History's Memory, Literature's Memory - Including Ourselves in History

Today the Philippines is left out of many American history books and mostly ignored in classrooms and overlooked in newspaper retrospectives, though the same issues of that war confronted the U.S. in Vietnam. At the turn of the past century, it was not surprising for Americans to misplace the Philippines but today Americans still think of it as vaguely somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Or is it the Carribean?

By Linda Ty-Casper* 
Posted by Bulatlat.com

Open an American history textbook, look up and down the table of contents and the index and you're not likely to find much, if any, about the Philippines. In a 2002 book entitled American Empire, the word Philippines appeared just twice, and nothing at all about its being the colony in Asia the taking of which converted the American Republic into an empire. Nothing about the Philippine-American War of 1899.

The Spanish American War was a different matter. It captured the imagination of America, for that War brought it face to face with the evil empire of the turn of the century, Spain. To destroy Spain's hold on the Western Hemisphere, America intervened in Cuba: interpreting its manifest destiny as the duty and obligation to save the world. Then pursuing the Spanish warships fleet to Asia, Commodore Dewey was sent, supposedly by the undersecretary of the navy (though this could be a myth; history is not immune to myths) to HongKong, from where he proceeded to Manila Bay, where on May 1, 1898 he sank Montojo's invincible fleet in one morning's work.

America called the Battle of Manila Bay the "splendid little war." Against hundreds of Spanish sailors drowned in Manila Bay, the Americans suffered only one casualty, from excitement or heat stroke most probably. In the hold, coalers fed the furnaces steadily, and the engine rooms heated up so much they had to strip down to their shoes, which they had to keep on because the floor plates sizzled.

On his way to Manila to pursue the Spanish fleet, Dewey had brought back the Filipino officers and leaders who had been exiled by Spain to HongKong, and gave them the arms and ammunition in the Spanish city of Cavite Viejo. Armed with this and Dewey's promise to help them overthrow Spain, as France had helped America in her war of independence, the Filipinos proceeded to besiege the Spanish garrisons, reducing them to three: Manila, Iloilo, and Zamboanga.

But in a change of heart, or a change of policy in Washington, instead of becoming jubilant, Dewey refused the invitation to attend the inauguration of the Philippine Republic June of 1898, denying promising the Filipinos help in getting their independence from Spain. Instead, the Filipinos were asked not to capture Manila but wait until American troops landed. After American troops landed in July they took the city, blocking the Filipinos from entering their city. Thus began the Philippine-American War.

Word of honor

The War started as push and shove, with the American army demanding to occupy trenches Filipinos had invested with their lives, promising, short of a written document, to return the trenches. Word of honor. Which they broke. During those times, word of honor was binding and combatants stopped fighting on Sundays to honor the Lord's day. Until the American Senate ratified the treaty of peace signed in Paris on December 10, 1898 giving the Philippines to America for $20 million. American troops were cautioned not to start or provoke hostilities, or to ask for discharge.

But on the 4th of February 1899, a Sgt. Gray fired at Filipinos allegedly crossing into American lines and the first shot of the Philippine-American War ended the Spanish-American War. Even with its overwhelming resources, it took American troops over three years to defeat the Filipinos (1899-1901) at the cost of tens of thousands of noncombatants, towns leveled to the ground, and thousands of military casualties. One journalist estimated it would cost $20M to rehabilitate wounded and sick American troops.

That is the Philippine-American War in a nutshell. Is it in American history books? America called the war an insurrection, designating it as an internal affair, though the Philippines had been a republic almost 8 months before it started, had an army, a cabinet, a Congress, with a Constitution patterned after the American Constitution.

Today the Philippines is left out of many American history books and mostly ignored in classrooms and overlooked in newspaper retrospectives, though the same issues of that war confronted the U.S. in Vietnam. At the turn of the past century, it was not surprising for Americans to misplace the Philippines but today Americans still think of it as vaguely somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Or is it the Carribean? Isn't that where mail order brides come from, and the what-is-it-called, the Peaceful Revolution that toppled Marcos in 1986, briefly holding the world's attention until the next international crisis pushed it out of the headlines?

I'm still asked if the Philippines is in Hawaii, and this, after the Philippines has been in the news--inside pages--part of the interest in Iraq and Al Qaeda, a link traced to the Abu Sayyaf pirates who took hostages in Malaysia and hid in the most southern islands of the archipelago. From Manila I had an email that text messages were asking Bush to liberate the Philippines along with Iraq, and end the Al Qaeda conspiracy.

When Commodore Dewey was sent, supposedly by Theodore Roosevelt, Undersecretary of the Navy, to Hong Kong to await the development of the Spanish American War - there was a frantic search for maps in which the Philippines could be located. What was found were old Spanish maps, no longer accurate, so when Dewey received his orders to proceed to the Philippines, he had to travel down China Sea slowly, feeling his way to the capital city of Manila.

When American troops began arriving to win on land what Dewey's navy had won in Manila Bay, the lack of maps resulted in their being landed at high tide. So the Filipinos' first view of the Americans were boatloads of soldiers struggling in the surf, one hand holding aloft rifles, the other their clothes, to keep both dry. The Filipinos supposedly ran away or at least covered their eyes.

True memory

Why should it matter that the Philippines is not in American textbooks? Well, unless we enter a country's history, we do not exist in its consciousness. Lacking a true memory of the Philippines has led to inequalities in the Philippine-American relationship. Witness the Filipino veterans whose rights are still not recognized by the U.S. Congress that took these rights away unilaterally almost as soon as World War II ended.. By the time, if ever, Congress recognizes their role in Bataan and Corregidor, how many will be left? There used to be 25,000 in San Francisco. There are now only 8,000. If the U.S. Congress continues to drag its heels, soon there will be no beneficiaries to recognize.

Two bells were taken by American troops from Balangiga, town of atrocities on both sides of the Philippine-American War. Two surviving bells! And the U.S. refuses to restore one to the town in Samar that the Americans, by their own account and admission, turned into a "howling wilderness."

Witness the continuing widespread feeling in the Philippines: gratitude for small American doles - outdated helicopters and planes that fall apart while in flight - with Japan having received more in aid than the Philippines whose rights to reparation from Japan were greatly reduced by the American policy of helping the former enemy reclaim its role in history. America paid much less for its bases in the Philippines than for bases in other countries.

Yet there persists a feeling of gratitude among Filipinos for American tutelage, the American word for their occupation of the Philippines in 1898. Pro-Americanism first became the new name for patriotism in the Philippines with the Federalist Party, established 1907, which encouraged former officers in the Philippine Republic to place their future in America so they can share in the profits of empire. These leaders traded off their memory, did not oppose the Philippine exhibit at the 1904 World Fair of tribal Filipinos to prove the Philippines needed civilizing, when other Filipinos had been educated in Europe as doctors and engineers. General Alejandrino, conferring with Dewey, was asked what language he wanted to use. Dewey had to get an interpreter when Alejandrino chose French.

Just after independence - won or granted, let's leave the point aside - the Parity Amendment gave Americans a free hand in developing the Philippines, but severely limited Filipinos equivalent rights in America. Claims of American benevolence, unsupported by historical facts, is responsible today for remnants of colonial mentality that survives in gratitude for being granted independence they had already won before the Philippine-American War even began, submitting to the exploitation of Philippine resources, acceptance second class citizenship, (this month an American Filipino lawyer in LA was led from a Walgreen drugstore, in handcuffs, for allegedly paying for a counterfeit $100 bill which was later proved to be genuine).

Sadly, the Philippine-American War is not in Filipinos' memory, it seems. Is it because it is not in American history's memory? Do we still need American confirmation. Filipinos are notorious for erasing memory, painful memory. After Manila was liberated in 1945, coming upon the bloodied walls of the infants' ward of the PGH - the babies had been smashed against the walls - the first thing the survivors did was to whitewash the walls.

“Consensus history”

Understandably, American history books cannot not record everything. And traditional history is "consensus history" ignoring challenges and divisions, upheavals and dissensions. Like probably all histories, it chooses to be celebratory, recounting the country's exceptional history; its uniqueness. The heights, not the depths of national life. Big man theory of history. Leaders. Elites. Capitalists. Generals. Witness the non-inclusion from textbooks, until recently, of Native Americans, Blacks, women, the labor force. History has been a narrative of victories, military and of the spirit, man's nobility. I imagine the defeated focus on their national souls, on recovering and nurturing it back into world history.

But American history's amnesia about the Philippines reflects the nation's uncertainty about whether it had done the right thing by taking the Philippines as a colony. To include and to name the Philippine-American War in history texts would force the U.S. to confront the issues raised at the turn of the century. The issues of conscience that surfaced in the Philippine Question were raised against the 1990 sanctions against the Vietnam War, the bombing of Afghanistan, of Belgrade. It must have been a troubling question then, as troubling as the war in Iraq: needing to have it dissimulated as the American duty to guide the world’s history, to bring American ideals and institutions to all, its obligation to reshape the globe in its own image.

Those who were for taking a colony in 1899 argued that its Manifest Destiny obliged Americans to expand its institutions, civilize and Christianize the world for the world's own sake. Taking a colony would be accepting its role as a world power, along with Europe. In the 1840s Herman Melville said, "We bear the ark of the liberties of the world." A senator said, in 1898 "…the trade of the world must and shall be ours. American law…order…civilization… flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted." Reinhold Neibuhr saw Americans as "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection." Woodrow Wilson tried to "bring the world...into conformity with American principles and American policies. More recently, Madeleine Albright declared that Americans have the "duty to be authors of history."

One soldier, in 1898, was so carried away by idealism and the adventure Manifest Destiny promised, he stabled his horse for two weeks - the length of time it was assumed it would take for American to take the Philippines - then enlisted. He might have started worrying when the voyage to Manila took a month. Many underage volunteers paid for papers attesting to their eligibility with their grandfather's gold watch at reference tables stationed at the street corners of San Francisco, believing that by taking the Philippines, it was fulfilling its Manifest Destiny to save the world, Filipinos included, from the Spanish empire. That destiny includes setting the world straight, guiding world "history."

The Philippines Question was bitterly debated - carried on in dinner speeches of guilds and associations, letters home of soldiers, letters to editors. One, in the caution of the times, was signed "A Lady from Lexington." At the turn of the century there were the anti-imperialists, the League having been founded in Boston, as well as writers like Mark Twain.

War letters

Now, people demonstrate openly against war in Iraq, believing that "a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation" or "economic expansion." They now demonstrate across the globe. At the turn of the last century, disillusioned, soldiers in the Philippines grew to oppose the Philippine-American War. Though their letters home were routinely censored by the Eighth Army Corps, the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston managed to collect some. A soldier in the Nebraska regiment: "We came here to help, not to slaughter, these natives; to fight the oppressor Spain, not the oppressed. It strikes me as not very fair to pursue a policy that keeps us volunteers out here to fight battles we never enlisted for. I cannot see that we are fighting for any principle now."

Rev. C. F. Dole received this letter : "Talk about Spanish cruelty: they are not in with the Yank. Even the Spanish are shocked… I have seen enough to almost make me ashamed to call myself an American.'" F. A. Blake, of California, in charge of the Red Cross: "I never saw such execution in my life… showing the determination of our soldiers to kill every native in sight. The Filipinos did stand their ground heroically, contesting every inch, but proved themselves unable to stand the deadly fire of our well-trained and eager boys in blue…bodies were stacked up for breastworks." Captain Elliott, of the Kansas Regiment, February 27th: "Talk about war being 'hell'… Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native… In the village of Maypajo, now not one stone remains on top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terrible scene of desolation. War is worse than hell."

Charles R. Wyland, Company C, Washington Volunteers, March 27: "I have seen a shell from our artillery strike a bunch of Filipinos, and then they would go scattering through the air, legs, arms, heads, all disconnected. And such sights actually make our boys laugh and yell, 'That shot was a peach.'.... Hasty intrenchments were thrown up to protect our troops…the bodies of many slain Filipinos being used as a foundation for this purpose... Other bodies were thrown into the deep cuts across the road, and with a little top dressing of dirt made a good road again for the Hotchkiss... " E. D. Furnam, of the Washington Regiment, writes of the battles of February 4th and 5th: "We burned hundreds of houses and looted hundreds more. Some of the boys made good hauls of jewelry and clothing. Nearly every man has at least two suits of clothing, and our quarters are furnished in style; fine beds with silken drapery, mirrors, chairs, rockers, cushions, pianos, hanging-lamps, rugs,pictures, etc. We have horses and carriages, and bull-carts galore, and enough furniture and other plunder to load a steamer."

Ellis G. Davis, Company A, 20th Kansas: "They will never surrender until their whole race is exterminated. They are fighting for a good cause, and the Americans should be the last of all nations to transgress upon such rights. Their independence is dearer to them than life, as ours was in years gone by, and is today." A private writes: "In a word, I believe they should be accorded all the rights that they claim for ourselves. As for myself, I marched into the battle to make them free, not to make them subjects. I understood our mission to be one of humanity and for the cause of freedom, but our offering on the altar of liberty has been prostituted. "Most all the men who think in the Army Corps are opposed, and have been from the start, to holding these islands. Well, I hope we may never get another weak-kneed politician in the presidential chair at a critical time like this."

Albert Brockway, Company M, Twentieth Kansas: "We must all bear our portion of the shame and disgrace which this great political war has forced upon us… The press censorship will not allow our papers to publish accounts of deaths, etc., hence we, on one end of the line, scarcely know how the others are getting along." When it was declared officially ended, the Filipinos who continued to fight were called bandits to justify their ruthless annihilation. Teaching the Filipinos self-government allowed Manifest Destiny to be a cover for exploitation. Before the Philippine American war was over Americans were using Spanish tactics - reconcentration and water torture - that they decried in Cuba.

The two faces of America

President McKinley supposedly fell on his knees to ask for divine guidance, rose again convinced that it was America's manifest destiny to scare off the Germans, Swiss, English, Japanese who had warships watching Dewey in Manila Bay, and to take not just a coaling station but the entire archipelago so America could be "traffic policemen" in Asia. Supposedly what convinced McKinley was that fighting in the Philippines would heal the pain of the Civil War, with the boys in blue and the boys in grey fighting in the same ranks. General Joe Wheeler, tracking Emilio Aguinaldo and his Republic across Luzon, was heard to rally his men with the cry, "Get those damn Yankees!"

Considering the bitterness of the debates, American history was not likely to record the issues that divided the nation over taking the Philippines. Excluded from history texts, these facts are buried in the newspapers of the times, in books stored in basements/subbasements of libraries. Archives are notoriously out of reach for the public. Back in the late 50s, a thunderstorm made me take shelter in Widener, where I discovered books about the Philippines in the sub-subbasement, D Level West. It was like finding chunks of gold in heaps of raw ore. I had no idea these existed anywhere. The books were catalogued as Oceania and only walking up and down alongside the shelves did I find them. Most were derogatory, calling Filipinos unfit to govern themselves, needing American tutelage, etc., justifications for the so-called Insurrection.

The rest of the remaining year, I was drawn to that sub-subbasement. I felt guilty about taking the time but there I was, finally concluding that a book of essays would probably end up in some library's sub-subbasement, unread, so I decided, to write historical novels set in periods critical to Philippine history: deeply imagined literature that one cannot wipe from one's eyes, writing history so it can become a contemporary experience. Not politicized history. And researching, researching because what's the point of historical novels if one maims them with distortions.

Notwithstanding the prediction about editor's raw nerves about imperialism--in the 70s when I was doing research as a Radcliffe Institute fellow, the wife of an editor, big publishing firm, discovering my project, asked, Do you expect to get it published?--I kept at it. I also had my grandmother's memory of the Revolution against Spain and the War with the Americans. She was born in 1871, had lived through various rebellions. Almost every night when we were children, she would have us lie in bed with her, telling us stories of the War and the Revolution. And she would say, Someone should write about this. This should be written down.... Finally, without realizing it then, I was doing as she asked. Confident in the historical novels' relevance, staying power, and wider reach, with material from archives and my grandmother's stories, which made the Revolution against Spain and the War with America as real as my own experience, I began with The Peninsulars, 1850s, Philippines, about the time of the British Occupation, a book to anchor the following years. As it happened it was not possible to answer all those books on the Philippines with just one historical novel. And a lot of things intervened. So, several novels later about the Philippine revolution, martial law, People Power, after thirty-three odd years, finally, the Philippine American War: The Stranded Whale.

So, here I am, still writing historical novels in order to include ourselves in the world's memory, in the world's history, in our own history. Literature as historical reality, a nation's memory. Literature, National Artist Franz Arcellana said, "must be read first as information, essential information; then as knowledge which is power, which empowerment leads to wisdom which in turn makes us understanding, merciful and forgiving." We do not only learn history from literature, we also understand it. In this sense we can recover our history in literature, a perception of ourselves that history ignores: ourselves not as imagined by political forces, but as we are. Through our literature we include ourselves in history, recover our place in it, belong to ourselves. Our memory of ourselves, the essence of our personal identity/and of national identity no matter where we live. Because, for all of us, literature is a sacred text. Posted by Bulatlat.com

*Linda Ty-Casper used to teach English literature at the University of the Philippines in the 1960s. She is the author of almost a dozen historical novels set in the Philippines. Despite being married to an American and living on American soil for the past 40 years, she remains a Filipino citizen. This paper was read in a talk given at the University of Connecticut on April 9, 2003.

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