Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Through a case study of the life of Mrs. Cora Allen, this paper explores the convergences between the Club Women’s Movement and early black fraternal organizations. Born in 1875, Mrs. Allen was an active member of the Supreme Lodge Knights of Pythias, the African American branch of the Pythian fraternal order throughout the late 1890s until her death in 1935. She was instrumental in the founding of the Pythian sister order, the Grand Court Order of Calanthe. Eventually, she served as the highest leader, Supreme Worthy Inspectrix. Most significantly, in 1923 and 1924, Mrs. Allen and nine other black women from Shreveport, Louisiana, headed the construction of the first Calanthean Temple, the first temple built for a female fraternal order. Mrs. Allen was also an active clubwoman responsible for founding the Mary Church Terrell Club in Shreveport in 1918. In 1927, Mrs. Allen became the President of the Louisiana Federation of Women’s Clubs, after having been recognized at the 1926 NACW conference by President Mary McCleod Bethune for having built the Calanthean Temple, which was estimated to be worth between 150,000-200,000 dollars. For several years during the 1920s, Mrs. Allen headed the Department of Fraternal Relations in the NACW. Recounting the convergences between her work with the Order of Calanthe and with the Club Women’s movement, this paper posits Cora Allen as an early black feminist leader and a cultural architect, interested in a practical convergence of community, religious and social values that might aid the work of racial uplift.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: “America Allá”: Educating the Colonial Subject in the Philippines, 1899-1900

This paper operates on intersections of imperialism, national identity, and pedagogy as it explores the U.S. attempt to transform Filipino schoolchildren from Spanish to U.S. colonial subjects the first decade of the 20th century.

Part One prepares for Part Two by surveying U.S. schoolbooks that, over the course of the 19th century, constructed a master U.S. identity narrative that fused Protestant history with Enlightenment political values. For example Emma Willard’s 1829 History of the United States called on the Pilgrims’ inherent political values to prove that they

"possessed a much higher cast of moral elevation, than any who had before sought the new world . . . . The hope of gain was the motive of former settlers—the love of God, was theirs. In their character, and in their institutions, we behold the germ of the love of liberty, and those correct views of the natural equality of man, which are now fully developed in the American constitution. "

Although overt references to religion faded over the century, nevertheless they were replaced by code words emphasizing (Protestant) religious values. In fact by the 1890s words such as “freedom,” “order,” and “honesty” signaled, to U.S. citizens interpellated by those textbooks, uniquely U.S. values that were, paradoxically, prerequisites for democracy across the globe.

Part Two will look at schoolbooks created for the Philippines shortly after annexation in 1899. The U.S. mandated universal education, in English, because “in teaching a people democracy it was wise to use the language to which most great democratic principles were native” (Frederick S. Marquardt, “Life with the Early Am. Teachers,” 23-27). Textbooks promulgated U.S. social/cultural values coded as “character” training and civics. As one teaching manual formulated the process,

"[U.S.] history and biography . . . provide[s]. . . material [for] teaching . . . morals. . . . The question may be asked, ‘Are we hard workers and honest like Lincoln?’ Or, ‘Can we not be as truthful as Washington was?’ Such lessons as ‘How Benjamin Franklin became Famous’ will contain many truths for every boy and girl to think about and act upon” (Harry Theobold, The Filipino Teacher’s Manual, 1907, 106-07).

Linking core values such as honesty, industry, and ambition to iconic U.S. figures served two contradictory functions: on the one hand it suggested that the locus of these values remained in the U.S. mainland, the property of Anglo-Saxons who, the narrative insists, invented them. On the other hand, teaching Filipino schoolchildren republican values through these examples created an internally colonized subjectivity that measured capacity for citizenship and self-governance by the subject’s ability to demonstrate those values. Most commentators agree that the U.S. attempt to educate the Philippines in its own image failed. In attempting to establish “America” “allá”—over there—U.S. educators exposed the inherent contradictions in a national ideology that first, fused religious values with political values; second, argued that the composite was secular rather than religiously based, and third, assumed that the national identity encouraged by the fusion could be transferred.


Keywords: U.S. schoolbooks; U.S. history; pedagogy; imperialism; Philippines; national identity; religion; citizenship; subjectivity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Compared to their counterparts today, Senate party
leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not policy
leaders. In the 1890s and 1900s, elected party leaders still did not
exist; policymaking was concentrated in the membership of the
Republican and Democratic caucuses and steering committees. In contrast
to their counterparts from that older era, recent leaders--Robert Dole
(R, Kans.), Trent Lott (R, Miss.), and Bill Frist (R, Tenn.) on the
Republican side, George Mitchell (D, Maine) and Tom Daschle (D, S.D.)
on the Democratic side--have been proactive in setting agendas,
crafting legislation, and speaking for their parties. Now, in the 21st
century, senators regularly look to floor leaders for substantive
policy agendas, for leadership in the negotiation of budget bills and
other major legislation, and for the design and implementation of media
strategies.
But these recent changes pale next to the development of floor
leadership in the early 20th century. Between 1789, when the first
Senate met, and the late 1890s, neither Senate party elected any
senator as its leader. No one is THE Senator, Woodrow Wilson wrote in
1885 (213). No one may speak for his party as well as for himself; no
one exercises the special trust of acknowledged leadership. Although
senators constructed institutions to coordinate policy and scheduling
in the 19th century--above all, the caucuses and the party steering
committees--these were institutions of collective leadership. The
emergence of party leaders is a late development, which began in the
minority (Democratic) party in the late 1890s, assumed formal status in
1913 with the election of John Kern (D, Ind.) as the Senate's first
majority leader and John Gallinger (R, N.H.) as the first Republican
floor leader, and assumed modern form in the 1920s and 1930s, as Joseph
Robinson (D, Ark.), Charles Curtis (R, Kans.), and Charles McNary (R,
Ore.) exercised the broad range of leadership responsibilities that
define the position to the current day.
In this paper, we examine the growth of floor leadership in the Senate,
a subject that has received only scattered attention from previous
scholars. This paper is part of a larger project on the development of
Senate leadership and party organization from 1789 to 2003. In this
paper as well as in the larger project, we are testing the theory that
institutional innovations reflected the need of closely balanced
parties to address both electoral and legislative concerns. In earlier
articles and in a developing book manuscript, we have explored this
theory to explain the
long-term development of Senate leadership. By exploring the birth of
modern floor leadership, this paper fills the last major gap in our
understanding of this development. For data, we are continuing to
exploit a rich body of archival, newspaper, and congressional records,
as well as an array of quantitative measures of party competition and
institutional innovations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although much has been written recently about the ideologies of race (viz., Eric T. Love) and gender (viz., Amy Kaplan) in Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, little, beyond Thomas Schoonover’s Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization, has noted the major role played by religious ideology. Yet arguments for and against America’s Christian mission abroad constituted one of the major discourses concerning the U.S. first foray into imperialism, the annexation of the Philippines in 1899.

This presentation will begin to fill that gap by examining the fusion of Christian and American identities at the turn into the 20th century—the moment when the U.S. launched itself as a world power. The paper will first, and briefly, gloss the figure of the National Christian—a figure that evolved through 19th-century sermons, schoolbooks, speeches, and popular histories-- in order to establish definitions, then examine how the figure was used by three late 19th-century groups: U.S. expansionists (such as William McKinley), U.S. anti-expansionists (such as Mark Twain), and Latin American observers such as Jose Martí, Ruben Darío, and Jose Enrique Rodó. Emilio Aguinaldo’s True Version of the Philippine Revolution will also play a part. The importance of these Latin American and Philippine intellectuals lies in the “outside” perspective that they provide, especially those who, like Martí and Darío, had spent time in the U.S. and expressed their own conflicts about American culture. In viewing the National Christian through their eyes, we are forced to rethink national imaging, here, specifically, the reigning figure of the white Protestant American--in terms of its impact abroad rather than in terms of our own internal dissensions. Hence the significance of “Figuring the National Christian” lies in its illustration of the long-standing existence of the fused Christian and National identities and in the ways that figuration underlay discourses of imperialism both at home and abroad, especially the image of the U.S. circulating in former Spanish colonies most directly impacted by American imperialism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript