Things were peaceful enough that John LaWall, leaving the hospital in Manila in early 1900, could march the eighteen miles back to his unit alone with an empty gun, and not only make it safely but remember that “the natives were very friendly, offering me water and rice cake whenever I stopped for a rest.”14
The continuing success of the campaign and the expanding American control over the archipelago allowed Otis, at least on a personal level, to declare victory and go home. That spring, he had started asking to be relieved and replaced by Arthur MacArthur. On May 3, 1900, he sent a telegram to Washington: “conditions here very satisfactory and improving, although some difficulty in Samar and Leyte, which have been satisfactorily met.”15 Essentially, Otis thought that “the war in the Philippines is already over … there will be no more real fighting.”16 McKinley and the Department of War agreed the next day.
Mission accomplished, Otis believed. All that was left was to mop up the remnants of the Army of Liberation and perhaps hunt down a few brigands in the mountains. Those tasks he could confidently leave to the new commanding officer of the U.S. Army in the Philippines, Brig. Gen. Arthur MacArthur. His last telegram was a confident one: The “war has terminated,” Otis wired. “Leading Filipinos express confidence in early pacification of islands … leading insurgents surrendering.” There was one tiny nugget of bad news in that same telegram. Early reports were coming in of the ambush of an American unit on Samar that had killed nineteen soldiers. But Otis boarded the steamer Meade on May 5 confident that the war was won.17
A Political Campaign
Such a mission accomplished was good news at home as well. Though his political position was strong, McKinley was beginning to eye the upcoming presidential campaign. Having the conflict in the Philippines ended well before that campaign became serious would, McKinley believed, redound strongly to his benefit. Conveniently for McKinley, the Philippine victory had created, with one exception, no serious rivals. A political threat from the hero of Manila Bay, George Dewey, fizzled when the admiral proved incompetent at politics. Entering the race for president, Dewey made a series of comic-opera gaffes speaking to reporters, so bad that one supporter wrote urging him to “say nothing, nor write anything that can turn away support and your campaign will be irresistible.”18 It was too late.
The one serious rival was Theodore Roosevelt, who had returned from Cuba and managed to get himself elected governor of New York. Roosevelt, in reality, was less of a rival than a problem. He was cordially disliked by many of the political powers in the Republican Party—most particularly Thomas Platt, the boss of the New York Republican Party. Platt wanted to sideline Roosevelt somehow, and the death of Vice President Garrett Hobart offered an opportunity. That office—“about as useful as a pitcher of warm spit,” as a later vice president would so eloquently put it—would be an excellent place to hide the reform-minded Roosevelt. Roosevelt, by becoming the V.P., would “take the veil,” as Platt put it.19 The problem for Platt was that both Mark Hanna and William McKinley disliked Roosevelt. They searched the country for a more suitable candidate than the Rough Rider, even looking at Roosevelt’s old boss at the Department of the Navy, John D. Long. But when the Republican convention opened in June 1900, there was no consensus candidate for the position. The convention would have to choose.
Roosevelt himself was not particularly interested in the vice presidency. Though he had told Henry Cabot Lodge in July 1899 that he would like to be vice president, he did so more because of his self-perceived political vulnerability in New York (“Utterly unstable,” he judged his position).20 But by December of that year, his hold on the governorship had firmed up and the vice presidency did not seem as attractive: “The Vice Presidency is a most honorable office, but for a young man there is not much to do. … It seems to me that I had better stay where I am.”21 His mind remained firm through February: “In the Vice Presidency, I could do nothing. I am a comparatively young man and I like to work. I do not like to be a figurehead.”22 The fact that Platt was pushing him for the office, Roosevelt greeted with a certain touching naïveté. Platt liked him personally, Roosevelt thought inaccurately, but was being pressured by the industries Roosevelt had taken on as governor. In any case, Roosevelt was more interested in remaining in New York, or being in the cabinet, or being appointed governor-general of the Philippines. The vice presidency seemed to him to be a trap. But it turned out that for once someone got the better of both Mark Hanna and Theodore Roosevelt. Despite all of Hanna’s maneuverings and Roosevelt’s reluctance, Thomas Platt and his allies managed to convince the convention that Roosevelt was their man.
The vice presidency was the only issue that really stirred the convention. The renomination of William McKinley was never in doubt. The party platform was scripted well beforehand to emphasize economic growth and well-being. The issue of imperialism was handled relatively easily. The taking of the Philippines was presented as the inevitable result of the war with Spain. The fighting that had broken out in 1899, the resistance of the ungrateful natives, was a conflict that had been won speedily and without much effort. Any remaining fighting in the Philippines would soon fade. The only unscripted part of the convention was the vice presidency, so the delegates focused their ardor on it. Roosevelt, ever willing to play to the crowd, arrived in the hall in Philadelphia in a cowboy hat and strode down the center aisle to approving roars. “An acceptance hat,” one observer called it.23 To Mark Hanna’s dismay, he discovered that behind Roosevelt was a potent if odd coalition. Many delegates from the Western states, who remembered Roosevelt’s heroism in the Cuban War, fought hard for his nomination. Combined with the leverage of the New York and Pennsylvania machines, the surge in Roosevelt’s favor proved irresistible, and he was nominated for the vice presidency on June 21, 1900.
Roosevelt accepted the nomination with reasonable good humor, though his misgivings remained. In public, he put on his best and loudest face. In his acceptance speech, he did not shy away from foreign policy and made it clear how the ticket would use the Philippines in the political contest:
The [Philippine] insurrection still goes on because the allies in this country of the bloody insurrectionary oligarchy in Luzon have taught their foolish dupes to believe that Democratic success at the polls next November means the abandonment of the islands to the savages.24
In private, Roosevelt was a bit more ambivalent about the nomination. “I should be a conceited fool if I was discontented with the nomination when it came in such a fashion. … Edith [Roosevelt] is becoming somewhat reconciled.”25 Mark Hanna on the other hand did not take the nomination well. In the convention hall, as Roosevelt was voted in, Hanna turned to a friend and said, “Don’t you understand that there is just one life between this crazy man and the Presidency?”26 It was to prove an eerily prophetic remark.
At their convention in July, the Democrats again nominated William Jennings Bryan to be candidate for president. It was not an inspired choice. Bryan ran on a platform of free silver and anti-imperialism, neither of which excited much in the way of popular passion. The economy was surging, and free silver had faded along with it. Bryan’s standing on anti-imperialism was grievously hurt by his support for the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. In any case, most Americans did not see imperialism as a particular sin. As long as the economy remained steady and the Philippines remained relatively quiescent, McKinley’s reelection seemed assured.
Less than Victory
Worryingly for the Republicans, only one of these conditions prevailed. The economy, after a brief soft patch in August and September of 1900, continued growing. The fighting in the Philippines, on the other hand, began to take on an ominous new pattern. There were 442 attacks on American forces, costing 130 killed and 322 wounded in the first four months of 1900.27 These small-scale attacks on American units continued to grow in intensity over the summer, and it did not seem that the new commander of the American effort in the Philippines could stop them.
Tha
t commander, Arthur MacArthur, has become famous in American history largely as the father of one of the great generals of the twentieth century, Douglas MacArthur. But Arthur MacArthur was a fine soldier in his own right. A Civil War veteran and a Medal of Honor winner, he had spent the ensuing thirty-plus years in the army, at every level of command. On a personal level, he could be difficult to get along with; like his son later, Arthur MacArthur was firmly convinced of his own rightness in almost every situation. He loved to use flowery language in his dispatches, and he was not above shading events to burnish his own image.
Unlike Elwell Otis, MacArthur was, from the very beginning, eager to understand how to deal with the situation in the Philippines. As Peyton March remembered,
[MacArthur] had a standing order with Kelly, the bookseller of Hong Kong, to send to him every book in stock published on Far Eastern matters, particularly those devoted to colonial administration of the various islands and parts of the Far East which were under control of the European powers.28
MacArthur quickly recognized what Otis did not; the Filipino revolutionaries had managed to reconstruct themselves organizationally and turn to an unconventional form of warfare that relied on ambush, concealment, and the avoidance of conventional set-piece battles.
Within days of Otis’s departure, MacArthur received further news of the attack on Samar that the former commander had glancingly referred to in his last telegram. A unit of the Forty-third Regiment of U.S. Volunteers, thirty-one men strong, had been stationed at the small town of Catubig. There in the middle of April they had been ambushed by a strong force of insurrectos. The ambushers besieged the Americans in the convent that was serving as their quarters and then smoked them out by throwing in burning hemp from the church next door. The Americans attempted to escape downriver, but were cut to pieces as they tried to board their boats. The survivors dug in along the river and held off the attackers until they were saved by a relieving force, but by that time nineteen men had been killed. Was Catubig an isolated incident or the start of a new kind of war in the islands?
Just as such pressing military questions were raising their head, MacArthur’s problems became political as well. In early June, members of the second Philippine Commission arrived in the islands, headed by William Howard Taft. Taft, an Ohio politician, a friend of Elihu Root, and a judge on the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, had agreed (somewhat reluctantly) to head the commission and help get a civilian administration up and running. An important question for McKinley and Root was, what should be the relationship between the commission and the military command in the islands? Eventually, the commission would take over governance. With conflict still going on, however, some sort of compromise had to be found. Unfortunately for both Taft and MacArthur, the compromise reached in Washington was ungainly, to say the least. MacArthur would remain both military and civil head of the administration in the Philippines, but the commission would appoint and remove his civil subordinates, pass legislation, and control the financial side. Left unclear was whether MacArthur could veto the legislation, whether the appointing and removal required his approval, and how much budgetary control he had. It was a recipe for friction and ill feelings.
There are various stories about how MacArthur greeted Taft and the other commissioners when they arrived in the Philippines. In some, MacArthur was supposed to have greeted Taft with frigid formality, so much so that the sweat of Taft’s brows dried upon his skin.29 In others, MacArthur was formal, but polite and cooperative, and lunched with Taft several times in the days after his arrival.30 In still others, MacArthur went out of his way to arrange an honor guard for the commissioners on their arrival, sent his second in command to greet them, and accommodated, with long suffering, the petty demands that the commissioners made.31
However the reception went, Taft and MacArthur soon butted heads. Both sides had a certain amount of justice to their causes. From Taft’s perspective, he was there to organize and get the Philippines running now that the war was essentially over. MacArthur’s resistance to the presence of the commission was thus simply the stodgy resentment of a soon-to-be superseded military commander. From MacArthur’s perspective, the commission consisted of a bunch of overweight civilians (Taft traveled with his own bathtub because normal ones could not contain his ample frame) who had no experience with the Philippines and yet expected him to bow to their orders. Worse, MacArthur’s sense that the war was not in fact over continued to grow. Worried that the insurgents were taking the strategic initiative away from the Americans, MacArthur tended to vent his frustration on the commissioners and their assumption of a golden and harmonious peace soon to come.
As part of the process of handing over power to the commission, MacArthur was supposed to declare provinces pacified. He thus followed Otis’s practice and kept American forces spread widely throughout the archipelago in garrisons of rarely more than a hundred men and officers, to introduce and enforce American rule. Most of these garrisons were out of direct communication with Manila, and it fell to the commanders of each to explore and understand their localities and figure out how harshly or gently to apply dominion. They would have to serve as the civil and military powers, setting the rules for the ordinary people and chasing down any resistance.
It was MacArthur’s only real option, but it carried with it risks. American forces, small in size and distant from one another, were extremely vulnerable if the insurgents ever gathered themselves in large numbers. In addition, the American soldiers were perhaps not the best tools for the job. They frequently understood the Filipinos in explicitly racial terms. When John LaWall described the Filipinos, he instinctively reached for such ideas:
Imagine an Indian “crossed” with a negro, the product of this union married to a Chinese, and whatever conception you may form of the offspring of such a strange combination should bear an analogy in appearance, if not in mental and moral attributes, to the Filipinos.32
These attitudes brought a level of contempt and patronization in the American attitudes toward the Filipinos. Worse, few of them spoke any of the dialects used in the Philippines.
It is clear that MacArthur still hoped against hope that the resistance was merely the leftovers of the Army of Lib-eration. On June 21, as Theodore Roosevelt was accepting the acclamation of the Republican convention, MacArthur tried a final throw of the dice. He announced a ninety-day amnesty for insurrectos. If they turned themselves in, they would not be punished but only disarmed and sent home. If those resisting were merely stragglers, MacArthur’s plan might have been effective. Instead, only a few insurrectos turned themselves in, and the attacks continued.
Guerrilla Warfare
The war that was developing in the summer of 1900 was a less immediately familiar one to the Americans. An American unit, a supply train, or an outpost would be ambushed by a small insurgent force, armed with either bolos or rifles. Pvt. Lewis Cozzens of Company B of the Thirty-third U.S. Volunteer Infantry recalled the incidents during late October and early November. On October 25 the telegraph wires linking the coast to Bangued, the town garrisoned by the Thirty-third, were cut. The American unit responded by sending out patrols to repair the cables. One of these was ambushed by the insurgents, who “greatly outnumbered” the U.S. soldiers. Casualties consisted of six dead and nine wounded. The next day, the insurgents opened fire on Bangued during the night and in the morning ambushed a “raft going downriver to Vigan.” On November 1 the insurgents stole an American flag flying outside one of the Thirty-third’s outposts, shot five horses, and cut the telegraph line again. On November 2 another company on patrol was ambushed with six wounded. In response, the Americans mounted a surprise raid on a village suspected of harboring insurgents. “The surprise raid was successful,” Cozzens reported. “A number of huts were burned, and a large amount of Mauser ammunition was confiscated.”33
The tactics seemed unfair to the Americans. As John Clifford Brown commented: “The soldier starts with a fine contempt for the
insurgent, who would not stand up for a square fight, but who always wanted to fight from ambush and who playfully boloed the stragglers.”34 Soldiers derisively labeled this kind of fighting amigo warfare because, after inflicting casualties, the insurgent force would fade away into the jungle, and when the Americans pushed on into the nearest town, all they would find were Filipinos in civilian clothing crying out “Amigo, amigo!” as a sign of friendship.
Whenever a village was approached the natives came forward and offered lukewarm water in coconut shells. They were all very profuse in their assertions of good will, smiling all sorts of welcome, but who were at heart insurrectos and who bona-fide partisans of the American invasion it was hard to say. It was simply a case of “Jack-in-the-box.” Enter American troops, white blouses, all “Amigos” and smiles; exit Americans, blue print trousers, sullen looks, and “Viva Aguinaldo.”35
In this war, knowledge was preeminent, but the Americans found intelligence gathering difficult. The American force in the Philippines, said Col. Arthur Wagner, was “a blind giant. The troops were more than able to annihilate, to completely smash anything that could be brought against them … but it was almost impossible to get any information in regard to [the insurgents].”36
Few of these attacks did much damage or inflicted heavy casualties. Mostly one or two soldiers would be wounded or killed. But there was rarely a chance to strike back effectively, and the American soldiers, used to the conventional fighting of the previous year of the war, found this war of shadows frustrating. What the new kind of war mostly meant for the American soldiers was long stretches of boredom interspersed with exhausting patrols and the occasional bit of action. The war strained the men, as it required them always to be alert, and yet they only rarely encountered an enemy with which to come to grips. “ ‘While there is no enemy in sight, yet we are always on the lookout and we have slept in our shoes ever since we landed,’ ” said Lt. J. H. Thomas. “The war may be over or may have just commenced. No one can tell what these devils will do next.”37
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