Yankee Doodles: images of a forbidden era

Yankee Doodles: images of a forbidden era
Posted: June 30, 2003
Prof. Fatima Lasay, University of the Philippines

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

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

The history of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) is largely forgotten today in the Philippines and the United States.

Yankee DoodlesForgetting was officially sanctioned; volumes of newspaper accounts, military reports, government documents, autobiographies, biographies and letters by American soldiers all became part of a “forbidden book” – so that a war that was at least 50 times more costly in human lives than the Spanish-American War was relegated in American textbooks as only an “insurgency.”

A few late 19th century journalists and political cartoonists, however, managed to express unpopular truths of massacres, tortures, pillaging, and wholesale destruction of villages.

An anonymous editorial cynically read, “We may have burned certain villages, destroyed considerable property, and incidentally slaughtered a few thousand of their sons and brothers, husbands and fathers, etc., but what did they expect? … And they complain that drunken American soldiers insult the native women. What did they expect from a drunken soldier anyway?”

McKinley’s and US Senate’s perception of the Filipinos

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

When President William McKinley told a delegation of church leaders that God had counseled him to annex the Philippines and “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,” few Americans knew that the Philippines had an educational system older than that of the United States and that the majority of Filipinos were Catholic.

McKinley’s depiction of Filipinos as uncivilized pagans played on prevalent racist sentiments and served to justify an unpopular war. One commonly held view ranked peoples of the world into four grades of culture — savagery, barbarism, civilization, and enlightenment. In this hierarchy, white America was the pinnacle of enlightenment while Filipinos belonged to the two lowest levels of culture and therefore incapable of self-government.

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

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

Filipinos: the “gugus, niggers, and monkeys” of 1904

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

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

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

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

Struggles for justice

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

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

“COLORED: Black and White”

In 2002, on the centennial of Philippine-American relations, three strong bulwarks of the Filipino activist community in California and the U.S. put together an exhibition of U.S. imperialist cartoons produced during the Philippine-American war. This exhibit, entitled “COLORED: Black and White,” presented drawings, editorial cartoons, photos, and news clips from prominent magazines and newspapers that covered the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This exhibit is part of a larger archival collection that has been on tour until today at various universities and institutions in the U.S. and Philippines. Exhibit curators, Helen Toribio, Abe Ignacio and Jorge Emmanuel are long-time cultural and community Filipino American activists. Helen Toribio, who grew up in Hawaii, said the exhibit is a way to get a dark period of U.S. and Philippines history ‘out of my system.’

‘Anyone who grew up here, grew up with the mythology of America the beautiful, the great democracy, and there is very little exposure to the dark side,’ she said. ‘There is a lot that is hidden about American history.’

Many who have seen the images in the “COLORED: Black and White” exhibition were shocked. Larkspur artist Elizabeth Saul said the exhibit helps explain the concept of Manifest Destiny, the philosophy that sought to justify the United States’ westward expansion. ‘These images speak so strongly,’ she said.

‘You can hear someone talk about (Manifest Destiny) over and over again, but when you are confronted with images that are vile, pompous and arrogant, it strikes a chord that words can’t communicate efficiently.’ A section of the exhibit focused on similarities in the portrayals of Filipinos and African Americans. U.S. troops fighting in the Philippines referred to Filipinos as ‘niggers’ or ‘gugus.’ Berkeley artist Mildred Howard said the exhibit ‘makes something horrible visible.’

“Sangandaan 2003″ and “Yankee Doodles”

This year, a centennial commemoration will be held in the Philippines.

“Sangandaan 2003″, an international conference on arts and media in Philippine-American relations, will present Filipino and Filipino-Americans the unique challenge and opportunity to assess, in reflective hindsight, how the events of the past century changed their lives.

The “COLORED: Black and White” exhibition is part of this commemoration, coming from an exhibition recently held at the UC San Diego Geisel Library and the Springfield College Art Gallery in City Heights. The exhibition in these venues, organized by John and Marivi Blanco, were spurred by the volunteer support by students at Miramar and Southwestern Colleges, as well as outreach events sponsored by UCSD students in various high schools and libraries throughout San Diego and Long Beach.

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

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

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Sangandaan Conference website www.sangandaan2003.upd.edu.ph – www.culturalcenter.gov.ph/sangandaan

Source: http://www.emanila.com/arts/article_2003_06_30_yankee_doodles.html