The "Makiling Echo": the multiple functions of a staff magazine in the American tropical empire of the early twentieth century

Abstract

In an essay outlining the world of staff magazines in the early twentieth century United Kingdom, Alastair Black argues for their usefulness in shedding light on a whole range of historical topics including, among others, the “workplace; social class; leisure; gender; authorship; publishing” and, in his own case, information management. Ironically, he also notes that they are very much understudied. In this article I take up Black’s call to study staff magazines, but in a context radically different; namely, the Philippines during the period of American colonization and focusing on just one example, the "Makiling Echo", the staff magazine for the Bureau of Forestry between the years 1921 and 1937.

More specifically, my aim is to take up Black’s call for further study of what he suggests was an important medium of communication in the early 20th century by uncovering the forces or concerns that established the conditions of existence of one particular example of the genre, as well as the particular functions it was called on to perform. The nature of these functions in the case of the Echo may be traced to two sets of rather distinct concerns.

The first of these was to act as a medium of communication between staff members. The Bureau of Forestry employees worked in small scattered groups in rough terrain with very rudimentary transportation infrastructure. Furthermore, the early days of the Bureau’s history saw a management style that was overly centralized and authoritarian and which, by the 1920s, had created an...