In view of claims by Catholic hardliners that the recent rain and floods were sent by God as a token of displeasure over the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, it is perhaps ironic that the man credited with convincing Filipinos that such beliefs had no scientific basis was a Spanish Jesuit.
Fr. Jose Algué, who had succeeded founder Fr. Federico Faura as director of the Manila Weather Observatory, was in November 1898 co-opted to serve the new American occupiers by Admiral Dewey, whose main concern was the military importance of accurate weather forecasting. Such was Algué’s progress that five years later at the St. Louis World’s Fair the Weather Bureau exhibit attracted great interest, projecting “the ‘civilizing’ and ‘modernizing’ effects of American rule in the islands.”
By the mid-1920s, a total of 252 meteorological stations across the Philippines were sending daily and monthly reports on rainfall “for climatological and economic purposes and data to assist in typhoon forecasting.” Such work was of international benefit, as typhoon warnings were also sent to observatories in China and Japan. The bureau’s “development of scientifically based weather maps was to play a leading role in managing the environment, trade and strategic interests of the region.”
This fascinating information comes from an essay by James Francis Warren entitled “Scientific Superman,” one of almost 50 contributions to Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State edited by Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010).
The aim of the editors is broadly twofold: to re-introduce and emphasize the concept of empire into US historiography, and to demonstrate that many innovations developed in the formal empire acquired in the 1890s were re-exported back home, where their effects were not always benign. The second of these themes is also pursued in McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire, which will be discussed in a future column (or two).
In “The Hazards of Jeffersonianism,” Paul Hutchcroft demonstrates that the export to the Philippines of the Jeffersonian ideal of decentralized government meant that “the American colonial regime in Manila was simply not set up in such a way as to encourage effective central control over the hinterland.” Moreover, the creation of an effective central bureaucracy — a modern civil service — was overtaken by events as new political structures were established, first at municipal and provincial and later at the national level.
As early as 1902, Governor-General Taft expressed concerns about caciquism and “feudal relations of dependence” in rural areas. “Many municipal councils were appropriating funds to their own salaries, leaving roads untended and teachers unpaid.” Predictably, the formation of the Philippine Assembly saw an attack on the civil service and the transformation of the office of municipal treasurer into “a blatantly political post beholden to local forces rather than the center.”
This implementation of “American notions of what a state ought to be” produced “little democratic substance,” merely transforming the “Spanish era economic elite into an American era political-economic elite.” Hutchcroft cites the argument of Samuel  Huntington that as the USA has, due to the circumstances of its foundation, never had to develop a powerful central authority to modernize its society, “its experience has little to offer modernizing countries today.” Instead, Hutchcroft concludes, “Jeffersonian ideals have often undermined the democratic and developmental objectives toward which they were applied with zeal.”
This problem was not resolved by Philippine independence and will be exacerbated by any move to federalism. Nowadays, Hutchcroft points out, both private and public US aid agencies promote decentralization, and he promises future work on this. Can’t wait.
The outsourcing of US military ancillary functions is not, as Jana Lipman shows in “Guantánamo and the Case of Kid Chicle,” a recent development. In 1940, the US Navy awarded the contract for the expansion of its facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to the Frederick Snare Corp., which employed 9,000 local workers on the job. In doing so, the Navy also outsourced its employment responsibilities, although this did not prevent Naval intelligence from investigating prospective Snare employees.
The workers had the worst of both worlds, because Snare argued on the one hand that as a US company with operations confined to the base it could ignore Cuban laws, and on the other that US employment laws could be disregarded because it was a private company in Cuba. This injustice was highlighted by the 1940 case of Lino “Kid Chicle” Rodríguez, a former boxer who, passed over by the Snare recruiter, jumped aboard the launch transporting workers to the base. The recruiter — a naval man named Lt. Kenneth West — is said to have hit Rodríguez with a blackjack and thrown him overboard, leading to the Cuban’s death.
Amid widespread popular protests, the US Navy argued that as the incident occurred aboard one of its vessels, the USA had jurisdiction, a position which met no challenge from the Cuban justice ministry. A Navy court-martial then found Lt. West not guilty of involuntary manslaughter and “conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline.” The following year, when two Cuban employees of Snare died on the base their families received no compensation and the US Navy conducted no investigation.
As Cuban labor is no longer available for employment on the base, their place is nowadays taken by overseas contract workers — from Jamaica and the Philippines.
As fascinating as the contents of Colonial Crucible are, the book is unfortunately flawed. Many of the contributions suffer from a failure to fully appreciate or acknowledge the economic basis of “imperialism.” One essay (Jeremi Suri’s “The Limits of American Empire”) actually disagrees with the rest of the contributors and claims that the US military is a “democratizing institution.” And a few of the essays, one of which I refused to read in full, sadly suffer from outbreaks of academic gibberish.
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