The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 4 | Issue 6 | Article ID 1745 | Jun 01, 2006

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

Paul A. Kramer

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

By Paul A. Kramer

Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-openedArlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Dayaddress there by a U.S. President, TheodoreRoosevelt placed colonial violence at the heartof American nation-building. In a speech beforean estimated thirty thousand people, brimmingwith “indignation in every word and everygesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the Cemeteryas a landscape of national sacrifice by justifyingan ongoing colonial war in the Philippines,where brutalities by U.S. troops had led towidespread debate in the United States. He didso by casting the conflict as a race war. Uponthis “small but peculiarly trying and difficultwar” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but“the triumph of civilization over forces whichstand for the black chaos of savagery andbarbarism." Roosevelt acknowledged andexpressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimedthat for every American atrocity, "a very crueland very treacherous enemy" had committed "ahundred acts of far greater atrocity."Furthermore, while such means had been theFilipinos' "only method of carrying on the war,"they had been "wholly exceptional on our part."The noble, universal ends of a war forcivilization justified its often unsavory means."The warfare that has extended the boundariesof civilization at the expense of barbarism andsavagery has been for centuries one of the mostpotent factors in the progress of humanity," heasserted, but “from its very nature it has

always and everywhere been liable to darkabuses [1]

President Theodore Roosevelt addresses a vastMemorial Day crowd at Arlington Cemetery inMay 1902 before assembled veterans and ajournalist. In his “indignant” speech, hedefended the U. S. Army against charges of“cruelty” in the ongoing Philippine-AmericanWar by racializing the conflict as one beingfought between the forces of “civilization” and“savagery.” (Theodore Roosevelt Collection,Harvard College Library.)

As did Roosevelt, this essay explores thePhilippine-American War as race war: a warrationalized in racial terms before U.S. publics,

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one in which U.S. soldiers came to understandFilipino combatants and non-combatants inracial terms, and one in which race played akey role in bounding and unbounding Americanviolence against Filipinos. My concern withrace is far from new in and of itself. Most of thewar’s historians—whether writing the moretraditional, campaign-driven U.S. literature ormore recent and more nuanced local and socialhistories of the war—make passing reference tothe racism of U.S. soldiers without thoroughexploration. [2] Stuart Creighton Miller, in hiscritical account of the war, places racism at thecenter of U.S. troop conduct. [3] This essaybegins from Miller’s starting assumption—thatrace was essential to the politics and conductof the war—but a lso emphasizes thecontingency and indeterminacy of the processby which these racial ideologies took shape,against the assumption that these ideologieswere reflexive “projections” or “exports” fromthe United States to the Philippines. Rather, asI will show, while race helped organize andjustify U.S. colonial violence, imperialprocesses also remade U.S. racial formations.[4]

Exploring this contingency requires attentionto two dynamics which have up to now beenlargely ignored in existing literatures. The firstof these is the contested character of raceduring the war. By 1898, Filipinos had beenengaging the Spanish colonial racial preceptsthat undergirded the Philippine colonial statefor at least two decades; they would continue todo so, in different ways, from the prewarRepublic into the war’s conventional phase andultimately in guerrilla struggle. Theseengagements often took the form of elite questsfor recognition, especially the affirmation ofcivilizational status as the criteria first forassimilation and political rights and, ultimately,for political independence. As I suggest, similarFilipino campaigns for recognition fromAmericans—before, during and after thewar—fundamentally shaped both U.S. racialideologies and Filipino nationalism.

The second source of contingency is the waritself. Racial ideologies and changing strategiesand tactics moved together in a dark, violentspiral. Within both Filipino and Euro-Americanpolitical cultures, patterns of warfare werethemselves important markers of racial status.“Civilized” people were understood to wage“conventional” wars while “savage” peoplewaged guerrilla ones. Filipino guerrilla warfareeventually marked the entire population as“savage” to American soldiers: rather thanmerely a set of tactics undertaken for militarypurposes, guerrilla war was the inherent war ofpreference of “lower races.” This racializationof guerrilla war raised the central question ofwhether Filipinos, in waging a “savage” war,were owed the restraints that defined“civilized” war. Ultimately, I will suggest, manyU.S. soldiers and officers answered thisquestion negatively. In many parts of theArchipelago, the war in its guerrilla phasesdeveloped into a war of racial exterminism inwhich Filipino combatants and non-combatantswere understood by U.S. troops to belegitimate targets of violence. [5] The heart ofthe emerging U.S. imperial racial formationwas rich in contradictions: the people of thePhilippines did not have sufficient “ethnologicalhomogeneity” to constitute a nation-state, butpossessed enough to be made war upon as awhole.

Questions of Recognition

By 1898, Filipino elites had been strugglingagainst Spanish racism, as a key element ofSpanish colonialism, for at least two decades.[6] An expatriate propaganda movement inEurope had help up Hispanicized “civilization,”advanced educat ion and bourgeo issophistication as arguments for greater rightswithin the Spanish colonial system. [7] Acommon editorial stance in the pages ofexpatriate journal La Solidaridad faulted someSpaniards—especially the Philippine friars—forrelentlessly denigrating Filipino “advancement”along these lines. [8] This was the strategy of a

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cosmopolitan, ilustrado elite with culturalcapital to spare, one that reached itsconsummation with the triumph of thePhilippine Revolution under Emilio Aguinaldoand the installation of the Philippine Republicin mid-1898. When the Malolos Congressformed, it was done in the name of an emerging“civilization” finally capable of expressing itselfas an independent state. The more radical,millenarian politics that had animated massparticipation in the revolution’s Katipunansocieties were marginalized in Aguinaldo’sRepublic. [9]

The taking of Manila by U.S. troops followingthe Battle of Manila Bay introduced a tense six-month period characterized by Filipino-American interaction and competitive state-building, in which the stakes of recognition hadnever been higher. On the ground, relationsbetween Filipinos and American soldiers in andaround Manila during this transitional periodwere varied. U.S. soldiers found themselves inan enticing, disturbing and incomprehensibleFilipino urban world; Filipinos unsure of theinvading army’s status were wary of theAmericans but eager for their business.Americans and Filipinos encountered eachother in commercial interactions, especiallythose involving liquor and sex. As U.S. soldiersconsolidated military control over Manila andits municipal government—from sanitation tolaw enforcement—and Filipino soldiersextended the Republic’s control in the wake ofSpanish defeats, they also met as members ofrival states-in-the-making. [10]

During this period, colliding interests, failedtranslations, mutual suspicions and questionsof jurisdiction easily boiled into animosity andconflict, especially where U.S. soldiers becamedrunk and disorderly or failed to pay theirdebts. Soldiers commonly characterizedFilipinos as a whole as filthy, diseased, lazy andtreacherous in their business dealings,sometimes applying the term “nigger” to them.One anonymous black soldier reflected back on

this period that the subsequent war would nothave broken out “if the army of occupationwould have treated [Filipinos] as people.” Butshortly after the seizure of Manila, white troopshad begun “to apply home treatment forcolored peoples: cursed them as damnedniggers, steal [from] them and ravish them, robthem on the street of their small change, takefrom the fruit vendors whatever suited theirfancy, and kick the poor unfortunate if hecomplained…” [11]

At the same time there was a striking amountof mutual recognition in the interval betweenwars, as U.S. soldiers came to know individualFilipinos or their families and visited theirchurches and homes. Up until the very brink ofwar, American soldiers frequented Filipinoconcerts, dances, ceremonies and dinners,often recording their admiration for Filipinograce, hospitality and artistic achievement intheir diaries and letters. One striking examplewas a poem presented at a Thanksgiving dinnerthrown by the 13th Minnesota in Manila inNovember 1898, which recalled the recent fallof Manila and expressed the soldiers’ thanks:

We’re thankful that the City’s ours, and floatsthe Stars and Stripes;We’re thankful that our cause is one that fromthese Islands wipesThe degenerate oppressors of a brother humankinWho now—beneath ‘Old Glory’—a nation’splace may win. [12]

To be sure, there were dark signs here: theU.S. flag as the sole guarantor of liberty;passive Filipinos as objects of U.S. redemption;the sense that Filipinos still had a “nation” towin ahead of them “beneath ‘Old Glory.’” Whatwas striking in light of future developmentswas that Filipinos were still “brother humankin.”

In the last months of 1898, as the Treaty ofParis was being negotiated, Filipinos sought

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recognition by launching legal and historicalarguments for the sovereignty of the PhilippineRepublic and the impossibility of the Islands’legitimate transfer from Spain to the UnitedStates. These claims were subtly and forcefullyexpressed by Felipe Agoncillo, representativeof the Philippine Republic sent to the UnitedStates to lobby on behalf of Philippineindependence before U.S. politicians and thegeneral public. As expressed in his January 30,1899 “Memorial to the Senate of the UnitedStates,” Agoncillo’s claim was that U.S. formalrecognition of the Philippine Republic hadalready been established by U.S. consular andnaval dealings with Emilio Aguinaldo’sgovernment. The army of the PhilippineRevolution had advanced sufficiently againstSpanish forces by the time of the U.S.declaration of war, he claimed, that Spain hadno legal title or right to cede Philippineterritory to the United States. Indeed, ChristianFilipino rebellions against Spain had brokenout “continuously with greater or less fury forthe past hundred years,” while “a large numberof my countrymen,” namely Muslims andanimists, had “never been subdued by Spanishpower.” Agoncillo also appealed to U.S. historyand political institutions, inviting Americanattention “to several notable and exactAmerican precedents” and urging “theRepublic of America” to “adhere to theteachings of international law as laid down bysome of its founders.” [13]

At the same time, the Republic soughtrecognition for its sovereignty in “civilizational”standing. This brand of argument wasparticularly common in the Republic’s officialnewspaper, La Independencia, itself meant tobe a concrete and mobile representation of thePhilippine Republic’s “civilization” andsovereignty before imagined audiences bothwithin and outside the archipelago. [14] Intheir first issue, the editors described "OurProgram" as: “demonstrating the ideal and thesupreme aspiration of the country; publicizingthe priorities of our government; requesting

recognition of our independence from othernations, grounding ourselves in the capacity ofthe race, in the deeds that outwardly reveal ourculture and in the vitality that we demonstratein governing 26 provinces with more than 3million inhabitants...” [15] Advertisingcorrespondents in “all the provinces of theArchipelago, London, Paris, Madrid, Singapore,Hong-Kong and Saigon,” its pages in late-1898and early 1899 highlighted erudite treatises on“modern” government, including civil servicereform, municipal budgeting, publ icinstruction, moral reform, public hygiene and“the spirit of association.” [16]

One fascinating window onto Filipino efforts atrecognition and their reception was the inlandexpedition of Luzon taken by two naval officers,William Wilcox and L. R. Sargent, in Novemberand December 1898. While the two men's taskwas "of a very indefinite nature," it wasfundamentally a project of recognition: todetermine whether the institutions controllingthe Filipino countryside constituted a state and,if a state, whether it was hostile or not to twowandering U.S. naval officers. As Sargent putit, they were "to proceed as far to thenorthward as the character of the country andthe attitude of the natives would permit, and toreturn only when forced to do so." [17]

If border control was a state's measure, thenthe Philippine Republic was up and running.Aguinaldo offered the two friendship and verbalconsent but no written passports. As a result,the two relied on local presidentes, whoprovided them passports, carriers and safepassage between towns, although at least onehad hesitated to give assistance in fear that"any incident" might "create a wrong andinjurious impression of the good faith of thePhilippines…" [18] Some members of the ruralelite may have seen great advantage in winningover two naive Americans; others may haveseen in them only the opening wedge of aninvasion. At one town they might be greeted"by the ringing of the church bells and the

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music of the band, and at the next by thecritical cross-questioning of the localauthorities." [19]

In either case, local officers of the Republic lostno chance to represent to visiting Americanstheir authority and popular support. Wilcox andSargent were regularly treated to elaborateFilipino patriotic celebrations, stirringdeclarations of independence, and impressivemilitary drills. "At that time the enthusiasm ofthe people was tuned to the highest pitch,"reported Sargent. "In every village, every manwas training in arms. Companies were formedof boys, from eight years of age upward." Anew civil governor "declared the purpose of thepeople to expend the last drop of their blood, ifnecessary, in defending the liberty thus gainedagainst the encroachments of any nationwhatsoever." Many times villagers hadgathered in the large room of the Presidencia,where they were quartered, and "put theirwhole hearts into the songs in which theirpatriotism found vent." [20] When asked aboutthe Philippines' status, "leading townspeople"had answered in unison that they would"accept nothing short of independence." [21]

This photograph of soldiers of the PhilippineRepublic shows the efforts of the newlyinaugurated state to convey the uniform,organized, “civilized” character of therepublic’s army and its warfare. Wilcox andSargent encountered many such forces on theirlate 1898 trip through Luzon (From Leon Wolff,

Little Brown Brother: How the United StatesPurchased and Pacified the Philippines (GardenCity, NY, 1961)), photographs after p. 49).

But even as Wilcox and Sargent worked theirway across Luzon, the unstable politicalwindow through which they were travelingbegan to close. As steamers and telegraph linesbrought word of the Treaty from Hong Kongnewspapers, Wilcox and Sargent faced stifferrestrictions. “Already the hope was fading thatfreedom from Spain meant freedom ofgovernment,” wrote Sargent. “The feelingtoward Americans was changing, and we sawits effect in the colder manner of the people,and in their evident desire to hustle us alongthe most direct road to Manila.” [22] As theyreached the Western coast of Luzon, and theU.S. Commissioners at Paris moved towardsformal acquisition of the Philippines, the partycame under greater scrutiny and was detainedor forced back. They were subject to a newregulation that travelers not "carry arms, norapproach within 200 meters of a fortification,not make any plans, or take photographs ofthem." [23] Their final report, written upontheir return in December, contained tacticaldata appropriate to war but also recognized thefervor of Filipino revolutionary aspirations andthe varied capacities of the Filipino people.Perhaps on these latter merits—perhaps due tobureaucratic inertia—it was issued into thepublic record as a Senate Document only in1900, a year and a half after it was originallyfiled.

Even as they lobbied abroad and performedlocally, Filipinos were highly suspicious ofAmerican capacities to recognize them in lightof circulating rumors of race. Prior to theoutbreak of the war, one of the chief Filipinosuspicions of Americans had been theirreputation for racial oppression. "One of thestories that received universal acceptance,"reported General McReeve of the pre-warinterlude, "was that ever since the Americanshad liberated their negro slaves they had been

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looking around for others and thought they hadfound them at last in the Philippines." [24]Filipinos that Wilcox and Sargent encounteredhad been “prejudiced against us by theSpaniards," charges "so severe that what thenatives have since learned has not sufficed todisillusion them." [25] Two points in particularhad stood out regarding "our policy toward asubject people”:

... that we have mercilessly slain and finallyexterminated the race of Indians that werenative to our soil and that we went to war in1861 to suppress an insurrection of negroslaves, whom we also ended by exterminating.Intelligent and well-informed men havebelieved these charges. They were rehearsed tous in many towns in different provinces,beginning at Malolos. The Spanish version ofour Indian problem is particularly well known.[26]

Correspondent Frederick Palmer blamed theoutbreak of war on these suspicions. “Allprominent Filipinos” that Palmer had spokenwith had agreed: “If the status of the negro, asthey understood it, was to be theirs in the newsystem, they would have to leave the islandsanyway, and they had concluded to make afight before going.” [27]

While Wilcox and Sargent traveled in the Luzonhighlands, U.S. and Spanish commissioners atParis settled the disposition of the PhilippineIslands, on December 10, 1898. McKinley hadat first supported only the acquisition ofcoaling stations and naval bases, but had beenpersuaded over time to press for the entirearchipelago. While the politics of recognitionhad been ambiguous in Manila and its environs,they would be stark and definitive at Paris,where Filipinos had been excluded from treatynegotiations. McKinley effectively closed thefirst chapter in the recognition debate in hisstatement of December 21, with Wilcox andSargent scarcely out of the woods. Authored byElihu Root and later known as the “Benevolent

Assimilation” proclamation, it narrated theAmerican destruction of the Spanish fleet andthe Treaty of Paris and laid a claim to U.S.sovereignty over the entire archipelago. Theproclamation was a sketch of bare-bonesmilitary government, laying out improvisedground rules for the maintenance of propertyrights, taxation and tariffs. McKinley seemedmost concerned, however, with the Filipinorecognition of U.S. sovereignty. In an effort toextend U.S. power “with all possible despatch,”U.S. military commanders in place were toannounce “in the most public manner” that theAmericans had come “not as invaders orconquerors, but as friends, to protect thenatives in their homes, in their employments,and in their personal and religious rights.” Itshould be the military’s “paramount aim” towin the confidence, respect, and affection ofthe inhabitants of the Philippines by assuringthem in every possible way that they wouldenjoy a full measure of individual rights andliberties which is the heritage of free peoples,and by proving to them that the mission of theUnited States is one of benevolent assimilation,substituting the mild sway of justice and rightfor arbitrary rule. [28]

Most significantly, however, the proclamationwas a formal derecognition of the PhilippineRepublic and established the relationshipbetween the U.S. and Filipinos as sovereignstate to passive, individual subjects. The term“assimilation,” by which the address wouldcome to be known, held more than a hint ofmalice: the very fact that it required theadjective “benevolent” to soften it implied thatthere were kinds of “assimilation” that werenot.

Race-Making and Colonial Warfare

The much-anticipated outbreak of war in earlyFebruary 1899, just before the U.S. Senate’sconfirmation of the Treaty of Paris, did not endthe Filipino struggle for recognition. Long intothe fighting, Filipino spokesmen revealed a

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continued preoccupation with promotingFilipino “civilization” to the wider world as acentral rationale for claims to independence.“We, the Filipinos, are a civilized, progressiveand peace-loving people,” stated GalicianoApacible in the Spanish-language pamphlet, “AlPueblo Americano” [To the American People]translated into English and published by theAnti-Imperialist League. The pamphlet praisedFilipinos’ education, literacy, art and politicaland religious leadership, urging Americans to“we igh our s ta tements aga ins t themisrepresentations under which Imperialismseeks to conceal its designs.” Following itsdefeat of Spanish forces, the Republic, ratherthan giving in to revolutionary excess, hade s t a b l i s h e d a n o r d e r l y g o v e r n i n ginfrastructure, one whose hallmarks of science,technology and education conveyed its“civilization.”

[T]hey reorganized the administrativemachinery which had been disturbed by recentstruggles: telegraphs, railroads, and means ofcommunication began to work regularly; wehad adopted the electric light in some of ourtowns; and we had establ ished a newuniversity, four high and several primaryschools. In brief, the new nation had enteredupon a path of progress which alreadypromised a bright future. [29]

Along with demonstrating their “civilization,”some Filipino leaders conceived of theirstruggle as explicitly anti-racial. Oneanonymous address “To the Filipino People,”captured by the U.S. Army in pursuit ofAguinaldo in March 1900, affirmed Filipinobravery and sacrifice and laid claim to divinely-granted freedoms. “We are living on one planetunder the same celestial vault,” it stated, “andif we differ in color, it is because of the distantlatitudes in which we are, and this difference inno way signifies any superiority of the one overthe other.” [30]

From its start, the war was challenged by U.S.-

based anti-imperialist societies that hadorganized together into the Anti-ImperialistLeague in November 1898. The organization,which organized in Boston, Washington,Chicago and many smaller cities, drew ondiverse political roots, many of them in earlierreform movements, from civil service reformleagues to single-tax leagues to abolitionism. Inparty terms anti-imperialism leaned towardindependents and reformers, but broughttogether a loose coalition of conservative andwhite-supremacist Democrats with an oldergeneration of liberal Republicans. Their initialhope was to turn U.S. public opinion againstPhilippine annexation in negotiations withSpain, using extensive lobbying andeducational campaigns; following the outbreakof war in February 1899, they criticized theU.S. invasion as unjust in both ends and means.[31]

Not all anti-imperialist argument hinged on therecognition of the Philippine Republic innational terms (as a state) or Filipinos in racialterms (as civilized). Indeed, many anti-imperialist claims, especially prior to outbreakof war, had been “internal,” focusing on thenegative consequences of “empire” for theUnited States itself, especially the erosion ofdomestic republican virtue and freedomthrough imperial corruption, tyranny andmilitarism. [32] Many of these concerns wereexplicitly racial: annexation of the Philippineswould lead to the “corruption” of the U.S. bodypolitic itself through Filipino citizenship andthe “degrading” of U.S. labor by additionalwaves of “Asiatic” immigrants. [33]

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This anti-imperialist cartoon by Charles Nelanseeks to illustrate the risks of “incorporating”the Philippines into the U. S. republican bodypolitic by casting the Philippine population as awhole as “savage” and incapable of exercisingpolitical rationality. It suggests that because ofFilipinos’ “incapacity for self-government,”imperialism could threaten the United States’own political institutions. (Charles Nelan,Cartoons of Our War with Spain, New York,1898)

But some anti-imperialists recognized thePhilippine Republic, even after the outbreak ofthe war. Embracing a transnational strategydescribed by Jim Zwick, they assistedrepresentatives of the Republic lobbying in theUnited States, translated and published theirarticles in the United States; and eventuallycarried out investigations into the conduct ofthe war. [34]

McKinley’s strategy to counter anti-imperialistclaims of authority was to appoint the first oftwo “Philippine Commissions,” the first arrivingin the Islands in early 1899. Also operating on atransnational political terrain, the Commissionhad two primary goals. First, within thePhilippine context, it was to serve as the cruxof the War Department’s “policy of attraction,”

the effort to draw ilustrado and principal elitesaway from the Republic. Once settled into theAudiencia, former home of the Spanishsupreme court, the Commission’s daily sessionsbecame the central ritual of urban, wartimecollaboration, where informants exchangedtestimony favorable to U.S. sovereignty forpolitical patronage. [35] As early as May, thisarm of the Commission’s work was showingresults. There were key ilustrado defectionsand political placements—especially those ofBenito Legarda, Felipe Buencamino, T. H.Pardo de Tavera and Cayetano Arellano--theinauguration of Pardo de Tavera’s pro-annexation newspaper La Democracia and thedisplacement of Mabini’s irreconcilable factionwithin the Republic by Pedro Paterno’s moreconciliatory one. The Commission’s secondproject, however, was aimed at the domesticU.S. public: to produce an authoritative recordof events in the Islands that would justify U.S.aggression and undermine anti-imperialistargument.

The task of rationalizing the war in its ends andmeans before the American public led to theactive production of a novel, imperial racialformation by the war’s defenders. Thisformation had a dual character, simultaneouslyand reciprocally racializing Americans andFilipinos in new ways. Its first half racializedthe U.S. population as "Anglo-Saxons" whoseoverseas conquests were legitimated by racial-historical ties to the British Empire. [36]Opponents of the Treaty and war frequentlyargued that while U.S. continental empire hadinvolved the legitimate unfolding of republicaninstitutions into empty (or emptied) space, thePhilippine annexation constituted a disturbing“imperial” departure from the U.S. 'sexceptional and exemplary traditions, one thatwould ultimately undermine the nation's moraland political foundations. This apparentviolation of U.S. historical laws was answeredwith extra-legal claims of racial essence.Specifically, the war's advocates subsumedU.S. history within longer, racial trajectories of

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"Anglo-Saxon" history which folded togetherU.S. and British imperial histories. ThePhilippine-American War, then, was a naturalextension of Western conquest, the organicexpression of the desires, capacities anddestinies of "Anglo-Saxon" peoples. Americans,as Anglo-Saxons, shared British genius forempire-building, a genius which they mustexercise for the greater glory of the "race" andto advance "civilization" in general. [37] Unlikeother races, they “liberated” the peoples theyconquered, indeed, their expressions ofconquest as “freedom”, proliferated as theterrors they unleashed became more visible.Anglo-Saxonist racial-exceptionalism was givenits most resonant expression in February 1899,when, Rudyard Kipling published "The WhiteMan's Burden.” The poem condensed race andhumanitarian martyrdom, recasting Americansas a "race" with an inevitable imperial destiny.[38]

If the first half of the double-sided imperialracial formation “Anglo-Saxonized” Americans,its second half “tribalized” Filipinos.Contemporary social evolutionary theory heldthat societies, in evolving from “savagery” to“civilization,” moved in political terms from“tribal” fragmentation to “national” unity.” [39]Successfully identify “tribes”—marked bylanguage, religion, political allegiance—andone had disproven a nation’s existence.Enumerate a society’s fragments, and whatmight otherwise have looked like a nationbecame merely the tyranny of one “tribe” overothers; what might have appeared a statebecame a problem of imperial “assimilation.”The “tribalization” of the Republic wouldrhetorically eradicate the Philippine Republicas a legitimate state whose rights the UnitedStates might have to recognize underinternational law. [40]This argument was forcefully advanced by thePhilippine Commission’s Report, its firstinstallment issued in January 1900, whichrepresented the most influential effort toreduce the Philippine Republic to what came to

be called the “Single Tribe” of the Tagalogs.The Report’s section on “The Native Peoples ofthe Philippines,” written by zoologist Dean C.Worcester, began by admitting disputes overthe “civilization” of the Filipino people.The most diverse and contradictory statementsare frequently met with concerning theinhabitants of the Philippine Islands, at presentcollectively known as ‘Filipinos.’ Some writerscredit them with a high degree of civilization,and compare them to the Pilgrim Fathers or thepatriots of ‘76, while others regard even themore highly civilized tribes as little better thanbarbarians. [41]

The Commission set out to “reconcile viewswhich are apparently contradictory” based ontheir investigation of Philippine conditions.After a brief review of opposing views, theypresented their conclusions: the Philippinepopulation consisted of “three sharply distinctraces,” the Negrito, the Indonesian and theMalayan. Early migrations by the Negritos, agroup “near the bottom of the human series,”had been displaced by invasions of Indonesiansand Malayans with superior racial constitutionand civilization. Out of these three races hadsprung “numerous tribes, which often differvery greatly in language, manners, customs,and laws, as well as in degree of civilization.”[42]

The argument of “tribal” pluralism became thecenterpiece of arguments against Filipino self-government. “The most striking and perhapsthe most significant fact in the entiresituation,” began the Commission’s report on“Capacity for Self-Government,” “is themultiplicity of tribes inhabiting the archipelago,the diversity of their languages (which aremutually unintelligible), and the multifariousphases of civilization--ranging all the way fromthe highest to the lowest--exhibited by thenatives of the several provinces and islands.”[43]

While Worcester admitted it was “extremely

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difficult to arrive at anything approaching acorrect estimate of the numbers of even themore important civilized tribes,” the report wasa powerful representation of the Commission’sability to encapsulate the Philippine populationby scientific means, one that gave birth to oneof its most widely-employed “facts”: thenumber “84” as the total number of Philippine“tribes.” [44] In future debates, the figure,meant to convey impossible plurality, wouldecho through imperial argumentation indefense of the Commission’s centralethnological and political conclusion: “TheFilipinos are not a nation, but a variegatedassemblage of different tribes and peoples, andtheir loyalty is still of the tribal type.” [45]

Worcester would be followed quickly into the“tribes” question by anti-imperialist andFilipino nationalist publicists. In 1900, forexample, Filipino nationalist Sixto Lopez wasasked by the New England Anti-ImperialistLeague to produce “a brief statement of thefacts” on the “tribes” question, “as a native ofthe country, and as one who has given someattent ion to the ethnography o f theArchipelago, both by personal research and bya study of the best works on the subject...” ForLopez, the Commission’s findings had been“entirely incorrect.” The number eighty-fourhad been the product of ”imagination, badspelling, translation, subdivision, andmultiplication.” The Commission had badlytranscribed already inaccurate Spanishrecords, mistaken the mountain peoples forlowland villagers, confused racial groups forlanguage groups, and exaggerated thedifferences between these languages. “It wouldbe just as absurd to regard the Americans asone tribe and the ‘Yankees’ as another,” hewrote, “and then to increase these two tribesinto four or more by misspelling the word‘Americans,’ or by translating it into French.”He claimed that the “so-called ‘tribes’” wereactually a small minority of the Philippinepopulation, analogous to “the uncivilized orsemi-civilized remnants of the Indian tribes still

inhabiting certain parts of the United States.”[46]

Even as the administration “tribalized”Filipinos in its campaign to rationalize the warat home, U.S. soldiers on the ground racializedtheir opponents with striking speed andintensity. In the war’s early months, what hadbeen diffuse and fragmented pre-waranimosities quickly congealed into novel racialformations at the very center of U.S. soldiers’popular culture, capable of defining a wartimeenemy and organizing and motivating violenceagainst that enemy. "A lively hatred of ournewly declared enemy was the one enthusiasmof the camp," wrote a corporal in the Montanaregulars in July 1899. [47] This race-makingprocess is vividly illustrated by terminologicalshifts in the diaries and letters home of U.S.volunteers during the early months of the war.Although the linguistic starting-points and end-points differed, many soldiers progressivelyracialized their terms for the insurgentsspecifically, and Filipinos generally, although infew cases did these terms entirely replaceother terms like “insurgent” or “native.”

Andrew Wadsworth, for example, a twenty-eight year old sergeant in the First NebraskaVolunteers, had observed shortly upon arrivalin Manila that “the natives are bright andintelligent as the average run of people," andadmired their art , musicianship andindustriousness. [48] Writing home from "theField" two weeks after the beginning of thewar, he wrote that "it was a hot time going oversome of the ground... [it] swarmed with theindians but we didn't do a thing to them..." [49]Within another two weeks, his racism was morematter-of-fact. "[H]ave forgotten whether Ihave written any of you folks since wecommenced to chase niggers," he wrote off-handedly, "have no doubt read in the paperswhat we are doing..." [50] Despite risingtensions, Earl Pearsall of the same unit hadrecorded in his diary on January 5th, with someregret, that “the insurgents have not been as

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friendly lately as they have been for they havenot visited our camp for three or four days.”[51] The day war broke out, he imagined that“the dusky fellows don’t care for any more ofthis warfare with the Americano.” [52] Lessthan three weeks later, however, he thrilledthat U.S. artillery had “put the black rascalsover the hills.” [53] Early in March, he reportedbeing “attacked by the ‘Gugos’” on theMariquina road. [54]

South Dakota volunteer Louis Hubbard, aleader in his unit’s regimental band, hadaccepted the gift of a sword from “one ofAguinaldo’s sergeants” in December 1898 andrecruited a Filipino musician, “the finestclarinetist I ever heard in my life.” [55] Twoweeks into the combat, he wrote that it was“lots of sport to hunt these black devils.” [56]Angered by reports of Filipino atrocitiesagainst U.S. troops, he wrote that “[t]hey arejust like any savage.” [57] In mid-March herecorded the hope for a speedy charge onMalolos, “for the quicker we get there and getthese ‘gugos’ of [sic] the face of the earth thequicker we will be ready to start for home.”[58]

Photographs of dead Filipino soldiers lying intrenches were often taken by U. S. soldiers andjournalists and included in commemorativealbums. Albert Sonnichsen wrote in his memoirof the “heaps of dead and dying natives…photographed by our people, and exhibitedwith such mottoes as: ‘Can the __d Regimentboys shoot? You bet they can. Count the deadniggers.’” (F. Tennyson Neely, Fighting in thePhilippines: A Photographic Record of thePhilippine-American War (London, 1899);Sonnichsen, quoted in Russell Roth, MuddyGlory: America’s “Indian Wars” in thePhilippines, 1899-1935 (West Hanover, MA,1981)

This racialization process attracted theattention of U.S. journalists and soldiers on theground. Some understood rising pre-warhostility as the inevitable surfacing of latent

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“race differences” on all sides. “After the firstglamour which surrounded our troops,” soldier-correspondent John Bass reported to Harper’sin mid-October 1898, “a glamour due to anexaggerated and almost childish idea of theliberty and freedom we were bringing to thePhilippines, the race differences have madethemselves felt, which antagonize the nativesand exasperate our men.” [59] Many journalistswere struck by increasingly widespread use ofthe term “nigger” by U.S. troops. “Our troopsin the Philippines… look upon all Filipinos as ofone race and condition,” wrote Henry LoomisNelson, “and being dark men, they aretherefore ‘niggers,’ and entitled to all thecontempt and harsh treatment administered bywhite overlords to the most inferior races.” [60]Frederick Palmer, sympathetic to the wareffort, was amused by the soldiers’ “good-natured contempt” toward “the little brownman,” but regretted the use of the term“nigger,” which “too often” included groupsthat were above it, however marginally:

If a man is white; if he speaks English; if heknows his lines as we know them, he is as goodas anybody on earth. If he is white and yet doesnot understand our customs, we insist that heshall have equal rights with us. If he is anyother color too often we include him in onegeneral class called ‘nigger,’ a class beneathour notice, to which, as far as our soldier isconcerned, all Filipinos belonged. [61]

H. L. Wells similarly noted that U.S. troops sawthe enemy in racial terms. “Undoubtedly, theydo not regard the shooting of Filipinos just asthey would the shooting of white troops…” hewrote in mid-1900. “The soldiers feel that theyare fighting with savages, not with soldiers.”[62]

The race-making process of the early phases ofthe war was revealed in the U. S. press inchanging images of Emilio Aguinaldo. The first,from May 1898, is in the nature of a portrait;the caption refers to Aguinaldo as “thepresident of the republic of the islands,” andcalls him “brainy,” “patriotic,” and “self-sacrif icing,” while the image notablyEuropeanizes his features. The second, fromMarch 1899, is a cartoon that represents himas a childish, ostentatious dictator beingcrushed by U. S. force; his skin tone isdarkened here and his features are distinctly“Orientalized.” (Left image from Bonnie Miller,“The Spectacle of War: A Study of Spanish-American War Visual and Popular Culture,”Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2003,368; right image from Abe Ignacio, Enrique dela Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio,The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-AmericanWar in Political Cartoons (San Francisco,2005), 125.

This "lively hatred" was not, however, simply a"projection" or "export," but a new racialformation developing on the ground. [63] Itsnovelty was evidenced by the consistency withwhich reporters—imperialist and anti-imperialist--felt compelled to explain it to theirdomestic readerships. It was strikinglyillustrated by the appearance of a new term,"gu-gu" or "goo-goo," in U.S. soldiers'discourse, almost certainly the linguisticancestor of "gook." [64] Veteran Charles A.Freeman, writing in the 1930s, noted that "[o]frecent years the world [sic] has been shortened

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to gook, but gu-gu persists in Philippine fictionand fact written by Americans, and applies tothe lower class Filipino." [65] If the term had asinister future, its origins remain speculative.The first of two plausible explanations—farfrom incompatible with each other—roots theterm in local dynamics: the term came from theTagalog term for a slippery coconut-oilshampoo, pronounced gu-gu, which may havecaught on a sense of the enemy's elusiveness.[66] A second account suggests the term wasborn at the intersection of immediate sexualtensions and racialized U.S. popular culture, asolder idioms were reworked to suit volatile newsurroundings. According to Freeman, amongthe songs sung by U.S. troops on the longvoyage from San Francisco had been a minstreltune "'Just because she made ‘dem goo-gooeyes.'" When American soldiers first "gazedinto the dark orbs of a Filipino dalaga" onarrival, they had commented to each other"'Gee, but that girl can make goo-goo eyes.'"Filipino men had taken the term as an insult;when American soldiers learned this, "it stuck,and became a veritable taunt." [67]

Whatever its specific origins, "gu-gu" formedpart of a distinctive, new Philippine-Americancolonial vocabulary that focused hatredsaround a novel enemy and lent American troopsa sense of manly, insider camaraderie. Thenewness, immediacy and localism of U.S.soldiers' racial formation were suggested bythe quotation marks and parentheticalexplanations soldiers commonly included nearterms like "gu-gu" in their letters and diaries,especially early in the conflict. On occasion,soldiers explained these terms to what theyimagined to be befuddled family members athome. Peter Lewis, for example, promised inNovember 1900 to write home again about his"fights with the 'Guggoes' as the Filipiones [sic]are called." [68] Race-making and colonialwarfare were developing together as intimatelylinked projects.

Racializing Guerrilla Warfare

If one way to rationalize a war of aggressionwas to declare the enemy state a “tribe,” oneway to end it was simply to declare it over byfiat. November 1899 saw the war’s first end byU.S. proclamation. General MacArthurreported that there was “no organizedinsurgent force left to strike at,” and declaredthat all future resistance be characterized asoutlawry and the killing of U.S. soldiersmurder. [69] General Otis cabled Washingtonstating that the revolutionaries had beendispersed and that “claim to government byinsurgents can be made no longer under anyfiction.” [70] In fact, Filipino tactics hadundergone a dramatic shift toward a guerrillastrategy. Disbanding the regular army in thewake of defeats, Aguinaldo divided the countryinto military zones each under a guerrillacommander, preparing for a regionallydispersed set of smaller campaigns throughlocally-raised sandatahan units. It was hopedthat in these new settings, tropical disease,impassable roads and unfamiliar conditionswould weaken the American advance, whilegeographic knowledge and village-level supportwould sustain guerrilla ambushes and surpriseattacks against isolated American patrols. [71]

This guerrilla campaign, in turn, altered thecommand structure, tactics and knowledgerequirements of the U.S. Army. General Otisdecentralized his forces to match the Filipinoarmy, splitting the army into four departments,his plan to advance outward into thehinterlands, fighting back Filipino rebels andgarrisoning the towns that supported them.[72] In these regional settings (eventually over600 scattered posts), often cut off from Manilacontacts, local commanders would by necessitytake on greater autonomy, and be forced toadapt their tactics to local crises.

Guerrilla war involved not merely a set oftactics but a set of understandings: about themeanings of combat, about the means tovictory, about oneself as a combatant, aboutthe nature of the enemy. Although each side

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perceived it as a radical break, it held differentmeanings for Filipino and American troops. ForFilipino officers, schooled exclusively inEuropean conventional warfare, guerrillawarfare was largely unfamiliar, although atleast some Filipino soldiers had encountered itfirst-hand while collaborating with the Spanisharmy against Muslims and animists. Filipinostrategists were compelled to explain it usinganti-colonial guerrilla struggles elsewhere.Filipino commanders, for example, tookinspiration (most likely, unreciprocated) fromthe struggle of the Boers against the BritishEmpire. Juan Villamor, advising GeneralAntonio Luna in Ilocos, claimed to have takenhis guerrilla model from the war in SouthAfrica, probably learned through Hong Kongnewspapers. In a speech to raise troops inFebruary 1900, Villamor apparently noted thatthis warring style, "such as we are startingtoday," was "characteristic of a small nationwhen fighting a big one," and had produced"the most surprising successes" in South Africa.[73]

One possible explanation for Aguinaldo’s delayin adopting guerrilla strategies and tactics maybe the symbol i c po l i t i cs o f war andpreoccupat ions with express ions of“civilization.” But there were other politicalreasons for the delay in adopting guerillawarfare. As the Republic’s officials knew well,guerrilla war was a decentralized war thatempowered local commanders at the expenseof the center; it could also involve mobilizingthe energy of, and handing power to, a ruralbase. This base was largely mistrusted byAguinaldo's cadre and was itself oftenambivalent about the question of whetherRepublican “independence” and kalayaan werethe same thing. [74]

But it was particularly difficult to relinquish thequest for recogni t ion . In i t s b id forinternational esteem and recognition, theRepublic's self-representations to the world hadnervously held itself to a standard of

"civilization" in which war played a significantpart. Officials of the Republic agreed with theAmericans that, among many other things,“civilized” societies adhered to the laws of"civilized" warfare. The military drillswitnessed by Wilcox and Sargent had drawn ona vocabulary of republican martial orderimbued with notions of a “civilized” fightingforce; Republic newspapers of 1898 hadforegrounded the organized, hierarchicalcharacter of the Filipino army and thefavorable condition of its Spanish prisoners asadvertisements for its broader "civilization.”

Guerrilla warfare, by contrast, meant scatteredorganization, loosely-disciplined troops littledistinguishable from "savages," the securing ofrural supplies inseparable from looting, areliance on concealment and deception thatviolated European-American standards ofmasculine honor in combat. [75] EmilioConcepción, for example, a captain fighting inNamatay, later recalled that he "was vacillatingfor some time" before he reorganized his troopsinto guerrilla units, for reasons of honor. "Inreality, when I took that step, I had thoughtabout it well for some days before, because inprinciple I believed that if I made myself aguerrilla fighter, I would stop being arevolutionary, and at that time for me the titleof revolutionary was much more glorious." [76]By winning a conventional war, the PhilippineArmy would win the world’s support forindependent Philippine statehood; victory inguerrilla battle, however, might mean losingthe war for international recognition.

If on the Filipino side, guerrilla war wasinternational politics by other means, on theAmerican side, guerrilla war was both noveland disturbing. It meant dispensing with hopesfor gallant rushes at the enemy and hunkeringdown for a protracted campaign that was bothboring and anxious, with soldiers isolated fromother units, in unknown terrain, unable torecognize the line between "amigos" andhostile peoples. It was little surprise that the

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term the war introduced furthest into AmericanEnglish was “boondock,” drawn from a Tagalogterm for mountain or remote area. [77]

For U. S. troops, guerrilla-style warfare intropical settings was unfamiliar and disturbing,subjecting them to exposure and disease andmaking it impossible to tell the “enemy” from“amigos.” The term “boondock” in AmericanEnglish would emerge from this disorientation.Filipino villagers and revolutionaries tookadvantage of American ignorance and theirown local knowledge in prolonging resistance.(Library of Congress.)

"Uncle Sam's cohorts, set down in thePhilippines at the beginning of the century, sawin everything something new, strange andutterly incomprehensible," recalled one veteranyears later. "The enemy existed unseen in thedripping jungle, in the moldering towns and inthe smoky clearings on the hillsides, and sincea natural prudence bade him not risk any openencounter, the enemy was not to be found. Butthey existed nonetheless." [78] Even as U.S.soldiers relied on Filipinos as guides,translators, carriers and providers of food andinte l l igence, they found the task o fdistinguishing Filipino soldiers from “friendly”

villagers in garrisoned towns, who declaredthemselves “amigos,” a frustrating anddangerous one. As Jacob Isselhard recalled,"[t]he natives of the towns in which these smallbodies of our men were placed... with thatparticular faculty of all Orientals to say onething and meaning another, professed to be'mucho amigo' (good friends) to our faces,while secretly aiding the insurrection with allthe means at their command." Those whostepped forward as guides, for example, “wouldinvariably and purposely get lost on a trailwhich led either to nowhere or into wellprepared death traps." [79] Erwin Garrett putthe problem succinctly in verse: “’Amigo’ toyour face, forsooth, / Or when you spend thedough, / But a red-handed ‘katipunan’ when /You turn around to go.” [80]

The collision between Filipino revolutionaryand U.S. Army perspectives on guerrilla warcan best be witnessed in a brief writtenexchange in late-August 1900 between Mabiniand General James Franklin Bell. [81] Bell hadwritten to pressure Mabini to reconcile himselfto U.S. rule and to declare himself againstcontinued resistance, as had an increasingnumber of revolutionaries. His argumenthinged on the difference between “civilized”war and its opposites. War, he began, couldonly be justified by a combatant where successwas possible; as soon as defeat was certain,“civilization demands that the defeated side, inthe name of humanity, should surrender andaccept the result, although it may be painful toits feelings.” Combatants who strayed from thisprinciple “place themselves in a separateclassification” as “incompetent in themanagement of civil affairs to the extent oftheir ignorance of the demands of humanity.”In this specific case, the end of conventionalwar and the dispersal of the Philippine Armymeant that continued Filipino resistance wasnot only “criminal” but was “also daily shovingthe natives of the Archipelago headlongtowards a deeper attitude of semicivilization inwhich they will become completely incapable of

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appreciat ing and understanding theresponsibilities of civil government.”Civilization meant “pacification” and theacceptance of U.S. sovereignty: “The Filipinopeople can only show their fitness in thismatter by laying down their arms…” [82]

Mabini countered with a brilliant riposte. [83]Bell’s starting point, he noted, was simply theclaim that might made right, that the U.S. warwas “just and humanitarian” because its armywas powerful, “which trend of reasoning noteven the most ignorant Filipino will believe tobe true.” If in real life, he noted, “the strongnations so easily make use of force to imposetheir claims on the weak ones,” it was because“even now civilization and humanitariansentiments that are so often invoked, are, forsome, more apparent than real.” No onedeplored more deeply the “guerrilla andambush system” the Filipinos had been “forcedto adopt”; Mabini had always considered “thefight that offers equal risks to both combatantsmore noble and more worthy of men.” But theFilipinos had been left no choice. The very lawsof war that authorized strong nations’ use of“powerful weapons of combat” against weakones were those that “persuade[d]” the weak toengage in guerrilla war, “especially when itcomes to defending their homes and theirfreedoms against an invasion.” [84]

Guerrilla war was, in other words, tacticalrather than ethnological: in this “extremecase,” the laws of war “implacably order theweak people to defend their threatened honorand natural rights under pain of being calleduncivilized and uncapable of understanding theresponsibilities of a proper government.”Civilization meant neither capitulation norconciliation, but resistance in the face ofdomination. Indeed, for Mabini, resistance tosubmission itself—even through guerrillawar—was the only mark of a “civilized” people.The Filipinos, he wrote, “fight to show to theUnited States that they possess sufficientculture to know their rights even where there is

a pretense to hide them by means of cleversophisms.” [85] Earlier Mabini had written,along the same lines, that “[a] humiliatingpeace is tolerated only in uncivi l izedcountries.” [86] Asserting the logic ofrecognition, Mabini hoped the Revolutionwould in this way “remind the Americans of thestruggle borne by their ancestors against theEnglishmen for the emancipation of thecolonies which are now the free States of NorthAmerica.” At that moment, the Americans hadbeen “in the same place which the Filipinos arein today.” Contrary to some, Filipino resistancewas “not motivated by hatred of race, but bythe same principles sealed with the blood of[the Americans’] own ancestors.” [87]

Mabini was right that, in waging guerrilla war,Filipinos risked “the pain of being calleduncivilized.” Throughout the colonial world,races were characterized by the way they madewar. The General Orders No. 100, the CivilWar-era regulations that were the U.S. Army’sprincipal reference-point on questions of“irregular” warfare in the Philippines, reliedheavily on racial-historical dichotomiesbetween “civilized” and “savage” war. While“barbarous armies” and “uncivilized people,”for example, offered no protection to civiliansfor example, the “inoffensive citizen” wasprotected in “modern regular wars of theEuropeans, and their descendents in otherportions of the globe.” While the Ordersauthorized retaliation by “civilized nations,”taken too far this principle quickly led nearer to“the internecine wars of savages.” [88]

By these lights, those who waged guerrilla warwere, by definition, “savage”: Filipino warfaredid not take this form out of ignorance orstrategy but out of race. Conventional wisdomto this effect issued from the top of the U.S.military hierarchy in the Philippines. “War in itsearlier form was an act of violence which, fromthe very nature of primitive humanity and ofthe forces employed, knew no bounds,” GeneralMacArthur declared in a December 1900

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proclamation. “Mankind, from the beginning ofcivilization, however, has tried to mitigate, andto escape, as far as possible, from theconsequences of this barbarous conception ofwarlike action...” [89] The Filipinos, in refusingthese boundaries, had shown themselves to beless than “civilized.” “The war on the part ofthe Filipinos,” wrote Secretary of War ElihuRoot, “has been conducted with the barbarouscruelty common among uncivilized races.” [90]

This sense of race as the root cause of guerrillawar was also useful in explaining the guerrillas’mass support as the U.S. effort ground to a haltin mid-1900. In his October 1, 1900 report,MacArthur sought to account for what hecalled, with begrudging respect, the “almostcomplete unity of action of the entire nativepopulation.” His conclusion was that Filipinoparticipation was neither rational nor political.“[T]he adhesive principle comes fromethnological homogeneity,” he stated, “whichinduces men to respond for a time to theappeals of consanguineous leadership, evenwhen such action is opposed to their owninterests.” [91] General Young concurred. “’Thekeynote of the insurrection among the Filipinospast, present and future is not tyranny,’” hestated in an April 1901 address, “for we are nottyrants. It is race.” [92]

U.S. soldiers also increasingly defined theentire Filipino population as the enemy. Racebecame a sanction for exterminist war, themeans by which earlier distinctions betweencombatants and non-combatants—alreadyfragile—eroded or collapsed entirely. As long aspopular support for the rebellion was conceivedof as “political”—as a matter of decisions,interests and incentives—within an ultimatelypluralistic Filipino polity, the task of the U.S.Army was to “persuade” Filipinos of varioussectors to accept U.S. sovereignty. That this“persuasion” might take terrible, total formswas something that U.S. officials readilyacknowledged. But no such persuasion waspossible where “ethnological homogeneity”

governed over reason. The Filipinos were oneunited “race”; its “savagery” placed it outsidethe bounds of “civilized” warfare: the twoexplanatory halves converged, pincer-like, intoracial exterminist war as the only means to“peace.”

Close ties between race and exterministwarfare can be found in the ever-present racialterms employed by U.S. soldiers’ in theirdescriptions of violence against prisoners andcivilians. In 1902, for example, Albert Gardner,in Troop B of the 1st U.S. Cavalry, composed awould-be comic song dedicated to “water-cure”torture—in which filthy water was poured intothe mouths of Filipino prisoners, drowningthem--sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn ofthe Republic:

1stGet the good old syringe boys and fill it to thebrimWe’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operateon himLet someone take the handle who can work itwith a vimShouting the battle cry of freedom

ChorusHurrah Hurrah We bring the JubileeHurrah Hurrah The flag that makes him freeShove in the nozzel [sic] deep and let him tasteof libertyShouting the battle cry of freedom. [93]

Racial terms were employed in accounts of theshooting of Filipino prisoners, often disguisedas failed “escapes.” William Eggenbergerreported hearing at one point that the“niggers” would “all the am [sic] prisoners theycapture from now on, and of corse [sic] we willring [sic] all the damn necks of the ones wecapture too…” [94] He recorded severaloccasions of shooting prisoners attempting to“escape,” but later confessed that

When we capture a suspicious nigger, we

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generally loose him in the swamps, that is he islost and he isn’t lost but he never shows up anymore. Turn about is fair play. They do it to usand we do it to them, they killed three of ourfellows with out mercy but we have taken avery sweet revenge and a very clear revenge tothem too. [95]

O n e o f t h e m o s t b a n a l a n d b r u t a lmanifestations of racial exterminism was U.S.soldiers’ imagination of the war as hunting. TheManila occupation and early conventionalwarfare had frustrated U.S. soldiers’ martialmasculinity; the metaphor of the hunt madewar, at last, into masculine self-fulfillment. [96]All at once, a language of hunting animalizedFilipinos, made sense of guerrilla war toAmerican troops, and joined them in manlyfraternity. “I don’t know when the thing will letout,” wrote Louis Hubbard one week into thewar, “and don’t care as we are having lots ofexcitement. It makes me think of killing jackrabbits.” [97] Earl Pearsall jotted in his diaryon the third day of the war that “[o]ur boyskept them on the run and shot them down likerabbits.” [98] John F. Bright described oneadvance near San Juan Bridge: “As weadvanced they would jump up like rabbits onlya few feet from us, dead game ready to selltheir lives as dearly as possible, but we shotthem down before they could do any damage.”[99]

Racial terms explicitly linked hunting toexterminism. “There is no question that ourmen do ‘shoot niggers’ somewhat in thesporting spirit,” admitted Wells. “It is lots ofsport to hunt these black devils,” wrote LouisHubbard just three weeks into the war. [100]Private George Osborn of the 6th Infantrywrote home from Negros on January 15, 1900:“Just back from the fight. Killed 22 niggerscaptured 29 rifels [sic] and 1 shotgun and I tellyou it was a fight… we just shot the niggers likea hunter would rabbits…” [101] In April 1899,Lieutenant Tefler wrote from Marilao thatnight-time scouting raids were his men’s only

relief from the boredom of guarding a railroad,that it was “great fun for the men to go on‘nigger hunts.’” [102]Racial-exterminist sentiment of this kind wasnot uncommon in U.S. soldiers’ songs, diariesand letters. It was at the very center of themost popular of the U.S. army’s marchingsongs, which marked the Filipino population asa whole as the enemy and made killing Filipinosthe only means to their “civilization.”

Damn, damn, damn the FilipinoPock-marked khakiac ladrone;Underneath the starry flagCivilize him with a Krag,And return us to our own beloved home. [103]

One Nebraskan soldier boasted to his parentsof his comrades’ bold, aggressive fightingspirit, restrained only by officers’ reticence. “Ifthey would turn the boys loose,” he wrote,“there wouldn’t be a nigger left in Manilatwelve hours after.” [104] Henry Hackthornexplained to his family that the war, which heregretted, had been avoidable but “the niggersgot in a hurry.” “We would kill all in sight if wecould only receive the necessary orders,” hewrote. [105] A dramatic monologue entitled“The Sentry” written and published by a U.S.soldier, features a sympathetic portrayal of alonely U.S. sentry on watch-duty. “If I catch oneof those bolo-men slinking around me, I’ll justplug the son-of-a-gun full of holes,” he says, justbefore he is treacherously killed. “I hate thevery sight of their black hides.” [106]Eggenberger reported happily in March 1900that Macabebes had killed 130 “ladrones”without one escape. “[L]et the good work go onwe will have the damn bug eaters sivilized [sic]if we have to bury them to do it,” he wrote.[107] The year before, he had casually urgedhis family to have an old friend write to him.“[T]ell him if he don’t rite [sic] to me when i getback i will take him for a nigger and bombardhim, tell him no Amegoes (friends) will go then,ha ha.” [108] A war of “no amigos” was a warwithout surrender.

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Race and Atrocity

Just as imperialists had mobilized racialideologies to defend the war’s ends, so too wasrace made to defend its means, underminingmoral and legal claims against Americansoldiers accused of “marked severities” in thehalls of U.S. governance, in press debates andin courts-martial. [109] When Senate hearingsbetween January and June 1902 raised thequestion of U.S. atrocities, the U.S. Army’sdefenders repeatedly held that abuses wererare; that where they occurred they wereswiftly and thoroughly punished; and thattestimony to the contrary was characterized bypartisan and cowardly—possibly traitorous--exaggeration. But racial arguments, in at leastthree var iet ies , were centra l to theadministration’s defense.

The first variant claimed that the Filipinos’guerrilla war, as “savage” war, was entirelyoutside the moral and legal standards andstrictures of “civilized” war. Those whoadopted guerril la war, it was argued,surrendered all claims to bounded violence andmercy from their opponent. Captain John H.Parker employed this line of argument in aNovember 1900 letter to President Rooseveltcomplaining that the U.S. Army should not“attempt to meet a half civilized foe… with thesame methods devised for civilized warfareagainst people of our own race, country andblood.” [110] This point was also made atSenate hearings in 1902, when General Hughesdescribed the burning of entire towns byadvancing U.S. troops to Senator Rawlins as ameans of "punishment," and Rawlins inquired:"But is that within the ordinary rules ofcivilized warfare?..." General Hughes repliedsuccinctly: "These people are not civilized."[111]

In their effort to depict Filipino combat as"savage," the war's defenders made much ofwhat they considered Filipino "race war"against whites. Racial exterminism by whites, it

seemed, was merely the inevitable, progressiveworking out of history; race war took place onlywhen non-whites resisted white domination, inviolation of the natural order. [112] Evidence ofa Filipino "race war" was found in what wasrepresented as an early 1899 military order byGeneral Teodoro Sandiko, a documentreputedly captured by U.S. soldiers. [113] In it,Sandiko allegedly commanded Filipinos insidethe U.S.-occupied city of Manila to revolt inpreparation for an invasion of the city from theoutside by the army of the Republic: not onlyU.S. soldiers, but all "whites" inside the citywere to be killed. While evidence of U.S. racialexterminist atrocities was cut off by censorship,the "Sandiko order" was widely promoted in theU.S. press as early as April 1899 as signs ofFilipino "savagery." "The war has developedinto a race war," wrote John F. Bass of theSandiko order in Harper's Weekly. "After thislet no one raise his voice to favor Aguinaldo'sgovernment or army." There was "no choice ofmethods" ahead, only the need for a "strongmilitary government, untempered by mercy."[114] Use of the "Sandiko order" intensifiedwith the Presidential race of 1900, finding itsway into Vice Presidential candidate TheodoreRoosevelt's speeches, and even into theRepublican platform. [115] The Filipinos' "racewar," it appeared, contrasted sharply with thewar of "civilization" waged by the UnitedStates.

If the first argument defined U.S. actions asoutside of the moral and legal framework of“civilized war,” the second explained Americanatrocities in a way that distanced them fromU.S. initiative. “Civilized” men mightreluctantly adopt “savage” methods to defeatsavages, but they could do so withoutsurrendering their civilization; guerrilla warwas tactical for whites, “ethnological” for non-whites. This argument required emphasis onracial solidarity between domestic U.S.audiences and American soldiers. Maj.-GeneralS. B. M. Young accused those who had claimed“that our soldiers are barbarous savages… and

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not fit to be considered as civilized,” as“abusing their own flesh and blood” for politicaladvantage. He found the anti-imperialists moretrai torous even than the Civ i l War’sCopperheads had been; the latter, at least, hadbeen defending “kindred,” where the currentwar had been “against a cruel and vindictive lotof savages, who were in no way related to us.”[116] Henry Cabot Lodge expressed similarsentiment in an address before the Senate.“One would suppose from what has been saidhere in debate,” he stated, “that it was an armyof aliens and mercenaries; that we had outthere in the Philippine Islands some strangeforeign force which we had let loose upon thathelpless people.” But this was not the case.“Why, Mr. President, those soldiers are ourown. They are our flesh and blood, bone of ourbone, flesh of our flesh.” If U.S. atrocities werenot a matter of “race,” they must be a matter ofemulation: Americans appropriated what little“savagery” they had undertaken from theirimmediate surroundings. “What is it which hasled them to commit these atrocities which weall so much regret and over which we sorrow?”Lodge asked.

I think I know why these things have happened.I think they have grown out of the conditions ofwarfare, of the war that was waged by theFilipinos themselves, a semicivilized people,with all the tendencies and characteristics ofAsiatics, with the Asiatic indifference to life,with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiaticcruelty, all tinctured and increased by threehundred years of subjection to Spain. [117]

The third argument attributed U.S. atrocitiesentirely to Macabebe collaborators organizedinto Scout units. If the “emulation” argumentsuggested that Americans were merelyimitating “savages,” the third argument wasthat atrocities had been committed almostentirely by cooperating Filipino troops overwhich American officers had little or no control.[118] Call it a policy of outsourcing “savagery”:where the Macabebe Scouts had been earlier

hailed as “Filipinos in Uncle Sam’s Uniforms,”they were represented during atrocityinvestigations as a kind of mad unconsciousthat could neither be dispensed with nor fullyharnessed. In response to reports that certainMacabebe units had looted the town ofMagallanes and raped women there, forexample, General Wheaton noted that theywere “in these outrages, conductingthemselves in their usual and customarymanner.” [119] Brigadier-General FrederickFunston strongly denied his own troops hadcommitted the “water cure,” but it was“common knowledge” that Macabebes haddone so “when not under the direct control ofsome officer” and it was “utterly impossible toprevent a few offenses of this kind.”Responsibility went only as far as race. Funstonhad “never heard of i t s hav ing beenadministered to a native by a white man.” [120]

The last act of the administration’s politicalcounter-offensive was an (almost) finaldeclaration of the end of the war. As oneWashington Post editorial noted, the McKinleyand Roosevelt administrations had attempted,and failed repeatedly, to end the war by fiat;indeed, it observed, the conflict had been"brought to an end on six different occasions"since the first declaration of U.S. victory. "Abad thing cannot be killed too often," it stated.Two months after his address at Arlington,President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to“kill” the war yet again, declaring thePhilippine-American War officially over on July4, 1902, as if cued by John Philip Sousa himself.[121] Returning U.S. soldiers, freed up by thetransfer of military power to the Scouts andpolice power to the newly-formed PhilippineConstabulary, were perhaps the most potent ifillusory signs to American audiences of an“insurrection” well-ended. [122] But this was acontinually beleaguered fiction that sometimesresulted in unflattering reversals: between1901 and 1905, parts of the provinces ofBatangas, Cebu, Bohol, Samar, Cavite andAlbay would be returned to military authority in

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response to persistent “ladronism.” [123] Thewar’s phantom life after mid-1902 was bestindicated by the Commission’s BandolerismoStatute of November 1902, which even morethan Roosevelt’s declaration, ended the war byfiat, defining any remaining Filipino resistanceto American authority as “banditry” rather than“ i n s u r r e c t i o n . ” S e c o n d w a s t h eReconcentration Act of 1903 which, to thecontrary, extended the war in tactical terms byauthorizing use of wartime measures wherenecessary under civilian authority; liberal usewould be made of this in subsequent years, inAlbay and Bicol in 1903 and Batangas andCavite in 1905. [124] The Commission wouldpass specific, separate acts shifting authorityfrom the military to civilians, officially “ending”the war in these regions in silent, piecemealfashion until 1913.

As power shifted from the U.S. Army to civilianadministrators, a process that was tense andreversible, so too did the racial formation thatwould organize U.S. colonialism in thePhilippines. On the face of it, the new regime’sracial terms—“tutelage,” “uplift”, “evolution,”“assimilation”—were dramatic departures fromthe depths of racial-exterminism, departuresthat closely corresponded to the needs of anemerging Filipino-American collaborationiststate whose “internal frontiers” would emergeas the next ground of struggle.

This cartoon from Public Opinion of June 1902offers civilian colonial rule, in the form of thePhilippine Bill, as a favorable alternative towar. It does so by dividing the Philippinepopulation into the “savage” population stillresisting, and the “civilized” populationcollaborating peacefully with U. S. colonialstate builders. Images like these paved the wayfor a postwar racial state predicated on notionsof “tutelage” and “assimilation” and illustratethe political dynamism of race.

If the U.S. military’s distrust of the newadministrators, and the frequent refusal ofofficers to take part in its new, inter-racialrituals, suggested conflict, there were alsocontinuities: students needed to be tested anddisciplined, children were to be supervised,controlled and punished. “Benevolent”assimilation could always, implicitly, bewithdrawn for the other kind. [125]

During the Philippine-American War, U.S.soldiers had borrowed and adapted a Tagalogword to create “boondock,” a term for a liminal,border region, with connotat ions ofbewilderment and disorientation. The“boondocks” emerged where older maps failed,where prior patterns and relationships could no

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longer be recognized. Making sense of colonialwar required Americans to develop a novelracial formation that could reorient the UnitedStates at a crucial transition in its imperialcareer. Filipino revolutionaries had attemptedto achieve American recognition through their“civilization” and even in their fighting, but ascombat and race-making became entangled,the two processes fused into racial-exterministwarfare with devastating human consequences.[126] The legacy of colonial violence wouldcontinue to haunt both societies as empirebuilding drew the United States and thePhilippines together in the 20th century.

Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor ofhistory at Johns Hopkins University and iscurrently a visiting professor at the Universityof Michigan. He is the author of The Blood ofGovernment: Race, Empire, the United Statesn d t h e P h i l i p p i n e s(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807856533/sr=8-1/qid=1149282281/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-7081971-4892702?%5Fencoding=UTF8)(University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Hisw e b s i t e c a n b e f o u n d h e r e(http://paulkrameronline.com/Kramer/home.html).

Notes:

[1] Theodore Roosevelt, Address of PresidentRoosevelt at Arlington, Memorial Day, May 30,1902, (United States: 1902).[2] Traditional historiography on the warminimizes U. S. racial animus and atrocity andemphasizes the “benevolence” of the U. S.campaign. See John Gates, Schoolbooks andKrags: The U. S. Army in the Philippines,1898-1902 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,1973); Brian McAllister Linn, The U. S. ArmyCounterinsurgency in the Philippine War,1899-1902 (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1989); Linn, The PhilippineWar, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University Press of

Kansas, 2000); Linn, “Taking Up the WhiteMan’s Burden: The U. S. Military in thePhilippines, 1898-1902,” in Luis E. GonzálezVales, ed., 1898: Enfoques y Perspectivas (SanJuan, Puerto Rico: Academia Puertorriqueña dela Historia, 1997), 111-142. For more nuancedaccounts, see Resil B. Mojares, The Waragainst the Americans: Resistance andCollaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906 (Quezon City:Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999);Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: APhilippine Province at War (Quezon City: NewDay, 1993); For a recent collection of historicalessays and artworks relating to the war, seeAngel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds.,Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American Warand the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream,1899-1999 (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2002).[3] Stuart Creighton Miller, “BenevolentAssimilation”: The American Conquest of thePhilippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1982).[4] On the political dynamism of race, seeMichael Omi and Howard Winant, RacialFormation in the United States from the 1960sto the 1990s (New York, 1994), esp. chaps.1—5; Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” AmericanHistorical Review, 100 (Feb. 1995), 1—20;Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism," inEtienne Balibar and Immanuel MauriceWallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class:Ambiguous Identities (London ; New York:Verso, 1991); Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology andRace in American History,” in Region, Race,and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. VannWoodward ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M.McPherson (New York, 1982), 143—78. For theargument that U. S. Indian policy was the“origin” of Philippine policy, see Walter L.Williams, "United States Indian Policy and theDebate over Phi l ippine Annexat ion:Implications for the Origins of AmericanImperialism," Journal of American History Vol.6 6 , N o . 4 ( 1 9 8 0 ) . O n t h e b r o a d e rreconstruction of race in the context of U. S.

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colonialism in the Philippines, see Paul A.Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race,Empire, the United States and the Philippines(Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2006).[5] For the purposes of this essay, exterministwarfare is warfare in which non-combatantsare viewed as legitimate targets during theduration of combat but co-existence isimagined as a postwar goal; I distinguish thisfrom genocide, in which violence is organizedaround the deliberate elimination of allmembers of an “enemy” society. I refrain fromthe use of the category of “total war” due to thecategory’s vague boundaries. On the concept ofexterminism, see Dirk Bönker, “Militarizing theWestern World: Navalism, Empire and State-Building Before World War I,” (PhD thesis, TheJohns Hopkins University, 2002). On “totalwar” during the Philippine-American War, seeMay, “Was the Philippine-American War a‘Total War’?” in Manfred F. Boemeke, RogerChickering, Stig Förster. eds., AnticipatingTotal War: The German and AmericanExperiences, 1871-1914 (Washington, D.C.:German Historical Institute; Cambridge, U.K. ;New York : Cambridge University Press, 1999).For an intriguing comparative perspective onthese questions see Helmut Walser Smith, “TheLogic of Colonial Violence: Germany inSouthwest Africa (1904-1907); the UnitedStates in the Philippines (1899-1902),” inH a r t m u t L e h m a n n a n d H e r m a n nWellenreuther, eds., German and AmericanNationalism: A Comparative Perspective (NewYork: Berg, 1999), 205-231. On other U. S. racewars, see John Dower, War Without Mercy:Race and Power in the Pacific War, 7th printing(New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); MarkGrimsley, “'Rebels' and 'Redskins': U.S.Military Conduct toward White Southernersand Native Americans in ComparativePerspective,” in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J.Rogers, eds., Civilians in the Path of War(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, c2002),137-161.[6] On racism in Spanish colonial policy, see

Josep Fradera, “Raza y Ciudadanía: El FactorRacial en la Delimitacion de los Derechos de losAmericanos,” in Gobernar Colonias (EdicionesPeninsula, 1999).[7] John Schumacher, The PropagandaMovement, 1880-1895 (Manila: SolidaridadPublishing House, 1973).[8] La Solidaridad, 1889-1895, Translated byGuadalupe Fores-Ganzon, vol.s 1-5; LuisMatheru, Vols. 6-7 (Manila: FundacionSantiago, 1997). For the case of Rizal, see PaulA. Dumol, "Rizal Contra European Racism: AnAutobiography of Jose Rizal Embedded inBlumentritt's Obituary of Rizal," in EuropeanStudies: Essays by Filipino Scholars (Diliman:University of the Philippines, 1999).[9] Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Malolos: The Crisis ofthe Republic (Quezon City,: University of thePhilippines, 1960); Cesar Adib Majul, ThePolitical and Constitutional Ideas of thePhilippine Revolution, rev. ed. (New York;Oriole Editions, 1974 [1967).[10] On the U. S. Army’s attempt to regulateprostitution in the interests of venereal diseasecontrol, see Paul A. Kramer, “The Darknessthat Enters the Home: The Polit ics ofProstitution During the Philippine-AmericanWar,” in Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire:Race and Intimacy in North American History(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).[11] [unsigned], from Wisconsin WeeklyAdvocate, May 17, 1900, in Willard Gatewood,"Smoked Yankees" and the Struggle forEmpire: Letters from Negro Soldiers 1898-1902(Urbana, Chicago and London: University ofIllinois Press, 1971), 279.[12] Quoted in Lewis O. Saum, “The WesternVolunteer and ‘The New Empire,’” PacificNorthwest Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan. 1966),22.[13] Felipe Agoncillo, “Memorial to the Senateof the United States” (Washington, DC, 1899),2, 7.[14] On the links between “print-capitalism”and nationalist “imagined community,” seeBenedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

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Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1991). Onthe press during the Philippine-American War,see John Lent, “The Philippine Press During theRevolution and the Filipino-American War,”Asian Thought and Society, Vol. III, No. 9(December 1978), 308-321; see also JesúsValenzuela, History of Journalism in thePhilippine Islands (Manila: Published by theAuthor, 1933).[15] “Nuestro Programa,” La Independencia,Year 1, No. 1 (September 3, 1898). Allquotations from La Independencia aretranslations from the original Spanish by theauthor.[16] Advertisement for La Independencia, Year1, No. 2 (September 5, 1898); See, for example,“ E l E s p í r i t u d e l a A s o c i a c i ó n , ” L aIndependencia, Year 1, No. 5 (September 9,1898); “De Higiene Pública,” La Independencia,Year 1, No. 36 (October 17, 1898); “LosPresupuestos,” La Independencia, Year 1, No.41 (October 22, 1898); “Apuntes SobreEnseñanza,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 47(October 29, 1898); “Moralización,” LaIndependencia, Year 1, No. 63 (November 18,1898).[17] L. R. Sargent, "In Aguinaldo's Realm," TheNew York Independent, Sept. 14 1899, 2477.[18] U. S. Senate, Senate Document No. 196,Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon,56th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 23, 1900, 13.[19] Sargent, "In Aguinaldo's Realm," 2479.[20] Sargent, "In Aguinaldo's Realm," 2480-1.[21] Report of Tour through the Island ofLuzon, 20.[22] Sargent, 2481.[23] Wilcox and Sargent, 16.[24] "General McReeve's Interview," reprintedin The Anti-Imperialist, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 4,

1899), 18. On discourses of slavery and anti-slavery in Philippine-American colonial politics,see Michael Salman, The Embarrassment ofSlavery: Controversies over Bondage andNationalism in the American ColonialPhilippines (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2001).[25] Wilcox and Sargent, 20.[26] Wilcox and Sargent, 20.[27] Palmer, “White Man and Brown Man in thePhilippines,” 79.[28] William McKinley to the Secretary of War,December 21, 1898, in "Message from thePresident of the United States," SenateDocument No. 208, 56th Congress, 1st Session(1899-1900), 82-3.[29] G. Apacible, Al Pueblo Americano/To theAmerican People (Anti-Imperialist League,1900).[30] "To the Filipino People," Exhibit 992, J. R.M. Taylor, ed., The Philippine Insurrection, Vol.V, 96. Taylor speculates that its author wasEmilio Aguinaldo; a likely candidate isApolinario Mabini.[31] For the best account of the domestic U. S.politics of the war remains Richard E. WelchJr., Response to Imperialism. The United Statesand the Philippine -American War, 1899—1902(Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1979). On U. S. anti-imperialism, seeDaniel Schirmer, Republic or Empire: AmericanResistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge,Mass., 1972); Robert L. Beisner, Twelve againstEmpire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898—1900( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 8 ) ; J i m Z w i c k , e d . ,Sentenaryo/Cenennial,

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