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Foreign in a Domestic Space

Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum

In the introductory chapter, we saw how, in a photograph of a group of armed Michiganders exploring and studying the Philippines a few years before the Philippine-American War, fern hunters more closely resembled “Indian hunters.” In chapter 1, we saw what kind of destiny awaited these students and professors after they finished collecting zoological, anthropological, and botanical material and returned stateside. I described how an anthropologist like Carl Guthe established his academic career with the accumulation of material, including Filipino skulls, that he disinterred from burial sites in the southern Philippines. If, in the Philippines, the American colonizer transformed himself from frontiersman to scientific explorer, what came next?

In this chapter I argue that the University of Michigan served as a site for the transformation of the American imperial mission in the Philippines from scientific collection to social improvement. America’s mission changed from the accumulation of plant and animal life—including “primitive” human life—in the name of science to the accumulation and application of social science expertise in the name of progressive social justice. The history of the transformation of America’s imperial mission is exemplified by the life and material belongings of the post–Progressive Era politician, colonial administrator, and jurist Frank Murphy (1890–1949). Rising to prominence as a result of his reliance on the expertise of University of Michigan academics, Murphy moved from local government in Detroit to his international post as governor-general in the Philippines before taking on national roles as Michigan’s governor and associate U.S. Supreme Court justice. He since has been credited with creating the early architecture, in Detroit, of what would become Franklin Roosevelt’s national New Deal program, and then with transplanting the “little New Deal” to the Philippines. As I show in this chapter, Murphy deployed these progressivist ideals in order to contain rather than unleash the most radical and transformative potentialities of both the labor movement in the United States and anticolonial, land reformist struggles in the Philippines. Through Murphy’s career, we can track the transnational career of what I call “progressivist imperialism,” the emergence of the ideals of the New Deal in relation to the “little New Deal” and vice versa. Rather than rehearse the generic conventions and limitations of the biographies of great men, however, this chapter ultimately turns to the domestic sphere and an interdisciplinary method of material and visual cultural analysis in order to shed light not only on how progressivist imperialism facilitated the domestication of radical politics but how Filipinos negotiated and challenged that process.

Figure 2.1. Exterior, Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, Harbor Beach, Michigan. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

Figure 2.2. Interior, living room, Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

Figure 2.3. Frank Murphy’s walking stick collection. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

Figure 2.4. Detail of cane made of Philippine mahogany. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by author.