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The Legacy of ‘American Exceptionalism’ in the Philippines’ Democratic Imaginary

Adele H Webb
University of Sydney
- For APSA panel, Structural Legacies of Colonialism, 31 Aug 2017 4pm –

ABSTRACT

A century before George W. Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ in Afghanistan, US military

forces invaded the Philippines in the name of democracy. The four decades of
American colonial occupation that followed are still largely seen in popular and
scholarly literature, as a benign attempt to establish democracy in the 'Far East'. In
political terms, scholars have investigated the legacies of this period in the formation
of institutions, including a decentralized system of elections and public education
system, and in the cunning adaptive strategies of the elite. Few works have
questioned the legacy of the representational practices of ‘colonial democracy’, in
public imaginings of legitimate political agency and the legitimate exercise of power.
This paper argues that the U.S. representations of social meanings and social
identities used to legitimize the military-led colonial project in the Philippines from
1899, shaped and constrained Filipino public imaginaries of democracy.

The study analyzes the Philippines Free Press weekly newspaper over five years,
from independence in 1946 until 1950. Editorial texts, cartoons, and letters from
readers are coded using a discursive practices approach, to assess the extent to which
U.S. colonial discourse is reproduced in local discourses. It finds that both staff and
readers of the newspaper overwhelmingly framed the Philippines’ autonomy and
agency as resulting from the ‘benevolent’, ‘patient’, ‘divine’ nature of the United
States; at the same time, Filipino capacity for democracy was framed in negative
terms, as dependent on proving themselves worthy of the generosity shown by the
United States. The paper demonstrates the way in which the use of ‘democracy’ as
a discourse to legitimize hierarchy in international politics can have anti-democratic
effects - on the way the ‘democratized’ actors perceive their own political agency,
and on the way ‘legitimate’ democratic behavior is imagined. As well as having
implications for foreign policy, the study raises concerns about academic literature
that renders invisible the role of democracy as discourse in constructing twentieth
century American global hegemony.
 2

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary understandings of democracy in the social sciences draw their roots, for
the most part, from the development of democratic theory in the post-1945 era. The ‘global
spread’ of democracy to nations in diverse regions and contexts is considered testimony
to the universal resonance of the western liberal democratic ideal, and has resulted in a
naturalizing of the evolution of democratic states as originating in the ‘western’ nations of
Western Europe and North America.

Colonization and democracy, on the other hand, are presumed antithetic, with the
distinction having become an ordering principle in post-1945 international relations. Yet
both the superiority of ‘western’ democracy and its distinction from the colonial past need
to be denaturalized. Not only does the teleological narrative of democratization reify the
global hierarchy of ‘democratized’ versus ‘democratizing’ countries (Slater 2006) as a
natural ‘state-of-affairs’; historically oriented studies expose an uncomfortably close
relationship between the emergence of liberal democracy and the practice of colonialism
and empire.

Yet the imperial dimension is absent from most contemporary discussions of democracy.
The lack of historicity that has accompanied the development of theory over the last half
century has erased liberal democracy’s complicated roots of empire; more particularly, it
has erased what Spivak labelled its “epistemic violence” (1988:280-81) – the centrality to
Western epistemology of the construction of an ‘Other’.

Edward Said’s ‘orientalism’ (2003) reminds us that the construction of a ‘self’ and ‘other’
binary that legitimised asymmetrical power in colonial practice, should be at the center of
discussions of colonialism’s legacies. In the tradition of Said’s work, two questions are
pressing in studying colonial and postcolonial histories: first, who claims the power to
narrate, or as Gregory (2004) puts it, “who assumes the power to represent others as other,
and on what basis?” (8); and second, “what do those meanings do?” (8).

This study undertakes to address both questions in relation to an illuminating part of

American imperial history that has been relatively under-studied in the colonialism
literature - the annexation of the entire Philippine archipelago in 1901.

Much of the discussion about colonialism, including its structural legacies, has centred on
the former empires of Europe. The United States, until recent decades, has been absent
from the discussion, with scholars often enamoured with de Tocqueville’s 1840s account
of Democracy in America, and the notion of ‘American Exceptionalism’. Yet the United
 3

States’ imperial pursuits, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, have importance
and a contemporary relevance in discussions of colonial legacies.

American political science scholars in particular, have demonstrated little patience for the
continuing problems of governance and institutional legitimacy in the postcolonial
Philippines. Yet I argue that by ignoring the legacy of American colonial discursive
constructions, scholars have rendered invisible important power dynamics at play. After
all, American colonialism in the Philippines was distinct from the ‘old world’ European
empires to which US colonial officials distanced themselves and their own endeavours,
but the distinction was perhaps most prominently a rhetorical one. Colonial agents
distinguished American policy in the Philippines as ‘benevolent imperialism’ and
‘democratic tutelage’. To reconcile America’s ‘exceptionalism’ with the annexing of a
foreign territory, the Filipino was discursively constructed in official policies and political
discourse as savage, child-like and incapable of self-rule. By doing so, President McKinley
and the United States government created for itself a moral imperative to intervene.

The main empirical contribution of this study comes from taking up the second part of
Said’s postcolonial challenge – of examining, as Singh and Schmidt (2000) put it, what are
“the effects such colonial discourses continue to have on the colonized after the colonizer
as physical agent has been removed” (18). While imperial discourses of the past cannot be
assumed to have produced fixed ways of thinking, we can reasonably expect that they did
shape and constrain imaginings in ways that have material impact. Thus, it is important
to understand how colonial representational practices influence postcolonial political and
social imaginaries. I interrogate the legacy of American representational practices during
colonial period on the postcolonial Filipino political imaginary.

There are methodological difficulties in analyzing implicit power. Not least, because the
line between exogenous and endogenous sources of social reality becomes blurred. In
addressing these challenges, scholars have tended to concentrate on language as a useful
source of data. By employing a linguistic analytic method, I interrogate the legacy of the
implicit power practices at work during American rule – through the constitution of
particular modes of subjectivity and the interpretative dispositions they legitimize - that
made possible the continuation of a hierarchical relationship between the United States
and the Philippines even into the postcolonial period.

The study’s central finding is that the construction of ‘reality’ found in a dominant post-
independent Philippine discourse – and the narrative of the inferior Filipino subject - aligns
with the American colonial discourse which was used to justify the denial of Philippine
political agency through a policy of ‘democratic tutelage’. Based on the findings, I make
the argument that the United States’ imperialism in the Philippines left a legacy in the
 4

Filipino imaginary, shaping the meaning of democracy and constraining the construction
of the Filipino subjectivity. The mechanism was a colonial rhetoric carried within a
middle-class discourse.

Three parts form the body of this study: the first discusses the relationship between empire
and democracy, and postcolonial theory’s challenge to interrogate the legacy of
representational practices that construct a binary between ‘self’ and ‘other’; the second
examines the case of America in the Philippines, and the rhetorical practices used to
legitimize the annexation of the archipelago even against the persistent opposition of the
Filipino population; the third part presents the findings of a discursive analysis of the
Philippines Free Press newspaper between 1946 and 1950.

PART ONE
Colonial ‘knowledge’ and Postcolonial legacies

Rather than simply representing the beginning of the global spread of the Euro-American
democratic ideal, the mid-twentieth century also marked the beginning of the era of
decolonization, and a transition from a world of empires, to the dominant socio-political
form of the nation-state (Go 2009:783). Up until the end of the Second World War, the
social world was constituted by imperial relations, and it was in the context of the world’s
leading colonial empires of Britain and France that the ideas of mass citizenship and liberal
political economy emerged during the nineteenth century, as Stovall writes, with colonial
control the “handmaiden” (2013:69). Not only did the modern era see the coincidence of
ideas of freedom and empire, there was a codetermination which cannot be overlooked –
the ideology of liberal democracy not only served to transform the ‘civilizing’ rationale for
empire, it brought about the biggest expansion of colonialism in history (Stovall 2013:72).

The liberal imperial project of the nineteenth century was based on the idea of “global
difference” – this meant “the difference between the civilization of the metropole and an
Other whose main feature was its primitiveness” (Connell 1997:1516). The democratic
revolutions at home, which were linked to the decline and ultimate abolition of slavery,
were also concerned with ‘the white man’s burden’, or what the French called la mission
civilisatrice. While at home, the expansion of democracy meant the integration of other
classes into the political sphere, imperial liberal democracy was based upon the
construction of difference – between citizens in the metropole on the one hand, and
subjects in the colonies on the other. The difference was based on race, and it legitimized
the exclusion of whole peoples from basic liberal rights (Stovall 2013:73).
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This wasn’t reserved to the realm of realpolitik. As sociology was becoming

institutionalized in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the contrast between the
metropole and the colonial Other became the centrepiece of the system of knowledge
about “origins” and “progress” (Connell 1997:1520). As Connell’s work explains, the
“grand ethnography” of sociology’s comparative method helped to resolve democratic
imperialism’s internal contradiction, by replacing imperial power with a ‘knowledge’
about ‘social evolution’, the legitimacy of which was provided by evolutionary biology
(1997:1531). The impacts of such colonial representational practices cannot be assumed
to have ended with the era of decolonization and the global spread of democracy. After
all, colonial legacies traverse the boundaries of the historical eras we use to categorise the
past.

The work that has been one of the most transformative in thinking about the relationship
between colonial knowledge and power is Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism. Bringing
together Foucault’s concept of discourse with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Said
exposed the power of imperial knowledge, specifically the asymmetrical power relations
between the observer and the observed (Guhin and Wyrtzen 2013:234), and brought into
focus the way meanings are produced, circulated and legitimated through representational
practices. Said’s work is largely attributed as the foundational text of what has become
‘postcolonial studies’, which frames colonialism not strictly in terms of political or
economic dimensions, but as having a more insidious legacy in the continuing legitimacy
of signs, metaphors and narratives which constitute a reality that protects the colonialists
power and privilege by sustaining the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Gregory
2004:255).

Applied to the study of democracy in the last century, Said’s Orientalism and other key
postcolonial texts inspire an interrogation of the colonial and imperial traces in
contemporary democratic identities and formations – not only questioning how
Eurocentric theory of democracy have gained strength “by setting itself off against the
Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground of self” (Said 2003); but also by asking
to what degree the ‘imperial gaze’ of Eurocentric epistemologies has altered the non-
Western Others’ perception of itself (Singh and Schmidt 2000:16). Such questions serve
to interrupt the teleological narratives of ‘the West’ (Gupta 1998:17), and seek to expose
the “continuing impositions and exactions of colonialism”, the trespassing into the present
of imperial symbols, identities, imaginings, and structures of meaning masked as external
to the colonial past, and rationalized as constituting progress and development (Gregory
2004:9).

Said stressed the need to pay attention to the exercise of dominance through language
practices, capturing what Shapiro, Bonham and Heradstveit (1988) later described as the
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“dialogic dimension of discourse and meaning-making”, by which meaning emerges as

the result of interaction, actual or symbolic, between the self and the other. Meanings and
identities that may appear natural and objective may in fact be vehicles for legitimizing
certain practices and beliefs, and provide justification for the enabling or constraining of
agency (Alvesson 1993).

In contrast to the humanities and cultural studies, the social sciences overall have been
slower to take up the challenge of Said’s work (Connell 1997, Go 2009). However, the
immediate aftermath of the Cold War saw a ‘constructivist’ turn in disciplines including
international relations, challenging the narrow rationalist approach to international power
and interests (Epstein 2010). At the same time, America’s involvement in the Gulf War
saw a rise in critical studies interrogating America’s role as colonizer and ‘orientalist’.

One of the most formative studies was that of Roxanne Lyn Doty (Doty 1993, Doty 1996),
who reframed the analytical lens for studying foreign policy from a ‘why’ question, to
asking ‘how’ a certain policy, action, or practice becomes possible. Doty’s work was
considered path breaking in political science (Murphy 1997), as it sought to reveal
assumptions about the world, particularly about its hierarchy, which conventional
approaches reified and took for granted. Doty’s work opened questions of how ideas and
identities, that enabled a certain decision or action to take place, were constructed
(Holland 2011:51).

Doty’s work also presented an approach to overcome the methodological difficulties often
associated with non-rationalist analysis in the social sciences. For Doty, discursive
practices are central to creating meanings and identities. Not only the content of discourse,
she argues, but the rules of discursive production work to create a certain social logic by
which practices and policies are deemed possible by some actors, whilst for other actors,
the same practices or actions could be deemed legitimately foreclosed.

The discursive approach brings into focus the important relationship between language
and agency. Behaviour is regulated by pre-existing discourses that structure the field of
possible responses (Epstein 2010:343). Yet this doesn’t infer a social / structural
determinism that removes any conception of agency, for which the Marxian approach is
often critiqued; nor, as Foucault’s work has tended to suggest, does it infer an absence of
dynamism and resistance. Recently Vivien A. Schmidt (2010) helpfully coined the term
‘discursive institutionalism’ to encompass “the vast range of works in political science that
take account of the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes by which
ideas are conveyed and exchanged through discourse” (2). Schmidt captures the dynamic
nature of discursive institutionalism, the interplay of structure and agency – discourses
serve “both as structures (of thinking and acting) that constrain action and as constructs
 7

(of thinking and acting) created and changed by those actors” (2010:14). This contingency,
Schmidt explains, derives from “background ideational abilities” which “underpin agents’
ability to make sense in a given meaning context” and to “think outside the institutions in
which they continue to act, [and] to talk about such institutions in a critical way […] and
then to take action to change them” (2010:16).

Central to these linguistic analytical frameworks, as with Said’s Orientalism, is a

conceptualization of power as implicit, rather than explicit. Such “implicit power
processes” (Doorewaard, Benschop and Brouns 1997) are easily obscured from the
researcher’s view, since they are located in “everyday discourses and practices” which
become the ‘commonsense categorization’ people use in everyday life (Stobbe 2005:107).
Structures of power are built through a process of internalization, and maintained through
legitimating speech acts that reproduce and reinforce a complex of images upon which
implicit power is based. Change is possible, yet it’s societal consensus makes it bounded
and relatively stable (Stobbe 2005:111).

PART TWO
American ‘Exceptionalism’ in the Philippines

‘The English novel, one might say, has been a kind of imperial enterprise, an appropriation of
reality, with the high purpose of bringing order to disorder. By contrast […] the American novel
has usually seemed content to explore, rather than to appropriate and civilize, the remarkable and
in some ways exampled territories of life in the New World and to reflect is anomalies and
dilemmas. It has not wanted to build an imperium but merely to discover a new place and a new
state of mind.’1

This was how Richard Chase described the uniqueness of the American novel in his 1957
book on the subject. Although the subject matter Chase was addressing was American
literary studies, the way Chase draws the comparison between the English novel and that
of the American writer vividly illuminates the tenor of much of the twentieth century’s
representations of America’s ‘exceptionalism’.

Though it has not always been discussed in this way, the idea of American exceptionalism
is importantly related to American foreign policy. When Tocqueville first coined the
phrase in the first half of the nineteenth century, he was using it in comparative context,
to say that America was unique in institutions and behaviour other Western countries in
Europe, in particular his home nation of France. In the early twentieth century, the term
‘American exceptionalism’ was used to explain why the United States presented an

1
Chase, Richard Volney. 1957. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, N.Y Doubleday.
 8

anomaly to socialist theories developed in the previous era of Marx and Engels, being the
only industrialised country without a radical working class movement or Labor party.
Explanations have been voluminous, but a significant portion of the works focus the
distinctness of values and beliefs underpinning social relations in the United States –
“liberty, anti-statism, individualism, egalitarianism and populism as explicated in the
Declaration of Independence” (Lipset 1988:30). Or as Louis Hartz wrote in 1955, ‘All
Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one set or another’ (Lipset
1988:30). This national imaginary - with its set of dogma about “the nature of good society”
and religious ethos, and its assent to notions of democracy, liberty, and opportunity - is
the political ideology around which the United States has organised (Lipset 1988:35).

America’s exceptionalism is no better demonstrated - so a common narrative goes - than

in relation to matters of colonialism and empire. Divorced from the histories of continental
Europe, the United States’ historiographic tradition has viewed American nation building
as materially different. In fact, until the late 1980s, it was a widely-held belief in the United
States that, as William Appleman Williams wrote in 1955, “one of the central themes of
American historiography is that there is no American empire” (1955:379). Indeed, most
colonial and postcolonial studies have, until very recently, omitted the United states as a
colonial power: an omission that only served to reproduce a notion of ‘American
exceptionalism’ (Kaplan and Pease 1993:17). As such, the ideology of American
exceptionalism has survived more than a century of American internationalism.

Only since the US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have debates about
‘American empire’ resurged. But rather than remaining a radical discourse of international
relations, the language of ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ in relation to US foreign policy has
become normalised, even used in positive terms by both its neoconservative and liberal
advocates, who see American empire as a ‘force for good’, in one way or another (Mabee
2004:1359-62). The emergence of the ‘liberal exceptionalism’ thesis, as noted in Julian
Go’s work, revised liberal thought to accommodate popular use of the term ‘empire’ by
insisting the American version of empire takes unique form since “[w]hile European
empires suppressed liberty, rights and democracy, America’s empire has been aimed at
spreading them” (Go 2007:75-76).

At the same time, however, the rhetorical reconciliation of terms like ‘empire’ and
‘imperialism’ even by liberal advocates of exceptionalist thought, has prompted a growing
body of critical scholarship which interrogates America’s role as colonizer. Works like that
of Kaplan and Pease have begun to complicate the simple chronology by making the case
for American nation building and empire-building as being “historically coterminous and
mutually defining” (1993:17); or as Michael Rogin (1993) even argues, that imperial
expansion has been integral to American politics from the earliest days (510).
 9

Constructing America’s ‘Empire of Liberty’ in the Philippines

The relationship of the United States to the Philippines from 1898 onwards, is critical to
this endeavor of interrogating the enabling myths upon which the American/liberal
exceptionalism thesis has been constructed and reproduced in American political culture,
and formed the basis of legitimacy for the United States identity of protector of freedom
during the long twentieth century.

In her 1996 book Imperial Encounters, Roxanne Lynn Doty considers the United States
foreign policy towards the Philippines, both during the colonial period and continuing
after independence, as an exemplary case of the ‘politics of representation’. Doty’s analysis
draws attention not only to the way the United States, through the discourse of politicians
and early colonial officials, represented itself in a particular way in order to legitimize the
US-Philippine encounter; central to her argument is the way the American colonial project
produced ‘knowledge’ about the Philippines and the Filipino ‘native’, that was
“disseminated, and put to use to justify US conquest, violence, and subsequent control”
(1996:37) – used to create a consensus for annexation and control of the Philippines that
made the action not only possible and legitimate, but a moral imperative for the United
States.

Such rhetorical strategies in colonial documents and speeches included negation of the
dynamic civic spirit and socioeconomic transformations of the late nineteenth century
Philippines, including erasing the presence of a nascent and agitating middle-class who
led the Katipunan rebellion against Spain, made ‘the Philippines’ a blank space. Erasing
a Philippine middle stratum, with their enlightenment inspired ideas and anti-colonial
sentiments, enabled the construction of a narrative of a simple binary between oppressed
people and their tyrannical rulers, thus creating for the United States an identity of
“benevolent guardian” whose foreign intervention is legitimised by an “imperial ethic of
care” (Slater 2006:1377).

Negation also gave opportunity for colonial writers and authorities to become the
producers of ‘knowledge’ about the Philippines. Descriptions of the ‘natives’, as Doty says,
were “driven by a logic of difference that established the identities and relative positions
of the United States and its other(s) as fixed and natural” (1996:36). After being classified
in a racial hierarchy (from Negritos at the bottom to the Indonesians of Mindanao at the
top), the Islands’ population (excepting a small oppressive elite) were described as the good
but primitive and ‘densely, inconceivably ignorant’ masses, whose ignorance prevented
them from even understanding what freedom is (1996:37). Representations of Filipinos
endowed them with characteristics that ranged from the more benign portrayal of being
like children, “lacking the rationality generally attributed to adults” and being “impulsive,
 10

unreflective, imitative, and unaware of consequences”, to less benign portrayals in which

they were represented as more analogous to animals than humans, likened to a ‘faithful
dog’, more likely to ‘feed’ than to ‘dine’ (1996:39).

Representing the Filipinos as without reasoning processes and intellectual capacity

rendered them incapable of self-government, and “in need of guidance, tutoring, and
uplifting”, and ultimately, “incapable of exercising agency” (Doty 1996:39-43). It also
legitimized violence. For example, faced with evidence of American soldiers using ‘the
water cure’ as a common interrogation method to force Filipino prisoners to confess,
Senator from Wisconsin, John C Spooner, rationalised the turn of events with a calculated
“exegesis”, of the US Declaration of Independence: when the document refers to ‘people’,
Spooner insists, this designation is reserved for Americans of English descent, “because
only they manifested the homogeneity necessary for self-government”. In his own words:
“Scattered tribes [a designation he gave the Filipinos] do not constitute a people”, thus the
Declaration does not apply to them (Harris 2011:71).

The trope of savagery was not unique to American war rhetoric, dating back as far as 1812
when colonial rule was overthrown with a call to arms against British diabolism and the
tyrannical and murderous English. The war declared against Mexico in 1846 was similarly
portrayed, Ivie (2005) writes, “as a reluctant act of national defence in response to an
irrational and evil Mexican aggressor, a belligerent foe that was easily inflamed and as
unstable as a violent storm” (56). Five decades later, as the United States was about to
enter the 20th century, President McKinley declared the ‘savages’ of the Philippines would
be the beneficiaries of America’s ‘noble generosity’ and ‘Christian sympathy and charity’,
adding another instance of discursive legitimation of military conflict.

It was to be the start of a long century throughout which the battle of civility against
democracy’s savage enemy gained ‘rhetorical texture’, and became a pervasive motif of
the American political imaginary, “without losing touch with its history” (Ivie 2005:56-
58). Colonial discourse constructed a “regime of truth” that represented the Filipinos as
not constituting a ‘people’ or a ‘nation’ and denied them the capacity to exercise agency.
At the same time, this very denial of agency of the Filipino presupposed America’s
mandate to act. It made it possible even necessary, to ignore, silence or forcefully express
Filipino attempts to exercise agency, and framed all such policy decisions and practices as
acts of “deliverance and salvation rather than conquests and exploitations” (Doty 1996:44).
America’s own identity could be reproduced in a manner that resolved the contradiction
between the promotion of the right of people to liberty and self-governance versus the
exercise of imperial power to deny Philippine independence. American colonisers could
be represented as “builders of nations and peoples rather than destroyers and
exterminators” (Doty 1996:37).
 11

For more than half a century, political science scholars have scrutinised the success or
otherwise of the American democratic ‘experiment’ in the Philippines by focusing on the
political developments in the Island archipelago including the quality of national elections,
the integrity of the political elite, and the extent to which the Philippines has taken on the
traits, values and institutional functions characteristic of ‘liberal democracy’. Far fewer
studies have interrogated how the social constructions of meanings and identities used to
legitimise the period of colonial democracy left a legacy in postcolonial Philippines.

PART THREE
Postcolonial legacies in the Filipino democratic imaginary

In writing about the US-Philippine encounter, Doty acknowledges that her account is one-
sided: while she investigates US colonial documents and official speeches and exposes an
American colonial discourse which legitimated a foreign policy of annexation and
continued intervention in the Philippines, the interaction of this colonial discourse with
local Filipino discourses, and the responses of Filipino actors to U.S. narratives, are not
explored. As such, Doty’s work does not address the question of colonial legacies. It does,
however, provide a seminal analytic frame for interrogating in a new way, the nature of
American rule in the Philippines and how such rule was legitimated; it also opens a new
set of questions relating to the extent to which colonial constructions of ‘reality’ and
representational practices shaped the perceptions of the colonized subjects themselves,
both about the legitimacy of the colonizer’s rule and about their own identity and capacity
for agency. In the remainder of this paper, I build on Doty’s work by considering to what
extent American colonial representations left a legacy in the Filipino post-independent
imaginary.

Throughout the period of America’s formal sovereignty over the Philippines, the colonial
discourse identified by Doty and discussed above did find receptive audiences - not only
within a chicane political elite who, by the time independence came, deployed the
narrative to minimise the disruption to their own positions of power, but also within the
middle class. In 1941, on the eve of the Philippine’s involvement in the Second World
War, Filipino writer E.P. Alcabedas reflected in an essay published in the Philippine
Magazine, on how the ‘maladministration and misadministration’ in the Philippines was
in fact a mirror of the Filipinos own ‘inability to make the wise choice’. It was the lack of
‘individual self-control’ and the ‘infidelity of one’s conscience’, he believed, that was
robbing the Philippines of the ‘blessings of freedom in a democracy’, not American rule
itself. In fact, he wrote of Philippine democracy:
 12

‘It is true that the real significance of freedom is but slightly understood here, especially among
the masses. We want to be free, yet we are prone to deny others what we wish for. And in our
youthful impulsiveness, we can hardly distinguish between liberty, which is the freedom to do
good, and license, which is the freedom to do wrong’.2

Before independence came in 1946, there was evidence of a Filipino middle class discourse
that had not only absorbed the construction of a Filipino subject as child-like and incapable
of governing itself, but was reproducing these ideas in a way that served to justify and
resolve the contradiction of the whole ‘colonial democracy’ paradox. In November of 1941,
one month before the attack on Pearl Harbour which instigated the Japanese occupation
of the American-held archipelago, the editorial of the same magazine reflected on how,
with hindsight, there were no reasonable grounds to argue the American ‘effort’ in the
Philippines had been ‘ill-advised’ or ‘futile’. Quite the contrary, the editorial stated. While
it might be admitted that ‘the political process here has been a forced one’, and that, as a
result, there had been ‘more lip-service to democracy than observance of its tenets and
practice of its procedures’, the United States ‘could not have done otherwise than to
introduce democratic forms in the Philippines’. Having to impose their sovereignty on an
alien people by force caused the people of the United States to suffer ‘no little
embarrassment’, but their act of ‘democratic imperialism’ was a ‘compromise policy’ –
reconciling on the one hand America’s belief in self-government and freedom, and on the
other their ‘responsibilities as a great power’. As the Filipino editorialist explained:
‘Children are drilled in table etiquette and ‘good manners’ when they have as yet not the
slightest notion of the desirability of these forms in social life. The whole schooling period
embodies a system of instruction and discipline the spirit of which comes from the elders, not
from the children themselves’.3

It is less clear from existing literature, however, how popular this discourse was amongst
a middle-class audience, and how it related to the material political and social outcomes
of the post-independence period. To date there has not been a systematic study of
postcolonial public political discourse in this early period of the new Philippine Republic,
at the time when the new type relationship between the two countries was being negotiated.
While there have been invaluable and formative works in historical and cultural studies
such as Hau (2000) and Rafael (2000), these works do not engage directly in a discussion
with the democratisation and international relations literature.

2
E Pascua Alcabedas, ‘The Standard of Our Democracy’, Philippine Magazine, April 1941, pp.159-160.
3
Editorial, ‘Spirit and Form in Democracy’, Philippine Magazine, November 1941, p.452.
 13

Research Design

For the purposes of this study, focus is given to the time immediately following the
granting of Philippine Independence by the United States on July 4, 1946 and until end of
1950. The period was a critical juncture in Philippine history. Not only given
decolonization and the long-awaited attaining of national sovereignty, the country was
emerging from the devastation and violence of the four-year Japanese occupation during
World War Two. As the occupation was in its final months, on the eve of independence,
head of the Commonwealth Government since 1935 and the principal political leader in
the first half of the century, Manual Quezon, died while in exile in United States. The
Republic entered its new life marred by internal conflicts: how to deal with the issue of
Japanese collaborators among the political elite; and what to do about the war-time
guerilla fighters with links to the communist party who were successfully mobilizing the
biggest peasant unrest in history. Not to mention how these internal difficulties were being
played out in the early geopolitics of the Cold War. This was also the period which
prepared the way for American troops to reenter the Islands in a counter-insurgency
mission to quell the peasant rebellion in the Central Luzon region, a policy that was largely
supported by the Philippine public.

By the time the American General Douglas MacArthur walked ashore at Leyte in October
1944, and uttered the famous words, ‘People of the Philippines: I have returned’, the
Second World War was almost over, and the American Government had its sights set on
more pressing geopolitical challenges. For most Filipinos, the years of Japanese rule
between 1941 and 1944 had been brutal, and laden with suffering, which made
MacArthur’s return an exhilarating national experience; the ‘liberation era’, as it became
known, was an extraordinary period of what historian E.P. Patanne called “stateside
guzzling”, when the ingesting of American-labelled commodities was “a form of ritual”
designed to reassure the Filipinos of the “good old days”.4

It was during this same period that post-independence relations between the United States
and the Philippines were being negotiated, especially relating to America’s trade and
military access to the newly sovereign islands. While it might have been the case that the
former American colony became free to enjoy the idea of political independence from July
4th 1946, the Islands economy remained subject to the preferential relationship of the
colonial era. Economic power remained concentrated and under monopolistic control,
with profits of the money-crop system going to landlords and compradors, while most of
the population struggled to pay for imported commodities including rice, which though it
could have been produced locally, was not. The United States retained the economic

4
E.P. Patanne, ‘The Liberation Era Lingers on’, Progress 1960 (110-114): 111.
 14

advantages of a colonial power but without responsibility for Philippine welfare (Jenkins
1954:69).

Particularly striking about this early independence period was how the asymmetrical
relationship between the two countries, which had been constructed and legitimated
during the colonial regime by the rhetoric of ‘democratic tutelage’, continued to constrain
the space for Filipino democratic agency, and enabled the United States to continue to
exercise a legitimate intervention in the Philippines without needing to claim the status of
sovereign power.

Following Benedict Anderson, who pointed to print culture as an important site for the
construction of a shared imaginary (1983), I analyze the discourse in the prominent and
widely circulated middle class newspaper, the Philippines Free Press,5 from 1946 to 1950.
The Free Press, as it is commonly known, was a weekly newsmagazine featuring regular
editorials, cartoons and feature articles by staff writers, as well as being dedicated to
publishing reader contributions in the form of letters, essays, poems, or satirical pieces. It
was considered at the time, and for decades following, to be the leading national weekly
in the Philippines, well known for its daring exposes, and considered as one reader wrote
in his published letter, ‘the most impartial and fearless’ with ‘the widest circulation among
its kind’.6 The Free Press was an important space for discussion of national politics, and a
reference point for debates about the nation’s democracy.

The corpus of data used for the study includes the weekly edition of the Free Press between
23 February 1946 and 30 December 1950 – in total, 226 editions of the newsmagazine.7
Table 1 in the Appendix shows the type and total numbers of texts that were manually
inventoried. Two of the three categories of texts were analyzed for this paper: first, the
cover editorial and cartoon, authored by staff; and second, texts discussing political and
social issues relating to democracy, elections, the nation, and government, including those
authored by staff as well as those texts sent in by readers and republished by the paper.

5
The paper began life during the first decade of the American occupation of the Philippines. The first issue came out
in January 1907, and contained both English and Spanish sections. Though it had some trouble finding private finance
to keep it running, by 1925 its subscription model was doing good business and it had established a regular and wide
readership. It became known as the publication that explored every significant issue and event without regard for the
influence of people involved. During the American period the magazine vigorously campaigned for an early
independence from the US, and it didn’t waver in exposing venalities of the highest office of government. Over its
history, the news magazine had many libel cases brought against its editors. During the Japanese occupation, the
editor and manager were imprisoned. It was known for its fierce criticism of the administration during early years of
Ferdinand Marcos’ presidency, and no sooner than martial law was declared on September 21, 1972, the Free Press
(with other outlets) was closed down, and its editor and leading writers arrested and imprisoned without charge.
6
Simon David, ‘Mr David’s Letter’, Philippines Free Press, March 13, 1948, p54.
7
A small number of editions from this period were missing from the Rizal Library American Historical Collection
Archive, and could not found be located elsewhere.
 15

The selected texts were manually coded according to the discursive practices approach
employed by Doty (1993). The usefulness of the method is not in establishing the cognitive
or psychological character of the individuals speaking or writing, not is the intention to
make sure that their language matches their motivation or intentions. Rather, this form of
discourse analysis enables the research to examine whether there is a “logic” at work in
language which constitutes a dominant discourse (Doty 1993:309).

This approach identifies three textual mechanism that work together within text to
construct realities, meanings and subjectivities:

1. Predication: labels, qualities or attributes attached to subjects with use of adverbs or

adjectives.
2. Presupposition: background knowledge that is assumed or implied by a text.
3. Subject-positioning: the way the relationships between subjects or subjects and objects
are represented, such as oppositional, similar, or complimentary.

The documents were read with an eye for these three textual mechanisms, and the
predicates, presuppositions and positioning relating to the two subject identities of
America/American and Philippines/Filipino were extracted from the texts. Next, the
extracts were analyzed for coherence and recurring meanings, identities and positioning.
The coding of text into these three separate categories serves the purposes of analysis and
comparison, though in actuality they work together to construct a world of knowledge.

The extracts were also coded according to whether they were part of staff discourse or
whether they were found within the discourse of the readership, as found in their published
texts in the paper. This separation improves robustness, by enabling an investigation of
whether there exists a discernible difference between the two discourse, or whether a
similar logic is at work in both, constituting what might reasonably suggest a dominant
middle class discourse.

Table 2 in the Appendix shows the predicates extracted from the staff-authored cover
pieces associated in the text with the two subjects of America /American and
Philippines/Filipino. Table 3 in the Appendix shows the descriptive characteristics or
capabilities attributed to the same subjects, but rather than being found in editorial texts,
these predicates were extracted from the essays, opinions and letters contributed by
members of the Free Press’ reading public, and republished by the paper.
 16

Findings

There is found a coherence in the predicates extracted from the text, which extends across
both the staff authored texts as well as those from the public readership. In the case of both
the America/American subject and the Philippines/Filipino, the predicates extracted
from the text hang together in a clear way, with few exceptions, suggesting a certain
coherence and shared logic. The coherence among the predicates both within table 2 and
table 3, and between them, suggests that at least as far as the discourse in the Philippines’
major newspaper was concerned, there did exist in the immediate postcolonial period a
dominant discourse.

In the case of the America/American, the subjectivity is described with adjectives like
‘parent’ and ‘guardian’, and in their relationship to the Philippines they are represented
with attributes such as ‘trustworthy’, ‘just and generous’, ‘eager friend’, ‘Mother America’,
‘to be treasured’, and ‘well intentioned’. While in contrast, a very different cluster of
predicates was associated with the subjectivity of the Philippines/Filipino. The latter is
described overwhelmingly negatively, with a simple count revealing that two-thirds of all
predicates attributed in the discourse to the local subject are derogatory. The Philippines
is referred to as ‘infested’, ‘diseased’, ‘plagued’, a ‘sick man’, of doubtful capacity, and the
Filipino is characterised as ‘fair Filipinas’ who is ‘easily wooed’, ‘immature’ and even
‘foolish-fond’. Of the one-third of predicates that were positive, all but a handful draw the
positive attribute from the Philippines’ special relationship with the United States, with
the local subject’s own value being derived from favour shown by its former coloniser. The
Philippines ‘owes thanks’ for being ‘illuminated’ and ‘made free’ by the former guardian.
In the case of both subjectivities, there is a sense from the predication that these character
descriptions relate to innate, or essential qualities of the subject.

Furthermore, it is possible to identity a logic or ‘deep structure’ which underlies the

predicates in Table 2 and 3, and forms the operating principle upon which the two
subjectivities are constructed in the newspapers dominant discourse. The representational
practices within the texts rely on a core opposition - between the self (the
Philippines/Filipino subject) and the other (the America/American subject) – which is
upheld by conceptual binaries upon which meaning and identities are based.

First, the dominant discourse takes as a natural state-of-affairs that there existed two
distinct roles that differed fundamentally in position and capacity. This is most commonly
manifested in the characterisation of a parent/child relationship between the United States
and the Philippines. The parental metaphor regards the U.S. as patient guide and teacher,
nurturing yet also disciplining the Philippines with its child-like characteristics, until it
could take responsibility for itself, and understand the consequences of its actions.
 17

The two extracts below demonstrate how this metaphor appears in the text. One is from
the cover January 3rd, 1946 – the initial post-war issue of the news magazine, and the first
since confirmation had been given that the United States would finally grant Philippine
Independence on the 4th July the same year.
In years gone by, in the press and on the platform, we were frequently and flatteringly warned
that ‘the eyes of the world were upon us’, that the whole world was looking our way. Not
always justified then, the phrase may, with much better grace, be used now.
For that, let us thank the United States – the United States and its lofty and noble ideals as
embodied in the Statue of Liberty – the Goddess of Liberty – Liberty enlightening the world.
[…] And today, divine transition, the benign rays from that symbol are flooding the Far East,
illuminating the dark places, bringing light and hope and inspiration to the downtrodden
and oppressed […] But for the Philippines and the advent of America in the Far East, the
peoples that now hail the dawning would still be fettered by the past, dreaming, hoping,
aspiring, striving”

One and a half years later, in the issue of the paper marking the first anniversary of the
country’s independence in 1947, the cover featured the cartoon in Figure 1, along with the
accompanying text:

“And what now, little man? Going it alone,

legs a bit shaky and steps a bit uncertain, but
getting along, head in the right direction and
hand tightly gripping the flag […]” 28th June,
1947.

Figure 1:
Philippines Free Press Cover
28 July 1947.8

8
Source: American Historical Collection, Ateneo de Manila University.
 18

Other metaphors complementary to the parent/child binary also feature in the text, such
as grantor/debtor, teacher/pupil, even light/dark. Especially in the case of the latter two
roles, there is a sense of permanency about the nature of this relationship. Consider the
poem printed in the second Independence Day edition of 3 July, 1948. Written and sent
to the paper by Mr Treyes of Bacolod City, and dedicated a whole page by the editor, the
poem is entitled “We Will Not Forget”. One of the striking features of the poem is the
way the author reassures America that while it may not reciprocate the love and intimate
knowledge of the Philippines:
“We will not forget, America!
Think not that we may forget, even if we tried.
Your flesh has been grafted into ours; and there,
It has taken root, and grown, and flourished”.9

According to the author, as a branch owes its entire existence and being to its trunk, so the
Philippines has been born out of America. For the author, this sapling relationship means
not only that the branch will always be a branch, rather than seeing itself as directly planted
in the ground; there is also a definite direction in the relationship that is implied – the trunk
doesn’t need the branch to survive, but the reverse is not true: “You may not know our Lapu-
Lapu, our Rizal”, he says, referring to the founding figures of Philippines history, “But we
know your Lincoln, your Washington…We love them as you love them”.10

There is a second central binary opposition recurring in the texts, which relates to the
existence of two distinct temperaments or dispositions. On the one hand, the United States
is represented as the steady hand – wise, reasoned, and responsible, symbolising order and
stability. In direct contrast, the Philippines is chaotic, impulsive and disruptive. As one
anonymous reader wrote in to the paper, Filipinos are ‘quick to resent, but especially quick
to forgive and forget’ and can be easily won over ‘by gentle persuasion and love and they
will give you the very shirt off their backs’.11

This manifests in a reoccurring sentiment that the Philippines under American rule was a
more stable place than under the rule of Filipino politicians. Mr Williams, from Negros
Occidental, wrote a letter to the Free Press published on 17 September 1949 in which he
compared ‘those days when an American governor was in Malacañan’, a time when the
country ‘was enjoying peace and prosperity through American benevolent and
supervision’, to the days of post-independent status, with a government ‘run like hell’. He
says it was fortunate for his country, that ‘Mother America’ ignored the earlier ‘pestering’

9
Artemio A Treyes, ‘We Will Not Forget’, Philippines Free Press, 3 July 1948, p.31.
10
Ibid.
11
Anonymous, Philippines Free Press, 3 December 1949, p.51.
 19

of the Philippine politicians for independence: ‘The USA knew well what would happen
to her fiesta-loving ward once beyond her control. Hence the transition period. No wiser
move could have been made’.12

Both the central binaries – of contrasting roles and dispositions occupied by the American
versus the Filipino subject - manifests in a pervasive sense of the latter being watched and
observed by the former. From the Filipino Club in New York, Julio Villa Jr wrote a letter
to the Free Press editor, published on 22 July 1950, in which he warned his fellow
countrymen:
‘Knowledge of the corruption in the Philippine Government today is beginning to spread to
America. The June Reader’s Digest Time Magazine of June 3, the World Telegram and Sun
of May 26, not to mention the dispatches to the New York Herald Tribune and Washington
DC papers, have presented the hard-hitting facts to the American people…’13

Three years earlier, Florentino Pamor, another concerned citizen, had written a letter to
the paper after the incidents of cheating and violence in recent national elections: ‘Let us
not give Mother America and the world the painful and shameful impression that we are
corrupt, degenerate people, who toy with our liberties and do not have respect for time-
honoured democratic processes’.14

It follows that these binary oppositions presupposed in the text position the subjects vis-à-
vis one the other, in a hierarchical arrangement; and that this subject positioning implies
as ‘natural’ the type and degree of agency that could be assumed by both. The United
States, within the dominant discourse, is endowed with an unbounded amount of agency,
and the subjectivity is constructed in such a way that its exercise of authority over the
Philippines is principled and legitimate. Juxtaposed to this is the positioning of the
Philippines as being inferior to the United States, with little to no agency. What’s more,
the construction of the Philippines/Filipino subjectivity as corrupt and inept means that
the level of agency endowed it is deemed reasonable in light of its premised capacity to
exercise it correctly.

The dominant middle-class discourse found in the Philippines Free Press constructed a firm
distinction, not only between the two subjects of the American and the Filipino, but also
between two different kinds of nation-states. While one signifies democracy, the ‘good
guy’, the world’s guide and protector; the other is deficient in comparison, floating around
the fixed signifier but not yet grounded. It worked

12
Eugene Williams, ‘A Government Run Like Hell’, Philippines Free Press, 17 September 1949, p.25.
13
Julio Villa Jr, ‘What US Filipinos think of the Philippine Government’, Philippines Free Press, 22 July 1950, p.45.
14
Florentino Pamor, ‘Annul the Elections!’, Philippines Free Press, 20 December 1947, pp45-6.
 20

The discourse found worked to legitimise an asymmetrical post-colonial relationship

between the United States and the Philippines. ‘The American grant of independence’,
wrote Teodoro Locsin in a November 1949 essay, ‘was based on the capacity of the
Filipino people for self-government. For democracy’. 15 Yet four years into the
‘experiment’, Locsin wrote, and given the way post-independent politicians were behaving,
the grant of independence may even have been premature.

It was not simply a matter of linguistic trends. The ‘reality’ that was naturalised in the
local Filipino discourse - which positioned the irrational, unreasoned and irresponsible
Filipino and Philippines state in direct opposition to the innately powerful, rational, and
good United States – made possible, even imperative, certain policies and practices in the
post-independence era, while precluding others. The effects of which moved beyond the
psychological into the material.

One of the most striking examples of this came as early as 1947, with what became known
as the ‘Parity Rights’ issue. The previous year, United States Congress had passed the Bell
Trade Act, legislation which detailed the terms by which trade between the two countries
would be governed following independence. Along with provisions guaranteeing
favourable trade conditions for the US such as tariff reductions, the Act would grant rights
to US citizens and corporations to the archipelago’s natural resources in parity with the
rights of Philippine citizens. The Act passed by US Congress contravened the Philippine’s
1935 Commonwealth Constitution. It required, therefore, that the newly independent
Philippine Republic amend its Constitution to accommodate the US law. If the newly
elected Philippine Congress would ratify the agreement, the US would offer its former
ward $800 million for post-war reconstruction.

Leading up to the national referendum to approve the constitutional amendment, public

discussion of the issue was voluminous. It testified to an associational life and a middle
class ‘public sphere’ that was present even in the very early days of the postcolonial
Philippines. It suggests, alongside it, a certain paradoxical feature of the American colonial
period – that, especially after the first decade and a half – the democratic energy that had
fueled the late nineteenth century social movement against Spain, continued into the next
phase.

The Philippines Free Press editor wrote that the paper’s mailbag “continued to bulge with
unsolicited letters, articles, poems on the much-debated question” (quote). The quantity
of the correspondence meant, the editor wrote in the introduction, that the paper could
only republish a sample of those who were for the change of the constitution in favour of

15
Teodoro M. Locsin, ‘The American Way or The Permanent Opposition’, Philippines Free Press, 12 Nov 1949, 2-3.
 21

US citizens’ parity rights, and those who were against. Of those in the former camp: one
wrote to those who fear America’s intentions:
“Read the history of Filipino-American relations since the inception of the American regime
to know the real intentions of the American people. You will learn some concrete facts about
the benevolence and altruism of the American people”.

Another wrote that:

“to reject parity to our benefactor and liberator (America) would be tantamount to violating
the essence and principles of character training”;

Yet another wrote of being glad for the chance to:

“show my undying gratitude for 42 years of benevolent tutelage, for the redemption of the
promise of liberation after three and one half dark years of Japanese oppression, and for their
honoring of our long-cherished dream of independence”.

The policy was not without contestation. Some of those against argued it interfered with
the newly independent nation’s own ability to define the terms of its own democracy. One
person wrote to the Free Press that the agreement with the United States ‘contradicts the
principles of democracy’. So much so that she felt confident the American people would never
approve such a proposition for their own country. Another person against it wrote:
“[…] our leaders were elected to represent the desires of the people. At least that is what my
textbook says. That, too, is what the Constitution means when it refers to sovereignty of the
people”.

But in the editorial of 15 February 1947, on the eve of the national plebiscite, the staff
writer makes his reply to such doubting voices swift:
“Whether the future will justify such phrases as ‘selling one’s birthright for a mess of pottage’
or ‘bartering away one’s patrimony’ only the future can tell. But, judging by the past, there
is no reason for excessive pessimism […] To those who question that, the answer may be
summed up in the well know words: ‘Oh, ye of little faith!’”

Discussion of the parity issue in the Free Press provides a glimpse, of not simply why the
plebiscite ultimately gained a majority amongst the voting (not discounting the role of
electoral fraud), but of how such a policy was legitimized by the Filipino population. In
the imaginary of many people at the time, was a belief in the benevolence and ‘goodness’
of the United States, as well as a sense in which the Philippines was indebted to its former
‘benefactor’.
 22

CONCLUSION

Since this study only systematically analyzed the Philippines Free Press news magazine
during the first five years of Philippines independence, it can only claim empirically to
demonstrate that within this period, the newspaper’s dominant discourse, shared both by
staff writers and reader contributors, constructed a hierarchical world in which the
Filipino’s incapacity for independent agency, the premise upon which America’s
annexation of the islands was legitimised half a century earlier, was still shaping the
political imaginary. This needs to be tested over multiple texts and sources, as well as
during different time periods. Furthermore, though a dominant middle class discourse was
found in the Free Press, this did not mean that this social construction was uncontested in
the post-independent Philippines. In fact, the persistent resistance of this pro-American
narrative from individual and groups also within the middle class has had a decisive
impact on the way the politics of the 1950s onwards played out, not least in an ongoing
‘communist’ insurgency which continues until today.

Yet this study has sought to demonstrate that to ignore the structural legacies resulting
from the discursive constructions of the subordinate colonial subject, is to obscure an
implicit power practice that is fundamental to colonialism. In the case of America’s
imperial rule in the Philippines during the first half of the twentieth century, the
embedding of the rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ and ‘other’, even within the colonized
subjects’ own perception of itself, suggests American colonization of the Philippines left a
legacy often obscured from view, or assumed to be the relic of an endogenous political
culture.

By rhetorically constructing the Filipino as incapable of exercising democratic agency and

inept in their cognitive understanding of freedom, while at the same time constructing
itself as the ‘exceptional’ world citizen and benevolent imperialist, the American
government and colonial officials not only created a reality in which military intervention
in the Philippines was a moral imperative, this social construction shaped the way the
colonized population viewed its own subjectivity. In other words, the implicit practice of
power of the United States over the Philippines, established under colonial rule through
the politics of representation, continued to shape politics in the postcolonial Philippines
through the reified binary between benevolent America and the Filipino of doubtful self-
governing capacity.

Postcolonial Philippines remained haunted by its colonial past. It wasn’t only the way the
American government continued to interfere in domestic political and economic affairs
after formally granting independence, it was also the visceral sense of being watched, and
of having to perform ‘democracy’ correctly to earn legitimacy in the eyes of the former
 23

ward. The post-colonial perceptions of self in the Philippines served to legitimize the
continued direct interference of the United States in the Philippines’ sovereignty, and to
compromise post-colonial nation building.

The collective experience of humiliation and infantilization was not easily forgotten. Four
decades under foreign gaze left an anxiety within many in the Philippines about the
capacity to correctly inhabit this democratic freedom. Caroline Hau describes this
collective Filipino subject of history as an “object of anxiety”—a doubled subject who is,
on the one hand, “free in its capacity to strive for perfection and respond to the ethical
imperative of transforming the determinants of its existing conditions”, and yet at the same
time “irreducibly constrained by these determinants and her history” (Hau 2000:27).

The contradictions of Philippine democracy’s founding legitimacy left an ambivalence,

too, about democracy itself. The dominant historiography celebrated the American
colonial period as a kind of sacred path along which the Philippine nation needed to travel
to reach the goal of freedom, for which national heroes and martyrs of the past had long
struggled. And yet, to memorialize history as such was to legitimize and perpetuate the
narrative of a Filipino subject as being of dubious capacity for self-government, prone to
misbehavior and vice. It left the question unresolved: could the constraints of this
hierarchical ordering—the American ‘teacher’ and the Filipino ‘pupil’—ever be overcome

There are also broader implications that can be drawn from the findings in this study. The
discursive practices found in American colonial discourse relating to the Philippines align
not only with the construction of the uncivilised state of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century British and French empires, it also resonates with post-1945 discourses of
international relations. There is similarity, in particular, with the ‘third world’ or
‘developing’ state constructions that formed the basis for the burgeoning ‘modernisation’
theory which, in turn, became the driving causal theory of democratization, and the
justification for global hierarchy and foreign interventions in the sovereignty of other
nation-states.

Slater (2006), Doty (1995) and others have argued that throughout the twentieth century,
and into the next, democracy has been used as a discursive tool to construct the normative
value, and hierarchical status of a ‘democratic’ versus a ‘democratized’ world: “The
imperative to ‘democratize’”, Slater argues, creates “an asymmetry between those
announcing the imperative and those subjected to it, between those who ‘democratize’
and those who are ‘democratized’” (2006: 1382). Yet using democracy as the “discourse
of justification” for imperial power means that the ideal of democracy is continually
 24

undermined by “the subordinating practices of the actual deployment of such power”

(Slater 2006: 1383).

The United States ‘democratizing mission’ in the Philippines provides a founding case of
imperialism in the name of democracy. After centuries of direct colonization, America
unleashed a new paradox that the world had not previously seen so flagrantly—“the
business of hoisting the flag of democracy at gunpoint” (Keane 2009:374). As such, the
Philippines also provides a rich case study of the legacies of the contradictions at the heart
of a liberal democratic ‘world order’: an unresolved anxiety amongst citizens about their
democratic agency, a longing for political legitimacy and worth, and an ambivalence
about democracy which has played into the hands of authoritarian populist politicians
(Webb Forthcoming).
 25

APPENDIX

Table 1: Philippines Free Press, Inventory of texts

Category Description Author Number

1. Covers Short front cover editorial, including the accompanying Staff 226
weekly cartoon illustration.
2. Politics Reportage, opinion, letters, poems discussing Staff and 195
democracy, elections, government, nationhood (staff Public
and public).
3. Huk Reportage, opinion, letters discussing the Luzon peasant Staff and 213
movement (staff and public). Public

Table 2: Philippines Free Press, Predicates from Cover Cartoons and Texts

United States / Americans Philippines / Filipinos

Deserving of Philippine gratitude;
Has lofty and noble ideals;
Is enlightening the world, illuminating dark
places, bringing light and hope and inspiration
to the downtrodden and oppressed;
Is a benign power;
Has exchanged imperialism for a new gospel of
political liberty;
Its actions are ordained by destiny;
Is benevolent;
Uncle Sam;
Is becoming weary, impatient with helping the
Philippines;
Proud of the Philippines progress;
Parent-like;
Capable of determining the destiny of
Philippine presidents;
Is trustworthy;
Has a record of dealing generously and justly
with the Filipino people;
Is hearing about lawlessness in the Philippines;
Its army is a source of irritation and resentment
in the Philippines;
Judge;
Good;
Plays the role of Santa for the Philippines;
Feels friendship, sympathy for the Philippines;
Infested;
On a political merry-go-round;
Of doubtful capacity for self-government;
Reeking of scandal;
Rotten;
Where lawlessness reigns;
Defenceless against graft & corruption;
Antithesis of America;
Seen as exemplar, bulwark of democracy in the Far
East;
Its democracy is being raped by those chosen to
defend and uphold it;
A bastion against communism;
Has become an international cynosure;
Owes thanks to the United States;
Illuminated by the United States;
Light of Asia, helping United States bring light and
liberty to oppressed people around the world;
Has become unvirtuous;
Immature, infantile in capacity for self-government;
A disappointment to the United States, needing to
impress;
Infested with a special breed of rats;
Notorious for corrupt politics;
Mocking the hope, breaking the heart of past hero
Rizal;
Full of evils;

Is eager to help the Philippines;
It stumbled upon the Philippine Islands;
Has left a positive legacy in the Philippines;
Is cherished by Filipinos;
Is a champion of the cause of all people who
would live in justice, decency and liberty;
Pro-Filipino;
Is hoping to save the Philippines from chaos
and ruin;
Good, ever accommodating;
Has demonstrated genuine altruistic spirit;
Has shared its lifeblood with the Philippines;
Has earned the right to supervise and monitor
in the Philippines;
Coldly critical, sophisticated.
26
Has as its greatest intangible asset, American interest
and goodwill;
America's Pearl of the Orient;
America's noble experiment of democracy in the East;
Characterised by corruption, looting and nepotism;
Plagued by thousand and one ills;
Free, but shaky, overwhelmed by new status;
Progressed under American rule;
Pro-American;
Taken America's cause as its own;
Was made free;
A sick man – anaemic, emaciated and enfeebled – in
urgent need of help;
Ravaged, demoralised;
In need of saving from chaos and ruin;
In a tragic position;
Normally peace loving nature beginning to be
corrupted;
Passionate;
Simple;
Have a gloomy future
Hoping the world is impressed by its progress as new
Republic;
Shamed by improprieties of government;
Idolise and cherish the word 'independence';
Greatest day was day United States granted them
independence;
Overcome by frenzied pursuit of wealth;
Afflicted with the psychology of greed;
Childish, easily entertained;
Takes things personally;
Held by Superstition;
Easily wooed;
Cherish American way of life, have made American
ideals their own;
Prostrate;
Foolish-fond;
 27

Table 3: Philippines Free Press, Predicates from reader texts

United States / Americans Philippines / Filipinos

The preferred source of capital for the
Philippines, America has a splendid record in
the Philippines;
Benevolent and altruistic;
Under American rule the Philippines made
progress;
Benefactor, liberator;
Owed the Philippines undying gratitude for
benevolent tutelage, honoured the Philippines
dream of independence;
With good sense and good judgement;
Not to be treated by PH as an entirely foreign
country;
American spirit;
Foreigners;
Its greatness lies in the people and the way they
think;
Benevolent, supervisor, Mother, All-knowing,
ready and able to help;
Handle politics disastrously, regard politics as
profitable industry, every nook and corner of country
invaded by politics, forgetting politics original import,
its slow progress can be attributed to politics,
diseased, cannot distinguish right from wrong because
diseased by money-making politicians;
A country in danger, its only salvation is the sure and
swift action of the President, in deep affliction;
Need the right man to break the chains off dear
Filipinas;
A prostrate country;
Cannot progress without outside capital;
Its democracy modelled on American ideals and
principles, but now ruled by manipulative politicians;
Filipinos often whimsical and vacillating, gullible
during elections, have the government they deserve;
Like a child lost in some unexplored jungle of Borneo;
Suffering the sins of corrupt officials;
Being watched by Americans – their conduct,
manners and faults are being observed;
Found fine and acceptable the American way of life
and the ideals professed by America;
A country in danger;
A Christian democracy, the only one in the Orient;
America’s fiesta-loving ward, drifting toward Red
disaster;
Of questionable fitness to live in a democracy;
Easily persuaded.

.
 28

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