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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation-building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the Cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” Roosevelt acknowledged and expressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimed that for every American atrocity, “a very cruel and very treacherous enemy” had committed “a hundred acts of far greater atrocity.” Furthermore, while such means had been the Filipinos’ “only method of carrying on the war,” they had been “wholly exceptional on our part.” The noble, universal ends of a war for civilization justified its often unsavory means. “The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity,” he asserted, but “from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.
1 Theodore Roosevelt, Address of President Roosevelt at Arlington, Memorial Day, May 30, 1902, (United States: 1902).
2 Traditional historiography on the war minimizes U. S. racial animus and atrocity and emphasizes the “benevolence” of the U. S. campaign. See John Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The U. S. Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973); Brian McAllister Linn, The U. S. Army Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Linn, “Taking Up the White Man's Burden: The U. S. Military in the Philippines, 1898-1902,” in Luis E. González Vales, ed., 1898: Enfoques y Perspectivas (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 1997), 111-142. For more nuanced accounts, see Resil B. Mojares, The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999); Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War (Quezon City: New Day, 1993); For a recent collection of historical essays and artworks relating to the war, see Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
3 Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
4 On the political dynamism of race, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, 1994), esp. chaps. 1—5; Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review, 100 (Feb. 1995), 1—20; Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London; New York: Verso, 1991); Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 143—78. For the argument that U. S. Indian policy was the “origin” of Philippine policy, see Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History Vol. 66, No. 4 (1980). On the broader reconstruction of race in the context of U. S. colonialism in the Philippines, see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
[5] For the purposes of this essay, exterminist warfare is warfare in which noncombatants are viewed as legitimate targets during the duration of combat but coexistence is imagined as a postwar goal; I distinguish this from genocide, in which violence is organized around the deliberate elimination of all members of an “enemy” society. I refrain from the use of the category of “total war” due to the category's vague boundaries. On the concept of exterminism, see Dirk Bönker, “Militarizing the Western World: Navalism, Empire and State-Building Before World War I,” (PhD thesis, The Johns Hopkins University, 2002). On “total war” during the Philippine-American War, see May, “Was the Philippine-American War a ‘Total War’?” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, Stig Förster. eds., Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge, U.K.; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1999). For an intriguing comparative perspective on these questions see Helmut Walser Smith, “The Logic of Colonial Violence: Germany in Southwest Africa (1904-1907); the United States in the Philippines (1899-1902),” in Hartmut Lehmann and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., German and American Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Berg, 1999), 205-231. On other U. S. race wars, see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, 7th printing (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Mark Grimsley, “’Rebels’ and ‘Redskins’: U.S. Military Conduct toward White Southerners and Native Americans in Comparative Perspective,” in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers, eds., Civilians in the Path of War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, c2002), 137-161.
6 On racism in Spanish colonial policy, see Josep Fradera, “Raza y Ciudadanía: El Factor Racial en la Delimitacion de los Derechos de los Americanos,” in Gobernar Colonias (Ediciones Peninsula, 1999).
7 John Schumacher, The Propaganda Movement, 1880-1895 (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1973).
8 La Solidaridad, 1889-1895, Translated by Guadalupe Fores-Ganzon, vol.s 1-5; Luis Matheru, Vols. 6-7 (Manila: Fundacion Santiago, 1997). For the case of Rizal, see Paul A. Dumol, “Rizal Contra European Racism: An Autobiography of Jose Rizal Embedded in Blumentritt's Obituary of Rizal,” in European Studies: Essays by Filipino Scholars (Diliman: University of the Philippines, 1999).
9 Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic (Quezon City,: University of the Philippines, 1960); Cesar Adib Majul, The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine Revolution, rev. ed. (New York; Oriole Editions, 1974 [1967).
10 On the U. S. Army's attempt to regulate prostitution in the interests of venereal disease control, see Paul A. Kramer, “The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution During the Philippine-American War,” in Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Race and Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
11 [unsigned], from Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, May 17, 1900, in Willard Gatewood, “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers 18981902 (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 279.
12 Quoted in Lewis O. Saum, “The Western Volunteer and ‘The New Empire,’” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan. 1966), 22.
13 Felipe Agoncillo, “Memorial to the Senate of the United States” (Washington, DC, 1899), 2, 7.
14 On the links between “print-capitalism” and nationalist “imagined community,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1991). On the press during the Philippine-American War, see John Lent, “The Philippine Press During the Revolution and the Filipino-American War,” Asian Thought and Society, Vol. III, No. 9 (December 1978), 308-321; see also Jesús Valenzuela, History of Journalism in the Philippine Islands (Manila: Published by the Author, 1933).
15 “Nuestro Programa,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 1 (September 3, 1898). All quotations from La Independencia are translations from the original Spanish by the author.
16 Advertisement for La Independencia, Year 1, No. 2 (September 5, 1898); See, for example, “El Espíritu de la Asociación,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 5 (September 9, 1898); “De Higiene Pública,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 36 (October 17, 1898); “Los Presupuestos,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 41 (October 22, 1898); “Apuntes Sobre Enseñanza,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 47 (October 29, 1898); “Moralización,” La Independencia, Year 1, No. 63 (November 18, 1898).
17 L. R. Sargent, “In Aguinaldo's Realm,” The New York Independent, Sept. 14 1899, 2477.
18 U. S. Senate, Senate Document No. 196, Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 56th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 23, 1900, 13.
19 Sargent, “In Aguinaldo's Realm,” 2479.
20 Sargent, “In Aguinaldo's Realm,” 2480-1.
21 Report of Tour through the Island of Luzon, 20.
22 Sargent, 2481.
23 Wilcox and Sargent, 16.
24 “General McReeve's Interview,” reprinted in The Anti-Imperialist, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 4, 1899), 18. On discourses of slavery and anti-slavery in Philippine-American colonial politics, see Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
25 Wilcox and Sargent, 20.
26 Wilcox and Sargent, 20.
27 Palmer, “White Man and Brown Man in the Philippines,” 79.
28 William McKinley to the Secretary of War, December 21, 1898, in “Message from the President of the United States,” Senate Document No. 208, 56th Congress, 1st Session (1899-1900), 82-3.
29 G. Apacible, Al Pueblo Americano/To the American People (Anti-Imperialist League, 1900).
30 “To the Filipino People,” Exhibit 992, J. R. M. Taylor, ed., The Philippine Insurrection, Vol. V, 96. Taylor speculates that its author was Emilio Aguinaldo; a likely candidate is Apolinario Mabini.
31 For the best account of the domestic U. S. politics of the war remains Richard E. Welch Jr., Response to Imperialism. The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899—1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). On U. S. anti-imperialism, see Daniel Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898—1900 (New York, 1968); Jim Zwick, ed., Sentenaryo/Cenennial, Posted at Japan Focus on June 2, 2006.
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