How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Yet the first full day of fighting revealed just how unbalanced things were. On February 5, the bloodiest battle of the war resulted in 238 U.S. casualties and thousands of Filipino casualties.19 The U.S. Army’s official report put the number at four thousand, though that was sheer guesswork.

  Weapons were part of the reason. Aguinaldo’s men had a few usable guns but little ammunition. A third of the troops surrounding Manila lacked rifles.20 One unit was armed with spears; another—facing off against the Utah Battery—had bows and arrows. And then there was the “battalion” composed of children instructed to throw stones at the enemy.

  A galling gun shortage would cripple the Philippine forces throughout the war. Aguinaldo’s men made do with whatever weapons they could smuggle from Asia (not many, given the U.S. blockade) or capture. They gathered tin cans that the U.S. Army had discarded and tried to convert them into cartridges.21 They melted church bells down for bullets,22 scraped the heads off matches for fulminate, and used tree resins for gunpowder. Later in the war, independence fighters sent pearl divers to scour the ocean floor for ammunition that the retreating Spaniards might have dropped.23

  But it was more than just arms. Warfare is, if not a science, then at least an art, requiring practice. U.S. soldiers were trained, and many were seasoned. Many of the generals who led them had fought in the Civil War or against Indians. In 1898, most were in their fifties or sixties.

  Not so on the Philippine side. As the colonized subjects of Spain, Filipinos had never had their own army. Many of those who had gained military experience in the 1896 revolt or the 1898 war had died, leaving what Aguinaldo called a “residual army,”24 a “motley crowd of crude recruits and volunteers.” Most were untrained even in basic firearms technique.

  And their leaders were astonishingly young. The “Father of the Philippine Army,” General Artemio Ricarte, was 32 in 1898. General Emilio Jacinto, regarded as the brains of the revolution, was 24. The other principal commanders were General Antonio Luna (32), General Mariano Noriel (34), General Miguel Malvar (33), General Gregorio del Pilar (23), and—the youngest—General Manuel Tinio (21).25 Tinio had dropped out of high school to join the revolution in 1896, and two years later he was a general. His aide-de-camp was 15.

  Aguinaldo himself was 29 in 1898. He lived until 1964.

  This hatchling army fared poorly against the armed forces of the United States. The war had begun in February 1899. In March, the United States seized the capital of the Philippine Republic,26 Malolos, at the cost of only a single fatality.27 Aguinaldo escaped and moved his government to San Isidro. When that fell, he moved it to Cabanatuan. Then to Tarlac, his fourth capital. Tarlac fell in November, ten months into the war. Aguinaldo fled to the mountains, refusing to tell even his field commanders his location.

  General Arthur MacArthur (father of the better-known Douglas MacArthur), who was commanding the U.S. forces, concluded that the war was over. There was simply “no organized insurgent force left to strike at.”28

  MacArthur was wrong, though. The following months saw engagements between the two sides double, then triple.29 What MacArthur had taken for the end of the war was instead the debut of a new strategy. Recognizing how badly he was outmatched, Aguinaldo had given up establishing capitals and fighting conventional battles. Instead, he’d ordered his followers to become guerrillas.

  It wasn’t a bad idea. If set-piece battles had exposed Aguinaldo’s weaknesses, guerrilla warfare played to his strengths: knowledge of the land and the popularity of his cause. “Insurrectos,” as they were called, could ambush U.S. patrols, hide their weapons, and then melt into the populace. They could draw on towns for food, shelter, and information, even when those towns were officially under U.S. control.

  One boy at the time remembered how women haggling in the marketplace would encode observations about U.S. troop size and movement into the mango and guava prices they demanded,30 which the fruit vendors would then convey to the guerrillas. He remembered how children seeing U.S. sentries approaching would send warnings by “accidentally” throwing balls into the guerrillas’ homes.

  All this required the support of the populace, which Aguinaldo was not above using force to ensure. But he didn’t need much compulsion in 1899. “I have been reluctantly compelled to believe,”31 MacArthur confessed, “that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo.”

  *

  Filipinos weren’t the constituency that Aguinaldo worried about, at least not at first. He worried about U.S. voters. As he saw it, the point of guerrilla warfare was not to defeat the U.S. Army—nobody thought he could do that—but to wear it down. If Aguinaldo could keep the fight alive through November, he hoped he might influence the 1900 presidential election.

  Filipinos couldn’t vote in that election, of course. But perhaps they could sway its outcome in other ways. McKinley was running again, this time with Roosevelt as his vice president, so there was little help to be got from the Republicans. Aguinaldo was more interested in McKinley’s Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who had run in 1896 and was also running again. Bryan sought to set the Philippines free.

  This was, from Aguinaldo’s perspective, a war for hearts and minds. He gambled that mainland voters were uneasy about being colonizers and that the sight of Filipinos dying for independence might make enough of an impression on them that the 1900 election would turn out differently from the one in 1896.

  Was there some deep-seated aversion to empire woven into the U.S. national character? Some lingering anti-imperialism held over from the Revolutionary War? Historians have debated that question for decades. But if one were arguing the affirmative side, one could do no better than to introduce into evidence, as Exhibit A, the case of Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.

  Twain was an unusual sort. He defied the buttoned-up conventions of the Victorian age, delighting instead in rude talk and taboo subjects. In his day, this made Twain a court jester, outclassed by such authors as William Dean Howells and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But today they are hard to remember, whereas Twain is impossible to forget. He seems more “American” than they do, than nearly anyone does.

  The best comparison is not Howells or Longfellow, but Twain’s British counterpart, Rudyard Kipling. Both are cherished to this day as authors who wrote in everyday language about life in the backcountry. Twain is best remembered for a novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), about a young white boy and an older black man making an odyssey on the Mississippi River. Kipling, who regarded Twain as “the largest man of his time,”32 read Huck Finn with admiration. Then he wrote his own major novel, Kim (1901), about a young white boy and an older Asian man on an odyssey through colonial India. Twain reread Kim every year.

  Yet there was a difference between the two authors, one that perhaps reflected a larger divergence between the cultures of Britain and the United States. Kipling was the age’s great champion of empire. He befriended Roosevelt and observed the brewing Philippine conflict with interest. He offered his advice in the form of a wildly popular poem. An advance copy went to Roosevelt, but the poem was first published, by an extraordinary stroke of coincidence, on the very day the war broke out. It was called “The White Man’s Burden: An Address to the United States,” and it began this way:

  Take up the White Man’s burden—33

  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.

  Today, with imperialism everywhere in disrepute, Kipling’s poem stands as a sort of intellectual ruins from a bygone time. It’s the single best-remembered paean to empire in the English language.

  At the time the poem was published, Twain would probably have endorsed its sentiment. He was a “red-hot imperialist,”34 he recalled. “I wanted the American eagle to go
screaming into the Pacific.” But as he watched the Philippine conflict unfold, Twain could no longer toe the line. In 1900 he declared himself to be “an anti-imperialist.”

  Twain was not just an anti-imperialist, he was the most famous anti-imperialist in the country. He became the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York and chronicled the expanding war with withering sarcasm. “There must be two Americas,”35 he mused. “One that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”

  For that second America, Twain proposed adding a few words to the Declaration of Independence: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.”36 He suggested a modified flag:37 red, black, and blue, with the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones.

  This was strong speech, but remarkably, it wasn’t even that far out. As Aguinaldo had hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party—hardly a radical organization in the age of Jim Crow—could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was “criminal aggression,”38 the Democratic platform charged in 1900, born of “greedy commercialism” and sure to ruin the country. “No nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” it warned. “Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”

  Empire dominated the 1900 election. Kipling, who lived in England, couldn’t vote. Twain declined to (though he allowed that any candidate running on an “Anti-Doughnut” platform could have had his support).39 But for the rest of the country, this was the first time overseas empire was put to a vote. And since the candidates hadn’t changed since the last election, it wasn’t a bad gauge of the national mood concerning empire.

  If it was a test, though, the anti-imperialists flunked it. In 1896 McKinley had won 51 percent of the popular vote. In 1900 he won 52 percent, meanwhile increasing his share of the electoral college from 61 percent to 65 percent. The imperial policy was affirmed, and it would never arise as a serious electoral issue again.

  Twain felt the ground shift beneath his feet. Though he continued to criticize imperialism, he kept his most incisive writings private, as he could find no way to publish them. After Twain died, in 1910, his literary estate suppressed them. It wasn’t until the 1960s,40 when those writings were released and taken up by opponents of the Vietnam War, that the reading public grasped the full depth of Twain’s hatred for empire.

  Back in the Philippines, the gloves came off. The election had shone a spotlight on the war, and General MacArthur had obliged McKinley by steering clear of anything that the Democrats might paint as an atrocity. Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling.

  The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos not as fellow Americans, but as irksome “natives.” When William Howard Taft, then the colony’s chief lawmaker, called Filipinos “our little brown brothers,”41 the soldiers scoffed. A song they sang, frequently and loudly, captured their view:

  I’m only a common Soldier-man in the blasted Philippines;42

  They say I’ve got Brown Brothers here, but I dunno what it means.

  I like the word Fraternity, but still I draw the line;

  He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine.

  Brother, indeed, was a word rarely used. The soldiers preferred gugu,43 a word that historians think was the etymological precursor of the epithet gook, which featured so prominently in the Korean and Vietnam wars. White soldiers also made use of a tried-and-true favorite from back home: nigger. They sang it proudly, as in the extremely-hard-to-misinterpret ballad “I Don’t Like a Nigger Nohow.”44

  The black soldiers in the Philippines heard this and winced.45 They connected the racism that pervaded the war to the racism they had just left at home—the 1890s were the high noon of lynching. Aguinaldo’s men made the connection, too, and issued propaganda suggesting that black soldiers might be better off switching sides.

  Remarkably, one did. David Fagen of the 24th Infantry accepted a commission in Aguinaldo’s army.46 The U.S. Army, eager to nip this sort of thing in the bud, placed a $600 reward on Fagen’s head, equivalent to three years of a private’s pay. And that’s what it got: Fagen’s head—or, at least, a head purported to be Fagen’s—dropped off in a cloth sack by a Filipino hunter.

  But Fagen was the exception. In general, soldiers closed ranks. To win Filipinos over, they inaugurated an extensive campaign of sanitation, road-building, and education in the areas they controlled.47 In those they didn’t, they staged raids, shooting insurgents and torching villages.

  Soldiers used both the carrot and the stick, but it was stick-wielding that shaped their identities. If troops in the Second World War understood themselves as “G.I. Joes”—general-issue cogs in a vast bureaucracy—those who fought in the Philippines understood themselves to be “hikers,”48 humping through hostile territory in search of guerrillas. Today you can find statues named The Hiker in dozens of towns. They are the most visible mainland monuments to the war.

  The “hikes” did great damage, but they couldn’t themselves extirpate the rebellion. The guerrillas remained at large, and the towns kept feeding them. Perhaps Filipinos helped the rebels out of enthusiasm for Aguinaldo’s cause; perhaps they simply realized that the nationalists were a lot better at identifying and punishing traitors than the U.S. Army was.49 Whatever the reason, it was clear that the U.S. inability to distinguish friend from foe was a serious disadvantage. A colonel described the U.S. Army as a “blind giant”—“powerful enough to destroy the enemy,50 but unable to find him.”

  Too clumsy to excise the rebellion with a scalpel, the army reached for a bone saw. Adopting a practice called “reconcentration,”51 it herded rural populations into fortified towns or camps where they could be more closely monitored. From the army’s perspective, this contributed a satisfying clarity to an otherwise murky situation. Those inside the reconcentration zones were “pacified.” Those outside were not, and could be treated accordingly: cutting off their food supplies, burning their homes, or simply shooting them.

  Somewhat awkwardly, though, reconcentration was the very tactic that Spain had used against the Cubans, the one that had provoked the United States to “liberate” Cuba in the first place. It “sounds awful,”52 confessed one U.S. official to his diary. “It works, however, admirably.”

  It did seem that the war was winding down. The disappointment of the 1900 election and sheer exhaustion wore the insurrection thin. Rich, educated Filipinos, meanwhile, started to accommodate themselves to U.S. rule. A month after the 1900 election, more than one hundred members of the colony’s elite formed the Federalist Party,53 which, as its name suggests, sought inclusion within the United States and eventual statehood. And the less likely Philippine independence seemed, the less inclined Filipinos were to support the rebels, an action for which they could be harshly punished by the U.S. Army.

  Another blow came in March 1901: the capture of Aguinaldo. Not only did he surrender, he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. “Let the stream of blood cease to flow,”54 he wrote in a proclamation. “Let there be an end to tears and desolation.” A spate of surrenders of other high-ranking officers followed. Satisfied that the war was over, McKinley handed most of the Philippines over from the military to the civil government under Taft on the Fourth of July, 1901.

  George Frisbie Hoar, the leading anti-imperialist in Congress, shook his head. “We crushed the only republic in Asia.”55

  *

  The fantasy of conquest is always the same: defeat the leader
and the country is yours. The United States had learned the folly of this when it won the Philippines from Spain, only to find itself fighting the Philippine Army. It was about to learn the lesson again.

  The Philippine archipelago contains more than seven thousand islands. The war against Aguinaldo took place mainly on the largest, Luzon, the northern island that contained Manila and half the population. Spain had ruled from Luzon, Aguinaldo had ruled from Luzon, and the United States now sought to do the same.

  Defeat the leader, the country is yours.

  Yet the farther south you went in the Philippines, the less relevant events in Luzon seemed to be. Particularly Aguinaldo’s surrender: in theory, it should have meant the end of the Philippine Republic. But as the United States sought to extend its control south over Samar, the third-largest island in the archipelago, it found a land still beholden to the nationalist cause. In May 1901 MacArthur ordered “drastic measures” to “clean up” Samar “as soon as possible.”56

  Those drastic measures were by now standard fare: interrupting trade, burning crops, resettling civilians, and conducting “hikes” against guerrillas. Yet here, the civilians resisted. A group of five hundred townspeople in Balangiga—who had seen their food supplies destroyed,57 their agricultural tools confiscated, and their neighbors incarcerated—launched a surprise attack on a U.S. camp. They killed forty-five soldiers in a single day.

  The Balangiga Massacre, as it became known, struck terror into the hearts of the colonizers. “Half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds,”58 remembered Taft’s wife, Nellie.

  The army kicked back into high gear. “They have sown the wind,”59 one captain said. “They shall reap the whirlwind.”

  The whirlwind came in the form of Major Edwin F. Glenn, who ordered a sweeping investigation. Glenn was a violent interrogator, fond of a technique that had become popular in the army and is uncomfortably familiar today. If the men he was questioning—and these included town officials and priests—failed to answer to his satisfaction, Glenn administered the “water cure.” Here is how a soldier explained it: “Lay them on their backs,60 a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads.”