Episode 9: Two plaques hang in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol, one that memorializes Minnesota’s participation in a forgotten war and another that claims the first plaque told is full of lies. Today on New Narratives, we start to tell the story of the second plaque and the Filipinx Minnesotans who were behind it. We’ll tell the story of their relentless activism to tell the story of the Philippine-American War the way their ancestors saw and experienced it. This episode is part 2 of a 2-part series on the Philippine-American War.
Guests: Meg Layese (she/her, Philippine Study Group of Minnesota), Paul Bloom (he/him, PSGM), Art Adiarte (he/him, PSGM), and Professor Karin Aguilar San Juan (she/they/siya, Macalester College).
Music by Takénobu.
Anya Steinberg: Hey everyone, and welcome back to New Narratives dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. I’m your host Anya Steinberg. I’m the storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit based out of St. Paul, Minnesota focused on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Anya: Last time, I told you the story of the Philippine-American War, a little known chapter in U.S. history that marked the beginning of America’s imperialist ventures in Asia long, long ago. Since then, nothing has changed about the story we tell ourselves about this war and about other wars in Asia: America, the freedom fighter, bringing democracy and light to a people sitting in darkness. But what if the darkness the Philippines was sitting in wasn’t about their lack of sophistication or their inferiority to the Western world? What if the darkness Filipinos found themselves in was first the looming shadow of the Spaniards and then became the _____ foot of Uncle Sam.
Today we continue the story of the Philippine-American War. But this time from the present day. We’ll be talking about a group of Filipinx-Americans who rallied against false narratives of this war a hundred years after it ended. We’ll touch on what Minnesota even had to do with this war. And we’ll also find out what Minnesota got wrong about it and how Filipinx-Americans finally told the true story of the Philippine-American War. If you haven’t listened to part one, do that now. We’ll explain what the Philippine-American War was, why nobody talks about it and how it matters today. But if you have listened well, then it’s time to jump in.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Anya: Remember the whole reason I started looking into this war? The plaque in the rotunda? For a recap, in the rotunda of the capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a giant plaque probably as wide as your arm span. The plaque is a memorial to Minnesotans who fought in the Philippine-American War at the start of the 20th century. It’s like any other war memorial, it tells the story of their bravery and triumphs. I was curious about these soldiers, mostly because I’d never heard of this war before. And because it was hard for me to imagine warfare back then. I have visuals of the war in Iraq, the U.S. War in Vietnam. I could even picture battle scenes from World War II or the Civil War, but the Philippine-American War? That was a grey spot in my mind. What did it look like to fight in that war? How did Americans adjust to the tropical Philippines? Most of all though, who were the Minnesotans that found themselves fighting halfway across the world?
Professor Aguilar San Juan: They’re just ordinary people like that’s who signs up for war, right, ordinary men, young men.
Anya: I called Professor Aguilar San Juan again from Macalester College to hear about these soldiers. They were Minnesota’s 13th regiment, basically a regiment of soldiers from the state’s National Guard who got federalized into the U.S. army to help out with the war. They were one of three regiments in Minnesota who trained to be sent to the Philippines, but they were the only ones to actually get sent across the ocean. Here’s Professor Aguilar San Juan…
Professor Aguilar San Juan: It’s 1898, 1899 and so apparently this 13th regiment was very important because it somehow tips the… it tipped the… what do you call it? I don’t know, whatever. It was like without them, the U.S. would be still lacking but because they sent this extra force, it kind of help. So imagine the Filipinos are like a tropical nation. They don’t have weapons. I mean, they have like their local weapons. They have like bolo knives and stuff. Small people, right? And then you have the U.S. come in with friggin arms, and they’re big corn fed guy and whatever. Like a gigantic foot of Uncle Sam and then like a little brown person.
Anya: These men, they were really well, more like, boys.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: So who comes from Minnesota? I mean, gosh, they’re like 19-year-old boys. They all sign up because they want to free, they want to free these people like Spain is terrible, right? So it’s a good war for America. So they’re rounded up at the state fair grounds. It’s kind of amazing. Like, I’ve been there, like that’s so weird. So they’re rounded up, then they have some initial training, then they go to San Francisco. A little bit of training there. But now they’re gonna go to the tropics, which none of them have ever been. First thing they did is the malaria dysentery like a lot of them digest because of that. Anyway, they go there thinking that’s what they’re going to– the ordinary soldier thinks that but then the generals are thinking that they’re going to run this war according to the Indian Wars.
Anya: Professor Aguilar San Juan is touching on a really important point here that all this history is connected. American generals in the Philippines were drawing on the Spanish practice of concentration that we talked about last episode as one of the origins of the concentration camp. These same generals were also using strategies they perfected in the U.S.’s relentless campaign of genocide against Indigenous peoples. All of this made for a brutal, brutal war. After the war had ended. When the soldiers figured out the U.S. was actually going to stay in the Philippines. A lot of them were not pleased. Historical records of letters and diary entries from members of the 13th regiment tell us that people felt duped, like the U.S. had lied about the freedom crusade they brought these boys to the Philippians for.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: There is a certain narrative of innocence in Minnesota, at least among the soldiers. Like that’s not what we intended to do. You know, just like in Vietnam. Many soldiers went and didn’t know that that’s what they were going to be doing.
Anya: So that’s the 13th regiment, the group of soldiers, the plaque memorializes. The plaque was mounted on the walls of the Minnesota State Capitol in 1948. Two years after the Philippines was finally granted independence. The plaque flew under the radar until the late 80s, when a woman named Nadine Cruz stumbled across the plaque.
Meg Layese: Nadine was the one who talked about all that, she was really crying. She said how the plaque, that the plaque at the capital of the 13th Minnesota infantry about how they went to the Philippines to liberate from the Spanish, which is not true.
Anya: That’s Meg Layese. Meg is a retired soil scientist and the chair of an organization called the Philippines Study Group of Minnesota, which I’ll refer to as PSDM from now on. She told me that her friend Nadine was actually the founder of PSDM and she wanted to mobilize the group to do something about the plaque. But wait back up. What exactly did the original plaque get wrong? Art Adiarte, another member of the PDSM clued me in.
Art Adiarte: I read the plaque. What was said in there, there were three things that they were referring to Aguinaldo, who led the war against the Spaniards. They referred to him as Cheif Aguinaldo and there is some racial connotation.
Anya: Because at the time, Aguinaldo wasn’t the chief, he was the president of the Philippines.
Art: Also the plaque says that the Filipinos were resurrected, which is not true because actually the Philippines already declared itself a republic under General Emilio Aguinaldo who became the first president. And third of all, they claimed that the U.S. deliver us from Spain, which is not true. What actually happened is the U.S. supported the Spaniards in terms of colonizing the Philippines. So they wanted to have the Philippines under their dominion, was one of the motivating forces why I decided to become active in that.
Anya: PSDM felt like the plaque was misrepresenting the war and glorifying something that was, for Filipino people, tragic and deadly. Ken Meter another member of PSDM got a grant to start researching the true history of the plaque which kickstarted PSDM’s campaign against the inaccuracies. They started lobbying against the plaque in 1994. They did all the things you learned about in civics class, calling representatives, writing letters, etcetera. The two main groups in charge of making decisions about the plaque was the Minnesota Historical Society and the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning board or the CAAP board. To me, it felt like it was pretty straightforward. The plaque was clearly biased, at the very least, and blatantly untruthful in parts. So replace it. Meg told me that it wasn’t that simple. PSDM encountered some pushback in their campaign.
Meg: There are five of us in the negotiating committee.
Paul Bloom: But there were two from historical society and Carolyn, who was sort of the archivist of the capitol, she was the hardest nut to crack.
Anya: That man you hear in the background? That’s Paul Bloom. Meg’s husband.When I asked Meg who opposed the plaque correction, she told me it was mostly members of the CAAP board. So why were they against it? That’s where Paul and Meg kind of disagreed.
Meg: I just do not know. But I really do not know why she was opposing it.
Paul: Cass Gilbert was a great architect. He designed the place where it shouldn’t muck with it. Although other people have put plaques in their posts. Cass Gilbert didn’t want to say they were worried about everybody…. minorities and so forth.
Meg: It’s not because of that but they just don’t wanna– the integrity of their Rotonda in a way, you could always see something wrong. And apart or anything, there’s always something we could find wrong, right? So we don’t want to have that, that thing that everybody’s going to be looking at their somebody’s work and then complain about it. So that I think they were kind of worried about that concern about that.
Paul: They already had been asked by American Indian to change some of the art. I think that was part of the problem. They’ve already been asked to make changes.
Anya: I asked Art if he also remembered the push back and what it was about, he thought it was less about the integrity of the rotunda and more about who got to tell the story of this war.
Art: Well, there’s so many plaques all over the U.S. that– the thing with plaques is written by the ones who are the victors of the conflict.
[MUSIC]
Art: Well, there’s so many plaques all over the U.S. that– the thing with plaques is written by the ones who are the victors of the conflict. In most of these cases, the U.S. was the victor. So on the other side of the conflict, those who were not the victors, they have to live with what the victors– they told the story, which is only good for the victors themselves. So it’s from the perspective of the victors and the perspective of those who were.
Anya: This small group of pretty uncontroversial soldier boys was suddenly under scrutiny by the descendants of people who these soldiers had traveled across the ocean to subdue and kill. And that was uncomfortable. But Art didn’t shy away from the fight.
Art: Well, I felt, of course, I knew it was false. And so I was strongly against it. And so I decided to join the Philippines Study Group of Minnesota, to try and correct the plaque.
Anya: Art said that at first, the CAAP board basically just wanted to band-aid over the whole thing.
Art: They wanted to just put a small plaque in there. And we said, you know, this does not, it’s not commensurate with us that in there. We wanted to just put a small correction. But we would love it for a bigger plaque, which is commensurate to what is at state capital.
Anya: PSDM mobilized again to call their representatives, write letters, traveled to the capitol to lobby, and more. They would hold giant postcard drives by community events to get community members to write in support for the corrective plaque. They basically threw the whole Philippinx Minnesotan community behind this. And finally, it paid off.
Art: We got this $10,000 grant from the state capitol and this was sponsored by Senator Sandy Pappas and Representative Andy Dawkins.
Anya: Now, the PSDM had to work with the Minnesota Historical Society and the CAAP board to come to consensus over what should be inscribed on the new plaque. Even within PSDM, there were conflicts, here’s Meg.
Meg: We have two factions, one thinks that we should remove the original path and just put the new plaque and then there’s this group also that– we don’t want to remove this, the original one, because then how people know what was in that history, why you were correcting it.
Anya: And then Meg and Paul said the capital was also hung up on the details.
Meg: They are so worried that we will be destroying the integrity of the Capitol Rotunda. So they get lots of _______ this, what we can do and what we cannot do. You cannot ever remove that bench that was set there.
Paul: You can’t even change the lights.
Meg: I said give us the dimension, work with that dimension. And so we wanted to have– the demand was to have that was as good as the original one, meaning it’s just not gonna be a plaque. It has to be with the same structure, the same stature as the original one.
Anya: As for the actual words on the plaque, well, that took forever to figure out.
Art: We had several meetings with the people who were there and they had our own experts, we had our own experts.
Meg: And then research, research, meeting, meetings all that.
Art: Well, it took us a year to change the language, I appreciate that.
Anya: But at last, the three groups PSDM, the CAAP board and the Minnesota Historical Society, they came to an agreement. They commissioned an artist to create the new plaque. It was finished in 2002. To celebrate, they threw an enormous party at the capitol. And what did that event and that day mean to you?
Art: It meant that, they were impressed with it because it told the true story about the Philippine-American War, which is a forgotten war. And the story was told from the perspective of the Filipinos and not the Americans. That to us is important you know that the truth about the story was told.
Anya: Meg was the one who actually spoke at the ceremony. I asked her to read me the speech she gave nearly 20 years ago to unveil PSDM’s hard earned corrective plaque.
Meg: Good afternoon, everyone and thank you all for coming. I am Meg Layese, chair of the Philippine Study Group of Minnesota.
[MUSIC]
Meg: On this day, 103 years ago, as Nebraska volunteer shot had a Filipino soldier in San Juan bridge near Manila, igniting the Philippine-American War. And today we are here to unveil a plaque that corrects inaccuracies in our memorial that pertains to this war. Your original plaque which was installed in 1948, honors the 13th Minnesota all volunteer infantry who volunteered to serve in the Spanish-American War and was sent to the Philippines in 1898. The 1948 plaque contains a number of demeaning remarks and _____. The most serious was the listing of 20 battles. And below that, the claim that this fought to, quote, freed up press people of the Philippine alass from the despotic role of Spain, unquote. The battles reserved, were not battles against Spanish, but in fact battles against Filipinos. Filipinos who had been fighting for independence and then before the Spanish-American War. It’s hard for us Filipinos that our history is being trivialized. We needed this to be corrected, that will be truth in history and therefore be true to who we are in our own eyes, in other people’s eyes. But we are not only Filipinos, we are also Minnesotan and as Minnesotans we believe that our state is served well when we tell our story of purity.
The story of the 13th Minnesota is an inspiring story that must be told of how this young man even as decompiled, the record of exemplary service, wrote their families of their dismay over being turned from an army of liberation into an army of congress over the governor healing these individual expressions of tensions, then successfully sought to bring the voice home. 100 years ago, we already see the great principles of respect for all peoples as simple human decency that our state take so much pride in today. Making the wrong right has been a long process. It is not easy to change something that has been on the wall of the state capitol rotunda for 54 years. We, the 6000 Filipinos who now call Minnesota home, are very proud that finally we are able to reclaim our history. Minnesota in turn has the distinction as the first state in the U.S. to correct one of the many memorials honoring Spanish-American War veterans who actually fought in what is now known as the Philippine-American War. You should all be proud of our state by making this correction as proclaimed that truth dishonors no one.
Anya: On that frigid winter day, Minnesota proclaimed that truth dishonors no one. So yeah, for once a happy ending. What do you think of that? I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I feel like so often when I tell stories about race or ethnicity, or imperialism or culture, you know, all the things we talk about in New Narratives, there’s rarely a happy ending. There’s rarely a moment where I can say, “Yeah, Justice was served, or that, that actually wrapped up pretty nicely.” So when I came across the story of the plaque, I wasn’t sure what to think. I was kind of like, “Yeah, but it took them decades to change it. Or Yeah, well, that doesn’t change the fact that someone wrote that plaque in the first place and that’s how the war has been remembered by Minnesota and since.” So when I asked Professor Aguilar San Juan, what she thought I thought she would pile on to with a smart criticism of the state or the institution of the U.S. military. But she surprised me.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: I think because it’s a two part plaque, it helps us ask a lot of questions about our role in the world, what it has been and what it can be. And I think that plaque is so important, I’m so proud to be a Minnesotan because of that plaque, like that’s one of the things I’m really proud about. It’s like, there is a critical discourse here. And we know how to make it public. And it shows our not sophistication, but our heart, if we can embrace that it was a bad story. And it’s a two-part story like that shows a lot of like, ability to learn and to think about others actually. Even though it wasn’t a nice story, but I don’t know any other state capitol that even mentioned the Philippines much less corrects itself on the story. Any mistake we make, even if it’s horrendous, there is an opportunity to learn from it and grow. I mean, if that’s the main lesson from life, that’s a pretty good one.
Anya: I found myself nodding along to her like, yeah, it is okay to be satisfied with the outcome this time. Because these two plaques hanging side by side in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol. It does make a pretty good ending. And that’s all for this episode of New Narratives. Special thanks to those featured in today’s story Meg Layese, Art Adiarte, and Professor Aguilar San Juan. Music featured in this episode is by Takénobu. This episode was written, edited, fact-checked, and produced by your host Anya Steinberg, storyteller intern at Asian American organizing project. More information about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org. Thanks for listening!