Colonial Crossings

Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War

PAUL A. KRAMER

Major Owen Sweet was in trouble. The prostitutes from Japan had been both a necessary evil and a pragmatic good, he explained to his superiors; in any case, they had been dictated by unfortunate circumstance. Four months into the United States' war against the Philippine Republic, the 23rd Infantry had taken control of Jolo, in the southern islands, from Spanish forces, and his troops had quickly succumbed to what he called "the lax moral conditions incident to the Philippines and Oriental countries generally." A "personal" investigation had exposed a veritable festival of vice: gambling houses, grog shops, saloons, and "several resorts of prostitution" inhabited by Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino "immoral women." Sweet feared that a spark might fly out of this chaotic mix that could touch off a second, Muslim-American conflict that the U.S. military could not afford. By his own account, he had sought to impose order on this moral unruliness, a "system of attrition" consisting of raids and closures and the expulsion of nearly all local sex workers. But Sweet had been called to task for not going far enough. He had allowed about thirty Japanese prostitutes to remain in Jolo, where he mandated their regular, compulsory venereal inspection to protect American soldiers from disease; in the process he had given explicit government sanction to the "social evil." In Jolo, as elsewhere, it turned out that moral empire and military-hygienic empire could not easily be squared, and Sweet had chosen.

His choice had been controversial, and that controversy can illuminate both its particular moment and the cultural history of U.S. global power more broadly. At base it was about bodies: the bodies of Asian women and U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, on the one hand, and the "body" of U.S. empire, on the other. This second kind of body was strictly metaphorical. Or was it? As Americans in the metropole learned that U.S. military authorities like Sweet had been regulating commercial sex in the interest of venereal control—a policy successfully barred from the United States by "social purity" reformers to that point almost without exception—many made sense of this disclosure by linking together the two types of bodies: the meanings of colonialism for the American "body politic" could be read from the fortunes of U.S. soldiers' bodies in the Philippines. Particularly in the hands of colonialism's skeptics and critics, regulated prostitution in the Philippines came to symbolize colonialism's nefarious impact on the metropole: a medical technique aimed at preventing contagion, it would promote other, and perhaps more sinister, "contaminations."

While reformers agreed that something stank at the intersection of military occupation, commercialized sex, and its medical regulation, they tracked the smell to diverging roots. Was the problem that the U.S. military in the Philippines was sanctioning prostitution (as social purity campaigners maintained), or that its efforts were attached to and symbolic of an illegitimate invasion (as anticolonialists argued)? Was the problem racial in that it conceded to and sanitized colonial "miscegenation," or that it undermined national exceptionalist pretensions by rendering the United States more "European"? Or was the problem merely that regulated prostitution in the Philippines was visible, raising questions about America's moral image in the world?

The U.S. military-colonial regulation of prostitution threatened to sunder two related sets of imagined barriers. The first insulated the United States from Europe; for American social purity reformers, the regulation of prostitution was—along with imperialism, statism, and sexual license—closely associated with European societies. Not for nothing was it known as the "continental system." The sudden revelation that U.S. military authorities in the Philippines were, for the first time, also practicing regulation on a large scale prompted fears about the weakening of American moral exceptionalism. The second barrier shielded metropole from colony; coupled to American hopes for the stabilizing export of U.S. institutions to the new colonies were anxieties about the unanticipated and unwelcome "reflex actions" that might flow the other way, blowbacks that could include corrupting venereal disease, immoral methods for controlling it, and race-mixing. Along both axes, regulated prostitution represented a dangerous colonial crossing that broke through the protective enclosures that Americans had hoped to raise around themselves, even as they ventured out into "the world."

Approached in this way, the history of U.S. military invasion, prostitution, and venereal disease control during the Philippine-American War provides one window onto the cultural history of U.S. imperial boundaries: of how Americans marked the place where the United States ended and the rest of the world began and how they made sense of their inability to completely control the processes that flowed across that elusive line. To talk about the bodies of U.S. soldiers and the hazards that sapped their force and purity was also to talk about the "body" of U.S. empire at a moment when that body's limits, constitution, and vulnerabilities were being hotly disputed. The rhetorical presence of Filipinos' bodies as sources of threat—and absence when it came to questions of sexual violence and vulnerability to disease—also said much about that imperial body's contours and occlusions. This examination of the body politics of empire, then, illuminates a history both of U.S. military-imperial disease control in a colonial setting and of the way that gendered and racialized fears of sexual contagion expressed and gave...