The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

On September 28, 1901, just prior to President Roosevelt’s above cablegram pouring oil on the troubled politico-military insular waters, a company of General Chaffee’s command, Company C, of the 9th Infantry, had been taken off their guard and massacred at a place called Balangiga, in the island of Samar.[20] This had made General Chaffee somewhat angry, and explains the subsequent dark and bloody drama of which General “Jake” Smith was the central figure, whereby Samar was made “a howling wilderness.” But Governor Taft was filled with much more solicitude about the success of his civil government than he was about the obscure lives lost at Balangiga. Apropos of the Balangiga affair he was wearing the patience of the doughty Chaffee with remarks like this: “The people are friendly to the civil government,” and suavely speaking of “the evidence which accumulates on every hand of the desire of the people at large for peace and protection by the civil government.”[21] The same Taft report goes on to deprecate “rigor in the treatment” of the situation and the “consequent revulsion in those feelings of friendship toward the Americans which have been growing stronger each day with the spread and development of the civil government.”

General “Jake” Smith was sent to Samar shortly after the Balangiga massacre, and did indeed make the place a howling wilderness, with his famous “kill-and-burn” orders, instructions to “kill everything over ten years old” and so forth, and the army was in sympathy generally with most of what he did,—except, of course, the unspeakable “10 year old” part—piously exclaiming, as fallible human nature often will in such circumstances, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Now the civil government could have put a stop to all this if it had wanted to. It had the backing of President Roosevelt. But it quietly accepted the benefit of such “fear of God”—to use the army’s rather sacrilegious expression about that Samar campaign—as the military arm put into the heart of the Filipino, and went on the even tenor of its way, still maintaining that the Filipinos must like us because the civil government was so benevolent,—as if the Filipinos drew any nice distinctions between Governor Taft and General Chaffee, or supposed the two did not represent one and the same government, the government of the United States. There was much investigation about that awful Samar campaign afterward. General Smith was court-martialed and partly whitewashed, at least not dismissed. At General Smith’s court-martial, there was some dispute about the alleged orders to “kill and burn,” to “kill everything over ten years old,” etc. But the nature of the campaign may be inferred from General Smith’s famous circular No. 6, which, issued on Christmas eve, 1901, advised his command, in effect, that he did not take much stock in the civil commission’s confidence that the people really wanted peace; that he was “thoroughly convinced” that the wealthy people in the towns of his district were aiding the insurgents while pretending to be friendly and that he proposed to

adopt a policy that will create in all the minds of all the people a burning desire for the war to cease; a desire or longing so intense, so personal, and so real that it will impel them to devote themselves in real earnest to bringing about a real state of peace.[22]

During all his trial troubles, General Smith “took what was coming to him” without a murmur, and General Chaffee stuck to him as far as he could without assuming the primary responsibility for the fearful orders above alluded to. If, when General Smith went to Samar, his superior officer, General Chaffee, was in just the direly vengeful frame of mind he, General Smith, afterwards displayed, and prompted him to do, substantially, what he afterward did, which is by no means unlikely, General Smith never whimpered or put the blame on his chief. But a fearful lesson was given the Filipinos, and the civil government profited by it. General Chaffee was never really pressed on whether he did or did not prompt General Smith to do what he did; Governor Taft was never even criticised for not protesting; but with a flourish of presidential trumpets, General Smith was finally made “the goat,” by being summarily placed on the retired list, and that closed the bloody Samar episode of 1901–02. I wonder General Smith has not gone and wept on General Miles’s shoulder and like him become a member of the Anti-Imperialist League of Boston. Some of the best fighting men in the army say that as a soldier in battle General Smith is superb. At any rate he may find spiritual consolation in the following passage of the Scriptures which fits and describes his case:

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.[23]

In his Report for 1901 Governor Taft says that the four principal provinces, including Batangas, which gave trouble shortly after the civil government was set up in that year, and had to be returned to military control, were organized under civil rule “on the recommendation” of the then commanding general (MacArthur)[24]: It certainly seems unlikely that the haste to change from military rule to civil rule came on the motion of the military. If the Commission ever got, in writing, from General MacArthur, a “recommendation” that any provinces be placed under civil rule while still in insurrection, the text of the writing will show a mere soldiery acquiescence in the will of Mr. McKinley, the commander-in-chief. Parol contemporaneous evidence will show that General MacArthur told them, substantially, that they were “riding for a fall.” In fact, whenever an insurrection would break out in a province after Governor Taft’s inauguration as governor, the whole attitude of the army in the Philippines, from the commanding general down, was “I told you so.” They did not say this where Governor Taft could hear it, but it was common knowledge that they were much addicted to damning “politics” as the cause of all the trouble.

Governor Taft’s statement in his report for 1901, that the four principal provinces, above named, Batangas and the rest, were organized under civil rule “on the recommendation of General MacArthur,” is fully explained in his testimony before the Senate Committee of 1902. From the various passages hereinbefore quoted from President McKinley’s state papers concerning the Philippines, especially his messages to Congress, the political pressure Mr. McKinley was under from the beginning to make a show of “civil” government, thus emphasizing the alleged absence of any real substantial opposition to our rule by a seeming absence of necessity for the use of force, so as to palliate American repugnance to forcing a government upon an unwilling people, has been made clear. There were to be no “dark days of reconstruction.” The Civil War in the United States from 1861 to 1865 was a love feast compared with our war in the Philippines. Yet the work of reconstruction in the Philippines was to be predicated on the theory of consent, so persistently urged by President McKinley before the American people from the beginning, viz., that the insurrection represented only a small faction of the people. We have seen how General MacArthur also had originally, in 1898, entertained this notion, and how by the time he took Malolos in March, 1899, he had gotten over this notion, and had—regretfully—recognized that “the whole people are loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represents.” And now came Governor Taft, after fifteen months more of continuous fighting, to tell General MacArthur, on behalf of Mr. McKinley, that he, MacArthur, did not know what he was talking about, and that “the great majority” were for American rule. The representative men of my own State of Georgia welcomed the return of the State to military control in 1870. Most of them had been officers of the Confederate army. The Federal commander simply told them that if they could not restrain the lawless element of their own people, he would. By premature setting up of the Philippine civil government, the lawless element was allowed full swing. General MacArthur had been in the Civil War. He knew something about reconstruction. But here were the Taft Commission, with instructions from Mr. McKinley to the effect that civil government, government “essentially popular in form,” was to be set up as fast as territory was conquered. It didn’t make any difference about the government being “essentially popular” just so it was “essentially popular in form.” To the Senate Committee of 1902, Governor Taft said:

General MacArthur and the Commission did differ as to where the power lay with respect to the organization of civil governments, as to who should say what civil governments should be organized, the Commission contending that, under the instructions, it was left to them, and General MacArthur thinking that everything was subject to military control ultimately, in view of the fact that the islands were in a state of war.[25]

Governor Taft then added that he and General MacArthur reached a modus vivendi. When a good soldier once finds out just what his commander-in-chief wants done, he will endeavor, in loyal good faith, to carry out the spirit of instructions, no matter how unwise they may seem to him. As soon as General MacArthur saw what President McKinley wanted done, he proceeded to co-operate loyally with Governor Taft to carry out the plan. He well knew the country was not ready for civil government, but if Mr. McKinley was bent on crowding civil government forward as fast as territory was conquered, he would make his recommendations on that basis. In the matter of the utter folly of the prematurity with which the civil government was set up in the Philippines in 1901, and the terrible consequences to the hapless Filipinos, hereinafter described, which followed, by reason of the premature withdrawal of the police protection of the army and the sense of security its several garrisons radiated, from a country just recovering from some six years of war, General MacArthur’s exemption from responsibility is shown by his reports for 1900 and 1901.[26] The former has already been fully examined, and the original sharp differences between him and Governor Taft made clear. In the latter report dated July 4, 1901, the date of the Taft inauguration as Governor, and also, if I mistake not, the day of General MacArthur’s final departure for the United States, the latter washes his hands of the kindly McKinley-Taft nonsense, born of political expediency, about there having never been any real fundamental or unanimous resistance, in no uncertain terms thus:

Anything in the immediate future calculated to impede the activity or reduce the efficiency of these instruments [our military forces,] will not only be a menace to the present, but put in jeopardy the entire future of American possibilities in the archipelago.[27]