Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

“The minute the policy with respect to these Islands is settled by Bryan’s defeat and the election of McKinley, the leniency which has been almost too great towards ladrones and these murdering generals will have to be changed. They must be given an opportunity to come in and if they do not come in in a short time, they ought to be deported from the country and sent to Guam. This will have an effect so healthy that a short time will see accomplished what we desire. There will be a great awakening for some of these men who have come to rely on the supineness of the Americans, and who do not understand that we can be severe when we choose....

“It was General Otis who inaugurated the plan of laughing at the insurrection, of capturing men and letting them go, and the result is that they have laughed at us, but with a little tightening of the reins their laugh will cease....

“They dread deportation more than anything else and I have written to Secretary Root and asked him to have a prison constructed at Guam to which we may send those whom we think worthy of a less punishment than hanging. The insurrection must be suppressed for the benefit of the United States and, still more, for the benefit of the Filipino people. The lenient methods, having been tried for two years, must be changed to those more severe....

“The insurrection, such as it is now, is nothing more than a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States sustained by murder and assassination of Filipinos by Filipinos....

“MacArthur is drawing the reins a little tighter, though not as tight as we think he ought to draw them, and he has now imprisoned about fifteen hundred insurgents. There have been a great many arrests made in Manila, which has been the head centre of the insurrection in the way of raising money. I should think there have been fifty or sixty insurgent officers arrested in the city....

“I sent a telegram to the Secretary of War on Sunday night which was signed by Buencamino and other prominent Filipinos, about a dozen of them, in which they spoke out with emphasis about the continuation of the insurrection. They propose to organise what they call a counter-revolution; that is, they mean they will organise a military movement among the Filipinos against Filipinos. They are getting very tired and weary of this murder and assassination policy without which the insurrection could not last a week....

“You could hardly believe the closeness with which the Presidential matters are being watched by the Filipinos, and how they follow the speeches made against the Republican cause. General Smith, away down on the island of Negros, told me he had found speeches by Hoar and Bryan, and other anti-expansionists and anti-imperialists, in the most remote mountains of his district....

“Every one is waiting and it is not impossible that should Bryan be elected there might be some riotous demonstration among the natives. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Señor Arellano, has made arrangements, should Bryan be elected, to leave the islands three days after the announcement. He is the ablest Filipino in the islands, by far the best lawyer and a man of the highest probity. He says that much as he is interested in the success and prosperity of his fellow citizens, he knows that they are utterly incapable of self-government and should the guiding hand of the United States be withdrawn, chaos, conscription and corruption would follow inevitably....”

I have taken these excerpts at random from my husband’s letters to his brother during the months of September and October, 1900, and they serve to show the situation which existed and will illustrate the fact that we were living in interesting times. But they deal only with the insurrection, while the main body of his correspondence shows that the Commissioners were engaged upon legislative matters of the gravest import which would be rendered entirely superfluous should Mr. Bryan be elected and his announced policies be carried into effect. In that event they proposed immediately to turn matters back to the military government and withdraw, leaving Mr. Bryan to face the problems which they knew he would soon discover had to be dealt with from the standpoint of constructive statesmanship.

In the meantime the peace movement was rapidly gaining adherents among the people in spite of the still active insurrectos, or rather, because of them and their methods; while everybody seemed to welcome the change from a strictly military to a partially civil government.