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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Major Owen Sweet's campaign against prostitutes began shortly after his arrival in Jolo, in the southern Philippines, in May 1899. The situation was urgent. Four months into a war against the Philippine Republic, the 23rd Infantry had taken control of the area from Spanish forces, but, as Sweet lamented, his troops had fallen “heir to the lax moral conditions incident to the Philippines and Oriental countries generally.” Lacking barracks space, his soldiers had been forced to live “in close contact” with “mixed races,” and Sweet had been “confronted with the same status of immoralities and the lawless community” as commanders had in Manila, Iloilo, Cebu and elsewhere. A “personal” investigation in November involving a “house to house examination and inspection” had revealed gambling houses, grog-shops, saloons, “joints where the vilest drugs were dispensed,” and “several resorts of prostitution” inhabited primarily by Chinese and Japanese, but also Filipinos, Moros, and “other immoral women scattered throughout the villages.” Sweet feared that these conditions might spark local tensions, opening a second, Muslim-American front that the Americans could not afford.
My thanks to Judith Walkowitz, Richard Meixsel, Martha Hodes, Dirk Bönker, Gabrielle Spiegel, Ann Stoler, Nancy Cott, Daniel Rodgers, Toby Ditz, Philippa Levine, Caleb McDaniel, Katherine Hijar, Mark Selden and Katherine Fusco for their comments and criticism. Any errors are my own. An earlier version of this essay was published in Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
1 The Southern Philippines, never fully conquered by the Spanish, remained under the control of powerful Muslim datus; U.S. military strategy against the Philippine Republic depended in part on the prevention of war between U.S. and Muslim forces until after the Republic had been defeated.
2 On March 5, 1902, the Adjutant of the 23rd infantry sent excerpts from reports by Rev. C. Guy Robbins, Private Adrian B. Trench, William B. Johnson and Rev. A. B. Leonard with regard to regulation in Jolo, with requests for a response; approximately 30 officers responded, including Sweet. The facts surrounding Sweet's removal remain unclear. Sweet's self-defense was accompanied by the claim this “most annoying and aggravating trial” had led to “mental, physical nervous strain and overwork,” health breakdown and a return to the United States “to save my life.” Letter from Owen J. Sweet to Commanding Officer (23rd Infantry), March 12, 1902, RG94/417937/B, NARA DC.
3 Owen Sweet to Adjutant General, February 6, 1902, in RG94/417937/B, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (NARA DC).
4 The existing literature on the Philippine-American War, while it details both combat history and the politics of the war, contains little or nothing regarding on-the-ground questions of gender, sex and prostitution. See Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Brian M. Linn, The United States Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). For an account of venereal disease among U.S. troops at Camp Stotsenburg in the early 20th century, see Richard B. Meixsel, Clark Field and the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Philippines, 1919-1942 (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 2001), 78-85.
5 According to one account, regulations mandating the venereal inspection of prostitutes had been imposed during the Civil War among Union army troops stationed in Memphis and Nashville. See Col. Joseph F. Siler, The Prevention and Control of Venereal Diseases in the Army of the United States of America (Army Medical Bulletin No. 67) (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Medical Field Service School, May 1943), 72. My thanks to Richard Meixsel for identifying this source.
6 See, especially, Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Maria Höhn, GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, c1992); Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press, 1993); Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California, 1989). For an excellent recent edited collection featuring research on the politics of gender, race, sex and U.S. military basing, see Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds. Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
7 On the “imperialism” debate, see Richard E. Welch Jr., Response to Imperialism. The United States and the Philippine -American War, 1899—1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Daniel Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Pub. Co. 1972); Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898—1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill 1968); E. Berkeley Thompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890—1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1970).
8 For a fuller exploration of “reflex actions” discourse in the early 20th century debate over U.S. colonialism, see Paul A. Kramer, “Reflex Actions: Colonialism, Corruption and the Politics of Technocracy in the Early 20th Century United States,” in Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas, eds., Projecting American Foreign Policy: Power and Intervention (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
9 For an example of work that systematically mistakes similarity for connection, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History, Vol. 88 (Dec. 2001), 829—65.
10 Alfred McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
11 On the cultural politics of U.S. imperial boundary-making between the United States and the Philippines and its intersections with the politics of race, see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
12 For a useful survey of the historiography of prostitution, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity,” American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 1 (1999), 117-141.
13 For the definitive work on the politics of prostitution and regulation in the British Empire, see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003). See also Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793-1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980).
14 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in 19th Century Medical Discourse (Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1997). On the treatment of venereal disease, see Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
15 For prostitution policy in Puerto Rico during this period, for example, see Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), ch. 3.
16 For the best accounts of venereal disease and prostitution in the Philippines, see Ken De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 69-93; Ken De Bevoise, “A History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in the Philippines,” in Milton Lewis, et. al., eds., Sex, Disease and Society: A Comparative History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 113-38.
17 Ian R. Tyrrell, Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), esp. ch. 9.
18 Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell, The Queen's Daughters in India (London: Morgan and Scott, 1899). On the investigation and its impact, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, c1994), 157-64.
19 On attempts at municipal regulation in the 19th century United States, see John C. Burnham, “Medical Inspection of Prostitutes in America in the 19th Century: The St. Louis Experiment and Its Sequel,” in Burnham, Paths into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine, and Morals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 138-149.
20 Frederic H. Sawyer, The Inhabitants of the Philippines (New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1900), 114.
21 H. S. Neuens, quoted in George Shibley, Momentous Issues: Competition in Business, Stable Price Level, Prosperity and Republic vs. Trusts, Falling Price Level, Depression, Empire, Militarism and Concentration of Wealth (Chicago: Schulte Publishing Company, 1900), 180.
22 Arthur Judson, The New Era in the Philippines (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1903), 107.
23 Motoe Terami-Wada, “Karayuki-San of Manila: 1890-1920,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 34 (1986), 289.
24 Ira C. Brown to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1900, in George W. Davis, ed., Report on the Military Government of the City of Manila, P.I., from 1898 to 1901 (Manila, P.I.: Headquarters Division of the Philippines, 1901), 276.
25 Quoted in Rev. A. Lester Hazlett, “A View of the Moral Conditions Existing in the Philippines,” in RG94/343790 (Box 2307), NARA DC.
26 Eileen P. Scully, “Prostitution as Privilege: The ‘American Girl’ of Treaty-Port Shanghai, 1860-1937,” International History Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1998), 855-883; Eileen P. Scully, “Taking the Low Road to Sino-American Relations: ‘Open Door’ Expansionists and the Two China Markets,” Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 1 (1995), 62-83.
27 On prostitution in the 19th century Philippines, see Maria Luisa Camagay, Working Women of Manila in the 19th Century (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, Center for Women's Studies, 1995); Luis C. Dery, “Prostitution in Colonial Manila,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 39 (1991), 475-89; Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society and the State in the 19th Century Philippines (Quezon Hall: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1996), 26-27, 41-4.
28 The regulation of prostitution took place within a broader context of ad hoc medical and public health institution building. By September 1898, the U.S. army had established two reserve hospitals in Manila and an interim Board of Health under military authorities would begin establishing sanitation and healthcare policies, overseeing special hospitals for smallpox and leprosy, as well as venereal disease. See Warwick Anderson, “Colonial Pathologies: American Medicine in the Philippines, 1898-1921,” (dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992), esp. chs. 1-2.
29 Robert Hughes to Adjutant General, U.S. Army, February 7, 1902, RG 350/2039/8 1/2), Box 246, NARA CP.
30 Quoted in De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 89.
31 U.S. missionaries in the Philippines, for example, often complained of the “querida problem,” the widespread co-habitation of U.S. soldiers with Filipino women during and after the war. It involved inseparable race, gender and class elements: ordinary U.S. soldiers were forbidden from bringing over U.S. wives, while Filipina-American unions raised fears of moral and racial degeneration through “miscegenation.” This topic, related to but also distinct from the present one, deserves treatment elsewhere. For a path-breaking exploration of these themes in the context of colonial Southeast Asia, see Ann Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia” in Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198-237.
32 Philippa Levine similarly argues for the local adaptations of venereal inspection regimes in the British Empire, and important variations between them. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 51. While regulation's critics would argue that U.S. officials had “imported” these policies from Britain, General MacArthur's favorable February 1901 citation of regulation in British India in defense of U.S. policies would be strikingly vague. While “books containing reference to this matter” could “not be obtained in Manila,” MacArthur was certain there existed works that demonstrated “that in Asia unusually strong measures have been taken to protect the English speaking soldier from the result of temptations which confront him. Maj.-Gen. Arthur MacArthur to Adjutant General of the Army, February 4, 1901, RG94/343790 (Box 2307) NARA DC.
33 De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 80-1.
34 John R. M. Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection against the United States, 1899-1903: A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction (Pasay City, 1971-3), vol. 3, 194-5.
35 Albert Todd to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1901, in Davis, ed., 264.
36 Charles Lynch to President, Board of Health, May 18, 1901, in Davis, ed., 267.
37 Robert Hughes to Adjutant General, U.S. Army, February 7, 1902, RG 350/2039/8 1/2), Box 246, NARA CP.
38 Frank S. Bourns to R. P. Hughes, November 2, 1898, Enclosure 41, in Davis, ed., 261-2.
39 Warwick Anderson emphasizes the notion of Filipinos as “reservoirs” of disease in Warwick Anderson, “Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1996), 94-118.
40 Simon Flexner, M. D., “Medical Conditions Existing in the Philippines,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 3rd series, Vol. 21 (1899), 165-77. This was also true of their longer report, published in the following year: Simon Flexner and L. F. Barker, “Report of a Special Commission Sent to the Philippines by the Johns Hopkins University to Investigate the Prevalent Diseases of the Islands,” Journal of the Military Service Institution, Vol. 26 (1900), 421-33.
41 They did make passing reference to the San Lazaro hospital with its “one ward devoted to the treatment of venereal diseases among the native prostitutes.” Flexner, “Medical Conditions Existing in the Philippines,” 166
42 Albert Todd to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1901, in Davis, ed., 264-6.
43 Between March 1 and May 15, 1901, the Board of Health reported a 52% profit. Charles Lynch to President, Board of Health, May 18, 1901, in Davis, ed., 269.
44 Lynch to President, Board of Health, May 18, 1901, in Davis, ed., 267-8.
45 According to U.S. army doctors, European and American prostitutes largely avoided what they perceived as stigmatizing inspection by U.S. army doctors, preferring instead to be inspected by private physicians.
46 Lynch to President, Board of Health, May 18, 1901, in Davis, ed., 268.
47 Philippa Levine emphasizes the ambiguities of brothels as spaces in “Erotic Geographies: Sex and the Managing of Colonial Space,” in Helena Michie and Roland R. Thomas, eds., Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 149-160.
48 Maj. Ira C. Brown to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1900, in Davis, ed., 276.
49 Brown to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1900, 275.
50 Brown to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1900, 275. This effort was undertaken shortly afterwards and a vice district was inaugurated. “Must Move Out to Adjust Social Evil,” The Manila Freedom, August 31, 1900, RG350/2039 (Box 246), National Archives and Record Administration College Park (NARA CP). On the district and its eventual suppression, see Dery, 481-2.
51 Brown to Acting Adjutant General, May 16, 1900, 276.
52 The origins of this policy in the U.S. colonial context remain obscure. Prostitutes in Singapore were also photographed by officials there for purposes of identification, although more research is needed before any conclusions about inter-colonial borrowing can be made. See James Frances Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940 (Singapore University Press, 2003 [1993]), 100-1, 108-9.
53 Maj. Charles Lynch to President, Board of Health, May 18, 1901, in Davis, ed., 266-7.
54 R. R. Stevens to Adjutant, March 25, 1902 (RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 3), NARA DC.
55 J. A. Moore to Adjutant, March 7, 1902 (RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 13), NARA DC.
56 E. B. Pratt to Adjutant, March 11, 1902 (RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 17), NARA DC. See also C. E. Hampton to Adjutant, March 14, 1902 (RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 19). When one civilian physician in Zamboanga complained that this lucrative source of revenue was a corrupt monopoly, he was rebuffed by army officials. Letter from Dr. A. T. Short, October [no date] 1908; RG94/1481399, NARA DC.
57 R. R. Stevens to Adjutant, March 25, 1902.
58 C. E. Hampton to Adjutant, March 24, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 19, NARA DC.
59 R. C. Croxton to Adjutant, March 10, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 21, NARA DC.
60 W.H. Sage to Adjutant, March 13, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 5, NARA DC.
61 W. A. Kent to Adjutant, March 6, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 27, NARA DC.
62 H. C. Bonnycastle to Adjutant, March 8, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 28, NARA DC.
63 R. R. Stevens to Adjutant, March 25, 1902.
64 D. B. Devore to Adjutant, March 13, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 24, NARA DC; J. H. Sutherland to Adjutant, March 6, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure ?, NARA DC. For reference to an assault charge, see R. C. Croxton to Adjutant, March 10, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 21, NARA DC.
65 C. E. Hampton to Adjutant, March 14, 1902, RG417937/B, Enclosure 19, NARA DC.
66 C. E. Hampton to Adjutant, March 14, 1902.
67 W. A. Nichols to Commanding Officer, March 10, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 7, NARA DC.
68 R. C. Croxton to Adjutant, March 10, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 21, NARA DC.
69 H. G. Cole to Adjutant, March 12, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 22, NARA DC.
70 H. G. Cole to Adjutant, March 12, 1902.
71 On the cholera epidemic that immediately followed the war, see De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 175-184; Reynaldo Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester University Press, 1988), 125-148.
72 Quoted in De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 89.
73 De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 90
74 On Protestant missions to the Philippines, see Kenton J. Clymer, Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898–1916: An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
75 Charles W. Briggs, The Progressing Philippines (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland Press, 1913), 122.
76 Charles W. Briggs, 112.
77 William B. Johnson, “The Administration's Brothels in the Philippines,” The New Voice Leaflets, Vol. 1, No. 26 (August 18, 1900); RG350/2045/10 (Box 246), NARA CP. Johnson was a “Special Commissioner” for the New Voice. Information from this article was used by The American League in its pamphlet “The Crowning Infamy of Imperialism,” RG 94/417937 (Box 2307), NARA DC.
78 Mark Twain, “Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date),” [February 1901], in Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War (Syracuse University Press, 1992), 41.
79 On social purity in this earlier period, see David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973). For the early 20th century, see David J. Pivar, Purity and Hygiene: Women, Prostitution and the “American plan,” 1900-1930 (CT: Greenwood Press, c2002).
80 For moral reformers as pioneers of new lobbying tactics, see Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
81 “Letter from Dr. O. Edward Janney.” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1899), 6.
82 Mrs. Mariana W. Chapman, “The New Militarism and Purity,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1899), 2, 3.
83 Aaron M. Powell, “Lessons from India,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 1899), 11.
84 “Letter from Josiah W. Leeds,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 2 (April 1899), 7.
85 “The Schooling of a Camp,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January 1899), 24. The article quoted a letter by Garrison to October 18, 1898 issue of The Woman's Journal.
86 “Notes and Comments,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 17, No. 2 (July 1902).
87 “Notes and Comments,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 15, No. 4 (January 1901), 1.
88 Aaron M. Powell, “Appeal for Purity,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 1899), 13.
89 Powell, “Lessons from India,” 10.
90 London Contemporary Review, quoted in Powell, “Lessons from India,” 11.
91 “London Congress of the International Federation for the Abolition of State Regulationof Vice,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January 1899), 18.
92 September 27, 1900 American Purity Alliance memorial to McKinley, RG350/2045 (Box 246), NARA CP.
93 “Memorandum Issued by the Commander-In-Chief,” April 28, 1898 (London: Harrison and Sons, St. Martin's Lane, 1898), RG 94/343790 (Box 2307), NARA DC.
94 On the suffrage movement and feminism, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).
95 See Tyrrell.
96 Kristin Hoganson, “As Bad Off as the Filipinos': U.S. Women Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women's History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer 2001). See also Alison L. Sneider, “The Impact of Empire on the North American Woman Suffrage Movement: Suffrage Racism in an Imperial Context,” UCLA Historical Journal, Vol. 14 (1994), 14-32; Louis Michele Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
97 On imperialist attacks on anti-colonialist masculinity, see Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 7.
98 “A National Disgrace,” The Woman's Column (November 17, 1900).
99 Resolution by the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association, to William McKinley (circa February 11, 1901), in RG94/343790 (Box 2307), NARA DC.
100 On anti-colonialism see esp., Schirmer, Republic or Empire; Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism.
101 On anti-colonialist racism, see Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, The Philippines, and the Inequality of Man.” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 24 (August 1958), 319-331.
102 “Uncle Sam Before and After His Wish for Expansion,” “Expensive Expansion” (Boston, 1900), in Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 182.
103 On Atkinson, see Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968), ch. 5.
104 Atkinson was charged with indelicacy and inaccuracy and his pamphlet condemned as “The Venereal Disease Libel,” in Frederick C. Chamberlin, The Blow From Behind (Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1903), 83-91.
105 Atkinson, 18.
106 Acting Secretary of War to Lillian Stevens, October 8, 1900, RG94/343790, NARA DC.
107 Elihu Root to William Howard Taft, January 21, 1901, William H. Taft Papers, Microfilm ed. M1584, Series 21, Special Correspondence, Vol. 2 (1900-1901), Reel 640. My thanks to Richard Meixsel for identifying this source.
108 There were profound connections between the politics of anti-regulation and temperance that cannot be fully explored here. Brothels and saloons were strategically conflated in ways that brought temperance and social purity reformers together: brothels would attract soldiers to drink, and saloons attract soldiers to prostitution. “Regulated” brothels in the Philippines were imagined as parallel to the army canteens that permitted the sale of alcohol to soldiers. On the army canteen, see Edward Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 359-361. On subsequent debates on opium traffic in the Philippines and its prohibition, see Anne L. Foster, “Models for Governing: Opium and Colonial Policies in Southeast Asia, 1898-1910,” in Julian Go and Anne Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 92-117.
109 Teller, quoted in “No Beer for the Nation's Defenders,” New York Times (January 10, 1901), 5.
110 Root to Taft, January 21, 1901.
111 Telegram from Root to Taft, January 15, 1901; Telegram from H. C. Corbin to A. MacArthur, January 16, 1901, Taft Papers, Reel 640.
112 MacArthur, quoted in “Moral Conditions in the Philippines,” report included with Wilbur Crafts to Theodore Roosevelt, January 22, 1902, 8, RG94/416181A, NARA DC.
113 Taft, quoted in “Moral Conditions in the Philippines,” 9.
114 “Moral Conditions in the Philippines,” 8.
115 Maj.-Gen. Arthur MacArthur to Adjutant General of the Army, February 4, 1901.
116 “Against ‘Regulated’ Vice,” The Woman's Column (May 3, 1902), 1.
117 Roosevelt, quoted in “For Social Purity in the Army,” The Outlook (April 19, 1902), 944-5.
118 “For Social Purity in the Army,” The Outlook (April 19, 1902), 944-5.
119 Editorial, The Philanthropist, Vol. 17, No. 2 (July 1902), 4.
120 “Conditions in America,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 17, No. 2 (July 1902), 6-7.
121 General Orders No. 101, May 21, 1901, RG350/2039/26 (Box 246), NARA CP.
122 M. A. De Laney to Chief Surgeon, February 18, 1903, RG 112/26/88939/B (Box 614), NARA DC.
123 “Moral Conditions in the Philippines,” 9.
124 Quoted in Geo. Davis to F. H. Maddocks, November 24, 1900, RG350/2045 (Box 246), NARA CP.
125 George Cortelyou to Elihu Root, March 21, 1902, RG 350/2045/26 (Box 246), NARA CP.
126 Report by George Curry, May 6, 1902, quoted in W. Cary Langer to George Cortelyou, June 11, 1902, RG 350/2045/28 (Box 246), NARA CP.
127 Elihu Root to Luke Wright, February 18, 1902, RG 350/2039 (Box 246), NARA CP.
128 “More Trouble in Manila,” The Philanthropist, Vol. 17, No. 3 (October 1902), 4.
129 Note enclosed, Secretary to the President to Elihu Root, February 6, 1902, RG350/2039/17 (Box 246), NARA CP.
130 Clarence Edwards to Mary Dye Ellis, April 3, 1902, RG350/2039/after-20 (Box 246), NARA CP.
131 Edwards to Ellis, April 3, 1902.
132 Letter from H. C. Bonnycastle to Adjutant, March 8, 1902.
133 Edward Lyman Munson, The Theory and Practice of Military Hygiene (New York: William Wood and Co., 1901), 835-7. My thanks to Warwick Anderson for identifying this source. Munson appears to have based his assessment on a favorable report by First Lieutenant S. L. Steer. Munson's pro-regulation report was in turn used by U.S. officers in their defenses of the Jolo inspection program. See Letter from H. L. Laubach to Adjutant, March 11, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 4, NARA; Letter from W. H. Sage to Adjutant, March 13, 1902, RG94/417937/B, Enclosure 5, NARA DC.
134 L. M. Maus, “A Brief History of Venereal Diseases in the United States Army and Measures Employed for their Suppression,” American Social Hygiene Association, June 14, 1917, 2, 5, Box 131, File 3, ASHA Collection, University of Minnesota. As a major in the Philippines, Maus had been moved from the Army medical department to become the first head of Bureau of Health under civilian auspices in July 1901. Venereal inspection also went into effect in occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, but appears to have emphasized the inspection of U.S. soldiers rather than prostitutes. See Siler, 75-78. The control of prostitutes was attempted in the province of Pinar del Rio; see Munson, 836. The fact that these inspection regimes were not subsequently politicized suggests that social purity reformers relied on anti-colonialists' criticism of the war in the Philippines.
135 Maus, 6.
136 Siler identified the origins of these regulations in the Cuban context. Venereal control measures there, he wrote, had been “extended in one form or another to other geographic areas at later dates.” See Siler, 75.
137 De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 86.
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