The wording of the plaque

THE PROPOSAL to install a corrective plaque by the Dewey Monument in Union Square that would serve the same educational purpose as the plaque by the Pioneers Monument in the San Francisco Civic Center has drawn the support of Debra Lehane, the city arts official who worked on the wording of the Pioneers Monument plaque

Instead of celebrating the U.S. Navy's destruction of a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May Day, 1898, the trident-waving bronze figure of Victory atop the 97-foot cenotaph will finally serve to draw attention to a shameful secret of US history -- how the United States broke its promise 106 years ago and brutally suppressed a Filipino independence movement.

The plaque will seek to acknowledge a lengthy, bloody war of colonization that has been ignored or described in U.S. history textbooks as "The Philippine Insurrection." The US Library of Congress has since changed the description of the conflict to "The Philippine American War."

Ms. Lehane prepared a draft of the wording of the plaque for review after personally researching the period. The community is invited to participate in critiquing her draft which is as follows:

"Citizens of San Francisco erected the Dewey monument in 1901 as a response to national and local patriotism. The United States had defeated Spain in the Spanish American War. Although that war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898, within months a new conflict began -- the Philippine-American War. This war lasted about three and one half years while the overall conflict lasted approximately ten years. As many as 400,000-600,000 Filipino civilians lost their lives compared to 10,000 US soldiers. The Philippines became a direct colony of the United States from 1899 to 1935. Political independence was returned to the Philippines by the United States in 1946."

The change from "Philippine Insurrection" to "Philippine American War" was welcomed by John Silva, a former UC Berkeley professor now based in Manila, who noted in his email that respected historians and authors like Hampton Sides have come to reject the "Insurrection" label.

As an example, John cited Sides' book, Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II''s Most Dramatic
Mission, where the author introduces the Philippines as the colony won after "a vicious campaign against the Philippine people which came to be known, inappropriately, as the Philippine Insurrection, as though the local citizenry were displaying an outrageous insubordination for seeking a voice in the future of their own archipelago."

On the wording of the plaque, a spirited email discussion has ensued with Oscar Peñaranda, a teacher from Union City, launching the first salvo with his point that the conflict should be properly called the "US-Philippine War," not the "Philippine American War."

"It is not accurate to equate the United States with the word America," Oscar wrote. "Therefore, it is not accurate to call the citizens or any adjective ascribed to the United States "American." America is not a country. It is a hemisphere. Half the world is America. To use it, like the majority of people, as a word appropriated only to apply to the United States, is inaccurate and acquiescent to an inaccuracy perpetrated by the biased power structure of the Unites States."
I expressed my view that it was already a giant leap to go from the "Philippine Insurrection" to the "Philippine American War" and that his proposal would unnecessarily detract from this new focus.

MC Canlas chimed in that he would support such a change only "if there is a strong movement to change Spanish-American War, Mexican-American War, American Civil War, American Revolution……"

On the other hand, author Jorge Emmanuel ("The Forbidden Book" together with Helen Toribio, Abe Ignacio and Enrique de la Cruz) expressed his agreement with Oscar that America is not a country.

"I remember years ago," Jorge wrote, "a friend from Bolivia said he was American but people from the US have arrogated that name to refer to people in the US only. In the future, Mexicans, Canadians, people in Central and South America may wish to take back "America" to be more inclusive and we should not stand in the way."

Jorge added a few other suggestions on changes to the period of the armed conflict, the number of its fatalities and the length of the colonial status of the Philippines. Below is Jorge's suggestion for the plaque:

"Citizens of San Francisco erected the Dewey monument in 1901 as a response to national and local patriotism. The United States had defeated Spain in the US-Spanish War. Although that war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898, within months a new conflict began -- the US-Philippine War. The war in the Philippines was declared over in 1902 even though armed conflict actually lasted about fifteen years. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians and 4,200 US soldiers lost their lives in that conflict. The Philippines became a colony of the United States in 1899 and was granted formal independence in 1946."

Please join the discussion and send in your own proposed wording. We hope to install the bronze plaque by the Dewey Monument in Union Square on May 1, 2006.

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ERRATUM. In my "Boondocks and Jazz" column of two weeks ago, I wrote that the San Francisco Examiner op-ed editor who called my attention to the Buffalo Soldiers and Jazz was James Finefrock. As I now recall, it wasn''t Jim who called me although Jim was kind enough to email my article to the one who did, his friend, now retired, who was also an op-ed editor five years ago. The source of my information was Lynn Ludlow.

After receiving Jim's email, Lynn contacted me to remind me of our phone conversation. He wrote that he shared the information with me to stress "the contribution to jazz in San Francisco by musicians who had served with the black Army units in the Philippines and Hawaii. As they were mustered out at the Presidio between 1903 and 1916, many settled in Oakland and found work in the black nightclubs of the Barbary Coast -- Sam King's and Lew Purcell's So Different. The details are reported in "Jazz on the Barbary Coast" by Tom Stoddard, a compilation of oral histories by Sid LeProtti, Reb Spikes and other musicians of the time."

Thank you for the information, Lynn, and my apologies for the mix-up.

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