Download Figures of the Unassimilable: American Empire, Filipino American

Figures of the Unassimilable:
American Empire, Filipino American Postcoloniality,
and the U.S.-Philippine War of 1898-1910s
By Oscar V. Campomanes
A. B., University of the Philippines, 1984
A. M., Brown University, 1987
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
May 2011
© Copyright 2011 by Oscar V. Campomanes
This dissertation by Oscar V. Campomanes is accepted in its present form
by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Date____________
____________________________________
Robert Lee, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date____________
____________________________________
Susan Smulyan, Reader
Date____________
____________________________________
Ralph Rodriguez, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council
Date____________
_____________________________________
Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School
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CURRICULUM VITAE
Oscar V. Campomanes was born in Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines on
November 23, 1961. He received his A.B., major in Filipino Language and Literature,
and minor and cognate in Journalism and Philippine History at the University of the
Philippines in 1984. Campomanes completed his A.M. in American Civilization at
Brown University in 1987.
Campomanes's work is widely published in both Philippine and international
journals, and in critical anthologies or reference volumes. His more recent articles
include: “Images of Filipino Racialization in the Anthropological Laboratories of the
American Empire: The Case of Daniel Folkmar” in PMLA (October 2008); “La
Revolución Filipina in the Age of Empire,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 18
(2007); and “Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and US Imperialism,” in ‘Positively No
Filipinos Allowed:’ Building Communities & Discourse (2006), edited by Tony
Tiongson, Edgardo Gutierrez, and Richard Gutierrez, with Temple University Press. He
has also served as a contributing writer for such volumes as the Encyclopedia of the
American Left (Garland, 1990), Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United
States (Oxford University Press, 1995), Cambridge Interethnic Companion to Asian
American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the Blackwell Companion
to Asian American Studies (2005). He is gathering his various critical essays of the past
two decades for publication as one anthology in both the Philippines and the United
States.
Last year, Campomanes was invited to participate in an anthology publishing
workshop and publication project, on the subject “Asian American Studies in Asia,” by
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the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan.
For the period 2006-2010, he was invited as one of several featured participants from
Japan, the Philippines, and the United States in a bookwriting project titled “The
Philippines and Japan Under the U.S.'s Shadow,” funded by the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science, the University of Tokyo (Todai), and Kanagawa University. The
book resulting from this transnationally collaborative project in comparative area, ethnic,
and empire/postcolonial studies, The Philippines and Japan in America's Shadow, has
recently been released by the National University of Singapore Press (2011).
Campomanes was the recipient of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
University Network (AUN) Distinguished Visiting Professorship from the Vietnam
National University-Hanoi, People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam, in 2002.
Distinctions and funding grants for his work, while on a tenure-track appointment in the
Department of English at the University of California Berkeley for the period 1993-1996,
include the University of California Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship (Summer 1994)
and a University of California Junior Minority Faculty Grant (1994), as well as two
Filipino Studies Working Group organizational grants from the Doreen B. Townsend
Center for the Humanities, University of California, for the 1993-1994 and 1994-1995
academic schoolyears. As a graduate student, Campomanes was awarded predoctoral
fellowships by the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. in 1991-1992 and a
summer residence fellowship at the Newberry Library (Chicago) in 1991.
Campomanes has held teaching appointments in the following universities:
University of California, San Diego (1999-2000), New York University (1998-1999),
University of California, Berkeley (1993-1996), Williams College (1991), and Yale
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University (1989-1990). He currently teaches literary and cultural studies fulltime and in
a tenured position in the Department of English at the Ateneo de Manila University
(Quezon City, Philippines), and serves as Associate Professorial Lecturer in the Graduate
School of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas (Manila, Philippines).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No profuse expressions of gratitude can ever adequately do justice to the
countless intellectual, affective, and material contributions, which so many people
(teachers and mentors, family and friends, colleagues and acquaintances or, specially, my
own students) have made to this study over the years. That it took such an inordinate
amount of time to complete, and travelled with me through the curious twists and turns of
my academic career (in varied institutional sites and existential habitats across the
continental United States and the Pacific), only makes the acknowledgments I am now
able to profess to them next to impossible or worse, liable to unforgivable omissions. In
an other and future incarnation of this project, I intend to compose a more proximate
inventory of my indebtedness to everyone who knows that, without their unquestioning
love, unconditional support, and unflagging trust, I could have not come anywhere near
its now successful—if most of the time, tortuous and tardy—completion.
I can best pay tribute to Robert Lee, lifelong mentor and lifetime friend, by saying
to him, simply, in Tagalog: taos-pusong pasasalamat. Bob will need no reminding about
how profoundly and immensely my intellectual formation, and own investments in
American and Filipino/Asian American Studies as fields of work and personal
commitment, are due, for the most part, to his boundless generosity of spirit and, more
crucially, to his astounding largeness of mind. Mari Jo Buhle and Neil Lazarus were
unsparing with their confidence in, and support, for this project, from its first conceptions
through its early, if often fragmentary, manifestations. I consider it one of my greatest
fortunes to have taken instruction from them, as well as from Bob—exemplars all—in the
arts of academic research and sociocultural critique. It is my hope that, in its present
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form, this project is able to live up to some of the exacting standards, which they, and
Bob, have set with their unimpeachable and exemplary work in their respective fields.
To Susan Smulyan and Ralph Rodriguez I owe a life-changing intervention,
which they quietly and steadily made in the final stages of this study's completion. But
even from the beginning, when I was just setting out to undertake what would turn out to
be a much-distended and unwieldy endeavor, Susan, in particular, never hesitated in
sharing with me her institutional wisdom and inspiringly good cheer, proving decisive to
my successful applications for grants in support of my research and writing for this
project at crucial moments. Up to the last minute, Ralph himself did not leave anything to
chance and went out of his way to help me negotiate the tricky terrains of the process of
completion. To Susan and Ralph, both: my endless thanks, and I wish to express to them
the hope that our engagements continue and take new and sustained forms.
At the Smithsonian Institution, which provided me with a nourishing base from
which to explore various sites for materials and critical exchanges related to the project in
nearly two memorable years of fellowship there, I could not have dreamed of any better
research supervisors than Gary Kulik and Charles McGovern. They were tough and
critical interlocutors of my then ever-shifting and continually amorphous work, forcing
me to clarify to myself what it was that I was seeking to accomplish with it. If the result,
as is here presented, satisfies some of their expectations of it, that should go a really long
way in giving me a sense of achievement.
Any serious researcher knows how academic work cannot take off at all or
prosper in any way without the professionalism, dedication, and kindness of librarians,
archivists, and other custodians of any society's knowledge and information repositories.
viii
I am unable to name each and every one of them who, in my time, extended every
imaginable courtesy, and all the considerate attention, to my requests for assistance in
search of the sources I needed for my work. But I must acknowledge and thank those
who made my research, and the research of countless other fellow travellers, something
to look forward to, with a great sense of anticipation and excitement, everyday,
throughout my respective visits (of varying durations) at the following institutions: the
John Hay and Rockefeller Libraries at Brown; the American Antiquarian Society in
Worcester, Massachussetts; the Peabody Museum and Houghton Library at Harvard; the
Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Archives Center of the National Museum of
American History, and the National Anthropological Archives of the National Museum
of Natural History, at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC); the U.S. National
Archives (Washington DC); the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room, and the
Manuscripts Division, of the Library of Congress; the Art Institute Library and the
Newberry Library in Chicago; the Philippine National Archives and the National Library
in Manila; and the American Historical Collection of the Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila
University. Although much of the material I gathered at these sites remain in reserve for
prospective new projects in the immediate and long term, and I have only used part of it
in actual writing, access to nearly all of them proved immensely enabling to the creation
of a broad canvas for my study and convinced me of the soundness of many of my
findings and conclusions for it.
I dedicate this product of my labors to the following, and only they would know
why (in ways that no words of mine could ever express): Louise Newman in the United
States, Yoshiko Nagano in Japan, and Lito Zulueta in the Philippines, first and foremost;
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Barton Levi St. Armand, Jean-Paul Dumont, Elli Dumont, Ric Bonus, Martin
Manalansan IV, Lisa Lowe, Matt Jacobson, Kevin Gaines, Jessica Hagedorn, Marcelo
Estrada, Nerissa Balce, Jody Blanco, David Lloyd, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Gary Colmenar,
Victor Bascara, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Cindy Tolentino, Vince Atos, Didi Doloricon, Todd
Steven Gernes, Linda Cimini Gernes, Elizabeth Francis, Michael Topp, Teresa Bill, Cyn
Marasigan, Lily Mendoza, Kathleen Zane, and Susie Tomlinson in the United States; and
in the Philippines: Shirley Lua, Marj Evasco, Janet Hope Tauro, D.M. Reyes, Beni
Santos, Jason Jacobo, Danton Remoto, Bien Lumbera, Lulu Torres-Reyes, Wendell
Capili, Del Tolentino Jr., Raymund Rovillos, Butch Torio, Raymond de Chavez, Jae
Jalandoni-Robillos, Delan Robillos, Zak Linmark, Gary Devilles, John Jack Wigley,
Ralph Semino Galan, and Ferdinand Lopez. It is also in memory of them who have
passed on but whose moral support I could have not subsisted without, at a difficult
transitional period in my life: Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, F.S.C., of De La Salle University,
and Ophie Dimalanta of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas in Manila;
and Dolores Stephens Feria, Jim Zwick, and William Henry Scott, true American friends
of Filipino peoples, everywhere.
Maria Hwang, in the Department of Civilization at Brown, and Gino Dizon in the
Department of English at Ateneo de Manila: my gratitude to you—for your crucial
mediations and for being such brilliant minds—knows no bounds.
Finally, for always being there by my side, and dispensing wisdom, care,
understanding and all those other things without which one could never make it in the
world, all my love to the only true women in my life: my mom Pat, and my sisters Helen
and Amy.
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Publication Credits
An early version of Chapter 1, “Empire & Filipino American Formations,” is
published as "The New Empire's Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unassimilability and
Unrepresentability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities," Hitting Critical Mass: A
Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2.2:9 (Spring 1995), 145-200. Copyright
with individual contributors.
A shorter version of Chapter 2, “Empire's 'Recognition' & the Filipino/Japanese
Analogy,” and retitled “The Japanese Analogy as Liminal Crisis-Effect in Initial FilipinoAmerican Encounters, 1898-1899,” appears in Kiichi Fujiwara and Yoshiko Nagano,
Eds. The Philippines & Japan in America's Shadow (National University of Singapore
Press 2011, 79-105). With permission.
Certain portions of Chapter 3, “Empire’s Recognition and the Filipino/Japanese
Analogy” are published as “La Revolución Filipina in the Age of Empire,” Japanese
Journal of American Studies 18 (Special Issue: “American Studies in Trans-Pacific
Studies”), 87-105. Copyright with individual contributors.
An early and shorter version of Chapter 4, “Empire's Other War/s and Casualty
Figures,” is published with the title “Casualty Figures of the American Soldier & the
Other: Post-1898 Allegories of Imperial Nation-Building as ‘Love and War,’” in Luis
Francia and Angel Shaw, Eds. Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War & the
Aftermath of an Imperial Dream (New York University Press, USA, and AnvilPublishing Manila, 2002), 134-162. Copyright with individual contributors.
xi
I am grateful to all the publishers for these contractual permissions, but especially
to the National University of Singapore Press.
xii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Signature Page
iii
Curriculum Vitae
iv
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction
1
Chapter 1
Empire and Filipino American Formations
31
Chapter 2
Empire’s ‘Recognition’ and the Filipino/Japanese Analogy
76
Chapter 3
The Philippine Revolution and the New Empire
127
Chapter 4
Empire’s Other War/s and Casualty Figures
169
By Way of a Conclusion
219
Bibliography
239
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INTRODUCTION
It is not for the Filipinos to decide, under the circumstances, when they have a
government which they think or a condition which they think qualifies them for selfgovernment, but it is for us to decide...when they have a government or a condition which
we think entitles them to self-government.
Senator John C. Spooner
(Congressional Record 1899, 1494)
There is war, there are defeats, truces, victories.
Frantz Fanon (1967 [1952], 221)
The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is
‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in
you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.
Antonio Gramsci (1971, 324)
“I believe that the power of the United States in any territory or possession
outside of the States themselves is absolute,” the imperialist senator Henry Cabot Lodge
thunders to a U.S. Senate in executive session debate on 24 January 1899. Only “the
limitation placed upon such outside possessions by the thirteenth amendment” posed “the
single exception” to this absolute power, the senator qualifies. Lodge here specifically
refers to Section 1 of Article XIII of the U.S. Constitution which formally abolished
slavery on 18 December 1865 and provided that “Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist with the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”
(emphasis supplied).1 It is eleven days before the outbreak of open war between some
30,000- strong U.S. Occupation troops and an undetermined number of Filipino
independence and revolutionary fighters in Manila, the Philippines, about six thousand
1
Congressional Record, 55th Congress, 3rd Session, 24 January 1899, 958. For more on Lodge,
see Chapter Four of this study and for an excellent account of the debates, see the chapter
“Debating the Treaty and Expansion” in MacCartney (2006, 224-257).
1
miles away. On the table and the focus of the debate is the Treaty of Paris, which
President William McKinley had recently submitted to the Senate on 3 January for the
latter body's review and ratification. Concluded and signed by Spanish and American
emissaries in the French capital on 10 December 1898 after several months of
contentious negotiations, the Treaty is in need of a 2/3 majority vote from the Senate to
be made effective.2
This was only one of several such debates that had commenced in Congress some
less than two months before, as prospects of renewed territorial expansion after the
Spanish-American War loomed for the nation with greater certainty and salience. Such
debates began in full force with a resolution filed by the Missouri senator George C. Vest
in early December 1898 (in anticipation of the Treaty then in negotiation) that the federal
government was not empowered by the U.S. constitution “to acquire territory to be held
and governed permanently as colonies” (emphases supplied). Specifically, these
debates—also and already in full swing in the general public culture and in the national
press as an immediate aftermath of the war with Spain—turned upon the novel
constitutional implications of the prospective U.S. annexation of the “Philippine Islands.”
Philippine annexation, through a peace treaty with Spain, was feared or anticipated by
many as ushering a major constitutional crisis that could create problematic precedents in
American history and might result in the United States, a republic, becoming a mere
clone of European imperialist nation-states with their extensive colonial dominions.3
2
The treaty negotiations from late September/October to early December 1898 were formally
authorized by the 1 August 1898 armistice between the Spanish and American governments,
which officially ended the Spanish-American War.
3
See Campomanes (2002, esp. 139-140, and 157ns. 23-27) for more discussion of these
momentous American public and political culture debates over what were then deemed by many
2
Indeed, Article III of the recently signed Treaty now stipulated the U.S. purchase
of “the archipelago known as the Philippine Islands” from Spain for the sum of twenty
million dollars, a sum payable “within three months” after the exchange of treaty
ratification by both nations. Did annexation of the Philippines by purchase and treaty
mean its colonization? And if so, what mode of governance would be proper to it and
would not radically contradict U.S. liberal and representative government as enshrined by
the U.S. Constitution? Would the islands and their peoples eventually become states and
citizens of the Union, as had been the prototypical pattern in national history when
continental territories, their settlers, and some of their indigenous inhabitants were first
annexed by treaty, frontier settlement, purchase, or war? The centrality of the Philippines
to these questions was immediately evident given that the Treaty now under
consideration involved U.S. expansion into far more “territory” than the “East Indies”
archipelago, although without the same aspect of purchase. Article I of the Treaty
provided for Spain’s surrender of “all claim of sovereignty over and title to Cuba” to the
as the unconsidered consequences of impending American annexation of the “Philippine Islands”
and how these found insoluble expression and intensification in the U.S.-Philippine War of 18981910s. Senator Vest’s position is one shared and increasingly adumbrated by diverse voices,
groups, and interests loosely ranged under an “anti-imperialist” stance and by a recently
established Anti-Imperialist League whose formidable membership included the most
consequential American intellectuals and writers of the period. To this assertion by Vest and antiimperialist voices about constitutional preclusions against coloniality, Lodge could only maintain
that “without a legislative act [by Congress] the Constitution does not extend to the Territories or
other possessions of the United States outside the limits of the States themselves” (Congressional
Record, 55th Congress, 3rd Session, 24 January 1899, 958). The 1901-1922 Insular Cases of the
Supreme court would essentially determine and affirm that the “Constitution does not follow the
flag” or that it does not extend of its own force into such new territories or possessions, subject to
the plenary powers of the U.S. Congress. Allan Punzalan Isaac (2006, 24-47) brilliantly manages
a discretely focused and fine-grained dissection of the vacillating language of the Insular Cases
specifically involving or implicating status questions related to the Philippines, its inhabitants,
and closely imbricated with the general constituency of this study, latter-day Filipino Americans
(and their predicament of navigating across and athwart what he calls the “enfolded borders”
between the American nation-state and its “tropical” satellites like the Philippines following the
U.S. annexation and disincorporation of their ancestral homeland and forbears).
3
United States and for the legitimacy of the occupation of the island by U.S. forces. With
Article II, the U.S. won Spanish cession of “Porto Rico” and other Spanish islands in the
“West Indies” and the (Pacific) island of Guam “in the Marianas or Ladrones.”4
That the contemporaneous question of Cuba is here not seen as equally pivotal to
the annexation and Paris Treaty debate/s (debates alternately headnoted in the
Congressional Record transcripts as “ACQUISITION OF TERRITORY” and “POLICY
REGARDING THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS”) may be explained by the Joint
[Senate/House] Resolution made some nine months before, whose Article IV is known as
the Teller Amendment. Named for its proponent, Colorado senator Henry M. Teller, the
amendment resolved “That the United States disclaims any disposition or intention to
exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said Island except for the pacification
thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government
and control of the Island to its people.”5 Although the passage of this amendment on 20
April 1898 appeased the fears expressed by a variety of American sectors that U.S.
intervention in the Cuban revolution against Spain would result in the territorial
annexation of Cuba (fears shared by the Cuban revolutionists), it is noteworthy that the
Teller Amendment is not easily accepted at this late a stage in the congressional and
public debates as effective precedent for and automatically applicable to the current
4
Treaty of Peace Between the United States and the Kingdom of Spain, U.S. Statutes at Large,
Vol. 30 (1899), 1754. The text of the treaty and a massive compendium of auxiliary documents
are also available as Senate Document No. 62 (55th Congress, 3rd Session), Parts 1 and 2 [publ.
January 1899].
5
Joint Resolution for the Recognition of the Independence of the People of Cuba, U.S. Statutes at
Large, Vol. 30 (20 April 1898), 738; and Congressional Record, 55 Congress, 2nd Session, 16
April 1898, 3988-89.
4
question of the Philippines (and of “Porto Rico” and Guam as well).6 A separate
resolution respecting the matter of the Philippines, such as Vest’s, had to be considered as
specifically necessary: an odd sign that somehow the Philippines was a question
considered different from or exceptional to that of the other island territories or
“possessions.”
But already, even in the Teller Amendment, we see important qualifications that,
in some variable versions here and there, would subsequently inform or shape the
operative rhetorics and modalities of U.S. extra/territorial imperialism and global power
after this period. For one, before a treaty with Spain could even be imaginable (indeed,
before the formal declaration of war against Spain on 25 April 1898 itself), the U.S.
government had already reserved and arrogated the right for the United States to
intervene in and to occupy Cuba. And in disavowing “any disposition or intention to
exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said Island,” U.S. authorities had
actually and simultaneously claimed an exception that could prove to be the rule of such
new and modal power of political and military interventions elsewhere: “except for the
pacification thereof.” For another, and more significantly, the determination of when and
how that state of pacification is achieved in the war-torn island (and now conceivably in
the Philippines or elsewhere) is something that only the U.S. government, acting on
behalf of its people, possessed the privilege to determine and declare: the U.S. and
Americans would only leave Cuba to Cubans “when that [pacification] is accomplished.”
With President McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” proclamation of 10
6
By this time, of course, Cuba had been occupied (and Spanish colonial suzerainty over it had
been replaced) by a “transitional” U.S. military regime that was posted there manifestly to ensure
and maintain a “state of pacification” in the aftermath of the Cuban insurgency against Spain and
the entry of U.S. forces into that revolutionary situation and war.
5
December 1898, in fact, which was enunciated in respect to transitional conditions in the
Philippines, this claim of “pacifying power” on the part of the U.S. was already
understood to be in unbreachable effect.7 In short, all that remained for Lodge and likeminded imperialist ideologues and writers this early in the entire history of Philippine
annexation was how to define the territorial or jurisdictional scope of a future American
satellite state in the Philippines and the status of its Filipino subjects in their political
relation to the U.S nation-state and body politic on the continent. The ambiguous
definitions or resolutions that were consequently formulated with respect to the
Philippines and Filipinos, substantially underwritten by “comparative racialization,”
could not but powerfully shape the ways migrating Filipinos would be placed or
displaced within the continental or American-national order of things during the colonial
and post-independence periods.8
7
President McKinley in his delicately worded 21 December 1898 instructions (after the yet
unratified Treaty of Paris cession) to the U.S. Philippine occupation forces commanded by Maj.
Gen. Elwell Otis wanted the good general and his troops to prove to Filipinos “that the mission of
the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right
for arbitrary rule” (U.S. Adjutant General’s Office 1902, vol. 2, 858-9).
8
On “comparative racialization,” see the PMLA's special issue on the topic (2008), esp. the
editorial essay by Shu-Mei Shih, “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction” (1337-1362) and
Campomanes, “Images of Filipino Racialization in the Anthropological Laboratories of the
American Empire: The Case of Daniel Folkmar” (1692-1699). Comparative racialization is best
defined as the metaphorical and metamorphic application of racialist notions of phenotypical and
ethnocultural difference(s) from one object community to another and/or between them under
historically specific conditions of imperial hegemony or as historically established discursive
formations put in the service of such a project of conquest or its variants. In the present study,
Chapter Two, “Empire's 'Recognition and the Filipino/Japanese Analogy” offers a critique of the
comparative racialization of Filipinos through the “Japanese Analogy” applied to Felipe
Agoncillo and Filipinos (of or for which he stood as a “political representative” during his
diplomatic missions to the U.S.A.) in the interwar period of late 1898 and early 1899. For general
and particular accounts of post-annexation comparative racialization of Filipinos in their
institutional and discursive elaborations between the 1898 U.S. annexation of the Philippines and
early U.S. Filipino migration and unsettlements in the West Coast and Pacific states, see the still
incomparable work of Carey McWilliams, Brothers Under the Skin (1943), and the essays by
Nerissa Balce and Ruby Tapia in Tiongson et al. (2008 [2006]).
6
The ensuing radical displacement/s of Filipinos by a curious American
post/neocolonial annexation project, in fact, would be indissociable from the essentially
parallel questions of tributary state formation and political status that beset the other
territories and peoples in the Pacific and the Carribean simultaneously or subsequently
annexed by the United States through the Paris treaty, by occupation, purchase, or later,
as a consequence of World War II and postwar U.S. superpower politics.9 Initially
defined as an "unincorporated territory" subject to American jurisdiction but permanently
disqualifiable as a possible or future state of the Union, as very recent critical-legal
studies scholarship has shown, the Philippines ultimately evolved into a quasiindependent (American) Commonwealth by the 1930s before political independence was
granted in the atmosphere of post-World War II decolonization. This meant that Filipinos
became "citizens" of an unsovereign Philippines but "subjects" of the United States
("American nationals") who had relatively free movement between the continent and the
islands until Commonwealth status and the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 deprived
them of this only one but striking privilege they enjoyed through “benevolent
assimilation” (Ngai 2004).10
9
Before the current explosion in comparative and critical-legal studies of U.S. Imperialism,
lawyer Arnold H. Leibowitz (1976) and legal scholar Winfred Lee Thompson (1989) were
already closely engaged in the shaping of the critical problematic now defining the field,
especially around the cross-imperial and reciprocal determinations of the status questions
involving the various U.S. “possessions” and their actively ethnoracialized inhabitants.
Independently but solidly, the sociologist Lanny Thompson (2002a; 2002b) brought such
antecedent critical work to their creative fruition in his transdisciplinary work on roughly the
same questions of cross- and intra-imperial comparativism in American empire studies; see also
Go (2008) but most especially, Burnett and Marshall (2001) and in focal reference to the political
advocacies for empire of Sen. Lodge, the essay, in this collection, by Mark Weiner (48-81).
10
Cynthia Tolentino (2009) picks up the question and the story of the liminal status occupied by
Filipinos after World War II up through the 1950s and in the context of assimiliationist (or what
she calls “canonical”) sociology, with its narratives of racial reform and professionalization
directed at “intellectuals of color” like Carlos Bulosan, but does so in an excellently conducted
7
Vicente Rafael and Nerissa Balce have both observed that before turning into an
ethnic designation in American multiculturalism, “Filipino-American” was the name for
a genocidal colonial war by which the United States forcibly annexed the Philippines as
its major extraterritorial dominion after 1898 (Rafael 1998, 25; Balce 2008 [2006], 45).
Recently, Dylan Rodriguez has extended this important point to its utmost limits and
theorized that “Filipino-American,” as the name for a new (and now thriving) field of
U.S. ethnic studies, has required the “disavowal” of its embeddedness in what he
generally calls the “genocidal relation” generated between the U.S.A. and the Philippines
as a consequence of that historical war (2008 [2006], 146, 154). Until its recent
reclassification as such by the Library of Congress, the “Filipino-American War”
(alternatively, “Philippine-American War” or “U.S.-Philippine War”), the war in
question, has been named in nationalist and imperialist American historiography, for the
longest time (since the officially perceived and declared end of the event by 1902), as
“the Philippine Insurrection.”
It is beyond dispute that nominative acts are materially decisive. They not only
subject those thusly named to some powerful system of classification that effectively
determines the terms of understanding and discourse-making concerning these but make
subjects out of them for contestation or containment within a prevailing grid of power
relations. For anticolonial Filipino resistance versus the U.S.A. during the war to be
comparison and intrication with the varying predicaments and levels of dis/incorporation of
African American and “oriental” writers as self-authorizing key-informants and objects of
disciplinary modelling and containment. See also Espiritu (2005) for the history and texts of
“Filipino American expatriate writers” who pursued an early version of transnational
cosmopolitics in their attempts to negotiate the competing demands of nationalist sentiment and
assimilationist fields of force across the Pacific.
8
named, for example, as an “Insurrection” is, as the Filipina historian Luzviminda
Francisco has long ago noted, to establish American sovereignty over the Philippines
before the (and before its becoming) fact and to put it beyond question in international
relations historiography and official/public knowledges (1973, n1). To call that newly
prominent creature of the U.S. multiculture or transnations “Filipino American” is
already, as Epifanio San Juan Jr. has previously and emphatically argued, to shanghai the
first term (Filipino) “in a relationship of domination and subordination” to the second,
now posited as the “sovereign,” term (American) [1991, 125; 2000, 125]. But these are
only the more obvious, and in that sense, unsurprising consequences of such acts of
imperialist and hegemonic-nationalist nomination. After all, the historical war has largely
been construed as, by nature, a juridico-legal struggle over the claims of American
imperial sovereignty over the Philippines following the 1898 Treaty of Paris (sovereignty
avant la lettre or thus considered effective before its implementation). In like manner, to
become Filipino American is for the migrant or U.S.-born, in point of fact, to be expected
to comply with the U.S nation-state’s fundamental demand to subject herself/himself to
its national sovereignty (immigrant assimilation).
The U.S.-Philippine War of 1898-1910s is strangely placed and displaced in the
history of twentieth-century colonial wars, and in U.S./Philippine historiographies and
area studies. Foundational to American empire-building, it has nonetheless been
generally construed, until recent and renewed interest in it, as a minor event by modern
American historians and American studies scholars. Although leading to the
neocolonization of the Philippines and one of its attendant consequences, the formation
9
of a Filipino American (and now global) diaspora, this war fared poorly for the most
part—again, until the emergent and redoubled attention paid to it by a number of
transdisciplinary projects—in the related fields of international postcolonial studies and
U.S. ethnic studies as well. Figures of the Unassimilable basically considers and
examines the war less as a forgotten/forgettable military-historical event than as the
occasion of a radical shift from a discourse of U.S. Sovereignty and Right to a practice of
“permanent war” beyond its period of occurrence. Seen this way, “war” becomes a
catalytic model for examining and understanding a number of interrelated formations
ensuing in its wake: American neocolonial governance in the Philippines and globally,
and the modern formation, as well as transnational displacements, of Filipinos and
Filipino Americans.
This project, then, is oriented by and to a different or alternative line of thinking
on these historical and sociopolitical questions of war, American empire, and
postcoloniality in the diaspora and what has been tagged “the New World Order.” It
essentially proceeds from the hypothesis that U.S. post/neo-imperial formations and
Filipino American subject-constitution between the “Filipino-American War” and the
community's multicultural, transnational, and postcolonial politics of recent times, can be
productively considered as traipsing along the abovementioned paradigmatic shift.
Following Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (2003 [1997]), this shift may be
seen as one from a “juridico-legal discourse over imperial Sovereignty and Right” (or
even national belonging/denationalization that is ethnoracialized) to a discourse and
practice of “permanent war” that entangles the constituencies conjured by the solidus in
the coupling “Filipino/American” (Echavez See 2009, 149-150n1). This project generally
10
seeks to contribute to the theorizing and understanding of such a paradigmatic shift
through a series of discrete historical and postcontemporary Filipino/American case
studies developed in separate chapters. It partially but indicatively explores the
significant implications and consequences of this shift for our understanding of FilipinoAmerican subject-constitution, historically, and in recent post-identity politics; American
empire-formation from the time of the historical war to the present; the problematic of
historiographic and sociopolitical in/visibility that surrounds both; and the new efforts,
now ramifying in a number of institutional and disciplinal sites, across the Pacific and
internationally, to address or redress such substantially intertwined critical problems and
problematics.
A few theoretical notes are in order, especially on some of the key terms
informing the discussion that follows, before proceeding to an outline of the various
chapters and critical objects of this study. For the central terms “Imperial Sovereignty”
and “Permanent War,” and the shift from one to the other that is tracked in various forms
and expressions in the Filipino/American case studies considered by the project, Michel
Foucault’s periodizing hypothesis and intermediate paradigm of power relations in his
1975-76 Collège de France lectures (collected in the volume Society Must Be Defended,
2003 [1997]) provides, as noted, a critically enabling heuristic frame. Notwithstanding
their specificity to modern Western European development (more specifically, British
and French), and political or state theory and historiography, Foucault's theoretical
formulations in the Collège lectures have omnibus applicability to the descriptive and
explanatory requirements of the modern war experience or history of sociopolitical
conflicts elsewhere in their respective or particular durations and sociohistorical
11
consequences.11 The theoretical interest here therefore is not in the historical specificity
of Foucault's archeological and genealogical “analytics of knowledge” with respect to
their particular and local objects but, to borrow Anne Stoler's term, their “polyvalent
mobility” (1995, 61) when appropriated for roughly analogous cases like those of U.S.
imperial and “Filipino/American” postcolonial formations.
This study selectively draws for its own purposes on the following pertinent
aspects of Foucault's argument in these lectures: a) War as basic principle for the analysis
of power relations [which analysis might then have to begin with a consideration of what
he calls “the military institution”]; and, b) in looking at War paradigmatically rather than
the question of Sovereignty obsessively, “the manufacture of subjects, rather than the
genesis of the sovereign [becomes] the general theme” of analysis. As he puts it in his
signature rhetorical style:
Can we find in bellicose relations, in the model of war, in the
schema of struggle or struggles, a principle that can help us
understand and analyze political power in terms of war, struggles
and confrontations?…Is the power relationship basically a
confrontation, a struggle to the death, or a war...Can and must we
group together in the general mechanism, the general form
known as war, phenomena such as antagonism, rivalry,
confrontation and struggles between individuals, groups,
classes...[Are] military institutions and the practices that
surround them, whichever way you look at them, directly or
indirectly, political institutions [and processes]?…Who basically
had the idea of inverting the principle and thought of saying: It is
quite possible that war is the continuation of politics by other
11
An outstanding exegesis of the lectures, although in specific reference to the emergence and
development of modern European racialism and bourgeois-imperial formations (most notably
involving Foucault's famous notions of biopower and biopolitics) is in Stoler (1995, esp. 55-94).
In Chapter Four of this remarkable book, Stoler “suggest[s] some of the ways in which
[Foucault's] insights dovetail with the changing terrain of scholarship on empire, citizenship, and
national identity more generally” (62; 95-136).
12
means but isn’t politics itself a continuation of war by other
means? (23, 46-48).12
From Foucault’s rhetorical questions about the paradigmatic force and charge of war in
analyzing a whole conspectus of relations and conflicts, a couple of conceptual hooks
emerges which prove enabling and productive for this project, namely: a) War as the
enforcement of Peace so that Peace is less War’s other than the conduct of war by other
means (the U.S.-Philippine War, for example, was euphemistically named or called “a
pacification campaign,” from its onset through its extension into and subsequent
representations in U.S. historiography; the naming of it as such already being indicative
of the pacifying and portentously consequent war-making powers claimed for the United
States between the Teller Amendment and McKinley's Benevolent Assimilation
proclamation); and, b) in shifting one's attention from questions of Imperial Sovereignty
to matters of Permanent War, one is returned to relations of domination and resistance
and is able to deny the imperial Sovereign the credence or purchase to the Sovereignty
that it declaratively and self-constitutionally claims; or rather, paraphrasing Stuart Hall's
familiar dictum, one realizes that Sovereignty, like its kindred formation of Hegemony, is
truly hard work, ever-precarious and relentlessly processual or political, i.e. it continues
and never ceases to involve”bellicose relations” and a “schema of struggles” that, in the
words of Fanon, may lead to “defeats, truces, victories” of all kinds and at all times.
12
Here alluding to the famous axiom of Carl von Clausewitz, “War is the conduct of politics by
other means.” Interestingly, in an authoritative English translation of the original German text of
1832, von Clausewitz qualifies that “When whole communities go to war...the reason always lies
in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War,
therefore, is an act of policy...” and yet goes on to say, in accord with the theoretical reversal
toward which Foucault in his own turn is gesturing, that “war is not merely an act of policy, but a
true political instrument, carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the
peculiar nature of its means” (von Clausewitz 1989 [1976], 86-87).
13
As Foucault puts it again, “To reveal relations of domination rather than the
source of sovereignty means this: we do not try to trace their origins back to that which
gives them their basic legitimacy. We have to try, on the contrary, to identify the
technical instruments that guarantee that they function” (46). In short, one begins to focus
clearly, in doing so, on what Foucault calls “the material agency” of subjectivation,
whether that or both of the imperial hegemon/Sovereign or its Others/subalterns. With a
paradigm of this kind, admittedly, one comes close to committing the heresy of reviving
the presumably outmoded model of domination and resistance in critical studies of
various kinds of sociopolitical and power relations, particularly, in this project's instance,
the typically hierarchical and asymmetrical colonizer-colonized and metropolitanperipheral binary oppositions.
But a critical phenomenology, no matter how partial, of U.S. empire-building and
Filipino/American subjectivation might become the salutary and alternative result of this
paradigmatic recourse, rather than the predictable production of yet another ideology
critique or discourse analysis of such relations. This kind of a modular account and
accounting of empire and its afterlives based on the paradigm of war allows one to
examine these phenomena of U.S. imperiality and Filipino-American postcoloniality in
terms of contingency and duration, with the empire’s sovereignty seen from such
perspective to be ever-incomplete and always precarious: forced, therefore to conduct
continuous war upon its Filipino subjects, by other ways, other means, so as to reinstate
14
at each turn the security and confidence of its foothold over them who trouble or
challenge it.13
Originally designed and begun as a deconstructive critique of American
Orientalism, especially around the fin-de-siècle conquest of the Philippines, this study
proceeded from the fact, recognized from an initial survey of possible and available
multi-archival sources for it, that many Americans framed the Philippines into a national
“question” or “problem” in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American war.
Poised between the multiple crises of the 1890s and new opportunities for territorial
expansion, numberless interested Americans—from ordinary citizens to writers,
statesmen, and opinion leaders— located the Philippines in the Orient or realm of
conquest, and actively constituted Filipino rebels against Spanish rule and the Philippines
itself as objects of racialist knowledge-productions and colonialist discourses.14 In its
13
Relatedly, the avowedly anti-imperialist American writer and public intellectual Gore Vidal
titled his controversial ruminations on how American imperial hegemony has come to be
characterized by a war economy that presumably retails in pacification/peace-making while
routinely engaging in permanent war against its perceived enemies, Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace (2002)—providing a perfect tag for the theoretical ideas adapted by this project from
Foucault’s lectures.
14
This period in American history is usually recounted in terms of the links between
opportunistic, jingoistic, and racialist national impulses toward extraterritorial expansion and the
multiple economic, cultural, and psychohistorical crises engendered by the recessions, industrial
overproduction, non-Western European immigration, urbanization, and the cultural malaise of the
late 1800s. To limit the circuit of references of the construction of U.S. imperial power to such
domestic problems and crises, needless to say, reinstates, if not reproduces the seemingly selfhermetic terms of contemporary discourses toward the end of global expansion, which was seen
as a safety valve or timely decompression for American society at a dramatic moment of its
possible disintegration. The ensuing consideration of the debates over the Philippine
Question/Problem, therefore, avoids treating these debates as self-propelled and -contained
discursive fields and reads them as often specifically referring to discrete acts and moments of
Filipino engagement, resistance, and intransigence, especially as what Robert Lee once called
“the discourse of the social problem” is turned on to the question/problem of the Philippines by
the nineteenth-century's end. The best general accounts of this period, esp. in terms of articulating
15
original design, this project sought to inventory and examine the images and
representations of Filipinos and the Philippines generated by such voluminous
knowledge-production and discoursing over the presumably unexpected rise of the U.S.
to world power (with and after the war with Spain in 1898) and the 1896-1898 Filipino
struggle for independence (reputedly the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific).
Coextending with the long-forgotten U.S.-Philippine War of 1898-1910s, these orientalist
knowledges and discourses of race and power were initially hypothesized as at once
affirming and troubling vaunted American national ideals and political
institutions/traditions of representative government and the U.S.A.'s eventual entry into
the global arena of imperial politics or power plays.
The project (with this design and intent) then aspired to speak to the striking
disproportion between the extensity of American orientalist and racialist knowledgeproductions about Filipinos and the Philippines at the point of colonial conquest and the
scarcity of critical and scholarly work in U.S. research institutions, and across pertinent
disciplines, on the subject. Edward Said's now-canonical Orientalism (1978) provided the
initial inspiration and the functional theoretical and conceptual frame for the study's
objects of investigation, beginning critical questions, and chosen source materials even as
a good number of Said's problematic assertions in that paradigmatic work about the
American variant of Orientalism as “an academic tradition,” “a style of thought based
upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the 'Orient' and 'the
Occident',” and “a corporate institution...or a western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient” (which, as many critics have since pointed out,
domestic crises with extraterritorial expansion, are by Williams (1969), Kolko (1984 [1976]),
Cashman (1988 [1984]), Painter (1989), Jacobson (2000), and Kiernan (2005 [1978]).
16
were much too Eurocentric) required radical interrogation and sustained challenge (1978,
2-3).
In particular, Said's scanty coverage of the peculiar historical development and
objects of American orientalist discourses, practices, and institutions, resulted from two
rather remarkably unexamined suppositions but paradoxically elicited the justification for
a separate and more critically sustained study of American Orientalism (at least as
emergent mold in which this study initially fashioned its own lineaments). One was a
presumed geopolitical focus of such American discourses that, for Said, were limited to
or mainly trained on “East Asia.” The other was a periodizing argument, which made
them the heir errant and apparent to an older and more classical, and thus more
philologically robust, European complex of orientalism only with the decline of old world
empires and the generally accepted supercession of them by an unscathed and militarily
superior U.S.A. after World War II:
Americans will not feel quite the same [as Europeans] about the
Orient, which for them is more likely to be associated very
differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike
the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans,
Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a
long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of
coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's
special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not
only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest
riches and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and
languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most
recurring images of the Other (1978, 1).
It became clear, as the sheer plenitude and multi-archival loci of American
orientalist texts, practices, and institutional networks that formed around the Philippines
and Filipinos from 1898 onwards (largely subterranean, and obscured by layers of
institutional and academic neglect) began to overwhelm this study's founding critical
17
questions and forced it to reformulate them, how unguaranteed Said's claim for a U.S.
orientalist geopolitical focus on the “Far East”/East Asia was, on the basis of actual
historical developments. The question that demanded some answer and could spur an
array of discrete, more materially focal, and varied investigations of American
Orientalism, therefore, was “Which (and whose) Orient?”15 The scattered and scanty
considerations of American Orientalism in Said's book became thoroughly
understandable, given his own autobiographical investments in Western European
orientalist obsessions with the Near/Middle East, and pointed to a recursive reproduction,
even in radically critical work like Said's, of the amnesiac politics that underwrote the
production of establishment knowledges on the Philippine colonial venture of the United
States.
Corollarily, Said's second supposition of a periodizing argument, that “from the
beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II, France and Britain
dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II, America has dominated the
Orient and approaches it as France and Britain once did (1978, 4),” while chronologically
elegant, could only hold true at the cost of ignoring—or not possibly knowing anything
substantial about—the specific part of the Far East that was, in fact, regarded by
American orientalists and imperialist ideologues as the “Far West,” and was their
15
As this project practically abandoned or moved away from its focus on the U.S.-Philippine
variant of orientalism, such critical studies were soon undertaken and complicated Said's
paradigm, if not taking it in a variety of unexpected directions, beginning with Lisa Lowe's
brilliantly comparatist deconstruction of French and British orientalisms (1991); Robert Lee's
award-winning study of and singularly cultural-materialist approach to a variety of discursive
constructs of the Oriental in modern American history and U.S. popular culture (1999); and
Victor Bascara's unusual and complex take on the Oriental as an American figure and the model
minority myth in relation to what he deftly establishes as the fundamental forms of ambivalence
and indeterminacy of U.S. imperialism (2006).
18
strategic object of desire/annexation during and after 1898: the “Philippine Islands” (see
Drinnon 1990 [1980], 271-278).16 One may certainly grant that, with the emergence and
development of U.S. Asian (area) studies, dimly in the 1920s, but most preeminently,
since the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, a geostrategic shift to China
and Japan as more consequential and institutionally hypervisible objects of orientalist
discourses and practices in the U.S. all but became logical and desirable. Given the
pivotal roles of these countries in the American project of establishing and securing
strategic alliances and blocs in the region within the context of Cold War politics, such a
shift in American orientalist objects and obsessions with them is perfectly explicable. But
what remained to be accounted for was why the historic lack of U.S. imperial sway over
them as relatively consolidated national and cultural areas seemed directly obverse to the
density of the resulting orientalist discourses and practices about them in immediately
burgeoning corporate institutions and enterprises. The inverse then becomes quite
striking: where the U.S. had claimed and held actual imperial control and formal
dominion, the Philippines, Said and others after him could not find any occurrences and
expressions of American orientalism at all or, if they did, could not easily fit them into
the East Asianist mould which was determined in advance to be its constitutive crux.17
16
Whatever the problems of its readers were with Drinnon's voluminous study, including its
avowedly polemical style, Facing West (1990 [1980]), along with Howard Zinn's classic A
People's History of the United States (1980) remain singular as rarely critical U.S. historiography
with their unwithering focus on the history of Philippine annexation as a story central to the
development of American imperial modernity; they also make for good companion reading to
Said's more literary-critical work as a way to address or texture Said's more bracing
generalizations about U.S. imperialism and orientalist/racialist discourses about its various
Others.
17
Note, however, that Said's periodizing argument and attempt at thick description of American
Orientalism would regress some more, given this problematic periodization, and consequently,
upon his own candid admission, founder and suffer from a lack of what he calls “internal [or
19
It soon became evident that this project could not really limit itself to a taxonomy
of U.S. orientalist images and representations on the model of Said's book. As a
commentator on the original proposal for this project correctly observed, an approach like
this was bound to treat ideology and discourse analysis “in a vacuum of textuality,
divorced from historical power relations,” apart from possibly and merely regurgitating
“already known and rather abstract types in studies of 'the other' (e.g. childlike,
cunning),” albeit with Philippine/Filipino foci, and its characterization of the Filipino
experience of U.S. conquest as that of an overwhelming “representational imperialism.”
The suggestion emerged “to explore how ideology and representations work in an
interactive way with the assertion of imperial power” so as to foreground their political
efficacy without reducing the work of the ideological and the representational to a model
of epiphenomenal causation or univocal influence. A second commentator expressed
serious concern about the study's plan “to handle historical context in relation to...a
technique of textual analysis” as a methodological maneuver. Was the project “going to
rely on the existing secondary historical literature to construct a synthetic historical
framework while probing into the primary (that is, textual) sources”? This observation
astutely marked the ways in which the project, as so originally designed, was otherwise
'created'] consistency” (6): “In contrast [to its European equivalent], the American understanding
of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and
Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic 'Oriental'
awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East
(the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.” Even as it is
noteworthy that he would practically abandon the 'orientalist' thesis in examining the cultural
moment/s of U.S. imperialism in his succeeding book, Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said
more than makes up for these sorts of conspicuous lacunae in Orientalism (1978) by devoting a
hefty section of the former—which he saw as a sequel to the latter—to American Empire critique,
nothwithstanding a continuing reliance upon modern European humanist literature and
perspectives in it for such a focal shift.
20
nervously straddling two different orders of disciplinary work that could prove to be at
cross-purposes, or even unmanageable: archival research/historiography and textual
critique.
The wisdom of these reservations was eventually borne out, in short order, in the
proliferation of self-limited ideology critiques or discourse analysis studies with little or
awkwardly rendered historiographic texture (on empire and other historical structures of
hegemony and subalternity) across many fields, especially within the last heydays of
Derridean deconstruction, the theoretical school, apart from Said's paradigmatic work,
from which such studies drew their inspiration and purchase. The project subsequently
took heart from a common suggestion of both commentators to envision and try to
execute an organization of itself that is less chronological or thematic, and explores or
widens “the range of cultural (and political) interactions” characterizing the
Filipino/American historical encounter and post/neocolonial relationships being covered.
Although this reformulation eventually became the chief source of the project's almost
insurmountable difficulties, it proved enabling to the main analytical thrusts that it was to
take, namely: to approach the historical and archival material as forms and sets of
dynamic encounter between Filipinos and Americans taking both textual and socialinstitutional forms rather than as univocal or self-enclosed discourses; to highlight the
importance of contingency and duration in the unfolding and accounting of the range of
these relations and encounters and thus show their ever-processual and hyperpolitical
character and dynamics; and to examine, on a sustained basis and across a variety of
cases, the problematic of Filipino/American invisibility and historiographic amnesia as
their actively induced effects and enduring or politically consequential legacies.
21
Still another, and the most important, context or stimulus for the project was the
emergence and development of Filipino Americans as a newly visible and audible
constituency of the United States, particularly in the arena of American artistic and
cultural production and, now increasingly, in the U.S. political and academic domains.
The story of their decisive emergence and coming to voice and visibility in American
society within the last decade has been quite remarkable, pushed on by a “demographic
drama” as a large-growth Asian-origin community since the post-1965
skilled/professional and family-reunification immigration waves and whose history of
American formation, therefore, can no longer be easily ignored (Okamura 1998; Posadas
1999; Bonus 2000; Le Espiritu 2003; Campomanes 2007). While not entirely new—there
have been some abortive attempts in the past, most notably in the atmosphere of the
“ethnic revival” of the 1970s, and some significant occasions for it such as World War II
and the 1986 People Power revolt in the Philippines—the astonishing story of this
constituency's emergence or recognition politics and self-representational acts and
initiatives in a variety of expressive forms and political tendencies, in recent years, will
soon require a critical and comprehensive recounting in its own right. But as this study
commenced from tentative conceptualization and got rerouted through extended research
and sporadic writing/publishing across the years and various sites, the Filipino American
“specter of invisibility” that it, with a few others, once demotically posed, was soon
“becoming a distinct topic in Ethnic Studies” itself.18
18
(Zwick1997a). As late as the late 1990s, Jim Zwick could still observe that, inspite of their
large numbers, “Filipinos are so rarely discussed in U.S. scholarship....” Shortly, an explosion of
Filipino Americanist scholarship, critical work, and cultural production, in uneasy synchrony with
related efforts in emergent American Empire critique, the transnational and postcolonial turns in
American Studies scholarship and historiography, and the cultural studies of hegemony and
22
In sum, and in its completed and now significantly altered state, this study
examines what some scholars now call the “puzzle” of the relative institutional and
historical invisibility of the Philippines and Filipino Americans, as a former American
colony and as post/neocolonial migrants and citizens, in U.S. public culture and academic
conversations that had held sway until recently. (It is a historical and historiographic
invisibility all the more striking given the enormity of the shadow and official archives on
them that exist in the U.S.A.'s impressive array of repositories, public and private, and the
archipelago's momentousness to the formation of American imperial modernity.)19
Buttressing this as a central problematic of the study was what critical writers like Gareth
Stedman Jones, in the early 1970s, and Amy Kaplan, in the early 1990s, have observed,
in a related vein, as the endemic but equally confounding invisibility of the American
Empire to itself (that is, its self-identification as a former formal colonizing power that
anxiously reconciles or dissipates its own experience of imperiality with its own
nationally constitutive claims for an anticolonial tradition or past).20 It is a hegemonic
subalternity of all kinds and across fields or disciplines, burst upon the academic scene in the
United States. Some of the impetus for these turns and what is turning out to be a paradigmatic
shift in Filipino/Philippine Studies in the American academy is obviously a matter of FilipinoAmerican emergence or recognition politics and the accumulated impact of a variety of
constituent initiatives and acts of self-representation toward this end, first made partly imaginable
and possible by the earlier politics of multiculturalism and multiethnicity of the late 1980s and
early 1990s in which many Filipino Americans partook and participated, via the coalitional and
tactical agency of the Asian American studies movement and cultural renascence of the period.
19
See Chapter One, this study, for more on shadow and official archives of the empire. On
American imperial modernity, Octavio Paz's radical reflections on the subject retains their
cogency and persuasiveness in light of both the so called “imperial turn” in American studies and
in official thinking about the ever-expanded global role and power of the U.S.A.
20
Niall Ferguson, a modern-day Kipling dispensing advice to the U.S.A. to do the job of global
gendarme forcefully and unhesitatingly—and whom Eric Hobsbawm has sardonically dubbed
“the most intelligent [historian] of the neo-imperial school” (2008, 62)—locates what he sees as
23
self-image that, from all accounts, and as this study obliquely illustrates through its own
case studies, constitutionally required the subsequent and peculiar displacements of
Filipinos across all arenas of U.S. history, culture, politics, and economic life, including,
quite interestingly enough, of the modern constitution of the U.S.A. as a world power as
the historical moment to which this politics of invisibilization can itself be traced.
In general, therefore, the study seeks to demonstrate in its own fashion that
Filipino American invisibilization and the self-invisibility of U.S. imperialism belong to
the same order of relations and are enmeshed in a complex of reciprocal determinations.
It is, at one and the same time, a partial study of subaltern Filipino and hegemonic
(imperial) American nationalisms and their competing claims upon or complex
imbrications with the following: Filipino/American identity and cultural formations; the
question of Filipino representation and American imperial-national self-image in a range
of U.S. historiographic and public discourses; and the politics of recognition faced and
pursued by Filipinos as an oddly placed and displaced culture group within an imperial
and multicultural nation that remains substantially defined by its dominant mythography
of immigration or as “a nation of nations.” In short, it is the study's basic argument that
the inaugural history of the U.S. colonial conquest of the Philippines by violent war
(1898-1910s), counting Filipino resistance to or negotiations with it, and their nonrecognition or exclusion by past and even current discussions of American nationality—
the inefficiency and possible decline of the American Empire, its wobbling as it were, in its
inability to shed off this self-contradictory kind of conceit and national self-image (2004) or to
deploy it as its moral force without any sense of contradiction; see also Campomanes (2008
[2006], 28, 34-35) for an analysis of the U.S.A.'s “imperial anti-colonialism” or “anti-colonial
imperialism” as its self-conceit which genetically inhibits any easy identification of, and
reckoning with it, as imperialism.
24
and more specifically, by U.S. nationalist and establishment historiography—
substantially explain, as much as they complicate, the invisibilization of
Filipinos/Filipino Americans or their formation as a U.S. culture group and as
post/neocolonial “Americans,” including the modern constitution of the U.S.A. as a
global hegemon itself.
After Chapter One, “Empire and Filipino Americans,” which primarily serves to
lay out the conceptual and critical apparati of the study, the bulk of the project is devoted
to a close reading of some indicative aspects, texts, and moments of what was then called
the “Philippine Question (or alternatively, “Philippine Problem). This complex series of
national debates coincided with the U.S.-Philippine War between 1898 and 1904, a war
that many scholars now recognize as extending into the 1910s, even beyond. These
debates or “discursive wars” are shown in the case studies presented in the succeeding
chapters to have decisively contributed to a determination of both the imperial status and
power of the United States, and the forms of political and cultural representation through
which the Philippines as a neocolony and Filipinos (as American subjects) could be
partly assimilated by and excluded from the U.S. body politic, popular memory/historical
consciousness, and social institutions.
Chapter One primarily offers a critique of Filipino/American institutional
relations of representation around the mutual problematic of invisibility (between
American Empire and Filipino Americans), and from the standpoint of the story of
Filipino American emergence or recognition politics alluded to earlier (tagged or
specified in this chapter as “Filipino American postcoloniality”); and moves backwards
toward the “colonial moment” of such relations, expressed here in the form of the U.S.-
25
Philippine War itself and the historical amnesia that, for various reasons, it elicited and
characterized its subsequent treatments. In the process, the chapter locates and identifies
the curious places occupied by the Filipino/American case of empire and postcoloniality
in a range of late-modern discourses (multicultural, transnational, and postcolonial) that
might inhibit a sustained critique of them and points to their potential reconfiguration by
a possible shift of perspective that recognizes the “specter of invisibility” (as actively
induced effect) and “the perils of forgetfulness” (Campomanes 1995 [1992]).
From the “narratives of representation” and “representative narratives” theorized
by this contextualizing section early on, Chapter Two, “Empire's 'Recognition and the
Filipino/Japanese Analogy,” proceeds to provide and analyze one such particular story:
the official U.S. non-recognition of the Philippine nationalism and independence that
emerged from the 1890s Revolution against the Spanish colonial state and preceded the
coming of the U.S. armed forces and colonial settlers. This U.S. imperial politics of nonrecognition of Philippine independence struggle and Filipino agency is suggested as the
very precept or template for empire's subsequent self-invisibilization and the amnesiac
reflex through which this form of formidable power could be maneuvered, particularly as
such non-recognition was and continues to be elaborated and actively maintained by
modern U.S. imperialist-nationalist historiography.
It is a politics of non-recognition that is specifically instantiated through a critical
and partial account of the official U.S. state dismissal of the diplomatic legation led by
Felipe Agoncillo and sent by the fledging Filipino (“Aguinaldo”) government to
negotiate questions of Philippine national sovereignty with the U.S.A.'s imperial entry
into the Asia-Pacific zone. In this chapter, and drawing from semiotic/sign theory,
26
“representational imperialism” of the kind being contingently developed by an emergent
world power is displayed as locked in mortal and close micropolitical combat with the
representational “diplomacy” of an emergent and fledgling republic, the question of
whose political status and standing might have been effectively occluded by the
American state but, through what emerges as and is called “the Japanese Analogy,”
effectively instituted an insoluble crisis at the very bosom of U.S. claims of sovereignty
and authority upon its new subjects and possessions.
Chapter Three, “The Philippine Revolution and the New Empire,” moves from
the micropolitics of Felipe Agoncillo's semiosic diplomacy on behalf of the Malolos
Republic to the macropolitics of the latter's engagement (as the embryonic state form of a
new nation) with the emergence and contingent arrival of the U.S.A. as the New Empire.
Primarily a set of general reflections about the broader global terrain on which to locate
the ensuing war/s between both entities and their nominal figures or representatives, it
relies, at its heart, on a selective and close reading of an account of the prospects and fate
of the Philippine Revolution, in an age of empires, by its premier ideologue and organic
intellectual Apolinario Mabini. Mabini presents an alternative and compelling angle on
the momentous stakes involved in the Revolution's struggles and confrontations with the
U.S. and other powers, which were otherwise bellicose but initially (even if only so
briefly) managed through diplomatic representations.
This chapter highlights Mabini's important point that the Philippine Revolution
immediately produced global repercussions that encompassed not only Spain and the
U.S. but also such other possible third party powers as Britain, France, Germany, Japan,
etc. As Mabini astutely observes in La Revolución Filipina (1931 [ca. 1902]), the
27
Philippine Revolution could not remain an exclusively Filipino affair (if it ever was) and
bore a double burden that could, correspondingly, earn it a double distinction: 1) it could
show, in successfully overthrowing Spanish rule, that imperial power was not
impregnable, and 2) related to this, it could mortally endanger the territorial and material
interests of all the imperial powers in the region by serving as an inspiration for other
colonized peoples in Asia to assert their right to shape their own political fortunes. And
yet precisely on account of such double burden and distinction, the Revolution, for
Mabini, seemed doomed to certain failure from the beginning, or at least such burdens or
handicaps could effectively account for the formidable difficulties and the diplomatic
approach it had no choice but to take on, particularly as a New Empire loomed on the
horizon to be its next, even simultaneous, antagoniste.
Deciding to argue the revolutionary cause and case from an objective position of
weakness by resorting to diplomacy (as a “weapon of the weak”), Mabini and his
colleagues implicitly pointed to a sensible and pragmatic strategy, under extremely
circumscribing circumstances, whose intent was to ask for or highlight the possible. If
diplomatically and internationally recognized by the U.S.A and other powers, as its
emissaries persisted in struggling for, the revolutionary republic could, in effect, forestall
or frustrate the emergent imperial ambitions of the U.S. which now treated Philippine
annexation as their very cornerstone, and neutralize the other powers that might have
stakes on their own and otherwise step in the New Empire's place were the U.S. to
withdraw its jurisdictional claims. This recognition strategy could also, by implication,
foment a negotiated struggle between and among such interested powers to declare first
preference for filling in the resulting vacuum in some form or, at the very least, to jockey
28
for influence over the archipelago's new government and, through it, the Asia-Pacific
region.
Although speculative, Mabini's explanatory context does make one reconsider the
reasons for the Revolution's defeat as advanced by its students, critics, and some
historians (extreme military disadvantage, dissensions within revolutionary ranks, the
political immaturity of its aspirant leaders and ambitious generals, Aguinaldo's so-called
capitulation to the Americans, and so on). In a very important sense, as Mabini implies,
nothing less than the whole imperial world was deadset against this Revolution and that
its prospects were simply not bright in a world dominated by empires (old and new), with
their competing and colluding interests. The chapter concludes with a critical
consideration of such a global context of inter-imperial collusions and conflicts with the
intent to develop or extend Mabini's suggestion that a knowledge of it could lead to a
more textured appreciation of the Revolution's diplomatic policy, its seemingly optimistic
but actually unlikely prospects, and its own desperate gestures to posterity.
The penultimate section, “Empire's Other War/s and Casualty Figures” (Chapter
Four) turns to a filmic narrative and a memorial allegory of “imperial love and war” in
the United States as double-edged weapons that are pressed into the service of, while
artifactually encoding, a contradictory politics of memorializing and forgetting the U.S.Philippine War; the events and turns of the New Empire's story of emergence and
formation through it; and most significantly, the figure tasked with its labor of expansion
into and conquest of the Philippines: the American soldier (named in its time as “the
Hiker”). Examining a story film, “The American Soldier in Love and War” (1903/1905),
in tandem with sculptural or monumental representations of the American Soldier as
29
Hiker that inconspicuously mark the memorial landscapes of the United States, this
chapter develops the argument for an “other war” that extended the actual U.S.-Philippine
War into the terrain of U.S. culture and cultural production (culture war, war of
representations) and beyond its period of occurrence in the form of “historiographic
skirmishes.”
This other war put the American soldier as citizen in the unsettling position of
heroic imperial subject locked in a life-and-death struggle with its recalcitrant object of
desire and conquest (the Filipino here represented as “savage,” as simultaneous target and
recipient of the nation's civilizing/pacifying intent) while acceding to the inconstancy of
the nation's affective guarantees for such self-sacrificial patriotism. Largely fought on the
continent, this other war and war with the Filipino as Other, it is argued, ultimately makes
common casualties of both its protagonists and antagonists, creating a simultaneous
deification and disavowal of the former and a racialization and valorization of the latter in
narratives or allegories of representation that performed a cultural form of war work
marked by symbolic erasures of and epistemic violence on its figural participants. Such
narratives, this chapter concludes, paradoxically worked to satisfy and project the
demands of hegemonic U.S. nationalism upon its citizens/soldiers in its moment of
imperial war, while seeking to pacify an agitated polity that itself had been worked into
jingoistic fervor but must now confront the cost and consequences, for them and their
Filipino Others, of the nation's imperial errands of “love” (benevolent assimilation)
abroad.
30
CHAPTER 1
EMPIRE AND FILIPINO AMERICAN FORMATIONS
[To reconstruct subaltern histories] is, in effect, to decipher the history of the possible and
to trace the contours of numerous alternatives to dominant modes of social formation.
Without such a history, not only is the universal history of cultural development--the
narrative of representation--all the more difficult to displace, but radical politics becomes
all the more confined to the issue of civil rights, that is, to the extension of representation
and the implicit affirmation of assimilation.
David Lloyd (1991, 88)
The United States is a unique case in history: an imperialism in search of universality.
Octavio Paz (1990 [1967], 198)
Colonialism...may be considered a genuine expansion of nationality.
J. A. Hobson (1965 [1902/1905], 6)
To tell the history of another is to be pressed against the limits of one's own--thus culture
learns that terror has a local habitation and a name.
Sara Suleri (1992, 2)
Deciding to undertake ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines in the late 1960s,
the Chicano anthropologist Renato Rosaldo was advised by his Harvard University
professor to reconsider the idea because "Filipinos are 'a people without culture'" (1989,
197).1 The Harvard professor was, of course, merely regurtitating for an intending student
of the Philippines in the 1960s—and with more imperious scope ("culture")—a 1905
declaration by Arthur Stanley Riggs, an American student of Filipino Drama, that "there
is no Filipino literature" (1981, 1). Anyone who has a passing familiarity with U.S.
colonialist discourse on Filipinos and the Philippines should find these authoritative
1
“Culture" here means that Filipino communities supposedly do not exhibit dense kinship
structures and symbolic/material culture systems that apprentice anthropologists are expected to
map and recover in their ethnographies for the sake of metropolitan readers.
31
statements unsurprising. Although comparable claims have been made in respect to other
colonized formations like Martinique, they gain unusual power for the Philippines which
holds a lengthy record of multiple colonizations: Spain, 1565-1896; United States, 19021940; Japan, 1941-1945; and U.S. neocolonial dependency, 1946-1991. The latter period
(neocolonial dependency) was terminated only by the withdrawal of U.S. military bases
or outposts of extraterritoriality from—and the reduction of strategic U.S. geopolitical
interests in—the Philippines, given the onset of a post-Cold War era after 1989; longfestering and irreconcilable U.S.-Philippine disputes over territorial sovereignty; and a
volcanic eruption (Mt. Pinatubo) that rendered the major bases inoperable and poetically
concluded nearly a century of U.S. neo/colonial dominion over the archipelago.
Such claims as the Harvard professor’s—and Riggs’s, way before him—
percolated as early as the beginning of the acrimonious 1898-1904 U.S. national debates
over the desirability of the Philippines as a possibly new state of the Union and its
peoples as the "new Americans" (see Miller 1982, 104-128; Ngai 2004, 96-126). Decades
later, the emergence of Filipinos and their cultures/literatures in the United States would
be vexed by the peculiar difficulties posed by the U.S. colonization of the Philippines and
by the ex-colony's disposition within the Empire's "spheres of influence" after political
independence became possible in 1946. Some of these fundamental difficulties would lie
in the exceptionalist forms by which the U.S. Empire demarcated its territorial stretch and
modes of imperial power (given the tremendous cost of the US-Philippine War, 18981910s), and by which Filipinos experienced unusual political liminality as a consequence
of contemporary U.S. national anxieties and compromises over their incorporation as
"ethnic aliens" (see Welch 1979, 150; Kramer 2006, 392-451; Tolentino 2009, 50, 55).
32
Sometimes called "America's First Vietnam" (Miller 1970; Francisco 1973), the
long-forgotten war of U.S. imperialist expansion and Filipino resistance referred to above
is considered among the most brutal in the annals of colonial warfare. The U.S.
government spent $650 million on a total mobilization of 126,000 troops, and ignored the
racially-motivated atrocities and massive depopulation and scorched-earth strategies
committed by the U.S. Eighth Army against the November 1899 shift to guerilla warfare
by the militarily disadvantaged republican forces led by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo.
(Estimates of war-related Filipino casualties range from a conservative 100,000 to a high
1 million; some historians cite the compromise figure of 250,000).2 Understandably, as a
result of this disenchanting experience of its first major war abroad and in Southeast
Asia, the United States soon both eschewed similar overt forms of imperial adventure
throughout "the American century" (except Vietnam, and recently Afghanistan and Iraq)
and articulated a "denial of empire" (Perkins 1962; Williams 1980; Miller 1982, 253-276;
Jacobson 2000, 261-265)3 which continues, effectively, to inform its neocolonial
economic, military, and cultural power politics in a globalizing world.
The consequences of this inaugural moment of U.S.-Philippine relations for latterday U.S. Filipinos are manifold and extend to their politics or forms of recognition and
2
On estimates of the war's cost in dollars and to the American Treasury, see Atkinson (1902) and
May (1987, 168).
3
Critical observers find it difficult to believe that "a war of this magnitude has been so
thoroughly forgotten" (Fuchs and Antler 1973, xi) and attribute this historical amnesia to the
"odd imbalance of treatment in our usual history courses, where the war with Spain, a brief, but
victorious military romp--a "splendid little war" as some called it--is the central event in the
foreign policy in the period and the taking of the Philippines as a shadowy anti-climax" (Schirmer
1972, vii).
33
emergence. Such consequences encompass the fitful struggles of a nominally
independent Philippines to emerge from what the Filipino writer N.V.M. Gonzalez once
called a "lahar of colonizations," which was capped only by the curious effects of U.S.
neocolonial rule (Strobel 1993, 117). Even after formal independence in 1946, the effects
of these colonizations continued to shape the fortunes and futures of Filipinos decisively,
whether as citizens of a country still effectively tethered to the United States as a result of
the unequal treaties and economic arrangements exacted by U.S. negotiators from postWWII Philippine regimes, such as the now abrogated Military Bases Agreement, and the
inappropriately labeled and historically controversial "Parity Rights," which granted to
U.S. Americans the right to Philippine land and resource ownership without granting the
same requisite rights of Filipinos to U.S. patrimonies on the continent (Shalom 1981, 3367; Shalom and Schirmer 1987, 87-103); or, following the depredations of post-WWII
national reconstruction, as migrants or immigrants of all kinds, primarily to the United
States, and increasingly to Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world (Molina 1982;
Pido 1986; Aguilar 1988; Okamura 1998; Bonus 2000; Parreñas 2001; Manalansan 2003;
Ceniza-Choy 2003; Le Espiritu 2003).
To reckon Filipino American community and cultural formations exclusively or
primarily in terms of that foundational myth of U.S. nation-building, immigration,
thereby, is to short-circuit an altogether more decisive and yet heavily suppressed
historical moment for them: the moment of William McKinley's “Benevolent
Assimilation.” Filipino Americanization can, in fact, be understood as a function of U.S.
colonialism and its aftermath in the Philippines (the term "Filipino American" can be
refunctioned thusly, instead of standing, as one more invariant instance, for the
34
conventional problematic of immigrant hyphenation in theories of American national
formation or even “Asian-American Pan-Ethnicity”).4 William McKinley's "Benevolent
Assimilation" is the U.S. neo/colonial analogue to immigrant assimilation but
"assimilation" in either case has critical differends: in their limits, promised rewards, and
placements or dislocations for others who are thus "adopted" and (un)welcomed into the
national fold.5
As the Philippines is the only Asian country of origin to have been subjected to a
sustained and systematic American experiment in extraterritorial colonial rule (18981941), "Americanization" and "America" take peculiarly extended trajectories and fluid
forms for Filipino migrants and their descendants. Americanization for Filipinos does not
so much as commence at the point of arrival on American soil as it does from the point of
departure itself. "So long before the Filipino immigrant, tourist or visitor sets foot on the
U.S. continent, she—her body and sensibility—has been prepared by the thoroughly
Americanized culture of the homeland" (San Juan 1991, 117). Rey Chow argues that this
pre-migratory Americanization is generally true for Asian countries where American
cultural offensives such as "rock and roll, hamburgers, shopping malls, television
programs, computer games, and tourism" structure and pervade "everyday realities"
(1990, 47). But the experience and legacies of direct and formal United States colonial
conquest, as distinct from the forms of neo-colonial dominion by which late-modern
American global power is characteristically known, endow Filipino Americanization with
4
For more elaboration of this, see Campomanes 2006, esp. 39-43.
5
For the most recent and cutting-edge discussion of the difference that Filipino-American
formations present to such theories and even to notions of Asian-American Pan-Ethnicity, see
Isaac (2006), esp. his notion of “folded” American national and expansionist borders across and
athwart the colonies of the “American tropics” like the Philippines.
35
singular effects and dilemmas. Upon their migration to the United States, "Filipinos find
themselves 'at home' in a world they've lived in before—not just in Hollywood fantasies
but in the material culture of everyday life." So they are just as quick and likely to
experience an acute "apprenticeship in disillusionment" (under the impact of
discrimination and rejection)6 as they are "to identify themselves as 'Americans' even
before formal citizenship is bestowed" (San Juan 1991, 117-119).
Categorical and Institutional Politics
This contemporizing and contextualizing chapter first takes up, as a necessary
opening gesture, the possibly thankless, if by now exhausted, politics of terms/categories
and knowledges.7 This is a necessary ruse to foreground the main and analytical foci of
6
Here, of course, the emblematic texts or testimonies are and continue to be Bulosan (1946/1973)
and, to a certain extent, Buaken (1948).
7
We have been admonished, for instance, "[not] to get bogged down in boring questions of
representation and inclusion, or worse still to leap up and lead a provincial cheer" (Eldridge 1994,
171). Besides, the multicultural and postcolonial critiques and the Subaltern Studies scholars have
already performed this politics with encompassing reach. See Mercer's work on "the mysteries of
the ethnic signifier" and his revealing excavations of the active subaltern and hegemonic
recodings of the terms "Negro, Colored, Black, Afro-American, and African American" at certain
historical conjunctures, in the improvisational cultures of Afro-diasporic politics, and in
metropolitan debates over citizenship and rights (in the U.S. and U.K.). These terms either signify
or contain what Houston Baker has called the "generational shifts" in African American struggles,
both for "democratic agency" in a society structured in race-caste dominance and against their
centuries-old cultural degradation by Euro-American racialist and colonialist discourses (Mercer
1992, 427-432; Baker 1981). For analogous shifts in "Mexican, Latin American, Spanish
American, Hispano, Latino, and Chicano" as terms of reference for a group whose "American"
history remains considerably determined by the territorial absorption of sizeable parts of what is
now Mexico into what is now the United States after the U.S.-Mexico War of 1848, see Saldívar
(1990). Such nominative shifts are dialectically linked with the fact of regional identity
differences (Texas and border regions, northern New Mexico and southern Colorado), racial
heterogeneity (mestizos, Spaniards, blacks, mulattoes, American Indians), and cultural
nationalism among the radically political and anti-assimilationist youth, of a "conquered minority
in a colonized land" (12-14). On another register, see Guha (1983; 1989) for inaugural examples
of the catalytic work done by the South Asian historians (who problematize the inscription of
Indian subjects in British imperialist and Indian nationalist historiographies) on the category of
the "subaltern" and its productive excavations of subjugated knowledges or historical narrations;
36
this multi-archival and critical project: the intractable questions of Filipino-American
postcolonialities and their curious historiographic and institutional/categorical
displacements. We use the flexible definition of postcoloniality offered by Aschcroft, et
al.: both in the conventional sense of independence struggles of colonized peoples or their
"project of asserting difference from the imperial centre," and in the broad sense of "all
the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the
present day."
According to this definition, the prophetic posteriority of the post-colonial
imagination and predicament does not necessarily ratify the developmentalist chronology
of a period before and after political decolonization as "the political impetus of the postcolonial impetus begins well before the moment of independence" (1989, 1-2, 4-5, 83).
Postcoloniality thus functionally defined is, however, pluralized here to emphasize the
irreconcilable tensions between the claim of the United States as the "originally
postcolonial nation" and the unseeming possibility of a U.S. Filipino postcoloniality.
Although made on a different register, Edward Said's observation—that what makes
Palestinian nationalism and dispossession extremely difficult to articulate against Jewish
Zionism is its victimization by "the classic victims of oppression and persecution" (1994,
53)—is somewhat analogous to contending Filipino/American postcolonialities. How can
Filipinos as colonial subjects assert their postcoloniality against the originally
postcolonial nation itself? As will be shown, it was precisely upon this claim of
antecedence that U.S. imperialist ideologues justified the taking of the Philippines at the
also, Spivak's commentary which notes that subalternity must be read as having multiple and
specific meanings in this collective's project (from its conceptual coinage in Gramscian thought),
referring variously to gendered, tribal, caste, peasant, and working-class actors subordinated by
historical systems of British domination and conquest in India under the Raj (1988b, 283-286).
37
turn of the twentieth century given the purported "unfitness" of Filipinos for
independence.
Indeed, one needs concentrate on the productive precariousness of the categorical
act itself, especially for what is now acknowledged as one of the largest Asian- and
Pacific-origin groups in the United States (especially given ever-accelerating emigration
from the Philippines), and for academic studies of this group's political-economic,
historical, and cultural formations.8 Charting the historical anchors of these categorical
shifts and knowledge-politics as the signposts for certain forms of political flux or fields
of power contestations is something that essentially remains undone for the
representational struggles of "Filipino Americans" in the U.S. public and institutional
realms. "Undone" as a term is deployed on a doubled level here: that this form of
accounting has not been done monographically in a U.S. context for Filipinos (although
Tiongson et al. 2006 constitutes a very good start), and that when done at all has had the
result of disarticulating the Filipino case and its precedents elsewhere from the already
limiting (and U.S.-centric) multiculturalist politics of recognition or representation, a
disarticulation that performs an assimilative effect when the long-current coalitional term
"Asian American," for instance, claims its representative cache on behalf of
heteregeneous stakes, including those of Filipino Americans.9
8
See Tiongson et al. 2006 and Okamura 1998 for the most recent and comprehensive studies, as
both volumes situate, on a sustained basis, Filipino American formations within the dynamic
interactions of empire, diaspora, and globalization. Reyes 2007 extends such a complex
theoretical apparatus to the analysis of Filipino American fiction.
9
Lowe 1991b remains unsurpassed as the most programmatic articulation of and call for
theoretical critique of this kind as it may apply to the various constituent groups ranged under the
rubric of Asian-American Pan-Ethnicity (with more elaboration in Lowe 1996). On the uneasy
and anxious mirroring between U.S. liberal and multicultural discourses and the problems that
this raises about the equally fraught relations between individualist and collectivist interests or
38
Our seeming "inability" to congeal the Filipino case in categorical terms has, in
itself, generated a number of uninterrogated effects; or rather, has effectively preempted
and prevented the interrogation that this inability, by itself, deserves and demands.
Generally, it has been a short step from this to the fact of categorical indeterminacy
itself—or how the Filipino condition resists political narratives or narrations which do not
unsettle the representative terms/categories mandated by prevailing discursive and
epistemic grids in U.S. nation-state bureaucracies, academia, and cultural domains (and
in this, the categorical unrecognizability of U.S. imperialism, which is initially discussed
below, is a remarkable homologue). Add to these the popular perception of the tardiness
and perpetuity of Filipino arrival on the U.S. scene of representational politics (especially
when compared to other Asian Americans) and you get a self-sustaining mix that
substitutes for a comfortable explanation of the so-called assimilability and, thus, historic
and cultural invisibility of Filipinos in the United States.10
rights (and on another level, between particular groups and the coalitional program of Asian
American Pan-Ethnicity) in constitutionally democratic and liberal-capitalist societies like the
U.S, see Taylor and Gutmann (1994); Chuh 2003; and the brilliant book by Nguyen (2002).
Cultural critics as dissimilar in orientation as Werner Sollors and Homi Babha share convergent
positions on this question. Sollors argues that multiculturalism ("defiant ethnic revivalism and
exclusivism in the United States") is, in fact, a measure of the exceptional capacity of the U.S.
polity to assimilate and allow the play of "cultural difference" among its multiple constituents
(1988, 13). Babha alerts us to the recoding of "cultural difference" into "cultural diversity" by
liberal and multicultural societies like the United States, or what he calls "a creation of cultural
diversity and a containment of cultural difference" which such polities libidinally compel: a
maneuver, which, as he notes, is secured by the diffusionist influence of anthropological-cultural
and philosophical relativists (1990, 208; italics supplied). For more discussion of this question
and in respect of the Asian American field, see Campomanes 1997.
10
Rather than pursue this phenomenon of tardiness to its productive thresholds, such a popular
perception works to confirm the discursively essentialist commonplaces generated by nearly a
century of U.S. colonial writing on Filipino peoples or on the perpetual interruptibility of their
nation- or community-building efforts (including their attempts to be recognized as agentive
individuals and groups by others): their vaunted factionalism, clientelism, colonial mentality and
assimilationist tendencies (the Philippines was multiply colonized after all), and their supposedly
retrograde value systems. For typical examples of this kind of writing on Philippine culture, and
39
One must also certainly risk rehearsing what is already known about categories
because the "narratives of representation" that they call up, to borrow David Lloyd’s
powerfully heuristic term, still possess tremendous power to efface themselves from sight
and thus to retain juridical sway over the designation and production of discursive events
or categorical formulations (Lloyd 1991). Lloyd defines "narrative[s] of representation"
as at once the "representative narratives of canonical culture" (modernity, humanism,
aesthetic culture, and the liberal nation-state as "Western" achievements generalized to
rest of the world) and the "narrative form taken by the concept of representation itself,"
which is to say that analogous "processes of formalization occur at every level, allowing
a series of transferred identifications to take place from the individual to the nation, and
from the nation to the idea of a universal humanity," to invoke an often imperceptibly
Eurocentered abstraction (63-64).11
especially as culture might be invoked to explain the Philippine postcolonial nightmare and
"Third World" predicament after the foreseeable disengagement by the United States as a
(neo)colonizing power, see Brands (1992), Karnow (1989), Iyer (1989, 151-193), O'Rourke
(1988, 99-126), but especially Fallows (1987; 1988). Fallows, for instance, disingenuously
inverted the "culture of poverty" thesis used by U.S. social science to explain black
"underdevelopment" in the 1960s but long since discredited, and virtually argued that festering
economic and social problems in the Philippines must stem from the poverty of Filipino culture,
not the extemely difficult aftermath of multiple colonizations. Campomanes (1994) provides a
brief account of how this colonialist cultural determinism translates into the paucity of
scholarship and institutional marginality of Philippine Studies in U.S. academic institutions. For
incisive critiques of Karnow and U.S. Filipinology's reproductions of these colonial-culturalist
arguments, see Ileto (n.d.) and Salman (1991). Not surprisingly, this explanatory model
imperceptibly migrates into U.S. writing on Filipino Americans (see Melendy 1980, the
regurtitative text in this regard) and have inordinately determined U.S. Filipino self-knowledges
and -representations; see Feria (1954), Muñoz (1972), Denton Villena-Denton (1986) and the
hortatory statements by various "community leaders" which saturate the op-ed pages of Filipino
American newsmagazines. Well-documented Filipino American testimonies in Espiritu (1995)
register the odd inflections of this colonialist cultural critique on Filipino American articulations
in manifold ways.
11
Lloyd's insights, drawn from a rigorous scrutiny of late eighteenth-century and residual
aesthetic culture (and Immanuel Kant's inaugural formulations of it) and, in another essay (1990),
John Stuart Mill's theory of representative government, hold tremendous utility for Asian
40
Concretely, specific categories—when secured and instituted by empowered
individuals, experts, nation-states or opinion leaders, social sectors or movements, and
cumulative accretions of knowledge—determine or legitimate what gets conventionalized
in university curricula or even the effective structures of academic disciplines and
departments; what gets acknowledged as a "core American culture" or some mystifying
cultural distillate as "Englishness" or "literariness;" how the past is at once to be
forgotten, remembered, or even relegated within a region remote from our conditional
present; how an electoral district gets "n" number of delegates to the highest
representative institutions or how much of an allocation from the national budget is
decided for various interest groups; indeed, what gets formed as "common sense" in any
social or intersubjective contexts (to name only some concrete stakes and disputes).12
Categories, then, have such material power and effects because they are never
above but are always implicated within (if not frequently configuring) fields of real
political struggles, whether over nationality, citizenship, right, the distribution of
American and multicultural studies practitioners who find themselves confronted with the
structural effects of representation as such, as they grapple with the heterogeneity of their
knowledge-objects and identificatory subjects at their levels. It is crucial here for Lloyd that the
“West” is "understood not as a bounded geographical domain but as a global complex of
economic, political, and cultural institutions" which universalizes a temporal schema of
acculturation by which the Rest must comprehend the goal to modernize or be “modern” — the
"ethical end" of being formed after Western developmentalist schemas as a consequence of
Euro/American colonialisms (1991, 63). For this quandary of representation in an Asian
Americanist context, see Lowe (1991b).
12
See Barbara Herrnstein-Smith's heuristic deployments of the metaphors/terms of "economy"
and "values" to theorize how categorical determinations of every conceivable kind involve a
politics of interests or equilibria in a highly contingent process of selection and coordination by
social actors as they negotiate the discourses and systems that govern or constrain their agentive
options (1984). Her model convincingly shows what convergences of such moments are required
in value-making (moments that traverse various "economies" — personal/psychic, social, cultural
etc.) so as to result in institutional or individual formulations and assertions of, say, aesthetic
taste/culture or literary canons.
41
resources or wealth, the function of social institutions, sexuality, or even who gets
defined as "human." At their most powerful, categories and their discursive fields
produce continuity, form, and "unities" where one otherwise confronts "a population of
dispersed events." They exact the creation of "the same" from a field of differences,
"resemblances" from heteregeneous elements, and an "origin" from a series of moments
(Foucault 1972, 21-22)—the very preconditions for classic narrative to arise and for
political representation to take place. Whether the nation, the name of a major author, an
invented tradition, the so-called ethos of an age, a historical periodization, a census
ethnicity, all these share the irrepressible ambition to produce or subjugate the different,
minor, anomalous, incommensurable, and intransigent within discourses. These
discourses are latticed by "principles of classification, normative rules, and
institutionalized types" which legislate and regulate the production of the intelligible and
irreducible in the communicative acts and social relations thus encompassed (see also
Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 1-14 and Foucault 1977, 113-138 but especially Foucault
1972, 22).13 The continuing and vigilant examination of categorical or nominative
politics, therefore, cannot be dismissed—as neoconservative humanist critics and popular
pundits have—as an exercise in idleness.
All these considerations may seem relentlessly abstract but they have become so
commonplace, from the 1990s onwards, as to constitute the first principles of
13
However, as Lisa Lowe has brilliantly shown in her Gramscian rereading of Foucauldian
qualifiers on these theoretical advancements, we cannot understand categories and the discourses
(including the narratives of representation) that they imply in their dominantly interpreted senses
of totalizing power or elaborations. That is, they are historically formed or contingent, are
susceptible to challenge, transformation, and accommodation by subjugated populations or
disciplined subjects at critical junctures, and have points of rearticulation precisely because of
their breakdowns and decompositions as hegemonic discourses under such pressures (1991a, 1015).
42
multicultural/postcolonial identity politics and discourse studies.14 In what follows, a
different set of possible insights is explored in or culled from the U.S/Filipino case. By
now, it should be obvious to the reader how the terms of usage here are being
operationally and tactically shifted, with the deployments of the identity terms "Filipino,"
"Filipino American," and "U.S. Filipino" as if they have interchangeable or varying
valences.15 Here, one has not even invoked such equally operative names as "Pilipino,"
"Pilipino American," "Pinoy," "Philippine," "Flip," among a host of available choices.
This is not even to include the variant meanings of "America" and "American" for
Filipinos in this country and whatever parts of the globe they now inhabit; or indeed, the
contradictions and redundancies produced in the conjunctions, F/Pilipino American,
Philippine-American, and "Filipinos in the United States."16
14
As should be obvious to anyone familiar with the theoretical turn in the U.S. academy since the
late 1980s, "multiculturalism" and "postcolonialism" as efficacious and descriptive "proper"
categories for "alternative modes of social formation" in our time have themselves precipitated
much hairsplitting and handwringing. A change of heart by a previously leading advocate and a
prominent creature of the multiculture, for example, is notably registered in Gates (1992). In the
neoconservative turn of the 1990s, an extensive journalistic reportage (too voluminous to
catalogue here) effectively parodied, and reduced the multicultural critique into, the "P.C. [or
politically correct] police:" an inadvertently ironic twist by which the accelerated circulation of
heretofore minoritized voices and narratives—which was meant to address the unequal Western
relations of representation in the first place—became recodifiable as an oppressive orthodoxy by
neoconservatives and "revolutionary" right-wingers who consequently felt marginalized in U.S.
intellectual production and public discourses. For the debates over the explanatory power of
postcolonialism in regard to the world order after the fact of post-World War II decolonization
and transition periods in global modernities, see Said (1993), the "More on the Postcolony"
segment of Public Culture (1992), the "Third World and Postcolonial Issues" of Social Text
(1992), Bhabha (1994, 171-197) and Appiah (1992, 137-157).
15
This is a modest attempt at operationalizing and mitigating the dynamic and confounding
effects of the representational act especially as it is undertaken here within multiple contexts.
One's hope is for us a treatment of each term as tactically meaningful in one's rhetorical practice
to avoid the tricky traps of the categorical politics being discussed.
16
The latter term is used, if only suggestively, in a first and exploratory essay by this writer on
exilic Filipino American writing (Campomanes 1995 [1992]). Cynthia Liu is to be credited for
shortening "Filipinos in the United States" to the more felicitous phrase "U.S. Filipinos," a term
which is here preferred if such a choice catches in subsequent studies. In fact, as the excellent
43
If there is in shorthand anything characteristic of the nascent narratives called up
by this variety of proper names (names which have finally begun to acquire categorical
status), it is this intractable instability: itself vulnerable to interpretation as a negative
value. But rather than read the resulting discursive and epistemic liminality of Filipino
Americans as something attributable to their forms of cultural cringe or to be redressed
by pluralist ploys, this critical study contends that dominant U.S. narratives of
representation experience the limits or thresholds of their juridical scope in the U.S.
Filipino predicament at certain levels. Perhaps, and more productively, this condition
holds opportunities for a continuing and critical reexamination of the long-prevailing or
current state of affairs in U.S. categorical politics or institutional arrangements of
representation and, thus, in limning what David Lloyd calls "the history of the
possible."17
U.S. Filipinos and their indeterminate forms critically pose the problem of
"unassimilability" (San Juan 1994, 118-119) and unrepresentability to a range of U.S.
discursive fields and institutional sites, or more importantly, cannot be so "assimilated"
into them without these discourses and institutions themselves being disrupted or
transformed altogether.18 What needs to be seen and shown is how U.S. Filipino
documentary compilations of the Filipino American Experience at San Francisco State University
bear out, the name "U.S. Filipinos" may have had some currency in 1930s Filipino American
journalism. A Philippines Mail 28 August 1933 editorial carries the head "What is Wrong with
U.S. Filipinos?" (Fabros and Herbert 1994, 22). Theo Gonzalvez suggests the provocative
formulation "Filipinos of America," in a prepositional slippage which specifies U.S. Filipino
cultural production and politics—their difference from other Philippine, and Filipino diasporic,
counterparts (in Campomanes 1995b).
17
For an excellent elaboration and texturing of this critical point, see the editorial essay, “Critical
Considerations, by Antonio Tiongson Jr. (in Tiongson et al. 2006, esp. 3-6, 11-13).
18
It is not being argued that these formative exclusions and their curious effects are somehow
primordially specific to Filipinos; rather, that they harbor complex historical dimensions relating
44
nominative (and representational) politics speak to the several U.S. fields which Filipino
Americans and their forms actually traverse and criss-cross without earning the requisite
currencies, in particular: Asian American studies, Filipinology (or what passes for it; this
American Asian studies component concerned with the Philippines as an "area" merits
study in itself),19 and the multicultural and postcolonial-transnational critiques in general.
Their curious condition of simultaneous polymorphousness and liminality crystallizes the
larger argument: Filipinos and their "subaltern" (because long actively repressed and only
ever-emergent) formations are precisely and significantly unaccommodated by such
fields for the multiple complications that they present to prevailing narrative patterns and
representational protocols in U.S.-based discourses and institutional networks. In
particular, the (post)colonial relations and entanglements between the Philippines and the
United States as imagining communities—and the pressures that they exert on U.S.
Filipino formations—have not been substantively raised within this array of discursive
fields and institutional sites, until recently. Or these have tended, at once, to be
acknowledged as constituting an inaugural moment (for the United States, as a neoimperial power; and for Filipinos, as now globally nomadic peoples who confront
multiple colonial legacies), and uncomfortably scanted or tokenistically considered.
The emergence of U.S. Filipinos and their forms/formations is visited by the
fundamental difficulty of being caught between the competing but entwined nationalisms
to the unique case of the Philippines as the only experiment of the United States in formal
colonialism (and therefore, as other sites for U.S. national identity constructions).
19
For an exploratory and admittedly partial account in reference to U.S. Filipinos, see
Campomanes (2001; 1994). See also May (1987), McCoy and de Jesus (1982, 1-18, 447-453),
and Stanley (1972) for a self-accounting by the long and perpetually endangered or marginalized
species of U.S. Filipinology.
45
or nativisms of the countries with which they simultaneously but conflictedly identify as
citizens: the United States and the Philippines.20 The conjunction "F/Pilipino American"
embodies and conjures these fraught and conflicting narratives of representation,
including the mutuality (if not resemblance) between U.S. American and Philippine
anxieties in narrating these distinguishing yet entangled "nations" to others. This is
perhaps why—with the probable exception of the "Flip" and bridge generations who
announced their coming-of-age and called themselves "Pilipino Americans" in the 1960s
and 70s—there existed much discomfort among U.S. Filipinos about this term and its
"oxymoronic" overtones, a discomfort that arguably remains (Campomanes 1995 [1992],
160-161, 187: n9). Yet this unique burden on U.S. Filipino politics of emergence and
recognition is at its heaviest, and the Filipino American difficulty in pursuing this politics
at its most vexed, at the precise moments when U.S. Filipino nominative or identity
formations are structured by such irreconcilable U.S.-Philippine nationalist antagonisms
and nativistic narrations.
20
Jean Gier discusses U.S. nativistic rhetorics on two levels: that of the dominant American
narrative, and that of U.S.-born Asian/Filipino Americans such as what one would find articulated
in the distinctive poetry of Jeff Tagami and the "Flip" writers. She also implicitly situates her
readings against the dominant Philippine nativisms in exilic or diasporic writing by U.S. Filipino
writers like N.V.M. Gonzalez or Bienvenido Santos, and against tentative critical accounts which
tend to gloss over this other U.S. Filipino narrative of nativity to "America" (one that is produced
out of migrant labor and "lays claim to the landscape" and to a history of shaping, familiarizing,
and homing a "local" region of the mythic continent). As Gier suggests, this other U.S. Filipino
nativism (or assertion of local nativity to a continental locale) is alter-native and counters the
mythic narrative favoring that of Anglo-European American settlers or their descendants. As
recently as a few years ago, writers like Elizabeth Pisares (2006) were still adumbrating Gier's
assertions within the context of the Asian American field and, now additionally, against what
Pisares calls “the neocolonial theory of invisibility” (187).
46
Institutional difficulties and constraints had historically beset U.S. Filipino
emergence and all attempts to mark the political, historical, and cultural moments
pertinent to it as objects or categories for productive critique. Prevailing discursive
conditions and epistemic frames at any time should make one shift the burden of U.S.
Filipino emergence from Filipino Americans to the difficulties posed before such a
project by these conditions themselves. What these discursive conditions and institutional
arrangements produce, in sum (and often unwittingly), are ethnocentric effects in which
the very national re-constitution of the U.S. as a neo-colonial global power through its
creation of an island or "insular" empire at the turn of the twentieth century is rendered
illegible, with tremendous consequences for Filipino American self-representations.21
That the formation of the United States as the "New Empire" by and after 1898 (Adams
1902; Campomanes 1999) radically necessitated the U.S. non-recognition of Filipino
nationality when the latter politically emerged after the 1896-98 Philippine Revolution
against Spain—a pivotal moment and expression of Philippine modernity which the U.S.
itself had to abort (or skew into the "pre-modern") as the intervening and new imperial
power in 1898-99—is perhaps the most obdurate of these historical and discursive
bequests.22
21
For the consequences of this nationalizing U.S. amnesia for other peoples and territories
absorbed into the "insular [or archipelagic] empire" (Hawai'i, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the various
Pacific/Carribbean island groups), see what is perhaps the best new conceptual and critical effort
in comparative U.S. Empire studies, involving the various U.S. dominions, by the sociologist
Lanny Thompson (2002). In Thompson's essay, the Philippine case yet again stands out for being
both anomalous and modular, at least in terms of administration and colonial state-building, when
compared to the post-annexation incorporation of the other archipelagic colonies.
22
See Chapter Two for a historical case study and historiographic critique of this politics of nonrecognition and representation, in the instance of Filipino revolutionary diplomat Felipe
Agoncillo's campaigns in 1898-99 and their virtual excision from the historical and state records,
47
For the United States to emerge as the New Empire at the turn of the twentieth
century required no less than the delegitimation of a new Filipino nation as implausible at
the time. What the New Empire and its ideologues immediately created was a massive
political and cultural archive which denationalized Filipinos and deemed them as
racialized subjects unfit for self-determination, requiring systematic U.S. tutelage in the
art for which the U.S. precisely claimed originary authorship in its own 1776 Revolution
against the British Empire. Apart from the figurative sense here, "archive" ought to be
construed in two other distinct senses.
Firstly, one must take note of the remarkably extensive "shadow archive" of
images, ideas, and stereotypes about Filipinos and the Philippines which were elaborated
in various U.S. culture forms from the visual mass media (graphics and photography,
early and pre-narrative U.S. cinema, proto-filmic modes like chromolithography,
stereography and postcards) to the verbal pictures and ethnological accounts encoded in
print media forms like the Sunday supplements of major U.S. newspapers and journalistic
reportage, hack histories, and book-length productions ranging in scope from travelogues
to constitutional-political polemics, and such popular spectacles as the material-culture
and "living" or dioramic Philippine exhibits which were organized (mostly under colonial
state sponsorship) for various U.S. world's fairs from 1898 in Omaha through 1904 in St.
Louis all the way up to the 1939 New York, or even for travelling "freak shows" and
"cheap amusements."
Secondly, one must also take into account the "official" or bureaucratic archives,
from those generated by the Bureau of Insular Affairs of the U.S. War Department
owing to the “crises” that he symbolically and politically presented to American sovereignty
claims upon the Philippines before and immediately after the Treaty of Paris negotiations.
48
(which had jurisdiction over the Philippines after colonial rule was substantially
enforced) and U.S. Army agencies, to the reorganized Division of Territories and Island
Possessions, Department of Interior (by 1939), including the institutional collections (of
the Smithsonian Insitution, National Archives, some major research universities, e.g.
Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, and California-Berkeley) which colonial functionaries and
scholars like Frank Hilder, W. Cameron Forbes, Dean Worcester and David Barrows (to
cite a few) assembled.23
Toward this end of Filipino denationalization, a colonial war of remarkable
proportions was waged until this "archive" itself became a self-fulfilling phantasm:
during the more than four decades that followed (1902-1946), the possibility of Filipino
nationality and self-determination became subject to ceaseless dismissal and perpetual
deferment by the U.S. colonial state and its multivariate discourses, mostly on racialist
arguments. The significance of this obsessive imperialist politics against Filipino
nationality lies precisely in the astonishing and consistent ways by which this politics and
colonial conquest had been adjudged as insignificant to the history of U.S. nation/empirebuilding and, therefore, deemed as forgettable or negligible (Welch 1979, esp. 150-159,
remains the most articulate of such maneuvers). Contrarily, U.S. neocolonialism and its
emergence through the U.S. "benevolent assimilation" of the Philippines is understood in
this chapter, and in the present project generally, as a crucial moment and form of U.S.
nationalism by which its twentieth-century modernity ("The American Century") was
23
On the notion of a "shadow archive," see Sekula (1990); on U.S. world's fairs Philippine
exhibits, see Rydell (1984, 120, 137-144, 163-178, 193-199) and Kramer (1999); on amusement
shows, see Slotkin (1993, 178); and on the Bureau of Insular Affairs, see Cruz (1974). For an
astute deconstruction of U.S. imperial archiving and administrative practices and institutions
through the salient case of the fabled 1903-05 U.S. Census project on the Philippines, see Rafael
2000.
49
triumphantly announced and the boundaries of a re-imagined United States were
simultaneously expanded and contracted from their continental moorings.24
Multiculturalism, Transnationalism, Postcolonialism
It would seem retrograde to discuss contending nationalisms and nativisms in this
study's context when metropolitan scholars, cultural critics, and writers have
triumphantly declared, by the 1990s, a "post-national" or transnational world order,
valorizing symbolic and virtual border-crossings or "borderlands." On this view, what we
could have been witnessing by that decade was the genesis of "post-modern nations”—or
imagined communities distinct from post-imperial/colonial state forms—allowing one to
differentiate nationalisms proper ("official") from their cultural or nomadic parallels and
articulations.25 The U.S. analogues of this presumably global (dis)order were and are the
forms of the frequently ungravitated multicultures and postcolonialities thusly celebrated
by the post-nationalist intellectuals and “Third World” writers once “ungenerously”
regarded by Kwame Anthony Appiah as “the comprador intelligentsia” (qtd. In Dirlik
24
The momentous territorial subjugations of Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the various
Pacific/Carribean island groups from 1898 onwards are obviously not on the same order as that of
the Philippines although the "problems" that they posed to the definition of US nationality and the
curious redrawings of US national borders that they produced are crucial to the degree that they
confirm the centrality of the Philippines as the unacknowledged locus of twentieth-century US
imperial-national anxieties and quandaries.
25
See Fujikane's excellent essay on "archipelagic nationalisms" in Hawai'i (1994). In a brilliant
essay, Viet Thanh Nguyen glosses these distinctions between cultural and official nations from
Partha Chatterjee's work on nationalism and Vicente Rafael's work on Philippine nationalist
dramas by examining the "macro- and micropolitics of representation" thematized in a historical
novel by U.S.-based Filipina writer/journalist Ninotchka Rosca, State of War. The micropolitics
among U.S. Filipinos in terms of material and symbolic translocations, social class or specific
economic displacements, gender divides and sexualities, Philippine ethnolinguistic heterogeneity,
etc. are all nicely tackled in a special number on “U.S. Filipino Literature and Culture” of the
journal Critical Mass (see, especially, Nerissa Balce-Cortes's essay for more amplifications of
Nguyen's astute readings; both in Campomanes 1995b).
50
1994, 356). Certainly, such claims were made precise by the assertive social minority
movements within metropolitan societies and the large-scale population transfers across
national frontiers in recent decades, which have increasingly problematized nationalist
narratives and modern nation-state formations. But post-modern nationalisms are
probably posterior to the political formalism of the modern nation-state to the degree that
they are homologous and co-implicated with the mobility of late (U.S.) capitalism and its
disorganized and multinational regimes of accumulation and dispersion worldwide (see
Harvey 1989). If transnationalism as a phenomenon in these respects is postmodernity
globalized ("post-nationality"), such observers were probably making the same totalizing
and triumphalist claims of descriptive power for it as others were for international
socialism in its own halcyon eras.26
It remains striking that the transnational (dis)order of mobility was first claimed
as generalizable to the rest of the world's citizens at the very moment when portentous
forms of "ethnic" and revanchist nationalisms were on the rise: in unified Germany (after
the fall of the Berlin Wall), the former Yugoslavia with the Balkan wars, the former
Soviet republics, the United States, etc.—a conjunction previously marked by Benedict
Anderson (1983) on another register, citing the cases of the China and the Indochinese
border conflicts in the late 1970s in stark relation to the then triumphantly internationalist
narratives of socialism and its states.
26
See Lazarus (1991) for a devastating critique of the universalist claims of "postmodernist social
theory." Also, as Michael Salman notes, "to say that post-modernity, migrations, and culture
flows have shattered our ideas of cultural [and national] homogeneity is one thing, but the
question of how power is linked to territoriality is quite another. Power may be global,
transnational, and international, but it is still territorial. Corporations still have headquarters, and
they still have to buy off or triumph over nation-states (electronic mail, 1 January 1995)."
51
In the end, this often heady transnationalist critique is still inescapably confronted
with the fact of the passport/visa and border guards, and the question of who has the
ability to transgress national boundaries accordingly and with varying kinds of
opportunity, competence, life-chances, and handicaps. It also fails to examine adequately
the reconstruction of nationality and national borders in the face of their deconstruction
under the pressure of such surely epochal developments in the mobility of peoples,
objects, ideas, and late capital across a globe collapsed to the most local levels by the
extraordinary breakthroughs in transportation, communication, and information
technologies. As Timothy Brennan also acutely pointed out, the "new immigrations" at
once blurred the national question by occurring after, and partly because, of
decolonization, "motivated by economic and cultural inequalities, wholesale labor
recruitments, and legal arrangements set up on the basis of the former Empires," and
posed it "more strongly than ever," although in the Western countries which were now
"being forced to account for the new composition of their collective make-up" (1989, 50).
Arguably, nationalism remained a vital force and source of productive energy for the
Philippines all the way up to the withdrawal of U.S. military presence in the Philippines
in the early 1990s. As massive disenchantment with the messiahnic promises of antiimperialist nationalism set in as a consequence of failed emancipatory movements and
statist enterprises in Africa and the decolonized world by the 1970s, Philippine
nationalisms could conceivably be periodized by the Western post-national critique as
archaic and, again, as indicative of Filipino tardiness.
Nonetheless, transnationalism as a theoretical paradigm, along with the precedent
ones of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, furnishes one with powerful languages to
52
describe and understand U.S. Filipino formations. There is also no gainsaying the
remarkable gains in institutional space or transformations which these critiques and their
constituencies have enabled: that academic periodicals like Hitting Critical Mass,
Journal of Asian American Studies, and Social Text sprung up and now actively
encourage Filipino Americanist work—including, at least till the latest contraction, the
exhilarating boom in ethnic studies academic/monographic publishing—indicates much
about contentious currents of institutional change and intellectual ferment in the United
States. The chief interest here, however, is less in the descriptive and explanatory
efficacy of transnationalism for this extended period of epochal transitions than in the
effective amorphousness which transnationalism, thus institutionally configured,
unwittingly accedes to U.S. imperial-national power politics. Theoretical discourses such
as transnationalism and multiculturalism may have produced their own U.S.-nationalizing
effects, and it is these effects that require close scrutiny in terms of their ramifications
and portents for the project and the recently lively upsurge of U.S. Filipino emergence
politics.
Consider, for example, these astonishing scansions of "Filipino-American"
postcolonial histories and cultures by high priest of the transnational critique, Arjun
Appadurai (citing the touristic peregrinations of the Indo-Anglian American journalist
Pico Iyer [1989] in Manila):
[T]he uncanny Philippine affinity for American popular music is
rich testimony to the global culture of the 'hyper-real', for
somehow Philippine renditions of American popular songs are
both more widespread in the Philippines, and more disturbingly
faithful to their originals than they are in the United States today.
An entire nation seems to have learned to mimic Kenny Rogers
53
and the Lennon sisters, like a vast Motown chorus. But
Americanization is certainly a pallid term to apply to such a
situation, for not only are there more Filipinos singing perfect
renditions of some songs (often from the American past) than
there are Americans doing so, there is, of course, the fact that the
rest of their lives is not in complete synchrony with the
referential world which first gave birth to these songs...[T]hese
Filipinos look back to a world they never lost. This is one of the
central ironies of the politics of global cultural flows, especially
in the area of entertainment and leisure. It plays havoc with the
hegemony of Euro-American chronology. American nostalgia
feeds on Filipino desire represented as a hyper-competent
production. Here we have nostalgia without memory. The
paradox, of course, has its explanations, and they are historical;
unpacked, they lay bare the story of the American missionization
and political rape of the Philippines, one result of which has been
the creation of a nation of make-believe Americans, who
tolerated for so long a leading lady who played the piano while
the slums of Manila expanded and decayed (1989, 3).
In this left-handed compliment for Filipino "hyper-competence" (the postmodern
reproductions without the Platonic originals), Appadurai reproduces the exhausted
cultural-determinist staples of U.S. colonial ethnography (Filipino mimicry, frivolity, and
docility) while acknowledging that these cultural traits might have their "historical"
postulates. As always for cultural readings of this stripe, the "historical" is promised but
not delivered.27
27
One hopes in vain, as one reads the essay along, for some historiographic analysis of this
particular moment in the “Americanization” of the Philippines. Appadurai, for example, could
have taken into account the heavily repressive and remorselessly violent military rule of the
nepotistic kleptocracy which U.S. military aid subsidized for over two decades, on behalf of
strategic U.S. geopolitical interests in the Asia-Pacific (1972-1985). He could have gone on to
consider the underground resistance movements which mushroomed as a consequence, along
with the countless cases of political persecution against (and thousands of casualties among)
various anti-dictatorship forces in the Philippines during the years of dynastic despotism by the
Marcoses: a "story" whose harrowing scope has yet to be more fully "laid bare" to metropolitan
citizens and readers. But perhaps these are aspects of his transnational and transcultural scenario
of the Marcos-era Philippines rather difficult to appreciate from the safety and institutional
creature comforts of a metropolitan-liberal locus, or from the exhilarating heights of hyperreality
and the dizzying swirl of "global culture flows." Filipino immigration to the U.S. accelerated
phenomenally during the reign of the dictatorship: does this mean that immigrating Filipinos were
54
And indeed, whatever Asian Americanist or multiculturalist scholarship on
Filipinos existed tended, until recently, to fashion itself after U.S. nationalist models
which privilege U.S. immigration mythography as the crucible for the making of
"Americans" (San Juan 1991, 545-549; Campomanes 1995a [1992], 162).28 The "pallid"
Americanization of Filipinos is thus reckoned in such typical accounts in terms of an epic
pattern begun by fringe 17th-century Anglo white-settler colonists, and replicated by
waves of immigrants since, to form an exceptional nation of enterprising frontier settlers,
deemphasizing internal colonizations such as those of African, Chicano, and Native
Americans, and the extraterritorial or extracontinental "benevolent assimilation" of the
Philippines and other archipelagic territories into the United States from 1898 onwards.
This governing teleology in narratives of American national formation accounts for the
unacknowledged race in Asian American historiography, for example, to establish a
"wave theory" of immigration and settlement to mark who (among the Asian groups) got
here first and could claim a longer, and more continuous, intergenerational history of
development (see Campomanes 1997).29 Postcolonial studies, while transnational in
scope, have remarkably excluded the United States Empire (and corollarily, Filipino
postcoloniality) by heavily emphasizing Anglophone and Francophone formations during
simply quite concerned to keep their musical notes synchronized "with the referential world
which first gave birth to these songs...”?
28
The recent studies by Isaac (2006) and Bascara (2006), among several others, represent a longdue and sustained departure from this long-standing tendency in previous literature, with their
sophisticated, multi-genre, and critically postcolonial approaches to Filipino American
incorporation by way of American colonial conquest.
29
We can count here the efforts of public historians like Fred Cordova (1983) and Maria Espina
(1988) to install the eighteenth-century Louisiana settlement of "Manilamen" as the tenuous
anchor of seven continuous generations (no matter how initially small) of Filipino presence on the
continent. An 1883 account, according to Lawcock (1975, 720), described these former sailors—
who deserted from the Spanish-Manila-Acapulco galleon trade and settled along the Louisiana
bayous—as "alligator-hide hunters and fishermen."
55
and after decolonization, or, by actually elevating the U.S., as already noted, to a
privileged status as the originary model of postcoloniality after its celebrated Revolution
against the British Crown (see Ashcroft, et al. 1989, 16-17, 32-33; Buell 1992, for the
most characteristic examples).
Such accounts eventually proceed to the business proper. The Asian/multicultural
American studies series would include the historical obstacles presented by the U.S.
ethno-racial order, the frustrated struggles to assimilate into "Anglo-conformity" and "be
American," the cultural nationalist or coalitional moments of ethnic self-recovery or
group-assertion, and the politics of inclusive representation or multiple subjectivities,
with a critical nod to the immigrant tradition and exceptionalism of the U.S. as a "nation
of nations." The postcolonial studies series would unfold the aftermath of decolonization
and the legacies of Old World imperialisms (British and French world-systems
predominate), the routes of diasporic cultures or circulation and white-settler formations,
with a tokenistic tip of the hat to the post-World War II U.S. neocolonial and cultural
hegemonic complex and, if critical Fanonianism is invoked, the African decolonization
debacles since the 1960s.30
Either way, as Amy Kaplan correctly observed sometime back, U.S.
exceptionalism, whether as a nation, an empire, or an imperial nation, is effectively
ratified (1993):
30
For a highly instructive account of postcolonial African politics and cultures of
disenchantment, see Lazarus (1990). Vicente Rafael's anthological effort in Discrepant Histories:
Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures (1995) clearly opened up new pathways for investigating
the U.S. (neo)colonization of the Philippines and its critically minoritized legacies. See the
pioneering essays by Reynaldo Ileto, Warwick Anderson, Michael Salman, Martin Manalansan,
and Neferti Xina Tadiar.
56
[T]he role of empire has been....ignored in the study of American
culture. The current paradigm of American studies today, still
under intense debate, emphasizes multicultural diversity and
scholarly "dissensus" [as opposed to the Cold War and 1950s
model of "consensus"] and analyzes American society and
culture in terms of internal difference and conflicts, structured
around the relations of race, gender, ethnicity, and class[.] Yet
the new pluralistic model of diversity runs the risk of being
bound by the old paradigm of unity if it concentrates its gaze
only narrowly on the internal lineaments of American culture
and leaves national borders intact instead of interrogating their
formation[.] By defining American culture as determined
precisely by its diversity and multivocality, "America" as a
discrete entity can cohere independently of international
confrontations with other national, local, and global cultural
identities within and outside its borders (14-15).
***
The absence of the United States in the postcolonial study of
culture and imperialism curiously reproduces American
exceptionalism from without. The United States either is
absorbed into a general notion of "the West" represented by
Europe, or it stands for a monolithic West. United States
continental expansion is often treated as an entirely separate
phenomenon from European colonialism of the nineteenth
century, rather than as an interrelated form of imperial expansion
(17).
That U.S. exceptionalism ("Americanism") as a specific and much elaborated
imperial-national ideology possesses such remarkable staying power, holds tremendous
popular appeal, and eludes the most sophisticated reckonings thus only demand that one
subjects it to exacting scrutiny in one's own critical discourses. "The notion of U.S.
exceptionalism is an old one with many meanings" (Wilentz 1990, 20), and as Kaplan
implied, it is not limited to U.S. immigration mythography in its encompassing precints.
One can turn to the usual City-Upon-A-Hill, Luciferous Europe-Adamic America, and
Empire-of-Liberty platitudes (John Winthrop and Thomas Jefferson) or the culture of
democracy plaudits from Old World observers (Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, Alexis de
Tocqueville).
57
But one is probably best served to follow Sean Wilentz in tracing the currencies
of this structure of national feeling to what, in its most cogent articulation, was really an
obsessive staple of early twentieth-century U.S. intellectual Left debates over the U.S. as
the penultimate rational and national expression of modern capitalism which, throughout
its genesis, manifested an "apparent departure from certain assumed historical norms or
laws of development" (Ibid.). Critical students like Wilentz—and scholars of such
contrasting persuasions as Lipset and Marks (2000) and Michael Denning (2004)—note
that, although U.S. social class conflicts reached acute proportions in the late 1800s, it
remained for contrarian observers of the time to account for the absence or failure of a
viable socialist movement to take such conflicts to the level of revolutionary seizure of
state apparatuses. Anxieties over the political efficacy of U.S. working-class radicalism
and consciousness relating to the inability of the U.S. context "to produce ever-sharper
antagonisms between capital and labor" (the title of Werner Sombart's 1906 classic Why
is There No Socialism in the United States? says it all) drove all kinds of observers to
acknowledge the power of U.S. surplus prosperity and increasingly sophisticated
production technologies, as well as cultural strains of political citizenship, in curbing a
"normative" progress toward proletarian utopias in the wake of U.S. capitalism's chronic
and intermittent crises.
Later writers like Leon Sampson would contend that this "Americanism," or
critical difference of the U.S. from other capitalist nations in such aspects, "had become a
substitutive socialism for American workers" (Wilentz 1990, 21). The resulting notion of
an "exceptional kind of working class" in the U.S. thus joined (while unusually ratifying)
a long parade in historical novelty which the U.S. and its forms were supposed to
58
exemplify, beginning with the Constitutional achievement of political Liberalism and
democratic culture on "virgin land," without the Castles, immutable hierarchies, and
archaic yet resilient dynastic forms of rule and social organization which burdened their
French and European bourgeois-revolutionary counterparts. Antonio Gramsci
alternatively reads the absence of such "great historical and cultural traditions" in the
United States—at once the wellspring of nationalizing tropes and intractable anxieties for
U.S. ideologues and writers—as a major reason "for its formidable accumulation of
capital which has taken place inspite of the superior living standard enjoyed by the
popular classes compared to Europe." For Gramsci, the U.S.-bred bourgeoisie did not
have to waste their productive energies fending off Old World reaction on the continent
except the native inhabitants and plantation society and its slavery system; their resources
were freed from the onerous burden of subsidizing residual traditions from old regimes.
Gramsci, however, wavers between recognizing such specificities of U.S. historical forms
or conditions, and emplotting the consequent Americanism as "an organic extension and
an intensification of European civilization, which has simply acquired a new coating in
the American climate."31
One then discovers thereby that it is important for the colonialist annexation of
the Philippines and Filipinos that it was practically coterminous with a Left-critical
31
For Gramsci, Americanism does not promise "a new type of civilization" as touted by its
organic intellectuals but is easily understandable "not only as a form of café life but as an
ideology of the kind represented by Rotary Clubs" (1971, 285, 318). A partial critique of the
temporality and theory of history that informs the ideology of American exceptionalism is in
Campomanes 1999.
59
debate on what made the U.S. a distinctive republic in classic-liberal and capitalformative terms. When one parallels that debate to the raucously chauvinist discourse
over the republic's "exceptional" political culture which the expansive turn-of-the-century
U.S. industrial-capitalist quest for global markets and geopolitical colonization of the
Philippines recharged, and which was conducted to the jingoist strains of U.S. American
paeans for the inexorable Anglo-Saxonist American march toward History's terminals
(recall the effusions of Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Beveridge),32 one cannot but be
struck by complexity of colonial Filipino insertion into the polity and history of the
United States.
This dovetailing of two interested exceptionalist discourses proved immensely
enabling for subsequent emplotments of U.S. national novelty and modernity in their
various forms and aspects. As the U.S. emerged as a global-capitalist superpower in Cold
32
No less than the "bard of empire," Rudyard Kipling, goaded U.S. imperialist hawks by writing
"The White Man's Burden" (1899) on the occasion of U.S. seizure of the Philippines, with the
charitable intent of dispensing British imperialist wisdom and experience to his U.S. AngloSaxon counterparts (this much-quoted text of Empire bears the subtitle, "The United States and
the Philippines," a fact little-noted by literary historians and postcolonialists):
Take up the White Man's burden-Have done with childish days-The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
Roosevelt was known to have shared an advance copy with fellow "Large Policy"
advocate and U.S. imperialist senator Henry Cabot Lodge with a note that "it was rather bad
poetry, but good sense from the expansionist viewpoint" and Lodge came back with the slightly
more generous riposte to Roosevelt that "I think it is better poetry than you say, apart from the
sense of the verses" (all quoted in Hitchens 1990, 65-66). Over eight decades later, Francis
Fukuyama would re-install the historic claim of the U.S. as a nation exceptionally outside or at
the terminus of Historical progress as he saw its tattered and post-Vietnam global politicalcultural hegemony standing amidst the perceivable ruins of socialist state-building experiments
(1989).
60
War rivarly with a state-calcified Soviet social democracy after World War II, U.S.
writers and intellectuals (historians and sociologists like Daniel Boorstin and Louis
Hartz; American Studies doyens like R.W.B. Lewis and Richard Chase) were reworking
"the exceptionalism idea, in their explanations for the apparent overriding consensus in
American political life" (Wilentz 1990, 21). It is noteworthy that this articulate
ideological work gained a nearly unassailable charge during a time of unparalleled
affluence for U.S. Americans.33 This discursive enterprise, apart from regenerating the
exceptionalist arguments first elaborated by some revolutionary philosophes and writers,
obliquely ratified a contemporaneous intellectual tendency to limit the formative
moments of modern U.S. imperialism to World War II and its aftermath. Any memory of
the U.S. formal colonial venture in the Philippines (1902-1941) disappears into an
inexplicable vacuum, satisfactorily salved by the 1946 U.S. concession of political
independence—amidst increasing contemporary calls for decolonization—to a heavily
war-devastated Philippines now dependent on politicized rehabilitation aid that ensured
its continued disposition within a U.S.-led "Free World" (see Shalom 1981, 33-67).34
33
Recall that the U.S. (with the neutral countries like Switzerland) was spared the tremendous
devastations and depredations of World War II (barring Pearl Harbor and Allied troop casualties).
The conservative 1950s came in the wake of a wartime liberalization of social hierarchies as
blacks, women, and other minorities were allowed into spaces of national and political-economic
incorporation after the massive deployment of the male population as soldiers created a
laborforce shortage for the flourishing military-industrial complex. In these respects, World War
II did much to defuse the ravaging and catastrophic effects of the Great Depression as a major
crisis of U.S. national capital accumulation. See Paz (1985 [1983], 21-52).
34
When the debilitating effects of colonization and neocolonial dependency on the postcolonial
Philippine scene was not as yet so acute and stark, the few U.S. writers who bothered to
acknowledge the Philippine colonial experiment did so to valorize the former formal colony as a
"showcase of democracy" and as an important column in the fortifications against evil communist
designs on the world. After Vietnam and the irrepressible postcolonial monstrosities of the U.S.supported Marcos regime, writers like James Fallows and Stanley Karnow began to articulate a
revitalized politics of disengagement and disenchantment, echoing a similar process that ensued
in the immediate wake of the costly and bloody Philippine war of conquest—which finds
61
Not only did this periodizing argument—popularized by the highly influential
diplomatic historian George Kennan (1951)—serve to minoritize and valorize the formal
Philippine colonial venture as itself "exceptional," in the sense of departing from the
republican ideals of the United States and the European imperialist norm as the turn-ofthe-century U.S. imperialists and anti-imperialists had already debated; it also buttressed
subsequent claims of modern U.S. historiography that the U.S. quickly withdrew into a
period of "isolationism" after what Ernest May claimed was "a mild case of imperialism"
(1968, 14; Young 1972, 133), as the country was presumably hesitant, from the very
outset, to succumb to the execrable landgrabbing games of its Old World predecessors.35
This chronological argument recruits even astoundingly sophisticated critiques of U.S.
"neocolonialism" such as Edward Said's (1978; 282-302, 322-328; 1993), which trace the
emergence of twentieth-century U.S. global power and deterritorialized hegemony only
to World War II's new realignments of inter-national and political-economic
boundaries.36 This historiographic unrecognizability of the 1898 Philippine annexation
crucially forms U.S. national self-definitions by enabling a generalized amnesia in
considerations of twentieth-century U.S. imperial-national status and power politics. The
U.S. government could now exercise the distinctive kinds of extraterritorial sovereignty
historical echoes in the ebb and flow of jingoism and disenchantment in the public culture during
the Vietnam War disputes.
35
Ernest May's understatement obviously takes after the classic thesis of diplomatic historian
Samuel Flagg Bemis that imperialism was "the great aberration" or exception in the otherwise
glorious political life and culture of the nation (1965 [1936]).
36
Said, from the perspective of his political sympathies, was understandably focused on pre- and
post-war French and British imperialisms (especially the latter's crucial complicities with political
Zionism in Palestinian denationalization and dispossession), consequently glossing over and
"Eurocentrically" minoritizing turn-of-century U.S. orientalist discourses on the Philippines/East
Asia and U.S. geopolitical maneuvers in that region.
62
that its own ideologues and citizens would not recognize as neo-imperial/colonial (see
Williams 1980): from systematic interventions in the 1950s Iranian Revolution all the
way up to the Granada, Panama, and Iraq invasions of the Reagan-Bush years (the
general refusal by most historians and scholars to connect present-day adventures in Iraq,
Afghanistan and other trouble spots in the world like the Southern Philippines to this
previous expansionism continues).
Vietnam War historian Marilyn Young had critiqued, as early as 1972, the many
lives of this powerful amnesia by divining a literal sense of exceptionalism in the
prevailing rhetorics of U.S. nationalist historiography and citizenship (133):37
As a nation, worse, as historians, we seem to suffer from a
historical amnesia of a remarkably virulent kind. We soften the
edges of America's behavior in the world by a series of
"excepts": except for the Spanish-American War, except for the
Taft through Roosevelt Latin American interventions, except for
post-World War II intervention in China, Korea, Iran,
Guatemala, Lebanon, Laos, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, except
for military rule over one million Okinawans--except for all
these, we ceased to be an imperialist power in 1900.
Young provides the remarkably early cut-off date of 1900 for the rearticulation of U.S.
national consciousness and exceptionalism, both in historiography and the hailing of neoimperial citizens. Indeed, it was shortly after 1900, only the second year of the
Philippine-American "phase" of the "Spanish-American War," that a rhetorics of U.S.
disenchantment and disengagement would begin to clarify the kinds of power and
investments that the New Empire would wield in the new world of the twentieth-century.
37
Williams (1980) is a pellucid and candid meditation on this creation of "empire as a way of
life" for U.S. citizens. He maps a simultaneous and increasing citizen dissociation from, and
association with, a mentality and mode of governance, which is unaccountable to a world that it
seeks to fashion after itself and dominate.
63
As scurrilous an annexationist as Theodore Roosevelt, for example, would lament by
1901 that the Philippines was not proving to be the profitable venture that many
colonization advocates had envisioned (given the accelerating cost in life and dollars of
prosecuting the war of conquest) and, in 1906, even argued that the Philippines had
become the U.S.'s "heel of Achilles" in the context of rising Japanese imperial power
which would have required the colony's costly armed defense if the Japanese dared to
seize it thence (Wolff 1960, 335-336; Hunt 1987, 132-133): something that happens in
1941 when Japan takes the Philippines and the U.S. quickly abandons its colony for
European allies and fronts.
How do these exceptionalist emplotments of U.S. imperial nationality constrain
and implicate present-day Filipino American politics of recognition, location, and
identities? Consider this series or order of prevalent formulations from the available U.S.
literatures on the Philippines or its peoples (this enumeration, obviously, is far from
exhaustive): "Forgotten Insurrection" (Wolff 1960, 360), "Forgotten Philippines"
(Stanley 1972, 291-316), "Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans" (Cordova 1983),
"Forgotten Filipinos" (Takaki 1989, 314-354). Each object—whether a turn-of-thecentury war of U.S. conquest and Filipino resistance, a national field in area studies, or a
congeries of peoples who are thus referenced—is deemed unrecognizable and doomed to
perpetual neglect. These accounts themselves (except Wolff's) yield few clues to the
relentlessly active effects of what is otherwise posited as a descriptive adjective
("forgotten") in a whole series of transitive trajectories by which the Philippines/Filipinos
become direct and indirect objects of powerfully amnesiac acts.
64
These displacements of an "Insurrection," a country area of study, and a U.S.
minority group, share the common modality of eliciting powerful acts of forgetting and
impressions of formlessness. It is as if future U.S. Filipino visibility requires no less than
U.S. American self-recognition that the U.S.-Philippine colonial encounter proved central
to the strategic formulations and transformations of twentieth-century American imperial
modernity and nationality; or that the politics of recognition pursued by Filipino
Americans is fatally entwined with an effective unrecognizability of the U.S. Empire
(secured by exceptionalist ideologues) after its discernible germination in U..S.
neocolonial rule over the Philippines. From this order of descriptions, the centrality of the
"Insurrection" and the question of Filipino nationality and their necessary occlusions in
U.S. accounts are clearly evident.
The U.S.-Philippine "War/s" and Filipino American Postcoloniality
"Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the
creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger
for [the principle of] nationality."
Ernest Renan38
That U.S. discourses and institutional arrangements significantly inhibited and
still essentially proscribe an open reckoning with the legacies of this temporally exotic
colonial war/enterprise for both present-day United States nationality and Filipino
Americans is proof of the materiality of amnesiac or exceptionalist politics and the
38
Translated by Martin Thom from Renan's 1882 Sorbonne lecture, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"
(Babha 1990b, 11 and 21: n1). The French text ("L'oubli et je dirai même l'erreur historique, sont
un facteur essentiel de la formation d'une nation et c'est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques
est souvent pour la nationalité un danger") is creatively condensed and translated by Eric
Hobsbawm as "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation" (1990, 12: n19).
65
potentially radical implications of U.S. Filipino self-placements (in case they return, with
their continued emergence, what has been actively repressed).39 The most astounding
symptom of this enduring amnesiac politics, apart from the blindspots noted for recent
institutional initiatives, is that "a generally recognized subfield of US imperial history"
has never developed (May 1987, 178).40 If there was no or little imperial or colonial
history, and if we follow Buell and Ashcroft et al. in asserting that the U.S. itself was the
originally postcolonial nation, it stands to reason that to imagine a "Filipino American
postcoloniality" becomes a well-nigh improbable project (better to discuss their
dis/incorporation as "immigrants" and, indeed, any semblance of U.S. Filipino emergence
in recent years has been largely through the agency of Asian American Studies). By the
same token, one can hardly raise the issue that U.S. imperialism—whatever the slippery
nature and history of this political beast—remained conspicuously absent in studies of
colonialisms and their residual forms or aftermaths (excepting recent sophisticated
characterizations of U.S. "neocolonialism" which limit their purviews to the period
39
This amnesia concerning the war was not as regulatory in U.S. government circles according to
Walden Bello's study of "official" U.S. government documents (1988). Bello found that at the
height of the Reagan-Bush era, and "Low Intensity Conflict (LIC)" in countries like El Salvador,
"U.S. counter-insurgency experts are still studying the Philippine Insurrection for lessons that can
be applied." For the U.S. to replicate its success in the Philippine War and the CIA-sponsored
1950s anti-Huk campaigns in the Philippines, an important lesson that the turn-of-the-twentiethcentury war presumably bequeathed for counter-insurgency programs elsewhere, especially after
the Vietnam debacle and the divisive public opinion it engendered, was the necessity of "political
will" in combining and employing "brute force" with "depopulation" strategies (158-159).
40
Only a semblance of Philippine area studies obtains in the United States, and the few U.S.
American scholars interested in Philippine-American colonial studies were historically unable to
institutionalize their enterprise. There is a Philippine Studies Program at the University of Hawaii
but the remainder consists of a handful of faculty appointments secured by a small cadre of U.S.
Filipinologists working within Southeast Asia Studies programs or centers and social science
departments in some research universities otherwise focused on other country areas (Berkeley,
Cornell, Yale, Michigan, and recently, Wisconsin-Madison). Fred Eggan's makeshift Philippine
Studies program at the University of Chicago went moribund nearly three decades ago. For a
preliminary account of the vicissitudes and geopolitical contexts of Philippine area studies in US
research universities and institutions, see Campomanes 2001.
66
between the World War II and "postnational" conjunctures, and a pioneering critical
anthology and historiographic critique coedited by “new Americanist” Amy Kaplan
[1993]).41
Following Marilyn Young, this study wagers the height of the U.S.-Philippine
War as a moment which clarifies and elaborates the imperial modernity and national
novelty ("exceptionalism") of the United States in catalytic ways that were not possible
before it and that proved astonishingly reproducible afterwards. Precisely because of their
ambiguous political consequences for the United States, that war—and the Philippine
colonial "experiment" that it created—became susceptible to subsequent exceptionalist
and amnesiac formulations even as contemporary U.S. debates over annexation already
provided the very terms for such historical displacements (see Miller 1982, 253-267).
As is known from psychoanalytic wisdom, no repression is completely successful,
and as Gayatri Spivak observes, "the most successful historical record is [disclosable as]
cross-hatched by cognitive failure" (1988a, 200). The Vietnam wars and the consequent
impulse to search for historical antecedents generated a contemporaneous but ephemeral
interest in the turn-of-the-century annexation of the Philippines, resulting in what was to
be lambasted by mainstream U.S. historians as "the Vietnam Analogy," particularly by
41
Very late as it may be, the few American Filipinists who are able to subsist in the American
academy, at least in endangered Southeast Asia studies programs, and who, for the longest time,
would not touch the sensitive topic of American Empire beyond their area studies foci, have
recently published a volume signalling their recognition of the history of American
historiographic and institutional amnesia concerning U.S. Imperialism; moreover, they are now
arguing for placing the American experience of empire within the context of comparative
imperialism studies (see McCoy et al. 2009). One suspects that this tectonic shift in their
accustomed purviews might be attributed, in large measure, to their extended engagements with
critical Filipino Americanists like Victor Bascara and some awareness of now emerging Filipino
American empire critique, which comprehensively bridges the divides between and among
American ethnic studies, U.S. area studies, Americanist cultural critique, and various disciplinary
domains.
67
Richard Welch who warned that anyone who explains "our involvement in Indochina by
means of the precedents of the Philippine-American War is in danger of escalating
historical parallelism to historical fiction" (1979, xiv).
First set forth by critical writers like William Pomeroy (1967), Daniel Boone
Schirmer (1971) and Luzviminda Francisco (1973) following earlier but groundbreaking
accounts of the U.S.-Philippine War by the Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo (1950)
and the journalist Leon Wolff (1960), the Vietnam Analogy identified striking parallels
between two U.S. imperialist wars otherwise separated by more than seven decades: both
were against national liberation movements whose protagonists were perceived and
fought as racial inferiors by large mobilizations of U.S. soldiers, involved anti-guerilla
warfare that wrought vast magnitudes of destruction and atrocities on noncombatant
populations seen as coddling the rebels (spurring contentious U.S. antiwar movements),
and exacted a high cost in dollars and moral capital while eerily producing common
counter-insurgency strategies ("reconcentration" for the Philippines; "hamletting" for
Vietnam). Apart from Welch, Robert Beisner (1970; 1985), John Morgan Gates (1972;
1973), and Glenn May (1987, 155-172; 1991) also disputed the Analogy's validity on the
basis of contextual differences between the two imperialist ventures and framed their
book-length treatments of the U.S. conquest of the Philippines in terms of this political
position, dismissing their opponents as "present-minded" and practically partisan.
The obverse effects of this virtual analogy (and the briefly productive debates it
provoked) on the intermittent journalistic and professional history-writing on the U.S.Philippine War are striking. David Bain who first wrote a book about Vietnam recalls
being gripped by the idea of writing a book about the forgotten Philippine war against the
68
backdrop of late 1960s social strife in the U.S. over Vietnam and upon rediscovering
Mark Twain's forgotten and uncanonized anti-imperialist essays in that context (1984, 23). Stanley Karnow's Pulitzer Prize-winning In Our Image: America's Empire in the
Philippines (1989) unwittingly illustrates the analogy's explanatory power in light of his
own experience writing and researching his own prior and bestselling book on Vietnam
(12, 80, 99, 140, 145, 147-48, 154, 178, 314). Stuart C. Miller qualifies his own 1970
essay, along with Francisco's and Pomeroy's, as marked by the "error of reading history
backwards" (1982, 306-7, n3) after being convinced by Welch's arguments. Similarly,
Beisner is compelled in his preface to the 1985 edition of Twelve Against Empire to
recant some of the more critical aspects of his 1970 arguments for the parallels between
the anti-imperialist movements of both periods.
Framed as the "Philippine Question" or the "Philippine Problem" (these were the
recurrent titles of countless tracts from the period), these debates raged coterminously
with the U.S.-Philippine war which ensued after Commodore George Dewey's Asiatic
squadron downed the decrepit Spanish armada in Manila Bay in May 1898 and Spain
ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 millions in the controversial Treaty of
Paris in December of that year. The momentous centrality of the Philippines conquest to
the articulation and clarification of U.S. imperial-national modernity between 1898 and
1904 lies in the way it generated widespread debates over U.S. founding principles
("Republic or Empire?)," national progress and power, the composition of the polity, and
future of the nation in the new world promised by the century's turn.
69
Turn-of-the-century U.S. American anxieties over formally joining the "last great
landgrab" are, at least, well-discussed in modern U.S.-history writing, concentrating on
the élite imperialist-anti-imperialist debates which raged in the halls of Congress, in
reams of newsprint and graphics, and in the cultural interventions of writers and
intellectuals (see Tompkins 1970; Shirmer 1972; Welch 1979; Beisner 1985 [1968]).
Such anxieties played out in extremely productive public discussions over the history of
U.S. expansionism, its constitutional precedents and links to the settlement of the
continent; national motives and interests in the decision to intervene militarily in the
revolutions in Spain's erstwhile colonies; Anglo-Saxonist notions of historical progress
and their applicability to "other" races; and a self-valorization of the New Empire against
European Old World colonialisms through assertions of national "uniqueness,
benevolence, and "inadvertence" in the moves to conquer and annex other peoples and
territories across the Pacific (Salman 1991, 221-224).
These debates agonized over the contradictions that inhered between U.S.
American constitutional ideas of self-government or liberty and the aquisition of a
territory for conquest rather than admission to statehood. Complicating and shaping these
debates were the inevitably racialist cast in which they were conducted by imperialists
and anti-imperialists alike and the association of political culture or development with a
Social Darwinist logics that determined for Filipinos their unassimilability, their
"unfitness" for self-government, and their presumed need to undergo tutelage in
representative government under the very nation which presumably invented the concept.
How exactly did the Philippine Question subtend this nationalizing moment of
U.S. imperial modernity? For present purposes, one can suggest two unexplored effects,
70
to be discussed in more detail and complicated some more in succeeding chapters.
Firstly, the very conquest of the Philippines and the primordial justifications for it
allowed articulate Americans like Brooks Adams —in contentious debates which
encompassed a whole cross-section of U.S. society, not just the élite sectors—to review
the nation's "historical progress" and to assert its singularity as the "culmination" of
known human history and civilization, to revalorize U.S. political culture and nowremarkable economic power. For example, if the U.S. constitution did not allow for
"taxation without representation"—which the colonial incorporation of about six million
Filipinos logically entailed—then a whole debate and series of resolutions could be
staged to adapt the sacred document to what Brooks Adams, the descendant of U.S.
presidents and brother of canonical writer Henry Adams, called "a novel environment"
(this exuberant argument for national novelty and innovation typifies the discourse of the
period):
In 1789 the United States was a wilderness lying upon the
outskirts of Christendom; she is now the heart of civilization and
the focus of energy. The Union forms a gigantic and growing
empire possessing the greatest mass of accumulated wealth, the
most perfect means of transportation, and the most delicate yet
powerful industrial system which has ever been developed...The
nation, in its corporate capacity, has to deal with problems
domestic and foreign, more vast and complicated than were ever
presented for solution. In a word, the conditions of the twentiethcentury are almost precisely the reverse of those of the
eighteenth, and yet the national organization not only remains
unaltered, but is prevented from automatic adjustment by the
provisions of a written document, which, in practice, cannot be
amended (1902, xv, xi-xii; also 208-9).
Adams, of course, had very little cause for worry about the resistance, among
anti-imperialist sectors and the old guard alike, to innovation and formal novelty or to the
reformulation of national structures to compel "the whole world to pay the United States
71
tribute" (209). Not only was the constitutional impediment resolved by a series of
Supreme Court cases in 1901 but the previously insignificant U.S. Navy was itself
phenomenally upgraded to make the new "island possessions" contiguous with the
continent in a network of "coaling stations" with the Philippines as its strategic nexus (a
vision articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan and other naval strategists). These are the
precedents for what the U.S., by the Cold War period, was able to install and perfect as
an impressive grid of military bases from San Diego island in the Indian Ocean through
Subic and Clark in the Philippines: the staging grounds for its crusades and interventions
in "trouble spots" around the globe.
Secondly, the suicidal resistance of Filipino guerillas led by Gen. Emilio
Aguinaldo and the nearly genocidal response it elicited from U.S. occupation forces
produced a massive disenchantment with costly military ventures, especially as reports of
widespread atrocities broke through the screen of censorship imposed in 1900 and
provoked embarrassing congressional hearings. This experience immediately forced the
United States, a new hand at extracontinental occupation and in colonial administration,
to innovate and clarify its imperial and global scope. The Philippines was to become an
acceptable anomaly as the U.S. would avoid the unwieldy landgrabbing schemes of its
Japanese, German, French of British counterparts and seek to maintain global spheres of
influence on the basis of the exercise of its formidable economic might.42
42
Note that the intractability of Filipino resistance to Spain's 1898 cession of the Philippines to
the United States for $20 million led Secretary of War Elihu Root, fearful of another war, to
argue against similar colonial ambitions in revolutionary Cuba, resulting in the 1901-1902 Platt
Amendment which placed the island under effective U.S. "neocolonial" dominion through
"nonmilitary" means (Francisco and Fast 1985, 207).
72
Asian American or Postcolonial?
Are U.S. Filipinos "Asian American" or "postcolonial"? Is the United States a
colonizer or the originally postcolonial nation (in the contemporary phraseology:
Republic or Empire)? This is like raising the turn-of-the-century question: “Does the
constitution follow the flag?” or is "taxation without representation" possible? Upon
learning that the 1901 U.S. Supreme Court "Insular Cases" which partly adjudicated the
Philippine Problem hinged on a close 5-4 vote, William Howard Taft (who was to
become the first Governor-General of the Philippines, then Secretary of War, and later, as
U.S. President) recounts:
I do not know who it is that said so but it amused me very much
when I heard it, that the position of the court was in this wise:
that four of the judges said the Constitution did follow the flag,
that four of them said it did not...and one said, "It sometimes
follows the flag and sometimes does not, and I will tell you when
it does and when it does not (quoted in Brands 1992, 77).
Recall that the Insular Cases determined the political status of the Philippines
within the Union as an "unincorporated territory," meaning that it was an "American
territory" subject to the jurisdiction of the United States while being deemed
unincorporable as a future state. One effect of this curious demarcation of U.S.
(extra)territoriality was that Filipinos were analogously defined as "U.S. nationals:"
subject to the jurisdiction of the United States but with no possibility of citizenship.
Partly, this was a compromise with the rabidly anti-annexationist Southern senators and
73
constituencies who were fearful about adding another "race problem" to the "Negro
Problem" of the body politic.
It might help U.S. Filipinos, then, in their latter-day pursuit of the quixotic
promise and dream of U.S. "citizenship," to remember how some remote period in their
"American history"—during which their ancestors were deemed simultaneously
absorbable and "unassimilable"—actually retains a startling resonance and holds out
many unexamined portents for their current predicaments. Such an act of remembrance is
precarious but possibly productive: it calls up an unimaginable becoming (the Filipino
American) and an unimagined community that represents the unrepresentable and
critically recognizes the perils of forgetfulness.
Coda
What probably helps allow formal U.S. "insular imperialism" to go unrecognized
and minoritized (and for its amnesia to set in) is a geographic alibi. The territories seized
by the United States beginning in 1898 are island groups (as opposed to the continental
expanse of nineteenth-century European colonies and dominions): seemingly
insignificant globs of real estate scattered across the Pacific, Carribean, and Indian
Oceans. The geographic becomes preternaturally poetic: the U.S. Empire was presumably
no empire since the islands could just as well have sunk into these vast bodies of water
and few people would have noticed. Historians of U.S. "foreign relations"—mostly
diplomatic historians— exhaust this geographic metaphor for all its worth: the curious
formulation "insular imperialism" ("island empire," in contemporary terms; see Morris
1899) emerges out of their historiographic work.
74
Glenn May, the formerly active and recently retired doyen of U.S.-Philippine
colonial historiography, argues as much, concerned to distinguish the territorial
insignificance of "benevolent" U.S. empire-building from its Old World competitors
(1987, 178). To get a sense of the contrastive power of May's argument, recall Marlow's
example in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1989 [1902], 36) who inspects the "large
shining map, marked with all the colors of the rainbow" and picks out the "vast amount
of red" (shadings of the British Empire's global stretch) for the assurance that "some real
work is done in there." A "Colonial Systems of the World" map-inset of a U.S. colonial
ethnological text on the Philippines displays the United States's seemingly innocuous
"blues" against the expansive colorings of Great Britain (pink in this map), Russia's
greens, and France's dark greys (U.S. War Department Bureau of Insular Affairs 1902, 67). Surely, there was already something to "neocolonialism" as a novel and modern mode
of global power which the U.S. had begun to articulate quite early in its own expansionist
career: an inchoately different sense of the "territorial."
75
CHAPTER 2
EMPIRE’S “RECOGNITION” AND THE FILIPINO/JAPANESE ANALOGY
The revolutionary envoy is for all the world, except for his language, which is that of
Spain, a typical Japanese…He is small and slight, with little hands and feet and a tiny
black moustache to match. His cheekbones are high, his hair is short, coarse, and jet
black, and his complexion is that of any dozen Japanese one would meet…[He spoke] in
low modulated tones…[and he was] most courteous and considerate….
New York World (qtd. In Hoyt 1979, 44)
[I]t is only the texts of counter-insurgency or élite documentation that give us the news of
the consciousness of the subaltern.
Gayatri Spivak (Spivak 1988, 203)
[With] the internal fractioning of the ideological universe of the dominant classes...ideas
may have to enter into a process of vigorous polemic and contestation in order to become
the normative-normalized structure of conceptions.
Stuart Hall (Grossberg and Nelson 1988, 41)
Prolegomena
In September 1899, a pseudonymous writer ventured an analysis of the events that
had led to the U.S.-Philippine War, then in the seventh month of its fierce campaigns and
clashes but with no end in sight for its combatants.1 The editor of the North American
Review, which published the piece, certified that it was written "by an authorized
personal representative of [Emilio] Aguinaldo" who deemed it imprudent to identify
himself "for diplomatic reasons" (hence, his nom de guerre, "Semper Vigilans,"
translatable in English as 'Always Vigilant'). That it bore the dateline "Paris, August,
1899" posits its likely author to be Felipe Agoncillo who had been variously identified,
indeed, as the Filipino government's minister plenipotentiary or "Aguinaldo's personal
1
"Aguinaldo's Case Against the United States," By a Filipino ("Semper Vigilans") [1899, 425432]. Hereafter cited in the text as "AC."
76
representative" abroad.2 Agoncillo eventually based himself in Paris after failing to
secure Filipino representation in the peace treaty negotiations in which Spain ultimately
ceded the Philippines to the United States in late 1898 for $20 million. From Paris, he
assiduously sought international recognition of Filipino independence, explored alliance
possibilities with other European powers, and coordinated fund-raising or arms purchases
for the Aguinaldo-led resistance.3
There are other cues for considering this statement as Agoncillo's handiwork
(such as its argumentative style) but authorship is less compelling an issue than the
article's rhetorical thrust. Any close look at what it says places it squarely in a series of
polemical publications that had issued from Filipino quarters for almost a year in their
2
In a cablegram dated 15 August 1898 congratulating President William McKinley for the
"successful termination of the [Spanish-American] War, Agoncillo represented himself as "High
Commissioner and Ambassador Extraordinary Provisional Government Philippine Islands." See
John R. M. Taylor, comp. The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States (1971) vol. 3.;
hereafter cited by volume number. Whitelaw Reid, of the United States Peace Commission,
describes Agoncillo in one entry of his much-quoted diary on the Paris treaty negotiations with
Spain as "a representative of Aguinaldo" (17 October 1898), and in another entry, as "the socalled representative of Aguinaldo" (18 October 1898), after the latter's attempts to join the
deliberations over the future of the Philippines met with indifference from both the Spanish and
American negotiators (Reid 1965, 82, 86).
3
No general and critical account exists, even in Philippine historiography, of the many efforts (a
good number of which were apparently successful) by Agoncillo and other Filipino leaders to
purchase and land arms, munitions, and supplies for Gen. Aguinaldo's forces during the wars
against Spain and the United States, although Ronald Mactal’s work (2000) has begun to address
the problem. Agoncillo's efforts have a long history but during 1899 when the U.S.-Philippine
War was raging, the scope of his activities covered France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Great
Britain (through the London Committee led by Antonio Regidor, an expatriate merchant), and the
China Coast ports (through the Comité Central Filipino led by Galicano Apacible). Other Filipino
agents covered Japan with mixed success (see Lydia Yu-Jose 2003). For extremely suggestive
indications of the scale and frequency of these undertakings in 1899-1900, see, among many
others, the intelligence from the U.S. minister in Paris which was relayed by Maj. Gen. Elwell
Otis (Manila) to U.S. Consul-General (Hongkong) Rounsevelle Wildman, 20 July 1899, The
Papers of Edwin and Rounsevelle Wildman, Box 1, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division
(LCMD); and, Rounsevelle Wildman to David Hill, Assistant Secretary of State, 14 May 1900,
General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, U.S. National Archives, Hong
Kong Consular Despatches, 5 May 1899-28 December 1901, Dispatch No. 170, Microcopy 108,
Reel 20; See also Teodoro Agoncillo (1960, 320-321).
77
attempt to represent their goals and concerns to an international audience. Semper
Vigilans resounds the major themes of their critique of U.S. intervention in the Filipino
revolution against Spanish colonial rule in the islands ("AC" 428-429):
You entered into an alliance with our chiefs at Hong Kong and at
Singapore, and you promised us your aid and protection in our
attempt to form a government on the principles and after the
model of the government of the United States. Thereupon you
sent a powerful fleet to Manila and demolished the old Spanish
hulks, striking terror into the hearts of the Spanish garrison in
Manila. In combination with our forces, you compelled Spain to
surrender, and you proclaimed that you held the city, port and bay
of Manila until such time as you should determine what you
meant by the word "control," as applied to the rest of the islands.
By some mysterious process, heretofore unknown to civilized
nations, you resolved "control" into "sovereignty," on the pretense
that what is paid for is "possession," no matter what the quality of
the title may be.
The article briefly recalls the history of common action between the United States
occupation forces and the Filipino revolutionary army against Spain, but raises the issue
of American betrayal and recalls the trajectory by which it had supplanted Spanish
authority with American "possession." By some turn, for Semper Vigilans, the United
States now seemed bent to stunt "the one sacred thing in the world, the spontaneous
budding of a national life," as the anti-imperialist intellectual William James had earlier
rendered the projected annexation of the Philippines.4 That Filipino aspirations to selfrule found their speculum and precedent in the history of American political culture and
institutions only made the turn to conquest ironic and quizzical, a theme that was being
developed to devastating effect by North American anti-imperialists. Semper Vigilans
pitches to this catalyzing critique by recalling American promises of "aid" and
4
Quoted in Robert Beisner (1985 [1968], 44).
78
"protection" for erstwhile allies and their devolution toward American "possession" based
on a "title" whose "quality" struck many contemporary observers as dubious.
Agoncillo had argued in 1899, as he and Filipino propagandists would reiterate
between 1898 and 1901, that "Spain could not under any circumstances cede what it did
not possess." The Filipino forces had practically liberated the rest of the archipelago
except for Manila when the United States brought in its troops.5 Agoncillo and various
agents of the revolutionary government around the world had made these arguments
reverberate in the international press and in diplomatic circulars before the war (and as
the war unfolded), eventually emphasizing the untenability of subsequent American
territorial demands by the precepts of international law, but they fell on deaf ears.6
In the United States, the "insurgent" Filipino leaders found a sympathetic hearing
only in anti-imperialist circles, whose most articulate voices and advocates, as one
sociological historian aptly described it, "included by far the greater part of the eminent
5
Felipe Agoncillo, "A Letter to the President and the American People," 30 November 1899
(1899b, 3218). These points would recur in Agoncillo's major polemical tracts, in his advisory
correspondence with Filipino leaders in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and his unacknowledged
correspondence with the U.S. State Department.
6
See, among numerous examples, "Memorandum [of] Felipe Agoncillo, of Manila, Philippine
Islands, [to] His Excellency, William McKinley," 3 October 1898 (Washington D.C.); and
Agoncillo, "Official Protests Against the Paris Treaty," 12 December 1898 (Paris), both in Taylor
vol. 5; Felipe Buencamino, "Circular to the Consuls of Germany, England, France, AustriaHungary, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden and Norway, Holland, Russia, Denmark, Portugal, Italy,
Japan, Uruguay and Spain," 27 July 1899 (Tarlac, Philippines), in Taylor vol. 4; Galicano
Apacible, Al Pueblo Americano/To The American People (Por El Comité Central Filipino/By the
Filipino Central Committee, Junio/June 1900), and Comité Central Filipino, To The President of
the United States of America (Hongkong) [1901], both rare pamphlets in the [Edward Everett]
Ayer Philippine Collection, Newberry Library. One must also note here the extensive publicity
work of Sixto Lopez in the United States (see Canning 2001 [1904]). Lopez accompanied Felipe
Agoncillo on the latter's two diplomatic missions to the United States on behalf of the Aguinaldo
government in late 1898 and early 1899.
79
figures of the literary and intellectual world."7 For example, the pacifist president of
Leland Stanford Junior University, David Starr Jordan, maintained ten days after the
outbreak of the Philippine-American war that the United States controlled Manila, the
capital, only "by dint of bulldog diplomacy" and, in the popular phrase of the day, "by the
fortunes of war" with Spain. In a speech before the university's Graduate Club that was to
be repeated by request for audiences in San Francisco and Berkeley, and later published
as a pamphlet, Jordan affirmed the tenuous character of developing American claims over
the Philippines, even with the recent ratification of the peace accord:8
To these [islands] we have as yet no real title. We can get none
till the actual owners have been consulted. We have a legal title
of course, but no moral title and no actual possession. We have
only purchased Spain's quit claim deed to property she could not
hold, and which she cannot transfer.
In response, American imperialists frequently invoked a disinterested
"humanitarianism" which was also most passionately argued for by many officials and
citizens for the earlier American crusade against Spain over Cuban liberation. "You
declared war with Spain for the sake of Humanity," Semper Vigilans acknowledges, "to
set Cuba free in conformity with your constitutional principles." But how was one now to
account, Semper Vigilans asks, for the campaign to "set up a double standard-government by consent in America, government by force in the Philippine Islands"? The
author expresses amazement in beholding "an unique spectacle--Filipinos fighting for
7
Quoted from Richard Hofstadter (1967, 172).
8
The Question of the Philippines [Address delivered before the Graduate Club, Leland Stanford
Junior University, 14 February 1899, 5]. Hereafter cited in the text as "QP."
80
liberty [and] the American people fighting them to give them liberty," with the
contradiction being plain and stark enough ("AC" 428).
"Do we need their consent to perform a great act of humanity?," was one of
President William McKinley's solemn replies to arguments such as those of Jordan and
Semper Vigilans/Agoncillo, but it was quite characteristic of official American
discourses.9 When then U.S. ambassador to Great Britain John Hay wrote to then Colonel
Theodore Roosevelt, at the end of that "splendid little war" with Spain, that this particular
war was "begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and
spirit favored by that fortune which loves the brave," he had merely begun to strum the
refrain of American imperial "beneficence" in the current strains of jingoistic pride and
valor. "It is now to be concluded, I hope," Hay declared in the same self-celebratory spirit
that was to suffuse the air for a while during the period, "with the fine good nature which
is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character, that a war should take
place anywhere and they not profit by it."10
It is precisely against such declarative innocence amid the swift currents toward
conquest earlier that Semper Vigilans recounts the formal American annexation of the
Philippines in February 1899 with ironic bitterness. "In the face of the world you
emblazon Humanity and Liberty upon your standard," Semper Vigilans observes, "while
you cast your political constitution to the winds and attempt to trample down and
9
Quoted in Paolo Coletta (1961, 346). A compendium of contemporary American arguments of
this kind as advanced in journals, speeches, etc. by missionaries, politicians, writers, etc. is
impossible to document with reasonable adequacy given its resulting voluminousness. Suffice it
to say that these arguments are remarkable for their shrillness and self-certitude, and are tediously
and unproblematically rehearsed by most American historians’ accounts of U.S. imperialism and
anti-imperialism.
10
The text used here for this classic July 1898 letter is from a letterbook copy in the John Hay
Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University.
81
exterminate a brave people whose only crime is that they are fighting for their liberty."
The process of converting disinterested American "humanitarianism" ("your aid and
protection," as Semper Vigilans tactically concedes) into a mandate for conquest has a
particular and closely contested history that the author then reprises.11
But more interesting and implicit in his polemical planks are forms of political
contests and process that exceed the overt maneuvers of American authorities toward
their visions of empire in what American imperialist writers and ideologues have thence
begun to call "the new possessions." These forms of politics shade into the realm of
culture and its production as information in the encounters between Filipino and
American authorities first, as allies, and, later, as belligerents. Vigilans faults the culture
and cultural information that the new empire's army and emissaries produced and
purveyed in the United States while dealing with their prospective subjects for the now
seemingly interminable state of war between both peoples ("AC" 426-427):
You went to the Philippines under the impression that their
inhabitants were ignorant savages, whom Spain had kept in
11
The contemporary debates over the U.S. drive toward empire were particularly acrimonious
between imperialists and anti-imperialists from December 1898, when the Paris treaty was
concluded, through the first year of the U.S.-Philippine War, when reports of the tolls it was
exacting on both sides began to filter through the screen of censorship that American military
authorities had set up in the war's early stages. (The debates centered around the legitimacy of
American territorial demands and the sovereignty of the Aguinaldo government couched in the
terms of American constitutional preclusions against colonization and Filipino racial capacities
for representative government; see discussion in Chapter Four). It is at the point of this
breakdown of official censorship that Semper Vigilans calls attention to the as yet unconsidered
conversations between American imperialists and Filipino leaders over the terms of American
intervention in the Filipino war against Spain, a dispute that had preceded and paralleled the
debates in the United States. It was perhaps in this context of active neglect or omission of the
struggle with the Filipinos that Jordan considered the sale price of $20 Million as too stiff for
Americans, "when we observe that the failure of Spain placed the Islands not in our hands but in
the hands of their own people, a third party, whose interest we, like Spain, have as yet failed to
consider. Emilio Aguinaldo, the liberator of the Filipinos, the 'Washington of the Orient,' is the de
facto ruler of most of the territory" ("QP" 6).
82
subjection at the bayonet's point. The Filipinos have been
described in serious American journals as akin to the hordes of
the Khalifa; and the idea has prevailed that it required only some
unknown American Kitchener to march triumphantly from North
to South to make the military occupation complete. We have
been represented by your popular press as if we were Africans or
Mohawk Indians. We smile, and deplore the want of
ethnological knowledge on the part of our literary friends. We
are none of these. We are simply Filipinos. You know us now in
part: you will know us better, I hope....
Semper Vigilans conjures spectral Filipinos whose features would not coincide
with the compounded visages that characterized American popular depictions of the
prospective colonials as "ignorant savages," "hordes of the Khalifa," "Africans" and
"Mohawk Indians." He declares with the intimacy of encounter in war, "You know us
now in part: you will know us better, I hope," but also with the intimacy of his own
mediating presence ("We") in a parallel contest over the malleable images of Filipinos in
popular media texts. Americans suffered from "want of ethnological knowledge," and
this was to be seen in the radical instability of the racial images that "literary" Americans
had rehearsed in reporting the Filipinos to themselves. Thus, on the determinate terrain of
imperial ethnography, the United States finds itself miming the classic European empires
against which it had historically asserted the uniqueness of its political ideals. Americans
were now propelled by the same equation of "white chauvinist ideology and imperialist
practice" that distinguished these historical exemplars of "tryannous sovereignty [and]
execrable colonial methods" ("AC" 427).12 Americans may now labor under the
predictable delusion that "an unknown American Kitchener" could facilitate the conquest
12
See also the excellent documentation/discussion of similar and equally compelling arguments
made by anti-imperialist American intellectuals in Daniel Boone Schirmer (1972, 88).
83
of the new territories, a jab by Semper Vigilans at the American "military governor" of
the Philippines, Major General Elwell Otis.
"I will not deny," Semper Vigilans qualifies, "that there are savages in the
Philippine Islands, if you designate by that name those who lead a nomad life, who do not
pay tribute or acknowledge sovereignty to any one save their chief." But he reinterprets
this ethnographic reality of Philippine tribes from the logic of racial hierarchy that drives
Western notions of historical progress into a history of Filipino resistance against Spanish
colonial despots. In his formulation, "Spain held these islands for three hundred years,
but never conquered more than one-quarter of them, and that only superficially and
chiefly by means of priest-craft." Pointedly alluding to the manifest paradoxes of the
American rescue mission of Filipinos from old-world colonialism by quashing the
Filipino project of self-emancipation, Semper Vigilans reminds the reader that,
comparably, "The Spaniards never professed to derive their just powers from the consent
of those whom they attempted to govern." In some sort of warning that explains the
"diplomatic" recourse of his government to reason and moral argument to oppose the
aspiring colonial ruler, he recalls that what the Spaniards "took by force, they lost by
force at our hands..." ("AC" 427).13
13
This contradiction in the coupling of American republicanism and imperialism, which remains
as an uncriticized given for many American historians, also remains as the source of their most
pointed anxieties about the rise of the United States to world power through what they often deem
to be the simultaneously inauspicious yet “inevitable” conquest of the archipelago. In quoting a
speech by John Hay that clearly indicates the precariousness of American imperial claims as late
as 1904, in which Hay objected to Democratic Party agitation to abandon the Philippine venture
as "an abdication of our position in the Pacific [and] a base treachery and betrayal of the loyal and
intelligent Filipinos who have trusted us," Kenton Clymer concedes that the "rhetoric was
overblown" but points out that "the sentiments were essentially sincere" (see Clymer 1975, 142).
Or, Richard Hofstadter, in attempting to account for the claims of President McKinley, Theodore
Roosevelt, and others upon God's counsel or "cosmic" sanctions for the decision to annex the
Philippines against all constitutional precedents, argues that "if the insiders themselves imagined
84
Thus addressed rhetorically to the American people but also the McKinley
Administration ("You"), the rest of the statement is conducted with notable acridity and
sarcasm. Alluding to the continuing American government propaganda in the Philippines
for Filipinos to accept American tutelary rule and trust the benevolence of its intentions,
Semper Vigilans declares: "[Y]our action is on a plane with the trick which a vulgar
charlatan at a country fair plays upon the unwary with three cards and an empty box"
("AC" 430).14 The statement is angled sharply at specific American authorities such as
Generals Wesley Merritt and Elwell Otis, successive heads of the United States
occupation forces in the archipelago. It accuses the U.S. Army officers of duplicity both
in their dealings with the Filipino revolutionary government and their statements to the
American public about the war in progress and its status quo ante.
For Semper Vigilans, American deceit could be readily inferred from the moves
to maintain American naval and land forces in the Philippines after the declaration of war
against Spain in April 1898 through the turn to conquest in the following year. He then
connects Gen. Merritt's turn-around in first praising and later deprecating the Filipino
that they heard the voice of God, we must be careful of imputing hypocrisy" since it seemed to be
"a magical mode of thought by which they quieted their own uncertainties" (1967, 178). This
"qualification" recurs again and again in the historical writing (with some modifications), as it
does in contemporary articulations, to admit of a full catalog. The most classic and elegant
formulation of this analytic ambivalence and post-hoc rationalization, especially in the context of
American cold war imperial politics, is George Kennan (1951/1952, 3-20).
14
See, for typical examples of this official U.S. government propaganda, those by the Schurman
(First Philippine) Commission; and earlier, William McKinley’s notorious benevolent
assimilation proclamation of 10 December 1898. Relatedly, American philosopher William James
concurs with Vigilans’s bitter critique by calling McKinley’s claim that independence was never
promised to the Filipinos “the most incredible, unbelievable piece of sneak-thief turpitude that
any nation ever practised” (1900; quoted in Beisner 1986 [1975], 43-44). For precise expositions
of these American propaganda texts and efforts, see Vicente Rafael (1993); and Bonifacio
Salamanca (1984 [1968]), 24).
85
leaders before the Paris treaty commission, and Gen. Otis's "falsifying [of] the reports of
the Philippine campaigns" as particular forms of this duplicitous behavior ("AC" 424,
429-431). These official acts of representing the Filipinos and their leaders to the
American people, in such particularly demeaning ways, constitute no small matter for
Semper Vigilans given the impact of such disinformation on both the conduct of the war
and the intensifying American debates over Philippine annexation. In consonance with
the anti-imperalist critique, Semper Vigilans argues that American "ignorance" about the
liberationist movement, peoples, and state of affairs in the islands had led to the quagmire
of imperialism and American abandonment of their revolutionary tradition or political
ideals of liberty and representative government ("AC" 426-427).
Imaging the Filipino Otherwise
The political representative is the political image.
Raymond Williams (1983, 267)
Reporting to General Emilio Aguinaldo about his first diplomatic mission to the
United States on behalf of the Filipino revolutionary government, Felipe Agoncillo
recalls the strange reception that awaited him upon arriving in San Francisco on 22
September 1898:15
Sapagkat bantog [sic] sa Estados Unidos at sa Europa ang pagkaalis ko sa Hongkong, dahil sa mga cablegramas ng mga
corresponsales ng mga periodicos, ay ang unang panukala ng
bayang amerikano ay akoy darating doon ng hálos hubad at may
bahag. Kayà pag pasok namin ng puerto ng California ay ilang
15
Felipe Agoncillo, Paris, to Emilio Aguinaldo, 22 October 1898, Philippine Insurgent Records
(PIR) 451.6, R.G. 94, U.S. National Archives, Micropy 254, Reel 28.
86
corresponsales ng periodicos ay nag presenta sa akin sa vapor at
humihingi ng conferencia; tinanggap ko po silang lahat ng
mahusay, bagaman guinao-an ko ng paraan na u[a]la silang
masimot sa aking pananalita tungkol sa aking lakad. Noong ding
arao na iyon, na publicar sa mga periodicos, na itinalâ nila na
ang ating Bayan ay di salvage at may katampatang civilizacion
kaparis ng iba.
(Because the newspaper correspondents cabled the news of my
departure from Hongkong extensively throughout the United
States and Europe, it was the first expectation of the American
people that I would arrive half-naked, and with nothing on but a
loincloth. So it was that after our entry into the port of
California, several reporters introduced themselves to me upon
coming aboard, and asked for a press conference; I received all
of them ably, sir, although I endeavored with some reticence not
to disclose the object of my mission to them. On that very day,
the newspapers reported that we are not a savage people, and
possess a civilization comparable to any other.)
Advance cable dispatches from newspaper correspondents had not only screened his
identity and his trip to the United States before he could verify them for interested and
curious North Americans. Felipe Agoncillo avers that after glimpsing him and seeing
something different, the expectant throng on the scene (which included newspaper
reporters) corrected their preconceptions about Filipinos as "uncivilized savages."
Teodoro Agoncillo's seminal account of Filipino republican formation at the turn
of the twentieth-century notes this singular event and keeps to the spirit of Felipe
Agoncillo's anecdotal report, with some elaboration (1960, 322):
Since it had been known in the United States and Europe that
Agoncillo left Hongkong on his way to America, the Americans,
in their staggering ignorance of geography expected that he
would arrive on civilized American soil naked, except for the Gstrings. They were, however, dumbfounded to see a highly
educated man, complete with hat and well-pressed European
suit, go down the gangplank with superior airs.
His historical account provides no more analysis of the event/encounter beyond
emphasizing the transformative effect of Felipe Agoncillo's arrival "on civilized
87
American soil." But it suggests a curious reversal of roles for both observed and observer,
adding inferential details of its own. Felipe Agoncillo is pictured as "superior" in air and
attire, his clueless and credulous North American reception committee, "ignorant in
geography," and "dumbfounded" by the portrait before them.16
What, exactly, did these curious American onlookers see with the first ever
Filipino they had laid their eyes on? How could have it been possible for beginning
American colonial stereotypes of Filipinos to be transformed this radically, and with such
instantaneousness, at such a particular moment? In what specific forms did such
transformations express themselves as a force-field? With what catalyzing significance,
thereby, was Felipe Agoncillo’s political image charged? To what proximate objects or
ends, if discernible at all, was it oriented? Within what specific historical and political
contexts—and given what contingencies—did Felipe Agoncillo’s representational act and
its political effects take place? What politics and semiosis of representation in
historiography can be limned in the documentary coverage of events of this sort?
In this chapter, we consider closely the "diplomatic" politics of Felipe Agoncillo
and the Filipino revolutionary leadership, through the Comité Central Filipino (hereafter
the Comité or CCF), as it brought American imperial politics of authority and knowledge
to heretofore unexamined threshholds of breakdown and crises. Between 1898 and 1901,
Filipino revolutionists challenged American sovereignty claims upon the Philippines in
16
We return to Teodoro Agoncillo’s narrative interventions toward the latter part of the chapter,
in our critique of certain acts of history-writing as consequential discursive events in the
historiography of United States imperialism.
88
the wake of the Spanish-American war, but specifically and closely during the short but
crucial period before the outbreak of the U.S.-Philippine War in February 1899. What the
Filipino intellectual and diplomat S. P. Lopez calls "the initial encounter" between
Filipino and American authorities takes place within these temporal bounds and in the
thick pall of these political (and, as we shall indicatively illustrate, historiographic)
disputes.17
We focus on the antebellum phase of the war on the argument that it has been (or
can be easily) glossed over when, in fact, it can tell us much about the determinate turns
that Filipino-American neocolonial relations of representation would shortly, and
thereafter, take. Particularly in the crucial months from late 1898 to early 1899, the crises
in U.S. imperialist representations of Filipinos and the Philippines expressed themselves
in the momentary emergence and disappearance of a shadowy Japanese Analogy (and of
Japan as a cultural icon or as a third term), mediating and, indeed, eventuating as concrete
crisis-effects of such Filipino revolutionary-diplomatic cultural politics and campaigns.
For to the extent that what can be alternatively called here “the Japanese bogey” seemed
to have functioned as a telling symptom of a politics in process and progress, it is
nonetheless striking that it arose at all.18 The political process that ensued, or in which it
17
Lopez (1966, 10). Lopez's formulation here, it must be noted, frames the early moments of
Filipino-American contact as a question of political initiative from the mutual perspective of
"encounter." But as even any cursory review of mainstream U.S. historiography should show, an
implicit recognition of Filipino revolutionary agency of this kind is very hard to intuit from most
available American accounts of the U.S.-Philippine War, a problem, obviously, tto which Filipino
nationalist historians like Teodoro Agoncillo would address their alternative and elaborative
chronicles. Thus is how such initial encounters/events become patently historiographic or
discursive in cast and significance, turning into events of and in the history of history-writing or
historical discourse themselves.
18
The German, and (to a limited extent) Japanese, "bogeys," were conjured by American
imperialists in agitating for Philippine annexation, with much encouragement from British
89
emerged as a telling critical effect, is thus understood here as more open-ended, highlycontingent, closely contested, and vexed by serious problems of political will or initiative
than most standard accounts of the American conquest of the Philippines and anticolonial Filipino resistance would typically permit.
As a crisis-effect, the Japanese Analogy, while emerging and fading away as a
shadowy or liminal margin of fin-de-siècle Filipino-American representational scuffles,
clearly bore portents for a much later contestation between Japan and the U.S. over the
Philippines. It is a Japanese-American discord over the archipelago in which Filipino
revolutionary strategy and diplomacy itself would play a precipitating part or might be
seen as having exhibited such astute foresight.19 Although this chapter will not be the
space to explore the many critical implications of this particular phenomenon, it suggests
some beginning interpretations. The focus here, in other words, remains to be the
contested dyad of Filipino-American neocolonial relations of representation and the
publicists who asserted right of preference to the erstwhile Spanish colony after the United States.
Although U.S. diplomatic historians have sought and been unable to establish the extent of Eurocontinental or Japanese imperialist designs on the Philippines in a postrevolutionary scenario,
they generally agree that the agitation against rival interests accomplished enough political work
to rally editorial/public opinion in the United States toward not only annexation but also an
Anglo-American rapprochement/alliance against rival empires. See Thomas Bailey (1969, 105139); David Healy (1970, 9-33, 48-67); Robert George Neal (1965); Peter Henry King (1958, 94118, 159-208); and Enrique J. Corpus (1934).
19
For excellent accounts of the triangulating entry of Japan, some of it actively elicited by
Filipino revolutionists, into the US-Philippines neocolonial dyad, see Ikehata and Yu-Jose (2003)
and Yu-Jose (1992). The first critical expression of the potentially incendiary conflict between the
two latecomer empires and its quick management, in the wake of U.S. anxieties over Japan’s
rising sun as an empire and the threat it posed to the Philippines, resulted in what Yale historian
Matthew Jacobson calls “an ugly deal...granting Japan free reign in Korea in exchange for
unchallenged U.S. hegemony in the Philippines” (1999, 118). For a well-documented and
extremely compelling analysis of the considerable general impact of Philippine revolutionary
propaganda/foreign policy politics on the other triadic relationship of the Philippines, Japan, and
China, see Rebecca Karl’s Staging the World (esp. the chapter on Comité member Mariano
Ponce’s activities in the East Asia region to which he was assigned, 83-115).
90
initial engagements that first provided its basic moorings or the templates that would
shape its future expressions.
One will be remiss in appreciating “the Japanese Analogy” as a liminal crisiseffect, and as engendered by Filipino revolutionary diplomacy within the self-confident
politics and rhetorics of American imperial and representational discourses, if one does
not contextualize this Analogy’s shadowy onset and egress within the larger frame of the
antebellum anti-imperialist campaigns of Felipe Agoncillo and the Aguinaldo
government. After a necessary explication of the theoretical and critical terms specifically
informing this chapter, and a brief introduction on Agoncillo and the Comité as historical
actors, the section that follows performs this necessary contextualization, highlighting
important events in the two Filipino diplomatic missions before and after the conclusion
of the Treaty of Paris negotiations. The final section details the critical effects of the
Japanese Analogy that quite curiously resulted from such an immediate context and
which showed up the veridical uncertainties and anxieties in the initial (arguably, even
subsequent) U.S. political and cultural representations of Filipinos. But we do so in the
form of, and by concluding with, historiographic critique, particularly of certain strains of
American history-writing that remained blind to (if not actively suppressing) the critical
valences of such Filipino revolutionary and historiographic acts or texts of political
agency and self-representation.
Representation, Semiotic, and Semiosis
This chapter strategically dwells on the politics and cultures of representation, at
the early moments of Filipino-American colonial contact. As a semiotic critique, and a
91
selective account of a historical phenomenon of political semiosis, it offers a partial
mapping of inaugural American imperialist/orientalist discourses at the turn of the
twentieth century as these were engaged by Filipino revolutionary-nationalist writers and
strategists in the realm of war propaganda and the domain of international relations. And
in keeping with our effort to elaborate the radical contingency of early Filipino-American
encounters, a corollary concern of this chapter is to show how the initial conflicts
between American and Filipino leaders over political authority and representation
remained unconsolidated or open-ended for later writers and historians to rework—or
resolve, in the case of some—in their own postcontemporary accounts.
Representation, the critical keyword in this chapter and throughout this study,
comes with a variegated history as a concept and modality. (It is used here, in equally
variable ways, to encompass a conspectus of simultaneous senses that are pertinent to
Agoncillo’s acts both as “a political representative” and as a political image in the
diplomatic arena and U.S. imperialist/orientalist discourses.) "Represent," as Raymond
Williams notes, emerged in the English language in the 1300s and swiftly generated "a
range of senses" in its relation to the residual verbal functions of the word "present," as in
"make present."20 "Making present," in such contemporaneous meanings, generally
encompassed "the physical sense of presenting oneself or another, often to some person
of authority;" "the sense of making present in the mind," as in active imagining; and "the
sense of making present to the eye, [eg.] in painting [or] in plays"—in a word, the
juridical/legal and aesthetic/artistic counters to the term which are familiar to modern
20
The succeeding subsection, with selective quotations, is a critical paraphrase of Raymond
Williams’s excellent etymology of the term representation in Keywords (1983, 266-269).
92
usage. Represent also came to mean "symbolize" (or "stand for") during the same period,
but already, as Williams notes, in relation to much older artistic and semiotic senses
developed in Western expressive and communicative theories since antiquity. The links
of these compounded meanings with the modern senses of "represent" and
"representation" as acts or institutions of political surrogacy, as in "political
representative" or "representative democracy," remained fertile but (following Williams)
"very difficult to estimate."
Still, for our purposes here, it is important that "there was considerable overlap
between the sense of a) making present to the mind and the sense of b) standing for
something that is not present" in their earliest definable moments of occurrence in the
English language. Williams dates the emergence of the literally political sense of
"standing for others" by the seventeenth century which roughly articulates with emerging
theoretical developments in the West (later given a certain precision by the political
culture of the American and French bourgeois revolutions) around the modern state, its
forms of legal authority and jurisdiction, and the individual's agency within the political
order. These developments required the typification of the bourgeois individual as a
political unit, agent, and subject, which gesture as well toward the rise of
literary/aesthetic theories of representation a century later that endowed "representative"
with the similarly abstractive sense of the "typical" for so-called “Others” (especially by
the mid-nineteenth century, "as an identifying element of realism and naturalism").21 As
21
With the development of anthropology first as a reportorial and proto-romantic genre
(travelogue, etc.) and later into a science of culture after Western imperialisms mature in their
encounters with "new worlds," representation as typification (in the achieved senses of the
cultural and symbolic) became enshrined within a specialized grid of intellectual production and
disciplinary discourses. See also Johannes Fabian (1983), Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
93
we hope to demonstrate, Agoncillo “represented” himself in so many ways: he made
himself present before President William McKinley, U.S. State Department, or the U.S.
and Paris Treaty authorities; he made himself present in the developing American
imperial imagination with such critical effects as the Japanese Analogy that his U.S.
apparitions precipitated; he stood for the Filipino right to representation in its constant
absence/absencing during the period concerned; and he typified the “Filipino” in
American cultural descriptions in a number of discourses, from the journalistic to the
historiographic.
Semiotic refers to the field of language and cultural theory conceptualized and
developed by American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce (1931).22 “Semiotic” is
otherwise pluralized as semiotics in Anglo-American refinements or elaborations; it is
called semiology in the French/continental tradition that traces its lineage to the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) instead of to the long-neglected Pierce. Whether
you are of an empirical or a literary bent, semiotic or semiotics can be simply defined as
the “science of signs” or the “art/pursuit of signs,” respectively. Semiosis is, again like
semiotic, of Piercean coinage. Quite plainly, and at the risk of oversimplification for our
purposes, semiosis means “sign-production” where sign is elementally defined as that
which stands for something else in its absence, and as guaranteed by a pertinent “code”
which sanctions or conventionalizes such linguistic or nonverbal signification or
correspondences. When we speak here of the Aguinaldo government’s or Agoncillo’s
Tennenhouse (1989), Mary Louise Pratt (1991) and James Fernandez et al. (2001). On
historiography and its relations of/with representation, see Raymond Williams and Edward Said
(1993 [1989], 178-179).
22
For elegant glosses on the Piercean notion of semiotic, consult the work of foremost exegetes
Umberto Eco (1979) and Julia Kristeva (1989).
94
“semiosic diplomacy,” therefore, we are referring to their active efforts to “stand for” the
Filipino right to representation and international diplomatic legitimation, both of which
were not only absent (it was a right in genesis from non-existence), but also, and this
should show clearly in the American reception of such diplomacy, actively absented, by
Washington and Paris Treaty authorities.
“Codes,” for anyone conversant with semiotic theory, are indispensable to the
production of signs and to signification processes and phenomena in general.
Morphogenetically variable according to their social locations and functions and often
crisscrossing or athwart each other, codes may be understood, loosely, as dialectal or
guild expressions of what Kristeva calls “the problem of language in its generality,” or if
the signifying system concerned is nonverbal/non-linguistic, the particular form of speech
community which intends it or is presupposed by it. We might say that the codes in
question include contemporary international law, American constitutional discourses, and
diplomatic etiquette—all of which Agoncillo directly invoked to make sense or “signify”
to his otherwise and curiously uncomprehending American interlocutors, so that the
latter’s strategic recourse to the code/s of American racialism, as our discussion proper of
the Japanese Analogy should prove, constitutes an only partially successful effort to
exclude Agoncillo’s speech acts from imperially powerful “speech communities” and
their governing codes or signifying conventions.
Finally, from Eco (1979), we understand that even non-signs (i.e. those that are
relatively unguaranteed by linguistic/signifying conventions or so-unmotivated, usually
because of their non-anthropogenic nature or provenance) can also behave or operate as
(or as if they are) signs, provided some human gesture embeds them strategically within a
95
code or codes that can accommodate or tactically sanction such deployments. Agoncillo
was a “non-sign” as far as the Paris treaty negotiators were concerned, for example, for
the imperial codes by which they implicitly worked and spoke, could not (and would not)
guarantee his equality of status and participation in their proceedings and deliberations.
As we also intend to show, Felipe Agoncillo was already previously subjected, by
political necessity, to this kind of reduction (literally becoming “non-anthropogenic,”
with little or no status) by the U.S. President's Office and State Department on his first
trip to the imperial metropolis. But in our account, the non-sign Agoncillo behaves or
operates as (or as if he is) a sign: for the government that he represented; for “the typical
Filipino” in the discourses within which he figured or insinuated himself; and for the
contested right to Filipino representation in the normatively excluding/exclusive circles
of treaty-making and imperialist sovereigns. Or rather, he ostensibly asserted and claimed
knowledge of the governing codes and tactically redeployed them, for political purposes
and exigencies that should, in due course, become evident.
One more thing: although both de Saussure and Pierce do not consider “sign” and
“symbol” as synonymous or interchangeable (for either, the symbol is simply one
particular kind of sign so that sign is the more embracing category), we use sign and
symbol in this discussion interchangeably, largely because of our emphasis here on
representation as a distinct set of communicative and expressive strategies with a political
charge, rather than on (or perhaps inspite of) the work of signification alone. In
representation, as we shall see through Agoncillo’s story, symbols as specific form of
signage, or symbolisms, are more salient. And nowhere is this salience better
encapsulated in the phenomenon under consideration than in the symbolic cache of the
96
Japanese Analogy itself, which was the expression through which Agoncillo’s diplomacy
met with its own brand of political efficacy and success.
Felipe Agoncillo and the Comité Central Filipino as Semiotic Agents
Felipe Agoncillo and the Comité Central Filipino consistently advocated for an
exacting public and international interrogation of the various claims made by American
imperialist/orientalist discoursing over the Filipinos as colonial subjects, and over the
Philippines as a prospective U.S. dominion. A strenuous advocate of international
diplomacy among the revolutionaries, Agoncillo, with the able and punctual assistance of
the then-newly constituted CCF under Galicano Apacible, presided over the propaganda
campaigns that kept the issue of international and North American recognition of Filipino
independence burning, even as all indications pointed to eventual U.S. imperial
hegemony in the Philippines.23 As a sign for and an agent of the manysided struggles that
preceded and paralleled the actual U.S.-Philippine war, Agoncillo deserves more than the
hagiographic or biographical, episodic or fleeting, treatments of his story thus far. Apart
from Gen. Aguinaldo, Agoncillo was probably the only Filipino leader (with Sixto Lopez
who accompanied him as his secretary on his diplomatic missions to the West/United
States) who performed a sustained metonymic function and acquired a centrally symbolic
value as the Filipino Other for the North American imagination in the official and public
realms.
A lawyer by training and vocation, Agoncillo drew from international law,
diplomatic protocols, and precedents in the U.S. Declaration of Independence,
23
For a reliable and detailed account of the CCF’s history and activities, especially under the able
and principled management of Apacible, see Alzona (1971, 65-142).
97
Constitution, and revolution against Great Britain, to delimit and argue against maturing
U.S. imperial claims over the islands. Performing as a political representative for the
Filipino republican government, Agoncillo engaged U.S. imperial ambitions in a close
contest for legitimation through diplomatic politics, rational or legal discourses, and a
creative (if not pleasurable) play of signs and images.24 From these positions, he selfconsciously spoke to the contingent convergence of epochal developments in U.S.
empire-building and Filipino nationalism as the nineteenth century sped toward its
momentous close. His Hong Kong exile, after he narrowly escaped deportation to a
Southern Philippine island for his political agitation against the Spanish colonial
dispensation in the late 1880s and early 1890s, was what provided him more than ample
opportunity to monitor global developments that would bear heavily on the Philippine
Revolution.25 Such a transitive nature of his political engagements and displacements
enabled him to tackle unratified U.S. claims of imperial sovereignty over the Philippines,
with indisputable competence and political efficacy, on their own ground. His political
24
Among the odd mix of Filipino political refugees, exiles, and deportees on this China Coast
port, Agoncillo emerged as a truly pivotal figure for his organizing zeal and skills. He first
chaired the Filipino Revolutionary Committee that was established in the British Colony in
December 1896 to support the revolution against Spain after it broke out in August of that year.
This loose organ became the Hong Kong Junta upon the voluntary exile to Hong Kong of
Aguinaldo and some of his advisers and line generals in December 1897, as a consequence of a
conditional truce with the Spanish colonial regime (Pact of Biak-na-Bato). When Aguinaldo
returned to the Philippines to reorganize the revolutionary forces in May 1898 and after Agoncillo
headed for the West for his diplomatic missions, the Junta was recast as the Comité Central
Filipino, with broadened powers to coordinate "insurgent" foreign policy and propaganda
campaigns. In sum, Agoncillo dispensed influential advice and legal expertise for Gen. Aguinaldo
as a member of the Filipino government-in-exile and its various antecedent organs ( through April
1898), and as its effective coordinator from May to August 1898; as the emissary sent to the
United States and abroad to consolidate international support networks and to argue for the
Filipino cause (September 1898-July 1903); and as the moderating presence in various
revolutionary committees that considered the policy, publicity, documentary, and logistical needs
of the fledgling government.
25
For his early political activities in his home province of Batangas, for which he suffered major
persecution and the loss of his personal fortune, see May (1993).
98
and symbolic self-representations formed part of the inescapable or irrepressible
references to which subsequent North American political acts would allude during the
U.S.-Philippine War (and after this war was declared over in 1902 by McKinley's
presidential successor, Theodore Roosevelt).26
After closely tracking various developments in the international sphere which
could shift the opportunities for Filipino revolutionary success or spell the defeat of
revolutionary aspirations, Agoncillo advised the Aguinaldo government to adopt a
"balanced policy."27 Although not a neatly-articulated set of strategies, this “balanced
policy” accentuated his polemical publications abroad and his voluminous
correspondence with Gen. Aguinaldo and other revolutionary officials especially as swift
events and political developments in the "Far East," the United States, and Europe
unfolded. One prong called for a formal and systematic diplomatic campaign to establish
the legitimacy of the inchoate republic by appealing to other (imperial) nations and the
U.S. for diplomatic recognition and material/moral support. Another prong involved
equipping the revolutionary army without cease for armed defense against possible
aggression by the U.S. and other imperial powers in case diplomacy failed. Within the
many scenarios that Agoncillo envisioned with his CCF colleagues, the United States
emerged as an inevitable factor in the Filipino project of emancipation from Spanish
26
Such inescapable and irrepressible references to Filipino alterity even in the self-hermetic
discourses of American imperialism and orientalism are read and discussed for their political
valences in Chapter Four.
27
See Respe [Agoncillo] to Mr. Rost [Aguinaldo], 1 August 1898; Agoncillo to Mabini, 2 August
1898; Respe to Mr. Rost, 15 August 1898, all in Taylor vol. 3 (1971 [1903-05]).
99
colonialism because of its heightening involvement (and subsequent intervention) in the
contemporaneous Cuban revolution.
Agoncillo and his CCF colleagues had to plan their diplomacy and propaganda
work from an acute awareness of ethnographic constructions of the “Filipino” percolating
in instant forms, which paralleled now-beginning and hotly contested constitutionalist
and generally political debates over “the Philippine Question.” This emergent and instant
colonial ethnography pervaded the popular/public discourse in the United States in ways
that could cause despair for them who were, of course, concerned to launch a reactive and
effective counter-discourse of self and on the legitimacy of their revolution. Writing later
for the North American Review in 1899 under the nom de guerre “Semper Vigilans,”
“Agoncillo” faults the cultural information that the American empire's army and
emissaries produced for U.S. public consumption, while dealing with their prospective
subjects in the critical antebellum phase, for the then seemingly interminable state of war
between both peoples.28 As noted about this essay, Agoncillo/Vigilans recalls these
problematic U.S. cultural descriptions of the Filipino as racial phenotype, or even as a
peculiar kind of political genotype, and their lusty preponderance in the “popular press”
before and in the immediate aftermath of the war’s outbreak (1899, 426-427):
28
It is almost certain from the internal evidence provided by the text and what we know of his
writing style that this piece of writing is his handiwork. But “Agoncillo,” or most especially
“Aguinaldo,” usually functioned as the proper names (a semiotically significant fact for our
purposes) for otherwise anonymous, identifiable, or shifting forms of authorship in the circulation
of revolutionary broadsides, a practice rooted in the collective nature of research and writing of
the CCF and the divisions of labor among its various members—what one leery contemporary
American writer, Edwin Wildman (the journalist-brother of U.S. Hong Kong Consul General
Rounsevelle Wildman), once cavalierly dismissed as “Aguinaldo’s clipping agency” (see
Wildman 1901).
100
The Filipinos have been described in serious American journals
as akin to the hordes of the Khalifa; and the idea has prevailed
that it required only some unknown American Kitchener to
march triumphantly from North to South to make the military
occupation complete. We have been represented by your popular
press as if we were Africans or Mohawk Indians...We are none
of these. We are simply Filipinos.
Agoncillo and the CCF, in other words, were obviously cognizant of, and strategically
based their diplomatic campaigns on, the political portents and consequences of this
concordance between instant American ethnologies of the Filipino and U.S. public
discoursing of “the Philippine Question.” Agoncillo’s own act of self-representation
during his missions, and the Filipino desire for representative government on whose
behest he presumptively stood, clearly and directly spoke to this politically unfavorable
state of affairs for Filipino revolutionary aspirations.
The Filipino Diplomatic Campaign and Its Political Semiosis
Agoncillo’s story, as we recount it here, covers the specific period between
September 1898 and February 1899 when he shuttled between the U.S. and France in
pursuit of U.S./international recognition of Filipino belligerency and independence. Three
events of extreme importance in relation to the "Philippine Question" occurred during
this period: the Treaty of Paris negotiations between the U.S. and Spain from October to
December 1898; the ratification battle around the Treaty in the U.S. Senate in January
1899; and the outbreak of the U.S.-Philippine War in early February 1899. Armed with "a
power of attorney" signed by Gen. Aguinaldo and designating him as "minister
plenipotentiary of the Philippine Revolutionary Government," Agoncillo's immediate
mission was to call on President McKinley to inform him first-hand of the Philippine
101
situation and to press, specifically, for Filipino representation in the Spanish-American
peace and treaty negotiations.29 To understand the exigencies which informed
Agoncillo’s missions, we must note the breathless pace at which these moments for
struggle actually shifted, endowing Agoncillo's missions with almost the same sense of
contingency and unpredictability as the very questions then being framed, in vibrant
public discourse and international press speculations, about the U.S. rise to world power.
The problem for the Filipino revolutionists, in fact, was how to read U.S.
intentions toward the Philippines at this juncture when they seemed unclear to the
Americans themselves. In the overarching question through which this general
prevarication among the American public and its politicians was framed, “Republic or
Empire”?30 The signs and signals emanating from Washington seemed rather mixed, as to
be judged from either dissimulating or vacillating pronouncements and actions of the
McKinley government or certain authoritative political circles alone (both pros and cons).
Did Americans or their political leaders want part or all of the Philippines, if they wanted
29
Agoncillo spelled out the implications of this strategy in a predeparture letter to Aguinaldo: "If
they accept our representative in the commission, we may arrive at a friendly understanding, and
it will enable us to prepare for a fight in case they refuse to listen to our request. On the other
hand, if at the very beginning they refuse to admit our representative, we will at once be in a
position to know what should be done, i.e., to prepare for war." 15 August 1898, in Taylor vol. 3.
See also de Ocampo and Saulo (1977, 80-81).
30
This was a problem raised from the very beginning of the tactical Philippine-U.S. alliance
against Spain. Reporting from Hong Kong that an American expeditionary and occupation force
had been dispatched to the Philippines under Maj. Gen. Wesley Merritt who, in his view, would
become Governor General after Manila surrendered, Agoncillo counselled Aguinaldo to "be
watchful and try to find out the real intentions of the Americans toward our unfortunate country.
You should not, however, disclose to them our desires." Respe [Agoncillo] to Mr. Rost
[Aguinaldo], 27 May 1898, in Taylor vol. 3. Apolinario Mabini, foremost political advisor of
Aguinaldo, recounted that he found Aguinaldo's proclamation of Filipino independence on 12
June 1898 to be "imprudent because the Americans were concealing their true designs while we
were making ours manifest.” On the work of Mabini for the Aguinaldo government and the
Philippine Revolution, see Campomanes (2007).
102
them at all? (Clearly, the outright annexation of the Philippines or any of its parts would
ratify the reality of American imperialism and signify the now-anticipated and anxietyridden departure of the country from its vaunted republican traditions.) Any careful
reading of the political scenario in the U.S. would note the unsettled—even troubled—
character of U.S. thinking about the islands, whether among cabinet members, the
commissioners eventually chosen for the peace negotiations, the senators and opinion
leaders, or indeed, the public at large.31 The momentous debate(s) on the Philippine
Question, already swirling at this time in its initial torrents, then presented the
revolutionists with manifold possibilities for speaking to the claims being made about the
Philippines by various U.S. sectors while simultaneously making the Filipinos’ own
readings of the signs (for an effective politico-diplomatic campaign) vexed and difficult.
It was to this shrill atmosphere that Agoncillo's campaigns were introduced by the turn of
events from the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth-century, which had swept an
emergent nation and an emergent empire into specular but antagonistic relations.
To return to the primal scene commencing this chapter, we might imagine the
massive wave of disorientation that swept through the large turn-out of Americans
(ordinary citizens and newspaper correspondents alike) at the San Francisco port where
Agoncillo disembarked on 22 September 1898, when he walked down the plank, not halfnaked—as newspapers and magazines would have them believe—but in a well-pressed
“European” suit.32 But what this San Francisco welcome certainly foreboded for
31
The semiotic figure most cited in American historiography to convey the politicality of the
issue has been President McKinley himself, with his legendary indecisiveness; see Joseph Fry,
“William McKinley and the Coming of the Spanish-American War: A Study of the Besmirching
and Redemption of an Historical Image” (1979).
32
Teodoro Agoncillo (1960, 322) is the only available secondary account of this event that bases
103
Agoncillo and he learned in due time was that President William McKinley was not
going to receive him officially, credentials from the revolutionary government and all, but
only as a “private individual.” In light of his “plan for sartorial excellence” and the
curious reception at San Francisco, Agoncillo was ostensibly aware that for McKinley to
do otherwise was, in effect, to recognize the Filipino cause or legal personality, and to
violate the U.S. agreements with Spain to settle the matter of the disposition of the
Philippines between them as the concerned powers.
The non-recognition of Agoncillo and concomitantly, of the Filipino republic,
began in McKinley's requirement that Agoncillo strip himself of his credentials from
Gen. Aguinaldo before he could be admitted to the President's office on 1 October 1898.
Although he was allowed to review the Philippine revolution against Spain, according to
some skimpy accounts, his request for the rights of Filipino belligerency and
representation in the Paris conference for the Aguinaldo republic elicited no significant
comment or expression of commitment from the U.S. president.33 What Agoncillo merely
gained from this exercise was the privilege of filing a memorandum on the Filipino case
itself on Felipe Agoncillo’s own primary report to Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo (about which, more
later). Although still reeling, nearly two weeks later, from this apparitional Felipe Agoncillo who
subjected the self-certitude of popular U.S. press stereotypes of the Filipino (Vigilans’s “hordes
of the Khalifa, Africans, and American Indians”) to such a precipitate and precipitant crisis, the
New York Sun had to concede in its 2 October 1898 issue that the Filipinos were “well-versed in
the ways of civilization.” It is also a credit to the remarkable intelligence-gathering of its
reporters on the ground that it could supply an explanatory background for the Filipino diplomats’
“sartorial excellence.” Confirming some suggestive evidence in the CCF documents (which, in
fact, points to this plan as something conceived all the way back in Hong Kong, the base from
which Agoncillo departed for his U.S. missions), the Sun report reveals: “Realizing that they
should be properly dressed, they had their measures taken for several suits as soon as they landed,
and then telegraphed to a fashionable tailor in Washington the measurements, with instructions to
make the suits. They were ready to be tried on when the Filipinos arrived” (see also Hoyt 1979,
42).
33
Undated note of Agoncillo to Aguinaldo, in Taylor vol. 5; see also Lewis Gould (1982, 103).
104
although again, as one historian's interpretation emphasized, "with a chilly injunction that
this did not imply recognition."34 This document, which U.S. Paris Treaty chief
negotiator Whitelaw Reid called and did concede as "an extraordinary paper," became the
basis for Agoncillo's subsequent press statements and polemical publications, including
his Memorial to the U.S. Senate (1899a) and his contribution to the U.S. Presidential
election debate on imperialism, To The American People (1900).35 Reid summarized it in
a diary entry as a point of interest: "In [this] paper he claimed an independent government
for the islands, asserted an alliance with the United States invited by us and accorded [by
the Filipino insurgents], and quoted the language of the Declaration of Independence,
which he requested Spain and the United States to make effective as to the Philippines."36
In a very important sense, however, Agoncillo’s revolutionary strategy, even with
such a seemingly innocuous request for an audience with the U.S. President at the White
House—and under whatever terms it might be granted—was working to serve on U.S.
state authority a fait accompli that had the effect of initiating the crises now poised to
haunt, without cease, McKinley’s (and the U.S.A.'s) maturing claims of sovereignty over
the “Philippine Islands.” Semiotically speaking, the instances of non-recognition of
Agoncillo himself are not so much the issue here as that he actively figured himself—and
34
Memorandum [of] Felipe Agoncillo, of Manila, Philippines," in Taylor vol. 5. See also H.
Wayne Morgan (1963, 406).
35
Memorial was republished by the Anti-Imperialist League in a slightly different version in
1899 and Agoncillo privately printed To The American People in Paris in 1900.
36
17 October 1898, Reid (1965, 82). What Reid did not mention in this dismissive summary were
two striking points that Agoncillo made: that in the protocol between the "United States of North
America" and Spain calling for the joint commission to conclude a treaty of peace, "Neither State
has apparently paid any attention to the right of the Filipinos to take part in this decision, which
will affect [their] destiny in history" and, that the U.S., if it were true to its "famous and sacred
declaration of independence" would act "in favor of the new nation which logically answers in
that part of the globe to its present benevolent and humanitarian action." (A text of the Memorial
is included in Taylor vol. 5.)
105
did so, in extensive American and international newspaper coverage—as the
representative of a right to representation. In his polemic against the final deal of
December 1898 in which Spain ceded the Philippines to the U.S. for $20M, Agoncillo
limited his own importance to protesting "resolutions agreed upon at the Peace
conference in Paris, as long as the juridical, political, independent personality of the
Filipino people is entirely unrecognized and attempts are made to impose on these
inhabitants resolutions which have not been sanctioned by their public powers."37
Apparently failing in his appeal to the American president, Agoncillo quickly sailed for
Paris, with some hope by that by his presence there he might continue to foreground the
unwarranted exclusion of Filipinos from the bargaining going on.
In Paris, Agoncillo sought an audience with American treaty negotiator Reid but
was predictably rebuffed. To Reid's and other negotiators' embarrassment, Agoncillo
persisted in making public and press statements insisting on the rightful inclusion of
Filipinos or their representatives around the bargaining table. But after the imperialist
power dealing in Paris was finally concluded, the arena for decision-making shifted back
to the U.S. where the treaty had to be ratified by a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate for U.S.
authority over the Philippines to be formalized and acquire its juridical sanctions.
Naturally, the larger public debates about the now-controversial U.S. sovereignty claims
over the Philippines ascended to new heights with such highly mercurial developments as
the ratification battles in the U.S. Senate and the imminence of war with the Filipino
revolutionary forces in case of treaty ratification. The Senate ratification battle, in
37
“Official Protests Against the Paris Treaty," in Taylor vol. 5.
106
particular, promised the same contentiousness as that of the larger public culture debates
(which were far from settled), and it was this political equation that apparently drove
Agoncillo to suggest to the CCF in Hong Kong to establish a Washington legation as
their "last recourse." In a prescient earlier reading of a snag in the Paris negotiations over
the Philippines, Agoncillo suggested that the revolutionists should speed up their arms
purchases, and predicted that if the U.S. took the Philippines, "Independence will not be
granted us. Their ambition is great...."38
Agoncillo returned to and arrived in Washington (from Paris) in late December
1898 and was later joined by three emissaries sent by the Comité from Hongkong.39 With
more help, Agoncillo lobbied against the treaty and flooded the State Department with
requests for another meeting with McKinley, and absent that, with Secretary of State
John Hay, to re-present his credentials and to press his case that a war could be averted if
the U.S. recognized that "the U.S. has no jurisdiction, natural or acquired, through any of
its agencies to adjudicate in any manner upon the rights of [the Philippines and
Filipinos]"—all were, of course, studiously ignored by the McKinley government.40 But
with the treaty winning approval by a one-vote margin in early February—charged by
American historians to last-minute backroom dealings among some tipping-point
senators and the nearly simultaneous outbreak of the U.S.-Philippine War—Agoncillo’s
38
Cablegram from Kitapalad [Agoncillo] to Kant [G. Apacible], received 18 November [1898],
in Taylor vol. 5.
39
The Washington Evening Star identified them as "Dr. Jose Lozada, Sr. Juan Luna and Capt.
Marti Burgos" (23 January 1899, 1).
40
Memorials from Senor Felipe Agoncillo and Constitution of the Provisional Philippine
Government (Boston: Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), n.p. Agoncillo to Aguinaldo, 6 April 1899,
John R. Thomas Jr. Papers, LCMD.
107
continued stay on U.S. soil became untenable. Agoncillo, however, would milk this
moment for whatever critical effects it could yield for the republican cause, even as his
legation members now received instructions from the CCF for redeployment elsewhere,
and he himself faced possible arrest and deportation by U.S. authorities.
In his public and press statements up to his precipitated flight to Montreal,
Canada, on the eve of the outbreak of the War on 4 February 1899, Agoncillo rhetorically
emphasized the dubiousness of the claim of U.S. authority over the Philippines by
invoking international law to question the Treaty's binding powers. He copiously quoted
from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to reiterate as well as
resound the parallel but now racuous anti-imperialist critique. The Anti-Imperialist
League critique, as we know, expressed interminable anxieties—later to be shared by
many exceptionalist American ideologues and by postcontemporary scholars—over the
unconsidered consequences of imperialism (and the Philippine conquest which was its
touchstone) for the future, and future forms, of American republicanism. Earlier, the
Washington Evening Star had inadvertently ratified Agoncillo's running arguments
against U.S. authority when it reported that the State Department, in considering what to
do to rid Washington D.C. of "the unwelcome visitor," was hogtied by the pending
Senate action on the treaty: "To regard Agoncillo in the light of a spy might be
tantamount to an admission that we are still in an active state of war, while to hold him
guilty of treason would involve the assumption that he is an American citizen and
indirectly that our jurisdiction over the whole of the Philippines is complete."41 What a
triple bind, indeed, if one added that to do either was also for the U.S. to, in effect,
41
7 January 1899, 1. See also Washington Post, 28 January 1899, 1.
108
recognize the Filipinos as rightful belligerents and itself, finally, as an imperialist nationstate.
The State Department certainly (and quite understandably) did not bother to
acknowledge Agoncillo's various attempts to be received as an envoy, even as a U.S.
Secret Service detail was deployed to keep tabs on his and the Filipino legation’s
movements under these politically intensifying conditions.42 Anywise, the Secretary of
State John Hay could not grant Agoncillo both the audience and recognition, which the
latter continued to seek, obviously fearful that to do so meant, yet again, the grant of
nominal status to him and the government he represented. Still, the radical effect of
Agoncillo's symbolic and semiosic standing in the whole economy of claims and counterclaims may be gleaned from a Washington Post editorial: "It seems an absurd condition
of affairs in which the government of the United States cannot protect itself against the
nuisance represented by Agoncillo, who pretends to be the diplomatic representative of
Aguinaldo's opera-bouffe establishment in the Philippines...[S]urely we can devise some
plan by which we may administer the great American bounce to this pestiferous Malay,
and the sooner we do so, the better for our moral and political sanitation.”43 But as the
war broke out on 4 February 1899, at a time when the crucial voting on the treaty
remained highly-contingent, the Washington press reported Agoncillo's flight to Canada
42
Sixto Lopez (Secretary to Agoncillo) to John Hay (U.S. Secretary of State), 5 January 1899;
Memorandum, Lopez to Hay, 5 January 1899; Lopez to Hay, 7 January 1899; Agoncillo to Hay,
11 January 1899; Agoncillo to Hay, 24 January 1899, all in Taylor vol. 5.
43
26 January 1899, 3; see also the front page cartoon titled “The Open Door” (in some allusion to
the fabled diplomatic notes of Hay) in the Washington Post, 1 February 1899 number, with the
caption: “A Good Policy in the Present Crisis.” The cartoon depicts Agoncillo as a carpetbagger
(with his rolled up mat/bag bearing the inscription “Credentials from Aguinaldo”) who is being
given the royal bounce out the door by the booted foot of what appears to be “Uncle Sam”
himself.
109
and pronounced that this “act of cowardice” on his part had relieved the State Department
of the fait accompli (now successfully established as far as Agoncillo was concerned), or
worse, the inexplicable embarrassment itself, of having him arrested or deported.
The Japanese Analogy as Semiosis in Diplomacy and Historiography
Teodoro Agoncillo, otherwise noted for the rigor of his groundbreaking research
into the Philippine revolutionary papers, did not document his account of the diplomat’s
arrival scene with Felipe Agoncillo's letter.44 Recently, Teodoro Agoncillo has been
under sustained attack or subjected to withering critique for his interpetive contributions
as a “nationalist” historian as well as for his scholarship.45 Among the Filipino scholars
of his generation, Teodoro Agoncillo had offered the most closely researched "Filipino
point of view" against the claims of U.S. imperial intervention in the Filipino revolution
against Spain. He discerned, and passionately argued for, anti-imperialist Filipino
nationalism to be as much a phenomenon among the population-at-large as it was among
the élite Filipino revolutionists. North American scholars had implied or explicitly
44
Shortly in the chapter in which such an account occurs of Felipe’s arrival scene, Teodoro
Agoncillo cites the same letter/report by Felipe Agoncillo to Gen. Aguinaldo but as a source for
his own recounting of Felipe Agoncillo's subsequent conference with President William
McKinley at the White House on 1 October 1898, on which the letter dwelt at length. (Ibid., 323,
and 707n28).
45
Glenn May, the presumptive American Filipinist historian of this period until his departure
from academic employment, has been the most relentless, seeing the "hegemony" of Teodoro
Agoncillo's work over Philippine revolutionary historiography as unwarranted. May calls
Agoncillo's work "nationalist" (a term of opprobium nowadays) and faults it for not
"documenting" his major claim that the Philippine Revolution against Western colonialisms had
the support of the Filipino "masses." Within the past two or so decades, May had gone through
the trouble of culling specific sections of Teodoro Agoncillo's work to "demonstrate" (to use his
favorite word) that Agoncillo had not done his "spadework" (again, another favorite word) or
done it well, in terms, that is, of what May counts as impeccable scholarship. See May 1987;
1991; 1997.
110
claimed otherwise by active omission of Filipino agency or by echoing contemporary
U.S. imperialist pronouncements that limited the "insurrection" to certain sections of the
Filipino elite or the "Tagalos."46 Polemical North American claims of Filipino incapacity
for self-government and the necessity for U.S. intervention had rested on this vision of
the Philippine Revolution as internally divided and "tribal," verging on anarchy and
atrocious anti-colonial and punitive violence if unassisted by external police power.
Something of this interpretive contention drives the recent and highly engaged
critique of Teodoro Agoncillo's work. In most particular instances, the question raised
about his interpretive claims concerns his competence as a scholar and his research
practices. Frederick Hoyt, for example, shouldered what he calls "the onerous task of
researching old [U.S.] newspaper files for this period" after finding Teodoro Agoncillo's
account of the above event "fascinating" but "undocumented."47 After examining U.S.
newspaper coverage of Felipe Agoncillo's first diplomatic trip to the United States (from
22 September to 8 October 1898), Hoyt asserts that no "evidence" exists for the historian
Agoncillo's contentions. On the contrary, for the event in question, Hoyt finds Felipe
Agoncillo to have been accorded respectful reception, extensive coverage and detailed
description, and "rather consistently discussed in flattering terms" by U.S. periodicals
46
In a rare acknowledgment of Teodoro Agoncillo's work in the United States, Richard H. Miller
condensed and digested his chapter on Felipe Agoncillo's diplomatic campaign for an anthology
of contemporary pronouncements and North American historical accounts about the U.S. rise to
world power. Miller retitled the chapter, "The Lost Cause," as "The Filipino Point of View," and
deemed it "important for the light it sheds on Aguinaldo's repeated efforts (through [Felipe]
Agoncillo and others) to effect a working diplomatic relationship with the McKinley
Administration in 1898." However, he introduces Teodoro Agoncillo as "the grandson of Felipe
Agoncillo, Emilio Aguinaldo's special emissary to President McKinley and the Paris Peace
Commission," as if this would help explain the work's "pardonable anti-American bias." Miller
(1970, 138-147).
47
Hoyt, "Agoncillo's Mission to America: Reality Confronts Mythology"(1979, 32 and 49);
hereafter cited in the text as "AMA," page(s).
111
("AMA" 48). He then quotes various newspapers copiously to "demonstrate" how Felipe
Agoncillo was not received with malevolence as he expected, but with benign tolerance.
Ample evidence from the extensive newspaper coverage that Hoyt patiently
scoured through does seem to bear him out. Among the reportorial proofs he marshalled
but to whose fascinating implications he seemed rather (and conspicuously) oblivious is
what we have been calling here the Japanese Analogy. In specifying quite a few instances
when the Filipino diplomats, throughout their first sojourn in the United States, were
likened by credulous American writers or reporters to the Japanese, Hoyt inadvertently
and unwittingly called attention to two important aspects of our historiographic critique
here. First, given that Agoncillo “quite naturally attracted” such widespread press and
popular attention as he did, being “the first Filipino [continental Americans] had ever
seen” at that important juncture of initial Filipino-American contacts, Hoyt observes in
passing that this might have had something to do with the absence of an adequate
language of [racialist or ethnological] representation through which Americans could
report their new alien others to themselves. And second, the Japanese Analogy is here
read by Hoyt to signify benign popular and journalistic American treatment of the first
and apparitional Filipinos (although Agoncillo was accompanied by Sixto Lopez who
acted as his secretary, and with Lopez’s rudimentary knowledge of English, as his
interpreter, Lopez merely functioned as the shadowy foil to Agoncillo’s symbolic
centrality)—the basis, therefore, for his claim of “the flattering terms” by which they
were represented in U.S. public culture during the period concerned. Hoyt writes:
“Seeking to find a racial parallel with which Americans would be familiar, these accounts
112
often compared Agoncillo to a Japanese. His manners and conduct were routinely praised
as those of a civilized, polished, well-educated gentleman” (“AMA” 32 and 35).
In short, as the Japanese Analogy seemed to have worked, it meant that the
‘Filipino’ is almost like the ‘Japanese,’ and that ‘Japanese’ here is less a racial and
racializing marker than a sign for being ‘civilized, polished, well-educated’—very
positive and flattering terms, indeed.48 Strikingly, the very Japanese Analogy that
American writers had applied to the “Filipino”—ill-equipped as they were (as Hoyt
notes) to appreciate or understand the novel difference that Agoncillo represented to
Americans at this radical juncture—also works, by itself, in another way worth marking.
It also analogizes the Japanese in respect of a determinate set of characteristics
presumably and preferably applicable only to American or Western equivalents
(civilization, education, and the term which couches both: “polish”). The work of
signification/representation that the “Japanese” here is made to bear as a term of
positivity, both as vehicle in regard to the Filipino as tenor, and as simultaneously
tenorial and vehicular in respect of the implicitly ultimate term “American/Westerner,”
is sociologically understandable: the typical U.S. diplomatic historian will tell us that
48
Analogy, in literary study, is not only a distinct form of establishing resemblance(s) between
two ideas, things, or actions but, as with its kindred figure of metaphor, involves the elucidation
of the one term (called ‘tenor’ in metaphor, that which is being talked about) by means of the
other (called ‘vehicle’ in metaphor, the way it is being talked about, that which carries the charge
of comparison). But unlike metaphor, which might allow for the yoking together of terms that are
either verisimilar or otherwise differential in the qualities they possess (provided in either case
that there exists some conceptual/linguistic basis for comparability) and which requires a kind of
interpenetration or transference of qualities between such verisimilar or differential terms (the
Latin rootword metaphora derives from the Greek metapherein, “to transfer” or “carry across”),
analogy is predicated upon the separability of the terms under comparison, and involves, in short,
the construction between these terms of an imaginary identity that is otherwise countervailed by
their constitutive difference. Analogy shares with simile this kind of predication, which the literal
and metamorphic comparison of metaphor (given its repression of simile’s explicit conjunctions
of “like” or “as”) naturally disallows. Not surprisingly, therefore, analogies tend to express
themselves in the form of simple or extended similes rather than in metaphorical accents.
113
after Japan’s conquest of the Northern China terrritories in 1894, its own attendant
colonization of Taiwan, and the emergence of a modern Japan from the Meiji
Restoration, Japan and the Japanese finally and simply earned the begrudging admiration
and collegial embrace of the United States as a civilizationally kindred nation.49
For the Filipino to be likened to the Japanese (and by unwonted implication, the
fledgling republic that Agoncillo as ‘Filipino” represented, to the modern Japanese nation
that “Japanese” symbolized in the contemporary [and later, postcontemporary] period) is
therefore nothing less than remarkable. It testifies, first of all, to the onset of a crisis in
American representational authority (which was to become endemic and from which it
was never to recover) in regard to Filipinos and the Philippine Revolution at this critical
juncture of early encounters. This is a crisis-effect, in the form of the Japanese Analogy,
that is instantiated by the problematic specter which Agoncillo as Filipino represented to
his American observers: it gave “lie” to the early and denigrating American racializations
of Filipinos and the Philippines as alien subject, revolutionary antagoniste, and territorial
object. The semiosic crisis can be seen in the symptomatic juxtapositions of racializing
tropes with apparently positive ones in the newspaper coverage that Hoyt examined.
49
From all accounts, this acceptance of Japan into the exclusive circle (although still continually
troubled by its ‘racial’ and “Oriental’ difference) became final and executory with Japan’s
spectacular trumping of czarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. An illustrated sheet music text
in the impressive collections of the Archives Center of the Smithsonian Institution (AC-SI) extols
the Japanese, as a consequence, as “The Yankees of the Far East,” no matter how satiric the
graphic illustrations and the lyrics of the sheet music. Many thanks to the archivist and scholar
Fath Ruffins of the AC-SI for her counsel in navigating the AC’s labyrinthine collections for such
telling cultural texts as this one. But to this sociologizing explanation we might add the equally
transformative and apparently lingering cultural-political and semiosic effects of the first
Japanese embassy/legation sent by Tokugawa Japan on an extended visit to Washington and New
York in 1860, elicited by the United States after the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry,
and admirably detailed in an excellent account by Tadashi Aruga (1976).
114
The Oakland Enquirer ‘s unequivocal assertion, right after the sighting of
Agoncillo at the port of San Francisco, that Agoncillo could impress any American as “a
distinguished native Philippine islander” was, in fact, rather rare (“AMA” 34). The San
Francisco Bulletin on 23 September felt compelled to point out that “Agoncello [sp.] is a
quick-witted dark-skinned man of rather small stature” and Lopez “is a sharp-looking
half-caste;” to which a San Francisco Call reporter, confounded by a discovery of the
latter as an unlikely English-speaking Filipino (surely a rarity), had to chime in, on that
same day’s issue, that Lopez’s “command of English is that of a stuttering schoolboy
with a year’s experience in the vagaries of Anglo-Saxon grammar” (“AMA” 33-34).
Later elaborations came with more and more racializing specificity. Although the
Chicago Tribune would early on tag Agoncillo as “a small brown man, with a Malay face
and polite manners” (23 September), its correspondent who had opportunity for closer
inspection by being on the same Overland Limited train that took Agoncillo and Lopez
from San Francisco to Washington (with a stopover in Chicago), testified in a front-page
story for 26 September that Agoncillo looked as “dark as the darkest American Indians,”
a telling phrase and an other racial analogy echoed word-for-word by the New York Sun.
The Chicago Times-Herald agreed the next day with a near-satirical characterization of
Agoncillo as “a swarthy diplomat.” Newspaper reports and reporters throughout this time
quite generally fixated on Agoncillo’s diminutive size, a characteristic phenotypical
criterion in American racialism. The Chicago Evening Post called Agoncillo “a swarthy
little man” (26 September), with the Chicago Journal swearing that the “pleasant little
man” stood at “not more than 5 feet, 2 inches in height” in a story on the same day, and
the Chicago Inter-Ocean fudging and demurring in its issue the next day (27 September)
115
that this “little man” actually stood at “not much over five feet.” Apparently, a 2-inch
difference mattered much. In all, the San Francisco Call seems to have set the
summarative terms for these racializations, with its observation that Agoncillo possessed
“all the racial characteristics of the Malay product” and that Lopez, “His secretary is the
typical Filipino” (‘AMA” 33, 35-37).
The Japanese Analogy characterizations seemed to have been yoked to this
emphasis on Agoncillo’s “littleness” and in relation to rather odd analogues and qualifiers
(in despair and at a loss for an adequate characterization, in the face of Agoncillo’s
multiplicity as a “sign” and representational figure, one newspaper even compared him to
a Frenchman). This is where the Japanese Analogy as a liminal crisis-effect—i.e. as both
a shadowy juncture of crisis and as an actively induced effect—in the veridical
uncertainties and claims of American representational authority/practices most
conspicuously appears hydra-headed. Such U.S. representations might be authoritative in
their overtones but are already self-deconstructing in their telling lacunae and
contradictions. It is not very difficult to imagine that this crisis-effect was directly
engendered by Agoncillo’s self-representations, as evidenced, for example in the selfconflicted terms of the extended or simple similes that proliferated given the visage he
offered to his American observers. Although the Chicago Tribune expressed confidence
that Agoncillo “looked more like any Japanese than any other nationality with which
Chicago is familiar” (27 September) or that, in the unhesitating words of the Chicago
Evening Post report the day before, “His appearance has that of an educated and polished
Japanese,” an earlier San Francisco Examiner report on 23 September had maintained
that “the dapper-looking little fellow” might seem “somewhat like a Japanese, but his
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features are of the Spanish cast.” The Washington Post, five days later, would strongly
disagree with this West Coast newspaper, while ratifying the Midwestern Evening Post’s
claim of a Japanese Analogy to paint Agoncillo, patently maintaining that he “[has] the
appearance of a polished and well-educated Japanese rather than a Spaniard.” Little
wonder that the San Francisco Chronicle seemed to have anticipated the problem quite
early by portraying the racially intractable fellow in its front-page 23 September story as
“a little young man of Spanish-Japanese appearance.” (see also “AMA” 33-36; emphasis
supplied).
Their reporters having personally tailed Agoncillo who had checked in with
Lopez by early October at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, preparatory to their trans-Atlantic
voyage to Paris after the meeting with McKinley, the New York papers Herald and
World might have had the last word on the culturally (and a bit racially) contradictory
quandary of whether, in fact, Agoncillo as Filipino was, by analogical reasoning,
Japanese or Spanish (as incongruous in the ways cultural comparisons/differences could
go). In the form of a qualifying refinement, the Herald’s characterization would strike a
present-day reader as peerless, even if a tad too sophistical: “Although he [Agoncillo]
speaks the language of Spain, he is of the Japanese type of appearance;” and as if to settle
the matter once and for all, the newspaper published a large picture of Agoncillo, quite
interestingly given a verbal supplement by Hoyt the historian as looking “alert,
intelligent, well-groomed, and properly dressed” (See “AMA” 44). Nothing in this
exuberant coverage however better summarizes and embodies the critical semiotic
puzzle/patchwork that Agoncillo represented to American readers than the World report
(8 October):
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The revolutionary envoy is for all the world, except for his
language, which is that of Spain, a typical Japanese...He is small
and slight, with little hands and feet and a tiny black moustache
to match. His cheekbones are high, his hair is short, coarse, and
jet black, and his complexion is that of any dozen Japanese one
would meet…[He spoke] in low modulated tones…[and he was]
most courteous and considerate….
Recall that on the strength of a singular lapse of documentary procedure by
Teodoro Agoncillo, Hoyt speculates about why a Filipino historian of his stature should
make such a reading of one historical event (the San Francisco arrival of Felipe
Agoncillo) and not provide the requisite "evidence." Unaware of Teodoro Agoncillo's use
of Felipe Agoncillo's letter, Hoyt argues that the Filipino historian might have simply
repeated a claim made by U.S. historians and by Felipe Agoncillo himself (publicly, upon
arrival) on the subject of "American ignorance." It should be clear from our discussion
that the crisis-effect of the Japanese Analogy, fading away as quickly as it emerged
(being specific only to the political effects of Felipe Agoncillo’s semiosic and culturally
productive diplomacy), does show up the matter of American “ignorance” in respect of
its Filipino Other/s in rather demotic ways. “American ignorance” is not only a Filipino
revolutionary-diplomatic counter-claim in response to their prospective and actual
neocolonizer’s own insistent claims about Filipino incapacity for representative
government but, as this concluding discussion hopes to demonstrate, is a politically
charged and obsessively historiographic question.
As Hoyt himself recognizes, a "tenacious myth, created and nurtured by two
generations of historians" posits that North Americans knew next to nothing about the
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Philippines before Admiral George Dewey's feat at Manila Bay on 1 May 1898.50 On this
view, Dewey's victory over the Spanish armada came as a "stunning surprise" to
Americans that, then, presumably, spurred their interest in the Philippines to grow in
leaps and bounds. Hoyt critiques this proposition as he finds it rearticulated by the
Filipinos, faulting historians like Samuel Flagg Bemis, Thomas Bailey, and John Hicks,
for reverberating contemporary claims to this effect (by William McKinley and Theodore
Roosevelt, for instance). For Hoyt, the "myth" of ignorance apparently held Teodoro
Agoncillo in its thrall, who had "simply accepted [it] from his distinguished American
colleagues." Just as North American historians were held captive by their privileged
historical actors, so was the historian Agoncillo swayed by the myths affirmed by his
professional betters in the United States. Hoyt then reproves Teodoro Agoncillo "for
rather casually extending the period of American ignorance of all things Philippine from
May 1, 1898, until Felipe Agoncillo's arrival in the United States on September 22, 1898
("AMA" 48-49).
Hoyt quotes Felipe Agoncillo's press statement upon his subsequent arrival in
Washington D.C. on 28 September 1898 as another possible source for the Filipino
historian's claims:51
50
Stuart Creighton Miller (1982, 13). For a related angle on what one guilty historian was later to
disavow as the "May Day Myth," see Thomas Bailey, " America's Emergence as a World Power:
The Myth and the Verity" (1961), reprinted in Bailey, eds. DeConde and Rappaport (1969, 2953).
51
Published in Boston Evening Transcript, New York Sun, Washington Evening Star,
Washington Post, 28 September 1898 ("AMA" 49). This remark is problematic since there is no
single reference in Teodoro Agoncillo's book to U.S. periodical sources. In fact, in keeping with
his programmatic emphasis on under-used Filipino vernacular and archival sources, his periodical
listings included only one American-published and Manila-based newspaper, the Manila Times.
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I am afraid that many Americans have formed an erroneous idea
of the Philippine Islands and their people[.] Prior to the outbreak
of the Spanish-American War, the American people knew little
or nothing of us or our islands[.] You were led to believe that we
were a savage or a barbarous race, half civilized[.] You have
heard little of us, and the American people know nothing of our
struggles and trials which we have endured under the rule of
Spain, and our many efforts, futile and unsuccessful, to throw off
the galling yoke of that country, whose colonial government has
been the worst, the most heartless, cruel, and unsympathetic of
any in the history of the world.
After this reference to a public utterance by Felipe Agoncillo, however, Hoyt shifts the
register and object of critique from the Filipino historian to the Filipino historical
character himself. Like another historian, Hoyt "discovers" (the word recurs) that the
Filipino "insurrection" against Spain, indeed, had hogged part of the limelight of U.S.
public interest from the open Filipino rebellion of August 1896 to the Filipino stand-off
with Spanish forces in 1898.52 Accordingly, he wagers that "[i]f Agoncillo had come to
the United States two years earlier and had been able to read major American daily
newspapers, he would never have made such statements." Hoyt finds Felipe Agoncillo's
"ignorance" to be doubly unconscionable given what he sees as an exponential increase in
U.S. newspaper coverage of the Philippines after the day of Dewey's feat. Yet again, "if
Agoncillo had picked up any of the four dailies published in San Francisco on the day of
his arrival...he would have discovered them filled with extensive news reports, feature
stories, articles, letters, editorials, and illustrations related to the Philippines" ("AMA"
52
Charting the newspaper indices of the New York Times and the San Francisco Call for the
period before Dewey's naval victory, Stuart Creighton Miller divines a pattern of foreknowledge
on the part of editors "obsessed with Spanish oppression in Cuba [who] found it only natural to
turn to additional evidence of tyranny in Spain's far-flung empire." For example, entries on the
Philippines in the New York Times Index accelerated from 2 in 1895 (the start of the Cuban
Revolution) to 21 in 1896, 24 in 1897, and 18 in 1898 before 1 May; 11 of these were editorials
and 30, front-page treatments (Miller notes that the San Francisco Call index lists a bit more than
the Times total for the same period); Stuart Creighton Miller (1982, 13 and 279n1).
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49). To be imaged as shorn of clothing thus becomes, by extension, to know little or
nothing, to suffer an epistemological lack or nudity demanding some re-dress.
Even under better circumstances, knowledge of Felipe Agoncillo's report to
General Aguinaldo would not clearly alter Hoyt's arguments, given the now-widened
compass of his historiographic critique to embrace both diplomat and chronicler. In fact,
in thrust and substance, Felipe Agoncillo's Washington arrival statement differs little
from his post-departure report to the Aguinaldo government, supplying the very
elaboration that Teodoro Agoncillo's paraphrase enables. What clearly emerges is Hoyt's
presumption that both Agoncillos (Felipe and Teodoro) had not done their homework,
and both of their claims upon authority, therefore, could only but invite the gentle disdain
of the assiduous and obsessive researcher. Claiming to know "American ignorance" about
Filipinos, they now stand revealed as guilty of the very crime they impute to the Other. If
Teodoro Agoncillo had cited Felipe Agoncillo's letter, in Tagalog and with its immediate
contexts, Hoyt (who knew no Tagalog) would still have recourse to Felipe Agoncillo's
arrival statement in translated English. And yet being shunted from vernacular knowledge
by the other historian's procedural lapse is the lack upon which Hoyt unwittingly
predicates his will to positivist and empirical research.
The point would thus remain. It would not matter who between the Agoncillos
(historian or historical character) could positively know the state of North American
affairs and knowledge during the period with respect to Filipinos and their cultures.
Seeking to represent the Other's representations of their people, they could only but,
perforce, be subjected to the accustomed measures of veracity by the historian and found
sorely wanting. Both of their attempts to “read” the Other seemed, after all, to be more
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ambitious than the contemporary ambition of the Filipinos to practice the art of
representative government. Filipinos would earn much animus in the United States for
not realizing that "racial" fitness came hand in hand with such aspirations (and American
“Filipinologists,” from Dean Worcester in the days of empire to Glenn May and Brian
Linn in the postcolonial epoch would not lack in reminding us about the intimate link
between one’s ‘race’ and one’s capacity, either for representative government or
historical narration/research).53 But precisely after Felipe Agoncillo's departure for
Europe from his “unsuccessful” U.S. trip to represent Filipino desires for independence in
the Spanish-American negotiations, their so-called racial incapacity for self-government
53
As recently as 1989, military historian Brian Linn was insisting on the error of Filipino
historians (in particular) on calling Filipino revolutionary resistance to U.S. Occupation “the
Filipino-American War or the Philippine-American War” and expressed preference for “the
Philippine War” instead (not unlike “the Vietnam War”), as either former designation “suggests a
war between two nations or peoples neither of which is applicable.” Strikingly, Linn prefaces this
assertion, made over and over again across the historical literature by a number of predecessors,
with the statement that the term "Philippine Insurrection" suggests a rebellion against a
constituted authority when in fact the war broke out before the United States exercised control
beyond the city of Manila (Ibid.; emphasis added)," a contradictory impulse in his argument for
the rest of the book that mimes the conflictedness of Glenn May's "revisionist" analysis in Battle
for Batangas (1991). For example, May considers President William McKinley''s instructions to
the U.S. Paris Peace Commission to demand all of the Philippines from Spain (after initially
wanting only the island of Luzon) as a decision that set the United States "on a collision course
with the new Filipino nation (1991, 76; emphasis added)." This symptomatic recognition of
Filipino nationality that randomly punctuates May's book goes against the grain of his account (as
of much of his research). May's central point, initially stated elsewhere, is that the Philippine
revolution of 1896 and the Philippine-American War of 1899 were, in his words, "to put [it]
bluntly, not a single national struggle but a collection of regional ones." Or, obversely, he
contends that "no such thing as a Filipino people existed in 1896 or even in 1899." See his A Past
Recovered: Essays in Philippine History and Historiography (1987, 181). After many years of
digging in Filipino revolutionary and American imperial archives, May had moved little from
contemporary imperialist ethnological pronouncements (such as Dean Worcester's) about
Filipinos as a mix of untamed tribes inhabiting uncharted jungles or, in Vicente Rafael's ironic
formulation, as "deluded peasants and workers led by a gang of ambitious mixed-blood Filipinos"
(Rafael 1993). One also hears echoes of May's representations of the Filipino people and
revolutionaries in what Michael Hunt has discerned to be a long-standing American
historiographic and discursive practice of construing "racial others" (like enslaved African
Americans or colonizable Cubans) as "incipient insurrectionists," bereft of agency and
manipulable by anarchist elements (1987, 51 and 62).
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became the object of spirited public debates in the United States, in which many writers
and opinion leaders began to express lingering doubts about such pertinent racialist and
political claims of U.S. imperial ideologues.
In Felipe Agoncillo's private (in some parts, encrypted) report to General
Aguinaldo and the public/arrival statement that Hoyt recovers from the published record,
a certain chronology subtends the diplomat’s claims of self-knowledge and about the
Other's innocence (a milder and kinder substitute for “ignorance”). This chronology
demarcates his act of arrival on American soil as the temporal border over which his
claim of transformative effects spills. Correspondents of metropolitan newspapers in
Hongkong, his point of departure, report a certain foreknowledge of him as the Filipino
political representative. Reporters in San Francisco, his point of arrival, wait in
expectation, ask for a press conference (entrevista as Felipe Agoncillo calls it) for a frank
appraisal of the anticipated image, only to recast it according to Felipe Agoncillo's
alternative portrait. The kind of foreknowledge that is previously made available in the
United States is negative according to Felipe Agoncillo; this becomes "positive" rather
quickly by the diplomat's reckoning, as Hoyt himself would "discover" for the period that
coextends with Agoncillo's visit/s. On both sets of images, Felipe Agoncillo is sparing on
details, although the contrast between the expected tribal characteristic [akoy darating
doon ng hálos hubad at may bahag; I would arrive half-naked, and with nothing on but a
loincloth] and the unexpected diplomatic comportment [tinanggap ko po silang lahat ng
mahusay; I received all of them ably] is indicative enough. Teodoro Agoncillo and Hoyt
123
would provide, each in his own way, the missing supplements, out of the anxiety that this
ceremonial reticence of the historical actor produces.
Strikingly, Hoyt concentrates on, and finds, positive images of Filipinos during,
and not before or after, Felipe Agoncillo's U.S. sojourn/s. All he asserts in contrast to the
kind of U.S. knowledge questioned by the Filipinos for the pre-arrival phase is its
positive bounty (which Felipe Agoncillo precisely critiques for its paradoxical poverty),
and nothing about its particular forms. Hoyt does not tell us if Felipe Agoncillo and the
people he represented (or of which he was the veritable portrait and proxy) were indeed
imagined in the U.S. as half-naked savages. He merely responds to one aspect of the
latter's claim which has to do with the deficiency of such available information. He does
not find what he is looking for (and what he finds gets generalized as counter-evidence)
because he looks in the wrong place, the period during which precisely the sudden
transformation reported by Felipe Agoncillo occurs. The diplomat is discussed "in
flattering terms" and in different detail (such as the remarkable Japanese Analogy) after
his arrival because the fiction of Filipino savagery could not be unproblematically
sustained with the alternative self-portrait or opposite visage that Felipe Agoncillo
offered to American observers.
While able to dispute the claim of ignorance by a generalized notion of extant
foreknowledge, Hoyt fails to synchronize it with the diplomat's chronological frame.
Indeed, by finding a flattering picture of Filipinos upon and immediately after Felipe
Agoncillo's arrival, Hoyt ratifies the sequence of transformation that the envoy sketches
[Noong ding arao na iyon....itinalâ nila na ang ating Bayan ay di salvage at may
katampatang civilizacion; On that same day, the newspapers reported that we are not a
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savage people, and possess a civilization comparable to any other]. Felipe Agoncillo
specifies the "ignorance" of North Americans as, in fact, a form of egregious
foreknowledge that was not irredeemable ("I am afraid that the Americans have formed
an erroneous idea of the Philippine Islands and their people...You were lead to believe
that we were a savage and barbarous race, half civilized.") It is not the case that North
Americans did not know or had no occasion to know about the Filipinos and their
historical conditions as well as aspirations. Rather, what they knew, especially what the
media of representation or imperialist ideologues purveyed or charted (at least before and
immediately after the shadowy Japanese Analogy), was deficient and in dire need of
political and semiotic texture. "You have heard little of us," Agoncillo says, and it is little
to the extent that North Americans had not understood "our struggles and [the] trials
which we have endured under Spain."
In raising the specter of the other imperial Other (Spain) and the revolution
against it for their intending liberators, Felipe Agoncilo begins to hint at the forms of
knowledge and disputes that his mission would bring to the brink of precipitant anxiety
and crisis. In this light, the ensuing disputes between Filipino nationalists and U.S.
imperialists over sovereignty after Spain's defeat begin to coincide with a more bracing
dispute over knowledge or ignorance, and the authority for policing or reproducing it. It
is not so much the kinds of representations that arise (partial and racial, on the part of
Americans; oppositional and polemical, on the part of Filipinos), as their effects. And
these effects, which are of "failure-in-success" and "success-in-failure," persist and spill
over from a now-remote historical moment in which they have remained sealed off, for
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the longest time, in the absence of the kind of semiotic readings and historiographic
critique as we have here attempted.54
54
“Failure-in-success” and “success-in-failure” are paradoxical formulations borrowed from
Spivak (1988). Spivak used these formulations in her critique of Subaltern Studies scholarship to
account for both its “cognitive failures” and institutional success in reading for Indian subaltern
agencies against the grain of colonial archive sources on the Raj, and the classic/hegemonic
narratives of both Cambridge imperial and Indian élite-nationalist historiographic traditions.
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CHAPTER 3
THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION AND THE NEW EMPIRE
Let us, however, not forget the particular circumstances under which we are writing…We
shall speak, not as wrongly so-called “insurrectos,” but as “Americanistas” who have not
ceased to be Filipinos….”
Apolinario Mabini, “The Message of President of McKinley” (1900, 490)
What has happened...is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile
soil...The process has not been at all the fancied “assimilation” [of foreigners]. Rather has
it been a process of their assimilation of us—I speak as an Anglo-Saxon.
Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-National America” (1957 [1916], 278)
Prolegomena
John Foreman, a longtime English resident of the Philippines and a highly
influential observer of contemporary developments there, never lacked in opinion or
views about the Philippine Revolution and the profiles/characteristics of the Filipino
revolutionary leaders. His compendious Philippine Islands (1898/99) not only became
the authoritative sourcebook for intending North American colonists; it also endowed
him with the authority to testify before a North American magazine readership and the
U.S. peace commission in Paris about Philippine cultures and the vaunted incapacity of
the Filipinos for self-government.1 In 1900, with the U.S.-Philippine War transformed
1
Controversial American proconsul Dean W, Worcester, for instance, once rarely acknowledged
his major indebtedness to Foreman's book, when he was not boldly and baldly borrowing from
other contemporary works and sources on the Philippines for his own monetarily and materially
rewarding expertly wisdom and advice for official Washington on Philippine policy and strategy
during this period; see Rodney Sullivan’s comprehensive and somewhat chilling account of
Worcester’s entrepreneurial politics of knowledge production (1991). The turn to culture experts
like the Englishman Foreman or to comparative imperialism in the areas, for example, of
administration/colonial state-building or colonial ethnology, among others, is ably explored and
127
into seemingly endless skirmishes between elusive Filipino guerillas and weary U.S.
soldiers, Foreman reviewed the initial Filipino-American encounters. In an inaugural
gambit characteristic of many such contemporary recountings, Foreman recalls:
"Through the intermediary of certain American officials in the far eastern posts, Emilio
Aguinaldo, the supreme rebel chief, came under the notice of Admiral (then Commodore)
Dewey, and under a verbal agreement with this officer, Aguinaldo and his staff were
conveyed from Chinese waters in an American warship and landed at Cavite,
[Philippines]” (1900, 52). This chronology itself unproblematically imputes the political
initiative to "certain American officials" in ways that ratify recurrent imperialist claims of
Filipino political helplessness.
Foreman opines that the naïveté and inexperience of Gen. Aguinaldo and his
cadre of advisers in relating to U.S. authorities in the region proved to be their fatal flaws
as well as their undoing. After the tactical U.S.-Philippine alliance against Spain,
according to him, the Filipinos "were so completely carried by the humanitarian avowals
of the greatest republic the world had ever seen that they willingly consented to cooperate with the Americans on mere verbal promises, instead of a written agreement
which could be held binding on the U.S. government." He limits the culpability of the
United States to the noncommittal assurances made by its "irresponsible politicians" and
their loose usage of "high-sounding phrases such as 'for the sake of humanity' or 'the
cause of civilization.'" He also reiterates a retrospective rationale, made by Admiral
examined in Julian Go and Anne Foster (2003). The instrumental force of such sharing and
exchanges in colonial or inter-imperial expertise during this period equals that of the thriving
traffic/commerce in talking head commentary, policy studies/analyses, and think thank research
advisories in the present-day United States (Campomanes 2001, 15n5). For exacting and pointed
profiles/histories of the instrumentalist policy sciences/analysts in the service of U.S. empirebuilding, see Alexander Cockburn (1988 [1987]) and Chalmers Johnson (2004 [2002]).
128
Dewey and others, that the contingent necessities for reducing Spanish power in the
islands upon American entry into them in 1898 constituted the sole concern of the North
American "military and naval commanders." As he discerns, North American realpolitik
stemmed from their recognition that "military occupation of [Manila] would have been an
extremely difficult and bloody enterprise if the natives had thrown their lot with the
Spaniards."
Short of affirming the persistent accusations of deceit made by Filipino publicists
against the United States, Foreman, in a gesture typical of most contemporary and
subsequent analyses, predictably shifts accountability to the Filipino revolutionists and
their followers. It all becomes a matter of their culturally genetic characteristics, in which
the very politics of maneuvers figures merely as a secondary process. For him, the
Filipinos did not possess sufficient political acuity to assess "the persuasive language of
United States officials who had no authority to speak in the name of their Government"
against the obvious acts of U.S. commanders "which, to shrewder minds, would have
belied the idea of alliance or partnership." Here he refers to the series of redeployments
through which the U.S. generals usurped, on the pretext of alliance tactics, the siege
positions that the Filipino revolutionary army had established around Manila where the
Spaniards had rallied for their last stand. To Foreman, removed from the fracas as a
presumably disinterested observer and with the benefit of hindsight, what the ensuing
developments would have presented to "shrewder minds" made this signal failure of the
Filipinos to read U.S. intentions toward the Philippines and the imminence of their own
victory perplexing:
When Manila, which [the Filipinos] themselves might have
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captured, fell into the hands of their so-called allies, the gates
were closed against them. The 'Philippine Republic' proclaimed
by Aguinaldo held its congress at Malolos (in the province of
Bulacan, a few miles from Manila), a ministry was formed, laws
were passed, taxes were collected, local presidents were
appointed in the provinces, and decrees were issued, but the
whole proceedings as well as the existence of the titular native
government were ignored by the Americans. But
notwithstanding these and many other snubs, they still clung,
during five months (between August, 1898, and February, 1899),
to the vain delusion that their independence would be secured
through the medium of American intervention. It was merely a
hope in which they received repeated encouragement from
several United States officials in the far East, but, in reality, at no
time up to the present has there existed any formal and binding
compact between the titular Philippine republic (or Philippine
representatives) and the Republic of the United States.
On this reading, the American strategic displacement of the Filipino revolutionary
troops and leaders from Manila, the symbolic site of their arrival as a new nation, at a
highly crucial stage of the Spanish-American War and their “insurrection,” should have
been transparent enough to them. (The capture of the colonial capital was, perchance, to
cap the military successes of the Filipinos elsewhere in the archipelago, signifying the
ultimate triumph of their Revolution.) Shunted by U.S. forces toward Malolos in nearby
Bulacan province through strategies made in the name of the partnership, the Filipinos
nonetheless persisted in proclaiming a republic from this otherwise adjacent base and in
retaining some of their trenches. Yet even as they lost no time in demonstrating their
ability to run their own affairs within such a context, they seemed beset by doubt and
their inadequacy to the task, unwilling to let go of "the vain delusion" of liberation
through the "medium" of an intervening power like the United States. In substantial
measure, this reading persists even in the most critical assessments of these early
interactions, especially when viewed in terms of their immediate and enduring historical
consequences. In fact, it became the most favored retrospective response by
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contemporary U.S. imperialist ideologues and apologists to the charges of duplicitous
American 'diplomacy' or brokering with General Aguinaldo in the antebellum period,
charges and claims that were made and repeatedly circulated in the international and
American press by Felipe Agoncillo and other Filipino revolutionary propagandists.
There is no certified document, no "formal and binding compact" between the
nascent government and the established one, and this, presumably, resolves the issue of
betrayal. If there was deceit on the part of the United States government, it was only
made possible by the unwitting and complicitous faith of the Filipinos leaders who
contented themselves with verbal promises of disinterested U.S. protection and
recognition of Filipino independence. What remains unremarked in analyses of this sort,
however, is the equivalent realpolitik adopted by the Filipino rebel leadership given the
arrival of the U.S. on the scene as a new and seemingly formidable imperial presence.
The consequent assumptions and denials of "authority" in the interaction between power
centers across the Pacific and the Atlantic also require reconsideration as actively
constructive stratagems. In the spirit of the candid admission of U.S. incapacity (without
Filipino help) to defeat the Spanish holdouts in the islands, "authority" remained to be an
ever-contingent stake that could only materialize for both sides by immediate and
unceasing maneuvers.
The 1896-98 Philippine Revolution (first phase) came at the tail end of the
nineteenth-century nationalist struggles against Iberian colonialism in the Americas and
effectively marked the end of the Spanish empire. But while it was the last of the Spanish
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Crown colonies to secede, the Philippines also became the site of what is generally
acknowledged as the first modern and anticolonial revolution in Asia. That Revolution
instituted an insurgent government by 1898 and a republic by January 1899, at precisely
the points when Spanish power was being eclipsed by the arrival of the United States as a
new player on the arena of global imperial politics.
Led by politicized fractions of the emergent mestizo and native bourgeoisie, it
mobilized a largely peasant-based soldiery and a multi-ethnic mass base in strategic
provinces and in the major islands. Like most nationalist movements, it had its own
generous share of internecine power struggles, ethnic and class conflicts, bourgeois/folk
messianism, Enlightenment conceits, and patriarchal-masculinist structures and ideolects
(see Rodao and Rodriguez 2001). But what probably distinguishes it from others, even
from the contemporaneous Cuban Revolution of 1895-1898 (to which it invites
immediate comparison), was its particular misfortune of being tightly contracted between
the death rattle of an old colonial regime (Spain) and the birth pangs of a new imperial
2
power (USA). Among the first to note the implications of this peculiar predicament of
the Philippine Revolution was Apolinario Mabini, perhaps the most visionary, radical,
and prolific of its organic intellectuals.
2
The Cuban revolution was eventually negotiated through the Platt Amendment of 1901-02
(implemented in/after 1903), probably owing some to the shrewd wisdom of Elihu Root who
maintained to McKinley and the imperialist hawks in that administration that the United States
was not militarily equipped and politically capable of conducting two counter-insurgency wars on
the Philippine and Cuban fronts at that point; on the patent unpreparedness of the U.S. War
Department and armed forces in war footing, see Campomanes (2002, 135-136, 154n13). See
also Louis Pérez (1983) for a critical account of the equally tragic fate of the extended Cuban
Revolution.
132
This chapter, for its main focus, selectively engages the critical thought of
Apolinario Mabini, as indicated in particular, in his essay “¿Cual es la Verdadera Misión
de la Revolución Filipina?” (What is the True Mandate of the Philippine Revolution?,
1899), published in the second volume of his La Revolución Filipina (1931 [1902], 2
vols.). La Revolución Filipina is typically read as, and for its, damning critique of the
weaknesses or handicaps besetting the Revolution and characterizing Gen. Emilio
Aguinaldo’s leadership but it is arguably much more valuable for its prescient foresight
on and critical precautions against a future Asia-Pacific constellated and traversed by
American empire-building and pragmatic geopolitics. For heuristic purposes, this
consideration in Mabini’s critical legacy is framed by an epigrammatic reference to a
related text that Harper’s Weekly published in its 26 May 1900 number, “The Message of
3
President McKinley.” In this polemic, it noteworthy that a presumably anti-American
voice like Mabini’s could “speak as an Americanista (Americanist)” without ceasing to
be “Filipino”—a speech act from the past as remarkable for its transnational
cosmopolitics as for the critical charge it carries against U.S. imperial racialism and
parochialism.4
3
It is not known who translated this piece from the Spanish but essays addressed by Mabini to a
number of American periodicals or US government/Philippine colonial government
organs/officials between 1899 and 1902 were typically mediated by the translation assistance
provided by the Comité Central Filipino (CCF) in Hong Kong—the Aguinaldo government’s
foreign policy and international propaganda bureau, or his American correspondents who were
sympathetic to the revolutionary cause or moved actively in US anti-imperialist circles. For a
partial accounting of the CCF's crucial work, see Chapter Two, this study.
4
Many thanks to former Ateneo School of Humanities Dean Leo Garcia for pointing out at a
lecture version of this discussion that Mabini's use of “Americanista” (Americanist) in this
context might not so much indicate the contemporary opprobium that attaches to the term
(especially in its synonymity with “federalista”), given the developing phenomenon of
revolutionists with reformist tendencies capitulating to the American side as the anti-American
resistance began to suffer reverses, as suggest the emergence, no matter how abortive, of a first133
In these and a number of other articulate and equable manifestations, Mabini
effectively limned a nascent theory of American imperial geopolitics and pragmatics to
explain the zero-sum investment developed by the United States in the containment and
defeat of the Philippine Revolution, and in the making of its trans-Pacific empire which
was to make this Revolution that empire’s first and most major casualty. But while he
was devoted to this task of understanding the stiff price and destructive violence exacted
by the USA as an emergent New Empire on La Revolución Filipina, it should be clear
that Mabini was never exclusively nationalist even as he was reductively tagged by
American antagonists as an “irreconcilable.” Merely a cursory review of his many
writings shows that he had often argued against American imperialists with an amazing
willingness and capacity, on his part, to inhabit the Other’s space and be empathetic to
the Other’s stakes. In short, he always took seriously, and engaged closely, what the
USA’s imperialist ideologues had to say regarding their advocacy for Philippine
colonization: from President William McKinley in Washington D.C. to campaigning
American generals on the ground.
Contexts, Contingencies, Contests
The conventional chronology of initial U.S.-Filipino encounters construes a short,
determinate, period of amity and alliance (April-July 1898) before a period of
generation critical American Studies tradition in the Philippines this early (indeed, Mabini, along
with Felipe Agoncillo and other revolutionists spent a considerable amount of their time and
energies to deeply engaged studies of American civilization and history in the hopes of learning
how to deal with the newly aspiring power and its functionaries). This much was pursued as a
conceptual and historical possibility as regards Mabini and his cohort, in an editorial essay
written for a volume of American Studies Fulbright lectures in 2000, published by De La Salle
University Press in Manila (see Campomanes, “Re-Framing American Studies in a Philippine
Context,” [2001, 1-20]).
134
accelerated tensions, rupture, and conflict (August 1898 through February 1899). James
Blount, an early chronicler of initial North American-Filipino encounters and relations,
offers a most striking metaphor for the forms of political flux that suffuse the reporting
documents. "If you turn the leaves of the contemporaneous official reports, you see quite
a moving picture show, and the action is rapid" (1912, 32). Blount specifically refers to
the contingent moves taken and recorded by the McKinley and Aguinaldo government
representatives toward their developing political and territorial claims that were, first, to
collude and, later, to conflict. The available documents not only reflect and intensify the
quick and mercurial surface of movement in the actions initiated by Filipino and North
American protagonists. They also strike the re-viewer as "pictures" that change and
stabilize just as quickly as they are drawn up in the serial moments of their occurrence in
these texts. One is not only overwhelmed by the blur of representational claims and
counter-claims. The action that they define is "rapid" and can only be apprehended, to
pursue the emergent cinematic metaphor, by parallel editing or some effort to cross-cut
through the "rushes."5
Indeed, the sea-change in Philippine-American relations is often told in a
language of chance or fortuity, reinforced by a kind of cinematic effect that later one
might recognize as montage-like (once the concept was invented), as both sides did seem
to move toward inevitably conflicting notions of imperial power and national
independence by the mediation of highly-contingent, if not seemingly accidental,
5
Blount published his account at the point when narrative film was just emerging from its period
of infancy (1912). His metaphorical use of “moving pictures” as a representational form thus
indicates something of the sense in which the new technologies of visual narrative and early
cinema have begun to structure contemporary forms of perspective and cognition, a fact with
significant implications for the critical arguments and interpretations of this study, particularly in
Chapters Two and Four.
135
circumstances (even as highly rational calculations by concerned actors were obviously at
work, or to extend the filmic metaphor some more, the scenography itself was, by and
large, driven by hidden scripts).6 But Gen. Stewart Woodford, advising President William
McKinley as early as 1897 (as he was enroute to his new posting as U.S. ambassador to
Spain), could have not put it any better for our understanding of the dialectic between
contingency and calculation that seems to characterize the flow of political events leading
to both the Spanish-American War and the entry of the USA into the Philippine
revolutionary scene: “Annexation by force might provoke protests but should it come as
the natural and logical result of successive conditions I think it would be accepted as
inevitable” (emphases added).7
This rapid evolution or devolution of the U.S.-Philippine encounter is supposed to
be marked by such fast-paced and fortuitous events or “successive conditions” as the
celebrated triumph of Admiral Dewey and the U.S. Asiatic Squadron over the Spanish
fleet at Manila Bay on 1 May 1898, after the retroactive U.S. declaration of war against
Spain in April; Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo's return from his Hong Kong exile to the
Philippines to reestablish the center of revolutionary leadership against Spain (under
Dewey's sponsorship) shortly thereafter; the military triumphs of the Filipino
revolutionists against the Spanish colonial army which had the effect of investing Manila
for the arriving U.S. expeditionary and occupation forces that were sent by Washington,
6
This kind of representational and cinema verité aesthetic in history-writing, esp. typical
American history-writing on the basic events recounted in this chapter and the preceding, is most
forcefully and quintessentially embodied by work of the historian Richard Welch (1979, esp.
Chap. 1).
7
Woodford to McKinley, 10 August 1897. The Papers of William McKinley, Library of
Congress Manuscripts Division; qtd. in Kenton Clymer (1975, 117).
136
between late June and early August, in three waves; the Spanish-American peace
protocol in Washington on 12 August and the mock battle in Manila on 13 August 1898
between the Spanish and U.S. armies, excluding the Filipino brigades; the SpanishAmerican peace treaty negotiations in Paris beginning in October 1898 and culminating
in a transfer of Spanish power and territories (especially the Philippines) to the U.S. in
December 1898, ignoring the rights and belligerency of the Filipinos and Cubans; the
establishment of a Philippine Republic by the Aguinaldo-led revolutionary movement
and the ratification battle over the Paris treaty in the U.S. Senate in January 1899 as
disputes over territorial sovereignty and authority sharply polarized; and the outbreak of
war between the erstwhile Filipino and North American allies by February of that year at
about the same time that imperialist advocates in the U.S. narrowly secured treaty
ratification over the objections of anti-imperialist opponents. These swift developments,
however, refer to specific maneuvers, most of it rationally calculated, others made under
the impress of “chance” or highly contingent circumstances, that remain disarticulated in
most analyses.
To be sure, these determinate junctures of chance and change crystallized as both
U.S. and Filipino authorities positioned their forces in strategic areas to secure leverage,
jurisdiction, and momentum while Spain weakened in its imperial might from the
combined onslaught of the Filipino and American forces. But yet again, these junctures
must be understood to be as much a matter of situational contingency as it is of rational
calculations by influential leaders for both power centers now finding themselves
moving, ineluctably, toward collision course. The rhetoric and politics of contingency, to
any present reader, also only makes sense against broader and older patterns of agitation
137
for imperial expansion in the United States and anticolonial revolution in the Philippines.
General Woodford’s astute advisory to McKinley about “the natural and logical result of
successive conditions” nicely bears out what Michel Foucault has so aptly written about
contingency, namely that “we must accept the introduction of chance as a category in the
production of events” (Foucault 1972, 231).
What were the immediate stakes, insofar as it is possible to distill them from the
murk of conflicting testaments? Broadly, these stakes had included the political
independence of Filipinos as it emerged as a distinct possibility or an aspiration after over
three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, and their Revolution against it from 1896 to the
coming, in 1898, of George Dewey and the U.S. Asiatic Squadron. Across the Pacific, the
stakes would involve the rise of U.S. imperialism, especially the opportunities that
loomed for a U.S. share in the arena of global power plays and the game of imperial
territorial acquisitions (as centrally and potently signified by Dewey's decisive account of
U.S. naval power at Manila Bay in May 1898); and the radical portents that these held for
reconfiguring the U.S. political system in the wake of U.S. "victory" in Cuba over Spain.8
Narrowly, the stakes took the form of opportunities for one to circumscribe the Other's
claims of alliance and sovereignty as what seemed to be common political goals headed
for dramatic rupture and, despite confident claims of a quick U.S. victory later, by
campaigning American generals in the Philippines like Elwell Otis, protracted war.
Before, during, and after this interregnum, U.S. and Filipino claims still needed to be
8
Philip Foner’s flawed but classic 2-volume history of the Cuban case (1972/1973), and Louis
Pérez’s careful and rigorously-documented historiography (see esp. 1983 and 1998) tell a
different story from that of painless U.S. “victory”—one of U.S. usurpation of the Cuban
revolution’s gains and something that bore striking parallels to the contemporaneous case of the
Philippines.
138
addressed to global and domestic audiences for legitimation and recognition even as
Spain was eventually written out of the picture through the effective combination of U.S.
imperialist and Filipino revolutionary maneuvers.
Without formally calling and studying it as such, certain American historians
consider this period to be a problem in diplomacy which, were it handled adroitly, would
have lessened the likelihood of conflict between the American armed forces and the
Filipino revolutionary army. Stuart Creighton Miller argues, for example, that "American
relations with the Filipino nationalists were, from the beginning, left to professional
military men, who were ill-suited to play diplomatic roles due to their training and
temperaments."9 In a critique made as well by a self-avowed military historian, Miller
believes that "they egregiously mishandled diplomatic functions and, more seriously,
failed to keep Washington accurately informed of the nature and complexity of the
insurrection against Spain and on the degree of organization and popular support for
General Emilio Aguinaldo's revolutionary government."10 Yet what this reading
obviously does is to shift the onus of responsibility for the resulting war onto minor
functionaries, further minoritizing, in consort with the express and developing attitudes of
the McKinley Administration, the Filipino revolutionists who sought the backing of
higher U.S. officials for their emergent republic yet could only tentatively obtain it from
9
Miller (1982). This view is best reflected by Miller's title for his chapter on both the antebellum
and early phase of the war, "The Soldier as Diplomat" (31-56).
10
Ibid. John M. Gates (1973, 35-36) extends Miller's counterfactual argument thus: had President
McKinley decided to retain the Philippines from the very beginning, "American consuls in the
Far East, Admiral [George] Dewey, and the officers of the expeditionary forces might have acted
differently in their relations with the Filipino revolutionaries."
139
such lower minions. The charge of imprudence is more especially levelled against some
American consuls in the region who, apart from military officials, had close contact with
the Filipinos and who, with their actuations, endowed some official character to the
Philippine-American cooperation against Spain before the war’s actual outbreak in
February 1899. This view of bungled diplomacy persists in most historical analyses and,
as Filipino historian Edilberto de Jesus correctly observes, hardly improves a
substantially similar reading of these events and their casus belli made by Albert
Robinson, New York Evening Post war correspondent for the Philippines.11
Rather than a conventional account of a diplomacy that "failed," this chapter, to a
significant extent (and using Mabini's alternative readings and angles of vision on what
transpired during this period for material)—and the preceding chapter on Felipe
Agoncillo, to a large extent—asks how "diplomacy" itself furnished both the idioms and
the stakes for constructing imperial power and enabling subaltern resistance. In the
symbolization of its power as style and spectacle ("bulldog diplomacy," in David Starr
Jordan's terms), American imperialism, as seen in the acts and texts of its operatives, both
articulates diplomacy with, and disowns, "duplicity" as a convention of crisismanagement. In the hands of the representative(s) of an inchoate republic whose national
status would be actively denied by Spanish and American state authorities, diplomacy
and "duplicity" merge as a mode of critical irony and practice.
11
Edilberto de Jesus Jr. (1966, 125-128); Robinson, (1901, 48). Unremarked upon in such a
reading is why this form of "diplomacy" was pursued with the Filipino revolutionary leadership
in the first place or why it continued to be pursued even when the signs of "failure" seemed
indicative enough or certain. In the face of mixed signals from the Washington government about
its intentions and the promises of recognition supposedly made to them by American authorities
in the "Far East" that were never formalized, Aguinaldo, Mabini, Agoncillo and the Comité could
only work with official U.S. government information and pronouncements circulating informally
through the international press.
140
Note, for example, how the "diplomatic" anonymity that Gen. Aguinaldo's
representative assumes as "Semper Vigilans" in Chapter Two, endows with more ironic
force the undiplomatic spleen that his North American Review essay otherwise vents on
its specific targets.12 Indeed, as became quite evident in the story of Agoncillo's
diplomacy and the Comité Central Filipino’s campaigns partially recounted in Chapter
Two, diplomacy does not necessarily translate into a strategy for transforming personal
ambition into a fiction of nation-building with which "trickery" Gen. Aguinaldo, Mabini,
Agoncillo, and their colleagues would be persistently charged in official and public
American discourses. Instead, diplomacy turns into both a micropolitics and a set of
critically semiotic acts for clarifying, limiting, negotiating, and preempting the political
and epistemological claims of American imperialism upon authority ("sovereignty") over
the Philippines, and about Filipino aspirations to nationhood.
"Control" and "sovereignty" were only two of the terms of authority that were
staked out and contested by American imperialists and Filipino revolutionists.13 The
problem, in other words, is not so much how to resolve the mystery in the "mysterious
process" of the politics of authority being waged (the term is Semper
Vigilans/Agoncillo's) as to map its movements and show how it may indicate forms of
political activity that exceed those that are literal and manifest. The "mysterious process,"
12
The Filipino revolutionists would be accused of duplicity precisely for practising the obverse of
imperial politics as here described (and indeed routinely acknowledged in the available U.S.
historical literature), obviously and tightly circumscribed as they were by the limited options
available to them (Mabini details some of these in the discussion that follows). See Dean
Worcester (1930 [1914], esp. Chaps. 2-4, 8 and 10) for a rather vituperative denigration of their
political and diplomatic maneuvers.
13
See Chapter Four for some more discussion of these contested keywords in the propagandistic
intramurals between American imperialism advocates and Filipino revolutionary publicists.
141
in this sense, becomes less a puzzle to be solved by a search for rational calculations than
a series of determinate acts whose illegibility must be read against itself.
It was, in fact, in this interpretive spirit that Semper Vigilans/Agoncillo critiqued
American imperial politics and ostensibly undertook his own diplomatic praxis against
the latter's representational claims. Note the layers of meaning to the choice by
"Aguinaldo's personal representative" of "Semper Vigilans" (Latin for "always vigilant")
as a pseudonym. To be vigilans/vigilant is to be wary of and keenly attentive to some
threat or danger, to be alert and ceaselessly watchful, functions that diplomats routinely
perform on behalf of their governments within the intrigue-infested and mercurial or
highly-contingent domain of international relations where, among others, they have to
gather useful intelligence. Yet to perform these functions or to recognize them as
imperatives also involves not only a constant dialectic of subjecting the Other's moves to
one's scrupulous watch (surveillance) and being subjected, in turn, to the Other's
(counter-surveillance). One must also, by necessity and ever-strategically, practise a
discourse of opacity in making one's public or official utterances and a form of
hermeneutics in reading those of the enemy's.
But the opacity of diplomatic discourse (conventionally in the forms of
ceremonial reticence or prudence, forms used to maximum effect by Agoncillo and the
official legation sent later to help him out in his Washington campaign) also abuts the
literalism of diplomacy as a representational practice. By the literal is meant, simply,
what is overtly political, which dimension also describes the principles of political
representation (such as "liberty" and self-government) that provided the staples for these
Filipino-American contests at a decisive moment of polarizing objectives and for the
142
internal faultines that subsequently divided each contending party’s ranks. It is in
consideration of these realities, that we now turn to Apolinario Mabini's own assessments
and articulations of Filipino revolutionary-diplomatic politics and prospects.
Mabini (1864-1903) on Philippine Revolutionary 'Diplomacy' and Prospects
Apolinario Mabini was born to a small landholding but perenially poverty-prone
family in Talaga barrio, Tanauan town, Philippine province of Batangas on 23 July 1864.
Undaunted by a difficult boyhood where he had to labor early to help his mother augment
the meager family income, he nonetheless remained in frail health for much of his youth
and life, up to his untimely death in 1903. His precocity in childhood and his brilliance as
a part-time student were much remarked upon by contemporaries, as were his arduous
struggles, through many interruptions and frequent self-supporting work, to obtain formal
education through all levels of the Spanish colonial educational system. Mabini’s
educational achievements across an extended period (capping in his graduation with a
licentiate in jurisprudence from the Dominican University of Santo Tomas in 1894 and
his eventual admission to the colonial equivalent of the bar) are now the stuff of legend.
Even more legendary was how he came to the notice of General Emilio Aguinaldo at
around the recrudescence of the Philippine Revolution in early 1898 with the return of
Aguinaldo from his Hong Kong exile. Mabini was commended to Gen. Aguinaldo
through the intercession and glowing endorsements of fellow Batangueño and eventual
revolutionary emissary to the United States, Felipe Agoncillo. Agoncillo was much
impressed by Mabini’s early politicization and independent propaganda/agitation work,
143
from Mabini’s involvement in radical freemasonry through his membership in the
14
fraternal organization Cuerpo de Compromisarios and the ill-fated La Liga Filipina.
Mabini served as a political advisor to General Aguinaldo from June 1898 to his
formal appointment as the Premier of the republican cabinet and Minister of Foreign
Affairs in January 1899 (he was replaced in this capacity four months from this date by
Pedro Paterno, a leader of the conservative faction of the republican congress, owing to
ideological disputes). Mabini drew up the plans for a provisional/transitional government
on the local and central levels as the Filipino revolutionists made territorial gains against
the Spanish colonial state at an accelerated pace from June 1898 onwards. He is also
credited with the authorship of many of Gen. Aguinaldo's decrees, proclamations, and
statements especially during the mid-to-late 1898 stand-off of the "insurgents" with Spain
and the American expeditionary and occupation forces.
It must be marked here that for his propaganda and agitation work in the mid-tolate 1890s, he was initially imprisoned by the Spanish regime for nine months (from
October 1896), and was only spared the harsher treatments that were meted to his
confrerés after he was paralyzed by a stroke before the August 1896 revolutionary
outbreak. Captured by advancing American forces in December 1899, a few months after
the eruption of war with the Americans, he was eventually deported to Guam (after being
held on extended house arrest) by a still-embryonic American colonial government as an
"irreconcilable" in January 1901. He remained in exile on this island for two years and
was only allowed to return to the Philippines after being compelled to take the customary
14
On Mabini's background, education, and early political activities, see the prizewinning
biography by Cesar Adib Majul (1993 [1964], esp. 10-20, 32-71).
144
oath of allegiance to the insular US government (the precondition set down by American
proconsuls for his repatriation). Amidst these experiences, he produced an entire oeuvre
that sought to give ideological guidance to the revolution, to justify it in the terms of
natural law and international jurisprudence, and to sustain partisan morale/fervor.
15
Mabini died from cholera in relative obscurity almost three months after his repatriation
in early 1903.
In estimating the ramifications of American intervention in the Revolution during
the crucial month of August 1898, Apolinario Mabini wearily observed, "We have not yet
finished the war with Spain, and we must not provoke another with America. We are not
in a position to conduct two wars” (quoted in Leon Wolff [1961 <1960>, 135]). Wolff
does not document this quote (almost certainly a paraphrase), which specifically refers to
Mabini's forebodings about an untimely war between the Philippine revolutionary army
and the American expeditionary and occupation forces after the latter outflanked and
excluded the former in the notoriously scripted attack on Spanish-held Manila on 13
August 1898. Mabini recalls counselling General Aguinaldo, “que procurase evitar a
toda costa el conflicto, porque de lo contrario tendríamos dos enemigos y la
consecuencia más probable sería la repartición de las Islas entre ambos” | ”to avoid the
conflict [with the Americans] at all costs because otherwise we would be facing two
enemies, and the most probable result would be the partition of the islands between
them" (Mabini (1931 [1902]), 2: 309-310). The extreme delicacy of the situation for the
15
Mabini's extant writings and selected correspondence are compiled in La Revolución Filipina,
con otros documentos de la época (1931), 2 vols. Other epistolary documents, written in his
various capacities outside of and as part of the revolutionary movement/government are collected
in Las cartas politicas de Apolinario Mabini (con prologo y notas) [1930 (ca. 1893-1903)].
145
revolutionists, before and after the now infamous mock Battle of Manila which flagrantly
excluded the Filipinos as combatants, drove Mabini to urge Aguinaldo to exercise
16
prudence and tact in fending off, while also containing, the American advance(s).
For in being (with the Cuban Revolution) the last of the epic nineteenth-century
anti-Spanish national liberation struggles but also the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific
region now shortly facing the specter of a newly aspiring conqueror, the Philippine
Revolution thus bore the double distinction of dissolving the Spanish imperium (its
victory would sound the final death knell for the once mighty empire) and portending
future Asian nationalisms (being the first in Asia, it could supply the model for future
others to follow). But this double distinction, correspondingly, required of the Philippine
Revolution a double burden, a fact none or precious few of its historians and students,
critically or affirmatively, ever seemed to have appreciated.17 The double burden
16
John Foreman writes of the series of redeployments through which the U.S. generals usurped,
on the pretext of alliance tactics, the siege positions that the Filipino revolutionary army had
established around Manila where the Spaniards had rallied for their last stand. As he recounts,
"the Filipinos were ordered not to attempt to take Manila by assault, to haul down their republican
flag in the bay, to evacuate one point after another, to give up their trenches to the American
troops, to abstain from co-operating against the Spaniards the day Manila was taken, and (under
the threat of force) to remove their outposts farther and farther away from the city” (1900, 52; for
a more detailed account, see Foreman 1899, 564-638).
17
Of the handful of American Filipinist historians who have sought explanations, on a sustained
basis, for the defeat of the Philippine Revolution at the hands of the United States Army, Glenn
May, Brian Linn, and John Gates are the most typical, with Linn and Gates additionally
attributing American victory to the benevolent intentions of the colonizers. All three and a few
others practically echo the arguments of John Farrell, made in 1954, that the supposed power
mania of, and presumably fractious political intramurals among, the Filipino revolutionary
leaders, along with the absence of a true nationalism among their followers, spelled doom for the
Filipino independence movement from its very outset. Unwittingly, even a critical scholar like
Benedict Anderson, as shown toward the conclusion of this chapter, ended up ratifying these
highly problematic or reductive interpretations in a much-anthologized essay. Filipino historian
Teodoro Agoncillo endeavored to anticipate and dispute (almost en avance) these kinds of
historiographic reductionism, attributing Filipino loss to American political cupidity and military
146
consisted in these: this Revolution’s triumph was necessary to signal the decline of oldworld colonialism in Asia even as it had to face, immediately and without rest, what the
United States was to signify and exercise as a neocolonial form of power in the century to
18
follow. For a Revolution so young, almost spontaneous in its occurrence, and a
fledgling republic so fragile and not yet effectively consolidated, this double burden
certainly proved much too much to bear.
Mabini recognized this inordinately symbolic weight and handicap of the
Philippine Revolution with characteristic prescience. “Preguntad a Inglaterra, Rusia,
Francia, Alemania, Holanda, Portugal y otras potencias ávidas de colonizar… | Ask
England, Russia, France, Germany, Holland, Portugal and other greedy powers,” Mabini
wrote in 1899, and “y veréis cómo tiemblan todas por sus colonias habidas y las que aun
esperan haber en el ansiado reparto de China… | and you will see how greatly they fear
for their colonial possessions and even those they expect to acquire in the covetous
partition of China….” To Mabini’s perspicacious mind, the Philippine Revolution—
especially in its second phase as a war of resistance against the United States’ invasion—
brutalities but stopped short of holding some Filipino revolutionists responsible for the strategic
reverses that the Revolution suffered as the war of conquest and resistance (esp. for the years
1899-1902) trudged to its fatal end. See May (1987, esp. 76 and 81); Linn (1989); Gates (1973);
Farrell (1954); Anderson (1955); and Agoncillo (1960).
18
Felipe Agoncillo, introduced earlier as Mabini’s backer, and who was then coordinating the
Hong Kong Junta of the revolutionary government, precisely advised Aguinaldo and Mabini to be
very cautious in mulling over "the best solution to our political problem, which is an exceptional
case in history." Felipe Agoncillo to Apolinario Mabini, 2 August 1898, Taylor (1971 [1903/05],
vol. 3); emphasis added. As one 1900 local circular ("to be forwarded from one post to another by
the Revolutionary Military Service") asserts, "Those who have said that the Philippine Revolution
is unparalleled in History were not mistaken in their statement." By this time, however,
"exceptionalism" is redefinable in terms of the tenacity of "the lower class of people" who
persisted in their resistance even as many of their élite leaders were surrendering to the
Americans. "To the Local Chief of Ligao and Lieut. Col. of the 2nd Battalion," (from the General
Headquarters of Military Operations, Albay [in Southern Luzon, Philippines]), 13 June 1900,
signed by Lieut. Col. Eugenio Rabiel, Taylor (1971 [1903-05], vol. 5).
147
served as the unacknowledged locus of these anxieties, which he observed percolating
among the great imperial nations. Concerning these powers’s own largely unarticulated
stakes in the outcome of the Philippine revolutionary conflict, Mabini continued: "Todas
ellas saben mejor que nosotros que la Revolución filipina es contagiosa, muy contagiosa;
que lleva en su seno volcánico el germen de la fiebre amarilla o de la peste bubónica,
mortal para sus intereses coloniales…. | They all know better than we do that the
Philippine Revolution is contagious, very contagious: it nurses within its explosive womb
the seeds of epidemic disease deadly to their colonial interests…."
19
These other sources of hostility to the Revolution not only compounded the
difficulties that the United States posed as an intervening power but also disabled all
attempts by the revolutionists to secure international recognition of their active
belligerency and provisional government. This, at any rate, was the consensual
conclusion of more discerning members of the Hong Kong Junta of the revolutionary
20
government. Even before or as the McKinley administration dispatched American
troops to the Philippines to "aid" the Filipinos in their insurrection against Spain, to
"protect" them from other rapacious powers, and "to maintain peace and order" in the
interregnum between Spanish defeat and American annexation, this pragmatic estimate of
their political circumscription punctuated their official/secret correspondence and their
internal as well as international communication work.21 Although foisted on the
19
"¿Cual es la Verdadera Misión de la Revolución?/What is the Real Mandate of the Philippine
Revolution? [1899]," in Mabini (1931 [1902], 2: 56-57); see also Majul (1996 [1957], 80-81).
20
See, especially, the 4 May 1898 minutes of the Junta, Taylor (1971 [1903-05], vol. 1).
21
See Chapter Two of this study for a more focused discussion of the inter-imperial investments
against the Philippine Revolution and how CCF diplomats like Felipe Agoncillo sought to
148
Revolution by circumstances beyond its leaders’s control, such a handicap with the
imperial powers as faced it was something that Mabini himself felt the Revolution was
required to accept as a necessary and inescapable given.
Asking himself by what “true ends” (el verdadero fin) the Philippine Revolution
was bound, he declares and interrogates, in tones both serious and suffused with halfmocking ironies:
….nuestro humilde entender, tiene por único objeto y término
final de sus aspiraciones mantener viva y fulgurante, en la
Oceanía, la antorcha de la libertad y civilización, para que,
iluminando la noche tenebrosa en que hoy yace, envilecida y
degradada la raza malaya, muestre a ésta el camino de su
emancipación social. ¿Que nos hemos vuelto locos y hemos
dicho una necedad? ¿Que sostenemos una utopía, una quimera
engendrada por nuestra imaginación enferma? (Mabini 1931
[1902], 2: 56; emphasis supplied)
….in our humble judgment, its singular objective and the
ultimate purpose of its aspirations is to maintain alive and
aflame in Oceania, the beacon of freedom and civilization, so
that its light shining in the dark night of our debasement as a
Malayan people, will show the way to social emancipation. Have
we gone insane and said something nonsensical? Are we
upholding a utopia, a chimera sprouting from our infirm
imagination?
Mabini, then, was quite clear on what the Philippine Revolution represented to the EuroAmerican corps of empire-states. If successful, it could be emulated by other colonized
peoples as a model and endanger imperial tenure in neighboring colonial territories. But
even if a failure, and by its very occurrence and precedence in the region, it already posed
a specter of future and similar popular uprisings against imperial rule, thus requiring
negotiate for US recognition within and despite the real and prevailing constraints that these
generated.
149
active and common containment by the ruling (and still expansive) powers. As he
positively affirmed, “que puede constituir en día no muy lejano el dique insuperable
contra sus ambiciones desbordadas. | In the immediate future, [our Revolution] could
constitute the insuperable dam against their deluvial ambitions”(Mabini 1931 [1902], 2:
57).
Little wonder then that inspite of a master plan and systematic campaign for
legitimating their revolution/republic in the international realm, and given these interimperial investments in their defeat, they naturally failed to elicit endorsements or even
some form of assistance from supposed sympathizers like the German Kaiser and the
Japanese Emperor.22 Sandwiched between two contending powers, more or less desired
as potential subjects by others like Britain, and chronically pressed for funds, arms, and
supplies, the Filipino revolutionists seemed doomed to "fail" from the beginning.
Recalling the almost-quixotic persistence with which the Filipino revolutionists battled
against these odds while emphasizing the real and ultimate goal of their enterprise,
Mabini, in another place of La Revolución Filipina, declares:
Hemos luchado convencidos de que nuestro deber y dignidad
nos exigían el sacrificio de defender mientras podíamos nuestras
libertades, porque sin ellas la igualdad social entre la casta
dominante y la población indígena sería prácticamente
imposible, y así no lograríamos establecer perfecta justicia
entre nosotros; pero sabíamos que no tardarían en agotarse
nuestros escasos medios y que nuestra derrota sería inevitable.
We have fought convinced that our dignity and sense of duty
demanded the sacrifice of defending our freedoms for as long as
22
Filipino polymathic intellectual Zeus Salazar (1983) and Filipina East Asianist scholar Lydia
Yu-Jose (1992) provide suggestive accounts of the ways in which the German Kaiser and
Japanese Emperor, respectively, kept Philippine revolutionary appeals and emissaries at bay and
yet indirectly tolerated continued explorations of possible support for them, through unofficial
channels, should developments favor such a policy and politics.
150
we were able, since without them social equality between the
hegemonic class and the native populace would be impossible in
practice and perfect justice among us could not be established.
Yet we knew that our sparse resources would be exhausted
23
before long and our defeat [was] inevitable.
Here the quest for "defending freedoms" and "perfect justice" activates the registers of
post-Enlightenment thought endemic to late nineteenth-century Filipino nationalist
writings. The goal of the Revolution resided in restructuring native society to make it
equitable and perfectible for its future citizens who had formerly languished as
hierarchized and debased subjects of a tyrannical colonial order (Majul 1996 [1957], 1939, 70-91). But what commands immediate attention is the tone of resignation to the
anticipated defeat, which loss was deliverable not so much by dissension from within
revolutionary ranks (recognized as contributive in itself) as by inter-imperialist dissent
from without.
This fatalistic tone counterpointed the triumphalism expressed in the secret
correspondence/state papers, and the international propaganda generated by the
revolutionary government and its various organs. But apart from following certain
rhetorical stratagems and lines of reasoning that were adopted to represent the Filipino
cause to a global audience, this "tone" also sought to sustain internal discipline and
morale. As the revolutionary army, junta, and fledgling republic suffered setback after
setback in their moves against American interventionist aggression, with no recognition
of their political stature and status forthcoming from the other powers, this fatalism
23
Mabini (1931 [1902], 2: 269). Also, his now famous riposte to Maj. Gen. J.F. Bell,
‘Contestación de Mabini,” 31 August 1900, (Spanish text in Mabini 1931 [1902], 2: 194-199)
which is published, and canonized in Philippine letters, as "In Response to General Bell" in
Lumbera and Nograles Lumbera (1982).
151
paradoxically acquired a certain moral resonance. Propagandists and ideologues like
Apolinario Mabini, and broadsides circulated internationally by the Comité Central
Filipino based in Hong Kong, made a virtue of weakness and disadvantage when the
revolution was arrayed against the formidable resources and yet symbolic (or political)
handicaps of the colluding and competing empires. It was as if, consigned to the margins
of imperialist politics yet representing a central threat to inter-imperial interests, the
revolutionists saw negotiation from disadvantage as enabling other strategies and forms
of triumph. Again, as Mabini had so presciently recognized with the revolutionary
recourse to diplomatic politics and reasoned discourse in the face of an aspiring colonizer
increasingly set to adopt a genocidal war strategy, “Habiéndose despreciado la
diplomacia como arma propia del débil, la lucha hubo de cesar solamente cuando los
revolucionarios dejaron de tener medios para continuarla | As diplomacy has been
dismissed as the weapon of the weak, the struggle would only cease once the
revolutionaries exhaust the means to sustain it” (Mabini 1931 [1902], 2: 269).
The Revolution, in other words, was not simply going to be, and was never only,
a Filipino affair for it involved rather forbidding global complications beyond the
overthrow of the Spanish theocratic state.24 There were the United States and other
powers with their differing investments in the simultaneous destruction and redemption
of Spanish imperial prestige and in the redivision of the world’s territorial and economic
spoils. Forced to accede to a reinsertion into the shifting global order of empire-states, the
new nation/republic could only bargain or negotiate for the moral and material resources
24
The Spanish colonial state that was established in the Philippines is conventionally and
correctly designated in Philippine historical studies as “theocratic” given the inseparability of the
Church, esp. the Spanish friars and religious corporations, from the business of government. An
alternative term is “frailocracy.”
152
needed for social reconstruction and political consolidation but which remained in the
hands of powerful Others. The constancy with which strategists like Mabini and
revolutionary organs like the Comité Central Filipino studied the international
dimensions of the struggle that they coordinated can only strike us in the present as
something marked by pathos and yet evincingly admirable. Familiar with international
and natural law, steeped in post-Enlightenment humanism, and versed in international
political affairs/developments, they mediated between the external forces and those
within their ranks who preferred to view the Revolution as a purely domestic problem
and exclusively a matter of internal consolidation. Their political cosmopolitanism
decisively shaped the diplomatic and subsequent propaganda campaigns that were
launched through the Junta/Committee in Hong Kong. This rhetorical line precisely
undertook to make political-cultural capital out of the utter marginality that came with
being a fledgling republic in the age of imperial nations.
As Mabini baldfacedly conceded, but with that characteristic sting from which
many of his discursive foes smarted and for which he had earned, in the case of some,
their grudging respect:
Es innegable que el Tratado de París legitima el traspaso a los
E. U. de América de la acción de España sobre
Filipinas….Tomamos aquí por norma de legitimidad, no la
justicia absoluta, sino esa relativa establecida por el tácito
consenso de las grandes potencias, bautizado para gloria y
engrandecimiento de éstas y en perjuicio y ruina de las débiles
con el pomposo nombre de derecho internacional, esa justicia
relativa que suele santificar los más inicuos despojos y las
usurpaciones más estupendas, cuya sanción reguladora es la
razón de la fuerza y no la fuerza de la razón (1931 [1902], 2:
54).
We are unable to deny that the Treaty of Paris legalizes the
transfer of Spain’s control over the Philippines to the United
States…Thus we take as legitimate norm not absolute but
153
relative justice, established and christened through the tacit
consensus of the great powers, for their glory and
aggrandizement, to the disadvantage and devastation of the
weak, in the pompous name of international law. It is this
relative justice that customarily hallows the most iniquitous
despoliations and most marvellous usurpations, whose governing
sanction is the reason of force and not the force of reason.
The Philippine Revolution in Modern History and Historiography
Pointing out the double potential/jeopardy of the Philippine Revolution (and its
twin strategies of armed resistance and self-marginality), as Mabini does in his own
“history,” certainly risks valorizing what, as its leading scholars or critics would argue,
was an abortive and deeply flawed nationalist movement. Obvious as it may be that an
alternative view or explanation of this sort is actually germane to the historical
contingency of the New Empire and the Philippine Revolution, and the consequential
actions of the protagonists considered in this study, it was precisely not ever considered
or developed as an explanation the way Mabini does in his own critical account, from the
work of John Foreman, Dean Worcester, and onwards, to the modern historians who have
so much as slightly considered the Philippine Revolution in its two phases (of antiSpanish and anti-American resistance) as a focal and noteworthy event with an
importance far beyond its otherwise self-liberationist aims.
Indeed, understood in terms of the patriarchal cast, political ambitions, and
ethnic/class-specific interests of some of its leading factions, it could only but be
dismissible as a pathetic parody of its eighteenth-to-nineteenth century American and
European antecedents. What Ranajit Guha divines as the "mediocre liberalism" of the
Indian upper classes under and after the Raj—“a caricature of the vigorous democratic
154
culture of the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West”25—may have been an
immanent feature of its Filipino (and élite-led) counterpart, from the perspective of selfironic “post-nationalist” critics. Viewed from the postcolonial and transnational
moments, this Revolution appears to be just another "naturalizing" discourse that
adverted (while acceding) to Europe as the "habitus" of modernity, rationality, and
normative humanism.26 In the interrogative terms of Nicholas Dirks, was it one more
variant, perhaps, of "the same old histories, increasingly tired and belatedly Whiggish
stories of national self-determination and the unfolding of freedom?" With much import
for the present discussion, Dirks asks: "how can we avoid caricaturing history the second
time around; must we always consign the 'other' to farce?" (1990, 26).
Indeed, caricature and parody have been the historiographic lot of the Filipino
nationalist upsurge of the 1890s even in the most empathetic revisionist accounts. When
not ignored altogether in general accounts of similar struggles before and after its time
(eg. Wheatcroft 1983), it is effectively and practically dismissed as an ephemeral (if
vexed) attempt at nation-building by "semi-civilized" peoples who are culturally diverse
and hopelessly divided. Consider these typically sardonic passages from Benedict
25
Guha (1989, 214). Here it may be said that some influential Filipino and American historians
substantially agree on a similar characterization/caricature of the élite leadership of the
Revolution. See Anderson (1995); Steinberg (1972); Constantino (1975) and Guerrero 's
dissertation (1977), a segment of which is published as “The Provincial and Municipal Elites of
Luzon During the Revolution, 1898-1902” (1982), for terse condensations of these historians's
slightly variable (they would say, "nuanced") representations of the national and local élites as
always-already compromised political opportunists and half-Enlightened despots. See Cullinane
(2003) and Paredes (1989 [1988]), among several others, for more complicated portraits of
selected figures and their critical and/or collaborative engagements with the American colonial
state as it was established and began to consolidate U.S. rule in the Philippines.
26
See Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992, 20-21); Vicente Rafael (1993, ix-xi); David Lloyd (1993, esp.
46-47).
155
Anderson's otherwise perceptive digest of the dominant Philippine studies wisdom on the
period (1995, 9-10):
In 1899, a Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed under the
leadership of 'General' Emilio Aguinaldo, a youthful caudillo
from the province of Cavite...It was, however, a fragile republic,
with more than a few similarities to Bolivar's abortive Gran
Colombía. It had no purchase on the Muslim southwest; parts of
the Visayas seemed likely to go their own independent way; and
even in Luzon mestizo leadership was contested by a variety of
religious visionaries and peasant populists...Moreover, the
mestizo generals themselves (who included the grandfathers of
both Ferdinand Marcos and Benigno Aquino, Jr.) began to
follow the pattern of their American forbears, by setting
themselves up as independent caudillos. Had it not been for
William McKinley, one might almost say, the Philippines in the
early twentieth century could have fractured into three weak,
caudillo-ridden states with the internal politics of ninetheenthcentury Venezuela or Ecuador.
The "fragility" of the Filipino republican experiment is explained, in this patently
counterfactual interpretation, solely in terms of this presumptive government’s tenuous
hold on its intended subjects and on the porous and uncertain limits of its territorial
claims. In turn, this unsecured sovereignty is attributed to intractable ethnic/class
differences among the populace and the unbridled political ambitions of "mestizo
generals." The 'General' himself (note the qualifying quotation marks) is representable
only as a "youthful caudillo" or a poor Asian copy of his hemispheric "American
forbears." Worse, Aguinaldo's generals contest his authority by being insubordinate or
"independent" and by supplying more and multiple variants of his own quintessential
example. In this context, McKinley's, or American, intervention in (or to use Mabini's
stronger formulation, “marvellous usurpation” of) the Philippine Revolution against
Spanish colonialism can somehow (“almost”) be upheld as both fortuitous and desirable.
156
More significant is the ways in which the varied genealogical strands of this
abortive Revolution/Republic make its "failures" attributable to the racial/cultural or
ethnological traits of its leading figures. For John Farrell (1954, 388-389), for example,
the historical significance of the presumably short-lived Filipino republican enterprise lay
in its substantially mimetic character in relation to its Western progenitors (although this
view is unsurprising):
Americans draw too much upon their own national experience
when they see every revolution or civil war as an independent
movement. Actually, and a close study of events in the
Philippine Islands in the 1890's supports this view, what really
happened was that an Asiatic people began against Spain and
after an interval resumed against the armed forces of the United
States, a revolt which, at least in some respects, resembles other
national and racial uprisings against the West which have
occurred since that time and in other parts of the Far East. It is
always a disadvantage in reporting these events that they are
more easily appreciated as independence movements; western
sympathizers have always been readily enlisted for that reason;
and in their origins these revolts may indeed, invariably, have
had something to do with misrule or the failure to rule properly.
But when these rebellions culminate in violent revolution,
certain evidences of what are more like conflicts of culture, or
race wars, have become more or less standard; the self-appointed
leaders speak for Asiatics, but they echo an ideology borrowed
from Europe. This serves to get them an audience and a body of
sympathizers abroad, while at home they use the same
propaganda to exploit racial and religious antagonism. The
attempt to grab power may involve prolonged warfare, featured
by numerous atrocities, and not only against one or more
European governments; there may be also internecine conflicts,
and repeatedly there has been warfare carried on against large
segments of the population who are either loyal to the West or
have responded poorly to propaganda for lack of comprehension.
Familiar orientalist tropes rather predictably pockmark Farrell’s homogenizing
and reductive excursus on ‘Asiatic revolts.’ A historically specific revolutionary moment
and movement (in which "an Asiatic people began against Spain and after an interval
resumed against the armed forces of the United States") becomes the invariant
157
elaboration or instantiation of other "national and racial uprisings against the West." The
inaugural singularity of that movement ("since that time") is strained through the
customary reflex to locate it in the "Far East" and thence render its “oriental” or genetic
characteristics discernible, avant la lettre. Its nationalism, while acknowledged, is
marked with racially different (read: "irrational") accents. Although labelled a
"revolution" it could have only begun as a series of "rebellions," with both such forms
characterized by atrocious violence. Once unleashed by its perpetrators, rebel and
revolutionary violence itself would not discriminate between the conqueror and the
conquered. The former is punished for "misrule" or "failure to rule properly," and "large
segments" of the latter suffer punitive actions for their mindless loyalism to colonizers or
their poor comprehension of revolutionary propaganda efforts. "Internecine conflicts,"
due to power-hunger among the "self-appointed leaders," punctuate the consequent and
retributive orgies of bloodletting that are then held as very certain to follow.
The sardonic streak in Anderson's breezy account understandably stems from his
critical effort to make continuous the postcontemporary political atrophy in the
Philippines and a history of evolved collusions between colonizers and indigenous élites
as a result of the vaunted success of U.S. Pacification in the Philippines through the
creation of compradors and surrogates drawn from, and appealed to through a policy of
cooptation of, some of the revolutionary ranks. Farrell, earlier, had actually and
admirably sought to bring the U.S.-Philippine war to light after half a century of
American historiographical neglect/omissions. But if Filipino revolutionists become
farcical facsimiles of Western/American models even in otherwise well-meaning
accounts like Anderson's and Farrell's, then we are not surprised about how they figure—
158
if at all—in the official or master texts of American and pro-imperialist historical
narratives, a critical study and deconstruction of which awaits the same sustained and
consequential attention as the Indian Subaltern Studies scholars have paid to the
Cambridge school of Anglo-Indian imperial and national historiography.27
The American Filipinist historian Glenn Anthony May, acknowledged doyen of
American imperialist historiography (although this is an appellation he is most likely, and
has virtually shown in some cases of defensiveness, to reject) once candidly
acknowledged in passing that “there is no recognized subfield of U.S. Imperial History”
(May 1987, 187; see Campomanes 2007b, 275). If there is one that is roughly equivalent
to it, it would be U.S. Diplomatic History and international relations/foreign policy
scholarship. Framed as such however, these fields of study cannot possibly accommodate
the kinds of historical actors, actions, “diplomacy,” “international relations'” and “foreign
policy” relating to Filipinos and the Philippines (that this study has partially focused on)
without self-destructing or without requiring a substantial and epistemological
transformation of themselves as institutional formations and practices (for more on this
point, see Campomanes 2008 [2006], 26-35; Tiongson et al. 2008 [2006], 2-4).
27
For exemplary texts from the Subaltern Studies tradition which has greatly inspired and
informed my work in critical historiography, and historical narrative as a literary/representational
genre, see Ranajit Guha (1995) and Partha Chatterjee (1995). Although conducted in her
inimitably clever manner, Spivak's famous critique of their philosophy of history and styles of
historical representation, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), is rather unhelpful, or perhaps
unsympathetic to what, in fact, are visibly literary styles and conventions that mitigate their
archivally rigorous work. A similar combination of historiographic rigor and productive
literariness is to be found in the work of Filipino historian Reynaldo Ileto (1979; 1998), another
major inspiration for this study. The best philosophical approach to and contextualization for
critical historiography of the kinds developed by the Subaltern Studies collective and historians
like Ileto is Jacques Rancière, The Names of History (1994).
159
US Imperial Geopolitics in the Age of Empire and the Postcolonial Period
The two epigraphs from Apolinario Mabini and Randolph Bourne with which this
chapter commenced mark the turning point (1900) and the endpoint (1916) of a crucial
period in modern history: what some writers have dubbed the epoch of “high
imperialism” or what Eric Hobsbawm has called, in his magisterial book (1989[1987]),
the “Age of Empire,” roughly from the mid-1870s to the Great War (WWI). It was a
period when, as V. I. Lenin has so famously put it, “the colonial policy of the capitalist
countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet [and] for
the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is
possible” (1990 [1916/1917], 76; emphasis supplied). The locus classicus for such
characterization and comprehension of world history during this period is, as the
extensive critical literature on imperialism commonly acknowledges, J.A. Hobson’s
Imperialism: A Study (1965 [1902/1905]). Accepted wisdom tells us that it was upon this
text that Lenin based a substantive part of his theoretical formulations on “imperialism”
as the “highest,” “special,” or “latest,” or more specifically, “monopoly,” stage of
capitalism.
Lenin was certainly referring to the global territorial annexations by a small corps
of imperial nation-states, which, as Hobsbawm (following Lenin) also acutely reminds
us, were “capitalist core countries” (1989[1987], 56, 50-61). These capitalist core
countries (the most prominent being Great Britain, France, Belgium, and more lately, the
emergent powers of Germany, Japan, and the United States) were then displaying ample
signs of what the Russian cosmopolitan intellectual J. A. Novicow critically diagnosed by
1901 as the widespread affliction of “kilometritis” (kilométrite), an “idolatry of square
160
kilometers” (qtd. in Kern 1983, 229). This exclusive circle is expanded here or there by
Hobson, Lenin, and Hobsbawm to include minor, unevenly developed, or “preindustrial
empires” like those of Italy; Portugal (adding more, as Hobsbawm notes, to her “ancient
African colonies”); Spain (“a net loser to the USA,” but following the cession of the
Philippines and transfer of Cuba and Puerto Rico to the USA, “still managed to pick up
stony territory in Morocco and the Western Sahara,” in Hobsbawm’s satiric words);
tsarist Russia (whose expansionism was “unique,” according to Hobsbawm, for its was
“secular” and involved movement into “contiguous” territories while losing some to
Japan, and in Hobson’s characterization, “principally Asiatic”); and the Netherlands
(which, observes Hobsbawm, either “failed or refused” to acquire more and merely
extended its dominion over much of the Indonesian archipelago that it already “formally
owned”).
28
Extrapolating from Hobson’s estimates—drawn from official sources and the
Statesman’s Year Book of H.C. Morris—Lenin reckoned that, by 1900 alone, 98.9% of
Polynesia (sometimes called Oceania but actually meaning Pacific basin/island
territories), 90.4% of Africa (especially after the Scramble of 1884-1886), 56.6% of Asia,
and 27.2% of the Americas were placed under various (but largely colonial) forms of
EuroAmerican dominion. Extending Hobson’s own periodizing arguments up to 1914,
tweaking a bit Hobson’s geopolitical statistical data and supplementing them with
updated information from the geographer A. Supan’s research, Lenin lists Great Britain
as acquiring, on the eve of WWI, a grand total of 33.5M sq kms; France, 10.6M sq kms;
28
See Lenin 1990 (1916/1917), 78; Hobson 1965 (1902/1905), 21; and Hobsbawm 1989 (1987),
59.
161
Germany, 2.9M sq kms; the USA, 0.3M sq kms; and Japan, 0.3M sq kms, among the
more noteworthy imperial-territorial expansions. It was in the context of this substantially
accomplished inter-imperial and monopolistic appropriation of global real estate that
Lenin famously advocated for a reading of the Great War as yet another momentous and
immensely violent attempt at a redivision of the planet among the monopoly-capitalist
powers (Lenin 1990 [1916/1917], 76, 80, esp. 9; emphasis supplied).
29
The Age of Empire was indeed a pure, and because of the epic carnage through
which it was accomplished by way of and culminating in WWI, bloody, spectacle in
kilométrite. But as Hobsbawm acutely notes, “what is spectacular is not necessarily most
important,” adding that for many thinkers since the 1890s and throughout this period
(eventuating in Lenin’s grand synthesis), “what seemed a new phase in the general
pattern of national and international development” singularly gripped their focus. In
Leninist terms, what commended itself to contemporary analysts was “a new phase in
capitalist development,” when Capital became financial in cast because of increasing
monopoly and concentration, of which empire and the wars fought over it as a political
form only seemed to be “the most striking aspects” (1989[1987], 59-60). Furthermore, an
indisputable fact about this period, beginning in the nineteenth-century, was “the creation
29
From this comparative tabulation, we see pretty early indications of the exceptionalist forms of
empire-building of Japan and the United States as “latecomers in colonialism” (in the apt words
of University of Tokyo international relations scholar Kiichi Fujiwara [2006]),whose
expansionism would significantly depart from the norm of territorial imperialism established by
their British and French predecessors, or more classically, Spanish and Portuguese antecedents.
In the case of the USA, its traumatizing experience as the ambivalent tyranny in the second- or
“Philippine-American War” phase of the Philippine Revolution, challenged to a near-genocidal
and –suicidal stand-off by anticolonial Filipino revolutionary resistance, compelled it to delimit
its imperial ambitions and to reformulate its aspirant suzerainty in a modality that critics would
recognize as ‘neocolonialism/imperialism’ in the twentieth century and, arguably, up to the
present; see Campomanes (1995, 146, 158-164; 1999, 135-137).
162
of a single global economy, progressively reaching into the most remote corners of the
world, an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and
movements of goods, money, and people linking the developed countries with each other
and with the underdeveloped world” (ibid., 62).30
It is on this broader historical and global canvas that one must locate the
emergence and consolidation of the New Empire at a crucially formative stage in its
checkered history. The tendency in the historical and postcolonial literature, as Amy
Kaplan wryly notes, has been to construe or periodize US imperial formation as either a
radical break from an established European or classical norm of imperial development or
to see it simply as an unbroken continuity from the early Republic to the American
Century and global age (Kaplan 1993, 14-15, 17). Instead, one ought to be mindful that
30
With few qualifications, Hobsbawm here could have just as well been describing our current
transnational moment, with the difference that rather than a multipolar imperial regime as with
the Age of Empire, the USA now unilaterally and monopolistically rules the global roost, even
with its “Coalition” politics and maneuvers from the Gulf War of Bush I to the Iraq War of Bush
II, to rein in the United Nations in the first, and “Willing” others in the second. (It is from these
historical and contemporary contexts that the discussion and critique of transnationalism in
Chapter One of this study implicitly draws.) Such, at any rate, is the astonishing but arguable
claim of the bards and heralds of the ever- and even New(er) American Empire of the present,
and who, inspite of their political and ideological differences with each other, agree upon this
basic historical assessment; see, for eminent examples, Ferguson (2004); Kiernan (2005);
Johnson (2007). In a sense, therefore, there is nothing unprecedented or even radically new about
our current usage and understandings of transnationalism and the term transnational, at least as
claimed in that species of recent transdisciplinary writing which construes our conjuncture as an
epochal break from periods long past and presumably forgotten. On our current conjuncture
(which indeed goes under the rubric “transnational,” among others) as an epochal break from
modernity, the baldest and most specific statement is by Antonio Negri, in Thesis 4 of his
“Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today”: “The periodization of
capitalist development shows that we are the beginning of a new epoch” (1992, 141). See also his
full-scale and now controversial exposition and elaboration of the twenty theses on Marx and
certain of his other “post-Marxist” ideas in his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire (2000),
where he argues that we are now under a global regime that has no national center and whose
governance of planetary life bespeaks a radically new form of “Sovereignty” that networks the
world without being specifiable and accountable to it.
163
the New Empire was never a separate and discrete formation but one always embedded in
its contemporaneity with a global and comparable field of competitors even as its
ideologues vociferously insisted on its exceptionality as the original and singular
exemplar of neocolonialism at various decisive stages of its particular development,
especially from 1898 onwards.31 None of the expansionist visions of contemporary and
consequential ideologues of the New Empire of 1898, and none of their specific
articulations and active maneuvers toward the achievement of such visions, could really
make sense to any analyst without some critical knowledge and consideration of this
global field or contemporary context.
U.S. Treaty of Paris Commission negotiator Whitelaw Reid, to cite just one
example among many, strenuously advocated for Philippine annexation after the 1898
Spanish-American War, "for American energy to build up such a commercial marine on
the Pacific Coast as should ultimately convert the Pacific Ocean into an American lake,
making it far more our own than the Atlantic Ocean is now Great Britain's" (in Morgan
1965, 29). This kind of geostrategic American politics and discourse that posited the
Asia-Pacific as its object of desire, and in an active contest with other imperial states
from the outset, quickly began to operate and proliferate after the republic’s most
articulate visionaries declared the USA's Manifest Destiny in the early nineteenthcentury, and more especially, after the republic survived its bitter sectional conflicts.
31
See Campomanes (1999) and Jones (1970) for critical takes on the continuity thesis, but also
Kaplan (2002, 15-16) where the latter herself tends toward it. Go and Foster (2003, 16-27), and
rather tardily, McCoy et al. (2009) attempt, with mixed success, to develop a comparativist
paradigm for the “global field” within which to analyze the development of, respectively, the
American colonial state in the Philippines (and Puerto Rico); and the American national security
state in the neo/postcolonial period.
164
Such a trans-Pacific American geopolitics discursively and actually reached its
apotheosis in the multiple contexts and unusual occasions offered the USA during the
Age of Empire by, first, the unequal treaty that was inked with the Hawaiian Kingdom;
then the compromise with Britain and Germany over the disposition of the Samoan
islands; and finally the extraterritorial leavings that were the spoils of the 1898 war with
Spain. These key developments in the USA’s trans-Pacific extraterritorialism notably
occurred throughout and serially punctuated the last quarter of the nineteenth-century.
For Reid and many nineteenth-century American imperial ideologues (such as the
irrepressible expansionist William Henry Seward, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State,
early on; the fabled naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, and even lately, the
geopolitician of American frontierism, Frederick Jackson Turner, etc.), the Pacific was a
vast space that kept the USA from the dream of a "China Emporium of American
Commerce" and an envisioned relationship with Japan as the "spearhead for the
32
commercial penetration of Northeast Asia." This vast Pacific basin needed to be
overcome in a bounding cognitive leap, redrawn from its previous zonings in mercantilecapitalist and Exploration-era colonial cartographs, and effectively made over into—
paraphrasing Reid, in Turnerian terms—maritime and archipelagic “frontiers” for an
imperially emergent United States.
Indeed, amidst the immense oceanic expanse were insignificant looking island
groups that could be used as naval outposts and "coaling stations," including the
Philippine and Hawaiian archipelagoes (geostrategic clusters of which were to be
32
Quotations and quotes from van Alstyne (1960, 174-175); see also the now-classic study of
nineteenth-century American imperialist ideology and ideologues by Walter LaFeber, The New
Empire (1963).
165
formally annexed, on various pretexts, at various times, throughout much of the twentieth
century, beginning with the nearly-simultaneous Philippine and Hawaiian annexations of
1898). Not for nothing then that the most distinctive American contribution to the
burgeoning turn-of-the-century science of geopolitics—otherwise largely Germanic in its
provenance and elaborations—was Mahanite navalism, which made of seapower and
maritime territories an equally, if not more, significant plank of national and imperial
expansionism (Kern 1983, 225-226).
With some highly contingent and creatively pragmatic maneuvers as a Pacific
power, and with the conquest of the Philippines substantially consolidated by the 1930s,
the United States subsequently managed to establish and control a formidable transPacific network of "200-Mile Economic Zones" and complex of naval-military
facilities.33 These remain and are currently constellated through Guam and the American
Samoa as "unincorporated territories," the Northern Marianas as a "Commonwealth,"
Hawaii as the only non-continental state, and the Republic of Belau as the last remaining
"trust territory" of the federal union (see Kiste et al. 1994), including offshore basings in
Okinawa (Japan), and East Asian subaltern territories like South Korea and Taiwan,
among others. Such, at present, is the Asia-Pacific World-System presided over by the
United States that is traceable to an extended history of American imperial desire and
modern power geopolitics, and the realization of which was fatally predicated upon the
33
Zones within two hundred miles surrounding the Pacific islands or island chains under some
form of federal control by the United States (either through trusteeship or commonwealth status)
are considered “exclusive” to the USA; see Kiste (1994, 239-40).
166
defeat and containment of the Philippine Revolution at the turn from the nineteenth to the
twentieth centuries.34
The Age of Empire, the time of Lenin and Hobson, or Aguinaldo, Agoncillo, and
Mabini was, in sum, a period characterized by curious amalgams and disjunctions of
economic and territorial monopoly. It was a time when the world was welded into one
dominated by empire/s yet simultaneously and fitfully redrawn by bloody border wars,
especially at its endpoint of World War I. It was a time when a national liberation
movement could be snuffed out at its infancy through the practical alliance of the great
34
"Pacific Rim” or “trans-Pacific” discourse and the notion of an American "Pacific Century" (as
late twentieth-century expressions of the transnational American Empire), therefore, are not
recent inventions, at least not in the ways 1990s critical work generally seems to have advened
(see Dirlik 1993; Dirlik and Wilson 1994 for critical elaborations of this longer history of empire
in a transnational mode). But even in studies of imperialism and neo/postcoloniality,
transnational/ism remains a contested keyword (especially as a descriptor of late-colonial and late
capitalist flows, institutions, practices, and phenomena), a comprehensive semantic archeology of
which equally remains unavailable or unaccomplished. Appadurai (1996) constituted a good start
but it was much too postmodern and culturalist in its critical idioms and Harvey (2003) seemed to
promise a more balanced account but ended up being much too political-economic with
disarticulated attention paid to matters of culture and the postmodern as a cultural dominant.
Interestingly, long before its now lusty currency and proliferation as a term—at least, since the
early 1990s—to describe the New World Order, and as a category of post-modern political and
cultural critique, the late Filipino nationalist intellectual Renato Constantino had already used
“transnational” (at times, synonymously, as “multinational”) to identify and specify an omnibus
organizational expression of late-capitalism’s global reach and its tentacular grips over the
postcolonial Filipino economy: the “transnational corporation” (or in his shorthand, the ‘TNCs’).
Along with a few farsighted contemporary analysts, Constantino sought to explicate, in a
preliminary way, Capitalism’s new and flexible regimes of accumulation across national frontiers
and in excess or abjuration of what used to be its national expressions and fealties (others would
later call and characterize this kind of transnational capitalism, in the particular case of American
capitalism, “post-Fordist”; see Harvey 1989; for Constantino, the reference here is to several
series of critiques of neocolonial political economy and US economic domination of the
Philippines that he produced and issued, in the form of handy pamphlets, with the collaboration
of his wife Letizia Constantino; and the classic text through which to get introduced to
Constantino’s ideological orientation and highly-influential work of critical decolonization is his
quite gripping account of contemporary and historical US hegemony in the Philippines and
Filipino resistance to it, Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness [1978]). More striking
perhaps is the even earlier use of transnational by the American public intellectual and antiwar
activist Randolph Bourne in his immensely insightful 1916 essay, “Trans-National America” (for
some discussion of this essay in relation to Constantino's work, Mabini, and the Age of Empire,
see Campomanes [2007a]).
167
powers otherwise divided amongst themselves by real and competing capitalist and
ideological investments. It was a time when a New Empire, the USA (or also more
generally what Hobson called the ‘new Imperialism’), could spectacularly and
uncompromisingly announce its advent, and begin to build its formidable edifice on that
seemingly insignificant Revolution’s mangled remains.
168
CHAPTER 4
EMPIRE'S OTHER WAR/S AND CASUALTY FIGURES
Across certain parts of the United States, many monuments and memorials stand
as mute yet articulate vestiges of the “Spanish-American War of 1898.” This war began
with Commodore Dewey’s victory over Admiral Montojo’s armada at Manila Bay in
May 1898 and symbolically ended with the destruction of Admiral Cervera’s fleet in the
Battle of Santiago in July 1898, and is customarily regarded and uncritically privileged
by many American historians as the inaugural event of the United States’ “coming out”
1
as a world power. Among these ubiquitous yet widely neglected monuments and
memorials to the 1898 war are various incarnations of a life-sized piece of sculpture
2
identified and inscribed with the enigmatic name of “The Hiker.”
1
In the parodic words of the diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey, “Dewey staged [the]
memorable coming out party [of U.S. imperialism] at Manila Bay on May Day [1898].” In a
comprehensive critique of the voluminous U.S. 1898 war historiography produced over the past
century, the historian Louis Pérez Jr. sardonically notes that it is otherwise “a wholly fortuitous
event,” the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898, “to which is
attributed the cause of a war that altered the course of U.S. History” (Bailey 1969; 8; Pérez 1998,
59).
2
“The Hiker," monument erected in Pawtucket, R.I., "To Perpetuate the Memory of All Who with
Unfailing Loyalty Defended on Land and Sea the Nation's Honor in the War with Spain,
Phillipine [sic] Insurrection and China Relief Expedition [1898-1902]." In Rhode Island, where
research for this chapter first began, several Hikers were mounted at various times and in
strategically central sites of cities and towns. For example, one was erected in "The City of
Woonsocket to Her Sons Who on Land and Sea Defended the Nation's Honor in the War with
Spain and the Philippine Insurrection, 1898-1902." Yet another Hiker, bluish from exposure to the
elements and bird shit, also stands rarely appreciated at the Kennedy Square in the capital city of
Providence. Many thanks to the self-admitted history hobbyist Mr. Peter Voulkes for first alerting
this writer to the existence of these monuments while we were researching together in the early
1990s at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Masssachussetts. Mr. Foulkes then
believed that many such monuments might have been erected in many small American towns,
probably from the same foundry cast that he speculated was made by some commissioned
sculptor/artist for a New York foundry, “[sic] Williams, Inc.” in 1904 or even earlier. A
Woonsocket Hiker photodocument provided by Mr. Foulkes bears that foundry’s stamp and this
169
The sociologist James Loewen forewarns that to regard these Spanish-American
War memorials and their inscriptions is to confront a mind-boggling “puzzle.” Like many
of them, the stately one in front of the State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, for example,
bears the typical descriptive head “Spanish American War Veterans, 1898-1902.” At the
base of most of these memorials, as Loewen notes, is usually a plaque inscribed with the
war’s standard symbol: a circle around a Maltese cross, with the descriptive head
spanning the circle and with the four arms of the cross inscribed with “Cuba,” “Porto
Rico,” “Philippine Islands,” and “U.S.A.” In some monuments, “China” is added in place
of “Porto Rico” or the “U.S.A.” to adduce the “China Relief Expedition” that was
launched from the Philippines in 1900, when the United States intervened along with the
other powers in the uprisings known as the Boxer Rebellion (Loewen, n.d.; rev. as
Loewen 1999, 136-144).
One variation of this standard presentation is an actual although miniaturized
Maltese cross mounted in front of the base of the Woonsocket, R.I. Hiker in addition to
the usual plaque. Two circles are actually etched within and at the center of the cross
whose top arm bears “U.S.A.” and bottom arm bears “Cuba” in large caps while
“Philippine Islands” and “Porto Rico,” respectively, are borne on the right and left arms
in smaller caps. At the center of the inset circle is the word “UNITED” framed by
“ARMY” at the top and “NAVY” at the bottom. Within the circumference formed by the
inner and outer circles is the inscription, “SPANISH WAR VETERANS 1898-1902.”
inscription: “The Hiker, copyrighted by Allen G. Newman, Sc. 1904.” This cast was apparently
being used as late as 1922 to make more copies. Another photodocument of the Pawtucket R.I.
Hiker supplied by Mr. Foulkes bears this date of installation and also confirms Newman’s identity
as one possible sculptor in an inscription on the left side of the statue’s base.
170
Encoded in this particular artifact is an emergent narrative of imperial U.S. nationbuilding after 1898, an allegory that would seem to be too obvious to admit of extended
exegesis here but whose constitutive elements should at least be sketched. The privileged
placement of the U.S. as the nation invested with the task of uniting or encompassing the
various major sites of its territorial expansion is only counterpointed by the strategic
placement of Cuba as the centrally symbolic space of that expansion’s vaunted aims of
liberation and benevolence for others groaning under the weight of old world Spanish
imperialist oppression. The U.S. Army and Navy are cast as the twin instrumentalities for
the work of making this expanded Union a simultaneously imaginable and accomplished
end. The displacements of the “Philippine Islands” and “Porto Rico” to the framing
margins of this new Union signal their actual and subsequent colonizations as extraneous
to the typicality of U.S. rescue and liberative work in Cuba which, through the Platt
Amendment, was presumably made a nominally independent nation after North
3
America’s “Spanish War” and interventions there.
But as Loewen pointedly asks, “how did a 100-day war wind up with a five year
time span in its monuments?” With the Hiker statues, this periodizing or temporal
anomaly often results in comic and seemingly unaccountable effects for those with some
functional knowledge of the key international events of the Spanish-American War and
3
Compare this with the rhetorical formulation “Vietnam War,” which has the same effect of
writing out Vietnamese national self-determination several decades later like the American
excision here of any memory of the Cuban Revolution after 1898. Loewen notes a similarly
incipient imperial allegory in the inscription for the Dover, N.H. Hiker which narrates that
Americans fought “to succor the weak and oppressed against foreign tyranny and to give Cuba
and and the Philippines a place among the free peoples of the earth” (quote in italics is the exact
phraseology on the monument). Although it is debatable if the Spanish-American War in Cuba
began “with a tinge of anti-imperialist sentiment” and made Cubans truly “free,” Loewen quite
acutely notes that in the U.S.-Philippine War, the U.S. was indisputably “the foreign tyranny”
(Loewen n.d.; emphasis supplied).
171
its aftermath. Earlier research for this chapter has determined "The Hiker" or "hiking" to
be terms coined by the soldiers who fought in the much-longer U.S.-Philippine War that
4
followed the three-month Spanish-American War of 1898. Philippine war soldiers
specifically used these terms to describe themselves and their campaigns to root out
unyielding Filipino guerillas from their mountain strongholds or jungle redoubts. Such
campaigns typically involved hiking through impenetrable thickets and on dusty/muddy
roads for countless miles and several days in heavy rain or under the searing heat of the
5
tropical sun: an image, no doubt, that takes on many self-heroic aspects.
Loewen notes that the Spanish-American War monument in Memphis bears this
curiously confused and confusing inscription: "The Hiker, Typifying the American
Volunteer who fought Spain in Cuba, the Philippines, and Boxer Rebellion." Here, the
Philippine Hiker is placed oddly in Cuba where no such "hikings" were necessitated by
subsequent political developments on the island. The U.S. Occupation forces, for
example, did not have to face armed Cuban revolutionary opposition as they did Filipino
4
"The Hiker," graphic illustration from McCutcheon (1900), including illustrations for the Hiker
monuments and the film analyzed later in this chapter, are reproduced with the best possible
fidelity and quality in, and may be accessed through, the shorter prepublished version of this
chapter in Francia and Shaw (2002, 134-162). A copy of this rare compilation of “PhilippineAmerican War” correspondence featuring the work of McCutcheon and published in the Chicago
Record is in the [Edward Everett] Ayer Philippine Collection at the Newberry Library in
Chicago.
5
For a typical and vivid example of contemporary usage, see the 21 November 1900 letter of the
soldier Peter Lewis to his brother Alexander Lewis, published in Kells (1999, 89-90). Referring
to a typical campaign, Lewis writes in his unedited English: “We had a pretty hard time of it on
that ‘hike’ most of the time we were up to our waists in mud you see we had to go through Rice
fields, the Rice fields are always soft the Rice grows in mud and water, and we had to plow
through them, as it happened we did not come across any amount of Insurgents, but I held a
Filipino up and took his Bolo away from him, I have the Bolo now, the Bolo is a heavy knife that
is most used by the Filipinoes, they use it to cut Bamboo with. We we started out on that ‘hike’
we got orders to take away all arms and Boloes [sic] that we find on Natives, so I captured this
one.”
172
resistance warfare after Spain's departure from the Philippines. And anyone who recalls
that the Boxer Rebellion was directed at the inter-imperial complex of American, British,
French, German, Japanese, and Russian interests in Beijing, Loewen adds, is left to
"wonder at what Spain was doing in China" in 1900 (Loewen, n.d.).
6
If the public memorials and monuments produce these curious kinds of
displacements and aporias, professional history-writing in the United States has not fared
much better, as we continue to show throughout this study. Doubtless, this war is
remembered by hegemonic textbook wisdom in the United States as the “splendid little
war” (after the eventual Secretary of State John Hay’s redoubtable phrase). “It has been a
splendid little war; begun with the highest motive, carried on with the magnificent
intelligence and spirit favored by that fortune which loves the brave,” wrote then
Ambassador Hay to then Col. Theodore Roosevelt in July 1898.
7
Echoing similarly triumphant declarations by other contemporary American
writers and politicians, the diplomatic historian H. Wayne Morgan would characterize
this war as “a small affair, brief, relatively cheap, [but whose] consequences were farreaching and important for the whole world.” Horace Porter, for example, would also
6
Results from Loewen's research also indicate that at least fifty (50) Hikers dot the national
memorial landscape, installed in various sites through the advocacy work of the National
Association of Spanish War Veterans. One sculptor, Theodora Ruggles Kitson, is determined to be
responsible for slightly over a half of these monuments with the rest by other sculptors including,
presumably, Newman for the Rhode Island ones. Loewen cautions however that this is a rough
and not a definitive count (1999, 136 and 143n1; Loewen, personal communication, 14 July
1999).
7
Hay, “the last to congratulate” Roosevelt on “the brilliant campaign” (a specific reference to
Roosevelt’s celebrated heroics and antics in the Battle of San Juan), shared his hopes that the war
was “now to be concluded with that fine good nature which is, after all, the fine distinguishing
trait of the American character. That a war should take place anywhere and they not profit by it.”
Letterbook (No. 1), John Hay Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
173
famously declare in the immediate flush of excitement over U.S. naval victories over
Spain that “no war in history has accomplished so much in so short a time with so little
loss.” These exuberant claims were only matched in their imperiousness by Senator
Redfield Proctor’s confidence, also then expressed after the cessation of hostilities, that
“the nation has at a bound gone forward in the estimation of the world more than we
would have done in fifty years of peace.”
8
It is nonetheless quite telling that even as this little war is remembered as splendid
in over three generations of professional and modern U.S. history-writing, considerable
anxieties attend or surround its many celebratory recountings. Surveying the extensive
contemporary and modern historiography on the Spanish-American War, the Cuban
American historian Louis Pérez found insistent refrains of euphoric national selfcelebration (concerning the war’s legacies) curiously mixed in with anxiously repetitious
9
tropes of “parody and belittlement” (Pérez 1998, 57-80). This damning estimate is
unsurprising to anyone possessing a cursory familiarity with the extensive historical
literature on this particular war and what its body of texts collectively glosses over. “In
reality it was not much more than the two overly glamorized naval victories at Santiago
Bay in Cuba in July and at Manila in May [1898],” the critical historian Stuart Creighton
8
Porter and Proctor (on 2 August and 15 August 1898, respectively) are quoted in Morgan (1963,
399 and 574 n55).
9
Relatedly, Amy Kaplan offers an exhaustive reading of Roosevelt’s and other spectacularized
accounts of the Battle of San Juan as accounts that rewrite the otherwise “parodic” aspects of this
battle through strategies of “belittlement” directed at its “others.” In her account, masculinist and
racialized representations of the battle actually stage a tableau of imperial-national hierarchization
that erases the heroism of participating African American (“colored”) troops and repositions the
black population within the national body politic while placing Cubans (and Filipinos) in the
realm of the “unassimilable” and beyond the pale of representative (or self-) government (Kaplan
1993, 219-236; reprinted in Kaplan 2002, 121-145).
174
Miller would aver by the early 1980s. Early U.S. victories in battles at El Caney and San
Juan Hill in Cuba may have made spectacular icons of General Henry Lawton and
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. But “the army’s only significant land campaign was a
disaster” in which the War Department’s organizational disarray and General William
Shafter’s ineptitude as a commander created major embarrassments (Miller 1982, 12).
What bears remembering is that this war managed to be so little under less
glorious circumstances and only for the most pragmatic considerations. Recalling the
state of U.S. readiness for the Spanish-American War, General Hugh L. Scott in Some
Memories of an American Soldier (1928) admits that he and fellow officers “knew” to
themselves that “our army was organized for peace, not war” (emphasis supplied). The
almost wicked irony to Hugh’s revelation, which a jubilant Senator Proctor would have
missed in August 1898 if something like it were pointed out to him, is probably best
appreciated by turning to the amusement expressed by a critical observer over the
indicative signs of the level of subsequent U.S. military and war preparations for the
Philippine occupation in July 1898. Relaying some surveillance reports and also some
updates on his efforts to coordinate arms purchases throughout East Asia for the Filipino
Revolutionary Army, Felipe Agoncillo, coordinator of the Comité Central Filipino based
in Hong Kong, mirthfully advised General Emilio Aguinaldo: “According to what I hear
the American soldiers who are there do not even know how to keep step. You should
10
send someone who is qualified in military tactics to watch their drills.”
10
Respe [Agoncillo] to Sr. Rost [Aguinaldo], 23 July 1898. Translation of the original Spanish
text available as Exhibit 144 in Taylor 1971 [ca. 1901-05], vol. 3.
175
Indeed, a candid and solidly researched account by the scholar Allan R. Millett
reads General Hugh’s 1928 “admission” as a polite way of saying that the United States
War Department and Armed Forces were not in any decent shape then to enforce the
nation’s emergent imperial will and desires. According to this authoritative account, both
the U.S. War Department and Armed Forces actually assumed and evolved a twin
strategy. “The major weapons to free Cuba would be the United States Navy and the
11
Cuban Revolutionary Army” (Millett 1975, 91). For the early campaign in the
Philippines, the U.S. Navy under Dewey similarly sought a de facto alliance with the
Filipino Revolutionary Army led by General Emilio Aguinaldo, and nurtured this alliance
carefully, at least until President William McKinley could hastily dispatch three waves of
a Philippine expeditionary and occupation force consisting of U.S. Army volunteers and
regulars between June and August 1898. (These troops were eventually instructed to
displace and limit the Filipino government’s own territorial claims and military victories,
creating the tensions between the anti-Spanish “allies” that ultimately resulted in open
war by February 1899.) This common strategy for Cuba and the Philippines was based on
the actual unpreparedness of the U.S. Army in war footing and significant congressional
opposition against increasing the less than 80,000 (1898) strength of Army regulars to
meet the 100,000-man force projected by planners as necessary to enforce American
political will. It also depended heavily, for much of the “little” war, on the almost
11
In the same account where he had little trouble accepting the conceit of a splendid little war, H.
Wayne Morgan himself figured as one of the earliest and few modern American historians to
concede the fact of “the questionable ability of the American army to enforce [American]
demands” and resulting territorial or war claims (1963, 397).
176
chimeric strength of the U.S. naval fleets, themselves then sorely in need of modern
12
upgrading.
How the U.S. war machinery could not match the heightening jingoistic bluster of
imperialist rhetoric (during and immediately after the Spanish-American War) and was
not in shape to enforce eventual U.S. jurisdictional claims over the “new possessions”
was evidenced in the fact that the initial priorities of U.S. military planners were largely
“defensive.” On the fear that the Spanish navy would “panic the American public or
upset the American naval effort” by laying siege to Atlantic Seaboard harbor facilities,
the War Department spent much of its share of the March 1898 $50 million war
appropriation by Congress on coastal defense. The disorganization of the War
Department and the Army, inversely equalled by their clunky bureaucratic procedures,
along with the twin strategy described above (Millett calls this a “manpower policy
compromise” between the War Department and congressional opponents concerned to
preserve the state identities of the regiments to be raised) entailed a “major cost.”
Although 20% of career army officers were already assigned to state regiments to aid in
the efficient preparation and mustering of troops, the deluge of 250,000 State volunteers
who responded to McKinley’s call for war service simply strained the regular army’s
12
The figure of “less than 80,000” is estimated by the military historians David R. Kohler and
James Wensyel in their equally candid account, “Our First Southeast Asian War” (1990, 21).
Millett specifies an “authorized wartime strength” of 65,000 by 1898 for the regular army, a
figure from which the Senate would not budge, even by the time more troops were required and
projected for the “Philippine Insurrection.” More, the final draft of the Army Reorganization Act
of 1899, according to Millett, mandated a review by 1901 “for possible reduction” of that force,
and the War Department was only authorized to raise another 35,000 volunteers for a separate
100,000-man force projected to complete the subsequent Philippine conquest and occupation
(Millett (1975, 112).
177
troop supply and preparation system to the breaking point and resulted in chaotic and
badly supplied training camp conditions.13
Quite apart from the brevity of hostilities between the United States and Spain,
what in effect made this war splendid and little for the United States is the fact, often
glossed over, of the already pre-existing revolutionary situations on the Cuban and
Philippine fronts. All the hard work, bloodletting, and the laborious years of armed
struggle of Cuban and Filipino “insurrectionists” (and their supporters among their native
populations) had practically and effectively withered Spanish power at the point when the
14
United States came in with its “rescue” missions. Both the inability of the American
Occupation of these two Spanish Crown colonies to remain deployed for very long in
roughly equal strengths to vouchsafe American control over them, and the subsequent
outbreak of the U.S.-Philippine War (as Filipino revolutionaries rejected the imposition
of the Paris Treaty provisions on the Philippines), led some pragmatic and sober
imperialist idealogues like then Secretary of War Elihu Root—fearful of another war in
Cuba—to argue for a strategically different approach to the latter that would later lead to
the infamous Platt Amendment.15
13
Consequently, as Stuart Creighton Miller notes, “tropical diseases struck down many more
Americans than did Spanish bullets.” Millett qualifies that, in fact, there were “more dead
Americans at home than Spanish bullets and tropical diseases killed outside the United States”
(emphasis supplied; Millett 1975, 91-93; Miller 1982, 12).
14
Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army and the Spanish-American
War (1998 [1971]) is a sedate and classic account of the “modernization” and professionalization
of the Army as having its beginnings in late-nineteenth century internal-institutional reform but is
unable to revise the picture that such changes did not come decisively until after the debacle of
1898 and precisely during and after the even more exacting war in the Philippines.
15
Or, in the words of political economists Luzviminda Franciso and Jonathan Fast, to enforce in
Cuba “neocolonial dominion through nonmilitary [means]” (1985, 207). On Root's pivotal role in
the formulation and execution of the compromise (and fatally compromising arrangements, at
least for Cuban aspirations to independence) called the Platt Amendment, see Pérez (1998, 124).
178
It certainly remains, as the critical historian Richard van Alstyne once so aptly put
it, that the Spanish-American War of 1898 was “a little war with big consequences”
(1960, 165).
16
One big consequence of this war for U.S. nationalist and establishment
historians was that it delivered to the United States what Paris Treaty chief U.S.
negotiator William Day euphorically called “a goodly estate indeed.” Through the muchcontested 1898 Treaty of Paris with Spain (the negotiations for which actively excluded
and refused to recognize the rights of belligerency of both Cuban and Filipino
revolutionists), the United States had now practically laid claim to the last remnants of
the Spanish Empire as its “new possessions.” The Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
Guam would be militarily occupied for varying periods and assigned variable forms of
neocolonial status within a now imperially expanded “union” or nation (Liebowitz 1976;
Thompson 2002; Go 2004). And relying on the flurry of the expansionist zeitgeist in July
1898 and the political momentum unleashed by postwar public euphoria, the United
States furtively took Hawai’i. McKinley quickly signed the resolution for its annexation,
capping nearly a decade of national hesitance on the continent and earnest lobbying by
American settlers in the islands toward that end (since the illegal 1893 coup against
Queen Lilieukalani’s government by renegade U.S. planter interests and
consular/missionary/settler elements).
Among such “big consequences,” the least considered and most actively
minimized by what Gareth Stedman Jones once called “State Department” historiography
16
Sociologist James Loewen clarifies that historians and cartographers have yet to account for
the incorporation, after the Paris Treaty, of former Spanish colonies in Africa such as Rio de Oro
(Western Sahara), Spanish Guinea, and about three other small territories outside of Africa during
a period roughly contemporaneous with or subsequent to this series of 1898-era US imperialterritorial annexations. Personal communication, 14 July 1999.
179
is the longer, more costly, and more consequential imperial war to which “the war with
17
Spain” ultimately led (Jones 1970, 61). The radical historian Howard Zinn had noted
long ago “the odd imbalance of treatment in our usual history courses, where the war
with Spain, a brief but victorious military romp –- a splendid little war as some called it –
- is the central event in the foreign policy in that period and the taking of the Philippines a
shadowy anti-climax” (Schirmer 1972, vii). As with the public monuments and their
aporetic allegories, U.S. historical textbook wisdom awkwardly shoehorns and absorbs
the eventual and indisputably more eventful war of conquest and resistance in the
Philippines (1899-1910s) into the Spanish-American War of 1898. This categorical
displacement of one war by another—which is to say, the way in which the privileging of
the Spanish-American War consigns the U.S.-Philippine War into an otherness that itself
requires a reiterative invisibilization— produces a number of effects and performs certain
political functions that build upon one another in a tautological chain of causations.18
What Zinn laments as an “odd imbalance” is no “accident,” as the war with Spain
and the Philippine conquest themselves would be predominantly construed in mainstream
U.S. history-writing until recent times. This imbalancing is a continuously anxious
exercise that actively plays curious tricks on the very stakes that drive the enterprise of
writing history or memorializing it through other means: remembering and knowing. By
17
Stedman Jones’ parodic label is an oblique reference to the inordinate influence of George
Kennan’s realist school on U.S. “international relations” historiography, an influence most
directly embodied in the long-standing predominance of Kennan’s American Diplomacy, 19001950 (1951) and Kennan’s own long-standing association with the U.S. State Department in
various capacities.
18
Louis Pérez (1999, 81-107) makes the same critical arguments, and more devastatingly so, with
respect to the US relationships with Cuba and the Cuban Revolution and the containment of both
by a few but enduring shibboleths in American imperialist historiography.
180
“knowing,” in particular, one must highlight here the highly mediated and politicized
forms of U.S. knowledge production on the Philippines and the history of U.S.
interventions and involvements there. For example, a famous journalist —whose
problematic historical account of Philippine-American colonial relations was released
and won the Pulitzer Prize after the People’s Power Revolution of 1986 that overthrew
Marcos sparked renewed U.S. public interest in that part of the globe —has had to admit:
“Most Americans may have forgotten, perhaps never even knew, that the Philippines had
been a U.S. possession” (Karnow 1989, 3).
19
In thus actively reproducing the Spanish-American War as a hegemonic category
of historical analysis and public memory in narratives of U.S. empire- and nationbuilding, mainstream historiography shares with public war memorials the tendency to
speak to two imperialist imperatives. One, to sustain the contemporary fiction of a
“splendid little war,” and to uphold the legitimacy of resulting U.S. territorial and
sovereignty claims over what others have called its “inadvertent island empire,”
subsequent acts and genres of remembrance in the United States are held to the task of
ceaselessly renewing the active contemporary dismissal of the Cuban and Filipino
nationalist revolutions against Spain (climactically, 1895-1898, for Cubans; and 18961898, for Filipinos). Two and relatedly, standard or official U.S. historical accounts and
the conventional designation "Spanish-American War" are called upon to posit and
insistently reproduce contemporary perceptions of this international crisis as solely a
19
For excellent critiques of Karnow's book and its reproduction of a similarly configured and
anxiety-ridden body of U.S. specialist scholarship on the Philippines, see Michael Salman (1991,
221-232) and Reynaldo Ileto ( 1999 [1997], 41-65).
181
matter between two empires—one in its emergence (the United States), the other in its
decline (Spain).
The odd chronological displacement of the U.S.-Philippine War by the SpanishAmerican War in and through the memorial inscriptions on existing national monuments,
therefore, does not really constitute much of a mystery or a puzzle. As Loewen himself
unsurprisingly points out,
The answer to this puzzle points to one of America’s least happy
foreign adventures – our war with the Philippines. Except for the
curious dates on our Spanish-American war memorials, this war
lies almost forgotten on our landscape. Hostilities began on
February 4, 1899 and may be said to have ended by the early
20
summer of 1902. Hence the “1898-1902” (1999, 137).
This temporal elision of the war in the Philippines is as chronotopic as it is symbolic.
Indeed, as Loewen finds out, “Words that appear on the wall behind the SpanishAmerican War monument in Springfield” contain the only possible clues to the
periodizing puzzle that is certain to confront anyone possessing some memory of the
splendid little war and regarding such monumental displacements: “the Philippine
21
Insurrection.” Perhaps more than these monumental replications and supplements of
20
For the duration of the war beyond the termination date of 4 July 1902 declared by President
Theodore Roosevelt which many historians take uncritically as valid, a careful reading of Russell
Roth’s Muddy Glory: America’s Indian War in the Philippines, 1899-1935 ( 1981) is extremely
suggestive. It is impossible to regard the subsequent wars against the “Moros,” “ladrones,”
tulisanes” and new “katipunans” as well as the coalitional or antagonistic politics that unfolded
with colonial or recalcitrant native “parliamentarians” as separate from the so-called
“pacification” effort. See also Ileto (1979; 1984, 85-114); and Jim Zwick (1998, 65-85).
21
By “chronotopic,” we mean that the temporal and spatial displacements of the PhilippineAmerican War fuse to induce highly selective and artifactually misleading forms of remembering
both the time and the place of, and those who fought during, this other war; or better yet: the
temporal displacement takes a spatial form while the spatial expression itself displaces the
markers of temporality or chronology.
182
equivalent categorical displacements in nationalist U.S. history writing, Loewen observes
that the official and historical “terminology” to designate the bigger and unsplendid
Philippine war as the “Philippine Insurrection” requires radical reconsideration, if not
22
overhaul.
War with and over the Other/s
To say that American memories of the U.S.-Philippine War (and the American
neocolonization of the Philippines that it entailed) have a vestigial and sedimentary
quality about them is perhaps to reiterate a by-now unsurprising fact. This is plainly
indicated by what remains, and by what is artifactually documentary of that war’s
recurrently neglected events and episodes. Whether the curiously inscribed monuments
described by Loewen or the categorical terms that displaces this war in historiographic
wisdom in anxiously iterative ways, these oddly situated and fragmented artifacts or
vestiges point to the possibility that perhaps the U.S.-Philippine War never truly ended.
Hyperbolic as it may sound, a war over its actively repressed memory and legacies
22
In an act of recognition as rare as it is bound to be hotly disputed by other American scholars,
Loewen asserts: “This term suggests that the United States held legitimate power in the
Philippines, against which some Filipinos rebelled. Nothing of the sort took place. The Filipino
independence movement was exercising control over most of the nation, except Manila, when the
United States attacked. This was a war, not an insurrection by a subordinate faction…” (Loewen,
n.d.) Among the earliest in the Vietnam War-era critical historiography to make and elaborate a
similar point is Luzviminda Francisco, “The First Vietnam: The U.S.-Philippines War of 1899”
(1973, 2-16, see n1). This categorical displacement has practical consequences for serious
research (as this researcher himself can attest to from experience). Loewen observes that the
Army’s website includes the Spanish-American War and pointedly excludes the Philippine War in
its list of “major wars.” Yet “it lists eleven different campaigns under “Philippine Insurrection,
[and] only three under Spanish-American War” (Loewen, n.d.). The Library of Congress
classification of the “Philippine Insurrection,” which has played tricks on beginning researchers,
has recently been changed to “Philippine-American War,” on similarly reasoned argument and
advocacy of concerned scholars and Filipino American community groups. We do not know what
this transformation portends or promises in terms of stimulating and sustaining research on the
war in the Philippines but it is a now-much welcomed step.
183
continued to be waged and rages — an “other war” whose desired stake is precisely to set
the terms for their critical recuperation or continued containment in U.S. historical or
23
popular consciousness. Waiting to be re-read or re-framed, these partial artifacts and
vestiges of the U.S.-Philippine War testify to this war as a war made other by the U.S.
war with Spain and to an even more other war as its continuing ramification in the
present.
In this chapter, we contend that in the first decade of the twentieth-century itself,
when the actual U.S.-Philippine War just as precipitously ebbed in importance to the
American public as it precipitately arose after the war with Spain, this other war was
already being fought and staked out with perhaps more anxiety and determination on the
continent than in the actual Philippine battlefields. The weapons with which this other
war was waged had effects as lethal as those inflicted by the ordnance being deployed in
the Philippines (the quick-loading Krag-Jorgensen, dum-dum bullets, naval cannonade,
the so-called infernal machines)—and the metaphorical ammunition or troop supply for it
23
One thinks here of recent resurgences, centering around the very monuments or popular icons
memorializing the “Spanish-American War” such as the Balangiga Bells controversy or the
Dewey Memorial in Union Square in San Francisco. With the Dewey Memorial controversy in
1997, the 90-foot-tall granite column “honoring the victor of the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898”
struck protesting Bay Area Filipino American community groups as celebrating a battle “that set
the stage for a United States occupation of the Philippine Islands and a war of resistance” barely
remembered in popular or textbook knowledge. With sympathizers, they asked for a plaque at the
base of the Memorial to put into historical perspective the popularly unacknowledged
implications of the Battle of Manila Bay and to provide a more candid appraisal of PhilippineAmerican relations. “What’s missing is the aftermath: Filipinos rejected their transfer from one
colonial power, Spain, to another. Battles broke out, and Dewey’s ships soon were lobbing shells
into Filipino-dug trenches.” Loewen documents a similar controversy involving Filipino
American community advocacy for a similar plaque for a monument in Minnesota, a plaque
which community cultural activists and their sympathizers took it upon themselves to install,
pending negotiations about long-term revision of the existing inscriptions. See King (1997, A13A14); Loewen (n.d).
184
was at least as inexhaustible as the body and military supplies for the actual war could
24
become tenuously low or be cut off at any point.
To appreciate the ultimately irrepressible significance of the U.S.-Philippine War
that might, in part, help to account for its active containment in official and popular
memory and the cultural or historiographic skirmishes waged around it in the United
States, one again only has to consider its scope and scale in comparison to the SpanishAmerican War. For “an enterprise so modestly begun,” the military historians David
Kohler and James Wensyel note, the Philippine war eventually saw a total deployment of
126,000 American officers and men (volunteers and regulars, practically the equivalent
of the total strength of the U.S. Armed forces at the time; at its peak, the deployment
reached a one-time total of 70,000 troops). More tellingly, “four times as many soldiers
served in this undeclared war in the Pacific as had been sent to the Carribean during the
Spanish-American War” and logged 2800 engagements. These U.S. Army historians cite
a scrupulous and much-cited U.S. Army body count of 4,234 killed and 2,818 wounded
on the American side by 1902 but do not note that no systematic information has yet been
compiled for American casualties as the Philippine war decentralized and moved to
24
Within four months of the outbreak of the war with the Filipino army in February 1899, the
U.S. already confronted a shortage of troops as it became evident that the war would be longer
and far more drawn out than the confident predictions of a speedy end to the “insurrection” made
by Maj. Gen. Elwell Otis. Stuart C. Miller and a few other historians note that 50% of the 30,000strong invasion and occupation troops sent to the Philippines were state volunteers whose terms
were ending that summer after the formal exchange of treaties between Spain and the United
States on 11 April 1899 determined their discharge and repatriation within six months of that date.
Miller notes that some state governors were already demanding the return of their state volunteer
regiments, and agitation for their return from parents and in public meetings was swirling in such
states as Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Tennessee, Nebraska, and South Dakota. One
outspoken Populist governor, according to Miller, “warned McKinley that keeping the volunteers
any longer would be as ‘unconstitutional as the war itself.’” Indeed, Miller further notes, only an
estimated 7 to 10% of the Philippine war volunteers decided to reenlist, on $500-bonus
inducements (Miller 1982, 78-80).
185
regions in the South. As do other historians who are aware that statistics were
deliberately not kept for Filipino casualties and losses, Kohler and Wensyel enumerate
the conventionalized figures of 16,000 casualties for the Filipino army, from an estimated
1898 strength of 20,000 to 30,000—which apparently is by itself a case of
undercounting—and civilian or noncombatant deaths of 200,000 “from famine,
pestilence, or the unfortunate happenstance of being too close to the fighting” (Kohler
and Wensyel 1990, 20). One can track a more consensual figure of 250,000 Filipino
deaths in a number of varying speculations on the war's casualty figures (as noted in
Chapter One), but those who cite it do not explain the basis for their common agreement.
What astonishes one, however, is the spread in various estimates from a low 100,000 to a
high one million, which at its worst would have meant the depopulation, by one-sixth, of
the turn of the twentieth century Philippines. No disputes arise over the total war cost to
the U.S. Treasury of $600 million, and at least $8 billion more in veterans’ pensions over
25
the succeeding years.
The U.S.-Philippine War also bears sustained critical reconsideration for the acute
ways it posed the history and the then-uncertain vectors of American national and
imperialist expansionism. Perhaps no other wars, except for the Civil War over a
generation before it, and the Vietnam War six or seven decades later, would divide the
nation as widely and critically as the war in the Philippines did. The most conspicuous
25
We are in debt to the late Jim Zwick for the important qualification on uncounted casualties for
the war as it extended to other Philippine regions and as continued but now highly localized
Filipino guerilla resistance began to be officially reported by the U.S. military and civil
government records as “banditry” or “brigandage” by or after 1901. For a contemporary
accounting, based on a study of government records, that produces the figure of $600 million war
cost (a figure that dwarfs the Spanish-American war initial appropriation of $50 million), see
Edward Atkinson's The Cost of War and Warfare from 1898 to 1902 (1902).
186
expression of the radical national crisis that it provoked was the major constitutional
debacle that the ensuing question of Philippine annexation inescapably heightened.
This constitutional crisis was quickly anticipated before the war and was given
deadly precision by the war’s extended duration and immediate political consequences. A
dominant position taken in these sharply divided debates was most baldly exemplified by
the imperialist senator Henry Cabot Lodge who thundered to a U.S. Senate in executive
session debate over the Treaty of Paris on 24 January 1899 that “I believe that the power
of the United States in any territory or possession outside of the States themselves is
absolute” (see Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3rd sess., 958). But Lodge, as pointed
out in the introductory chapter, was merely adumbrating similar positions in several
debates that had commenced in Congress in late 1898 and were to be maintained in
increasingly shrill tones by expansionist politicians and opinion leaders throughout the
subsequent eruption and unfolding of the war with the Filipino revolutionists; and that
such debates were clearly jumpstarted by a resolution filed by the Missouri senator
George C. Vest in early December 1898 (in anticipation of the Treaty then in negotiation)
that the federal government was not empowered by the U.S. constitution “to acquire
territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies” (See Congressional Record,
55th Cong., 3rd sess., 20; emphasis supplied).
Specifically, these debates turned upon the novel constitutional implications of the
prospective U.S. annexation of the “Philippine Islands.” Philippine annexation, through a
peace treaty with Spain, was feared or anticipated by concerned citizens, writers, and
politicians to pose a major political crisis that could prove unexampled in the history of
187
the nation and might result in the United States becoming a mere clone of European
imperialist nation-states and their extensive colonial systems. The anxieties surrounding
this constitutional crisis over “imperialism,” brought to the surface by the envisioned new
expansions beyond the nation’s continental borders, were what other subsequently
proposed congressional resolutions (such as Vest’s) had sought to address, with mixed
success and with results that to this day strike a few critical students as largely
unresolved.
We are only beginning to understand how the interventions and adjudication of
the U.S. Supreme Court in these debates through the so-called “Insular Cases” worked to
create several “resolutions:” a) they mollified these widespread public anxieties and
enabled the legal expressions of American neo-imperialism; b) they produced the
anomalous forms of simultaneous annexations and disincorporations of the Philippines
and Puerto Rico as “territories” and their people as differentially located “subjects” of the
Union; c) and they continued containing, through 1922, the many ramifications of the
rulings themselves in terms of the “constitutional” exercise of U.S. global power and the
question of citizenship and naturalization concerning the inhabitants of domains
26
imperialized by that power.
26
See the excellent and exhaustive studies of the Puerto Rican legal scholars Efrén Rivera Ramos
(1996) and Edilberto Roman (1998); also Leti Volpp (1999-2000) for a more locally-focused
consideration of the anomalous status and the basis of anti-Filipino exclusion in the context of
American empire formations, and Isaac (2006) for a legal-critical studies approach to and
semantic analysis of the language of the Insular Cases. Gratitude must be expressed here to
Professors Ramos, Roman, Leti Volpp and Isaac for our productive exchanges on these questions.
For recent and more extended studies of the Insular Cases and their consequences mostly for
Puerto Ricans and, to a certain extent, Filipinos, see Duffy and Marshall (2001) and Sparrow
(2006), among others, in a now growing body of scholarship on the status and constitutional
questions foregrounded by American imperial expansion by and after 1898, and left essentially
undetermined or simply contained in the jurisprudence and legislative corpus of American legal
institutions and judicial authorities.
188
So with nothing less than the veracity and integrity of that founding document of
the national polity, the U.S. Constitution, as the center of contention (and widely
considered in jeopardy because of the possible extension of its sovereignty and reach
beyond the nation’s settled continental frontiers), Senator Lodge himself, during the
Senate debate, would backtrack a bit from his claim of “absolute power” over “outside
possessions” and assert the Constitution’s selective application or exception (at least, its
27
“anti-slavery” clause) to these areas and their populations after eventual annexation.
The Comité Central Filipino in Hong Kong (also earlier known as the Hong Kong
Junta), which served as the propaganda and intelligence-gathering bureau of the Filipino
revolutionary government, kept close tabs on these expressions of tenuousness in the
national political will in U.S. public culture and within U.S. government circles.
Dismissed later by one contemporary American writer as “Aguinaldo’s clipping agency”
(Wildman 1901), the Comité advised General Aguinaldo about the mercurial flux of
political developments in the United States and about revolutionary strategy by dutifully
forwarding, through clandestine channels in Manila and Malolos, countless
newsclippings, multilingual translations, digests, and annotations of accounts on
latebreaking political developments in the U.S. and related U.S. maneuverings in its
27
Only “the limitation placed upon such outside possessions by the thirteenth amendment” posed
the “single exception” to this absolute power, the senator qualified. Lodge here specifically
referred to Section 1 of Article XIII of the U.S. Constitution which formally codified the abolition
of slavery on 18 December 1865 and provided that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
with the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis supplied). Senator
Vest’s assertion that no sanction could be had from its Constitution for the U.S. “to acquire
territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies” was one that was increasingly being
made at this critical juncture by a heterogeneity of voices, groups, and interests loosely ranged
under an “anti-imperialist” position and by a vocal and recently-established Anti-Imperialist
League.
189
relations with the other powers.
It was on the basis of the Comité’s developing assessment that the impending or
possible war with the United States would necessitate a series of political campaigns
“abroad,” designed to poke at the ideological faultlines of American public opinion, that
General Aguinaldo appointed Felipe Agoncillo as envoy of the First Republic to the
United States (for Agoncillo’s mission, see the critical narrative provided in Chapter
Two). Agoncillo quickly reorganized the Comité and systematically established a network
of revolutionary correspondents or representatives strategically posted in Canada,
Australia, Great Britain, Japan and Europe to coordinate the Filipino international
political campaigns. Wilfully ignored by U.S. authorities and the State Department and
barely tolerated or recognized in the arena of inter-imperial diplomatic politics, he was
nonetheless eventually joined in his U.S. and international political or propaganda work
for the First Republic by an expanded legation deputized and sent by Hong Kong
28
headquarters. One might sum up the work of Agoncillo and his colleagues as an
inversion of the classic doctrine of von Clausewitz (“war is politics by other means”)
thusly: politics is war by other means.
28
The international diplomatic initiatives of these revolutionary representatives make for
fascinating study and await critical elaboration, of which Chapter Two in this study is only a
beginning treatment. Their main mission consisted in reasoned efforts to “exhibit” and prove
Filipino political capacities to a North American and international audience and their tireless
maneuvers, inspite of one setback after another, to negotiate issues of Philippine sovereignty
under extremely circumscribed circumstances. It is barely remembered now that inspite of the
prudent efforts of these envoys, no imperial or major nation-state during that period consented or
dared to recognize the rights of belligerency and the status of the revolutionary government, in
obvious deference to U.S. interests and to forestall inter-imperial squabbles over the islands (see
Campomanes 2007 for some exploration of why this was the case and why the missions were,
from the beginning, doomed). Their network remained in place way into 1901. A suggestive
glimpse and particular instance of the work of these Filipino envoys, particularly their
coordinated campaigns with the U.S. Anti-Imperialist League, is in Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist
League and the Origins of Filipino-American Oppositional Solidarity” (1998).
190
It is against the backdrop of these contemporary divisions, subdivisions, and
quicksilver political realignments stemming from the prospects and duration of a U.S.Philippine War that one can speak of the contemporary existence and postcontemporary
extensions of an “other (Philippine-American) war.” Two important stakes must be
marked here for this critical narrative of an other war to emerge. First, the constitutional
crisis that shaped up and intensified also cleaved to an undeniable tenuousness of U.S.
sovereignty claims over the Philippines from the perspective of international law, a crisis
of legitimacy which the Treaty of Paris did not resolve and, in fact, clearly
29
foregrounded. Second, the unpreparedness of the U.S. Army and War Department in
war footing itself became at issue, sharpened by the grim turns that the Philippine war
was taking and would take within the two years after this war was repeatedly declared by
30
campaigning U.S. generals to be quick and easy one for the U.S. armed forces. As army
and war atrocities mounted and the increasingly genocidal tenor of the war became
quickly evident, two problems became endemic: troop discipline breakdown and sagging
national morale, especially as the Filipinos resorted to guerilla warfare by November
29
(The treaty’s ratification by the Senate in February 1899 by a close margin of one vote was
notably timed with the outbreak of the Philippine-American War.) In the apt words of the “antiimperialist” Stanford University President David Starr Jordan: “Even the most headlong of our
people admit that we stand in the presence of a real crisis, while, so far we can see, there is no
hand at the helm….By the fortunes of war the capital of the Philippine Islands fell, last May, into
the hands of our navy. The city of Manila we have held, and by dint of bulldog diplomacy, our
final treaty of peace has assigned to us the four hundred or fourteen hundred islands of the whole
archipelago. To these we have as yet no real title....” (Jordan 1899, 5).
30
Unchecked U.S. Army atrocities and the scorched-earth tactics adopted by certain generals
against Filipinos— combatants and non-combatants alike—would result in military press
censorship and embarassing congressional hearings (in which the errant officers are given a slap
on the wrists) by 1902. The selection of testimonies before Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s Senate
Committee on the Philippines in Henry Graff, Ed., American Imperialism and the Philippine
Insurrection (1969) is a good place for any beginning researcher to start.
191
1899, after losing in set-piece and conventional battles in which they suffered from
decisive disadvantages.
With mounting criticism of the war’s conduct abroad and from a arising antiimperialist or citizen opposition among important sectors of the American public and
intelligentsia, patriotic appeals and appeals for fresh troops would be ceaselessly made by
the McKinley government and imperialist writers. It is within this context that one can
begin to reconsider the relentless efforts of U.S. authorities to dismiss the cause of the
Filipino revolutionaries, Filipino appeals for U.S. withdrawal from the Philippines,
neutrality or, at worst, limited protection from other powers interested in annexing the
Philippines into their own dominions. It was in this context that American representations
of Filipino “racial incapacity for representative government,” “Filipino savagery,” and
“Aguinaldo’s despotism” began to be massively produced, to escalate and intensify, to
circulate widely, and to have decisive political effects both in the United States and in the
realm of international relations.
In turning to the extensive archival trove that remains from this U.S. cultural
politics (as an other war), one cannot but be struck by its aspect of massive proliferation
and nearly obsessive self-reproduction in the continent during the period coextending
with the U.S.-Philippine War of conquest and resistance. Taken together, the texts
produced during this period represent a formidable cultural armory that elaborated a kind
of imperialist violence and aggression distinct from and yet related to the savagery of the
U.S. conduct of war in the islands. Scores of early motion pictures, thousands upon
thousands of photographs, countless graphics or cartoons, reams of journalistic prose,
192
tomes of instant ethnographies and colonial reports, and major world’s fairs exhibits
(1901-1909) subjected Filipinos and the Philippines to a process of racialization and
alteritism that worked to extend the imperative of conquest and military victory into the
arena of U.S. popular culture and cultural production.
31
This other war clearly waged a cultural politics, whose work on behalf of or even
against the imperial project of the nation proved just as crucial and important to this
project’s eventual ascendancy as the simultaneous U.S. war and military operations in the
Philippines. These forms of cultural production unquestionably belonged to the same
order of conquest and imperialism as the very wars and the advocacy work directed by
expansionist politicians and military men. But what accounted for their power was
precisely their status as independent and highly contingent initiatives through which the
U.S. culture industry could intervene in the larger debates over empire-building and
national consolidation. Filmmakers, photographers, graphic artists, anthropologists,
journalists and other cultural producers wielded and borrowed from the language of turnof-the-century visual culture and the already sophisticated technologies of mass media or
communication to supplement and elaborate the work otherwise performed by a clunky
war machinery that could not accomplish on its own the “pacification” of both an agitated
American public and intransigent Filipino resistance.
This “other war” as cultural politics, or this culture war, revolved around a set of
elusive but obsessive questions and came under the rubric of what was then called “The
Philippine Question” or “The Philippine Problem.” One question that it foregrounded was
31
“Alteritism” is a neologism invented by the literary critic Sara Suleri-Goodyear to refer to the
obsessive and limiting binarist logic of selfhood and otherness that substructures both the
constitution of imperial will/discourse and the colonial studies that fixate upon it as the object of
critique (1992, esp. Ch. 1).
193
that of American national identity or purpose in light of imperial expansion, which now
needed to be clarified or elaborated precisely through interested advocacy and the test of
public discourse, under challenge as it was by Filipinos and before the eyes of the world.
Another involved the vaunted supremacy of American political culture (civilization and
self-government were the contemporary keywords), which now needed to be
ritualistically affirmed and against which Filipino primitivism (or as coded then, native
savagery and tribalism, etc.) were ranged as its salient Other and contestant. In effect,
this other war would shape up as a war with the Filipinos who were quickly cast in the
role of “Other” and who would come, in fact, to embody “otherness” itself for empirebuilders and imperial citizens. But as we go on to argue below, this culture war also
implied and inadvertently foregrounded a war with and within what was doubly posited
32
as an American national “Self” and other-self.
These contested concepts were far from empty or abstract and the war waged over
them was far from contained within or limited to an airtight ensemble of U.S. referents
and protagonists. Even if the referents were actively excised or not explicit, the concepts
or constructs deployed had very specific targets against which the heft of the resulting
cultural armory was precisely weighed. For example, primitivism when deployed by these
cultural texts was not simply a racial denigration of Filipinos but a re-inflection of the
recalcitrance or conduct of Filipino guerilla activity as a mode of “uncivilized warfare.”
In this case, the reference or orientation of the political deployment of the concept
32
“Otherness” or alterity is a concept no longer in need of theoretical exposition, given its now
commonplace character in cultural critique, although a provocative deconstruction of its highly
problematic deployments in colonial studies is found in Suleri-Goodyear (1992); it is a still useful
critical conception that this chapter hopes to demonstrate operationally in the analysis that
follows.
194
testifies, implicitly, to an unmarked other: the undesirable persistence, for U.S.
authorities, of Filipino guerilla resistance itself.
Civilization and self-government were, to be sure, two of the most contested
keywords with regard to the political aspirations of Filipinos during this period. A
developmentalist language suffuses this other war’s cultural archive, setting the terms for
the wholesale denigration of Filipino desires for self-determination and independence on
racialist and cultural-determinist grounds. It is a language that, as the critic Vicente
Rafael has aptly described, “envisions an essential continuity between the individual’s
possession of its body — its ability to rein in its impulses and consolidate its boundaries
— and a people’s control over the workings and the borders of its body politic” (Rafael
1993). But again, while in this case it is a language racuously spoken in the United States
in explicit reference to the “primitive” Aguinaldo’s “tribal” peoples, the widespread use
of this language could also be marking or referring implicitly to the crisis pervading that
conjuncture in the history of U.S. nation-building as a result of imperialist expansion (see
Campomanes 2008).
The discourses of selfhood or self-government here, we argue, would be lexical
and syntactical encodings of a war or a struggle deep in the heart of a nation poised to see
its borders break down as it expands imperially beyond the continent just as it still
confronts the “other” problem of assimilating many racial or ethnic others into its body
politic: emancipated blacks, assertive white women, vanishing Indians, and millions of
33
Europe’s “unwashed” non-Anglo immigrants. In the end and in this light, imperialist
33
A tandem reading of the following groundbreaking accounts of this conjunction between
nation-building and imperial expansion at this time can indicate something of the intractable
anxieties in the general culture over the possible disintegration of U.S. national identity, as it had
195
expansion actually sharpened the problem of assimilating subjects and territories that are
also being defined, by nature, to be racially or historically unassimilable (or only partly
assimilable) into a nation whose borders are simultaneously expanding and requiring
contraction. Because imperialist expansion dangerously distended the borders of the
nation to include “other” territories and peoples, such borders themselves now needed to
be secured or redrawn. It is this anxiety-ridden paradox that the other/culture war
symptomatized as well as addressed. And if “war is politics by other means,” and the
politics at stake was national consolidation at the very moment of imperial expansion,
then this other war actually faced the larger mandate of making imperial-national
expansion (and consolidation) as much a micropolitics as a macropolitics. These
questions were to be as much an individual concern for the ordinary citizen as a common
experience for the entire nation being reimagine —or whose borders needed to be
redrawn — at the very cusp of empire-building “abroad.”
Ultimately, an examination of the other war would enable us to think of “casualty
figures” beyond actual body counts and the brute reality of war atrocities and violence.
For this other war produced a form of violence very difficult to appreciate, even now with
the hindsight afforded by the passage of slightly over a hundred years: precisely, it makes
of the actual war an other itself. In so aestheticizing it (for to make something other is to
reduce it to an aesthetic grid), the actual war is brought back to the continent but now
been constituted up to that point, by the (im)possible inclusion or assimilation of alien others and
non-Anglos: Matthew Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish,
and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995, esp. Chs. 4 and 5); Gail Bederman, Manliness
and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995;
77-215); Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United
States (1999, 3-85, 116-131); and Kristin Hoganson, Fighting For American Manhood: How
Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998, 107-199).
196
shorn and cleansed of its mess, many costs, and savage malevolence. And a major
“casualty figure” of this other war and war with the Filipino other, we argue, is the figure
most directly tasked to prosecute it for the imperially expanding but paradoxically
endangered nation (whose unconditional support he must now sustain, and whose “love”
he must “win” or deserve): the American soldier.
Soldier and Empire-State
In Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, the historian
George Mosse tracks the genesis, many lives, and rhetorical compulsions of a symbolic
discourse emerging out of post-revolutionary and early nineteenth-century Europe and
peaking during World War I (and it is a discourse equally true of the now-passing
"American Century" and now extensive war résumé of the United States). Calling this
symbolic discourse "The Myth of the War Experience," Mosse notes that it revolves
around a figure who simultaneously or alternately elicits admiration and revulsion,
respect and dishonor, veneration and abasement from the very imagined communities or
entire nations he is imputed with the power to symbolize and represent. Mosse designates
this pivotal figure and constitutive element of this Myth and the modern war experience
the "citizen-soldier," or the soldier as citizen (1990, 19).
Developed in over two centuries by an array of influential (and some obscure)
European statesmen, intellectuals and philosophers, poets and visual artists, and by
countless soldiers and war veterans themselves, this Myth linked the war experience as
"organized mass death" to post-Enlightenment narratives of ethical formation; that is, it
linked the fighting soldier or army to modern citizenship and the ideological and
197
34
territorial imperatives of the imperial nation-state. This novelty and modernity of the
soldier or the fighting army was itself registered in the generalized shifts in the popular
perceptions and actual "status" of soldiers from conscripts and glamorized (at times,
despised) "mercenaries" to enthusiastic "volunteers" and self-sacrificing patriots.
Post-revolutionary France and post-Napoleonic Germany, in appealing to, and
compelling, male citizens to fight for no other motives than "freedom" and the
"Fatherland," became (for Mosse) the inaugural and fertile grounds for the formation of
this Myth; that is, in fighting on behalf of beleaguered Germany or expansionist France,
or yet again in the grisly trench warfare of the "Great War" much later, ordinary male
citizens as brave and manly soldiers were also privileged as "representatives of the local
or national community" and gained entry into these nations' pantheon of heroes (ibid. 19
and 22).
But this nationally “representative” charge of the soldier that evolves in the West
is not as unproblematic or easily imputed as it sounds. To hold these fermenting
developments in the historical understanding of the citizen-soldier (and his focal place in
the libidinal economy of nationalism) together with an appreciation of the curious work
performed by Loewen’s American war memorials is to get a sense of a haunting paradox.
Benedict Anderson has pointed to the special power that the "cenotaphs and tombs of
Unknown Soldiers" possess, for example, and observes that their claim on people's
attention is vertebrated with conflicting demands. They are able to solicit "public
34
Ibid., p. 3. Mosse notes that with the French Revolution and the German Wars of Liberation,
soldiers in Europe acquired a respectability that military service in the name of King or God
could not accord their predecessors. (If anything, Christic or chivalric iconography of courage,
self-sacrifice, and redemption was itself absorbed into and redeployed in this new valorization of
the soldier as citizen.)
198
ceremonial reverence" only because they do not purport to identify or contain the actual
remains of soldiers. Although emptied of empirical referents (they refer to every one and
no particular soldier), these tombs are "nonetheless saturated with ghostly national
imaginings" (1983, 17).
General Douglas MacArthur's 1962 Address to the U.S. Military Academy, as
Anderson quotes him, performs similar operations: in this famous speech, he conjures the
American soldier in the paradoxical yet simultaneous terms of ethereal absence and
corporeal presence. For MacArthur, "a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in
blue and grey, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty,
honour, country" if the soldier's sacrifices are not recognized by the American public.
Claimed by the future as the herald of American ideals, he is also made to "belong” to the
present, to the American people, and to the past or a long line of accomplishments by
martial forbears. The uniform colors invoked in this speech symbolize the two World
Wars, the Spanish-American War, and the Civil War in a kind of temporal regress (ibid.,
n2).
We can actually track back, beyond McArthur, to another hortatory speech made
at Canton, Ohio against the backdrop of the extending period of the U.S.-Philippine War
in 1903 to get a better sense of the power and appeal evoked by these compulsive
exhortations. Perhaps no one has more plainly made these double moves of celebrating
the American soldier while reducing him to anonymity than then-Secretary of War Elihu
Root who intoned:
When the war with Spain was over, the 250,000 men who had
been raised for that war disappeared as quietly to their homes,
never thinking for a moment of exercising the slightest influence
upon the political life of the country. That this is so unnoticed,
199
and causes so little surprise among our people, is the highest
testimony to the abiding confidence of the people in the soldiers
of the American army. They have their faults, but their faults are
small and their virtues are great; and they are justly the pride of
the American people from whom they come, and to whom, when
their duty is done, they return.
Root, in this speech, renders up the American soldier here as a paradoxically self-limited
and limiting figure (1916, 18-19). The citizen-soldier is subjected to the abstractive
demands of nationalist symbolisms, and inadvertently exposed as vulnerable to disavowal
by the very nation from whence he springs and whose “love” he must elicit.
This burden of vulnerability always needs relief or easing and it is what efforts
like MacArthur's in 1962, Root's in 1903, countless other similar appeals in times of war,
and war monuments, seek to do on the most obvious level. Appeals like MacArthur and
Root's perform this work by resituating the American soldier in a line of affinity and a
range of relationships to underscore to whom he belongs and who belongs to him as the
fulcrum of common national patriotism. The American soldier thus is made to constitute
"a center of power that help[s to] define who are the outsiders and insiders in American
culture" over the course of the generations (Linenthal 1993, 216).
An element of transhistoricism thus subtends the relationship between the soldier
and the nation. Root underscores this for the American soldier and his audience in an
1899 speech extolling the soldiers who were being sent to the fight the war of conquest in
the Philippines: "on every field from the day when along the stone walls that line the
Cambridge road, the men of Concord and Acton each made his own disappearing gun
carriage to the day when the flag floated over the citadel of Manila, the American soldier
has answered loyally to every call of duty." Apart from situating the citizen-soldier
within a valorized genealogy, Root’s exhortation here is twofold: to the American people,
200
in Root’s concluding words, to "be faithful and fair to them [who] maintain the honor of
the flag and the integrity of American sovereignty;" and to the male youth of the nation to
renew the sacrifices of their predecessors that they may be so remembered in the present
and the future (Root 1916, 13).
35
This chapter addresses these paradoxical images of the American soldier and the
demands upon him to become both a victorious hero and a casualty figure—especially in
relation to the U.S.-Philippine War and his onerous task of consolidating imperial
nationality and nationhood across temporal, spatial, and social barriers through his war
work. Following Root and Mosse in a sense, we argue that more than the cenotaphs,
tombs, and monuments themselves, it is really the figure of the American citizen-soldier
that carries the charge of national symbolism and kinship. Memorialized by the
monuments, the figure of the American soldier becomes the spirit of his people, but in
ways that produce tenuous connections and contradictory effects. Anderson himself
suggests that the monuments steep the soldier in anonymity and abstraction and inspire
his eternal life and momentary deaths (and so do, equally, the hortatory speeches). As a
specially burdened citizen, he risks potential neglect even as he also becomes the
common sign in which an imperially expanding nation is exhorted to recognize itself.
35
Anderson prefers to call this “transhistoricism” to nationalist narrative as “intrahistorical,”
concerned as he is to mark where religion and nationalism actually part in their rhetorical or
hortatory labor (when they are not otherwise conjoined or homologous in their claims); that is,
although nationalist appeals around the American soldier in this case are saturated with Christic
(McArthur’s “white crosses”) or religious tropes—or as Linenthal would put it, “acts of folkreverence” that are demanded of the American people for their soldiers as “sainted heroes”---it
remains the case that the best that the citizen-soldier can hope for is a niche six feet deep
(perhaps, even an unmarked grave) and he is not guaranteed a place in heaven as religion’s
divinely mandated warriors would be: the citizen-soldier becomes a casualty figure, as it were, of
the nation’s secularism and modernity. See Anderson, (1998, 360-368); and Linenthal (1993,
138).
201
Here, we wish to emphasize the constitutive weight and impossibility of the soldier’s
burden which, when coupled with the brute realities of war violence that he must face,
must mean that his morale and resolve are ever-fragile resources that require constant
replenishment.
Indeed, "the theater of war," to borrow a fatally felicitous military phrase,
involves more than playing the part of the unquestioning patriot. Every citizen and
soldier must face the grim reality of violence and the imminence of death, grief, and loss
that war occasions. How, then, can a nation (an imperial nation, in this case) create or
sustain the force for its fighters and supporters to face such objectively daunting odds?
36
Such appeals as Root's or McArthur’s do not and cannot always suffice, especially when
the war being fought is actually or potentially unjustifiable, and doubt and dissent arise
from critical members of the imagined nation or from those who inhabit its margins and
37
contest its claims. It is in being mindful of the anxious lack or insufficiency of
imperialist verbal and monumental exhortations that we turn to the other war and the
ways in which its cultural work both extended and supplemented national empirebuilding, politics, and actual war work abroad.
36
Here lies the appeal of nations as imagined communities "because regardless of the actual
inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep,
horizontal comradeship," as Anderson has classically written. This powerful affinity is equalled
only by religious faith in its capacity to make "so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as
to willingly die for such limited imaginings" (1983, 16).
37
Root's 1899 speech, for example, contained a veiled barb against the emergent anti-imperialist
critique launched by a motley group of concerned citizens as early as mid-to-late 1898: "I protest
in the name of the American soldier against all those who, believing because they wish to believe,
without opportunity for explanation or contradiction, circulate and print the idle stories which fly
through the air from malicious tongues, impugning the honor of the true and noble Americans
who are protecting the honor of our flag."
202
American Soldier in Imperial “Love and War”
In this main section, we wish to indicate something of the political work and
aspirations of the many cultural texts that were deployed in the other war. If anything,
these texts are shot through with vestigial casualty figures of the American soldier and of
this other/culture war that was largely fought on the continent. Here, we endeavor to
expand the notion of the war monument, as Loewen and Anderson have used it, into a
complex of representational genres and texts that would include contemporary U.S. mass
38
communication and visual culture texts. In this case, we focus on early American
cinema productions, or as they were called then at the very moment of film’s inception as
a form, “moving pictures.” At the heart of our discussion here is a close reading of a 16
mm. film in three parts, titled The American Soldier in Love and War (hereafter cited as
ASLW). Photographed by the filmmaker G. W. Bitzer on 9 July 1903, it was released for
public exhibition by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. in October 1903 and
39
redistributed in 1905.
38
As will become quickly evident, the curious forms of “history-writing” of which the war
monument was the supplementary obverse (both the monumental inscriptions deciphered by
Loewen and” transhistoricism” flagged by Anderson as incipient allegories of empire-building
and nationalism) also have their own analogues to the cultural texts, or at least the cinematic
texts, that are examined here.
39
Copyright nos. H33641, H33642, H33643, 21 July 1903, American Mutoscope and Biograph.
Co., Paper Print Collection, Library of Congress. The combined length of the surviving footage is
90 feet and runs, on projection, for a brisk three minutes. See Paul Spehr, “Filmmaking at the
American Mutoscope and Biograph Co, 1900-1906” (1982, 325, for the first launching date of the
film; and 322-327, for a brief account of Bitzer’s early filmography for the A.M.B., also known
as the Biograph, from 1900 to 1906). See also American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. (AMB),
Bulletin No. 55, 27 November 1905 in Kemp Niver and Bebe Bergsten (1971, 213), for the 1905
redistribution date.
203
Very little was known about ASLW when research on it for this study and on other
“Spanish-American War” films at the Library of Congress was begun in the early 1990s.
The film archivist Paul Spehr found it to be among the first “long entertainment” releases
of the A.M.B., although perhaps it is more properly classified as a “story film;” that is,
one that has a protonarrative structure before “narrative cinema” emerges with
filmmakers like D. W. Griffith after 1907-08 (Spehr 1982, 325). Film historian Charles
Musser provided a generic one-paragraph discussion and reproduced some studio stills of
the film in the first number of his multi-volume work on early American cinema; but
Musser’s contextualization of this film in his chapter on the Spanish-American War and
the birth of U.S. cinema predictably ignored the significance of the film’s recovery as a
Spanish-American War text and took that classification for granted, an historical elision
about which we make a critical point below.
40
Unsurprisingly, an earlier descriptive digest of the film by the famous
archeologist of early American cinema Kemp Niver bore similarly indicative lacunae.
While Niver renders the film’s cinematic action in the deadpan and proximate ways that
were true for the other films in the research guide that he compiled, some intriguing
traces of the trajectory of Niver’s heroic recovery project on the first-generation film
prints—of which this particular early American film was a part—leads one to an initial
speculation that Niver misclassified the film and left out important details about its
40
See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990, 342-343).
Subsequently, I found out that Peter Davis’ parodic videodocumentary on the Philippine Question
and the U.S.-Philippine War, This Bloody Blundering Business (1975), also used the surviving
footage, setting it to parlor music (as was the exhibition custom of the time) and providing mock
inter-titles to fill in the lacunae of the extant prints. Understandably, Davis does not cite
documentation of the provenance and does not note the generic classification of this film.
204
41
“story” and productive orientations.
Niver identifies the "Spanish-American War" as
the unifying theme for the films, a description that creates suspicion on the part of a more
knowledgeable reader that something was left out. He also presents them as a separable
unit, hence, his serial numbering and the self-contained synopses he provides for each
print. But from his three-part description alone, an organic conception of the films
emerges, no matter how dimly (Niver 1985 [1967], 7):
"The American Soldier in Love and War, no. 1 [32 ft.]: A
woman is sitting at a table with her head on her arms in a set of a
living room. She moves when a man in military uniform comes
into the room from behind a curtain. He walks towards her and
begins to comfort her. The film ends as the man in military
uniform is embracing the woman."
"The American Soldier in Love and War, no. 2 [31 ft]: A
painted backdrops depicts a jungle. From camera right, a man in
the uniform of a Spanish-American War soldier enters. He acts
as if he is wounded or exhausted and falls to the ground. Two
actors, a man and woman dressed as natives, enter from camera
left. The male native immediately sets upon the fallen American
soldier and attempts to kill him. There is a scuffle. The woman
begs for the life of the soldier as the film ends."
"The American Soldier in Love and War, no. 3 [27 ft]: This
was filmed from the point of view of a theater audience. The set
and surroundings convey the impression of a jungle or a desert
island, with heavy foliage and an ocean nearby. The only onstage piece of equipment is a doorway to a hut. A white man in
an Army uniform with a large bandage around his head is sitting
in front of the hut. Standing alongside, facing the camera, is an
actor made up to resemble a large black woman. She is fanning
the man with a palm fan. Another native is holding a bowl from
which the wounded soldier is eating. The next action shows a
41
Niver has been rightly celebrated for converting the nearly 3,000 early films into negatives
from the paper prints in which they were originally submitted to the Library of Congress for
copyright purposes until 1912 and for reconstructing their production history from rare sources
such as publicity catalogs/bulletins, early trade publications, and production logs. His epic and
painstaking effort involved a dedicated staff that rephotographed the prints frame by frame for
over a decade, later viewing and annotating them for production credits, casting, location and date
of production, and alternate versions/titles. Paul Spehr, "Foreword," p. vii, and Niver, "Preface,"
pp. ix-x, in Kemp Niver, Early Motion Pictures (1985 [1967]).
205
man with a beard and pith helmet arriving accompanied by a
white woman wearing a large picture hat. The woman rushes
into the arms of the soldier. After much embracing, the soldier
indicates that the black woman had saved his life, and the picture
closes with the white woman removing her necklace and handing
it to the other woman."
Niver's description for these three seemingly separate prints stands in tension with
their actual “emplotment.” Of these prints, ASLW no. 1 and ASLW no. 2 sound from his
description as self-contained enough to be watched separately while ASLW no. 3 would
seem predicated on the first two for its conclusive character to be established. It is thus
perhaps not surprising that Niver gives the latter more texture, describing it as "filmed
from the point of a view (P.O.V.) of a theater audience" as though the first two were not,
or that the continuity in characters, setting, and P.O.V. across all three is not clear. Only
in ASLW no. 2 does Niver provide the context of the Spanish-American War so that
ASLW nos. 1 and 3 are freed from this referent and become transposable to wars before
1898 or to themes and events that involve the questing of a white soldier-hero in
comparable "jungles" or fronts.
On viewing the prints themselves, one discovers that they actually form a
continuous “plot” or organic series of actions that depict the American soldier's heroism
and predicament. Elaborated in three shots and scenes, this film (here we drop Niver's
“tripartite” theorem) retains the same characters and sutures the themes of separation,
conflict, reconciliation, and reunion that mark the hero's displacements. Indeed, the
company that produced the film advertised and marketed it as one unit while indicating
206
its tripartite design: in 1903, the year of its making and first release, and again in 1905,
42
long after the war to which it specifically alludes was considered over:
2418
The American Soldier In Love and War
[161 feet]
These three scenes are to be used in connection with two war
views, to make a complete story in one film for projection. The
first scene shows the young American officer parting with his
sweetheart and starting for the Philippines. The second shows the
regiment leaving its post to embark on the transport--then comes
a fight in the brush, then the wounding of the young officer; his
capture and rescue by a Filipino girl, and finally his meeting the
sweetheart and her father in the Filipino hut, where he has been
nursed back to life.
Significant textual riddles about the film would result if the 1903 description is
contrasted with that of 1905, information from the company's surviving photo catalogs,
43
and Niver's 1967/1985 digest. What is vaguely described in the 1903/5 announcements
as the departure of the soldier's regiment for the Philippines (preceding the "scuffle with
the male native" in the second scene) does not survive with the extant version and must
42
American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. (AMB), Bulletin No. 9, 29 August 1903 and Bulletin
No. 55, 27 November 1905, in Niver and Bergsten (1971, 90 and 230).
43
One AMB photo catalog [n.d.] breaks down the stipulated length of 161 feet of the release
print into 55 feet for No.1, 47 feet for No. 2, and 53 feet for No. 3. This photo catalog and the
1905 announcement for the film list specific production numbers and codes for its three scenes:
2418--"Garzatori, "2419--"Garzatura," and 2420--"Garzava," respectively. See Biograph Photo
Catalog, Vol. 5, Reel 2, Motion Picture Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors, 18941908 (Microfilm Edition), Motion Picture and Television Reading Room, Library of Congress;
and AMB, Bulletin No. 55, 27 November 1905, in Niver and Bergsten (1971, 213). The film's
internal and advertised structures may also have constituted a copyrighting stratagem, given the
widespread piracies and litigious patent wars among producers that characterize the early period
of American film and technological invention. David Levy states that the AMB developed
"notoriously erratic copyright practices" in its early years (see his "Re-constructed Newsreels, Reenactments and the American Narrative Film”; 1982, 249). Indeed, Niver lists three separate
copyright numbers for each scene of the film even as they all carry the same copyright date. On
the "patent wars" and resulting litigation and their precipitant effects on early film form,
technological innovations, and early film as intellectual property, see André Gaudreault (1990
114-122), and Janet Staiger (1990, 189-191).
207
now be considered lost. And while the 1905 blurb essentially retains the 1903
description, it drops the original specification of inserting "two" war views for the more
general "war views": a cue to exhibitors to make variable kinds of inserts from already
available and extensive newsreel footage on the Philippine- or the Spanish-American
Wars. The insertion of the "war views"—exhibition practices in the period involved such
improvisational mixtures of available or specified "shorts"—would have made the film's
narrative projection much longer and more intricate. But to thus imagine the film's
insertion of the war views (which film historians would call "actualities" or "reenactments" [Levy 1982, 245-250; Musser 1983, 32-34, 41-44]) is to consider the curious
discontinuities that such "inserts" should bring to this film's narrative arc.
Charles Musser identifies such "two war views" to be an actuality film of troops
marching off to war at Governor's Island, "Fifteenth Infantry, USA" (the full title is
actually "Fifteenth Infantry Off for Cuba"), and "Warfare Practice" which he calls "a
44
realistically staged battle footage." It is curious that Musser, usually a scrupulous
researcher, should lop off that important part of the title for one insert, “… off for Cuba.”
Like Niver, Musser glosses over the specifically U.S.-Philippine War reference or content
of the film. This is evident in his unconsidered acceptance of the film’s prior
classification by Niver and others as a Spanish-American War text. But it is puzzling that
Musser would also excise the reference to Cuba in the full title for the insert, which
would have made the misclassification consistent. Arguably, these are not incidental
44
These specified inserts even exceed the main three the parts in length: "No. 1575, Fifteenth
Infantry Off for Cuba" (the full title) was listed for 73 feet in the AMB Picture Catalogue of
November 1902, p. 183, Box A-47, "The Biograph Co.," MPTV Reading Room, Library of
Congress. "Warfare Practice" (No. 516) was titled "Skirmish Fight" and listed for 180 feet, in the
AMB Photo Catalog (n.d.) Vol. 2, Reel 2, Motion Picture Catalogs, n.p.
208
forms of omission or inconsistencies but a function of how American film and cultural
historians, in their acts of mediating or relaying cultural texts of the ‘Spanish-American
War,” also fall prey to this term’s tendency to make the “U.S.-Philippine War “ a
shadowy other and minor historical episode: an effect completely at odds with the
artifactual remains of the film in question, whether in the form of fragmentary prints or
contemporary exhibition cues.
Yet the film retains its complexity and political valence as a document of U.S.
nation-building or nationalism in its imperialist currents and as a cultural weapon pressed
into service in the war against Filipinos. Even in its fragmentary state, this film recharges
the American soldier with iconic powers in ways that recall, if exceed, Anderson's and
45
Loewen’s monuments. The film functions as an allegory on the nobility of American
national purpose against the "brutality" of Spanish oppression in Cuba and Filipino
guerilla resistance. Although the contextual referents here consist in the two distinct wars
with Spain and the Filipinos, the suggested insertion of the "Fifteenth Infantry Off for
45
As will be obvious, the readings offered here of the filmic inscriptions of the American soldier
in ASLW were first inspired by Amy Kaplan's suggestive essay on primitivism, the crisis and
construction of masculinity, and the reconstruction of American nationhood through imperial
expansion (1990; reprinted in Kaplan 2004, 92-120). After reading an early conference version of
this, my Chapter Four, for purposes of critical commentary, Kaplan went on to write something
about the film and publish it (1999; reprinted in Kaplan 2004, 146-170), giving ASLW a particular
interpretation (for example, the Father in the film is tagged by Kaplan as “Uncle Sam” himself),
and although her interpretations seem much more specific and plausibly so in that later essay, I
remain convinced that the power of this film lies in its general applicability, that is, the ways in
which (if one follows the 1903/05 company descriptions and Niver's latter-day one) it provides a
general template of the kinds of affective filiations and affiliations central to the romance of
nation as empire. To specify the film's elements and sociologize them rather coherently as Kaplan
did in her 1999 essay is, as one would say in literary studies, “to enclose the text with a final
signified.”
209
Cuba" footage after the parting scene in ASLW No. 1 between the white soldier, (who is
specifically leaving for the Philippine war), and his "sweetheart" (who fears for his fate in
such a faraway land), should signal their patent conflation in the spectator's gaze. Spain,
itself a white nation, may have been imaged in contemporary cultural forms as a "brute"
but only at the risk of effacing the intrication of the "brutality" of the primitive with race
and color (as in the film's scuffle scene between the white hero and the "Filipino" in
blackface, where race and color are coded as signs of the Filipino’s primitive brutality).
46
If anything, this transposition of "primitive brutality" onto any Other only illustrates what
Mariana Torgovnick has called the "generalized notion of the primitive" that subtends
Western discourses of empire/nation-building and selfhood (1990, 22 and 276).
Yet that Niver substituted the war with Spain for the film's Philippine context is
semantically strategic. It is a move guaranteed by the film's own incongruous
representation of troops headed for Cuba as no different from those sent to fight the
Filipino rebels. The meaning of nation as empire (and of the soldier as both its semiosic
icon and envoy) was certainly pulled between the short and glorious war with Spain and
the long and gruesome war against Filipinos that followed it. What should be denoted
here is the difference between fighting a war of conquest against a struggling people and
fighting a "war of liberation" for Cubans against oppressive Spanish colonists. The war in
the Philippines would be rhetorically rendered with the same “nobility of purpose” as the
46
See Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987, 65), for an 1898 cartoon that
depicts Spain as a simianized and treacherous foe who tramples a miniaturized American flag
while stepping on a fresh grave whose tombstone reads: "Maine soldiers murdered by Spain."
This brute is shown wielding a knife that drips with the blood of the three American soldiers in
the cartoon whose mutilated corpses are strewn about him.
210
war in Cuba but this semantic extension became untenable as anti-imperialist critics and
47
Filipino publicists emphasized the emergent contradiction in their critiques.
Conflated or reckoned together, these two wars enfold between them the valor
and villainy, celebration and neglect, symbolism and anonymity, that shape the soldier's
48
half-life as a national emblem. It is within the semantic field bordered by such extreme
valuations of the work performed by the soldier that the film performs its own
mediations. In plotting the American soldier's various dislocations and their meanings,
47
A thumbnail discussion of the anti-imperialist Americans is in Miller (1982, 104-128) although
accounts of this sort are considerably elaborated and refined in work such as Willard Gatewood,
Black Americans and the White Man's Burden (1975) and Gaines (1993) which widens the
debates on the Philippine Question that are normally limited by historians to the elite imperialist
and anti-imperialist sectors. See also the texts cited in n33, this chapter, esp. Hoganson (1998).
Jim Zwick’s untimely death left his dissertation, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the
Development of a Foreign Policy Opposition, 1898-1921,” tragically uncompleted, but what I
have seen of it promises to radically overturn a great deal of our received wisdom on the muchmaligned and much-misunderstood Anti-Imperialist League and their assiduous commitments to
Philippine “independence.” For a typical example of Filipino efforts abroad to dispute American
claims on the Philippines, see Felipe Agoncillo, To The American People (1900).
48
The dispute over the war atrocities of the U.S. armed forces in the Philippine-American War
continued without let up (and especially in the analogical context of the Vietnam War) in the work
of the few scholars who worked on the subject (only the stoppage of it by the editor of
PILIPINAS, the late-lamented guild journal of the Philippine Studies Association, where it raged
for sometime, effectuated an uneasy truce). See the vituperative debate the ensued after Brian
Linn criticized Stuart Creighton Miller's thoughtful account of the war and its impact on national
opinion, Benevolent Assimilation, as "one of the severest attacks on the U.S. Army ever
published." Linn, "Stuart C. Miller and the American Soldier” (1986a; also 1986b, his reply to
Miller's response); S. C. Miller, "Response” (1986a; and 1986b, his rejoinder to Linn's reply to
his response); John Gates, letter to the Editor (1987), with Miller's reply to it. Linn and Gates had
both pounced on Miller for amplifying and providing extensive documentation for the antiimperialist critique and such earlier critical accounts of the U.S.-Philippine War as Leon Wolff's
Little Brown Brother (1961), and for taking (in his book) an unblinking look at the excesses
committed in this war of conquest as did the contemporary anti-imperialists and later accounts
such as Wolff's. For works that stop short of completely exonerating the U.S. Army, see Glenn
Anthony May (1991), Gates' own Schoolbooks and Krags: The U.S. Army in the Philippines
(1973) and Linn's own The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902
(1989). The latter two (Gates and Linn) are self-acknowledged military historians, which might
partly explain their intemperate reactions to work like Miller's.
211
the film distributes certain kinds of labor among the various characters even as it also
typifies their characteristics.
For example, the white soldier-hero is courageous and stoic and the white heroine
is inconsolable in her grief during the parting in ASLW No. 1. The soldier's seriousness of
purpose and his efforts to allay the heroine's fears are emphatically signified by the
actor’s dignified comportment. The many hugs and kisses, and the interminable goodbyes
exchanged between the lovers illustrate, through “acting by indication” (in the absence of
49
sound, the convention of screen acting at the time), these contrastive actions/reactions
of the hero and heroine. By sharper contrast, the Filipino male “primitive” is depicted as
a treacherous brute and "the Filipino girl" comes off as a clear subordinate and his
hesistant accomplice during his savage attack against the American soldier in ASLW No.
2. This idea of treachery is simultaneously inflected by a shadowy form of cowardice on
the Filipino’s part—a metaphorical allusion to ideas in circulation in U.S. public
discourse that Filipino guerilla resistance was a mark, precisely, of uncivilized warfare
and “cowardly” conduct—when the he enters from camera-left in stealth after soldier
falls, wounded. Here, the Filipino’s simian features are suggested through make-up and
his “black skin” is indicated by his “black underclothes,” as if to ensure that color was the
most visible and phenotypical sign of Filipino primitivism. The female primitive, " a
large black woman" and thus hardly girlish in visage, hovers to the left as the soldier
grapples with the club-wielding Filipino warrior. She is flung to a kneeling position
beside the disabled hero to beg for his life after she grips the male primitive's stone club
from behind, suggesting the primal and brute force of the Filipino.
49
See Musser (1990, 3, 5, 36, and 211).
212
Here, contemporary viewers were apparently expected to recognize this scene as
an allusion to and a rearticulation of the Pocahontas-Capt. John Smith “culture story,”
especially for the ways in which it could engender (in the multiple senses of the term) the
50
Filipino-American colonial encounter. That the “native American” romance is retold at
the same time as an “Africanized” post-Reconstruction scenario designates the “Filipino”
as a foreign presence made familiar and a familiar image made alien in the complicated
contexts of American colonial conquests and domestic racial crises. Strikingly, the
intransigence of the Filipino as the new other abroad is here refigured into subordination
while the subjugation of “the colored races at home” hints and renews the idea of their
racial intractability or unassimilability as emancipated or adopted citizens of the nation.
The opposition between the first two scenes and their characters in itself makes it
plain who between the races at war possess the "civil" virtues and the "primitive" traits
but also divides the labor in terms of gender between the men who do the fighting and the
women who support, nurture, and grieve for them. ASLW No. 3 curiously presses the
female primitive/s into the role of "slaves" of affection as well. In this scene, we see the
"Filipino girl" or Pocahontas who saved the soldier's life providing him relief him from
the tropical heat with a palm fan, off-center. On camera-right, another Filipina from
nowhere is shown sitting by the soldier’s side, nursing him back to vitality and feeding
him from a bowl.
The most astonishing twist to this film, apart from the heroine violating the
division between home and alien terrain (one would wish to know how and why she
50
For a sense of the striking homologies between the multiple permutations of the Pocahontas
story and its reiteration in interested presentations like this film, see Frances Mossiker,
Pocahontas: The Life and the Legend (1976, 15ff, 37ff, 61-71).
213
ended up in the jungle) is the entry of the heroine's father—"the man with a beard and a
pith helmet"—into the scene of the action. This insertion of the father's presence signals
another abstractive and distributive currency that the film energizes with regard to the
soldier, war, and empire/nation-building. In thus framing the costs and risks of war
(ASLW No. 2) between personal sacrifice (ASLW No. 1) and familial support (ASLW
No. 3), the film structures war and its relation to national purpose as at once a family
affair and a personal romance, or indeed, as a “dark” form of family romance. It not only
cues people to translate the disruption, by colonial war, of their personal lives and loves
(and their possible losses) into multiple investments; it also transvalues them as viable
individual gains writ large as national goals. More significantly, in this case, it asks
viewers to imagine both an expanded and a sharply delimited structure of kinship, in
which colonized Filipinos are imagined or represented as simultaneously assimilable and
excludable, dependent upon the place within the familial/national structure that could be
allowed them at all. Although seemingly a marginal figure, "the man with a beard and a
pith helmet" is identified by the 1903 blurb for the film as the heroine's father which
makes him a different center for the hero's affective relations and now marginal others.
He not only makes it possible for the heroine to be reunited with the her lover (it is
presumably with his sanction that she travels to the scene of war, but only with his
protective escort); such power to enable their reunion and impending union may have
actually subsidized the soldier's “struggle.” If the relationship is to end in marriage
("union"), the hero would have to prove worthy of his esteem and earn his nod or
approval.
214
It is obvious that within the economy of the film, the old man stands for the
soldier's paternal double, the nation in its age and wisdom, the Father that rules, the
empire-builder. He registers as a benign or “benevolent” presence in ASLW No. 3, and
takes to the primitive woman on camera-left after his daughter gives her necklace to the
other in gratitude. If he is the other half of the empire/nation for whom the soldier is a
surrogate fighter, he also holds the power to recognize and embrace the hero as his son
"in law" and to take the colonizable others into his fold where they take up specific roles.
The daughter signals to the female primitive/s this adoptive gesture of the family/nation
with the necklace with which, we argue, she also signifies and shares her own form of
"bondage." In ASLW No. 3, we see a quick but almost imperceptible division of scenic
space into center and margin: the white characters in the middle and the two female
primitives on camera- right and -left. What fate awaits the male primitive who is written
out of the picture at this juncture is implied as the female primitive is obviously and
almost inexplicably split into two incarnations: one "dressed to resemble a large black
woman" (from ASLW No. 2) which suggests a maternal role for her; another (who
emerges out of the "Filipino hut" in ASLW No. 3) who looks young, comely, and servile.
The containment or subjugation of the primitive is thus partly achieved by its projection
to the plane of desire and the feminine, or indeed, of the other as desirably
feminized/feminine (Kaplan 1990, 665-667 and 671-675).
The borders of nation are henceforth redrawn in the paired structuring patterns of
51
race and gender, but what one may call the "erotics of empire," in these respects, are
51
See Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire” (reprinted in Kaplan 2000) for how empire’s
relationships with eros are elaborated in the rescue and performative narratives of the best-selling
American historical romances at the turn into the twentieth the century, leaving readers awash in
215
played out by inadvertence. This is perhaps the highest level upon which the film
performs its semantic labor but with risks for representations of the soldier as the fulcrum
of national consensus and his relationship with kin as the core for empire and nation. If
representing the war for nation as a personal romance and a family affair abstracts war of
its grim underside of violence or death, it also poses the paradox of "love" for adopted
52
others when colonizing them. The primitive is not only a “real” Other but also a trait, a
"primitive corporeal virility" that white men and soldiers in these moments of empire
seek to recuperate for a nation that is imaged to have "overcivilized" itself.53 Thus the
scuffle scene in which the white soldier grapples with the primitive simultaneously
reduces the latter at once into a measure of one's (and a nation's) progress and a sign of
repressed or lost origins. This implies a conception of self, history, “assimilation (now far
from benevolent)” and nation in which the masculine primitive is not only an exteriorized
other but also an actively repressible instinct. Banished to the nether regions of the
personal and national subjectivity by the demanding process of "civilization" and "self-
the heady atmosphere of imperial adventurism or inviting them to refigure the imaginative
exploration of remote regions as also the invigoration of atrophied bodies.
52
A close dissection of the rhetorical relationship between the American war of conquest in the
Philippines and American claims of "Benevolent Assimilation" is in Rafael (1993).
53
Kaplan (1990, 664). As Kaplan notes, this contemporary crisis of masculinity (bewailed as
cultural “effeminacy” caused by “overcivilization” or industrial overproduction) was less a social
pathology than a frame for discussing the current questions of overproduction, national culture,
and "social atrophy " that came with the closing of the frontier, the swift urbanization, the
massive immigration from non-Northern Europe, the breakdown of Anglo-Saxonism as a basis
for national identity, and the consequent social/racial conflicts that guaranteed expansionism and
the redrawing of national boundaries. For example, no less than the revitalization of American
manufacturing and industry by the search for global markets was staked in the idea of "national
muscle-flexing" (the phrase is from Kaplan).
216
government," the primitive is now to be sought in nether regions abroad where it
presumably resides undisturbed.
54
The crisis of a nation, uncertain over the integrity of its body politic at this time, is
thereby allegorized through the crises of masculinity and civilization that are here
acknowledged. This national crisis is occasioned by imperially expansionist love and
war, where seeking and doing battle with one's "primitive" might offer the ritualistic
revival of the ideal of self-government but also force one to confront its untold risks,
costs, and deficits. War becomes the site in which to recover and test the limits of
national vigor and manhood, and earn the love and recognition of nation, kin, and
colonial subjects. But in encountering the primitive within and without the nation's
borders, the soldier must also face the "transcendental homelessness" that the quest of
55
"going primitive" entails. The soldier is to be separated from loved ones to be
eventually reunited/reconciled with them even as this happy pattern might be revised by
injury, death, and war's contingencies. Dead or surviving, the American soldier must
inevitably witness the various doubles and settings for his quest falling away to make him
stand in anonymity and solitude as the nation incarnate in graphic images and
monuments. Abstracted as such, he is to “expatiate” [ex- out; spatiari, walk, roam;
54
For the deployment of this language by American imperialist ideologues and cultural producers
in the face of the multiple crises of the 1890s and their resulting recourse to a programmatic
primitivism and anti-modernity, see T. Jackson Lears (1981). For a historically specific account
of the recurrence of this cultural tendency in American political culture and among key
nineteenth-century political figures, see Ronald Takaki (1979). Primitivism, if we can call this
tendency thus, recurs as a “Western” response to the endemic crises of developmentalist
modernization and constitutes a feature of its cultural logic of modernism (see Torgovnick 1990).
55
Torgovnick establishes the equivalence of these phrases in Gone Primitive (1990, 185-188). As
she argues, "Going primitive is trying to go home to a place that feels comfortable and
balanced...(185) and ‘going home’ involves only an individual journey—actual or imaginative—
to join with a ‘universal’ mankind in the primitive. There can be homelessness then " (p. 188).
217
enlarge] the borders of empire and nation even as he is perpetually expatriated, either to
be claimed or disowned, recognized or neglected.
Coda
The Philippine (American) soldier as Hiker appears in monumental and graphic
image as a solitary figure, his rifle slung over a shoulder or embraced in one arm as if it
were both a burden needing to be borne and a weapon of conquest requiring secure
possession. Rife with allegorical resonance, this image of the soldier was a muchcontested iconic staple of the Philippine-American (culture) war on the continent.
Imperialist politicians and cultural producers would repeatedly invoke the cant of
“bearing the white man’s burden” in arguing for Philippine conquest and annexation; but
the burden of the citizen-soldier in turning ideological cant into bloody reality was simply
unredeemable. The Hiker’s gun, at ready, symbolized his presumptive readiness to kill or
be killed by the other, in the process and in the name of conducting the nation’s imperial
56
errands abroad. “Killed a million,” the Hikers did. And while we know that only several
thousands of them were themselves killed in a war whose memory remains partial and
actively suppressed, an other war still litters the national memorial and cultural
landscapes with these soldiers’ uncountable casualty figures and artifactual remains.
56
Mark Twain, “Thirty Thousand Killed a Million [n.d.],” reprinted in Atlantic Monthly (1992,
62)
218
BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION
Most aptly it was said that the Philippines was foreign to the United States for domestic
purposes, but domestic for foreign purposes.
S.P. Lopez (1966, 8)
No distinction is more revered by the American historian than that between domestic and
foreign affairs.
William E. Leuchtenburg (1952, 483)
“[Micronesia] must belong to the United States with absolute power to rule and fortify
them. They are not colonies; they are outposts."
U.S. Secretary of War, ca. 1945-46 (qtd. In Howe et al. 1994, 229)
[Postulate 3:] That the map be faithful, depicting not only the natural reliefs of the empire
but also its artifacts, as well as the totality of the empire's subjects (this last is an ideal
condition, which may be discarded in the production of an impoverished
map)...[Postulate 6:] That the map, finally, be a semiotic tool—that it be capable, in other
words, of signifying the empire or of allowing references to the empire, especially in
those instances when the empire is not otherwise perceptible....
Umberto Eco (1994 [1992], 96)
Possessions, Territories, States
Returning to the scene, with which this study opened, of the Senate debate over
treaty ratification and Philippine annexation in January 1899, and a thundering Senator
Lodge at the podium and setting the terms of debate in his advocacy for the treaty's
approval and the U.S.A's imperial turn as the new century loomed ahead — a century
Henry Luce (1941) would later famously nominate as “American” — one realizes, in
following the debates (but most especially the labyrinthine twists and turns of the
senator's reasoning), that things momentous and holding portents for the New Empire,
and the island possessions and territories up for its grabs, were aborning. Two modal
219
forms of imperial-national power and their common rampart of American exceptionalism
were clearly emerging from these inaugural moments of their articulation and
contestation in the realm of official U.S. public culture and in the halls of Congress. It
was not only that Senator Lodge claimed “absolute power” for the United States, over
“any territory or possession outside of the states themselves,” a power only qualified or
“excepted” by the Thirteenth Amendment. Attention must be fixed on two keywords used
and juxtaposed by Senator Lodge in his argumentative speeches and upon whose
simultaneous interchangeability with and subsequent distinctions from one another the
designation and constitution of the United States as a “New Empire” would actually turn
and depend: “territories or possessions.”
Credit may perhaps be attributed to Lodge for practically foregrounding
“possession/s” as an entirely novel and political term, with a variety of nuanced and
contested meanings (some of which derive from an emergent popular usage to which
Lodge seemed attuned), within these and subsequent other debates over the new national
expansionism and its “constitutional” ramifications.1 But operative notions of
“Possession/s” here would only make sense in the contradistinction and inseparability of
this term from the more settled and “constitutive” concept of “Territories” that was
1
Popular usage of and quite literal senses of “Possession” as ownership by conquest, jurisdiction,
natural right (in terms of property or intent to settle), and presumptive control/sovereignty, among
others, in reference to the “Philippine Islands,” Cuba, “Porto Rico,” the “Ladrones,” and Hawai'i,
quickly circulated through countless multi-genre tomes, pamphlets, editorial and reportorial texts
in the major and regional broadsheets, legal treatises, official federal government publications etc.
which proliferated especially after the news of Commodore George Dewey's spectacularized
triumph over the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay on May Day 1898. Just for some
examples: Halstead (1898); Adams (1898); Van Bergen (1899); Thayer (1899), and so on.
Thompson (2002) offers a fascinating study of how this instant literature on the “new
possessions” actually anticipated, through otherwise dubious and contradictory ethnographic,
historical, social, and political claims about them, the specific and varying forms of rule
eventually fashioned by the United States for the purposes of their administration and partial
assimilation as (extra) territories.
220
simultaneously being put to work in the debates. These two terms and their coupling and
decoupling in Lodge’s and other influential speakers’ eventual deployments of them
would begin to entail at least two distinctive and basic modal forms of U.S. “empirebuilding” from this moment onward. We may identify these modal forms, in close
approximation of their contemporary terminological bases, as: a “new” and inchoate form
of U.S. (extra)territoriality, and an insistent yet elusive form of possessiveness.
If one could now designate the “other possessions” of the U.S. as those very
island groups, most centrally the Philippines, that were up for formal annexation (here it
is important to note that, while yet unratified by the Senate, the Treaty was understood by
its advocates, and arguably, even in the public culture debates, as already commending
these island groups to the ownership of the United States in effect), what were the
“Territories” that Lodge was referring to here and what defined their relationship to the
“States”? Very quickly, from the drift of the debate, first of all, came the ritual
affirmation and reminder that “statehood” constituted the basic unit of full incorporation
into, and political representability in, the national body politic and its system of
governance. Lodge controversially added that “the Territories are not part of the United
States, but belong the United States as England’s colonies belong to England” (emphasis
supplied).2 By “Territories” here, however, Lodge was not really referring to the “other
possessions outside the limits of the States themselves” but to the then as-yet
2
The exact quote goes: “I am confident to stand on the proposition [laid down by Daniel
Webster in 1849] that the Territories are not part of the United States, but belong to the United
States as England's colonies belong to England” in Congressional Record, 55th Congress, 3rd
Session, 24 January 1899, 958; see also Thompson (1989,46-47) and Grunder and Livezey (1951,
41-43).
221
“unincorporated” territories of New Mexico, Alaska, and the then recently-annexed
Hawaii.
Yet Lodge had actually conflated these differently displaced (extra)territorial
domains with his bald assertion of the absolute sovereignty of the “United States” over
them. As undifferentiated “territories” (i.e. non-states), they belonged to (“owned” by)
the U.S. on essentially the same terms and plane. Indeed, then, the Territories (of New
Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii) counted as “possessions” and the “other possessions”
figured, in effect, as Territorial in status in their relationship to the States (i.e. having yet
to ascend to statehood and their peoples having yet to earn full citizenship and
constitutional protections)3. In truth, as Lodge candidly conceded, using the analogy in
the possessive power of the British Empire, they were all comprehended as “colonies”
and subjects of the United States until deemed otherwise by full incorporation as states
and citizens. As such — and hence, the anxiety here about the historic association of
colonization with enslavement that compelled Lodge to invoke the exception of the
Thirteenth Amendment — these non-states and noncitizens who inhabited them could be
understood as nominally protected by a selectively applied clause of the Constitution
nonetheless. As “property” and practical chattels of the United States, the Territories or
possessions and their peoples could be partially incorporated and protected by one
relevant constitutional provision that, in immediate consequence upon its invocation,
paradoxically nullified and rendered unconstitutional that anomalous status as
“possessions” and as colonial/territorial subjects. But as subordinated to the absolute
3
This sticky and radically problematic question of differentiation between territory and colonial
possession that would later lead to the original formulation of the doctrine of incorporation and
unincorporated territory was to be nervously solved by Supreme Court reasoning in the Insular
Cases based on the racial differential; see Rivera Ramos (1996).
222
power of the U.S, and with the Constitution not extended to them of its own force and
without the exercise of congressional plenary powers, they were largely “outside” or
external to the nation and its vaunted system of constitutional and representative
government.
At base, in other words, these so-called Territories or other possessions could
already be seen as inhabiting an impossible position (until and unless the absolute power
thought it fit to liberate them from that liminality): they were now located “territorially”
and simultaneously inside and outside the imperial nation and its borders (although being
inside or part of it came, in Lodge's hands, with such exquisite qualifications). While
some provision/s of the Constitution could cover them, the Constitution could not be fully
applied to their now ambiguated status. While not part of the U.S, they belonged to it.
Here, territory had yet to be distinguished from possession (even as implicitly, both are
actually “colonial” in standing): they were conflated and conflatable but already, in
combination, designated the elusive operations of a developing absolute and arbitrary
imperial-national power. Territoriality as simply the basis to American empire-building
was now reconceptualized to mean the national incorporation or unincorporation of
others, and the extraterritorial domains they inhabited, in due course, but with no
guarantees and subject to plenary legislation; and American posssession/possessiveness,
in respect to them, was now something, relatedly and necessarily, that may not be
subjected to the preclusions of the anti-slavery clause of the U.S. Constitution even if, in
principle, as Lodge conceded, this was or should be the case. Such was the curious
admixture of absolution and conditionality which the “constitutionality” of American
imperial expansion, and with the conquest of the Philippines, set down for the terms of
223
dis/incorporation of the new territories and possessions after the 1898 Treaty of Paris
cessions, a treaty whose ratification squeaked past equally articulate opposition in the
Senate by a close margin of one vote.
At Around the Centennial...
When San Francisco city planners launched an international competition to redesign the city’s famous Union Square in 1997, they did not expect that their decision to
keep its central landmark “sacred” and untouchable would elicit a heated controversy.
Located prominently in the middle of the square, the Dewey Memorial was put up in
1901 “to commemorate the victory of the American Navy under Commodore George
Dewey at Manila Bay” in May 1898. San Francisco Chronicle staffwriter John King
reported that the graceful 90-foot tall granite column, which is capped by a bronze
sculpture symbolizing victory, quickly became the object of protest from an array of local
Filipino American community leaders and organizations (1997, A13-A14).
King’s investigation of the controversy found out that for “many Filipino
Americans” in the Bay Area, Dewey’s triumph was “nothing to celebrate” and required a
more critical memorial representation and inscription. They argued that the battle
commemorated by the monument merely “set the stage for a United States occupation of
the Philippine Islands and a [Filipino] war of resistance” with no recall in American
popular memory and barely covered by textbook wisdom. With allies from the San
Francisco-Manila Sister City Committee, they issued a demand for a plaque at the
Memorial’s base to put into historical perspective the popularly unacknowledged imperial
consequences of the Battle of Manila Bay and to provide a more candid reassessment of
224
Philippine-American post/neocolonial relations. Paraphrasing his interviewees’
sentiments, King acknowledged that, in the Memorial’s narrative inscriptions, “What’s
missing is the aftermath: Filipinos rejected their transfer from one colonial power, Spain,
to another. Battles broke out, and Dewey’s ships soon were lobbing shells into Filipinodug trenches.”4
On 20 November 1998, in a related development, the late archivist and scholar of
U.S. anti-imperialism Jim Zwick announced on the World Wide Web that the Library of
Congress had changed its old “Philippine Insurrection” subject categories to “[Philippine]
Revolution, 1896-1898” and “Philippine-American War, 1899-1902” (1997b). Zwick
noted that the new subject categories went into effect on 25 March 1998, six weeks after
the Library’s continued use of “Philippine Insurrection” for its “Motion Pictures of the
Spanish-American War” website triggered widespread criticism from concerned scholars
and Filipino Americans in discussions that circulated through Zwick’s much-accessed
website Sentenaryo/Centennial, several other academic webpages, and various listservs.
This timely critique of the enduring categorical sway of “Philippine Insurrection” in U.S.
research institutions after almost a hundred years since the set of events this research
category and classification designated was not itself anything new, and as Zwick
4
Concerned that these Filipino American community critiques of an urban facelifting that meant
to leave a colonial relic intact were not misunderstood or dismissed as irrelevant, community
leader and immigration lawyer Rodel Rodis was quoted by the story as saying, “You can’t change
what happened, but you can explain it a lot better” (King 1997), A13-A14. On the politics of
memorial historiography and historical monuments in the United States and for a rigorous
documentation of heavily disputed sites in many states of the Union, see James Loewen's often
amusing but actually serious venture in public history, Lies Across America: What Our History
Sites Get Wrong (1999). On the curious aporias of American “monumental” memory with regard
to the Spanish and “Philippine-American” Wars, see Chapter Four, this study.
225
correctly observed, was one that a few critical historians and cultural activists on both
sides of the Pacific had been making for decades.
The category “Philippine Insurrection” did not merely remain as an enduring relic
of “the colonial era in Philippine-American relations,” Zwick’s announcement qualified.
U.S. official and historiographic usage of term also unquestionably served to perpetuate
and uphold the much-disputed legitimacy of the United States’ claim of sovereignty upon
the Philippines after the U.S. purchased the islands from Spain for $20 million in the
1898 Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War. In effect, the subsequent war
of conquest that lasted for several years in the Philippines after this transaction between
the two imperial nations served to create and enforce that authority, a claim of
sovereignty rejected and fiercely resisted by Filipino “insurgents.” It is on account of
these critical considerations, although not explicitly stated in the announcement, that
Zwick considered the Library’s categorical gesture—made under critical pressure—as
“significant” and “a centennial accomplishment that will have an enduring positive
impact.”5 Because the Library’s categories are used as a standard by American libraries
5
Through his tireless and impressive Internet archiving activities on the Philippine Revolution
and the Philippine-American War which made widely available a wealth of contemporary verbal
and visual texts on these events, and through his own comprehensive scholarship and critical
publishing, the late Jim Zwick himself had been at the forefront of the movement to secure public
and academic “recognition” of the centrality of these events to modern U.S. history and the
formation of U.S. imperialism and nationalism. His documentary work on Mark Twain’s
opposition to the conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the last century, Mark Twain’s
Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War (1992), has been
recognized as a major breakthrough in Twain’s and U.S. imperialism’s literary historiography for
it demonstrated beyond question how the disappearance from U.S. public and institutional
consciousness of the anti-imperialist work and texts of such an iconic and canonical American
writer as Twain acutely symptomatized the denial of empire that pervaded twentieth-century U.S.
culture. Zwick’s abortive dissertation project, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the Development
of a Foreign Policy Opposition, 1898-1921” — at least, what has come through of it in
prepublication in a variety of forms and venues —promised to radically overturn a great deal of
our received wisdom on the much-maligned and much-misunderstood Anti-Imperialists and their
226
nationwide, and emulated by many library systems worldwide, Zwick’s optimism about
the salutary effects of this institutionalization of the “Philippine-American War” as the
“accepted” name for the war did not seem entirely misplaced.
Yet there continued to be significant occasion for remaining sober about this
matter of forgotten and long-unrecognized histories of the “colonial past” of the United
States as most acutely brought up by the Bay Area Filipino American protests. Writing
on a major documentary film on Theodore Roosevelt for the journal Radical History
Review, the critical historian Matthew Frye Jacobson remarked candidly upon the
perduring and effective reign of U.S. “imperial amnesia” around the conquest of the
Philippines:
The funny thing about the centennial of the Philippine-American
War is that the hundred-year observance will be the first time
that most Americans will be hearing of the event itself. (Which
leads one to suspect that this centenary might not be getting
much play.) If ever there was an opportunity to redress this
deficit in national memory, one might have thought that a fourhour documentary on Theodore Roosevelt would have been it.
Not only was Teddy Roosevelt a central figure in the conquest of
the Philippines, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice
President, and President but in his historical writings like The
Winning of the West, public addresses like “The Strenuous Life,”
and comments made late in his life on race and national
character, one discovers in Roosevelt’s thought running themes
of race, “civilization,” virtue and national vigor, whose perfect
historical expression was the U.S. war against Philippine
independence….Whatever else it accomplishes and despite some
significant merits, David Grubin’s four-hour profile of TR for the
PBS American Presidents series, stands as an exemplar in the
arts of amnesia and the extraordinary ingenuity with which
Americans have been able to forget their imperialist past (so as
to absolve their imperialist present). In this instance, U.S.
shifting yet essentially stolid commitments to Philippine “independence” for much of the formal
U.S. colonial period in the islands.
227
imperialism is neatly stashed behind the towering figure of the
imperialist himself (1999, 116).6
In short, where the “towering figure of the imperialist himself” could become the
productive metaphor for an actively minimized history of U.S. imperial aggression
abroad, Jacobson observes that the film recasts the larger themes of U.S. history (like the
expansionism in Roosevelt’s period) as a “great-man biography in the tragic – and
ultimately in the heroic – mode.” By distilling this history into the already exceedingly
conventionalized tropes of Roosevelt’s rise from asthmatic child to a “steam engine in
trousers,” the film missed a unique opportunity to examine how, in fact, Roosevelt as a
figure both embodied and actively dissimulated the spectacular entry of the United States
into the Age of Empire, with Dewey’s heavily iconized naval victory over the Spanish
Armada at Manila Bay and the U.S.’ “splendid little war” with Spain in 1898 (118).7
6
The literature on Roosevelt is voluminous and much of it is celebratory but easily the most
succinct and critical is the chapter on Roosevelt in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A
Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995, 70-215). For a
critical account by a Filipino historian that focuses on Roosevelt’s investments in the Philippine
conquest, see Oscar Alfonso’s now classic Theodore Roosevelt and the Philippines, 1897-1909
(1970).
7
For the notion of a “double discourse” of U.S. imperialism that disembodies this imperialism’s
geographical or territorial stretch and reembodies its imaginative domains in primitivist or AngloSaxonist allegories of maleness, see Kaplan (2002, 92-100). Between the heavily verbal (and
occasionally critical) chronicle by Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit: A Study of our War with
Spain (1936) and the heavily visual (and mostly ethnocentric) documentation by Frank Freidel,
The Splendid Little War (1958), one gets a relatively full and proximate spread of the self-parodic
yet chauvinistic narratives of the 1898 war produced by U.S. historians. Out of slender historical
material (or a hundred-day war), the popular/public historian Ivan Musicant is able to fashion a
voluminous and sanctimonious 740-pp. account that largely renews the problematic claims of
nationalist U.S. historiography about the inadvertence of the American imperialism, Empire By
Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (1998). A brilliant
and eminently readable survey and critique of the “splendid little war motif” and its “tropes of
parody and belittlement” in 1898 U.S. historiography can be found in Pérez, The War of 1898
(1998, esp. 57-80).
228
Containing only three casual references to events in or concerning the Philippines
in Roosevelt’s time, this film, for Jacobson, generates lacunae that go far beyond the
mere problem of the film’s narrative mode. These three eventual references to the
Philippines take it as a matter of course that Roosevelt, in various capacities, had selfevident reasons to be involved in such events: the first was his strategic deployment, as a
short-term Assistant Secretary of the Navy, of Dewey’s fleet near Manila at the onset of
the Spanish-American War of 1898; the second reference concerned eventual President
Roosevelt’s worries about the threat posed to the Philippines as a U.S. territory by
Japan’s impressive resurgence as an imperial power after its 1904 victory in the RussoJapanese War; and the third involved “the ugly deal” struck by Roosevelt with Japan in
1905 where in return for Japanese self-selection from long-standing but inchoate interests
in the Philippines, Roosevelt refrained from countering or challenging Japanese
hegemony in Korea.
For Jacobson, the filmmaker Grubin’s resulting “non-treatment of the PhilippineAmerican War,” with these reductions of affairs involving the Philippines into
minoritized sideshows, “constitutes an exquisitely structured silence.” He is struck by
how “a single phrase”—“the taking of the Philippines”—is called upon by the film’s
background commentary to perform an inordinate amount of explanatory labor to
contextualize Roosevelt’s worries about the threat that Japan posed to U.S. possession of
the islands. Collectively “hidden and untouched” behind this singular but cryptic
wording, for Jacobson, are several critical sets of events: the U.S.-Philippine War, itself,
which led to such a policy conundrum in the first place, preceded by Spain’s sale of the
Philippines to the United States for $20 million; U.S. destruction of the republican
229
government which the Filipino nationalist movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo hewed out
of the Philippine Revolution against Spain, an imperial conquest that entailed hundreds of
thousands of Filipino combatant and noncombatant deaths; and “the ultimate
establishment of a much-detested colonial administration in Manila.” The most
symptomatic moment of the “enormity” of the film’s omission of the U.S.-Philippine
war, for Jacobson, involved two problematic assertions: one, “by talking head
commentary,” that criticized Roosevelt’s “secret ‘sell-out’” of Korea while remaining
oblivious to “the moral implications” of the colonization of the Philippines upon which
this Korea policy was predicated; another was the film’s astonishing claim, in this
immediate context, that “there was no war during [Roosevelt’s] administration” (ibid.)
An unabashed jingoist who strenuously argued for the invigorating effects of the
Philippine war for a nation and white American masculinity commonly perceived as
endangered by “overcivilization” by the end of the 1890s, Roosevelt is here practically
refunctioned, according to Jacobson, as inheriting a war from his predecessor. After
Republican President William McKinley was assassinated by the Czech anarchist Leon
Czolgoz at the Pan-American Exposition (Buffalo) in September 1901, his bellicose
Vice-President dramatically and climactically ascended into an indisputable status as the
focal figure in the Philippine conquest. (McKinley’s death occurred so shortly after his
reelection victory in 1900 and what was widely interpreted as public endorsement of his
imperialist policies and the “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines.) But because it
was under McKinley’s watch that the clamorous annexation disputes over the Philippines
and the bitter war fought to resolve them had been raging since late 1898 and early 1899,
the active centrality of Roosevelt both in the advocacy of Philippine colonization and
230
management of the U.S.-Philippine War is here easily enshrouded.8
Arguably one of Roosevelt’s first major acts within only less than a year of his
ascendancy into the U.S. presidency, and which might strangely accord with Grubin’s
redacted portrait of a “pacifist” Roosevelt, was to sign and issue an unusual document
whose implications, to date, remain unquestioned and continue to elude the critical
scrutiny of scholars and analysts. It is a document that seemed ironically necessary for a
war that was undeclared in the first place (unlike the Spanish-American War); for it to
have been “declared” by Congress would have meant recognition of the Aguinaldo
government as a legimitate belligerent. Without any sense of irony and, indeed, with the
most intentional fortuitousness, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation
ending the U.S.-Philippine War (“Philippine Insurrection”) on 4 July 1902, “in the one
hundred and twenty-seventh year of the Independence of the United States.”9 Few could
comment with bilious irony on the timing, in the many senses of the term, of this highly
curious edict which has no parallel in imperial or diplomatic histories (an act which
declares the end to a war that was officially undeclared in the first place); one such fatal
sense to Roosevelt’s “timing” was his action of sounding the death rattles to Philippine
independence aspirations on the very birth date of U.S. independence from British
imperialism. And thus, too, did Roosevelt, at the stroke of a pen, officially write out the
U.S. imperial war in the Philippines by proclaiming its termination at the very moment
8
As Jacobson contends, “given [Roosevelt’s] instrumentality in bringing the United States to the
Philippines through his maneuvers as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, McKinley might properly
be said to have inherited the war from him” (127-128n2.)
9
The text of this presidential proclamation is in The Mabini Case. Message from President,
transmitting to the Senate a letter from the Acting Secretary of the Navy, with inclosures relating
to the Government Existing in Guam and the Mabini case, etc., Senate Document No. 111, 57th
Congress, 2d session (24 January 1903). It was reprinted as one of several appendices to Vol. 2 of
W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands (1928).
231
that the United States was emerging as the “New Empire” into the stage of global
imperial politics.10
American Lebensraum: Money Order Cheques, Maps, Malaysian Mess Boys
There are only two “texts” on a United States Postal Service money order cheque
that are rendered in screaming red ink. They are thus signified as the first aspects to a
commonplace transaction, in the form of a cheque mediating between the Postal Service
which vouches for it and the payor who purchases it, that should claim anybody’s
immediate attention. On the upper left hand is the designated serial number for the
particular issue, and to the immediate right of the “PAY TO” box or field underneath the
serial number is the crucial qualification, “NEGOTIABLE ONLY IN THE U.S. AND
POSSESSIONS.” The significance of the former (mark of seriality) is obvious enough
but the signification of the latter text (statement and scope of negotiability) is not. What
does it mean for a federal guarantee to hold true in all the “states” of the Union and its
“possessions”? What are the “possessions” referenced here and what does it mean for
these “non-states” and the peoples who inhabit them to be “possessed”? And possessed
by whom?
Apart from the typical purchaser not possibly apprehending this extension and
distension of a federal guarantee beyond a demarcated “U.S.” (and how a further and
enigmatic distinction between “states” and “possessions” is simultaneously made) is yet
another, perhaps more prior, displacement. It can be described as a kind of oxymoronic
10
On the christening of the United States as the “New Empire” in 1902 by the historian and
Roosevelt associate Brooks Adams, at around the same time that Roosevelt was proclaiming the
completion of Philippine conquest by presidential edict, see Adams, The New Empire (1965
[1902], xv, xi-xii, and 208-209).
232
sleight-of-hand: it is a visibility that makes itself invisible, a visuality that produces a
form of blindness. By precisely the cheque’s typographical accents on serial number and
“negotiable” domain, an effect of these texts’ obviousness is generated that has the
paradoxical impact of displacing itself from anyone’s visual grasp. One becomes, in
effect, oblivious to the obvious. Or to put it another way: what is here rendered visually
obvious makes one assume, as if by some kind of conditioned reflex, that what is thusly
signified is both innocuous (serial number) and natural (“[negotiable only in] THE U.S.
AND POSSESSIONS”). While highlighted in crimson tint, both texts immediately
dissolve into that order of things we call “matters of fact;” or more precisely, they are
presented—and one seems expected to appreciate or even elide what they signify—as “a
matter of course.”
To get a better sense of the typicality or reproducibility of these curious
representations of the “states” and “possessions” of the Union and their naturalizing
effects — and it is a typicality or reproducibility literalized by the seriality of tracking
numbers on postal money order cheques — one need only pay more attention than usual
to representational modes as equally commonplace as weather maps on television news
shows or even atlases. As a matter of course, the North American continental trunk of the
country and its impressive sprawl of forty-eight states would constitute, at a glance, one’s
visual sweep of such mappings of the nation’s “state/s.” Sidebarred in miniaturized
boxes, on some fringe quadrant of the frame, would be the two non-contiguous states of
Hawaii (with its recessive archipelagic spread in the distant north-central Pacific) and
Alaska (with its subcontinental mass, and too northwest of the continent to be reflected to
scale).
233
Of all the so-called “possessions,” and there is a fairly good number of them that
can count as such, it is probably the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Estado Libre
Associado de Puerto Rico) — to the southeast of the Florida panhandle and in the
Caribbean — that one could presume to be marginally known to viewers.11 But Puerto
Rico is invariably excluded from such framings. Indeed, one is apparently predisposed
not to expect that tiny island to appear as part of what is imaginable and visible as the
“United States” in these cartographic representations. (Guam and other Pacific/Carribean
island territories are simply beyond the perceptual and cognitive fields that are here being
supposed for everyday or typical viewers' geographic consciousness and apprehension).12
Reporting on the employment of Filipinos within the United States Navy in and
by 1970, the television documentary producer Timothy H. Ingram was compelled to
11
The curious lineaments and unmappable geography of the American Empire after the so-called
Philippine Question was effectively "resolved" by Roosevelt's presidential declaration, the Insular
Cases, historiographic invisibility and amnesia, etc. consisted in this heterogeneous geobody of
exceptional political arrangements and subject populations: Guam and the American Samoa
remain as "unincorporated territories" of the United States; the Commonwealth of the Northern
Marianas have the same status as Puerto Rico's within the union even as Guamenian and
Marianas islanders are classified as U.S. citizens; while American Samoans are (like the Filipinos
under American colonial rule till the Commonwealth period) considered "American nationals."
The Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia enjoy a "Compact of
Free Association" with the United States which means that while they retain control over internal
affairs, their international relationsforeign policy are determined by U.S. strategic interests and
defense requirements; meanwhile, the Republic of Belau is not so much an independent nation as
the "last remaining trust territory" of the United States under the United Nations trusteeship
system. And one is as yet unable to speak here of and consider such unassimilable (unmappable
and evanescent) possessions and territories as the U.S. Virgin Islands, Okinawa, Diego Garcia,
those “outposts” or even insular enclaves called military bases all over the world etc. Do and can
these count as in and out of the U.S. imperial lebensraum?
12
Neil Smith begins his account of what he calls “The Lost Geography of the American Century”
with the apocryphal story of Philippine annexation that recounts President William McKinley as
“fumbling with a map” in uncontained jubilation (after Dewey's spectacularized triumph at
Manila Bay in May 1898 was understood to have commended the Malayo-Polynesian archipelago
to incipient U.S. territorial claims upon them), but “eventually admitting to a friend that 'I could
not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles'” (2004 [2003], 1-28).
234
describe the hierarchies and structures he found them laboring in as somewhat akin to
plantation society and enslavement (“the floating plantation,” as his report is strikingly
titled). Of 16,669 Filipino enlistees in the Navy then, Ingram found over 80% of them
stuck in the “steward rating,” unable to move beyond service and menial work, and
effectively barred from other possible placement ratings even if they might have
possessed college degrees or have passed the necessary qualifying examinations (1970).13
Most Filipino navy enlistees then, as “officers’ stewards and mess hall attendants,”
performed a range of duties that is unambiguously describable as domestic and
domesticated. Yen Le Espiritu notes that there were lucky ones who would make it to
“higher” niches (other than the unlucky 40% who remained as “stewards”) after a 1973
reform of employment policy allowed Filipinos to serve in 56 of the U.S. Navy’s 87
available occupational ratings (1995, 16). But their mostly “clerical” work for personnel,
disbursements, and commissaries were only slight improvements over the kinds of labor
that Espiritu, and other studies before hers, document to have been typically and
historically expected of these Filipino navy enlistees. Otherwise, Filipino navymen
cooked and served the officers' meals as cooks and waiters, and maintained and cleaned
the officers' “galleys, wardroom and living spaces” as cabin boys. Off-ship, they served
as houseboys for officers and as kitchen help, dishwashers, and bus boys in the Naval
Academy mess halls. If their officers so wished, they could also be tasked to babysit
household pets or to wait on the officers' wives as “personal servants.” Ingram writes that
“Filipino messboys also provided that added touch of luxury and class to the Coast Guard
13
Also first cited in Quinsaat, “An Exercise on How to Join the Navy and Still Not See the
World,” in Quinsaat, et al. (1976, 108, 110, and 111n13). See Yen Le Espiritu, Filipino American
Lives which also cites and culls Ingram’s report after Quinsaat’s lead (34n63).
235
dining room for Department of Transportation executives” and were, in fact, a major
point of contention as a set of perks between the Treasury Department (which then had
jurisdiction over the Coast Guard) and the Department of Transportation (which was
then seeking this jurisdiction for itself) in past interdepartmental discussions or
negotiations. In addition to being “requisitioned to add class to important dinners” by yet
another federal agency (the Defense Department), Filipino stewards also served
presidential advisers, staff members, “assorted bigwigs,” and the President in the White
House dining rooms (1970, 18).
Another subsequent critical report, based on interviews conducted by several
U.C.L.A. Filipino American students with fifteen former U.S. Navy Filipino employees
in 1974, continued to bear out Ingram’s uneasily-secured and potentially scandalous
findings. Ingram, indeed, reveals that he faced major stonewalling from the White House
with his queries into the number of Filipinos working in the presidential dining room: his
nine phone calls elicited nothing but “hemming and hawing and bureaucratic run-around”
from the staff. Calls to the commander of the Naval Aide’s Office, Ingram adds,
provoked a reply that such questions as he was posing were “pretty complicated things to
get into” and were referred to the Press Secretary’s office where five more of Ingram’s
calls “were jockeyed back and forth between three people for two days with promises to
get back with information” that was never provided (18).
Jesse Quinsaat notes that Ingram’s report was followed by a similar exposé in
Time Magazine and suggests that it may have led to the “full-fledged investigation” (on
the use of stewards in the military and the U.S. President’s staff) conducted by one
Senator, William Proxmire, in the early 1970s. This senatorial investigation, along with
236
the demands of the civil rights movement, forced the Navy to revise its longstanding
practice of limiting Filipinos to the steward rating by 1973, although in 1973, still fully
9000 of 11,000 Navy stewards were Filipinos and they were curiously and inexplicably
designated in U.S. Navy statistical categories not as “Filipinos” but as “Malaysians”
(1976, 108; on slight improvements in Filipino employment status in the Navy since
these investigations and the 1973 policy reform, see Espiritu (1995, 16).
Quinsaat, writer of the critical student report, was so struck by the precision of
Ingram’s metaphor of “floating plantation” that he rewrote personal impressions (circa
1965) of Sangley Point off Manila Bay — historically the Filipino recruitment station and
“the headquarters of the U.S. Naval Forces in the Philippines” up to the 1960s — as a
“scenario” with which to introduce his discussion of the students’ research. Quinsaat
renders 1965-era Sangley Point in analogous terms:
The biggest housing space is taken up by the home of the
admiral, who is Commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the
Philippines. It is a huge, two-storey, white-washed structure
surrounded by stately palms and finely trimmed shrubbery. A
driveway curves around to the front door, where one is usually
greeted by one of the Admiral’s Navy Pilipino stewards[.] With
its manicured lawns, shaded portals and ubiquitous dark-skinned
servants dressed in white smocks, the whole scene is
[reminiscent] of some ante-bellum southern plantation.
But beyond this analogy, Quinsaat actively reads against the grain of this military
installation’s “pacific” façade. He effectively describes Sangley Point as a form of
American extraterritorial settlement that “floats” with the Navy’s amphibious functions
and operations. Its seeming insularity might have consisted in a geographic sense
(“physically small, as U.S. Navy bases go, occupying about six square miles of the Cavite
peninsula” – like an “island,” indeed) and the fact that much of the space was developed
237
for the base personnel’s residential requirements as a secluded enclave (the wire wall
girding Sangley Point and separating it from Cavite City was “interspersed with signs
marked ‘Bawal Pumasok’ [DO NOT ENTER]”). But a small airstrip, from which
American aircraft were actually flying reconnaisance missions to nearby Vietnam then,
betrayed something of its “strategic value” and belied one’s immediate impression that
this naval base “carrie[d] few of the trappings which mark a military installation at
war.”14 Forms of seemingly insular and residual American presence in a “former” U.S.
colony, as it were, could disguise an amphibious or aerial (highly-mobile) power that was
actually at work, and the amorphous boundaries or hierarchizations that they otherwise
marked.
14
For the “scenario” and quotations, see Quinsaat (97-98).
238
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