256 Reviews of Books too,thiswouldhelpJesseninhislargeraimtorescue Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Certainly, Jessen’s Populism from its synonymy with parochialism (37). western Populists saw no such distinction between do- Entwined with this conspiratorial conception of poli- mestic and foreign affairs. These smart volumes join tics was the Populist critique of monopolistic capital- works by historians including Steven Hahn, Kristin ism and the corrupt centralized authority it relied upon, Hoganson, and Allison L. Sneider, which make clear ’

which animates Jessen s account of the imperial poli- that major domestic questions of Reconstruction, the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/124/1/256/5305445 by State Univ NY at Stony Brook user on 17 September 2020 tics of the late nineteenth century. In Congress, in the tariff, industrial reform, consumption, and women’s western press, and from the campaign stump, as Jessen suffrage were debated in the context of enormous pub- richly illustrates, the Populists critiqued empire as a lic discussion about empire. Much more work of this dangerous process of militarization and centralization nature examining how empire was lived across every- that would hollow out American democracy, enslave day practices—in church, by readers at home, as em- labor, and expand American monopoly to overseas bodied in citizenship, through visual and material cul- lands under government protection. Some Populists ture, and as embedded in state and non-state institu- were not far wide of the mark in their view of how im- tions—is needed if historians are to fully grasp the perial state building proceeded, especially in light of power of empire in shaping domestic concerns. By the insights from Moore’s American Imperialism and way of contrast, over the past three decades and in the State. As California’s one-term Populist representa- more than 120 volumes, Manchester University Press’s tive Curtis H. Castle put it in 1899, “All kinds and Studies in Imperialism series has sustained a sharp fo- descriptions of monopolies are to be farmed out” to cus on the interplay between the domestic and the im- monopoly capitalists in the new empire who aimed to perial in British social and cultural life. There is no “forever bar the poor from any portion, however small, analogous series in the U.S. academy. of the stolen wealth wrung from the unrequited toil of That is not to say that empire was the sole influence subject nations” (quoted on Jessen 163). That is not to on what constituted “American-ness” or that all Ameri- say that Populists were concerned for the well-being of cans were comfortable with the idea of being imperial, the colonized, who were considered an alien threat to but that empire saturated American public and cultural the racial boundaries of the American nation-state life, nationally and locally. Both these volumes signifi- (108–112, 165–168). cantly enrich our understanding of that saturation. Populism and Imperialism is framed as a cautionary STEPHEN TUFFNELL tale. Populist defeat at the polls and in Congress on University of Oxford each occasion illuminates “how patriotism and nation- alism have consistently been used to silence dissent in REBECCA TINIO MCKENNA. American Imperial Pasto- ” the United States (9). Jessen attributes the defeat of ral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Phil- western Populism to a surging Republican Party that ippines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. responded to the Populist critique by waving the Pp. xi, 281. Cloth $45.00. bloody shirt, accusing Populist opponents of being Copperheads and traitors, and emphasizing the impor- In 1900, members of the Philippine Commission, who tance of national unity over the divisiveness of their were representatives of the American colonial govern- Populist opponents. Populists were simply outdone by ment in the Philippine colony, visited the mountains of the patriotic bombast of wartime nationalism. Yet at Benguet Province and saw the verdant beauty of the other points Jessen seems willing to concede that re- plateau known as Baguio. One of its visitors was the gional and partisan divisions within the anti-imperial zoologist Dean C. Worcester, who, as some American coalition, chiefly between western reformers and east- historians note, would become a rich and corrupt colo- ern Mugwumps and conservatives who eschewed the nial official who owned land, cattle ranches, and gold radical language of reform and attacked the threat of mines in Baguio—and would earn the hatred of Fili- empire to representative government and national mo- pino journalists (130). This first American encounter rality, were insurmountable obstacles to the creation of with Baguio would seal the fate of Mountain Province a viable opposition (180–181, 211–216, 247). One and its people as essential to the project of building an wonders too about the role that Populist enthusiasm for American empire in the Philippines. empire played in fracturing this fragile coalition. Still, The natural beauty of Baguio—covered in tree ferns Jessen’s work is a welcome addition to recent literature and dotted with fresh spring waters, located in an area that explores the flexibility of anti-imperialism in the 4,700 feet above sea level—so stunned the American United States. visitors that they compared the climate to “northern It is perhaps surprising that American historians New England in the late spring or early summer” have so far overlooked the powerful anti-imperial po- (quoted on 30). Mountain Province was the tropical litical economy of Populist anti-monopoly, but it does Adirondacks or “Wyominginthesummer” for then reflect that historians have been slow to recognize the secretary of war William Howard Taft (1), and it was impact of empire on U.S. domestic history in the advertised later on as “the Switzerland of the Orient”

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2019 Canada and the United States 257 by the first decade of U.S. colonial rule (quoted on the American-style cottages of Baguio Country Club 143). Prior to the Americans, the Spanish referred to for white American and Filipino colonial government the indigenous peoples of the region under one name, employees, the fresh produce in Baguio markets, the Igorrote or Igorot, though the peoples of the northern parks, the landscape views, and the “big blue hydran- Luzon provinces of Benguet, Abra, Apayao, Kalinga, geas” and “blood-red bougainvilleas” (144) all seem to

Ifugao, and Mountain Province had no collective name paint an idyllic picture of the summer capital. But Mc- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/124/1/256/5305445 by State Univ NY at Stony Brook user on 17 September 2020 for their own ethnolinguistic groups. Apart from the Kenna always returns to a critical reading of this temperate climate, the Igorots raised herds of cattle, ca- “American pastoral” by extending the work of cultural rabaos (water buffalo), horses, and chickens. The pas- critics Raymond Williams, Leo Marx, Rosalind Morris, turelands were so well cultivated that the chickens and others. Baguio, like the classic pastoral, was a sign raised on the mountainsides yielded meat that reminded of power—an imperial sign of the American empire. some travelers of poultry from “the countryside of Just as pastoral poets and painters made art about the Spain” (quoted on 30). More importantly, the Benguet countryside for aristocrats who made their wealth by natives had gold. Even before the arrival of the Span- “appropriating the countryside from peasants” (15), so iards, the Igorots collected gold from riverbeds and did Americans build Baguio by appropriating Igorot mines since the seventeenth century. Baguio was a key land and labor. As McKenna puts it, “In Baguio, the center of gold trade in the nineteenth century, and by US occupation became associated with nature itself— 1878, “four to eight thousand ounces” of gold were as a greensward at the center of the town site, as land- sold by Benguet Igorots (quoted on 32). scape views, as the golf green peacefully tended by Thus began the American colonial project of creating Igorots, as fresh strawberriesandmilkonthetable” what historian Rebecca Tinio McKenna calls the (15). Baguio’s beautiful landscape, then, was created “American imperial pastoral.” McKenna’s brilliant and by imperial violence, underwritten by Igorot disposses- elegant book, American Imperial Pastoral: The Archi- sion, racial objectification, land theft (such as the story tecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines,centers of Ibaloi elite Mateo Cariño and his family), and the on the making of Baguio as an “American retreat, the reengineering of nature into a “picturesque setting” that transformation of Philippine pasture into American naturalized American imperial power (159). pastoral,” and what the design, construction, and use of At the turn of the century, Americans built a summer Baguio tell us about the “figurative architecture” (3) of retreat on Igorot land; this retreat provided refuge from the American empire at the turn of the nineteenth into the ongoing guerrilla war conducted by Filipino the twentieth century. McKenna examines Baguio as revolutionaries who continued to dream and struggle an American hill station turned summer retreat as a for independence or kalayaan (53). Baguio was the “palimpsest of landscapes,” also exploring the contra- American colonial resort created as “a great American dictions of imperial ideology and “how rule and sub- garden miraculously blooming in the Orient” (11), as a jects of rule were generated in the face of Philippine re- respite from the heat of Manila, and as a site of “regen- sistance” (19). McKenna deftly narrates her study of eration” for overworked colonial clerks and for battle- the making of a colonial summer capital with the “his- weary American soldiers and their families. Building tory of capital,” or power appropriated and used by the hill station that is Baguio would prove to be the re- American colonialists, through a cultural materialist generation of American imperial power as well—how reading of architectural plans, maps, local histories, “good sanitation, smooth roads, sound nourishment, re- news accounts, popular literature, and advertising. Ba- freshing air, leisure, Modernity, Civilization, and guio as the American empire’s “government hill sta- Beauty” (15) were secured by the violence of empire. tion” is a colonial structure that reveals the histories NERISSA S. BALCE and ideologies of the white Progressives who came to Stony Brook University the Philippine colony as colonial administrators, of the ’ Filipino elites who collaborated with the American co- JOHANN N. NEEM. Democracy s Schools: The Rise of lonial regime, and of the Filipino indigenous communi- Public Education in America. (How Things Worked.) ties who served as exploited labor and were racially Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. marked by colonial officials like Dean C. Worcester as xiii, 240. Cloth $54.95, paper $22.95, e-book $22.95. living proof of barbarism and backwardness. ROBERT N. GROSS. Public vs. Private: The Early His- ’ McKenna s study of Baguio as a colonial structure tory of School Choice in America. New York: Oxford fi was dif cult to read without feeling some form of University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 209. Cloth $74.00. American imperial nostalgia for the Baguio of the early twentieth century. At the time, the American On the surface, Johann N. Neem’s Democracy’s summer capital was touted as “one of the most progres- Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America and sive and cleanest cities in the world . . . under the Robert N. Gross’s Public vs. Private: The Early His- American flag” (quoted on 143). The mention of “Stet- tory of School Choice in America attack very different son Hats,”“Benguet Buttermilk,”“Benguet Cheese,” subjects in the history of American education. Neem

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2019