‘Smoked Yankees’, ‘Wild’ Catholics and the Newspaper ‘Lions’ of Manila

Abstract

When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, American troops battled Spanish forces in Cuba and across the Pacific in Spain’s longtime colony, the Philippines. There, American troops initially fought alongside Filipino rebels, but after the defeat of Spanish forces the United States annexed the islands and fighting broke out between the rebels and their new occupiers. American soldiers, including nearly 6,000 African Americans, struggled to understand their adversaries, employing varied conceptual frames that mixed scientific racism, the notion of Manifest Destiny, and American exceptionalism and that encompassed long-standing fault lines in American identity, including religion. The chapter draws material from diaries of soldiers, black and ethnic newspaper presses, and diplomatic sources to describe a potent but ephemeral mix of racialist thinking during and immediately after the Philippine-American War.