Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire
The Philippine-American War as Race War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12811019 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul A Kramer (0000-0003-3801-4099, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Publication date | 2006-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Japan focus (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1557-4660 • E-ISSN: 1557-4660 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1557466006005043 |
| OpenAlex | W4410180829 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Speaking on May 4, 1902, at the newly opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” Roosevelt acknowledged and expressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimed that for every American atrocity, “a very cruel and very treacherous enemy” had committed “a hundred acts of far greater atrocity.” Furthermore, while such means had been the Filipinos’ “only method of carrying on the war,” they had been “wholly exceptional on our part.” The noble, universal ends of a war for civilization justified its often unsavory means. “The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity,” he asserted, but “from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.”
Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Race (biology · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History
| Highly cited | No |
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