The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware,[7] having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary, officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may, possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be made an example of; and that will embarrass us in punishing them when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands, or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore, in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The majority of the people of the province are really sick of the war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto, and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore, this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province just as Bell did Batangas. But we don’t want any howl about it.

At this point of the supposed colloquy,—I say “colloquy,” though tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt’s “colloquys” with Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington, calls “unilateral conversation”—one can imagine the senatorial Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: “The man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an annex of the White House?” Then we can imagine President Roosevelt bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus:

I put Jake Smith out of business, as you gentlemen all know, for his inhuman methods of avenging the Balangiga massacre in Samar, and I am just as much opposed to cruelty as any of you Senators can be. But Bell in Batangas is an altogether different case from Smith in Samar. All this about the odor of decomposing bodies wafted from reconcentration camps, and “clouds of vampire bats swirling out on their orgies over the dead,” that Senator Bacon’s army friend, whoever he may be, wrote the Senator, relates to Samar, and never did have any application to Bell’s methods in Batangas. Bell did a clean job in a minimum of time and with a minimum sacrifice of life, and, while he did have those reconcentration camps in Batangas, he saw to it religiously that nobody starved, and that all those people received daily medical treatment.

For the correctness of the picture of conditions presented in the above hypothetical talk, I of course intend to be understood as vouching. If such a talk could have been had in 1903 by President Roosevelt with Senator Bacon and those of his colleagues who shared his views, the Albay situation might have been handled creditably. But the Administration was in no position to be frank with the Opposition. No Administration has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a position to be frank with the Senate and the country concerning the situation at any given time in the Philippines, because at any given time there was always so much that it could not afford to re-open and explain. Mr. Root, for instance, might have been questioned too closely as to why, when Secretary of War, he had gone around the country in the fall of 1900 speaking for Mr. McKinley, and talking about “the patient and unconsenting millions” so anxious to be rid of “Aguinaldo and his band of assassins,” when at that very time his (Mr. Root’s) generals in the Philippines were engaged in activities, the magnitude of which may be inferred from a telegram sent from Washington to General Wood at Havana, asking if he could possibly spare the 10th Infantry, and adding:

Imperative that we have immediate use of every available company that we can lay our hands on for service in the Philippines,[8]

although at West Point in 1902 he told the cadets how nobly the army had labored in putting down “an insurrection of 7,000,000 people.” No, the Administration in 1903 simply could not afford to be frank concerning the situation in the Philippines. I need not recapitulate here any more of the long train of reasons why, because they have all been fully explained in the preceding chapters. Of course President Roosevelt had no such guilty knowledge of the facts as Mr. Root. He was not in constant daily contact with army officers at the War Department, familiar with the actual situation in the Philippines, as Mr. Root was. He was simply “sticking to Taft.” Somewhere along about the time the military folk in the Philippines were scoffing at the unnecessary sacrifice of life incident to the lack of a strong government, President Roosevelt had written his warm personal friend, Hon. George Curry, now a member of Congress from New Mexico, who had been a captain in his regiment before Santiago, was then an official of the civil government of the Philippines, and later Governor of New Mexico, by appointment of Mr. Roosevelt: “Stick to Taft, George” or words to that effect. Mr. Roosevelt’s attitude was simply that of an intensely loyal friend of Mr. Taft who simply assumed that the Philippine Government was not going to tolerate impotence in the matter of protecting life and property. But everybody at both ends of the line was too deep in the mire of all the long and systematic withholding of facts from the American public which had been occurring ever since 1898, and which it has been the aim of the preceding chapters to illuminate by the light since becoming available in the published official records of the Government. Hence, in the hypothetical conference above supposed, President Roosevelt was in no position to take any high ground. He would have had to admit that the civil government of 1901 was set up too soon in order to stand by half-baked notions dished out in 1900 by the Taft Commission in aid of his own and Mr. McKinley’s campaign for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, respectively. In other words the truth about the Philippines from the beginning might, and probably would, have seriously jeopardized the Roosevelt presidential chances in 1904. So Governor Taft was left to his own resources in struggling with the problem of law and order in the Islands, intimately understanding the obvious bearing, just suggested, of what he might do out there, on the election of 1904. What then did Governor Taft do to meet the situation in 1903? Chronological order, as well as other considerations making for clearness, would suggest that I begin by telling what he did not do.

In May, 1903, I was sent to the province of Surigao to try some cases arising out of what has ever since been known in that out-of-the-way region as “the affair of March 23d” (1903). In his annual report for 1903, pages 29 and 30, in describing the Surigao affair, Governor Taft correctly states that a band of outlaws came into the town of Surigao on the day above named, killed Captain Clark, the officer in charge of the constabulary, took the constabulary’s guns, while they were all away at their mid-day meal, scattered about the town, and departed. But Mr. Taft’s report disposes of the whole incident in a most casual way. As a matter of fact the gist of it was that a heroic little band of Americans under Mr. Luther S. Kelly, the provincial treasurer, an old Indian scout of the Yellowstone country, hastily gathered the seven American women then in the town, one of them in a delicate condition, into the stone government house, and stood off those semi-civilized sensual brigands until reinforcements arrived. Governor Taft’s failure adequately to present the gravity of the episode in his account of it does not argue well for the subsequent solicitude he might feel about other American women in other remote provinces which he was anxious to keep on his “pacified list,” to say nothing of politically negligible native life therein.[9] Nor does this report include any of the material facts showing the ineffectiveness of the rank and file of the constabulary to cope with the situation, or the general feeling of insecurity I found in the province as to how far the whole population might be in sympathy with the brigands. As a matter of fact, after that Surigao affair, Governor Taft had to turn the army loose in the province to go and get back and restore to his constabulary the seventy-five to one hundred stand-of-arms the brigands had so rudely and impolitely taken away from them, and I held court there for a month trying the people who were captured and brought in, with Colonel Meyer, of the 11th Infantry, one of the most thorough and able soldiers of the United States Army, and seven hundred soldiers of his regiment acting as deputy sheriffs, and yet all the time the province was under “civil” government, nominally. Colonel Meyer got the men who killed Clark, and, upon due and ample proof, I hung them, but Surigao was never taken for a day from the list of provinces enjoying “the peace and protection of a benign civil government.” The writ of habeas corpus was never suspended for a moment.

In the report above quoted from, Governor Taft remarks that if the prompt steps he did take (he had already described the prompt sending of the military to the scene) had not been taken, “the trouble might have spread.” But the Surigao affair seemed to teach the civil government nothing in the matter of subsequent protection of life, nor did it lessen their persistence in relying on their constabulary for due extension of such protection in time of need.

By June, 1903, another scheme was invented for avoiding calling on the military. When you are in a foreign country building a new government on the ruins of an old one, you naturally find out as much as you can about how the old one met its problems. The Spaniards had had the same problem in their day about not ordering out the military, because they did not have any military to order out. They were too poor to garrison the various provinces. They had long followed the plan, from time to time, of reconcentrating in the main towns of disturbed districts all the country population they could get to come in, and then acting on the assumption that all who did not come in were public enemies. This meant that when the country people came in, they simply looked out for themselves, while away from their homes, and farms, as best they could. Of course nobody at all looked after the farms, and nobody provided medical attention for the reconcentrados, or sanitary attention for the reconcentration camps. This general plan was formally sanctioned by the Commission, in so far as the following law sanctioned it. The law was enacted, June 1, 1903. It is section 6, of Act 781, which was an act dealing with all the constabulary problems, of which this was one. It read:

In provinces which are infested to such an extent with ladrones or outlaws that the lives and property of residents in the outlying barrios[10] are rendered wholly insecure by continued predatory raids—