Textbook Wars: Governor-General James Francis Smith and the Protestant-Catholic Conflict in Public Education in the Philippines, 1904-1907

Abstract

American imperialism opened new battlefields for the conflict between Protestants and Catholics over religion in public schools. The nineteenth-century textbook wars followed the flag to the Philippines. American Catholics had fought to protect their children from anti-Catholic school books and Protestant Biblical readings since the beginning of the common school movement. These issues provided much of the rationale behind the 1884 decision to establish a separate Catholic school system. Nevertheless, many Catholic children continued to attend public schools. With the end of the Spanish-American War, Catholic frustration with secular Protestantism took on fresh urgency. Now they feared that Catholic children in the Philippines, and in other new territories, would have their minds and souls contaminated by false interpretations of their church, interpretations that seeped in through American textbooks. The textbook battles that erupted in the Philippines rekindled old animosities and became part of a longer struggle waged by Catholic leadership in the United States to exercise more authority over colonial education. Its repercussions found their way to the White House and Theodore Roosevelt.