Karnow's In Our Image: U.S. Empire in the Philippines

Overview of Karnow's Central Argument

Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines chronicles the history of the United States and the Philippines across several hundred years of modern history. Karnow's main argument about the relationship between the two nations is that the United States held an empire over this far-off but ostensibly independent country — an empire that "dare not speak its name." Over the course of the book, Karnow paints a convincing portrait of a colonized nation.

Karnow suggests that what was particularly damaging about the de facto, if not de jure, American empire in the Philippines was the contradiction it created with America's self-image as a democratic, non-imperial country. By engaging in the kind of relationship America had with the Philippines, the United States betrayed its most fundamental principles while simultaneously engaging in exploitation. Because America did not perceive itself as a nation capable of exploiting others — as its parent country England had done — it could not even acknowledge, after the fact, the abuses it perpetuated in the Philippines.

Karnow is explicit about the vehemence of his thesis from the outset. Even the subtitle, America's Empire in the Philippines, reinforces the idea that America attempted to remake the Philippines in its own image — politically, economically, and religiously. America used the Philippines as a colonial bastion against political ideologies it disliked, particularly communism. Furthermore, because this remaking was carried out on an unequal basis — with the Philippines assumed to be an inferior child to the parental and patriarchal United States — the relationship between the two nations was, in Karnow's view, almost structurally doomed to be exploitative.

Historical Scope and Narrative Structure

Karnow quotes a Filipino saying that captures this layered subjugation: "Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.... Few countries have been more heavily shackled by the past than the Philippines." In other words, the Philippines existed first in the European imagination as a place to carry the "white man's burden" of exporting Christianity, and then in the American imagination as a beautiful and exotic island paradise.

Karnow is not Filipino himself — he is an American foreign correspondent — but he unambiguously takes the Philippine nation's side in this book, or at least that of the Aquinos. Rather than beginning chronologically with the origins of U.S. engagement in the Philippines, Karnow opens with the image of Corazon Aquino speaking before a joint session of Congress, asking for aid and greater foreign investment in the Philippines. He uses this scene as a touchstone to explore the reasons behind Aquino's need to appeal for assistance and the shadowy circumstances surrounding the assassination of her husband, Benigno Aquino.

From that starting point, Karnow reaches back to Ferdinand Magellan's accidental arrival in the Philippines in 1521, tracing a history that stretches nearly as far back as the European discovery of the Americas. Magellan's installation of Spanish rule — and the corruption that came with it — created a tradition of political patronage and glad-handing that, Karnow argues, formed the very foundation of the Marcos regime centuries later. Karnow then moves rapidly through American history: the Manifest Destiny ideology of the nineteenth century and its application to the Philippines, and the successive presidencies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft, each of whom shaped U.S. policy toward the island nation in significant ways.