God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (review)

Susan K. Harris’s God’s Arbiters builds upon a familiar thesis in American literary and cultural scholarship: that the national myth depends upon white Anglo-Saxon Protestant values. Like Reginald Horsman in Race and Manifest Destiny (1980), Harris argues that white Christian values shaped internal and external colonial ventures, racializing colonial subjects as excluded others rather than as new citizens. Harris broadens this argument to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines and the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), events shaping modern U.S. imperialism but usually overshadowed by the Spanish-American War (1898). Famous for his criticism of U.S. policies in the Philippines, Mark Twain serves as a cultural index of domestic anti-imperialism in this period. The book also treats critics of U.S. imperialism in Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines.

Clearly organized in three sections analyzing the religious and racial factors used to justify or oppose annexation, rationalize exclusive notions of U.S. citizenship, and how policies in the Philippines were viewed around the world, God’s Arbiters displays the continuity of U.S. imperialism from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Harris’ detailed discussions of how educational practices after annexation were shaped primarily by white Protestantism reveal the folly of our colonial policies. Our well-intentioned effort to impose English as the national language and Protestant social values on Filipinos subjected to Spanish Catholicism for centuries seems ludicrous were it not so destructive. With few exceptions, American educators in the Philippines used the reluctance of its people to accept an alien language and religious values as evidence of Filipino/a “backwardness” and justification of our colonial rule.

Harris provides a clear counter-narrative to U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, as well as Cuba and Puerto Rico, by reading closely the works of Cuba’s José Martí, Nicaragua’s Rubén Darío, and Uruguay’s José Enrique Rodó. Harris extends Martí’s theorization of “Nuestra America” to include the anti-imperialism of Filipino revolutionaries, like Emilio Aguinaldo and Apolinario Mabini, who used their knowledge of U.S. constitutional law to challenge the hypocrisies of the U.S. state and demand equal rights for all those living under U.S. authority. By linking Latin American and Filipino/a resistance to U.S. imperialism in theoretical rather than practical politics, Harris shows how hemispheric and transpacific studies can be coordinated in the new American Studies. Her interpretations of Aguinaldo’s and Mabini’s writings are also noteworthy for her attention to their political. Aguinaldo, the Filipino rebel (and first President) notoriously tricked into capture by General Funston, changed his mind about U.S. occupation in the course of his long life, eventually considering the U.S. a lesser of evils among the nations vying for control of the Philippines. Mabini, who died of cholera in 1903, reveals how our imperial policies contradict our Constitution’s idealism. God’s Arbiters is an invaluable scholarly interpretation and critique of U.S. imperial policies still corrupting our democratic aspirations.