But while the anti-imperialists had loud voices, those in the GOP had relatively little influence.28 Their natural allies were across the aisle, in the Democratic Party. This presented a serious difficulty, because the Democrats were split between the adherents of William Jennings Bryan and Grover Cleveland. While both men opposed imperialism, their supporters found it difficult to get along. Adding in Republican anti-imperialists only heightened the political chaos.
The anti-imperialists could not hope to command a majority, but it was possible that they could defeat ratification and thus either force a renegotiation or, more likely, force McKinley into the same constitutional shenanigans that had marked the annexation of Hawaii. But though they fought with vigor, the anti-imperialists were hamstrung from the beginning by disorganization and by William Jennings Bryan’s quixotic announcement, in an interview on December 13, 1898, that he favored approving the treaty and then settling the issue of the Philippines afterward.29
While the anti-imperialists were riven by dissension, the pro-treaty side put forward a remarkably effective set of arguments. Those arguments included simple political posturing, as when Henry Cabot Lodge argued that the anti-imperialists were, in reality, anti-American:
To the Americans and their government, I am ready to intrust my life, my liberty, my honor and, what is far dearer to me than anything personal to myself, the life and liberty of my children and my children’s children. If I am ready thus to trust my children to the government which the American public create and sustain, am I to shrink from intrusting to that same people the fate and fortune of the Philippine Islands?30
Needless to say, neither the Filipinos nor Lodge’s children or children’s children were asked about his choice.
But the imperialists also deployed a range of more substantial points. They argued that the United States had long practiced a policy of imperialism against Native Americans, and that many of the anti-imperialist senators and certainly the vast majority of the American people felt that this was and had been a wholly acceptable policy. As Sen. Albert Beveridge put it:
You, who say the Declaration [of Independence] applies to all men, how dare you deny its application to the American Indian? And if you deny it to the Indian at home, how dare you grant it to the Malay abroad?31
In fact, the treatment of Native Americans gave the American legal system a set of case law that could be applied to the Philippines. The legal status of Native American tribes within the U.S. legal system, that of “domestic dependent nations,” had been established by a Supreme Court decision of 1831: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. The ruling as written by Chief Justice John Marshall essentially denied Native Americans American citizenship and made them wards of the federal government, dependent on the goodwill of government officials. By the 1880s that status had been further reduced, as Congress asserted its control more tightly over the reservations. The Supreme Court declared in United States v. Kagama (1885) that the tribes were only “local dependent communities,” rather than nations. This was, in essence, the creation of a colonial people, notwithstanding that it was within the bounds of the United States. On this legal basis, coupled with the decision of the Supreme Court in Ross v. United States (1892) that the protection of the Constitution did not extend beyond the borders of the United States, the government could essentially rule the Philippines as it saw fit. The United States would not have to bring democracy or citizenship to peoples of a different race if the nation did not feel like it.32
The debate raged so much that a British poet took a hand, not that Rudyard Kipling was ever shy about voicing his opinion. In the February issue of McClure’s Magazine, Kipling published his famous poem “The White Man’s Burden,” subtitled “The United States and the Philippines.” Kipling opened with an unsubtle declaration of imperialist purpose:
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.
For Kipling, as for the imperialists, the Philippines were to be something of a sacred trust, which the United States would watch kindly over. The Filipinos could not be counted on to govern themselves. A benevolent protectorate over the islands would civilize the inhabitants until they were capable of guiding their own fate. Theodore Roosevelt thought it “poor poetry, but good sense.”33
If the United States did not take the Philippines, the imperialists asked, then who would? No one thought that an independent Philippines would be able to remain so in the face of the avaricious imperialism of the European nations. German behavior in Manila Bay had made everyone aware of that. Nor was the prospect of going back to the Spanish to renegotiate the treaty a pleasant one. As Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge said during the ratification fight:
The President cannot be sent across the Atlantic, in the person of commissioners, hat in hand, to say to Spain with baited breath: “I am here in obedience to the mandate of a minority of one-third of the Senate to tell you that we have been too victorious, and that you have yielded too much, and that I am very sorry that I took the Philippines from you.”34
By the beginning of February, McKinley was close to having enough votes. In addition to his reasoned arguments, the president added a substantial dose of pork. As one observer noted:
If an honest vote could be taken I doubt whether there is a bare majority for the treaty; but all the railroad influence … all the commercial interests and every other interests which can be reached are bringing pressure on Senators in the most shameful manner.35
But it was finally the news of the fighting in the Philippines that took McKinley over the top. A vote against annexing the islands after February 4 was a vote against the troops. McKinley was to summarize that feeling shortly after the ratification vote in a speech in Boston:
It was not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.36
On February 6, 1899, the Senate voted 57–27 to ratify the Treaty of Paris and officially annex the Philippines. Voting for the treaty were forty-three Republicans, seven Democrats, and seven from smaller parties (Populist, Silver). Voting against were twenty-two Democrats, two Republicans, and three from smaller parties. McKinley had held the Republicans together and pulled over enough Democrats to get the treaty ratified.
The victory solidified McKinley’s political position. He had managed to win a political battle that, combined with the military victory in the Spanish-American War, made him a popular president, both in Washington and across the land. One of the few things McKinley had to fear was an extended military campaign in the Philippines causing popular unrest at home, and, since the results of the first few days of fighting had been an unequivocal and overwhelming American victory, there seemed little chance of that.
But McKinley was in a somewhat pensive mood the evening of February 6. The potential weightiness of that situation came home to him. The president, Charles Dawes reported, was “much troubled” by the news of the outbreak of fighting, and how the conjunction of the fighting and the ratification “seemed to emphasize the thought of the enormous responsibilities now resting upon him and his country.”37 McKinley bestirred himself enough the next day to send a telegram to Otis, congratulating him on the military victory, but left the general to his own devices as to what was to follow. How should the United States govern this new territory, McKinley wondered, a territory with millions of inhabitants, without a common language or culture, who were unlikely to welcome American rule?
Reaction in America and the Philippines
The victory at Manila was a needed tonic for the U.S. Army at home. Although American ground forces had been utterly triumphant in Cuba, the rampant disorganization, disease, and d
ownright squalor that had dogged army units, both in the staging depot at Tampa and on the ground in Cuba, had brought with it a storm of criticism. Compared to the glittering and seemingly costless victories of the navy, the army seemed an old-fashioned and organizationally senile remnant of a preindustrial age. As one paper put it in early 1899: “ ‘If we wish Manilas on land, we must equip our regiments as skillfully as we do our battleships.’ ”38 The navy was modern—a machine-oriented service that subordinated the individual to the giant engines, turrets, and guns of Dewey’s battleships. The army was hopelessly antique, made up of poor Northern city boys, emigrants, and the dregs of American society. The report of the Dodge Commission, created in the fall of 1898 to examine the military shortcomings of the Cuba effort, was released in February 1899, and its critical conclusions reinforced the negative image of the army.
But the soldiers at Manila changed that image. The U.S. Volunteer units that did much of the fighting were almost entirely from the West. They seemed enthusiastic and cheerful and hearkened back to a beautifully rural image of the American frontier, a frontier now believed to be closed but remembered fondly. They fought against inhabitants seemingly much like the Native Americans. The Filipinos were Indians all over again—living on the land, but not using it properly, fascinating in their own right as “harmless and simple children of nature” but doomed to be “forever blotted out by the encroachment” of civilization.39
As they had in the West, Americans would civilize the people and the land, enclose it, and cultivate it. American efforts in the Philippines were simply a continuation of efforts on the North American continent, and Filipinos, like Indians, would have to accept that fact. Newspapers expanded “manifest destiny” to include the archipelago. They rhapsodized about the retired soldiers settling in the Philippines and exploiting its agricultural and mineral resources. National Geographic spoke of the United States as “fit representatives of humanity, invincible in war yet generous to fallen foes, subjugators of lower nature, and conquerors of the powers of primal darkness.” The job of the nation, the magazine continued, was to pick up, not the “White Man’s Burden,” but the “ ‘Strong Man’s Burden,’ ” by raising the weak to “enlightenment.” The words echoed spiritual, modernist, and Darwinist themes in fascinating combination.
As the campaign continued and American successes piled up, the army gained further respect at home. The successes of February played a large part in getting Congress to agree to McKinley’s request for expansion of the army. On March 2, 1899, Congress approved a bill that would maintain the Regular Army at the strength of 65,000 reached in the Spanish-American War and add a further 35,000 volunteers to supplement the regulars. With the National Guard and volunteer units in the Philippines already well over their enlistment time, it would be this force that was to fight the war in the Philippines.
On a popular level, the successes in the Philippines connected to ordinary Americans more intimately than had the previous generation’s victories in the Indian Wars. The National Guard and U.S. Volunteer personnel were essentially civilians, temporary soldiers enlisted to fight Spain. Unlike most of the regulars, then, they were well connected to family and friends back home. Their victories resonated quickly at the local level. The Tenth Pennsylvania returned from the Philippines in August 1899. On their way home, they stopped at Yokohama, Japan, where they had the opportunity to play a baseball game against the Yokohama Cricket and Athletic Association, winning 15–5. They were greeted at the Presidio in San Francisco by a delegation of prominent Pennsylvanians who had traveled across the country to escort them home.40 George Marshall, later one of the most important military figures of World War II and after, but then a young man in Pennsylvania, remembered the return of Company C of that regiment to his hometown:
[They received a] tumultuous welcome. … When their train brought them to Uniontown from Pittsburgh, where every regiment had been received by the President, every whistle and church bell in town blew and rang for five minutes in a pandemonium of local pride. [The parade that followed] was a grand American small-town demonstration of pride in its young men and of wholesome enthusiasm over their achievements.41
The war, at least in 1899, was a popular one. It spurred an interest in the larger world, as people sought to understand these strange new lands. Membership in the National Geographic Society would rise a hundredfold over the next decade and a half.42
For the Filipinos, on the other hand, the Battle of Manila and the campaigns after were disasters both strange and familiar. Familiar in that the American victory, unless reversed, seemed to promise the same sort of imperial over-lordship that the Philippines had experienced in the centuries of Spanish rule. Familiar because the Americans promised enlightenment and civilization, words that echoed the calls of the Catholic church to salvation and grace, if updated for a modern world. Familiar because, though the Americans spoke of their “mild sway of justice” instead of the “arbitrary rule” of Spain, it was hard for the Filipinos to sense a difference.43 External domination was external domination. The disaster was strange because the Filipinos had had a substantially uninterrupted string of military successes. They had, since the middle of 1898, essentially broken Spanish control over a large part of the islands. They had fought and won a series of battles with Spanish forces to do this, and while they had experienced casualties, there was nothing to compare to the dead and wounded of February 1899.
In essence, then, the Battle of Manila and the campaigns immediately afterward were shocks to the system of the Army of Liberation, shocks from which it needed to recover. Antonio Luna’s suggestions were a good start, but Aguinaldo’s situation was both hindered and aided by the structure of the revolution. Aguinaldo and the resistance leaders had to keep the Filipinos fighting. That meant getting the elites (the ilustrados and principales) and the peasants reasonably unified against the United States.44 This was both easier and more difficult than it might have seemed: more difficult because the religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the islands meant that Aguinaldo had to unify not one people but many; easier because that diversity meant that disunity could not spread easily. A breakdown of fighting spirit among the Tagalog populations of Luzon would not likely impact the Moros of the southern islands. In a sense, the fundamental differences between the Filipinos acted as a cultural firebreak between them, for good and ill. The results of Manila would likely not have much influence on southern islanders, like the Moros, with one exception: Aguinaldo himself.
Much of Aguinaldo’s influence was the informal influence that went along with his success. That influence had been growing as the Spanish crumbled. Manila was a setback. Malolos was worse, because it made clear Filipino defeats. On February 7, Aguinaldo had published an account of the Battle of Manila calculated for its propaganda value:
The treachery of the American Army, which was certain of victory, received its deserved punishment from our brave soldiers who, without losing their serenity for a moment and without considering their inferiority in number repulsed heroically the heavy and treasonable attack. … the number of American dead amounts to more than 500. … Our loss was much smaller, not exceeding 47 killed and wounded.45
The Army of Liberation might know different, but few others outside of Manila. When Caloocan was captured, a similar account appeared in the Heraldo Filipino:
The American traitors received another very hard lesson. They sustained a loss of more than one thousand in Caloocan. … On our side, very small loss. … Panic reigns in the American army, many of the soldiers of which refuse to fight any longer.46
Those reading the newspaper article might have been forgiven for wondering how these harsh lessons learned by the Americans kept happening deeper and deeper in Filipino territory. That suspicion was confirmed by the loss at Malolos. No newspaper article could cover up the dissolution of the Republic’s government. The forced retreat from the capital made it all too obvious who was winning and who was losing.
There was another problem with rebuilding the Army of Liberation after Manila. Such a project required the dynamism of energetic leaders at every level of the force. Luna was such a leader, but Aguinaldo, as a result, was jealous of Luna. Worse, his subordinates were jealous of their positions. Anyone who threatened those, even if it was in the interest of reform, was certain to run into trouble. Given this, it should be no shock to find out that Luna himself—aided by his own brusqueness—became drastically unpopular as soon as he began pushing his reforms, unpopular with the people around him and, growingly, with Aguinaldo himself.
Immediately after the battle, however, Aguinaldo turned to rebuilding the army. He issued a proclamation on February 7 to begin the process. The document is fascinating as a mirror to Aguinaldo’s problems. He first downplayed the setbacks: “Commanders … must cheer up the spirits of the troops, who have become discouraged on account of a few small advantages obtained by the Americans through surprises.” Then he turned to practical matters: “demoralized” soldiers would have their weapons taken from them and given to officers. Those officers had to “take an oath not to use [the weapons] for the purposes of robbery, assaults, kidnapping, acts of violence, or other improper acts.” In addition, those officers
shall recognize no other chiefs but the zone commanders or provincial commanders respectively, and shall receive the necessary instructions from the latter. They shall move always in combination with the regular forces of the army.47
Clearly, Aguinaldo’s control over his army, tentative to begin with, was in severe danger of fracturing completely in the wake of defeat. Perhaps the only thing that kept Aguinaldo from losing military (and perhaps civilian) control was that there simply was no one else with more credibility to take over. Luna, his major military rival, was roundly hated by other Filipino officers, for his reform attempts as well as his sometimes seemingly irrational behavior. And, since he had yet to win a battle, his pronouncements were greeted with some skepticism. Apollinaro Mabini, leader of a faction committed to total independence, was from the same Tagalog group behind Aguinaldo and had little independent sway.
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