IN OUR IMAGE: AMERICA'S EMPIRE IN THE PHILIPPINES by Stanley Karnow
Random House; 494 pages; $24.95
IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: THE MARCOSES, THE AQUINOS, AND THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION by Sandra Burton; Warner; 483 pages; $24.95
In 1901 Filipino guerrillas massacred a company of American soldiers, slicing open the corpses and filling them with molasses and jam to attract ants. In retaliation, one U.S. general ordered his men to turn the island of Samar into "a howling wilderness." Samar has never recovered. Forty-one years later, Filipinos were risking savage Japanese reprisals to feed American prisoners of war marching in the notorious Bataan Death March. At war's end, Filipinos hailed the Yanks with a band playing God Bless America.
History has played few tricks with as many odd twists and turns as the U.S.'s imperial adventure in the Philippines. In his first book since Vietnam: A History, journalist and historian Stanley Karnow chronicles 90 years of the U.S.'s relationship with its former colony with a keen eye for such incongruities. Beginning with a penetrating look at 300 years of cruel Spanish rule in the islands, Karnow sketches a history suffused with politics both Machiavellian and messianic: from Commodore George Dewey's whipping the Spaniards at Manila Bay in 1898 and America's later subversion of Emilio Aguinaldo's fledgling government, to Douglas MacArthur's ringing 1942 promise to return to the Philippines and Washington's support for Ferdinand Marcos until the virtual eve of Corazon Aquino's "people power" revolution in 1986.
With sweeping historical breadth, Karnow explores two countries caught in an obsessive parent-child relationship. National emotions swing between involvement and indifference, animosity and affection, pity and fear, longing and disgust. It is a tale of how the U.S. tried to re-create itself in the malleable Philippines, an accidental unit of 7,000 islands with little in common save Roman Catholicism and an ambiguous urge to be free. It is also the story of how the U.S., though it succeeded in imbuing the archipelago with aspects of its likeness, failed at imparting its democratic spirit. In In Our Image, the sins of the creator are amply reflected in the faults of its creature.
After the bloody war to put down the so-called Philippine insurrection from 1899 to 1902, the prickings of democratic conscience led the U.S. to transplant its institutions to the islands and to plan for independence. But it did so grudgingly, unconvinced that those systems would hold. Expansionist Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, for example, proclaimed, "What alchemy will change the oriental quality of their blood, and set the self-governing currents of the American pouring through their Malay veins?" With misdirected liberality, William Howard Taft, the first civilian governor of the islands, referred to Filipinos as "little brown brothers." Privately, he thought Filipinos would take at least 50 to 100 years to learn "Anglo-Saxon liberty."