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Selling Empire: American Propaganda and War in the Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Susan A. Brewer
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At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans and Filipinos fought bitterly for control of the Philippine Islands. The United States viewed the Pacific islands as a stepping-stone to the markets and natural resources of Asia. The Philippines, which had belonged to Spain for three hundred years, wanted independence, not another imperial ruler. For the Americans, the acquisition of a colony thousands of miles from its shores required a break with their antiimperial traditions. To justify such a break, the administration of William McKinley proclaimed that its policies benefited both Americans and Filipinos by advancing freedom, Christian benevolence, and prosperity. Most of the Congress, the press, and the public rallied to the flag, embracing the war as a patriotic adventure and civilizing mission. Dissent, however, flourished among a minority called anti-imperialists. Setting precedents for all wartime presidents who would follow, McKinley enhanced the power of the chief executive to build a public consensus in support of an expansionist foreign policy.

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 40 , October 2013 , e1
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Copyright © The Authors 2013

References

Notes

1 This article first appeared as Chapter 1, “The Divine Mission”: War in the Philippines,” in Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14-45 and is reprinted in revised form here with the permission of Oxford University Press.

2 “He is evidently going to make unity—a reunited country—the central thought.” Diary of George B. Cortelyou, 9 December 1898, Box 52, George B. Cortelyou Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York; Hill and Wang, 1996), 66-111; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 221-65; For an excellent historiography on the United States as empire see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116 (December 2011): 1348-1391.

3 Ida Tarbell, “President McKinley in War Times,” McClure's Magazine, July 1898, 209-24; Stephen Ponder, “The President Makes News: William McKinley and the First Presidential Press Corps, 1897-1901,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 24 (Fall 1994): 823-37; For an outstanding collection of political cartoons see Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, Helen Toribio, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T'boli Publishing, 2004).

4 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 252-54; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 374.

5 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 150.

6 Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133, 138.

7 Robert Hannigan, The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898-1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1-16; Thomas Schoonover, Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 98.

8 Robert Hilderbrand, Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 17-28.

9 Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 167-68.

10 Allan R. Millett and Peter Malowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1994), 287-88.

11 LaFeber, American Search, 142-43; Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1980), 77.

12 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 10-12.

13 Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 32.

14 William Allen White, “When Johnny Went Marching Out,” McClure's Magazine, June 1898, 198-205.

15 Leech, Days of McKinley, 209.

16 Leech, Days of McKinley, 238; Gould, Presidency of William McKinley, 101.

17 Gould, Presidency of William McKinley, 50.

18 Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit (1931; reprinted, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989), 334.

19 Paul A. Kramer, “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine War as Race War,” Diplomatic History 30 (April 2006): 190; Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 102-5.

20 John Seelye, War Games: Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 275; F. W. Hewes, “The Fighting Strength of the United States,” McClure's Magazine, July 1898, 280-87; Edna Woolman Chase and Ilka Chase, Always in Vogue (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 47.

21 Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 36, 41.

22 William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley: From March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1900), 85, 97, 109, 113-14, 124.

23 Gould, Presidency of William McKinley, 132, 139; George B. Waldron, “The Commercial Promise of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines,” McClure's Magazine, September 1898, 481-84.

24 H. Wayne Morgan, ed., Making Peace with Spain: The Diary of Whitelaw Reid, SeptemberDecember 1898 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 215.

25 McKinley to Secretary of War, transmitted to General Otis, 21 December 1898; Adjutant General to Otis, 21 December 1898; Alger to Otis, 30 December 1898, Box 70, Cortelyou Papers; H. W. Brand, Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 48.

26 Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Roger J. Bresnahan, In Time of Hesitation: American Anti-Imperialists and the Philippine-American War (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1981).

27 Leech, Days of McKinley, 353; McKinley, “Speech at Banquet of Board of Trade and Associated Citizens,” Savannah, 17 December 1898, in Speeches, 174.

28 Diary, 5 February 1899, Box 52, Cortelyou Papers; McKinley, “Address Before the Tenth Pennsylvania Regiment,” Pittsburgh, 28 August 1899, in Speeches, 215.

29 Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 34, 325; Glenn Anthony May, A Past Recovered (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1987), 133.

30 Kramer, Blood of Government, 112-13.

31 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), 225-61; Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan (Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1899), (here); Nick Deocampo, “Imperialist Fiction: The Filipino in the Imperialist Imagery,” in The Philippine- American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999, ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francis (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 224-36; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 146-60.

32 Linn, Philippine War, 132-36; Frederick Palmer, “The Campaign in Luzon,” Collier's Weekly, 4 November 1899, 3.

33 Otis to Adjutant General, 17 January 1899, Box 71, Cortelyou Papers; Linn, Philippine War, 135, 325; Hilderbrand, Power and the People, 49.

34 Brands, Bound to Empire, 58; Palmer, “Campaign in Luzon,” 3.

35 William Oliver Trafton, We Thought We Could Whip Them in Two Weeks, ed. William Henry Scott (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1990), 65-66.

36 McKinley, “Speech at Dinner of the Home Market Club,” Boston, 16 February 1899, in Speeches, 185-93; Nation, 23 February 1899, 140.

37 McKinley, “Address Before the Tenth Pennsylvania Regiment,” in Speeches, 211-17.

38 Diary, 17 September 1899, Box 52, Cortelyou Papers; Henry Cabot Lodge, “Shall We Retain the Philippines?” Collier's Weekly, 10 February 1900, 4.

39 “Albert J. Beveridge's Salute to Imperialism,” in Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, vol. 1, 4th ed., ed. Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1995), 425.

40 Lodge, “Shall We Retain,” 3; Walter L. Williams, “American Imperialism and the Indians,” in Indians in American History: An Introduction, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie and Peter Iverson (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1998), 244; John F. Bass, “Jolo and the Moros,” Harper's Weekly, 18 November 1899, 1159.

41 Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 152-53; McKinley, “Speech at Madison, Wisconsin,” 16 October 1899, in Speeches, 318; Dean C. Worcester, “Some Aspects of the Philippine Question,” 15 November 1899, Hamilton Club of Chicago, Serial Publications. No. 13.

42 William McKinley, “William McKinley's Imperial Gospel,” 1899, in Major Problems, ed. Paterson and Merrill, 424.

43 George B. Hoar, “Shall We Retain the Philippines?” Collier's Weekly, 3 February 1900, 2-3; Alan McPherson, “Americanism against American Empire,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 176.

44 William McKinley, “Annual Message,” 5 December 1899, (here); Speech of Hon. George Turner, U.S. Senate, 22-23 January 1900, Washington DC; Editorial, “The Country and Its War,” Harper's Weekly, 3 June 1899, 540.

45 Hoar, “Shall We Retain,” 3; “Anti-Imperialist League Pamphlets,” Box 7, Moorfield Storey Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” February 1901, in Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 22-39.

46 William Howard Taft to Elihu Root, 11 August 1900, Series 21, Reel 640, William Howard Taft Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Kramer, Blood of Government, 133.

47 McPherson, “Americanism,” 175; William McKinley, “Second Inaugural Address,” 4 March 1901, (here).

48 Linn, Philippine War, 221.

49 Taft to Root, 14 July 1900, Series 21, Reel 640, Taft Papers; Taft to Root, 14 October 1901, Container 164, Elihu Root Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

50 Root to Taft, 15 January 1901, Taft to Root, 17 January 1901, Root to Taft, 21 January 1901, and Root to McKinley, 24 January 1901, Series 21, Reel 640, Taft Papers; Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 180, 191.

51 “Extracts from President McKinley's Last Speech,” 5 September 1901, Joseph Tumulty to Woodrow Wilson, 20 September 1919, Container 50, Joseph Tumulty Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 126-53.

52 Kramer, Blood of Government, 145-56; Roosevelt to the Secretary of War, 18 February 1902, Container 162, Root Papers.

53 Kramer, Blood of Government, 155.

54 Brands, Bound to Empire, 79; LaFeber, American Search, 177.

55 Leech, Days of McKinley, 384.

56 Theodore Roosevelt, “Annual Message,” 3 December 1901 and “Annual Message,” 2 December 1902, (here).

57 “President Truman's Address,” 1 September 1950, Box 46, George M. Elsey Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.

58 George. W. Bush, “Remarks by the President to the Philippine Congress,” 18 October 2003, (here); David E. Sanger, “Bush Cites Philippines as Model in Rebuilding Iraq,” New York Times, 19 October 2003.