Presidio Officers Club, San Francisco. October 22, 2008-February 22, 2009.

The Presidio of San Francisco is currently exhibiting a collection of photographs and artifacts related to Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. The years covered are the textbook periods most American historians subscribe to. It also chronicles the rise of the Presidio as the key military base for the emergent American imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific regions.  The Presidio was the major embarkation station for troops shipping out to the Philippines. It is to the credit of the Presidio’s historian, Randolph Delahanty, to make this period inclusive to 1915, a periodization that has slowly gained acceptance among scholars of this event.  1915 was the year that all forms of resistance to American rule was crushed or ceased, notably the pacification of Muslim Mindanao.

The exhibit brochure describes the period as a ‘little-known war’,  a misnomer that speaks more to the intriguing suppression of this memory in the American national psyche than its aftermath, which accounted for than 80,000 native casualties and 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed.  It is quite appropriate that this revealing exhibition is being presented in the midst of the wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars, with its glorification of heroism, victory, and military prowess, also reveal underneath it, the dark side of inhumanity to fellow humans. The Philippine-American war was no exception. In fact, its unfolding during those years, bear an uneasy resemblance to later U.S. wars: hamleting in Vietnam has its origins in the ‘reconcentrado’ of civilian populations in Tagalog provinces to ‘starve’ the guerrillas from necessary resources; the Vietnam My Lai massacre  and  the indiscriminate shooting of non-combatants in Iraq mirror the Balangiga massacre and scorch-earth tactics of Colonel Jake “Howling” Smith; the furor about water-boarding as a legitimate intelligence gathering method is mirrored in the ‘water-cure’ torture that was practiced on Filipino guerrillas. The Philippine encounter also brought the American soldier for the first time, in direct confrontation against an Islam fighter. A history of  the ‘little-known war’ does not make these connections especially if the narrative has been forgotten. American textbooks have always treated this episode as a footnote to the ‘splendid little war’ – the Spanish-American War of 1898.  An unforgivable absence, since as this exhibit amply proves, there is no lack of material either in the archives (Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and special collections) nor a lack of visible war memorials erected throughout the country. One memorial in fact, sits at Union Square, San Francisco, where it barely passes recognition by pedestrians and tourists – a monument to Admiral Dewey’s victory against the Spanish armada in Manila Bay.

This exhibit more than compensates for this unforgivable absence of memory. There is a deliberate attempt to provide balance and yet not overwhelm or underwhelm the exhibit-goer. The materials are drawn primarily from the collection of Sgt. Hiram Harlow who served in the US Army during that period. Harlow’s diary reflect the attitude of most Americans during that time in terms of race relations, most of whom found the Filipinos not different from American blacks or native Americans.  The exhibitors were careful to note that such attitudes reflect the period.  The American press was particularly vociferous in portraying the Filipinos as uncivilized and were depicted in political cartoons as black, a few of them as black children as if to emphasize their need for care and civilization.  A section of the exhibit is dedicated to political cartoons published during that period; much of the materials came from the collection of Abraham Ignacio and published in their remarkable book, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War in Political Cartoons (2004). I find it interesting that press releases privilege the Harlow collection and make no mention of the cartoon section.  The cartoons reveal, in no uneasy terms, the popular racist undercurrent that persisted at that time – a shameless acceptance of imperialism couched as ‘manifest destiny’.

The exhibit also showcased the memoirs of the Lopez family, scion of the industrialist/business family of the same name. Caught between their nationalist aspirations as part of the emergent wealthy class of native Filipinos who supported the early Philippine republic and the looming possibility of having new colonial masters, the Lopez sought to negotiate the release of their men folk who were imprisoned by the Americans.  Their attempt to enlist the anti-imperialists in the U.S.  to their plight was futile, partly because the anti-imperialist movement whose supporters counted Mark Twain, David Starr Jordan (Stanford president), William James, among a few, could not muster enough political following for the Democrats, who lost to Republican McKinley in the 1900 presidential election. Under McKinley, the war and the Philippine acquisition was justified to the U.S. public as a civilizing mission and as spreading democracy to a then unknown country that suddenly was thrust into the American imaginary.  The late Daniel Boone Schirmer (Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (1972), the pre-eminent scholar of this movement, noted that at least the anti-war movement shifted the emphasis from outright colonialism to a tacit form of informal empire and the subsequent co-optation of the native elite who eventually gave their support to the American programme. If there were winners from this war, it was the native elite whose pre-eminence in Philippine politics was established and supported by American rule.

The Presidio administration should be commended for their effort in re-visiting this period in American history that more and more has receded from American memory as the ‘larger’ wars continue to be valorized and memorialized. By threading the history of the Presidio as the pre-eminent Pacific/Caribbean military station through the lives of Sgt. Harlow, the Lopezes, and other representations of the period, it offers a more compelling narrative that war, more than anything else, is about individuals, albeit, in events larger than themselves. An outcome from this perspective, although a sub-text in this exhibition (but perhaps might require a larger presentation at another time, elsewhere), is the effect of wars in the narrative of American immigration. In the exhibit are a couple of photographs quite telling in the context of the emerging American social fabric: one pictured a Filipino mother cradling an apparent half-white infant; in another picture a U.S. soldier is flanked by two Filipino women, on one side appears to be the wife and on the other, his mother-in-law.  It is war’s supreme irony – as it suppresses and displaces people, it gives rise to new ones. In less than a decade, the fortunes of many Filipinos were inexorably tied to America’s destiny.