Improving on the Civilising Mission? Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines

Abstract

Just days after William Howard Taft arrived in the Philippine Islands in early June 1900 to take up his position as the chairman of the five member commission charged with the task of establishing a civilian government for the newly annexed colony, he wrote to J.G. Schmidlapp, an old friend in Ohio, to assure him that he was settling quite comfortably into his exotic surroundings. Taft found the climate in Manila much more agreeable than he had been led to expect was possible in the tropics. The heat, he estimated, was comparable to Cincinnati during the summer months. He was also heartened by the ‘strong, healthy-looking’ young Americans he encountered in the streets of the capital, which he deemed as robust as any back home. But Taft drew a much larger lesson from the apparent ease of his own acclimation and that of his countrymen to the tropical locale. He concluded that though ‘it may be that it is the survival of the fittest […] it is evident that men can live here and be healthy’.