. Constitution followed its flag with “the rights and liberties of American citizens,” he warned, “race hatred will curtail these prerogatives.” Annexation to the United States in whatever form, Mabini maintained, would “unite us perpetually to a nation whose manners and customs are distinct from ours, who hate mortally the colored race, and from which we shall not be able to separate ourselves except by means of a war.”36

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 league, 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.37

Not all anti-imperialist arguments 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.38 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.39 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.40

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.41 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, namely 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.42 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 United States’ 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 extralegal 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, and both taken together were the organic expression of the desires, capacities, and destinies of “Anglo-Saxon” peoples. Americans, as Anglo-Saxons, shared Britons’ racial genius for empire-building, a genius which they must exercise for the greater glory of the “race” and to advance “civilization” in general.43 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.44

 

Figure 4: This anti-imperialist cartoon by Charles Neland 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.)

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.45 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.46

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.47

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 a 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.”48

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.49

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.”50 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.”51

Worcester would be followed quickly into the “tribes” question by antiimperialist 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.” He refuted charges of barbarism laid on these groups, claiming that headhunting and cannibalism had been identified only by “untrustworthy authority”; in reality, “non-Christians” such as those on Mindanao “have a religion and a code of morals of their own, the latter of which they adhere to and which in many respects is superior to that practiced by the Spaniards.”52

Figure 5: This illustration, of a portion of a table in the Philippine Commission’s 1900 report on “The Peoples of the Philippines,” shows the race-making process at its most technocratic. While the list of “tribes” and their populations was speculative at best, its statement of the total number of “tribes” as eighty-four became a widespread shorthand for the Philippines’ inher- ently fragmented, antinational polity.

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 prewar 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 1899.53 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 such as “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.54 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.”55 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.”56 Despite rising tensions, Earl Pearsall of the same unit had recorded in his diary on January 5, 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.”57 The day war broke out, he imagined that “the dusky fellows don’t care for any more of this warfare with the Americano.”58 Less than three weeks later, however, he thrilled that U.S. artillery had “put the black rascals over the hills.”59 Early in March, he reported being “attacked by the ‘Gugos’” on the Mariquina road.60

Idaho volunteer Wheeler Martin, upon landing in Manila, thought it an “odd place you can see lots of sights and lots of people but they cant talk english nor we can’t understand them”; he had seen “some of the prettyest [sic] women I ever saw in my life” there.61 Fighting outside the city the following March, he reported going after “a strong hold of the niggers,” and the month after that, “scraping niggers… out by Paranaque.”62 For the first two weeks of the war, Oregon volunteer William Henry Barrett referred to the enemy exclusively as “natives” or “Philippinos.”63 Just over two weeks later, he recorded that other companies had “chased out the niggers run them across the swamps into Malabon.”64 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.”65 Two weeks into the combat, he wrote that it was “lots of sport to hunt these black devils.”66 Angered by reports of Filipino atrocities against U.S. troops, he wrote that “[t]hey are just like any savage.”67 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.”68

Figure 6: 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 prewar 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.”69 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.”70 Major George Anderson, 36th Volunteer Infantry, mixed approval with distance. “It is true that the word ‘nigger’ was very often used as applied to the natives, probably correctly,” he testified later. “I never used the word myself.”71 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.72

Figure 7: 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 Univer- sity, 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.)

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.”73

This “lively hatred” was not, however, simply a “projection” or “export,” but a new racial formation developing on the ground.74 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.”75 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.”76 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: theterm 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.77 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 [young woman]” on arrival, they had commented to each other, “Gee, but that girl can make googoo eyes.” Filipino men had taken the term as an insult; when American soldiers learned this, “it stuck, and became a veritable taunt.”78

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.”79 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 Arthur 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.80 General Otis cabled Washington stating that the revolutionaries had been dispersed and that a “claim to government by insurgents can be made no longer under any fiction.”81 In fact, Filipino tactics had undergone a dramatic shift toward guerrilla warfare. 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 [guerrilla] 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.82

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.83 In these regional settings (eventually over six hundred 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. Reliable intelligence was a scarce commodity. “The troops were more than able to annihilate, to completely smash anything that could be brought against them,” reported Colonel Wagner, “but it was almost impossible to get any information in regard to those people.”84

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 firsthand while collaborating with the Spanish army against Muslims and animists. Filipino strategists were compelled to explain it using anticolonial guerrilla struggles elsewhere. Filipino nationalist Isabelo de los Reyes, for example, published an article on guerrilla war in the March 1900 Filipinas Ante Europa, by “a valiant and enlightened Filipino lieutenant” who had fought in Cuba.85 Filipino commanders also took inspiration (most likely, unreciprocated) from the Boers’ struggle 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 of 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.86

One possible explanation for Aguinaldo’s delay in adopting guerrilla tactics may be the symbolic politics of war and preoccupations with expressions of “civilization.” The most obvious reason for this delay was political. As the republic’s officials knew well, guerrilla war was at once a decentralized war that empowered local commanders at the expense of the center, and a people’s war that involved mobilizing the energy of, and handing power to, a rural base. This base was, in turn, largely mistrusted by Aguinaldo’s cadre and was, itself, often ambivalent about the question of whether republican “independence” and kalayaan [freedom] were the same thing.87 But it was also, perhaps, not so easy to let go of the quest for recognition. In its bid for international 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.88 Mabini, for example, gave strict orders in mid-1898 forbidding atrocities by Filipino troops due to the importance of showing to the world that Filipinos were a civilized people. Emilio Concepción, 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.”89 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.90

“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 be found. But they existed nonetheless.”91 Even as U.S. soldiers relied on Filipinos as guides, translators, carriers, and providers of food and intelligence, they found the task of distinguishing Filipino soldiers from “friendly” villagers in garrisoned towns, who declared themselves “amigos,” a frustrating and dangerous one. As Jacob Isselhard recalled, “[T]he natives of the towns in which these small bodies of our men were placed… with that particular faculty of all Orientals to say one thing and meaning another, professed to be ‘mucho amigo’ (good friends) to our faces, while secretly aiding the insurrection with all the means at their command.” Those who stepped forward as guides, for example, “would invariably and purposely get lost on a trail which led either to nowhere or into well prepared death traps.”92 Erwin Garrett put the problem succinctly in verse: “‘Amigo’ to your face, forsooth, / Or when you spend the dough, / But a red-handed ‘katipunan’ when / You turn around to go.”93

The collision between Filipino revolutionary and U.S. Army perspectives on guerrilla war can best be witnessed in a brief written exchange in late-August 1900 between Mabini and General James Franklin Bell.94 Bell had written to pressure Mabini to reconcile himself to U.S. rule and to declare himself against continued resistance, as had an increasing number of revolutionaries. His argument hinged on the difference between “civilized” war and its opposites. War, he began, could only be justified by a combatant where success was possible; as soon as defeat was certain, “civilization demands that the defeated side, in the name of humanity, should surrender and accept the result, although it may be painful to its feelings.” Combatants who strayed from this principle “place themselves in a separate classification” as “incompetent in the management of civil affairs to the extent of their ignorance of the demands of humanity.” In this specific case, the end of conventional war and the dispersal of the Philippine army meant that continued Filipino resistance was not only “criminal” but was “also daily shoving the natives of the Archipelago headlong towards a deeper attitude of semicivilization in which they will become completely incapable of appreciating and understanding the responsibilities of civil government.” Civilization meant “pacification” and the acceptance of U.S. sovereignty: “The Filipino people can only show their fitness in this matter by laying down their arms.”95

Mabini countered with a brilliant riposte.96 Bell’s starting point, he noted, was simply the claim that might made right, that the U.S. war was “just and humanitarian” because its army was powerful, “which trend of reasoning not even the most ignorant Filipino will believe to be true.” If in real life, he noted, “the strong nations so easily make use of force to impose their claims on the weak ones,” it was because “even now civilization and humanitarian sentiments that are so often invoked, are, for some, more apparent than real.” No one deplored more deeply the “guerrilla and ambush system” the Filipinos had been “forced to adopt”; Mabini had always considered “the fight that offers equal risks to both combatants more noble and more worthy of men.” But the Filipinos had been left no choice. The very laws of war that authorized strong nations’ use of “powerful weapons of combat” against weak ones were those that “persuade[d]” the weak to engage in guerrilla war, “especially when it comes to defending their homes and their freedoms against an invasion.”97

Guerrilla war was, in other words, tactical rather than ethnological; in this “extreme case,” the laws of war “implacably order the weak people to defend their threatened honor and natural rights under pain of being called uncivilized and uncapable of understanding the responsibilities of a proper government.” Civilization meant neither capitulation nor conciliation, but resistance in the face of domination. Indeed, for Mabini, resistance to submission itself—even through guerrilla war—was the only mark of a “civilized” people. The Filipinos, he wrote, “fight to show to the United States that they possess sufficient culture to know their rights even where there is a pretense to hide them by means of clever sophisms.”98 Earlier Mabini had written, along the same lines, that “[a] humiliating peace is tolerated only in uncivilized countries.”99 Asserting the logic of recognition, Mabini hoped the revolution would in this way “remind the Americans of the struggle borne by their ancestors against the Englishmen for the emancipation of the colonies which are now the free States of North America.” At that moment, the Americans had been “in the same place which the Filipinos are in today.” Contrary to some, Filipino resistance was “not motivated by hatred of race, but by the same principles sealed with the blood of [the Americans’] own ancestors.”100

Mabini was right that, in waging guerrilla war, Filipinos risked “the pain of being called uncivilized.” Throughout the colonial world, races were characterized by the way they made war. The General Orders No. 100, the Civil War–era regulations that were the U.S. Army’s principal reference point on questions of “irregular” warfare in the Philippines, relied heavily on racial-historical dichotomies between “civilized” and “savage” war. While “barbarous armies” and “uncivilized people,” for example, offered no protection to civilians, for example, the “inoffensive citizen” was protected in “modern regular wars of the Europeans, and their descendents in other portions of the globe.” While the orders authorized retaliation by “civilized nations,” taken too far this principle quickly led nearer to “the internecine wars of savages.”101

By these lights, those who waged guerrilla war were, by definition, “savage”; Filipino warfare did not take this form out of ignorance or strategy but out of race. Conventional wisdom to this effect issued from the top of the U.S. military hierarchy in the Philippines. “War in its earlier form was an act of violence which, from the very nature of primitive humanity and of the forces employed, knew no bounds,” General MacArthur declared in a December 1900 proclamation. “Mankind, from the beginning of civilization, however, has tried to mitigate, and to escape, as far as possible, from the consequences of this barbarous conception of warlike action.”102 The Filipinos, in refusing these boundaries, had shown themselves to be less than “civilized.” “The war on the part of the Filipinos,” wrote Secretary of War Elihu Root, “has been conducted with the barbarous cruelty common among uncivilized races.”103

This sense of race as the root cause of guerrilla war was also useful in explaining the guerrillas’ mass support as the U.S. effort ground to a halt in mid-1900. In his October 1, 1900 report, MacArthur sought to account for what he called, with begrudging respect, the “almost complete unity of action of the entire native population.” His conclusion was that Filipino participation was neither rational nor political. “[T]he adhesive principle comes from ethnological homogeneity,” he stated, “which induces men to respond for a time to the appeals of consanguineous leadership, even when such action is opposed to their own interests.”104 General S. B. M. Young concurred.“The keynote of the insurrection among the Filipinos past, present and future is not tyranny,” he stated in an April 1901 address, “for we are not tyrants. It is race.”105

U.S. soldiers also increasingly defined the entire Filipino population as the enemy. Race became a sanction for exterminist war, the means by which earlier distinctions between combatants and noncombatants—already fragile—eroded or collapsed entirely. As long as popular support for the rebellion was conceived of as “political”—as a matter of decisions, interests, and incentives—within an ultimately pluralistic Filipino polity, the task of the U.S. Army was to “persuade” Filipinos of various sectors to accept U.S. sovereignty. That this “persuasion” might take terrible, total forms was something that U.S. officials readily acknowledged. But no such persuasion was possible where “ethnological homogeneity” governed over reason. The Filipinos were one united “race”; its “savagery” placed it outside the bounds of “civilized” warfare: the two explanatory halves converged, pincer-like, into racial-exterminist war as the only means to “peace.”

Close ties between race and exterminist warfare can be found in the everpresent racial terms employed by U.S. soldiers in their descriptions of violence against prisoners and civilians. In 1902, for example, Albert Gardner, in Troop B of the 1st U.S. Cavalry, composed a would-be comic song dedicated to the “water-cure” torture—in which filthy water was poured into the mouths of Filipino prisoners, drowning them—sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

1st

Get the good old syringe boys and fill it to the brim

We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him

Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim

Shouting the battle cry of freedom

Chorus

Hurrah Hurrah We bring the Jubilee

Hurrah Hurrah The flag that makes him free

Shove in the nozzel [sic] deep and let him taste of liberty

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.106

Racial terms were employed in accounts of the shooting of Filipino prisoners, often disguised as failed “escapes.” William Eggenberger reported hearing at one point that the “niggers” would “all the am [sic] prisoners they capture fromnow on, and of corse [sic] we will ring [sic] all the damn necks of the ones we capture too.”107 He recorded several occasions of shooting prisoners attempting to “escape,” but later confessed that

When we capture a suspicious nigger, we generally loose him in the swamps, that is he is lost and he isn’t lost but he never shows up any more. Turn about is fair play. They do it to us and we do it to them, they killed three of our fellows with out mercy but we have taken a very sweet revenge and a very clear revenge to them too.108

Most strikingly, racial terms were used in describing attacks against known civilians. An Oregon soldier at one point described shooting indiscriminately into forests and residences. “[T]he ‘nigs’ were so well hidden and using smoke less powder,” he wrote home, “it was almost impossible to find any of them, but we filled the trees with lead… we sent a shot into every clump of bush and houses, thick leaved trees, or anything that looked like a place for a ‘nigger’ to hide.”109

One of the most banal and brutal manifestations of racial exterminism was U.S. soldiers’ imagination of the war as hunting. The Manila occupation and early conventional warfare had frustrated U.S. soldiers’ martial masculinity; the metaphor of the hunt made war, at last, into masculine self-fulfillment.110 All at once, a language of hunting animalized Filipinos, made sense of guerrilla war to American troops, and joined them in manly fraternity. “I don’t know when the thing will let out,” wrote Louis Hubbard one week into the war, “and don’t care as we are having lots of excitement. It makes me think of killing jack rabbits.”111 Earl Pearsall jotted in his diary on the third day of the war that “[o]ur boys kept them on the run and shot them down like rabbits.”112 John F. Bright described one advance near San Juan Bridge: “As we advanced they would jump up like rabbits only a few feet from us, dead game ready to sell their lives as dearly as possible, but we shot them down before they could do any damage.”113

Racial terms explicitly linked hunting to exterminism. “There is no question that our men do ‘shoot niggers’ somewhat in the sporting spirit,” admitted H. L. Wells. “It is lots of sport to hunt these black devils,” wrote Louis Hubbard just three weeks into the war.114 Private George Osborn of the 6th Infantry wrote home from Negros on January 15, 1900: “Just back from the fight. Killed 22 niggers captured 29 rifels [sic] and 1 shotgun and I tell you it was a fight… we just shot the niggers like a hunter would rabbits.”115 In April 1899, Lieutenant George Telfer wrote from Marilao that nighttime scouting raids were his men’s only relief from the boredom of guarding a railroad, that it was “great fun for the men to go on ‘nigger hunts.’”116

Racial-exterminist sentiment of this kind was not uncommon in U.S. soldiers’ songs, diaries, and letters. It was at the very center of the most popular of the

U.S. Army’s marching songs, which marked the Filipino population as a whole as the enemy and made killing Filipinos the only means to their “civilization.”

Damn, damn, damn the Filipino

Pock-marked khakiac ladrone;

Underneath the starry flag

Civilize him with a Krag,

And return us to our own beloved home.117

One Nebraskan soldier boasted to his parents of his comrades’ bold, aggressive fighting spirit, restrained only by officers’ reticence. “If they would turn the boys loose,” he wrote, “there wouldn’t be a nigger left in Manila twelve hours after.”118 Henry Hackthorn explained to his family that the war, which he regretted, had been avoidable but “the niggers got in a hurry.” “We would kill all in sight if we could only receive the necessary orders,” he wrote.119 A dramatic monologue entitled “The Sentry” written and published by a U.S. soldier features a sympathetic portrayal of a lonely U.S. sentry on watch duty. “If I catch one of those bolo-men slinking around me, I’ll just plug the son-of-a-gun full of holes,” he says, just before he is treacherously killed. “I hate the very sight of their black hides.”120 Eggenberger reported happily in March 1900 that Macabebes had killed 130 “ladrones” without one escape. “[L]et the good work go on we will have the damn bug eaters sivilized [sic] if we have to bury them to do it,” he wrote.121 The year before, he had casually urged his family to have an old friend write to him. “[T]ell him if he don’t rite [sic] to me when i get back i will take him for a nigger and bombard him, tell him no Amegoes (friends) will go then, ha ha.”122 A war of “no amigos” was a war without surrender.

 

RACE AND ATROCITY

Just as imperialists had mobilized racial ideologies to defend the war’s ends, so too was race made to defend its means, undermining moral and legal claims against American soldiers accused of “marked severities” in the halls of U.S. governance, in press debates, and in courts-martial.123 When Senate hearings between January and June 1902 raised the question of U.S. atrocities, the U.S. Army’s defenders repeatedly held that abuses were rare; that where they occurred they were swiftly and thoroughly punished; and that testimony to the contrary was characterized by partisan and cowardly—possibly traitorous— exaggeration. Racial arguments, in at least three varieties, were central to the administration’s defense. The first variant claimed that the Filipinos’ guerrilla war, as “savage” war, was entirely outside the moral and legal standards and strictures of “civilized” war. Those who adopted guerrilla war, it was argued, surrendered all claims to bounded violence and mercy from their opponent. Captain John H. Parker employed this line of argument in a November 1900 letter to President Roosevelt complaining that the U.S. Army should not “attempt to meet a half civilized foe… with the same methods devised for civilized warfare against people of our own race, country and blood.”124 This point was also made at Senate hearings in 1902, when General Hughes described the burning of entire towns by advancing U.S. troops to Senator Rawlins as a means of “punishment,” and Rawlins inquired: “But is that within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare?” General Hughes replied succinctly: “These people are not civilized.”125

In their effort to depict Filipino combat as “savage,” the war’s defenders made much of what they considered Filipino “race war” against whites. Racial exterminism by whites, it seemed, was merely the inevitable, progressive working out of history; race war took place only when nonwhites resisted white domination, in violation of the natural order.126 Evidence of a Filipino “race war” was found in what was represented as an early 1899 military order by General Teodoro Sandiko, a document reputedly captured by U.S. soldiers.127 In it, Sandiko allegedly commanded Filipinos inside the U.S.-occupied city of Manila to revolt in preparation for an invasion of the city from the outside by the army of the republic: not only U.S. soldiers, but all “whites” inside the city were to be killed. While evidence of U.S. racial-exterminist atrocities was cut off by censorship, the “Sandiko order” was widely promoted in the U.S. press as early as April 1899 as signs of Filipino “savagery.” “The war has developed into a race war,” wrote John F. Bass of the Sandiko order in Harper’s Weekly. “After this let no one raise his voice to favor Aguinaldo’s government or army.” There was “no choice of methods” ahead, only the need for a “strong military government, untempered by mercy.”128 Use of the Sandiko order intensified with the presidential race of 1900, finding its way into vice presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt’s speeches, and even into the Republican platform.129 The Filipinos’ “race war,” it appeared, contrasted sharply with the war of “civilization” waged by the United States.

If the first argument defined U.S. actions as outside of the moral and legal framework of “civilized war,” the second explained American atrocities in a way that distanced them from U.S. initiative. “Civilized” men might reluctantly adopt “savage” methods to defeat savages, but they could do so without surrendering their civilization; guerrilla war was tactical for whites, “ethnological” for nonwhites. This argument required emphasis on racial solidarity between domestic U.S. audiences and American soldiers. Major-General S. B. M. Young accused those who had claimed “that our soldiers are barbarous savages… and not fit to be considered as civilized,” as “abusing their own flesh and blood” for political advantage. He found the anti-imperialists more traitorous even than the Civil War’s Copperheads had been; the latter, at least, had been defending “kindred,” where the current war had been “against a cruel and vindictive lot of savages, who were in no way related to us.”130 Henry Cabot Lodge expressed similar sentiment in an address before the Senate. “One would suppose from what has been said here in debate,” he stated, “that it was an army of aliens and mercenaries; that we had out there in the Philippine Islands some strange foreign force which we had let loose upon that helpless people.” But this was not the case. “Why, Mr. President, those soldiers are our own. They are our flesh and blood, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.” If U.S. atrocities were not a matter of “race,” they must be a matter of emulation: Americans appropriated what little “savagery” they had undertaken from their immediate surroundings. “What is it which has led them to commit these atrocities which we all so much regret and over which we sorrow?” Lodge spoke climactically.

I think I know why these things have happened. I think they have grown out of the conditions of warfare, of the war that was waged by the Filipinos themselves, a semicivilized people, with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics, with the Asiatic indifference to life, with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiatic cruelty, all tinctured and increased by three hundred years of subjection to Spain.131

The third argument attributed U.S. atrocities entirely to Macabebe collaborators organized into Scout units. If the “emulation” argument suggested that Americans were merely imitating “savages,” the third argument was that atrocities had been committed almost entirely by cooperating Filipino troops over which American officers had little or no control.132 Call it a policy of outsourcing “savagery”: where the Macabebe Scouts had been earlier hailed as “Filipinos in Uncle Sam’s Uniforms,” they were represented during atrocity investigations as a kind of mad unconscious that could neither be dispensed with nor fully harnessed. In response to reports that certain Macabebe units had looted the town of Magallanes and raped women there, for example, General Wheaton noted that they were “in these outrages, conducting themselves in their usual and customary manner.”133 Brigadier-General Frederick Funston strongly denied his own troops had committed the “water cure,” but it was “common knowledge” that Macabebes had done so “when not under the direct control of some officer” and it was “utterly impossible to prevent a few offenses of this kind.” Responsibility went only as far as race. Funston had “never heard of its having been administered to a native by a white man.”134

The last act of the administration’s political counteroffensive was an (almost) final declaration of the end of the war. As one Washington Post editorial noted, the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations had attempted, and failed repeatedly, to end the war by fiat; indeed, it observed, the conflict had been “brought to an end on six different occasions” since the first declaration of U.S. victory. “A bad thing cannot be killed too often,” it stated. Two months after his address at Arlington, President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to “kill” the war yet again, declaring the Philippine-American War officially over on July 4, 1902, as if cued by John Philip Sousa himself.135 Returning U.S. soldiers, freed up by the transfer of military power to the Scouts and police power to the newly formed Philippine Constabulary, were perhaps the most potent if illusory signs to American audiences of an “insurrection” well-ended.136 But this was a continually beleaguered fiction that sometimes resulted in unflattering reversals: between 1901 and 1905, parts of the provinces of Batangas, Cebu, Bohol, Samar, Cavite, and Albay would be returned to military authority in response to persistent “ladronism.”137 The war’s phantom life after mid-1902 was best indicated by the commission’s Bandolerismo Statute of November 1902 which, even more than Roosevelt’s declaration, ended the war by fiat, defining any remaining Filipino resistance to American authority as “banditry” rather than “insurrection.” Second was the Reconcentration Act of 1903 which, to the contrary, extended the war in tactical terms by authorizing use of the wartime measure where necessary under civilian authority; liberal use would be made of this in subsequent years, in Albay and Bicol in 1903 and Batangas and Cavite in 1905.138 The commission would pass specific, separate acts shifting authority from the military to civilians, officially “ending” the war in these regions in silent, piecemeal fashion until 1913.

As power shifted from the U.S. Army to civilian administrators, a process that was tense and reversible, so too did the racial formation that would organize U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. On the face of it, the new regime’s racial terms—“tutelage,” “uplift,” “evolution,” “assimilation”—were dramatic departures from the depths of racial exterminism, departures that closely corresponded to the needs of an emerging Filipino-American collaborationist state whose “internal frontiers” would emerge as the next ground of struggle. If theU.S. military’s distrust of the new administrators, and the frequent refusal of officers to take part in its new, interracial rituals, suggested conflict, there were also continuities: students needed to be tested and disciplined, children were to be supervised, controlled, and punished. “Benevolent” assimilation could always, implicitly, be withdrawn for the other kind.139

During the Philippine-American War, U.S. soldiers had borrowed and adapted the Tagalog word bundok, meaning mountain or remote area, and converted it to “boondock,” a term for a liminal, border region, with connotations of bewilderment and disorientation. The “boondocks” emerged where older maps failed, where prior patterns and relationships could no longer be recognized. Making sense of colonial war required Americans to develop a novel racial formation that could reorient the United States at a crucial transition in its imperial career. Filipino revolutionaries had attempted to achieve American recognition through their “civilization” and even in their fighting. But as combat and race-making became entangled—as guerrilla war became the warfare of “savages”—the two processes spiraled together into racial-exterminist warfare with devastating human consequences.140 The legacy of colonial violence would continue to haunt both societies as empire-building drew the United States and the Philippines together in the twentieth century.

 

Posted at Japan Focus on June 2, 2006.

Notes

1

Theodore Roosevelt, Address of President Roosevelt at Arlington, Memorial Day, May 30, 1902.

2

Traditional historiography on the war minimizes S. racial animus and atrocity and emphasizes the “benevolence” of the U.S. campaign. See John Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The U.S. Army in the Philippines, 18981902 (Westport, CT, 1973); Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989); Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 18991902 (Lawrence, KS, 2000); Brian McAllister Linn, “Taking Up the White Man’s Burden: The U.S. Military in the Philippines, 1898–1902,” in 1898: Enfoques y Perspectivas, ed. Luis E. González Vales (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1997), 111–42. For more nuanced accounts, see Resil B. Mojares, The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 18991906 (Quezon City, Philippines, 1999); Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War (Quezon City, Philippines, 1993). For a recent collection of historical essays and artworks relating to the war, see Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York, 2002).

3

Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philip- pines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT, 1982).

4

On the political dynamism of race, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, 1994), esp. chaps. 1–5; Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100 (February 1995): 1–20; Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Waller- stein (London; New York, 1991); Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 143–78. For the argument that U.S. Indian policy was the “origin” of Philippine policy, see Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperial- ism,” Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (1980). On the broader reconstruction of race in the context of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).

5

For the purposes of this essay, exterminist warfare is warfare in which noncombatants are viewed as legitimate targets during the duration of combat but coexistence is imagined as a postwar goal; I distinguish this from genocide, in which violence is organized around the deliberate elimination of all members of an “enemy” I refrain from the use of the category of “total war” due to the category’s vague boundaries. On the concept of exterminism, see Dirk Bönker, “Militarizing the Western World: Navalism, Empire and State-Building before World War I” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 2002). On “total war” during the Philippine-American War, see May, “Was the Philippine-American War a ‘Total War’?” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, eds. Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster (Washington, DC; Cambridge, England; New York, 1999). For an intriguing comparative perspective on these questions, see Helmut Walser Smith, “The Logic of Colonial Violence: Germany in Southwest Africa (1904–1907); the United States in the Philippines (1899–1902),” in German and American Nationalism: A Com- parative Perspective, eds. Hartmut Lehmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (New York, 1999), 205–31. On other U.S. race wars, see John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, 7th printing (New York, 1993); Mark Grimsley, “ ‘Rebels’ and ‘Redskins’: U.S. Military Conduct toward White Southerners and Native Americans in Comparative Perspec- tive,” in Civilians in the Path of War, eds. Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (Lincoln, NE, 2002), 137–61.

6

On racism in Spanish colonial policy, see Josep Maria Fradera, “Raza y Ciudadanía: El Factor Racial en la Delimitacion de los Derechos de los Americanos,” in Gobernar Colonias (Barcelona, 1999).

7

John Schumacher, The Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895 (Manila, 1973).

8

La Solidaridad, 1889–1895, trans. Guadalupe Fores-Ganzon, vols. 1–5; trans. Luis Matheru, vols. 6, 7 (Manila, 1997). For the case of Rizal, see Paul A. Dumol, “Rizal Contra European Racism: An Autobiography of José Rizal Embedded in Blumentritt’s Obituary of Rizal,” in European Studies: Essays by Filipino Scholars, ed. Vyva Victoria M. Aguirre (Quezon City: Diliman, 1999).

9

Teodoro Agoncillo, Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic (Quezon City, Philippines, 1960); Cesar Adib Majul, The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine Revolution, rev. ed. (New York, 1974 [1967]).

10

On the S. Army’s attempt to regulate prostitution in the interests of venereal disease control, see Paul A. Kramer, “The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War,” in Haunted by Empire: Race and Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Stoler (Durham, NC, 2006).

11

[Unsigned] from the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, May 17, 1900, in Willard Gatewood, “Smoked Yankeesand the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Urbana, IL; Chicago; London, 1971), 279.

12

Quoted in Lewis O. Saum, “The Western Volunteer and ‘The New Empire,’ ” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 57, no. 1 ( January 1966): 22.

13

H. M. Brace, “Itamo, the Insurrecto: A Story of the Philippines,” The Soldier’s Letter 1, no. 1 (1898): 16–19.

14

Brace, “Itamo, the Insurrecto: A Story of the Philippines,” 19–20.

15

Felipe Agoncillo, Memorial to the Senate of the United States (Washington, DC, 1899), 2, 7.

16

On the links between “print-capitalism” and nationalist “imagined community,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). On the press during the Philippine-American War, see John Lent, “The Philippine Press during the Revolution and the Filipino-American War,” Asian Thought and Society III, no. 9 (December 1978): 308–21; see also Jesús Valenzuela, History of Journalism in the Philippine Islands (Manila, 1933).

17

“Nuestro Programa,” La Independencia, year 1, 1 (September 3, 1898). All quota- tions from La Independencia are translations from the original Spanish by the author.

18

Advertisement for La Independencia, year 1, no. 2 (September 5, 1898).

19

See, for example, “El Espíritu de la Asociación,” La Independencia, year 1, no. 5 (Sep- tember 9, 1898); “De Higiene Pública,” La Independencia, year 1, no. 36 (October 17, 1898); “Los Presupuestos,” La Independencia, year 1, no. 41 (October 22, 1898); “Apuntes Sobre Enseñanza,” La Independencia, year 1, no. 47 (October 29, 1898); “Moralización,” La Indepen- dencia, year 1, no. 63 (November 18, 1898).

20

R. Sargent, “In Aguinaldo’s Realm,” New York Independent, September 14, 1899, 2477.

21

U.S. Senate, Senate Document No. 196, Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 56th Cong., 1st sess., February 23, 1900, 13.

22

B. Wilcox, “In the Heart of Luzon,” New York Independent, September 14, 1899, 2475; L. R. Sargent, “In Aguinaldo’s Realm,” 2479.

23

Sargent, “In Aguinaldo’s Realm,” 2480–1.

24

Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 20.

25

Sargent, “In Aguinaldo’s Realm,” 2481.

26

Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 16.

27

“General McReeve’s Interview,” reprinted in The Anti-Imperialist 1, 3 ( July 4, 1899): 18. On discourses of slavery and antislavery in Philippine-American colonial politics, see Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

28

Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 20.

29

Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 20.

30

Quoted in A. Johnson, History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War and Other Items of Interest (Raleigh, NC, 1899), 131. The history of black soldiers fighting in the Philip- pines, and primary documents relating to their experiences, have been explored elsewhere: Willard Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden (Urbana, IL, 1975); Gatewood, “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire. For black public opinion on the war, see George P. Marks, ed., The Black Press Views American Imperialism, 1898–1900 (New York, 1971). On African Americans, gender, and empire, see Michele Mitchell, “ ‘The Black Man’s Burden’: African-Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood 1890–1910,” International Review of Social History 44 (1999): 77–99.

31

Frederick Palmer, “White Man and Brown Man in the Philippines,” Scribner’s Maga- zine 27 ( January 1900): 79.

32

Ibid

33

William McKinley to the Secretary of War, December 21, 1898, in “Message from the President of the United States,” Senate Document 208, 56th Cong., 1st sess. (1899–1900), 82–3.

34

Apacible, Al Pueblo Americano/To the American People (New York, 1900).

35

“To the Filipino People,” Exhibit 992, in John M. Taylor, ed., The Philippine Insurrection against the United States (Pasay City, Philippines, 1971), V:96. Taylor speculates that its author was Emilio Aguinaldo; a likely candidate is Apolinario Mabini.

36

Mabini, quoted in Teodoro Kalaw, The Philippine Revolution (Manila, 1969), 176, 177.

37

The best account of the domestic S. politics of the war remains Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979). On U.S. anti-imperialism, see Daniel Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, MA, 1972); Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968); Jim Zwick, ed., Sentenaryo/ Centennial, http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/index.html; E. Berkeley Thompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920 (Philadelphia, 1970); James A. Zimmerman, “Who Were the Anti-Imperialists and the Expansionists of 1898 and 1899? A Chicago Perspective,” Pacific Historical Review 46 (November 1977), 589–601; James A. Zimmerman, “The Chicago Liberty and Loyalty Meetings, 1899: Public Attitudes toward the Philippine-American War,” North Dakota Quarterly 43, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 29–37. On the importance of anti-imperialism to twentieth-century foreign policy, see Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism (Malden, MA, 2001). While they took the name “anti-imperialist” for themselves, many critics of the war advocated overseas economic and cultural imperialism alongside their anticolonialist and antimilitarist politics. I nonetheless use their term for themselves here for purposes of clarity.

38

For examples of anti-imperialist argument, see Philip Foner and Richard Winches- ter, The Anti-Imperialist Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States (New York, 1984); Roger Bresnahan, ed., In Time of Hesitation: American Anti-Imperialists and the Philippine-American War (Quezon City, Philippines, 1981); and Zwick, Sentenaryo/ Centennial. On the anti-imperialist sense of history, including national-exceptionalist fears of decline, see Fabian Hilfrich, “Falling Back into History: Conflicting Visions of National Decline and Destruction in the Imperialism Debate around the Turn of the Century,” in The American Nation, National Identity, Nationalism, ed. Knud Krakau (Münster, Germany, 1997), 149–66.

39

On the role of race in the annexation debate, see Rubin Francis Weston, Racism in S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on American Foreign Policy, 1893–1946 (Colum- bia, SC, 1972). On racial-exclusionist anti-imperialism, see Christopher Lasch, “The Anti- Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of Man,” Journal of Southern History 24 (August 1958): 319–31; Eric Tyrone Lowery Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).

40

Jim Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the Origins of Filipino-American Oppo- sitional Solidarity,” Amerasia Journal 24 (Summer 1998): 64–85.

41

On the politics of Filipino-American collaboration, see Ruby Paredes, , Philippine Colonial Democracy (Manila, 1989); Norman G. Owen, ed., Compadre Colonialism: Studies on the Philippines under American Rule (Ann Arbor, MI, 1971); Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Westport, CT, 1980); Bonifacio Salamanca, The Filipino Reaction to American Rule, 1901–1913 (Hamden, CT, 1968).

42

Anglo-Saxonists themselves conceded that the United States’ “Anglo-Saxonism” was compromised by diverse European As Matthew Frye Jacobson shows, these groups actively debated the politics of imperial conquest in the Philippines; imperialists among them compromised any strict, essentialist connection between Anglo-Saxonism and empire. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Berkeley, CA, 2002), chap. 5.

43

Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1315–53.

44

Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” McClure’s Magazine (February 1899).

45

On contemporary social-evolutionary theory, see George Stocking, , Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago, 1982); Curtis Hinsley, The Smith- sonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, DC, 1981); John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana, IL, 1971); Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, 1944).

46

On “tribes,” see Morton Fried, The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park, CA, 1975).

47

“The Native Peoples of the Philippines,” Report of the Philippine Commission 1 (1900): 11.

48

Ibid., 11–12.

49

“Preliminary Report: Capacity for Self-Government,” November 2, 1899, Report of the Philippine Commission 1 (1900): 182.

50

“The Native Peoples of the Philippines,” 14–15.

51

“Preliminary Report: Capacity for Self-Government,” 182. On the politics of statistics, see Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ, 1995

52

Sixto Lopez, The “Tribes” in the Philippines (Boston, 1900). While Lopez here recog- nized “non-Christians” as superior to Spaniards, the question of whether “non-Christians” belonged to the Philippine nation on an equal footing with “civilized,” Hispanicized peoples would emerge as a central battleground between Filipinos and S. colonial officials in the early twentieth century. See Kramer, The Blood of Government. On Lopez’s work in the United States, see Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the Origins of Filipino-American Oppositional Solidarity.”

53

L. Lisle, “How I Killed an Insurgent,” Manila Times, July 4, 1899, 3.

54

Andrew Wadsworth to Sister, July 20, 1898, Folder 158, Hussey-Wadsworth Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann On Wadsworth’s correspondence, see Margaret Inglehart Reilly, “Andrew Wadsworth: A Nebraska Soldier in the Philippines, 1898– 1899,” Nebraska History 68, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 183–99.

55

Andrew Wadsworth to Sister, February 19, 1899, Folder 172, Hussey-Wadsworth Papers.

56

Andrew Wadsworth to Jennie Wadsworth [Aunt], March 8, 1899, Folder 173, Hussey- Wadsworth

57

Earl Pearsall, Diary Entry for January 5, 1899, Folder: “Pearsall, Earl, 1898-W-1521, 1st Vol. Inf., Diary for 1899,” Box 97: Nebraska Infantry, 1st Regiment, Spanish- American War Survey (SAWS), U.S. Military History Institute (USMHI).

58

Pearsall, Diary Entry for February 4, 1899, Folder: “Pearsall, Earl, 1898-W-1521, 1st Vol. Inf., Diary for 1899.”

59

Pearsall, Diary Entry for February 24, 1899, Folder: “Pearsall, Earl, 1898-W-1521, 1st Vol. Inf., Diary for 1899.”

60

Pearsall, Diary Entry for March 6, 1899, Folder: “Pearsall, Earl, 1898-W-1521, 1st Vol. Inf., Diary for 1899.”

61

Wheeler Martin to “Dear Father, Mother, and all,” August 18, 1898, Folder: “Martin, Wheeler , 1898-W-131, Col. A, 1st Idaho, Vol. Inf., 15 letters, newsclip,” Box 27: Idaho Infantry, 1st Regiment, SAWS, USMHI.

62

Wheeler Martin to “Dear Father, Mother, and all,” March 18, 1899; April 4, 1899, Folder: “Martin, Wheeler , 1898-W-131, Col. A, 1st Idaho, Vol. Inf., 15 letters, newsclip,” Box 27: Idaho Infantry, 1st Regiment, SAWS, USMHI.

63

William Henry Barrett, Diary Entry for February 9, 1899, Folder: “Pvt. William Henry Barrett, 1898–1939, 2nd Oregon Volunteer Infantry,” Box 137: Oregon Infantry, 2d Regiment, SAWS,

64

Barrett, Diary Entry for February 23, 1899, Folder: “Pvt. William Henry Barrett, 1898–1939, 2nd Oregon Volunteer Infantry.”

65

Louis Hubbard to “My dearest Mother,” December 20, 1898, Folder: “Louis Hubbard, 1898-W-987, 1st Regt. Band, 1st S. D. Vol. Inf., Newspaper, map letters,” Box 169: South Dakota Infantry, 1st Regiment, SAWS, USMHI.

66

Hubbard to “My dearest Mother,” February 20, 1899, Folder: “Louis Hubbard, 1898-W-987, 1st Regt. Band, 1st S. D. Vol. Inf., Newspaper, map letters.”

67

Ibid.

68

Hubbard to “My dearest Mother,” March 17, 1899, Folder: “Louis Hubbard, 1898-W-987, 1st Regt. Band, 1st S. D. Vol. Inf., Newspaper, map letters.”

69

John Bass, dispatch of August 30, 1898, in Harper’s Weekly 42 (October 15, 1898): 1008.

70

Henry Loomis Nelson, quoted in Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, 240.

71

Statement by S. Anderson, October 6, 1901, in “Charges of Cruelty, Etc., to the Natives of the Philippines,” Senate Document No. 205, Part 1, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 21.

72

Palmer, “White Man and Brown Man in the Philippines,” 81.

73

H. L. Wells, quoted in The Watchman (Boston), July 27, 1900, in Richard E. Welch, “American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 2 (1974): 241.

74

In my interpretation, U.S. soldiers’ use of the term “nigger,” for example, does not convey the mere “export” of unchanged domestic U.S. racial formations, as the evolution of soldiers’ terminology for Filipinos itself suggests. There is evidence that in some cases the term became detached from its domestic contexts and applied to Filipinos as opposed to African- Americans, as when a white soldier explained to a black soldier that the term “nigger” did not apply to him in the Philippines. [Unsigned] from the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, May 17, 1900, in Gatewood, “Smoked Yankeesand the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898– 1902, 280.

75

On the term “gook,” see also David Roediger, “Gook: The Short History of an Americanism,” in David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London; New York, 1994).

76

Charles Freeman, “Yankee Music in the Far East,” American Old-Timer 3, no. 1 (1935): 31.

77

For this interpretation, see Russell Roth, Muddy Glory: America’s “Indian Wars” in the Philippines, 1899–1935 (West Hanover, MA, 1981), 223.

78

Freeman, “Yankee Music in the Far East,” 31.

79

Lewis to “Friend Tom,” November 25, 1900, in Peter Lewis and R. Kells, Foot Soldier in an Occupation Force: The Letters of Peter Lewis, 1898–1902 (Manila, 1999), 96.

80

MacArthur, quoted in Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, 112.

81

Otis, quoted in Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, 112.

82

On the structure of the Philippine army during both the first and second revolutions, see Luis Camara Dery, “The Army of the First Philippine Republic,” in Luis Camara Dery, The Army of the First Philippine Republic and Other Historical Essays (Manila, 1995), 1–77.

83

See Linn, S. Army Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902. On problems of intelligence gathering during the guerrilla stage of the war, see Brian McAllister Linn, “Intelligence and Low-Intensity Conflict during the Philippine War, 1899–1902,” Intelligence and National Security 6, no. 1 (1991).

84

Wagner, quoted in Linn, “Intelligence and Low-Intensity Conflict during the Philip- pine War, 1899–1902,” 90.

85

Isabelo De los Reyes, Introduction to Rodriguez, “La Guerra de Guerrillas,” Filipinas Ante Europa, year 2, no. 20 (March 10, 1900), 81–82. Translation from the original Spanish by the author.

86

Juan Villamor, Inédita Crónica de la Guerra Americano-Filipina en el Norte de Luzon, 1899–1901 (Manila, 1924), 81. Translation from the original Spanish by the On other connections between the Philippine-American War and the almost simultaneous Anglo-Boer War, see Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons.”

87

On class tensions between the republic and Filipino peasants during the Philippine- American War, see Milagros Guerrero, “Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1899–1902” (Ph.D. , University of Michigan, 1977).

88

On late-nineteenth-century Filipino masculinity and codes of honor, see Norman Owen, “Masculinity and National Identity in the 19th Century Philippines,” Illes I Imperis 2 (Spring 1999): 23–48.

89

Epifanio Concepción, Memorias de un Revolucionario (Iloilo, Philippines, 1949), 57. Translation from the original Spanish by the

90

See, for example, Paul Dickson, War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases from the Civil War to the Gulf War (New York, 1994), 28.

91

Percy Hill, “The Anting-Anting,” American Old-Timer 1, 12 (October 1934): 12.

92

Jacob Isselhard, The Filipino in Every-Day Life: An Interesting and Instructive Narrative of the Personal Observations of an American Soldier during the Late Philippine Insurrection (Chicago, 1904), 99–100.

93

Erwin Clarkson Garrett, My Bunkie, and Other Ballads (Philadelphia, 1907), 18. The Katipunan was the name of the revolutionary secret society that inaugurated the Philippine

94

On contrasting S. and Filipino definitions of “peace,” see Maria Serena I. Diokno, “Perspectives on Peace during the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902,” South East Asia Research 5, no. 1 (1997): 5–19.

95

James Bell to Apolinario Mabini, August 28, 1900, in The Letters of Apolinario Mabini (Manila, 1965), 265–6.

96

On Mabini, see Cesar Adib Majul, Apolinario Mabini, Revolutionary (Manila, 1964); Cesar Adib Majul, Mabini and the Philippine Revolution (Quezon City, Philippines, 1960).

97

Apolinario Mabini to James Bell, August 31, 1900, in The Letters of Apolinario Mabini, 259–60.

98

Ibid.

99

Mabini to Felipe Buencamino, July 20, 1900, in The Letters of Apolinario Mabini, 254.

 

100

Mabini to Bell, 260.

101

Francis Lieber, “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” in Lieber’s Code and the Law of War, Richard Shelly Hartigan (Chicago, 1983), Articles 25, 28. On regulations regarding Union Army conduct during the Civil War, see Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, England; New York, 1995).

102

Arthur MacArthur, “Proclamation,” in 57th , 1st sess., House Document 2: “Annual Report of the Secretary of War,” 1901, vol. 1, pt. 4, 92.

103

Root, quoted in Moorfield Storey and Julian Codman, Secretary Root’s Record: “Marked Severities” in Philippine Warfare (Boston, 1902), 54.

104

MacArthur, Report to General of Army, October 1, 1900, 4, 6.

105

Young, quoted in “Gen. Young on Filipinos: The Cavalry Leader Makes a Speech in Pittsburg [sic],” New York Times, April 28, 1901, 3.

106

“The Water Cure in the I.,” in Notebook, Folder: “Albert E. Gardner, 1898-W- 851, Troop B., 1st U.S. Cav., Scrapbook, Booklets, Letters, Soldiers’ Manual,” Box 194: U.S. Cavalry, 1st Regiment, SAWS, USMHI.

107

William Eggenberger to “Dear Mother and all,” January 28, 1900, Folder: “Wm Eggenberger, 1898-120, K, 3rd U.S. Inf.,” Box 214: “U.S. Infantry, 3rd Regiment,” SAWS, USMHI.

108

William Eggenberger to “Dear Mother and all,” March 25, 1901, Folder: “Wm Eggenberger, 1898-120, K, 3rd U.S. Inf.,” Box 214: “U.S. Infantry, 3rd Regiment,” SAWS, USMHI.

109

Southwick, quoted in Sean McEnroe, “Oregonian Soldiers and the Portland Press in the Philippine Wars of 1898 and 1899: How Oregonians Defined the Race of Filipinos and the Mission of America” (master’s thesis, Portland State University, 2001), 84.

110

On martial masculinity during the Spanish-Cuban-American War and Philippine- American Wars, see Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998). On the period more broadly, see Donald Mrozek, “The Habit of Victory: The American Military and the Cult of Manliness,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York, 1987). On “passionate” or “savage” masculinity among middle-class American men, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), chap. 10; John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington, IN, 1973).

111

Hubbard to “My dearest Mother,” February 12, 1899, Folder: “Louis Hubbard, 1898-W-987, 1st Regt. Band, 1st S. D. Vol. Inf., Newspaper, map letters,” Box 169: South Dakota Infantry, 1st Regiment, SAWS, USMHI.

112

Pearsall, Diary Entry for February 7, 1899, Folder: “Pearsall, Earl, 1898-W-1521, 1st Vol. Inf., Diary for 1899.”

113

John Bright, quoted in Gregory Dean Chapman, “Taking Up the White Man’s Burden: Tennesseans in the Philippine Insurrection, 1899,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1988): 33.

114

Hubbard to “My dearest Mother,” February 20, 1899

115

Osborn, quoted in Roth, Muddy Glory, 53.

116

George Telfer to Lottie, April 7, 1899, in George Telfer and Sara Bunnett, Manila Envelopes: Oregon Volunteer George F. Telfer’s Spanish-American War Letters (Portland, OR, 1987), 151.

117

“The Soldiers’ Song,” in “Sound Off!” Soldier Songs from the Revolution to World War II, Edward Arthur Dolph (New York; Toronto, 1942), 200–202. See also the Military Order of the Carabao, Songs of the Carabao (Washington, DC, 1906). The song was sung to the tune of “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching,” a Union Army song in the Civil War.

118

Frank Johnson to parents, January 17, 1899, quoted in Saum, “The Western Volunteer and ‘The New Empire,’ ” 23.

119

Henry Hackthorn to “Dear Mother,” June 24, 1899, in Roger Grant, ed., “Letters from the Philippines: The 51st Iowa Volunteers at War, 1898–1899,” The Palimpsest 55, no. 6 (November/December 1974): 174.

120

“The Sentry,” in Pandia Ralli, The Soldier’s Banner: Souvenir Edition, Walter Cutter Papers, Box 1, USMHI.

121

Eggenberger to “Dear Mother and all,” March 26, 1899, Folder: “Wm Eggenberger, 1898-120, Col. K, 3rd U.S. Inf.”

122

Eggenberger to “Dear Mother and all,” May 20, 1899, Folder: “Wm Eggenberger, 1898-120, Col. K, 3rd U.S. Inf.”

123

On the investigation of S. atrocities, see Welch, “American Atrocities in the Philippines.”

124

John H. Parker quoted in Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, 190–1.

125

General Hughes, quoted in Henry Graff, ed., American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection (Boston, 1969), 65. For related arguments, see O. O. Howard, “Is Cruelty Insepa- rable from War?” The Independent 54, no. 2789 (May 15, 1902): 1161–2; James Chester, “The Great Lesson of the Boer War,” Journal of the Military Service Institution XXXII, no. CXXI ( January–February 1903): 1–6.

126

On the attribution of “racial” conflict to colonized people more broadly, see Frank Füredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998).

127

On the political use of “insurgent records,” see Renato Constantino, “Historical Truths from Biased Sources,” in John M. Taylor, ed., The Philippine Insurrection against the United States, I:ix–xiii; John T. Farrell, “An Abandoned Approach to Philippine History: John R. M. Taylor and the Philippine Insurrection Records,” Catholic Historical Review 39 (1954):385–407.

128

John F. Bass, dispatch of March 9, 1899, in Harper’s Weekly (April 22, 1899): 401–4.

129

“Chicago Hears Roosevelt: Immense Throngs Greet the Vice Presidential Candi- date,” New York Times, October 7, 1900, 1. Republican Party, Republican Campaign Text-Book 1900 (Milwaukee, WI, 1900). Sixto Lopez refuted charges of “race war” in “The Filipino Position,” Springfield Republican (MA), October 11, 1900.

130

B. M. Young, “Our Soldiers in the Philippines, an Address Delivered before the Men’s Club of the Church of the Epiphany, of Washington, DC, the Evening of November 13, 1902,” Folder: “Speech ‘Our Soldiers in the Philippines,’ ” Box 10, Samuel B. M. Young Papers, USMHI, 1, 2, 4.

131

Speech by Henry Cabot Lodge, May 5, 1902, Congressional Record, 57th , 1st sess., 5035. For a related argument regarding the moral “degeneration” of American soldiers under Filipino “influence,” see Henry C. Rowland, “Fighting Life in the Philippines,” McClure’s Magazine XIX (1902): 241–7. To make perfectly clear the race of “cruelty,” the War Department submitted 57 pages of testimony on U.S. soldiers’ atrocities and those of their Filipino allies, and 370 pages of testimony on the atrocities of Filipino revolutionaries. Compare: “Charges of Cruelty, Etc., to the Natives of the Philippines,” Senate Document No. 205, Part 1, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1–57; “Charges of Cruelty, Etc., to the Natives of the Philippines,” Senate Document No. 205, Part 2, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1–370.

132

On the Philippine Scouts, see Alfred McCoy, “The Colonial Origins of Philippine Military Traditions,” in The Philippine Revolution of 1896: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, Florentino Rodao and Felice Noelle Rodriguez (Quezon City, Philippines, 2001), 94–102; James R. Woolard, “The Philippine Scouts: The Development of America’s Colonial Army” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1975).

133

Wheaton, quoted in May, Battle for Batangas, 259–60.

134

Exhibit A, Letter from Frederick Funston to the Adjutant-General, February 2, 1902, 3.

135

Theodore Roosevelt, Proclamation of July 4, 1902, in General Orders 69, in “The Mabini Case,” Senate Document No. 111, 57th Cong., 2d sess. (1902–1903), 8–9.

136

On the Philippine constabulary, see McCoy, “The Colonial Origins of Philippine Military Traditions,” 102–6; George Yarrington Coats, “The Philippine Constabulary: 1901– 1917” (Ph.D. , Ohio State University, 1968).

137

William Pomeroy, “ ‘Pacification’ in the Philippines, 1898–1913,” France-Asie 21 (1967): 438.

138

Ibid., 442–3.

139

On “benevolent assimilation,” see Vicente Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the S. Colonization of the Philippines,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, NC, 1993).

140

Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski identify 1,004 S. battle deaths, 3,161 U.S. deaths by noncombat causes, and 2,911 wounded during the Philippine-American War, of a total 126,468 U.S. soldiers served. This was approximately three times the U.S. mortality rate during the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York, 1994), Appendix A, 653. Filipino military casualties are estimated at 16,000. Filipino civilian casualties remain uncertain, with estimates ranging as high as 250,000. See, for example, Glenn May, “150,000 Missing Filipinos: A Demographic Crisis in Batangas, 1887–1903,” Annales de Demographie Historique 1985 (1985): 215–43; John Gates, “War-Related Deaths in the Philippines, 1898–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 53, no. 3 (1984): 367–78.

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