The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

I am aware that in view of the issues discussed at the election of this assembly I am expected to say something regarding the policy of the United States toward these islands. I cannot speak with the authority of one who may control that policy. The Philippine Islands are territory belonging to the United States, and by the Constitution, the branch of that government vested with the power and charged with the duty of making rules and regulations for their government is Congress. The policy to be pursued with respect to them is therefore ultimately for Congress to determine. * * * I have no authority to speak for Congress in respect to the ultimate disposition of the Islands.

After that there was some talk about “mutually beneficial trade relations” and “improvement of the people both industrially and in self-governing capacity.” But with regard to the “process of political preparation of the Filipino people” for self-government the Secretary said that was a question no one could certainly answer; and so far as he was concerned he thought it would take “considerable longer than a generation.” Somewhere in the early Philippine State papers there is a quotation used by Mr. Taft from Shakespeare about “Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope.” The Filipinos have eagerly read for the last twelve years every utterance of Mr. Taft’s that they could get hold of. If any of those embryonic statesmen of the first Philippine Assembly, familiar with the various Taft utterances, had looked up the context of the Shakespearian quotation above alluded to, he would have found it to be as follows:

And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d,

That palter with us in a double sense:

That keep the word of promise to our ear

And break it to our hope.[22]

Since the announcement by Secretary of War Taft at the opening of the Philippine Assembly in October, 1907, of the policy of indefinite retention of the Islands with undeclared intention, the Filipinos have of course clearly understood that if they were ever to have independence they must look to Congress for it. But they know Congress is not interested in them and that they have no influence with it, and that the Hemp Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Sugar Trust, have. So that since 1907, both the American authorities in the Philippines and the Filipinos have settled down, the former suffused with benevolence—hardened however by paternalistic firmness, the latter stoically, to the programme of indefinite retention with undeclared intention. No conceivable programme could be devised more ingeniously calculated to engender race hatred. The Filipino newspapers call the present policy one of “permanent administration for inferior and incapable races.” The Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, known as the Philippine Government Act, which is the “Constitution,” so to speak, we have given the Filipinos, accords “liberty of the press” in the exact language of our own Constitution. The native press does not fail to use this liberty to the limit. Naturally the American press does not remain silent. So here are a pair of bellows ever fanning the charcoals of discontent. And the masses of the Filipino people read the Filipino papers. If they cannot read, their children can. In one of the reports of one of the American constabulary officials in the Philippines, there is an account of the influence of the native press too graphic to be otherwise than accurate. He says one can often see, in the country districts, a group of natives gathered about some village Hampden, listening to his reading the latest diatribe against the American Occupation. Never was there such folly in the annals of statesmanship. In their native papers, the race situation of course comes in for much comment. Now the most notorious and inflexible fact of that race situation is that the colonial Anglo-Saxon does not intermarry with “the yellow and brown” subject people, as the Latin colonizing races do. It would be an over-statement of the case to say that the Filipinos to-day had rather have the Spaniards back as their overlords instead of us. In 1898, they “tasted the sweets of liberty,” to use an expression of one of their leaders, and I am perfectly sure that to-day the desire of all those people for a government of their own is so genuine and universal as that it amounts to a very hopeful positive factor in the equation of their capacity for self-government. But there is no doubt that many of the Filipinos after all have a very warm place in their hearts for the Spanish people. How could it be otherwise when so many of the Filipinos are sons and grandsons of Spaniards? Much of like and dislike in life’s journey is determined pre-natally. On the other hand, the American women in the Philippines maintain an attitude toward the natives quite like that of their British sisters in Hong Kong toward the Chinese, and in Calcutta toward the natives there. The social status of an American woman who marries a native,—I myself have never heard of but one case—is like that of a Pacific coast girl who marries a Jap. This is merely the instinct of self-defence with which Nature provides the weaker sex, just as she provides the porcupine with quills. But look at the other side of the picture. When an American man marries a native woman, he thereafter finds himself more in touch with his native “in-laws” it is true, but correspondingly, and ever increasingly, out of touch with his former associations. This is not as it should be. But it is a most unpleasant and inexorable fact of the present situation. In an address delivered at the Quill Club in Manila on January 25, 1909, Governor Smith, after reciting the various beneficent designs contemplated by the government and the various public works consummated (at the expense of the people of the Islands) deplored, in spite of it all, what he termed “the growing gulf between the races.” Said he:

An era of ill feeling has started between Americans and Filipinos, and, I hesitate to say it, race hatred.

Cherchez la femme! You find her, on the one hand, in the American woman whose attitude has been indicated, and you find her, on the other, in the refined and virtuous native woman, who finds her American husband’s relations to his compatriots altered—queered—since his marriage to her, no matter how faithful a wife and mother she may be. This is the unspeakably cruel situation we have forced upon the Filipino people—whom I really learned to respect, and became much attached to, before I left the Islands—and President Taft knows it as well as I do. Yet he does not take the American people into his confidence. He simply worries along with the situation, wishing it would get better, but knowing it will get worse. That this situation is a permanent one is clearly shown by all the previous teachings of racial history. In his Winning of the West, written in 1889, speaking of the French settlers in the Ohio valley before 1776, and the cordial social relations of the dominant race with the natives—relations which have always obtained with all Latin races under like circumstances—Mr. Roosevelt says (vol. i., page 41):