The Lost Tribe of Coney Island

I just finished The Lost Tribe of Coney Island by Claire Prentice. It seems that there have been a few changes over the past 100 years in the U.S. We still like invading countries because we don’t think that the natives can run things for themselves, but we don’t bring back those natives and exhibit them alongside other “freaks” in amusement parks. This may be because we now have television and YouTube rather than because we have evolved in the moral department…

The specific natives in Prentice’s book are a group of Igorrotes, headhunting, dog-eating, g-string-wearing people from the Philippines, an American territory at the time. They are brought to Coney Island by a medical doctor, Truman Hunt, who cheats the Igorrotes out of their pay and spends all of the cash on fine living and booze. He would fit right into any subprime mortgage story!

Who started this deplorable practice of exhibiting exotic foreigners? Our federal government:

In 1904, the American government spent $1.5 million taking thirteen hundred Filipinos from a dozen different tribes to the St. Louis Exposition. The Philippine Reservation became one of the most popular features of the fair, and the Igorrotes drew the largest crowds of all. By displaying the tribespeople in this manner, the US government hoped to gain popular support for its occupation of the Philippines by showing the American public that the Filipinos were innocents, a people far from ready for self-government, and in need of paternalistic American protection.

Hunt brought his tribe first to Coney Island, which in those pre-TV days was a more important source of entertainment for New Yorkers than today:

Luna Park occupied thirty-eight acres and operated like a self-contained town, employing more than a thousand people and housing its own telegraph office and long-distance telephone service. Dubbed an “electric Eden,” it was a dream world lit by one million tiny electric lightbulbs (the electric bill was four thousand dollars a week1) and filled with domes, spires, minarets, lagoons, colonnades, and castles. In the park grounds, Thompson and Dundy staged dramatic dioramas of real and imagined events like The War of the Worlds, The Kansas Cyclone, and The Fall of Port Arthur. They were designed to take advantage of the public’s fascination with wars, disasters, and distant lands and people at a time when newspapers carried few photographs.

Luna Park occupied thirty-eight acres and operated like a self-contained town, employing more than a thousand people and housing its own telegraph office and long-distance telephone service. Dubbed an “electric Eden,” it was a dream world lit by one million tiny electric lightbulbs (the electric bill was four thousand dollars a week1) and filled with domes, spires, minarets, lagoons, colonnades, and castles. In the park grounds, Thompson and Dundy staged dramatic dioramas of real and imagined events like The War of the Worlds, The Kansas Cyclone, and The Fall of Port Arthur. They were designed to take advantage of the public’s fascination with wars, disasters, and distant lands and people at a time when newspapers carried few photographs.

Dr. Hunt was married three times. The first wife died, leaving him with a daughter whom he entrusted to relatives and almost never saw. He married a second wife, a trained nurse from Germany, in the Philippines, but they quarreled and he abandoned her with an infant son. Without going to the trouble of divorcing the second wife he married a girl he met at the St. Louis fair:

She had been just seventeen, less than half his age, when they met in St. Louis the previous year. She was a girl just out of school, and she was named Sara. Like thousands of young women and men, Sara had traveled to St. Louis to find work and excitement at the fair. She had left her widowed father, her brother, and her five sisters behind in her childhood home in Louisville, Kentucky, in the hope of making a new life for herself. She would get her dream, though she could hardly have imagined how her life would turn out. Truman had given her a job as his stenographer in the Igorrote Village. They married a few short months later, just days before Truman left America for the Philippines. On her wedding day she took new Christian and middle names to go with her new surname. From now on Sara A. Gallagher was Sallie G. Hunt.

Although he was pursued and prosecuted for some of his crimes against the Filipinos, Dr. Hunt was not charged with bigamy. The second wife was eventually able to obtain an uncontested divorce from Hunt on the grounds on adultery (i.e., marrying and living with another woman!).

How was marriage different back then? With both communication and travel being expensive and slow, Prentice describes couples being apart for many months or even years with just a few letters exchanged.

Why did the good doctor go bad?

McIntyre [a federal official] had come across men like Truman Hunt before. He had been stationed in the Philippines long enough to see that in the climate of upheaval and lawlessness that prevailed in the new colony at the turn of the century, even honest men had been known to commit dishonest acts. Embezzlement, theft, drunkenness, gambling, exploitation of the tribespeople, and licentious association with native women were among the vices that thrived among the islands’ new American populace. An early Report of the Philippine Commission noted, “Many [men] leave the United States honest, but with the weakening of the restraints of home associations and with the anxious desire to make so long a trip result successfully in a pecuniary advantage, demoralization and dishonesty are much more likely to follow than at home.

Dr. Hunt was eventually pursued by the federal government for cheating the Bontoc Igorrotes but they didn’t have full-time U.S. Attorneys in every state and a convenient menu of federal crimes for which he could be charged in a federal court. The Feds had to hire a private lawyer to prosecute Hunt and it had to be done under state law and in state court, where the judges were just as likely to defer to local Elks Lodge members as to the awesome majesty of the federal government:

[Federal agent] Barker had brought with him Schneidewind and an attorney named Louis J. Blum, whom he had hired on behalf of the government to prosecute Truman. Blum ran the respected Chicago law firm Blum and Blum with his brother; the Blums were both bachelors who still lived at home with their Jewish German mother. Louis Blum was fifty pounds overweight, something he put down to his mother’s delicious home cooking.

Julio, Maria, Feloa, Dengay, and Tainan were staying on to act as witnesses in Truman’s prosecution. The others would take the train from Chicago to San Francisco, where they would board a ship to Manila. Judge Bethea had ruled that any of them who wished to stay could, but the tribespeople had had enough of their American adventure.

FOR SEVEN WEEKS, Blum and Barker worked tirelessly to build a case against Truman while the showman raged, drank, and grumbled his way around Chicago, telling anyone who would listen that he was the victim of a conspiracy that went all the way to the top of the US government. Finally, on September 4, 1906, Truman was arrested for embezzlement and taken before Justice Wolff. Wolff found in favor of the Filipinos and Truman was taken to the county jail.

Blum, who had agreed with the government to prosecute all the cases against Truman for a flat fee of five hundred dollars,8 had learned that Truman had already paid Funk more than seven hundred dollars.9 For that money she was presumably prepared to do whatever it took to keep him at liberty.

The cost of securing an indictment in Memphis was around $120.19 On top of that, there would be the expense involved in taking Truman, under guard, to Memphis. The government had already spent $4,193 on deporting the Igorrotes who had sailed for the Philippines in July. Added to that would be the legal and detectives’ fees, Barker’s time, and the cost of travel, food, and accommodations for the Igorrotes and all other witnesses. Barker knew the bureau chief was eager to keep further costs to a minimum, and had been relieved when McIntyre had agreed to pursue a prosecution in Memphis. Had Pinkerton only done what he was assigned to do and kept Truman in his sights, the showman would be in Memphis by now awaiting trial.

Barker felt sorry for the savage. The Igorrotes were good, honest people whose straightforward worldview and complete lack of cunning made them pathetically vulnerable to attack in the rough and tumble of the courtroom.

Barker and Blum turned to each other, speechless. This was an astounding verdict in favor of the pagan Filipino tribespeople from the southern, all-white, Christian jury [in Memphis]. … Truman’s sentence was set at eleven months and twenty-nine days to be served in the Shelby County workhouse.

Truman did serve a few months in jail but his connections with some local good ol’ boys enabled him to get a new trial from the judge and immunity from being extradited to Louisiana where the feds could have prosecuted him for some of his thefts from the Filipinos that had occurred in New Orleans. The Feds eventually got tired of the expense of chasing after Truman.

What about the Igorrotes?

Two and a half months had passed since the other members of Truman’s original group had set sail for Manila. After four hundred and sixty days in the United States, twelve thousand miles by train and sea on the outward journey alone, and thousands of tribal performances before millions of Americans in fifty towns and cities, their financial rewards came to just thirty dollars and eighty-five cents each.

Before he left Coney Island, Chief Fomoaley shared his impressions with a journalist. “I have seen many wonders [in America], but we will not bring any of them home to Bontoc. We do not want them there. We have the great sun and moon to light us; what do we want of your little suns [electric lighting]? The houses that fly like birds [trains and cars] would be no good to us, because we do not want to leave Bontoc. When we go home there, we will stay, for it is the best place in all the world

And when did we finally loosen our grasp on the Philippines?

The debate over America’s involvement in the Philippines and the rights of Filipinos to rule their own country reached a milestone with the passing of the Jones Act of 1916, which formally declared the US government’s commitment to Philippine independence. But another three decades passed before the issue was finally resolved: on July 4, 1946, America handed sovereignty of the islands back to the Philippine people with the signing of the Treaty of Manila. In the eyes of many Filipinos, the Americans had done nothing but harm; others celebrated the introduction of public education and widespread political elections.

More: Read the book, for which Prentice deserves tremendous credit due to her comprehensive research and evocative writing.