American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism by Julian Go, Duke University Press, 2008, 377 pp., $23.95 paperback
The Yankee abroad has always been a reluctant imperialist. He dons the mask of the kind but stern patriarch, reluctant to administer discipline, but forced to do so for the good of those for whom he claims responsibility. The paradox of Puritanism—which runs deep in the U.S. psyche—compels him to justify his guilty imperialist pleasures on moral and humanitarian grounds. The latest, most obvious manifestation of this is Iraq, where the rationale for invasion—once the claims that this former U.S. ally possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to Al Qaeda were debunked—quickly shifted to the altruistic notion of introducing democracy to Middle Eastern soil. Iraqis, heirs to one of the planet’s oldest civilizations, would be schooled in the ways of a free and democratic government, U.S.-style.
In his book, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning, Julian Go, a sociologist at Boston University, traces Yankee colonialism, conceived as a tutelary vehicle for responsible self-government, to the War of 1898. In this conflict, which inaugurated the so-called American Century, the United States easily defeated Spain in three months and, upon the signing of the Treaty of Paris in December of that year, took over the reins in Las Islas Filipinas and Puerto Rico. In the case of the Southeast Asian archipelago, the United States found itself embroiled in the vicious Philippine-American War, predating the one in Vietnam by more than half a century and officially lasting from 1899 to 1902, but unofficially waged for several more years. The bloody conflict resulted in the deaths of about 400,000 Filipinos, and more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers.
Against the backdrop of Manifest Destiny and the red-meat urgings of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” the United States proclaimed that its approach to colonial rule would be one of benevolent assimilation, and that its policies would reflect the unimpeachable desire to teach the subject populations to build and maintain a democracy. The premises of such an approach are obvious enough: one, that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, left to their own devices, would be unable to “learn” democracy, and two, that the U.S. occupiers would be exemplary teachers. Operating with this neat rationale, however, meant ignoring a few inconvenient truths. For instance, the Malolos government that had been set up by the Philippine revolutionary general Emilio Aguinaldo and his cabinet, declaring independence in 1898, was self-servingly portrayed by Washington as an elitist attempt to grab power, as Go puts it, “for their own ends in disregard for the rights and opinions of the mass of the population.” Similar sentiments were expressed about the Puerto Ricans, who had already been steeped in party politics but were nevertheless viewed as corrupt as “the caciques of Latin American republics.”
While studies of U.S. rule in each place have been extensive, Go points out that no attempt at a systematic comparative analysis between the two experiences has been made, and it is precisely such an analysis he seeks to construct in this book. The author draws a lucid portrait of U.S. colonialism as a tutelary project in its first decade and a half, from 1898 to 1912, and examines how the respective Filipino and Puerto Rican elites responded.
The viewfinder Go uses for his analysis is culture, since it “provided the schema by which tutelary policy was conceived and then adopted” and “was also a critical dimension of enacting and fulfilling [such policy] on the ground.” Or, put another way, the meanings each group of elites took from or imparted to U.S. notions of democratic rule were tied in to their particular cultural models. He thus charts the responses of the respective elites, the “students,” as it were. Initially, the two elites reacted identically, attempting to “domesticate” U.S. colonialism to fit within their own schemas, already conditioned and shaped by Hispanization. Both elites expected a certain degree of autonomy—the Puerto Ricans would use it as a platform for statehood, while the Filipinos aspired to independence—and that the occupiers would act as patrons. But these expectations were only intermittently met, as Go documents. You would think then that both elites would alter their expectations in similar ways.
In fact, the two groups would later on diverge: The Puerto Ricans minimized their own schemas while willfully incorporating those of the North Americans, thereby effecting “a structural transformation” (italics in original). Thus, instead of aiming for the concentration of power in one jefe or party, they accepted sharing it, albeit reluctantly, with other political groups. As for the Filipino elites, they “continually drew upon their preexisting schemas to make meaning of tutelage” and “reproduced their prior political culture while changing it in a very different way. Rather than abjuring their prior schemas for new ones”—as the Puerto Ricans did—“they modified them so as to revalue their preexisting system.”
So why the divergence?
Go provides several possible reasons, among them the fact that in Puerto Rico there had already been some form of elections, even under the Spanish. Before the outbreak of the War of 1898, there were already two major political parties on the island, the Incondicionales, or Spanish party, and the nativist Autonomist Party, headed by Luis Muñoz Rivera. Months before the war began, the Autonomists won island elections, thereby gaining a certain degree of self-government but still in the protective embrace of Madrid. This wasn’t the case in the Philippines, where any putative attempts at reform and eventual self-government were stifled, mostly at the behest of the almighty friar orders that had in essence become the state. Only when the Philippine Revolution of 1896 began were there half-hearted efforts toward democratic reform, and by then, of course, it was too little, too late. Thus, patronage, while a critical element in the colonial histories of both, had, in the case of Puerto Rico, a party-based element, while in the Philippines, it did not. Therefore “the Americans’ ruling strategies did not undermine the predictions the elite had made of them.” Put another way, U.S. concessions, no matter how minor, still represented a great deal more than Spanish tyranny ever offered.
The reasons for the divergence Go cites are indeed significant, yet I wish he had paid more attention to the Philippine-American War’s role in such divergence. He asks, “Did the war in the Philippines have long-term repercussions that somehow shaped the fact that the Filipino elites’ path diverged from that of their Puerto Rican counterparts?” He concludes that it didn’t, since U.S. strategies in both places were similar. This is faulty logic: Such similarity is not evidence that differences were inconsequential, but simply that on a policy level, the Yankees may have chosen to ignore the fact of a war on the ground.
One senses that Go himself isn’t quite convinced of his own argument, since he states elsewhere that from one perspective, “if tutelage in the Philippines failed to insinuate liberal democracy, it was because the project itself contained inherent contradictions—an argument that parallels the argument that the Philippine-American War led to a loosening of tutelary effort.” Besides, he also notes that the Filipino masses continually exerted pressure on elite colonial intermediaries like Manuel Quezon, first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, through a relationship characterized by reciprocity and mediated through razón and inteligencia, to retain the demand for complete independence. Even if a significant number of the elite were privately more pro-U.S. and would have been happy with the status of a protectorate, they could not say so in public, for the memory of both the 1896 Revolution and the 1899 war against the United States was ever fresh in the minds and hearts of the body politic.
The war in this instance is the specter that looms behind Go’s comparisons. If the author had paid it more mind, American Empire, with its many virtues, would have been even more insightful. As it is, the pundits contemplating Iraq’s possible futures would do well to read this book. Had there been more awareness of the complexities of Iraqi culture, particularly its political history, perhaps some of the more egregious and deadly blunders made since start of the U.S. occupation—immoral to begin with—could have been avoided.
Luis H. Francia is the author of, among other books, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (Kaya Press, 2001), and is editor, with Angel Velasco Shaw, of Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (NYU Press, 2002). He teaches at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program.
