How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The site of the Balangiga Massacre is today marked by a large statue group celebrating the heroism of the Balangigans, here shown bursting into an army tent.

  The whirlwind also took the form of General Jacob Smith. He had fought the Lakota at Wounded Knee and adopted a similarly unyielding approach to Filipinos. “I want no prisoners,”61 Smith allegedly told his subordinate. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.” All rice was to be seized, Smith insisted, and any male over the age of ten who did not turn himself over to the U.S. government should be killed. “The interior of Samar,” he ordered, “must be made a howling wilderness.”

  Smith fell far short of that heinous goal, but the Samar campaign showed the war at its worst. Samar also revealed that whatever they thought in Washington, the war wasn’t over. In fact, it wasn’t even over in Luzon. There, too, the embers of rebellion glowed hot, with the Province of Batangas in open rebellion and insurgents continuing their attacks throughout the island.

  The longer the war wore on, the dirtier it got. Nationalists, finding it increasingly hard to win support and much-needed supplies from the towns,62 used terror tactics: kidnapping, torturing, and executing “collaborators,” sometimes in extravagant ways. The U.S. Army, for its part, expanded its policy of reconcentration. And, though this was prohibited, the men continued to torture their captives. Yet again, like the cast of some hellish musical, the soldiers expressed their feelings in song. One of the men wrote this rousing number, titled “The Water Cure in the P.I.”:63

  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

  Hurrah. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.

  Hurrah. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.

  Shove the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

  News of these atrocities aroused scandals when they reached the mainland. Major Glenn was tried for torture. General Smith, having ordered a massacre, also faced trial, though not for crimes against Filipinos, but for “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.”

  Smith’s actions were unrepresentative and clearly embarrassing to the administration. But it was hard to see them as entirely out of step with the higher purposes of the war. Roosevelt himself, who ascended to the presidency after McKinley’s assassination, had long understood the fight against “savages” to be a form of warfare “where no pity is shown to non-combatants,64 where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity.” And yet it was, in his judgment, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars.”

  Glenn was fined and suspended for a month (“nobody was seriously damaged” by the water cure,65 Roosevelt insisted). Smith was reprimanded and retired from active duty. “Taken in the full,66 his work has been such as to reflect credit upon the American Army and therefore upon the nation,” Roosevelt said. “It is deeply to be regretted that he should have so acted in this instance as to interfere with his further usefulness.”

  *

  However deeply harsh tactics were “regretted” once they came to light, they had a grim efficacy. While U.S. public works campaigns undermined support for the rebels, tortures, torching, and food deprivations punished the holdouts harshly. Insurgents surrendered, or they simply died. A Republican congressman who toured Luzon in 1902 reported what he saw to a newspaper. “The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner,”67 he said. “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”

  From accounts like this, it can sound as if most Filipinos who perished died at the hands of the zealous “hikers,” as if the whole war were Samar. Doubtless, the guns and torches did kill tens of thousands. But the full story of Philippine mortality is considerably more complicated. As was often the case in the nineteenth century, most victims of the war died from disease.68

  Muddying the waters further, the diseases started under Spanish rule. The late nineteenth century had brought tumult to the Philippines, moving people around the archipelago and disrupting long-standing economic arrangements. Both motion and instability carried lethal epidemiological consequences, most notably during the cholera epidemic in 1882–83, which killed hundreds of thousands, and the rinderpest outbreak in 1887, wiping out nine in ten cattle and carabao. Before Dewey ever set eyes on the lights of Manila Bay, the horsemen of the apocalypse were already stalking the Philippines.

  When the war with the United States came, those horsemen charged forth, now all at once and galloping: cholera, malaria, dysentery, beriberi, rinderpest, tuberculosis, smallpox, and bubonic plague. “Everything that could possibly happen to a country had happened or was happening,”69 Nellie Taft remembered.

  The armies—both sides—carried disease with them on the march. So did the prostitutes who flocked to Manila and the countless refugees the war produced. People moved, as they never had before, in and out of malaria zones, carrying the infection in their bloodstreams. Aguinaldo contracted malaria,70 and it gutted the troops who fled with him to the mountains.

  If movement spread disease, so did confinement. Reconcentration was, from an epidemiological perspective, a particularly horrifying tactic. It forced populations with different immunities and diseases together into close quarters in unsanitary conditions. At the same time, it cut Filipinos off from their fields, leaving them reliant on imported food, often nutritionally poor rice from Saigon, if they got food at all. Malnutrition increased susceptibility to many diseases, and it led directly to beriberi.

  Beriberi, it should be noted, is an extremely hard disease to contract. To get it as an adult, you have to eat a profoundly restricted diet, such as milled rice and virtually nothing else, for months. But Filipinos, separated from their farms and able to purchase only the cheapest food,71 suffered from it in large numbers, probably in the tens of thousands. It struck babies the hardest. Although infantile beriberi was unknown to doctors at the time (thus unrecorded as a diagnosis), it is doubtless the reason why Manila during the war had the world’s highest recorded infant mortality rate.

  Reconcentration took its toll on the countryside, too. Fields went untilled as farmers were forced into garrison towns. In a biblical turn, those untended fields attracted swarms of locusts, which further eroded the food supply. The U.S. Army exacerbated the situation by making war on food: burning grain stores, confiscating or killing animals, and installing blockades to stop trade. Guerrillas starved, but so did everyone else.

  Everyone, that is, but the U.S. soldiers. They sucked much of the rice, eggs, chickens, fruit, fish, and meat from the Philippine economy with their purchase orders. And after there was no longer enough meat left in the Philippine economy, the army bought refrigerated beef from Australia. With vaccines, fresh water, sanitation, and ample food, U.S. forces were only grazed by the diseases that decimated the colony.

  Up to mid-1902, the U.S. military lost 4,196 men, more than three-quarters of whom died of disease. It counted around 16,000 combat fatalities on the opposite side. But that number represents only recorded war deaths and is a tiny fraction of total mortality. General J. Franklin Bell, the architect of the reconcentration strategy, estimated that on Luzon alone the war had killed one-sixth of the population,72 roughly 600,000. Textbooks usually offer an estimate of 250,000 for the whole archipelago, though there is no hard evidence behind that figure. The most careful study,73 made by the historian Ken De Bevoise, found that in the years 1899–1903, about 775,000 Filipinos died because of the war.

  “Of course,74 we do want military glory,” wrote Twain, noting the death toll, “but this is getting it by avalanche.”

  On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War
over. If De Bevoise’s calculations are right, it had claimed more lives than the Civil War.75

  *

  Roosevelt’s announcement wasn’t the first time the authorities had declared an end to the war. It wasn’t even the second time. The Washington Post reminded readers that Taft had announced the “fourth and final termination of hostilities” two years earlier and that “the war has been brought to an end on six different occasions since.”76

  “A bad thing cannot be killed too often,” the paper concluded.

  Having pronounced the war over only to see it rise from the grave time and again, colonial officials shouldn’t have been surprised when it turned out that Roosevelt’s proclamation was, like the others, too hasty. As before, the trouble lay outside of Luzon, though this time even farther south.77

  “Moroland”—the islands of Mindanao,78 Palawan, and Basilan plus the Sulu Archipelago—comprised the less-populated bottom third of the Philippines. It was like a different country. Inhabited mainly by Muslims (called “Moros”) rather than Catholics and governed by a system of sultans and datus, it adhered to Islamic law and practiced both polygamy and slavery. With every free Moro man carrying a blade at all times, Moroland was also armed to the teeth.

  Spain had never managed to control the area and had settled for something akin to a nonaggression pact with the sultan of Sulu. The United States followed suit, signing an agreement with the sultan that left his legal authority intact. Did this mean that slavery was once again legal in the United States? anti-imperialists wondered. “Slaves are a part of our property,”79 the sultan insisted. “To have this property taken away from us would mean a great loss.” Washington decided to turn a blind eye, which was all the easier to do once the Insular Cases established that the Thirteenth Amendment didn’t apply to the Philippines.

  Still, it was hard to imagine that this tenuous peace would last forever, especially as the U.S. Army presence in the south grew. Hostilities erupted in the Battle of Bayan in May 1902, two months before Roosevelt declared the Philippine War over. And those reading Roosevelt’s proclamation closely would have realized that even with the war “over,” civilian authorities controlled only the Christian areas. In Moroland, and in the Luzon highlands, the military still ruled.

  What the military would do with Moroland, however, was an open question. This was the first time the United States was governing Muslims, and attitudes among officials varied enormously.

  One approach was championed by Captain John Pershing, who held a post on the shore of Lake Lanao, a large body of water in Mindanao, around which nearly half the Muslim population of Moroland lived. Pershing made the news during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump described, with relish, how Pershing (“rough guy,80 rough guy”) had captured fifty “terrorists,” dipped fifty bullets in pig’s blood, lined up his captives, and then shot forty-nine of them, letting the last go to report what happened. “And for twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem, okay?” Trump concluded.

  Actually, not okay. Setting the ethics of extrajudicial killing aside, Trump’s history was wildly off base. In fact, Pershing proved to be extraordinarily sympathetic toward the Moros. He made diplomatic visits to them, unarmed. He studied their language and customs, ate their food (“I have never tasted more delicious chicken”),81 and counted some as “strong personal friends.”82 By 1903 he was taking low-level meetings without an interpreter.83

  The friendly overtures worked: Pershing was elected a datu—the only datu within U.S.84 officialdom—and became honorary father to the wife of the sultan of Bayan. Pershing undertook a seventy-two-mile expedition around the lake, firming up alliances where he could and making war where he couldn’t. It was the first time any U.S. or Spanish official had made it all the way around.

  For all this, Pershing made headlines. Young, handsome, and peace-seeking, he was the opposite of General Jacob “Howling Wilderness” Smith. Roosevelt made him a brigadier general, jumping him over 909 more senior officers.85

  But of course, Pershing’s desire to conciliate meant tolerating Moro customs, including slavery. Not everyone was willing to do that. Particularly hostile to Pershing’s approach was General Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s old comrade in arms from the Rough Riders, who became governor of Moro Province in 1903. Wood was an uncompromising man—“intolerant,86 arrogantly superior, and cocksure of his rightness” is how a colleague described him—and he had little patience for Moro self-government. At a meeting with the datus of Jolo, Wood announced that “a new order of things has come about.87 A new and very strong country now owns all these islands; that is the United States.”

  Wood withdrew from the noninterference agreement, abolished slavery, and established a head tax, knowing full well that these actions would provoke a fight. “One clean-cut lesson will be quite sufficient for them,”88 he wrote to Roosevelt, “but it should be of such character as not to need a dozen frittering repetitions.”

  In what was by now something of a custom, Wood established reconcentration zones and launched a series of raids.

  Wood hoped for “one clean-cut lesson.” Instead, he got what he feared: a dozen frittering ones. His raids killed thousands of Moros but never managed to end the war. In 1905, hundreds of resisters—entire families—fled up to the crater of a dormant volcano, Bud Dajo. Objecting to Wood’s abolition of slavery and above all to his tax, they had essentially seceded, creating a micro-Confederacy on a hilltop.

  It was the fight Wood had been spoiling for. In March 1906 he sent up an expeditionary force. The “battle,” lasting four days, was profoundly one-sided—a soldier described the Moros as falling “like dominoes” under machine-gun fire.89 Wood lost twenty-one men and estimated that six hundred Moros had died,90 although the Filipino interpreters working with the army put the figure at nearly one thousand. “All the defenders were killed,”91 Wood reported.

  Massacres like this weren’t unknown in the United States. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Bloody Island—the Indian wars had painted the West red. Yet Bud Dajo dwarfed them all.92 “We abolished them utterly,93 leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” wrote a bitter Mark Twain, privately. “This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”

  “I would not want to have that on my conscience for the fame of Napoleon,”94 Pershing wrote to his wife. Yet Pershing got his own chance to burden his conscience when he became Moro Province’s governor in 1909. Despite Wood’s hope that “one clean-cut lesson” would end things, the war continued: raids, counterraids, armed bands, and military rule. In 1911 an exasperated Pershing issued an executive order to completely disarm the province, requiring that Moros turn in not just their guns but their bladed weapons, too.

  Had a federal official given an order like that on the mainland, it would have violated the Second Amendment. Here, it merely incensed and alarmed the populace. Six to ten thousand fled their homes and moved up another volcanic mountain, Bud Bagsak, taking with them some three hundred rifles.

  Soldiers stand over a trench filled with men’s and women’s corpses after the Bud Dajo Massacre, 1906. W.E.B. Du Bois declared this photograph to be “the most illuminating thing I have ever seen” and proposed displaying it in his classroom “to impress upon the students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.”95

  Pershing was more patient than Wood. He waited for months, and eventually, once the food started running out, most of the rebels came back down. But Pershing’s patience stretched only so far, and in June 1913 he launched a surprise attack. “The fighting was the fiercest I have ever seen,”96 he wrote, and the Moros were “given a thrashing which I think they will not soon forget.” In the end, Pershing lost fifteen men and guessed he had killed some two hundred to three hundred Moros,97 including women and children. Historians’ estimates range from two hundred to more than five hundred.98

  *

  Bud Bagsak did not end the fighting. It went on
, with further battles taking place later that month. Violence would rack the region for years.99 Nevertheless, Moro Province was brought under civilian rule in 1913, ending fourteen years of martial law.

  Since 1903, the highest position in the U.S. Army has been chief of staff. J. Franklin Bell, architect of the reconcentration policy, held that post after his time in the Philippines. So did Leonard Wood, four years after the Bud Dajo Massacre. After leaving Moro Province, Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, becoming a hero of the First World War. Then he, too, became chief of staff.

  Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.

  7

  OUTSIDE THE CHARMED CIRCLE

  The McKinley administration had hoped that, by overthrowing Spanish tyranny, it would win the allegiance of Spain’s former subjects. In the Philippines, this looked like hubris. Instead of cheering crowds, U.S. forces met Emilio Aguinaldo’s Army of Liberation, and the war lasted years.

  But it wasn’t an unreasonable hope. When U.S. troops landed in Puerto Rico,1 crowds did gather to cheer them on. Puerto Ricans shouted “¡Viva los Americanos!” and presented the soldiers with cigars, fruit, and flowers. Locals referred to themselves as “Porto Rican, American,” and municipal officials renamed streets after Washington and Lincoln.