The Third Asiatic Invasion

Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946

Rick Baldoz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814709214
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a wave of Filipino immigration to the United States, following in the footsteps of earlier Chinese and Japanese immigrants, the first and second “Asiatic invasions.” Perceived as alien because of their Asian ethnicity yet legally defined as American nationals granted more rights than other immigrants, Filipino American national identity was built upon the shifting sands of contradiction, ambiguity, and hostility.

Rick Baldoz explores the complex relationship between Filipinos and the U.S. by looking at the politics of immigration, race, and citizenship on both sides of the Philippine-American divide: internationally through an examination of American imperial ascendancy and domestically through an exploration of the social formation of Filipino communities in the United States. He reveals how American practices of racial exclusion repeatedly collided with the imperatives of U.S. overseas expansion. A unique portrait of the Filipino American experience, The Third Asiatic Invasion links the Filipino experience to that of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Chinese and Native Americans, among others, revealing how the politics of exclusion played out over time against different population groups.

Weaving together an impressive range of materials—including newspapers, government reports, legal documents and archival sources—into a seamless narrative, Baldoz illustrates how the quixotic status of Filipinos played a significant role in transforming the politics of race, immigration and nationality in the United States.

1
The Racial Vectors of Empire
Classification and Competing Master Narratives in the Colonial Philippines

The late nineteenth century was a time of rapid political transformation in the Philippines. A national independence movement had taken hold, putting three centuries of Spanish colonial rule on the verge of collapse. This struggle was quickly derailed, however, as the Philippines were dragged into the American imperial orbit during the Spanish-American War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. Meanwhile, the American drive for an extraterritorial empire created problems at home as lawmakers struggled to justify the nation’s acquisition of overseas territories. The United States itself was a product of anticolonial struggle, with a political culture that rested in part on universalist principles of natural rights and government by consent. It was not immediately clear, for instance, how the campaign to “liberate” the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam from Spanish tyranny could be reconciled with American plans to exercise dominion over these territories. As a result, U.S. officials were careful to highlight the benevolent and paternal aims of overseas expansion, suggesting that American imperium was different from the kind of rapacious colonialism practiced by European powers, which was focused solely on commercial and territorial aggrandizement.¹

The question of how to absorb overseas territories into the U.S. polity triggered an intense ideological debate about the social and political consequences of global expansion. Territories previously annexed by the United States, such as Louisiana, Mexico, and Florida, had been treated as “incorporated territories,” whose inhabitants were collectively naturalized into the American Union.² The idea of incorporating the Philippines and by extension Filipinos into the body politic of the United States provoked a protracted debate about whether it was in the nation’s best interest to retain the islands permanently or to grant them their sovereignty. Advocates of U.S. expansionism argued that the acquisition of overseas territories was beneficial both to Americans and to the residents of newly enchained colonies. The United States, they claimed, was uniquely positioned to bring the light of civilization and economic development to populations who had fallen behind the rest of the world while under centuries of Spanish misrule. The acquisition of colonies did not, according to expansionists, pose any threat to the political integrity of the United States, since the U.S. Congress had plenary power to determine who was included or excluded from the boundaries of American citizenship. Opponents of overseas expansion, on the other hand, equated annexation with incorporation and worried that the inhabitants of overseas colonies would be integrated into the U.S. polity as fully vested members. They also raised the prospect that these newly minted American subjects would migrate in large numbers to the imperial center, where they would compete with whites for scarce economic resources.

Proponents and opponents of extraterritorial expansion both employed the language of race to advance their political agendas, but they drew on different strands of American racial thinking. Imperialists justified the conquest and seizure of the Philippines through a paternalistic racism that stressed the social and cultural inferiority of Filipinos, while at the same time emphasizing their potential for advancement under a program of corrective colonialism. They viewed American intervention in the Philippines as both an opportunity and an obligation. The most obvious opportunities were political and economic, as the United States attempted to bolster its position vis-à-vis other core capitalist states competing for access to emerging commercial markets in the Asia-Pacific region.³ Installing a U.S. colonial outpost in the Philippines was not simply a matter of reaping economic rewards and geostrategic advantage. It was also, proclaimed the imperialists, the duty and destiny of the United States to share its talent for democratic development and save the Filipinos from civilizational ruin. Colonialism, then, was not simply a political choice but also a moral and racial obligation to be carried out by “Anglo-Saxons” for the benefit of the world’s “lower races.”⁴

The anti-imperialists also traded in the politics of race, but they employed an ideology of aversive racism that drew on scientific theories of ethnological difference and fears about racial retrogression. They amplified the potential dangers posed by incorporating the Philippines into the U.S. polity, painting the alarmist scenario of millions of Filipinos flooding across America’s borders to compete for jobs and to intermarry with whites. Anti-imperialists also warned that formally annexing the Philippines would result in the collective naturalization of all inhabitants of the islands, putting them on equal footing with white citizens. Elected officials from southern and western states were particularly vocal in stoking fears about the racial consequences of imperial expansion, since they represented regions of the country where anxieties about economic competition and integration with blacks and Chinese ran deep.

As congressional leaders worked to resolve the political status of the Philippines, President McKinley set about establishing the machinery of colonial rule in the archipelago. One of his first acts was the creation of the Philippine Commission in 1899 to survey and report on conditions in the islands. The commission was charged with investigating the islands’ material resources, inhabitants, and commercial potential to evaluate their economic and geopolitical value to the United States. The commissioners conducted an ethnological study that cataloged the various “races” and “tribes” of the archipelago for purposes of scientific classification and colonial administration. Other population surveys quickly followed, and this initiative reached its zenith with the completion of an official territory-wide census of the islands in 1903. The publication of the territorial census was important because it registered as social fact the intention of colonial administrators to use race as an organizing principle of the new Philippine social structure.⁵

This chapter examines how racial knowledge about Filipinos was produced and institutionalized as a mode of rule during the early years of American dominion in the islands. More specifically, it examines how American officials reconciled two seemingly contradictory objectives: the drive to enlarge the territorial borders of the United States through overseas imperial conquest and the simultaneous desire to delimit the boundaries of the American polity to exclude those populations deemed unfit for national citizenship. The first section looks at the congressional debates about overseas expansion, focusing on how the language of race and class was deployed by proponents and opponents of annexation. Imperialists, I argue, used paternalistic racism to undercut Filipino demands for national self-determination in the aftermath of the war and to justify claims about the need for a protracted period of Anglo-Saxon discipline and tutelage in the islands. Anti-imperialists drew on a very different strand of racial ideology to frame their case. American society, they argued, was already beset by racial conflicts, and the annexation of the Philippines would only add to the nation’s intractable “race problem.” Though the imperialists ultimately triumphed, the anti-imperialists had an important influence on the direction of U.S. colonial policy, especially when it came to determining the civic status of subject populations.

The second section explores the impact of early colonial population surveys in the Philippines, revealing how the very practice of enumeration and classification produced new lines of division in Philippine society. These initiatives, as Benedict Anderson has argued, allowed the colonial state to quantify and “serialize” all those under its jurisdiction, making it easier to carry out governmental functions such as taxation, public education, military conscription, and the like across diverse and dispersed territories. The surveys were both descriptive and prescriptive, assigning names and meanings to social collectivities and placing them into taxonomic grids that demarcated boundaries and relationships between population groups.⁶

The racial knowledge generated by American surveyors in the islands soon came full circle, as colonial officials arranged for representatives of different Filipino “races” to be displayed at world’s fairs and expositions across the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century. Filipino ethnological exhibits quickly became a national sensation and were among the most popular draws at expositions in St. Louis, Portland, and Seattle, providing a powerful visual representation of imperial hegemony and America’s global ascendancy. The final section of the chapter examines the ideological functions of these ethnological displays, revealing how these showcases encouraged vicarious identification with U.S. imperial mastery and reinforced popular attitudes about global racial hierarchies.

The Burdens of Empire

Territorial expansion had long been a guiding principle of American national development, even before the United States made its bid for a transoceanic empire during the final decade of the nineteenth century. The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1898, formally ended the Spanish-American War and resulted in the cession of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba to the United States. Congress ratified the treaty in 1899, but this did not put an end to the debate on the issue of territorial expansion.⁷ Opponents of annexation argued that it was in the best interests of both Americans and Filipinos for the United States to relinquish its claim of sovereignty over the Philippines. Anti-imperialists initially couched their agenda in humanitarian terms, highlighting the incompatibility of colonial subjection and democratic governance, but their arguments took on a more explicitly racial tone as the debate wore on. Chief among their concerns was the political status of America’s newly acquired subjects. Precedents regarding the acquisition of territories (e.g., Florida, Louisiana, northern Mexico) had contained some treaty provision for granting citizenship to the “civilized” inhabitants of annexed lands.⁸ Whether this custom would apply to America’s new insular possessions became the source of intense contestation in the U.S. Congress. Annexationists argued that the acquisition of overseas dependencies simply continued the nation’s tradition of frontier expansion beyond its contiguous borders. Anti-imperialists saw America’s bid for a global empire as violating the sacred principle of “government by consent” found in the Declaration of Independence, and they argued that the United States could not annex territories without also incorporating their inhabitants into the nation’s body politic. Easy resolution of this issue was complicated by the fact that lawmakers wanted to disaggregate the political status of the Philippines and Puerto Rico to assure that the course of action taken in one territory did not bind them to apply the same policy in the other dependency.

The Philippines stood apart from the other insular possessions in a number of ways. The local population had vociferously opposed the imposition of American colonial rule in the islands and quickly took up a protracted insurgency against the United States. Its geographic location in “the Orient” and its large population (relative to the other Spanish holdings) also distinguished the Philippines from the other territories.⁹ Yet for many U.S. lawmakers the potential rewards that might be reaped from a colonial outpost in the Asia-Pacific region outweighed the risks. An influential group of American politicians and industrialists had long expressed interest in expanding its influence in the Far East. A series of economic depressions during the last decades of the nineteenth century amplified anxieties in the American business community about a glut of industrial capacity and the inability of the national market to absorb surplus goods produced by domestic manufacturers. Increasing commercial ties with foreign markets offered one potential solution to this problem, and U.S. trade with Asia had been on a rapid upward trajectory, growing from $5.7 million in 1870 to nearly $45 million in 1898.¹⁰ The imperialist lobby viewed the Philippines as a potential boon to American business interests as well as a strategic vantage point from which they could launch their economic and geopolitical ambitions on a global scale. U.S. and European industrialists jockeyed for position during this period, hoping to gain some sort of strategic advantage with regard to the vast consumer markets in China.¹¹

Imperialists readily acknowledged that their primary interests in the Philippines centered on commercial and geostrategic opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region. They regularly touted the potential for new market outlets in Asia. Senator Albert Beveridge, the staunch imperialist from Indiana, advanced this sentiment in bold terms:

American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours. And we will get it as our mother [England] has told us how. We will establish trading posts throughout the world as distributing points for American products. We will soon cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness. Great colonies governing themselves, flying our flag, and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade. Our institutions will follow our flag on the wings of commerce. And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright. . . . The Philippines are logically our first target.¹²

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge described the Pacific as “the ocean of the future” and extolled the prospects for American investors by citing a recently conducted survey of the islands: “There are many opportunities for the investment of capital, Hemp, tobacco, coffee, cacao and rice are assured products. Cattle do well. Timber, gold, copper and iron are found in the mountains. . . . A steam or electric railway is needed to connect with the northern districts, which are rich, but undeveloped. It could be easily built and would yield large results to the investor.”¹³ Senator Chauncey Depew, a former Wall Street banker, highlighted the value of a transoceanic commercial empire during his address to the 1900 Republican national convention:

The American people now produce 2,000,000,000 worth more than they can consume, and we have met the emergency and by the providence of God, by the statesmanship of William McKinley, and the valor of Theodore Roosevelt and his associates, we have markets in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, and we stand in the presence of 800,000,000 people, with the Pacific an American lake. . . . The world is ours.”¹⁴

Political and economic benefits notwithstanding, public opinion remained divided when it came to the probity of colonial conquest. “Liberating” the Philippines and other colonies from Spanish autocracy had support across the political spectrum, but holding the archipelago and its people in subjection for commercial gain raised some difficult moral questions. That Filipino leaders continued to press their demands for national independence, even after formal annexation, kept the debate about the ethics of empire alive. Consequently, imperialists modified their message to emphasize the moral and paternalistic aims of U.S. empire. Filipinos, they argued, lacked the capacity for self-government and required a lengthy period of American colonial supervision before they would be ready to join the family of modern nations. Seen from this point of view, imperial conquest was not so much about the global scramble for territory and markets but a moral duty required of Anglo-Saxons for the betterment of the world’s “lower races.” Imperialists drew heavily on the doctrine of racial paternalism that gained popularity during the Progressive Era and linked America’s program of “benevolent assimilation” with the reformist impulses that characterized this period. For example, they frequently drew parallels between the pacification of the Philippines and the subjugation of Native Americans during the “Indian Wars.” Filipinos were regularly compared to Native Americans, and expansionists looked to federal Indian policy as a model for colonial education and governance in the Philippines.¹⁵ Secretary of State John Hay, for example, advised American envoys surveying the islands to consider inserting a provision in the treaty with Spain that would affix to Filipinos a status similar to the “uncivilized native tribes” in the Alaska territory.¹⁶

That Filipinos so publicly and vociferously rejected America’s gift of armed benevolence did not deter the expansionists. Imperialists derided Filipino demands for national self-determination as the petulant utterances of a childlike population who did not know what was good for them. Senator Samuel McEnery of Louisiana declared that only one-quarter of Filipinos were “semi-civilized,” and “the rest of the population is as ignorant and savage as the...