The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

Paradise Lost.

Throughout the last year of Governor Taft’s administration in the Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901–2 had precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public, already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of “the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa.”[1] He did not want to order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated him to his native municipal police and constabulary, experimental outfits of doubtful loyalty,[2] and, at best, wholly inadequate, as it afterwards turned out,[3] for the maintenance of public order and for affording to the peaceably inclined people that sort of security for life and property, and that protection against semi-political as well as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with the dignity of this nation. The better class of Filipinos, though not so enamored of American rule as Governor Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about resigned themselves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism stopped by that sort of adequate police protection which was so obviously necessary in the disturbed and unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many years of war, and which they of course realized could only be afforded by the strong arm of the American army. But they knew that if the army were ordered out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of that strenuous institution. The result was a sort of reign of terror for nearly a year, in 1902–3, in the richest province of the whole archipelago, the hemp-producing province of Albay, at the southern end of Luzon, and also in portions of the province of Misamis. These conditions had begun in those provinces in 1902, and, not being promptly checked, because the army was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving like a garden of weeds. Super-solicitude concerning the possible effect of adequately vigorous governmental action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the Administration in charge of the Federal Government at Washington, an attitude not surprising in the colonial agents of that Administration, but which, as we have seen, had been from the beginning, as it must ever be, the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly impotent as senile decadence ever rendered Spain.

The average American citizen will admit that the average American statesman, even if he be not far-sighted, looks at least a year ahead, in matters where both his personal fortunes and those of the political party to which he belongs are intimately related to what he may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor Taft’s administration of affairs in the Philippines was wholly uninfluenced by any possible effect it might have on President Roosevelt’s chances for becoming an elected President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very poor party man as well. Assuming that he was neither, let us examine his course regarding the disturbances of public order in the Philippines in that year, as related to the first and most sacred duty of every government, adequate protection for life and property.

In President McKinley’s original instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, after quoting the final paragraph of the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila:

This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army;

the President had added:

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of the United States to give protection for property and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands.

* * * I charge this Commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.

We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of citizen in the republic to-day than the man now[4] at the head of it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President Roosevelt, entitled “The First Civil Governor,” which began as follows:

A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public life and American public men[5] remarked that the first Governor of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make a first-class President of the United States with the qualities which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States, and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely correct.