But challenging as the task appeared, the Americans had useful experience. The U.S. Army had waged race war in the American West, shooting civilians, executing prisoners, raping women, torturing captives, looting and burning villages, and herding the defeated into concentration camps. Now, it was assumed, they would chew through the preindustrialized, agricultural Philippines.
As Richard Welch Jr. writes of U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, “They were determined to prove their manhood by ‘shooting niggers.’ Removed from the inhibitions of small-town American folkways, they celebrated by burning barrios of nipa huts; stimulated with the instant authority granted by a uniform and a rifle, they saw civilians as inferior and short… as less than human.”22 The American journalist H. L. Wells observed in the New-York Evening Post: “There is no question that our men do ‘shoot niggers’ somewhat in the sporting spirit.”23
The U.S. Army’s attack on the village of Malabon was one of the first battles. A soldier wrote home: “Brutality began right off. At Malabon three women were raped by the soldiers…. Morals became awfully bad. Vino drinking and whiskey guzzling got the upper hand of benevolent assimilation.”24
The third U.S. military governor of the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur,25 later justified these actions in testimony in front of the U.S. Senate:
Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.
As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific—that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race—thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man.26
When General MacArthur referred to Americans as descendants of the Aryan who were now using the U.S. military to expand back to the race cradle, no senator asked for clarification.
Early in the war, Filipinos shot and cut open the stomach of a U.S. soldier. General Loyd Wheaton ordered a massacre of civilians in retaliation. In a letter home, a soldier from Kingston, New York, recalled, “Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women, and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger.”27 F. A. Blake of the American Red Cross visited the Philippines and reported, “American soldiers are determined to kill every Filipino in sight.”28 And there was “fun” to be had with the women: Captain Fred McDonald ordered every native killed in the hamlet of LaNog, save a beautiful mestizo mother, whom the officers repeatedly raped, before turning her over to enlisted men.
General Arthur MacArthur, the third military governor of the Philippines and father of General Douglas MacArthur. In Senate testimony, General MacArther portrayed the U.S. Army’s westward expansion to the Philippines as in the tradition of America’s Aryan ancestors. (The U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center)
Typically, when the U.S. Army arrived, soldiers rounded up the mayor, town officials, priests, and any other potential sources of information. “Water detail!” an officer would bark, and up came the torturers with their black tools. In the Philippines conflict, waterboarding was known as the “water cure.” Former first lieutenant Grover Flint of the 35th Infantry served in the Philippines from November 1899 to April 1901 and later described the water cure to a Senate panel:
U.S. soldiers torturing a Filipino, 1901. When the U.S. military waterboarded Filipinos, the practice was accepted. When the Japanese later waterboarded U.S. personnel in World War II, America tried them for war crimes. (Ohio State University)
A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin… is simply thrust into his jaws and his jaws are thrust back, and, if possible, a wood log or stone is put under… his neck, so he can be held firmly… in the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out—I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to…. Well, I know that in a great many cases, in almost every case, the men have been a little roughly handled; they were rolled aside rudely, so that water was expelled. A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but he can not drown.29
A popular U.S. Army marching song, “The Water Cure,” gleefully described the process:
Get the good old syringe boys and fill it to the brim.
We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him.
Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Chorus:
Hurray. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurray. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
Shove in the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
We’ve come across the bounding main to kindly spread around
Sweet liberty whenever there are rebels to be found.
So hurry with the syringe boys. We’ve got him down and bound.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Oh pump it in him till he swells like a toy balloon.
The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon.
But we’ll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Keep the piston going boys and let the banner wave.
The banner that floats proudly o’er the noble and the brave.
Keep on till the squirt gun breaks or he explodes the slave.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
Chorus:
Hurrah. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
We’ve got him down and bound, so let’s fill him full of liberty.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.30
Ingenious Yankees employed a variety of other gruesome tortures, including flogging, scorching bound prisoners over open fires, and the “rope cure” (hanging trussed prisoners from the ceiling). A private from Utah summed things up in a letter home to his folks: “No cruelty is too severe for these brainless monkeys, who can appreciate no sense of honor, kindness or justice.”31 Roosevelt stiffened American resolve in the Philippines with a speech he called “The Strenuous Life”:
We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines…. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their willingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation.32
Veteran soldiers told newspaper reporters, “Th
e country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like Indians,” and that it was necessary “to blow every nigger into a nigger heaven.”33 The Medal of Honor recipient Frederick Funston executed POWs, tortured civilians, and raped women and then stoutly defended these tactics: “I am afraid some people at home will lie awake nights worrying about the ethics of this war, thinking that our enemy is fighting for the right of self-government…. They are, as a rule, an illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency.”34
In war, many more combatants typically are injured rather than killed—the ratio from the U.S. Civil War and other conflicts was five to one. But a summary of Filipinos dead from February through July of 1899 found only 3,297 wounded to 14,643 killed, a ratio of one to four35; U.S. soldiers were killing four times more Filipinos than injuring them. General MacArthur explained: “Men of Anglo-Saxon stock do not succumb as easily to wounds as do men of ‘inferior races.’ ”36
IN A DECEMBER 1899 essay called “Expansion and Peace,” Teddy explained that “peace may come only through war.”37 But while Americans at home were led to believe that civilization was following the sun, the reality in the Philippines was different, as Leon Wolff recalls in Little Brown Brother: “New-comers from the States were astonished at the discrepancy between fact and fable. They had read and had been told that the fighting was over except for minor police actions. Instead they found that the ‘quiet countryside’ meant constant scouting parties, petty engagements, ambushes, and tense garrison duties in hundreds of far-flung villages.”38 Nevertheless, one year into a race war that the army had assumed would be a cinch, the U.S. military governor-general, Otis, told reporters: “I have held that opinion for some time that the thing is entirely over. I cannot see where it is possible for the guerillas to effect any reorganization, concentrate any force or accomplish anything serious.”39 On the day Otis spoke those words, Filipino freedom fighters killed nineteen U.S. soldiers in a fierce battle.
When he retired, the war “won,” Otis made a victory lap of parades and banquets across the nation. In an interview with the popular Frank Leslie’s Weekly, Otis insisted, “The war is already over. The insurrection ended some months ago, and all we have to do now is to protect the Filipinos against themselves and to give protection to those natives who are begging for it.”40 In Washington, President McKinley congratulated Otis on his victory. As more soldiers lost their lives in 1900 than the year before, a joint session of Congress cheered a new American hero.
AFTER MORE THAN A year of bloody fighting, the new American military governor, Arthur MacArthur, warned that the war was not winding down and that the guerilla warfare was intensifying. MacArthur concluded that the freedom fighters could resist only if civilians supported them, so like the Spanish had done in Cuba, he decided to “concentrate” the civilian population to better hunt the guerillas. The U.S. Army would post notices that in a few days, all civilians within a designated zone were to report to a concentration camp. The people could bring what they could carry; the remainder of their possessions were to be abandoned.
Inside the fetid and poorly supplied camps, many uprooted civilians died. Outside the camps, U.S. troops shot captured freedom fighters as common criminals because MacArthur had stripped them of their prisoner-of-war status. Officers set the example. General Frederick Funston ordered his regiment to take no prisoners, and he bragged to reporters that he had personally strung up thirty-five civilians. Major Edwin Glenn chimed in that he had forced forty-seven prisoners to kneel before him and repent their sins before they were bayoneted to death. Writing home, Private Clarence Clowe reported:
At any time I am liable to be called upon to go out and bind and gag helpless prisoners, to strike them in the face, to knock them down when so bound, to bear them away from wife and children, at their very door, who are shrieking pitifully the while, or kneeling and kissing the hands of our officers, imploring mercy from those who seem not to know what it is, and then, with a crowd of soldiers, hold our helpless victim head downward in a tub of water in his own yard, bind him hand and foot, attaching ropes to head and feet, and then lowering him into the depths of a well of water till life is well-nigh choked out, and the bitterness of a death is tasted, and our poor, gasping victims ask us for the poor boon of being finished off, in mercy to themselves.41
The president ruled the Philippines through his War Department, whose top man in the islands was the U.S. military governor of the Philippines, now MacArthur. In 1900, an election year, McKinley told voters that since the Filipino insurrection had been defeated it was safe to transfer power from a “military government” to a U.S. “civil government.” It was critical that McKinley select just the right poster boy to lead the new civil government. On a cold January day in 1900, it was Judge William Howard Taft who stood in front of the president in his Executive Mansion office. Back in 1876, President Ulysses Grant had summoned Judge Alphonso Taft as his secretary of war, charged with assimilating the Indians at the height of the Indian Wars. Now President McKinley was summoning Alphonso’s son to be the War Department’s benevolent assimilator of the Pacific Negroes.
Taft had no knowledge of the Philippines beyond that of any Cincinnatian who read the news. But when he learned what was on the president’s mind, Taft immediately parroted the McKinley administration’s rationale: that the Filipinos were incapable of ruling themselves, that America had to exert itself to help its Pacific wards, and that America was “doing them great good” by building them a nation. McKinley subsequently announced the formation of the Taft Commission to study conditions in the Philippines, with Big Bill the lead commissioner.
For forty-nine days in the spring of 1900, Commissioner Taft steamed across the wide Pacific, dreaming of how he would mold the Pacific Negroes into a “self-governing people” and build them a shiny new nation. Big Bill imagined that if he and the other nation builders demonstrated their benevolent intentions, the Filipinos would naturally want to become just like their American masters. He called this his “policy of attraction.” Wrote Taft: “We expect to do considerable entertaining and especially of Filipinos, both ladies and gentlemen. We are advised that the army has alienated a good many of our Filipino friends… and given them the impression… that they regard the Filipino ladies and men as ‘niggers’ and as not fit to be associated with. We propose, so far as we are able, to banish this idea from their mind.”42
The U.S. commissioner to the Philippines, William Howard Taft, and Mrs. Helen “Nellie” Taft en route to Manila, 1900. On this trip Taft decided to implement a “policy of attraction.” He reasoned that if U.S. colonial rulers were benevolent, the Filipinos would over time desire to be like Americans. (Library of Congress)
The McKinley administration had so successfully hidden the military reality that even the commission was unaware of the intensity of the fighting and that hundreds of thousands of Filipinos lay rotting in their early graves. When he sailed into Manila Bay on June 3, 1900, Commissioner Taft noted in surprise, “The populace that we expected to welcome us was not there.”43 After observing Big Bill’s arrival, an American newspaperman wrote, “We ought to ship this splendid fellow back. It’s a shame to spoil his illusion that folks the world over are just like the folks he knows out in Ohio.”44
PERHAPS WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT’S most famous utterance is that the Filipinos were his “little brown brothers.” Yet immediately upon his arrival, Commissioner Taft cabled opinions with little brotherly love: “The population of the islands is made up of a vast mass of ignorant, superstitious people, well-intentioned, lighthearted, temperate, somewhat cruel, domestic and fond of their families, and deeply wedded to the Catholic Church…. These people are the greatest liars it has been my fortune to meet, in many respects nothing but grown up children…. They need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.”45
With the presidential election just mon
ths away, Taft’s cables reinforced the president’s claims: “The backbone of the revolt as a political war is broken.”46 Yet while Taft wrote superbly optimistic reports, General MacArthur described a depressing quagmire where the U.S. Army controlled only 117 square miles out of a total of 116,000 square miles, a hostile country where Americans could not venture out alone, and a shell-shocked populace whose hatred for their oppressors grew each day.
MCKINLEY NEEDED TO PICK a running mate for the 1900 election and Teddy got the job. For two decades as a famous author, Roosevelt had urged America to follow the sun, and in the case of America’s latest expansion, he had toed the administration’s line. “The insurrection in the Philippine Islands has been overcome,” he boldly declared to the New York State Republican Party in April of 1900.47 Impressed with Rough Rider Teddy’s magnetism and public relations, the Republican Party nominated the forty-one-year-old for vice president. The campaign’s slogan was “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake.”
Map of the Orient showing Manila as the geographical center of the Oriental Commercial Field. Republican National Committee presidential campaign advertisement, published in Harper’s Weekly, July 28, 1900. In the 1900 presidential campaign, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt portrayed the expensive military acquisition of the Philippines as a good investment for America’s trading future in Asia, a claim that rested upon the voting public’s ignorance of Asian geography. Roosevelt later realized that taking the Philippines was a mistake.
The Imperial Cruise Page 9