scholarly journals The Iron Hand of Power: US Architectural Imperialism in the Philippines

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Daniel Immerwahr

ABSTRACT Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainland US to the Philippines. In that colonial setting, Burnham was able to realise his vision far more easily, as neither he nor the officials executing his plans were ultimately accountable to Filipinos. Forced labour, confiscated land, repurposed public money, unchecked political power and wartime social disruption all aided US architectural imperialism. Rather than regretting this, Burnham and his associates celebrated the opportunities that their undemocratic setting provided. This article treats not only Burnham but also William E. Parsons (1872–1939) and Cameron Forbes (1870–1959), who extrapolated and enforced Burnham’s plans, and Juan Arellano (1888–1960), the Filipino architect who, to his later regret, helped remake Manila in the colonisers’ image.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gremil Alessandro Naz

<p>This paper examines the changes in Filipino immigrants’ perceptions about themselves and of Americans before and after coming to the United States. Filipinos have a general perception of themselves as an ethnic group. They also have perceptions about Americans whose media products regularly reach the Philippines. Eleven Filipinos who have permanently migrated to the US were interviewed about their perceptions of Filipinos and Americans. Before coming to the US, they saw themselves as hardworking, family-oriented, poor, shy, corrupt, proud, adaptable, fatalistic, humble, adventurous, persevering, gossipmonger, and happy. They described Americans as rich, arrogant, educated, workaholic, proud, powerful, spoiled, helpful, boastful, materialistic, individualistic, talented, domineering, friendly, accommodating, helpful, clean, and kind. Most of the respondents changed their perceptions of Filipinos and of Americans after coming to the US. They now view Filipinos as having acquired American values or “Americanized.” On the other hand, they stopped perceiving Americans as a homogenous group possessing the same values after they got into direct contact with them. The findings validate social perception and appraisal theory, and symbolic interaction theory.</p>


2020 ◽  
pp. 183-194
Author(s):  
Charles D. Ross

This chapter narrates how Nassau resumed its normal state as a forgotten and destitute outpost. It outlines the effects of the Civil War in the United States, the cessation of blockade running, and the financial windfall of 1862–1864. The chapter then looks at the powerful hurricane that hit the city, in which hundreds of homes and businesses were completely destroyed. It recounts the center of opposition to blockade-running efforts during the war — the US consulate, and the four men who occupied that office to stop the shipping of contraband: Sam Whiting, Seth Hawley, and Vice-consul William Thompson. It also discusses the significance of Charles Jackson, John Howell, and Epes Sargent in providing aid to the consul's office during the war. The chapter argues that former US consul Timothy Darling was the only prominent merchant to be an ardent supporter of the Union cause, adding he was a true New Englander living in the tropics and was in strong opposition to the slave-holding Confederacy. The chapter also notes the contributions of Lewis Heyliger in Confederate departments, the cotton brokers, and the shipments coming in from Europe. Ultimately, it highlights how Henry Adderley, his son Augustus, and their business partner and Henry's son-in-law George David Harris epitomized the success of the opportunism surrounding the Great Carnival.


Author(s):  
Patrick Cullen

The United States' diplomatic security apparatus that operates today from Washington DC to Iraq and Afghanistan is uniquely massive. It is incomparable in its size, budget, degree of institutionalization, and level of sophistication when set against both other nations as well as its own humble origins in WWI. To understand why this is so, the first half of this chapter historically maps and causally explains how, and why, US diplomatic security has been transformed over the course of its modern hundred-year history. The second half provides an empirically rich study of the various roles and functions of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the US military units that protect the US diplomatic mission.


Author(s):  
Dafydd Townley

The Watergate affair has become synonymous with political corruption and conspiracy. The crisis has, through fact, fiction, and debate, become considerably more than the arrest of five men breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC in the early hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Instead, the term “Watergate” has since come to represent the burglary, its failed cover-up, the press investigation, the Senate enquiry, and the eventual resignation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. Arguably, Watergate has come to encompass all the illegalities of the Nixon administration. The crisis broke when the Vietnam War had already sunk public confidence in the executive to a low ebb, and in the context of a society already fractured by the turbulence of the 1960s. As such, Watergate is seen as the nadir of American democracy in the 20th century. Perversely, despite contemporaries’ genuine fears for the future of the US democratic system, the scandal highlighted the efficiency of the US governmental machine. The investigations that constituted the Watergate enquiry, which were conducted by the legislative and judicial branches and the fourth estate, exposed corruption in the executive of the United States that stretched to the holder of the highest office. The post-war decades had allowed an imperial presidency to develop, which had threatened the country’s political equilibrium. Watergate disclosed that the presidency had overreached its constitutional powers and responsibilities and had conspired to keep those moves hidden from the electorate. More significantly, however, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon revealed that the checks-and-balances system of government, which was conceived almost 200 years before the Watergate affair, worked as those who devised it had planned. Watergate should illustrate to Americans not just the dangers of consolidating great power in the office of the president, but also the means to counteract such growth.


Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-685
Author(s):  
DAVID JOHNSON LEE

ABSTRACT:The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 129-137
Author(s):  
He Shuquan

The United States has a robust trade and investment relationship with China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN is collectively the fourth-largest trading partner, and China is one of the largest trade partners of the United States, the largest export destination for China. Thus, China and ASEAN countries are competing in the US market intensively. The purpose of this paper is to calculate the net gains or losses for the ASEAN-5 Members and China during 1993 and 2007 in the US market. There are two main contributions of this paper: one is to dynamically estimate the net shifts of the economies as compared to the traditional comparative static approach; the other is to extend the shift‐share analysis to attribute the net gains or losses to competing exporters. This study adopts the widely used shift-share analysis technique to exam the net gains or losses for the ASEAN-5 and China during 1993-2007 in the Unites Sates market. The paper provides a new extension to the shift‐share analysis to attribute the net shift to competing economies with a dynamic approach. The paper applies the methodology to the competition among China and ASEAN-5 in the US import market with the data drawn from World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS), a data consultation and extraction software developed by the World Bank. The discussion focuses on three periods: 1993-1997, 1998-2002 and 2003-2007. In general, China performs the best among the competing economies. Among the ASEAN-5 Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand perform better than the other two members. During the first period, all economies have positive export growth as the actual export growth shows. However, in terms of net shift, only China and the Philippines are the winners with positive value of net shifts. During the second period, China stands out while the ASEAN economies show negative net shifts values. Similar is the case for the third period. In terms of the industries, China focuses on different industries during the thee periods, and the ASEAN economies depend heavily on a few industries. China’s gains in these industries are much bigger than the ASEAN economies’ gains in value. The ASEAN economies gain in small numbers of industries with small values. When attributed the gains or losses to competing economies, China only loses to the Philippines during 1993-1997, and gains from all competing economies during all periods. Though net losers, the ASEAN-5 also gain from other competing economies. For example, Indonesia gains from Singapore and Thailand during 1993-1997, from the Philippines and Singapore during 1998-2002, from Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore during 2003-2007. The trade war between the United States and China provides opportunity for the ASEAN countries in the Unites Sates market, however, there are negative impacts on the ASEAN countries as well. The ASEAN countries are more vulnerable. Keywords: shift-share analysis, export competitiveness, Asia, ASEAN, China.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Anna Rhodora Solar ◽  
John Matthew Poblete

The Philippines had its own share of colonial past. Just as other Asian and African countries which were under the Western colonizers, the Philippines partook of the momentous event that proposed an alternative to the world order dominated by superpowers—the Bandung Conference. The principles collectively known as Bandung Spirit were embraced by the Philippines and had a clear understanding of its symbolic significance. Yet such understanding of these principles was coupled with compromises on the Philippines relations with the United States. Over the decades, the Philippines had to do a balancing act between its being sovereign, independent state and its recognition of the relevance of its past colonial master—the US. Hence, this raises the question of whether the Philippines is living or leaving the Bandung Spirit. Specifically, this paper assesses whether the Philippines still upholds the same Bandung Spirit in its traditional form or has it given a contemporary understanding of it. The paper argues that the Philippine-US relations remain to be an evident display of US presence in Southeast Asia albeit redefined to blend with the Bandung Spirit.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Tyrrell

The article compares attitudes towards and laws regulating the use of alcohol and opium in the United States (US) colonial possession of the Philippines. Forces within the United States and missionary groups in the field in the Philippines fought to have the supply of alcohol to American troops restricted by abolition of the military canteen system, and to eliminate use of alcohol among the indigenous population. To achieve these aims, they developed highly skilled networks of political lobbying led by Wilbur Craft's International Reform Bureau. Temperance, church and missionary groups differed among themselves over the relative seriousness of the two drugs’ impact in the Philippines, but skillfully adapted their tactics in the light of experience in the colony to focus on opium. They developed a tacit coalition with the US government, using the Philippines opium policy to distinguish the United States as a morally superior colonial ruler. By lobbying the government to oppose opium use in the East Asia region, they served to promote an American regional hegemony, and provided an important departure point for modern US drug poalicies.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Friedman

Following the trend of cities throughout the United States subsidizing new baseball stadiums within their economic redevelopment strategies, in 2005, the city government of Washington, D.C. agreed to subsidize the construction of Nationals Park for the use of the Washington Nationals baseball team. In its design of the stadium, HOK Sport architects sought to represent the “transparency of democracy” as they were inspired by the democratic image and iconography of the US Capital city. Using a perspective based in Lefebvre’s (1991b) production of space, I explore the power relations produced and reproduced within spatial and cultural production. I argue that instead of creating an inclusive space, architects designed a space that exemplifies the late capitalist moment in its focus on consumption, social control, and aesthetic production. Nationals Park, thus, excludes people by class, privileges visitors over residents, and provides an unrealistic view of the city that marginalizes less powerful groups.


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