On October 5, 1904, William Howard Taft stood before a crowd at the University of Notre Dame and gave a speech about the Philippines, where he had spent the past three years as civil governor. Taft recounted the history of Spanish Catholic exploration and empire in the islands, praising the “enterprise, courage, and fidelity to duty that distinguished those heroes of Spain who braved the then frightful dangers of the deep to carry Christianity and European civilization into the far-off Orient.” He argued that the involvement of Catholic missionaries transformed Spain's project in the Philippines from one potentially motivated by greed to one dedicated to the uplift of the human condition. “The occupation of the islands took on a different aspect from that of ordinary seeking for gold and profit,” he told his audience, “and was not in the least like the conquests of Pizarro and Cortez. The natives [in the Philippines] were treated with great kindness and consideration. The priests exerted every effort to conciliate them.”Footnote 2
Five years later Taft made another speech celebrating Spanish Catholic missionaries. This time he was in the small citrus city of Riverside, California, sixty miles east of Los Angeles. There he helped a predominantly Protestant group of city boosters unveil a tablet honoring the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra as an “apostle, legislator, [and] builder” who advanced “the beginning of civilization in California.”Footnote 3 Recalling his experience in the Philippines, Taft told his audience:
We who come from the Eastern States are accustomed to take much smug satisfaction in making reference to our ancestors and I think it is at least calculated to reduce the swelling of our heads to bear in mind for a while that there were others besides the English who were fighting the battles of progress during the sixteenth century. … it is hard for us to believe that such important and unselfish work was being done at this time by those who were not our ancestors.Footnote 4
Yet believe it, by all accounts, they did. Taft's Riverside speech would be happily recalled by local boosters for decades to come. As we shall see, Taft was in good company when he praised Spanish Catholic missionaries as heroic founding figures.Footnote 5
The existence of such praise is striking, given what we know about the persistence of anti-Catholicism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. In 1887, for example, the American Protective Association dedicated itself to combating Catholic influence in national life; in 1898, anti-Catholic and Black Legend propaganda surged as the United States went to war with the Spanish empire; and from 1910 to the end of the First World War, a flourishing anti-Catholic press achieved circulation figures that rivaled the major metropolitan dailies.Footnote 6 To be sure, not everyone joined anti-Catholic organizations or subscribed to anti-Catholic periodicals, and the lurid style of antebellum American anti-Catholicism was on the wane. Yet a longstanding Protestant association of Catholicism with hierarchy, authority, and obscurantism continued to foster widespread suspicions that “Romanism” was essentially incompatible with American values.Footnote 7
Taft's speeches, however, were examples of an emerging counter-narrative, which developed alongside continuing anti-Catholic rhetoric. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, in the process of accelerating Anglo-American settlement in Southern California and American empire building in the Philippines, white, Protestant Americans gained influence in areas that had previously been governed by Catholic Spain and dominated by Catholic elites. In each place, new languages linking Catholicism and American national identity developed. Anglo-Protestant builders of, and stakeholders in, U.S. power began to position Catholic faith and historical figures as newly compatible with U.S. history, identity, and purpose. In Southern California, Anglo-American boosters began to celebrate the region's history of Spanish Franciscan missions, preserving and restoring existing mission buildings while selling a romantic mission story to tourists and settlers.Footnote 8 In the Philippines, U.S. imperial officials, journalists, and popular writers tempered widespread critiques of contemporary Spanish friars, celebrating the friars' early missionary precursors as civilizing heroes and arguing for the value of Catholic clerical authority.
Considered separately, these new languages were locally specific responses to different historical circumstances. Southern California boosters were engaging in historical myth making, tourist industry development, and real estate speculation. They were doing so from an ascendant political, economic, and cultural position, in the wake of a boom in Anglo-American tourism and settlement. Colonial officials and American writers in the Philippines, on the other hand, were attempting to administratively construct and rhetorically defend a nascent and contested colonial state. They were doing so in the context of domestic American debate about the imperial project and in the shadow of an ongoing war against Filipino nationalists. This essay will begin by tracing these distinct histories.
I will then go on to argue, however, that each place saw similar rhetorical shifts, driven by comparable forces and motivations. First, in both places American Protestants joined Catholics in arguing that the United States needed to evolve beyond parochial religious bigotries: in Southern California, part of the appeal of the mission celebrations was their self-conscious and frequently self-congratulatory embrace of religious toleration and cooperation. In the Philippines the delicate politics of colonial state building encouraged political figures and many popular writers to explicitly steer clear of outright anti-Catholicism. Second, in both places the celebration of Euro-American clerical authority helped to create, narrate, and justify the United States' emergence as a globally powerful nation and empire. In Southern California, the commemoration of Franciscan missionaries as founding figures rhetorically naturalized the recent history of American territorial acquisition, elided the Mexican role in that story, and provided a timely parable about the benefits of paternalistic labor management and economic growth. In the Philippines, efforts to defend the much-criticized Spanish friars—and to celebrate the early Catholic missionaries to the islands—framed American colonial rule as a continuation of heroic European civilizing work and advanced a vision of Catholic clerical authority as a potentially useful technology of imperial control. Although the particular stories in each place were locally rooted and distinct, in both places old anti-Catholic tropes were challenged and transformed in ways that reinforced U.S. continental development and transoceanic empire.
Historians of Southern California and the Philippines have noted the emergence of new approaches to Catholicism in each place but have not fully explained them. The extensive scholarly literature on Southern California's Spanish past mythology is primarily concerned with tracing the role of tourism in regional development and with illuminating the race-making project at the heart of the myth.Footnote 9 Some scholars have dismissed the topic of religion by pointing to the ways that Protestant Californians described Franciscan missionaries in quasi-Protestant terms (as simple men doing hard labor), whereas others have seen an anti-modernist impulse behind Anglo boosters' attractions to a pastoral past. Both arguments illuminate key aspects of the mission commemorations but fail to explain the whole. The movement to celebrate the missions never lost sight of the fact that the missions were markers of Catholic history: as we shall see, Anglo boosters often directly addressed the issue of Protestant/Catholic difference. Furthermore, while anti-modernism was a part of Spanish past mythmaking in California, the fact that the mythmakers were ambitious, socially ascendant boosters fits uneasily with T. J. Jackson Lears's description of the status anxiety and backward gaze at the heart of East Coast, bourgeois anti-modernism.Footnote 10
A few scholars of American empire building in the Philippines have addressed religious issues, but they have focused predominantly on Protestant-Catholic tensions. They describe, for example, how some U.S. Catholics worried about the influx of Protestant missionaries to the islands or how American Protestant servicemen were accused of desecrating Catholic churches during the war. Protestant-Catholic accommodations or attractions have been explored more fully by scholars primarily interested in the politics of race and empire building.Footnote 11 Most significantly, Paul A. Kramer has noted that U.S. Protestants cast Spanish and Filipino Catholics as fellow Christians and has established the important role of Christian/non-Christian distinctions in the justification of U.S. rule and the construction of a bifurcated colonial state.Footnote 12
By and large, then, scholarship on the Spanish past myth in Southern California and on empire building in the Philippines has noted the importance of Protestant-Catholic relations but has primarily focused on local examples of the same themes we see in national histories: anti-Catholic animus and anti-modern attraction. Rather than reading the national into the local, however, this essay moves in the other direction, identifying events and language created on-site in the U.S. Pacific, as a result of particular local encounters, histories, ambitions, and anxieties.
Furthermore, by focusing on the U.S. Pacific, this essay takes seriously the connections that Gilded Age and Progressive Era Americans themselves perceived between two regions that scholars do not often consider together: the West Coast of the United States and the Far East. During the nineteenth century, one rationale for extending U.S. sovereignty to the West Coast and pursuing colonial rule in the Philippines was the long-standing belief that U.S. military and commercial access to the Pacific was key to the development of the United States as a viable nation with a global mission. Furthermore, Spanish imperial history made engagement with Roman Catholicism a necessary part of the project of U.S. Pacific power. Though many Anglo-American Protestants supported Protestant missionary efforts or expressed a belief in providential Manifest Destiny, the popular ideal of a Christian-American moral empire was complicated by the presence of Catholic histories and communities in these places. Taking a Pacific perspective illuminates the multifaceted religious context of the emergence of the United States as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century.
A Pacific perspective also shifts one's understanding of the history of Catholicism in American culture, a history that has been dominated by narratives of Catholic immigration and assimilation. In surveys of U.S. Catholic history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in particular are often described as eras of the “Immigrant Church,” when record numbers of Catholics arrived from eastern and southern Europe and faced recurrent waves of nativist anti-Catholicism. Yet, as Timothy Matovina argues, when one's perspective moves away from the East Coast, the notion of an Immigrant Church breaks down.Footnote 13 In the American West and in the new overseas colonial empire, Anglo Protestants were the newcomers, and they were moving into regions with large Catholic populations and long Catholic histories. Although Southern California and the Philippines did not themselves define the U.S. Pacific, in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era they did emerge as two highly visible Pacific regions: California through rapid growth and tourism and the Philippines as a controversial site of overseas colonial empire.Footnote 14
Southern California and the Philippines
At the end of the nineteenth century, Southern California was reeling from a period of rapid change that transformed the physical, economic, cultural, and religious landscape of the region. Since the advent of U.S. rule in 1848, landed wealth—and with it economic and political power—had shifted from a Spanish-speaking, ranching oligarchy of Californios to a rapidly growing English-speaking majority, comprised primarily of recently arrived Anglo-American settlers and developers. The complex and uneven process of Californio displacement took place over several decades. The Californios faced economic, environmental, and legal challenges in the second half of the nineteenth century, including declining cattle prices, drought, high taxes, Anglo squatters, and American legal attacks on Mexican land titles. In the 1880s, the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway to Los Angeles sparked a rate war with the existing Southern Pacific line, enabling an influx of Anglo Americans from the East Coast and Midwest. Though a crash followed the boom, by the end of the century, most of the large Californio ranches—which had not only supported this landed gentry but also relied on a large body of Indian and Mexican workers—had been converted into small farms, towns, or citrus tracts.Footnote 15
This transformation was also religious: the new Anglo Californians were predominantly Protestant, and what had once been a Catholic region now became a distinctly Protestant one. In the decades following 1880 a greater proportion of the Los Angeles population belonged to Protestant churches than in any other American city of similar size, and Protestants predominated in local institutions and government.Footnote 16 The politically and economically ascendant Protestants did not form a unified religious block. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Protestant Episcopals, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ were all busy building their own institutions, and from the 1890s to the 1940s, regular Protestant churchgoers in Los Angeles were consistently outnumbered by a majority who claimed membership in no congregation.Footnote 17 Yet as internally diverse as the Protestant community was, its growth marked a shift away from Catholic cultural dominance.
The new Anglo-American settlers arrived to find a landscape marked by Southern California's Catholic mission past. The missions had been established by a group of eighteenth-century Franciscans led by Father Junípero Serra, who had attempted to convert and exploit the labor of the Native Americans in the region—primarily the Kumeyaay, Ipai/Tipai, Cahuilla, Acjachemem, Tongya, and Chumash—while extending the Spanish empire northward. Newly independent Mexico had secularized the missions in the 1830s. Though the mission lands were supposed to belong to the Indians who worked them, grants of mission land went to many Californio families instead, further dislocating the Indians who had labored on the missions.
Until the late nineteenth century, outside observers of the California missions tended to be critical of the missionaries' treatment of the Indian neophytes. Beginning in 1786, visitors from France and England compared this mission system to slave colonies, recapitulating and advancing Black Legend critiques of Spain while also reflecting some of the conditions they witnessed: the use of corporal punishment, neophyte attempts to escape, and regimented labor.Footnote 18 In the first widely read U.S. account of Mexican Alta California, Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Dana too referred to the Indians on the missions as “slaves.” Such comparisons became less popular in the United States after the Civil War—Dana himself replaced “slaves” with “serfs” in editions of his book printed after 1869—but they never died out.Footnote 19
Travelers like Dana weren't the only ones interpreting mission history. In the 1870s, determined to protest the then-ascendant version of California history that cast Spanish speakers as lazy and dishonest, many Californios had composed their own versions of a nostalgic history and contributed their memoirs to researchers working for historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. As a whole, the Californios' narratives of the mission era were ambivalent. Some Californios advanced liberal critiques of the missions as oppressing the Indians or keeping them ignorant or indicted the missionaries for claiming the best land in the region. Because many Californios' own rise to political and economic prominence had depended on the government seizure and sale of mission lands, their critiques of the missions also justified their own positions. At the same time, however, other Californios (or sometimes the same Californios in other moments) praised the missionaries for their civilizing work and productivity. For example, Antonio Coronel—a politician and teacher who served as mayor of Los Angeles in the 1850s—blamed the missionaries for not “train[ing the Indians] so that they could be self-governing or self sufficient” yet also admired the missionaries for ruling “over a good number of neophytes all in an orderly fashion and without encountering the least insubordination from them.”Footnote 20
Bancroft used the Californios' stories in his 1888 book California Pastoral, ironically reiterating some of the very stereotypes that the Californios had been trying to undo. Yet he was not the only Anglo to find a useable past in Californio reminiscences.Footnote 21 Arguably the most famous popular account of old California came from the pen of the New England-born, Calvinist-raised writer, Helen Hunt Jackson, who became a lover of Southern California late in life. In 1882, not long after the appearance of her exposé of American Indian policy, A Century of Dishonor, she traveled to California at the behest of Congress. While there, she became friends with Antonio Coronel and his wife, who told her about Californio history and culture and introduced her to a prosperous Californio family, the Del Valles. She used the example of the Del Valles's ranch, the stories she heard from the Coronels, and the visits she made to Indian villages as source material for her wildly popular novel Ramona, published in 1884.
Ramona revolves around the tragic romance between the half-Scottish, half-Indian orphan Ramona and Alessandro Assis, a Luiseño Indian who is forced off his land and eventually killed by Anglo settlers. Jackson intended Ramona to be an Uncle Tom's Cabin for modern-day “Mission Indians,” whose homes and livelihoods continued to be threatened by speculators and settlers: it was political agitation wrapped in a fictional package. Yet the package turned out to be more attractive than the politics. Footnote 22 Beloved for its tragic protagonists and its regionalist color, the story spawned popular investigations into its historical veracity, an annual pageant, three Hollywood films, and a booming tourist industry.
Ramona, however, was not the only popular representation of Southern California history. By the 1890s, Anglo-Protestant residents and visitors had created a massive tourist and entertainment industry dedicated to celebrating what the journalist Carey McWilliams famously called the state's “Fantasy Heritage”: a heady mixture of colorful and gracious Californio ranchos and dashing caballeros and dark-eyed señoritas. Both Ramona and the Fantasy Heritage texts and events also often included celebrations of the mission past.
When writing about the missions, Helen Hunt Jackson and the Fantasy Heritage writers adopted the Californios' nostalgic tones and evinced a similarly admiring stance toward the missionaries-as-civilizers, yet they avoided the Californios' critiques of missionary abuses of power. Jackson wrote a series of articles on the California missions for the Century Magazine, in which she praised the mission fathers for their hard work, self denial, and abounding faith—qualities that Jackson, in an effort to call attention to unjust treatments of California Indians, contrasted with the rapacious behavior of Anglo-American settlers.Footnote 23 State boosters chose a mission-style building to represent their state at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, in the ensuing decades, enclosed courtyards, whitewashed walls, and red tile roofs adorned mission-style buildings from hotels to train stations, hospitals to homes.Footnote 24 In 1895, editor and California publicist Charles Fletcher Lummis took over a fledgling organization dedicated to preserving the remains of the old missions. The Landmarks Club became Lummis's pulpit, from which he argued for the missions' economic and spiritual value while raising money to preserve the mission buildings most in danger of collapse.Footnote 25
Other writers and boosters also began to celebrate the missions. Women's club members joined forces with Lummis to organize for mission causes and also to agitate for the construction of El Camino Real, a road that ran roughly from San Diego to Sonoma and, by the 1910s, dramatically increased tourist access to the mission sites. George Wharton James, an ex-Methodist minister who reinvented himself as a national speaker and expert on mission topics, published books with names like In and Out of the Old Missions of California and Through Ramona's Country.Footnote 26 John Steven McGroarty, one of the few Catholic mission boosters in Southern California, wrote a romantic historical production called the Mission Play that became a local cultural institution in the 1910s; McGroarty went on to become California's poet laureate and congressman.Footnote 27 Frank Miller, a midwestern-born Quaker, transformed his father's small hotel into the Riverside Mission Inn, where Taft would eventually speak in favor of Spanish mission history. The inn was built to resemble Miller's vision of a mission (actually an exuberant mishmash of architectural styles) and eventually boasted a large collection of religious art, wax figures of Pope Pius X and his Pontifical Court, a row of mission-style arches, a courtyard, and a campanile.Footnote 28
These prominent boosters were joined by legions of enthusiasts and curious journalists. The local literary magazine Land of Sunshine (later Out West) published reams of mission-related stories and news, particularly under the editorships of Lummis and, subsequently, James. Individual tourists wrote home about visits to mission monuments, visiting reporters published accounts of mission events and landmarks in their home papers, and railroads and national package tour operators advertised excursions to mission sites.
These attractions to the mission past were diverse. For some, the mission architectural style represented the dream of sociable, outdoor living in temperate climes; for others, it was an easily identifiable symbol for the region, even serving as a brand for the citrus industry. Charles Fletcher Lummis was often horrified by the historical inaccuracy and gauzy romanticism of the Ramona cult: Jackson's gentle, loving missionaries became more masculine and rugged in Lummis's rendering. Yet among the popular writers, boosters, and tourists who began to cast the missions in heroic tones, a few common themes predominate.
In opposition to claims that the missionaries treated the neophytes as slaves, Jackson and the boosters repeatedly depicted the missions as good for the Indians, particularly in comparison to Anglo-American settler behavior or (more frequently) to the Mexican secularization of the missions. Jackson declared it “wonderful” that “the Indian, from the naked savage with his one stone tool, grinding acorn-meal in a rock bowl, [was transformed] to the industrious tiller of soil, weaver of cloth, worker in metals, and singer of sacred hymns.”Footnote 29 She also explicitly addressed the question of the individual Indian's everyday experience. While acknowledging corporal punishments for drunkenness and marital quarrelling, Jackson also judged “the rule of the friars” to be “mainly a kindly one” and “wise and humane.”Footnote 30 And Jackson was merely the forerunner of a larger trend. In 1903, Maj. Benjamin C. Truman—a Civil War correspondent turned California promotional writer for the railroads—published the book Missions of California. In it he argued that “for seventy years these missions constituted a paradise, not only for the missionaries and their troops, but for the Indians, who, while they were compelled to work from ten to sixteen hours a day, were well enough fed and clothed, philanthropically cared for, and treated to horse racing, bear baiting, bull fighting and cock fighting Sunday afternoons.”Footnote 31
In addition to denying that the missions were enslaving or exploitative, popular Anglo treatments of the missions cast the mission past in ways that diverged from larger themes in nineteenth-century American anti-Catholic discourse. Anti-Catholic rhetoric often accused Catholic priests and friars of excessive sensuality, a claim rooted in Protestant critiques of the corporeality of Catholic worship. This accusation became a staple of American gothic literature, popularized in lurid fantasies of sexual excesses in convents and confessionals.Footnote 32 By contrast, Anglo admirers of the missions cast the missionaries as moral paragons, guides and protectors of grateful Indians and upholders of an almost Victorian domesticity. The most popular such story described a missionary—often Junípero Serra—defending a neophyte woman from rapacious Spanish soldiers. This tale was featured in the Mission Play and also in a California Federation of Women's Clubs pageant in the early 1920s. In the latter, the character of Serra was made to observe, in outraged contrast to the lascivious priests of antebellum anti-Catholic fiction, ”How vile are the ways of men!” Serra then instructs both Spanish soldiers and Native American men about respect for women.Footnote 33
Anti-Catholic and anti-clerical discourse also frequently featured the claim that Catholic churchmen were sensuous and lazy—that they, like the church as a whole, lived lavishly on others' labor. Yet Southern California boosters described the missionaries as turning their backs on the luxury and pomp of Rome to toil in the wilderness. A typical West Coast Magazine article described the missions as the work of “men who gave up all of those fascinations and allurements and attractions that the world estimates most highly, and merely went about doing good.”Footnote 34 The boosters' missionaries were also often hard-working and productive. Lummis, in particular—who arrived in Southern California by walking from Ohio—frequently argued that the Franciscans possessed an almost Rooseveltian masculinity, and a number of different writers described the missions as a “hive of industry.”Footnote 35 The Franciscan missionaries, boosters seemed to agree, were almost the precise opposite of slave masters or anti-Catholic villains.
As the Anglo-American migration to Southern California was underway, the United States went to war with Spain in its Caribbean and Pacific possessions. The Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898 resulted in a brief resurgence of Black Legend rhetoric. In William Randolph Hearst's newspapers and in political cartoons featuring various versions of a Spanish brute abducting a fainting, feminized Cuba, Americans were called to free Cuba from rapacious, Catholic Spain.Footnote 36 With more lasting effect, it also resulted in U.S. acquisition of the Philippines as a colony: first on paper through the Treaty of Paris, later in fact through the Philippine-American War. The armed struggle between U.S. troops and the so-called Filipino “insurgents” lasted officially until 1902, though violent confrontations continued for decades afterwards. In the meantime, ships full of American servicemen, journalists, teachers, government officials, and missionaries set sail for the islands.
At the onset of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, most Americans were unfamiliar with the Philippines.Footnote 37 This gap in knowledge was quickly filled by popular books and articles, written mostly by white, Protestant Americans, explaining the history of the archipelago and the culture of the predominantly Catholic, Muslim, and animist Filipinos. Among the first to publish book-length narratives were the naturalist Dean C. Worcester and the popular writer Charles Morris. Worcester was blessed with good timing; he had traveled to the Philippines in 1887 and 1890 as a student and scientist and so was able to publish an account of his travels as early as 1898. His The Philippine Islands and Their People established him as a widely quoted expert on the Philippines. In 1899 he was appointed to the U.S. Philippine Commission, and in 1901 he became secretary of the interior in the Philippines.Footnote 38 Morris had good timing of another sort: by 1898 the Pennsylvania native had already established himself as a popular nonfiction author. His book Our Island Empire: A Hand-Book of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands, was first published in 1899 and eventually went through six editions.
These two books were soon joined by works penned by Americans traveling to the islands. In 1899 The Outlook sent H. Phelps Whitmarsh to report on the Philippines, and he quickly moved from writing about the Philippines to participating in the imperial government: in December of 1900 he was appointed governor of Benguet Province. In 1900 Florence Kimball Russel set out with her husband, a Signal Corps officer, on a trip around the islands to lay telegraph cable. The same year, Fred Washington Atkinson began his job as the first general superintendent of education in the Philippine Islands, and a year later, the future journalist Paul T. Gilbert graduated from Yale and set sail for the Philippines as a young teacher. All three quickly published books on their experiences intended for popular audiences. Though these different writers had different jobs and different relationships to American imperial authority, in their popular writing they all positioned themselves as mediators and interpreters, producing texts that attempted to explain the nature of the Philippines and the American imperial project in the Pacific to a curious reading public back home.
Throughout the first decade of colonization, the secular and religious press in the United States also produced extensive reporting and commentary on the Philippines. Magazines and newspapers ranging from the North American Review to the New York Evangelist did their own reporting on events in the Philippines and also published articles that drew heavily on the more famous book-length accounts, particularly Worcester's.
Like the Southern California boosters, popular writers on the Philippines did not create their narratives in a vacuum. They drew on the testimony and writing of their primary Filipino interlocutors, the elite, Spanish-speaking ilustrados, and on previously published texts.Footnote 39 Primary among these texts were The Philippine Islands, a description of the archipelago written by the British Catholic John Foreman and widely acknowledged to be the most influential (if also the most mistake-ridden) guide to the Philippines in the English language, and Noli Me Tángere, a protest novel written by the Filipino patriot José Rizal.Footnote 40
Rizal, Foreman, and many ilustrados made extensive critiques of the behavior of Spanish friars.Footnote 41 Catholic and non-Catholic Filipinos accused the Spanish friars on the islands of charging exorbitant rents on vast landholdings, despotically wielding religious and civil authority, running an ineffective educational system, and becoming sexually involved with Filipino women.Footnote 42 These complaints had been publicized by the Propaganda reform movement in the 1870s—of which Rizal was a leader—and during the Philippine Revolution, approximately 300 friars were taken prisoner, some of whom were tortured or murdered, and many fled their parishes for the comparative safety of Manila.Footnote 43 For American Protestants newly arrived in the Philippines, anti-Catholic logic must have seemed almost over-determined: not only did it suffuse Black Legend American wartime propaganda, but Filipino anti-friar critiques often mirrored U.S. anti-Catholic tropes.
Americans in the Philippines not only repeated these critiques, but sometimes interpreted Philippine history through a particularly American anti-Catholic lens. In recounting the story of a friar delaying a Filipino funeral service, the young teacher Gilbert employed a few gothic atmospherics: he described “yellow candles” that “threw a fitful light over the little image on the bier” while a mourning family waited for the priest to “dispose of the small child.”Footnote 44 Even the American Philippine Commission seemed to have lurid anti-Catholic tales on their minds: in information-gathering interviews with Filipinos in 1899, Americans repeatedly asked about Spanish friars' sexual misconduct, while their interview subjects attempted to lead them back to the issue of friar land tenure.Footnote 45 Clearly American anti-Catholicism inflected the way some Americans depicted, and comprehended, Philippine anti-friar tensions.
Still, against this background, many popular writers backed away from a wholesale anti-Catholic critique. Recounting Philippine anti-friar critiques in one moment, they nonetheless praised church history and goals, and even sometimes the friars, in the next. Though Worcester was highly critical of the Spanish friars throughout his book, both he and Morris distanced themselves from wholesale anti-Catholicism. They described the friars as “rough” men who had been “largely recruited from the lowest classes of Spain,” making the problem one of class rather than religion.Footnote 46 They also included caveats, such as “many of the friars have been moral and well-meaning men,” before engaging in discussions of particularly immoral friars.Footnote 47
Sometimes an individual friar was described in affectionate tones, particularly by Americans who knew him personally. American travelers often lodged with friars, and some depicted the friars' homes as welcome respites from jungle travails while dwelling at length on the epicurean pleasures they encountered there.Footnote 48 Before he was appointed governor of Benguet Province, The Outlook's Whitmarsh wrote a “sketch” of his visit with a Spanish friar. He described in appreciative detail the food he was served: an elaborate dinner consisting of “‘puchero,’ a substantial dish of ham, cabbage, carbanzos, and bananas boiled together. Then, in turn, a ‘kari,’ or curry of kid's meat; a fine ‘dalag,’ a lagoon fish; and a mountain fowl, something like a pheasant, fried whole. … [And] all through the meal … our glasses were kept full of heavy Spanish claret.”Footnote 49 Four years later, Gilbert, the teacher who had waxed poetic about the body on the bier, depicted a friar with whom he stayed as “bustle[ing] around so for us, … cooking the eggs himself, and cutting the tough bologna, holding the glass of moscatel so lovingly up to the light before he offered it.” Recalling his sojourns with friars, he concluded that he had “found them charming and delightful men” and “hospitable entertainers.”Footnote 50
Whitmarsh and Gilbert may simply have been describing their experiences, but both men (and likely most of their readers) were also well aware of the anti-friar discourse that surrounded them. Whether because of a personal loyalty to their hosts or a desire to prove themselves capable of seeing beyond anti-friar stereotypes, both Whitmarsh and Gilbert turned the stereotype of the sensuous, luxury-addicted churchman on its head. In these passages, the friars' provision of lavish meals washed down with European claret or moscatel is not decried as a corrupting excess but celebrated instead as hospitality and imperial example; the friars are depicted as providing oases of comfort and Old World hospitality.
While Worcester and Morris issued caveats and qualifiers, and Whitmarsh and Gilbert painted warm portraits of friar hospitality, the most common way that American writers side-stepped anti-Catholicism was through a lapsarian narrative about the friars. According to this narrative, the early friar missionaries were admirable, civilizing heroes responsible for an imperial Eden: they “tamed the masses into orderly beings” or “rescued the Filipinos from barbarism and raised them to the condition of comparative civilization.”Footnote 51 This Eden fell, however, at an ill-defined historical moment, when the friars assumed excessive civil authority. Atkinson, the first general superintendent of education in the Philippines, explained that friar abuses “dat[e] rather far back into the previous history of the Philippines, to the times when the members of these orders first began to act in other than a purely religious capacity.”Footnote 52 While he was civil governor, Taft published an account of the Philippines' history and present called The Philippines, and in it he agreed with Atkinson's explanation of the friar situation but claimed that the turning point was more recent, occurring “in the last half-century” when “extensive civil duties” were imposed on the friars by the Spanish government.Footnote 53 Atkinson and Taft could have explained friar corruption as part of a corrupting dynamic in the Catholic Church but instead chose to root it in a contingent historical moment (and a failure of imperial administration), allowing them to idealize everything prior to that moment.
Taft, Atkinson, and other composers of popular writing about the Philippines did not produce the hagiographic, commercialist celebration of the Spanish friars that one finds in Southern California. Their re-evaluation of Catholicism was more subtle, yet no less profound: in recounting friar misdeeds that resonated both with Filipino critiques and with American anti-Catholic rhetoric, they assiduously refused wholesale condemnation, reserving space for expressions of respect, admiration, and affection for Spanish Catholic churchmen past and present.
Rejecting Anti-Catholicism
Many boosters in Southern California and American civil authorities, teachers, and travelers in the Philippines cast their approaches to Catholic pasts and Catholic clerics not only as specific responses to local issues, but also as broader rejections of anti-Catholic sentiment. In Southern California, this self-perception was part of the attraction: boosters and some tourists celebrated both Junípero Serra and their own open-minded appreciation of Junípero Serra. Religious toleration, for them, was marketable and practical. Claims to religious toleration could provide an uplifting gloss on the tourist experience, positioning California as beyond the reach of old confessional animosities. At the same time, rejections of anti-Catholicism could help build mutually useful relationships with local Catholic authorities. In the Philippines, rejections of anti-Catholicism were key to the complex negotiations of colonial state building. Feeling pressure from Catholics in the Philippines and the United States, as well as from the Vatican, Americans in the civil government were careful to avoid speech or actions that could be interpreted as anti-Catholic, and popular writers followed suit.
The formation of alliances with Catholic notables was an integral part of Anglo-Protestant mission celebrations in Southern California. In her Ramona research, Jackson consulted not only her Californio friends, but also the Catholic bishop Francis Mora, as well as priests in San Diego and Santa Barbara.Footnote 54 Miller frequently invited Bishop Thomas J. Conaty and other Catholic churchmen to join representatives of the Protestant faith in speaking at local history celebrations, and when he decided to declare St. Francis the patron saint of his Mission Inn, he contacted the church for permission.Footnote 55 Lummis sought cooperation from many local Catholic figures in his work to publicize and preserve the missions, including Bishop Conaty and his successor, Bishop George T. Montgomery, Catholic notables like the lawyer and politician Isidore B. Dockweiler, and groups like the Knights of Columbus.Footnote 56
Some of this collaboration with Catholics was purely practical. Lummis needed the church's permission to proceed with preservation work on mission buildings. Indeed, the diocese usefully provided the Landmarks Club with temporary leases on some of the mission properties.Footnote 57 Miller also made use of his connections to the church, particularly to Bishop Conaty. He frequently turned to the bishop for information—”Which St. John is San Juan Capistrano named for?” he wrote to ask in 1909—and invited Conaty to speak at Mission Inn events in order to add authenticity to the hotel's Catholic theme.Footnote 58
This collaboration also served the needs of Southern California's Anglo Catholics, including the official hierarchy. Smarting from widespread Anglo-American criticism of the mission system, the local English-language Catholic newspaper—the Catholic Tidings—was pleased by the late-century emergence of non-Catholic attractions to the missions. In 1895, the Tidings declared its satisfaction that the mission architectural style was being used in railroad depots. Another Tidings editorial of the same year also included an enthusiastic (if somewhat belated) review of Jackson's Ramona—citing in particular her sympathetic portrayal of Ramona's confessor, Fr. Salvierderra—and praised Lummis for being “exempt … from … narrow race or creed prejudices.”Footnote 59 The paper also made a point of contradicting critical accounts of mission history by citing Jackson's and Lummis's published work, explicitly pointing out that non-Catholics were praising the mission past. Bishop Conaty, too, recommended the work of James and Lummis to Catholics around the country who inquired about the missions.Footnote 60
Furthermore, non-Catholic boosters and their Catholic allies imagined that the celebration of heroic Catholic figures helped break down anti-Catholic sentiment. When Lummis was raising money for a “Serra Hall” at the Southwest Museum (one of his major building projects), he wrote to Bishop Conaty that he wanted “enough Protestants … to chip in, so as to show the real breaking down of the cruel and foolish prejudices of creed and race, when it comes to the recognition of a World Hero.” The bishop appears to have shared Lummis's sentiment and even his language. In a speech at the museum, Conaty declared, “Nothing has been done more to break down the foolish and unchristian prejudices of race and creed than the example of this saintly man,” Junípero Serra.Footnote 61
The boosters were aware that mission-related, inter-religious harmony could be used as symbol and spectacle. They argued that part of the value of the missions for California was in fact that they allowed people to imagine themselves in a space where old hatreds could be put aside, where Protestants and Catholics could stand side by side to celebrate a regional founding history that was also Catholic. When DeWitt V. Hutchings, Miller's son-in-law, wrote a local history as promotional material for the Mission Inn, he lingered on an account of Bishop Conaty's 1907 involvement in Miller's erection of the wooden Serra Cross on Mount Roubidoux, a Riverside landmark dedicated to Junípero Serra. Hutchings proudly claimed that “although they [the erectors of the cross] were Protestants, they invited a Roman Catholic Bishop to perform the ceremony and to bless the cross, and they dedicated it to the memory of another Catholic, and it stood rough-hewn and strong against the sky, a tribute to brotherhood and symbol of the true spirit of Christ.”Footnote 62 The Riverside experience was interpreted along ecumenical lines by tourists as well. A group of Shriners on a cross-country tour visited Riverside in 1912, later publishing a travel narrative about their experience. Describing an Easter celebration at Miller's Serra Cross, one member wrote that he stood in awe at the sight of “thousands in brotherly and non-sectarian faith kneel[ing] at sunrise on Easter morn” under the Serra Cross, a monument that was “not a symbol of a doctrine, but, here alone in all the world, the eschutcheon [sic] of universal belief, the signet of God's Fatherhood of all.”Footnote 63
Government officials and writers in the Philippines also had an eye on community cohesion when they policed their own speech for anti-Catholicism, but their concerns had a more immediate and expedient cast. On the one hand, the civil government had to tread carefully in offering support to the remaining friars on the islands, lest the government come under criticism from anti-friar contingents in the Philippines and from American Protestants. On the other hand, many Filipinos (even those who advanced anti-friar critiques) were afraid that American colonialism meant Protestant evangelism. American Catholics shared their concern, particularly in light of the influx of American Protestant missionaries to the islands after the Philippine-American War.Footnote 64 The U.S. civil government attempted to prove that the imperial project was not an American Protestant crusade, and some Americans even claimed that it was the separation of religious and civil authority that made the U.S. administration superior to the Spanish. In this context, Americans writing about the Philippines presented tolerance of Catholicism as a necessary strategy and a marker of national pride.
In the United States, Catholic newspapers watched developments in the Philippines vigilantly. During the Philippine-American War, Catholic papers publicized and protested the widespread use of Catholic churches by American soldiers for military objectives, so much so that when Taft gave his Philippines speech at Notre Dame, he went out of his way to defend the practice as a military necessity.Footnote 65 Catholic print media also publicized reports that American soldiers were stealing or mistreating sacred objects. The most serious accusation—that Americans had looted Catholic graves—inspired President William McKinley to meet with both James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and Father William McKinnon, the chaplain to the First California Regiment in the Philippines, to smooth things over.Footnote 66
The most vexing religious issue for the American colonial government was something called the “friar problem”: the question of what to do with the exiled and imprisoned Spanish friars and their vast landholdings. The United States was bound by the Treaty of Paris to attempt to secure the release of imprisoned friars and to respect ecclesiastical property rights.Footnote 67 At the same time, many of the friars who had been ousted from their parishes were prevented from returning by threats of violence on the part of their former parishioners. In response, the U.S. government carefully negotiated between the Vatican, Filipino Catholics (and Filipinos with anti-friar concerns—often the same people), U.S. Catholics, and American Protestants worried about U.S. subservience to the Vatican. Secretary of War Elihu Root put Taft in charge of an American delegation sent to Rome in June of 1902. Before finalizing the plans, President Theodore Roosevelt quietly ascertained that the editors of the United States' two principal Protestant papers—The Outlook and The Independent—would stand behind the mission. He also carefully appointed both Protestants and Catholics to the mission.Footnote 68
Administrative caution was accompanied by literary circumspection; reporters and popular writers realized early that, even when repeating Filipino anti-friar claims, they would have to defend themselves against accusations of anti-Catholic bias. Already in 1898, the New York Evangelist complained that “if anybody protests against the United States becoming guardian of the monastic orders which have robbed and plundered the Filipinos and the Porto Ricans, he is pronounced a narrow-minded bigot and religious fanatic.”Footnote 69 Certainly the Evangelist was not the place to look for pro-Catholic rhetoric, but its complaint points to a concern that affected many popular writers on the Philippines. Both Worcester and Morris criticized the friars extensively—sometimes in harsh terms—but often they did so by quoting long passages from the Catholic John Foreman's The Philippine Islands. As Worcester explained, “It is not from any lack of similar facts within my personal knowledge that I have quoted [Foreman] so extensively in this connection, but for the reason that his religious proclivities place him above the suspicion of prejudice which might attach to one not an adherent of the Catholic faith.”Footnote 70
While the rejection of anti-Catholicism enabled Southern California boosters to figure themselves as broad-minded global citizens, in the Philippines American popular writers were wary of appearing too religiously biased to do their jobs. They did not gleefully embrace religious toleration the way the Southern California boosters did, but they did soberly police the distance between their own claims and those that could be cast as the result of knee-jerk anti-Catholicism. In both places, the extension of U.S. cultural and political power into the Pacific region resulted in explicit calls for a more tolerant approach to Roman Catholicism.
Making Place and Power
There is, however, another side to this story. Celebrations of Catholicism in Southern California and the Philippines were celebrations of a very particular and limited version of Catholicism. They focused not on local lay communities, nor on Catholic theology or lived religion, but rather on Catholic authority figures and the practices that appeared to embody that authority. Most of the Catholic figures being celebrated were men of European backgrounds, and most were exercising clerical authority over Filipinos, Mexicans, and Native Americans. In addition, though writers in California and the Philippines expressed admiration and respect for some present-day Catholic clerics, their most adulatory language was reserved for historical figures.
These celebrations of Catholic clerical authority did not challenge core anti-Catholic assumptions about the nature of Roman Catholicism. Boosters in Southern California and popular writers in the Philippines replicated old anti-Catholic associations of Catholicism with paternalistic authority and hierarchy. What made their depictions of Catholicism different was the value they assigned to those qualities: to them, Catholic authority and hierarchy were central to the project of Western settlement and overseas empire. They claimed that Catholic churchmen were responsible for shaping space—for introducing groves and vineyards in California, or neatly plotted towns in the Philippines—and in the process they invoked these churchmen in their own efforts to define these spaces as meaningful American places. California became a land of gentle labor under beneficent guidance, a sunny West Coast corollary to the nation's foundational story of hard colonial striving in rocky New England soil. The Philippines became a proving ground for visions of an exceptional empire, involving the management of subjects pre-civilized by Spanish missionaries yet alienated by Spanish friars' ties to the state.Footnote 71 In the process, the embrace of a particular vision of Catholicism was a way of making power: justifying, narrating, and facilitating the existence and contours of Anglo-American hegemony.
In Southern California, the missions were described in ways that both reflected and celebrated the boosters' own commitments to economic growth and commercial development. At first glance, odes to the mission era may look purely anti-modern, like romantic pastoral fantasies. Jackson, for instance, dreamily declared that “the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for verse rather than for prose.”Footnote 72 Yet Jackson was among the many authors who described the missions as “hives of industry,” and a variety of other publications encouraged tourists to see the missions as sites of efficient production, under effective management, of a vast array of exportable goods. When planning a package tour of Southern California, potential tourists could read in their Raymond and Whitcomb brochures that
it was on the lands of this mission [Carmel] that the first potatoes grown in California were raised in 1826. The temporal welfare of the estate had reached a rich development in the year 1825, when the fathers possessed 90,000 cattle, 50,000 sheep, 2,000 horses, 2,000 calves, 370 yoke of oxen, with merchandise to the value of $50,000, and over $40,000 in silver.Footnote 73
Staying at the Mission Inn, they would be reminded by the hotel's handbook “not [to] forget that those missionaries brought the palm, the olive, the vine, the date and the orange.”Footnote 74 Off to see the Mission Play, they would hear a long enumeration of each mission's primary productive industries.Footnote 75 The missions themselves, one was not allowed to forget, were practically bucolic factories.Footnote 76
The productivity of the missions was attributed not to the Indians who performed the work but to the padres in charge. A West Coast Magazine article praised the missions' tile roofs and described them as having been made “under the Padre's direction.”Footnote 77 In 1894, the Fiesta de Los Angeles program credited “the energy and tact with which the Friars managed the Indians and the general affairs of the missions” with producing “granaries and store houses … filled to overflowing, and their live stock cover[ing] the country.”Footnote 78 The same mission procedures derided as enslaving in the early nineteenth century were now celebrated as an example of managerial skill that led to the development of early California industry.
The vision of Southern California championed here was one of commercial development and economic growth on a grand scale. Mission promotions were an industry unto themselves, supported and funded by some of the region's most prominent developers and business organizations, such as the railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association.Footnote 79 Some boosters also invested their own money in real estate whose value was increased by the tourism and settlement their work promoted.Footnote 80 Boosters thus cast Serra and the missionaries in their own images, as builders of a wealthy California; and the myth in turn allowed them to sanctify booster activity, imagining themselves and their compatriots as noble men building California for the greater good. Frank Miller suggested to Bishop Conaty that both the bishop and Miller's benefactor Henry Huntington were like modern-day Junípero Serras: “In the way that you are a fit successor to Father Junípero Serra … with your great intellect and sweet, strong heart,” Miller wrote to Conaty, “so Mr. Huntington is a successor to Father Junípero Serra in that he is building and developing, not missions directly, but his work is of the kind that gives employment to many and improves and beautifies the country.”Footnote 81 In a speech written for a Riverside event, Conaty honored Huntington by praising his “great business insight, … tremendous outlay of capital, [and] … unbounded faith” and declaring that “we will not forget the brown-habited Franciscans and their mission labors, nor shall we forget … the men who in business and commercial circles have developed the material interests of the country.”Footnote 82 In celebrating the missionaries, boosters and their allies could cast clerical authority as managerial skill and envision themselves and the missionaries participating—across time—in a common project of regional uplift and development.
More broadly, mission celebrations promoted Anglo-American power by providing historical justification for its ascendance. There were two competing historical narratives at work in the celebration of the missions. In the one most commonly cited by historians (and most familiar to students of Manifest Destiny), the Franciscan missionaries were described as precursors of American settlement, laying the groundwork for the inevitable arrival of Americans. According to one Ramona-related picture book, for example, Serra both taught “the naked savages the arts of husbandry and the way of salvation” and also laid “the foundation of an empire destined to be the hope of men compelled to sweat and toil and suffer”: Serra mediated between the indigenous past and the American future.Footnote 83 According to this stadial vision of California history, the Anglo-American takeover was part of the region's progressive development from Indian to Spanish to American and part of the larger project of the extension of the U.S. empire of liberty.
Nevertheless, at other moments, mission boosters cast Serra and the other missionaries as equivalents to the British North American colonists or to American Revolutionary heroes. President Taft articulated this claim in his Riverside speech when he said that “there were others besides the English who were fighting the battles of progress during the sixteenth century,” but he was only reflecting a more widespread sentiment. Truman—the railroad promotional writer—declared that the missions “represent an energy as forceful, a courage as unfaltering, a devotion as true as that manifested by the Puritan fathers upon the bleak and unhospitable shores of New England; and here, now, at their shrine, do the forces of these two distinct civilizations meet and clasp hands in one common love of country.”Footnote 84
This narrative of parallel histories was also embraced by prominent Anglo Catholics in California and beyond. McGroarty mused, for example, that “it is a curious fact to think of that while the Puritan was establishing the white man's civilization on the Atlantic seaboard, the brown-robed Franciscans were doing exactly the same thing and at the same time on the shores of the Pacific.”Footnote 85 Both Bishop Conaty and the Tidings often referred to Serra and his fellow missionaries as “pioneers” or “colonists,” rhetorically invoking other such American founding figures. And in 1901, the Tidings excerpted an article from the nationally circulated Catholic World in which the creation of the California missions was described as “this early colonization,” which was “contemporaneous with the American Revolution, and the two movements, so widely apart in distance and character, have found close relationship as the long procession of years has united the interest of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.”Footnote 86
This language of parallel histories cast California history—and indeed United States history as a whole—in the starkly dichotomous terms of civilizer and subject, eliding the differences between Spanish and British colonialism in the New World and rhetorically erasing the history of Mexican sovereignty in the West. Racial misrepresentations and elisions were, of course, deeply embedded in the Anglo-American expansionist project in Southern California. By casting non-Anglo Californians principally as historical figures, Anglo-American boosters seemingly rendered irrelevant the Native American and Spanish-speaking Californians of the present.Footnote 87 Present-day Spanish speakers became “Mexican” or “Spanish” according to their economic class, regardless of their birthplace or ethnicity. Tourists hoping to see romantic “Indians” were blind to the actual Native Americans they saw around them.Footnote 88 In short, the idealization of the “Spanish” past relegated the cultural contribution of Spanish-speaking and Native American Californians to a previous era, rhetorically marginalizing and even erasing the contemporary contributions of non-Anglo Californians.
Booster celebrations of the missions contributed to this race-making project. Stadial progression went from Indian to Spanish to American. Mexicans, if mentioned at all, were cast as presiding over a temporary decline between the Spanish and the American eras, blamed for unwisely secularizing the missions in the 1830s. The notion of the friars as analogues to the Puritans went even further, erasing Mexicans entirely from a newly binary national historical myth, which featured only European Christian civilizers and their native subjects. The result was a new possibility for narrating the founding of the United States, one that expanded the geographical and religious boundaries of the story, while hardening European/non-European distinctions. Separated by language, religion, and nationality, Serra and the early British colonists shared only a conviction of their own civilizations' advancement, in comparison to that of the native men and women they encountered. That putative superiority became the bond that united the memory of the diverse founding figures of the American East and West, making the founding story more about a broad racial superiority and less about a particular religious or cultural heritage.
Furthermore, the depiction of the missionaries as analogues to Protestant colonists was a way for Anglo-American settlers to naturalize their own presence in the Pacific region, to insert a foundational U.S. history narrative into what had until recently been foreign territory. The language of Puritan/Franciscan equivalence conjures a vision of parallel histories unfolding on parallel coasts, destined to, in Truman's words, “clasp hands”—like the two halves of the transcontinental railroad—to form what could then seem like a pre-determined whole. This rhetorical move was geographically and religiously capacious, but it also did the cultural work of continental expansion, symbolically justifying an Anglo-American takeover that was still a contentious political fact.Footnote 89
In the Philippines, the turn away from anti-Catholicism and the embrace of some elements of the Spanish Catholic past were also implicated in the making of American power. However, unlike in Southern California, where boosters looked to justify and perpetuate an already established economic, political, and racial hegemony, in the Philippines the process of establishing U.S. colonial authority was still very much under way. Although Americans in the Philippines always maintained that U.S. colonial rule was superior to Spanish, some did see the Catholic Church as a historical—and potentially future—”civilizing agency” in Filipino life and attempted to mobilize and define Catholicism as a technology of their own empire.Footnote 90
Popular writers on the Philippines explicitly linked religion to imperial control. In Our Island Empire, Morris argued that the friars “were enabled to control [Filipinos] through the agencies of faith and superstition.”Footnote 91 Four years later Gilbert struck the same note, describing the “subjugation” of the “natives” as originating in “the finding of the Santo Niño,” a wooden figure of the Christ child in Cebú with a reputation for miraculous power. “Since then,” he wrote, “the monks and friars, playing on the superstition of the islanders, have managed to control them and to mold them to their purposes.”Footnote 92
This notion of the Catholic Church as a force of social control went beyond book-length narratives and became a staple of American Protestant reporting on the Philippines, which focused mostly on the friars as individual agents of that power. For example, in 1898 a writer for the Presbyterian New York Evangelist opined that “one can tell on entering a village by its appearance whether the priest be a true pastor to his flock, or not. In the one case, the streets will be clean, the surroundings of the houses neat and orderly, trees will be planted between the houses to check the progress of fires, and everything will indicate habits of thrift and care.”Footnote 93 A good friar was understood to be responsible for everything from making the Philippines governable to beautifying the village: he dispelled both political and aesthetic chaos, turning the people tractable and the wild landscape into a suburban neighborhood.
Americans' attractions to this notion of a socially controlling Catholic Church resulted from both a generalized concern for imperial order and a more particular anxiety about Filipino religious agency and its political and military manifestations. During the Philippine-American War, American soldiers had developed a fear of “fanatical” Filipino fighters, men and women who believed that they possessed divine mandate and magical protection. These beliefs, in fact, had a long history: for over 200 years, Philippine religio-political movements had organized armed uprisings under the direction of leaders who adopted names like “Jesus Christ,” “Maria Santisima,” or “pope.”Footnote 94 Many carried invulnerability charms called anting-anting: the practice was derived from pre-Spanish traditions but had come to incorporate recognizably Catholic symbols, such as a “white … shirt, on which was written in Latin a chapter from the Gospel of St. Luke.”Footnote 95 Russell and Freer, when describing these rebellions, did not call them “Catholic”—they described them instead as “fetishism of the worst kind” or evidence of Filipino “ignorance and superstition”—yet the potential power of the Catholic symbols was impossible for them to miss.Footnote 96 They read these rebellions as evidence of the danger of Philippine Catholic faith divorced from institutional authority: Catholicism, that is, gone native.
In institutional terms, the biggest threat to the power of the Roman Catholic Church on the islands in the decade after 1898 was the formation of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI). A nationalist, schismatic version of Catholicism, the IFI was founded in 1902 by Isabelo de los Reyes and Gregorio Aglipay.Footnote 97 During its first few years it grew rapidly: up to a quarter of the Catholic population of the islands converted, including entire congregations.Footnote 98 For the Catholic Church, the popularity of the IFI meant not only the loss of Filipino faithful, but also the potential loss of property in the Philippines. Schismatic congregations claimed local ownership over church buildings, and American policy makers were brought into the property debate by angry Roman authorities.
Some American responses to the IFI were quite positive, particularly—but not exclusively—within the Protestant religious establishment. A number of Protestant ministers and missionaries expressed the hope that the IFI was the first step toward Protestantization of the Philippines. John Bancroft Devins, a clergyman who toured the islands as a representative of the Presbyterian Church, quoted the pastor of the American Methodist Church in Manila saying that he believed that “Aglipay loosens this fruit from the tree and we gather it.”Footnote 99 American Protestant clergymen in the Philippines were even courted by the IFI, which initially suggested a formal alliance, until the Americans demanded what the IFI considered excessive doctrinal changes.Footnote 100 Even the more secular Freer positively reported that an Aglipayan priest he knew was well informed in world affairs and, most importantly, “particularly interested in the United States and things American” and a firm advocate of American-style public schooling.Footnote 101
Still, the IFI seemed a double-edged sword, even to those as religiously committed as Devins. As much as Devins hoped that the IFI would lead Filipino Catholics to Protestantism, he did not celebrate the Aglipayan rebellion against Rome. In language dripping with disdain, he wrote that Aglipay's church was “spectacular rather than substantial. A deposed priest styling himself Archbishop, and placing other priests in bishoprics, is amusing rather than edifying. Apparently the man … does not see the incongruity of assuming and transmitting ecclesiastical authority with no organized body behind him.”Footnote 102 While Devins may have seen in the IFI many improvements over the Roman Catholic Church, he was not comfortable with its essential challenge to the notion of hierarchical authority. Atkinson was also wary of (and profoundly condescending toward) the Aglipayan movement, writing that he “has viewed with doubt a certain tendency on the part of so-called enlightened natives to the exercise of free thought” and advising the Roman Catholic Church to send more priests as soon as possible so that “certain malcontents who are behind this movement will be reconciled and return to the church.”Footnote 103
Sensitized by these events, American observers noted evidence of Philippine transformations of Catholicism everywhere around them: in the sombrero that Joseph wore during a Christmas pageant, for instance, or in the fact that the wooden Santo Niño had dark skin and an anti-authoritarian past.Footnote 104 According to Florence Kimball Russel, the wife of the Signal Corps officer laying cable around the Philippines, the Santo Niño had once been summoned to Rome by the pope but had miraculously escaped his locked box, ignoring the pope and choosing to remain in his home church in Cebú. Less threatening than a militarized uprising and less organized than a schismatic church, elements of Filipino Catholic tradition like these still gave American imperial observers a sense that the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church was threatened by the figurative—or, in the case of the Santo Niño, quite literal—escape of Catholic symbols.
Catholicism thus appeared to be a useful imperial tool but only if contained and managed within the institutional church. The friars had been forces of this containment, but they had been rendered politically problematic—and less effective—by widespread anti-friar sentiment. One American response to this situation was to envision a new kind of Catholic hierarchy on the islands—one that would possess the virtues of the friars without their potential for corruption. Because they blamed friar corruption on an ill-defined moment in time when the Spanish friars had assumed too much civil power, some American writers and officials began to advocate for the perpetuation of Catholicism in the colonial Philippines along with the introduction of church-state separation. In fact, they began to cast religious freedom as the United States' principal gift to the Philippine people, a way of bringing them “freedom” without granting them political self-determination (and conveniently ignoring the fact that the Philippine Republic's Malolos Constitution had contained a clause for religious freedom).Footnote 105
Americans who advocated religious freedom in a Catholic Philippines ignored papal condemnations of the separation of church and state and instead turned to liberal American Catholicism as a model.Footnote 106 A leader of the liberal—or Americanist—movement in the U.S. Catholic Church was Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul. A friend of McKinley, Ireland had been one of the first major Catholic figures in the United States to advocate military intervention in the Philippines and continued to be a vocal supporter of American colonial policy. More generally, he advocated the development of a particularly American Catholicism that would unite the “church and the age.” Contrary to the conservative wing of the U.S. church, Ireland envisioned a church that would have a voice in politics, and he supported religious freedom and the separation of church and state.Footnote 107 Liberal Catholics insisted—to a Protestant public often suspicious of Catholic immigrant enclaves—that they could be both devout Catholics and patriotic Americans at the same time.
American observers argued that nationalist American Catholicism was an answer to the imperial dilemma; like Spanish Catholicism it would maintain order in the Philippines, but unlike the Spanish church it would respect the separation of church and state and thereby remain immune to corruption. In February of 1901, the Independent's editorialists argued that though they were Protestants, they recognized the need for a Catholic Philippines, but they wanted Catholicism “there at its best, not its worst. It is better, more prosperous and successful here than in any other country in the world, and its adherents are loyal, as they are not in any of the Latin countries. It is this kind of Catholicism that they [Catholic authorities] ought to want to develop in our American possessions.”Footnote 108
The turn to liberal American Catholicism as a model was not simply abstract: both Catholic and Protestant Americans advocated importing American clergy to the Philippines or training Filipino clergy in the United States. A Washington Post article of 1902 put it most succinctly in the headline: “American Friars in Islands: They Will Carry American Ideas and Finally Solve the Friar Problem.” This, the article explained, could happen because “residence in this country has convinced them of the justice of our statutes, of the wholesomeness of our social organization, and of the well-meaning of the common people. They will carry not Jesuitical, but American, ideas to the Philippines, and assist in the propagation of political doctrines that make for eventual freedom and equality.”Footnote 109 Another article approvingly quoted an American chaplain's idea of bringing Filipino priests to the Catholic University in Washington, DC to “familiarize them with American ideals.”Footnote 110 When exported to American colonial territory, liberal American Catholicism became another version of Catholicism with its eyes turned to a foreign metropole, but this time the metropole was Washington, DC. Far from advocating the Protestantization of the Philippines, many Protestant observers had come to advocate the preservation of the Catholic Church in their country's new imperial possession, and the relocation of the heart of that church to American shores.
When Taft stepped up to the podium at Notre Dame, and again in Riverside, California, he bore with him the legacy of a long discursive tradition. Protestants had used Catholicism as a social, cultural, and political foil in the New World since British colonists first gazed back across the Atlantic. In comparison to Europe, Catholicism looked like a marker of the Old World and old ways: of monarchy and imperial corruption in contrast to American democracy and republican virtue, of priestly authority—over everything from the gospel to sex—in contrast to American independence of thought and domestic freedoms, of hierarchical institutions and distinctions in contrast to American equality of condition. These oppositional pairs reflected neither European nor American realities, but that was not the point. Catholicism was a foil against which Protestant Americans could define their own ideals, even when those ideals were far from being met.
But as the nineteenth century came to a close, Americans on the East Coast and in the Midwest turned their attention—and frequently their feet—toward the Pacific. Many traveled or moved to Southern California, or read about or participated in the acquisition and management of the Philippines as a colony. In both places they encountered traces of Spanish Catholic pasts. And in both places they interpreted the past and present in ways that sometime challenged old dichotomous constructs of an American Protestant self juxtaposed against a foreign Catholic subject.
Bruce Cumings has recently advised students of modern U.S. history to employ a “Pacificist” gaze, emphasizing the fact that places we often define as “West” (California) and “East” (the Philippines) have been conceptually and materially linked since Americans first began to imagine the global military and commercial opportunities presented by continent-wide expansion.Footnote 111 Understanding the place of the United States in the world—then as now—required grappling with U.S. power around the Pacific. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Americans, attempting to both constitute and comprehend U.S. power, approached Catholic histories and authority figures with new eyes.
In both the Philippines and Southern California, Anglo-American understandings of the place and nature of Catholicism in the United States were challenged by specific conditions and encounters, by the novel positions in which Anglo Americans found themselves, and by the new anxieties and ambitions attendant on those positions. In each place, new interpretations of Catholic pasts and clerical authority developed alongside persistent suspicions of Catholicism and performed some of the cultural work of expansion and empire. And in each, in books that sold widely, in magazines with national circulation, and in tourist attractions that drew people from around the country, these new languages about Catholicism became part of a national lexicon, available to people across the nation as the American Century unfolded.
