The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

As early as the beginning of April, 1899, just after the taking on March 31st of the first insurgent capital, Malolos, General MacArthur, who commanded our troops in the assault on that place, had said, in an interview with a newspaper man afterwards verified by the General before the Senate Committee of 1902 as substantially correct:

When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo’s troops represented only a faction. * * * I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon * * * was opposed to us * * *. But after having come thus far, and having been brought much in contact with both insurrectos and amigos,[4] I have been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads.[5]

The presidential election of 1900 had been fought out, in the midst of considerable bitterness, on the idea that the Root view was correct and the MacArthur view was altogether mistaken. So that after 1900, the McKinley Administration was irrevocably committed to the Root view.[6] The Philippine Government had, after 1900, diligently set to work to live up to the Root view, and to fit the facts to the Root view by prayer and hope, accompanied by asseveration. Hence in 1901 the alleged joyous sobs of welcome with which the Filipino people are, in effect, described in the report of the Philippine Commission for that year as having received the “benign” civil government, said sobs or other manifestations having spread, if the Commission’s report is to be taken at its face value, “like wild-fire.” Hence also the attempt of 1902 to minimize the insurrection of 1901–2, in Batangas and other provinces of southern Luzon, conducted by what Governor Luke E. Wright, in a speech delivered at Memphis in the latter part of 1902, called “the die-in-the-last-ditch contingent.” Hence the quiet placing of the province of Surigao in the hands of the military in 1903 without suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the failure to order out the army in Albay in 1903 and in Samar in 1904. Hence also the prompt use of the army in Samar, Batangas, and Cavite in 1905, after the presidential election was safely over. Hence also the seething state of sedition which smouldered in the Visayan Islands in 1906, punctuated by the outbreak in Leyte of that year.

The psychologic processes by which the distinguished gentlemen who signed the Great Certificate of March 28, 1907, got their own consent to sign it make the most profoundly interesting study, relatively to the general welfare of the world, in all our Philippine experiments so far. They are the final flowering of the plant Political Expediency. They are the weeds of benevolent casuistry that become from time to time unavoidable in a colonial garden tended by a republic based on the consent of the governed and therefore by the law of its own life unfitted to run any other kind of a government frankly. These processes find their origin in the provisions of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act. Three days after President Roosevelt approved the Act, he issued his proclamation of July 4, 1902, above noticed, declaring the insurrection at an end. Section 6 of that Act provided:

Whenever the existing insurrection in the Philippine Islands shall have ceased, and a condition of general and complete peace shall have been established therein, and the fact shall be certified to the President by the Philippine Commission, the President, upon being satisfied thereof, shall order a census of the Philippine Islands to be taken by said Philippine Commission.

This census was intended to be preliminary to granting the Filipinos a legislature of their own, but as a legislature full of insurrectos would of course stultify its American sponsors before all mankind, it was announced in effect, in publishing the census programme, that no legislature would be forthcoming if the Filipinos did not quit insurrecting, and remain “good” for two years. If they did remain good for two years after the census was finished, then they should have their legislature. During the lull of “general and complete” peace which, in the fall of 1902, followed the suppression of the Batangas insurrection of 1901–2, and preceded the Ola insurrection of 1902–3 in the hemp provinces of southern Luzon, the Commission made, on September 25, 1902, the certificate contemplated by the above Act of Congress, and the taking of the census was accordingly ordered by the President of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt, by a proclamation issued the same day.[7] Section 7 of the aforesaid Act of Congress provided:

Two years after the completion and publication of the census, in case such condition of general and complete peace with recognition of the authority of the United States shall have continued in the territory of said islands not inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes, and such facts shall have been certified to the President by the Philippine Commission, the President upon being satisfied thereof shall direct said Commission to call, and the Commission shall call, a general election for the choice of delegates to a popular assembly of the people of said territory in the Philippine Islands, which shall be known as the Philippine Assembly.

On March 27, 1905, the President of the United States was duly advised that the census had been completed, and on March 28th, the presidential proclamation promising the Filipinos a legislature two years later if in the meantime they did not insurrect any, was duly published at Manila. It is true that there is no Philippine state paper signed by anybody, either by the President of the United States, or the Governor-General of the Philippines, or any one else, certifying to a condition of “general and complete peace” between the certificate to that effect made by the Philippine Commission on September 25, 1902, above mentioned, which authorized commencing the census (and was justified by the facts), and the presidential promise of March 28, 1905, that if they would “be good” for two years more, they should have a legislature. But the whole manifest implication of the representations of fact sought to be conveyed by the action both of the Washington and the Manila authorities at the date of the presidential promise of March 28, 1905, is that a condition of general and complete peace had obtained ever since the last certificate to that effect, the certificate of September 25, 1902. Yet, as we saw in the chapter covering the last year of Governor Wright’s administration, besides the Samar disturbances that lasted all through 1905, a big insurrection was actually in full swing in Cavite, Batangas, and Laguna provinces, on March 28, 1905, had then been in progress since before the first of the year, and continued until the latter part of 1905, the then Governor-General, Governor Wright, having, by proclamation issued January 31, 1905, declared Cavite and Batangas to be in a state of insurrection, ordered the military into those provinces, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. President Roosevelt’s proclamation of March 28, 1905, can by no possibility be construed as saying to the Filipinos anything other than substantially this: “You have not insurrected any since my proclamation of July 4, 1902. If you will be good two years more, you shall have a legislature.” What then was the Philippine Commission to do at the end of those two years, peppered, as they had been, with most annoying outbreaks in various provinces not inhabited by “Moros or other non-Christian tribes.” During the presidential campaign of 1904 the Commission had committed themselves, as we have seen, to the proposition that nothing serious was going on at that time in Samar. So how could they take frank official cognizance on paper of the reign of terror let loose there by their delay in ordering out the army until after the presidential election, a delay which, like a delay of fire-engines to arrive at the scene of a fire, had permitted the Samar outbreak to gain such headway that it took two years to finally put it down? Then there was the outbreak of 1906 in Leyte, described in the last chapter, as to which even the Commission had admitted in their annual report for that year[8]:

Possibly its [Leyte’s] immediate vicinity to Samar has had to do with the disturbed conditions.