“War is a great silencer of hypocrisy.”—James H. Blount
James H. Blount is the author of the book, The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1912.
Blount came to the country as an Army Officer from 1899-1901, who was later appointed into a civil position, as United States District Judge in the Philippines from 1901-1905. As such, he participated in the war with the Filipinos and later presided in assumed peace over cases involving Filipinos.
In the preface to the book, Blount writes: “To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer.”
Blount had the benefit of two perspectives—that of a conqueror and a purveyor of justice in a colonized world. To conclude a heroic shift in attitude in Blount is naïve, but the book remains a treasure chest of histories where the voices of the colonial administrators are mixed with the military might and, in the interstices, the nearly silenced points-of-view of Filipino leaders.
Our problem therefore as readers of the histories parlayed by Blount is to bracket each episode described. Each bracket allows a pause that could well give us another way of fleshing out narratives withheld from us for a long time. After all, every story about this island-republic, in failed revolutions or deceptive peace, there hides both truth and lies, archival distortion and documentary impressions. While the writer of the book has a position that presents a more favorable—and flattering—insight about the Philippines and the birthing of a nation, Blount shall remain an outsider who provides judgment, the lawyer who was first a soldier accustomed to the ways of the weapon and, later, the lawyer steeped in the tradition of Western jurisprudence.
What value does the book, now re-read, possess amid the continuing colonization and Americanization of our country? As a non-historian (a status I have always been proud of), I sense in the book an adventitious opportunity to be a voyeur of text and images closeted in the educated Filipino gaze. This is a gaze that has been schooled in Western traditions and, for all the adventure in pedagogy, has yet to be fully brought out in the open.
Why the caveat? Because there are entries in the book of Blount that threaten to induce this feeling of the American colonial legacy being benign. There lies the prison that we have been in for many years, long after the last American governor-general had passed on.
Still, the voyeur in us can be pleasured by some of Blount’s words: “The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation [the America] the voice of a weaker subject people [the Filipinos] who passionately and rightly long to be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for the last fourteen years [1898-1912], sometimes ignorantly, sometimes viciously, and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous idea that where the end is benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary to the end.”
Ethnocentrism wins! The America is always “the great free nation” and us, the weaker subject who also want to be free.
The rest is history. On March 12, 1912, the Jones Bill is filed in the House of Representatives. The bill carries the title “A bill to establish a qualified independence for the Philippines, and to fix the date when such qualified independence shall become absolute and complete.”
Blount describes the bill as having a “supreme virtue” because it promises and fixes the date of independence to July 4, 1921.
Then follow the more supreme (my word) details about election. Blount takes note of the Philippine Assembly in 1903, whose 80 members each represented some 90,000 people. In the footnote is written this information: “The total population of the Philippine Archipelago on March 2, 1903, was 7,635,426. Of this number, 6,987,686 enjoyed a considerable degree of civilization, while the remainder, 647,740 consisted of wild people.”
Given that population profile, who shall be allowed to vote then?
Blount recalls the existing law in the Philippines where the qualifications for voting consist of two types: property qualification and educational qualification. Blount has more details: “In any case, in order to vote, the individual must be 21 years old, and must have lived for six months in the place where he offers to vote. The property qualification requires that the would-be voter owns at least $250 worth of property, or pay a tax to the amount of $15.”
Blount explains how the Americans adopted the Spanish cedula system, where individuals pay tax according to a graduated scale and where certain civic rights are given to those who pay the higher tax and denied to those who pay less.
Regarding the educational qualification, the would-be voter is required to speak and write either English or Spanish, or must have held certain municipal offices under the Spanish regime, before the American occupation. The Jones Bill, according to Blount, adds to the educational qualification the “speaking, reading, and writing of the native dialect of a given locality.”
Assuming similar voter’s requirements are imposed for the next election, what kind of politicians do you think will be elected to lead this nation? Just some wild thoughts, really.
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1 comment
rp was the only colony of the u.s.
the country was a prize catch for the u.s. because they could partake in the division of south america and africa.