At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Second Industrial Revolution created an enormous upsurge in the size and productivity of the American economy. Despite leading to real wage growth across broad swaths of the labor force, the majority of the profits that were accumulated as a result of this unbridled economic growth wound up being concentrated in the hands of a few entrepreneurial capitalists like Vanderbilt, Wall Street financiers like J.P. Morgan, and other captains of industry, such as Carnegie. While for some observers, these men were thought to embody the American ideal of the “self-made man,” for others, these wealthy men were nothing but the Robber Barons of a Gilded Age. As this moniker suggests, not everything was what it appeared to be during this period of unfettered capitalist expansion. Beneath that gilded veneer, there were tremendous economic disparities, which tore away at the social fabric of American life and threatened to undermine democratic self-governance.
The Progressive Movement arose in response to this rapid and rampant destruction. Progressives sought to solve the social and political problems caused by the concentration of industrial ownership in the form of trusts and monopolies. These problems ranged from the industrialization of urban spaces to the urbanization of immigrant laborers, and from the lack of industrial regulation to the corruption of political machines. Progressive reformers, like Jane Addams and John Dewey, were alarmed, not just by the spread of slums, poverty, and the exploitation of labor, but also by the corruption of democratic self-governance and the rise of a plutocracy.
To their credit, these progressive reformers did revitalize democracy by achieving women’s suffrage, establishing direct primary elections, direct election of senators, and the introduction of initiatives and referendums at the local and state levels of government. But progressive reformers could also become overzealous, aiming by means of prohibitions—such as the prohibition on the production and consumption of alcohol--, to remake the moral character of American citizens. Ironically, either as a result of the witting cynicism of overzealous moralists or the unwitting naivete of well-intentioned reformers, the Progressive Movement helped to replace the plutocratic tyranny of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age with the bureaucratic tyranny of the expert, the intellectual, the priestly reformer and do-gooder nannies of the Progressive Era. As Christopher Lasch has argued, this bureaucratic tyranny, with its ideological underpinnings moored in socialist idealism, discouraged self-reliance, stimulated new dependencies, and led, ultimately, to a loss of competence, which, in turn, undermined the very same culture of participatory democracy and self-governance that progressives aimed to cultivate.
Still, here in America, the emergence of this therapeutic state had less to do with the impact that socialist ideas and practices may have had on the Progressive Movement than it did with the influence of America’s jingoistic Manifest Destiny. The idea, in no uncertain terms, was that the US was on a God-given mission to regenerate humanity. Indeed, prior to nannying the workers in the meat-packing districts of Chicago, or to nagging the immigrants in the streets of New York, or to naysaying the drunkards and prostitutes congregating in red-light districts across the nation, progressives in America had aimed to determine the extent to which people who were assumed to be racially inferior should be incorporated into the ever-expanding territories of the United States of America. This perceived inferiority notwithstanding, progressives believed that these “savage” and “uncivilized” people could be “improved” and that they too might learn to govern themselves and participate as citizens of equal standing in the republic. The key to this transformation, they reasoned, was education, by means of which these groups could be assimilated into mainstream Anglo-American culture.
After the Civil War, progressives focused initially on the emancipated slaves of African descent in the South. But after all the well-intentioned progressive educational and political reforms of the Reconstruction Era fell into a state of disrepair and abandon, they were replaced by the Jim Crow laws that legitimized the state-sponsored terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The other, still more populous and ubiquitous group on which progressives focused were the Native Americans or “Indians” from whom the West had yet to be fully won. Indeed, it would not be until well after the conclusion of the so-called “Indian Wars,” and the ensuing failures of the US government to educate and assimilate the Native Americans into mainstream society, that these people, who had been displaced from their ancestral lands and banned from participating in American democratic culture, would be granted full US citizenship with its attendant responsibilities and rights.
At the turn of the century, as the US extended its imperium over the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama) and the Pacific (Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, the Mariana Islands), the list of people who would need to be incorporated into the republic suddenly grew exponentially. This was cause for some concern and much debate. Could American society assimilate these culturally diverse and geographically distant peoples and still manage somehow to remain democratic? Should these people, who had never before participated in democratic self-governance, be recognized as full-fledged citizens of the Union and entrusted with the right to vote? These questions and doubts led some progressives, like Theodore Roosevelt, to view America’s expanding overseas empire as an unparalleled opportunity to implement progressive reforms on an imperial scale. Indeed, according to this view, Anglo-Saxon America had the duty to carry out this civilizing mission. It was, as Rudyard Kipling famously put it, the White Man’s Burden. Other more prejudicial thinkers, like Andrew Carnegie of the Anti-imperialist League, instead argued that the incorporation of people who were not of Anglo-Saxon descent into the body politic of the nation would ultimately undermine the republican virtues of American democratic culture.
The Supreme Court settled the matter of whether and to what extent Puerto Ricans and Filipinos would be incorporated into the nation with the so-called “Insular Cases” (1901-1914). Much as they had done in Plessy v Ferguson (1896), which established the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal,” in these cases concerning the Philippines and Puerto Rico the justices determined that in fact the U.S. Constitution did not “follow the flag” and that America’s recently acquired territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific should henceforth be considered as being “foreign in a domestic sense.” This meant, in so many words, that these islands and their inhabitants were never going to be fully incorporated into the union and that they were, to all intents and purposes, to remain nothing more and nothing less than colonies. They were not merely “separate,” but they were also denied the possibility of ever being recognized as “equal.” So, would these colonies and their people ever be granted independence? This would depend, reasoned the leaders of US Insular Affairs, on the ability of these colonized people to understand what Taft (who was the first American civil commissioner charged with governing the Philippines) referred to arrogantly as “Anglo-Saxon liberty.”
Although Taft viewed the Filipinos as “superstitious and ignorant” and judged them to be unqualified for either universal suffrage or autonomy—reasoning that they “need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is”--he nevertheless believed that under “careful” US tutelage, they could be taught, through “widespread schooling” and “political education” the “possibility of the honest administration of government.” The aim of Taft’s “Policy of Attraction” was to carry out what President McKinley conceived as “Benevolent Assimilation.” Indeed, the educational effort put into practice by Taft proved in time to be the single most important element in reconciling Filipinos and Puerto Ricans to the U.S. presence in their islands and attracting them with promises of eventual assimilation, integration, incorporation: first and foremost, the intellectuals or ilustrados as they were known, who collaborated with the American colonial government, but eventually also vast numbers of ordinary Filipinos and Puerto Ricans who attended American schools.
The education they received was not merely a matter of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Taft’s educational initiative involved the moral imperative to enlighten and civilize the otherwise “savage” and “mongrel races” of the Philippine archipelago. Infused with a curious optimism, which was as much the result of the would-be universal principles of Lamarkian evolutionary theory (i.e., the idea that offspring inherit the “improved” structures developed by adapting to environmental changes), as it was the result of the exclusionary principles of eugenics, this educational undertaking was progressive both in content and intent. Taft’s “Policy of Attraction” placed enormous power in the hands of progressive pedagogues, who imagined they could cultivate “progressive improvements” among their colonial students and teach them American republican virtues and democratic self-governance.
This culturally and politically transformative education involved, in other words, a process of conversion, a total “remaking” of the Filipinos and Puerto Ricans in the image of America’s Founding Fathers. In this sense, Taft’s “Policy of Attraction” did not constitute a radical break, but rather formed a logical continuum, with the politics of forced conversion that characterized the Spanish conquest and colonization of both the Americas and the Philippines.
The Spanish example is pertinent because in 1898, when the US took over from Spain its few remaining colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Americans justified this imperial expansion by claiming that they were liberating the Puerto Ricans and Filipinos from the double tyranny of Spain’s monarchy and the Catholic Church. But what they really did was impose a new tyranny by means of forced conversion: Precisely what the Spaniards had done before them. Consider, in this regard, how Bartolomé de las Casas--an erstwhile conquistador turned Dominican friar, priest, and eventual Bishop of Chiapas, who was popularly regarded as the Defender of the Indians--famously argued against the cruelty of the conquest and in defense of peaceful tactics of conversion. He never, however, called into doubt the need of the Indians to convert to Christianity, nor did he ever stop to question how this process of so-called “peaceful conversion” amounted to a strategy for the psychological, cultural, and societal destruction of the autochthonous civilizations he aimed to convert. Indeed, the success of the conversion depended on the ability of Spanish friars and priests to convince the indigenous people of the Americas to hate themselves and desire to be otherwise.
As in Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans” or as is also the case in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, conversion to Christianity has always and already involved the willful destruction of who one has become thus far in life in order to be reborn anew as an improved self.
Self-hatred likewise formed the basis of the progressive education that Americans sought to impart to Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Only, instead of becoming members of the Christian community or ecclesia, America’s colonial subjects were supposed to become members of modern civilization. These “savages” would be remade, not in order to save their souls, but in order, ostensibly, to capacitate them for self-governance. Yet, if self-governance had in fact been the ultimate aim, the educational system built in the colonies by the Americans would have encouraged the study of history, literature, and political philosophy. Instead, especially at the high school level, it placed emphasis on the practical and technical knowledge required for the industrialization of agriculture. The true aim of America’s educational undertaking in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, it would seem, was to ready these islands and their people for full incorporation into the modernizing processes of capitalism’s growing world economy.
With this imperial context in mind, we are in a better position to see how progressivism actually served to further the interests of empire, and not merely, as it pretended, to cure social ills, lift up the downtrodden, and offer hope to the unenlightened. At home, the educational reforms of John Dewey’s Lab Schools aimed to teach children problem-solving skills and teamwork so that they would be prepared for participation in democratic self-governance; but these progressive educational reforms actually served in the long run to prepare the majority of US students for work in industry and developed in them a new dependency on the sate which bred individual incompetence. Abroad, in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, these same progressive pedagogical principles were adopted and implemented with the aim of converting Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, not into competent and full-fledged citizens, but rather into good laborers and even better consumers of America’s industrially produced goods.
This undermining of progressive educational goals was unwittingly carried out by some of the very same Filipinos and Puerto Ricans who, as pensionados, received scholarships to study toward advanced degrees in education in some of the finest universities in the United States. The case of Camilo Osias in the Philippines is especially revealing, given the tragic irony that informed his career as a scholar and educator. He had studied under Dewey at Columbia University and learned to apply his pragmatic approach to education. Upon his return to the Philippines, he was charged by Atkinson, who was the American Commissioner of Education, with editing and curating the Filipino Readers, which would serve as the basis for the “conversion” of Filipinos to modernity and enlightenment. These readers, which placed Greek and Roman mythology alongside Filipino mythologies, sought to inspire the moral transformation of Filipinos, encouraging them to identify with the supposedly universal values of the modern civilized world. When these students graduated primary school and advanced to study at the high school level, they discovered how, in fact, their would-be teachers and civilizers valued them: as workers.
This, then, proved to be the ultimate aim of progressive education: to make good workers out of everyone who lived under U.S. sovereignty; to make them conform to the logic of productivity, first as laborers, then as consumers. The idea was never to actually free people so that they might engage in the public life of self-governance, but to keep them perpetually in a state of dependency that cultivates incompetence for democratic self-governance. It is this planned incompetence which reveals the disdain with which America’s imperialists, among them iconic progressives like Roosevelt and Taft, have always regarded democracy not just abroad, but at home as well.
تعليقات