Empire's Proxy

American Literature and U. S. Imperialism in the Philippines

Meg Wesling

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814794784
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley's project of “benevolent assimilation,” they established a school system that centered on English language and American literature to advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as justification for the U.S.'s civilizing mission and offered as a promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on American soil, the field of American literature was just being developed and fundamentally, though invisibly, defined by this new, extraterritorial expansion.

Drawing on a wealth of material, including historical records, governmental documents from the War Department and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, curriculum guides, memoirs of American teachers in the Philippines, and 19th century literature, Meg Wesling not only links empire with education, but also demonstrates that the rearticulation of American literary studies through the imperial occupation in the Philippines served to actually define and strengthen the field. Empire's Proxy boldly argues that the practical and ideological work of colonial dominance figured into the emergence of the field of American literature, and that the consolidation of a canon of American literature was intertwined with the administrative and intellectual tasks of colonial management.

1 The Alchemy of English

Colonial State-Building and the Imperial Origins of American Literary Study

What alchemy will change the oriental quality of their blood, in a year, and set the self-governing currents of the American pouring through their Malay veins?

—Senator Albert J. Beveridge, in a speech delivered before the U. S. Congress, 1900

Our bayonets and rifle balls may force them into subjection but it is left for our public schools to raise and elevate them and put them upon the plane of thinking men and women, capable of governing themselves wisely and well.

—Fred W. Atkinson, general superintendent of public instruction of the Philippine Islands, 1902

This chapter tells one story, about the origins of the field of English at the end of the nineteenth century, by way of three shorter stories, each a different episode in the history of English as a language, an academic field, and a literature. Let me begin in August 1898, in Saratoga, New York, where, at a meeting of the American Social Science Association (ASSA), Dr. Holbrook Curtis put forth the idea of forming a special committee of men in literature and the arts. Curtis was not a professional literary man but a throat specialist from New York and an amateur of the arts; approaching the ASSA president on a hotel veranda in upstate New York, he proposed a new committee to assume a role like that of the Académie Française, to stand as “an academic institution of unquestioned origin and standard” that might recognize men of literary and artistic achievement and provide the occasion for their fraternity together.1 The next February, in a ballroom rented from the Academy of Medicine in Manhattan, the first annual meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters was convened and its charter members selected. That year, the National Institute elected ninety members in literature, forty-five in art, and fourteen in music, and declared its official purpose: to provide for “the advancement of art and literature” and the revitalization of “the traditions of good literature,” while remaining “hospitable to all discoverers of new worlds.”2

The National Institute got off to a rocky start. The first president, Charles Dudley Warner, was so ill that he could not preside over the institute’s inaugural meeting in February 1899, and instead had his paper read for him.3 It soon recovered, however; under the tenure of its second president, William Dean Howells, at the height of his popularity as a novelist and editor, the National Institute began to assemble an impressive membership of literary figures like Henry Adams, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain. Within a few years, the membership of the National Institute stood at 150; a smaller, even more selective and elite group of 50 members, calling itself the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, had formed as a subgroup of the National Institute, with the self-appointed responsibility to “assist in securing just dignity and importance for refinement, culture, and creative imagination” and “advise the public on matters of taste regarding literature and the fine arts.”4 Its members included many, though not all, of the recognized authors of the time—all male, all white—as well as some “literary men” in politics: President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay. While writers dominated its ranks, it was not exclusively a fraternity of authors but an assemblage of men with various connections to the literary—journalists, authors, editors, professors, and others. That is to say, it was elite not in the sense that each of its members was an established creative author, but that each was poised, by virtue of class and of cultural training, to recognize and appreciate “good” literature.

To some of its critics at the time, the National Institute, as well as the even more elite Academy, had little purpose beyond flattering the vanity of its members. William James declined membership in the Academy on the basis that he had a “lifelong practice of not letting [his] name figure where there [was] not some definite work doing in which [he] was willing to bear a share.”5 William Dean Howells betrayed similar fears in his presidential address before the Academy a few years later, when he opined that the American Academy of Arts and Letters could have neither the “authoritative structure” nor the “authoritative office” of Académie Française and its other European counterparts, but must instead content itself to offer merely the “affectionate recognition” of its own members.6 Subsequent critics have similarly passed it off as an insignificant club with little initial literary or political effect.7 Nevertheless, the founding of the National Institute bears witness to a cultural shift in the meaning and importance of the literary at the end of the century. Responding to the ready availability of cheap books for mass circulation and the changing material conditions of literary production, the goals of the group were emblematic of a trend that redefined the literary. No longer a broad category that would have included all printed books, “literature” was a concept in transition, coming to signify only creative works that embodied the imaginative genius of the artist and resisted, through the difficulty of language, form, and style, their commodification and mass circulation.8 As more reading material became available to larger groups of people, the upper classes of the post–Civil War era retreated into what Richard Brodhead has called a “high literary zone” defined by literary magazines which targeted a highly educated audience, and a distinction in which popular writing was marked as “non-literary and unworthy of attention” while other writing was “identified as rare or select: in short, as ‘literature.’”9 The founding of the National Institute, with its goal of advancing the “traditions of good literature,” was part of the redefining of the symbolic capital of the literary as a marker of education and elite class taste.10 That it formed to guard these traditions suggests the sense of threat such men of letters felt from the changing nature of book publishing and of the reading public; that they assigned themselves the ability to confer the value of literariness to particular works and authors indicates the significant ideological value invested in the literary as a signifier of elite cultural status.11

As the literary elites of New England were convening to celebrate and safeguard the future of “traditions of good literature” at the “rather vulgarly fashionable spa” in Saratoga, there was quite another conflict playing out eight thousand miles away.12 My next story begins in Manila that same August, as the United States engaged in a scramble for power in the Philippines. August 1898 witnessed a second project geared to celebrate and preserve a selected set of “American values,” this time in the aftermath of the U. S. defeat of the Spanish forces in Manila. President William McKinley attempted to secure U. S. sovereignty in the islands by circulating instructions, translated into Spanish and Tagalog, in which he charged U. S. commanders with the protection of Filipinos “in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights.”13 Directed against the encroachment of British, French, German, and Japanese interests in the archipelago, McKinley’s declaration ignored entirely the emergent Philippine Republic that had been established under the presidency of revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo, as well as its subsequent infrastructural achievements: Aguinaldo’s Declaration of Independence issued in June, the appointment of an executive cabinet, and the establishment of an official state press, El Heraldo de la Revolución.14 Instead, McKinley’s declaration signaled the start of a competitive state-building process in which the United States attempted to safeguard the Philippines as its war bounty by inventing and insisting upon a particular image of Filipinos as a “backward race,” incapable of self-government and thus in need of the protectionist guidance of American sovereignty. Despite the fact that the United States had initially publicized its intervention as an effort to assist in Cuba’s war for liberation against the “tyranny of Spanish rule,” here the refusal to recognize Philippine independence was quickly reframed as a transfer from despotic rule to benevolent tutelage, as reflected in McKinley’s “firm hope” that “all the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands may come to look back with gratitude to the day when God gave victory to American arms at Manila and set their land under the sovereignty and the protection of the people of the United States.”15

Though members of the newly minted National Institute of Arts and Letters were almost certainly following newspaper accounts of the adventures of Commodore Dewey and his naval successes in the Philippines, it is doubtful that they perceived a connection between the institutional, literary flag-staking they had just performed and the expansionist maneuvers underway in the Philippines. In fact, most would have vociferously denied that any political intentions characterized the group, and the anti-imperialist views of several of its members, including Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, and Howells himself, among others, would have made less likely the possibility that they would have seen their fraternity of letters in such a nationalist, pro-expansionist light. But by the National Institute’s inaugural meeting in February 1899, the United States would be deeply embroiled in an imperialist venture in the Philippines, just one week into a new war against its erstwhile allies, the Filipino revolutionaries. While the members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters debated the future of American letters, the U.S. military government in Manila was ordering the reopening of schools, with mandated instruction in English, as the first step in establishing the sovereignty of the United States over its new territory. Thus as the future of American letters and the advancement of American cultural achievements were being promoted, defended, and worried over among the literary elite in New York and New England, a project of colonial domination was getting under way in the name of the very traditions the National Institute looked to uphold and defend. In fact, the National Institute’s two aims—to secure the status of American literary traditions and to introduce the value of those traditions into the national consciousness—were so closely aligned with the self-described civilizing mission enacted in the Philippines that one might regard the two projects and their coincident development as unlikely twin births, emerging from the same body of cultural values and connected by a core set of values discernible to the careful eye.

These first two stories describe the political functions of English from different vantage points: one, from the elite circles of a narrowing sphere of literary production at the end of the century; the other, which I subsequently explore in more detail, from the schoolhouses in Manila where the imposition of English was regarded as the essential foundation for establishing the authority of United States rule. But there is a third site from which I want to tell this story, and that is in the academic institutions in which English became a defined and dominant field in the late 1890s. The National Institute of Arts and Letters was the professional society whose appearance coincided with the consolidation of the field of English at all levels of the curriculum, and the introduction of American literature as a field of study. Each of these developments was part of a late nineteenth-century process of redefining the literary, as an academic enterprise, a form of cultural capital, and a signifier of national identity.16 Put together, these divergent histories ask us to reconceptualize the history of American letters and the field of English. More specifically, they suggest that the academic field of English must be conceived differently if the politics of English—its role as an instrument of power—were considered to be constitutive in its development as an academic discipline, and if that discipline were understood to be complicit in the public culture of English as an apparatus of social stratification, assimilation, and subjugation, not only in the United States but outside of it as well. What happens to the field of English, we might ask, when the schoolhouses in Manila, not the common schools of Massachusetts, are put at the center of its story of origin?

Standardization and the Field of English

The power of American literary study as an ideological force in the pedagogical reproduction of the white middle class did not originate from nowhere. Rather, it emerged in tandem with, and contributed to, the consolidation of the field of English and its dual mandates of language instruction at the elementary and secondary levels, and literary study in newly formed departments of English that were, by the turn of the twentieth century, beginning to offer defined curricula for American literary study at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Other scholars have usefully documented the historical process through which the field of English was consolidated; however, this scholarship has largely looked inward, defining the origins of the field within a national, or even regional, framework.17 A review of how American literary study emerged as a field at the end of the 1890s will help to illuminate the stakes of the field, such that it was so instrumental to the ideological and administrative tasks of colonial dominance and the paradigm of “benevolent assimilation.” This is, then, a short history of how the field of English emerged and gained credibility, such that by the time of the U. S. occupation of the Philippines it had become a largely standardized field uniquely invested with specific cultural values and entrusted with the function of mental and moral training. It will, as well, suggest how the new field of English, particularly at the secondary and university level in the United States, gained its animating force through its institutionalization as the capstone of the colonial project.

The origins of the study of American literature at the high-school and college level involved two developments: first, the institutionalization of literary study in the school through the consolidation of the field of English; second, the introduction of U. S. literature into the field, and the formalization of a list of standard American literary texts for regular study. Importantly, these developments occurred somewhat in tandem; that is, though we often think of American literature as the newcomer to the older field of English literary study, American texts found their way into the curriculum of English studies at the same time that the study of English literature began to replace that of Latin and Greek as the proper training ground for instructing the mental discipline of young minds. This is not to say that they carried the same cultural weight, however. As David Shumway has documented, late nineteenth-century efforts to define American literature encountered a difficult paradox. On the one hand, the ideological value of the literary meant that its association with the nation was an important source of pride; “Literature—especially poetry and drama—had long served to glorify England, “the land of poets” and home of Shakespeare.”18 Enthusiasts of American literature, like the Atlantic Monthly editor Horace Scudder, championed a national literature as the most effective source of “Americanism.”19 On the other hand, it was through its relation to English literature that American literature was originally attributed its high cultural value; many of its supporters emphasized the shared linguistic heritage of the two nations as a way of claiming for American culture the racial privilege of Anglo-Saxon superiority. As Nina Baym has demonstrated, literature textbooks “rather emphasized than played down the English origins of the American nation, thereby instructing classrooms of children of non-English ancestry to defer to the Anglo-Saxonism of their new country’s heritage.”20 So, while the likes of Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Pope dominated the earliest courses in literary study, such courses integrated American authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

These were seen as unique but not antithetical traditions, and the cultural value of American literature, as we shall see, derived in part from the ability of its field-practitioners to mark its distinctiveness from British literature and its role as a nationalist influence. Moreover, it is important to note how relatively quickly Englis...