The government first
deployed its military forces against Spanish colonial rule
not in the
Philippines but in Cuba. Public support for the government's
moves grew as lurid tales of Spain's cruelty toward the Cuban
people began to appear in newspapers owned by media moguls
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Then in
January 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sailed into Havana
Harbor on a good will visit. Fortuitously, on February
15th, the Maine mysteriously exploded and sank, with 258
officers and sailors perishing. The press charged that
Spain had used a “diabolical weapon” – a torpedo – to sink
the Maine. “Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields,
blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood,” wrote the New
York World (Pulitzer). “The whole country thrills with war
fever,” railed the New York Journal (Hearst).
U.S. investigators
eventually discovered that an explosion of the ship's boiler,
not an enemy missile,
had sunk the Maine, but by then war hysteria had taken hold
of the nation. In April, at the urging of President
William McKinley, Congress declared war on Spain, including
in its declaration a promise to free Cuba. Privately,
however, President McKinley admitted to broader goals: “We
must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep all
we want.”
An enthusiastic proponent
of war was the young and dynamic Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant
Secretary
of the Navy, who believed that war per se stimulated “spiritual
renewal” and the “clear instinct for racial selfishness.” “I
should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs
one,” TR wrote to a friend. Mexico, Chile, Spain, Germany,
England and Canada were on his list of favored targets.
Eager to participate,
TR rushed to Cuba to lead his Rough Riders in a charge at
San Juan Hill that
established his reputation for fearless belligerence. “Cuba
Libre!” and “Remember the Maine!” were popular slogans of the
day, exhorting young Americans to join the campaign to liberate
distant peoples from the jaws of tyrants.
The domestic social
context surrounding these overseas pursuits was not pretty. In 1896, the
Supreme Court had enshrined racial segregation and Black
disenfranchisement as the law of the land in Plessy v. Ferguson,
a decision that matched in spirit the bellicose patriotism
and racism of U.S. officialdom and sanctioned decades of
Jim Crow discrimination. White leaders – governors,
senators and local sheriffs – expressed no qualms about the
lynching of three or four Black people a week by southern
mobs. Indeed, Teddy Roosevelt called people of African
descent “a perfectly stupid race” and lectured Black audiences
that the rapists among them did their people more harm than
any lynch mob. On the very day that Congress
declared war, Missouri Congressman David A. De Armond stated
that African Americans were “almost too ignorant to eat,
scarcely wise enough to breathe, mere existing human machines.”
Racial ideologies of
inferiority and superiority that produced violence against
African Americans
at home influenced the perception that peoples of color abroad
were equally undeserving of respect, or sovereignty. “Self-government,” Senator
Beveridge said, “applies only to those who are capable of
self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent,
we govern our territories without their consent, we govern
our children without their consent.”
With only 379 U.S.
combat deaths, the U.S. conflict with Spain in Cuba ended
in a mere ten
weeks, prompting Secretary of State John Hay to dub it a "splendid
little war.” With its end, hundreds of thousands of miles
of territory, along with the peoples of Cuba and Puerto Rico,
came under U.S. colonial governance.
A far longer campaign,
however, lay ahead in the Philippines. While U.S. troops were
still engaging the Spanish in Cuba, the McKinley administration
had dispatched Admiral George Dewey to the Philippines. Upon
his arrival, Dewey found that General Emilio Aguinaldo's
guerrilla army of 40,000 had been battling Spain for two
years and was poised to rule the islands. In keeping
with U.S. Secretary of State William R. Day's stated objective
of "independence for the Philippines,” Dewey informed
Aguinaldo that the U.S. intended to "free the Filipinos
from the yoke of Spain.” In his report home, Dewey
even described Filipino soldiers as intelligent and “capable
of self-government.”
But as soon as U.S.
troops landed in force on Luzon, President McKinley appointed
a puppet
government and ordered Dewey and General Wesley Merritt to
prevent Aguinaldo's troops from marching victoriously into
Manila. In mid-June, when Aguinaldo declared independence,
it was clear that what had begun as a slam-dunk expulsion
of Spain from Cuba had morphed into a no-end-in-sight war
against Filipino self-determination that would last for more
than a decade and involve 70,000 U.S. troops.
President McKinley
called the Philippine mission “benevolent assimilation.” Unfortunately, it bore
the earmarks of a colonial project seasoned with racial warfare. A
U.S. press that initially had lauded Filipinos as freedom-fighters
in their battles with Spain now demonized Aguinaldo. The
occupation grew more aggressive as U.S. corporate investors
arrived, and clashes with armed and unarmed Filipinos became
more frequent. The San Francisco Argonaut, an influential
Republican paper, wrote candidly: "We want the Philippines.
The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately, they
are infested with Filipinos.” The paper went on to advocate,
as part of a pacification program, forms of torture that
would "impress the Maylay mind” – “the rack, the thumbscrew,
the trial by fire, the trial by molten lead, boiling insurgents
alive.”
Aguinaldo commanded
only 20 regiments, primitively armed, but since he enjoyed “almost complete
unity of action of the entire population," according
to the U.S. War Department, his fighting confounded U.S.
forces. The Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur prophesied,
would need "bayonet treatment for at least a decade.”
U.S. officers told
their troops the Filipinos were "niggers," no better than the
Native Americans at home. A private wrote home: “The
weather is intensely hot, and we are all tired, dirty and
hungry, so we have to kill niggers whenever we have a chance,
to get even for all our trouble.” Atrocities quickly
accumulated, including massacres of prisoners, soldiers,
civilians and entire villages. Marine General Littleton
Waller, later known as “the butcher of Samar,” issued orders
to “punish Filipino treachery with immediate death.” General
William Shafter told a journalist it might be necessary to
kill half the native population to bring “perfect justice” to
the other half. General Robert Hughes, speaking to
the U.S. Senate about the army's treatment of civilians: “The
women and children are part of the family and where you wish
to inflict punishment you can punish the man probably worse
in that way than in any other.” Asked if this was “civilized
warfare,” he responded, “these people are not civilized.”
On the island of Samar,
Marine Brigadier General Jacob Smith announced that the enemy
was any male or
female “ten years and up” and told his soldiers: "I want
no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill
and burn the better it will please me." A popular
method of torture was “the water cure,” which involved forcing
water into the stomachs of victims. One soldier admitted applying
this technique to 160 Filipino prisoners,134 of whom had died. A
U.S. Red Cross worker said, “American soldiers are determined
to kill every Filipino in sight.” Numerous reports from the
field repeatedly confirmed a war without rules.
Stuart Creighton Miller's
study of the Philippine occupation found that on the island
of
Luzon, the U.S. Army uprooted entire rural populations, burned
homes and destroyed property, including livestock. As
in Vietnam, surviving villagers were herded into fenced camps
ringed by what General Franklin Bell called a “dead zone” – meaning “[e]verything
outside…was systematically destroyed – humans, crops, food
stores, domestic animals, houses and boats.” “These tactics,” Miller
concluded, “were the cheapest means of producing a demoralized
and obedient population.”
Widespread abusive
treatment of the Filipinos so appalled the editor of the
Detroit Journal
that he felt compelled to ask if U.S. policy would “win us
the respect and affection of a people who are saying almost
unanimously that they do not like us and our ways and that
they wish to be left to themselves?” In contrast, A
Philadelphia Ledger reporter applauded the atrocities, saying
of the Filipinos: “The only thing they know and fear is force,
violence and brutality, and we give it to them.”
The Philippine occupation
was the first war, historian Gail Buckley has pointed out,
in which “American
officers and troops were officially charged with what we
would now call war crimes.” In 44 military trials, all of
which ended in convictions, “sentences, almost invariably,
were light.” The Baltimore American editorialized that the
U.S. occupation “aped” Spain's cruelty and committed crimes “we
went to war to banish.”
The capture of Emilio
Aguinaldo in March 1901, his signing an oath of allegiance
to the U.S.
and urging fellow officers to accept amnesty, raised U.S.
hopes that the resistance was finished. Well, not yet.
Six months later, the occupation forces suffered their greatest
defeat when Filipino guerillas, armed with little more than
bolos, slaughtered 45 U.S. officers and enlisted men in Samar. General
Adna Chaffee conceded it was “utterly foolish to pretend
that the war was over or even that the end is in sight.”
After governing New
York State, Teddy Roosevelt ascended to the Vice-Presidency.
With the
assassination of McKinley in 1901, he entered the Oval Office,
from which pulpit he justified the occupation of the Philippines
in even stronger language than had his predecessor. The Filipinos
are “Chinese half-breeds,” he said, and the conflict was "the
most glorious war in our nation's history." Meanwhile,
back in Asia U.S. forces remained hip-deep in the nation's
first overseas quagmire, troops lived in fear, and morale
continued to sink as guerillas picked off two or three U.S.
troops weekly. These deaths, a U.S. correspondent reported,
created a “spirit of bitterness [in] the rank and file of
the army.” The writer concluded that "the Filipino hates
us ... and permanent guerilla warfare will continue for years.”
Military engagements finally ended
in 1911. In a dozen years of war, the United States had fought
2,800 engagements, more than 200,000 Filipinos and 4,234
U.S. soldiers had died, and the Congress had spent $170 million
dollars.
Historical hindsight
reveals that the Philippine occupation not only marked the
debut of U.S.
imperial ambitions on the world stage, but by providing a
template for European conquests in Asia, Africa and Eastern
Europe it was a fitting introduction to humanity's most violent
century.
For a different view,
we can turn to President George W. Bush. On a state visit to Manila
in October 2003, he told a joint session of the Philippine
parliament: "Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines
from colonial rule."
William Loren Katz based this essay on research for two
books, The Cruel Years: American Voices at the Dawn of
the 20th Century and the revised edition of The
Black West [Harlem Moon/Random House, 2005]. He is the author
of forty U.S. history books, and wishes to thank Jean Carey
Bond whose editorial diligence brought this essay to completion.
The Katz website is WILLIAMLKATZ.COM.