Getting Out: Learning from Past Exit Strategies
Karnow, Stanley
SYMPOSIUM : GETTING OUT Stanley Karnow: The Philippines HOWEVER MUCH their methods differed, the British, Dutch, and French intended to cling to their colonies forever . But, from its start in...
...Taft pursued a policy of "benevolent assimilation," the concept vaguely espoused by McKinley...
...troops fought together in horrendous battles...
...They laid out mosaic plazas, verdant parks and capacious boulevards, their titles honoring Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, and designed civic buildings, with their Hellenic columns to replicate those of Washington, D.C...
...As a result of his clout, Filipinos were classified "nationals" and, in contrast to other Asians, granted unchecked entrance into the United States, where hospitals coveted them as doctors and nurses-and do to this day...
...Thus Americans supplanted the Spanish-and, as the witticism went, "three centuries in a Catholic convent were replaced by fifty years in Hollywood ." Xenophobic Filipinos challenged the U.S . presence in a bitter guerrilla conflict-oddly termed by Washington as the "insurrection"that dragged on for five years...
...Teenagers with cigar brand monikers such as Benedicto and Bonifacio tagged themselves Bernie and Butch . The passport to success for adolescents was an elegant Ivy League diploma...
...Hindered by incompetent leaders and wielding antiquated Mausers and Remingtons, the ragtag Filipino militiamen were no match for the American forces, with their array of Gatlfng machine guns and Krag-Jørgensen carbines . They lost some twenty thousand men-five times the U .S...
...toll...
...The conquest of the Philippines was ancillary to their paramount goal of dislodging Spain from Cuba, but they realized that by propelling American power into the Pacific, businessmen could boost their lucrative trade with China and Japan and profit from tapping their thriving markets and rich sources of raw materials . Pious evangelical clergymen of every denomination and sect lauded the endeavor as a unique opportunity to raise the "shining cross" of Christ on the hilltops of Asia . Walt Whitman acclaimed America's actions for expanding the country's horizons, and Rudyard Kipling composed his famous poem "The White Man's Burden" as an appeal to the United States to share with Britain the strenuous, unrequited task of improving the blighted condition of ignorant pagans . The opponents of America's new role in the Philippines included civil service reformer and former senator Carl Schurz, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, and onetime patrician New York, Boston, and Philadelphia abolitionists, who equated the subjugation of peoples overseas with slavery and argued that annexation of the islands would blatantly transgress America's lofty principles of justice" as well as trigger an influx of "barbarous Asiatics" into the country...
...commander, General Jacob W. "Hell-Raising Jake" Smith, insisted that "all persons over the age of ten be killed" and the region "turned into a howling wilderness...
...Soon an American infantry brigade entrenched itself on the outskirts of Manila and plunged President William McKinley into a quandary...
...bases at Angeles and Subic Bay, though under pressure from powerful factions determined to end what Filipino senator Teofista "Tito" Guingona called "the last shackles of the past," they were closed by the Penta . gon during the 1980s In the end, perhaps the best assessment of America's role in the Philippines is that of America's Vietnam foe Ho Chi Minh, who once remarked, "If the French had governed Vietnam the way the Americans administered the Philippines, our struggle against them would have been unnecessary" STANLEY KARNOW was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1991 for his book In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines...
...38 . DISSENT I Winter 2009 SYMPOSIUM : GETTING OUT Appointed governor, William Howard Taft arrived in June 1904 and engaged the prominent architects and urban planners Daniel Burnham and William Parson to transform Manila into a clone of an American metropolis...
...DISSENT I Winter 2009 . 39...
...cultural impact was phenomenal . Precursors of Peace Corps volunteers, intrepid young Americans dubbed Thomasites, for thevessel that conveyed them, plunged into the remotest corners of the archipelago to teach English, turning it into the country's lingua franca . Under their aegis kids learned to brush their teeth and recite their prayers . High school bands, led by drum majorettes, belted out stirring John Philip Sousa marches at raucous fiestas...
...Spurred by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, both chambers of Congress voted in 1934 to create a Philippine Commonwealth pending the declaration of independence a decade afterward...
...The U.S...
...At dawn on May 1, 1898, obedient to Roosevelt's clandestine orders, Commodore George Dewey steered his minuscule squad ron into Manila Bay-and, within seven hours, sank the antiquated Spanish armada . The heroic triumph immortalized Dewey...
...SYMPOSIUM : GETTING OUT Stanley Karnow: The Philippines HOWEVER MUCH their methods differed, the British, Dutch, and French intended to cling to their colonies forever . But, from its start in 1898, the United States meant to limit its control of the Philippinesand, to that degree, the American-Filipino experience was unusual in the annals of imperialism . The conquest of the Philippine archipelago was initially masterminded at the swanky Metropolitan Club in Washington by a covert coterie of obdurate men-the highbrow senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the naval strategist Captain Alfred Mahan, and particularly the belligerent Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy...
...Gifted musicians imitated Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Duke Ellington, and vaudevillians copied Fanny Brice, A1 Jolson, and Sophie Tucker...
...Independence was delayed by the Second World War, during which Filipino and U.S...
...A court-martial indicted him for butchering two hundred Filipinos, but, like Lieutenant William Calley, who perpetrated the notorious massacre of the Vietnamese My Lai villagers in 1968, Smith was treated leniently...
...Even so, it was a graceful withdrawal . Since then, dismayed by the corruption and mismanagement that scourge the islands, many Filipinos look back nostalgically on the American era as utopian . Some politicians even blus ter openly that they were CIA "assets ." The populace overwhelmingly endorsed the presence of the U.S...
...Unable to identify the Philippines on a map, he was spoofed by Peter Finley Dunne for not knowing whether they were "islands or canned goods," but McKinley famously explained that after nights of pacing the White House and kneeling to God for help, he decided to "take them all and uplift and civilize and Christianize them...
...Dispatched to Washington, the astute, debonair Manuel Luis Quezon y Molina vigorously lobbied Capitol Hill on behalf of the Philippines, becoming a familiar figure in its marble corridors and smoky cloak rooms . Quezon even drafted much of the relevant legislation...
...The U.S...
...Yet, condescendingly captioning them "little brown brothers," he cultivated the elite illustrados, as other U .S...
...As many as three hundred thousand civilians perished, either caught in the crossfire or in cholera and typhus epidemics . A gruesome episode occurred in September 1901 on the Visayan island of Samar after guerrillas slaughtered thirty-seven Americans in the town of Balangiga...
...Reflecting the racist attitudes of the time, he regarded Filipinos as inferior...
...The atrocities committed byAmerica and graphically reported in Harpers Weekly and other publications mortified the public at home-as Vietnam would generations later...
...presidents would subsequently, and launcheda political tutelage program to prepare them for freedom . s EARLY As 1902 Filipinos elected a par liament, and before long the nation's Abureaucracy was almost entirely indigenous...
Vol. 56 • January 2009 • No. 1
