The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

But whosoever questions for one moment Governor Wright’s high personal character, simply does not know the man. To do so, moreover, would fatally cloud the issue I have sought to make clear between his view of the duty of our government and my own. In his moods that reminded one of Lincoln, Governor Wright used to say: “Don’t shoot the organist, he’s doing the best he can.” It is true that his answer to Judge Parker was not a full and frank statement of the case. But did it lie in American human nature, when your antagonist was recklessly over-stating the case in the heat of debate on the eve of a presidential election, to take him into your confidence and tell him all you knew, in simple trusting faith that he would thereafter quit exaggerating? To permit the dispute to boil down to the real issue, viz., how many lives it was permissible to abandon on the “greatest good to the greatest number” theory, would obviously jeopardize the existence of a government which the Governor of the Philippines naturally believed to be better for all concerned than any other. And there is your cul-de-sac. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.

We can point with pride to many things we have done in the Philippines, the public improvements,[19] the school system, the better sanitation, and a long list of other benefits conferred. But in the greatest thing we have done for them, we have builded wiser than we knew. “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” In fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos into one homogeneous political unit. In a most charming book, entitled An Englishwoman in the Philippines,[20] we can see our attempts to fit government by two political parties into over-seas colonization caricatured without sting until we really remind ourselves of a hippopotamus caressing a squirrel. In one passage the British sister describes our programme as one “to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American methods; but at the same time they have plenty of soldiers to knock him on the head if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it”—“A quaint scheme,” she naïvely adds, “and one full of the go-ahead originality of America.”

The more we teach the Filipinos, the more intimately they will become acquainted, in their own way, with the history of the relations between our country and theirs from the beginning, including the taxation without representation, through Congressional legislation (hereinafter noticed) placed or kept on our statute-books by the hemp trust and other special interests in the United States. And they will learn all these things in the midst of a “growing gulf between the two peoples.”[21]

In fourteen years we have made these unwilling subjects, whom we neither want nor need any more than they want or need us, a unit; a unit for Home Rule in preference to alien domination, it is true; but, nevertheless, a patriotic unit—one people—a potential body politic which can take a modest, but self-respecting place in the concert of free nations, with only a little more additional help from us.

In the handling of an insurrection in any given province with courts and constabulary during the first four or five years after the Taft government of the Philippines was founded, the function of a representative of the office of the Attorney-General, coming from Manila to help the local prosecuting attorney handle a large docket and a crowded jail, was by no means remotely analogous to that of a grand jury. He originated prosecutions, found “No Bill,” etc. When Mr. Harvey came to Samar, he came direct to the court room, and I suspended the trial of the pending case, and, after greeting him, began an informal talk which was akin to the nature of a charge to a grand jury, putting him in possession of the general aspects of the uprising. He was a very just and kindly man, and entered into the spirit of the task. I elaborated on the class of cases where the defendant claimed, as most of them did, “Yes, I joined the band of brigands, but I was made to do so.” It was also indictable to furnish supplies to the public enemy. This presented the class of cases where the brigands would swoop down on a town and demand rice, and not getting it, would sometimes kill the persons refusing it, and so intimidate the rest into finding rice for them. Also there was the class of cases where a man would claim to have been one of the inhabitants of an unprotected town who had gone off to the hills in a body, for safety, to propitiate the mountain people by becoming part of them. This sort of thing at one time threatened to become epidemic with all the coast towns. It did not, however. A modus vivendi of some sort, sometimes express, sometimes merely tacit, would be arranged between the coast people and the hill people. These modus vivendi arrangements enabled the coast people to obtain a certain degree of safety, in lieu of that we should have secured them but did not, by making the hill folk believe that the coast men were against us and for them. At one time the prosecuting attorney got hold of evidence sufficient to authorize the issuance of a warrant for the Presidente of Balangiga, the man supposed to have engineered the massacre of the 9th Infantry in September 1901. I authorized the issuance of the warrant for his arrest. But the native governor of the province, and also Major Dade, the American regular officer commanding the constabulary, satisfied me that we did not have force sufficient to protect Balangiga from the Pulajans, if we arrested the presidente, who, being persona grata to the Pulajans, was able to keep them from descending on his town. To arrest him would therefore mean, in their opinion, that the people of Balangiga would take to the hills for protection, and join the hill folk, or Pulajans, and if a town as large as Balangiga set any such example all the coast towns might follow it. So the supposed perpetrator of the 9th Infantry massacre was allowed to remain unmolested. The American court was impotent to enforce its processes.

In my mass of Philippine papers there is one containing a copy of my remarks to the Assistant Attorney-General on his arrival at Catbalogan, above referred to as analogous to a charge to a grand jury at home. It is dated Catbalogan, Samar, September 28, 1904, and is headed: “Remarks by the court upon the occasion of the arrival of Assistant Attorney-General Harvey, with regard to the recent disturbances in Samar, and the cases for brigandage and sedition growing out of the same.” Certain parts of this contemporary document will doubtless give the reader a more vivid apprehension of the then situation than he can get from mere subsequent description. Of course the visiting representative of the Attorney-General’s office was familiar in a general way with the manner of the handling of the Albay insurrection in the previous year, described in the chapter preceding this. In discussing the Samar situation the “remarks” of the court contain, among other things, this passage:

In the cases growing out of the Albay disturbances there were a great many people who strayed out to the mountains just like cattle. They did not know why or whither they went. As to those persons, Judge Carson, Mr. Ross, and myself were unanimous in the opinion that some of them could be indicted under the vagrancy law. There were others of a greater degree of guilt, but who did not appear to have been what you might call ordinary thieves, and we were all agreed to indict those under the sedition law, the limit of which is ten years and ten thousand dollars. Thus you do not force upon a Judge of First Instance the responsibility of sentencing a man to twenty years of his life for a connection with bandits which may be but little more than technical. Besides those two classes, there were in Albay of course the bandits proper, to whom the bandolerismo [brigandage] law was specially intended to apply. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that this bandolerismo law is one of the most stringent statutes that ever was on the statute-books of any country. It is very far from the purpose of this court to attempt to say what would be the wisest legislation, or to say that this is not the very best legislation, under the circumstances. How we administer the several laws alluded to governing public order, will settle whether or not substantial justice is done.

The men in the United States who in those days were slinging mud at the Philippine trial judges as being “subservient,” wholly missed the core of the whole matter. In the provinces where so many heavy sentences were imposed, the real situation was that a state of war existed, and the judges believed, and I think correctly, that they were practically a military commission of one, and much more able to give a prisoner a square deal, tempering justice with mercy, than officers briefly gathered from the scenes of the fighting to act as a military commission. We tried those men with as little prejudice as if they had just come from the moon. Moreover, from the italicized concluding words of the above excerpt from my talk to the Assistant Attorney-General, it will be seen that the court had practically unlimited discretion in the matter of punishment, and was, in fact, about the only court of criminal equity in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.

In the last analysis, the righteousness or unrighteousness of a civil government in a country not yet entirely subjugated, depends on whether more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation with constabulary whose “prisoners of war” are tried, to see what they may have done, if anything, by one-man courts, or whether more innocent people suffer through completing the work of subjugation as any other great power on earth but ourselves would have completed it, with an army, trying the prisoners by military commission. Unless you yourself were a traitor to your country, you considered as criminal attempts to subvert your government by cut-throats that no one of the respectable Filipinos, from Aguinaldo and Juan Cailles down, would have hesitated to have shot summarily. But you sought to make the punishment in each case fit the crime, by ascertaining as dispassionately as if the defendant were fresh from the moon, just what each accused man had himself done. Either Aguinaldo, or an American military commission would have had such people shot in bunches, as not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war. The trouble with the civil government did not lie in its judiciary, but in its constabulary. It was the physical handling of the crowds of prisoners by the constabulary, and their failure, because not numerous enough, to protect peaceably inclined people, which made it a fact that turning the situation over to the military would have meant less sacrifice of the innocent along with the guilty. It is much more merciful to kill a few hundred people, as a lesson to the rest, and let the rest go, with the clear understanding that if they insurrect again you will promptly kill a few hundred more, than to permit a reign of terror from one month to another and from one year to another, with all the untilled fields, famine, pestilence, and other disease this involves, merely in order to be able to invoke the blessing of the Doctor Lyman Abbots of the world on a supposedly benign “civil” government.

In all my sentences, and in all his indictments, Mr. Harvey and the writer sailed close to the wind, by holding only those responsible who had taken active parts in the sacking and burning of villages and the massacre of their inhabitants. I knew that sooner or later some officious prosecuting attorney of less noble mould than Harvey would ask me to convict some poor creature of brigandage for giving a little rice to the brigands, and my mind was made up to refuse to do so, and in so refusing to commit heresy once and for all by expressing my sentiments, in the decision, concerning the failure to give adequate protection to defenceless people, along the lines indicated in this chapter. No such case was in fact presented. I broke down under the strain of graver cases early in November and left Samar forever, bound for Manila.