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Lessons from 1911: Taal Volcano, American Colonialism, and Philippine Disaster Nationalism

Tagged: disasters, environmental history, imperialism, Ethnic histories, Progressive Era

Past Dr. Theresa Ventura

Taal Volcano crowns an island in the centre of Lake Taal in Southern Luzon. Its wide-mouthed cone is filled with water, giving Taal the Ripley'due south Believe Information technology or Not distinction of containing the largest lake on an island in a lake that is too on an island. Taal also has the distinction of beingness the second most active volcano in the Philippines. We were reminded of that subversive power when it began to show signs of an eruption on the forenoon of January 12, 2020. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) issued a level four out of five alert, mandating an evacuation of the area. In a matter of days, almost xxx,000 people within a nine-mile radius moved to safety, including the vi,000 living on Taal Island. Photographers arrived and captured the chaos of the evacuation, the devastation of homes blanketed in ash, and the arresting beauty of volcanic lightning storms. Such images also brought empathy and an international outpouring of donations. The week revealed the terror of an eruption, the ways in which local communities mobilize care, and the political outrage that follows when the federal state appears boring to respond, as was the case with the already contentious Duterte administration. The 2020 eruption also allows us to reflect on the politics of disaster, the press, and land obligation during Taal's deadliest eruption in the Progressive Era.

When Taal erupted in January of 1911 the Philippines were the largest overseas colony of the United States. Residents on what was so called Bulkan ng Isla—Volcano Isle—awoke to a potent earthquake on Jan 27. With quakes mutual and no official observe to evacuate, many decided to stay in place. But three days after Taal exploded in an outburst audible over an area 360-kilometers in diameter. For one calendar week, the volcano spewed a four-kilometer high column of burning mud, iron salts, sulfur, and carbon dioxide. Taal Lake contracted before crashing onto the opposite shore in a volcanic tsunami that reached 762 meters inland. The receding waters dragged people, homes, and animals on its render to the lake bed. Bulkan ng Isla, wrote an observer, "was devastated, not a blade of grass escaping," and an estimated 1200-2000 people lost their lives.^[i] As Taal quieted, a new storm over the American response brewed.

In contrast to the wide apportionment of today's empathy-invoking photographs, Taal'due south 1911 eruption barely registered in The states mainland media. The inattention was an antiquity of colonialism. Formally annexed in 1899, the Supreme Court ruled in 1901 the Philippines were strange [to the US] in a domestic sense." The verdict rendered Filipinos, along with Puerto Ricans, "non-denizen nationals." As American subjects, they bore fidelity and responsibilities to the American authorities, including military service. But as "non-citizens," they were denied the full privileges and protections of citizenship, non the to the lowest degree of which was a vote in federal governance. The nationalist paper El Ideal captured what it meant to vest to even so remain carve up from the United States in an editorial condemning American "passivity in the disaster." Mainland disinterest was due "in part, to the fact that the dead and wounded are only Filipinos. If the tragedy had occurred elsewhere in the United states and the Authorities had show[n] the same attitude the roar of indignation of the people would have made the White Firm tremble on its foundations."^[2]

The on-the-ground relief, moreover, demonstrated the difficulties of conducting a rescue mission during an extended war machine occupation. The Philippine Law—a militarized island-broad police force led past Americans and composed of American and Philippine recruits—was the one country institution with the capacity to organize a coordinated response. Units were already in Southern Luzon when Taal erupted. But the Constabulary's response was hindered by its well-deserved reputation as an agent of state repression. It guarded taxation collectors, forcibly transferred suspected lepers from their communities, and fabricated arrests for everyday practices like gambling and opium taking. The Constabulary policed agricultural workers suspected of breaking work contracts or reneging on debt, and it retained the legal power to resettle entire barrios suspected of harboring thieves. When the Constabulary finally reached Taal, survivors fled. Officers returned the mistrust; equally 1 American later recalled, his superior assumed fleeing survivors were "robbing the dead in the stricken district."^[iii] Far from organizing a rescue, the Constabulary devoted time and resource to investigating suspected cases of theft. The Reddish Cantankerous disbursed its funds to a former US soldier turned Taal bout guide named JD Ward. Ward charged P2500 for the apply of his bancas (small boats), a fee La Vanguardia chosen "stupendous!"^[4] Adding insult to injury, Ward "dash[ed] aimlessly around the lake," refusing to transport the injured and fulfill his contractual obligation "considering at that place were American women aboard the launch."^[5] Inasmuch every bit Americans in the Philippines paid attention to the tragedy, they appear to have washed so every bit disaster tourists.

Crater of Taal Volcano before and after the 1911 eruption. Miguel Saderra Masó, S.J., The Eruption of Taal Volcano, Jan. thirty, 1911. (Philippines: Weather Bureau, 1911), plate V.

Subsequent press criticisms built on and extended longer-continuing criticisms of Us dominion and in the procedure articulated what I telephone call "disaster nationalism." Disaster nationalism presented a formidable claiming to at least three tenets of colonial dominion. First, to the charge that the Philippines were too ethnically and linguistically diverse to found i nation, disaster nationalists turned Taal into a symbol of national unity. Its eruption, wrote the once pro-American El Ideal, was "an invisible thread, which united common interests and makes one those who were born under the same heaven." Volunteer-led recovery efforts, including the wearing of black armbands to commemorate victims, were proof that there was a Filipino "public spirit [that] in private and in social matters watches over its own."^[half-dozen]

Second, disaster nationalism rejected the motif of American colonialism as a schoolhouse. As scholars have noted, including most recently Sarah Steinbock-Pratt's Educating the Empire, American imperialists cast their rule as training Filipinos in the art of commonwealth.^[7] This logic was embedded in institutions such as the Philippine Assembly, an elected legislative body established in 1907 that acted as a lower house to the presidentially-appointed seven-fellow member Philippine Commission. The bulk-American Commission retained full veto ability over legislation proposed by the majority-Philippine Associates. Otherwise staid matters of budgeting were heated battles over stewardship and the right, equally one patriotic system charged before Taal's eruption, to "properly set up the budgets without killing the people with hunger."^[8] Following the eruption, Assembly members appropriated P100,000 for relief, which the Commission vetoed. La Democracia declared the veto to be proof that Usa Commissioners, "in the presence of a scene of misery and much tears which urgently require the sacrifice of the virtually rebellious self-love," chose "to constitute supremacy, to testify power."^[9]

Third, disaster nationalism reclaimed the torrid zone from the racist environmental determinism of colonialists. To the charge that tropical heat disinclined Filipinos to work, disaster nationalists held the American response lazy. That two of the nigh powerful members of the Philippine Committee – Secretarial assistant of the Interior Dean Conant Worcester and Governor Full general West. Cameron Forbes – were on vacation when Taal erupted confirmed the allegation. Both were in Baguio, the before long-to-open summer capital nestled in the Cordillera Mountains. Rebecca McKenna's American Majestic Pastoral shows how U.s.a. fears of Manila's tropical estrus led administrators to build a temperate summertime uppercase at great price to a perpetually small colonial treasury.^[10] Even Worcester admitted that the distance betwixt upland Baguio and lowland Taal meant that "a menses of several days elapsed before it was realized that an bloodcurdling calamity had occurred."^[11] For the nationalist paper La Vanguardia, both vacations in the mountains during summer and tours through the islands by boat in cooler weather indicated that "the clamor of the people has not reached the yacht on which the gentlemen of the payroll have just made a trip for pleasure and investigation. The music on board drowns the imprecations of the multitude which supports the state."^[12]

Taal every bit seen from the Tagaytay Ridge in Cavite Province. The squat summit sticking out of the h2o (Lake Taal) is the volcano. Although it appears pocket-size, it is large enough for settlement and farming. Photograph past author.

Finally, disaster nationalism turned an intimate knowledge of Philippine landscape into a criterion of governance. Experiential knowledge, rather than temperate winters, bestowed foresight. When the rice crop failed after in 1911, La Vanguardia asked "why did the Philippine Commission not foresee that the rice crop would one solar day not be sufficient equal to consumption?" (September 22, 1911). The ability to anticipate disaster required a state that managed its risks. Assembly members scored their biggest victory when they secured funding for the establishment of a seismologic monitoring station at the base of Taal. Jumping to 1982, the independent Philippine state grouped this station and others into PHIVOLCS, which has since played a crucial part in monitoring volcanic activity, mandating, and coordinating evacuations. Taal'south 1911 eruption would become the last of the twentieth century to have claimed more than than 1,000 lives. May it stay that way through the twenty-first century.

The anticolonial disaster nationalism of the Progressive Era emphasized a point increasingly relevant in an age of climate crisis. The boundary between natural and human-made disaster was and remains porous. For Filipinos, Taal's tragedy was compounded by the disaster of U.s. colonialism. Its sting was felt in the disinterest shown by the mainland press, the mutual distrust betwixt the Constabulary and local residents, and the political and symbolic battles over the relief. Today'due south global outpouring of back up, by contrast, points to the global reach of the Filipinx diaspora likewise equally the changed geopolitical realities of Philippine independence. However, and as many have noted, the Trump administration's response to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the earthquakes of 2020—whether lecturing on budgets, denying relief, or tossing paper towels—throws the human costs of "strange in a domestic sense" into stark relief.

Theresa Ventura is an banana professor of history at Concordia University, Montréal. She is completing a manuscript entitled, Empire Reformed: The U.s., the Philippines, and the Practices of Development, 1898-1946, which places contests over natural resource management at the middle of American overseas country building and power. She has held fellowships from the ACLS-Melon Foundation, the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec and has published inPhilippine Studies (2015),Agricultural History (2016),History and Technology (2019), and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (forthcoming 2020).

Comprehend Image: Photograph of Taal Volcano by Maliz Ong (CC0 Public Domain), PublicDomainPictures.cyberspace.

^[1] Charles Martin, "Observations on the Recent Eruption of Taal Volcano," Philippine Journal of Science, Apr. 1911, 87-91 (quotation 84).

^[2] "They…and We," El Ideal, Feb. 7, 1911.

^[3] William C. Farr, "Taal Eruption, 1911," Philippine Magazine 35:5 (May 1938), 232-3, 249-51 (quotation 232).

^[4] "P25000 From the Carmine Cross," La Vanguardia, Apr. 28, 1911.

^[v] Farr, "Taal Eruption," 251.

^[6] "At that place is a Public Spirit," El Platonic, Feb. 11, 1911.

^[vii] Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing, 2019). Come across, equally well, Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Colina: Academy of Northward Carolina Printing, 2006), 288 and the essays in Ruby R. Pareds, ed., Philippine Colonial Commonwealth (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1989).

^[8] "League of all Patriots without Distinction of Party, Race, or Sect, to Defend the Political Rights and Material Interests of the Filipinos Grievously Neglected past Those Nearly Called to Support Them," El Comercio, January. 10, 1911.

^[9] "About the Failure of a Bill," La Democracia, Feb. 7, 1911.

^[10] Rebecca Tinio McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.s.a. Colonialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

^[11] Worcester, "Taal Volcano and its Recent Destructive Eruption," National Geographic Magazine, Apr. 1912, 313-67 (quotation 343).

^[12] "Rice and Meat," La Vanguardia, Sept. xiv, 1911.

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