This play came out of the discovery of a little-known chapter in American history, the three-year war fought by the United States in the Philippine Islands from 1899 to1902.  We two authors were not yet the theater scholar and historian we later became, but were young Americans living through the national anguish of Vietnam. We wanted to say something about the history of our own time through the medium of theater. As we followed clues in our reading about the Philippine "insurrection," we realized that Vietnam was not unique in American history.

In 1898 the U.S. waged its "lovely little" war against Spain to free Cuba from Spanish rule.  Though the war's avowed purpose was "Cuba Libre", its architects made no promise not to take the rest of Spain's island empire: Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines. Not long after Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay however, Americans were surprised to learn that their brief welcome as liberators had expired; they now faced resistance as occupiers.

Bitter opposition to the U.S. "annexation" of the Philippines and the ensuing war to enforce it developed at home. The distaste for empire was summed up by a first-term Republican senator from Illinois in an attack on his own party leadership: "You do not speak their language, you do not know their schools, you cannot read their newspapers. Who wants to go, covered with the gewgaws and flubdubs of royalty and have the natives keep the flies off your sacred person while you listen to the interpreter?"

Southern Democrats scathingly pointed to the racial implications of the new colonialism.  "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, needled his Yankee colleagues: "We inherited our race problem, but you are going out in search of yours."  He charged that a disguised materialism was at the bottom of the entire affair.

On the other side were the expansionists, all Republicans, Henry Cabot Lodge, junior Senator from Massachusetts, Theodore Roosevelt, who was swept into office as Governor of New York after his "Rough Riders" military performance in Cuba, the senator-to-be from Indiana Albert J. Beveridge, who openly proclaimed that God had chosen America to "lead in the regeneration of the world," and William McKinley, who had defeated William Jennings Bryan to win the presidency in 1896.

McKinley dismissed domestic  objections and Philippine resistance in a sentence: "We were obeying a higher moral obligation, and did not require anybody's consent."  McKinley was returned to office for another four years in a campaign that rode a wave of popularity for his new vice-presidential nominee, Theodore Roosevelt. That year, 1900, marked, according to The Nation magazine, "Year One" of the  American empire.

It took us four years to complete the play; it was published by Houghton Mifflin in1973. In the summer and fall of 1980, it was performed at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles. The conditions that brought the play into being seemed unlikely to repeat themselves, and after 1980 the play settled into an honorable oblivion. Now another bitterly-debated war has brought it back.

Our text is composed entirely from the historical record, culled from the widest array of archival materials: press reports, Senate debates and hearings, court-martial transcripts, personal correspondence and autobiographies, popular humor, army marching songs, political pamphlets, and more. We have done much cutting and shaping, but the only language that is ours is the occasional line for continuity. Even our title comes from a 1900 magazine editorial. As the saying goes, you can't make these things up. We have been asked why we wrote a play and not an historical narrative. We made the play with the conviction that theater is an ideal medium through which to capture the  myriad individual choices that comprise "history." We wanted to convey the experience of the intentions, appetites, arguments, fantasies, bargains,  accidents, and blunders that combine to become the historical record, in effect, a national "fate."