US media in times of war

[Fatima Lasay]

Yankee Doodles
6 July - 24 August 2003
Bulwagang Juan Luna (Main Gallery)
Cultural Center of the Philippines
Opening Reception 6 July 5:00 PM

Artists: Elmer Borlongan, Antipas Delotavo, Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Brenda
Fajardo, Roberto Feleo, Egai Fernandez, Gerry Leonardo, Neil Manalo, Alfredo
Manrique, Norberto Roldan.
Curated by Santiago Albano Pilar
Exhibition Design by Fatima Lasay


The history of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) is largely forgotten
today in the Philippines and the United States. Forgetting was officially
sanctioned; volumes of newspaper accounts, military reports, government
documents, autobiographies, biographies and letters by American soldiers all
became part of a "forbidden book" - so that a war that was at least 50 times
more costly in human lives than the Spanish-American War was relegated in
American textbooks as only an "insurgency."

A few late 19th century journalists and political cartoonists, however,
managed to express unpopular truths of massacres, tortures, pillaging, and
wholesale destruction of villages. An anonymous editorial cynically read,
“We may have burned certain villages, destroyed considerable property, and
incidentally slaughtered a few thousand of their sons and brothers, husbands
and fathers, etc., but what did they expect? ….And they complain that
drunken American soldiers insult the native women. What did they expect from
a drunken soldier anyway?”

In 1898, the Philippine Constitution was ratified, creating an executive
branch, a representative assembly, and judiciary. Then came the election of
a president and the dispatching of diplomatic representatives around the
world. But the creation of the first republic in Southeast Asia was cut
short by the United States when it imposed its imperialist demands on the
new republic. The Philippine Revolution was thus forced to continue its
pursuit for national independence in the Philippine-American War. The
Philippine-American War was also to become America's baptism as an
imperialist colonial power in the Pacific, and this expansionist agenda was
met with fierce resistance by Filipino Revolutionaries.

When President William McKinley told a delegation of church leaders that God
had counseled him to annex the Philippines and "to educate the Filipinos,
and uplift and civilize and Christianize them," few Americans knew that the
Philippines had an educational system older than that of the United States
and that the majority of Filipinos were Catholic. McKinley's depiction of
Filipinos as uncivilized pagans played on prevalent racist sentiments and
served to justify an unpopular war. One commonly held view ranked peoples of
the world into four grades of culture -- savagery, barbarism, civilization,
and enlightenment. In this hierarchy, white America was the pinnacle of
enlightenment while Filipinos belonged to the two lowest levels of culture
and therefore incapable of self-government.

Senator Albert Beveridge in a famous Senate speech referred to Filipinos as
"a barbarous race" of children incapable of even understanding "Anglo-Saxon
self-government" adding: "[God] has marked the American people as his chosen
nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine
mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit...” The first
American teachers introduced English into hundreds of schools already in
existence at that time but the myth that the U.S. brought the school to the
Philippines remains to this day. American education became a tool for
pacification and assimilation into the U.S. colonial system.

What to the United States was only an “insurgency” required the deployment
of 126,000 U.S. troops, and took the lives of anywhere from 250,000 to a
million people, the vast majority Filipino. Although the Philippine-American
War was officially declared to have ended in 1902, fighting continued well
beyond the first decade of the century.

A fierce national debate ensued in the U.S. between pro- and
anti-imperialists that became the subject of political campaigns and media
editorials. In most publications Filipinos were presented to the American
public as dark skinned savages. These portrayals were intended to project
Filipinos and non-whites in general, as inferior beings within the
racialized milieu of U.S. society. The imperialist cartoons appeared on the
pages of Puck, Judge and Life magazines. These three were among the most
influential opinion makers of their day. All three magazines employed some
of the best artists of the day to draw for them. Puck and Judge were
generally supportive of President McKinley. They wholeheartedly backed the
U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines. In fact, at the time, Judge
magazine was regarded as propaganda vehicle for the Republican party.

In these cartoons, Filipinos were portrayed as diminutive (slaves)
(pickanninies) or wild beasts – images that were associated with blackness.
These depictions were intended to vilify Filipinos as the enemy – much like
Japanese, Vietnamese, and Arab peoples were demonized during the most recent
wars. What Americans saw in pictures was reinforced by a racist language
that labeled Filipinos as “gugus”, “niggers”, and “monkey,” and by the
promotional hard sell of world fairs, such as the 1904 St. Louis World Fair,
that displayed Filipinos along with other native peoples from other
countries as uncivilized beings.

Meanwhile, the United States set up a colonial arrangement with the help of
Filipino elites that allowed US corporations unlimited access to Philippine
natural resources such as timber and minerals, and control of major
industries. They created a market in the islands for American surplus
products, installed the largest military bases outside the US, and exploited
Filipinos as a pool of cheap labor for US businesses and the military. Note
the mass migration of contract workers recruited to work in the fields of
Hawaii and California in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, and the mass recruitment of
Filipinos in the US and the Philippines into the American military during
WWII.

While many Americans led by the anti-expansionists opposed the colonial
conquest of the Philippines, others argued that expansion was necessary for
commerce and the capture of foreign markets for U.S. surplus products.
Senator Albert Beveridge's speech in Congress in 1900 was a rallying cry for
U.S. imperialism: "The Philippines are ours forever.... And just beyond the
Philippines are China's illimitable markets.... Our largest trade henceforth
must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean.... The Philippines gives us a
base at the door of all the East."

Pointing to a map on his wall, President William McKinley declared: "I sent
for the chief engineer of the War Department and I told him to put the
Philippines on the map of the United States ... and there they will
 stay....”

On June 19, 1865, slaves in Texas learned of their emancipation; and on June
12, 1898, Filipinos declared their independence from Spain. Our separate
histories are filled with many stories of struggles for justice. Now and
then, the stories converge as it did in the Philippine American War when
David Fagin and other African American soldiers joined the Filipino
revolutionary forces to protect a fledgling republic from US domination.
Their example foreshadowed the kind of inter-racial cooperation that became
necessary for future generations to forge in the resistance against racism.
Over the past 100 years Filipinos have continuously fought back against all
forms of injustices.

In 2002, on the centennial of Philippine-American relations, three strong
bulwarks of the Filipino activist community in California and the U.S. put
together an exhibition of U.S. imperialist cartoons produced during the
Philippine-American war. This exhibit, entitled "COLORED: Black and White,"
presented drawings, editorial cartoons, photos, and news clips from
prominent magazines and newspapers that covered the U.S. annexation of the
Philippines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This exhibit is part
of a larger archival collection that has been on tour until today at various
universities and institutions in the U.S. and Philippines. Exhibit curators,
Helen Toribio, Abe Ignacio and Jorge Emmanuel are long-time cultural and
community Filipino American activists. Helen Toribio, who grew up in Hawaii,
said the exhibit is a way to get a dark period of U.S. and Philippines
history 'out of my system.' 'Anyone who grew up here, grew up with the
mythology of America the beautiful, the great democracy, and there is very
little exposure to the dark side,' she said. 'There is a lot that is hidden
about American history.'

Many who have seen the images in the "COLORED: Black and White" exhibition
were shocked. Larkspur artist Elizabeth Saul said the exhibit helps explain
the concept of Manifest Destiny, the philosophy that sought to justify the
United States' westward expansion. 'These images speak so strongly,' she
said. 'You can hear someone talk about (Manifest Destiny) over and over
again, but when you are confronted with images that are vile, pompous and
arrogant, it strikes a chord that words can't communicate efficiently.' A
section of the exhibit focused on similarities in the portrayals of
Filipinos and African Americans. U.S. troops fighting in the Philippines
referred to Filipinos as 'niggers' or 'gugus.' Berkeley artist Mildred
Howard said the exhibit 'makes something horrible visible.'

This year, a centennial commemoration will be held in the Philippines.
"Sangandaan 2003", an international conference on arts and media in
Philippine-American relations, will present Filipino and Filipino-Americans
the unique challenge and opportunity to assess, in reflective hindsight, how
the events of the past century changed their lives. The "COLORED: Black and
White" exhibition is part of this commemoration, coming from an exhibition
recently held at the UC San Diego Geisel Library and the Springfield College
Art Gallery in City Heights. The exhibition in these venues, organized by
John and Marivi Blanco, were spurred by the volunteer support by students at
Miramar and Southwestern Colleges, as well as outreach events sponsored by
UCSD students in various high schools and libraries throughout San Diego and
Long Beach.

As the exhibition comes to Manila for the first time in July for "Sangandaan
2003," it will be met by ten contemporary Filipino artists in an exhibition
entitled "Yankee Doodles" to be held at the Main Gallery of the Cultural
Center of the Philippines. In the virtual absence of discussions on the
history of the Philippine-American War, "Yankee Doodles" responds by
remembering and interrogating this critical period in American and
Philippine history, and its consequences and implications in today's world.




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Text credits:
"Malevolent Assimilation" from the "COLORED: Black and White" exhibition
curated by Helen Toribio, Abe Ignacio and Jorge Emmanuel.
Colored: Black 'n' White at the Intercultural Center, Program
Director/Coordinator Darius Spearman, A Program of the Sonoma Student Union,
Sonoma State University.
"Images of racism: How 19th century U.S. media depicted Filipinos, other
nonwhites as savages" by Benjamin Pimentel, Chronicle Staff Writer, Tuesday,
July 17, 2001.

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Sangandaan Conference website
http://www.sangandaan2003.upd.edu.ph
http://www.cuturalcenter.gov.ph/sangandaan