American Imperial Pastoral

The Architecture of US Colonialism in the Philippines

Rebecca Tinio McKenna

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226417936
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1904, renowned architect Daniel Burnham, the Progressive Era urban planner who famously "Made No Little Plans, " set off for the Philippines, the new US colonial acquisition. Charged with designing environments for the occupation government, Burnham set out to convey the ambitions and the dominance of the regime, drawing on neo-classical formalism for the Pacific colony. The spaces he created, most notably in the summer capital of Baguio, gave physical form to American rule and its contradictions.In American Imperial Pastoral, Rebecca Tinio McKenna examines the design, construction, and use of Baguio, making visible the physical shape, labor, and sustaining practices of the US's new empire—especially the dispossessions that underwrote market expansion. In the process, she demonstrates how colonialists conducted market-making through state-building and vice-versa. Where much has been made of the racial dynamics of US colonialism in the region, McKenna emphasizes capitalist practices and design ideals—giving us a fresh and nuanced understanding of the American occupation of the Philippines.

ONE

A Cure for Philippinitis

There’s a malady terrific and it’s very very sad

For you can’t think of anything.

They call it Philippinitis and you have it very bad

When you can’t think of anything.

You start to write a letter and you try your best to think,

You sit for half an hour and then overturn your ink,

Then drop your pen and paper and go out and take a drink

For you can’t think of anything, can you?

Chorus:

It’s so easy to forget a little thing like a thought,

When your mind is topsy-turvy and your memory is short.

I’d be a “savvy” hombre and I’d know a great lot

If I only could remember what I’ve quite forgot.1

“Philippinitis” inspired this American soldiers’ song, a tune probably written around 1901 or 1902. Barmy as they may seem, the lyrics help to explain the appeal to American colonialists of a mountaintop retreat in the Philippines’ Cordillera mountains. In this verse, an ailing soldier makes light of his forgetfulness and mental lassitude—the feeling that his mind is slipping away. These were the sure symptoms of a bout of Philippinitis. A 1908 Manila travel guide offered this description of the condition: “a word coined for the purpose of expressing facetiously a state of mental and physical torpor, with lack of interest in one’s surroundings, ambition wanting, a general disinclination to mental or physical exertion, forget-fulness, and irritability.” Besides taking precautions to avoid cholera and malaria, typhoid fever and dysentery, Americans who found themselves in the Philippines were to guard against overeating and remaining too sedentary. These were the vices that made one susceptible to that terrific malady.2

Philippinitis had equivalents across colonial South Asia, among them “Burmah head” and “Punjab head.”3 More generically, the ailment was known as “tropical neurasthenia,” a south-of-the-equator version of the distressed condition that William James had popularized as “Americanitis” perhaps also somewhat facetiously.4 American medical officer Dr. Louis Fales wrote on the nonfatal but troubling ailment in 1907. 50 percent of American women and 30 percent of men who visited the Philippines, he reported, “were struck by neurasthenia to such an extent that they are in a state of semi-invalidism.” Women afflicted by tropical neurasthenia, Fales wrote, “become nervous, irritable, anemic, lose weight, suffer with neuralgia, spells of faintness, sleep poorly” and suffer from menstrual problems. Children were expected to fair poorly, too, with consequences for civilization itself. Dr. Fales cautioned that the offspring “of neurasthenic parents . . . will inherit an organism lacking in nerve force; being forced to live in an enervating climate, their small reserve will be still farther drawn upon, and in a generation or two there will result a race with little resemblance to the mother stock, small, puny, weak-minded in fact a degenerate race which would soon cease to exist if new stock did not continually come from the home land.”5 Such prospects may have thrown into doubt whether the acquisition of the Philippines and Americans’ service there were truly to elect what Theodore Roosevelt had termed the “strenuous life.”

Indeed, the specter of Philippinitis boded ill for a lengthy American presence on the archipelago and amplifies the disquiet of the soldiers’ song. Statistics on the causes of death at the start of the US occupation were no more encouraging. At the height of armed conflict—between July 31, 1898 and 1900—600 Americans were killed or died from battle wounds, while 700 had succumbed to disease. The story for Filipinos was far bleaker. The Philippine-American War brought about the death of more than 700,000 between 1898 and 1902—some from combat and others from outbreaks “of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, tuberculosis, beriberi, and plague.” The annual death rate on the archipelago had doubled in these years from thirty to sixty per thousand. Over the course of the US occupation, Americans would come to view Philippine peoples and unsanitary practices that made them vectors of those dreaded diseases as more threatening than the climate. But early on, tropical conditions were themselves most worrisome. Altogether, the threats posed by the climate, disease, mental distress, and combat in the tropics supplied the Philippine Commission with motive to begin investigating possibilities for a health resort in the mountains of northern Luzon as early as 1899.6

Commissioners chose to explore the province of Benguet. Noted for its cool temperatures and its abundant pine trees, Benguet sits in the southern part of Luzon’s Cordillera Central, a mountain range with peaks reaching as high as 8,000 feet.7 Americans hailed the Cordillera as the Philippines’ Adirondacks or likened them to the mountains of the US West. To the Spanish, the region and its climate recalled “the Peninsula.”8 For the Igorots native to Benguet, the landscape, largely open grassland, keyed up a distinct set of meanings. It was one they had forged as they reproduced their lives and responded to Spanish incursions over centuries.

The landscape gave physical shape to the Ibaloi’s political economy and social organization, both fashioned in the context of Spanish colonialism. By the late nineteenth century, Benguet was composed of a couple of “pueblos,” indicating Christian residents, and a larger number of Ibaloi “rancherías,” groupings of six to twenty “scattered huts.”9 This social geography reflected the fact that through Spanish rule, Igorots across the Cordillera had made the work of reducción—the consolidation of Philippine peoples into tractable towns of 2,400 to 5,000, which the Spanish undertook in the lowlands—exceedingly difficult.10 As we will see, some Igorots met attempts at colonial subjection with a willingness to negotiate, but others responded with warfare or with flight into “higher and lonelier mountains, swelling the hordes of head-hunters, into whose savage life they fall back,” wrote one observer.11 To the Spanish, for whom urbanism was a sign of civilization, this only heightened Igorots’ backwardness. Igorots’ dispersal and dwelling across the peaks and plateaus of the Cordillera signaled their “barbarism,” as did their refusal of baptism and unwillingness to pay tribute.12

The highlands were not only home to those who had long resisted Spanish subjection; they also proved seductive to lowlanders seeking escape from Spanish authority. Lowlanders who set off for retreat in the Cordillera were known as remontados (those who return to the mountains, or runaways), and some anthropologists argue that at least some Cordillerans are the progeny of remontados.13 “Igorot,” in fact, first appears in Spanish accounts as “Ygolote,” a term that referred to peoples on the mountainous edges of the Ilocos in the west and in Pangasinan, the lowland province just south of Benguet.14 Some believe that the Igorots of Benguet, the Ibaloi, may be descendants of Pangasinan people who ascended the mountains to work gold mines even before the arrival of the Spanish; their customs changed as they adapted to a new environment.15 Nabaloi, the language of the Ibaloi, reflects these migrations in its incorporation of elements of Pangasinan and Ilocano.16

When the Spanish formulated their understandings of these Philippine mountain peoples, they could look to precedent from the Peninsula. Indeed, conquistadors and administrators may have been reminded of “the mountains south of Granada,” a region feared “a preserve of unconverted and politically dangerous Moors.” For almost a century before they began expelling the Moors from the Peninsula, the Spanish worried “that the mountains harbored a permanent ‘fifth column’ of unbelievers.”17 Similar concerns plagued Spaniards and Americans in the Philippines. According to reports of the Philippine Commission, in the tumult of the early 1900s, “ignorant and superstitious people” chose to “withdraw to the mountains, under the leadership of leaders who profess to have divine attributes and to have the assistance of God in the protection of their followers.” American commissioners recognized that these runaways followed the paths of insurgents during the Spanish period who had “had no refuge but the mountains, and being in the mountains conducted a free robber life, and about them gathered legions not unlike those of the Robin Hood days of England.”18

Igorots and these remontados, then, were largely successful evaders of a tribute- and labor-seeking colonial state. “Far from being ‘left behind’ by the progress of civilization in the valleys,” James Scott writes of hill peoples of Southeast Asia, “they have, over long periods of time, chosen to place themselves out of the reach of the state”—the colonial state. And this choice was largely enabled by the mountains; Scott describes how political authority “sweeps readily across a flat terrain,” while “abrupt changes in altitude, ruggedness of terrain, and the political obstacle of population dispersion and mixed cultivation” tend to halt its progress.19 In the province of Benguet, it was not only geography that presented challenges to imperial sovereignty; it was also the materials, like gold, that the indigenous people harvested from the earth that gained them a fragile and circumscribed measure of independence.

In this southernmost province of northern Luzon, gold would produce a wealthy elite whose degree of power over fellow Ibaloi was unique among Cordilleran ethnolinguistic groups. By the time of the US occupation, this gold had allowed the elite to amass herds of cattle through trading along the coast and in the lowlands. The extensive pastureland across Benguet hinted at the central place of cattle in Ibaloi social organization and economic and ritual life. Attempts to secure this wealth and the social status attached to it in the face of Spanish incursions would shape another Ibaloi response to the invaders: not flight and abandonment of lands but negotiation. These accommodations by the elite would create the circumstances under which Benguet became recognized as the first comandancia militar, or military district, in the mid-nineteenth century.20 Some elites, it seems, traded degrees of sovereignty vis-à-vis the Spanish for economic and social power within their communities.

In setting their hill station on Ibaloi lands, Americans sought to capture some of the advantages offered by the Cordillera—its remote location and the amenability of at least some of its native dwellers. They followed the Spanish, who had first envisioned a mountain hill station in the later 1870s.21 Not unlike the Spanish, who by the nineteenth century sought to consolidate colonial state power, Americans were undertaking colonial conquest and, in that context, sought a break from the heat of the tropics and the preservation and reproduction of their own culture and labor force. Americans were also seeking reprieve from the exigencies of colonial state and nation building and from Filipinos who themselves had beaten trails in the mountains to elude US forces. This insurgency is something that the tune “Philippinitis” evokes in later verses. The soldier sings of the “civil governor” and General Adna Chaffee, a veteran of the Indian Wars, the US occupation of Cuba, and a US relief expedition to China during the Boxer Rebellion, all before landing in Manila where he served as major general of the regular army. “They [the civil governor and Chaffee] do what they can,” but as the song goes, “The Philippines are pacified, not tranquilized, said he; / He overlooked a little thing as anyone mag see— / He forgot the Filipinos, and it’s plain as plain can be / That he can’t think of everything—can he?”22 In building their hill station in Benguet far from the Manila capital, Americans would seek an antidote to “Philippinitis,” that hazard of colonizing the archipelago. On Baguio pasture they would advance Spanish work of turning what had for centuries been a space of limited colonial state authority into a domain of colonial power. Americans would claim Baguio for a “government reservation”—a distinctive zone of US authority within the nation-state Americans were building. In the process, they would reorient the landscape again, ultimately turning Ibaloi pasture into American pastoral and making ascent into the mountains appear not a sign of barbarism but a privilege and perk of the civilized.23

“A Sort of Thermopylae”

In early 1900 Robert Rudd mustered out of the Presid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  A Cure for Philippinitis
• 2  Liberating Labor: The Road to Baguio
• 3  “A Hope of Something Unusual among Cities”
• 4  “Independencia in a Box”
• 5  Savage Hospitality
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index