A few weeks passed before MacArthur and Merritt learned that the war in Cuba was over, following Theodore Roosevelt’s stunning victory at San Juan Hill, that more American troops would be coming to the Philippines under General Elwell E. Otis—and that Arthur MacArthur and General Thomas Anderson would assume command of Otis’s two divisions, some 20,000 men.
That fall, under American occupation, Manila enjoyed the coming of peace. Martial law was lifted, and MacArthur was now commanding a division of more than 9,000 men, with more reinforcements on the way.
He was going to need them. On December 11 news came over the restored telegraph that President McKinley had decided, after considerable hesitation and second-guessing as well as prayer, that the United States would annex the Philippines rather than grant the islands outright independence. Independence without the means to safeguard it, some argued, would only leave the islands exposed to colonization by Germany, Britain, or France. Annexation by America was really the best solution.4
That feeling did not extend to the Philippine insurgents. Overnight McKinley’s fateful decision turned Aguinaldo and the Filipino National Army from allies into enemies—and on the night of February 4, 1899, fighting broke out between a sentry of the First Nebraska Volunteers and Filipino troops. America’s first land war in Asia had begun.5
Arthur MacArthur would distinguish himself in the fighting to clear the rebels from Manila and to drive them north, finally capturing Aguinaldo’s capital at Malalos, twenty miles north of Manila. By May he was a national hero. Newspapers proclaimed, “Tis Dewey on the Sea, and MacArthur on the Land.” But as the spring of 1899 dissolved into summer, an American army already weakened thanks to the exit of thousands of volunteers as their term of enlistment came due and they boarded ships for home, was weakened further by the outbreak of diseases like typhus, dysentery, and yellow fever.
Aguinaldo, in the meantime, refused to surrender. “We are no nearer a conclusion of hostilities here than we were three months ago,” one officer wrote home to his wife on June 15. As the summer dragged on, Arthur MacArthur would have had to agree. They were going to need a lot more troops, and a much more aggressive commander than General Otis if they were going to win this war.
Meanwhile, Douglas’s personal battle with hazing at West Point was reaching a climax.
Ordinarily, a cadet could escape the torture of hazing only by agreeing to a knockdown bare-knuckle fight with a skilled upperclassman, which usually left the plebe unconscious and bleeding. MacArthur was a skilled boxer, but he resigned himself to the hazing regime.
“We always prepared a warm reception for the sons of well-known men,” said Robert Wood (later a close friend of Douglas MacArthur and CEO of Sears, Roebuck), and he was not kidding. Being forced to recite his father’s military records and “making funny speeches,” or hanging by his toes and fingers from a cot until he dropped from exhaustion, were just the start. Douglas MacArthur took all the hazing “with fortitude and dignity,” Wood remembered, even after upperclassmen gave him a “sweat bath,” by putting him in full dress uniform, wrapping him in a blanket and a raincoat, and making him sit up all night in the middle of summer.6
The turning point came one night when a gang of cadets led him blindfolded into a darkened tent, stripped him stark naked, and ordered him to do 250 “spread eagles” (meaning standing on his toes with arms extended, dropping to a stoop, flapping his arms and rising to a sitting position, then doing it again) over a bed of broken glass—followed by “wooden willys” that involved holding the regulation rifle at a fire position, dropping down to reload at the order of “ready,” and then repeating the exercise until the upperclassmen decided to call it quits.
Douglas passed out before they called it quits. When they revived him, he went into severe convulsions, with arms and legs jerking uncontrollably.
He was still in convulsions when they carried him back to his room, where he asked his roommate to throw a blanket under his feet so that their involuntary thudding wouldn’t alert the company officers to what had happened—and to jam a blanket in his mouth in case he cried out in pain.7
The next morning Douglas refused to go on sick report, as some urged him to do, or to speak about the incident. He turned out for drill and other duties like the other cadets, but when he was returning to his tent he was stopped by an upperclassman—the same one who had led the hazing the night before.
The man was ashamed about what had happened, but he also had a message.
“By your plucky work last night,” he told MacArthur, “you have a bootlick from the entire Corps.”
A bootlick meant he had earned the respect of every cadet at West Point for his endurance—and for keeping his mouth shut. It meant an end to hazing for Douglas MacArthur, and a new prestige among his fellow cadets.8
In short, “he emerged from camp with flying colors. He showed himself a true soldier,” a colleague remembered. Others, however, took a very different view of things. When a cadet named Oscar L. Booz died as a result of hazing by members of MacArthur’s class, the McKinley administration launched a formal inquiry, while a special committee of the House of Representatives decided to hold an investigative hearing. One of the former victims of hazing they particularly wanted to hear from was Cadet Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur was in a quandary. On the one hand, he couldn’t snitch on former classmates. “Come what may,” he wrote later, “I would be no tattletale.” On the other, he couldn’t lie to the court of inquiry. He had already been summoned to the superintendent’s office to name his original tormentors, and he had refused.9 If McKinley’s special court of inquiry demanded the offenders’ names, and if MacArthur refused again, “It would in all likelihood mean my dismissal and the end of all my hopes and dreams. [Instead] it would be so easy and expedient to yield, to tell, and who would blame me?”
The answer, of course, was himself.10
The date was December 1900. Far away in the Philippines his father’s war with insurgents, after a year and a half, had taken a strange but decisive turn.
—
Step by step, battle by battle, the Americans had finally cleared out resistance from the island of Luzon and broken the back of the Philippine National Army. With the rebel forces destroyed, General Otis and other officers assumed the war was over; Arthur MacArthur, however, did not. He grimly predicted that the insurgency was about to make a comeback. He also knew that the Americans had made themselves deeply unpopular in the Philippines and that unless they wrapped up the war quickly, this could turn into a protracted, costly stalemate—what a later generation would call a “quagmire.”
Starting in January, the quagmire revealed itself. American control of Luzon steadily deteriorated; the number of engagements—always with small bands of hit-and-run partisans—rose, as did the number of American casualties. As in all guerrilla wars, the conduct of the war grew progressively more vicious, with each side taking the opportunity of atrocities by the other side to commit atrocities of its own.11
Finally, Washington had had enough and in March 1900 replaced Otis with Arthur MacArthur. At the same time, it appointed MacArthur military governor of the Philippines. The news left Aguinaldo and his guerrillas deeply worried. They knew who they would be dealing with. One of their leaders admitted, “MacArthur was the most able American General.” They sensed the war was going to take a much tougher turn.12
They were right. MacArthur now had some 70,000 troops under his command, two-thirds of the entire U.S. Army, plus auxiliary units of Philippine ethnic minorities like the Macabebes and Illocanos, who hated the majority Tagalogs leading the insurgency.13 MacArthur was ready to take the fight directly to the enemy. From December 1899 to September 1900, the U.S. Army fought more skirmishes with Filipino guerrillas and suffered more casualties—well over a thousand—than it had in every Indian war since 1865.14
Officials in Washington, and the public, were horrified. But as America’s first great counterinsurgency strategi
st, the predecessor of future theorists such as David Petraeus and David Galula, MacArthur understood that the mounting casualties were the price of future success.15 The goal was to push the insurgents off to the margins, deeper and deeper into the mountains and the jungle, while isolating them from the larger population. That population, he believed, was now united in its support of the revolutionaries. “That such unity exists is an undeniable fact,” he wrote, whatever journalists and propagandists in Washington might think, along with Washington’s sanguine emissary William Howard Taft, who arrived in June 1900 convinced that the fighting was all but over.16
MacArthur knew better. Victory would come, he believed, only after the majority of Filipinos finally decided that resistance to American occupation was futile—and that supporting the occupation could even be beneficial.
That was what he set out to do as military governor, a job combining economist, political theorist, civil engineer, business executive, and secondary school teacher all in one. Fortunately, Arthur MacArthur was prepared for all of them. From his headquarters in Manila he and his staff worked long days that dragged on through dinner, discussing problems in sanitation, education, economic development, and civil administration as well as the war. He also appointed boards of officers to study key issues like land reform, while he put soldiers to building schools, vaccinating civilians, setting up courts run by Filipino judges in pacified areas, and making sure municipal elections were safe and fair—much as his son would do in occupied Japan, and American soldiers would do in Iraq and Afghanistan more than a century later.
In the meantime, however, there was still a war to win. In December 1900—even as his son Douglas was about to be called as witness for the president’s hazing investigation—Arthur MacArthur declared martial law throughout the Philippines. He applied a general order that President Lincoln had issued during the Civil War and General Sherman had used during his march through Georgia, declaring that combatants who were not in uniform, and civilians who helped them, would be subject to the death penalty.17 He also ordered thirty-nine prominent insurrection leaders to be interned in Guam and had their property seized—including Aguinaldo’s.
Either you’re for us or you’re against us, MacArthur was saying to the Philippine elites. Despite Taft’s misgivings, the strategy worked. Insurgents began to surrender to their American pursuers; public support for the insurrection weakened. The final stroke came in March 1901, when by a simple ruse MacArthur was able to arrange for the capture of the Filipino leader Aguinaldo himself. That, combined with MacArthur’s internment of key figures of the Filipino establishment, finally snapped the spine of the Filipino insurgency.
On April 19, after three weeks of intense negotiation, Aguinaldo—pressured by family and friends—threw in the towel. He agreed to swear allegiance to the United States and call on his followers to surrender in exchange for the immediate release of 1,000 prisoners, another 1,000 in May, and a further 1,000 a month later. Except for a few hot spots like Batangas province, south of Manila, and the island of Samar, the insurgency collapsed.18
As Arthur MacArthur sailed back to San Francisco on July 2, 1901, he could be satisfied with the outcome. He was now a major general; he had decisively won the most extensive guerrilla war that any Western nation, let alone the United States, had ever faced. He also had won the respect, even adoration, of a generation of American soldiers for whom he was, by general consent, the finest officer with whom they had ever served.
He had missed shaping his son Douglas’s years at West Point, but he would leave him a far more valuable gift. This was that a number of the officers under whom Douglas would serve—Peyton March, Frederick Funston, John J. Pershing, Charles Summerall—would have earned their spurs in the Philippines under his father’s command. The trust and respect they felt for the father would transfer when they took over command of the son, as all of them did. Some would be protective; most, like Funston and Summerall, would be tough but fair; John J. “Black Jack” Pershing would be brutal.
But all of them would remember the general who stood tall under enemy fire in the Philippines and found a way to win a war that most had thought unwinnable. Whatever Douglas’s occasional flaws, they would give him the benefit of the doubt because they remembered the MacArthur who had risked everything to save his country from the humiliation of defeat, and gave his soldiers the prize they most craved: final victory.
—
The day the anti-hazing court met, Douglas MacArthur felt desperately ill—again, the paralyzing nausea that almost overwhelmed him the day of his qualifying exam in Milwaukee. And again it was his mother who came to his rescue. From the West Point Hotel, she sent him a letter. He opened it during a recess in the court, he tells us, and inside he found a poem:
Do you know that your soul is my soul such a part
That you seem to be fiber and core of my heart?
None other can pain me as you, son, can do;
None other can please me or praise me as you.
Remember the world will be quick with its blame
If shadow or shame ever darken your name.
Like mother, like son, is saying so true
The world will judge largely of mother by you.
MacArthur read the last four lines with tears in his eyes:
Be this your task, if task it shall be
To force this proud world to do homage to me,
Be sure it will say, when its verdict you’ve won
She reaps as she sowed: “This man is her son!”
With the poem folded in his pocket, MacArthur strode into the courtroom. “I can still feel the beads of sweat on my brow,” he wrote sixty years later. “I still feel my knees giving way under me and that dreadful nausea.”19 “I did my best to fend off the questions, to dodge the issues,” but the judges, all retired military men, refused to be put off. They ordered him to divulge the names of his hazers.
“I pleaded for mercy; that my whole life’s hope lay in being an officer; that always I had been with the colors; that my father, then on the battleline 10,000 miles away, was their comrade in arms of the Civil War and Indian wars; that I would do anything in the way of punishment, but not to strip me of my uniform.”
There was a pause, and then the head of the court said, “Court is recessed. Take him to his quarters.”20
Back in his room, Douglas MacArthur waited all day to be put under arrest. But the order never came. They were not about to arrest or expel the son of Arthur MacArthur, the hero of the Philippines; they found other ways of getting the names they wanted. When Douglas had to appear before the congressional committee, the questioning was more grueling—“you do not look very robust now,” one congressman remarked sarcastically when MacArthur said having to endure the hours of “spread eagles” hadn’t done him any lasting physical harm—but in a sense it was anticlimactic. The congressmen now had the names; what they really wanted was Cadet MacArthur to condemn hazing as a ritual institution. This he adamantly refused to do.
Q: Did you consider it cruel at the time?
A: I would like to have you define cruel.
Q: All right sir. Disposed to inflict suffering; indifference in the presence of suffering; hard-hearted; inflicting pain mentally or physically…
A: I should say perhaps it was cruel, then.
Q: You have qualified your answer. Was it or was it not cruel?
A: Yes sir.
Q: And you did not expect it was part of the essential education of an officer to be subjected to such cruelty?
A: I do not think it is essential; no sir.21
But was it cruelty? Decades later MacArthur still refused to see the hazing itself as anything but a natural part of how West Point shaped the character of its cadets to deal with adversity, how to uphold the solidarity of the Corps, how to endure—and get rid of those who couldn’t take it. “Hazing was practiced with a worthy goal,” he would write later, but sometimes “with methods that were violent and uncontrolled.
” The answer was regulation, not abolition.
He was not alone. John J. Pershing, who had been a vigorous, even hated TAC (tactical officer) at West Point two years before MacArthur arrived—cadets called him Lord God Almighty—had been an enthusiastic hazer as an upperclassman and did nothing to stop it during his time as TAC. He once told a friend, “I hope the day will never come when hazing is abolished.”22 MacArthur would have had to agree.
The investigations had come as Douglas MacArthur was in his third year as a cadet. He had already proved himself to be one of the best in West Point’s history. As someone who served three years with him at the academy put it, “There was never another cadet quite like him.”23
Photographs in his cadet uniform show him poised and confident, with strikingly handsome—almost beautiful—good looks (another reason he may have been a target for hazing early on). There’s also a slightly faraway, visionary cast to his eyes that’s familiar from myriad photographs of him during World War Two and Korea. That’s no coincidence. The years at West Point created the essential core of the Douglas MacArthur the world would know for the rest of his life, the framework of values, habits, and attitudes that would sustain him for the next half century.
“Think of the sort of man he is today,” his former West Point roommate said in 1953, “and you have exactly the picture of what he was when he graduated in 1903.”24
One of those values was his love of the army, which bordered on religious idolatry. The barracks and facilities at West Point were broken down, unsanitary, and squalid. Two cadets shared a room with barely enough space for one of them to stand. There was no electricity, no running water. Instead, cadets had to fetch any water they needed with a five-gallon metal bucket from an outside spigot. From reveille at 6:00 A.M. until mandatory lights-out for underclassmen at 10:00 P.M., every day was a regimented routine of drill, classes, inspections, and parades.
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