The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

This was followed by a perfectly true and correct picture of the peace and quiet which then prevailed for the time being everywhere throughout the archipelago, except in Samar, which dark and bloody isle was specifically excepted. Then followed a statement as to Samar, full of allusions as elaborately optimistic as any of the Taft cablegrams of 1900, to impliedly inconsiderable “prowling bands” of outlaws in Samar. Of course nobody at home knew the answer to this, so it silenced the Parker batteries, and the Samar massacres proceeded unchecked. Meanwhile the 14th Infantry at Calbayog, Samar, and the 18th Infantry, at Tacloban, Leyte, smiled with astute, if contemptuous, tolerance, at the self-inflicted impotence of a republic trying to make conquered subjects behave without colliding too violently with home sentiment against having conquered subjects; sang their favorite barrack room song,

He may be a brother of Wm. H. Taft,

But he ain’t no friend of mine;

and continued to enjoy enforced leisure. They did chafe under the restraint, but it at least relieved them from the not altogether inspiring task of chasing Pulajans through jungles and along the slippery mire of precipitous mountain trails, and at the same time permitted the secondest second lieutenant among them to swear fierce blasé oaths, not wholly unjustified, about how much better he could run the Islands than they were being run.

On October 26th, I wired Governor Wright at Manila as follows:

Since my letter of October 6th, situation appears worse. Additional depredations both on east and west coast. Smith-Bell closing out.[17] Reliable American residing in Wright says that during week ending last Sunday thirteen families living along river Nacbac, barrio of Tutubigan, said pueblo, kidnapped by brigands and carried off to hills. This means some sixty people having farms along river, rice ready to be harvested. Seven of the eleven barrios of Wright have been burned.

Blount.

When I sent that telegram of October 26th, the situation in the pueblo of Wright was typical of the reign of terror throughout the island. Wright could have been reached by the 18th Infantry (then over at Tacloban, in Leyte), and garrisoned on eight hours’ notice. But I had little hope that the telegram would stir the 18th. The best man I had ever personally known well in high station was at the head of the government of the Islands, and as he was my friend, I sat down to think the situation out, determined, with the prejudice which is the privilege of friendship, to analyze his apparent apathy, and to conjecture how many times thirteen families “having farms along river, rice ready to be harvested” would have to be carried off to the hills by the brigands in order to move the 18th Infantry before the presidential election. Then I wondered just how many seconds it would have taken a British governor-general, backed by unanimous home sentiment concerning the wisdom of having colonies, to have acted, had a great British colonial mercantile house like Smith, Bell & Co. appealed to him for protection of its interests. And that brought me, there on “the tie-ribs of earth,” as Kipling would phrase it, to the fundamentals of the problem. The British imperial idea of which Kipling is the voice and Benjamin Kidd the accompanist is based, superficially, upon a supposed necessity for the control of the tropics by non-tropical peoples, though fundamentally, it is an assertion of the right of any people to assume control of the land and destinies of another when they feel sure they can govern that other better than that other can govern itself. Is this proposition tenable, and if so, within what limits? Is it tenable to the point of total elimination of the people sought to be improved? If not, then how far? How far is incidental sacrifice of human life negligible in the working out of the broader problem of “the greatest good of the greatest number?” In his article in the North American Review for December, 1907, Governor Ide makes exhaustive answer to “the doctors who for some months past, in the columns of the North American Review and elsewhere, have published prescriptions for curing the ills of the Filipino people,” including Senator Francis G. Newlands, Hon. William J. Bryan, and the writer. In the course of disposing of the quack last mentioned, Governor Ide gets on rather a high horse, asking, with much dignified indignation, “How many people in the United States would have known or cared whether the army was or was not ordered out in Samar in 1904?” I concede that the solicitude was a super-solicitude, as do the Harvey letters, but like them, I must recognize its reality. However, when Governor Ide reaches this rhapsody of conscious virtue: “It is inconceivable that the Commission could have been animated by the base and ignoble partisan prejudices thus charged against them,” capping his climax by triumphantly pointing out that “Governor-General Wright was a life-long Democrat,” he doth protest too much. For the angelic pinions he thus attaches to himself are at once rudely snapped by the reflection that a very short while after his article came out in the North American Review Governor Wright became Secretary of War in President Roosevelt’s Cabinet, and a little later took the stump for Taft and Sherman, in 1908. Governor Wright did not stoop to deny or extenuate his share in the matter, and I honor him for it.[18] But to stick to your own crowd and then deny afterwards that you did so—that is another story. However, let us brush aside such petty attempts to cloud the real issue, which is: How many people would Governor Wright and Vice-Governor Ide have permitted to be massacred by the Pulajans in Samar in 1904 before they would have ordered out the military prior to the presidential election? Let us consider the case, not with a view of clouding the issue, but of clearing it. The truth is, Governor Wright was very gravely concerned about the Samar situation from August to November, 1904. Of course it is due to him to make perfectly clear that he did not realize the gravity of that situation as vividly as those of us who were on the ground in Samar, four or five hundred miles away. But the information hereinbefore reviewed, conveyed to him by the Provincial Governor, by Mr. Harvey, the Assistant Attorney General sent to Samar for the express purpose of getting the Manila government in possession of the exact situation, and by myself, was certainly sufficient to make him “chargeable with notice” of all that happened thereafter, certainly chargeable with knowledge of all that had happened theretofore. Of course there was General Allen, the commander-in-chief of the constabulary, at Manila, presumably speaking well of his command—the right arm of the civil government—presumably giving industrious and tactful aid and comfort to the idea that the authorities could afford to worry along with the constabulary alone until after the presidential election. But that could not discount the actual facts reported from the afflicted province by the officials on the ground. General Allen, it should be noted, remained in Manila all this time. So that any Otis-like “situation-well-in-hand” bouquets he may have thrown at his subordinates in Samar, and the situation there generally, were mere political hothouse products, surer to be recognized as such by the shrewd kindliness of the truly considerable man at the head of the government than by most any one else he could hand them out to. That man knew, to all intents and purposes, in the great and noble heart of him, what was really going on in Samar. He knew that massacres had been occurring, and that they were likely to keep on occurring. In other words, he knew that preventable sacrifice of life of defenceless people was going on, and that he could put a stop to it any time he saw fit. The question he had to wrestle with was, should he stop it, knowing the “Hell fer Sartin” the Democratic orators in the United States would at once luridly describe as “broke loose” in the Philippines? I insist that there is no use for any holier-than-thou gentleman to become suffused with any glow of indignant conscious rectitude based on the premises we are considering. Better to look a little deeper, on the idea that you are observing your republic in flagrante colonizatione, with as good a man as you ever have had, or ever will have, among you, as the principal actor. Governor Wright’s course was entirely right, if the Philippine policy was right. If his course was not right, it was not right because the Philippine policy is fundamentally wrong. Governor Wright of course believed that the Philippine policy was right. I myself did not come finally to believe it was wrong until it was revealed in all its rawness by the period now under discussion. Of course the Governor did not vividly realize that the American women in Catbalogan were not entirely safe. If he had, he would have rushed the troops there, politics or no politics. But native life was politically negligible. What difference would a few score, or even a few hundred, natives of Samar make, compared with that pandemonium of anarchy and bloodshed all over the archipelago which Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide had long been insisting would follow Philippine independence? Was the whole future of 8,000,000 of people to be jeopardized to save a few people in Samar? That was the moral question before the insular government, in its last analysis. And the government faced the proposition squarely, and answered it “No.”

I will go farther than this. If I had believed, with Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide, that Philippine independence meant anarchy in the Islands, and the orthodox “bloody welter of chaos,” I too might have hesitated to order out the troops on the eve of the election, and my hesitation, like theirs, might have continued until the election was safely over. So might yours, reader. Don’t be so certain you would not. Practically absolute power, sure of its own benevolence, has temptations to withhold its confidence from the people that you wot not of. Don’t condemn Governor Wright. Condemn the policy, and change your republic back to the course set by its founders. Give the Philippine people the independence they of right ought to have, instead of secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, through the medium of your next great war.

The question of whether the troops should have been ordered out or not at the time above dealt with is by no means without two sides. On the “bloody welter” side, you have the well-known opinions of Messrs. Taft, Wright, and Ide. On the other side you have before you—for the moment—only my little opinion. So instead of having in Governor Wright a Bluebeard, you simply have a man of great personal probity and unflinching moral courage, following his convictions to their ultimate logical conclusion without shadow of turning, in the act of colonization. In other words, Mr. American, you see yourself, as others see you. So face the music and look at yourself. In your colony business, you are a house divided against itself, which cannot stand. On the other hand, I knew the Filipino people far more intimately than either Mr. Taft, Governor Wright, or Judge Ide. I spoke their language—which they did not. I had met them both in peace and in war—which they had not. I had held court for months at a time in various provinces of the archipelago from extreme northern Luzon to Mindanao—which they had not. I had met the Filipinos in their homes for years on terms of free and informal intercourse impracticable for any governor-general. It was therefore perfectly natural that I should know them better than any of these eminent gentlemen. I was not prepared to be in a hurry about recommending myself out of office by assenting that our guardianship over the Filipinos should at once be terminated, but I knew there was nothing to the “bloody welter” proposition. The home life of the Filipino is too altogether a model of freedom from discord, pervaded as it is by parental, filial, and fraternal love, and their patriotism is too universal and genuine, to give the “bloody welter” bugaboo any standing in court.