Each penal farm produced enough copra for direct sales to oil refiners, in turn encouraging Americans to point to each as exemplars of progressive penology and labor control.San Ramon, one report boasted, “well merits classification as an educational centre rather than as a penitentiary.”All four hundred and seventy-two prisoners were “employed in productive labor … their employment is limited to the sort of work in which training will be of the greatest value to them upon their return to their homes, whether these be in the mountains or in the most remote fishing villages”—a remarkable assertion given that a third of prisoners were serving life sentences and excepting what the report elsewhere referred to as the occasional “escape of prisoners from San Ramon Farm and the Iwahig Penal Colony.”Prisoners absorbed the risks inherent to the large-scale planting of a tree that takes seven years to come to maturity. But once this period had passed, private investors flocked to the southern Philippines and financed the operations of the coconut empire. The largest was the International Banking Corporation, the first American bank with a charter granting it the power to open branches outside the continental United States. Its executive board and shareholders included rail and shipping magnates, many with close connections to the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, in turn, authorized the IBC to act as the fiscal agent of the state in the Caribbean, notably Panama during the canal’s construction, in China, to collect indemnities from the Boxer Rebellion, and in the Philippines.48 IBC credit smoothed the transition of colonial administrators to private business. Worcester and the former director of prisons, ML Stewart,macetas con drenaje used an IBC loan to form the American-Philippine Development Company in 1913. The company operated a private plantation near San Ramon managed by a former San Ramon superintendent.
The connections and proximity effectively created a prison-to-plantation pipeline filtering freed prisoners into contract work on the APDC plantation. Ever the agricultural entrepreneur, Worcester portrayed the conversion from Muslim dissident to disciplined laborer as complete. “Our laborers,” he wrote to a family member in the US, “are all either Samal Moros or exconvicts from the San Ramon penal station, and they are real workers, who work by the hour, and complain of a SHORT day, never of a long one.”49Wartime demand for oleochemicals and nitroglycerin sparked a rush to clear more land for coconut plantations and to open facilities for oil refining in the Philippines. In 1915, Worcester took over the management of the American-owned Visayan Refining Company’s $2 million facility in Cebu, strategically located near that island’s deep port and a short distance from the penal colony and plantations of Northern Mindanao. He would amalgamate this facility with two other firms, selling a large share of the capital stock to Lever Brothers, Ltd. of London.The Philippine National Bank, meanwhile, extended credit to Philippine landowners and businessmen eager to enter the market and limit American control of the economy. Cebuano tycoon Vicente Madrigal opened a competing oil refining facility near Worcester’s. A promise from the Philippine National Bank to compel a Manila-based shipper to buy from Madrigal at an inflated price allowed him to offer local growers and pickers higher prices than that paid by Worcester. Such competing infusions of capital, high demand, and inflated copra prices brought small farmers into the coconut market. By the end of the war, the total area planted to coconuts had trebled.Between 1910 and 1918, imports of copra into the continental US grew from 9.914 million pounds to a staggering 326 million pounds.The expansion of the coconut economy carried significant environmental and economic risks. In 1924, the American Dean of the Philippines’s College of Agriculture, Charles Fuller Baker, received a “gift” from Fiji—“a little box containing a specimen of a very small blackish moth … [that] is devastating the coconut plantations of Fiji, and the government of this group of islands, in alarm, has sent abroad for men to come and study it and try to control it.
Through this one extremely insignificant thing, the chief source of income of Fiji is imperilled.” Baker ordered an investigation in Mindanao and discovered another moth, “which may, on occasion, be nearly as bad and which may someday spread all over this Archipelago.”Baker’s investigation also uncovered a bud-rot, “which is destroying more and more of our trees” and necessitated cutting and burning of the infected plants.Baker turned the need for the scientific management of the risks of plantation agriculture into a reason for extending the American occupation. “In the Philippines,” he wrote, “we have as yet barely emerged from the ‘Dios cuidao’ stage of cultivation.”The moth, the rot, and plummeting postwar demand for copra rendered the nearly four million Filipinos linked to the coconut commodity chain precarious. Thirty-four refining facilities closed, all of which were Filipino owned. US and European firms owned the majority shares in the remaining seven mills. The US remained the main market for ninety percent of Philippine copra, rendering the coconut plantation economy more dependent on the United States at the very moment American dairy and cottonseed farmers responded to the economic crisis of the 1930s by decrying “unfair” Philippine competition.Just as the logic of tropicality informed the production of copra, so too did tropicality shape North American consumption of copra. More often, this logic emphasized the risks that tropical environments and goods posed to white Americans. The logic was not unique to copra. Louisiana cane and Western beet sugar growers, fearful of competing with Philippine and Puerto Rican sugar, invoked images of the tropics as overly sexual and damaging to white health in their campaigns to impose tariffs on insular sugar. Drawing on an assemblage of forms that April Merleaux calls “antiimperial populism,” continental sugar growers framed the “sugar trust’s” exploitation of “cheap” tropical labor as a move to undercut the well-being of white settler family farmers.United Fruit countered suspicion of the banana with mass marketing campaigns and cookbooks that domesticated the fruit.Shippers and food manufacturers of coconut oil, however, had to overcome both suspicion of the tropics and an older oleomargarine controversy. Beginning in the latter nineteenth century, North American dairy farmers retaliated against the competition posed by vegetable fats by waging a campaign for “pure food.”
The campaign tapped into the consuming public’s anxieties over the growing complexity of food processing in an age of rapid industrialization and urbanization.In this campaign, the golden yellow of butter signified purity whereas the coloring of an otherwise white oleomargarine marked it as artificial and hence impure. The campaign culminated in the 1886 “Oleomargarine Act,” which imposed a prohibitive tax rate on the import and sale of oleomargarine, then defined as any dairy butter alternative. Additional state laws prohibited oleomargarine manufacturers from dying the product yellow—a ban that crossed the northern border and was not lifted in Quebec until 2008. Other states required manufacturers to dye the product pink, further reducing oleomargarine’s likeness to butter by drawing a color line around foods considered pure and ingestible. The earliest campaigns for coconut oil products in the United States played with tropes of the tropics and the pure food controversy. The Troco Nut Butter company of Chicago and Wisconsin blended coconut oil with milk into a solid spread. The company’s landscape advertisements acknowledged the amalgamation but sought to contain the larger threat of racial miscegenation and food adulteration by depicting dairy cattle vacationing on tropical shores. The cattle lolled under the shade of tall and spindly coconut trees. The landscapes, not surprisingly,macetas 7 litros were devoid of the stout dwarf trees engineered by economic botanists and the Filipino prisoners who had picked the nuts. The company also turned the state-regulated whiteness of oleomargarine into a selling point. Far from a pale imitation of butter, Troco was “made from the white meat of tropic coconuts,” “wholesome natural ingredients,” and “appetizing natural foods we especially like to eat. The dainty white meat of coconuts churned with pasteurized milk are inviting ingredients.”The company’s 1918 Troco Cookbook further domesticated the coconut by guiding readers on how to use the product in place of butter, the price of which skyrocketed to a high of sixty cents a pound during the war. Authored by domestic science educator Ida Bailey Allen, the Troco Cookbook urged readers to think of coconut oil as part of a “balanced ration as a promotion of family health and a means toward economy.”The substitution of the oil for butter and other cooking fats contributed to a popular perception that coconut oil and butter were indistinguishable. This conflation hid the myriad industrial uses of copra, from the manufacture of nitroglycerin to detergents. It also positioned North American dairy farmers to wage a protectionist war on coconut oil when prices for butter slumped after the war. Agricultural producers on both sides of the Pacific experienced a postwar slump but dairy farmers allied with cottonseed oil manufacturers and blamed “the ‘coconut cow’ for their plight.”Beginning in 1921 and escalating during the crisis of the 1930s, organizations from the National Board of Farm Organizations to the National Conference of Dairy Organizations passed resolutions against the menace of “Oriental and foreign oils.”These groups joined with the Southern Tariff Association to form a “Tariff Defense Committee of American Producers of Oils and Fats.” Drawing on the template set by continental cane and beet sugar growers, the dairy campaign “employed racial tropes that connected the hygiene and safety of Philippine imports to the race of the workers who produced and transported them.”The Butter and Cheese Journal depicted a shipment of Philippine copra as “impossibly filthy,” smelling “like stable manure or worse” with “an army of naked Malays sweating under the tropical heat, tramping copra that is going to be made into the poor man’s butter. Think of it!” As Paul Kramer notes, the “journal’s nightmare vision joined dark visions of bodily corruption and racial invasion.”
The visions contributed to the “American liberation of the Philippines” in the form of the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act creating the Philippine Commonwealth with the promise of independence in 1946. The Philippine planters who had embraced the coconut boom now found themselves atop a 2,000,000-acre plantation hierarchy faced with ecological crises from the black moth to bud-rot, and the loss of duty-free access to its largest market. In 1939, Manuel Quezon ordered the Philippine National Assembly to investigate the coconut industry at home and abroad. The resulting commission headed by Maximo Kalaw traveled throughout the islands, Ceylon, and Marseilles, then on the eve of German occupation. Kalaw found that the attacks of North American farmers had reverberated loudly and globally. “Everywhere one goes, be it in Europe or Asia, and inquires about the copra market, he finds that Philippine copra has that black mark. It is generally placed at the bottom of the list. This has been the sad history of Philippine copra.”In addition to being held in low esteem, Philippine copra faced obstacles that had resulted from the crop’s symbiotic relationship to the US Pacific coast. The ports of San Francisco and Los Angeles removed copra from ships through sucking pumps, which meant Philippine exporters were better off packing in bulk rather than bags. The Port of Marseilles did not have this capacity. Entry into French markets therefore meant Philippine exporters would have to change copra packing methods, take on the expense of building bag factories, and forge regular shipping links to Marseilles, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen.Kalaw’s proposed solution to the loss of the American market and barriers to European markets was twofold. The first was to develop a National Coconut Corporation with the goal of improving copra production and consumption. The organization Kalaw wrote should tackle the taint on Philippine copra by imposing new measures of standardization and regulating the sanitation of copra drying facilities. Kalaw also imagined a post independence economy fuelled by coconuts not just as an export commodity but as a domestic food: “The diet of the Filipino is very deficient in fat, and that is why the average Filipino is not found to be so strong. Increase in the consumption of coconut products will give this necessary fat to the average Filipino.”Filipinos, in short, needed to eat more of the plantation crops they grew.