Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

General Wright, on behalf of the Commission, called on General Chaffee and was much surprised to learn that he had not even read the Constabulary bill which had been passed some time before and held up pending the hoped for opportunity to carry it into effect. When General Wright explained the purport of the measure General Chaffee said,

“I am opposed to the whole business. It seems to me that you are trying to introduce something to take the place of my Army.”

“Why, so we are,” said General Wright. “We are trying to create a civil police force to do the police work which we understood the Army was anxious to be relieved of. You have announced your purpose to concentrate the Army in the interest of economy, and to let our civil governments stand alone to see what is in them and we consider it necessary to have a constabulary, or some such force, to take care of the lawless characters that are sure to be in the country after four years of war, and especially in a country where the natives take naturally to ladronism. The Municipal police as now organised are not able to meet all the requirements in this regard.”

“There you are,” said General Chaffee, “you give your whole case away.”

“I have no case to give away,” replied General Wright. “We are trying to put our provincial governments on a basis where they will require nothing but the moral force of the military arm, and actually to preserve law and order through the civil arm. The people desire peace, but they also desire protection and we intend through the civil government to give it to them.”

The Commissioner then suggested the names of some Army officers whose peculiar tact in handling Filipinos had marked them as the best available men for organising and training native soldiers, but General Chaffee was not inclined to detail them for the work, so General Wright returned to the Commission quite cast down and communicated to his colleagues the feeling that they were to have a continuance of the same difficulties with which they were required to contend under the former administration.

But a peacemaker came along in the person of General Corbin. He spent some time with General Chaffee and then came to Malacañan to visit us. He made a hurried, but quite extensive trip through the Islands and gave the whole situation pretty thorough inspection. After he left, a change was found to have come over the spirit of affairs, and it was thought that he had managed to make clear to everybody concerned that, while there was a military arm and a civil arm of the government in the Philippines, they represented a single American purpose and that that purpose had been expressed by the administration at Washington when the Commission was sent out to do the work it was then engaged upon.

After that General Chaffee seems not only to have been amenable to reason, but to have been imbued with a spirit of cordiality and helpfulness which was most gratifying to the long-harassed Commission. To facilitate co-operation, a private telephone was installed between the offices of Mr. Taft and the Commanding General, and it seemed to me that my husband suddenly lost some of the lines of worry which had begun to appear in his face.

The Constabulary, as everybody knows, was eventually established and perhaps no finer body of men, organised for such a purpose, exists. It took a long time to get them enlisted, equipped and properly drilled, but to-day they are a force which every man and woman in the Philippines, of whatever nationality, colour, creed or occupation, regards with peculiar satisfaction. They include corps enlisted from nearly every tribe in the Islands, not excepting the Moros and the Igorrotes. The Moro constabulario is distinguishable from the Christian in that he wears a jaunty red fez with his smart khaki uniform instead of the regulation cap, while the Igorrote refuses trousers and contents himself with the cap, the tight jacket, the cartridge belt and a bright “G-string.” To the Ifugao Igorrote uniform is added a distinguishing spiral of brass which the natty soldier wears just below the knee. It is difficult to imagine anything more extraordinary than a “crack” company of these magnificent barelegged Ifugaos going through dress-parade drill under the sharp commands of an American officer. The Constabulary Band of eighty-odd pieces, under the direction of Captain Loving, an American negro from the Boston Conservatory of Music, is well known in America and is generally considered one of the really great bands of the world. All its members are Filipinos.

Press clippings and some correspondence which I have before me remind me that even at this period there began to manifest itself in the Taft family, and otherwheres, a mild interest in the possibility that my husband might become President of the United States. Mr. Taft himself treated all such “far-fetched speculation” with the derision which he thought it deserved, but to me it did not seem at all unreasonable. We received first a copy of the Boston Herald containing two marked articles in parallel columns, one of which, headed by a picture of Mr. Taft, stated that in Washington there had been serious suggestion of his name as a Presidential candidate and the other giving a sympathetic account of an anti-imperialistic meeting at Faneuil Hall. We thought the two articles as “news items” hardly warranted juxtaposition, and it seemed to us the editor was indulging a sort of sardonic sense of humour when he placed them so. Not that my husband was an “imperialist,” but that he was generally so considered. Indeed, he was the most active anti-imperialist of them all. He was doing the work of carrying out a thoroughly anti-imperialistic policy, but he recognised the difference between abandoning the Philippines to a certain unhappy fate and guiding them to substantial independence founded on self-dependence. It took a long time to get the shouters from the housetops to accept this interpretation of our national obligation, but there was reassurance in the fact that where our honour is involved Americanism can always be trusted to rise above purely partisan politics.