American History Tellers - Philippine-American War | The Path to Independence | 5

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

The Philippine-American War marked the emergence of America as a global power. But what has been the legacy of the war in the country in which it was fought? How did the war set the stage for Philippine independence, and pave the way for generations of Filipino immigration to the U.S.?In this episode, Lindsay speaks with Dr. Vicente Rafael, a historian whose work focuses on the colonial and post-colonial Philippines and the country’s relationship with the United States. They’ll discuss the history of the Philippines before, during and after the war, the roles education and language have played in U.S. imperialism, and how the war is remembered – or forgotten – in the Philippines today.Listen to new episodes 1 week early and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. In a moment, we're going to finish our series covering the Philippine-American War, certainly one of America's least known conflicts. It's just one example of the many, many stories that we've forgotten or never learned. Real events that affected real people and reverberate in our lives today. There are so many stories, I couldn't tell them all even if I released a new podcast episode every day. But that's exactly what

I'm doing. On my newest podcast, History Daily, we do history daily. Every weekday, I bring you something from the past that happened on that day in history. Something inspiring, something interesting, something tragic or moving. To give you a taste, here are the first few minutes of the December 21st episode on the launch of Apollo 8. To hear the rest, search for and follow History Daily wherever you're listening now. It's early morning, December 21st, 1968, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Bill Anders, a 35-year-old rookie astronaut, sits in his spacecraft, the Apollo 8. Anders flexes his fingers in the stiff gloves of his pressure suit.

He is uncomfortable. He's been strapped to his chair for almost three hours as the crew outside work on the rocket that will launch the Apollo 8 into space. Beside him are two other astronauts, Mission Commander Frank Borman and Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell. Their mission is a historic one. They will be the first men to leave Earth's orbit and the first to journey to the far side of the moon. But before they can achieve their mission, they have to get off the launch pad, and that's perhaps the most dangerous part. Anders is tired of waiting, but his fellow astronauts, Borman and Lovell, know that this is all part of the process.

The two of them have been to space together before, on a mission a few years back, but this mission is different, and all three astronauts know it. The Saturn V rocket that will take them into space is the biggest and most powerful ever made. It's as tall as a 36-story building and is filled with hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquefied fuel. Today will be only the third time a Saturn V rocket has taken off, and the first time the rocket will carry a crew. As the countdown enters its final moments,

Anders' eyes flick over the constellation of dials and switches on the instrument panel in front of him. He quickly scans for any last-minute errors, any warning lights, but there's nothing, and so the mission will continue. At nine seconds before launch, the Saturn V engines roar to life. The cabin shakes around Anders and the other two astronauts as the rocket blasts out seven and a half million pounds of thrust. Metal arms that hold the rocket to the launch pad detach. For a moment, the Saturn V rocket is free, standing alone on a ball of flame. This is the point of greatest peril. If the engines fail now, the entire rocket will collapse to the earth and explode.

But then, like a skyscraper hurling itself into the sky, the Saturn V rocket surges upward, clears the launch pad, and soars into the clouds. Apollo 8 and its crew are on their way into space. Hundreds of thousands of people watch the launch on the ground in Florida, and millions more watch on television sets around the world. 1968 has been a year of violence and discord in America and overseas. There have been assassinations, riots, and wars. For many of the people watching this momentous event, the launch of Apollo 8 and its daring mission into space provides something that has been desperately missing, hope.

From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate, available now wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In our series on the Philippine-American War, we barely scratched the surface of the events that led up to the war and its effect on the island nation where it was fought. The Philippines are an archipelago of over 7,000 islands, and they had spent centuries under Spanish colonial rule before the first American forces arrived in 1898. All that geography and that history had an enormous

impact on the war and the American colonial period that followed, far beyond the scope of our past four episodes. It even affected how the country and its inhabitants are named. Here to help us dig deeper into the Philippine-American War and its legacy is Professor Vicente Rafael. He's a professor of history in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington and author of several books on Filipino history, language, and culture, including Motherless Tongues, The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation. Here's our conversation. Dr. Vicente Rafael, thank you so much for speaking with me on American History Tellers.

Thanks. I'm happy to be here. So the Philippines are a broad, vast, and diverse country, and we've only just begun exploring its history on this series of American History Tellers. But I want to start with addressing the diversity of spelling. We know the Philippines and we know Filipinos, but those two words start with a P-H and an F. And I wonder if you could explore the history behind the country's name and the demonym. Yeah, the name Filipinas was actually given by the Spaniards when they came to colonize the Philippines. It was named after heir apparent to the Habsburg throne, which would have been Felipe II, Philip II. And at that time, it just named part of the archipelago. It wasn't

until later in the 16th and increasingly the 17th century that the name was applied to those areas that were colonized by the Spaniards. And the word Filipino itself originally referred to Spaniards born in the Philippines. So in that sense, it was a Creole name and very similar, for example, to how Spaniards born in the New World were known as Americanos. Spaniards born in the Philippines at that time were known as Filipinos who were unhappy with Spanish rule and claimed a stake in the colony as against a stake in Europe, in the peninsula. And Filipino eventually became sort of nationalized. It came to refer to all those peoples, I said, who felt like they had a stake in the colony. And then eventually in the nation that emerged out of that colony.

And that is what Filipinos, at least citizens of the nation-state today, are known as Filipinos. The word Philippines, spelled with a PH, of course, is the anglicized version of Filipinas, which would be the Spanish term. So you see how there is lots of different variations. It is also sometimes referred to as Pilipinas, that is with a P rather than with an F, although now it's interchangeable because the Institute of National Languages included the letter F, which did not used to be part of the Filipino alphabet, but it's now part of it. So Filipino, Pilipino, Philippines, that in some ways reflects the very complicated colonial history of the country. So colonial and national history of the country, yeah. Our series covered only a portion of that history, the history of the Philippine-American War.

But let's talk about what happened immediately prior, when Filipino revolutionaries fought against Spain for their independence. How did that fight lead to the Philippine-American War? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, when I teach my class on Philippine history, I usually situate the Philippine-American War as the third stage of the revolution. First stage of the revolution was the beginning, 1896, anti-colonial revolution against Spain, which proceeded by fits and starts, retreats and advances. And the coming of the United States into the scene as a result of the war against Spain

marked a distinct stage in the progress of that revolution. So from the Filipino perspective, the war against the Americans was really a continuation of an anti-colonial war against the Spaniards. And it would have been inconceivable to think of the war against the United States without the precedent of a war against Spain. When folks were already mobilized, they were armed and were very much attuned to the needs of gaining the country's sovereignty, which, of course, the United States upended. When did Spain's influence in the area first start? Well, the first permanent settlement was in 1565 in the Visayas, although earlier contact was made in 1521 with Magellan. And from the Visayas, the Spaniards then proceeded to conquer different islands,

move the colonial capital to Manila in 1571. And so you can see how there's like almost 300 years, a little bit more than 300 years of Spanish rule in the archipelago. Although I hasten to add that that rule, that Spanish regime was not entirely successful and was constantly challenged throughout the archipelago. So the influence, however, Spanish colonial influence, however, came most decisively in the form of Catholicism when a majority of the population eventually converted to Catholicism. And, you know, as you know, Christian conversion was a key part of Spanish colonization and one of the ways in which they managed to hold on to the

archipelago, despite having a sort of very superficial physical presence at no point did the Spaniards sort of overwhelm the Philippines the way they did South America, the New World. And so the Philippines was never really a Spanish settler colony. It was always more of a kind of a colonial outpost, which they kept. Similarly with the United States. The United States never succeeded in turning the archipelago into a settler colony because they couldn't get as many Americans to come and settle in the Philippines. It's always remained a kind of colonial outpost as far as the U.S. was concerned. You mentioned throughout the 300 years of Spanish reign there that there's always been resistance, but I'm interested in these

moments in which, even though there could be resistance over 300 years, suddenly in this one period beginning at the end of the 19th century, there's 20 years of incredible strife and a lot of change. What was it about this era that differentiated it from the previous 300 years? Well, first of all, the forms of resistances that occurred early on were local resistances. They were meant to achieve a certain degree of autonomy, or they were meant to register a certain amount of displeasure, but always on a local level. It was never seen. These local resistances were never envisioned as something that would spread throughout the archipelago.

But by the 19th century, enormous amounts of transformations had occurred. First of all, it's not uncommon in world history to think of the late 18th and 19th century as the era of revolution, you know, beginning with North American revolutions and South American revolutions, as well as revolutions in Europe, Western Europe, the French Revolution, and so forth. And these events, as well as the ideas attached to these events, would spread across the Pacific and into the Philippines and would transform the way at least a certain group, in this case, the learned, the westernized, the literate and fairly wealthy groups of people in the Philippines

began to think of their own condition as analogous to what was happening in the rest of the world. So dissatisfaction with colonial rule was qualitatively transformed. And what happened was that with the rise of revolutions, certain groups of people began to think of themselves no longer as colonial subjects, subject to the absolute rule of the Spanish king, but now began to think of themselves as possibly, potentially equal citizens who had a claim to sort of equal treatment to the law. And when that was denied to them, that was when they began to turn towards possibilities of separation, dreams of independence, movements to overthrow first through reform, and then

eventually by revolution, overthrow the rule of the Spaniards. So global changes, as well as changes within the colony, economic, political, social, and cultural changes within the colony, would spur this movement towards more radical attempts at revolution, rather than the local revolts that had preceded it in the past. When Philippine nationalism did emerge in full bloom, it was in some ways a result of conflict between church and state. What had happened, as I said, because Christian conversion and the Catholic church were such important players in the colonial regime, an emergent bunch of Filipino priests, these were mestizos, as well as Creole and Indio priests, that is native priests,

began to demand equal treatment with the Spanish friars who had monopolized the management and the running of Filipino parishes, and they were denied these equal rights on the basis of the fact that they were not Spanish. That is to say, they were treated as inferior, racially inferior to Spaniards, and deemed to be incapable of running these parish churches. What emerged was this sustained attempt to protest this racist treatment by Spanish priests on the part of the Filipino priests. And the discourse among the Filipino priests became, as it were, the starting point later on for protesting Spanish rule on the basis of racist, unequal treatment by the Spaniards. This was in the 1860s. So by the time you get to the 1870s and 1880s, many of the folks who were influenced by these

Filipino priests looked to their discourse and looked to their protests as inspirations for demanding equal treatment from the Spaniards. And the Spaniards then, at that time, who were embroiled in a series of uprisings, principally in Cuba, the first half of the Cuban Revolution was going on, were totally spooked. And they were totally freaked out. They did not want to lose the Philippines the way they had lost Latin America. And so they responded with enormous amounts of repression, of censorship, with violence. And the more violence that they used against these Filipino nationalists, the more militant they became. Some of them were exiled,

some of them were tortured and killed. By the time you get to the 1880s and the 1890s, things had ramped up and intensified. And many Filipinos who were nationalists were forced to go into exile, many of them to Spain, some of them to other parts of Europe, like France, where they continued to lobby for reforms. And when these reforms were denied, when Spain refused to listen, then, as I said, there was a turn towards movements of separation of armed uprisings. Eventually, by 1892, you have and starts until 1898 when the United States appeared on the scene as a consequence of the Spanish-American War. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother.

But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out

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and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Let's talk about the period in which the U.S. appeared on the scene. Their involvement in the Philippines is difficult to parse. There's a friction between the U.S. ideals of liberty and self-independence and U.S. imperialist ambitions. What is this collision of ideals, and how did the Americans reconcile it? Well, first of all, a recent scholarship would put that assumption to question, that somehow imperialism and republicanism were at odds in the United States. I mean, some

would say that as early as 1776, republicanism was in the service of imperialism and vice versa. You know, after all, one of the reasons why the United States declared independence from Britain was the fact that the British were opposed to sort of the expansion of the 13 colonies by way of taking Indian lands. The British had drawn a line in the sand, as it were, that was meant to prevent the 13 colonies from taking any more Indian lands in order to prevent conflict in these areas. And of course, this infuriated the colonists who felt that settlement expansion was absolutely necessary. And so this was one of the reasons why they wanted to overthrow the British. Alongside that, of course, was the demand for representation for equal treatment. at the hip in every attempt to sort of spread democracy or to spread Republican virtues or

whatever, came alongside the entrenchment of slavery, the dispossession of Indian land through settlement across the continent. So by the time the United States arrived at 1898, these two intertwined traditions had enjoyed a long history, actually, and had enabled the United States to become the power that it was. So rather than see something like the benevolent assimilation, as McKinley's, you know, professed notion that the United States was in the Philippines out of purely humanitarian reasons, right? Rather than to see this kind of imperial humanitarianism as an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms, it was in fact pretty consistent. I mean, at least in my opinion and the opinion of other historians, other people might disagree, but it seemed to me benevolent assimilation rather than a contradiction in terms, was actually a kind of humanitarian imperialism that had characterized United States history for a very long time.

What was the role of religion in McKinley's benevolent assimilation? In the case of McKinley, the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation was declared in the middle of the Filipino-American War. Prior to that, before the war actually started, there's that very famous scene in the White House in the wake of George Dewey's victory in Manila Bay, where the United States was basically scrambling to figure out, now what, right? So we've defeated the Spaniards, but we don't have control of the Philippines yet, right? Because at that point, U.S. presence was pretty much limited to Manila Bay. They had no ground troops at that point. And there's that famous scene in the White House as the United States is trying to figure out what to do next, where McKinley is visited by a group of evangelical Christian representatives. And he

points to the map of the Philippines and he said, you know, we're going to civilize them. And he points to the map of the Philippines and he said, you know, that's what we're going to, we're going to civilize them. And he says, we're going to Christianize them. And that's a very telling statement because of course, McKinley must have known that the Filipinos were majority Catholics. And what he meant by Christianize them, of course, was that we're going to convert them to the real Christianity, not to the fraudulent, corrupt Christianity of the Spaniards, which is Catholicism. And this is part of a discourse. I mean, I see this as symptomatic of a U.S. white Anglo-Saxon Protestant view of the Spaniards as practicing a very corrupt, very debased form of Christianity, which is Catholicism. This in turn is part and parcel of a larger American discourse about Spain as this backward, corrupt nation. This is part of,

you know, what's known as the Black Legend, right, that really has its origins in what the 17th or the 16th century, when paint them as oppressors, and therefore, conversely, to justify their intervention and their colonization of the Philippines as a liberation of Native peoples that had long been oppressed and that had long been sort of tortured and enslaved. And actually, that's a word they used, enslaved, right, by the Spaniards. So, among certain Americans, the Filipino-American War was actually framed as a kind of abolitionist movement, right, consistent with the abolition of slavery in the United States. Just as the Union forces had abolished slavery in the South. Now, progressive forces in the United States are going to abolish slavery in the Philippines and kick out the slave masters who they depicted as the

Spaniards. So, that very small term, you know, Christianize them. McKinley's saying we're going to Christianize them, saying that this is benevolent assimilation. Once again, it's sort of deeply rooted in the sort of imperial humanitarianism of the United States. Another thing that the United States attempted to do in converting Filipinos was, well, encourage them to convert from Spanish to English. In your book, Motherless Tongues, one of the things you write about is the perhaps weaponization of language. What did that look like in the Philippine-American war and the years after? Yeah, that's really interesting to think about religion and language together in the case of the United States. It's so different as in the case of

the Spaniards where religion and language is also sort of deeply connected. In the case of the United States, first of all, try as they might, American missionaries, Protestant missionaries really couldn't make much headway in converting Filipinos from Catholicism to Protestantism. There was certainly some success, and certainly with the help of the U.S. government, the power of the Catholic Church was severely constrained and severely limited, at the same time that they still had to work with the Catholic Church in order to encourage the collaboration, especially of conservative Filipino elites, who still clung to Catholicism as a source of cultural and political identity. In the case of English, what happened was that the United States adopted a policy that was in some ways 180 degrees different from the Spaniards. The Spaniards

hesitated, if not resisted, teaching of Spanish to Filipinos for fear that a population, a subjugated, colonized population literate in Spanish would begin to read sort of quote-unquote subversive literature, secular literature that would undercut the power of, in this case, the Spanish friars, who were in some sense the real power of the church. And so, rather than encourage people, the population, learning Spanish, what happened was that the Spanish priests instead learned the local languages and communicated with the population through their specific vernaculars. In the case of the Americans, Americans quickly realized that if they were going to successfully or at least attempt to successfully colonize the Philippines, they would have to

develop a kind of common language that would serve as a lingua franca. Because you have to remember, the archipelago, divided as it was, along ethno-linguistic lines, had as many as 120 distinct languages. And so there was no common language that they could communicate. And so English quickly became the sort of default lingua franca. Additionally, as early as 1901, 1902, the military governor general at that time, Arthur MacArthur, who was the father of Douglas MacArthur, so English, the teaching of English, was seen as a kind of counterinsurgent measure that would reconcile the people to the values, the culture, and of course the politics of the colonizing power, in this case the United States. The teaching of English, like everything else that the United States did in the country, proceeded by fits and starts. The attempt was to use English as a language, as a-unquote, liberated and cleansed of its insurgent forces,

one of the first things they did was to reestablish the public school and then get soldiers to start teaching kids in English. And then eventually the soldiers were replaced by American teachers that were recruited from the United States that were known as Thomasites. And the reason they were known as Thomasites was because they came to the Philippines on board a U.S. Army ship called the Tomas, the USS Tomas, since they were called the Tomasites. And they were spread across the provinces where they, again, took the lead in instructing the students in English. And the remarkable thing about these American programs was how relatively successful they were, which is not to say there weren't resistances, there weren't attempts to sort of circumvent this order.

But for the most part, public schools were sort of popular, and the teaching of English became popular. And by about the 1930s, you had a situation where about 35% of the population was reasonably literate in English, although differently. I mean, of course, it varied in terms of social class. Those who were richer were much more fluent, those who were poorer, much less so. But it became, in some ways, a valuable instrument for sort of tapping down insurgent energy among the population and, in a way, sort of attracting greater collaboration with the local population. And so today, it remains as a very important language, medium of communication, and one of the official languages in the Philippines to this day. Sticking with the topic of education, though,

you're now a professor of history at the University of Washington, but you grew up in the Philippines. I'm wondering, how was the history of the war taught in the Philippines? For the most part, the war is quickly covered over. And there are many complex reasons for this. There hasn't been a full study of how and why this occurred. But my sense is that once the United States colonial rule was established, the United States sort of proceeded to, as I say, orchestrate Filipino collaboration to its rule, and among other things, sort of encourage Filipino participation in colonial governing, something that the Spaniards

withheld. They allowed for the emergence of a reasonably robust free press that would make it possible for Filipinos to sort of criticize the colonial government. And so there was a kind of, as some people have called it, a kind of colonial democracy that actually emerged in the Philippines. Filipino elites became deeply invested in the continuation of American colonial rule, even as they continued to lobby for greater autonomy and eventual independence for the Philippines. So there was a kind of modus operandi that was sort of established between the Filipinos and the United States, which made it seem like, on the one hand, U.S. rule was something that had to be negotiated, that would eventually allow for Filipino independence. But at the same time,

Filipinos felt like they needed the United States in order to sort of stabilize the colony, especially the elites, and stave off the possibility of a social revolution, which was always just bubbling underneath the surface. And this became even more apparent once the Japanese began to arm and threaten parts of Southeast Asia. Filipinos realized that they couldn't go it alone with the Japanese, and so needed the United States, and so on and so forth. So because of all these reasons, the Filipino-American War was sort of, you know, eventually sort of smoothed over, and then the Japanese invasion came.

When the Japanese came, it's very interesting, one of the things they wanted to do was to wean Filipinos away from their connections, from their loyalties to the Americans. And so what they did was they brought up the Filipino-American War and basically told Filipinos, why should you stick to Americans? Look what they did during the war. They killed so many people. They brutalized the country, et cetera, et cetera. And so it was actually the Japanese that resurrected memories of the Filipino-American War, once again, as a propaganda tool, right, to break or to sunder the ties between Filipinos and Americans and to drive them towards the Japanese. Now, there were Filipinos, Filipino nationalists at that time, who had always been anti-American, who had always shaped

under American control. And they gravitated towards the Japanese. Many of these Filipinos, for all kinds of different reasons, after the war, took these lessons seriously and began to research and to teach about the Filipino-American War in various places. And one of the places where the Filipino-American War was taught and was sort of investigated was, of course, the University of the Philippines. And it was in the University of the Philippines that early on, you had nationalist historians who sort of brought up the Filipino-American War as an example of the sort of brutalities and cruelties of American imperialism. So alongside the emergence of a kind of post-war anti-imperialist mode of thinking, historical thinking, the Filipino-American War once again

was brought up. But again, it was limited by and large at the sort of major university, in this case, the University of the Philippines, which, of course, ironically was established by the United States beginning 1908. In any case, it wasn't until you get to the late 60s, well, actually mid to late 60s, and then increasingly towards the 70s, that the Filipino-American War becomes sort of more broadly taught in the Philippines. And this was, of course, the era of the emergence of a new moment of nationalism. So whenever you have a kind of nationalist surge in the Philippines,

Filipino-American war always comes up. Whenever this nationalist surge sort of dies down, the Filipino-American war becomes an afterthought, right? So in my case, I grew up in the Philippines and I came of age around the 70s and the 80s, where the Filipino-American War, of course, was taught at that time. And even someone like President Marcos, when he declared martial law, would point to the Filipino-American War as a way of leveraging his negotiations with the Americans, especially around the question of the United States basis. So memories of the war come

and go, depending on the particular political and cultural moment, at least in the Philippines, much less the case in the United States. Yeah. You mentioned that you were in college in the mid-70s. And I imagine during that time, the middle of the Vietnam War, the United States leaned on the Philippines heavily. What was the times like for you as someone growing up and probably discovering this history for the first time? You know, again, it's an interesting question because it sort of relates back to what I was talking about in the 19th century. The Vietnam War was something that had enormously global implications. It wasn't just about the U.S. It wasn't just about Vietnam or even Southeast Asia. It was about sort of this, you know, it was a decisive moment of the Cold War. And of course, the Cold War had this huge global implication that spread all over the world. In the case of

the Philippines, the Vietnam War was seen precisely among nationalists, and especially among sort of Marxists, because Marxism was beginning to sort of emerge as a real force at that time. The Vietnam War was seen in some ways as beholden to the Filipino-American War. And people were consciously making comparisons, saying that, you know, everything that was happening in Vietnam really began in the Filipino-American War, whether you were talking about torture, whether you were talking about genocide, various other kinds of, oh, hamleting, you know, what was called Vietnam hamleting, had its beginnings in the Philippines with the establishment of concentration camps and so forth. So people were making these conscious connections between Vietnam and the Philippines, these conscious connections between Vietnam and the

Philippines, between the war in Vietnam and the war in the Philippines. And so in a way, protesting the Vietnam War, which is in some ways popular in the Philippines, you know, going to the U.S. embassy and confronting, you know, police and dodging tear gas, which I did when I was in college, you know, it was in some ways a kind of protest against the Filipino-American war, right? Seeing these in global terms. So that was one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, of course, is, as you said, Philippines, the U.S. bases in Philippines were absolutely crucial to the war in Vietnam. It was the two large U.S. bases in the Philippines were absolutely crucial to the war in Vietnam. It was the two large U.S. bases, Clark Air Base and Suik Naval Base, were important sort of nodal points in refueling, refurbishing, and launching sort of U.S. attacks, U.S. war in Vietnam.

So all of these things were interestingly connected. So the last thing I want to say about that, too, is that the U.S. also actively sought to recruit Filipinos to fight in Vietnam. And in fact, there was a small but a sizable contingent of Filipinos that did go to Vietnam first as humanitarian sort of aides, as doctors, as dentists, and so forth, as social workers that were sent to Vietnam because the assumption is, well, they're brown people, you know, and brown people will respond to brown people in the same way. So, you know, there was a kind of racial assumption that was built into that.

Secondly, the United States also convinced Marcos to send these troops in exchange for large cash donations, quote-unquote, cash aid to the Philippines as well. So on the one hand, there was protest against Vietnam War. On the other hand, there was also this continuing collaboration with the United States government by way of sending both troops as well as Filipino humanitarian aid. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand,

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turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. I want to start kind of working towards the modern Filipino-American experience, but let's talk about actually when the bulk of Filipino-Americans began arriving. What was the early days of Filipino immigration to the United States like? Well, there's been some sort of Filipinos became much more important and much more visible presence in the U.S. first as recruits to the U.S. Navy. So as early as 1901, the United States began to recruit Filipinos into the U.S. Navy, just as they had recruited Filipinos to serve in U.S. military in the form of the Philippine scouts, for example, to help fight the revolutionary forces.

So as many colonial powers did, they would always form these native militias to quell local revolts. The United States did the same thing. And some of these folks that were recruited in the U.S. Navy eventually would settle in the United States. I mean, it began this long tradition, this long history of U.S. recruitment of Filipinos into the Navy. Many of the Filipinos, of course, who were recruited ended up serving in sort of menial tasks, mostly below deck as, you know, servants to white officers and that sort of thing. And that continued until, I think it ended in the 1980s. So past independence, U.S. Navy was still a route

that Filipinos would take in order to secure entry into the United States. And then, of course, there were migrant workers. Many of them would United States. And then, of course, there were migrant workers. Many of them would work odd jobs in restaurants, in hotels, serving as domestic workers. Some of them would go to school in places where they could get into USC, UCLA, University of Washington, and so forth. And then the thing about Filipino immigration or Filipino migrant workers, they reached a peak around the 1930s, right? You know, estimates vary at something like 50 to 80,000 migrant workers in the country at that time. And this caused incredible backlash among white Americans, you know, nativists who saw these Filipinos as what some of them called the third Asiatic invasion.

So in other words, the first Asiatic invasion were the Chinese, the second were the Japanese, and the third were the Filipinos. And they saw the coming of the Filipinos, many of whom were single men in their 20s and 30s, right, without families. Many of them saw the invasion of these Filipino men as a kind of perverse replication of the Filipino-American War. They precisely called it as an invasion, thinking that just as the United States has invaded the Philippines, now Filipinos were invading the United States. And so the nativists saw the presence of Filipinos as a threat to

their communities. One of the reasons why Filipinos were able to come freely into the United States because of their legal status. Unlike the Japanese and the Chinese who were excluded by law, Filipinos could come into the United States because they were classified as quote-unquote nationals. That is, not full citizens, but not aliens either, insofar as the Philippines was U.S. territory. For example, just like Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. So they traveled in and out of the United States with relative ease. It was when they got to the United States that they faced a lot of obstacles, a lot of persecution, a lot of prejudice, and so forth. And there was an attempt precisely to exclude them. And the reason, as I said, is because they saw the presence of these Filipino men as an existential threat. One of the things that white nativists always brought up is the fact that

Filipino men not so much took the jobs of Americans, because many of these jobs, white men didn't care for. But what they really objected to was the fact that these Filipino men on their day off would get cleaned up, they would get dressed up, they would go to town, they would hang out in dance halls, and they would sort of hang out with white women, mostly working class class Eastern European white women who would work in these dance halls. And they would parade around with them, arm in arm, dressed to the nines. And this drove white nativists nuts. As far as they were concerned, what these Filipino men presented was a real danger.

The fact that if they intermarried with the white population, they would produce mixed-race children that would then lead to the disappearance of the white race. So they saw Filipinos as a real existential threat. And here you have sort of a forerunner of what today has become sort of very popular on the right, which is this notion of replacement theory, right? Filipinos would replace whites. And so there was this panic, this white racial panic to get rid of Filipinos through legal means. For example, they would deny them marriage certificates if they wanted to get married.

They wanted to reclassify them as quote-unquote Mongols or Orientals that would then allow them to be excluded under the Chinese exclusion law. And finally, through extra legal means, right, through violent means, lynchings, beatings, imprisonment, harassment, and so forth. Finally, Filipinos, finally the coalition of white nativists and white labor unions lobbied Congress, and they got Congress to speed up the grant of independence for the Philippines. And this resulted in the so-called Tidings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which provided for the transition of the Philippines first into a commonwealth, and then the granting of independence eventually after a 10-year provisional period. And what this did essentially was it transformed the Philippines from a U.S.

territory into a commonwealth and therefore what the United States at that time considered to be an alien land, a separate land. And it would reclassify Filipinos into aliens and subject them to exclusion. And that's exactly what happened. So with the 1934 Act, it provided a route for Philippine independence, but it also provided a means for legally excluding Filipinos and keeping them out of the United States. And this is what happened in 1934 and 1935, along with a concerted effort to repatriate them back to the Philippines, none of which actually worked. Filipinos weren't having it. They didn't want to go back to the Philippines. Many of them stayed on as these abject, harassed population until 1941. What

happened in 1941? The Pacific War exploded. All of a sudden, Filipinos were now encouraged to enlist in the U.S. military, the U.S. Army. So from being abject population, they now became allies in the Pacific War. So you see the ups and downs of immigration history, right? From necessary labor to sort of invasive presences to allies in the war. Well, as we wrap up here, I'm interested, what is the legacy of the Philippine-American war today? Well, it's very simple. Without that war, someone like me and someone like many other Filipinos, such an integral

part of the United States, would not be here at all, or very few of them would be here at all. Again, it's very much wrapped up in the history of the U.S. empire. It was a common practice among my generation that if you wanted to move up, as it were, if you wanted to develop expertise and go to graduate school, the most desirable route was to get a master's and a graduate degree, PhD, in the United States. And the U.S. itself offered several opportunities to do that. There was the Fulbright grant, and there were several other private grants that made it possible

to do that. I was not a recipient of a Fulbright grant. Instead, I applied directly to the university that I eventually went to, which was Cornell University, and I was given a scholarship to go there. And the idea, as it was with Fulbright and all these other various grants, was that you would go to the United States, you would be trained there, and then you would return to the Philippines with sort of this knowledge that you obtained in the United States, and then you would use it to sort of improve the country and teach the people and so forth and so on. So there was kind of almost, if you will, neo-colonial assumption built into getting a U.S. education was that you would bring the U.S. back with you. You'd be an

agent, as it were, of U.S. sort of hegemony, if you will. And again, this goes all the way back to the early part of the 20th century when the United States began to sponsor Filipinos and send them to schools in the United States to sort of impress them with life in the U.S. and then bring them back to the Philippines to serve in leadership positions. In my case, that did not happen because rather than go back to the Philippines, I ended up getting a job first at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and then eventually at the University of California in San Diego and now at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and then eventually at the University of California in San Diego, and now at the University of Washington. So you might say I'm sort of like a failed example, right? Rather than serve as an agent of empire, I ended up becoming a critic of empire, rather than civilizing Filipinos, you know, with the knowledge I gained from the Philippines, quote, unquote, I ended up sort of inspiring them, hopefully inspiring them to think otherwise and in different directions. Not just Filipinos, of course, too, but other Americans in my capacity as a professor in a public university. So, yeah, yeah. So I'm a failed

example in that sense. Another legacy of the war, aside from the fact that it's opened up the path for Filipino immigration in the United States, it paved the way for continued U.S. hegemony in the Philippines. You know, today there's a lot of talk of rising Chinese influence in the Pacific, especially in the Philippines. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the United States continues to be an incredibly powerful influence in Filipino lives. Everything from the English language to the economy of the country, foreign investments, ways of thinking and doing things, technology, all of these things are deeply affected by the Philippines' continuing connection to the United States. And one of the effects of this continuing connection to the United States. And one of the effects of this continuing connection

to the United States is that there's a tendency to sort of lessen or attenuate connections with the rest of Asia. So, for example, Filipinos may know a lot about what goes on in Hollywood or in New York, but very little about what goes on in Jakarta, what goes on in Bangkok, what goes on in Kuala Lumpur, what goes on in Hanoi. So there's a kind of purred away from Southeast Asia. And finally, the third legacy of the Philippines sort of continuing ties to the United States. Ironically, the Philippines, which for the longest time during the Spanish colonial period was governed as a province of Mexico, and in some ways was an integral part of Latin America,

that connection once again has been sundered. Because of the fact that Filipinos never gained fluency on a massive scale in Spanish, there's been this weird sort of disconnect with Latin America, despite the fact that they shared this long history of Spanish colonization. So just as the Philippines sort of turned away from Southeast Asia and from the rest of Asia, so too have they sort of not been as connected with Latin America. And again, in part, this is because of, you know, what Benedict Anderson, the famous scholar of nationalism, once said was this massive lobotomy that was administered by the United States, basically emptying Filipino memories and Filipino connections with all things Spanish, right? So not just with Latin America, but with Spain itself.

Dr. Rafael, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Oh, it's my pleasure. That was my conversation with professor and historian Vicente Rafael. His books include White Love and Other Events in Filipino History and Motherless Tongues, The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation. From Wondery, this is the fifth episode of Philippine-American War from American History Tellers. On our next season, Billy the Kid was a legendary outlaw who became one of the most

iconic embodiments of the Wild West. But he wasn't always the six-gun-toting killer of popular myth. In 1865, he was just a teenage orphan struggling to survive in the remote, lawless countryside of New Mexico, where he became embroiled in one of the bloodiest feuds in the American Southwest. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Audio editing by Derek Behrens. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe and Peter Arcuni. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery. This is the emergency broadcast system. A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next?

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