All’s war in love and fairs
NEW YORK CITY — April’s end marks two significant anniversaries. The first is that of the inauguration of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, intended to commemorate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase
in 1803, but delayed by a year. The second centers on the end of the war in Vietnam in 1975, 40 years ago, when the victorious soldiers from the North and the Viet Cong entered Saigon, leading to the collapse of both the South Vietnamese regime and US support. (As to why I don’t use the more familiar appellation “Vietnam War,” I’ll get to that in a while.)
Seventy-one years separate the two historic events, one the triumphal coming out of the United States as a global power—the new bully on the block and latest player in the Great Game, as the competition among the mostly Western superpowers for a piece of the colonial pie was referred to—and the other, the beginning of a steep decline in the US image at home and abroad.
The 1904 World’s Fair and the war in Vietnam may seem to be worlds apart, but in reality they trace their origins to the same moralizing and do-gooder philosophy: the overwhelming belief in Via Americana as the way forward for the rest of the human race, particularly those with darker skin, a belief to be implemented whether or not the object of all that fuss wished to be “civilized” in the first place.
The fair was the United States’ coming-out party, its extravagant announcement to the rest of the planet that it had arrived, following the defeat of Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War and of the Philippine revolutionary government in the ensuing 1899 Philippine-American War—a war much longer, more brutal and bloodier than the four-month conflict between an aging Spanish empire and the arriviste Yankees.
The centerpiece of the fair, the largest in the world and spread over 1,200 acres, was the Philippine Exhibit, with representation from various regions of the then-US colony, and with buildings and installations erected on 47 acres. As I have noted in earlier columns and as remarked upon in different texts, the purpose of exhibiting all types of Filipinos to an insatiably voyeuristic American public was to demonstrate that incipient progress was being achieved in the drive to bestow on their little brown brothers fraternal love. Other ethnic groups from other parts of the world were on display as well, in what was basically a human zoo,
And what was the rationale for the war in Vietnam? Before I say something about that, let me explain why I don’t simply use “Vietnam War.” That isn’t the term the Vietnamese employ. To them it is the American War, one that spilled over into Cambodia and Laos. Theirs is a more accurate term, since Vietnam had not declared war on the United States, and didn’t have troops amassed at that country’s borders. Above all, this was a civil war, between the North and the South—an ironic echo of the civil war that raged in the US from 1861 to 1865, also between North and South, the difference being that the civil war in the United States didn’t see any foreign power involved.
The reason for the American War was simply a continuation of bearing the White Man’s Burden—to “Christianize and civilize” the Other—the exact same rationale for the subjugation and occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. Then, it was in the context of the aforementioned Great Game. In the 1970s, it was in the shadows of the Cold War, where the great game was now between two superpowers: the US and the USSR. According to the prevailing domino theory, were Vietnam to end up as a Communist state, the surrounding countries would fall like dominoes and become Communist. And that had to be prevented at all costs.
In spite of massive US firepower and the insertion of US boots on the ground—at one point totaling 500,000—Ho Chi Minh’s forces prevailed and the North unified the country. The defeat of the US was a striking instance of the empire striking back. It was as though the Igorots, most likely the most exploited group of Filipinos at the World’s Fair, rose up successfully against their white masters and kicked them out of the fair. In retrospect, the American War or the Vietnam War, however you choose to call it, and the other wars the United States has been involved since exemplify not so much a Via Americana as a Funeris Americana.
Clarification: In an earlier column where I wrote on the lack of notable American women faces on US currency, I noted that the Philippine 1,000-peso bill had a woman’s face but the image on the Internet wasn’t clear enough for me to identify her. It turns out that that face belonged to the formidable Josefa Llanes Escoda, an early advocate of women’s suffrage, founder of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines and a leader in the resistance movement against the Japanese during World War II, for which she was killed. I was e-mailed this information by a descendant of hers, Isabel T. Escoda, a friend, veteran journalist and longtime resident of Hong Kong.
Copyright L.H. Francia 2015
Like us on Facebook
