The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

As a matter of fact, the report of the American Governor of Cavite—and conditions were conceded to be identical in the two provinces of Cavite and Batangas—shows that the reason it was so hard to suppress the Cavite-Batangas troubles of 1905 was that the people would not help the authorities to apprehend the outlaws. No doubt the King of England would have signed a similar certificate as to the people of the shires and counties in which Robin Hood, Little John, and Friar Tuck, held high carnival. Of course I do not mean to libel the fair fame of that fine freebooter Robin Hood and his companions by placing the rascally leaders of the bands of outlaws now under consideration in the same jolly and respectable class with those beloved friends of the childhood of us all. But the Cavite-Batangas “patriots” of 1905 could never have given the authorities as much trouble as they did if the people had not at least taken secret joy in discomfiture of the American authorities. Until finally suppressed, all such movements as these always grew exactly as a snow-ball does if you roll it on snow. Says Governor Shanks, a Major of the 4th United States Infantry, who was Governor of Cavite, in 1905 in his report for that year,[12] in explaining the uprising under consideration, and the way it grew: “The Filipino likes to be on the winning side.” Certainly this is not peculiar to the Filipino. Governor Shanks proceeds:

The prestige acquired (by the uprising) at San Pedro Tunasan, Paranaque, Taal, and San Francisco de Malabon had great weight in creating active sympathy for ladrone bands and leaders. Something was needed to counterbalance the effect of their combined successes, and the appearance of regular troops was just the thing needed.

This explains how “the overwhelming majority” of which the certificate of 1907 speaks was obtained in Cavite. It took six months to obtain said “majority” at that. I suppose the campaigning of the American regulars might be credited with obtaining the “majority,” and the reconcentration of brother Baker of the constabulary might be accorded the additional credit of making the majority “overwhelming.” If you have, as election tellers, so to speak, a soldier with a bayonet on one side, and a constabulary officer with a reconcentration camp back of him on the other, you can get an “overwhelming majority” for the continuance of American rule even in Cavite province.

Through men I commanded during the early campaigning, I have killed my share of Filipinos in the time of war; and after the civil government was set up I had occasion to hang a good many of them, under what seemed to me a necessary application of the old Mosaic law, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.” But I thank God I have never been a party to the insufferable pretence that they, or any appreciable fraction of them, ever consented to our rule. This, however, is the whole theory of the Philippine Commission’s certificate of March 28, 1907. It is curious how generously and supremely frank a brave soldier will get when he forgets to be a politician. In one of his state papers of 1907 Governor-General Smith[13] speaks of General Trias, who had been Lieutenant-General of the insurgent army in the days of the insurrection, and next in rank to Aguinaldo himself, as one “whose love of country had been tested on many a well fought field of honorable conflict.” Contrast this tribute to the respectability of the original Philippine war for independence against us with the long list of stale falsehoods already reviewed in this volume, on the faith of which, in the presidential campaign of 1900, the American people were persuaded that to deny to the Filipinos what they had accorded to Cuba was righteous! The leaders of the Cavite-Batangas uprising of 1905 had been officers of the insurgent army, and that was the secret of their hold upon the people of those provinces. It is true that they must have been pretty sorry officers, and that they were ladrones (brigands). They were cruel and unmitigated scoundrels working for purely selfish and vainglorious ends. But it was the cloak of patriotism, however, infamously misused, that gained them such success as they attained in 1905. Says the American Governor of Cavite province in his annual report for 1906[14]:

The province should be most carefully watched. I am convinced that ladrone leaders do not produce conditions, but that the conditions and attitude of the public produce ladrones.

So much for the Cavite-Batangas hurdle. And now as to the Samar and Leyte hurdle.

The signers of the certificate of 1907 justify their certificate as to Samar and Leyte on a very ingenious theory. The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, already cited, which had provided for the taking of a census preliminary to the call of an election for delegates to a legislature, had recognized the crude ethnological status of the Moros and other non-Christian tribes. These had never had anything whatever to do with the insurrection against us. Therefore in making the continuance of a state of general and complete peace for a prescribed period a condition precedent to granting the Filipinos a legislature, the Act of 1902 had limited that condition precedent to “the territory of said Islands not inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes.” In fact President Roosevelt’s proclamation of September 25, 1902, already noticed, ordering the taking of the census on the theory that a state of general and complete peace then existed, explains that this theory is entirely consistent with trouble among the Moros and other non-Christian tribes because they, it says, quoting from a statement of the Philippine Commission previously made to the President, “never have taken any part in the insurrection.” The Moros and other non-Christian tribes were, so to speak, in no sense assets of the Philippine insurrection. All the rest of the population was—that is, if there was anything in the veteran General MacArthur’s grim jest of 1900, prompted by Governor Taft’s half-baked opinion to the contrary, that “ethnological homogeneity” was the secret of the unanimity of the opposition we met, and that somehow people “will stick to their own kith and kin.” When the Philippine Government Act of 1902 was drawn nobody pretended for a moment that there were any non-Christian tribes either in Samar or Leyte. The whole population of those Islands were valuable assets of the insurrection. If any one doubts it, let him ask the 9th Infantry. You will find in the Census of 1903 that there are no non-Christian tribes credited either to Samar or Leyte.[15] When the Philippine Government Act of 1902 was drafted, the exception about Moros and other non-Christian tribes was intended to except merely certain types of people as distinct from the great mass of the Philippine population as islands are from the sea. The fact is, no person connected with the Philippine Government either before or after the certificate under consideration, ever thought of classifying the ignorant country people of the uplands and hills of Samar or Leyte, as “non-Christian tribes.” The Philippine Census of 1903 does not so classify them. The very volume of the Report of the Philippine Commission for 1907 in which the certificate aforesaid appears, does not. In that volume,[16] the report of the Executive Secretary deals elaborately with the subject of non-Christian tribes. Professor Worcester of the Philippine Commission has for the last twelve years been the grand official digger-up of non-Christian tribes. He takes as much delight at the discovery of a new non-Christian tribe in some remote, newly penetrated mountain fastness, as the butterfly catcher with the proverbial blue goggles does in the capture of a new kind of butterfly. The Executive Secretary’s report, out of deference to the professor, omits no single achievement of his with reference to his anthropological hobby. It treats, with an enthusiasm that would delight Mrs. Jellyby herself, of “the progress that was made during the fiscal year in the work of civilizing non-Christian tribes scattered throughout the archipelago.” It gives an alphabetical list of all the provinces where there are non-Christian tribes, and, under the name of each province it gives notes as to the progress during the year with those tribes. Neither Samar nor Leyte appear in that list of provinces. So that the Samar “Pulajans,” or “Red Breeches” fellows,—“fanatical” Pulajans, they are called in the certificate—were “non-Christian tribes” for peace certificate purposes only. One thing which makes it most difficult of all for me to understand how these gentlemen got their consent to sign that certificate is that each non-Christian tribe in the Philippines has a language of its own, whereas the country people of the uplands and mountains of Samar and Leyte who are labelled—or libelled—“non-Christian tribes” in the certificate of 1907, were no more different from the rest of the population of those islands than, for instance, the ignorant mountain people of Virginia or Kentucky are different, ethnologically, from the inhabitants of Richmond or Louisville. In his report for 1908,[17] Governor-General Smith himself makes this perfectly clear, where he describes the Samar Pulajan, or mountaineer, thus:

The Pulajan is not a robber or a thief by nature—quite the contrary. He is hard working, industrious, and even frugal. He had his little late[18] of hemp on the side of the mountain, and breaking out his picul[19] of hemp, he carried it hank by hank for miles and miles over almost impassable mountain trails to the nearest town or barrio. There he offered it for sale, and if he refused the price tendered, which was generally not more than half the value, he soon found himself arrested on a trumped-up charge, and unless he compromised by parting with his hemp he found himself, after paying his fine and lawyer’s fees, without either hemp or money.

The non-Christian tribes, on the other hand, never have anything to do with the civilized people. The Act of Congress of 1902, therefore, had no sort of reference to the simple, ignorant, and ordinarily docile mountain folk who tilled the soil, revered the priests, paid their cedula or head tax like all the rest of the population of the Islands, and carried their agricultural products from season to season, their hemp and the like, to the coast towns to market. In other words, inclusion of the Samar “Pulajans,” or “Red Breeches” brigade, and the Leyte bandits, in the peace certificate of 1907, as “non-Christian tribes” was an afterthought, having no foundation either in logic or fact. It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation. This is clearly apparent from President Roosevelt’s message to Congress of December, 1905.[20] You do not find any buncombe about “non-Christian tribes” in that message. In there reviewing the Samar and other insurrections of 1905 in the Philippines, you find him dealing with the real root of the evil with perfect honesty, though adopting the view that the Filipino people were to blame therefor, because we had placed too much power in the hands of an ignorant electorate, which had elected rascally officials. “Cavite and Samar,” he says, “are instances of reposing too much confidence in the self-governing power of a people.” If we had let the Filipinos go ahead with their little republic in 1898, instead of destroying it as we did, they knew and would have utilized the true elements of strength they had, viz., a very considerable body of educated, patriotic men having the loyal confidence of the masses of the people. But we proceeded to ram down their throats a preconceived theory that the only road to self-government was for an alien people to step in and make the ignorant masses the sine qua non. Yet if there was one point on which Mr. McKinley had laid more stress than on any other, in his original instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, that point was the one consecrated in the following language of those instructions:

In all the forms of government and administrative provisions which they are authorized to prescribe, the commission should bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for * * * the expression of our theoretical views, etc.