February 7, 2019: The Philippine American War: War or Insurrection?

[On February 4^th, 1899 Filipino rebels launched an attack on American troops in Manila, the opening salvo in what would become the Philippine American War (or Philippine Insurrection—see Thursday’s post for more on that distinction). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that largely forgotten, brutal turn of the 20^th century conflict, leading up to a weekend post on the war’s legacies for 20^th and 21^st century histories!]

On why what might seem to be a semantic distinction is anything but.

Between its February 1899 starting point and its July 1902 close, the military conflict between Filipino and U.S. forces would take more than 4000 American and more than 20,000 Filipino soldiers’ lives, and contributes to the deaths of another 200,000 Filipino civilians. To use the words of A Few Good Men’s Captain Jack Ross (Kevin Bacon), “Those are the facts, and they are undisputed.” In the light of such clear and horrific historical details, it can seem mighty silly to quibble over whether to call that conflict the Philippine American War or the Philippine Insurrection (or Rebellion, or whatever similar term one might employ). There’s no doubt that debates over historical frames or lenses can and too often do obscure the human experiences (and, too often, horrors) at the heart of those histories; whether we call the forced transport of African slaves to the Americas the Middle Passage or the Triangle Trade or the Transatlantic slave trade, for example, the tens of millions of Africans affected by it—and the millions of them who died aboard those ships—comprise the stories and histories on which we should most fully focus. That lesson holds true for many if not all histories, and is certainly the case when it comes to the turn of the 20^th century military conflict in the Philippines.

Yet as an English Professor (I know I’m also and in this space chiefly an AmericanStudier, but Professor of English Studies is my official job title and a central part of my identity), I know that language matters a great deal, and indeed is not just a frame for reality but a principal method through which reality (or at least the human experience of it) can be constructed. Among the many such effects of calling the Philippine American War an “insurrection” instead would be a clear vision of the Philippines themselves as under United States control in the era. That is, an insurrection or rebellion is always an attempt to battle and overthrow an existing regime, the power structure in that particular place and time. Yet as I’ve noted throughout this series, the U.S. Senate didn’t approve the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish American War until four days after the opening shots of the Philippine American War—so even if we don’t see the two conflicts as inextricably intertwined (as I argued on Monday we should), or don’t recognize the validity of Emilio Aguinaldo’s June 1898 Philippine Declaration of Independence, it makes very little sense to consider the United States as the clear authority in the islands as of February 1899. And if the U.S. wasn’t that authority at that time, then there’s no reason not to see the conflict that began in that month as a war between two equal forces for control over the islands (or even, if you want to go further, as a continued U.S. invasion of the islands and attempt to overthrow the established First Philippine Republic).

Moreover, thinking of the conflict as a war in those ways also significantly challenges our sense of when it ended. It’s true that Aguinaldo was captured and surrendered in March 1901, and his fellow general Miguel Malvar did so in April 1902, leading to President Theodore Roosevelt’s July 4, 1902 peace amnesty. But many Filipino forces (especially Muslim Filipinos in the islands’ southern, Moro region) continued fighting for more than a decade after that; this conflict has come to be known as the Moro Rebellion, and is said to have ended with the June 1913 Battle of Bud Bagsak. But here again, calling this conflict a “rebellion” gives credence to the U.S. as an established authority in the Philippines; and if we’re able to question that authority when it comes to the first years of this war, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do so throughout the conflict. At the very least, there’s significant value in thinking about all 14 years of the conflict as a series of battles between opposing forces seeking control of the islands, and reframing the war in that way starts with a semantic shift.

Last war context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

February 6, 2019: The Philippine American War: Mark Twain and Imperialism

[On February 4^th, 1899 Filipino rebels launched an attack on American troops in Manila, the opening salvo in what would become the Philippine American War (or Philippine Insurrection—see Thursday’s post for more on that distinction). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that largely forgotten, brutal turn of the 20^th century conflict, leading up to a weekend post on the war’s legacies for 20^th and 21^st century histories!]

On a couple ways to contextualize a complex, important essay.

I wrote one of my earliest blog posts, just a week into this blog’s existence back in November 2010 (ah, how young we all were!), on Mark Twain’s turn to anti-imperialism (and specifically to the Philippine question) in his 1901 essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” I had the chance to re-read the essay when I taught my Mark Twain Special Author course in Fall 2017 (more on that course in a moment), and felt then even more strongly what I had already thought was the case about “Person”: that it walks a very fine line between critiquing the kinds of paternalistic and patronizing attitudes that underlie imperialistic enterprises and ironically furthering those attitudes. That is, when Twain opens his essay with the sentence “Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole,” he is clearly satirizing the motivations behind those who extend such “blessings,” and thus implicitly criticizing the notion of the “blessings” themselves; but I’m not as sure that he is using “darkness” entirely satirically, here or at any point in the essay. In any case, it’s a complex essay, and one that deserves extended reading beyond my brief engagement here!

Like all literary texts Twain’s essay also benefits from contextualization, however, and here I want to highlight a couple particular such contexts. For one thing, “Person” was part of an organized, unified turn of the 20^th century anti-imperialist movement. Twain’s essay was published through the New York Anti-Imperialist League, a local branch of the American Anti-Imperialistic League. Founded in June 1898 in direct response to the ongoing Spanish American War—in the same month that yesterday’s subject, Emilio Aguinaldo, declared Philippine Independence from both Spain and the U.S.—the League gathered an impressive array of political, social, and cultural voices in opposition to precisely the kinds of imperial ventures that the war helped extend. Twain was a particularly prominent member of the League throughout its existence, and his 1901 essay should thus be read in the context of both his own many anti-imperalist statements from 1898 on and the voices and ideas of his fellow anti-imperialists over those same years. A text always speaks in part on its own terms, of course, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and these contemporary contexts are vital ones for understanding “Person.”

So too are contexts related to Twain’s half-century writing career. As I detailed in this post, one of the most enlightening discoveries I made through teaching the Twain-focused class was of his early efforts at social satire and critique. I had always thought that those genres were part of the final decade and stage of Twain’s career; but while he certainly turned to them more fully in the early 1900s, they had been a part of his journalistic and writing repertoire since at least 1866’s masterful satire “What Have the Police Been Doing?” As that piece reflects, Twain tended to maintain his satires straight through (a la Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”), meaning that it is entirely up to the readers to read between the lines and understand the authorial perspective and arguments behind the voice being both employed and satirized. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case for “Person,” and again any piece has to work to at least some degree on its own terms as we can never know with what contexts an audience would be familiar; but at the same time, we can’t read a satirical essay from an author who frequently worked in the genre as entirely separate from those career-long efforts. Just one more layer to reading Twain’s complex and crucial contribution to the debate over the Philippines and U.S. imperialism.

Next war context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

February 5, 2019: The Philippine American War: Emilio Aguinaldo

[On February 4^th, 1899 Filipino rebels launched an attack on American troops in Manila, the opening salvo in what would become the Philippine American War (or Philippine Insurrection—see Thursday’s post for more on that distinction). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that largely forgotten, brutal turn of the 20^th century conflict, leading up to a weekend post on the war’s legacies for 20^th and 21^st century histories!]

On three telling 1890s stages in the career of the Filipino revolutionary leader.

1)      Freedom fighter: Born in 1869 to a Spanish colonial official father and a mixed-race Chinese Filipina mother in the town of Cavite el Viejo, Aguinaldo initially followed in his father’s footsteps and became the town’s “Municipal Governor-Captain” at the age of 25. But just four years later, in March 1895 he joined the Katipunan, a Masonic-inspired secret society dedicated to overthrowing Spanish rule and establishing Filipino independence; and in August 1896 he helped lead Filipino forces in the Philippine Revolution against the Spanish. If we see the Philippine American War as tied to the Spanish American War (as I argued in yesterday’s post that we should), then it would make sense to define those interconnected military conflicts as originating with the Philippine Revolution (along with, for example, José Martí’s revolutionary efforts in Cuba). And Aguinaldo’s revolutionary leadership was a key ingredient to those vital historical origins.

2)      U.S. ally: The Philippine Revolution failed, and in late 1897 Aguinaldo and other revolutionary leaders went into voluntary exile in Hong Kong. But almost immediately Aguinaldo organized a “Hong Kong Junta” to carry on the revolutionary agenda, and so when the Spanish American War began the following year he was ready and willing to serve as a U.S. ally against the Spanish forces on the islands. The U.S. was clearly just as ready, as only two weeks after the May 1^st Battle of Manila Bay, Commodore George Dewey transported Aguinaldo on the USS McCulloch from Hong Kong back to Cavite el Viejo. By the end of May Aguinaldo was leading nearly 20,000 Filipino troops against the Spanish in the Battle of Alapan (this less than half a year after the end of the Revolution, so it seems clear that many of the same forces took part in both), and his military leadership and victories would prove vital to the U.S. triumph over the Spanish on the islands and in the war overall.

3)      Insurgent enemy: Aguinaldo saw his efforts as working toward a different goal, however. After that victory at Alapan he raised the Philippine flag for the first time, and shortly thereafter he issued the Philippine Declaration of Independence and installed himself as the first President of the Philippine Republic. Aguinaldo’s leadership and troops were crucial to the U.S. war effort, and so the U.S. military leaders did not challenge these political steps; but they foreshadowed, and indeed in many ways began, the divisions that would explode into the Philippine American War just half a year later. For more than two years Aguinaldo would lead the Filipino forces in that war, first in his official role as president and then (after U.S. forces chased him from Manila) as the leader of an insurgent resistance to the U.S. occupation. In March 1901 Aguinaldo was captured by U.S. forces, and in April signed an oath of allegiance to the U.S.; but fellow revolutionary leaders would carry on the insurgency for another year (and, by some measures, another decade after that), extending this final 1890s stage to Aguinaldo’s complex and crucial legacy.

Next war context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?