26 minute read
Pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirit that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Henry V. To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as an official of that government, watch it work out through a number of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen, in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American occupation of the Philippines to date. This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret each...
2 hour read
Any narrative covering our acquisition of the Philippine Islands must, of course, centre in the outset about Admiral Dewey, and the destruction by him of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on Sunday morning, May 1, 1898. But as the Admiral had brought Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong to Manila after the battle, and landed him on May 19th to start an auxiliary insurrection, which insurrection kept the Spaniards bottled up in Manila on the land side for three and a half months while Dewey did the same by sea, until ten thousand American troops arrived, and easily completed the reduction and capture of the beleaguered and famished city on August 13th, it is necessary to a clear understanding of the de facto alliance between the Americans and Aguinaldo thus created, to know who brought the Admiral and Aguinaldo together and how, and why. The United States declared war against...
2 hour read
The battle of Manila Bay was fought May 1, 1898. Until the thunder of Dewey’s guns reverberated around the world, there was perhaps no part of it the American people knew less about than the Philippine Islands. We have all heard much of what happened after the battle, but comparatively few, probably, have ever had a glimpse at our great sailor while he was there in Hong Kong harbor, getting ready to go to sea to destroy the Spanish armada. Such a glimpse is modestly afforded by the Admiral in his testimony before the Senate Committee in 1902. 1 Asked by the Committee when he first heard from Aguinaldo and his people in 1898, Admiral Dewey said 2 : I should think about a month before leaving Hong Kong, that is, about the first of April, when it became pretty certain that there was to be war with Spain, I...
59 minute read
Admiral Dewey contemplated that we should merely remain masters of the situation out where he was until the end of the war. President McKinley set about to effect “the conquest of the Philippine Islands.” The naval victory of Manila Bay having made it certain that at the conclusion of our war against a decadent monarchy we would at last have an adequate coaling station and naval base in the Far East, the sending of troops to the Philippines, in appropriate prosecution of the war, to reduce and capture Manila, the capital and chief port, raised the question at once “And then what?” The genesis of the idea of taking over the archipelago is traceable to within a few days after the destruction of the Spanish fleet. Within a few days after the official news of the battle of Manila Bay reached Washington, the Treasury Department set a man to work...
2 hour read
Early in the spring of 1899, Mr. McKinley sent out the Commission of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman, to try to stop the war. They bent themselves to the task in a spirit as kindly as that in which we know Mr. McKinley himself would have acted. They failed because the war was already on and the Filipinos were bent on fighting for independence to the bitter end. But they learned a good deal about the facts of the earlier situation. Speaking of these in their report to the President 3 with especial reference to the period beginning with Aguinaldo’s landing at Cavite in May, after describing how the Filipino successes in battle with the Spaniards finally resulted in all of them being driven into Manila, where they remained hemmed in, they say: While the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, the Filipino forces made themselves...
36 minute read
There was some of the parleying and ink, however, that was not wholly wasted. But to properly appreciate it as illustrative of the fortitude and tact which the early Filipino leaders seem to have combined in a remarkable degree, some prefatory data are essential. Aguinaldo’s capital was then at Bacoor, one of the small coast villages you pass through in going by land from Manila to Cavite. From Manila over to Cavite by water is about seven miles, and by land about three or four times that. The coast line from Manila to Cavite makes a loop, so that a straight line over the water from Manila to Cavite subtends a curve, near the Cavite end of which lies Bacoor. Thus, Bacoor, being at the mercy of the big guns at Cavite, and also easily accessible by a land force from Manila, to say nothing of Dewey’s mighty armada riding...
2 hour read
In the last chapter, we saw Aguinaldo’s republic formally established at Malolos, September 15th, claiming jurisdiction over all Luzon. In Chapter IV ., entitled “Merritt and Aguinaldo,” we saw the political condition of southern Luzon in August, 1898, and the following months, and verified the correctness of Aguinaldo’s claims as to complete mastery there then. Let us now examine the state of affairs in northern Luzon in the fall of 1898. In Senate Document 196 , 56th Congress, 1st Session, dated February 26, 1900, transmitted by Secretary of the Navy Long, in response to a Senate resolution, may be found a report of a tour of observation through the half of Luzon Island which lies north of Manila and the Pasig River, made between October 8 and November 20, 1898,—note the dates, for the Paris Peace Conference began October 1st and ended December 10th,—by Paymaster W. B. Wilcox and Naval...
2 hour read
This is a tale of three cities, Paris, Washington, and Manila. Article III. of the Peace Protocol signed at Washington, August 12, 1898, provided: The United States will occupy and hold the city, bay, and harbor of Manila, pending the conclusion of a Treaty of Peace which shall determine the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines. 1 The “Papers relating to the Treaty with Spain” including the telegraphic correspondence between President McKinley and our Peace Commissioners pending the negotiations, were sent to the Senate, January 30, 1899, just one week before the final vote on the treaty, but the injunction of secrecy was not removed until January 31, 1901— after the presidential election of 1900. They then were published as Senate Document 148 , 56th Congress, 2d Session. It was not until then that the veil was lifted. The instructions to the Peace Commissioners were dated September 16, 1898....
2 hour read
From this number General Bell deducts several thousands as having been recaptured by the Spaniards, or bought in. I at once hear some former comrade-in-arms of the Philippine insurrection say: “Oh, no. They couldn’t have had as many as 40,000 guns, or near that.” I thought the same thing when I first read General Bell’s report on the matter. But he removes the doubt thus: “They are being continually sent away to other provinces.” We did not understand Aguinaldo’s movements then. All his troops were not around Manila. From what I learned from General Lawton and his staff in 1899, my belief is that Aguinaldo had perhaps 30,000 men with guns around Manila, and out along the railroad, at the time of the outbreak of February 4th. It is idle, of course, at this late date, to claim that the Filipinos were not bent on independence from the first. The...
43 minute read
Cautioning Otis against any clash at Iloilo, Mr. McKinley wired January 9th: “Conflict would be most unfortunate, considering the present. * * * Time given the insurgents cannot injure us, and must weaken and discourage them. They will see our benevolent purpose, etc.” 4 The Iloilo fiasco did indeed furnish to the insurgent cause aid and comfort at the psychologic moment when it most needed encouragement to bring things to a head. It presented a spectacle of vacillation and seeming cowardice which heartened the timid among the insurgents and started among them a general eagerness for war which had been lacking before. In one of his bulletins 5 to Otis, General Miller tells of two boats’ crews of the 51st Iowa landing on January 5th, and being met by a force of armed natives who “asked them their business and warned them off,” whereupon they heeded the warning and returned to their...
2 hour read
We shall not have them (Filipinos enough to conduct a decent government) in 10, 20, or a 100 years, because the Yankees will never acknowledge the aptitude of an “inferior” race to govern the country. Do not dream that when American sovereignty is implanted in the country the American office-holders will give up. Never! If * * * it depends upon them to say whether the Filipinos have sufficient men for the government of the country * * * they will never say it.” Is not the American who pretends that he would have done anything but just what the Filipinos did, had he been in their place, i.e. , fought to the last ditch for the independence of his country, the rankest sort of a hypocrite? General Otis was a soldier, and his views may have been honestly colored by his environment. But how at this late date can any fair-minded man read...
3 hour read
“The thing is on,” said General Hughes, Provost Marshal of Manila, to General Otis, at Malacañan palace, on the night of February 4, 1899, about half past eight o’clock, as soon as the firing started. 1 He was talking about something which every American in Manila except General Otis had for months frankly recognized as inevitable—the war. On the day of the outbreak of February 4th, General Otis had under his command 838 officers and 20,032 enlisted men, say in round numbers a total of 21,000. Of these some 15,500 were State volunteers mostly from the Western States, and the rest were regulars. All the volunteers and 1650 of the regulars were, or were about to become, entitled to their discharge, and their right was perfected by the exchange of ratifications of the treaty of peace with Spain on April 11, 1899. The total force which he was thus entitled...
2 hour read
The political or governmental problem being now reduced from 3141 islands to eleven, the last three of the nine contained in the above table may also be eliminated as follows: ( See map at end of volume . ) Paragua, the long narrow island seen at the extreme lower left of any map of the archipelago, extending northeast southwest at an angle of about 45°, is practically worthless, being fit for nothing much except a penal colony, for which purpose it is in fact now used. Masbate—easily located on the map at a glance, because the twelfth parallel of north latitude intersects the 124th meridian of longitude east of Greenwich in its southeast corner—though noted for cattle and other quadrupeds, is not essential to a clear understanding of the human problem in its broader governmental aspects. Bird’s-eye view of the Philippine Archipelago, showing the preponderating importance of Luzon. For greater...
29 minute read
Some one has said, “Let me write the songs of a people and I care not who makes their laws.” Give me the campaign songs of a war, and I will so write the history of that war that he who runs may read, and, reading, know the truth. The volunteers of 1899 had, most of them, been in the Spanish War of ’98. That struggle had been so brief that, to borrow a phrase of the principal beneficiary of it, Colonel Roosevelt, there had not been “war enough to go ’round.” The Philippine insurrection had already broken out when the Spanish War volunteers returned from Cuba in the first half of 1899. Few of them knew exactly where the Philippines were on the map. They simply knew that we had bought the islands, that disturbances of public order were in progress there, and that the Government desired to suppress...
9 minute read
For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying—Peace, peace; when there is no peace. Jeremiah viii., 11....
50 minute read
Me miserable! Which way shall I fly? Paradise Lost. Throughout the last year of Governor Taft’s administration in the Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901–2 had precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public, already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of “the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa.” 1 He did not want to order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated him to his native municipal police...
59 minute read
We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of citizen in the republic to-day than the man now 4 at the head of it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President Roosevelt, entitled “The First Civil Governor,” which began as follows: A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public life and American public men 5 remarked that the first Governor of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make a first-class President of the United States with the qualities which would make a first-class Chief Justice of the United States, and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely...
5 minute read
I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with shaping the course of the government out there for which they are responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka or...
33 minute read
My heart is heavy with the fate of that unhappy people. Speech of Hon. A. O. Bacon in U. S. Senate. 1 Because the especially cordial relations which existed to the last between Governor Wright and myself 2 are familiar to a number of very dear mutual friends, I deem it due both to them and to myself, in view of the contents of the preceding chapter, to state that I see no reason why, in writing a history of the American Occupation of the Philippines, I should omit or slur the facts which convinced me that that occupation ought to terminate as soon as practicable, and that any decent kind of a government of Filipinos by Filipinos would be better for all concerned than the McKinley-Taft programme of Benevolent Assimilation whereof Governor Wright was the legatee. By the thousand and one uncandid threads of that programme, slowly woven from...
25 minute read
The Americans give out and write in their papers that the Philippine Islands are completely pacified, and that the Filipinos love Americans and their rule. This, doubtless with good motives, is complete and utter humbug, for the country is honeycombed with insurrection and plots; the fighting has never ceased; and the natives loathe the Americans and their theories, saying so openly in their native press and showing their dislike in every possible fashion. Their one idea is to be rid of the U. S. A. * * * and to be free of a burden of taxation which is heavier than any the Spaniards laid on them. Also an Englishman who was in Samar in 1904–5, a Mr. Hyatt, who, with his brother, served with the American troops there in the bloody Pulajan uprising, afterwards wrote a book called the Little Brown Brother , wherein he fully corroborates Mrs. Dauncey’s appreciation of...
55 minute read
The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 3 deals at some length with disturbances which occurred in the island of Leyte (area 3000 square miles, population nearly 400,000), beginning in the middle of June. It describes among other things a visit of Governor-General Ide to Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, made in consequence of said disturbances, and conferences held by him there with Major-General Wood, commanding all the United States forces in the Philippines, Brigadier-General Lee, commanding the Department of the Visayas (which included Leyte, headquarters, Iloilo), Colonel Borden, commanding the United States forces in the island of Leyte, Colonel Taylor, the chief of the constabulary of the District, etc. Certainly from this formidable gathering of notables, it is clear that there was about to take place in Leyte what our friends of the Lambs’ Club in New York would call “An all star performance.” Leyte was four to...
2 hour read
Let us examine these amiable liberties thus taken with the facts of history by men of irreproachable private character, briefly analyzing their action. Such an examination and analysis are indispensable to a clear understanding by a great free people whose proudest boast is love of fair play, of whether the Filipino people, or any appreciable fraction of them, have ever in the least consented, or do now in the least consent, to our rule, as the small minority among us interested in keeping the Islands, have systematically sought, all these years, to have this nation believe. As the above certificate of 1907 was the last hurdle that Benevolent Assimilation had to leap on the Benevolent Hypocrisy course over which we had to gallop in order to get from the freeing of Cuba to the subjugation of the Philippines, let us glance back for a moment at the first hurdle or...
31 minute read
It is a relief to turn from such matters to some of the real substantial good we have done out there to which Governor Forbes has heretofore publicly pointed with just pride. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1909, Governor Forbes (then Vice-Governor) said, among other things: We have completed the separation of Church and State, buying out from the religious orders their large agricultural properties, which are now administered by the government for the benefit of the tenants. This statement I cannot too cordially endorse. It would be grossly unfair not to accord full measure of acclaim to Governor Taft for the way he worked out the problem of the Friar Lands. He has been attacked in some quarters in this regard, and most unjustly. Not being a Catholic, and all my people being Protestants, I have no fear of being suspected of special pleading in...
2 hour read
Professor Worcester was originally a professor of zoölogy, or something of that sort, in a western university. In the early nineties he had made a trip to the Philippines, confining himself then mostly to creeping things and quadrupeds—lizards, alligators, pythons, unusual wild beasts, and other forms of animal life of the kind much coveted as specimens by museums and universities. In 1899, just after the Spanish War, he got out a book on the Philippines, and as an American who had been in the Philippines was then a rara avis , it came to pass that the reptile-finder ultimately became a statesman. He was brought, possibly by conscious worth, to the notice of President McKinley, accompanied the Schurman Commission to the Islands, in 1899, and the Taft Commission in 1900, and finally evolved into his present eminence as Secretary of the Interior and official chief finder of non-Christian tribes for...
16 minute read
Then Mr. Fergusson comes to the obvious but apparently unattainable remedy, which he says is to make a Philippine appointment a permanent means of livelihood by providing an effective system of transfers to the Federal service after a reasonable period of service here. * * * Under the present regulations influence must be brought to bear at Washington in order that requisition may be made by the Chief of some bureau there for the services of a clerk desiring to transfer. You see, if a Washington Bureau, say the Coast and Geodetic Survey, or the Geological Survey, sends a man out to the Islands, he is never for a moment separated from the Federal Civil Service or the Federal Government’s pay-roll. The same is true of civilian employees of the army. But the man in the Insular Service, when he wants to get back home, is little better off than if he...
35 minute read
Of course these appalling figures 8 must be taken with a grain of salt. In the first place, the man who furnished them was merely reproducing the general impression of his neighbors as to the diminution of the population of the province. He does not pretend to be dealing with official statistics. On the other hand, all of the yearly reports of the various native provincial officers are, as a general rule, pathetically optimistic. They all seem to think it their duty to present a hopeful view of the situation. In fact if you read these reports one after the other, the various signers seem to vie with one another in optimism as if their tenure of office depended upon it. So that, balancing probabilities, it would seem unlikely that the provincial secretary of Batangas would have stated more than what he at least believed to represent actual conditions, and...
57 minute read
This also sounds liberal, on first reading, but its object was, and its effect has been, to enable the American Hemp Trust to corner and control the Manila hemp industry. There is but one article of Philippine export which any one in the United States is interested in, that was admitted into the United States free of duty under the Dingley Act. 4 That article is hemp. The object of the law was to favor Americans interested in exporting hemp from Manila to the United States as against Europeans exporting it to England and other foreign countries. This does not look, on its face, either unpatriotic or un-Christian. It is not unpatriotic or un-Christian, ordinarily, to favor your own people, as against their foreign competitors. The moral quality of such favoritism, however, must depend on who is to pay for it. Under the Act of 1902, the Manila authorities have...
21 minute read
I know of no graver responsibility that an American statesman can take upon himself before the bar of history than to deny the right of any given people to self-government. Certainly any man who denies that right at least assumes the burden of proof that they are unfit to attend to their own affairs. Mr. McKinley assumed it without pretending to know anything much about the Filipinos, the motive being that the Islands would be profitable to us. When Mr. Taft went to the Philippines in 1900, he went, not to investigate the correctness of Mr. McKinley’s assumption, which was implied in the purchase, but to champion it; not to give advice concerning the righteousness of having taken over the Philippines, but to bolster up the policy. He assumed the burden of proof before he knew anything about the facts. The burden has been on him ever since. Any subordinate...
46 minute read
He who points out a wrong without being prepared to suggest a remedy presumes upon the patience of his neighbor without good and sufficient cause. Up to this point the wrong has been unfolded, with such ability as was vouchsafed the narrator, “from Genesis to Revelations,” so to speak; also his own attitude as an eye-witness, and its evolution from the Mosaic doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, to the more Christian doctrines of the New Testament. Let us now consider the remedy. In the course of our travels with the army in the earlier chapters of this book, we first followed its northern advance, from Manila over the great central plain drained by the Rio Grande and crossed by the railroad connecting Manila Bay with Lingayen Gulf; its further advance from the northern borders of the plain over the mountains of Central...
8 minute read
If the McCall Resolution, or any one of the kindred resolutions, were passed, and complied with by the President of the United States, and accepted by the other Powers, and the Filipinos were helped to organize territorial governments such as Arizona and New Mexico were before they became States, several such territories could form the nucleus about which to begin to build at once, as indicated in the chapter on “The Road to Autonomy.” A number of such territories could be made at once as completely autonomous as the governments of the territories of Arizona and New Mexico were before their admission to our Union. With those examples to emulate, together with the tingling of the general blood that would follow a promise of independence and a national life of their own, similar territorial governments could be successively organized, as indicated in the preceding chapter, throughout the archipelago. These could,...
3 minute read
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