Sublime

Going by this logic, the US government—also eager to justify its reason of annexing the Philippines—imported 1,300 indigenous Filipinos from different tribes to the tune of $1.5 million and displayed them at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.

Filipinos weren’t the constituency that Aguinaldo worried about, at least not at first. He worried about U.S. voters. As he saw it, the point of guerrilla warfare was not to defeat the U.S. Army—nobody thought he could do that—but to wear it down. If Aguinaldo could keep the fight alive through November, he hoped he might influence the 1900 preside

In 1904, two years after America’s victory in the Philippine-American War, the United States government tried to put the best face on its colonization of the archipelago of more than 7,000 islands. Thirteen hundred Filipinos from a dozen tribes were put on display at the St. Louis Exposition, in replicas of their home villages,

Hunt was a Spanish-American War veteran and former lieutenant governor of Bontoc, where he had become a trusted friend of the Igorrotes. The United States took control of the Philippines from Spain as part of the terms of the 1898 Treaty of Paris ending the war between the two nations. The U.S. also received stewardship of Puerto Rico and Guam and

In late July 1906, a couple of months after their contracts with Hunt expired, the government stepped in and sent home all of the Filipinos—except five who stayed on as witnesses in Hunt's trial. The court cases dragged on. Five Filipino witnesses were kept in America until March 1907. On March 20, they too returned to the Philippines.

A Republican congressman who toured Luzon in 1902 reported what he saw to a newspaper. “The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner,” he said. “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”

It did seem that the war was winding down. The disappointment of the 1900 election and sheer exhaustion wore the insurrection thin. Rich, educated Filipinos, meanwhile, started to accommodate themselves to U.S. rule. A month after the 1900 election, more than one hundred members of the colony’s elite formed the Federalist Party, which, as its name

Yet there was one trick Japan tried that the United States hadn’t. It decided to grant the Philippines independence. Not to promise independence—the United States had done that, eventually—but to actually grant it. On October 14, 1943, that’s what Japan did. About half a million people attended the celebration that day on the Luneta. Emilio Aguinal

“Moroland”—the islands of Mindanao, Palawan, and Basilan plus the Sulu Archipelago—comprised the less-populated bottom third of the Philippines. It was like a different country. Inhabited mainly by Muslims (called “Moros”) rather than Catholics and governed by a system of sultans and datus, it adhered to Islamic law and practiced both polygamy and