A (Very Long) Response to Ly's Post

I'd like to add to some of the great points Ly made in her post in response to my presentation last Tuesday.  The notion of "the caring plantation master who could provide a better life for the slave" is visually represented in the illustration Ly provided-- and I think both tropes deeply rely on a particular brand of sentimentalism that was so important for promoters of slavery, and a few decades later, the promoters of colonization in the Philippines.

Ly's comparison of Native American and Filipino "before and after" portraits is completely on point.  These kinds of portraits were often used to promote the "progress" schools' and military's ability to Americanize the Philippines.  The "transformation" the photographer (or editor of the photographs) wanted to depict in these photographs of Filipinos is so similar to the "before and after" photo of Tom Torlino from the Carlisle School that Ly posted.
   

This photo is from The Philippines Past and Present, a two volume study of the Philippines by anthropologist Dean Constant Worcester, published in 1914 (available online through Project Gutenberg).  The photograph of General Aguinaldo and Frank Crone also came from Worcester's study.  I also hope that you recognized the re-imagining of this photo in BenCab's (Benedicto Cabrera) painting Pit-a-Pit's Metamorphosis (1972).

This photo is from The Philippine Problem by Fredrick Chamberlin, published in 1913 (available online through the University of Michigan).  BenCab also re-imagined this photograph in his painting Invaders and Resisters (1980).

Comparisons between Native Americans and Filipinos were often made in articles written in publications like Harper's and The New York Evening Journal to illustrate the Philippines for their audiences, borrowing from already familiar notions of colonized subjects. In an 1899 Harper's Weekly* article "Philippine Ethnology," Marion Wilcox writes "[Igorots] are tall, robust...their skin is brown, their hair is black, straight, and very thick...In the time of war they paint their bodies and faces.  Our North-American Indians so thoroughly interpret to us this type of humanity that we shall presently hear of a Pacific discovery of America, and maybe find that some of our present hostiles are blood-relations to the poor foes of the Pilgrims and Puritans."  In relation to the visual and rhetorical tropes used to promote colonization, sentimentalism "softened" the kind of ethnographic stereotypes that promoted racial inferiority employed by Wilcox.  Also, Wilcox marginalizes the diversity of the Filipino people by choosing to represent them as only Igorots.  I think Crone is rather dismissive of this as well-- the Filipinos are an extraordinarily ethnically diverse bunch-- which happens when a population is spread over 7,000 islands-- and some parts of the Philippines were more directly culturally influenced by Spanish rule than others.  The Igorots are mountain peoples of the northern islands of the Philippines whose communities are very isolated-- so while Filipinos in Manila (the capital) donned Spanish-style clothing and were heavily influenced by Spanish culture, Igorots continued to wear their own clothing and continued their own indigenous practices.  The Muslim population in Mindinao in the southern Philippines, mostly consisting of the Moro people ("Moro" is Moor in Spanish-- again, recasting the Filipino as African but this time in the context of Spain), was very adamant in resisting Spanish rule and cultural influence, so they closely guarded their cultural practices from Spanish influences.  Wilcox capitalizes on casting the trope of the "barbaric" tribal Other by comparing the Igorot to the Native American.  (I think it is interesting to also note how the geographical distance between the US and the Philippines gave visual and rhetorical representations of the Philippines even more weight on how white Americans understood the new colony and the Filipino, in comparison to Native Americans and African Americans who lived with them in the same country.)  I found that Crone did not pay much attention to grouping photos together based on where they were taken geographically, and I'm not sure of whether or not his more or less random geographical grouping stems from indifference toward meaningfully distinguishing different ethnic groups from each other.

I'd like to share this just to illustrate how comparisons between Native Americans, African Americans and Filipinos went beyond visual and rhetorical representations.  In her book Empire's Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines, Meg Wesling directly addresses the Americans' common association of Native Americans and African Americans with Filipinos-- an association that was not only part of the general imagination of a racialized Other but also one that extended to education.

Detached from the interiors of the middle-class home, sentimentalism had thus become a crucial strategy aimed at the 'rehabilitation' of the nation's imagined Others through the forcible interiorization of its values.  Before its export to the American colonial Philippines, it was installed at the center of a number of late nineteenth-century social programs meant to "Americanize" immigrants and Native Americans and "uplift" African Americans and members of the working class, most notably in schools.  The opening of schools like the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and the Carlisle Indian Industrial Training School in 1879 marked the institutionalization of the nineteenth century fail in the domesticating function of the sentimental.  At Hampton, newly emancipated African Americans were trained not just in teaching and in mechanical and agricultural trades, but also in manners, moral values, and habits of middle-class domestic life... Publicity photographs taken for the school featured before-and-after photo sequences that compared the modest surroundings of 'old-time' African Americans next to the well-appointed dining rooms and impressively built homes of Hampton graduates, displayed in the photos as perfectly poised to illustrate the benefits of middle-class domesticity.  In re-creating such domestic scenes, Armstrong [the principle of Hampton] envisioned the structure of the domestic sphere to have a salvific force for a people he regarded as 'a thousand years behind us in moral and mental development.'    

Essentially, education for these groups was very much concerned with enforcing a cultural transformation, a transformation that valued Anglo-Saxon and Puritan tradition of American middle-class life at the time.

I'd like to point out a direct connection between education in the Philippines and the Carlisle School Tom attended.  Lt. Col. Richard Pratt, the headmaster of the Indian Industrial Training School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, presented to Congress an educational program for Filipinos to come to the United States and study alongside Native Americans in his school.  Pratt viewed the education of a Native American or Filipino with a "protectionist rationale": Wesling puts it well, "Pratt fashioned a vision of colonial tutelage as the process of good white men protecting colonial subjects from bad white men; good civilization, in other words, as the antidote for the corruption, greed, and violence that characterized the scarcely hidden underside of colonial expansion."  (Here, I think that Pratt is taking stabs at Spanish colonial rule, advocating the Americans as kind, benevolent colonizers.)  But ultimately, his plans failed to go through when the House of Representatives rejected his proposal-- Joe Cannon, a Republican from Illinois and the soon-to-be Speaker of the House, called it an "outrage" to spend public funds to educate Filipino children in the US because they couldn't be educated "above the sentiment of the people from whom they sprang and with whom they must live."  In his rhetoric, Cannon continues language of the racial inferioritization of the Filipino and even begins to comment on the notion that they are not welcome in the United States.  (The latter point becomes super important in thinking about the status of Filipinos during the American colonial rule (which, by the way, ended in 1945).  Filipinos held the vague status of "nationals" and could travel to the US without having to do extensive paperwork.  Many came to work in the fields of California and Hawaii, but once they reached US soil, they were not considered citizens.  In the Crone manuscript, there is an interesting document that outlines his recommendations for immigration control of Filipinos where he denounces interracial marriage and details the "type" of Filipino that should be allowed or not allowed to travel to the States.)  Even if Pratt's proposal was rejected, it was used as a model to develop the first schools in the Philippines. 

It is also compelling to note that even as Filipinos gradually held more and more positions in government and other organizations implanted in the Philippines by the Americans, the position of Secretary of Education was never held by a Filipino during the entirety of American colonial rule.  I think this shows how education was integral to the cultural transformation that the American colonizers considered to be the centerpiece of their imperialist project.

*Just a note on Harper's Weekly-- it wasn't always the tongue-in-cheek news roundup it is known as today.  From The Online Books Page by UPenn: "Harper's Weekly began publication in 1857 as 'a journal of civilization,' and contained notable coverage of the US Civil War and New York's Tammany Hall. The first incarnation ceased publication in 1916. Brief revivals were made in the 1920s and 1970s. In 2000, an electronic 'Harper's Weekly Review,' a weekly news roundup with links to material on the Harper's website, began. That form of the weekly continues to this day."  It also used to feature fiction and was the first magazine to publish a Sherlock Holmes story.  (thx wikipedia)