The Imperial Cruise Read online

  U.S. sailors ferried the returning hero to the mainland, where thousands cheered as U.S. Marines turned rifles over to the freedom fighters. Addressing the crowd, Aguinaldo declared, “Divine Providence is about to place independence within our reach. The Americans have extended their protecting mantle to our beloved country…. The American fleet will prevent any reinforcements coming from Spain…. Where you see the American flag flying, assemble in numbers; they are our redeemers.”68

  Pears’ Soap advertisement, 1899. Admiral George Dewey was the most famous military man in the world, the high-tech Daniel Boone bringing bright, White civilization to the dark savages. (First appeared in McClure’s Magazine, October 1899)

  For the first two months after Dewey splintered the Spanish fleet, American and Filipino military forces complemented each other: the U.S. Navy held the sea, and the Philippines Revolutionary Army beat Spanish forces into a humiliating retreat behind Manila’s walls. But while Filipinos perceived the U.S. Navy as a benevolent force providing a protective canopy under which they fought for independence, Washington saw things differently. In his residence, President McKinley wrote a note to himself: “While we are conducting a war and until its conclusion we must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want.”69

  The Philippines’ first Independence Day was celebrated on June 12, 1898. The main event was led by (now president) Aguinaldo in his hometown. He proudly unfurled the country’s new flag, explaining that the banner’s red, white, and blue colors were a salute to “the flag of the United States of America as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards that Great Nation for the disinterested protection she is extending to us and will continue to extend to us.”70

  The Filipinos would not celebrate another Independence Day for sixty-four years.

  ON JUNE 16, THE AMERICAN consul, Oscar Williams, wrote from Manila that “[Aguinaldo] has 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.”71 But the future of the Philippines would be decided in the American Aryan’s capital. The very idea that a Pacific Negro was capable of ruling eight million people was unthinkable. Instead of referring to the leader of the Philippines as President Aguinaldo, the New York Times called him “Chief Aguinaldo,” or just “insurgent” or “unmoral infant.”72 Professor Theodore Woolsey of Yale Law School argued, “The so-called Filipino republic is but a body of insurgents against the sovereignty of the United States.”73

  “Filipino’s First Bath,” Judge magazine, June 10, 1899. President McKinley bathes a Filipino in civilization’s waters like St. John the Baptist. “Oh, you dirty boy,” exclaims McKinley. The artist was able to depict Filipinos as Africans because so few Americans knew the difference. ( Puck magazine begat Judge magazine, which begat The New Yorker magazine.)

  On June 30, 1898, President Aguinaldo made the strategic error that marked the beginning of the end of Filipino nationhood: he allowed twenty-five hundred armed American soldiers to come ashore to prosecute the war with Spain. Aguinaldo told his cabinet, “I have studied attentively the Constitution of the United States, and I find in it no authority for colonies, and I have no fear.”74

  “Hurrah for the Fourth of July! We’re coming in on independence day celebrations too.” Minneapolis Journal .President McKinley’s premise that the U.S. military would act with benevolent intentions convinced Americans that the people of Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines appreciated American invasions of their countries. (Charles Bartholomew, Cartoons of the Spanish-American War)

  The half-starved Spanish held out behind Manila’s walls. Aguinaldo’s troops held the rest of the country. But one crucial element had become clear: the Spanish were White and the Filipinos were not. The Americans approached the Spanish with a deal: U.S. forces would pretend to attack Manila, the Spanish would pretend to defend, and, after a little noise, the Spanish would surrender the capital. The Americans would then claim a glorious victory, the Spanish—who had realized they could not win—a manly defeat without casualties. Recalled Admiral Dewey, “The Governor-General arranged with me that I was to go up and fire a few shots and then I was to make the signal, ‘Do you surrender?’ and he would hoist the white flag and then the troops would march in.”75 All of this was kept secret from the Filipinos.

  “Holding His End Up.” Europeans gaze at a newly imperial Uncle Sam, who stands on an Army and Navy platform in 1898. Because Americans knew so little about their new possessions, the artist could portray Hawaiians, Cubans, and Filipinos as monkeylike Africans. ( Philadelphia Inquirer, 1898)

  On August 13, the Americans and Spanish “fought” the sham Battle of Manila. Filipino troops tried to join their U.S. Army allies, but the Americans shot at them to prevent any but White troops from passing through Manila’s thick walls.

  For almost four months Aguinaldo’s forces had beaten back the Spanish until they were huddled in the capital eating horse meat and rats. The U.S. Army waltzed into Manila with little wear and tear. And since the Americans had been careful to commit nothing in writing, Aguindalo had no documentation to support his story. Historian Ambeth Ocampo writes, “By nightfall, it had become painfully clear that the Americans transformed the ‘ally’ to ‘enemy.’ ”76

  U.S. Army soldiers on Manila’s wall, August 13, 1898. The McKinley administration portrayed the Battle of Manila as a great military victory. The truth was that the United States and Spain agreed that Spain would surrender Manila to the Americans after a fake battle, which served the interests of both the U.S. and Spanish militaries and kept the non-White Filipinos from taking the capital.

  The capture of Manila marked the end of the Spanish-American War and thrilled the expansionists who imagined that Manila (as the assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had argued) would be a key strategic link for the United States. In his rush to war, Teddy apparently never asked himself the elementary question of why a merchant shipping goods from China would first ship them to nearby Manila.

  The United States could have saved blood and treasure if Washington had just leased warehouses in Hong Kong rather than attempt the military conquest of a poor and inconvenient Asian backwater. Only years later would Roosevelt comprehend the enormity of America’s blunder in the Pacific.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s Strategic Blunder

  Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt imagined Manila to be a key American strategic link to China. Roosevelt never asked himself the elementary question of why merchants would detour to Manila on the U.S.-China trade route.

  Chapter 4

  PACIFIC NEGROES

  “We come not to make war upon the Philippines, but to protect them in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.”1

  —PRESIDENT WILLIAM MCKINLEY, 1899

  “The people of the United States want us to kill all the men, fuck all the women, and raise up a new race in these Islands.”2

  —ROBERT AUSTILL, SOLDIER IN THE PHILIPPINES, 1902

  Textbooks present the debate over whether the United States would keep the Philippines as a titanic battle between imperialists and anti-imperialists. The anti-imperialist writings of Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie give the impression that the United States was doing something new, that up to that point the country did not have a tradition of holding alien peoples as colonial subjects. But America already had a colonial policy. In 1832—when the United States government controlled only a small portion of the continent—the Supreme Court had designated White Christian males as “guardians” of their Indian “wards.” As Professor Walter Williams writes in the Journal of American History article “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation”:

  The imperialists believed that imperialism abroad was similar to past United States expansion over North America. The precedents to govern colonial subjects were clear and exact, based on the long road from independence to wardships fo
r American Indians. There was an almost solid consensus among white Americans of the time that expansion over Indians was unquestionably right. White Americans generally did not believe that their past was criminal, they accepted the rightness of their actions in the Philippines. To admit doubt would have undercut the whole history of the nation.3

  “Governing the Philippines is not a sign of a new policy, but the enlargement of a policy long pursued, wrote Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, later president of the American Historical Association and the editor of American Political Science Magazine.”4 The Atlantic Monthly concluded that “the question is not whether we shall enter upon a career of colonization or not, but whether we shall shift into other channels the colonization which has lasted as long as our national existence.”5 Senator Orville Platt called westward Pacific expansion “the law of our national growth… the great law of our racial development.”6 As Theodore Roosevelt had written in the third volume of his Winning of the West series: “Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples.”7

  Though the American Anti-Imperialist League—newly founded to oppose the annexation of the Philippines—threatened to gather ten million protests, “the petition drive died out at a miserable five thousand signatures.”8 The Baltimore American concluded, “It is the same old law of the survival of the fittest. The weak must bend to the strong and today the American race is the sturdiest, the noblest on earth.”9

  One of the most famous stories about McKinley is how the president confessed to a visiting delegation of Methodist ministers that he fell to his knees and prayed for enlightenment and that God told him it was his duty to uplift, civilize, and Christianize the Filipinos. The story might not be true, but it captures the benevolent intentions that McKinley injected into U.S. foreign policy. McKinley understood that to his electorate, imperialism was a dirty word, and so he made Americans believe that their nation’s boldly imperial moves were instead efforts of great compassion and sacrifice. If the average American felt pity for Others, he had a Christian duty to help.

  The Senate debate over retention of the Philippines was a clash between young bucks and old fogies. The American Anti-Imperialist League’s president was over eighty years old; Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts was seventy-two; Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain were comparative youngsters at sixty-three years of age. In contrast, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was forty-eight and Theodore Roosevelt was forty. Thirty-six-year-old Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana exclaimed, “The millions of young Americans with a virile manhood unequalled in the world will not admit or submit to the proposition that their flag is not to fly in the midst of the swiftly coming world events, so vast that all history have been but preparation for them.”10

  The British author Rudyard Kipling penned the poem “The White Man’s Burden” to urge the senators to emulate their Anglo-Saxon brethren. The subtitle was “The United States and the Philippine Islands.”

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Send forth the best ye breed—

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

  To wait in heavy harness

  On fluttered folk and wild—

  Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  The savage wars of peace—

  . . . . . . .

  Go mark them with your living,

  And mark them with your dead!

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  And reap his old reward:

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Ye dare not stoop to less—

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Have done with childish days—

  The lightly proffered laurel,

  The easy, ungrudged praise.

  Comes now, to search your manhood

  Through all the thankless years,

  Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,

  The judgment of your peers!11

  On Admiral Dewey’s orders, two American Navy men—W. B. Wilcox and L. R. Sargent—conducted a fact-finding mission on the Philippine island of Luzon from October 8 to November 20, 1898. Wilcox and Sargent documented a fully functioning Filipino government that was efficiently administering justice through its courts, keeping the peace, providing police protection, holding elections, and carrying out the consent of the governed. The two Americans recalled the moving, patriotic speech of a Philippines government official who promised that “every man, woman, and child stood ready to take up arms to defend their newly won liberty and to resist with the last drop of their blood the attempt of any nation whatever to bring them back to their former state of dependence.”12 When the burden-bearing men in the War Department realized Dewey’s report had documented Aguinaldo’s functioning democracy, they buried it.13

  President McKinley imagined all would be well when the Pacific Negroes submitted and accepted America’s kindness. On December 21, he instructed the U.S. military to act with benevolent intentions:

  It should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them, in every possible way, that full measure of individual rights which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.14

  On February 4, 1899, the U.S. military governor of the Philippines—General Elwell Otis—suddenly ordered U.S. lines to be extended out from Manila into Philippines army territory and ordered sentries to fire on Filipino “intruders.” That evening, Private William Grayson and Private Orville Miller were on guard duty. Grayson peered into the darkness and saw four Filipinos who were later found to be drunk and unarmed. Grayson yelled, “Halt!” A Filipino shouted back, “Halto!” Grayson recalled, “Well I thought the best thing to do was to shoot him. He dropped. Then two Filipinos sprang out of the gateway about 15 feet from us. I called ‘Halt’ and Miller fired and dropped one. Well I think I got my second Filipino that time. We retreated to where six other fellows were and I said, ‘Line up fellows… the niggers are in here all through these yards.’ ”15

  All that had occurred was that four inebriated Filipinos lay dead. The army could have treated this as a minor event, but back at headquarters, General Robert Hughes ran up to General Otis and exclaimed, “The thing is on!”16 Colonel Frederick Funston was asleep when an aide startled him awake: “Come on out here, Colonel, the ball has begun.”17 U.S. rifles crackled and cannons roared all along the ten-mile-long front separating American and Filipino forces. An Englishman who observed the coordinated American attack noted skeptically, “If the Filipinos were aggressors, it is very remarkable that the American troops should have been so well prepared for an unseen event as to be able to immediately and simultaneously attack, in full force, all the native outposts for miles around the capital.”18

  U.S. forces killed more than three thousand Filipino freedom fighters in twenty-four hours. Photos of Filipino corpses heaped in American-dug ditches recalled the U.S. Army’s burial scene at Wounded Knee. In the annals of warfare, few remember that more Filipinos died defending their country in that first day’s storm than Americans died storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in World War II.

  Two days later, on February 6, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War, by one vote more than the required two-thirds majority. Reflected Colorado’s Senator Thomas Patterson, “Senators wh
o had stood against the treaty, incensed by what they were led to believe was a wanton, deliberate, and unprovoked assault upon the American Army by Aguinaldo’s forces, changed their purposes and voted for ratification.”19 The American public learned that the treaty called for the United States to purchase the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars, seemingly a good deal at two dollars per Pacific Negro. Yet as Admiral Dewey later observed, “We were far from being in possession of the property which we had bought…. After paying twenty million for the islands, we must establish our authority by force against the very people whom we sought to benefit.”20

  Dead Filipino soldiers in a U.S. Army ditch, the day after the Americans’ surprise attack ignited hostility, February 5, 1899. The ditch was circular and many more bodies lay outside the frame. Theodore Roosevelt saw an exact parallel between the Filipinos and the Apaches and the Sioux. (National Archives)

  As with Baghdad more than a century later, Americans assumed that the fall of a capital meant control of the country. The author Henry Adams wrote Theodore Roosevelt to express his alarm: “I turn green in bed at night if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines [where] we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.”21