HOMAGE TO DAVID FAGEN:
AFRICAN AMERICAN
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION
by E. SAN
JUAN, Jr.
Fellow, Harry Ransom
Center, University of Texas, Austin
Let him
never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned
in the dark.
--WILLIAM
VAUGHN MOODY, “On A Soldier
Fallen in the Philippines”
(1901)
The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men
in Asia and Africa, in American
and the islands of the sea.
--W.E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903)
From 1865
to 1898, the United
States underwent momentous
changes not least of which was the formal “emancipation” of
African slaves exploited by the Southern plantation aristocracy.
However, the failure of the complete “reconstruction” of the South
institutionalized segregation and white racial supremacy for
another century. U.S.
victory over the moribund Spanish empire in 1898 signalled its
birth as a world imperial power dominant over the Caribbean and Latin America. Its colonization of the
southeast Asian islands of the Philippines
(bought from Spain
after its defeat) allowed it to project itself as an Asian-Pacific
power and ruler of “dark-skinned” Malayo-Polynesian indigenes.
In July 1900, when the third meeting of the Pan-African Congress
met in London, the Filipino Republic’s resistance to US
“pacification” of the colony was over a year old, with the
preponderance of native casualties due to quasi-genocidal war
practices anticipating the forcible “hamletting” in Vietnam,
scorched-earth counter-insurgency tactics, torture by
“water-boarding,” and so on. In a now historic speech at the
Congress, W.E.B. Du Bois, who participated in the Anti-Imperialist
League (one active member was William James, Du Bois’ professor at
Harvard University) opposed to US suppression of the dark-skinned
Filipinos, took notice of the universal plight of “the darker races
of mankind” as well as “the brown and yellow myriads” by
prophetically announcing that “The problem of the twentieth century
is the problem of the colour line…” (1970, 125).
The dialectic between race and class implicit in Du Bois’ address
had already been anticipated in his 1891 paper on “The Enforcement
of the Slave Trade Laws.” Du Bois analyzed the interface between
ideology, politics, and economic structure: “If slave labor was an
economic god, then the slave trade was its strong right arm; and
with Southern planters recognizing this and Northen capital
unfettered by a conscience it was almost like legislating against
economic laws to attempt to abolish the slave trade by statutes”
(quoted in Lewis 1993, 159). Legal ideology and economic
practice were so intricately meshed that one cannot privilege one
category over the other. At that time Du Bois was neither an “economic
determinist” nor a postmodern deconstructionist. Neither was Karl
Marx when he studied the politics of the U.S. civil war in his
journalistic writings. Marx regarded the destruction of the
slave system as a necessary pre-requisite for the advance of the
working-class struggles in the U.S.
and Europe, hence the whole-hearted support of the British trade
unions and the first International Working Men’s Association for Lincoln and the Union.
In his recent pathbreaking work, Kevin Anderson demonstrates how
Marx’s inquiries into the complex dialectic between
race and class in the U.S. civil war, as well as in Ireland’s
struggle against British colonialism, led Marx to change his
earlier hypothesis of society’s unilinear development and the
progressive aspect of British colonialism. By 1853, and especially
in his studies of Russia and non-western formations from 1857 (the
completion of the Grundrisse) to the 1879-1882 notes on
indigenous peoples, Marx formulated a multilinear and
non-reductionist theory of social change that did not univocally
and exclusively focus on economic relations of production. Anderson
concludes that Marx’s mature social theory “revolved around a
concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for
particularity and difference but also on occasion made those
particulars—race, ethnicity, or nationality—determinants for the
totality” (2010, 244). In 1862, before the Emancipation
Proclamation, Marx had already conceptualized the subjectivity or
revolutionary agency of “free Negroes” as a crucial
element in the victory of the Union forces.
Prologue
to Possession
Du Bois,
of course, famously speculated on the “double consciousness” of
this African American agency in The Souls of Black Folk published
just a year after the end of the Filipino American War of 1899-1902
(actually, guerilla resistance continued up to 1913). A moral and
spiritual dilemma then confronted this emergent identity. While the
African half dreamed of realizing full humanity, the American half
yielded to a citizenship option: he joined the troops sent to the Philippines
on a “civilizing mission.” Soon he discovered the reality of the
imperial situation where race, nationality and class articulated
for him the choice he must make: to follow a racialist-capitalist
order, or cast his lot with the “dark-skinned” victims. This
is what African American soldiers were ultimately confronted with
when the bifurcated “subject-position” (to use the
postmodernist idiom) was faced with the need to reconcile knowledge
and real-life situations. Imperial duty had to give way to the
ethical imperative of fraternal solidarity with peoples occupying
the same position as his community, a historically conscious
partisanship committed to a transcendent cause that would dissolve
racial, class and national barriers in the name of a
universal humanist principle.
This theme of the dialectic of race, class and nation informs my
project of speculative historical inventory of which this essay is
a preliminary investigation (segments appeared in an earlier
version in Cultural Logic). Here I explore how this process of
African American internationalist praxis, personified by the
African American soldier David Fagen and replicated by selected
radical African American activists in the last century, materialized
in the concrete historical situation of the Filipino-American War
of 1899-1902 and acquired richer nuances and ramifications when the
U.S., after World War II and during the Cold War, made the
Philippines a laboratory for reactionary counter-insurgency and
intervention in developing “third world” nations. The fraught
issues of race, class and nation that post-9/11 global capitalism
has sublimated today into the Manichean dualism of
“terrorism-versus-Western civilization” were all rehearsed earlier
in the narratives of African Americans who, cognizant of the
two-edged “double consciousness” and its creative impact in the
Civil Rights mobilization, joined their honor and lives with the
four-centuries-old struggle of the Filipino masses of workers and
peasants for dignity, popular sovereignty, and democratic
socialism.
Unless news of a disaster grabs the headlines—the eruption of a
volcano that drove the US
military forces from Clark and Subic bases two decades ago, or of
American missionaries kidnapped by the Muslim separatists, the Abu
Sayyaf (labeled a terrorist group by the US State Department in
2003), the Philippines
scarcely figures in the U.S. public
consciousness. Not even as a tourist destination, or as the source
of mail order brides and domestic help. Some mistake the Philippines as islands in the
Caribbean, or somewhere near Hawaii
or Tahiti; others wondered then if “them Philippians were the folks
St. Paul
wrote the epistle to.”
September 11, 2001 changed this somewhat. When U.S. occupation troops in Iraq continued to suffer casualties
every day after the war officially ended, pundits began to supply
capsule histories comparing their situation with those of troops in
the Philippines
during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902). A New York Times
op-ed summed up the lesson in its title, “In 1901 Philippines,
Peace Cost More Lives Than Were Lost in War” (2 July 2003, B1). An
article in the Los Angeles Times contrasted the simplicity of
McKinley’s “easy” goal of annexation with George W. Bush’s ambition
to “create a new working democracy as soon as possible” (20 July
2003, M2). Immediately after the proclaimed defeat of the Taliban
and the rout of Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines
became the second front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, with
hundreds of US “Special Forces” re-invading the former colony.
Necrological
Rites
Few Americans know about the
Spanish-American War of 1898—school textbooks allow only a few
paragraphs for this “splendid little war.” After Spain’s surrender in the Treaty of
Paris, December 1898, the US Empire began with the military rule
over Cuba, and
annexation of the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, Guam and later on, Hawaii
and parts of Samoa. Fewer
know about the Filipino American War which began in February 1899
and lasted until 1913, with the Filipino Muslims sustaining the
heaviest casualties in publicized massacres. This chapter in US history is only now beginning to
merit some attention in the wake of the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (Boot 2002;
Kaplan 2003).
This story of African
American soldiers in the Philippine revolution—US officials
called it “an insurrection”—might begin with President William
McKinley.While there was public support for the war against Spain,
pitched as a crusade to liberate the Cubans from Spanish tyranny,
there was fierce debate over acquiring the Philippine Islands. This
expansionist zeal of the “yellow journalists,” commercial houses,
and militarists was opposed by an organized nation-wide group
called the Anti-Imperialist League. It included Andrew Carnegie,
former president Grover Cleveland, George Boutwell, co-founder of
the Republican Party; and numerous personalities such as Mark
Twain, William James, William Dean Howells, Jane Addams, George
Santayana, and others. Besieged by such a crowd, McKinley confessed
to a visiting delegation of Methodist church leaders how he sought
the light of “Almighty God” to advise him what to do with the
Philippines, and God told him that, among other things, “there was
nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the
Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by
God’s grace to do the very best we could by them….and then I went
to sleep, and slept soundly” (quoted in Schirmer and Shalom, 1987,
22-23). It was this sound sleep and McKinley’s policy of
“Benevolent Assimilation” that led to US casualties of 4, 234 soldiers killed, about 3,000
wounded, and anywhere from 250,000 to 1.4 million “new-caught
sullen peoples” of the islands forever silenced.
With the
1898 Treaty of Paris, Spain agreed to cede—that is, sell—the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, even
though it had already lost control of the islands except for its Manila garrison. But the Filipinos, as
William Blum puts it, “who had already proclaimed their own
independent republic, did not take kindly to being treated like a
plot of uninhabited real estate. Accordingly, an American
force numbering initially 50,000 [126,500, all in all] proceeded to
instill in the population a proper appreciation of their status,”
gaining for the US
its “longest-lasting and most conspicuous colony” (2004, 39).
Admiral Dewey himself, the hero of the battle of Manila Bay,
reflected on how the Peace Conference “scarcely comprehended that a
rebellion was included with the purchase.” Henry Adams wrote
Theodore Roosevelt to express his alarm that the US was ready “to plunge into an
inevitable war to conquer the Philippines, contrary
to every profession or so-called principle in our lives and
history. I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror
of a year’s warfare in the Philippines where…we must slaughter a
million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts
of flannel petticoats and electric railways” (Ocampo 1998, 249).
While postmodern scholars today expound on the need then of
Americans to assert manhood, moral superiority, and so on, material
interests were indubitably paramount in the turn-of-the-century
discourse on progress and civilization. U.S. policy decisions
and consequent practices were framed in a “regime of truth” based
on the now well-known politics of colonial representation. Roxanne
Lynn Doty (1996) describes this discursive economy that has since
framed North-South relations, in Foucaultian terms, as the denial
of the transcendental international signifier, sovereignty, to
Filipinos and other newly conquered indigenes; that is, the denial
of the capacity to exercise agency. Force is justified because the
annexed or colonized are unruly, undisciplined, rebellious,
disposed to resist the laws established by the civilizing
missionaries . What stood out in the cry for colonial possession is
the need for a naval port and springboard for penetrating the China
market and demonstrating American power in the Asia/Pacific region.
This ideological legitimacy for the occupation was voiced by
Senator Alfred Beveridge, among others. After rehearsing the
profits to be gained from trade and natural resources, he repeated
a familiar refrain from past conquests of the Native Americans, the
Mexicans, and other indigenes:
They
[natives of the Philippines]
are a barbarous race, modified by three centuries of contact with a
decadent race. The Filipino is the South Sea Malay, put through a
process of three hundred years of superstition in religion,
dishonesty in dealing, disorder in habits of industry, and cruelty,
caprice, and corruption in government. It is barely possible that
1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in
the Anglo-Saxon sense (Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 25)
This was
echoed by General Arthur McArthur who thought the natives needed
“bayonet treatment for at least a decade,” while Theodore Roosevelt
felt that the Filipinos needed a good beating so they could become
“good Injuns” (cited in Ignacio 2004). The “barbarous” natives,
however, resisted for a time longer than anticipated, offering
lessons that still have to be learned, even after Korea and Vietnam,
and the quagmires in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Despite the neoconservative revisionists’ view that the US “savage war of peace” in the Philippines was humane,
humanitarian, and honorable under the circumstances, US intervention to annex the Philippines
continues to haunt the conscience of some humanists and historians
of international relations.
Counting
the Victims
Current
controversy among scholars surrounds the tally of Filipino victims
of US
pacification. Journalist Bernard Fall cited the killing of three
million Filipinos in “the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to
population) ever fought by a white power in Asia,” comparable to
the carnage in Vietnam.
Describing it as “among the cruelest conflicts in the annals of
Western imperialism,” Stanley Karnow, author of the
award-winning In Our Image, counts 200,000 civilians and
20,000 soldiers (1989, 194), while others cite the figure of
600,000 victims. Filipina historian Luzviminda Francisco arrives at
the figure of 1.4 million Filipinos sacrificed for Uplift and
Christianization—in a country ruled by Christian Spain for three
hundred years. While Kipling at the outbreak of the war urged the
US to “take up the White Man’s burden” and tame the “new-caught
sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child,” Mark Twain wrote some
of his fiery pieces denouncing “Benevolent Assimilation” as the
“new name of the musket” and acidly harped on the “collateral
damage” of the US “civilizing mission”: “Thirty thousand [US
soldiers] killed a million [Filipinos]. It seems a pity that
the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing
circumstance” (1992, 62). Recently Gore Vidal stirred up the
hornet’s nest when he wrote in the New York Review of Books:
Between
the years 1899 and 1913 the United States of America
wrote the darkest pages of its history. The invasion of the Philippines,
for no other reason than acquiring imperial possessions, prompted a
fierce reaction of the Filipino people… 400,000 Filipino
“insurrectos” died under the American fire and one million Filipino
civilians died because of the hardship, mass killings and scorched
earth tactics carried out by the Americans. In total the
American war against a peaceful people who fairly ignored the
existence of the Americans until their arrival wiped out 1/6 of the
population of the country….Our policy in the Philippines
was genocide. We were not there to liberate or even defend a
‘liberty-loving’ people, we were there to acquire those rich
islands and if we had to kill the entire population we would have
done so. Just as we had killed the Indians in the century before
(some of our best troops in the Philippines were former
Indian fighters) and as we would kill Southeast Asians later in
this century (1981).
In Search
of the Dissenter
Whatever
the exact figures of the dead, this landscape or theater of war was
surely surveyed and closely inspected by one corporal David Fagen, an African
American soldier, after he landed in June 1899. The Filipino
revolutionary army was beleaguered and on the defensive, having
suffered several defeats in Manila, Caloocan and Malolos, and the US
was on the way to winning the war. It was only a matter of time
that superior force would reign supreme.
Fagen was one among fifteen to thirty deserters from four regiments
of “Buffalo Soldiers”—the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and the 23rd and
24th Infantry-- dispatched to the Philippines in July and
August 1899. Seven thousand African Americans were involved in the
war. After fighting the Native Americans as “Buffalo Soldiers,”
these four regiments were mobilized for the Spanish American War.
As the New York
State Military Museum
reminds us, the use of black soldiers by the War Department
conformed to the belief that black soldiers were “naturally adapted
to survive the tropical climate.” In fact, the 7th, 8th, 9th and
10th US Volunteer Infantry were later formed in response to the
government need for soldiers “immune to tropical diseases.”
Incidentally, it was members of the 10th Cavalry that used its
“Indian fighting skills” to save Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough
Riders” from certain extermination. But they never received
recognition equal to Roosevelt’s.
When the Philippine resistance proved tougher than the officials
estimated, the War Department recruited two regiments of black
volunteers, the Forty-Eight and Forty-Ninth Infantry and sent them
to the Philippines
in early 1900 to stay up to the official end of the war.
We know
the names of seven of about twenty-nine African Americans who
deserted—their names have been expurgated from ordinary historical
accounts. Deserters from
the military are never mentioned in official histories, much less
in approved textbooks and government documentaries. Only Fagen of
Company I of the 24th Infantry seems to have survived in civic
memory because he joined the revolutionary army of General Emilio
Aguinaldo, the beleaguered president of the first Philippine
Republic. Fagen’s courage and skill as a guerilla leader earned him
the trust of his Filipino comrades. As captain of his unit, Fagen
led skirmishes against the pursuing troops of General Funston who
offered a $600 reward for his head. A report of his “supposed
killing” failed to convince even the U.S. Army, so Fagen continues
to live on, at last arriving at his niche in the American National
Biography (Oxford
University
Press, 2000).
Invoking
the Double
Before
describing the circumstances surrounding Fagen’s defection, I
should state at the outset that my interest is not so much in the
personal life and biographical circumstances of Fagen as in
his position as an indexical sign, a pedagogical signifier ( if you
like) of intersubjective or interethnic relations. It would of
course be useful to have complete biographical details about Fagen
and his other companions, and a full disclosure of all government
documents on all the incidents of the war in which the soldiers
participated. My interest, however, is in the political, ethical,
and philosophical—dare one use the term “ideological”-- issues.
What I am concerned with in this historic event in which Fagen and
seven other African American soldiers were involved, is its
potential as an allegorical trope, an exemplary figure (for some,
an exemplum), of the politics of self-determination for enslaved
and subjugated communities.
From the conventional optic, Fagen’s decision to join the
Philippine anti-colonial revolution was a treasonous act, a
violation of his oath of loyalty to the US military and
government. But given the situation of African Americans at that
time in US
post-reconstruction history, in the context of what some describe
as an apartheid caste-system sanctioned by the 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson
judgment and other laws, one might ask: Is Fagen’s status that of a
full citizen whose word to uphold the authority of the state is
uncompromised? Is Fagen’s decision to fight the invasion (under
Filipino leadership) simply that of a soldier citizen, or could it
not be read as an allegory of the black nation’s struggle for
self-determination? If the United States’ war against the
Philippine republic that had virtually wrested power from colonial
Spain a war of colonial conquest, within this framework, can we not
regard Fagen’s refusal to be part of the State’s violence a
quintessential act of political dissent and his joining the enemy
as an act of rebellion against the racial State?
Given the domination of white-racial supremacy, Fagen’s act may be
taken as a complete repudiation of that juridical-political
order. His refusal to surrender confirms his choice as a
moral and political act of self-determination—both on a personal
and collective dimension. To commit oneself to join a revolutionary
movement resisting a colonial power and its history of slavery and
racialized subjugation of African Americans, is to reaffirm the
right of collective self-determination. It is to reaffirm a long
durable tradition of revolt against a slave-system. Further, in
contradistinction to the maroon revolts of the past which sought to
restore a pre-capitalist or pre-feudal order in an isolated place,
Fagen’s decision to join the Filipino anti-colonial struggle—a
struggle comparable to Haiti’s revolution against the French, with
the qualification that the U.S. in 1899 was a fully industrialized
capitalist power--is to reaffirm a new level of dissent which, at
the threshold of the era of finance-capital and wars for the
division of the world into colonies and imperial metropoles,
acquires a global transnational resonance. This concrete
universality of Fagen’s individual revolt taken as a symbolic act
at the beginning of the century of revolutions and intercontinental
wars, is what I would like to explore further in connection with a
quite distinct strain in African American political thought, dating
back to Frederick Douglass and earlier reflections on slave revolts
up to W.E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, C.L. R. James, Harry Haywood,
Harold Cruse, Nelson Peery, and others. This is a modest exercise
in a transformative critique of cosmopolitan, possessive
individualist—shall we say, neoliberal-- reason.
Historical
Panorama
Before
focusing on the figure of Fagen as an African American
rebel-soldier, it might be useful to paint him against the
historical landscape of the time. The war against the Spanish
Empire was quite brief—indeed, “a splendid little war,” in John
Hay’s terms. After Theodore Roosevelt’s “fabled” storming of San
Juan Hill and the surrender of the Spanish forces in Santiago, Cuba, followed by the
passage of the Teller amendment, that episode might have concluded
with the Treaty of Paris in December 1998. But strong opposition to
colonial annexation of the Philippines
delayed its Senate ratification.
Why would the United
States want to acquire a
colony? The major reason is the need of the ascendant
commercial, industrial and military interests to penetrate the
markets and natural resources of Asia.
The initial desire (as expressed by Senator Beveridge, among
others) was for a gateway to China. The Philippines
offered a strategic location for a naval base, a military
launching-pad, in addition to the immense value of its raw
materials, above all mineral deposits. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
emphasized the potential market of the Philippines’ ten
million inhabitants, thus carrying out McKinley’s adherence to “the
great American doctrine of protection to American industries.”
President McKinley—whose wife was obsessed in converting the pagan
“Igorottes”-- pushed for colonization under the slogan of
“Benevolent Assimilation” of the colonized subjects under US
sovereignty (for a summary of the historical context, see
Constantino 1970, 67-91).
By the time Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in May 1998, the
Filipino revolutionary forces under General Emilio Aguinaldo had
practically liberated the whole country and was besieging the
Spanish garrison in the Walled City of Manila. Dewey held Aguinaldo
at bay with false promises of US support. The Spaniards,
after a mock battle already agreed upon, decided to surrender to
General Merritt on August 13. Earlier, on June 12, General
Aguinaldo formally proclaimed the independence of the Philippines from Spain;
and on June 23, a revolutionary government was formed with
provisions for administration of the entire country. Thus before
the arrival of the first US expeditionary troops
on June 30, there was already a functioning Philippine government
operating nationally and locally, which commanded the loyalty of the
people. But despite Aguinaldo’s desire to negotiate some kind of
compromise with the U.S., McKinley and his military officials
proceeded to build up the occupation forces until fighting broke
out on February 4, six months after the Spanish surrender, and a
few weeks after the inauguration of the Philippine Republic on
January 23, 1899.
From June 29, 1898, McKinley’s policy sought to enforce “the
absolute domain of military authority” on people who had just won
their freedom with arms. He knew that Aguinaldo and his followers,
the bulk of which came from the landless peasantry and impoverished
middle strata, would never surrender their newly won independence.
Fifty to seventy thousand troops were needed to pacify and
“benevolently” assimilate the islands. The Filipinos resisted in
frontal battles from February to March, 1899. Meanwhile, in July
1899, the first of 6,000 segregated African American soldiers
arrived in the Philippines.
The US began to
occupy Jolo and other Muslim povinces once guarded by isolated
Spanish forts in the southern Philippines.
On November 13, 1899, after losing the capital of Malolos and
substantial fighters, Aguinaldo disbanded the regular army and
switched to guerilla warfare. Military governor General Otis did
not understand this new strategy and believed that the insurrection
was suppressed with the capture of Malolos, the headquarters of
Aguinaldo’s government. Before he was replaced by General Arthur
McArthur, father of General Douglas McArthur, who was forced to
abandon Bataan and Corregidor to the invading Japanese forces in
1942, Otis wrote to the War Department in April 1900 that we are no
longer dealing “with organized insurrection, but brigandage,” which
would require police action by a quarter of a million soldiers (Pomeroy
1970, 86), Mark Twain’s suspicion, shared by a large majority, was
that “we do not intend to free, but to subjugate, the people of the
Philippines” (Putzel 1992, 52). On May 2, 1900, Otis was replaced
by General McArthur who imposed martial law on December 20, 1900.
Waterboarding
and Other Gory Business
There is
general consensus that the pacification of the Philippines
is one of the bloodiest wars in imperial history. After two days of
fighting, the Filipinos on Manila’s
perimeter and nearby provinces sustained a casualty of nearly
10,000. Aguinaldo’s officers schooled in European manuals followed
positional warfare along classic military lines; but they were
forced to resort to mobile warfare, utilizing their knowledge of
the countryside and universal support from the populace in the face
of vastly superior US
firepower. The inaugural model of anti-colonial “people’s war” may
be found here, as well as its ruthless antidote, “low-intensity”
warfare.
As we saw, Otis and his officers thought that the insurrection
would be over in a matter of weeks. Mobile tactics and eventually
guerilla strategy reduced the US garrisons to easy targets, with
the US troops finding themselves ill-suited and ill-equipped to
confront their enemies lacking adequate firearms, often fighting
with bolos—long bladed knives—and spears. The Filipino insurgents
resembled the proverbial fish swimming in the ocean of their
sympathizers so that by subterfuge and hand-to-hand combat, the
rebels overcame the odds against them. After protracted fighting
with unconscionable losses, the US army began to treat
all the “niggers” as enemies, whether armed or not; it resorted to
destroying villages and killing civilians. In the second year of
fighting, 75,000 troops escalated the war against the Filipino
masses, not just the sporadic guerillas in the “boondocks”—the term
adopted from the Filipino word, “bundok,” contested mountainous
terrain.
General MacArthur observed that guerilla warfare was contrary to
“the customs and usages” of civilized warfare,” hence those
captured were no longer soldiers but simple criminals, brigands,
etc. They were “are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of
war.” This accorded with the US Army “Instructions” (General Order
100) issued during the Civil War, defining “war rebels” who “rise
in arms against the occupying or conquering army” as “high robbers
or pirates” (Pomeroy 1970, 87). Those rebels would be today’s
“unlawful combatants” not deserving of Geneva Convention
guidelines. By placing Filipino resistance outside the bounds of
recognized warfare, William Pomeroy notes, “the American military
authorities in effect and in practice gave sanction to barbarous
methods,” among them the infamous “water cure,” rope torture, and
others (1970, 88). Such atrocities flourished in the
racialist ethos of the conduct of the war.
The US
pacification campaign against the insurrectos, argues Jonathan
Fast, “degenerated into a grisly slaughter of non-combatants”
(1973, 74). From April 1901 to April 1902, four successive “depopulation
campaigns” were carried out. The first occurred in Northern Luzon, described by one American
Congressman: “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records;
they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could
get hold of a Filipino they killed him” (quoted in Wolff 1968,
352). Then in August 1901, in Panay
island, the same procedure was adopted. US troops cut an area
60 miles wide from one end of the island to the other, burning
everything in their path. In September and October, US troops
swarmed into Samar, with orders from General Jacob Smith to burn
and kill everything over ten,” as a reprisal for the ambush of 48
American soldiers in the town of Balangiga. His subalterns
fulfilled his vow to make the whole island “a howling wilderness.”
The climax
is rather unsurprising. In December, the entire population of
Batangas (about 500,000) was forced into concentration camps.
Frustrated by Filipino perseverance in resisting US
sovereignty, General J. Franklin Bell who masterminded the Batangas
campaign stated that he intended to “create in the minds of the
people a burning desire for the war to cease—that will impel them
to join hands with the Americans….” For this purpose, it was
necessary to keep the people “in such a state of anxiety and
apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become
unbearable” (Storey and Codman 1902, 71-73). Due to the brutal
conditions in the detention camps, to hunger and diseases, over
100,000 died in Batangas alone. Later on, General Bell calculated
that over 600,000 Filipinos in Luzon
alone had been killed or died as a direct result of the
pacification campaign. This estimate made in May 1901 does not take
into account the victims of the other four campaigns listed
above. The extermination of almost the entire population of
Samar remains emblematic of how the US administered the
stick without the carrot. General Jacob Smith wiped out the town,
summarily executed prisoners, and devastated the whole
province--probably the longest and most brutal campaign on record.
His method could not be considered exceptional, as Linn and others
argue, because it had been repeated many times. Although Roosevelt
declared the war over on July 4, 1902, the fighting lasted until
1910 when the last guerilla leader was captured in Luzon; and
Muslim uprisings continued until 1916, punctuated by the massacres
of Bud Dajo in 1906 and of Bud Bagsak in 1913.
Orientalist
Theater of Cruelty
Harsh
measures such as “reconcentration” or hamletting of civilians
became official policy in fighting Aguinaldo’s guerilla forces. The
most notorious practitioners were Gen. Bell who inflicted it in
Batangas and southern Luzon and Gen. Jacob Smith who turned Samar into a “howling wilderness.”
Recently, in the controvery over the use of torture such as
“waterboarding,” Paul Kramer rehearsed again what a British witness
called “the murderous butchery” of the US “pacification”
campaign. Except for such apologists of the McKinley and
Roosevelt policies, such as Brian McAllister Linn (whose claim to
neutrality in his book, The Philippine War 1899-1902, is quite a
feat of Olympian hauteur), the general consensus is that the
atrocities committed by the invading US army is out of proportion
to the resistance of the revolutionary guerillas of the Philipine
Republic, even allowing for the desperate measures Filipinos took
to retaliate in kind. Of course, it is easy to say that both are
guilty. But that is to abandon the search for historical clarity if
not some measure of provisional objectivity. Kramer recounts some
of the findings of the Senate committee that inquired into the
reports of “cruelties and barbarities” earlier revealed through
letters sent to newspapers. At one hearing, the testimony of
Charles Riley of the 26th Volunteer Infantry described in detail a
scene of “water cure” that he witnessed, but after the ritual of a
court martial, the guilty officer Capt. Edwin Glenn was suspended
for a month and fined fifty-dollars; in 1919 he retired from the
army as brigadier general.
At one hearing. William Howard Taft, head of the second Philippine
Commission sent to the islands and first Civil Governor of the Philippines,
was forced to admit that “cruelties have been inflicted” and the
“water cure” administered, but countered that military officers
have condemned such methods. Elihu Root, Secretary of War, excused
the cruelties because the Filipino insurgents were guilty of
“barbarous cruelty, common among uncivilized races.” One stark
leitmotif in this narrative centering on Fagen is the question of
civilization. Filipinos were not only an “uncivilized race,” they
were savages, barbarous, treacherous, wild devils, and so on. In
one Senate hearing, Senator Joseph Rawlins asked General Robert
Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing US troops
was “within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare,” to which
Hughes replied curtly: “These people are not civilized” On January
9, 1900, Senator Beveridge already reminded the U.S. public not to
worry about the cruel conduct of the war because “We are dealing
with Orientals.” This strain appeared again in Senator Lodge’s
ascription of “Asiatic” cruelty to all Filipinos. Harvard University
philosopher William James accused McKinley’s camp of hypocrisy and
cant and said: “God damn the U.S. for its vile
conduct in the Philippine Isles” (Zinn 1980, 307). Systematic
extermination of homes and inhabitants occurred in the destruction
of Caloocan
before Aguinaldo switched from positional to guerilla warfare. The
general sentiment of the occupying army was captured by one
volunteer: “We all wanted to kill ‘niggers’…beats rabbit
hunting…”In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the
Philadelphia Ledger reported: “The present war is no bloodless,
opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed
to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active
insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea
prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog…”
(Zinn 1980, 308).
Were it not for a persisting amnesia or selective forgetting in the
national psyche, the catalogue of gruesome facts would be a
perverse imposition. Aside from Twain, Vidal and others, Gabriel
Kolko rendered one of the most cogent reflections on the “enormity
of the crime” of force and chicanery accomplished by officers most
of whom were veterans of the Indian campaigns:
…Against
the Indians, who owned and occupied much coveted land, wholesale
slaughter was widely sanctioned as a virtue. That terribly bloody,
sordid history, involving countless tens of thousands of lives that
neither victims nor executioners can ever enumerate, made violence
endemic to the process of continental expansion. Violence reached a
crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet
bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the
Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when
anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy
of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval
from the eminent journals and men of the era who were also much
concerned about progress and stability at home. From their
inception, the great acts of violence and attempted genocide America
launched against outsiders seemed socially tolerated, even
celebrated (1976, 287).
Race War
One might
venture the proposition that even before the Filipino American War
started, it was already a thoroughly racialized conflict. This is
no longer news. Historian Richard Welch observed that the attitudes
of the invaders then demonstrated “colorphobia,” and the Filipinos
to be subjugated were considered “monkey men” and “niggers” (1979,
101). A recent book by Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government,
elaborates on what W.E.B. Du Bois observed about the “race
questions” of the United and those of the world becoming tightly
“belted” together by imperialism. Du Bois identified the US
“ownership of Porto Rico, and Havana, our protectorate of Cuba, and
conquest of the Philippines” as constituting the “greatest event
since the Civil War,” confirming how the space between America “and
the islands of the sea” was dissolving, and with it, the former
boundaries between the “race questions of the United States, the
Caribbean, and the Pacific.” He urged the unity of “Negro and
Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian,” to struggle
for “an America
that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities”
(1997, 102).
Kramer’s book is one of the most sustained exposition of how race
and imperial ideology coalesced to produce the exceptionalist
politics of US
global hegemony, with the conquest of the Philippines as a kind
of experimental laboratory for its invention. It rehearses what
many previous historians have noted: the racial formations in the
US were exported and renegotiated anew in the Philippine scene,
with the Filipino savages labeled “niggers,” “gugus” (forerunner of
“gooks”), Indians, etc., but with a difference in function. The
racial imaginary justified extermination of the enemy race. Though
self-limited in its focus on “race” as an amorphous, protean
concept, Kramer convincingly demonstrates that on all sides, the US conquest of the Philippines
was a “race war” with profound implications that resonate up to
today’s thinking about ethnicity, racial relations, and a viable
multicultural democracy.
Let us situate Fagen in the context of a “race war” that initially
claimed to be a civilizing, benevolent project, but no longer a
mission to liberate the Philippines from Spanish tyranny. The US,
as Du Bois says, seized this “group of colored folks half a world
away….[to rule] them according to its own ideas” (1970, 184). It is
certain that Fagen experienced the bitter race hatred that black
soldiers experienced when they were in Tampa, Florida,
where a race riot began; black soldiers retaliated against drunken
white soldiers. Twenty-seven African American soldiers and three
whites were severely wounded. The chaplain of a black regiment in
Tampa asked: “Is America any better than Spain?...Has she not
subjects in her own borders whose children are half-fed and
half-clothed, because their father’s skin is black…Yet the Negro is
loyal to his country’s flag.” That loyalty was severely eroded and
dissolved in Fagen when he landed in the Philippines in 1899 to
help carry out a “regime change.”
Forging of
Collective Conscience
From the
start, African Americans in the media and the leadership of
civil-society groups demonstrated strong opposition to the colonial
intervention. The ambivalence toward the war in Cuba was replaced with vigorous opposition
to the war in the Philippines.
As part of the Anti-Imperialist League (founded on October 17,
1899), Du Bois condemned the war as an unjust imperialist
aggression, the slaughter of Filipinos a “needless horror.”
The League recalled Fredrick Douglass’ view, enunciated sixty years
earlier, that the interests of the Negro people were identical with
that of the struggling colonial peoples: “We deny that the
obligation of all citizens to support their government in times of
grave national peril applies to the present situation” (Foster
1954, 415). In Nov. 17, 1899, the American Citizen, a black paper
in Kansas City,
Kansas, stated that
“imperialist expansion means extension of race hate and cruelty,
barbarous lynchings and gross injustice to dark people.” Bishop
Henry Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called the US occupation of the Philippines
an “unholy war of conquest” (Welch 1979, 110). Another newspaper
(Broad Ax, Sept. 30, 1899) called for the formation of a “national
Negro Anti-Expansionist, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Trust,
Anti-Lynching League.”
On July 17, 1899, a meeting of African Americans in Boston
protested the “unjustified invasion by American soldiers in the
Philippine Islands.” They resolved that “while the rights of
colored citizens in the South, sacredly guaranteed them by the
amendment of the Constitution, are shamefully disregarded; and,
while the frequent lynching of negroes who are denied a civilized
trial are a reproach to Republican government, the duty of the
President and country is to reform these crying domestic wrongs and
not to attempt the civilization of alien peoples by powder and
shot” (The Boston Post, July 18, 1899). Whether Fagen knew or was
aware of this sentiment, can not be ascertained for now. But he certainly
was aware that in general US troops treated Filipinos as “niggers”
who were “therefore entitled to all the contempt and harsh
treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior
races,” as a correspondent of the Boston Herald wrote (Schirmer
1971, 21).
Fagen no
doubt shared many of the sentiments expressed by black soldiers who
felt they were sent to the Philippines to take up
“de white man’s burden.” One of them wrote in a letter of 1899:
“Our racial sympathies would naturally be with the Filipinos. They
are fighting manfully for what they conceive to be their best
interests.” A black infantryman wrote from Manila
in June 1901 to an Indianapolis
paper: “This struggle on the islands has been naught but a gigantic
scheme of robbery and oppression.” Amid the burning of
villages and massacre of supporters of the insurgents in Batangas
and Samar, African Americans in Massachussetts addressed a message
to President McKinley about how Negroes in Wilmington, North
Carolina, “guilty of no crime except the color of their skin and a
desire to exercise the rights of their American citizenship, were
butchered like dogs in the streets;” and how “black men were hunted
and murdered in Phoenix, South Carolina,” while McKinley catered
cunningly to Southern race prejudice” (Zinn 1980, 312-13).
Lifting
the Veil
It was in
this environment suffused with racialized exterminist sentiments
that David Fagen enters the scene. I cannot describe all the varied
and forceful sentiments expressed by African American soldiers and
other participants in the war found in letters compiled by Willard
Gatewood,”Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from
Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902—an extremely valuable primary
sourcebook. As a sample, I cite an anonymous black soldier
who complained that white troops, after seizing Manila, began “to apply home
treatment for colored peoples: cursed them as damned niggers, steal
[from] them and ravish them” (Gatewood 1987, 279). Patrick
Mason, a sergeant in Fagen’s 24th Infantry regiment, wrote to the
Cleveland Gazette: “I feel sorry for these people and all that have
come under the control of the United States. I don’t
believe they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the
morning is the “Nigger” and the last thing at night is the
“Nigger”…You are right in your opinions. I must not say as much as
I am a soldier”(Gatewood 1987, 257). A black lieutenant of the 25th
Infantry wrote his wife that he had occasionally subjected
Filipinos to the water torture (Dumindin 2009). Capt. William
Jackson of the 49th Infantry admitted that his men racially
identified with Filipinos but stated that “all enemies of the U.S.
government look alike to us…hence we go on with the killing.” Fagen
occupied the same position, but he drew a necessary demarcation
between his being a soldier for the Empire, and his being an
insurgent for an occupied community on the defensive, struggling
for national/communal self-determination.
Most often quoted is the statement of Sgt. Maj. John W. Galloway
who accused whites of “establish[ing] their diabolical race hatred
in all its home rancor in Manila.”
He wrote about how white soldiers told Filipinos of “the
inferiority of the American blacks—[their] brutal natures, cannibal
tendencies” (1987, 253); and speculated that “the future of the
Filipino, I fear, is that of the Negro in the South.” As a reprisal
and warning to African Americans, the US
military accused Galloway of
sympathizing with the insurgents. He was jailed, deported, and
discharged dishonorably. Completely informed of the history of
racial conflict in the U.S., the Filipino resistance used what one
black soldier called “affinity of complexion,” revealed, for
example, by a comment made by a Filipino lad: “Why does the
American Negro come…to fight us when we are much a friend to
him…Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes,
that make a beast of you?” The Filipino resistance claimed to speak
as “black brothers” of African Americans, distributing pamphlets
addressed “To the Colored American Soldier” with the appeal:
It is
without honor that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters
have thrown you into the most iniquitous fight with double
purpose—to make you the instrument of their ambition and also your
hard work will soon make the extinction of your race. Your friends,
the Filipinos, give you this good warning. You must consider your
situation and your history; and take charge that the blood of…Sam
Hose proclaims vengeance (Gatewood 1997, 258-59).
Another
soldier wrote on Christmas Eve, 1900, to Booker T. Washington:
“These people are right and we are wrong and terribly wrong.” One
African American enlisted man learned from his experience that
“Filipinos resent being treated as inferor” and thus set “an
example to the American negro.” After surveying the archive
of sentiments expressed by numerous participants, Anthony
Powell concludes that throughout the war African American soldiers
would be continually plagued by misgivings about their role in the
Philippines…Their racial and ideological sympathy for colored
people struggling to achieve freedom seemed always to be at war
with their notions of duty as American citizens and their hope that
the fulfillment of that duty would somehow improve the plight of
their people at home” (1998).
One might interpolate here that during the war years, an epidemic
of anti-black violence swept the South. Howard Zinn notes that
between 1889 and 1903, “on the average, every week, two Negroes
were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated” (1980. 308).
In Lakeland, Florida, during that same period, black soldiers
confronted a white crowd because they were refused service by a
drugstore owner. Du Bois described the outburst of racist violence,
such as the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia,
in 1899. These and other incidents were known to the Filipino
revolutionaries. Despite the Filipino appeal of racial solidarity
against white oppressors and the offer of commissions to defectors,
there were only twenty-nine desertions among the four regiments of
African American regulars; and only nine actually defected to the
rebels (Robinson and Schubert 1975, 73). Other researchers cite 20
defectors, seven of them blacks (including Fagen). Various reasons
dissuaded them, among others, their long-standing loyalty, the hazards
of war, severance of cultural/social ties, the threat of long
imprisonment, capture and certain death. Why and how David Fagen
surmounted these risks and dangers, remains a persistent subject of
speculation, speculators being attracted more to the personality
rather than to the convictions or collective meanings invested in
his actions.
Journey to
the Liberated Zone
Born in
1875 in Tampa, Florida, Fagen’s early life is
unknown. Described as a “dark brown young man with a carved scar on
his chin, standing five feet six inches tall,” Fagen worked
then at Hull’s
Phosphate Company. At the age of 23, on June 4, 1898, Fagen
enlisted in the 24th Infantry, one of the four black regiments
based in Tampa at that time, and was
sent to Cuba.
Upon its return, Fagen accompanied the regiment to Fort Douglas,
near Salt Lake City,
Utah, where he was
discharged. After his father died, Fagen re-enlisted on February 12
at Fort McPherson,
Georgia,
where his character was validated as meeting “all requirements.” He
trained at Fort D.A. Russell, near Cheyenne,
Wyoming, before being shipped to
the Philippines
from San Francisco
in June 1899. Immediately after his arrival, he was engaged
in a major campaign in the fall of 1899. General Samuel Young led
the northeast thrust to Central Luzon, fighting the insurgents near
Mount
Arayat and
then garrisoning key towns in the vicinity. Fagen’s Company 1,
together with three others, occupied San Isidro,
the principal town of Nueva
Ecija province, from which President
Aguinaldo fled.
It is said that Fagen encountered difficulties with his superiors.
But the cause could not be incompetence since he was promoted to
corporal in the months after his arrival at Fort Russell.
Reports indicate that he could have been court-martialled for refusing
to do all sorts of “dirty jobs.” While a person does not form
important decisions based simply on personal discomfort, this
adversity may have reinforced that sharpened awareness of how
thoroughly racist the war was conducted, with Filipinos regarded as
“black devils,” “niggers,” thieves, and other insults. All these
converged in that “particular solution” to a dilemma that Fagen
selected on November 17, 1899. There is no doubt that his decision
to defect was prepared and planned in advance. Assisted by a rebel
officer with a horse waiting for him at the company barracks, Fagen
cut off his ties with Company I and headed for the guerilla
sanctuary.
Subsequent reports describe how Fagen wreaked havoc on the invading
army. One veteran recounts how Fagen, in the midst of raging
battles, would taunt US solders; during one encounter,
he reportedly shouted, “Captain Fagan’s done got yuh
hite boys now” (Ganzhorn (1940, 191). But there was more to
it than getting back at white supremacists. Instead of simply escaping
to an isolated native community and withdrawing from the conflict,
Fagen embraced the revolution with such boldness and energy that no
one could be blind to the depth of his commitment to the Filipino
cause, especially in the light of George Rawick’s reminder
that Afro-American slaves “do not make revolution for light and
transient reasons.”
Avatar of
the Underground Detachment
From
November 1899 to September 1900, we have no record of Fagen’s
activity as a leader of the Filipino resistance. On September 6,
1900. General Jose Alejandrino, commander of the Republic’s army in
Nueva Ecija, promoted Fagen from first lieutenant to captain “on
account of sufficient merits gained in campaigns.” His valor and
audacity, as well as popularity, were acknowledged by his soldiers
who referred to him as “General Fagen.” The New York Times (October
29, 1900) deemed Fagen important enough to cover his exploits,
remarking that Fagen was a “cunning and highly skilled guerilla
officer who harassed and evaded large conventional American units
and their Filipino auxiliaries. From August 30, 1900 to January 17,
1901, Fagen figured in eight clashes with the US
army. In one daring raid, he led 150 rebels in capturing a steam
launch loaded with guns on the Rio Grande de la Pampanga river and
escaped unhurt into the forest before the American infantry
arrived. In two of the skirmishes mentioned, Fagen clashed
with General Frederick Funston, the US army’s famous
guerilla hunter. John Ganzhorn, a member of General Funston’s elite
scouts, recalled confrontations with Fagen whose shrewd tactics led
to successful ambushes (Ganzhorn 1940, 190-92; Funston 1911, 380).
A new development alarmed the US military. In
February 1901, six members of the 9th Cavalry regiment deserted and
joined the insurgents in the province
of Albay: John Dalrymple,
Edmond DuBose, Lewis Russell, Fred Hunter, Garth Shores
and William Victor. Except for Dalrymple, who died of a fever, the
five others surrendered with the other Filipino insurgents. All
were court-martialled, only DuBose and Russell were publicly hanged
before a crowd of three thousand people on February 7, 1902.
Records prove that their execution was deliberately agreed upon by
the military to serve as a warning to soldiers not to emulate
Fagen. The Judge Advocate General reported to the Secretary of War
that the execution of the two black soldiers was necessary because
“great injury has been done the United States by deserters from the
service, chiefly of foreign birth or of colored regiments, who have
gone over to and taken service with the enemy” (quoted in Brown
1995, 171). The other soldier, Fred Hunter was killed while trying
to escape; Victor and Dalrymple were sentenced to life imprisonment
in Leavenworth.
Shores and another soldier from the 25th Infantry regiment were
sentenced to death for entering “the service of the
insurrectionists,” but President Roosevelt commuted their sentence
to dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay, and imprisonment at
hard labor for life (Powell 1998). In May and June 1901, two
volunteer regiments of African American troops were shipped home.
Of some twenty deserters sentenced to death, only these two black
privates were executed (Robinson and Schubert 1975, 78).
While the insurgency continued for more than a decade, Roosevelt had to terminate that “dirty war”
(Boehringer 2008) on July 4, 1902 to allay public sentiment against
the war and prevent further desertions.
Birth of a
Legend
In March
1901, Funston captured Aguinaldo by devious means, thus emerging as
one of the few heroes of the ugly and brutal war. As recorded in
his memoirs, Funston’s frustration at his failure to capture or
kill Fagen became an obsession, contributing to the rise of a
collective phantasy. Throughout 1901, Funston continued to pursue Fagen
around Mt.
Arayat—sightings
of him were reported by the Twenty Second Infantry in February and
April. Rumors of his exploits, stories of his cunning and audacity,
led to the creation of a public image, a myth larger than the
man—not unlike Nat Turner’s. While the infantry was chasing him in
Nueva Ecija, a Manila Times report narrated his visit to a brothel
in the capital city, with the following account:
[Fagen]
wore a crash blouse, similar to those of the native police, with a
broad white trimming such as officers wear. The insignia on the
shoulder straps were a braid of Spanish bugles. His trousers were
dark in color, neat fitting, and topped a pair of patent leather
shoes. A brown soft felt hat completed his apparel (Feb. 26,
1901).
When two
civilians approached him, Fagen supposedly “rose from the chair,
placing his foot upon it, and grasping his concealed revolver in
his right [hand] and a small sword or bolo in his left.” His
escape from the military cordon around the city is considered “as
daring as he is unscrupulous.” He is even reported to have
recklessly boarded a troop ship headed back to the United States.
American prisoners of Fagen also repudiated the charges of
atrocities and brutalities. At least two of them, George Jackson, a
black private of the Twenty-fourth Regiment, and white Lieutenant
Fredrick Alstaetter, testified that they were treated kindly by
Fagen. Nonetheless, Funston and other officers called him “a
wretched man,” “a “rowdy soldier,” “good for nothing whelp,”
lacking intelligence because of his “unusually small head,” and so
on. Belying these rather malicious dismissals is the gravity with
which senior officers like General Adna Chafee (veteran of the
ferocious and brutal suppression of the Boxer rebellion in China)
expressed grave concern about black turncoats and defectors.
Of the twenty defectors, black and white, who were condemned to
death, only two were actually executed: the two black privates
noted earlier. President Roosevelt supported these executions
while commuting all other death sentences for other guilty
soldiers. The other victim of this drive to persecute disloyal
soldiers involved Sergent Major Galloway (already mentioned
earlier), also from Fagen’s regiment. His letter to a
Filipino acquaintance condemning the war as immoral was captured in
a raid on the Filipino residence and used to judge him as
“exceedingly dangerous” and a “menace to the islands,” for which he
was jailed, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.
Fagen operated as a guerilla commander, persisting in a relentless
and protracted struggle against the US army, even when his
immediate superior, General Alejandrino, surrendered on April 29,
1901. During the negotiation for his surrender, General Alejandrino
asked an American officer if Fagen and two other deserters would be
allowed to leave the islands; the answer was negative. When
Alejandrino’s successor, General Urbano Lacuna himself surrendered
to Funston on May 16, 1901, General Lacuna also sought amnesty for
Fagen. Funston’s response was not surprising: “this man could
not be received as a prisoner of war, and if he surrendered it
would be with the understanding that he would be tried by a
court-martial—in which event his execution would be a practical
certainty” (1911, 431).
Prophecy
of An Ending
On March
23, 1901, General Emilio Aguinaldo was captured by Funston.
He accepted US
sovereignty and called on his followers to do so. His generals,
Lacuna and Alejandrino, soon followed. But not Fagen. It was
reported that he left the revolutionary camp with his Filipino wife
and a small group of nationalist partisans for the mountains of
Neva Ecija. Throughout the year, Fagen was hunted as a bandit, with
a reward of $600 for his head, “dead or alive.” Funston
rejoiced over Fagen’s branding as a common criminal, “a bandit pure
and simple, and entitled to the same treatment as a mad dog.”
Civilian bounty hunters and civilian law enforcement agencies
joined forces in pursuing Fagen.
On December 5, 1901, a native hunter Anastacio Bartolome turned up
at the American outpost of Bongabong, Nueva Ecija, with a sack
containing the “slightly decomposed head of a negro,” which he
claimed was Fagen’s. He also produced other evidences, such as
weapons and clothing, Fagen’s commission, and the West
Point class ring of Fagen’s former captive, Lt.
Frederick Alstaetter. But the military officers who reviewed the
report were not convinced, and called the official file “the
supposed killing of David Fagen.” And there is no record of payment
of a reward to Bartolome. There are two explanations for what
happened: Either Bartolome found Fagen’s camp and stole the
evidence he presented, together with the head of an Aeta, a tribe
of black aborigines; or Bartolome colluded with Fagen in order to
fake his death and thus get relief from further pursuit.
Fagen could then have fled further to live with the natives in the
wilderness of northern Luzon where
Jim Crow could not pester him. Shrouded in mystery, Fagen’s
“death” becomes the birth of his legendary career in academic
minds. On October 30, 1902, a Philippine Constabulary unit
recounted their pursuit of Fagen and other insurgents ten months
after he had allegedly been hacked to death by Bartolome. The most
plausible explanation, assuming Bartolome’s story as fabricated, is
that Fagen survived and remained for the rest of his life with the
aborigines and local folk with whom he identified.
Our
pioneering biographers, Michael Robinson and Frank Schubert,
conclude that Fagen’s rebellion is significant in revealing the
“intensity of black hostility toward American imperialism,” a
militant act of self-determination that can cross boundaries and
seize opportunities anywhere:
[Fagen’s]
career illustrates the willingness of Afro-Americans to pursue
alternatives outside the caste system when such options become
available. Militance does not distinguish him from the civilians
who razed Tiptonville,
Tennessee. The
difference is in the circumstance. The Philippine insurrection
offered him a choice similar to the one Nat Turner gave Southampton slaves and the Seminole
wars gave escaped slaves like Abraham (1975, 82).
The editor
of the Indianapolis Freeman supplied an obituary to Fagen’s
supposed death on December 14, 1901, by attempting to extenuate the
“traitor’s death” with the plea that he was a man “prompted by
honest motives to help a weaker side, and one to which he felt
allied by ties that bind.”
Indeed, the specific historical circumstance inflected individual
choice. Unlike the slaves who revolted from the plantations in
South America and the Caribbean
and formed runaway communities—maroons, cimmarones, quilombos—Fagen
joined a community already up in arms against an invading and
occupying power. In that process of affiliation, his rebellion from
a white-supremacist polity mutated into a revolutionary act. His
decision exemplified what Eugene Genovese calls (in his study of
how Afro-American slave revolts helped fashion the modern world) a
visionary emblem of dialectical transformation: “Ignorant and
illiterate as the slaves generally were, they grasped the issue at
least as well as others, for their own history of struggle against
enslavement in the world’s greatest bourgeois democracy led them to
recognize and to seize upon the link between the freedom of the
individual proclaimed to the world by Christianity and the
democratization of the bourgeois revolution, which was transforming
that fateful idea into a political reality” (1979, 135).
Unwarranted Testimony
Before
returning to the socially symbolic and prefigurative value of
Fagen’s act, I want to cite here the testimony of the Filipino
general under whom Fagen served. General Jose Alejandrino wrote a
memoir in Spanish entitled La Senda del Sacrificio (The Price of
Freedom, published in 1933). He recounts how when he confronted
Funston to discuss the terms of his surrender, Funston brusquely
demanded that his surrender cannot be accepted without his first
delivering Fagen, otherwise he remains a prisoner. Alejandrino
refused because it would be an infamy since (as he told Funston) if
you catch him, “you would be capable of bathing him in petroleum
and burning him alive” (1949, 173). General Alejandrino met
Fagen around August 1899 when Aguinaldo was in full retreat.
Alejandrino provides us ingredients for a portrait of Fagen that
might flesh out the legend, tid-bits loved by the spinners of our
mass media infotainment industry. I quote a small portion from
Alejandrino’s valuable memoir:
Fagen was
a Negro giant of more than six feet in height who deserted the
American Army, taking with him all the revolvers that he could
bring, and who served in our forces with the rank of captain. He
did not know how to read or write, but he was a faithful companion.
He was very affectionate and helpful to me, going to the extent of
carrying me in his arms or on his shoulders when I, weakened by
fevers and poor nutrition, had to cross rivers or ascend steep
grades. The services which he rendered to me were such that
they could only be expected from a brother or son…I had heard narrations
of the feats of valor and the intrepidity of Fagan, but his most
outstanding characteristic was his mortal hatred of the American
whites.….When our surrender was effected, I really felt very sorry
in having to leave Fagen ( 1949, 174-76).
Neither
Alejandrino nor Fagen appear in the recent provocative book on the
colonial occupation, Policing America’s Empire (2009), by Alfred
McCoy, a leading authority on Philippine-American relations. But
Fagen’s example of imperial “blowback” casts a shadow on the putative
origin of the hegemonic security state in the US
subjugation of Filipino resistance. McCoy argues that the
establishment of modern sophisticated policing, covert techniques,
systematic surveillance, and internal security apparatus employing
native soldiers and acquiescent Filipino elite, succeeded in
pacifying the Philippine colony. However, numerous peasant
insurrections, seditious revolts, and workers’ strikes occurred
from 1902 to 1946 (Constantino 1975). Contrary to McCoy’s thesis,
the US
deployed various non-legal tactics to control the recalcitrant
“body politic” (see Boudreau 2009). Aside from rewarding Filipino
rebels who surrendered, the US applied maximum counterinsurgency
terrorism in the Samar and Batangas campaigns (the latter illustrated
the classic “scorched earth” tactic of destroying food supplies,
farm animals, villages, and concentration camps where eleven
thousand civilians died in a few months)—a “systematic destruction
of the countryside” later replicated in Vietnam (McCoy 2009, 81).
Coercion and persuasion were combined and modulated according to
local and inter-state contingencies. Such methods of the “dirty
war” which McCoy catalogues—clandestine penetration, psychological
warfare, disinformation, media manipulation, assassination, torture
(such as the infamous “water cure”), and other sub rosa
techniques—functioned within the larger program of violent colonial
subjugation beginning with McKinley’s “preemptive warfare” in
starting hostilities on February 4, 1899 to legitimize the military
occupation of the islands after the signing of the Treaty of Paris
in December 1898 (Corpuz 2002, 298-301; Sheridan 1900). These
expedient methods supplemented political instrumentalities and
ideological agencies that tried to coopt Filipino “revolutionary
nationalism” through bribery, appointments to state offices,
concessions, “divide and rule” schemes, etc. Though they dampened
public sentiment and decapitated the native leadership, they never
really stifled the durable Filipino hunger for sovereignty nurtured
for over 300 years. Fagen’s heirs today are the ingenious guerillas
of the communist-led New People’s Army and the formidable
combatants of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, not to mention
countless Filipino militants inspired by African American “civil
rights” movements in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York,
Boston,
etc. Imperial mimesis thus worked both ways, intensifying the
internal colonialism of Black ghettoes after the demise of
“Reconstruction” in the South (Marable 1983).
Pacification
of annexed territory implied persistent refusal of the natives to
yield consent to domination. Despite the elaborate
institutionalization of the Philippine Constabulary and Philippine
Scouts by the end of 1901-1902—the ambush of 48 American soldiers
in Balangiga, Samar, on September 28, 1901 was used to justify the
blanket punishment of all civilians “under ten” (Tan 2002,
141), Fagen was never captured, nor was incontrovertible data of
his whereabouts gathered. Policing and surveillance failed, at
least in this instance. After Fagen’s “supposed death” in
December 1901, he was still being blamed for inflaming the Filipino
resistance, as in the Samar
disaster, and the renewed fighting in the other islands. His
legendary figure begins to haunt popular memory and civic
conscience. We might encounter Fagen again in the persons of
African Americans who found themselves in the Philippines when the
US army returned to “liberate” the colony from the Japanese
occupiers, with the son of Gen. Arthur McArthur leading the forces
to liberate the colonized from Japanese tyranny. Their sense of
affinity was no longer based on complexion but on shared ideals and
political solidarity.
Alternative
Mutualities
After a
hundred years, the situation of David Fagen and six other African
Americans who were labeled by the Manila Times as “vile traitors”
still await understanding and judgment by the peoples in the United States and the Philippines,
as well as by the international community. This topic is still a
tabooed subject, too dangerous to handle. Ngozi-Brown reminds us
again of their “extremely difficult situation,” serving as
“foot soldiers for a racist ideology in which white Americans
characterized Filipinos as they did African Americans as inferior,
inept, and even sub-human. When the United States military
occupied the Philippine islands, it installed a racist society
which alienated Filipino and African American soldiers” (1997,
42). The official authorities of course have pronounced them
traitors and renegades, though one novelist, Robert Bridgman
(author of Loyal Traitors) believed that their commitment to
American ideals compelled them to resist the immoral course of
their country and that a “higher patriotism” prompted them to
commit treason (Powell 1998). Can such ambivalence of judgment be
maintained? After the war, over 1,200 African Americans opted to
stay in the Philippines.
One soldier explained why those soldiers preferred to make the Philippines their home and explains
why: “To an outsider or one who has never soldiered in the Philippines
the question would perhaps be a hard one to answer, but to the
initiated the solution is easy and apparent at once… They found
[the Filipinos] intelligent, friendly and courteous, and not so
very different from themselves” (1901).
World War II gave the opportunity for African American soldiers to
“return,” as it were, to the Philippines as part of
MacArthur’s “liberation” army. In his autobiography, Black
Bolshevik, Harry Haywood mentions his brief sojourn in Manila, Philippines, where he
met a group of revolutionary students and intellectuals with ties
to the Hukbalahap, Communist-led anti-Japanese guerillas. He
was told how American troops disarmed these peasant guerillas in
the underground who helped in the capture of Manila. Writes Haywood: “They
were bitter and sharply critical of MacArthur’s hostility toward
the popular democratic movement. His clear intention was to return
to the status quo of colonialism” (1978, 526), a return to the days
of his conquering father, General Arthur MacArthur, and his
notorious “stringent” and “drastic” measures under General Order
100, punishing non-uniformed guerillas as criminals (Linn 2000,
213).
During the same period, Nelson Peery, bricklayer and political
activist, participated in World War II as a soldier in the
all-black 93rd Infantry Division. He details the momentous
political awakening that he experienced in the Philippines
in the first volume of his autobiography, Black Fire (1994). Peery
made contact with the same groups and confirmed Haywood’s
observation. The entire apparatus of the US State, its
intelligence agencies and armed forces, had mounted a ruthless plan
to crush the national liberation movement as they did forty-five
years before. Peery noted that MacArthur quickly moved to
re-establish a fascist, privileged officer corps in the Philippine
army to protect the investments and control the islands for the United States.”
Peery recalls how the activists knew the story of David Fagen and
how the “US
army would never have allowed this talented black soldier to become
an officer. Captain Fagen, with his black comrades, fought to the
death for Philippine independence” (1994, 277).
Homage to the Peasant Insurrection
Peery goes
on to indict the hundred thousand US (mainly Southern) white
soldiers who slaughtered over a million Filipinos, introduced the
water cure, burning of villages, killing of civilians as part of
the “scorched earth” tactics, while they “routinely brutalized the
black troops.” Nevertheless, he goes on: “The black Twenty-fourth
and the Twenty-fifth Infantry murdered right along with them. The
Philippine people would not surrender. In 1914, black troops were
sent in to crush the Moro rebellion. This time, however, the black
soldiers refused to fight their black Filipino brothers. The people
of Mindanao never forgot that”
(1994, 278).
Peery’s testimony arrives at this eloquent judgment that, in my
view, delivers a powerful rhetorical thrust that is quite
unforgettable and prophetic at the same time in terms of what is
going on right now in the Philippines:
If the
Americans had never committed genocide against the Indian; if they
had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples
of this land; if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America
had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into
slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never
developed the most widespread, brutal, exploitative system of
slavery the world has ever known, if it had never held carnivals of
torture and lynching of its black people; if it had never sundered
and fractured and torn and ground Mexico into the dust; if it had
never attacked gallant, defenseless Puerto Rico and never turned
that lovely land into a cesspool to compete with the cesspool it
had created in Panama; if it had never bled Latin America of her
wealth and had never cast her exhausted peoples onto the dung heap
of disease and ignorance and starvation; if it had never financed
and braced the Fascist dictatorships; it if had never pushed
Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the jaws of hell—if America had never
done any of these things—history would still create a special bar
of judgment for what the American people did to the Philippines
(1994, 276-77).
Although
Peery did not join the Huks (the Filipino communist guerillas)
then, he may be said to have traced Fagen’s footsteps in forging
solidarity with Filipino revolutionaries opposing US
neocolonialism, imperialism mediated through the native client
oligarchy. A politics of linkages and reciprocity afforded a new
internationalism, a global perspective, a
synthesizing”double-consciousness.” Kevin Gaines observes that the
Spanish-American War and the Philipine campaign accomplished little
in the way of improving African American social conditions since
political disfranchisement persisted, culminating in the Atlanta
Race Riot of 1906. However, Gaines believes that African American
soldiers, even within their contradictory position in an
imperialist war and within a segregated army, provided symbols of
heroism and “a boost of morale” (Interview PBS). The fusion of the
struggle for civil rights at home and self-determination for
colonized peoples abroad constitutes a paradigm-shift from the
dualistic polarity of isolationism and messianic nation-building,
from the social-Darwinistic and evolutionistic stance of
Anglo-Saxon, Eurocentric triumphalism.
Theorizing
Elective Affinities
The most
incisive formulation of this transformation may be found in Harold
Cruse’s reflections on his passage through World War II as a
soldier radicalized by contact with the anti-colonial movement in
the French colony of Algeria. Chiefly
responding to Albert Camus’ existentialist theory of metaphysical
rebellion in a 1966 essay published in Sartre’s review, Le Temps
Moderne, Cruse’s project of conceptualizing the black “idea of
revolt” germinated from his part in the war effort. It was a unique
catalyzing experience that connected fragments of his world picture
into some kind of concrete universality. Cruse’s perception of the
global arena pervaded by revolution and counter-revolution
crystallized from a reflexive rationality:
The Army
was the beginning of my real education about the reality of being
black. Before the war, being black in America
was a commonplace bore, a provincial American social hazard of no
particular interest or meaning beyond the shores of the Atlantic. It was simply a national American
disability—a built-in disadvantage to us all that we had to put up
with, similar to a people that has to endure the constant imminence
of droughts, floods, famines, or native pestilences. Race in America
is her greatest “natural calamity,” but it has today become
internationalized into a global scandal because she is so rich in
everything else, including democratic pretensions. A global war has
made all this a global fact. But it is also a fact that it took
this global war to initiate a personal metamorphosis that has
culminated in what I am in 1966, as an American black (1968, 169).
Cruse’s
metamorphosis parallels Fagen’s, except that Fagen and his fellow
African Americans were plunged into a war of colonization, while
Cruse was engaged in the fight against fascism and reaction. But
Cruse’s realization of his collective plight and the
ethico-political imperatives required to resolve the division
between his abstract citizenship and his humanity, between his
racialized self and his potential species-being, resembles Fagen’s.
It approximates what Frantz Fanon would refer to as the passage
from the racial/national sensibility to a liberatory social
consciousness transcending national boundaries and other socially
constructed differences. This is not the occasion to elaborate on
this Fanonian theory of collective self-determination (for Fanon’s
dialectics, see San Juan 2004).
Meanwhile I would like here to add the insight of C.L. R. James on
how the revolt of the colonized subalterns in Africa, Latin America
and Asia, joining the insurrection of the racially oppressed
peoples/nations (African Americans, indigenous communities, etc.),
could act as the “bacilli” or ferment that would mobilize the
proletariat and usher the beginning of world revolution against
capitalism. Whether this is still applicable today or not,
remains to be discussed. In any case, Fagen’s metamorphosis
prefigured what Cruse and others went through as their minds
entered the stage of world-history, in a moment when the Owl of
Minerva (to use Hegel’s worn-out trope) has not yet awakened from
the night of the problematic, duplicitous Enlightenment and
its contradiction-filled “civilizing mission.”
From
Solidarity to Community
After more
than a hundred years of Americanization, however, the attitude of
the “natives” would no longer be hospitable to Fagen, or even to
Haywood, Peery, and their kind. Filipinos have chosen to be on the
other side of the Veil, have exchanged their identity for that of
their erstwhile colonizers. That is, they have chosen to be “white”
in body and soul, a testimony to a century of McKinley’s
not-so-“Benevolent Assimilation.” The majority of
Americanized Filipinos seems to confirm the fructifying power of
what scholar David Joel Steinberg called “the U.S.
policy of self-liquidating colonialism, in which the ‘little brown
brother’ [Taft’s patronizing epithet] was permitted to achieve
independence when he grew up, a maturation process that took
forty-five years” (1982, 50). Nonetheless, Filipinos have
celebrated some other personalities of foreign descent, including
two Spaniards who served as generals of the Philippine army (Generals
Manuel Sityar and Jose Torres Bugallon), and a Chinese (Gen. Jose
Ignacio Paua), but Fagen has so far eluded such recognition. The
reason is simple: the Philippine elite, vulnerable to
blandishments, corruption, and patronage, has absorbed American
Exceptionalism and perpetuated the Veil, fearing that to elevate
Fagen to heroic stature would offend the fabled “special relations”
with Washington
and stir up the guardians of White Supremacy.
Vibrant solidarity with the Philippine struggle by progressive
African Americans – one recent example is that of former
TransAfrica Forum president and long-time activist Bill Fletcher,
Jr. (2004) who denounced the knee-jerk "terrorism" label
imposed by the Bush administration on the Communist Party of the
Philippines fighting the brutal, corrupt US-supported regime of
Gloria Arroyo – testifies to the enduring legacy of David Fagen's
early commitment (via support for national-liberation struggles) to
a universal ideal of socialist emancipation. This motive-force of a
synthesizing historical process may also be illustrated in the way
the South African struggle against apartheid, led by the African
National Congress of Nelson Mandela, generated a catalyzing effect
on the pan-African praxis in the United States in the 1970s and
1980s (Johnson 2004). From the diasporic intellectual tradition
initiated by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s to Du Bois’ Pan-African
conferences to Malcolm X’s diasporic populism, an African American
internationalist outlook has continued to evolve up to the present.
It is a totalizing trend that found its civic embodiment in the
Black Panther Party’s support for the Vietnamese and Cuban
revolutions, among others, and (to cite a major artist) in the
border-crossing lives and aesthetic performances of Amiri Baraka
(1984), Jayne Cortez, and other African American artists.
Before and after the Paris Commune of 1872, Marx and Engels
theorized the proletariat as a universal subject or agent of
humanity’s emancipation. But Marx in his last years envisaged a multilinear
process of global emancipation that took into account the
intersectional dynamics of class with race, ethnicity, and
nationalism (Anderson 2010, 240-44). With the rise of imperialism,
the revolt of colonized peoples became for Lenin a vitalizing force
in the growth of world socialist revolution, the “weak link” of
oppressed emergent nations, delineated in his 1916 theses on “The
Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to
Self-determination” (1971). The unfinished struggle for Filipino
national self-determination from the Cavite Mutiny of 1872 onwards
has been obscured if not denigrated by U.S.
scholarship on the Philippines.
Peter Stanley (1974) and David Steinberg (1982), just to cite two
experts, categorized U.S.
occupation as “tutelage,” or “compadre colonialism” in which rulers
and ruled negotiated compromises on an equal basis, both sides
collaborating in underwriting the Cold War’s prime “showcase of
democracy” in Asia. Using an
empiricist-functionalist methodology, Stanley Karnow sums up the
orthodox apologetics of neocolonialism: “After World War II,
American negotiators did indeed force Filipino leaders to accept
onerous conditions…But the majority of Filipinos, then yearning to
be part of America’s
global strategy, would have been disappointed had the United States
rejected them. So they submitted voluntarily to their own
exploitation” (1989, 330; for rebuttal, see San Juan 2000, 2007;
Doty 1996). Oriented against global/transnational capitalism, the
Philippine project of national liberation does not simply mimic a
Eurocentric model but articulates the manifold demands of women,
indigenous communities, youth, racial/ethnic, and gendered
minorities in a new paradigm of radical collective transformation
in this new millennium.
Lenin’s
Prophecy
Lenin’s
multidimensional vision of social transformation coalescing
ethnicity, nation and race in both core and periphery, the imperial
metropole and the colonized dependency, was implicit in Du Bois’
heuristic idea of “double consciousness” applied to
intercontinental conflicts and controversies. Meanwhile, the
British-Boer war in South Africa,
the Boxer Rebellion in China,
and the Spanish-American War intervened around the composition of
The Souls of Black Folk—a historic conjuncture chosen by John Sayles
for its contemporary resonance with the Iraq
and Afghanistan
experience in his forthcoming historical novel, “Some Time in the
Sun” (Getlin, 2010). As though reflecting on Fagen’s
situation, Du Bois addressed the complicated dialectic of class,
race, ethnicity and nationalism in his 1900 “Address to the
Nations of the World.” This was delivered around the time that
Fagen separated himself from the occupying army, joining the
Philippine insurgents in the plains of Northern
Luzon to continue the subversive tradition of Nat
Turner, Sojourner Truth, George Jackson, and other African American
rebels. With serendipitous intuition, Du Bois affirmed Fagen’s
internationalist solidarity within an encompassing
historical-materialist framework:
[T]he
modern world must remember that in this age when the ends of the
world are being brought so near together the millions of black men
in Africa, America, and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the
brown and yellow myriads elsewhere, are bound to have a great influence
upon the world in the future, by reason of sheer numbers and
physical contact.… Let the nations of the world respect the
integrity and independence of the free Negro states of Abyssinia,
Liberia, Haiti, and the rest, and let the inhabitants of these states,
the independent tribes of Africa, the Negroes of the West Indies,
and America, and the black subjects of all nations take courage,
strive ceaselessly, and fight bravely, that they may prove to the
world their incontestable right to be counted among the great
brotherhood of mankind. (Bresnahan 1981: 193f)
REFERENCES
Alejandrino,
Jose. 1949. [1933] The Price of Freedom. Tr. Jose M.
Alejandrino. Manila:
Solar Publishing Corporation.
Baraka,
Amiri. 1984. The Autobiography of Leroi Jones. New York: Freundlich
Books.
Blum,
William. 2004. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions since World War II. Monroe, Maine:
Common Courage Press.
Boehringer,
Gill. 2008. “A Magnificent Seven and an Unknown
Soldier: Black American Anti-Imperialist Fighters in the
Philippine-American War.” Bulatlat viii.12 (April 27-May 3,
2008).
Boot,
Max. 2002. The Savage Wars of Peace. New York:
Basic Books.
Boudreau,
Vince. 2009. “Methods of Domination and Modes of Resistance.”
In The American Colonial State
in the Philippines.
Ed. Julian Go and Anne Fortes. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Bresnahan,
Roger. 1981. In Time of Hesitation. Quezon City:
New Day Press.
Constantino,
Renato. 1970. Dissent and Counter-Consciousness. Quezon City Malaya
Books.
-------.
1975. The Philippines:
A Past Revisited. Quezon
City: Tala Publishing Services.
Corpuz,
Onofre D. 2002. Saga and Triumph: The Filipino
Revolution Against Spain.
Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Press.
Cruse,
Harold. 1968. Rebellion or Revolution. New York:
William Morrow & Co.
Doty,
Roxanne Lynn. 1996. Imperial Encounters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
Du Bois,
W.E.B. 1997. The Souls of Black Folk. Bos
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From 
There is one name that is not on theFP100 who
should be -- and that isChalmers Johnson, who from my perspective rivals Henry
Kissinger as the most significant intellectual force who has shaped and defined
the fundamental boundaries and goal posts of 
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