Imperialists
Theodore Roosevelt had questions, and Arthur Judson Brown seemed like a man who might have answers. In 1902, Roosevelt was president and needed more information on the Philippines. He had William Howard Taft’s commission report, but Taft was still on the other side of the world. Brown, on the other hand, was in Washington, just recently returned for a tour of Presbyterian missions in Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Siam, India, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Why not ask the missionary secretary for his impressions of the United States’ new colonial territory?
The two men had known each other since 1900, when Brown invited then-vice president Roosevelt, President William McKinley, and former president Benjamin Harrison to take part in the opening exercises of a missionary conference in New York. After McKinley and Harrison delivered their ten-minute prepared speeches, Roosevelt entertained the gathered crowd with extemporaneous tales of bear hunting in the Rockies.1 Roosevelt and Brown continued a friendly correspondence after the event, and when Roosevelt heard that Brown had recently returned to the country from the Philippines, the new president invited the missionary to the White House.
Brown would later remember Roosevelt’s conviction that US diplomacy needed be sure to prioritize “fairness and friendship” in its relations with Asian people now that the United States had “been brought into such close contact” with Asia. Roosevelt’s use of the passive voice was telling. He and Brown both agreed that the time had passed for any questions about why or how the United States had come to the Philippines. The important thing now was that the United States was in power. The question on both of their minds was not whether they should withdraw, but as Brown put it, “in what spirit should we remain.”2
In the coming years, Brown sent along his books and articles, urging Roosevelt to read them for information about not only the Philippines but other missionary lands as well. Roosevelt responded with appreciation. In October 1904, Roosevelt thanked Brown for sending his new book and scrawled at the bottom of the page, “When can you get to Washington? I wish you to lunch with me.”3
For Brown, it was essential that Filipinos always understand that the Protestant missionaries were not “agents of the US government or affiliated with it in any way.” The Philippines had known centuries of religious governance under Spanish rule. Brown and the missionaries he represented wanted to be clear that US occupation meant a separation of church and state for the Philippines. The Protestant missionaries would be there, but they wanted conversions to be based on religious conviction, not political pressure. So naturally, missionaries and their supporters at home spent a good amount of energy talking about politics.
Diplomats and missionaries both served as sources of information and as strategists for the US-Filipino relationship. Brown’s report to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions repeatedly cited William Howard Taft’s commission and included a page-long quotation from President William McKinley.4 American occupation meant religious freedom, these leaders all agreed. Religious freedom would open the way for American missionaries. It was an interesting formulation, made only the more interesting when the president of the United States mined the director of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions for information, and the director of the missionary society in turn relied on government sources.
The Protestant missionary response to the wars of 1898 was, in a word, complicated. There was significant missionary support for the war, and for the occupation of the Philippines that followed it. This was true even as Filipino resistance made it clear that US governance was not welcome. American rule opened up a new mission field and Protestant missionaries welcomed the opportunity to “civilize” the islands. But two facts made the US missionary experience in the Philippines different than what they had experienced elsewhere. First, the majority of Filipinos were Catholic. And second, they were ruled not by a European or Turkish power, but by a conquering United States. Together, these facts challenged the existing dynamics of missionary diplomacy.
The US occupation of the Philippines ushered in a new era of American Christian imperialism. As had been the case throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries looked to empire as a potential tool for evangelism. With empire, they hoped, missionary access could follow. In the Philippines, this hope would be realized. Here, more than anywhere before, missionaries were acting at the pleasure of the US government.
Cuba and Humanitarianism
Long before the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, Americans had been concerned about Spanish colonial rule. Americans had observed, and often sympathized with, the early nineteenth-century independence movements in South and Central America that had removed much of Spanish power in the hemisphere and replaced it with new republics.5 But what was happening in Cuba as the island fought for its independence from Spain drew American attention in new ways, and it was Cuba that would eventually open the door to the Philippines. A new language of humanitarian concern animated US observers, both inside and outside the mission movement.
Cuba had been fighting for its independence since the 1860s. The latest stage of the war between Cuba and Spain emerged in 1895, and observers in the United States watched closely and with rising alarm. Spain began a policy of “reconcentration” in 1896 in an effort to quash the guerrilla tactics of the revolutionaries. Under this program, the colonial government moved Cuban civilians from their homes to centralized locations under military rule. The results were horrifying. Sanitary conditions were terrible in the camps, and many residents could not access adequate food or medical care. Reports in the United States estimated civilian deaths between 300,000 and 500,000 (though the actual deaths were probably closer to 100,000).6 Americans were particularly struck by stories of suffering women and children that inspired a chivalric desire to intervene and protect innocents from abuse at the hands of supposedly rapacious Spaniards.7 In the summer of 1897, the Christian Herald reported that every piece of news they received from Cuba brought “some new and startling story of brutality inflicted upon the helpless Cuban peasantry by the Spanish troops under the name of military law.”8
Missionaries helped to spread the news of Cuban suffering while also suggesting that Cuba would make an excellent mission field. The Baptists, Episcopalians, and Southern Presbyterians had already sent missionaries to the island, only to be removed by the Spanish. There, they found a populace that had been “lying for centuries at our very gates, crushed beneath the tyranny and superstition of the Romish Church.” As one article in the Christian Observer suggested, missionary-minded Americans found themselves with the opportunity to act like the Good Samaritan. Cuba had been left “stripped, wounded, and half dead” by Spain. Now American Christians had to ask if they would pass by, or take action to help their neighbor.9 The Boston Globe reported in early April that American ministers were enthusiastic about the possibility of intervention in Cuba precisely because they thought it would open the way for a more aggressive missionary project.10
With the increasingly upsetting news from Cuba, the US State Department, too, began to urge Americans to take action. On Christmas Eve, 1897, Secretary of State John Sherman issued a press release urging Americans to donate funds and provisions for Cuba. President McKinley created a Central Cuban Relief Committee, adapting a model that the government had previously used to manage aid in the Armenian crisis. McKinley appointed Louis Klopsch of the Christian Herald, the leading evangelical periodical of the era; Stephen Barton of the American Red Cross; and Charles Schieren of the New York Chamber of Commerce to oversee the work. Soon they sent nurses along with a hundred hospital beds and five thousand dollars in food for Cuban children. The needs were great, and they urged Americans to give generously.11
The Golden Rule inspired the Christian and philanthropic organizations to take an interest in humanitarian issues. But US diplomats had not previously embraced this role, instead preferring to leave philanthropy to private citizens and nongovernmental organizations such as the mission boards. In the 1820s, John Quincy Adams had insisted that the United States did not go out into the world in search of “monsters to destroy.” But by the 1890s, that seemed like a policy that had outlived its relevance. Americans were deeply enmeshed in global networks. Whether they went searching or not, they found monsters abroad. Increasingly, some government officials suggested that the only appropriate response was to destroy them when they were found.
Destroying monsters, after all, was not only philanthropic. It also made the United States look good. It signaled America’s position as a civilizing and benevolent country. Sending donations to Cuba, the Christian Herald argued, provided “a striking and memorable object lesson to the entire world” about what kind of country the United States was.12 Economic interests were also at play, as the United States searched for new markets for US manufactured goods. But the emphasis in public statements all focused on the humanitarian issues at hand. Pamphlets and petitions called on the US government to “rescue” Cuba. One such pamphlet declared that “the cause of freedom in Cuba is the cause of God and man.”13 In the congressional debates about intervention, Rep. Harry Skinner of North Carolina argued that God had given the United States to Cubans “as their guardians, defenders, and protectors.”14 The White House and the State Department both insisted that the United States cared about the fate of the Cuban people and wanted to bring relief and safety to the island nation.
To be a guardian and defender, these politicians argued, the United States would need to go to war with Spain. That was certainly the theme of President William McKinley’s 1898 war message. The “Cuba question,” he insisted, had an “intimate connection” to the state of the American union. Ongoing fighting had challenged the United States in enforcing neutrality laws, caused losses to US trade, and “by the exercise of cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized practices of warfare, shocked the sensibilities and offended the humane sympathies of our people,” the president argued. There were multiple grounds for US intervention, he continued. But first, McKinley argued that “in the cause of humanity,” the United States ought to “put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries” existing in Cuba.15
McKinley’s claims for humanitarian motivations were supported by his call to continue the distribution of food and supplies, and his request that the Congress appropriate funds from the national treasury “to supplement the charity of our citizens.”16 Congress agreed, and the war in Cuba lasted from April to December 1898. Cuba was not the only front in the “splendid little war” between the United States and Spain. After fighting began in Cuba, McKinley ordered a US squadron to Manila, where another group of Spanish colonial subjects were at war for their independence. Within hours, the United States claimed victory.
None of this interest in intervention meant that the United States planned to claim Cuba as its own colonial territory. McKinley said such a move “cannot be thought of.” Forcible annexation “would be criminal aggression.”17 The Teller Amendment to Congress’s resolution for war codified this vision, declaring that the United States had no intention of ruling over Cuba once victory was obtained. But this did not mean that the United States recognized Cuban independence yet. That would wait until the US government was satisfied that Cuba was prepared to self-govern.
The war would have profound effects on the shape of US imperialism. At the Treaty of Paris, Spain lost its possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. With the exception of Cuba, all of these Spanish colonies became US territories. It was in the Philippines that the war would most clearly usher in a new era of US foreign relations and missionary diplomacy. As one writer in the Christian Observer urged, missionaries might “overcome the evil of war with the good of the Gospel. Let us remember the Maine and give them hot shot from our Gospel guns.”18
Missionary Opportunism in the Philippines
As in Cuba, the Philippines had seen many years of anticolonial protest and warfare by the time the Americans arrived. Spanish rule on the archipelago was repressive; the Filipinos had little political power within the empire. Instead, the Spanish ruled the islands through the military and the Catholic friars. By 1898, a resistance movement to increase Filipino representation in Spanish governance had developed into a revolution that sought independence.
At first, Filipino revolutionaries had hoped that the United States might be an ally. Revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo met with the US consul in Singapore before the United States entered the war, and he left that meeting assured that the United States would support the independence of the Philippines. Admiral George Dewey, the hero of the US naval attack on the Spanish, arranged Aguilaldo’s return to Manila. With the Spanish defeated, Filipino revolutionaries got to work building a new Philippine Republic. It would not last long.
The negotiations over the Treaty of Paris did not include any Filipinos. The treaty named the Philippines as a US territory, reflecting the understanding of the Euro-American powers that the Filipinos were racially and culturally unprepared for self-government. The fighting in the Philippines soon shifted from a war for independence from Spain into a war for independence from the United States. As the US government and the American missionaries debated how they would respond to the new opportunities presented to them by this new colony, the Filipinos themselves did not plan to make colonial rule easy for the United States.19
One of the first tasks facing the US government was simply to learn more about the place and the people. Accordingly, President McKinley appointed a commission to travel to the Philippines and report on its political, social, and cultural conditions in the interest of setting up a new colonial government. William Howard Taft, a well-respected lawyer, was selected to lead this important project. In this role, Taft would create legislative and judicial policies for the islands and would soon replace the existing military government as governor-general. In June of 1900, Taft and his commission arrived in the Philippines.
The Philippine Commission’s report set out to describe conditions on the islands at this pivotal moment between colonial regimes. There was little that they did not consider worthy of study: the report covered public health, the civil government, the military, the economy, the liquor trade, sugar farming, mining, forestry, transport, taxation, education, and more. Appendices included extensive tables on the climate, ethnographic reports from different regions throughout the islands, and a lengthy history of the judicial system throughout the history of the Philippines. It provided, or at least the government hoped it provided, a roadmap for US colonial rule.20
Taft knew from the beginning that religion would be an important theme for US rule. Spain had ruled the islands largely through Catholic friars who had monastic orders based on the islands. These religious leaders were Spanish, not Filipino, and owned a huge amount of the land. Americans believed that much of the resistance to Spanish rule was resistance to the friars. Getting rid of the friar system was accordingly a priority. What would replace it, however, was up for discussion.
For some American Christians, the humanitarian rhetoric meant that the war in Cuba could be embraced as a Christian cause. Yet the humanitarian questions were different in the Philippines. For many observers, war in the Philippines seemed much more about territory and colonization. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for example, had embraced the cause in Cuba, but had questions about the Philippines. So, too, did many US clergy.21 William Jennings Bryan, McKinley’s opponent in the presidential race of 1900, joined his voice to those Christians who balked at the imperialism of America’s entry into the Philippines with the reminder that the Great Commission “has no Gatling-gun attachment.” American missionaries, he warned, needed to keep their distance. At risk was the too-close identification of the missionary project with the colonial one. How would it look, he wondered, if missionaries seemed to be part of a conquering force? “Let it be known that our missionaries are seeking souls instead of sovereignty,” he urged. “Let it be known that instead of being the advance guard of conquering armies, they are going forth to help and uplift.”22
This warning was needed, for many American Protestant missionaries and their supporters viewed the US occupation of the Philippines as an act of God.23 For these Christian observers, the ease with which the United States had triumphed in the Philippines could be nothing short of Providential. Over and over again, they emphasized the accidental nature of occupation, and the ways in which the United States was duty bound to govern there. As Arthur Judson Brown of the Presbyterian mission board explained, the country had gained this new territory through “no scheming of our own.”24 The ABCFM believed that the US victory was “the will of God, and we stand in awe as we think of it.” It was so swift, with no cost of life—how else could it be explained?25 Methodist bishop William Oldham claimed that the “roar of the American cannon was the voice of Almighty God announcing that the Philippines should be free.”26 Methodist bishop James Thoburn, too, attributed the US possession of the Philippines to divine intervention when he testified before the US Senate.27
Despite this enthusiasm, it was not initially clear what the United States could or should do after the victory in Manila. President McKinley would later describe the islands as having “dropped into our laps,” leaving him with the question of “what to do with them.” The war there had begun, as it had in Cuba, as an independence movement. But many US observers insisted that the Philippines could not possibly be independent. Racist assumptions about who could or could not self-govern structured these discussions in the United States. At the same time, many Americans believed that to take possession of an overseas colony would be a break with the American past and its core values.
Missionary supporters, meanwhile, were noting an opportunity “second to none that has ever been offered them,” as one article in The Independent explained. The Philippines were “an immense territory hitherto closed” to evangelism and now “open and ready for occupation.”28 The Methodist Woman’s Missionary Society put it a bit less militaristically: if the islands were “providentially opened to the society,” they wanted to send along their missionaries. According to a report on the society’s meeting in the Washington Post, there was “no mistaking the feeling of the delegates on the question of the retention of the islands.” They had every expectation that once the Philippines were brought within the United States, they would make “a fruitful and advantageous field” for missionary labor.29 The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, too, felt that the hand of God had been at work in these “political and military relations into which the United States has been so strangely forced.” Moral and religious responsibilities, they argued, necessarily followed. By late June, that mission board had already received letters from five states urging Presbyterian missions to the Philippines, with one pastor having raised more than a thousand dollars to support the first missionary to be sent there even before the mission board agreed to appoint one.30 American Protestants, in short, were excited by the opportunity that empire seemed to offer.
Julia Ward Howe agreed. The peace advocate, reformer, and poet addressed a congregation on the subject of victory in the fall of 1898. Victory, she noted, was “the joyous word of this hour,” but the difficult task would be to turn the momentary success of Admiral Dewey at Manila into a lasting victory in the Philippines. That victory would not come from the military, but from a band coming from “clean Christian homes.” Instead of weapons, “their ammunition is the spelling book, the grammar, the psalms of David, the promises of Christ.” In time, she hoped, the missionary would say to the soldier, “Your business was to destroy men; mine is to create citizens, which is far better.” Howe’s address noted the long-standing work that US missionaries had done around the world to fight against oppression, but noted that “in all its noble record missionary labor has never had before it a scope so vital, so important as that opened by the late military operations.” They now had the opportunity to “make whole races free with the freedom of the 19th century, the freedom of intelligent thought, of just institutions, of reasonable religion—what a prospect is this!”31
Would the United States take up the “white man’s burden,” as Rudyard Kipling so famously phrased it, and govern a colony of nonwhite subjects in apparent need of civilizing rule? Or would it hold on to what some Americans considered its anti-imperialist traditions and leave the islands to self-rule? Was that even an option? For American Christians who had not given much passing thought to these islands before, it was a dilemma indeed.
As debates over what to do with the Philippines echoed in the halls of Congress, from church pulpits, and in the columns of newspapers across the country, President McKinley paced the floors of the White House late into the night, wondering what to do. When he later described this time to a group of fellow Methodists, McKinley claimed that the answer came to him through prayer. He knelt down to pray, asking God for guidance on this monumental decision. And finally, the answer came. The United States could neither return the Philippines to Spain—it would be “cowardly and dishonorable”—nor turn them over to another imperial power such as France or Germany—this would be “bad business.” But they also could not leave the Philippines alone—“they were unfit for self-government and would soon have anarchy and misrule worse than Spain’s was.” Only one choice seemed to remain. The United States would simply have to “take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”32
McKinley’s language here is striking. Whether or not he had literally fallen to his knees to pray for God’s guidance in the Philippines, he articulated a Christian diplomacy that was in accord with the commitments of missionaries and their US supporters. After all, missionary diplomats had advocated more or less similar goals for decades: uplift, civilization, and Christianization were all watchwords of the late-nineteenth-century mission movement. The sorts of schools, hospitals, and presses that Protestant missionaries had established at their various stations elsewhere around the world seemed like they would fit in well with the administration’s vision of US rule in the Philippines. And McKinley’s justification for this—to serve “those for whom Christ also died”—was an explicitly Christian call to action. To have the president of the United States advocating not only for a civilizing and uplifting form of empire, but to directly link those goals to the work of Christianizing was an exciting development for McKinley’s Methodist audience. In his rhetoric, at least, McKinley was a powerful ally to missionary diplomacy.
If earlier generations of Christian imperialists had sought to direct US political and economic interests overseas in ways that would benefit the mission movement, here now was a US empire that seemed ready for missionary activity. One Episcopal priest described how, standing on the Pacific shore in North America and looking out over the ocean, his “heart thrilled at the thought of that great field now open for the church in the Philippines” as he “pray[ed] earnestly that the Holy Ghost may direct us in occupying it.”33 The government had acted first, and now missionaries could respond.
The churches quickly did so.34 By the end of the decade, American missionaries had arrived in the Philippines from the YMCA, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopalian Church, the American Baptist Missionary Union, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the United Brethren in Christ, the Foreign Christian Missionary Society of the Disciples of Christ, the ABCFM, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Free Methodist Church, and the Christian Science Society.35 The missionaries went about their work, dividing the land among the various mission boards and adopting the colonial language of “unoccupied territory.” This wording of occupation is at once striking and unsurprising. They were, after all, part of a colonial force.
These missionaries believed themselves to be joining with the government of the United States in a single project: bringing civilization, the gospel, and religious freedom to the Philippines. They saw the US flag as “the glorious symbol of liberty and a Christian civilization,” and they saw themselves as important bearers of both of those concepts.36 Bishop Charles Brent, of the Episcopal Church, insisted that it was time for Americans to realize their duty “not merely as a Churchman, but also as a citizen” to support these missions wholeheartedly.37 As they had done for many years around the world, missionary organizations again walked the delicate balance between celebrating the importance of religious freedom and expecting the US government to aid missionaries in their evangelistic project. The war simply brought a new attention to these long-standing concerns.
Imperial Governance
If Protestant missionaries were excited by the possibilities of partnering in the colonial governance of the Philippines, American Catholic observers were horrified. Protestant missionary anti-Catholicism was no secret, and McKinley’s language of Christianizing the Philippines was alarming. After all, the Philippines were majority Catholic. Christianity had come to the Philippines long ago. The problem for Protestant missionaries and their supporters was the type of Christianity that had flourished on the islands. Catholic Americans were accordingly watching closely to ensure that the “religious freedom” that the United States promised the Philippines was not simply anti-Catholicism in disguise. Both groups waited anxiously to see what William Howard Taft, the newly appointed governor-general of the Philippines, would do.
In the 1900 US presidential election, various questions raised by the Philippines were at the heart of McKinley’s battle against William Jennings Bryan for the White House. While Taft governed a colony that was actively resisting US rule, a vibrant anti-imperialist movement emerged in the United States that set off a debate not only about the specifics of US governance in the new territories of the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and Guam, but also about the nature of American national identity. No one could afford to be complacent about the challenges of US empire.
American anti-imperialists argued that the United States had been founded in an anti-imperialist revolution and had, throughout its history, embraced values in opposition to colonialism and empire. These values, they claimed, were at the heart of their understanding of American national identity. Thomas Jefferson had called for the United States to become an “empire of liberty,” spreading its freedoms wherever the flag flew. Any new territories, under this approach, would need to eventually become states with full and equal membership in the American union. Such a future, anti-imperialists insisted, was not possible for the far distant and nonwhite spaces of the former Spanish empire. The United States simply could not incorporate them as colonies (or, in the American terminology, “territories”) without fundamentally changing its character.
Protestant and Catholic Americans could be found in both the pro- and anti-imperialist camps. While the Christian stance on humanitarian questions seemed clear, it was far cloudier on the question of colonial governance. Anti-imperialists worried about the corruption and oppression that so often followed colonial rule. Pro-imperialists focused instead on the opportunities that empire provided for evangelism and benevolence. Both sides could look back on a century of US missionary engagement with empires and colonized people to find evidence for their arguments.
To prove that imperialism had been at the core of America’s history since its beginning, pro-imperialists pointed to more than a century of US imperialist rule over Native Americans. Whatever anti-imperialists had argued about the meaning of US history, the fact remained that the United States had controlled colonial territory throughout its history. It had always been both a republic and an empire. For the entire history of the United States, the government had not only sought to claim the lands of Indigenous Americans, it had also imposed significant changes to Indigenous culture, often through the work of missionary societies. Missionaries and US empire went hand-in-hand. This history was not lost on anyone. For pro-imperialists, it was clear that the United States had long been imperial.38
Mission boards largely agreed, but in 1904, the Methodists raised an interesting question. If the Philippines were an American space, could the denomination still refer to the Philippines as a “foreign” mission? Foreign missions were, by definition, in countries outside of the United States and its governing power. A minority report to the General Conference raised this question, arguing that the Philippines ought to be considered a “home” mission, just like the missions to the various Native American nations in North America. But the conference as a whole disagreed. “The power to classify its missions and direct their administration is in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and not in the government of the United States,” the decision read. Allowing US colonization over “an island beyond the seas” to change the classification of its missions would be to allow the US government inappropriate power over the missionary organizations. For these Methodists, distance and race mattered more than political governance in determining a space’s identity as “foreign” or “home.” Could the government’s relationship to the Philippines determine the missionary relationship to the Philippines? “We think not.”39
In spite of this wariness about giving the government too much control over how the mission societies categorized their work, many missionary leaders celebrated the opportunity to work within this US colonial space. Arthur Judson Brown was particularly enthusiastic. He came into his role as general secretary for the Presbyterian mission board with a commitment to the progressive movement known as the Social Gospel, and he considered social service and human welfare to be just as important to missionary work as evangelism. Brown traveled with his wife, Jennie E. Thomas Brown, to the Philippines in 1901 as part of a delegation to study the viability of Presbyterian missions and the path forward. He took this role seriously, studying the available reports on Philippine history and culture and interviewing Governor-General Taft, Catholic bishops, Board of Education officials, public school teachers, and of course the missionaries themselves. He would later describe these visits as “crowded with interviews, conferences, addresses, and visits to institutions.”40 The trip would be the source of several publications for various audiences: a 1902 report, intended for the Presbyterian mission board, and a book, The New Era in the Philippines, which went through multiple editions in 1903.
Figure 8.1. Map of the Philippines, 1903. This map accompanied one of Arthur Judson Brown’s publications on the Philippines for US missionary audiences. Note the use of Connecticut in the top left of the map to communicate scale to readers in the US mainland.
Source: Brown, New Era in the Philippines, 306.
Brown’s reporting identified the Filipinos as a “naturally intelligent and kindly” people who were not ready for self-government. Brown estimated that it would take “some decades” before they would be prepared, and even then only if they received the sort of cultural reform that he believed necessary. He found most of the “common people” to be “ignorant and superstitious,” but he believed that could be easily explained by their history. “What else could be expected after nearly four centuries of corrupt and oppressive Spanish rule?”41 American sovereignty, he was sure, would change things.
The state and the mission alike agreed that what Filipinos really needed was character development. Brown insisted that missionaries were uniquely positioned to do this work. The problem was, he argued, that the Filipinos were idle and undisciplined. They needed to learn the industriousness of “the Scotchman, the Yankee, or the Chinese.” This industriousness could be taught by the missionaries, he believed, even as he associated industry with particular racial groups over others.42
The methods and institutions that guided mission work elsewhere would need tweaks in the Philippines due to the related work of the colonial government. The United States had taken charge of health care within Manila, but left the rest of the Philippines to be cared for by the missionaries. As public health was a major concern in the colony, this would be an important task. Government control of elementary education freed the missionaries to focus on the higher branches. The missionaries debated naming their new college after President McKinley.43
Protestant missionaries generally approved of the state control of education, seeing it as an important marker of the separation of church and state that would diminish Catholic influence while subtly supporting their own power. Brown, for example, celebrated the 1901 school law that removed religion from the public schools as part of a fight against the Catholicism of the islands, identifying “intellectual freedom and enlightenment” as the “death to the type of Romanism which prevails in the Philippines.”44 Certainly this was how William Jessup, a missionary in Syria, understood the situation. Reading Brown’s book on the Philippines, he was struck by the ways that the public schools would lift “an immense load” off the missionaries. “To think of being on a ‘Foreign Mission Field’ with the enthusiastic backing of the whole United States in giving the people a true education! Why the idea is superb!”45
Missionaries and their supporters embraced the language of responsibility and duty that drove the “white man’s burden” approach to the Philippines. Accordingly, missionary reporting on the moral effects of empire did not shy away from harsh critique, either of Filipinos or of the “irreligious” Americans they encountered on the islands. Missionaries had long worried about the bad influence of immoral Euro-Americans on potential converts’ ideas about Christianity. Here, the sheer numbers of Americans unaffiliated with the church seemed a major threat. Accordingly, the missionaries built an American church for the colonizers in addition to Filipino churches for the colonized, effectively segregating worshippers.
Missionaries also organized opposition to the sale of alcohol at military canteens and the government regulation of prostitution.46 Speaking in front of the Christian Alliance Convention, missionary Bessie White reported that before the Americans took Manila, there were only two saloons in the city. One year later, there were four hundred. Reports like this, shared first with missionary audiences but then reported in mainstream publications like the New York Times, spread missionary critiques to a wider audience.47
Both of these topics hit on the core question of what kind of influence US rule would have. Was the United States a moral force in the world? And if so, how could it justify these policies that, to their critics, seemed to encourage immoral behavior? Missionaries and their supporters asked these questions with deep earnestness, and they were met with similar passion from their audiences. When Rev. Homer C. Stuntz, the superintendent of the Methodist missions in the Philippines, spoke to the General Methodist Missionary Convention on reasons to oppose the canteens, it was, according to the Baltimore Sun, “one of the hits of the address.”48
Though missionaries benefitted from and identified with aspects of the US political project in the Philippines, they well understood themselves to have a distinct role. As missionaries regularly insisted, they were not political. Brown, for example, claimed that mission boards “would prefer to have no relations with governments,” though this claim was belied by the activities of many mission boards throughout the century.49 Indeed if this were true, why had he invited Roosevelt and McKinley to the 1900 missionary conference? The connections between the missionaries and the government was complicated in the Philippines. This was not a space where missionary diplomacy played out in the ways that it had earlier in the nineteenth century. Though their contemporaries in other parts of the world continued in consular work, and though mission boards continued to remain in contact with the State Department, Philippines missionaries did not fill diplomatic roles. They did, however, understand their presence to be an important part of US influence on the islands, particularly because they saw themselves as embodying a particular American virtue: religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
Religious Freedom
When Taft arrived in the Philippines, he, like so many American observers, noted that it had no tradition of separating church and state. Under Spanish rule, much of the civic life of the islands had been administered by Spanish friars in the Augustinian and Dominican orders. By the time of American arrival, the friars had become unpopular among the Filipinos. The hostility, as Taft understood it, came from several sources. Perhaps most important, there was “a cleavage between the native clergy and the friars” due to the exclusion of Filipinos from the religious orders. This was a lesson that should have struck Protestant missionaries as well—problems emerged when the leaders of the religious hierarchy were perceived as outsiders. But American missionaries focused on a different lesson: the friars, Americans understood, had too much power and had been corrupted. They were major landowners in the Philippines, controlling access to 420,000 acres of land. They had also long controlled the public school system. Unraveling the connections between the state and the Catholic church in the Philippines would be one of the most sensitive tasks that Taft would face in the Philippines.50
The challenge was heightened by American missionaries and politicians trumpeting the ways that US rule would bring religious freedom.51 Methodist Bishop William Oldham had claimed that God’s purpose had “clearly” been for the United States to colonize the Philippines in order “to give the Filipinos freedom of religion.” The Methodist Foreign Missionary Society echoed this idea, praising the “guarantees of religious liberty” that would come with peace and US rule.52 Religious freedom was, in fact, specifically mentioned in the Treaty of Paris that established US sovereignty over the islands. It was at the heart of the American project, but its meaning was unclear.53
In both its domestic and foreign applications, religious freedom was a concept with multiple meanings. Protestant missionaries had long been skilled at simultaneously using several—at times contradictory—definitions in order to support their own work. American religious freedom depended on the separation of church and state, but also assumed that, in some general but important sense, the United States was a Christian nation. American religious freedom demanded that the law recognize an individual’s freedom of conscience, but in this colonial context it operated alongside a system that required imperial rule when the people did not exhibit proper “civilization”—including the embrace of the right kind of Christianity.
In their many stations around the world, Protestant missionaries had long used a flexible definition of religious freedom that prioritized their right to evangelize. They continued to present themselves as the embodiment of religious freedom now that the way was opened for their work in the Philippines. Religious freedom to them meant the ability to choose one’s religion. Protestant missionaries truly believed that once people had the free choice to become Protestant, its obvious benefits would bring them to the church. Arthur Judson Brown, for example, explained that the problem with Filipino Catholicism was that it had been forced by Catholic friars who controlled religious, political, and civic matters. The people had not been given a choice.
Although Protestant missionaries also combined civic and evangelistic work, they insisted that their work was different because they understood their own religious outlook to be most conductive to the improvement of the islands and of individual Filipinos as well. From there, not only true Christianity but also civilized culture and democratic politics would follow. This complicated logic explained how Brown could proclaim his support for the separation of church and state while still insisting that “every true American patriot” ought to support Protestant missionaries.54
Catholic Americans, unsurprisingly, took issue with such an idea. For even though Protestant missionaries were anxious to “Christianize” the islands, the fact remained that the majority of the islands’ inhabitants, were, in fact, Christians. They just weren’t Protestants. Looking at a century of Protestant missionary diplomacy and their own experiences of anti-Catholicism in the mainland United States, these observers were quick to notice Protestant anti-Catholicism masking itself as religious freedom. They worried that the removal of the friars and the secularization of the schools would decimate the Catholic church on the islands. Archbishop John Ireland voiced these concerns in the pages of The Outlook, where he was interviewed on the subject of how Catholics and Protestants might cooperate in the “religious reconstruction” of the Philippines. He rejected any efforts of Protestant missionaries in the islands. The Catholics were “in complete control” there and to remove Catholicism would be to “throw them into absolute religious indifference.” As an American, too, Ireland objected to Protestant missions. “Do your Protestant missionaries realize,” he asked, “that they are doing the greatest harm to America by making her flag unpopular?” By making it appear to Filipinos that US rule would result in the removal of Catholicism, he claimed, missionaries were damaging the entire colonial project.55
Protestant missionaries responded to these attacks quickly. Presbyterian James Rodgers insisted that Filipinos saw the United States as the bearer of religious freedom. The mission was not creating bad will toward the United States. Rather, Filipinos understood the Protestant missions to be part and parcel of the project of religious freedom.56 Such assurances were not entirely comforting to American Catholic audiences.
Within the government, McKinley, Taft, and Roosevelt were all attentive to the concerns of these Catholic Americans, at least in part in the interest of defending themselves in electoral battles. But the attention to Catholic concerns was not merely self-interested. Many writers who tried to explain the Philippines to readers in the United States emphasized that while individual corrupt friars may have caused problems, Catholicism itself had been an important and valuable tool of colonization and civilization on the islands. Just as Protestantism could serve the colonial interests, in other words, so too could an American version of Catholicism.57
Taft, for his part, had a genuine respect for Filipino Catholics and the civilizing power of Catholicism in general. His speeches on the subject of religion in the Philippines in front of Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Catholic audiences were respectful of the Catholic past and present of the Philippines. While he shared missionary discomfort with the rule of Spanish friars, he understood that the problem was not Catholicism itself, but particular dynamics within the friar system. The solutions to the problems of church and state were relatively simple, at least in theory. First, Taft would work with the Catholic hierarchy to replace Spanish friars with other Catholic leaders who would not generate such opposition from the Filipino people. Then, he would transfer the power of major institutions that had been run by the church into the hands of civil government.
Taft worked with the Vatican to ensure these transitions would be smooth, and his communications with the US public were respectful of Catholicism, both in the Philippines and in the United States. The contrast with Protestant missionary rhetoric was evident. Where they saw innate problems with Catholicism itself, he saw particular issues that emerged out of a particular colonial context.58
Though Taft won accolades for his diplomatic visit to the Vatican, the implementation of his plan was far more challenging in practice than it had been in theory. The schools presented a particular challenge. After the Treaty of Paris, the US government took control of Filipino schools. At first, a Catholic army chaplain served as school superintendent, partly in the hopes that this would ease the transition from the schools being run by priests during the Spanish era. The government banned religious instruction and removed religious emblems from the walls. Catholics in the mainland United States and the Philippines alike were concerned by what they saw happening. To quiet their fears, Taft allowed priests and nuns to provide after-hours religious instruction to those children whose parents requested it. But rumors spread that teachers and administrators were largely being staffed through Protestant mission boards and the YMCA. Protestant missionaries, for their part, complained about an unstated preference for Catholic instructors. Neither of these claims had merit.59
Demand for public school teachers was high, and a good deal of care went into selecting who might serve in this capacity. In 1903, the superintendent of schools reported examining 1,500 applicants to make 500 appointments as teachers. All applicants were required to be a college or normal school graduate with at least two years’ experience in the classroom and two references that could attest to “moral character and personal habits,” in addition to a certificate of good health and a successful examination in a range of subjects. Successful applicants signed a contract for two years and were required to serve at whatever location the Civil Service Board sent them to.60 In time, the government hoped to employ as many Filipino teachers as they could train. In the meantime, teachers came from the United States.
If the Protestant missionaries struggled at times to justify their work in the Philippines among Filipino Catholics, they had considerably less trouble in explaining their work among other groups in the Philippines. Americans understood there to be roughly three religious groups in the Philippines: the Catholics, the Moros, and the Negritos. As Brown phrased it, the Moros were “fanatical Mohammedans” and the Negritos were untouched by Spanish colonialism, having maintained “their primitive paganism.” None of these, he argued, were civilized “according to Anglo Saxon standards.”61 The government mirrored this three-way classification, governing the Catholic, Muslim, and pagan sections of the Philippines differently. While colonial officials believed that all three groups were markedly superstitious and in need of modernization, they also understood that these religious identities were the most important factors in understanding how to rule over them.62
In the face of the violent opposition to US rule in the northern part of the archipelago, the initial strategy of the US government in the southern Moro territory was to rule indirectly. Working with local leaders, such as the sultan of Sulu, seemed to be an ideal way to rule this new colonial possession. But by 1902, the American approach changed. With the anti-American resistance elsewhere in the archipelago seemingly more controlled and rebellions in the Moro Province on the rise, the United States turned its attention to the Moros. Here the government’s goal of being the bearer of civilization seemed ever more important. Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key partners in this work, just as they had done in other regions of the Philippines and around the world. Soon, the government welcomed missionaries into the region.
Leonard Wood, appointed the new governor of the Moro Province in 1903, traveled to the Philippines by way of Constantinople, and his experience of the Ottoman Empire shaped his approach to the Muslims he met in the Philippines. He was convinced, even before his arrival, that the sultan of Sulu would be “degenerate, dishonest, tricky, dissipated, and absolutely devoid of principle.” He ruled with an iron fist, and led the Americans to respond to Moro resistance brutally, often interpreting their resistance as religious fanaticism rather than anticolonial rebellion. In the first decade of American rule in the region, more than ten thousand Moros were killed.63 Missionaries endorsed Wood’s approach. Henry Otis Dwight, an ABCFM missionary, had even suggested that displays of violence would be essential to maintaining colonial authority in this new American Muslim territory.64
Wood welcomed missionaries into the region, hoping that their work to civilize and evangelize would have broader effects on the Moros’ willingness to succumb to colonial rule.65 Missionary hospitals, in particular, were heralded as an important tool of colonial rule. They served as the colonial carrot next to the stick of brutal violence. Missionaries, allied with the government, hoped that the civilization they brought with them would lead to better times in the future.
The missionary experience in the Philippines provided early hints that a new era in missionary diplomacy had begun. The United States based the legitimacy of its power on the idea that it brought civilization and religious freedom to its new colonial subjects. Missionaries were both an asset and a challenge to that claim. As complicated as it could be, it was far easier for the US government to come to a compromise with the missionary movement in other empires. In the Philippines, it was clear that the missionary definition of religious freedom as the right to evangelize was not fully compatible with the government definition of religious freedom that respected the right to have one’s religious beliefs respected and left alone.
The turn of the century in the Philippines presented a moment to rethink some of the central components of US missionary diplomacy. As the US position on the world stage evolved, did the earlier relationships between missionaries and US foreign relations still work for the benefit of both groups? While many US officials continued to unthinkingly assume at times that Protestant missions would be an important and obvious partner in the work of civilizing the world, there were increasing challenges to this long-standing opinion. Missionaries were not driving the conversation here; rather, their ability to participate in US diplomacy was fully reactive.
The missionary role in religious freedom as an international relations issue would go on to be an important continued connection between the mission movement and US politics into the twentieth century. As part of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America’s Committee on the Relations of Missions and Governments, Arthur Judson Brown regularly traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with presidents, secretaries of state, and chairmen of the House and Senate committees on foreign affairs. “We were invariably received courteously,” he would later remember, because the politicians understood that the missionaries had “no political or personal interest to serve,” being only interested in “matters affecting religious freedom and friendly international relations.” Left unexamined in Brown’s reflections, though, was the extent to which religious freedom was itself a political interest.66
As Taft’s career in US politics continued, he would become, if anything, a stronger advocate of foreign missions. At a 1908 speech before the Laymen’s Missionary Movement in Carnegie Hall in New York City, Taft spoke of how traveling abroad taught him “the immense importance of foreign missions.” He learned that “Christianity is the hope of modern civilization, for Christianity is the true democracy.” Unlike many of his Protestant listeners, he continued to include Catholicism as a civilizing force, but they agreed with him that the influence of the churches “upholds the hands of the civil governor for the maintenance of the peace and order.” This was not, he suggested, about any sort of inappropriate union between church and state. Rather, he explained that he was “talking practical facts upon the effect of religion on government, and I know what I am talking about.”67 Missionaries, he insisted, did not cause trouble for the government. Instead, they were valuable partners.
As president, Taft welcomed a group of Methodist bishops to the White House in 1910. Again, he praised the work of missionaries and reflected on his time in the Philippines. There were some at the time, he recalled, who had opposed US rule there, claiming that “we were reaching out with a greed of territory and a greed for power, rather than with the desire to advance the cause of civilization and help our fellow-men.” But in the intervening years, those critics had been proven wrong, Taft argued—thanks to the efforts of Protestant missionaries. The results of a decade of missionary labor had shown that “we are all working in the same field—you in one way and those of us who conduct the civil part of the Government in another; but it is all for the glory of God and the promotion of Christianity among men.”68
Taft’s comments were about the Philippines, but they could just as easily have been about China as well. There, too, missionaries and their relationship to the government and imperialism had been a major political issue for the past decade. There, Christian missionaries were increasingly identified by a group of anti-Western Chinese men and women as part and parcel of the attempt to control their country.
Brown’s visit to the Philippines had been part of a broader trip to visit Presbyterian missions around the world. Upon his return in 1902, Brown would be called on not only as a recent witness of things in the Philippines, but in these other countries as well. His reflections on China in particular would be important to a new series of discussions about missions and foreign relations in the first decades of the new century.69 As Brown euphemized in his memoirs, there were “conditions in China which called for the personal presence of an officer of the Board.” Those conditions were the Boxer Uprising and its aftermath, a crisis that would raise a new set of questions about missions and foreign relations for the new century.