For the Common Defense
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While their guerrilla operations nullified America’s earlier military success, the insurgents employed terrorism to defeat what they called the enemy’s “policy of attraction.” Directed primarily against Filipinos holding positions in American-sponsored municipal governments, terrorism (the guerrillas called it “exemplary punishment on traitors to prevent the people of the towns from unworthily selling themselves for the gold of the invader”) took many forms. Lucky “traitors” were fined or had their property destroyed; unlucky ones were hacked to death with bolos or buried alive. To mete out punishment and control the villagers, the insurgents established shadow governments in the barrios. Many officials who worked openly with the Americans for civic improvements also worked secretly for the insurgents, spying on their townsmen, collecting taxes, recruiting men, and supplying information. The system of terror and invisible governments was successful in many locales, where fewer and fewer people cooperated with the Americans.
The deteriorating situation provoked an ugly reaction among some American soldiers, who committed atrocities such as torturing prisoners. Official policy forbade these cruelties. But authorities argued, with some plausibility, that the very nature of guerrilla warfare led to excesses, and imperialists insisted that anti-imperialists exaggerated troop misconduct for political purposes; indeed, the number of verifiable atrocities was only fifty-seven. However, since soldiers do not publicize their illegal acts, the actual number of misdeeds was certainly higher.
By May 1900, when Arthur MacArthur succeeded Otis, the military situation had become frustrating. Although the Americans were not in immediate danger of losing the war, the guerrillas were holding their own and Filipino terror sapped much of the civic action program’s appeal. Furthermore, although MacArthur needed more troops, he was obliged to send men to China to help suppress the anti-Christian and antiforeign Boxer Rebellion. When the Boxers besieged the Legation Quarter in Peking, McKinley ordered U.S. forces to participate, for the first time, in an international relief expedition. He wanted to save the beleaguered Americans in the Legation Quarter and to protect national interests as expressed in the “Open Door” policy, which called for equal trade privileges in China for the major European powers, Japan, and the United States, as well as the maintenance of Chinese sovereignty. A small naval squadron assembled and the U.S. committed 10,000 men commanded by Adna R. Chaffee to the relief force, which included troops from several European nations, Russia, and Japan. Prior to the legations’ mid-August relief, Secretary of War Root got 5,000 troops to China, and more were on the way. Some went directly from the U.S. and others from Cuba, but many came from MacArthur’s command. When the crisis ended Root ordered those soldiers en route to China to proceed to Manila instead, and most of the men already in China eventually followed them.
Meanwhile the American position in the islands had deteriorated. Making matters ever more difficult, at least from MacArthur’s perspective, was the arrival of the Taft Commission, headed by William Howard Taft. McKinley ordered the commission to establish civil government in the Philippines, and in September 1900 it began exercising legislative authority, while MacArthur exercised executive power. Since the president had failed to define the division of authority between MacArthur and Taft, jurisdictional squabbles soon arose.
Unlike Otis, MacArthur realistically assessed the war and devised an appropriate strategy that combined “a more rigid policy” toward guerrillas, greater efforts to protect the civilian population from insurgent terrorism, and continuing benevolence. In December 1900 he invoked General Orders No. 100. Issued during the Civil War, the orders had gained international acceptance as an ethical code for the conduct of warfare. War should be fought in conventional style between uniformed armies; guerrillas deserved little mercy, being subject to imprisonment, deportation, or execution. Although an army should respect the rights of civilians, two loopholes—“military necessity” and “retaliation”—allowed commanders to employ harsh measures against those who continued to resist. MacArthur also insisted on vigorous offensive action, and to carry it out his troop strength approached 70,000 by early 1901. Before the 1899 enlistments expired, Congress passed a bill in February 1901 increasing the regular Army to 100,000 men. For the second time a veteran volunteer force departed while a new force, this one of regulars, arrived. But close coordination between MacArthur and the War Department allowed the drawdown and buildup to occur simultaneously without hindering the war effort.
MacArthur also pursued an old Indian-fighting tactic by recruiting pro-American Filipinos, emphasized military intelligence, and called on the Navy for greater assistance. Otis had recruited a few Philippine scout companies but MacArthur expanded the program to compensate for the Americans’ inadequate knowledge of local languages, customs, and terrain. As had many officers in the American west who had worked with Indian scouts, MacArthur turned to indigenous soldiers reluctantly. By June 1901 he had organized 5,400 scouts (plus 6,000 Filipino police who performed semimilitary duties), but the February 1901 Army Act had authorized more than double that number. The Army organized a Division of Military Information in Manila to collect and disseminate timely intelligence data. MacArthur asked the Navy to intensify its patrolling to sever the insurgents’ interisland communications and the flow of arms from abroad.
While stressing more vigorous military measures, MacArthur realized that government based on force alone was not sufficient, that permanent pacification required the consent of the governed. Thus he continued the benevolent action program. To nurture pro-American sentiment, officials formed the Filipino Federal Party, which offered a political alternative to Aguinaldo’s independence movement. Working closely with the Taft Commission, the new party organized village committees to combat the influence of the guerrillas’ shadow governments and helped to pave the way for civil rule.
Between the fall of 1900 and the spring of 1901, the guerrillas suffered three stunning blows. In a spirited campaign in which anti-imperialists accused him of conducting an undeclared (and hence unconstitutional) war of “bare-faced, cynical conquest,” McKinley won reelection against anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan. His victory demoralized the guerrillas, who could no longer hope that America would soon withdraw. With carefully calculated timing, MacArthur then initiated his stiffer policy. Instead of releasing guerrilla leaders, the Americans deported, imprisoned, or executed them. In the field, Army patrols hounded insurgent bands, allowing them no rest or sanctuary and isolating them from their village bases, where larger and better-organized garrisons provided security. Finally, in March 1901 General Frederick Funston, leading a company of Filipino scouts, staged a daring raid that captured Aguinaldo. The next month Aguinaldo issued a proclamation accepting American sovereignty and calling on his compatriots to end resistance. Thousands of guerrillas began surrendering monthly, while others simply gave up the fight and went home. By summer only two sizable guerrilla units remained active, Malvar’s in Batangas and Vicente Lukban’s on Samar.
Capitalizing on the insurgent collapse, on July 1 McKinley transferred executive authority from the military governor to civil authority, designating Taft as the civil governor; legislative power remained with the commission, which now included three Filipinos. Concurrently, Chaffee replaced MacArthur as commanding general and continued to exercise control in the remaining unpacified areas. One of the civil government’s first acts was to establish a Philippine Constabulary, officered by Americans but manned by Filipinos and separate from the Army’s scouts and the municipal police. By January 1902 the constabulary had 3,000 enlisted men, who maintained order in pacified regions and allowed the Army to concentrate where guerrilla bands were still active.
The final pacification campaigns on Samar and in Batangas were brutal. The ghastly massacre of a U.S. infantry company at Balangiga, Samar, in September 1901 whipped Americans into a vengeful fury. Chaffee believed that “false humanitarianism” was responsible for the massacre; now, he said, if the troops fol
lowed his instructions “they will start a few cemeteries for hombres in Southern Samar.” The commanding general gave the pacification task to Jacob H. Smith, known for good reason as “Hell Roarin’ Jake.” Smoke from burning villages and crops marked the progress of Smith’s troops on the island. Meanwhile Chaffee ordered J. Franklin Bell to pacify Batangas. Believing that “it is an inevitable consequence of war that the innocent must generally suffer with the guilty,” Bell rigidly enforced General Orders No. 100 and kept up to 4,000 troops scouring the province, fighting Malvar’s men, destroying crops and livestock, and herding more than 300,000 civilians into concentration zones. “General Bell does not propose to starve these people as Weyler did the Cuban reconcentrados,” editorialized a pro-administration newspaper, and imperialists echoed the theme. But one commander called the zones “suburbs of hell,” and widespread suffering occurred in them as people lived without adequate food and shelter and thousands died of disease.
By April 1902, Lukban and Malvar had surrendered and Samar and Batangas had been pacified. These final campaigns were atypical of the pacification effort, which, like the Filipinos’ guerrilla warfare, varied from place to place. While none were pretty, no previous regional pacification efforts rivaled this late-war ugliness.
However, persistent charges throughout the war that American troops had committed atrocities, reinforced by the Samar and Batangas episodes, provoked an anti-imperialist backlash and prompted Senator George F. Hoar to request a special investigating committee. The Republican majority persuaded him that the Senate’s standing committee on the Philippines should undertake the investigation. Chaired by the imperialist Henry Cabot Lodge, who had faint patience with those who criticized American soldiers, the committee held sporadic hearings between January and June 1902. The committee ensured that friendly witnesses predominated, badgered hostile witnesses, barred the public, issued no final report, and allowed only pet reporters access to its findings. The hearings did expose some instances of American misconduct, as even friendly witnesses sometimes made damaging admissions, but Lodge was generally successful in limiting the investigation’s scope in order to prevent a full-scale review of the administration’s war policy, and the antiwar furor quickly subsided. An era of romantic nationalism made sustained criticism of the nation’s “duty” to spread civilization difficult, and most Americans had trouble remaining morally indignant about events seven thousand miles away involving a nonwhite race. People also found it difficult to criticize success, and on July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt proclaimed a successful end to the war.
The United States had crushed Aguinaldo’s dream of an independent republic. The successful conquest resulted from a combination of strong military force and wise political action. As American soldiers soundly defeated the guerrillas, benevolence and the Federal Party won popular support. The Americans swiftly integrated the revolutionary leadership into the civil government, while the constabulary, assisted by the scouts and the greatly reduced American garrisons, maintained peace. But the cost had been high. The financial tab was $400 million, twenty times the price paid to Spain for the islands. More than 125,000 troops saw service, of whom approximately 4,200 died (approximately 1,000 of them in action) and another 2,900 were wounded. Approximately 20,000 Filipino soldiers also died.
Combatants were not the only ones who suffered. Civilians in certain regions, such as Batangas, endured a demographic catastrophe for which the war was only partly responsible. An outbreak of rinderpest (a disease that killed cattle and carabaos) not only reduced the number of agricultural workbeasts but also compelled malaria-carrying mosquitoes that preferred bovine-blood meals to bite humans instead. The workbeast shortage and wartime disruptions reduced rice production, so the people ate imported thiamine-deficient polished rice rather than nutritious home-grown varieties. Malnourishment weakened their immune systems, making the populace unusually susceptible to malaria and other potentially fatal diseases. Bell’s concentration policy fueled the death rate, since microparasites were rapidly transmitted from one host to another in the overcrowded conditions.
Although most officers wholeheartedly embraced the war, a few questioned its justness and wisdom. One general referred to it as an “unholy war” and another believed that the United States had “ruthlessly suppressed in the Philippines an insurrection better justified than was our Revolution of glorious memory.” Others feared that expansion weakened rather than strengthened American security, and the question of how to defend the islands baffled strategists for decades to come. Even Teddy Roosevelt soon perceived that the Philippines were America’s “heel of Achilles.”
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TEN
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Building the Military Forces of a World Power, 1899–1917
With uncharacteristic restraint, Theodore Roosevelt assessed American military policy at the dawn of a new century: “I believe we intend to build up a good navy, but whether we build up even a respectable little army or not I do not know; and if we fail to do so, it may well be that a few years hence . . . we shall have to learn a bitter lesson. . . .” Even though he had more insight into world politics than most of his countrymen, Roosevelt could not have predicted in 1900 that in less than two decades the United States would be embroiled in a world war or even that the nation would enter that war with standing forces beyond the imagination of policymakers in the nineteenth century.
However inadequate those forces were, they represented a fundamental change in American policy. The shift in policy produced an essential dependence upon a standing battlefleet to protect the United States from foreign invasion and reduced dependence upon coastal defense artillery and fortifications, backed by military forces. It also increased dependence upon the Navy and the regular Army for military tasks beyond the continental United States. At the same time, the political elite gained increased confidence in the skill and political neutrality of the Army and Navy officer corps and became more willing to institutionalize military advice and accept military professionalism as compatible with civilian control. Both groups shared an interest in the reform of the militia as the nation’s reserve force for land operations and the creation of federal reserve forces for both naval and military mobilization in case of a major war. They also urged the accelerated application of new technology to military operations, especially improved ordnance, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, and electronic communications. The reasons for increased American military preparedness in the early twentieth century can be reconstructed with some certainty. The nation’s political elite feared that great power international competition (largely, but not completely, economic) had increased the likelihood of war. Imperial rivalries around the globe threatened to involve any number of major nations. Although such rivalries were hardly new, the introduction of efficient steam-powered warships and large passenger liners and merchant vessels made transoceanic military operations a possibility. In an era of rampant nationalism when “insults” to the flag, the destruction of private property, and physical assault upon foreign citizens could stir both elite and popular demands for punitive military action, small conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America became more common and carried the seeds of larger wars. Imperial rivalries over the creation and protection of colonies offered similar perils.
The cornerstone of American military policy remained, however, the defense of the United States. Unlike their European contemporaries, American policymakers did not worry excessively about land invasions, since the United States enjoyed amicable relations with Great Britain, which meant that the Canadian border did not require more than routine policing. Mexico until 1910 was ruled by a friendly dictator, Porfirio Diaz; when his regime collapsed, so too did the Mexican armed forces. Even though the Mexican revolutionaries bore no love for the United States, they used their limited military forces against one another with few exceptions. Whatever major threats the United States faced had to come from the sea and from naval powers like Great Britain, German
y, and Japan. The worst threat (but least likely) was that a major power would launch a naval assault, perhaps accompanied by a limited land campaign, against a major American seaport city like San Francisco or New York and then hold the city for diplomatic advantage. The more likely threat was that a major power would penetrate the northern half of the Western Hemisphere, a fear traditionally expressed in the Monroe Doctrine. In specific geographic terms, American policymakers worried about the newly annexed Hawaiian Islands, the Isthmus of Panama, where they intended to build a canal, and the unstable nations of the Caribbean. They saw Alaska as relatively safe, since its weather and terrain made it unappealing to foreign powers searching for bases. Revolutionary Mexico drew more concern because various Mexican factions flirted with Germany as a source of military support against possible American intervention.
The defense of the continental United States, then, seemed to rest on the ability to mount immediate military operations to defend Hawaii, the Canal Zone, and Puerto Rico or to preempt any foreign power that attempted to establish a new military presence in places like the Virgin Islands, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Entangled with issues of economic advantage, republican sentiment, and the belief in national self-determination, the policy of the United States toward nations of the hemisphere did not rest entirely upon military considerations. Nevertheless, it required military forces that did not depend upon mobilization and formal declarations of war. Therefore, the American government had to assume that military action beyond the nation’s borders—whether those operations were limited or became the opening moves of a general war—would require larger and more effective regular forces. One of the primary concerns of American defense policy before World War I became the creation of a ready reserve force that could be sent beyond the nation’s borders.