The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  On the campaign trail, Roosevelt demonstrated little knowledge regarding the Philippines but great skill in framing the debate in terms of the sun-following imperative. “It is unthinkable,” he proclaimed, “that the United States would abandon the Philippines to their own tribes. To grant self-government… under Aguinaldo would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief.”48

  “The Administration’s Promises Have Been Kept” (Republican campaign poster, 1900). The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket portrayed the U.S. military’s invasions as benevolent: “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake.” This humanitarian justification for military action still resonates with the American public.

  The Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, tried to paint American activity in the Philippines as imperialistic, but to no avail. On election day, November 6, 1900, voters handed the Republicans their biggest victory since Ulysses Grant’s triumph in 1872. Upon hearing of the result, Robert Austill, a soldier in the Philippines, concluded: “The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, fuck all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands.”49 With the contest now decided, McKinley presented a whopping request of $400 million for the War Department. Some wondered why, if the islands were, as McKinley and Roosevelt claimed, becoming peaceful, so much more money was necessary. In the course of hearings on the War Department appropriations, General MacArthur’s pessimistic military assessment came to light. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican forlornly asked, “Why did all this truth telling become available only after the election?”50

  ON MARCH 23, 1901, the U.S. Army captured President Aguinaldo in his mountain lair. After two months in General MacArthur’s custody in Manila, the Philippines’ founding father declared, “There has been enough blood, enough tears, enough desolation…. I cannot refuse to heed the voice of a people longing for peace… by acknowledging and accepting the sovereignty of the United States throughout the Philippine Archipelago…. I believe that I am serving thee, my beloved country.”51 The New York Times—which had pilloried Aguinaldo as a lying thief—now described America’s captive as “a warm, friendly, intelligent, trustworthy, and reasonable person—a man of honor with the best interest of his countrymen at heart.”52

  President McKinley made the most of the news with a victory lap across the country to “heal the sharp divisions” created by the conflict. “At Harvard University, he called upon Americans to forget their past differences over the Philippines and unite in peace to carry out the task assigned to them by Providence: to bring the benefits of American civilization to the Filipinos.” The president’s tour ended in San Francisco. As Stuart Creighton Miller writes in Benevolent Assimilation: “Climbing a nearby sand dune, McKinley gazed at the Pacific in the manner of the conquistador Balboa and claimed that vast ocean for American freedom.”53

  ON JULY 4, 1901, the United States pulled off one of the most remarkable shell games in colonial history. Textbooks recall that on that day the U.S. ended “military government” in the Philippines and initiated “civil government.” In a flowery ceremony in Manila, a mostly White Christian audience applauded as General MacArthur—the outgoing military governor—handed over the reins to William Howard Taft, the incoming civil governor. Before this, the majority of the War Department’s men, supplies, and money had flowed to the military in the Philippines, while few men and much less money went to the civil arm. After the ceremony, it would be exactly the same. Governor Taft’s government was “a military regime under a civil name.”54

  Governor Taft lived in the Malacañang Palace, the elegant whitewashed home of the Spanish governors. His wife, Helen, wrote, “We are really so grand now that it will be hard to descend to common doings. We have five carriages and two smaller vehicles, and fourteen ponies, a steam launch and dear knows how many servants.”55

  The governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft, on a carabao. Filipino farmers used carabaos as beasts of burden to plant and harvest rice, their main crop. U.S. military action reduced the population of carabaos by 90 percent, which contributed to mass hunger throughout the Philippines archipelago. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

  Outside Manila, the U.S. military was still herding civilians into concentration camps, vultures grew too fat to fly as they feasted on the corpses of dead Filipinos, torture was routine, and the smoke of burnt towns hung in the air. In Manila, Governor Taft met with Americans and those Filipinos who would collaborate with his rule, setting a pattern that would bedevil future U.S. nation builders from Saigon to Kabul. Taft’s correspondence reveals he had little respect for his collaborators—educated and wealthy Filipinos who spoke English and wore top hats—but for the fact that they scratched his back by telling him what he wanted to hear. In return, Taft funneled money and power to these elite few, cementing the oligarchy that still controls the Philippines.

  Democracies usually build themselves up from the bottom—the masses that vote—and thus have a wide foundation. Taft tried to build from the top down, with the few elite that he nursed in his governmental kindergarten. He approved the formation of the Federal Party (Partido Federal), which was made up of his rich collaborator buddies and heralded by the McKinley administration as a democratic step forward, but Taft prevented the formation of competing parties. He allowed only 3 percent of the upper crust to vote, and those elections were only for lower-level offices; Americans held all the top posts. Explained Taft, “The masses are ignorant, credulous, and childlike [so] the electoral franchise must be much limited, because the large majority will not, for a long time, be capable of intelligently exercising it.”56 The Yale-educated governor never considered that Filipinos could master higher education like Whites; instead they would be processed through schools modeled on Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where good Blacks learned how to work with their hands and say “yes, sir” at every opportunity. Taft wrote privately, “In this system we must beware the possibility of overdoing the matter of higher education and unfitting the Filipino for practical work. We should heed the lesson taught us in our reconstruction period when we started to educate the negro.”57 Taft put out a call for American teachers to help build the nation and lavished U.S. taxpayer money on the building of schools. After just three months in the Philippines, one of the American teachers grew frustrated: “I find this work very monotonous, trying to teach these monkeys to talk.”58 A Radcliffe graduate looked on the bright side: “I suppose with patience and perseverance they will progress little by little until within two or three hundred years they may be quite Americanistic.”59

  ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1901, Governor Taft got a new boss, as Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president after McKinley succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. Just two weeks into his presidency, Teddy was confronted with the nation’s worst military crisis since Custer’s Last Stand at Little Bighorn. U.S. soldiers had tried to benevolently assimilate the residents of Balangiga, a tiny fishing village on the island of Samar. On September 28, the villagers revolted and killed fifty-one Americans. An untested president awoke to headlines proclaiming the “Balangiga Massacre.”

  General Jake Smith

  General Smith ordered U.S. troops to kill all Filipino men over the age of ten: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”

  General Jake Smith was put in charge of disciplining Balangiga and the island of Samar. Smith had built his career over decades as an Indian hunter out West. On October 23, the U.S. Navy ship New York bobbed off the west coast of Samar. Major Littleton Waller, a battle-hardened marine who had fought in Asia, the Middle East, and Cuba, came aboard to receive his orders from Smith for the subjugation of the island. Smith ordered Waller, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hosti
lities against the United States.”60

  WALLER: “I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir.”

  SMITH: “Ten years.”

  WALLER: “Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?”

  SMITH: “Yes.”61

  Smith gave the entire population of Samar Island—two hundred fifty thousand people spread over five thousand square miles of inhospitable jungle—ten days to abandon their homes and enter U.S. concentration camps or be shot dead on sight. In field reports, Major Waller enumerated the many Filipino civilians he had slain. There were no American casualties.

  Whispers about the orgies of violence in the Philippines gradually made their way back to the United States. Congressman Thomas Selby of Illinois asked, “What American ever dreamed that within four years… our generals in the Philippines would be following the notable and brutal methods of that Spanish dictator?”62 Added Congressman Joseph Sibley of Pennsylvania, “This is not civilization. This is barbarism.”63 In his 1901 Message to Congress, Roosevelt explained that the problem was simply that the Filipinos had not followed the sun:

  The Philippines… are very rich tropical islands, inhabited by many varying tribes, representing widely different stages of progress towards civilization. Our earnest effort is to help these people upward along the stony and difficult path that leads to self-government. [Americans] are now successfully governing themselves, because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, toward this end. What has taken us thirty generations to achieve we cannot expect to see another race accomplish out of hand.64

  Realizing that another brutal military campaign might create a backlash that could seriously damage his presidential chances in 1904, Roosevelt reined his army in, but it was too late: Congress was bestirred by soldiers’ letters and press reports so at odds with the president’s benevolent line.65 A January 15, 1902, New York Times headline was the first sign of potential trouble: “Senior Massachusetts Senator Wants to Question Gov. Taft About the Administration of the Islands.” Senator George Hoar, the article explained, “spoke at length regarding the unreliability of statements which have been made from time regarding the situation in the Philippines.”66 The Republican-controlled Senate was subsequently forced to hold hearings, an enormous threat to the accidental president, in office less than six months. Fortunately for Teddy, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the president’s best friend in the Senate, installed himself as chairman of the Philippine Investigation Committee. Lodge then chose Senator Albert Beveridge—famous for his eloquent speeches supporting Aryan expansion—to run the hearings and tamp down the noise.67 Relieved, Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “With the Philippines, I feel tolerably safe under your management.”68

  The U.S. Senate’s hearings on the Philippines began on January 31, 1902. First up to be grilled about the unreliability of the administration’s statements was Governor Taft, who had authored so many of them. In almost two months of testimony, Taft hewed to the benevolent line, only once inadvertently straying to admit routine American torture: “That cruelties have been inflicted; that people have been shot when they ought not to have been; that there have been… individual instances of water cure, that torture which I believe involves pouring water down the throat so that the man swells and gets the impression that he is going to be suffocated and then tells what he knows… all these things are true.”69 A popular magazine called the slip “a most humiliating admission that should strike horror in the mind of every American.”70

  Back in the White House, Roosevelt’s monocle must have fallen from his eye. Realizing his mistake, Taft repeated the benevolent intentions line: “It is my deliberate judgment that there never was a war conducted, whether against inferior races or not, in which there were more compassion and more restraint and more generosity, assuming that there was a war at all, than there have been in the Philippine Islands.”71

  Unfortunately for Roosevelt, Taft was followed by an avalanche of embarrassing testimony that belied Teddy’s claims that the United States condemned torture and that it was done by only a few low-level, bad-apple soldiers. In one letter that surfaced, a soldier had written that he had personally waterboarded 160 Filipinos, of which 134 died.72 Other evidence made it undeniably clear that atrocity warfare was condoned and encouraged from the top. Suddenly confronted by an indignant press, Roosevelt rushed a memo to Lodge claiming his intolerance of uncivilized warfare. Teddy listed forty-four officers and soldiers who had been tried “for violation of orders forbidding cruelty, looting and like crimes.”73 Thirty-nine of these cases had resulted in convictions, but Senate investigators discovered that those convictions had mysteriously been reduced to “reprimands” and that these convicted felons were now commanding soldiers in the Philippines. One by one, most of Roosevelt’s assertions to the Senate were proven untrue.

  However, the truth made little difference. Americans so embraced the benevolent intentions myth that they ultimately could not accept the idea that their humanitarian military was capable of atrocities. In the hearings, Senator Joseph Rawlins of Utah asked General Robert Hughes if exterminating whole Filipino families was “within the ordinary rule of civilized warfare?” Replied General Hughes, “These people are not civilized.”74

  There were a few who saw through this. Senator Edward Carmack of Tennessee, in a speech on the floor of the Senate, blamed the U.S. military’s bloodlust on Roosevelt, who habitually demeaned Filipinos as “savages,” “barbarians,” “a savage people,” “a wild and ignorant people,” “Apaches,” “Sioux,” and “Chinese Boxers.”75 On May 22, 1902, Senator Hoar assailed the president: “You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of peoples you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps…. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”76 The two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan declared himself disgusted: “The country must purge itself of the guilt of the Republican crimes against the innocent people of the Philippines!”77

  Roosevelt told Americans not to expect much from those who hadn’t followed the sun: “The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art which our people have taught themselves by the labor of thousands of years, cannot be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging from conditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the dim years before history dawned.”78

  On June 28, 1902, Senator Lodge ordered Senator Beveridge to adjourn the Philippines Investigation Committee. Beveridge did a cut-and-paste job on the final report, suppressing any slander contradicting American benevolence in the Philippines. On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt tried to make the Philippines conflict disappear into history with a wave of his hand, declaring that “the insurrection against the authority and sovereignty of the United States is now at an end, and peace has been established in all parts of the archipelago except in the country inhabited by the Moro tribes.”79 Roosevelt’s claim did not impress the Filipino freedom fighters, who battled on. By then the war had cost American taxpayers more than six hundred million turn-of-the-twentieth-century dollars,80 4,234 Americans were dead, 2,818 had been wounded, and many soldiers who returned home would perish of related diseases and wounds.81 Most American history books claim that U.S. forces killed about twenty thousand freedom fighters and two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand Filipino civilians; other sources estimate that the U.S. military sent one million to three million to their early graves. Even with a lowball number, this represents serious slaughter: three hundred thousand Filipinos killed in forty-one months. The United States later fought World War II over a period of fifty-six months with approximately four hundred thousand American deaths. So Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, with their mechanized weaponry, killed about the same per month—seventy-two hundred—as American civilizers
did in the Philippines.

  And that was up until only 1902. At the moment President Roosevelt declared mission accomplished, his army was simultaneously launching a full-scale offensive near Zamboanga in the southern Philippines, where U.S. troops remain today.

  FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS as a best-selling author, Roosevelt had euphemized the Aryan’s westering as civilized. Now, as president, his actions in the Philippines were seen by many as barbaric. The cover of a popular magazine depicted a U.S. Army officer supervising two soldiers as they waterboarded a barefoot Filipino prisoner thrown on the ground with his hands and feet bound. One soldier points a pistol at the Pacific Negro’s head and shoves a funnel into his mouth. Another soldier forces water into the victim from a U.S. Army pail. In the background a group of Europeans laugh mockingly, saying, “Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more.”

  The New York Evening Journal featured an editorial cartoon of a U.S. Army firing squad executing blindfolded, barefoot Filipino boys. The caption read: “Kill Every One Over Ten—Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines.”

  And one morning, Roosevelt awoke to an inconvenient story in the Washington Post about how the U.S. Army had systematically executed thirteen hundred Filipino prisoners of war in just one camp. The Americans had brought in a native priest to hear the condemned prisoners’ last confessions. U.S. soldiers marched the Filipino prisoners to the killing ground and, after making them dig their own graves, shot them in the head. The body of the priest swung from a noose overhead.

  Life magazine, May 22, 1902. American soldiers waterboarding a Filipino. Europeans in the background gloat that Americans no longer hold the moral high ground: “Those pious Yankees can’t throw stones at us any more.”