Essay --

Rudyard Kiplings seminal poem, The White Mans Burden resonated amongst American policymakers in the aftermath of the warfare of 1898. For a price of twenty million dollars, the Spanish relinquished their control of the Philippines to the United States, thereby transforming America into an overseas empire. As statesmen in Washington considered their tender Pacific possession, they viewed the archipelago as a moral liability rather than a strategic asset. The first formal evaluation of the prospects for Filipino independence came in February 1900, when death chair McKinley dispatched the Philippine Commission to capital of the Philippines to compile a report on the subject. In this paper I consider their assessment through a amicable lens. I argue that while McKinleys emissaries strove for objectivity, preconceived notions of national identity, race, and civilization influenced their judgment. Ultimately, the Commission viewed American-ness as a prerequisite for independence. Backg roundThe Spanish had maintained compound authority over the Philippines since Ferdinand Magellan laid claim to the islands in 1521. For over three hundred years the Spanish government, aided by friars from the Catholic Church, used Manila as a naval base and cultivated the hinterland as a source of cotton. Filipino aristocrats across the archipelago learned Spanish, and helped to disseminate the Catholic assent to the majority of animists and sabians worshippers of the moon and stars. Although many friars were seriously engaged in helping the Filipino peasants, over time they gained a reputation for exploitation and corruption. In result to these grievances and to an absence of representation in the colonial legislature, community political leaders began in the early 19... ...mission rejected the prospect of Philippine independence primarily because the universe of discourse deviated from the western concept of the nation. The masses of the people are without a common speech and lack the sentimentality of a nation. The Filipinos are not a nation, yet a variegated assemblage of different tribes and peoples, and their loyalty is still of the tribal type (pdf one 192). . . their lack of education and political experience, combined with their racial and linguistic diversity, disqualify them, in spite of their mental gifts and domestic virtues, to undertake the task of governing the archipelago at the present time . . . should our power by any want be withdrawn, the Commission believes that the government of the Philippines would speedily lapse into anarchyThe Filipinos are not a nation, and there can be no political organism that we call a people,