How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  51 “reconcentration”: See especially ibid, lecture 1, and May, Batangas.

  52 “sounds awful”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, August 22, 1904.

  53 more than one hundred members: Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures and the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2008).

  54 “Let the stream”: Constantino, History of the Philippines, 229.

  55 “We crushed”: Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968), 162.

  56 “drastic measures,” etc.: MacArthur, quoted in Linn, Philippine War, 306.

  57 Balangiga: Rolando O. Borrinaga, The Balangiga Conflict Revisited (Quezon City, 2003).

  58 “Half the people”: Helen Herron Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York, 1914), 225.

  59 “They have sown”: Joseph L. Schott, The Ordeal of Samar (New York, 1964), 55.

  60 “Lay them on their backs”: Quoted in Richard Franklin Pettigrew, The Course of Empire: An Official Record (New York, 1920), 285.

  61 “I want no prisoners” … “The interior of Samar”: Schott, Ordeal, 78, 98.

  62 increasingly hard to win support: On revolutionaries’ difficulties in commanding loyalty, see Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, 225–30, and Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 18–19, 167–68.

  63 “Water Cure in the P.I.”: May, Batangas, 147, discussed in Kramer, Blood of Government, 141.

  64 “savages,” etc.: WTR, 9:58, 57.

  65 “nobody was”: Roosevelt to Speck von Sternberg, July 19, 1902, LTR, 3:297–98.

  66 “Taken in the full”: “Court Martial of General Smith,” The Army and Navy Journal, July 19, 1902, 1166.

  67 “The country was”: Boston Transcript, 1902, quoted in Moorfield Storey and Marcial P. Lichauco, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States (New York, 1926), 121–22.

  68 died from disease: The following account of Philippine mortality leans heavily on May, Batangas, and De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse. On public health during the war, see also Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Philippine Culture, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Philadelphia, 1995), 51–82, and Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006).

  69 “Everything that could”: Taft, Recollections, 253.

  70 Aguinaldo contracted malaria: Aguinaldo, Second Look at America, 107; Simeon A. Vilal Diary, Rare Books, NLP.

  71 only the cheapest food … infant mortality rate: De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse, 61, 140.

  72 killed one-sixth of the population: Storey and Lichauco, Conquest, 121. The historian Resil Mojares estimates that one-sixth of the population of Cebu died as well—a hundred thousand deaths from war, including disease, between the years 1898 and 1906. War Against the Americans, 135.

  73 The most careful study: De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse, 13.

  74 “Of course, we do want”: Twain, “Review of Edwin Wildman’s Biography of Aguinaldo,” 1901–1902, in Zwick, Twain’s Weapons, 103.

  75 claimed more lives than the Civil War: This is true even when the fatalities of soldiers in the Civil War, around 620,000, are combined with the uncounted death toll of civilians, estimated at 50,000. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), xi–xii.

  76 “fourth and final,” etc.: “It Must Be Over Now,” Washington Post, May 6, 1902, discussed in Kramer, Blood of Government, 155.

  77 this time even farther south: Hostilities continued in the north, too, though there is debate about whether to classify them as war or crime. See, for example, Orlino A. Ochosa, Bandoleros: Outlawed Guerrillas of the Philippine-American War, 1903–1907 (Quezon City, 1995).

  78 “Moroland”: An extraordinarily useful account of the Moroland war is Peter Gordon Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos, 1899–1920 (Quezon City, 1977). I also rely on Frank E. Vandiver, Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing, vol. 1 (College Station, TX, 1977); Robert A. Fulton, Moroland: The History of Uncle Sam and the Moros, 1899–1920 (Bend, OR, 2009); essays by Joshua Gedacht and Patricio N. Abinales in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison, WI, 2009); and Arnold, Moro War.

  79 “Slaves are a part”: Gowing, Mandate, 56. On this issue, see Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

  80 “rough guy,” etc.: Donald Trump, February 29, 2016, campaign rally, North Charleston, South Carolina.

  81 “I have never tasted”: John J. Pershing, My Life Before the World War, 1860–1917, ed. John T. Greenwood (Lexington, KY, 2013), 152.

  82 “strong personal friends”: Donald Smythe, Guerrilla Warrior: The Early Life of John J. Pershing (New York, 1973), 84.

  83 without an interpreter: Pershing, My Life, 189.

  84 elected a datu … honorary father: Vandiver, Black Jack, chap. 9.

  85 909 more senior officers: The figure of 862 is commonly reported, but see ibid., 390n88.

  86 “intolerant”: Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (Garden City, NY, 1946), 414.

  87 “a new order of things”: Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood: A Biography (New York, 1931), 2:8.

  88 “One clean-cut lesson”: Wood to Roosevelt, August 3, 1903, in Gowing, Mandate, 156.

  89 “like dominoes”: Brian McAllister Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 39.

  90 six hundred Moros had died: For contemporary estimates, which ranged as high as fifteen hundred, see Fulton, Moroland, 339. The interpreters’ figure comes from the report of Major Omar Bundy, March 12, 1906, 8, Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Document File 1890–1917, entry 25, NADC. I’m grateful to Joshua Gedacht for supplying this document.

  91 “All the defenders”: Despite Wood’s pronouncement, some Moros survived, maybe up to one hundred. See Fulton, Moroland, 339, and Jack McCallum, Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism (New York, 2006), 229.

  92 Bud Dajo dwarfed them all: There’s something both difficult and distasteful in comparing the size of massacres. The difficulty is that perpetrators rarely perform corpse censuses; the distasteful part is that comparing body counts can suggest that the lesser massacre was “less bad,” implying an uncomfortably glib moral mathematics wherein killing forty people is exactly half as wrong as killing eighty. Still, for what it’s worth, we think that Sand Creek (about 150), Wounded Knee (about 200), and Bloody Island (75–200) killed fewer people combined than Bud Dajo. Bloody Island, however, is especially hard to count. Reports from those who were there vary wildly, with 75–200 a rough median, but with the extremes varying from 16 (the report of a Pomo chief) to more than 800 (a U.S. major who arrived on the scene two months after). Sand Creek: Report of the John Evans Study Committee (Evanston, IL, 2014), 7; Wounded Knee: Jerome A. Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman, OK, 2014), 288; Bloody Island: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, CT, 2016), 131–33.

  93 “We abolished them”: Twain, “Comments on the Moro Massacre,” 1906, in Zwick, Twain’s Weapons, 172.

  94 “I would not want”: Fulton, Moroland, 370.

  95 “most illuminating,” etc.: Du Bois to Moorfield Storey, in The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst, MA, 1973), 1:136.

  96 “The fighting was” … “given a thrashing”: Pershing to “Frank,” June 19, 1913, folder 1, and Pershing to Leonard Wood, July 9, 1913, folder 3, box 371, Pershing Papers.

 
97 guessed he had killed: Pershing, My Life, 302. In his official report, Pershing estimated, based on “Moro sources,” that there had been “between three and five hundred” defending Bud Bagsak, though some Moros escaped during the fighting and it’s unclear if the 300–500 estimate includes them. Pershing, Report of Bud Bagsak Operations, October 15, 1913, folder 4, box 372, Pershing Papers.

  98 Historians’ estimates: Smythe puts the death toll at “over 500” (Guerrilla Warrior, 200); Gowing at 300–500 (Mandate, 240); Fulton at 200–400 (Moroland, 449–50); Linn at more than 500 (Guardians, 41).

  99 further battles: Arnold, Moro War, 240–41.

  7. OUTSIDE THE CHARMED CIRCLE

  1 When U.S. troops landed: Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures and the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2008), 55. More generally, see Emma Dávila-Cox, “Puerto Rico in the Hispanic–Cuban–American War: Re-assessing ‘the Picnic,’” in The Crisis of 1898: Colonial Redistribution and Nationalist Mobilization, ed. Angel Smith and Emma Dávila-Cox (London, 1999), 96–127.

  2 Many Puerto Ricans believed: Go, American Empire, 81. See also Christina Duffy Ponsa, “When Statehood Was Autonomy,” in Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of American Empire, ed. Gerald L. Neuman and Tomiko Brown-Nagin (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 1–28.

  3 “a prosperous and happy country”: Duffy Ponsa, “When Statehood Was Autonomy,” 25.

  4 Albizu Campos: Prominent biographical accounts are Federico Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary, trans. Anthony Rawlings (New York, 1971); Benjamín Torres, Marisa Rosado, and José Manuel Torres Santiago, eds., Imagen de Pedro Albizu Campos (San Juan, 1973); Luis Angel Ferrao, Pedro Albizu Campos y el nacionalismo puertorriqueño (San Juan, 1990); Marisa Rosado, Pedro Albizu Campos: Las llamas de la aurora, 2d ed. (Santo Domingo, 1998); Laura Meneses de Albizu Campos, Albizu Campos y la independencia de Puerto Rico (San Juan, 2007); and Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony (New York, 2015).

  5 “the most friendly” … “delirious”: Richard Harding Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns (New York, 1898), 325, 350.

  6 Albizu’s father: Ferrao, Albizu, 122.

  7 “appeared to be”: Charles Horton Terry, paraphrased in Dante Di Lillo and Edgar K. Thompson, “Pedro Albizu Campos,” Report, February 19, 1936, Albizu FBI File, sec. 1.

  8 stay after class: Bill O’Reilly, “The Apotheosis of Hate,” Palabras Neighbors 5, c. 1951, in Albizu FBI File, sec. 8.

  9 arranged for a scholarship: Di Lillo and Thompson, Albizu Report, February 19, 1936, Albizu FBI File.

  10 “Pete”: Laura Meneses de Albizu Campos, “Como conoci a Albizu Campos,” September 1957, folder 7, box 31, Reynolds Papers. On Albizu’s time at Harvard, see Rosado, Albizu, and Anthony de Jesús, “I Have Endeavored to Seize the Beautiful Opportunity for Learning Offered Here: Pedro Albizu Campos at Harvard a Century Ago,” Latino Studies 9 (2011): 473–85.

  11 most interesting club: E. D. M., “International Clubs in German Universities,” Unity, June 13, 1912, 238.

  12 China, Germany, etc.: Based on consultation of The Harvard Crimson in years between the club’s establishment in 1908 and the end of Albizu’s time in 1921.

  13 Boston Symphony Orchestra: Barbara Tischler, “One Hundred Percent Americanism and Music in Boston During World War I,” American Music 4 (1986): 164–76.

  14 Münsterberg: Jutta Spillman and Lothar Spillman, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 322–38.

  15 He’d spoken out: “Forum Upheld Military Camps,” Harvard Crimson, April 3, 1915.

  16 International Polity Club: “Polity Club Changes Program,” Harvard Crimson, October 18, 1916. On Albizu’s membership, see “Polity Club Elects New Officers,” Harvard Crimson, June 2, 1915.

  17 “When the Spanish-American,” etc.: Pedro Albizu Campos, “Porto Rico and the War,” Harvard Crimson, April 14, 1917.

  18 “heel of Achilles”: Roosevelt to William Howard Taft, August 21, 1907, LTR, 5:762.

  19 “sober up”: Emilio Aguinaldo with Vicente Albano Pacis, A Second Look at America (New York, 1957), 133.

  20 The Outlook: “A Battle with Moros,” The Outlook, June 21, 1913.

  21 “We were constantly reminded”: Jim English, “Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958,” The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 251.

  22 “to gather together”: Address on Flag Day, June 14, 1916, in The Foreign Policy of President Wilson: Messages, Addresses and Papers, ed. James Brown Scott (New York, 1918), 176, 175.

  23 The State Department stopped insisting: Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994), chaps. 7 and 11.

  24 “outside the charmed circle”: Woodrow Wilson, First Annual Message, December 2, 1913, APP.

  25 “sovereignty, jurisdiction”: Joint Resolution for the Recognition of the Independence of the People of Cuba, 1898, 30 Stat. 739.

  26 “money can be borrowed” … “When people ask”: Louis A. Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 32.

  27 “complete jurisdiction”: Quoted in Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 2009), 24.

  28 Cuba was easily absorbed: Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens, GA, 1990), chaps. 4–5.

  29 Afro-Cubans: See Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), chap. 2.

  30 “all the rights”: Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, Convention for the Construction of a Ship Canal, November 18, 1903, 33 Stat. 2234.

  31 “I have about the same”: Roosevelt to Joseph Bucklin Bishop, February 23, 1904, LTR, 4:734.

  32 To ensure political: Barbara Salazar Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, Congressional Research Service Report R42738, 2016.

  33 In his letter: Albizu, “Porto Rico and the War.”

  34 twenty thousand Filipinos … “modern Moses”: Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 344–45.

  35 “an inexcusable blunder”: Democratic Party Platform, June 25, 1912, APP.

  36 “no longer to be,” etc.: Woodrow Wilson, First Annual Message, December 2, 1913, APP.

  37 not empty speech: Wilson’s views and actions are helpfully discussed in Roy Watson Curry, “Woodrow Wilson and Philippine Policy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (1954): 435–52.

  38 “a form of home rule” … “There is faith”: Albizu, “Porto Rico and the War.”

  39 “conquered possessions”: Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York, 1902), 5:3.

  40 “children” … “training”: Woodrow Wilson, “The Ideals of America,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1902, 731, 733.

  41 “white men of the South,” etc.: Wilson, History, 5:38, 5:49, 5:78.

  42 “the first southern scholar”: Frederick Jackson Turner, American Historical Review 8 (1903): 764.

  43 couldn’t help but notice: See reviews by Francis Wayland Shepardson, George McLean Harper, and C. H. Van Tyne in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 14, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, NJ, 1972).

  44 “to protect”: Wilson, History, 5:62.

  45 “the mere instinct”: Ibid., 5:58.

  46 “It teaches history”: “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true” is how the quotation is usually given. But that version appeared in 1937, twenty-two years after the event, and there is not much evidence in favor of it. Griffith’s version, by contrast, was printed in the New York American on February 28, 1915. For a full and judicious account, see Mark E. Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and �
��Like Writing History with Lightning,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 9 (2010): 509–33.

  47 most popular film: Leon F. Litwack, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico et al. (New York, 1995), 136.

  48 recruiters used the film: The connections between Wilson and Birth are detailed in Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 18 (2007): 689–718.

  49 “liberation of all colonies”: Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007), 37.

  50 “The day of conquest,” etc.: Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the Conditions of Peace, January 8, 1918, APP.

  51 In China: Erez Manela, “Global Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Wilson,” in Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism, ed. Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 145.

  52 “conveyed the impression”: [Pedro Albizu Campos], editorial annotations on biographical writing about Albizu, folder 4, box 30, Reynolds Papers. The context and use of the first person in the handwritten version of the annotations establish that their author is Albizu.

  53 “thirty or forty thousand”: Meneses de Albizu Campos, Albizu, 29.

  54 getting to Wilson: Anti-imperialists’ campaign to catch Wilson’s attention in 1919 is chronicled in Manela, Wilsonian Moment. Manela’s extraordinary work supplies the narrative frame for this section and is one source for my accounts of Gandhi, Zaghlul, Thanh (Ho), and Mao. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, “World War I, Wilsonianism, and Challenges to U.S. Empire,” DH 38 (2014): 852–63.

  55 “No people”: Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 71.

  56 Nguyen Tat Thanh: William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh (New York, 2000), 58–60. See also Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (Berkeley, CA, 2002).

  57 Albizu got another shot: See Albizu’s autobiographical note in Wells Blanchard, Harvard College Class of 1916: Secretary’s Third Report (n.p., 1922) and the following Harvard Crimson articles: “Campos, 2L., for Peace Conference,” January 13, 1919; “Cosmopolitan Club Plans for ‘International Night,’ Feb. 21,” January 25, 1919; “Cosmopolitan Club Will Hold Dance,” February 25, 1919.