Glenn Anthony May 1945–2020

Glenn Anthony May will most probably be remembered in Philippine historiography for his controversial book published amid the fervor for the centenary of the Philippine revolution against Spain. The book appeared in 1996 in the United States, and a Philippine edition came in early 1997. An exercise in historical methodology, Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-Creation of Andres Bonifacio (May 1996, 1997) questioned the historical basis for the conventional knowledge about Andrés Bonifacio, asserting this image was founded on unverifiable or forged documents. The "Bonifacio myth," May said, was a fabrication. Not surprisingly, the book became the object of irate reactions for its perceived irreverence against the nation's icon. In 1999 the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies invited me to review the book, and I scored it for its inconsistencies in logic (Aguilar 1999). Rather than getting annoyed with me, Glenn, whom I did not know personally at that time, reached out to me. My critique had become a bridge. That experience was an eye-opener to the possibility that individuals could disagree at the level of ideas but be collegial in person. In this part of the world not too many make that distinction.

May was a veteran at upsetting his readers. After initially enduring "the most boring five months" of his life reading legal cases at the Stanford Law School (as he said in an email on 11 March 2011), he returned to Yale

At the 2006 conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Makati City.

Photo courtesy of Michael Charleston "Xiao" Chua, https://xiaochua.net/2013/04/16/xiaotime-15-april-2013-dokumento-ng-pagkatalaga-kay-emilio-jacinto/

University, where he had done his undergraduate studies and then obtained his PhD in History in 1975. Building on his doctoral dissertation, he published his first book five years later. Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (May 1980) examined US efforts at political education, formal education, and economic development in its new colony. Contrary to the prevailing view at that time that the US was a "successful colonial power" (ibid., xvii) and, unlike its European counterparts, had achieved something exceptional in the Philippines, Social Engineering argued that US colonial policy failed: The poor remained under an oligarchy; the country remained economically dependent on the US; and reforms in the education system were inconsistent and ill conceived and executed. Deflating the Americans' self-congratulatory claims about the success of colonial education was particularly provocative. Without using the term, Glenn asserted that US colonial policy in the Philippines failed because it was essentially racist.

In 1987 he published under the imprint of New Day a collection of nine essays under the title A Past Recovered, which he described as "either explicitly revisionist or otherwise overtly provocative" (May 1987, vii). The title was May's riposte to Renato Constantino's (1975) A Past Revisited, which Glenn described as "a mixture of propaganda and advocacy" rather than history (May 1987, 11). Although he conceded that to some extent he could be "guilty of mindless positivism," he nonetheless endorsed the nationalist agenda and admitted "a good deal of admiration" for Constantino as well as Teodoro Agoncillo (ibid., vii–viii). He was concerned, he said, that the country should "produce a generation of nationalists who are able to think critically" as a result of learning not "a new dogma" but the rigors of historical methodology, imparting to them "the critical use of sources and a healthy skepticism about received wisdom" (ibid., 24).

A significant essay in A Past Recovered examined forty-two municipal elections in Batangas between 1887 and 1894. "Civic Ritual and Political Reality: Municipal Elections in the Late Nineteenth Century" described electoral rituals as well as "the techniques employed by the rival factions [that] were just as creatively illegal as those that we have come to know in the twentieth-century Philippines" (ibid., 46). Moreover, in analyzing the local elite, May argued that the officeholders were of modest economic means, and the true power brokers were...