The triumph of tagalog and the dominance of the discourse on english language politics in the philippines during the american colonial period 3

57
CHAPTER THREE
THE AMERICAN DISCOURSE ON ENGLISH IN THE PHILIPPINES

At the turn of the century, when America was just about to embark on its first real
colonial adventure with the annexation of the Philippines, the publishing industry seemed to have
hit a jackpot. With the great interest in “our new possessions” (and since these new possessions
were so far away and exotic), the numerous travel picture books and travel narratives on the
Philippines that were churned out would ensure publishers of healthy profits in years to come.
Through these books, ordinary Americans could seemingly participate in the activities that only a
handful of those involved in the colonial project were allowed. The result of “the almost endless
production and replication of images in books and postcards,” Benito Vergara tells us, is the
“dissection and dissemination of a colony.”
121
These photographs play an important part in the
colonial project because they perform the function of surveillance that every state finds
imperative to display its power of; the display of which requires that knowledge be obtained and
displayed.
122

The display not just of knowledge but of expert knowledge was claimed by many of
these publications, boasting as Carpenter’s Through the Philippines and Hawaii did of numerous
“illustrations from original photographs.”
123
The claim of “originality” was important as these
books emphasized both the contradictory promises of authority and of a new, frontier experience.
Read within the context of the recurring declaration of American officials that the Philippine
venture was exceptional, a singular project like none the world had ever seen, the claim of
originality in these books are especially symbolic.
One such photograph, a very nondescript pastoral scene of a dusty street with a tree in the
foreground and a native house in the background appeared in an 1899 publication called Our

Island and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil by William S. Bryan, with the caption

121
Benito Manalo Vergara, Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in the Philippines
in the Early Twentieth Century, (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1993).
122
Ibid.
123
Frank. G. Carpenter, Through the Philippines and Hawaii, (Garden City and New York:
Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1929).
58
“A Visayan Village, Island of Panay.”
124
The exact same image appeared a year later in a similar
publication, Ebenezer Hannaford’s History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines: With
Entertaining Accounts of the People and their Modes of Living, Customs, Industries, Climate and
Present Conditions. The caption for the photo in this second publication identifies the scene as
being in Tarlac, on the island of Luzon, more than six hundered kilometers away from Panay the
place which Bryan had, in the first book, said the picture was of. The second publication assigns
special historical value to this generic photograph by identifying it as “A Street in Tarlac, The
Village that was Aguinaldo’s Capital during the summer of 1898.”
125
The place that Aguinaldo
was operating out of in the summer of 1898 would indeed be a curiosity as it would have been the
place where Aguinaldo, with American reassurance of aid, relaunched his attack against the
Spanish.
The false claims made by both Bryan and Hannaford are interesting in of itself for
insights into the veneer of authority necessary in the colonial project and present in most colonial
discourse. However, there is yet one more image, the exact same one (same angle of vision, same
position of tree, street and house, same placement of small details like stones and leaves) but this

one a “copy from a photograph” which appeared in an 1891 issue of Ilustracion Filipina. This
one is captioned Paisaje-Carcanias de Manila, copia de un cuadro tomado al oleo de la Señorita
Carmelita Zaragoza.”
126
This version identifies the pastoral scene as being in Manila. This 1891
version was drawn from a photograph when Aguinaldo was not yet a General but a trader and a
petty government official in his small town of Cavite. Ilustracion Filipina was part of the
Illustrado campaign to illustrate and make known what they believed was already formed and
already there—a Filipino people, who were modern, well-educated, equal to the Spanish and
therefore capable of participation in public life. The American project, began eight years after this

124
William S. Bryan, editor. Our Island and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil, (St.
Louis: N.D. Thompson Publishing Company, 1899), 735.
125
Ebenezer Hannaford, History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines: With
Entertaining Accounts of the People and their Modes of Living, Customs, Industries, Climate and Present
Conditions, (Springfield, Ohio: Crowell and Kirkpatrick, 1900), 36.
126
Ilustracion Filipina, November 7, 1891. This minutiae is known to me because Carmen
Zaragoza is my great grandmother; she is the mother of my maternal grandmother. An uncle of mine,
Tonypet Araneta, brought these details to my attention.
59
illustration was drawn, was to picture the Filipino people as splintered people, still incapable of
running their own government, still in need of lessons and experience in democracy. The contrast
could not be more stark—between one project to name and expose what was already formed and
another to supposedly form by naming and exposing.
The confusion created by this image reminds us not just of the impossibility of
discovering the “truth” about the image as much as the irrelevance of it, especially in the face of
these gestures of misidentification and misrepresentation. In understanding colonial relations, the

task at hand becomes both the understanding of how this image has been conscripted into the
mammoth enterprise of producing knowledge for the justification of the colonial project and to
the identification of possible spaces of resistance and the assertion of identity and even
nationhood.
In understanding colonial relations, many studies approach their projects from the
perspective of American objectives and policies. Such studies differentiate themselves from older
colonial histories that “exaggerate the accomplishments of the U.S. rule and deal with the Filipino
actors somewhat superficially.”
127
Instead, their projects are seen (by themselves) as more sober
accounts of the course of American colonialism. Their conclusions are not necessarily laudatory,
in fact, quite the opposite of the older colonial histories, these histories are not afraid to identify
failure. An example of this is Glenn May’s Social Engineering in the Philippines which declared
that American colonial policies that were aimed at revolutionizing Philippine society actually
“brought about little fundamental change.”
128
Such studies evaluate the whole colonial project
within the rubric of efficiency and within the very terms, conflicting as they were, set by the very
colonial project itself. May himself sees his project as assessing whether “the announced goals of

127
Glenn Anthony May, “The State of Philippine American Studies,” in A Past Recovered,
(Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1987), 182. May cites as examples the histories written by Dean C.
Worcester, W. Cameron Forbes, and Joseph Ralston Hayden.
128
May, Social Engineering in the Philippines, xvii. Other works of this vein are Lewis E.
Gleek’s American Institutions in the Philippines and Peter W. Stanley’s A Nation in the Making. Gleek
situates his project in between the two streams that either “exhault or condemn” American policies and
record of performance. Stanley focuses on documenting the different and sometimes conflicting motives
and styles of the various colonial officials and concludes that the American record in the Philippines is

ambiguous.
60
the policy-makers were achieved.”
129
The function of the scholar, in May’s model, is equal to
that of an external auditor, who checks the business establishment’s books and analyzes its
decisions based on a shared standard and a shared objective.
Some of the more recent studies, however, approach the understanding of colonial
relations with a strong sense of wariness. Instead of seeing and evaluating the American colonial
project on its own terms, it sees it as one that masks conquest, rule, and exploitation. Their
project, therefore, becomes one of unmasking. In particular, these studies examine the knowledge
and meanings, seen now as established and largely inexorable, created by the American colonial
order, through affiliation with the universal forces of science, progress, rationality, and
modernity. These new meanings and knowledge scripted not just the Filipinos but other colonial
projects as immature and fledgling and “other” to what they projected themselves as: modern,
scientific, benevolent. The result is the creation of a discourse of the American colonial project as
not only necessary but also part of the natural order of human development.
An example of this kind of study is of course the work of Renato Constantino,
particularly his essay “The Miseducation of the Filipino,” which was discussed in length in the
first chapter. Constantino, more than any other Philippine scholar, successfully melded the
discourses of historical scholarship and advocacy and this of course has been used to denigrate his
works as being more advocacy than scholarship. The works of Reynaldo Ileto on American
health policies depart from the depiction of these policies as altruistic, a notion that even
nationalist historians like Agoncillo have found impossible to get away from.
130
Constantino and

129
May, Social Engineering, xv.
130

Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the
Philippines,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Philippine Culture, ed. Vicente L. Rafael,
(Manila: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1995), 51-81. Ileto’s own interrogation of this issue has demonstrated that
the institution of health campaigns is far more complicated than a matter of just bringing in vaccines and
teaching the “ignorant natives” the basics of sanitation. His study of the cholera outbreak in 1902 detailed
haphazard, unscientific, and experimental methods used by the Americans to control the epidemic and thus
exposed the inaccuracy of the idea of a neutral and scientific project. He also suggests that these sanitary
measures were carried out alongside efforts to suppress a growing popular resistance to American
colonialism. See also Rodney J, Sullivan and Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Americanism and the Politics of
Health in the Philippines” in Philanthropy and Cultural Context: Western Philanthropy in South, East and
Southeast Asia in the 20
th
Century, ed. Soma Hewa and Philo Hove, (Laham and Oxford: University Press
of America, 1984), 39-64. Here Ileto and Sullivan show how the emphasis placed on the scientific methods
of state health services aided in the justification of colonial rule and that the policies of American health
61
Ileto (and Agoncillo), are often considered “nationalist” historians, the suggestion being that their
studies are deeply rooted in a nationalist agenda and therefore lack the much demanded scholarly
objectivity. The very category of “nationalist” and therefore “nationalist historian” will be
interrogated and recast (through the nuances of Tagalog) in Chapter Seven.
There are a good number of other scholars who have examined the enterprise of
knowledge production, and in particular in the construction of the idea that Filipinos were
uncivilized and in need of tutelage. Michael Salman focuses on how the slavery issue was
recruited for this purpose; Paul Kramer looks at the shifting uses and projection of race in this
particular period that was becoming increasingly sensitive to race issues. Both these works stand
out for their dynamic portrayal of the slipperiness of these concepts/issues and how their
employment changed in response to changing policies and political terrains. Vicente Rafael looks
at knowledge about the colonial subject and how this was generated through the census in order to
create a system of surveillance and a colonial subject that would colonize itself.
131

The project of
constructing knowledge and identity was not confined to the Filipino subject. The Spanish were
implicated as well. A recent study, documents the systematic attempt to distort the history of
Spanish occupation in the Philippines and the American attempt to place the Spanish in a
perpetual medievalism.
132


officials served as a venue for reiterating the binary of the oriental and the occidental mind and asserting the
idea of the “ignorant native.
131
Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism
in the American Colonial Philippines, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Paul A. Kramer,
Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines, (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006); Vicente L. Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and nationalist Resistance in the
U.S. Colonization of the Philippines,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and
Donald E. Pease, 185-218, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993); and of course Benito
Vergara’s book on photography its uses in the colonial project, mentioned earlier. Of particular interest is
Salman’s discussion in Chapter 10 of his book of the slavery controversy of 1912-14 where he shows the
contentious issue of the existence of slavery. Salman shows how the issue was used by the Americans to
put into question the Filipino ability for self-governance and by the Filipinos as a trope for highlighting
American enslavement of the Philippines. Kramer discusses of how the issue and idea of race was carefully
handled because of the contradiction that was created by America’s entry into the colonial field during a
time of burgeoning liberal ideas about race. This resonates with some of the discussions in this thesis that
look at the growth of American liberal philosophies and its influence on colonial policies. See the
discussion in this thesis of the growth of public education in the United States in Chapter Two.
132
Maria Gloria Cano Garcia, “The ‘Spanish Colonial Past’ in the Construction of Modern
Philippine History: A Critical Inquiry into the (Mis)Use of Spanish Sources,” Ph.D. dissertation, National
University of Singapore, 2005. The study examines the enterprise carried out by such colonial officials and

academics as James LeRoy, Emma Blair, and James Alexander Robertson, as one of methodical depiction
of the Spanish period as medieval in order to create a contrast between the backward and benighted Spanish
62
The current chapter takes off from these studies which interrogate the manufacture of
America’s other. It focuses, in particular, on the logic of American colonial officials and scholars
in implementing English throughout the Philippines. It was a specious logic that claimed rigorous
scientific study and empirical knowledge as its basis but was sometimes contradictory and
sometimes irrational. The aim in this chapter is to show, through the colonial officials’ own
words, the almost robotic repetitiveness of the discourse, symptomatic of the attempt to create a
powerful and unified rationale for the presence of English in the Philippines. This discourse will
be portrayed in this chapter as an almost impenetrable fortress built on the steadfast belief in the
ideas of exceptionalism, altruism and Anglo-Saxon superiority.
To be sure, there are small spaces within the discourse that endure not a breach but reveal
its slight pliability. They are infinitesimal chinks in the armor that hardly render the armor
anything but a commanding force but may nonetheless, through equally infinitesimal causes,
consequences, and chains of events alter the course of the battle. These little chinks, as the next
chapter will show, tolerated minor modifications that conspired to effect major changes. Yet,
these accommodations were made only when the position of English in Philippine society was
firmly assured.
There have been recent calls for the study of colonial discourses to investigate
“hegemonic operations” and to problematize the “unity and coherence”
of colonial undertakings.
133
The astonishing sameness of the logic and language of these colonial
officials and scholars, as this chapter will show, suggests that the discourse of hegemony cannot
as yet be put to rest.
In numerous histories, ethnographies, travel narratives, personal letters, and official
documents the justification for the English language policy is rehearsed over and over to uniform

to the modern, liberal, and benevolent Americans. This project, Cano argues, was carried out through a

wholesale erasure of certain facts regarding reforms undertaken by the Spanish colonial government during
the last thirty years of their occupation and through the appropriation of certain Spanish political terms that
were injected with negative connotations in order to support their campaign to create knowledge that would
justify the American colonial project.
133
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony,” in Tensions of
Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, (Berkely:
University of California Press, 1997), 20.
63
perfection till a discourse is created. Such a discourse becomes not only the only rational solution
but even plain and simple common sense. In these specimens of the colonial mindset, the
discourse, repeated, drone-like, was predicated on an insistence on the American duty to educate
and centered on a six-point justification.
First, was the argument of the importance of a common language for national
development, unity, and progress. The Philippines, according to this reasoning was linguistically
divided and no indication existed that one of the local languages functioned as a lingua franca;
neither was there any indication of language fusion.
Second, was the contention that Spanish, which at the turn of the century was the
language of educated Filipinos, could not be promoted as the lingua franca because it was already
associated with a kind of elitism the Americans were supposedly interested in eradicating.
Third, was the infantilizing of Philippine language and culture. The claim was that local
languages, referred to as “dialects,” were underdeveloped and that no literature in these local
languages existed or if they did, it was of poor quality.
Fourth, was the claim that even if there were reasons to use the local languages or a local
language as the medium of instruction and as the official language, this would be an
administrative nightmare. The logical conclusion therefore was that, fifth, there was no other
option but to institute English which, according to their reasoning, was fast become the world
language, was already anyway the language of commerce in the Orient, was the language of great
literature, and according to some of these proponents, the language of democracy.
Finally, the claims of eagerness on the part of Filipinos to learn English abounded,

erasing any objections to the allegation that the English policy was an unwanted imposition. In a
very short amount of time, the logic of this justification, unrelentingly replicated, persistently
pushed and peddled, became common sense.
A good example of this is the Monroe survey of 1925. The survey, more formally known
as the Board of Education Survey of 1925 was the output of a commission tasked with surveying
64
the educational system of the Philippines. The survey, controversial during its time
134
and
analyzed in variant ways today
135
, was critical of the state of Philippine education and by
implication the educational achievements colonial officials touted. The Survey reviewed and
reaffirmed the existing English language policy and repeated what numerous officials, journalist,
and scholars had been rehearsing over the past quarter century. The survey’s treatment of the
language issue, quoted here in length, is significant for its sustained discussion and presentation
of the problem and of the solution of English as having been thoroughly examined from all
possible dimensions and for its seemingly respectful regard for the local languages.
Nowhere else in the world is found a racially homogenous people numbering no
more than 12,000,000, operating a large public-school system, and having a
language situation anything like as complex or as difficult of solution. . . The
Philippine situation is unique in three respects: First, in place of one language,
there are numerous dialects. Second, there seems to be no immediate prospect of
any one of the local dialects becoming supreme or driving out the other dialects.
Third, there is little or no tendency toward building up a common language
through a fusion of all or several of the dialects. Such a tendency may appear in
time; but if so, several generations must elapse before one language can be
produced. There exists in no one of the local dialects any great amount of
cultural literature. . . There is no anticipation and no desire [for English] to
replace the native dialects as a common medium of communication among the

masses of the people. This can only come about as a natural process through the
course of time. By a common language is meant a language for common
intercourse in business, professional, intellectual, political, and cultural affairs. . .
Not only because of the multiplicity of the dialects and the lack of a common
medium of communication, but because of the meagerness of culture material
and of world-wide contacts, such a medium is required. Without this there is no
possibility of building up a stable group or a national culture. . . Two other
considerations lead to the conclusion that English should be maintained as the
language of instruction. In the first place, the introduction of the dialects as the
language of instruction would be a divisive influence. Wherever the question of
the possible universal use a dialect has been raised unless the suggested dialect
was the local one, the suggestion has been pronounced impossible. . . At present
teachers and school administrators are transferred freely from one part of the
Islands to the another. . . This intermingling of the school staff among peoples of
other regions and dialects is one of the most important social forces making for

134
In reaction to the Monroe report, the Philippine Legislature also ordered a committee to study
it. The committee eventually questioned many of the findings of Monroe. Fonacier-Bernabe notes that the
committee report was an evaluation of an evaluation of the educational system and argues that the
controversy surrounding these two reports of 1925 opened the debate for the place of the vernaculars in
Philippine society. See Emma J. Fonacier-Bernabe, Language Planning in Philippine Education, 1565-
1975, Dissertation, University of the Philippines, 1978.
135
See for example Elizabeth Camp, Benevolent Colonialism?: A Reading of the 1925 Survey of
the Philippine Education System, Thesis, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1994 which argues
that the Monroe survey systematically “othered” Filipinos. See also Andrew B. Gonzalez, Language and
Nationalism: The Philippine Experience Thus Far, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1980)
which includes the Monroe survey among those who agitated for a change in the language policy. The
Survey actually only recommends the use of the vernaculars in moral education.

65
progress and for the ultimate social and political unity of the Islands. . .
Furthermore, in view of the difficulties of teacher training, textbook preparation,
creation of cultural materials, organization of supplementary materials, and many
related problems the administration of a system of schools in many dialects or
even several would be so complicated as to be impracticable. The cost of such a
system would be much greater than that of the present. . . There remains one
other suggested solution of the problem—the possibility of a common Philippine
language made by a fusion of the dialects. As a matter of fact, no such language
now exists, nor does there seem to be a steady tendency towards its formation. If
such a language were created, it would be an artificial product. Its use in the
schools would be a far more artificial procedure than in the present use of the
English, for English is a living language and the one in most general use
throughout the world.
136


Many of the features of the rationalization for English as the medium of instruction are present
here: exceptionalism (“no where else in the world”), the iteration of lack (common language,
literature), the reassurance that local culture was not to be erased (“no anticipation or desire to
replace the native dialects”) and the appeal to efficiency (use of several vernaculars is
“complicated and impracticable”). The process through which this logic becomes common sense
is done not simply through constant reiteration of the rhetoric but also through the unquestioned
premising of the motives and objectives of the policy on the idea of progress. Progress is the
trump card and the standard recommended panacea and almost anything in the name of progress
becomes acceptable. The call in the Monroe Report for “social and political unity” and for a
“stable national culture” actually implies the triumph of a dominant order. Given the heterogenic
and dynamic nature of all social, political, and cultural formations, the idea of “unity” and
“stability” can only be possible with either the erasure, silencing, or marginalization of less-
dominant forces. Such a call and other similar calls for progress (like the call “to tutor Filipinos

in democracy” and “to prepare for self-government”) that are attached to the generation of the
common sense discourse that English be the medium of instruction and official language in the
Philippines is resounding only if one already accepts value-laden concepts such as capitalist
markets, elections, democratically-elected leaders, and national development.

Worcester and the Origins of the Discourse

136
Board of Educational Survey, A Survey of the Educational Systems of the Philippine Islands
(Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1925) 24-28.
66
The idea of English education in the Philippines was, by some accounts, a matter of
course, i.e. it was unimaginable that education would take place in any language apart from
English. Within two months of the commencement of the Spanish-American war and even before
Spain surrendered Manila (in August, 1898) a general superintendent of public instruction for
Manila had been chosen and preparations had started for school opening in September. When
schools did open in Manila, over four thousand Manila school children started to receive
instruction in English. Though the fate of the Philippines at that time was officially still
uncertain, American military officials had began the first steps toward building American-style
state institutions such as public, nonsectarian schools where the medium of instruction was
English. Even if provisions for a thorough investigation into the Philippine condition and for
informed recommendations that would guide American supervision were made, action often
preceded inquiry. “There was no time. . . to think or plan or select. What the great American
people wants done at all, it wants done at once,”
137
is Mary Helen Fee’s description of the
implementation of English in the Philippines. This eagerness to act, possibly coupled with a
strong and solid confidence in the righteousness of the action resulted in the misrecognition and
miscalculation of Filipino responses and, in the case of the implementation of English, in the
creation of a discourse to explain and rationalize the belated decision.

The first official statement regarding the use of English in schools and as official
language was made in the report of the first Philippine Commission. This commission,
constituted by President McKinley in 1899, was composed of Jacob Schurman, president of
Cornell University (and president of this first commission); Admiral George Dewey, General
Elwell Otis, the ranking army and naval commanders; the Honorary Charles Denby, an American
diplomat; and Dean C. Worecrster, faculty member of the University of Michigan and
acknowledged expert on the Philippines. The commission arrived in the Philippines in April,
1899 armed with a message to the Filipino people that was altogether a veiled threat, a declaration
of the United States’ right over the Philippines, and (mostly) an olive branch saturated with
statements about the loftiest of American intentions—“uninterrupted devotion,” “noble ideas,”

137
Mary Helen Fee, “Growth of English,” The Cablenews-American, 28 August, 1911, 76.
67
“pure intentions,” etc. The statement lists eleven areas of concern “deemed of cardinal
importance” (civil rights, civil services, justice, infrastructure, trade, etc.) and one of these
concerns was education. Provision number ten reads: “Effective provision will be made for the
establishment of elementary schools in which the children of the people shall be educated.
Appropriate facilities will also be provided for higher education.”
138
The message contains no
mention of what language education should take place in; however, the official report which is the
output of the Schurman Commission, recommends English. It reads:
The introduction of the teaching of English into these schools was received with
great satisfaction by the natives. The young Filipinos display a considerable
aptitude for learning new tongues, and it is believed if this policy is followed out,
English can within a short time be made the official language of the archipelago.
The commission strongly recommends that it be done.
139

This and the many other recommendations arrived at by the Schurman Commission
was submitted to McKinley after a seven-month investigation of the Philippines. The
recommendations, contained in a voluminous, three-volume report were the result of the
numerous hearings held by the Commission where key Americans, Spanish, Filipinos, and
Europeans were interviewed regarding their knowledge of specific areas of Philippine life. The
recommendations were also the result of the observations made by the Commission during their
travels throughout the Philippines.
The chapter on education in this report that contained this recommendation was written
by Dean C. Worcester, the member of the Commission who was the “Philippine expert.”
Worcester was, as his biographer describes him, “the most influential American in the Philippines
at the time.”
140

Most of the American scholars and academics who were Worcester’s contemporaries
were in clear opposition to the American occupation of the Philippines and to the Philippine-

138
Report of the Philippine Commission (Schurman), Volume 1, (Washington, Government
Printing Office, 1900), 4.
139
Ibid, 34. The recommendation was certainly heeded and soon became one of the enduring
policies of the American colonial government. See reference to English as medium of instruction in
President McKinley’s instructions to the Taft Commission (made a few month after the publication of the
Schurman report) below.
140
Rodney J. Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C. Worcester,
(Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1992, first published in 1991 by the Center for South and Southeast
Asian Studies of the University of Michigan), 67.
68

American War. Worcester was unlike them and was, from the outset, enthusiastic about
America’s engagement in the Philippines.
141
Worcester’s engagement with the Philippines
occurred through two biological expeditions (the first in the mid-1880s and the second at the
beginning of the 1890s) that brought him into the forests and mountains of Palawan, Basilan,
Iloilo, Cebu, Samar, and Mindoro. It was during these expeditions that Worcester encountered
the various indigenous Philippine people and formed his belief that “real” Filipinos were found
among these “savage” people.
He returned in 1893 to his life as an instructor at the University of Michigan and may
have continued on in a career in the academe if not for the Spanish-American War which piqued
America’s interest in the Philippines and created the need for an American expert on the
Philippine. Worcester was invited on numerous occasions to speak on the Philippines in venues
throughout the United States and by October, 1899, he had published The Philippine Islands and
their People which went through several reprintings in a matter of months.
Worcester parlayed his position as the Philippine expert to arrange a meeting with
President McKinley. At the meeting, Worcester and McKinley found that they were in agreement
over the idea that the majority of Filipinos were in sympathy with the Americans and would
easily acquiesce to an American takeover. Several historians have noted the blunder of
McKinley’s miscalculation of the Filipino resolve to resist American occupation
142
which
resulted, of course, in a bloody and drawn-out Philippine-American war. Worcester himself
justified this misrecognition in Philippines Past and Present (published in 1914) by arguing that
his previous experience was centered in the Visayas and not in the Tagalog region which, he
argued, was where the center of the revolution against the United States was.
143

It was in this very meeting that McKinley offered Worcester a position as a commissioner
and which was to be the start of Worcester’s career as a colonial official. It was a career that was

141
See chapter 8 of Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War,
1899-1902 by Richard E. Welch, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979) which
centers on the response of scholars and writers. Worcester is briefly mentioned on page 119.
142
See for example, Welch’s Response to Imperialism, page 15; Wolff’s Little Brown Brother,
pages 62, 70-73, 267; Stanley’s A Nation in the Making, page 54.
143
Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism, 37.
69
eventually to end in him being remembered in Philippine history as the caricature of colonial
oppressiveness.
144
It was a career also in which he was to play a key role in shaping important
policies on the Philippines, in molding the colonial discourse of Philippine culture and
civilization, and in initiating the discourse to explain English in the Philippines.
To a certain extent, Worcester recalls Thomas Babington Macaulay who famously argued
for English education in India. Both men are the identifiable source of the campaign to have
English used in the education of colonial subjects. Both shared an utter belief in the superiority of
the Anglo-Saxon culture which can be connected to their belief in the suitability of English for
colonial education. The Philippine Commission report, the writing of which Worcester had a
considerable influence in,
145
concludes with a prediction that “the Filipino will be more American
than the American.”
146
This recalls Macaulay’s now notorious statement from his 1835 “Minute
on English Education” which argued: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and

colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
147
One considerable
difference between the Macaulay and the Worcester projects was that Macaulay’s advocated
English education for a select group who would “be interpreters” between the British and their
Indian subjects; Worcester’s advocated English education for a whole population.
The project—mass education of a whole population in a foreign language—was so large
and complex and yet Worcester seems to have taken such a surprisingly blithe attitude toward it.
His sole rationale for the recommendation of English in the Philippines in the 1899 report is the
positive Filipino reception of it. This is in sharp contrast to Macaulay’s minute which runs over
ten pages. The beginnings of this apparently unexamined decision to implement English in the
Philippines parallels the McKinley/Worcester misrecognition of Filipino reception of American
occupation.

144
This is because of his role in the El Renacimiento court case of 1908 which will be discussed in
the succeeding chapters.
145
Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism, 86.
146
Report of the Philippine Commission (Schurman), 184.
147
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on English Education,” in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry,
ed. G.M. Young, 729, (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952).
70
This early misrecognition serves as a kind of foreshadowing of one way to view of the
Philippine career of Worcester. He began his career as an expert on the Philippines and Filipinos
who had survived the recesses of the Philippine jungles. As Philippine commissioner he saw
himself as the defender of the “non-Christian tribes” who he saw as the “real” Filipinos. He was,
however, unpopular among the majority of the Filipinos. Manuel Quezon had called him “the

man most hated by the Filipinos”
148
and history has retained this villainous image. Filipino
students study him now only as the corrupt and vengeful colonial official bent on silencing the
brave Filipino journalists who spoke against the American occupation. With an element of
dramatic irony, Worcester seems to have misconstrued his role in the Philippines.
In his role as a protagonist, Worcester imagined himself the champion of the “non-
Christian tribes”
149
Worcester had been interested in tribal people even during his expedition days
and his first book, The Philippine Islands and Their People, records this. Sullivan tells us that
this concern stemmed from “his personal predilections, not any directive from his superiors.”
150

Worcester’s understanding of the indigenous people was, as was the custom of the time, that they
were savage and barbarous. Worcester, however, prided himself on his scientific and thorough
ethnography
151
and on his precise understanding of these groups’ uneven social development. He
divided the “non-Christian tribes” into two (excluding the violent “Moros”)—the Negritos, who
he described as having a low level of intelligence and incapable of civilization
152
and the Malays,
who he acknowledged had varying degrees of civilization (semi-nomadic, agriculturalists, head-
hunters)
153
. Worcester was particularly interested in the practice of head-hunting and his
narratives included many incidents involving them. What these groups had in common,
Worcester argued, was their hatred of the Christian Filipinos who, according to him had for

148
Quoted in Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery, 184.
149
The term, Worcester explains, was the most accurate they could come up with to describe the
mostly non-lowland people who had resisted conversion. The term included the muslims of the south. See
Worcester’s Philippines, Past and Present, page 533.
150
Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism, 141.
151
Worcester, The Philippines, Past and Present. Worcester claims to use Blumentritt as a source
but that he suspected that his statements were very inaccurate.” (from page 534.) “As a result of these
personal investigations I was able to reduce to twenty-seven the eighty-two non-Christian tribes said by
Blumentritt to inhabit the Philippines.” (page 557)
152
Ibid, 660.
153
Ibid, 661.
71
generations inhumanly abused these groups. He argues that “the Filipinos are absolutely without
sympathy for the non-Christian peoples, and have never voluntarily done anything for them, but
on the contrary have shamelessly exploited them whenever opportunity has offered.”
154
This
attitude is in direct contrast to his perceived attitude of the American toward these groups. The
Americans, Worcester claimed, adopted a “firm and kindly policy” and as a result met with
“extraordinary success in winning their good-will and weaning them from the worst of their evil
customs.”
155
The strong, kind, effective, and crusading protagonist in the Philippine drama, as
Worcester saw it, was America and Americans like him.

The “non-Christian tribes” plays a central role in Worcester’s argument for continued
American occupation of the Philippines.
156
His 1921, The Philippines, Past and Present depicts
these tribes as needing protection from “Filipinos;” while the “Filipinos” are depicted as needing
protection from the “Moros.”
157
Worcester saw Christian Filipinos as children too. In his 1899,
The Philippine Islands and Their People, repeated verbatim in his 1921 publication, he describes
“civilized Filipinos” as “utterly unfit for self-government” because they were “’big children who
must be treated like little ones.’”
158
This framing of the colonial relationship that assigns the lack
(puerile people, corruption) to either the Filipinos and the Spanish and casts the Americans in
either a neutral or benevolent light makes a constant appearance in Philippine scholarship.
Worcester, it would seems, is the first in a line of thinkers who structure their analysis of
Philippine history and society in these terms his discourse resonates even today.
159


154
Ibid.
155
Ibid, 662.
156
See Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery, particularly chapters ten and eleven for a detailed
discussion of how Worcester manipulated the anti-slavery issue in the Philippines between 1912 and 1914.
157
He describes “their strong adherence to the Mohammedan faith and their inclination to
propagate it by the sword.” Worcester asks: “Who will hold them in check if the Americans were to go?

Certainly not the Filipinos. They have never been able to do it in the past, and they cannot do it now.” Ibid,
661.
158
Dean C. Worcester, The Philippine Islands and Their People, (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1901), p. 482. Originally published in 1899.
159
See Lewis E. Gleek, Jr., American Institutions in the Philippines, (Manila: Historical
Conservation Society, 1976) and Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines. Gleek’s
project in American Institutions is to evaluate the success of American institutions and traditions in the
Philippines. He documents the far-reaching influence of American institutions and traditions but assigns
failures to Philippine values such as compadres, the malakas principle, the lack of national strength, the
lack of obedience to the law. He says that the question is not per se the appropriateness of American
institutions, but the appropriateness of Philippine values to the functioning of their imported democratic
72
This discourse of the Filipinos (Christian, non-Christian tribal, Muslim) as a
child/children needing protection from itself and from each other is important for two reasons.
First, it lends insight to Worcester’s misinterpretation of the Filipino response to the imposition of
a foreign language as medium of instruction and official language. His discourse of sharply
drawn lines between civilized and uncivilized contains the idea that a people who are incapable of
thought would be incapable as well of opposition. Convinced as he was of the Americans’
protagonist role and of the universal goodness of the project of education in English, Worcester
confused his limited encounter for a breadth of knowledge. In 1900, his only ground for the
implementation of the English policy was that the Filipinos wanted it. The aggressive opposition
mounted by Filipinos to this and many other American policies was cause for the colonial
officials to create a more sophisticated defense. Within a year, this casual and easy rationale for
the English policy had to evolve into a more sophisticated three-point rationale
160
that eventually
evolved into the much-repeated, much-defended, and ubiquitous discourse with a six-point
rationale.

The discourse of the infantile Filipino is important, secondly, because it became the root
of the corollary discourse of civilizational evolution which progresses from primitive to medieval
to modern and which is in turn also the root of the six-point rationale. The uncivilized savage
with an undeveloped and primitive language (1) is in need of a common language to unite them
toward progress (2). The Spanish language is not an option because it is related to the medieval
Spanish formations that promoted an elitism, sometimes called caciqueism (3). The highest rung
in the evolutionary ladder, the most developed, efficient, and democratic rung is represented by

principles.” (page 317) Like Gleek, Glenn May lists American achievements: public education, sanitation,
freedom of speech, road building, economic policies. These he says were “much less self-serving” than
those of other colonial powers. His conclusions about the effectiveness of social engineering programs
instituted by the U.S. is that because of the different personalities, different agendas, and different
management styles among the colonial officials, no real and lasting change occurred. Evident in his
discussion of who he depicts as the heroes of the American colonial government, people like David
Barrows, education director from 1905-1909, is a view of the Filipinos as in need of revolutionary
reshaping into citizens who will be capable of independence.
160
The second Philippine Commission, the Taft Commission which was an executive body (unlike
the Schurman Commission which was an investigative body) mentions three reasons for the policy of
English as the medium of instruction. They were that, first, the use of English was the most practical (for
matters such as textbook production); second, that Spanish was not widely known anyway; and third, that
the locals wanted to learn English. Reports of the Taft Commission, (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1901), 109.
73
English, brought by the Americans. English is an excellent and highly developed language and, it
is sometimes argued, the most democratic of the languages (4). It is also the most efficient and
practical choice for the Philippines (5) and finally the most democratic because apart from
Filipinos wanting it, it will be the great equalizer that will unite them (6).

Historical Evolution and Primitive Philippine Languages and Culture

The idea of progress is premised first on the idea not just of backwardness but of a
direction out of the backwardness as well. The discourse to explain English as the medium of
instruction traces a linear path similar to the path traditionally used to explain the development of
European society from primitive to medieval to modern. The narrative of progress and the idea of
evolution from primitive to medieval to modern was of course present not only in the justification
of English but in the colonial narrative of the whole of Philippine history.
161
In this discourse as
it is used for language, local languages and cultural practices are fixed as primitive; Spanish
colonial practices including education and the implementation of the Spanish language on
Philippine society (though not the language itself) as medieval; and the American education and
language policies as not just modern but exceptionally so. Vicente Rafael has described what he
calls the “hierarchy of languages”
162
in contemporary Philippines. At present, English occupies
the top of the hierarchy as it is the language of higher education, the language of the professions,
the diplomatic corps, multinational business, the legislative and judicial branches of government,
etc. Spanish, which had always been spoken by a very small minority of Filipinos, has become
associated with aristocratic lineage that predated American rule. Tagalog, at the bottom of the
hierarchy, is associated with the masses.
163


161
See Reynaldo C. Ileto, “The Philippine Revolution of 1896 and U.S. Colonial Education”, in
Knowing America’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War, (Honolulu: Center for Philippine
Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1999). Ileto
discusses two Philippine History textbooks that are predicated on the idea of progress and narrate the
history of the Philippines “along a medieval-to-modern axis.”
162

See Chapter 1 of Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translations and Christian
Conversion in Tagalog Society under early Spanish Rule, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University
Press, 1988).
163
See also Vicente L. Rafael, “Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca,” in White
Love and Other Events in Philippine History, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000),
168-169. Rafael’s description here of the three languages is made within the context of “mestizoness and
74
“The Filipino people, taken as a body, are children and, childlike, do not know what is
best for them,”
164
declared Fred W. Atkinson, the first director of education for the Philippines.
Contemporary historians depict him as knowing virtually nothing about the Philippines and
virtually nothing about primary education
165
when he first arrived in the Philippines to take up his
post, yet he was confident that he could ascertain what was best for the Filipinos. Similarly,
Blair and Robertson, commenting on the critique of Leon Maria Guerrero against the Anglo-
Saxonization of the Filipinos through the schools, asserted: “The truth is, Filipinos, in the mass,
are, as regards the purposes of any real education, virginal material to work upon.”
166
The
discourse, based on the idea of a genesis or a coming into being, of a blank slate, an innocent and
ignorant child, or a feral state poised for evolution, is applied as well to the local languages and
culture. James LeRoy in defending the decision to use English as the medium of instruction
sarcastically suggests the use of a vernacular instead and with the move the need to “polish the
dialect…to create in it a literature, to put into the best works of ancient and modern writers, to

Taglish.” The description of Tagalog, therefore, is made from above—from the perspective of the elite
Filipino class. Tagalog, for example is described as “a language for addressing a mass audience.” The

perspective is also made from the position of an outsider, one who does not really use Tagalog and
therefore sees it as a tool for constructing certain social orders like “cultural authenticity,” “the national
order,” or “a fusion of interests between those above and below the social hierarchy.” Rafael describes this
condition as a contemporary one. The argument in this thesis regarding this issue, at least for the
American period is that, first, the Tagalog writers saw Tagalog as a witness to the fulfillment of
cultural authenticity and the national order rather than a tool for constructing them; and second, that
the nationalist elite tapped into this discourse too, albeit sometimes appropriating it in a different way. For
further discussion of this, see chapter six and seven.
164
Fred W. Atkinson, The Philippine Islands, (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1905), 6.
165
In Social Engineering in the Philippines, Glenn May says this of Atkinson: “Six feet, four
inches tall and thirty-five years old, Atkinson was the principal of the high school in Springfield,
Massachusetts. At first glance, he seemed an unlikely candidate. Almost all his experience had been in
secondary school education, and it was obvious that the Americans would concentrate initially on primary
education. . . Although Atkinson had never managed a system of school before, the head of the
Commission [Taft] was willing to take a chance on him. ‘The field is so new in the Philippines that
experience in the United States can hardly seem to furnish much of a guide for what must be done here. It
will be largely original work.’” (80-81). Compare Stanley Karnow’s description of Atkinson in In Our
Image, published nine years later: “Six feet four inches tall, Atkinson was a Harvard graduate with an
advanced degree from Germany who knew nothing about primary education. But Taft named him director
of education for the Philippines, explaining indulgently that the Americans were only experimenting.
‘Experience in the United States can hardly seem to furnish much of a guide for what must be done here. It
will be largely original work.’” (201).
166
Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898,
Volume XLVI (Clevland, Ohio: The Arthur Clark Company, 1907), 367.
75
give it a scientific terminology, and to write the history of the world and the Philippines over
it.”

167

The authority with which these colonials speak was based on a steadfast belief that the
colonial project America was undertaking was a scientific one. In 1898, there was very little
interest and knowledge among Americans of the Philippines. As the colonial enterprise was
taking shape, so was a body of “scientific” knowledge about the Philippines. Ethnologists, social
scientists, linguists, journalist, travelers, and soldiers churned out publications on the Philippines,
some were empirical in nature and others recorded personal impressions. Linguists, economists,
anthropologists, historians, and sociologists from the best American universities took on the
challenge of assisting the colonial government by focusing research and publication in and
offering new courses on the new colonial possessions. University presidents and professors
became colonial officials or consultants to the government.
168

Interest in Philippine languages and literatures was great.
169
Given, however, these
scholars assumptions about the greatness of Western civilization, it is not surprising that their
pronouncements about Philippine languages and Philippine literature depicted them as wanting.
MacKinlay, for example, states “Compared with an Aryan language, Tagalo [sic] is deficient in
many qualities which have made European tongues the vehicle of civilization.”
170
Visayan,
compared to Tagalog is described as “more virile and expressive” but is “blunter as befits a race
of sailors.”
171
Of Philippine literature, Frank R. Blake proclaims, “These languages have produced
little or nothing which can claim to be literature in the sense of elegant writing.”
172
Of Ilocano

literature MacKinlay says, “There is practically no literature except a few romances of the class

167
James A. LeRoy, Philippine Life in Town and Country, (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1905), 218.
168
Franklin Ng, “Knowledge for Empire: Academics and Universities in the Service of
Imperialism” in On Cultural Ground: Essays in International History, Robert David Johnson, ed.,
(Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1994), 123-146.
169
In 1922, Frank Blake published a survey of linguistic studies on Philippine languages done
since 1898. He lists eighty-seven, thirty-four of which were government funded. Frank R. Blake, “The
Part Played by the Publications of the United States Government in the Development of Philippine
Linguistic Studies,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, volume 42 (1922), 147-170.
170
William E. W. MacKinlay, “Memorandum on the Languages of the Philippines,” The Journal
of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland V. 31 (1901), 214.
171
Ibid, 215.
172
Frank R. Blake, “Philippine Literature,” American Anthropologist 13.3 (1911), 449.
76
banished from European literature by Don Quijote.”
173
As Anglo-American aesthetics was the
platform upon which Philippine culture was studied, these findings are not surprising. The
discourse that was set up was so effective and enduring that the acceptance of it persists to today.
As writer Eric Gamalinda tells us, “The perception that English is a sign of progress and
education and the native languages a sign of backwardness has been so successfully instilled in
Filipinos that even today many Filipinos are ashamed to be caught speaking their language.”

174

What is surprising, however is the manner in which colonial officials apparently misread
or misused the existing linguistic studies, sometimes exaggeratingly so. Fred Atkinson, a
graduate of Harvard with advance degrees from Germany,
175
for example, describes the
Philippines and its chaotic linguistic and cultural state, impervious even to the logic and science
as: “a land where…there never was a common dialect, not to mention language; nothing of
importance in the way of native literature existed; and there was such a confused number of
different tribes, each with its own tongue, that ethnologists themselves have not yet worked out
their solution.”
176
The claim of scholarly confusion belies the comprehensive corpus of linguistic
work, documented for example by Blake,
177
that already existed prior to American occupation.
Equivocation is evidenced in the arguments of Charles Burke Elliott who noted that the linguist
Wilhelm von Humboldt declared Tagalog to be the richest and most perfect language of the
Malayo-Polynesian family.
178
Yet within the same paragraph Elliott declares that “it shows no

173
William E.W. MacKinlay, “Some Minor Languages of Luzon,” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 25 (1904), 171. The language in MacKinlay’s article was
unabashedly partisan. In this article, for example, for every language described, information about the
number of men from that language group who have enlisted in the Scouts, Constabulary or Military Police
is also provided. In page 217 of “Memorandum ” (cited above) he closes by stating that further linguistic
studies will “aid the officers and employees of the United States, under whose banner this medley of races

shall find peace, prosperity and true liberty,” By contrast, the language of Frank Blake is more neutral and
at times even encouraging (see footnote 177). Blake was openly critical of MacKinlay In page 157 of “The
Part Played…” (cited above) he calls MacKinlay’s work “pretentious,” “distinctly disappointing,” “meager
and unsatisfactory,” and “inferior.” Perhaps the veneer of objectivity demanded of scholars today was
expected of scholars as well in the first decade of the 20
th
Century.
174
Eric Gamalinda, “English Is Your Mother Tongue/Ang Ingles Ay ang Tongue ng Ina Mo.” In
Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999, ed.
Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, 253, (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
175
Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, 201.
176
Atkinson, The Philippine Islands, 403.
177
Blake, “The Part Played…,” 147-148.
178
See Wilhelm Von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Languge-Structure and
Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
77
capacity for growth…had no vitality and little literature worthy of the name.”
179
Homer C. Stuntz
also takes on the scholars head-on: “Academic critics in American sanctums, manufacturing their
facts by aid of strong imaginations pour out scorn upon the attempt to ignore ‘their native
language, their literature, the thousand-fold stimuli of their environment.‘ The bold fact is, that
the Filipinos have no literature—none!”
180
Daniel Williams, who traveled throughout the

Philippines as part of the staff of the Philippine Commission in 1901 declared that “none of these
dialects possess any literature of consequence, and to give instruction in any of them would
simply perpetuate the provincialism of the people.”
181
Bernard Moses, member of the Philippine
Commission cautioned against education in the vernacular which does not have any developed
literature: “The boy who grows to manhood knowing only a language without a literature finds
that as a result of his training in school he has not the means for increasing his knowledge and he
very readily falls back into the mental darkness of the semi-savage state.”
182
These hyperbolic
pronouncements are born out of a refusal to acknowledge evidence to the contrary. Frank
Carpenter for example, extols the achievements of the colonial government in the area of
education claiming that the “coming of the regiment of teachers was a more remarkable invasion
than that of our soldiers” and that these teachers had to toil because “there was no common
language.” In the very next paragraph, however, he documents Tagalog’s popularity and
prevalence, followed again by a triumphalist declaration of the American education project:
The Manila newspapers with the largest circulation is printed in the
mother tongue of the Tagalogs, who are culturally the most advanced of the
Filipino groups. This is the language of more than fifteen hundred books and
many periodicals are printed in it. More of the popular songs, love stories, and
poems are written in Tagalog than in any other dialect of the Islands. Yet in

Originally published in 1836. Von Humboldt finds in the Philippines “the most richly developed and
individual state of language” of all languages of the “Malayan community,” (p.11). Of the “indigenous
element” of language (meaning that part of the language distinct from Sanskrit) he declares: “I find its
character most fully and purely evolved in the Tagalic tongue.” (p.20). In his discussion of verbs in the
Malayan languages and of the syllables prefixed to the basic word he says: “These syllables were obviously
not always so numerous and finely differentiated as we find in the Tagalic grammarians.” (p.77).
179

Elliott, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government, 227.
180
Homer C. Stuntz, The Philippines and the Far East, (Cincinnati: Jennings and Pye, 1904), 210.
181
Williams, The Oddysey of the Philippine Commission, 132.
182
Qtd in Forbes, The Philippine Islands, Volume 1, 440; repeated verbatim (but not attributed to
Moses) in United States, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, Description of the Philippines,
(Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1903), 227.
78
twenty-five years we have accomplished more toward giving the Filipinos a
common language than the Spaniards did in three centuries.
183


The very obvious disregard for a fuller and more accurate picture about the language situation in
the Philippines, the perpetuation of a lie, was an essential element of the logic to explain why
English had to be made the medium of instruction.

Historical Evolution and Medieval Spanish Social Formations
The contrast to the medieval and benighted state that American colonial officials scripted
for the Spanish occupation of the Philippines
184
was, of course, the enlightenment of their own.
Atkinson describes an “awakening” after a crisis that brings new ideas and understandings about
the condition of man and the role of education to a civilization. For examples of enlightenment
he gives the United States after the Civil War and Germany after the treaty of Westphalia.
185
The
examples, symptomatic of how the Americans envisioned their enlightenment, refer to the ideas

of the equality of the races (the Civil War) and of the separation of church and state (Westphalia).
Civilization is achieved principally when these advanced ideas are to be conveyed to a population
through popular education. This assumption is indicated most forcefully in the first sentence of
the Shurman report. “It is evident that the fitness of any people to maintain a popular form of
government must be closely dependent upon the prevalence of knowledge and enlightenment
among the masses.”
186
It is by following this logic that the numerous colonial officials,
academics, and travel writers who constructed the discourse of English in the Philippines argued
for the connection between language and social formation. Following their arguments, Spanish
came to represent a medieval feudal structure and English came not only to represent but actually
be the language of democracy.

183
Frank G. Carpenter, Through the Philippines and Hawaii, (Garden City and New York:
Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1929), 49-51.
184
See Maria Gloria Cano Garcia, “The ‘Spanish Colonial Past’ in the Construction of Modern
Philippine History: A Critical Inquiry into the (Mis)Use of Spanish Sources” for voluminous examples of
this strategy and for an explanation of how the strategy was carried out with systematic precision.
185
Atkinson, The Philippine Islands, 380.
186
Report of the Philippine Commission (Schurman), 17.
79
Unable to deny the material evidence for public instruction that had been instituted by the
Spanish, the Americans launched a two-pronged attack on the nature of Spanish efforts at mass
education. First, was the claim that this education had been merely religious and superstitious.
The second claim was that Spanish occupation of the Philippines fostered the foil of democracy,
caciquism. Caciquism is described by Leroy as a kind of “rural bossism,” that is reminiscent of

“the South before the war.” He identifies it as the “prime feature of the village life of the
Filipinos during the entire three hundred years old Spanish control” and as “the chief drawback
to the effective working of the autonomous municipal code which was put into operation by the
Taft Commission.”
187

Early on, the first two Philippine Commissions endeavored to investigate education under
the Spanish. The first commission, the Schurman Commission, provided a four-page description
of lack in its report of education under the Spanish. The report became the basis for
recommendations to improve the situation. The Taft Commission reprised the same description
of a pathetic Spanish attempt at public education in order to contrast it to the strides and successes
the Americans had made in a matter of a year. Both focus their descriptions on the extreme
emphasis placed upon religious education and on the utter lack of facilities. The Schurman report
reads: “education in Christian doctrine is placed before reading and writing, and, if the natives are
to be believed, in many of the more remote districts instruction began and ended with this subject
and was imparted in the local native dialects at that.”
188
The Taft report reads: “in the typical
provincial school at first a kind of religious primer was read in the native language, and that later
a book on Christian doctrine was taught. The text-books found in the schools were crude, and
provided a large amount of religious instruction.”
189
The Schurman report makes much of how
instruction in Spanish was withheld: “It is further and persistently charged that the instruction in
Spanish was in very many cases purely imaginary, because the local friars, who were formerly ex
officio school inspectors, not only prohibited it, but took active measures to enforce their

187
James Leroy, Philippine Life in Town and Country, (New York: Putnam, 1905), 172-173.
188

Report of the Philippine Commission (Schurman), 31.
189
Report of the Philippine Commission (Taft), 106.
80
dictum.”
190
The Taft report, however, explicitly makes a charge of Spanish education producing a
kind of elitism: “a few persons have stood out prominently as educated Filipinos, while a great
mass of the people have either not been educated at all or furnished only the rudiments of
knowledge.”
191
This depiction suggested that Spanish education policies were based on the idea
that the objective was to keep the public superstitious and separated from the Spanish. It also
suggested that the objective was to withhold Filipinos from progress and to keep them benighted.
This presentation contrasts to their own presentation of the American project which was focused
only on the upliftment of the masses.
LeRoy repeating this two-pronged attack and affirming American exceptionalism says,
The education of the former regime had, though a majority of the
Christian population could read or write, been woefully deficient and inefficient. .
. from five to ten per cent of the Christianized population could speak Spanish
sufficiently to conduct real conversation in it, and those who could so speak it
were, in the main, the wealthy few of the villages and the better-class Filipinos of
Manila. The masses were unreached (except by religion, and in that carried little
beyond superstition) and ignorant. No plan which did not primarily aim at
reaching below and bringing aim at reaching below and bringing them up could
be worthy of the American name.
192


David Barrows, Director of Public Instruction from 1902-1909, refrained the exact same

sentiment in 1907:
Popular education, while by no means wholly neglected under the
Spanish government, was inadequate, and was continually opposed by the
clerical and conservative Spanish forces, who feared that the liberating of the
Filipino people would be the loosening of the control of both Spanish state and
church. . . the American government is as anxious to destroy ignorance and
poverty as the Spanish government and the Spanish church were desirous of
preserving these deeply unfortunate conditions.
193


Atkinson, likewise, expresses a similar argument: “. . . in the Philippines the masses have learned
little else than the catechism. . . Spain justified her conquest here only on religious grounds and
failed because she did not take upon herself in addition, just that moral obligation which we have
accepted.”
194
Carpenter poetically delivers a similar sentiment: “It is often said Spanish
conquerors came with a sword in one hand and a cross in the other. We may have gone into the

190
Report of the Philippine Commission (Schurman), 31
191
Report of the Philippine Commission (Taft), 105.
192
LeRoy, Philippine Life in Town and Country, 216.
193
David Barrows, History of the Philippines, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1905), 314.
194
Atkinson, The Philippine Islands, 11-13.
81

Islands with a gun, but we also carried a schoolbook.”
195
The discourse here is certainly one of
evolution: Spanish colonization effected some improvements but also created antiquated
formations.
America, however, possessed the newer, more modern, and more superior culture. This
superiority was inextricably linked to the nobility and altruism of upholding democracy and
equality for all. Probably no statement about the American commitment to progress and its own
democratic principles is as dramatic as that made by travel writer John Bancroft Devins.
Contrasting the American mindset to that of the Spanish, Devins argues that the Spanish held that
“it was unwise to teach the native a common tongue; to keep them tractable it was necessary to
keep them divided.”
196
The American thinking was that “a common tongue may bring rebellion
and war, even that is better than a peace maintained only by denying the Filipino people the first
requisite to national progress; and therefore the introduction of American schools and American
school-teachers.”
197
This exact same sentiment is repeated by Williams: “we propose to do at
once what Spain never did in all her sovereignty; i.e., teach the people one language—English—
throughout the entire archipelago. Although this policy may create a single tongue to criticize us
and to demand our withdrawal, we are big enough to take this risk and meet it when it comes.”
198

American dedication to the betterment and progress of the Filipino is depicted as selfless,
unassailable and would be defended even to the detriment of their own security. In this discourse,
the ideas of education, language, progress, and democracy are brought together and thus English
becomes the logical solution to the problem created by the Spanish. The foil to the Spanish
language that promoted caciqueism, was English. English was what Atkinson called “the great
equalizer.”

199


Historical Evolution and Modern American Social Formations

195
Carpenter, Through the Philippines and Hawaii, 48.
196
John Bancroft Devins, An Observer in the Philippines or Life in Our New Possessions, (Boston:
American Tract Society, 1905), 191.
197
Ibid.
198
Williams, The Oddysey of the Philippine Commission, 133.
199
Atkinson, The Philippine Islands, 408.