32 numbered mimeographed pages, with no title page or colophon.
Lyrics for 30 songs. Possibly the only existing copy. WorldCat locates only copies of the “Wallow” banquet songbooks for 1913 , 1933 and 1934.
The Military Order of the Carabao was formed by US officers who fought the so-called Philippine “insurrection” of Emilio Aguinaldo, the failed Filipino movement for independence after the Spanish-American War. It was characterized at the start by racist antipathy to the Filipinos after mutually-brutal four years of rebellion and counter-insurgency.
Annual reunion banquets, called “Wallows”, were marked by boisterous singing of camp ditties, led by “Damn, the Insurrectos” (originally “Damn the Filipinos”) which derided “cross-eyed Kakiack Ladrones”, who should be “civilized” with a “Krag” rifle. Reports of the 1913 Wallow so angered President Woodrow Wilson that he withdrew his name from honorary membership. This did nothing to deter Cabinet officers, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Generals and Admirals from attending successive Wallows, despite the convivial singing with lyrics of racist profanity and outright opposition to the American policy of eventual Philippine independence. This rare copy, which can only be dated by the song “Carabaos of 1927”, includes “Damn the Insurrectos”, unchanged, except for “cross-eyed” being replaced by “pock-marked”, and with more old and new songs that lament the twilight of colonialism, with required kow-towing to Filipino officials, once obsequious servants, who now had to be respectfully treated as “little Brown Brothers”. The racist lyrics eventually disappeared as the Washington Wallows continued through World War II to the Vietnam War and beyond, when the banquets became elite Washington black-tie social affairs that attracted the highest officials of the American Government.