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  • God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 by Susan K. Harris
  • Donald Pease
God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902. By Susan K. Harris. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011.

I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool, and all His work must be contemplated with respect.

Susan K. Harris has assembled an impressive archive for God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 consisting of congressional debates, political speeches, textbooks, novels, newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, sermons, short stories, memoirs, poems, essays, letters, and cartoons that disclose the racialized religious discourse with which turn-of-the-century Americans deliberated over the annexation of the Philippines. The book’s argumentative line builds upon themes familiar to scholars working on a comparative history of imperial and anti-imperial formations. Harris’s description of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism as underpinning the contentions of anti-annexationists as well as American imperialists complicates Reginald Horsman’s account of this belief structure in Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism; her explanations of the significance [End Page 85] of the Empire to the formation of United States national identity confirms the core insight of Amy Kaplan’s magisterial Anarchy and Empire; Harris’s account of the involvement of U.S. religious organization in the Americanization of the Philippines complements Ian Tyrell’s conjectures in Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (2010).

Harris’s compelling readings of key texts in U.S. culture and history at the inception of U.S. imperialism also importantly contributes to current debates over textbooks, Christian nationalism, and the Unites States’ role in global Realpolitik. But Harris assigns her project an additional purpose at the book’s conclusion where she gives expression to the hope that the discourse she has elaborated in God’s Arbiters “will help us understand some of the conversations that we are having in the twenty-first century, especially as those conversations rest on assumptions about religion, race, and what it takes to be an ‘American’” (204).

The discourse to which Harris refers was generated out of a symbiosis of evangelical Protestant theology and liberal democratic ideals. The discourse emerged at the moment in United States history when White Protestant Anglo-Saxon ideals confronted the racial and religious realities of imperial expansionism at the turn of the century. The complex interdependence of the theological and political elements of this discourse supplied the basis for often contentious discussions of the United States government’s discordant responsibilities to the domestic republic and to the global order in the age of Empire.

Until 1898, the United States government was unwilling to assume the political, administrative, and moral burdens of a colonizing power. But in December 1898, the Treaty of Paris forced Spain to give up Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. God’s Arbiters specifically focuses on the role this discourse played in re-configuring the core attributes of U.S. national identity—White Protestant Christianity, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and enlightenment political rationality—after the Treaty of Paris brought all three into crisis.

The constitution may have provided the textual basis for the nation’s ruling political ideals, but, according to Harris, the discourse forged to engage the Treaty of Paris fortified it with a theological subtext that endowed Americans with the divinely ordained mission to decide on the destinies of nations across the world. Harris traces the origins of Americans’ felt responsibility to educate and uplift racially and religiously inferior cultures to a complex dynamic animating the national mythos:

Imagining itself within a mythic national history that credited the country’s material success on its unique fusions of Enlightenment and Protestant thought, [the United States] incorporated an evangelical mission to broadcast its formula to the rest of the world. At the same time, its own racial ideologies rejected the possibility that non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants could ever emulate the American story . . . [because] for all their efforts, Americans could not replicate themselves in the Philippines, nor, at bottom, did they wish to do so.

(81) [End Page 86]

Harris divides her book into three sections. God’s Arbiters...

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