War of Frontier and Empire

by David J Silbey

  Any distraction was welcomed. Mail from home was immensely popular, and payday was the day of all days. The men spent their pay almost immediately. As one soldier remembered:

  Right then the celebration started. There was one big rush for the dice and monte games, and another big rush for the saloons. I was with the second bunch. I drank everything that the [saloon] sold that night from goo-goo vino and Jap sake to Schlitz beer and good old Kentucky rye. … If the goo-goos had swept down upon the city that night I couldn’t have moved a finger to help save the occasion for Uncle Sam.38

  Neither boredom nor the guerrilla strategy were likely to force the Americans to evacuate, but they did make for good stories in the American media, forced the American army to recognize that it had not been as victorious as it had thought, and convinced many Filipinos that the republic lived. But for victory, Aguinaldo was relying on something else.

  Interestingly, Aguinaldo was well tuned in to domestic events in the United States. Despite the fact that he was on the run and frequently deep in the mountains or jungles, he managed to keep up with a range of news stories from America. He often used them against the Americans. In leaflets aimed at African-American soldiers, he went as far as to mention Sam Hose, the African-American from Georgia lynched by a white mob in 1899.39 And what he read in the newspapers led him to pin his hopes on the U.S. presidential election. If the insurgents could make the Americans bleed a steady trickle of wounded and dead throughout 1900, they could influence the election. Aguinaldo wrote to one of his generals:

  In order to help the cause of Philippine Independence in the coming presidential election in the United States of America which will take place early in September [sic] of this year, it is very necessary that before that day comes, that is to say, during these months of June, July, and August, we should give the Americans some hard fighting.40

  Aguinaldo’s grasp of the date of the election was faulty, but there is some justice in his reading of the campaign that far. Bryan’s fiery anti-imperialist rhetoric, filling the media, seemed to dominate the campaign. McKinley faded into the background. If Bryan won, Aguinaldo concluded, he would free the Philippines.

  There was an air of desperation about Aguinaldo by the middle of 1900. He was on the run for most of the early part of the year, hunted by Americans and unable to stop in any one place for more than a few days. His personal servant had deserted him one night, taking with him a rifle and a number of rounds. His generals sent him lists of the latest officers to desert the insurrection, and one of the officers of his personal escort had attempted to take his unit and leave Aguinaldo behind. Aguinaldo had him shot, but he could not enforce such discipline on anyone farther away. His rule extended as far as his sight, and sometimes not even that.

  Such was the case throughout the Philippines. The revolutionaries not only had to fight the American soldiers but also try to prevent Filipinos from cooperating with the foreigners. They were fighting a two-front war, in essence. On one front they had to keep up their efforts against the U.S. Army; they had to not lose, at least until the presidential election. On the other front they had to ensure that the people of the Philippines, large and small, wealthy and poor, important and obscure, helped them and hindered the Americans. Traitors could not be tolerated:

  Certain residents of the town of Bay, named Domingo Punsalan [and] and Manuel Revilla … forgetting they were Filipinos, accepted positions given by the enemy … [and] displayed the United States flag in the town hall. The upright and patriotic residents of the above mentioned town, at the sight of such outrageous insolence, invaded the town hall and killed Punsalan and Revilla.41

  Despite such actions, however, the ongoing American efforts to woo Filipinos to their side continued to have success throughout 1900.

  But if the Filipinos were losing on the civilian side, on the military side things were no longer so clearly in favor of the United States. The outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in China in June had pulled two regiments of American troops away from the Philippines, leaving MacArthur short-handed. The number of attacks on American forces had been going up steadily during the early summer, interrupted only by monsoon season.

  The problems made him difficult. Taft wrote back to Root that MacArthur “regards all the people as opposed to the American forces and looks at his task as one of conquering eight millions of recalcitrant, treacherous, and sullen people.” Further, Taft complained of “the indisposition of General MacArthur to enter into a discussion … or cooperate in any way.”42 It is clear in retrospect that MacArthur’s evaluation of the situation was closer to reality than Taft’s. It is probably not surprising that the general found it hard to work with the eternally cheerful judge.

  After the breathless and soaked interval of the monsoon, things started to slide out of control. The insurgent attacks continued to rise, and the size of the insurgent forces seemed to be increasing. It is sometimes difficult to tell how many insurgents there were. John D. LaWall remembered his unit of sixty men being attacked on September 17, 1900. Their camp, located next to a river, was ambushed at night from across the water. LaWall’s account makes it clear that he never actually saw the insurgents. The soldiers lined up on the river’s edge and poured volley fire into the “bamboo thicket” across from them, repulsing the attackers, their “occasional shots dying away in the distance as dawn began to let light upon the scene.” Despite the confusion of the firefight, LaWall confidently reported that the sixty men of his unit had fought off five hundred insurgents.43 If such inflated numbers were common, it is no wonder that MacArthur was depressed.

  This is not to say that such depression was without reason. Two events, in particular, showed that the war was largely out of American control. In early September, on the island of Marinduque, Filipino insurgents ambushed a force of fifty-six American soldiers of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Volunteers, commanded by Capt. Devereux Shields. After a three-hour firefight, the Americans retreated but were soon surrounded in a rice paddy. Wounded, Captain Shields surrendered himself and his entire command.

  Worse was to come. On September 17, a combined force of the Fifteenth and Thirty-seventh Infantry Regiments, which consisted of about 130 men under the command of Capt. David L. Mitchell, came upon a strong insurgent force at Mavitac, in the Laguna Province of Luzon. The insurgents, commanded by Gen. Juan Cailles, had dug in on the other side of an arm of the Laguna de Bay, at the far end of a bridge. The surrounding land was still soaked from the monsoons, making movement extremely difficult. Mitchell did what had served American officers well since the start of the war. He sent his men across the bridge in a frontal assault on the insurgent fortifications. Experience had taught him, as it had taught other American officers, that the insurgents would fire high and would break before the Americans got too close.

  Unfortunately for Mitchell’s command, the insurrectos refused to cooperate. Instead of firing high, the Filipinos fired accurately. Instead of breaking when the Americans closed to within a few hundred yards, the Filipinos continued to fire. The result was a debacle for the U.S. soldiers and a stunning victory for the Filipinos. Advancing under the heavy and accurate fire, unable effectively to shoot in return at the Filipinos in their entrenchments, the Americans at first pressed the attack and then after an hour broke and retreated. In that hour, twenty-four American soldiers were killed and nineteen were wounded. The Filipinos lost roughly ten dead and twenty wounded. When the American soldiers returned the next day, they found that Cailles had wisely retreated, content to take his victory back with him. MacArthur put the best face possible on the setback in his report. “Thirty-three percent [casualties] is profoundly impressive loss and indicates stubbornness of fight, fearless leadership of officers and splendid response of men.” The enemy, MacArthur reported, had no doubt returned home and hidden their weapons “to appear for time being, or until called into fight again, as peaceful amigos.”44

  And that was the crux of it. MacArthur’s remarks about “fearless lead
ership” and “splendid response” were simply a thick coating of whitewash on a profoundly ominous development. The Filipino guerrillas seemed to be developing what the Army of Liberation had never had: the ability to inflict serious damage on an American unit while holding the field of battle. Whereas at Catubig in April, a large force of Filipinos had surprised and trapped a small force of Americans, at Mavitac the two forces had met on the battlefield, neither surprised. The Filipinos had won. If they could do that on a regular basis, and still effectively melt back into a population that would support them with money, food, and other supplies, then MacArthur and the American effort in the Philippines were in serious trouble. The situation was bad enough that MacArthur’s son Douglas, then at West Point, would later be heckled at the Army-Navy baseball game with the chant “MacArthur! MacArthur! … Who is the boss of this show? Is it you or Emilio Aguinaldo?”45

  Autumn

  The fall campaigning season was thus, from MacArthur’s perspective, a particularly critical one. The United States had to ramp up its military efforts and effectiveness. Otis’s focus on the civilian side of things had worked to reestablish something approaching normality, and the reforms of the legal and economic systems were clearly successes. But that success was not matched with a similar success on the military front. That quite a few Filipinos were returning to prosperity gave them more resources to spare, and they frequently spared them to aid Aguinaldo’s forces. As Capt. John L. Jordan said, “this business of fighting and civilizing and educating at the same time doesn’t mix very well.”46 MacArthur’s level of stress can be detected in his treatment of Taft and the members of the Philippine Commission. MacArthur’s dinner parties conspicuously did not include commission members, and he picked a series of inane arguments with the commissioners, including one in which the general vetoed an appointment decided on by the commission, even though MacArthur himself had recommended the officer.47

  MacArthur finally decided to turn up the heat on the insurrectos. First, he sent two battalions of soldiers, over 1,200 men, to Marinduque to recover the captured soldiers of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Volunteers, and made it clear to the commander of the battalions, Gen. Luther Hare, that the population was not to be spared: “Regard all the males over the age of 15 as enemies. … [They] should be held as hostages until the hostiles are killed or captured.”48

  Second, he formulated a plan to attack the insurgents more aggressively. He would leave most of the garrisons where they were, but pull back a number of troops from more remote or peaceful areas and concentrate them in flying columns of men. These he proposed to send into the areas with the most active insurgents, to patrol aggressively and go after the insurrectos on their own turf.

  He laid out the plan for the War Department in a telegram dated October 26 detailing the time frame and the requirements. He thought that “full development” of the plan needed four months, and he “urgently recommend[ed]” that the War Department stop taking troops from the Philippines and sending them home or to China. The next day, the War Department telegraphed back its assent, saying that Root wanted the plan “prosecuted with vigor.”49 As these new troops arrived in the Philippines, MacArthur used them and the surplus troops gained by closing down some of the outposts to build up forces in hotly contested areas. In the northern Luzon province of Ilocos, Gen. Samuel Young saw the troops under his command increase from 3,590 on August 18 to 4,928 on November 3.50

  Assaults directly on the insurgents were only half the effort required. The Americans had to find a way to persuade the civilian population not to provide the guerrilla forces with money, supplies, or information. The “benevolent assimilation” that McKinley and Otis had promised had worked in some areas and with some groups, but it had not done so in the greater part of the archipelago. Now, MacArthur was determined to apply the whip hand. Marinduque was only the beginning.

  The behavior of American soldiers in the Philippines was officially governed by General Orders 100. GO 100 had been written during the Civil War to help Union forces deal with the task of controlling occupied Southern territories. The author, a distinguished lawyer named Frances Lieber, had had sons fighting on both sides, and he aimed the orders to be stern but fair. “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another, and to God,” he wrote in the orders.51 He based his guidelines on a range of sources, including the medieval scholar of the laws of war, Hugo Grotius, American policies in the Mexican War, and international laws. GO 100 demanded the fair treatment of enemy soldiers and of civilians in occupied terrain. But it also required that those enemy soldiers and occupied civilians meet certain rules of behavior. Enemy soldiers had to wear uniforms. Occupied civilians could not act to hide or assist enemy soldiers without fear of repercussion.

  These rules reveal that Lieber was particularly worried about guerrilla warfare, unsurprising in the context of the Civil War. Guerrillas, Lieber said, were “not public enemies, and therefore, if captured, are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war, but shall be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates.” If the civilian population acted to hide or assist such guerrilla forces, the occupying army was justified in punitive destruction of civilian property, as long as that destruction was not “wanton.”52

  GO 100 had been in effect in the Philippines since the arrival of the American army, but Otis had emphasized the gentler side of the order and de-emphasized the harsher. MacArthur had followed his lead, but in the fall of 1900 he began to reconsider that. The punitive measures allowed by GO 100 could certainly be the stick to go along with the benevolent carrot held out so far. Captured insurgents could be executed summarily. Towns giving support to Aguinaldo’s forces could be destroyed. The Filipino population could be made to feel the pain of propping up the revolution.

  MacArthur hesitated, for political rather than military reasons. The presidential campaign was coming into its last weeks in October. Bryan had been unrelenting in his assaults on America’s imperial venture. With imperialism such a critical issue, the War Department did not want to give the anti-imperialists anything that resembled a last-minute issue with which to flog the president, and explicitly turning to harsher methods in the Philippines would be such an issue. Combined with the recent insurgent success, it might tilt the balance against McKinley. MacArthur thus focused first on a renewed military campaign without the harsh new measures while awaiting the election outcome.

  The Election and an American Commitment

  The Republicans ran a canny campaign in 1900 based on economic good times, promising “Four more years of the Full Dinner Pail.” Their vice presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, strode around the country, bellowing loudly from behind his glasses and mustache. He traveled farthest and did his most good in the West, a targeted region for the Republicans. It had voted overwhelmingly for Bryan in 1896 on the foundations of economic depression and the promise of free silver. But now the economy was good, and the Westerners had been enthusiastic imperialists. The Republicans hoped to capitalize. In one Western trip, Roosevelt traveled 12,870 miles and gave speeches to more than 600,000 people.53 He waved the bloody flag and accused the Democrats who opposed the war in the Philippines of being descendants of the pro-South Civil War copperheads. He emphasized the contradiction at the core of Bryan’s platform. How, Roosevelt said, could the Democrats argue for freeing “Malay bandits” when the Democratic strongholds of the Solid South denied “the right of self-government to our fellow-Americans of dusky color?”54

  That rhetorical device highlighted the contradiction for African-Americans in the election of 1900: neither party seemed attractive. The Republicans had fallen under the sway of imperialism; the racial notions of Social Darwinism drove their views of race relations at home and abroad. Kipling, whose views many African-American Republicans found to be “sham and hypocrisy,” was a guiding star for that imperialism.55 Worse, President McKinley seemed oblivious to African-Am
erican concerns, preferring, for example, to condemn the lynchings of five Italian-Americans in his 1900 State of the Union address and ignore the hundreds of lynchings of African-Americans in the same year. Resentment toward Roosevelt still boiled in the African-American community. But the Democrats were no better than the Republicans, captive as they were to their Southern wing, from which so much of Jim Crow flowed. Though some of the Democratic machines of the North—notably Tammany Hall in New York—reached out to the African-Americans, it was not enough. Most of the African-Americans who could vote did as they had done since the end of the Civil War: voted Republican, albeit while perhaps holding their nose.

  Creakily, then, the Republican coalition held together on November 2. McKinley won a second term, this time by a larger margin. In 1896 McKinley had garnered 51 percent of the popular vote against Bryan’s 48, and 271 electoral votes versus Bryan’s 176. McKinley had won with the Northeast and the Great Lakes states against Bryan’s hold on the Solid South and most of the far West. In 1900 McKinley opened up his lead, again taking 51 percent of the vote, but this time to Bryan’s 45 percent. The electoral college margin was even wider. McKinley held the Northeast and Great Lakes and shattered Bryan’s hold on the West, taking Kansas, South Dakota, Colorado, Utah, and Washington, and losing only Kentucky in return. In a final triumphant slap to Bryan’s face, McKinley won the Democrat’s home state of Nebraska by a bare 7,000 votes. That gave McKinley 292 electoral votes to Bryan’s 155, and a solid grip on the White House. The Republicans also made gains in the congressional elections. What had been a relatively close Republican advantage in the House (187 to 161) became a gaping one. They gained thirteen seats and the Democrats lost ten, making the GOP’s majority an unassailable 200 to 151. The Republican majority in the Senate, most of whose members were still chosen by the state legislatures, remained sizable.