Joseph Scalice

Here we are. The long journey of forty-six days is ended and we are anchored in Manila Bay, two and a half miles from the shore. At this distance the city is only a shining white line between the blue water and the bluer sky. hot? You never imagined the real meaning of that word, and yet the thermometer marks only ninety-nine; the moist atmosphere makes it seem many degrees higher. Thin clothing and excitement are helping us to bear the heat for there is a sense of exhilaration in the thought that we are at last in Oriental America.

These are the opening lines of the volume of colonial memoirs that I am now reading through. The reflections are those of Edith Moses on her arrival in the Philippines on June 3, 1900. Her husband, Bernard Moses, served as Secretary of Public Instruction on the Philippine Commission from 1901 to 1908. He subsequently returned to teaching at Berkeley where Moses Hall was posthumously named in his honor.

Edith Moses’ memoirs were published as Unofficial Letters of An Official’s Wife by D. Appleton and Company in 1908. The book is a blend of exoticism and racism and clearly captures the perceptions and attitudes of a high ranking and well educated US colonial official.

In the first week of June, Moses writes about their quest for a home. They selected their home from among those abandoned by the departing Spanish. William Howard Taft, the three hundred pound Governor General and future US president, toured the homes with them. Edith Moses complained: “They were certainly not the palaces report and our imagination had pictured them.” (4)

Despite her initial disappointment with their new oceanfront home, Moses found the Escolta, where Spanish “girls in lace mantillas” (9) shopped, to be fascinating. “Think,” she wrote, “of America in possession of the finest walled city now intact!” (10)

On June 11, Edith Moses begins to write of housekeeping.

Your first impression will be that we keep trained baboons to do housework, for the probability is that a half-naked, dark-skinned creature is rushing up and down the hall on all fours, with big burlap socks under his hands and feet. He is only a monkeylike coolie who polishes the narra floors. (14)

Almost every page has a similar reference to monkeys, native boys (adult males), childlike Filipinos, lazy natives and so on. One wonders to what extent Bernard Moses, responsible for administering a system of education in the Philippines, shared his wife’s prejudices.

There are also glimpses of public life under American colonial rule. The city of Manila is under martial law, we are told, and no one is allowed out of their home after nine without a pass. Moses speaks to two of the guards of their home, who were disappointed when a

fiesta went off without any trouble; one of the boys told me he was “aching for a scrap,” but another said he didn’t want “to kill no niggers, they hadn’t done nothing to him.” It is a miserable life [Moses concludes] - that of a soldier in peace - and I don’t wonder these boys would like to see a little active service. (50)

Edith Moses’ letters provide us authentic insight into the mentality and the perceptions of US colonial officials in the Philippines. The insight we gain, however, is deeply disturbing.