The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

But you bet the army knows.

Kipling, Ballad of the Boer War.

The essentials of the situation which confronted the Taft Commission on its arrival in the islands in June, 1900, and the mental attitude in which they approached that situation, may now be briefly summarized, with entire confidence that such summary will commend itself as fairly accurate to the impartial judgment both of the historian of the future and of any candid contemporary mind.

It is not necessary to “vex the dull ear” of a mighty people much engrossed with their own affairs, by repetition of any further details concerning the original de facto alliance between Admiral Dewey and Aguinaldo. Suffice it to remind a people whose saving grace is a love of fair play, that, after the battle of Manila Bay, when Admiral Dewey brought Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong to Cavite, both the Admiral and his Filipino allies were keenly cognizant of the national purpose set forth in the declaration of war against Spain, and that the Filipinos could not have been expected to make any substantial distinction between the casual remarks of a victorious admiral on the quarter-deck of his flagship in May, remarks concurrent and consistent with actual treatment of the Filipinos as allies, and the imperious commands of a general ashore in December thereafter, acting under specific orders pursuant to the Treaty of Paris. The one great fact of the situation, “as huge as high Olympus,” they did grasp, viz., that both were representatives of America on the ground at the time of their respective utterances, and that one in December in effect repudiated without a word of explanation what the other had done from May to August. They had helped us to take the city of Manila in August, and, to use the current phrase of the passing hour, coined in this period of awakening of the national conscience to a proper attitude toward double-dealing in general, they felt that they had been “given the double cross.” In other words they believed that the American Government had been guilty of a duplicity rankly Machiavellian. And that was the cause of the war.

We have seen in the chapters on “The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” and “The Iloilo Fiasco” that, in the Philippines at any rate, no matter how mellifluously pacific it may have sounded at home—no matter how soothing to the troubled doubts of the national conscience—the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation of December 21, 1898, was recognized both by the Eighth Army Corps and by Aguinaldo’s people as a call to arms—a signal to the former to get ready for the work of “civilizing with a Krag”; a signal to the latter to gird up their loins for the fight to the death for government of their people, by their people, for their people; and that the yearning benevolence of said proclamation was calculated strikingly to remind the Filipinos of Spain’s previous traditional yearnings for the welfare of Cuba, indignantly cut short by us—yearnings “to spare the great island from the danger of premature independence”[1] which that decadent monarchy could not even help repeating in the swan-song wherein she sued to President McKinley for peace. We did not realize the absoluteness of the analogy then. It is all clear enough now. We can now understand how and why Mr. McKinley’s programme of Annexation and Benevolent Assimilation of 1898–9, blindly earnest as was his belief that it would make the Filipino people at once cheerfully forego the “legitimate aspirations” to which we ourselves had originally given a momentum so generous that nothing but bullets could then possibly have stopped it, was in fact received by them in a manner compared with which Canada’s response in 1911 to Speaker Champ Clark’s equally benevolent suggestion of United States willingness to accord to Canada also, gradual Benevolent Assimilation and Ultimate Annexation, was one great sisterly sob of sheer joy as at the finding of a long lost brother. From the arrival of the American troops on June 30, 1898, until the outbreak of February 4, 1899, there had been two armies camped not far from each other, one born of the idea of independence and bent upon it, the other at first groping in the dark without instructions, and finally instructed to deny independence. There was never any faltering or evasion on the part of Aguinaldo and his people. They knew what they wanted and said so on all occasions. At all times and in all places they made it clear, by proclamation, by letter, by conversation, and otherwise, that independence was the one thing to which, whether they were fit for it or not, they had pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

We have seen how easily the war itself could have been averted by the Bacon Resolution of January, 1899, or some similar resolution frankly declaring the purpose of our government; how here was Senator Bacon at this end of the line pleading with his colleagues to be frank, and to make a declaration in keeping with “the high purpose” for which we had gone to war with Spain, instead of holding on to the Philippines on the idea that they might prove a second Klondike, while justifying such retention by arbitrarily assuming, without any knowledge whatever on the subject, that the Filipinos were incapable of self-government; how, there, at the other end of the line, at Manila, Aguinaldo’s Commissioners, familiar with our Constitution and the history and traditions of our government, were making, substantially, though in more diplomatic language, precisely the same plea, and imploring General Otis’s Commissioners to give them some assurance which would quiet the apprehensions of their people, and calm the fear that the original assurance, “We are going to lick the Spaniards and set you free,” was now about to be ignored because the islands might be profitable to the United States.

We have seen the war itself, as far as it had progressed by June, 1900, one of the bitterest wars in history, punctuated by frequent barbarities avenged in kind, and how, if the Taft Commission had not come out with McKinley spectacles on, they would have seen the picture of a bleeding, prostrate, and deeply hostile people, still bent on fighting to the last ditch, not only animated by a feeling against annexation by us similar to that the Canadians would have to-day if we should also try the Benevolent Assimilation game on them—first with proclamations breathing benevolence and then with cannon belching grape-shot—but further animated by the instinctive as well as inherited knowledge common to all colored peoples, whether red, yellow brown, or black, that wheresoever white men and colored live in the same country together, there the white man will rule. Understand, this was before Judge Taft had had a chance to assure them, with the kindly Taft smile and the hearty Taft hand-shake, that their benevolent new masters were going to reverse the verdict of the ages, and treat them with a fraternal love wholly free from race prejudice. If Judge Taft could only have arrived in January, 1899, and told them that the Bacon Resolution really represented the spirit of the attitude of the American people toward them, then the finely commanding bearing of Mr. Taft, and the noble genuineness of his desire to see peace on earth and goodwill toward men, might even have prevented the war. But this is merely what might have been. What actually was, when he did arrive, in June, 1900, was that the milk of human kindness had long since been spilled, and his task was to gather it up and put it back in the pail. When I, a Southern man who have taken part in the only two wars this nation has had in my lifetime, reflect that in this year of grace, 1912, Mr. Underwood’s otherwise matchless availability as the candidate of his party for President is questioned on the idea that it might be a tactical blunder, because of “the late war,” which broke out before either Mr. Underwood or myself were born, I cannot share the Taft optimism as to the rapidity with which the scars of “the late war” in the Philippines will heal, and as to the affectionate gratitude toward the United States with which the McKinley-Taft programme of Benevolent Assimilation will presently be regarded by the people of the Philippine Islands.

We have seen the futile efforts of the Schurman Commission of 1899, sent out that spring, in deference to American public opinion, with definite instructions to try and patch up a peace, by talking to the leading spirits of a war for independence, now in full swing, about the desirability of benevolent leading-strings. “They [meaning the Schurman Commission] had come,” says Mr. McKinley, in his annual message to Congress of December 5, 1899,[2] “with the hope of co-operating with Admiral Dewey and General Otis in establishing peace and order.” They came, they saw, they went, recognizing the futility of the errand on which they had been sent. And now came the Taft Commission a year later, on precisely the same errand, after the Filipinos had sunk all their original petty differences and jealousies in a very reasonable instinctive common fear of economic exploitation, and a very unreasonable but, to them, very real common fear of race elimination, amounting to terror, and been welded into absolute oneness—if that were somewhat lacking before—in the fierce crucible of sixteen months of bloody fighting against a foreign foe for the independence of their common country. President McKinley’s message to Congress of December, 1899, is full of the old insufferable drivel, so grossly, though unwittingly, ungenerous to our army then in the field in the Philippines, about the triviality of the resistance we were “up against.” The message in one place blandly speaks of “the peaceable and loyal majority who ask nothing better than to accept our authority,” in another of “the sinister ambitions of a few selfish Filipinos.” Thus was outlined, in the message announcing the purpose to send out the Taft Commission, the view that no real fundamental resistance existed in the islands. Basing contemplated action on this sort of stuff, the presidential message outlines the presidential purpose as follows—this in December, 1899, mind you:

There is no reason why steps should not be taken from time to time to inaugurate governments essentially popular in their form as fast as territory is held and controlled by our troops.

Then follows the genesis of the idea which resulted in the Taft Commission: