The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

Tut! tut! says the casual reader. What did the Government at Washington know of all these goings on, that it should be charged later with having violated as binding a moral obligation as ever a nation assumed? It is true that the news of the Williams ovation, as in the case of the Pratt serenade, reached Washington only by the slow channels of the mail. But Washington did in fact receive the said news by due course of mail. When it came, however, Washington was nursing visions of savages in blankets smoking the pipe of peace with the agents of the Great White Father in the White House—i.e., thought, or hoped, the Filipinos were savages—and remained as deaf to the sounds of the Williams ovation as it had been to the strains of the Pratt serenade.

However, hardly had Admiral Dewey taken his binoculars from the gig that carried Aguinaldo ashore to raise his auxiliary insurrection, when he called his Flag Secretary, or the equivalent, and dictated the following cablegram to the Secretary of the Navy:

Aguinaldo, the rebel commander-in-chief, was brought down by the McCulloch. Organizing forces near Cavite, and may render assistance that will be valuable.[26]

This sounds a little more serious than “earnest boys” alleging the lack of a toothbrush as an excuse for declining mortal combat, does it not? How valuable did this assistance prove? Admiral Dewey had to wait three and one half months for the army to arrive, and this is how the commanding general of the American forces describes conditions as he found them in the latter part of August:

For three and one half months Admiral Dewey with his squadron and the insurgents on land had kept Manila tightly bottled. All commerce had been interdicted, internal trade paralyzed, and food supplies were nearly exhausted.[27]

And, he might have added, the taking of the city was thus made perfectly easy. Otherwise, as Aguinaldo put it in one of his letters to General Otis, we would not have taken a city, but only the ruins of a city. Admiral Dewey said to the Senate Committee in 1902: “They [the Spaniards] surrendered on August 13th, and they had not gotten a thing in after the 1st of May.”[28]

In the early part of the next year, 1899, President McKinley sent out a kind of olive-branch commission, of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman. The olive branch got withered in the sulphur of exploding gun-powder, so the Commission contented itself with making a report. And this is what they said concerning what followed the Dewey-Aguinaldo entente:

Shortly afterwards, the Filipinos began to attack the Spanish. Their number was rapidly augmented by the militia who had been given arms by Spain, all of whom revolted and joined the insurgents. Great Filipino successes followed, many Spaniards were taken prisoners, and while the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, the Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire island [of Luzon] except that city.[29]

Of conditions in July, sixty days after Admiral Dewey had on May 20th said to Aguinaldo in effect, “Go it, little man, we need you in our business,” Mr. Wildman, our Consul at Hong Kong, writing to the State Department, said, in defending himself for his share in the business of getting Aguinaldo’s help under promises, both express and implied, which were subsequently repudiated, that after he, Wildman, put the insurgent chief aboard the McCulloch, May 16th, bound for Manila to co-operate by land with our navy: “He * * * organized a government * * * and from that day to this he has been uninterruptedly successful in the field and dignified and just as the head of his government,”[30] a statement which Admiral Dewey subsequently endorsed.[31]

We have seen the preliminaries of this “government” started under the auspices of our Admiral and under what he himself called “the protection of our guns” (ante). Let us note its progress. If you turn the leaves of the contemporaneous official reports, you see quite a moving picture show, and the action is rapid. On May 24th, still “under the protection of our guns,” Aguinaldo proclaimed his revolutionary government and summoned the people to his standard for the purpose of driving the Spaniards out forever. The situation was an exact counterpart of the cotemporary Cuban one as regards identity of purpose between “liberator” and “oppressed.” His proclamation promised a constitutional convention to be called later (and which was duly called later) to elect a President and Cabinet, in whose favor he would resign the emergency authority now assumed; referred to the United States as “undoubtedly disinterested” and as considering the Filipinos “capable of governing for ourselves our unfortunate country”; and formally announced the temporary assumption of supreme authority as dictator. Copies of these proclamations were duly furnished Admiral Dewey. The latter was too busy looking after the men behind his guns and watching the progress of his plucky little ally to study Spanish, so he forwarded them to the Navy Department without comment—“without reading them,” said he to the Senate Committee in 1902.[32] When his attention was called to them before the Committee by one of the members reading them, his comment was, “Nothing about independence there, is there?”[33] It seems to me it did not take an international lawyer to see a good deal “there,” about independence. In a proclamation published at Tarlac in the latter part of 1899, which appears to have been a sort of swan-song of the Philippine Republic, Aguinaldo had said, in effect, “Certainly Admiral Dewey did not bring me from Hong Kong to Manila to fight the Spaniards for the benefit of American Trade Expansion,” and in this proclamation he claimed that Admiral Dewey promised him independence. It is true, that in a letter to Senator Lodge, which that distinguished gentleman read on the floor of the Senate on January 31, 1900, Admiral Dewey denounced this last statement as false. It is also true that those Americans are few and far between who will take Aguinaldo’s word in preference to Admiral Dewey’s. Certainly the writer is not one of them. But Aguinaldo is no Spanish scholar, being more of a leader of men than a master of language, and what sort of an interpreter acted between him and the Admiral does not appear. Certainly he never did get anything in writing from Admiral Dewey. But after the latter brought him to Manila, set him to fighting the common enemy, and helped him with guns and otherwise in quickly organizing an army for the purpose, the Admiral was at least put on inquiry as to just what Aguinaldo supposed he was fighting for. What did the Admiral probably suppose? He told the Senate Committee that the idea that they wanted independence “never entered his head.” The roar of mighty guns seems to have made it difficult for him to hear the prattlings of what Aguinaldo’s proclamations of the time called “the legitimate aspirations of a people.” The milk in the cocoanut is this: How could it ever occur to a great naval commander, such as Admiral Dewey, familiar with the four quarters of the globe, that a coterie of politicians at home would be so foolish as to buy a vast straggly archipelago of jungle-covered islands in the South Seas which had been a nuisance to every government that ever owned them? But let us turn from the Senate Committee’s studies of 1902 to the progress of the infant republic of 1898 at Cavite.