Chapter 4
“We come not to make war upon the Philippines, but to protect them in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.”1
—PRESIDENT WILLIAM MCKINLEY, 1899
“The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, fuck all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands.”2
—ROBERT AUSTILL, SOLDIER IN THE PHILIPPINES, 1902
Textbooks present the debate over whether the United States would keep the Philippines as a titanic battle between imperialists and anti-imperialists. The anti-imperialist writings of Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie give the impression that the United States was doing something new, that up to that point the country did not have a tradition of holding alien peoples as colonial subjects. But America already had a colonial policy. In 1832—when the United States government controlled only a small portion of the continent—the Supreme Court had designated White Christian males as “guardians” of their Indian “wards.” As Professor Walter Williams writes in the Journal of American History article “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation”:
The imperialists believed that imperialism abroad was similar to past United States expansion over North America. The precedents to govern colonial subjects were clear and exact, based on the long road from independence to wardships for American Indians. There was an almost solid consensus among white Americans of the time that expansion over Indians was unquestionably right. White Americans generally did not believe that their past was criminal, they accepted the rightness of their actions in the Philippines. To admit doubt would have undercut the whole history of the nation.3
“Governing the Philippines is not a sign of a new policy, but the enlargement of a policy long pursued, wrote Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, later president of the American Historical Association and the editor of American Political Science Magazine.”4 The Atlantic Monthlyconcluded that “the question is not whether we shall enter upon a career of colonization or not, but whether we shall shift into other channels the colonization which has lasted as long as our national existence.”5 Senator Orville Platt called westward Pacific expansion “the law of our national growth… the great law of our racial development.”6 As Theodore Roosevelt had written in the third volume of his Winning of the West series: “Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples.”7
Though the American Anti-Imperialist League—newly founded to oppose the annexation of the Philippines—threatened to gather ten million protests, “the petition drive died out at a miserable five thousand signatures.”8 The Baltimore American concluded, “It is the same old law of the survival of the fittest. The weak must bend to the strong and today the American race is the sturdiest, the noblest on earth.”9
One of the most famous stories about McKinley is how the president confessed to a visiting delegation of Methodist ministers that he fell to his knees and prayed for enlightenment and that God told him it was his duty to uplift, civilize, and Christianize the Filipinos. The story might not be true, but it captures the benevolent intentions that McKinley injected into U.S. foreign policy. McKinley understood that to his electorate, imperialism was a dirty word, and so he made Americans believe that their nation’s boldly imperial moves were instead efforts of great compassion and sacrifice. If the average American felt pity for Others, he had a Christian duty to help.
The Senate debate over retention of the Philippines was a clash between young bucks and old fogies. The American Anti-Imperialist League’s president was over eighty years old; Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts was seventy-two; Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain were comparative youngsters at sixty-three years of age. In contrast, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was forty-eight and Theodore Roosevelt was forty. Thirty-six-year-old Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana exclaimed, “The millions of young Americans with a virile manhood unequalled in the world will not admit or submit to the proposition that their flag is not to fly in the midst of the swiftly coming world events, so vast that all history have been but preparation for them.”10
The British author Rudyard Kipling penned the poem “The White Man’s Burden” to urge the senators to emulate their Anglo-Saxon brethren. The subtitle was “The United States and the Philippine Islands.”
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
. . . . . . .
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!11
On Admiral Dewey’s orders, two American Navy men—W. B. Wilcox and L. R. Sargent—conducted a fact-finding mission on the Philippine island of Luzon from October 8 to November 20, 1898. Wilcox and Sargent documented a fully functioning Filipino government that was efficiently administering justice through its courts, keeping the peace, providing police protection, holding elections, and carrying out the consent of the governed. The two Americans recalled the moving, patriotic speech of a Philippines government official who promised that “every man, woman, and child stood ready to take up arms to defend their newly won liberty and to resist with the last drop of their blood the attempt of any nation whatever to bring them back to their former state of dependence.”12 When the burden-bearing men in the War Department realized Dewey’s report had documented Aguinaldo’s functioning democracy, they buried it.13
President McKinley imagined all would be well when the Pacific Negroes submitted and accepted America’s kindness. On December 21, he instructed the U.S. military to act with benevolent intentions:
It should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them, in every possible way, that full measure of individual rights which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.14
On February 4, 1899, the U.S. military governor of the Philippines—General Elwell Otis—suddenly ordered U.S. lines to be extended out from Manila into Philippines army territory and ordered sentries to fire on Filipino “intruders.” That evening, Private William Grayson and Private Orville Miller were on guard duty. Grayson peered into the darkness and saw four Filipinos who were later found to be drunk and unarmed. Grayson yelled, “Halt!” A Filipino shouted back, “Halto!” Grayson recalled, “Well I thought the best thing to do was to shoot him. He dropped. Then two Filipinos sprang out of the gateway about 15 feet from us. I called ‘Halt’ and Miller fired and dropped one. Well I think I got my second Filipino that time. We retreated to where six other fellows were and I said, ‘Line up fellows… the niggers are in here all through these yards.’ ”15
All that had occurred was that four inebriated Filipinos lay dead. The army could have treated this as a minor event, but back at headquarters, General Robert Hughes ran up to General Otis and exclaimed, “The thing is on!”16 Colonel Frederick Funston was asleep when an aide startled him awake: “Come on out here, Colonel, the ball has begun.”17 U.S. rifles crackled and cannons roared all along the ten-mile-long front separating American and Filipino forces. An Englishman who observed the coordinated American attack noted skeptically, “If the Filipinos were aggressors, it is very remarkable that the American troops should have been so well prepared for an unseen event as to be able to immediately and simultaneously attack, in full force, all the native outposts for miles around the capital.”18
U.S. forces killed more than three thousand Filipino freedom fighters in twenty-four hours. Photos of Filipino corpses heaped in American-dug ditches recalled the U.S. Army’s burial scene at Wounded Knee. In the annals of warfare, few remember that more Filipinos died defending their country in that first day’s storm than Americans died storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in World War II.
Two days later, on February 6, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War, by one vote more than the required two-thirds majority. Reflected Colorado’s Senator Thomas Patterson, “Senators who had stood against the treaty, incensed by what they were led to believe was a wanton, deliberate, and unprovoked assault upon the American Army by Aguinaldo’s forces, changed their purposes and voted for ratification.”19 The American public learned that the treaty called for the United States to purchase the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars, seemingly a good deal at two dollars per Pacific Negro. Yet as Admiral Dewey later observed, “We were far from being in possession of the property which we had bought…. After paying twenty million for the islands, we must establish our authority by force against the very people whom we sought to benefit.”20
Dead Filipino soldiers in a U.S. Army ditch, the day after the Americans’ surprise attack ignited hostility, February 5, 1899. The ditch was circular and many more bodies lay outside the frame. Theodore Roosevelt saw an exact parallel between the Filipinos and the Apaches and the Sioux. (National Archives)
As with Baghdad more than a century later, Americans assumed that the fall of a capital meant control of the country. The author Henry Adams wrote Theodore Roosevelt to express his alarm: “I turn green in bed at night if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines [where] we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.”21
But challenging as the task appeared, the Americans had useful experience. The U.S. Army had waged race war in the American West, shooting civilians, executing prisoners, raping women, torturing captives, looting and burning villages, and herding the defeated into concentration camps. Now, it was assumed, they would chew through the preindustrialized, agricultural Philippines.
As Richard Welch Jr. writes of U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, “They were determined to prove their manhood by ‘shooting niggers.’ Removed from the inhibitions of small-town American folkways, they celebrated by burning barrios of nipa huts; stimulated with the instant authority granted by a uniform and a rifle, they saw civilians as inferior and short… as less than human.”22 The American journalist H. L. Wells observed in the New-York Evening Post: “There is no question that our men do ‘shoot niggers’ somewhat in the sporting spirit.”23
The U.S. Army’s attack on the village of Malabon was one of the first battles. A soldier wrote home: “Brutality began right off. At Malabon three women were raped by the soldiers…. Morals became awfully bad. Vino drinking and whiskey guzzling got the upper hand of benevolent assimilation.”24
The third U.S. military governor of the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur,25 later justified these actions in testimony in front of the U.S. Senate:
Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.
As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific—that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race—thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man.26
When General MacArthur referred to Americans as descendants of the Aryan who were now using the U.S. military to expand back to the race cradle, no senator asked for clarification.
Early in the war, Filipinos shot and cut open the stomach of a U.S. soldier. General Loyd Wheaton ordered a massacre of civilians in retaliation. In a letter home, a soldier from Kingston, New York, recalled, “Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women, and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger.”27 F. A. Blake of the American Red Cross visited the Philippines and reported, “American soldiers are determined to kill every Filipino in sight.”28 And there was “fun” to be had with the women: Captain Fred McDonald ordered every native killed in the hamlet of LaNog, save a beautiful mestizo mother, whom the officers repeatedly raped, before turning her over to enlisted men.
General Arthur MacArthur, the third military governor of the Philippines and father of General Douglas MacArthur. In Senate testimony, General MacArther portrayed the U.S. Army’s westward expansion to the Philippines as in the tradition of America’s Aryan ancestors. (The U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center)
Typically, when the U.S. Army arrived, soldiers rounded up the mayor, town officials, priests, and any other potential sources of information. “Water detail!” an officer would bark, and up came the torturers with their black tools. In the Philippines conflict, waterboarding was known as the “water cure.” Former first lieutenant Grover Flint of the 35th Infantry served in the Philippines from November 1899 to April 1901 and later described the water cure to a Senate panel:
U.S. soldiers torturing a Filipino, 1901. When the U.S. military waterboarded Filipinos, the practice was accepted. When the Japanese later waterboarded U.S. personnel in World War II, America tried them for war crimes. (Ohio State University)
A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin… is simply thrust into his jaws and his jaws are thrust back, and, if possible, a wood log or stone is put under… his neck, so he can be held firmly… in the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out—I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to…. Well, I know that in a great many cases, in almost every case, the men have been a little roughly handled; they were rolled aside rudely, so that water was expelled. A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but he can not drown.29
A popular U.S. Army marching song, “The Water Cure,” gleefully described the process:
Get the good old syringe boys and fill it to the brim.
We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him.
Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Chorus:
Hurray. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurray. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
Shove in the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
We’ve come across the bounding main to kindly spread around
Sweet liberty whenever there are rebels to be found.
So hurry with the syringe boys. We’ve got him down and bound.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Oh pump it in him till he swells like a toy balloon.
The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon.
But we’ll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Keep the piston going boys and let the banner wave.
The banner that floats proudly o’er the noble and the brave.
Keep on till the squirt gun breaks or he explodes the slave.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Chorus:
Hurrah. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
We’ve got him down and bound, so let’s fill him full of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.30
Ingenious Yankees employed a variety of other gruesome tortures, including flogging, scorching bound prisoners over open fires, and the “rope cure” (hanging trussed prisoners from the ceiling). A private from Utah summed things up in a letter home to his folks: “No cruelty is too severe for these brainless monkeys, who can appreciate no sense of honor, kindness or justice.”31 Roosevelt stiffened American resolve in the Philippines with a speech he called “The Strenuous Life”:
We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines…. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their willingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation.32
Veteran soldiers told newspaper reporters, “The country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like Indians,” and that it was necessary “to blow every nigger into a nigger heaven.”33 The Medal of Honor recipient Frederick Funston executed POWs, tortured civilians, and raped women and then stoutly defended these tactics: “I am afraid some people at home will lie awake nights worrying about the ethics of this war, thinking that our enemy is fighting for the right of self-government…. They are, as a rule, an illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency.”34
In war, many more combatants typically are injured rather than killed—the ratio from the U.S. Civil War and other conflicts was five to one. But a summary of Filipinos dead from February through July of 1899 found only 3,297 wounded to 14,643 killed, a ratio of one to four35; U.S. soldiers were killing four times more Filipinos than injuring them. General MacArthur explained: “Men of Anglo-Saxon stock do not succumb as easily to wounds as do men of ‘inferior races.’ ”36
IN A DECEMBER 1899 essay called “Expansion and Peace,” Teddy explained that “peace may come only through war.”37 But while Americans at home were led to believe that civilization was following the sun, the reality in the Philippines was different, as Leon Wolff recalls in Little Brown Brother: “New-comers from the States were astonished at the discrepancy between fact and fable. They had read and had been told that the fighting was over except for minor police actions. Instead they found that the ‘quiet countryside’ meant constant scouting parties, petty engagements, ambushes, and tense garrison duties in hundreds of far-flung villages.”38 Nevertheless, one year into a race war that the army had assumed would be a cinch, the U.S. military governor-general, Otis, told reporters: “I have held that opinion for some time that the thing is entirely over. I cannot see where it is possible for the guerillas to effect any reorganization, concentrate any force or accomplish anything serious.”39 On the day Otis spoke those words, Filipino freedom fighters killed nineteen U.S. soldiers in a fierce battle.
When he retired, the war “won,” Otis made a victory lap of parades and banquets across the nation. In an interview with the popular Frank Leslie’s Weekly, Otis insisted, “The war is already over. The insurrection ended some months ago, and all we have to do now is to protect the Filipinos against themselves and to give protection to those natives who are begging for it.”40 In Washington, President McKinley congratulated Otis on his victory. As more soldiers lost their lives in 1900 than the year before, a joint session of Congress cheered a new American hero.
AFTER MORE THAN A year of bloody fighting, the new American military governor, Arthur MacArthur, warned that the war was not winding down and that the guerilla warfare was intensifying. MacArthur concluded that the freedom fighters could resist only if civilians supported them, so like the Spanish had done in Cuba, he decided to “concentrate” the civilian population to better hunt the guerillas. The U.S. Army would post notices that in a few days, all civilians within a designated zone were to report to a concentration camp. The people could bring what they could carry; the remainder of their possessions were to be abandoned.
Inside the fetid and poorly supplied camps, many uprooted civilians died. Outside the camps, U.S. troops shot captured freedom fighters as common criminals because MacArthur had stripped them of their prisoner-of-war status. Officers set the example. General Frederick Funston ordered his regiment to take no prisoners, and he bragged to reporters that he had personally strung up thirty-five civilians. Major Edwin Glenn chimed in that he had forced forty-seven prisoners to kneel before him and repent their sins before they were bayoneted to death. Writing home, Private Clarence Clowe reported:
At any time I am liable to be called upon to go out and bind and gag helpless prisoners, to strike them in the face, to knock them down when so bound, to bear them away from wife and children, at their very door, who are shrieking pitifully the while, or kneeling and kissing the hands of our officers, imploring mercy from those who seem not to know what it is, and then, with a crowd of soldiers, hold our helpless victim head downward in a tub of water in his own yard, bind him hand and foot, attaching ropes to head and feet, and then lowering him into the depths of a well of water till life is well-nigh choked out, and the bitterness of a death is tasted, and our poor, gasping victims ask us for the poor boon of being finished off, in mercy to themselves.41
The president ruled the Philippines through his War Department, whose top man in the islands was the U.S. military governor of the Philippines, now MacArthur. In 1900, an election year, McKinley told voters that since the Filipino insurrection had been defeated it was safe to transfer power from a “military government” to a U.S. “civil government.” It was critical that McKinley select just the right poster boy to lead the new civil government. On a cold January day in 1900, it was Judge William Howard Taft who stood in front of the president in his Executive Mansion office. Back in 1876, President Ulysses Grant had summoned Judge Alphonso Taft as his secretary of war, charged with assimilating the Indians at the height of the Indian Wars. Now President McKinley was summoning Alphonso’s son to be the War Department’s benevolent assimilator of the Pacific Negroes.
Taft had no knowledge of the Philippines beyond that of any Cincinnatian who read the news. But when he learned what was on the president’s mind, Taft immediately parroted the McKinley administration’s rationale: that the Filipinos were incapable of ruling themselves, that America had to exert itself to help its Pacific wards, and that America was “doing them great good” by building them a nation. McKinley subsequently announced the formation of the Taft Commission to study conditions in the Philippines, with Big Bill the lead commissioner.
For forty-nine days in the spring of 1900, Commissioner Taft steamed across the wide Pacific, dreaming of how he would mold the Pacific Negroes into a “self-governing people” and build them a shiny new nation. Big Bill imagined that if he and the other nation builders demonstrated their benevolent intentions, the Filipinos would naturally want to become just like their American masters. He called this his “policy of attraction.” Wrote Taft: “We expect to do considerable entertaining and especially of Filipinos, both ladies and gentlemen. We are advised that the army has alienated a good many of our Filipino friends… and given them the impression… that they regard the Filipino ladies and men as ‘niggers’ and as not fit to be associated with. We propose, so far as we are able, to banish this idea from their mind.”42
The U.S. commissioner to the Philippines, William Howard Taft, and Mrs. Helen “Nellie” Taft en route to Manila, 1900. On this trip Taft decided to implement a “policy of attraction.” He reasoned that if U.S. colonial rulers were benevolent, the Filipinos would over time desire to be like Americans. (Library of Congress)
The McKinley administration had so successfully hidden the military reality that even the commission was unaware of the intensity of the fighting and that hundreds of thousands of Filipinos lay rotting in their early graves. When he sailed into Manila Bay on June 3, 1900, Commissioner Taft noted in surprise, “The populace that we expected to welcome us was not there.”43 After observing Big Bill’s arrival, an American newspaperman wrote, “We ought to ship this splendid fellow back. It’s a shame to spoil his illusion that folks the world over are just like the folks he knows out in Ohio.”44
PERHAPS WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT’S most famous utterance is that the Filipinos were his “little brown brothers.” Yet immediately upon his arrival, Commissioner Taft cabled opinions with little brotherly love: “The population of the islands is made up of a vast mass of ignorant, superstitious people, well-intentioned, lighthearted, temperate, somewhat cruel, domestic and fond of their families, and deeply wedded to the Catholic Church…. These people are the greatest liars it has been my fortune to meet, in many respects nothing but grown up children…. They need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.”45
With the presidential election just months away, Taft’s cables reinforced the president’s claims: “The backbone of the revolt as a political war is broken.”46 Yet while Taft wrote superbly optimistic reports, General MacArthur described a depressing quagmire where the U.S. Army controlled only 117 square miles out of a total of 116,000 square miles, a hostile country where Americans could not venture out alone, and a shell-shocked populace whose hatred for their oppressors grew each day.
MCKINLEY NEEDED TO PICK a running mate for the 1900 election and Teddy got the job. For two decades as a famous author, Roosevelt had urged America to follow the sun, and in the case of America’s latest expansion, he had toed the administration’s line. “The insurrection in the Philippine Islands has been overcome,” he boldly declared to the New York State Republican Party in April of 1900.47 Impressed with Rough Rider Teddy’s magnetism and public relations, the Republican Party nominated the forty-one-year-old for vice president. The campaign’s slogan was “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake.”
Map of the Orient showing Manila as the geographical center of the Oriental Commercial Field. Republican National Committee presidential campaign advertisement, published in Harper’s Weekly, July 28, 1900. In the 1900 presidential campaign, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt portrayed the expensive military acquisition of the Philippines as a good investment for America’s trading future in Asia, a claim that rested upon the voting public’s ignorance of Asian geography. Roosevelt later realized that taking the Philippines was a mistake.
On the campaign trail, Roosevelt demonstrated little knowledge regarding the Philippines but great skill in framing the debate in terms of the sun-following imperative. “It is unthinkable,” he proclaimed, “that the United States would abandon the Philippines to their own tribes. To grant self-government… under Aguinaldo would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief.”48
“The Administration’s Promises Have Been Kept” (Republican campaign poster, 1900). The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket portrayed the U.S. military’s invasions as benevolent: “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake.” This humanitarian justification for military action still resonates with the American public.
The Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, tried to paint American activity in the Philippines as imperialistic, but to no avail. On election day, November 6, 1900, voters handed the Republicans their biggest victory since Ulysses Grant’s triumph in 1872. Upon hearing of the result, Robert Austill, a soldier in the Philippines, concluded: “The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, fuck all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands.”49 With the contest now decided, McKinley presented a whopping request of $400 million for the War Department. Some wondered why, if the islands were, as McKinley and Roosevelt claimed, becoming peaceful, so much more money was necessary. In the course of hearings on the War Department appropriations, General MacArthur’s pessimistic military assessment came to light. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican forlornly asked, “Why did all this truth telling become available only after the election?”50
ON MARCH 23, 1901, the U.S. Army captured President Aguinaldo in his mountain lair. After two months in General MacArthur’s custody in Manila, the Philippines’ founding father declared, “There has been enough blood, enough tears, enough desolation…. I cannot refuse to heed the voice of a people longing for peace… by acknowledging and accepting the sovereignty of the United States throughout the Philippine Archipelago…. I believe that I am serving thee, my beloved country.”51 The New York Times—which had pilloried Aguinaldo as a lying thief—now described America’s captive as “a warm, friendly, intelligent, trustworthy, and reasonable person—a man of honor with the best interest of his countrymen at heart.”52
President McKinley made the most of the news with a victory lap across the country to “heal the sharp divisions” created by the conflict. “At Harvard University, he called upon Americans to forget their past differences over the Philippines and unite in peace to carry out the task assigned to them by Providence: to bring the benefits of American civilization to the Filipinos.” The president’s tour ended in San Francisco. As Stuart Creighton Miller writes in Benevolent Assimilation: “Climbing a nearby sand dune, McKinley gazed at the Pacific in the manner of the conquistador Balboa and claimed that vast ocean for American freedom.”53
ON JULY 4, 1901, the United States pulled off one of the most remarkable shell games in colonial history. Textbooks recall that on that day the U.S. ended “military government” in the Philippines and initiated “civil government.” In a flowery ceremony in Manila, a mostly White Christian audience applauded as General MacArthur—the outgoing military governor—handed over the reins to William Howard Taft, the incoming civil governor. Before this, the majority of the War Department’s men, supplies, and money had flowed to the military in the Philippines, while few men and much less money went to the civil arm. After the ceremony, it would be exactly the same. Governor Taft’s government was “a military regime under a civil name.”54
Governor Taft lived in the Malacañang Palace, the elegant whitewashed home of the Spanish governors. His wife, Helen, wrote, “We are really so grand now that it will be hard to descend to common doings. We have five carriages and two smaller vehicles, and fourteen ponies, a steam launch and dear knows how many servants.”55
The governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft, on a carabao. Filipino farmers used carabaos as beasts of burden to plant and harvest rice, their main crop. U.S. military action reduced the population of carabaos by 90 percent, which contributed to mass hunger throughout the Philippines archipelago. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Outside Manila, the U.S. military was still herding civilians into concentration camps, vultures grew too fat to fly as they feasted on the corpses of dead Filipinos, torture was routine, and the smoke of burnt towns hung in the air. In Manila, Governor Taft met with Americans and those Filipinos who would collaborate with his rule, setting a pattern that would bedevil future U.S. nation builders from Saigon to Kabul. Taft’s correspondence reveals he had little respect for his collaborators—educated and wealthy Filipinos who spoke English and wore top hats—but for the fact that they scratched his back by telling him what he wanted to hear. In return, Taft funneled money and power to these elite few, cementing the oligarchy that still controls the Philippines.
Democracies usually build themselves up from the bottom—the masses that vote—and thus have a wide foundation. Taft tried to build from the top down, with the few elite that he nursed in his governmental kindergarten. He approved the formation of the Federal Party (Partido Federal), which was made up of his rich collaborator buddies and heralded by the McKinley administration as a democratic step forward, but Taft prevented the formation of competing parties. He allowed only 3 percent of the upper crust to vote, and those elections were only for lower-level offices; Americans held all the top posts. Explained Taft, “The masses are ignorant, credulous, and childlike [so] the electoral franchise must be much limited, because the large majority will not, for a long time, be capable of intelligently exercising it.”56 The Yale-educated governor never considered that Filipinos could master higher education like Whites; instead they would be processed through schools modeled on Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where good Blacks learned how to work with their hands and say “yes, sir” at every opportunity. Taft wrote privately, “In this system we must beware the possibility of overdoing the matter of higher education and unfitting the Filipino for practical work. We should heed the lesson taught us in our reconstruction period when we started to educate the negro.”57 Taft put out a call for American teachers to help build the nation and lavished U.S. taxpayer money on the building of schools. After just three months in the Philippines, one of the American teachers grew frustrated: “I find this work very monotonous, trying to teach these monkeys to talk.”58 A Radcliffe graduate looked on the bright side: “I suppose with patience and perseverance they will progress little by little until within two or three hundred years they may be quite Americanistic.”59
ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1901, Governor Taft got a new boss, as Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president after McKinley succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. Just two weeks into his presidency, Teddy was confronted with the nation’s worst military crisis since Custer’s Last Stand at Little Bighorn. U.S. soldiers had tried to benevolently assimilate the residents of Balangiga, a tiny fishing village on the island of Samar. On September 28, the villagers revolted and killed fifty-one Americans. An untested president awoke to headlines proclaiming the “Balangiga Massacre.”
General Jake Smith
General Smith ordered U.S. troops to kill all Filipino men over the age of ten: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
General Jake Smith was put in charge of disciplining Balangiga and the island of Samar. Smith had built his career over decades as an Indian hunter out West. On October 23, the U.S. Navy ship New York bobbed off the west coast of Samar. Major Littleton Waller, a battle-hardened marine who had fought in Asia, the Middle East, and Cuba, came aboard to receive his orders from Smith for the subjugation of the island. Smith ordered Waller, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”60
WALLER: “I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir.”
SMITH: “Ten years.”
WALLER: “Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?”
SMITH: “Yes.”61
Smith gave the entire population of Samar Island—two hundred fifty thousand people spread over five thousand square miles of inhospitable jungle—ten days to abandon their homes and enter U.S. concentration camps or be shot dead on sight. In field reports, Major Waller enumerated the many Filipino civilians he had slain. There were no American casualties.
Whispers about the orgies of violence in the Philippines gradually made their way back to the United States. Congressman Thomas Selby of Illinois asked, “What American ever dreamed that within four years… our generals in the Philippines would be following the notable and brutal methods of that Spanish dictator?”62 Added Congressman Joseph Sibley of Pennsylvania, “This is not civilization. This is barbarism.”63 In his 1901 Message to Congress, Roosevelt explained that the problem was simply that the Filipinos had not followed the sun:
The Philippines… are very rich tropical islands, inhabited by many varying tribes, representing widely different stages of progress towards civilization. Our earnest effort is to help these people upward along the stony and difficult path that leads to self-government. [Americans] are now successfully governing themselves, because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, toward this end. What has taken us thirty generations to achieve we cannot expect to see another race accomplish out of hand.64
Realizing that another brutal military campaign might create a backlash that could seriously damage his presidential chances in 1904, Roosevelt reined his army in, but it was too late: Congress was bestirred by soldiers’ letters and press reports so at odds with the president’s benevolent line.65 A January 15, 1902, New York Times headline was the first sign of potential trouble: “Senior Massachusetts Senator Wants to Question Gov. Taft About the Administration of the Islands.” Senator George Hoar, the article explained, “spoke at length regarding the unreliability of statements which have been made from time regarding the situation in the Philippines.”66 The Republican-controlled Senate was subsequently forced to hold hearings, an enormous threat to the accidental president, in office less than six months. Fortunately for Teddy, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the president’s best friend in the Senate, installed himself as chairman of the Philippine Investigation Committee. Lodge then chose Senator Albert Beveridge—famous for his eloquent speeches supporting Aryan expansion—to run the hearings and tamp down the noise.67 Relieved, Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “With the Philippines, I feel tolerably safe under your management.”68
The U.S. Senate’s hearings on the Philippines began on January 31, 1902. First up to be grilled about the unreliability of the administration’s statements was Governor Taft, who had authored so many of them. In almost two months of testimony, Taft hewed to the benevolent line, only once inadvertently straying to admit routine American torture: “That cruelties have been inflicted; that people have been shot when they ought not to have been; that there have been… individual instances of water cure, that torture which I believe involves pouring water down the throat so that the man swells and gets the impression that he is going to be suffocated and then tells what he knows… all these things are true.”69 A popular magazine called the slip “a most humiliating admission that should strike horror in the mind of every American.”70
Back in the White House, Roosevelt’s monocle must have fallen from his eye. Realizing his mistake, Taft repeated the benevolent intentions line: “It is my deliberate judgment that there never was a war conducted, whether against inferior races or not, in which there were more compassion and more restraint and more generosity, assuming that there was a war at all, than there have been in the Philippine Islands.”71
Unfortunately for Roosevelt, Taft was followed by an avalanche of embarrassing testimony that belied Teddy’s claims that the United States condemned torture and that it was done by only a few low-level, bad-apple soldiers. In one letter that surfaced, a soldier had written that he had personally waterboarded 160 Filipinos, of which 134 died.72 Other evidence made it undeniably clear that atrocity warfare was condoned and encouraged from the top. Suddenly confronted by an indignant press, Roosevelt rushed a memo to Lodge claiming his intolerance of uncivilized warfare. Teddy listed forty-four officers and soldiers who had been tried “for violation of orders forbidding cruelty, looting and like crimes.”73 Thirty-nine of these cases had resulted in convictions, but Senate investigators discovered that those convictions had mysteriously been reduced to “reprimands” and that these convicted felons were now commanding soldiers in the Philippines. One by one, most of Roosevelt’s assertions to the Senate were proven untrue.
However, the truth made little difference. Americans so embraced the benevolent intentions myth that they ultimately could not accept the idea that their humanitarian military was capable of atrocities. In the hearings, Senator Joseph Rawlins of Utah asked General Robert Hughes if exterminating whole Filipino families was “within the ordinary rule of civilized warfare?” Replied General Hughes, “These people are not civilized.”74
There were a few who saw through this. Senator Edward Carmack of Tennessee, in a speech on the floor of the Senate, blamed the U.S. military’s bloodlust on Roosevelt, who habitually demeaned Filipinos as “savages,” “barbarians,” “a savage people,” “a wild and ignorant people,” “Apaches,” “Sioux,” and “Chinese Boxers.”75 On May 22, 1902, Senator Hoar assailed the president: “You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of peoples you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps…. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”76 The two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan declared himself disgusted: “The country must purge itself of the guilt of the Republican crimes against the innocent people of the Philippines!”77
Roosevelt told Americans not to expect much from those who hadn’t followed the sun: “The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art which our people have taught themselves by the labor of thousands of years, cannot be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging from conditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the dim years before history dawned.”78
On June 28, 1902, Senator Lodge ordered Senator Beveridge to adjourn the Philippines Investigation Committee. Beveridge did a cut-and-paste job on the final report, suppressing any slander contradicting American benevolence in the Philippines. On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt tried to make the Philippines conflict disappear into history with a wave of his hand, declaring that “the insurrection against the authority and sovereignty of the United States is now at an end, and peace has been established in all parts of the archipelago except in the country inhabited by the Moro tribes.”79Roosevelt’s claim did not impress the Filipino freedom fighters, who battled on. By then the war had cost American taxpayers more than six hundred million turn-of-the-twentieth-century dollars,80 4,234 Americans were dead, 2,818 had been wounded, and many soldiers who returned home would perish of related diseases and wounds.81 Most American history books claim that U.S. forces killed about twenty thousand freedom fighters and two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand Filipino civilians; other sources estimate that the U.S. military sent one million to three million to their early graves. Even with a lowball number, this represents serious slaughter: three hundred thousand Filipinos killed in forty-one months. The United States later fought World War II over a period of fifty-six months with approximately four hundred thousand American deaths. So Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, with their mechanized weaponry, killed about the same per month—seventy-two hundred—as American civilizers did in the Philippines.
And that was up until only 1902. At the moment President Roosevelt declared mission accomplished, his army was simultaneously launching a full-scale offensive near Zamboanga in the southern Philippines, where U.S. troops remain today.
FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS as a best-selling author, Roosevelt had euphemized the Aryan’s westering as civilized. Now, as president, his actions in the Philippines were seen by many as barbaric. The cover of a popular magazine depicted a U.S. Army officer supervising two soldiers as they waterboarded a barefoot Filipino prisoner thrown on the ground with his hands and feet bound. One soldier points a pistol at the Pacific Negro’s head and shoves a funnel into his mouth. Another soldier forces water into the victim from a U.S. Army pail. In the background a group of Europeans laugh mockingly, saying, “Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more.”
The New York Evening Journal featured an editorial cartoon of a U.S. Army firing squad executing blindfolded, barefoot Filipino boys. The caption read: “Kill Every One Over Ten—Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines.”
And one morning, Roosevelt awoke to an inconvenient story in the Washington Post about how the U.S. Army had systematically executed thirteen hundred Filipino prisoners of war in just one camp. The Americans had brought in a native priest to hear the condemned prisoners’ last confessions. U.S. soldiers marched the Filipino prisoners to the killing ground and, after making them dig their own graves, shot them in the head. The body of the priest swung from a noose overhead.
Life magazine, May 22, 1902. American soldiers waterboarding a Filipino. Europeans in the background gloat that Americans no longer hold the moral high ground: “Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more.”
Roosevelt, in a brilliant public-relations maneuver, decided to rescue his reputation as a civilized man by substituting pictures of American atrocities with imagery of Pacific Negroes being benevolently assimilated by Americans. Understanding that humanitarian U.S. voters still dimly perceived the distant islands, Roosevelt would recreate a mini Philippines in the middle of America.
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was the biggest international fair ever, double the size of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. (The fair’s official name was the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, celebrating President Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territory one hundred years earlier.) Almost ninety million people would view exhibits from forty-five countries. The fair was so huge that the 1904 Olympics, the first held in the United States, was staged in just one small part of the grounds. With government funds, Roosevelt commandeered the largest part of the fairgrounds to create a make-believe Philippines, where fairgoers would see benevolent assimilation come to life.
“Kill Everyone Over Ten.” A U.S. Army firing squad executing blindfolded, barefoot Filipino boys. “Criminals because they were born ten years before we took the Philippines.” ( New York Evening Journal, May 5, 1902)
Teddy cleverly distanced himself, declaring that he didn’t want to exploit the event for political purposes in an election year. Instead, he managed his race fair through Taft, by now his assistant president. Roosevelt called his zoo-like freak show the Philippines reservation. In case anyone didn’t grasp the significance of the name, it was located next to the Indian reservation.
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was the largest international fair to date, double the size of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The official name was the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. President Roosevelt portrayed President Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territory one hundred years earlier as similar to the recent acquisition of the Philippines. Roosevelt commandeered the largest part of the fairgrounds for his Philippines reservation, an election-year Potemkin Philippines, where fairgoers could see benevolent assimilation come to life. (Library of Congress)
Roosevelt had his minions search the wilds of the Philippines and ship twelve hundred Filipinos to St. Louis, where he presented them as creatures closer to monkeys than human beings. The Filipinos had no input into how their country was represented.
The fair’s chief of the Department of Anthropology was William McGee, who was also president of both the National Geographic Society and the American Anthropological Association. The esteemed anthropologist proclaimed that “white and strong are synonymous terms…. It is the duty of the strong man to subjugate lower nature, to extirpate the bad and cultivate the good among living things… and in all ways to enslave the world for the support of humanity and the increase of human intelligence.”82 To reinforce the idea that the uncivilized Filipinos were headed toward extinction, Smithsonian scientists named one of them “Missing Link.” Yet there was hope for some of Teddy’s Others; as the fair program noted, “scientists have declared that with the proper training they are susceptible of a high stage of development, and, unlike the American Indian, will accept rather than defy the advance of American civilization.”83
“Missing Link.” President Roosevelt presented Filipinos as monkey-men in need of American benevolence. (Library of Congress)
Smithsonian Institution scientists exhibited the Filipinos on a scale from barbaric to civilized. Loinclothed dog eaters in fenced-in enclosures squatted over a roasted canine. American observers quickly understood why such savages needed to be held in barbwired concentration camps. One fairgoer wrote his wife, “I went up to the Philippine village today and I saw the wild, barbaric Igorots, who eat dogs, and are so vicious that they are fenced in and guarded by a special constabulary…. They are the lowest type of civilization I ever saw and thirst for blood.”84 Farther on, visitors came upon the more reassuring scene of fresh-scrubbed Filipino children dressed in Western clothes reciting their lessons in a model American school. After that, fairgoers admired the most civilized of all: natty Filipino military men in shiny boots, smartly twirling their rifles, obeying the commands of a White American officer.
The official brochure of the Philippines reservation made the benevolent assimilation process clear. The cover featured a scary-looking savage in a bird-feather headdress. The back cover featured the end result of American uplift: a close-shaven Filipino standing ramrod-straight, dressed in his U.S. Army–supplied uniform.
As a keepsake souvenir to take home to the kids, fairgoers could purchase an “Album of Philippine Types.” Each Filipino type was represented by two photographs that looked like mug shots, which they were—Roosevelt’s scientists had searched Bilibid Prison in Manila to find “typical” Pacific Negroes. Fairgoers viewed more than one thousand photographs depicting a Philippines populated by robbers, murderers, and rapists.
Front and back covers of the official Philippines reservation pamphlet. The front features an uncivilized Filipino. The back features the end result of President Roosevelt’s benevolent assimilation. (National Archives)
The Philippines reservation was by far the most visited part of the St. Louis World’s Fair, with approximately 18.5 million visitors.85 (The population of the entire United States at that time was approximately 83 million.) Those who witnessed the display were some of America’s leading citizens, teachers, politicians, and businessmen, who then spread Teddy’s race message throughout the country’s institutions and across its kitchen tables: like Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, the Philippines would become Americanized and civilized. Two Christian missionaries wrote: “[The Philippines reservation] has strengthened our confidence in the wisdom of our government’s general policy respecting the Philippines and their people, and in the hopeful outlook for the Filipinos under American jurisdiction.”86 When Princess Alice visited the Philippines reservation on May 27, the press had a field day contrasting her civilized White Christian bearing with the uncivilized dog eaters.
When a delegation of leading Filipinos had met with Secretary of State Root to discuss the possibility that the Philippines might become an American state, Root had responded, “Statehood for Filipinos would add another serious problem to the one we have already. The Negroes are a cancer in our body politic, a source of constant difficulty, and we wish to avoid developing another such problem.”87 In 1904, as Teddy’s race fair reframed the debate about Pacific Negroes, candidate Roosevelt bragged to voters that the number of Negroes employed by the U.S. federal government, “which was insignificant even under McKinley, has been still further reduced.”88
Roosevelt celebrated his victory by taking his family on a luxury train trip to St. Louis two weeks after the election. The Roosevelts strolled through the Philippines reservation to see the Filipino monkey-men in need of U.S. help and came upon the model American school. Teddy watched with fascination as a classroom of smiling Filipino children welcomed him by singing, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Teddy flashed his famous smile and exclaimed, “It is wonderful. Such advancement and in so short a time!”89
“Crack archers of the Negrito village,” Philippines reservation pamphlet. President Roosevelt helped Americans imagine Filipinos as wild African-looking peoples in need of benevolent assimilation. (National Archives)