Emilio Aguinaldo And Uncle Sam In Uncle Tom’s Cabin
A.k.a. "The Racial Context of Filipino Representation in Late-19th-Century America" --my presentation at the 2006 AAAS Conference in Atlanta on March 25
1) Introduction
Scholar Richard Slotkin argues that during the Philippine-American War, the U.S. military identified Filipinos with African Americans: "The parallel between the logic of massacre in the Philippines and the lynching of Blacks in the South and Midwest was a fact of contemporary life and rhetoric. If 'Indian' was the racial epithet for Filipinos preferred by the high command, the second most popular -- and the one preferred by the rank and file -- was 'nigger'" (Gunfighter Nation, 114). The extreme, genocidal violence against Filipinos in the Philippines coincided with murderous violence against African Americans in the United States, when race riots bloodied the streets in Illinois, South Carolina, and North Carolina, in response to the growing numbers of middle-class African Americans due to Reconstruction. These riots stripped African Americans of their homes, businesses, and rights in these places. In a way, the atrocities committed against Filipinos in the Philippines fueled the raw violence against African Americans in the United States, and vice-versa.
My presentation today looks at the racial context of Filipinos' entrance into the American cultural imaginary in the late 19th century by tracing the cultural genealogy of this compelling political cartoon, in which Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the anti-Spanish then anti-American revolutionary struggles, and Uncle Sam are depicted as the characters Topsy and Miss Ophelia, respectively, from Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous abolitionist text published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The cartoon was drawn by Victor Gillam for the weekly satirical magazine, The Judge, in February 1899, during the heat of the Philippine-American War, 47 years after the novel was published. While the encounter between the United States and the Philippines during this time was conditioned and informed by multiple racializations in earlier encounters with Hawai'i and Cuba as well as by the long history of U.S. oppression and genocide of Native Americans and African Americans, today I want to focus on how blackface minstrelsy provided one of the modes for Filipinos' cultural legibility in the American imagination. This cartoon suggests the strength of racialized images of African Americans in thinking about Filipinos during this time.
2) Reading of cartoon
The caption reads: "OUR NEW TOPSY. TOPSY (Aguinaldo)—'I's so awful wicked there cain't nobody do nothin' with me. I keeps Miss Feeley (Uncle Sam) a-swearin' at me half de time, 'cause I's might wicked, I is.'—Uncle Tom’s Cabin."
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was wildly popular in the 19th century -- probably the first "bestseller" in the history of American publishing -- and it spawned numerous minstrel shows, the first ones produced while the novel was still being serialized. It was credited as the first American novel to feature sympathetic Black lead characters, and it was also credited with humanizing Black slaves and pushing the cause of abolition in the United States. In 1862, when the Civil War was in full swing, Stowe was introduced to then President Abraham Lincoln, and he is said to have greeted her by saying: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"
Briefly, Topsy is the quintessential “savage” African American slave girl whom the Northern white female character Miss Ophelia struggles to “tame” in the novel. The wording in the caption is a reworking of a famous line in the novel, at which point Ophelia is scolding Topsy for stealing and destroying the things she stole: "'What did you burn 'em for?' said Miss Ophelia. [Topsy replies,] 'Cause I 's wicked,--I is. I 's mighty wicked, any how. I can't help it'" (Penguin ed., 360). However, it turns out that while Topsy did indeed steal a ribbon and a pair of gloves under Ophelia's nose, her claim that she burned the other items she confessed to taking was due to the fact that she really hadn’t stolen them at all and therefore could not produce them at Ophelia's demand. I can't do a closer reading of this scene right now, but suffice it to say that this scene in the novel has an ambivalent effect: while it suggests that Topsy does not understand that lying and stealing are wrong -- which therefore justifies her being disciplined by Ophelia -- it also suggests that Topsy lies about having stolen more than she actually did because Ophelia expects it of her. The scene depicts Ophelia basically browbeating Topsy into confessing in excess of what she did take, threatening to whip her, etc., thus eliciting a kind of exasperated sympathy for the little slave girl.
3) Minstrel shows
This cleverly constructed cartoon, however, clearly draws from the tradition of blackface minstrelsy as well. If you'll notice on the image, Topsy is wearing white gloves. While these could certainly refer to the gloves that Topsy took from Ophelia's room in the novel, they also signify the stock minstrel character of the "dandy," a Northern urban black man who comically imitates upper-class whites. The reference to the dandy does two things here: first, it indicates the gender of the person that Topsy represents in this cartoon, namely the Philippine revolutionary leader and president, Emilio Aguinaldo; second, it suggests that Aguinaldo's actual gentlemanly appearance is a laughable mimicry of truly civilized men -- a mimicry that is "exposed" by Victor Gillam’s depiction of him as a "heathen" slave girl -- and that his claiming presidency of an independent Philippines is a mere pretension.
The cartoon's caption says "Our new Topsy," already staking a proprietary claim on the Philippines and its people. The cartoon suggests that the Philippines needs to be civilized and educated by the United States through colonialism, similar to the way that Topsy is eventually civilized by Aunt Ophelia in the novel.
The patronizing depiction of Topsy, and by extension Aguinaldo, in the cartoon and the more compassionate portrayal of Topsy in the novel are actually not all that discontinuous. Despite its largely sympathetic treatment of African American characters, Uncle Tom's Cabin was also, unfortunately, riddled with stereotypical depictions of Black slaves. In fact, the darker they are, the more stereotypical they are. Uncle Tom, for instance, who is "of a full glossy black" (68), represents the stereotype of the ultimate servile slave who is obsequious and self-sacrificing to a fault. Meanwhile, Topsy, who is "one of the blackest of her race" (351), is the complete opposite of Tom, and embodies the kind of incorrigible savagery that was used rhetorically to justify the enslavement of Black people. These stereotypical representations of African Americans in the novel borrowed heavily from already existing representations of African Americans in minstrel shows.
Blackface minstrel shows became popular during the 1830s in the urban North with the emergence of the Jim Crow plays. So by the time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her novel, there was already a significant body of staged portrayals of African Americans by whites in blackface. She funneled these existing stereotypical images into Uncle Tom's Cabin, which were then funneled back out into the staged adaptations of the novel. To give more of a background on blackface minstrelsy, these shows were spectacles, plays which portrayed Blacks whose character flaws, like greed, stupidity, or "uppitiness," would typically get them caught in absurd situations. Other characterizations include: buffoonery, immorality, irresponsibility, child-like behavior, and subhumanity. There was usually a lot of physical comedy, including contortions, eye-rolling, and clowning. Most black minstrel characters, reinforcing cultural stereotypes about African Americans, were meant to be laughed at and scorned by the audience. Here are some photos of minstrel characters in the staged versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
This is Florence Brackney, a white woman in blackface, playing Topsy.
And this is David Belasco, in blackface, as Uncle Tom.
Despite the various, differently coded black figures in the novel, certain black characters like Tom and Topsy seem to have gripped cultural imagination more strongly than, say, George or Eliza. George and Eliza are the mulatto characters depicted as more progressive and fiercely independent, who are in effect expelled from the body of the nation into Africa. (As a side note, one wonders if their bodies, as evidence of interracial mixing, pose the embodied threat of a miscegenated America and therefore must be expelled.) Of course, Topsy also goes to Africa, but only after her reformation; ironically, it is only when she becomes acceptably civilized in New England that she leaves, after having been forcibly brought into this society by Ophelia as part of her disciplinary education.
So what is Topsy like before Miss Ophelia takes her in hand? Our first "picture" of her in the novel is as a sly, smart-mouthed, unkempt creature whose greatest feature is her almost unnatural talent for mimicry and break-dancing. St. Clare, the sometimes sympathetic New Orleans slave owner who is aware of the moral wrong of slavery but feels powerless to change the institution, decides to engineer a social experiment in order to force his Northern cousin, Ophelia, who is visiting him in Louisiana, to set action to words and "civilize" the slaves who she says are indeed civilizable. For this purpose, St. Clare buys the notoriously wayward and badly behaved nine-year-old Topsy:
She was one of the blackest of her race; and her round shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, moved with quick and restless glances over everything in the room. [...] Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction. The express of her face was an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity. She was dressed in a single filthy, ragged garment, made of bagging; and stood with her hands demurely folded before her. Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance,--something, as Miss Ophelia afterwards said, "so heathenish," as to inspire that good lady with utter dismay... (351-2)St. Clare then urges Topsy to perform, treating her like an animal: "'I thought she was rather a funny specimen in the Jim Crow line. Here, Topsy,' he added, giving a whistle, as a man would to call the attention of a dog, 'give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing'":
The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the thing struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning around, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race; and finally, turning a summerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing note, as odd and unearthly as that of a steam-whistle, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances which she shot askance from the corners of her eyes. (352)Introduced to this grotesque picture of Topsy, Ophelia at first balks at the thought of taking the child under her wing, but when St. Clare points out that it would be a missionary's duty to educate a "heathen" like Topsy, Ophelia realizes her hypocrisy and "evidently soften[s]. 'Well, it might be a real missionary work,' said she, looking rather more favorably on the child" (353). She soon after begins to teach Topsy her letters, sewing, and other domestic duties such as cleaning her (Ophelia's) bedchamber.
What we should note here is the vividness of Stowe's initial depictions of Topsy in the novel and their consonance with minstrel depictions, especially the dancing and the performative aspect of Topsy's pose. It is easy to see why most of the minstrel shows based on Uncle Tom's Cabin played up these initial characteristics of the Topsy character instead of those characteristics to be found in the glowing paragraph near the end of the novel, when Topsy is described as demure and civilized.
Scholar Jim O'Loughlin emphasizes the role of Topsy in these plays:
Topsy's character as written by Stowe was both to be laughed at and sympathized with, befitting a creation that drew on both the minstrel and the sentimental tradition. But as Topsy became part of popular culture, particularly in stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the minstrel aspect of her character came to define her more than the sentimental aspect. In this case, as laughter replaced tears, representations of Topsy began to do quite different cultural work. [...] In Stowe's novel, [eventually] Topsy ceases to be a source of humor. However, she continues as a comedic character in [the Aiken stage adaptation]. ("Articulating Uncle Tom's Cabin, 582)The prominence of Topsy representations that focus on her pre-reformation characteristics suggests the lasting rhetorical power of Stowe's characterizations of black stereotypes as "heathens" as well as of the depiction of (white) missionaries' frustrations and anxieties over the civilizable capacity of the heathen.
When studying the cartoon, the imperialist tropes of education, tutelage, and civility are the first thoughts that come to mind for those who know something of the history of U.S.-Philippine relations. The fact that Aguinaldo is rendered as Topsy instead of the ultimately Christ-like Tom, the fiery and piercingly intelligent George, or the fiercely protective mother Eliza is already very revealing. The depiction of the United States (represented by Uncle Sam) as Ophelia further supports the idea that the cartoon is trying to say something about the "duty" of the United States to educate the Philippines until it is able to govern itself as a democracy. That the Topsy in this cartoon is the Topsy before her reformation makes sense. The minstrel elements in Topsy's character in the novel, according to O'Loughlin, entailed the trope of the "wild child," and anxiety about the poor (581). The societal distress over both figures resolved itself through programs designed to reform them partly through education. Thus a program of education, which has a clear imperialist tenor in the context of the debates over Philippine annexation in the late 1890s, was applied as well to those whom Stowe considered marginal or troublesome to the constitutional body of American society 50 years earlier.
4) Gender drag
So now, what do we make of the gender drag in this cartoon? The simple answer is that Gillam the artist had to fit Aguinaldo and the U.S. to the characters in the story. But the ease with which that was done is worth considering. There was a convention of depicting Aguinaldo as an effeminate man or man in drag in the American political cartoons. He and the anti-expansionists and anti-imperialists in the U.S. were often portrayed in drag, with the charge of womanish-ness leveled against them. In fact, the anti-imperialists -- including presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan -- were nicknamed the "Aunties," and drawn as such, meaning your old maid aunt who scolded you for playing too rough on the playground. But in Aguinaldo's case, I think it's more significant that he's depicted as a child, and indeed there was a convention of this kind of portrayal as well, especially with him holding on to the skirts of one of the "Aunties."
What's particularly telling is that Gillam put Uncle Sam in drag, and I would argue that this has to do with the structure of colonial "benevolence" that America deployed in the Philippines. Gillian Brown's discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe's so-called "radical" feminist politics might help clarify the (disingenuous) rhetoric of parental love that attends both master-slave relations and colonial relations. Brown writes, "Stowe replaces the master-slave relation with the benign proprietorship of mother-child, transferring the ownership of slaves to the mothers of America. Women prefer familial ties to market relations, caring for the welfare of their dependents--children and slaves--rather than for the profits wrought from them" (Domestic Individualism, 32). This passage suggests that, for Stowe, it was all right that maternal women owned slaves since they would take the best care of them. This sounds a lot like the colonial paternalism of missionizing and education, only with the father replaced by the mother-figure. Indeed, the normatively paternal figuration of Christian benevolence is simply replaced by a maternal figuration while the structure of parental love, patronage, and discipline remains the same. Once Ophelia learns to love Topsy, all of this maternal love propels Topsy's progress. Yet the very violence of disciplining Topsy gets effaced or obscured by this rhetoric of maternal love. So if we read the 1899 Aguinaldo/Topsy cartoon, with the facile slippage of gender roles from male to female, back into Stowe's text, it actually helps to make a salutary connection between the nature of mother-love in Stowe's text and the dually masculine and feminine structure of colonial "benevolence." I mean, why use Uncle Sam rather than the clearly female figure of Columbia or Liberty? I would argue that Uncle Sam dressed badly as a woman more easily evokes the threat of violent discipline, and that Filipinos were seen as savage enough that they needed a hard hand. And as history bears out, they did, indeed, receive some tough loving from Uncle Sam.
5) Conclusion
In tracing the genealogical roots of the 1899 Aguinaldo/Topsy cartoon to both the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the history of blackface minstrel shows, I hoped to show the deep connection between racialization and spectacular image-making in the case of Filipinos in the United States. The multiple intertextual connections of the cartoon and the deep well of popular culture from which it draws limn the contours of what I call the "cognitive mechanics" of race and empire in this earlier era, hence my interest in form -- namely, figures of blackface minstrelsy, racial substitution, gender drag, infantilization, and tropes of education and mimicry -- by which we, as readers of material culture, recognize race and raced bodies.
The long history of Indian-hating, the legacy of slavery, and the failure of Reconstruction all had major legal, cultural, and psychonational consequences for U.S.-Philippine relations and Filipino racialization and gendering. As Oscar Campomanes and other scholars suggest, the study of Filipinos at the moment of the United States' incipient rise as an imperial and global power elucidates these early forms of racialization and the way that racialization is an ongoing and fluid process. While Black and Indian racialization laid down the formal conditions for the entrance of Filipinos into the American cultural imaginary, Filipino racialization as formed out of the crucible of race war outside the United States also influenced the treatment and representation of racial "others" "at home" in America. This study of the cartoon, in short, suggests the usefulness of a transnational perspective in studying contemporaneous racializations.
In bilateral fashion, reading the 1899 cartoon back into the 1852 novel and the minstrel shows that it spawned also clarifies the terms of public and cultural legibility for raced figures living within American society, as highlighted by the colonial tropes of education and mimicry in the relationship between Topsy and Ophelia which Victor Gillam mined for his cartoon. That an abolitionist novel could be used to promote colonialism in the Philippines provides some insight into the conditions of African Americans' acceptance into the American body politic. It is significant that American cultural memory would have retained the figure of Topsy as she is before her reformation. What was memorialized over and over again in the minstrel shows for years after the novel’s publication was the savage and heathen Topsy, wildly dancing and singing, rather than the reformed, upstanding, Christianized black woman who herself becomes a missionary -- suggesting that her mimicry is so successful that it is no longer mimicry but a bid for full absorption into the national culture and body politic, a prospect that the nation continues to forestall.
The above was a 20-minute presentation distilled from my larger paper on the Topsy/Aguinaldo cartoon. The paper itself needs a lot more work, especially with regards to the missionary/colonialism connection. Thanks to Prof. Benitez of UWash for his general engagement and suggestions on this particular point.
Anyway, it wasn't until I read the presentation at the conference that I realized how this project actually does relate to what I envision my eventual dissertation doing. The paper won't be in the dissertation itself (although a couple of people suggested I publish it anyway), but right now it's a space where I'm working out some of the ideas for the larger project.
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