THE BURDENS OF EMPIRE

The Treaty of Paris signed in 1898 formally ended the Spanish-American War, but its passage raised vexing questions about the political status of the United States' newly acquired subjects. Territorial expansion had long been a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy, even before the United States made its bid for a transoceanic empire during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Up to this point, all previous treaties had contained some framework for granting naturalized citizenship to the inhabitants of annexed lands. This template was widely utilized in the annexation of territories in the Southeast (Florida, Louisiana) and the western frontier (Northern Mexico, the Northwest Territory), and laid the groundwork for extraterritorial expansion in places such as Hawaii and Alaska. This precedent was called into question, however, when Congress deliberated over the status of the Philippines, whose inhabitants were seen as racially unfit for U.S. citizenship (Thompson Reference Thompson2002; Kramer Reference Kramer2006).

This shift in thinking reflected some of the key ideological beliefs circulating in U.S. political culture during the late nineteenth century, most notably the belief that race was a central organizing principle of the modern world. U.S. racial thinking drew heavily upon “scientific” approaches that offered a putatively rational and objective explanation for the hierarchical stratification of humankind. Politicians and intellectuals cast Anglo-Saxon dominance as the inevitable by-product of the evolutionary processes of history, as evidenced by the technological and cultural supremacy of the Western imperial powers. Racial theorists extended the elaborate classification systems for plants and animals to humankind, believing they could apply modern scientific methods to measure and quantify the genetic predispositions and cultural capacities of different races. With such classification systems, racial theorists justified social hierarchies that divided races, nations, and/or classes as if they were the result of natural evolutionary processes, rather than human contrivances and social conflict (Horsman Reference Horsman1981; Gossett Reference Gossett1997).

Because of the racial thinking of the day, policy makers intensely debated the political status of the United States' overseas colonies, especially the question of whether to provide citizenship to colonial subjects and the repercussions for U.S. law. They viewed the extraterritorial expansion of U.S. empire as a referendum on national identity and political ascendancy. Advocates of annexation argued that projecting U.S. power overseas was an extension of domestic expansion and frontier conquest. Those opposed to annexation saw imperialism as a violation of the sacred U.S. principle: government by “the consent of the governed,” as found in the Declaration of Independence. The anti-imperialists also expressed apprehension about incorporating “hordes” of unassimilable aliens of inferior racial stock into the U.S. polity.

The Philippines stood apart from the other territories because of its geographic location in “the Orient” and, more notably, because its inhabitants put up armed resistance to U.S. occupation. These circumstances critically shaped the debate on the Philippines. Because of a series of economic depressions during the last decades of the nineteenth century, U.S. political leaders had long been interested in expanding the United States' influence in the Asia-Pacific region. The U.S. business community was concerned about “overproduction,” specifically the inability of the domestic market to absorb surplus economic production. If this economic uncertainty was to be resolved, U.S. manufacturers needed to develop new foreign markets. Access to the vast and as yet untapped consumer market in China was considered the ultimate prize by both U.S. and European industrialists (Jacobson Reference Jacobson2001; LaFeber Reference LaFeber1998; Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1989). The imperialist lobby saw the Philippines as a potential boon to U.S. business interests and viewed the Asia-Pacific region as a strategic location from which it could establish their economic and military ambitions on a global scale. The United States paid Spain $20 million for the “rights” to the islands, taking little interest in the fact that leaders in the Philippines had already declared themselves a free and independent nation.

On the other side of the Philippine question were the anti-imperialists who warned of grave consequences from annexing the Philippines. They questioned the economic benefits of overseas expansion and raised concerns about the social costs of imperial rule. Congressional representatives from southern and western states were particularly vocal proponents of this position, warning of vexing race problems that would result from acquiring the islands. Citing their firsthand experience with the “race question” in their respective regions, they described how their White constituents had been victimized by racial conflicts. In the South, Whites had suffered under “Negro rule” during Reconstruction, and Whites in the West had suffered “swarms” of Asian laborers who stole the jobs of hardworking U.S. citizens. The anti-imperialists' concerns about the racial composition of the islands played an important role in crafting U.S. policy on the islands. Policy makers and colonial officials used racial knowledge to locate Filipinos and the Philippines outside the U.S. body politic, rendering Filipinos' claims to nationality and equality invalid.

Seeking to sway public opinion on the region, policy makers benefited from Americans' lack of familiarity with the Philippines. The islands became a blank canvas onto which they projected an image of an exotic landscape populated by an ominous collection of racial hybrids, wild tribes, and premodern peoples. In doing so, they drew on racial anxieties of the period and located Filipinos within the extended hierarchy of the world's peoples. Through the practice of racial association, they labeled Filipinos variously Indians, Niggers, Orientals, and Chinese half-breeds, grafting the negative traits ascribed to these groups onto Filipinos. Like Indians, Filipinos were portrayed as savage, recalcitrant, and premodern; like Blacks they were described as inherently lazy, intellectually inferior, and sexually aggressive; and like “Orientals” they were seen as treacherous, cunning, and inscrutable. Linking Filipinos with these groups offered a convenient way to situate them near the bottom of the global pecking order. The specter of race in the Philippines, then, suggested that the opportunities provided by imperial conquest might be offset by the “burdens” that came along with it. Foremost among these “burdens” was the prospect of granting Filipinos unfettered access to U.S. institutions through citizenship. As U.S. leaders deliberated their newfound status as a global power broker, the entanglement of race and empire became increasingly insoluble, and the public debates on the Philippine issue increasingly revolved around the as yet undefined political status of these newly acquired peoples.

“THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE”

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

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge described the Pacific as “the ocean of the future” and extolled the prospects for U.S. investors by citing a recently conducted survey of the islands:

During his address to the 1900 Republican National Convention, Senator Chauncey Depew, a former Wall Street banker, described the opportunities spawned by empire:

Political and economic arguments notwithstanding, public support for annexation remained divided, but as the debate wore on, the arguments of the annexationists became more deliberately and exclusively racial. Their paternalistic racial ideology emphasized the “civilizing mission” of U.S. empire in the colonial zones, an argument that viewed Filipinos as having neither the intellectual nor the moral capacity to govern themselves, rendering their demands for national self-determination meaningless. Elevating Anglo-Saxon civilization and debasing Malay/Oriental cultural development thus worked in tandem and symbolized the distinction between colonizer and the colonized. With this view, intervention in the Philippines was not a choice but rather a sacred duty to bring civilization to the Orient and rescue Filipinos from their “debased condition.” When imperialists framed Philippine annexation as a sacred mandate or as a matter of national destiny, they drew heavily on racial doctrine and paternalistic impulses that marked the Progressive Era. Viewing U.S. aims in the Philippines as an extension of Manifest Destiny, Senator Beveridge asserted that extending the U.S. empire into the Pacific was simply an extraterritorial variation of longstanding practices of conquest and expansionism, practices that characterized the nation's development since its inception. The imperialists frequently drew parallels between the pacification of Filipinos and the subjugation of Native Americans during the “Indian Wars,” and thereby powerfully communicated the remedial nature of the U.S. mission in the Philippines. Filipinos were regularly described as Indians or Natives who lived in tribes, and Filipino soldiers were called Braves. In public speeches, Theodore Roosevelt often referred to Filipinos as savages, Apaches, and Sioux, and he suggested that granting independence to “unfit” Filipinos “would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief” (Williams Reference Williams1980, p. 827).

Imperialists also derided Filipino leaders' and anti-imperialists' arguments for self-determination. Senator Samuel McEnery of Louisiana declared that only one-quarter of Filipinos were “semi-civilized,” stating that “the rest of the population is as ignorant and savage as the aboriginal Indians” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1862). Beveridge agreed, warning:

These interlocking narratives of White supremacy and Filipino dependency sought to bring closure to the question of “the natives' ” state of civilization and thus their entitlement to sovereignty.

“PEOPLE OF A CERTAIN RACE”

Many anti-imperialists believed that subjugating and acquiring overseas territories contradicted U.S. democratic traditions, in particular the principle of “government by consent.” Their arguments for political consent, however, quickly gave way to a more complex set of objections. Chief among their concerns were deep-seated anxieties about the racial and class consequences of incorporating Filipino subjects, specifically in granting them U.S. citizenship. Senator John Daniel articulated this position when he questioned why Americans were being forced to “take up and annex and combine with our own blood and with our own people, and consecrate them with the oil of American citizenship” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1430). A sectional alliance of political leaders from the southern and western states argued this point most vociferously, emphasizing two key issues. The first focused on the hazards of extending civic rights to a group of racial undesirables, such as the Filipinos; the second issue centered on the labor problems that would arise if Filipinos were to “swarm” into the United States and compete with White labor.Footnote ⁶

Like their opponents, anti-imperialists located Filipinos near the bottom of the global racial order, but unlike the imperialists, they were pessimistic about the prospects of success for a project of civil uplift. They dismissed the notion that the natives could be led out of their savage condition through U.S. supervision and tutelage, asserting instead that annexation would result in the degradation of White Protestant civilization. The sustained guerrilla campaign waged by Filipinos against the U.S. occupation gave the anti-imperialists' case some extra weight. Whereas the imperialists dismissed the Filipino independence movement as a fringe group of bandits and rabble-rousers, anti-imperialists pointed to the use of guerrilla tactics against the U.S. colonial army as evidence of Filipinos' inherent savagery and unwillingness to be civilized.

The more important question for the anti-imperialists was whether “liberation carri[ed] with it the right of this country to take the sovereignty of those islands and control them against their will and against our own traditions and principles?” (U.S. Congress 1899, p. 1531). Senator William Bate of Tennessee suggested that extraterritorial expansion was a qualitatively different phenomenon from the continental type, and that the annexation of Louisiana or the Northwest territories offered no precedent or “justification for expansion of territory in distant seas, over peoples incapable of self-government, over religions hostile to Christianity, and over savages addicted to head hunting and cannibalism” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 3612). Senator George Turner from Washington State framed the issue slightly differently, claiming that the United States had only two options in the Philippines: grant the Philippines U.S. statehood or withdraw from the territory altogether. However, the idea of admitting “Filipinos … to American citizenship through statehood,” said Turner, “would be the beginning of the end of the American Republic,” Hence, the United States was faced with a decision to “immediately withdraw from the Philippines or if we are determined to retain them, must immediately proceed to exterminate their inhabitants” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1055).

Another dilemma for the U.S. colonial project was the traditional settler-colony model popularized by the European imperial states. The initial experiences of U.S. officials and military personnel seemed to indicate that large-scale settlement of the “White man” in the region was untenable. The geographic distance and the foreignness of Oriental culture were the two most common reasons anti-imperialists gave for excising the Philippines from the United States' colonial holdings. Congressman Charles Wheeler of Kentucky expressed this sentiment when he stated, “The Philippine Islands are nearly 8,000 miles from our coast, lying in the Tropics, and inhabited by a barbarous and alien people; they are unfit for a white man to live upon … [their] people are utterly unfit for citizenship” (U.S. Congress 1899, p. 1283). The tropical climate worried Congressman Adolph Meyer of Louisiana, who argued:

Those opposing annexation also dismissed the notion that the Philippines might be a suitable destination for U.S. workers seeking stable employment. Senator Joseph Rawlins of Utah asked:

Opponents of annexation who doubted that Filipinos could be civilized by U.S. colonial institutions cited the racial composition of the islands, geography, and native culture as some of the reasons Filipinos were incompatible with Western democracy. The islands were in “the heart of the torrid zone,” a potential “Pandora's box” of problems that might prove ruinous for any U.S. political experiment. John Daniel of Virginia dismissed the potential for a civilizing mission: “Not in a hundred years, nay, not in a thousand years can we lift the Philippine Islands and the mixed races that there inhabit to the level of civilization which this land, God-blessed, possesses” (U.S. Congress 1899, p. 1431). Senator George Gilbert of Kentucky observed, that “no empire has ever civilized any people in the world's history.” He cited other colonial experiments that had failed to deliver on the promise of colonial uplift and warned his fellow congressmen:

Anti-imperialists were even more concerned about the potential for large-scale migration of Filipinos to the United States. If the “Constitution followed the flag” as they insisted, annexation would require granting Filipinos citizenship rights, which included unrestricted immigration. The political establishments in southern and western states were especially interested in this issue, feeling they had long borne an unequal share of the nation's race problem. Those concerned about Filipino immigration feared the “threat” of Filipinos to White American labor and the addition of another “unassimilable” race into the national community. Though often articulated as separate issues, these class and racial arguments were inextricably intertwined, so much so that it was often impossible to delineate where class arguments ended and where racial ones began.

Anti-imperialists feared that whereas U.S. workers would find the Philippines an unsuitable destination, Filipino laborers would find the United States a very suitable destination to migrate to and settle in. This prospect worried anti-imperialists who feared that White labor would be replaced by “the cheap half-slave labor, savage labor, of the Philippine Archipelago” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1959). Compounding the problem were worries that Filipino laborers would be exempted from immigration quotas because of their potential citizenship rights in the United States, which caused some to predict that Filipinos would quickly flood across the border and displace hardworking White men from their occupations. Those opposed to annexation regularly invoked hysterical claims about the potential for “millions” of Filipinos to relocate to the United States, an assertion that assumed a majority of the Philippines' population would relocate to the United States.

Anti-imperialists frequently compared the potential immigration of Filipinos to the problem of Chinese immigration, drawing on existing cultural stereotypes about “Asiatics.” Like the Chinese before them, Filipinos were characterized as unassimilable and averse to the “American standard of living.” Nativist groups invariably equated Asians with low wages, poor working conditions, and peculiar modes of living, which were the outcome of natural “race tendencies” toward the lowest possible standards. The argument against cheap labor reflected the concerns of U.S. labor organizations that had previously lobbied Congress for a prohibition on Chinese immigration. Sympathetic politicians were eager to take up this cause to garner support from organized labor. If these “dangerous competitors” were allowed to “flood” the United States, the argument went, they would eventually “reduce the American standard of living to a level of pauperism.” Assuming that Filipinos, like the Chinese, were instinctively drawn to low wages “by their very nature” and could not be organized into labor unions, leaders argued that allowing Filipinos to enter the United States would “nullify, in substance, the Chinese exclusion act” (U.S. Congress 1899, p. 1447).

Even more disquieting than labor competition concerns to anti-imperialists were the potential social consequences of unrestricted Filipino immigration. Anti-imperialists played on anxieties about miscegenation to bolster their position. Specifically, they remarked ad nauseam on the precise racial makeup of Filipinos to illustrate the dangers of incorporating “the alien races … semi-civilized, barbarous, and savage peoples of these islands into our body politic” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 3622). Few in the United States had any firsthand information about peoples of the Philippines, so within this vacuum of racial knowledge, anti-imperialists constructed an alarming profile of the “races” in the Philippines. To convey a racial threat, politicians from southern and western states compared Filipinos with other racial “undesirables,” such as Blacks, Chinese, and Indians whose deficiencies were already familiar to the U.S. public. Their accounts from the Philippines suggested that Filipinos were little more than savages who “were reported to be little addicted to the use of clothing, either by male or female” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2632). Even more dramatic were the dietary habits of the islanders, as “witnessed” by a U.S. military official who noted, “A native family feeds; it does not breakfast or dine, it simply feeds.” During mealtime “a wooden bowl of rice … is put on the floor; the entire family squats around it” and “the fingers are used to convey the food into the mouth” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2632). A petition from organized labor opposing annexation explained that U.S. workers could not be expected to survive on the Filipino diet of fish, rice, and vegetables. These claims communicated the exclusionary and defensive thrusts of the anti-imperialist argument, which was aimed at preventing the downfall of the White race at the hands of Filipinos.

“THE MANY AND MIXED RACES OCCUPYING OUR NEW POSSESSIONS IN THE EAST”

For political leaders in the South, lingering resentment over Reconstruction and the social order that followed the Civil War shaped their approach to the Philippines. In their view, Black advancement during Reconstruction had come at the expense of Whites, and they feared incorporating Filipinos into the United States with full citizenship would replay this doomed scenario. Because White southerners claimed that they had borne a larger share of the burden of the nation's “race problem,” political leaders from the South believed it was their duty to speak out vociferously on the issue. They regularly challenged U.S. colonial authority overseas by paralleling the Philippines' position to their own alleged political subordination by the North after the Civil War. “Those of us who live in the States of the South have some knowledge of these wrongs and outrages,” stated Senator James Berry of Arkansas. “I will never vote to force upon the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, Malays, Negroes, and savages though they may be, the curse of a carpetbag government” (U.S. Congress 1899, p. 1298).

Others admonished their northern colleagues whose lack of firsthand experience living alongside inferior races hampered their ability to understand the racial implications tied up in the Philippine question. Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, who represented a state “where the race question has been the cause of untold misery and woe,” claimed expertise on the real dangers of race mixing and chastised annexation advocates in the North, pointing out that “hitherto the South has enjoyed a monopoly in the odium of shooting and hanging men of the colored race. Have the Northern people grown envious and do they seek to emulate our example?” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1261). Tillman also warned his colleagues that imperial policy would likely result in

By advancing the claim that it was White citizens, rather than Filipinos, who would be the real victims of imperial expansion, anti-imperialists transposed the colonial power dynamics of U.S.-Philippine relations. They argued that mixing “higher and lower” racial groups inevitably led to the weakening or destruction of the superior race, in this case, the White public. “We understand and realize,” Tillman explained, “what it is to have two races side by side that can not mix or mingle without deterioration and injury to both and the ultimate destruction of the civilization of the higher” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1532). He then made a case for the virtue of maintaining racial boundaries as a matter of national policy: “We are still an undegenerate people. We have not yet become corrupted. We have in our veins the best blood of the northern races, who now dominate the world” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1532). Emphasizing the potential injury to the White public, Senator Bate of Tennessee described the annexation of the Philippines as a “Pandora's Box which has shown many evils.” He further warned that the islands would be a “serpent in our bosom,” stating:

Other members of Congress similarly wondered whether the United States could “embrace in its holy arms such people as reside in the Philippines?” a population that included “head-hunters, savages, and slaveholders … and make them citizens?” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1543).

This portrayal of Filipinos as a caustic admixture of racial archetypes melded together over centuries of conquest and migration became central to the public debate about Philippine policy. The precise “racial character” of the Filipino people was still speculative at the time of the initial U.S. occupation, and few Americans, including the politicians in the debate, had ever seen or interacted with any Filipinos. Despite their lack of firsthand knowledge, they engaged in wild conjecture about the racial composition of the islands. Senator Daniel described the Philippines as a racial “witch's cauldron” and questioned why the United States was being asked to annex such a territory “and make it part of our great, broad, Christian, Anglo-Saxon, American land.” In addition, the United States was expected to “annex the contents” of the islands and “take this brew—mixed races … in all their concatenations and colors” as part of the deal (U.S. Congress 1899, p. 1430). The dangers of incorporating Filipinos were further complicated by outlandish reports:

Joining southerners in the chorus of racial arguments against annexation was a vocal bloc of congressional leaders from the western states, who tapped into lingering resentment over Chinese immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had placed strict limits on new immigration from China, but the arrival of significant numbers of Japanese immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century had reignited animosity against Asians. Congressional leaders in the West drew on these animosities, warning against the dangers of Filipino immigration. Representative Francis Newlands of Nevada warned that this group would “be invited here in swarms by speculators of labor, as were the Chinese” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2001). Washington State Senator George Turner likened Filipino immigration to a foreign invasion in which “10,000,000 Filipinos now, or 20,000,000 or 40,000,000 in the indefinite future” would swarm into the United States and pit “underpaid and underfed Filipinos against the mechanic, the artisan and the laboring man of this country” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1055). This scenario irked many political leaders who had worked so hard to pass Chinese exclusion legislation in the previous decades. Annexation would likely inaugurate a new wave of Asian immigration to the United States, “Open[ing] wide the door by which … Asiatics can pour like the locusts of Egypt into this country” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2172).

The comparisons between Filipinos and Chinese did not focus exclusively on labor competition; they also emphasized the cultural incompatibility of “Asiatic” and American values. In light of the putative unwillingness of Chinese to assimilate into the U.S. mainstream, nativist politicians assumed Filipinos would be just as incorrigible, a sentiment expressed by Congressman George Gilbert: “I say keep them out. We can not even civilize the Chinese within our borders who have been here for fifty years. These Chinese … wear pigtails, eat rats, and worship Confucius … in spite of all the churches and schools around and about them” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2172).

The alliance of southern and western political leaders played a key role in placing the race question at the center of the debate about Philippine annexation. Anti-imperialists supplanted their arguments about the undemocratic nature of colonial acquisition with defensive discourses, emphasizing the threat posed to the White public. This coalition portrayed innocent White citizens as the real victims of unrestrained capitalist expansion and the failed social experiment of racial assimilation. This ideology of White victimhood distorted the power dynamics between colonizer and colonized, depicting Filipinos as the source of nefarious political ambitions. Drawing upon a vast reservoir of racial idioms and anxieties already present in American popular culture, the anti-imperialists were able to draw a clear parallel between the rather inchoate social identification of Filipinos and other racial undesirables whose defects were already a matter of public knowledge.

THE PHILIPPINES, BUT NOT FILIPINOS

The imperialists eventually triumphed on the annexation issue, but they took many of the anti-imperialists' concerns into account in crafting a colonial policy for the Philippines. The two sides found common ground on key issues, including unrestrained immigration and Filipinos' civic status in the United States. Politicians on both sides worked toward a resolution of the Philippine question that would put these concerns at ease. Simultaneous deliberations over the political status of Puerto Rico complicated the disposition of the islands and revealed the extent to which colonial policy in the insular territories hinged on race. The sentiments of Congress and the McKinley administration toward Puerto Rico were far more positive, as Congress supported giving Puerto Ricans access to naturalized citizenship and/or granting U.S. statehood at some point in the future. Colonial policy makers were concerned, however, that any path toward political incorporation for Puerto Rico might set an unwanted precedent for the administration of the Philippines. Policy makers rationalized their proposal to treat the two territories differently based on the perceived assimilability of the distinct subject populations, describing Puerto Ricans as a “friendly and peaceful” people who were “orderly, law abiding, and anxious for development,” and who had welcomed U.S. annexation (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2043). This characterization stood in stark contrast to that of the Filipinos, who had taken up an armed insurrection against the U.S. occupation.

According to other policy makers, both geographic and cultural proximity distinguished the Puerto Rico situation from that of the Philippines. Representative Sereno Payne of New York claimed that the Puerto Rican population consisted of “generally full-blooded white people, descended of the Spaniards, possibly mixed with some Indian blood, but none of them [of] negro extraction” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 1941). Ohio's Jacob Bromwell suggested that Puerto Ricans were “as a whole a higher grade of civilization than the Filipinos” who had “professed themselves ready to become … loyal citizens of this country” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2043). Filipinos, on the other hand, were both more geographically and culturally distant, which called their potential assimilability into question. The hostile response to U.S. annexation by “unruly and disobedient” Filipinos provided evidence of their impetuous character. Further, the racial composition of the Philippines was contrasted with Puerto Rico to drive home the distinctiveness of the two colonies: “How different the case of the Philippines…. The inhabitants are of wholly different races of people from ours—Asiatics, Malays, negroes and mixed blood. They have nothing in common with us and centuries can not assimilate them” (U.S. Congress 1900, p. 2105). These racial anxieties gave rise to the fear that extending political rights to Puerto Ricans would set a precedent that “would be used against us” when it came to determine the political status of the Philippines (U.S. Congress 1900, pp. 1994, 2162, 2696). Anti-imperialists in Congress now realized they lacked support to win the vote for relinquishing the Philippines, and shifted focus to working out a compromise policy to limit U.S. liability in the Philippines.

This dilemma was eventually resolved through a novel policy approach that established a new political classification known as “unincorporated territories.” Previous territories annexed by the federal government had been treated as de facto “incorporated territories,” meaning that inhabitants of those areas were entitled to the rights and protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. In unincorporated territories, inhabitants' rights would be circumscribed, limited to a set of “natural protections” designated by U.S. authorities. Under this political framework Congress would determine the political status of unincorporated territories on a case-by-case basis, including trade policy, citizenship rights, and territorial governance. This legislation achieved the desired goal of empowering Congress to treat Puerto Rico and the Philippines differently (Thompson Reference Thompson2002; Kramer Reference Kramer2006).

Freed to develop parallel policies for colonial subjects on a case-by-case basis, without having to worry about establishing any “unfavorable” precedents, policy makers set about developing a policy to incorporate the Philippines, but not Filipinos. They quickly looked to federal Indian policy as a model, as the political subjugation of American Indians offered a sociolegal framework for incorporating Filipinos as colonial wards excluded from U.S. citizenship.Footnote ⁷ In adopting this analogy, imperialists were freed from the principle that the Constitution always follows the flag, and had a historical exemplar after which to fashion a policy for Filipino subjects. They pointed out that the United States' record of westward expansion had always ignored the “consent doctrine” in federal policies regarding American Indians. A series of earlier Supreme Court decisions had established that Indians were U.S. “wards” ineligible for citizenship, yet subject to U.S. sovereign authority. The U.S. government had long classified Indians as “wards” of the United States in an administrative sleight of hand that attempted to distinguish them from European colonial subjects. This analogy also helped to shape the ongoing cultural debate about extending U.S. power in the Philippines, glossing the ethics of colonial rule or capacities of the ruled. Imperialists, such as Albert Beveridge, pointed out that the “consent doctrine” had always been conditional:

As in the case of American Indians, race was central to the formation of the policy that incorporated Filipinos, providing an ideological filter that helped to reconcile the disconnect between universalist ideas about natural rights and the particularistic application of those principles to racially subordinated groups.

The actual governance of the Philippines by U.S. colonial officials shared many similarities with American Indian policy. The islands were administered by the Bureau of Insular Affairs, whose conceptualization and design were similar to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and even shared the same acronym (BIA). The majority of officials in the Philippines had experience in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and were instructed to draw upon judicial precedents, such as the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), in the formation of Philippine policy. Colonial Governor William Howard Taft was instructed to pursue policy “by analogy to the statutes in the United States dealing with the Indian tribes” (Williams Reference Williams1980, p. 829). The United States classified Filipinos as “colonial wards” of the United States, a political designation akin to the “domestic dependent nations” status given to Native American tribes.Footnote ⁸

EXPORTING RACIAL STATECRAFT

After the initial military occupation, the arrival of large numbers of U.S. officials in the Philippines in 1899 ushered in a new period of colonial state building in the territory. Central to this process was a series of “ethnological” surveys that sought to enumerate the peoples, land, and resources in the archipelago. This program of classification and cataloguing reached its apogee when U.S. census enumerators conducted a national census from 1903 to 1905 and formally institutionalized “identity categories” as part of the colonial governance. This initiative helped to draw territorial boundary lines to bring closure to the newly acquired domain and the subjects living within it. The first of these surveys was conducted in 1899 by a group of handpicked political appointees, known as the Philippine Commission, and was followed by separate study carried out by the Secretary of War in 1901, which was charged with administering the Bureau of Insular Affairs. The publication of the first territory-wide census in 1903 refined the classification process by establishing a formal statistical hierarchy that assigned all Filipino subjects to officially recognized identity categories. All three of these undertakings shared a common fixation with the racial composition of the Filipino people, placing the sections dealing with racial matters at the front of their reports. The conception and execution of these three projects shed light on the centrality of racial ideology to U.S. colonial policy, and help to illuminate the link between systems of social classification and the structuring of the social hierarchies that marked relations between Filipinos and Americans in the ensuing decades.

The U.S. system of racial classification found its first official expression in the Philippines with the creation of the Philippine Commission by President McKinley in 1899. The members of the commission were an eclectic group of political insiders, military advisors, and public intellectuals, ostensibly chosen because of their individual expertise in social, political, or military issues. The commissioners were charged with gathering information and hearing testimony about a variety of subjects on the territory, including demographic issues, natural resources, climatic conditions, and commercial opportunities. Most notable among their investigations were the “political, social, and racial questions” relating to the islands.Footnote ⁹ This report was quickly followed by a study conducted by the secretary of war, Elihu Root, to gather knowledge about “the people of the Philippines” and to serve as a supplement to the work of the Philippine Commission. The War Department submitted its findings to the U.S. Congress in 1901 to help meet the “constantly growing demand for information on this subject” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, p. 1).

Importantly, the surveys constituted the first official information about the islands collected by U.S. colonial representatives, and as such their data took on the legitimacy of state authority. The commission drew upon a range of secondary-source materials, as well as expert testimony from a variety of individuals claiming to have specialized knowledge of the islands. It organized the typology of racial/tribal groups around geographic location, population estimates, and loosely defined ethnolinguistic affiliation, developing a grid that followed the style of zoological classification systems from which the ethnological field was derived. Filipino tribes were even characterized as living in “habitats,” making the zoological influence readily apparent. The presence of two academics on the commission, Jacob Schurman and Dean Worcester, added further weight to the putatively scientific nature of their findings.

The first substantive section of the commission's four-volume report, “The Native People of the Philippines,” laid out some of the basic racial characteristics of the population. Volume two contained a more exhaustive discussion of Filipino “tribes” and their “physical characteristics,” “manners,” and “customs.” The findings divided Filipinos into both “tribal” and “racial” groups, although these two designations were used interchangeably, and placed them into “three sharply distinct races—the Negrito race, the Indonesian race, and the Malayan race” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 11). The report detailed and subdivided the physical and cultural traits of all three races into eighty-four tribal groups, whose “language … customs … and degree of civilization” were listed in a series of tables and charts.

Recognized by Schurman's group as the first inhabitants of the islands, the Negritos held great ethnological interest. Mapping a genealogy of the Filipino people, the commissioners used the Negritos to trace the origins, character, and development of the native population. Schurman's group surmised that Negritos had “lost ground in the struggle for existence” to the Malay and Indonesian races due to their congenital inferiority. The report described the Negritos as “weaklings of low stature, with black skin, closely curling hair, flat noses, thick lips, and large, clumsy feet” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 11). Because they were thought “in the matter of intelligence” to “stand at or near the bottom of the human series,” they were deemed “incapable of any considerable degree of civilization” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 11). Their cultural characteristics were said to be equally despicable. They led unproductive and nomadic lives, “wandering almost naked through the forests living on fruits and tubers” and hunting game with “bows and poison arrows” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 11).

The predominant ethnological theory of the period held that the Negritos had migrated to the area from Africa during the sixteenth century. The commissioners endorsed this theory and sometimes referred to the Negritos as “blacks.” The report noted that if the Philippine Negrito “as he exists to-day be compared to the African, a sufficient number of characteristics will be found to indicate a relationship with the latter race” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 334). They reached this conclusion on the observation:

The Negritos were thought to be a dying race, slowly disappearing from the archipelago due to conquest by neighboring racial groups, such as the Malays and Indonesians who were “endowed with a certain degree of culture” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 335).

The Philippine Commission contrasted the racial characteristics of the Indonesian and Malay groups with the Negritos. The report found that Indonesians inhabited the southern part of the island chain, though it left open the possibility that a “more careful study of the wild peoples of North Luzon” might discover the existence of the Indonesian race in that region. The commission identified Indonesians as physically superior to both the Negritos and Malays, with European features such as “high foreheads, aquiline noses, [and] wavy hair,” adding affirmatively that “the color of their skins is quite light” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 12). The Malays were described as the most numerous of the Filipino races and were singled out as “mixed-breeds” who were “not found pure in any of the islands” due to prolonged miscegenation with “Chinese, Indonesians, Negritos, Arabs, and, to a limited extent, Spaniards and other Europeans” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 12). The Filipino races were placed within a color continuum in which darker skin tones were correlated with inferior mentality. The report observed that the Malays' “skin is brown and distinctly darker than that of the Indonesians, although very much lighter than that of the Negritos,” adding that the Malays' “nose is short and short and frequently considered flattened” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 1, p. 12).

AMALGAMATION AND DOWNWARD MOBILITY

The three “pure” Filipino races—Negritos, Malays, and Indonesians—were contrasted with the newest and most vital “class” present in the Philippines at the turn of the century, the mestizos. The mestizos fell into two classes, those of European/Filipino extraction and the offspring of Chinese/Filipino relations. The former group was a product of Spanish and British settlement in the islands, and accounted for a small but influential segment of the population. The commissioners noted the privileged position of this group, pointing out that the mestizo caste “is usually the most important and noble, because it has, if one may say so, in its blood the nature and culture of the superior race” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 343).

The U.S. surveyors held particular interest in miscegenation and the effects of “mongrelization” on the population, both among indigenous ethnic groups and between Filipinos and foreigners. The corruption of blood evinced by such relationships was linked to an erosion of the social order and political instability in the islands. The effects of miscegenation were uneven and often contradictory, depending upon which groups were involved. The offspring of Filipinos and Chinese were thought to exhibit superior mental traits that allowed them to occupy a middle stratum in the population with aspirations for upward mobility. While “Chinese half breeds” were reportedly “shrewder than the natives of pure extraction,” they also bore some of the nefarious traits of the “Chinamen,” such as dishonesty, clannishness, and conceit. The Chinese mestizos' outsider status fostered resentment and disloyalty in this population, making them adversarial and reliant on “subterfuge” to gain recognition and political gain. U.S. officials often accused the Chinese mestizo population of fomenting the Philippine opposition to U.S. rule in order to advance their own suspect political agenda. For example, they regularly dismissed the insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo and his top lieutenants as “Chinese half-breeds,” who were motivated by avarice rather than a genuine desire for Philippine independence.

Racial admixture between Anglo-Saxons and Filipinos raised different anxieties about the deleterious effects of such amalgamations on the White population. The European mestizos were rejected by both Filipinos and Anglos, which gave rise to a complicated “mental condition” in which members of this group continually strove to “attain the respect and consideration accorded to the superior class,” even though their native blood linked them to “the other side” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, pp. 51–52). In vain, they attempted to “disown their affinity to the inferior races … while on the other hand jealous of their true born European acquaintances” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, pp. 51–52). As the explanation went, interracial unions led to biological decline because the blood of the inferior race contaminated the purity and vitality of European-American genetic material. These observations buttressed claims about the perils of racial amalgamation, a practice that led to downward mobility for Whites and to social rejection for non-Whites.Footnote ¹⁰ This argument was a central and enduring feature of U.S. racial ideology, both at home and abroad, and cast the enforcement of racial boundaries as a matter of group survival.Footnote ¹¹

MORAL MAKEUP

Colonial officials gave further reasons for why Filipinos lacked the capacity for self-rule and for why they should be denied U.S. citizenship. U.S. representatives were particularly concerned about the “moral makeup” of the natives, who were characterized as fanatical, dishonest, and lacking self-control. They cited these racial tendencies as evidence of Filipinos' need for colonial tutelage, as well as their unsuitability for U.S. citizenship. Declarations about group character and aptitude were, for the most part, subjective and embodied the style of racial essentialism that buttressed the U.S. colonial project in the islands. Claims about defects in Filipino culture were manifold and covered a range of practices and customs. Their continued practice of premodern customs, for example, reinforced the association of Filipinos with American Indians, and invoked images of a savage population awash in primitive behaviors. Accusations of widespread “head hunting” and “scalping” by Filipino insurgents painted an alarming picture of these “jungle folk,” who would require decades of colonial discipline before being ready for self-government.

The most infamous of these character traits was an uncontrollable tendency to “run amok,” a display in which Filipinos unleashed a frenzy of indiscriminate homicidal violence. The inability of Filipinos to manage or control their “dominating passions” was an enduring theme of both colonial surveys. The running-amok phenomenon was believed to be a cultural trait common to all Malay peoples, and another example of their unfitness for modern self-governance. Depicted as savage and lawless fighters during the initial U.S. military occupation, islanders were regarded more as ruthless bandits than as a legitimate political insurgency. Added to claims of widespread “scalping” and “head hunting,” Root's study suggested, “True to their Malay instincts, all tribes of the Philippine people can not resist the desire to mutilate the bodies of their fallen enemies” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, p. 36).

It was a commonly held belief among foreign observers that Filipinos lacked normal “sentiment” and had a diminished ability to feel pain, empathy, or pleasure. These traits were believed to be a result of the tropical climate and other environmental conditions that produced a “relative enervation of the cerebral mass,” which helped to explain the “inconsistency and volubility of his character that is naturally indolent and apathetic” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, pp. 378–379). The apparent lack of sentiment, however, was deceptive, leading observers to believe “that there is a calm when the tempest is in reality raging,” and that the repression of their true nature inevitably led to an even “more vehement … explosion of the passion which dominates them” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, pp. 378–379). Irrational fits of anger were endemic to the Filipino personality and further evidence of Filipinos' racial volubility. The commission noted the “terrible … influence which [their] passions exercise over them, particularly anger and fear, which deprive them of their intelligence, disturbing radically their judgment and reason” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, pp. 378–379). They also pointed out that all too frequently an “Indian of good character and customs … commits some atrocity … apparently with all the cold blood in the world, but in reality without thinking of the consequences…. [It] absorbs all his faculties and converts him into a veritable lunatic” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, pp. 378–379).

The Moros of the Southern Philippines, whose Muslim customs drew unflattering scrutiny, were found especially lacking in self-control. They were “ignorant of their own religion,” yet “fanatic in its defense,” and possessed a “fervent hatred against the Christian, whether European or native” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, p. 63). This hostility was attributed to the decadent culture of the Muslims who were said to be “absolutely indifferent to bloodshed or suffering” and were described as willing to “take the life of a slave or stranger merely to try the keenness of a new weapon,” and even to send out their young children to “kill some defenseless man, merely to get his hand in at slaughter” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, p. 63). These violent orientations were sometimes taken to extremes. A Moro “disgusted with his luck, or tired of life,” it was reported, would “shave off his eyebrows, dress himself entirely in red [and] run amuck in some Christian settlement, killing man, woman, and child till he is shot down by the enraged townsmen” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, p. 63).

This impulsive behavior stood in contrast to another set of character traits ascribed to Filipinos: their inherent laziness and aversion to revered “American” traits like hard work. Much of this behavior was attributed to the “lymphatic temperament” of the indigenous population, and significant debate took place over whether Filipinos could be weaned from their indolent lifestyle to adopt Western work habits. Filipinos lacked a proper Protestant work ethic, in part because of the poor example that had been set by the Spanish who had enabled the natives' natural apathy. A variety of officials noted that “a great deal has been said and written to demonstrate the lazy habits and the worthless character of their manual labor” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 44). The fact that the native “has very few necessities” made him “disinclined to work,” a problem that concerned officials as they probed the suitability of the indigenous workforce to participate in U.S. plans to develop the Philippine export economy. The Philippine Commission particularly worried about labor shortages that might result from the application of Chinese exclusion laws to the islands. Much of the expert testimony presented at the commission hearings on the Philippines raised doubts about the natives' work ethic and their capacity to work as reliable wage laborers. The testimony of one witness typified this sentiment: “They are indolent, and as a rule if they have a few dollars they will say, ‘I am going on a holiday, you had better look out for someone else’” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 2, p. 228). The larger question for the surveyors was whether these ingrained habits were entrenched or if the native could be trained to adopt Western standards. In this regard, U.S. authorities expressed confidence in the remedial power of colonial tutelage to reform the Filipino and make him a pliable laborer over time:

Another Filipino cultural deficiency documented in the colonial surveys was this group's predilection for vice and deceitfulness, which highlighted their lack of restraint and ethical judgment, and again cast doubt on their readiness for modern citizenship. The “average native” was “adept at lying, stealing, gambling, and all other vices imaginable, with indolence to a fault” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 2, p. 450). U.S. officials portrayed Filipinos as hopelessly addicted to leisure and indulgence, which contrasted with the values of asceticism and self-discipline that were so central to the Protestant cultural identity. Filipino men were said to be happy to “demoralize themselves and others” by living upon the “earnings of their wives,” suggesting their profound alienation from Western gender roles and familial norms (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 2, p. 33). Instead of engaging in wage labor, local men were “content to lounge around, indulge in cockfighting and other sports, and let their wives do all the work” (U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs 1901, p. 18). This weakness for impulsive, pleasure-seeking behavior manifested in native feasts and celebrations, which were described by the Philippine Commission as “magnificent and wasteful,” in which “vanity, their dominant vice, play[ed] a great part” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 384). Filipinos seemed oblivious to the wastefulness of such occasions, the commission observed. It also noted that their “delight in feasts and spectacles is very great.” They were said to spend weeks at a time engaging in “comedies, music, artificial fires, attended with great noise, and to cock fighting, which to them is the greatest of diversions” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 384). The gamecock was a prized possession which, when in competition, served as a “pretext for gaining, or for losing everything they have at hand.” For the Filipino, gambling was not a simple “pastime,” but a “means for obtaining a living” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 384). These showy displays and frivolous habits, the commission reported, belied a “weakness of character” that again was more suited to impetuous children than to rational adults.

Other traits identified by U.S. officials reinforced the claim that Filipinos needed a long period of remedial guidance before they would be ready for self-government or U.S. citizenship. Dishonesty and moral turpitude were portrayed as instinctual racial traits for Filipinos, which called their demands for political recognition into question. According to the secretary of war's report:

The duplicitous nature of Filipinos was manifested in their dealings with foreigners when Filipinos “naturally” sought to “escape punishment” from authorities during interrogations by colonial officials. Rather than admit his “crime,” the native “with all the kindness in the world denies the evidence, inventing things with astonishing ability, confirming with impressive stoicism one lie with another, and this with a third, until his story becomes utterly improbable” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 379). This overwhelming fear of punishment or recrimination by European or U.S. overseers furnished “a satisfactory explanation of many of his absurdities, wild answers, and contradictions in which he so frequently indulges, and which can not otherwise be explained” (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 3, p. 379). These same traits were documented by Philippine Commissioner Dean Worcester, who observed:

Working in tandem with the natives' reputation for outright dishonesty was another well-worn “Oriental” stereotype: the proclivity to mimic Euro-American cultural habits. The commission reported that the Filipino “like most Orientals … is more imitative than original,” and this was said to make evaluating their aptitude for independent thought and self-governance exceedingly difficult. This predisposition toward mimicry evinced a falsity of character and lack of sincerity. Outsiders were thus forced to sift through layers of personality to get at the true motives of the native (U.S. Philippine Commission 1900, vol. 2, p. 247). Whether the native truly understood what he was imitating or was simply engaging in rote facsimile of Euro-American behaviors was an open question: “The Filipino, as a general thing, is very fond of imitating the people whom he believes to be his superiors in culture; and as they are fond of culture, they are desirous of obtaining it” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 504). This attribute cast suspicion on Filipinos' claims about their readiness for self-determination, since it could not be determined if they really believed in the democratic and intellectual principles that they espoused. U.S. and European authorities agreed that Filipinos' aspirations were insincere, and were probably motivated by tyrannical ambitions or economic self-interest. Mimicry and the falsity of character that it represented compelled outside observers to employ extra scrutiny when evaluating whether Filipinos' democratic ambitions were legitimate or deceptive acts of cultural plagiarism.

MAPPING A RACIAL ORDER

The census began in 1903 with the declaration by U.S. authorities that the Philippine insurrection was officially over. This meant that census enumerators could, for the most part, carry out their work without fear of attack by Filipino rebels. As a large-scale, island-wide undertaking, the census symbolized the finality of U.S. sovereignty in the territory. The census enterprise also reflected a shift in Americans' racial attitudes and their imperial vision. Previous concerns expressed by anti-imperialists about potential racial ruin for White Americans in the Philippines were now moot as the colonial state became sufficiently entrenched. Master narratives of colonial uplift and benevolent assimilation were now official policy as the United States formally exercised its dominion over the islands and its peoples. Another aim of the census was to take a careful inventory of the newly acquired possession for purposes of governance and socioeconomic development. The publication of the first colonial census in 1905 marked an important milestone in this initial phase of the United States' racial project in the Philippines. A multivolume study, The Census of the Philippine Islands, drew together much of the previous ethnological data about the territory, attempting to produce a definitive record of the islands' population, resources, and development. A key task of the census was to determine the potential for commercial expansion in the region and to ascertain the capacity of Filipinos as wage laborers in a modern export economy.

The census findings conveyed that the Philippines was ripe for development and with an infusion of “American invention and capital,” would make an excellent “market for American products” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, pp. 41, 47). Colonial officials pointed out the necessity of building a national railroad system that could transport raw materials, such as coal, timber, hemp, gold, and silver to Manila, and that under U.S. direction could become “one of the great ports of the Orient,” making it the “primary mercantile point for American merchandise to China and other points” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 46). Unfortunately, the Filipinos themselves were said to lack the requisite industriousness and intelligence to develop the economy without a prolonged period of remedial guidance by the United States. The census found an unusually large number of “defective classes” in the population, which hindered prospects for development. According to enumerators, “The proportion of defectives—that is, the insane, blind, deaf, and deaf and dumb—was materially larger than in the United States” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, p. 39). The high rate of defectives was linked to the lack of public hygiene and modern sanitary practices among the Filipinos. Census officials collected large amounts of data on health indicators, such as rates of birth, disease, and mortality, that were used as the basis for a large-scale public works program in the islands to be directed by U.S. educators and medical personnel. The aim of these programs was to use modern Western methods to resocialize Filipinos to “become more intelligent and rational” in their daily habits and customs.

The colonial censuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were thoroughly modern instruments for documenting and interpreting demographic data, backed by the scientific legitimacy of their methodologies. As with previous surveys carried out by the Philippine Commission and the secretary of war, the racial character of the islands' inhabitants was a central concern. The statistical and interpretive findings of the census were ostensibly neutral, but the categories they produced were clearly ideological in that they instructed Filipinos (and others) how to identify themselves and each other. With its elaborate statistical grids, the census attempted to develop a rigorous system for classifying and quantifying the population of the Philippines to facilitate the administration of the colonial state. The four-volume treatise provided information on the islands' geographical, agricultural, and industrial features, yet no topic received more attention than their demographic character. The census institutionalized “race” as an administrative feature of the Philippine social structure, which for the first time would be incorporated into law and governance. The volumes offered a copious maze of statistical grids constructed by enumerators purporting to measure the correlations between different sets of social variables. Among the more notable patterns discovered in this exhaustive mapping of the Philippine social structure was a high correlation between racial/ethnic designations and social class. Prevailing notions about the inferior nature of Filipinos were reaffirmed through the analysis, which exhaustively mapped linkages between race and a range of social problems, including economic underdevelopment, moral decay, and public health threats. The findings of the census reinforced, once again, the necessity of U.S. political and commercial tutelage as a precondition for racial advancement.

Borrowing personnel and methods used in recent U.S. surveys in Cuba and Puerto Rico, enumerators in the Philippines scrutinized data on race, occupation, sex, age, mortality, disease, household structure, and a range of related subjects. Most demographic data were collected at the direction of David Barrows, who led the Philippine Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes. Barrows sought to correct some of the spurious claims of previous studies, which lacked the scientific rigor of his approach. One of his most significant contributions was the development of a clearer quantification of the number of races and tribes inhabiting the islands, as well as his commentary on the attributes and orientations of the population. The census brought the racialization of Filipinos more fully into line with Euro-American conventions of social classification, locating Filipinos within the global hierarchy of the world's four or five major “races.” Barrows employed a more bounded set of racial categories, closely associated with the idea of “color,” and then further divided these groups into subcommunities of “tribes,” reordered as either “civilized” or “wild.” He dismissed many of the exaggerated claims about the large number of tribes published in earlier studies by Austrian ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt and by Spanish friars. This was accomplished by reducing the “ethnological distinctions” between previously separate groups and instead lumping previously separate groups into larger categories of tribes said to share a common lineage. The results of these changes were stark, as the “82 tribes of Blumentritt … and the 67 tribes of the Jesuits” were reduced to a total of twenty-four (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 467). Barrows's system labeled eight of these tribes as Christian people and the other sixteen were characterized as wild (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 467). Most of the civilized population was thought to be of Malay stock, and the uncivilized population could be traced to Negrito ancestry. According to the census the civilized tribes shared a strong resemblance to each other “mentally, morally and physically” and possessed the greatest potential for advancement, having had the most extensive interactions with Westerners.

The enumerators focused much of their attention on developing a separate census schedule to count the so-called “wild tribes” of the Philippines. Barrows believed that most of the peoples in the territory shared a common ancestry, which disproved earlier surveys' claims about the large number of distinctive tribal groups. He bolstered his claims with the assertion that nowhere in the Philippines could one find clearly demarcated political bodies that represented discrete population groups. Enumerators even called the existence of formal tribal associations into question: “The Malayan has never by his own effort achieved so important a political organization. Such great and effective confederacies as we find among the North American Indians are far beyond the capacity of the Filipino of any grade” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 453). This meant that, for the most part, seemingly separate ethnic groups previously recognized by ethnologists were actually “identical peoples.” Local traditions of group identification and political association were dismissed by census officials who imposed new identity categories linked to race.

COLOR CODED

The color-coded racial system employed in the census reflected the dominant racial thinking in the United States at the time, which identified four or five major races in the world generally descended from the regions of Europe, Africa, the Asia/Pacific, and the Americas. In the case of the Philippines, census officials recognized five races: White, Brown, Yellow, Black, and Mixed. Census population grids showed that the “Brown” race made up 99% of the islands' residents, excluding Manila, which had a larger-than-average foreign and mixed population than the rest of the country. The Yellow race included Chinese and Japanese and made up 0.06% of the population.Footnote ¹² Whites, including Europeans and Americans, made up 0.02%, and the census also counted a “few negroes in the islands” who were “discharged soldiers of the negro regiments” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, p. 44). The mixed designation was a particularly imprecise category since it included an array of “part-Brown people” who were part Chinese, Spanish, and to a “trifling extent” American, owing to centuries of colonial and mercantile encounters. While the colonial state acknowledged the mestizo population, census officials largely dismissed the idea that an infusion of European blood modified the “the race as a whole.” U.S. officials also rejected claims that a class of wealthy mestizo elites of “Spanish blood” on the islands could quickly lead the Philippines down a path of self-determination (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1905, vol. 1, pp. 479–481). Barrows viewed these population figures as representative of the racial homogeneity of the archipelago's ancestry. The racial categories he employed were cross-correlated with a range of other variables, most notably with categories related to social class. Grids showed the relationship between “color” and classifications such as occupation, land ownership, literacy, household assets, birth and death rates, as well as the number of “defectives” by racial group. Thus, the association between race and social class was a central theme of the surveys, which in turn reflected key organizing principles of U.S. society. These same categories were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control that facilitated the colonial state's vision for a new social order in the islands.

The three surveys conducted at the advent of U.S. rule in the Philippines shared the same epistemological underpinnings, drawing interchangeably on theories of race as both a biological category and as a cultural condition. The demographic data contained in the reports assigned new power to the idea of race, and the artificial boundaries they inscribed into the national population were legitimated by the privileged status of scientific authority. Census officials employed the same kind of racial essentialism as previous surveys had, subsuming the inconsistencies and contradictions in their analysis under a maze of grids, charts, and tabulations. The meaning and analysis of demographic data were filtered through a previously established system of ascriptive hierarchy that evaluated and ranked the population according to subjective criteria imposed by the United States.