Taming Wild Tongues: Race, Animality, and Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines, 1887–1917

Highlighting New York Senator Chauncey Depew’s 1900 characterization of U.S. occupation in the Philippines as a “kindergarten of liberty,” the paper takes up the colonial rhetoric of American conquest in the islands as an educational project and examines its philosophical basis, academic legitimization, and material manifestations. Whereas historians of imperialism have noted how territorial conquest followed a faux scientific rationality of white supremacy based on Social Darwinism, I call much needed attention to the embedded relationship to animality. Drawing from zoologist and Philippine Commissioner, Dean C. Worcester’s 1898 "Notes on Some Primitive Philippine Tribes," and his 1898 book, The Philippine Islands and Their People: A Record of Personal Observation and Experience with a Short Summary of the More Important Facts in the History of the Archipelago, I illuminate the foundational role animality played in structuring biological narratives of the Philippines and the intellectual capacity of the various Philippine peoples. I situate both occupation as an educational project and the institution of colonial schooling within the larger framework of Worcester’s zoological study of the archipelago to illuminate how the popular colonial infantilization of Filipinos as “little brown brothers” positioned various Filipino tribes directly akin to animals, and thus, behind the fully realized Anglo human in the evolutionary history of the “Family of Man.” Filipinos were, as one popular American newspaper described them, “America’s new ape men,” and the system of education was intended to domesticate them. This paper then details the specific function of English language instruction in serving as a mechanism for transforming the supposed incoherence of the wild tribal languages into rational thought and expression. I examine the speciesist philosophical underpinnings of the colonial English instruction policy to demonstrate how English instruction operated as a method to tame the so-called savage tongues of the infantilized Filipinos.