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Vivid Images Bring Hidden History to Light
The Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War in Political Cartoons, by Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel and Helen Toribio. T'Boli Publishing and Distribution, 2004 San Francisco.
By Max Elbaum
posted 5/24/05
(Review published in Socialism and Democracy Journal #37 [Vol. 19, No. 1], Spring 2005)
The Spanish-American War of 1898 lasted six months and cost 2,446 lives. It is featured prominently in all U.S. history textbooks.
The Philippine-American War of 1899-1914 lasted 15 years and killed at least 100,000 people. It is hardly mentioned even in college-level history texts and has been all but erased from the U.S. public memory - even within the (non-Filipino-American) left.
Yet the Philippine-American War occupies a central place in the rise of the U.S. to become the 20th century's paramount imperial power. It was a pivotal episode in the intertwining of U.S.-style racism and empire-building, openly touted as the moment when the U.S. supplanted Britain in "taking on the white man's burden." And Washington's brutal assault on the Philippine independence movement was daily front page news at the turn of the century, with the New York World editorializing that "The American public eats its breakfast and reads in its newspapers of our doings in the Philippines."
The campaign to bury the history of U.S. manipulation, racism, pillage and annexation in the Philippines began even while the war was still underway. The Chicago Chronicle printed a cartoon in 1900 showing then-President William McKinley locking shut a book titled "True History of the War in the Philippines." The cartoon's title was "The Forbidden Book."
