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3 Agents of Assimilation Female Authority, Male Domesticity, and the Familial Dramas of Colonial Tutelage In the late morning of July 23, 1901, crowds of people gathered at Pier 12 of the San Francisco wharf to bid farewell to the U.S. transport ship the Thomas. Among the ship’s passengers were 509 American teachers on their way to the Philippines, enlisted to work in the fledgling public school system instituted during the U.S. occupation of the islands.1 The Thomasites, as the teachers came to be called, were not the first envoy of Americans recruited to teach in the Philippines; the Sheridan had arrived a month earlier, bringing with it forty-eight teachers, and more were to arrive during the following year, such that, by 1902, there were more than a thousand Americans teaching in Philippine schools. This was the largest cohort, however, and as such, the departure of the Thomas represented a significant moment in colonial occupation of the Philippines and in the establishment of colonial dominance through President William McKinley ’s program of “benevolent assimilation.” Significantly, this was not the Thomas’s first trip on this imperial route. The ship, originally named the Persia, was constructed by Irish shipbuilders in 1893; after serving as a commercial transport under British and American commercial lines, the U.S. government purchased the Persia from the British in July 1898. Renamed the Thomas, the transport had first carried soldiers and supplies between Cuba and Puerto Rico, then expanded its imperial route to include the Philippines. This was its seventh trip between Manila and San Francisco, previously carrying soldiers as reinforcements for what Secretary of State John Hay called the “splendid little war” against Spain. Essentially a ship of imperial conquest, the Thomas was this time carrying a new battalion, what one passenger, the Agents of Assimilation 105 journalist and teacher Adeline Knapp, called “an army, not of conquest, but of education.”2 As a transport for teachers, the Thomas was refitted to mark a new phase in the colonial strategy in the Philippines, timed to combat the growing unpopularity of the U.S. intervention in the Philippines and to mask the growing brutality of the U.S. military’s campaign to crush Philippine resistance to continued colonial rule. The launch of the Thomas was part of a larger public-relations display. Three weeks before, on July 4, U.S. colonial administrators had declared the end of the war in the Philippines and celebrated the inauguration of a new civil government under the leadership of William Howard Taft, despite continued widespread resistance to the U.S. presence on the islands.3 Against a backdrop of parades, balloons, and balls, Taft’s inauguration as civil governor on the United States’ Independence Day marked an ideological shift in the colonial strategy. The festivities of Independence Day in 1901 could hardly herald the success of the United States Army in securing the consent of Filipinos to U.S. governance on the islands; the continued guerrilla strategy of resistance on the part of Filipino revolutionaries wreaked havoc on the U.S. military’s claims for peaceful control of the islands, and the hollowness of such claims were made increasingly evident by the brutality of the United States’ maneuvers for military control, such as the forcible relocation of Filipino civilians into “reconcentration” camps and the deliberate destruction of land, villages, and crops. Furthermore, Americans at home had begun to perceive the human cost of the continued conflict, as well as its moral and ideological complications . William Howard Taft made light of the conduct of American troops by asserting that “there never was a war conducted, whether against inferior races or not, in which there was more compassion and more restraint and more generosity.”4 Soldiers’ letters told another story, however. Correspondence sent home and circulated by organizations such as the Anti-Imperialist League depicted a brutal war in which whole towns were razed and civilians killed; they described in detail the “water cure” and other acts of torture used against Filipino soldiers or civilians suspected of collaborating with the “insurgents.”5 Such testimony made fictions of a peaceful or willing adaptation to U.S. colonial rule, rendering the façade of benevolence an insufficient antidote for the contradictions between the language of benevolent uplift and the practice of violent subjection in securing the colonial order. It is precisely such a contradiction that rendered this voyage of the [18.118.137.243] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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