How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Forbes filled his diary with tales of polo, baseball, and golf, though usually with a racial twist. One of his favorite polo horses was called Nigger.11 His baseball team, named after the costume of the Igorot people of the Luzon mountains, was the Gee Strings.12 “I remember one day playing golf,13 with a breechless Igorot caddy,” Forbes wrote. “I said to myself, ‘Now how many am I?’ and the boy replied, ‘Playing five.’ I was as much astonished as though a tree had spoken.”

  Forbes didn’t expect Filipinos to speak, or at least he didn’t expect them to say much worth hearing. He knew that many sought independence, but he wrote that “they want it very much as a baby wants a candle because it is bright and because it is held out for him to seize at.”14 He doubted that Filipinos “knew exactly what it meant.” At any rate,15 Forbes didn’t “believe in it for them” and felt that their interests were best served by benevolent men from the mainland.16

  Men, that is, like Daniel Burnham.

  Burnham could start with Manila. If Bellamy’s twenty-first-century Boston was the dream, Manila was the nightmare. The “ancient pest-hole” (as one reformer called it) was crowded,17 disease-ridden, and poor. “It has the crookedest streets of any city in the world,”18 the guidebook exclaimed.

  Mainlanders blamed all this on Filipinos, but the Manila that Burnham encountered in 1904 had been badly mauled by the forces of history. Its timeline read like a book of the Old Testament: 1899, war; 1901, bubonic plague; 1902, cholera and rinderpest; 1903, the “Great Fire.” Nellie Taft, the wife of Governor-General William Howard Taft, recalled the “constant terror,”19 the feeling that “we were living always in the lowering shadow of some dreadful catastrophe.”

  Yet what was from a human perspective a disaster was, from an urban planner’s perspective, an invitation. Large swaths of the city had been cleared by war, by diseases, and by the destructive public health campaigns that accompanied them (involving, in one case, U.S. troops torching an entire district in the name of fighting cholera).20 Real estate was cheap, and the best land was already in governmental hands, seized by the military at the start of the war.

  “Manila has before it an opportunity unique in the history of modern times,”21 pronounced Burnham, “the opportunity to create a unified city equal to the greatest of the Western World.”

  With Forbes’s backing, Burnham dove in. He was willing to defer to the reigning Spanish mission style of architecture, but the city’s urban footprint would be radically reconfigured. Under Spain, the center of power, called Intramuros, had been a cloistered, church-studded city within a city, packed within imposing walls and surrounded by a moat. Burnham would fill the moat (unsanitary), punch holes in the walls for traffic, and give the city a new center.

  He fixed on the Luneta, a cleared area near the water, where musicians played in the evenings. This, moved a thousand feet to the west and surrounded by governmental buildings, could serve as Manila’s command center. Broad avenues would radiate outward from it, cutting diagonally through the street grid. Why? “Because every section of the Capitol City should look with deference toward the symbol of the Nation’s power,”22 Burnham explained.

  Burnham sought to impress on Filipinos the authority of the colonial government. Yet he was ultimately less concerned with Philippine opinion than with the needs of mainlanders. So, though he had little to say about the many neighborhoods that had been torched or shot up in the previous years (other than to imagine carving boulevards through them), he fretted at length about Manila’s lack of a world-class hotel. He proposed placing one (a “world famous resort”) adjoining the Luneta.23 He also left room among the Luneta’s governmental buildings for a country club, boat clubs, and a casino. These weren’t built for Filipinos, and indeed some clubs would refuse to admit them. They were for foreigners—a promise, Burnham wrote, of “continuous good times” made in the hopes that “those who make fortunes will stay and others will come.”

  Forbes loved it. The plan “seems to meet with approval all round,”24 he said, beaming.

  *

  “If one has capital and a well-considered plan,25 the thing does itself,” Burnham announced confidently the year he erected his White City in Chicago. But subsequent experience had taught him the folly of that statement, if he ever believed it. Plans didn’t “do themselves.” They needed careful stewardship.

  It was a lesson Burnham learned to take seriously. At roughly the same time as he was drawing up his plans for Manila, he started on another large urban plan, for Chicago. Chicago and Manila—they were his most ambitious projects. Today they’re the two cities that most clearly bear his mark.

  Cities are fiendishly complex, and planning them takes care. In Chicago, where Burnham had lived and worked for decades, he was painstaking. He fired off queries to experts throughout the city. He asked the nine leading shipping firms about the dimensions of their ships. He asked a doctor in a Chicago hospital where his patients came from. He inquired about the backgrounds of the students at Northwestern and the University of Chicago. In its acknowledgments, his Plan of Chicago,26 which took two years and a staff of dozens to produce, thanked 312 people for their help.

  Burnham needed that help. The Chicago plan was by necessity a group effort in both conception and implementation. Carrying it out would take decades. A commission of four hundred prominent citizens took charge of executing the plan. They sponsored lectures and made a film with the hope of drumming up support. The commission arranged to have a book about the plan, Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago, introduced into the eighth-grade curriculum of the city’s public schools, presumably on the theory that the children would preach the Gospel of Burnham to their parents.

  Mostly, it worked. Not entirely—large parts of the plan were never realized, such as a Luneta-style core of civic buildings at Congress and Halsted Streets. But between 1912 and 1931, Chicago voters approved some eighty-six plan-related bond issues,27 for a combined cost of $234 million.

  In the Philippines,28 however, it was different. There weren’t any voters to persuade. Burnham spent six weeks in the colony, a place he knew little about before arriving. He toured Manila with Forbes and spoke with some officials, but his contact with Filipinos other than servants was limited. No living Filipino warranted mention in his letters,29 in his diary, or in the plan itself. In all, Burnham worked on his plan for six months, and that left time for travel, tourism, and his simultaneous work in Baguio.

  Burnham could never have gotten away with such haste in Chicago. In Manila, however, it was fine. Three days after the government approved his plan (with no changes),30 construction began.

  Things could move quickly because power over the built environment lay in the hands of a single man, the consulting architect (initially called the insular architect). There was no such position on the mainland. But in the Philippines, Forbes explained, “we so fixed it that the Insular Architect prepared plans for all public buildings, whether insular, municipal,31 or provincial.” Small towns couldn’t even modify their walls or parks without the consulting architect’s approval.32 And, by law, the consulting architect was “charged with the interpretation of the Burnham Plan.”

  Not only did Burnham get an architectural dictator to execute his plan, he got to choose his man. On his recommendation, the government appointed William E. Parsons,33 an architect trained at Yale and the École des Beaux-Arts, who served from 1905 to 1914. Parsons saw the job as an “architect’s dream.”34 He had sole control over all public building in the colony. He also operated, with Forbes’s encouragement, a private firm, so he could erect commercial buildings to match the public ones.

  Parsons went on a spree, building many of the landmarks of Manila: the Army-Navy Club (whites only), the Elks Club (ditto), the Manila Hotel (de facto whites only), the YMCA (separate entrance for whites), the Central School on Taft Avenue, the University Hall of the University of the Philippines, the railway station, and the Philippine General Hospital. He also issued his own
city plans, for Cebu and Zamboanga, along Burnham-style lines.

  It didn’t take long before Parsons began worrying about the “large and rapidly increasing number of buildings” under his supervision.35 One solution would have been to delegate. Instead, he standardized. Schoolhouses,36 markets, hospitals, and even provincial capitols could simply be duplicated. His office circulated blank forms to collect basic information about building sites and then returned the appropriate blueprints.

  It made a certain sense. After all, did a market in Davao really need to be different from one in Balanga? Yet when an efficiency-minded Congress proposed standardizing architecture on the mainland, howls of protest were heard.37 Each place was unique, critics argued—you couldn’t just put the same building everywhere.

  Maybe not on the mainland. But in the Philippines, Parsons could do what he liked. It was a fact his mainland colleagues noted with interest and more than a little envy. “I doubt if this method would bear fruit in our own city improvement plans,38 in which everything depends on slow-moving legislative bodies,” observed a correspondent for the Architectural Record. “The iron hand of power, when wielded for the public good, is a mighty weapon.”

  *

  Cameron Forbes kept Daniel Burnham apprised of the progress on Manila, reassuring him that “the Burnham plan is sacred and is being strictly adhered to.”39 Burnham was no doubt pleased to hear it. But Manila was not his chief concern. He was, he declared upon arriving in the Philippines, “more deeply interested in the summer capital project,”40 the city he planned at Baguio. Manila offered him a relatively free hand, but Baguio was to be built, like the White City, entirely from scratch. Burnham saw it as his chance “to formulate my plans untrammeled by any but natural conditions.”

  The idea of a summer capital was not new. European colonizers had built a series of hill stations, most famously Shimla in India, where Rudyard Kipling summered and from which the British ruled during the hot months. U.S. officials, fearing the effect of the Philippine climate on their constitutions, sought a hill station of their own. They chose Baguio, 150 miles north of Manila and five thousand feet above sea level. In 1903 the government declared Baguio the summer capital of the Philippines, and in 1904 Forbes charged Burnham with planning the still-unbuilt town.

  Before construction could start, though, there had to be a road. Baguio was accessible only via a long trail zigzagging up a crumbling canyon wall. Getting there was a feat. When the portly William Howard Taft made the trek, he reported proudly to Washington, “Stood trip well.41 Rode horseback twenty-five miles to five-thousand-foot altitude. Hope amoebic dysentery cured. Great province this.”

  “How is the horse?” was the secretary of war’s cruel reply.

  Building a road to Baguio became an obsession of the colonial state. The steep slopes and regular landslides turned it into an all-consuming, Werner Herzog–style man vs. nature affair. At peak, construction employed some four thousand men from dozens of nations.42 “The Filipinos so far are the worst,”43 complained Forbes. “They are afraid of heights and rolling rocks.”

  They had good reason to be. Workers fell off cliffs; died from dysentery, malaria, and cholera; and were crushed by bridges that came skidding down the slopes. One part of the trail earned the name the Devil’s Slide for the many men it had killed.44 “Few days pass without casualty,”45 Forbes noted in his diary.

  Still, for Forbes, the prize was worth it. Baguio was paradise: perpetual springtime, a cool mist, rolling hills, pine trees galore. It “gives the red corpuscles,”46 he wrote.

  Burnham, for his part, could barely contain himself. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build a city—a real city, not a plaster one—from the ground up. The land wasn’t empty, as much of it lay in the hands of Igorots, Philippine uplanders. But the mainlander-dominated Philippine Supreme Court held that Igorots, being savages, could not own land.47 At any rate, the government claimed fourteen thousand acres of it—more than twenty times the area that Burnham had for his White City. If built properly, he salivated, it “could be made equal to anything that has ever been.”48

  Burnham pulled out all the stops: large governmental buildings, commanding views, a grand axis cutting through the Baguio meadow. He placed the most important structures on the slopes that ringed the meadow. Doing so was costly, Burnham acknowledged, but to build them in the valley would ruin what he called the “unusual monumental possibilities” of the area.49 As Burnham saw it, the governmental buildings should be placed so as to “frankly dominate everything in sight.”50

  Forbes, getting into the spirit, selected a property for himself: a twelve-acre uphill plot overlooking all of Baguio. He made plans to open the Baguio Country Club, featuring an eighteen-hole golf course “equal to the finest in Scotland,51 where, owing to the clear briskness of the air, no drives will be foozled or balls get dormy.”

  Upland empire: The governmental center of Baguio, overlooking the valley in accordance with Burnham’s plan to erect “monumental buildings where they command a view”52

  The architecture of power, plus golf: that summed it up well. Though technically Baguio was a command center—the part-time capital of the United States’ great Asian colony—it was also a retreat. Forbes saw it as “a blessed relief from Manila,”53 where “the swarm of people who rush in is fearful. Here, people only come if sent for, or if their business is urgent enough to bring them up to the hills.”

  It doesn’t appear that much business made that uphill trek. The Philippine Commission, the colony’s appointed body of lawmakers, convened only “every three days,”54 Forbes recorded in his diary, “and we crash through our business in about an hour or less.” The real center of life was the Baguio Country Club, where frank conversations could be had over rounds of golf. But of the 161 original members of the club, only 6 were Filipino.55

  Free from the heat, free from business, and largely free from Filipinos, Governor-General Forbes found time for other pursuits. “I get up leisurely when I feel like it,56 write in my journal sparingly so as not to run into the error of being too voluminous, and play a few hands of cards to iron the crinkles out of my mind.” In the afternoons, Forbes would spend “an hour or so” reading newspaper clippings, but he would stop at four to “take a ride, or play polo, according to the day.”

  “I have let the great world sweep by,”57 he purred.

  *

  None of this was cheap. The road alone cost $2 million by the time it opened in 1905—a tenth of what the United States had paid Spain to buy the Philippines. And that didn’t count the expensive repairs required every time a monsoon washed parts of the road away, or the many lives lost building it. Then there was the city itself, constructed to Burnham’s plan under Parsons’s guidance. It was a triumph of modern engineering straight out of Bellamy, boasting wide streets,58 an excellent sewer system, an ice plant, and, by 1921, hydroelectric power. Added to this municipal investment, which far outstripped investments made in any lowland Philippine city, was the cost of hauling the entire top layer of the government up to the mountains for four months a year.

  Even a British reporter, presumably accustomed to this sort of thing, couldn’t help but “admire the audacity” of the men who,59 with disease rampant and a war still raging in the south, had built Shangri-La.

  Filipinos were less admiring as they watched money that had been ear-marked for postwar reconstruction flow uphill, funding a months-long spa for an unelected government. “Stingy towards the people and lavish toward itself,60 it has no scruples nor remorse about wasting money which is not its own,” one paper complained. In 1913, the year Forbes left, the Philippine Commission finally relented and agreed to conduct its summer business in Manila, though Baguio continued to serve as the government’s unofficial nerve center.

  The restoration of Manila as the all-seasons capital marked a turning point in colonial politics. It corresponded with Woodrow Wilson’s election and his policy of handing over local power to Filipinos.
In 1914 more than one in four governmental positions were held by mainlanders.61 By 1921, it was fewer than one in twenty.

  William E. Parsons, Burnham’s protégé, found Wilson’s Filipinization campaign intolerable. The top men on his staff were mainlanders,62 and he was unwilling to see that change. “It is impossible to understand how any man, having at heart the welfare of the Filipino people, can conform to the present policy,” he wrote in his letter of resignation.

  But Parsons left feeling that his work was done. He reported with pride that the main contours of Burnham’s Manila were “nailed down,63 as it were, with permanent public and semi-public buildings.” The foundation had been laid. It just remained for his successors to build atop it.

  As it happened, Parsons’s greatest successor arrived the very year Parsons left. But he wasn’t visiting the city for the first time. Juan Arellano had been born there.64

  *

  Juan Arellano was from one of the most extraordinary families in the Philippines. One brother, Arcadio, was the first Filipino architectural adviser hired by the United States. Another, Manuel, would become one of the colony’s most noted photographers. Juan’s cousin Jose Palma wrote the national anthem used by Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic (which is also the anthem today). His cousin Rafael Palma was one of the six original Filipino members of the Baguio Country Club and the future president of the University of the Philippines.

  Juan’s métier was painting, and he was among the first Filipino impressionists. He submitted an early work, Woman Descending Stairway, to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, one of the many mainland fairs that show-cased the empire. To his disappointment, it didn’t win a prize.65