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| Photo from Wikipilipinas |
By Chester B
Cabalza
Dean C Worcester
was an accidental anthropologist, a practicing zoologist, one of the pioneers
of Philippine studies, and the first Secretary of the Interior for the Philippine
Insular Government during the American period. He was born on October 1, 1866
in Thetford, Vermont, United States and got married to Marrion Fay on April 21,
1893
It was Professor
Joseph Beal Steere, an American ornithologist and lawyer, who first brought
Dean Worcester together with several zoology undergraduate students to the
Philippines through the 1887-88 exploration sponsored by the University of
Michigan. Thereafter, upon graduation from college in 1989, the following year
Worcester headed the Menage Scientific Expedition (1890-93), aimed at
collecting and documenting mammals in the Philippines and Borneo. The
three-year expedition was funded by the Minnesota Academy of Natural Science.
With a teaching
profession as a lecturer at hand in his alma mater in Michigan University, he
also became the curator of the University Museum in 1895.
Three years
later, Worcester’s life path began to change when he wrote a popular book on
the Philippines. His published and influential ethnographic and photographic
account of The Philippine Islands and their
People in 1898 was based on the letters he had written during his early voyages
to the Southeast Asian country.
It appeared in
September 1898, Manila had been occupied less than a month after the U.S Navy
under Admiral George Dewey arrived in the Philippines. In 1899-1902, the
Philippine-American War broke out which took more lives of American soldiers
than during the American-Spanish War in early 1898. On January 20, 1899,
William McKinley, the last US President to have served the American Civil War,
appointed the First Philippine Commission or the Schurman Commission with a
five-person group led by Dr Jacob Schurman, President of Cornell University.
Dean Worcester’s
maiden book about the Philippines became a best-seller, given the intense
interest of the American public in their new colony. Because the book received
a resounding success, it even reached the attention of then US President
McKinley. The budding zoologist and accidental anthropologist, who was planning
to enroll in a graduate course in Germany, was called to meet with the
president, and later appointed him as a Commissioner to the first Philippine
Commission.
With the new
mission at hand, Dean Worcester returned to the Philippines, became a public
official to the First Philippine Commission, and supervised compilation of the commission’s
final report since 1899, mainly because of his vast knowledge printed in his
significant book about the Philippines.
While working as
a Commissioner for the Philippine Insular Government, he also published another
groundbreaking book which described comparative view of tribes and cultures of
the Negritos and the Malays that were supported again by texts and photographs.
However, his book on The Philippine
Islands and their People continuously garnered widespread critical acclaim
which boosted the author’s career of fame, power, and fortune. The book was
predicted to become the standard work on the Philippines, at that time.
It was also
deemed that Worcester shaped and influenced much of the way that Americans
imagined their first colony in Asia. Using photography, he published his
classic photographs in his books and was used to illustrate census of the
Philippines. On the other hand, his medium of taking photos of places and
activities of Filipinos, particularly naked indigenous peoples of the
Philippines, has been adamantly questioned today by some scholars and intellectuals.
His photographic
collections truly were contentious and troubling. He used many of his black and
white photographs in public lectures and popular articles to support America’s
colonialism in the Philippines and perpetuate the white man’s responsibilities
to civilize the tribal peoples of the Philippines. It was also used for
scientific records framed through controversial 19th century racial
classification and evolutionary paradigms. Nevertheless, his photographs
provided an invaluable archive of the history of American colonialism, the
colonial history of early anthropology, and of the late 19th and
early 20th century Philippines.
Subsequently by March
16, 1900, the Second Philippine Commission or the Taft Commission was formed,
headed by Judge William Howard Taft who would later become the Secretary of
War. The said commission was granted legislative and limited executive power to
craft laws and overhaul the political system in the country. That same year, Commissioner
Worcester was re-appointed to the Taft Commission.
It was in 1901
that his colorful political career as a public administrator flourished when he
was appointed as Secretary of the Interior. Undoubtedly, Secretary Worcester
shaped much the regime’s internal administration. His extraordinary
relationship with the Philippines started since his early scientific voyages in
the archipelago with his writings on the Philippines and its people. As part of
his job, he had traveled extensively across islands of the archipelago
particularly Mindoro and Palawan in 1910.
Dean Worcester
remained a controversial American administrator during his tenure. His strong stances
on “No to Philippine Independence” angered many Filipino patriots and anti-imperialists
during his time for his ferocious paternalistic pledge to civilize the America’s
brown colonial subjects.
In 1913, he
resigned from the Philippine Insular Government as Secretary of Interior,
making him the longest serving administrator in the American colonial
government. His powerful position formerly oversaw a number of government
bureaus on agriculture, forestry, government laboratories, health, mining,
weather, and the non-Christian tribes. More so, his fondness and interest to
the latter bureau proved his advocacy to permeate American imperialism in the
Philippines.
However, he
opted to become the Vice President of the Philippine American Company, a New
York-based corporation that invested on plantations, mines, and other ventures.
That same year, he also directed and produced a film entitled, Native Life in the Philippines, in
collaboration with long-time staff camera operator and government photographer
Charles Martin. It was believed that this film could have supported Worcester’s
continuous and adamant political aims of ensuring that the Philippines should
not be granted independence.
Hence, after
leaving the American government service, however, he remained and retired in
the Philippines until his death in 1924.
Other notable
books authored by Worcester include the following: The Non-Christian Tribes of Northern Luzon (1906) A History of Asiatic Cholera in the
Philippine Islands (1908), Sports
Among the Wild Men of Northern Luzon (1911); Slavery and Peonage in the Philippine Islands (1913); One Year of the New Era (1914); and the two-volume book of The Philippines Past and Present, first
printed in 1913 and reprinted in 1914.
Online
sources:
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