The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  On Monday evening, August 7, Governor Wright threw the largest party in the history of the American occupation. The Malacañang Palace was ablaze with electric lights as American military men in gold braided uniforms twirled their jewel-covered ladies across the gleaming dance floor. Filipino newspapers commented with disapproval on the lavishness considering “the poverty stricken condition of the country” and noted that beleaguered Filipinos in the reception line “raised their hats in salutation to the Secretary of War without emitting a single shout of welcome.”9 Ever since Admiral Dewey had arrived, proud Filipinos had heard themselves described as niggers and gugus. The humiliation had been furthered as new Americans had arrived in Manila with “the St. Louis exposition idea of the Philippines.”10 One Filipino gentleman, observing the line of his countrymen outside the Malacañang Palace, mourned, “Instead of being a triumphal entrance, this looks like a funeral procession.”11

  In the following days, Taft announced that he found “tranquility throughout the islands, except in one or two provinces.” While he acknowledged that “it is true that business prosperity does not now exist,” he blamed the Philippines’ sorry economic condition on acts of God: rinderpest, cholera, famine, locusts, and drought.12 Taft made no mention of the American concentration camps as breeding grounds for cholera, of American atrocity warfare’s causing the famine, or of the bloated American colonial government’s holding back progress. Instead, Taft promised a plan to revitalize the Philippines: Americans would build railroads to uplift the nation, which didn’t impress residents of this archipelago consisting of seven thousand islands. Meanwhile, mutilated corpses—American and Filipino—were carried daily into Manila by barge and wagon.13 The Manila Chamber of Commerce informed Taft that “the country is in a state of financial collapse.”14 Yet benevolent Big Bill, blinders on, assured all that everything would be well—someday.

  Taft’s big night in Manila was Friday evening, August 11, at a banquet held in his honor at the Hotel Metropole. In his address, Taft described the Filipinos as “sacred wards of the United States” and reassured the American colonials that a benevolent President Roosevelt was committed to “elevating them as a whole to a self-governing people.” Taft cautioned that this Americanization would take generations: “Nine tenths of the people of the Philippine Islands are today utterly incapable of exercising intelligently self-government.” As usual, Big Bill bubbled benevolence. “I am greatly distressed,” he said, “to learn that in some of the provinces of this archipelago hunger stalks.” He advised a solution: “All these [problems] are easily overcome by the industry which is manifest in Java and Japan. The foundation of a great nation like Japan is in the industry, thrift, and intelligence of the people.”15

  Princess Alice’s big night followed on Saturday, August 12, with a lavish ball thrown in her honor. The Washington Post wrote, “The eyes of the world are on her representing as she does not only the Chief Executive of our nation, but the typical American girl.”16 Alice, wearing a traditional Filipino gown that three seamstresses had labored over for three months, sweltered as she shook hands with twenty-four hundred guests. Reported the Manila Times:

  The impression made by Miss Roosevelt has been one of girlish simplicity. Her smile and greeting has been uniformly cordial and her attire appropriate. Even possessing eight trunks and a maid, with the necessity of a fresh frock for every occasion, with the knowledge of being the cynosure of all eyes every moment of the day and night most women would find the situation difficult, yet this young woman is as self-possessed as a princess and uses her tiny hand glass and powder puff with an unconcern which is the marvel of all observers.17

  The next day, the Taft party boarded the U.S. Army ship Logan for a thirteen-day sail around the Philippines. The English-language press informed readers that the Taft party would encounter “bashful tree-top dwellers, dog-eaters, blood-thirsty head hunters and other strange tribes,” as well as “simple natives” and their “wild island chiefs.” One newspaper was sure that “Miss Roosevelt will every now and then come across the not especially appetizing spectacle of a couple of natives carrying on a pole between them a nice fat dog prepared for some village banquet.”18

  THEIR FIRST STOP WAS Iloilo, the third largest city in the Philippines. Iloilo had for hundreds of years been a picturesque place. Then in March of 1899, the U.S. Navy arrived and demanded that Iloilo submit to American rule. Residents responded that they preferred President Aguinaldo. The U.S. Navy then shelled the town, killing civilians. Fleeing residents set Iloilo on fire to prevent the Americans from capturing anything valuable. As the Taft party came ashore that Tuesday, August 15, many residents still remembered the “terrible drunkenness and looting” exhibited by the U.S. military just six years earlier.

  Alice Roosevelt in the Philippines. Notice the Filipinos in the background, with whom she does not interact. (National Archives)

  Three events were scheduled for the Americans’ one-day visit: a morning welcoming ceremony with speeches and a parade, a ladies’ luncheon, and an evening banquet. Mrs. Campbell Dauncey, the Englishwoman who lived in Iloilo, arrived at the pre-parade reception held in the Gobierno (government building). She noticed Alice: “A young girl with a fluff of fair hair tied behind with a big bow of black ribbon, a very pale complexion, and heavily-lidded blue eyes. She had on a coat and skirt of stiff white pique, which did not do justice to her pretty figure, and a plain straw hat with blue ribbons on it tilted over her forehead.”19 The secretary of war was even more noticeable:

  Mr. Taft, who is a very tall, fair man of enormous build, towered over the heads of everyone about him. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so vast…. He has a large clever face, which creases up into an amiable smile for which he is famous, and which has helped him enormously in life. In curious contrast are his eyes, which are small, and placed rather close together, and very shrewd in expression. When he is serious, it is a stern, rather hard face, and not very pre-possessing, but when he smiles the Taft smile, it is altered in the most extraordinary manner, and he really looks charming.20

  Glancing around the reception room, Dauncey was surprised that “the Americans were all at one end and the Filipinos at the other…. I thought it a great pity that it did not occur to Mr. Taft, Miss Roosevelt or the Governor, or anyone like that to go and stand amongst the Filipinos and give a real and tangible demonstration of the theories they were here to express…. A little thing like that would convey more truth about equality than miles of bombastic print or hours of windy rhetoric.”21

  Soon the crowd moved out to the balcony to observe the parade. Dauncey noted floats “prettily done up with banana plants, one had sugar canes growing in it, there were ploughs and rows of men carrying spades and hoes and things.” But then a group of stone-faced protestors filed by, holding aloft large colorful three-sided lanterns bearing pleas written in English and Spanish. One lantern asked the American colonial rulers for “A Square Deal,” another declared “We Are At Your Mercy,” and yet another was a plea “To Govern Ourselves Our Own Way.” At the sight of these demands, “Mr. Taft stared very solemnly and steadily, standing upright in front of the balcony with Miss Roosevelt beside him, his arms folded across his chest.”22

  Big Bill’s dark scowl transformed into the radiant Taft smile when the young students from Iloilo’s American school filed by. Here were the little Pacific Negroes that Yankee teachers were training to abandon their parents’ ways in favor of things American. Taft raised his hands over his head to applaud, signaling the other Americans, who followed his lead and clapped enthusiastically. An attendee glanced at the Filipinos nearby: the parents of the students stood unsmiling and still.23

  After the parade, the crowd went back inside the government building. Remembered Dauncey, “Mr. Taft took the chair assigned to him, into which he wedged himself with infinite trouble; but the chair at once broke into pieces. Everyone laughed very much, Mr. Taft most heartily of all, saying in a good-natured, jolly way: ‘Her
e! Someone give me a chair I can sit down on. I’m tired of standing.’ They brought him another chair, and he took his place, and the speechifying began.”24 One after another, the people of Iloilo arose and addressed their desire for freedom and self-government. Then Secretary Taft arose and laid it on the line: “I did not come to give you your independence, but to study your welfare. You will have your independence when you are ready for it, which will not be in this generation—no, nor in the next, nor perhaps for a hundred years or more.”25

  Recalled Dauncey, “You can have no idea of the effect these words had upon the audience. We were simply staggered.”26 Then, as if to add salt to the wound, Taft and the Americans exited for a luncheon hosted by an American lady. No Filipinos had been invited.

  The climax of the day was a big banquet at the Santa Cecilia Club. Princess Alice did not attend, declaring that she was too tired. There were many other empty chairs that evening, because most of the invited residents of Iloilo did not show up. Perhaps they boycotted the dinner because they didn’t want to endure another American lecture on their deficiencies. Maybe they were insulted because earlier that day not one of their lady folk had been deemed worthy to sup tea with the White women. Or perhaps, like Alice, they were simply too tired.

  Throughout dinner, anyone could stand up and speak his mind. The editor of the Iloilo newspaper “made a most fiery and eloquent speech…. He declared that the Philippine Islands had been discovered as long as America, and that the Filipinos had the same spirit as that which had caused the Americans to revolt from England.” Recalls Dauncey, “He got fearfully excited, and called God to witness that his people were only asking for their rights in wishing to have this foreign burden removed; he and they demanded, insisted on, their Independence!” At the end of this speech, the few Filipinos in the room—mostly waiters, the orchestra, and a few stragglers who had wandered in off the street—“applauded frantically.” When the interpreter rendered the editor’s speech into English, the Americans sat in “utter silence.” The evening ended with another Taft speech telling the Filipinos they would have to wait generations for their independence. The Americans applauded enthusiastically. The Filipinos were silent. After dinner, one drunk American picked a fight with a Filipino waiter.27

  Secretary Taft and Alice Roosevelt in Malolos, Philippines, August 1905. (National Archives)

  So it went throughout the Americans’ tour. The Taft party visited areas deemed safe by the U.S. military, met with preapproved locals, dismissed Filipino calls for independence, and ignored American culpability for the country’s sad state.

  On Tuesday, August 22, at a banquet in Cebu, the Philippines’ second-largest city, one audience member described the “pitiful” conditions there and requested American aid. Taft swatted his request away by lecturing the Filipinos that they had to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps:

  The problem that the United States has entered upon in these Islands is to prepare a whole people for self government, and that problem includes not only the teaching of that people how to read, write and figure in arithmetic, but also to teach that people that if they would have prosperity they must labor and to teach them how to labor. You cannot have bricks without straw. You cannot raise crops without labor, and until the people understand the necessity of labor, this cannot be a great people. I am revealing no secret of the Congressional delegation when I say that the one fact that they will carry away from here, more deeply impressed on their minds than any other, is the necessity for changing this people from an idle people to a laboring people…. No one can be blind to the fact that the effort of these calamities might have been much reduced and made much less had the people been more industrious.28

  The Manila Times summarized Big Bill’s Cebu speech:

  * * *

  MUST LEARN THE DIGNITY OF LABOR

  Taft Makes Vigorous Yet Kindly Speech to Entreaters in Cebu Who Plea to Be Helped

  Put Industry Before Self-Government29

  Unmentioned by the press was the fact that for the past six years the U.S. military had burnt down homes in and around Cebu and destroyed crops and farm animals in an effort to flush out Filipino freedom fighters. American troops had decapitated the local leadership by assassinating four of Cebu’s mayors and had terrorized the populace by waterboarding prisoners, raping women, and torturing priests and even the chief of police. A U.S. soldier had written home from Cebu, “We can burn them out and kill them one by one and thus quiet them down for a time, but it is my belief that we can expect permanent peace only when the last Filipino plants his little brown feet on the golden shore.”30

  AT 8:30 A.M. ON SATURDAY, August 26, the Logan dropped anchor in Manila Bay. The Manila Times called it a “triumphal tour of the southern islands of the Philippine archipelago.”

  Over the next week in Manila, the Congressional delegation met with Filipino leaders who argued that they had the political capacity to govern themselves. The Manila Times reported that the listening Americans laughed out loud at the idea.

  On Thursday morning, August 31, the Taft party waved goodbye to the American colonials and their Filipino collaborators as they steamed out of Manila Bay on their way to Hong Kong. One American official with long experience among the Filipinos wrote, “The real epic pathos of the whole thing was that Mr. Taft was actually sincere. He believed that the majority of the Philippine people were for him and his policies.”31 A former American colonial official later quoted a senator on the cruise, “When we left the islands I do not believe there was a single member of our party who was not sorry we own them, except Secretary Taft himself.”32

  There had been a final send-off banquet in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel de Francis the evening before. The honored guest speaker had been the chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs, the Illinois representative George Foss. Congressman Foss certainly followed the sun; a Harvard graduate, he had studied political science at Columbia University under Professor John Burgess and was a heartland Republican. The audience of American colonial officials leapt to their feet in applause as Congressman Foss concluded his speech:

  I believe that it has been a providential guidance which has brought the Americans to these islands…. The question then arose: What shall we do with the Philippines? Give them back to Spain? No. Turn them over to the Filipinos? No. The Filipinos had no experience which would warrant their governing themselves. They were not prepared. A solemn duty rested upon the American people to lift them to the clear, bright sky of American liberty and American independence. You, gentlemen, are here to do as your forefathers did in New England.33

  Chapter 10

  ROOSEVELT’S OPEN AND CLOSED DOORS

  “We do not understand why your people in China preach the doctrine of Love, while in America you treat Chinese worse than any other nation, nay even the negroes!”1

  —PETITION TO PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM STUDENTS OF THE ANGLO-CHINESE COLLEGE IN FUZHOU, CHINA, 1903

  On September 3, 1905, the secretary of war, William Howard Taft, steamed west from British Hong Kong to the Chinese city of Canton. For this segment of the cruise he was not following the sun. Instead, Big Bill was traveling secretly at night, aboard the U.S. Navy gunboat Laliao that glided quietly through the Pearl River Delta, entering China on a warship under the cover of darkness because U.S. consular and military officials had warned him that he risked personal harm. Anti-American posters were plastered on city walls up and down China’s coast, and furious attendees at packed mass meetings shook their fists as they listened to emotional anti-Yankee speeches. Nevertheless, after much debate, Taft had decided he would face local wrath and deliver a tough message from President Roosevelt in the Chinese city most aflame with anti-Americanism.

  The Pearl River Delta

  The Chinese of the Pearl River Delta had the most experience with American Foreign Devils—in both China and the United States.

  From ancient times, the emperor—the Son of Heaven—had reigned from Beij
ing. Uninterested in dealing with lowlife traders, he had designated the southern port city of Canton as a backdoor service entrance for those “Foreign Devils” hoping to do business in China. The emperor had assigned Cantonese merchants the odious job of dealing with these barbarians and thus Canton became the international commercial outlet for the Middle Kingdom.

  As a result, for centuries Foreign Devils had come to Canton from Arabia, Persia, Africa, Egypt, Rome, France, England, Germany, Holland, Spain, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, India, and the United States. During that time, the Cantonese had endured, and in a number of ways benefited from, these intrusions. That changed three years into the Roosevelt administration. To protest Teddy’s treatment of them as uncivilized beings, the Chinese had united to boycott all things American.

  UNCIVILIZED THE CHINESE WERE certainly not. For most of human history, China was the most populated, wealthiest, and most sophisticated country on earth. The Travels of Marco Polo, published in 1295, told astonishing tales of enormous banquet rooms with five thousand seats, walls studded with precious stones, and consumers using paper money to purchase mass-printed books from well-stocked bookstores. (Marco Polo was so amazed by Chinese paper money that he devoted a chapter to it.) In Europe, monks hand-copied books while thousands of best-selling tomes rolled off China’s modern printing presses. China’s iron manufacturing industry produced one hundred twenty-five thousand tons a year—an amount not equaled by Europe until the twentieth century. Chinese wore soft, luxurious silk versus the Europeans’ rough-hewn tunics, and at home the Chinese lived in a stylish comfort of which Europeans could only dream.