The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

He further says:

There is a wide difference, it is true, between the general intelligence of the educated Filipino and the laborer on the street and in the field, but this is not a barrier to self-government. Intelligence controls in every government, except where it is suppressed by military force. Nine tenths of the Japanese have no part in the law-making. In Mexico, the gap between the educated classes and the peons is fully as great as, if not greater than, the gap between the extremes of Filipino society. Those who question the capacity of the Filipinos for self-government forget that patriotism raises up persons fitted for the work that needs to be done.”[11]

It is because I believe that in the Philippines we are doing ourselves an injustice and keeping back the progress of the world by depreciating and scoffing at the value of patriotism as a factor in self-government and in the maintenance of free institutions, that I have written this book. There is no more patriotic people in the world than the Filipino people. I base this opinion upon an intimate knowledge of them, and in the light of considerable observation throughout most of Europe, and in Asia from the Golden Horn to the mouth of the Yang-tse. Woe to the nonsense, sometimes ignorant, sometimes vicious, wherewith we are regaled from time to time by Americans who go to Manila, smoke a cigar or two in some American club there, and then come back home and depreciate the Filipino people without at least correcting Col. Roosevelt’s wholly uninformed and cruel random assertions of 1900 about the Filipinos being a “jumble of savage tribes,” and about Aguinaldo being “the Osceola of the Filipinos,” or their “Sitting Bull!” It is wonderfully inspiring to turn from such stale slander to Mr. Bryan’s above statement of the case for our Oriental subjects, a statement framed in his own infinitely sympathetic and inimitable way, which says for me just what I had long wanted to express, but could not, so well. And in the midst of the recurring slander that the Filipino people are “a heterogeneous lot,” it is refreshing to find in a preface to the American Census of the Philippines of 1903, by the Director thereof, a passage where, in comparing the tables of that census with those of the Twelfth Census of the United States, he says:

“Those of the Philippine Census are somewhat simpler, the differences being due mainly to the more homogeneous character of the population of the Philippine Islands.”[12]

When we consider the above in the light of the past and present operation of our own immigration laws, it is not flattering, but it may and should tend to awaken some realization of the manifold nature and blinding effects of current misapprehensions in the United States concerning the inhabitants of the Philippines. One Filipino does not differ from another any more than one American does from another American—in fact they differ less, considering immigration. The Filipino people are not rendered a heterogeneous lot by having three different languages, Ilocano, Tagalo, and Visayan,[13] which are respectively the languages spoken in the northern, the central, and the southern part of their country, any more than the people of Switzerland are rendered heterogeneous by the circumstance that in northern Switzerland you find German spoken for the most part, while farther south you find French, and near the southernmost extremities some Italian. At this late date no credible person acquainted with the facts will be so poor in spirit as to deny that the motives of the men who originally started the insurrection were patriotic. Nor will any one who served under General Otis’s command in the Philippines deny that that eminent desk soldier continued to cling to his early theory that it was a purely Tagalo insurrection long after the deadly unanimity of the opposition had seeped, with all-pervading thoroughness, into the general mind of the army of occupation. The white flag or rag of truce, alias treachery, used to be hoisted to put us off our guard in pretence of welcome to our columns approaching their towns and barrios. Such use of such a flag, followed by treachery, the ultimate weapon of the weak, had been in turn followed, with relentless impartiality in countless instances, by due unloosening of the vials of American wrath, until every nipa shack[14] in the Philippine Islands that remained unburned had had its lesson, written in the blood of its occupants or their kin, to the tune of the Krag-Jorgensen or the Gatling. Yet General Otis’s reports are always bland, and always convey the idea of an insurrection exclusively Tagalo.

In the summer of 1900, the newly arrived civilians, the Taft Commission, had no special interest in the soldiers who, for better, for worse, were “doing their country’s work,” as Kipling calls his own country’s countless wars against its refractory subjects in the far East; and no especial sympathy with that work. Two years later we find President Roosevelt, in connection with the general amnesty of July 4, 1902, congratulating his “bowld lads,” as Mr. Dooley would call them—meaning General Chaffee and the Eighth Army Corps—on a total of “two thousand combats, great and small” up to that time, but you never find in any of Governor Taft’s Philippine state papers any more affirmative recognition of continued resistance to American rule than some mild allusion to “small but hard knocks” being administered here and there by the army. From the beginning there was a systematic belittling, on the part of the Taft Commission, of the work of the army, incidentally to belittling the reality and unanimity of the opposition which was daily calling it forth.[15] This was not vicious. It was essentially benevolent. It was part of the initial fermentation of their preconceived theory. But the trouble about their theory was that it was only a theory. It would not square with the facts. They were trying to square the subjugation of the Philippines with the freeing of Cuba, a task quite as soluble as the squaring of a circle. They hoped, with all the kindly benevolence of Mr. McKinley himself, that the opposition to our rule was not as great as some people seemed to think. They had come out to the islands earnestly wishing to find conditions not as bad as they had been asserted to be. And the wish became father to the thought and the thought soon found expression in words—cablegrams to the United States presenting an optimistic view as to the prospects of necessity for further shedding of blood in the interest of Benevolent Assimilation, alias Trade Expansion. Some flippant person will say, “That is a polite way of charging insincerity.” This book is not addressed to flippant persons. It is a serious attempt to deal with a problem involving the liberties of a whole people, and will be, as far as the writer can make it, straightforward, dignified, and candid. Judge Taft’s fearful mistake of 1900–1901 in the matter of his premature planting of the civil government—a mistake because based on the idea that “the great majority of the people” welcomed American rule, and a fearful mistake because fraught with so much subsequent sacrifice of life due to too early withdrawal of the police protection of the army—was not the first instance in American history where an ordinarily level-headed public man has, with egregious folly, mistaken the mood and temper of a whole people. The key to his mistake lay in the fact that, coming into a strange country in the midst of a war, he ignored the advice of the commanding general of the army of his country concerning the military situation, and took the advice of a few native Tories, or Copperheads, of wealth, who had never really been in sympathy with the insurrection and who, flocking about him as soon as he arrived, told him what he so longed to be told, viz., that the war did not represent the wishes of the people but was kept up by “a conspiracy of assassination” of all who did not contribute to it either in service or money. He thereupon decided that the men who told him this really represented the voice of the people, and that the men in the field who had then been keeping up the struggle for independence for sixteen months, in season and out of season, were simply “a Mafia on a very large scale.” Consequently the Taft Commission had been in the islands less than three months when Secretary of War Root at Washington was giving the widest possible publicity to cablegrams from them, such as that dated August 21, 1900, mentioned in the preceding chapter, conveying the glad tidings that “large number of people long for peace and are willing to accept government under United States”[16]; and by November next thereafter, the “large number” had grown to “a great majority,” and the “willing” to “entirely willing.” The November statement was:

A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government under the supremacy of the United States.[17]

Yet, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the real situation in the Philippines at this very time was described four years later at the Republican National Convention of 1904 by Mr. Root thus:

When the last national convention met, over 70,000 American soldiers from more than 500 stations held a still vigorous enemy in check.

Between the date of their arrival in the Islands on June 3d, and the date of this August 21st telegram, the Taft Commission did little junketing, but remained in Manila imbibing the welcome views of the “Tories” or “Copperheads,” and seeking very little information from the army. But it so happens that the Adjutant-General at Manila used to keep a record of the daily engagements during that period, which record was later published in the annual War Department Report,[18] and it shows a total of about five hundred killings (of Filipinos) between June 3d, and August 21st, to say nothing of probably many times that number hit but not killed, and therefore able to get away. (You could not include any Filipino in your returns of your killings except dead you had actually counted.) It also happens that on June 4th, the day after Judge Taft’s arrival, General MacArthur, in response to an order from Washington sent some time previous at the instance of Congress, had all the Filipino casualties our military records showed up to that time (i. e., during the sixteen months from the day of the outbreak, February 4, 1899, to June 3, 1900), tabulated and totalled, and the total Filipino killed accordingly reported by cablegram to the War Department on June 4, 1900, was 10,780.[19]