6
SHOUTING THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
The Greater America Exposition opened on July 1, 1899, with boisterous celebration. Thousands flocked to Omaha to take it all in: the World’s Congress of Beauties, a Moorish palace, a rainbow-colored electric fountain, the Filipino band, and a reenactment of Dewey’s triumph at Manila Bay. Veterans of the war with Spain, including a troop of Rough Riders, marched through the grounds to loud cheers.
The last in line, though, the First Nebraska Volunteers, raised a few eyebrows. The Denver Evening Post couldn’t help but notice that “there was something pathetic about their appearance.” Their uniforms were tattered, they bore injuries, and they looked harrowed.
They had come from the Philippines.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The war had begun with a promising alliance: the United States and the Philippines against Spain. With Commodore Dewey controlling the sea and Emilio Aguinaldo racking up victories on land, it moved quickly. Dewey ran a naval blockade and supplied Aguinaldo with arms; Aguinaldo used those arms to dislodge the Spaniards.
For Aguinaldo, who had led a failed revolt against Spain in 1896, Dewey’s arrival was a deus ex machina. “The Americans, not from mercenary motives, but for the sake of humanity and the lamentations of so many persecuted people, have considered it opportune to extend their protecting mantle to our beloved country,” read a message from his junta. “Where you see the American flag flying, assemble in numbers; they are our redeemers!”
Aguinaldo’s faith in the United States was buoyed by repeated assurances from Dewey and other U.S. officials that once the war was over, Filipinos would have their independence. Aguinaldo noted with consternation that none of these promises ever appeared in writing, but he pressed on. In June 1898 he established a government (making himself its “dictator”) and issued its declaration of independence: “Under the protection of the Powerful and Humanitarian Nation, the United States of America, we do hereby proclaim and declare solemnly in the name by authority of the people of the Philippine Islands, that they are and have the right to be free and independent.”
The new government quickly went about the business of state-building. Within months, it had drafted a constitution, established a capital, started a newspaper, opened schools, established a university, issued currency, appointed diplomats, and levied taxes. It had a flag, too. The Philippine Declaration of Independence set the flag’s colors as red, white, and blue, “commemorating the flag of the United States of North America, as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards this Great Nation for its disinterested protection.”
The trouble started in August. The siege of Manila—undertaken jointly by the U.S. Army and the Philippine Army of Liberation—ended when Spain surrendered the city to the United States alone. After U.S. troops entered the city, locking out their comrades in arms, McKinley issued his declaration. There would be “no joint occupation with the insurgents,” and the Filipinos “must recognize the military occupation and authority of the United States.”
Thus began a standoff. The United States held Manila and ruled the waves. Aguinaldo’s government claimed the rest of the country, although that claim was notional in the less populated and culturally distinct south.
The Philippine troops that had besieged Manila held their positions in the suburbs ringing the city, waiting. U.S. soldiers waited inside the city, biding their time as soldiers often do. Bars opened along the main strip, which the men referred to affectionately as the “Yankee Beer Chute.” Prostitutes raced to Manila from Russia, Romania, Austria, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and Japan. It was the sex-work equivalent of a gold rush.
As time passed, troops on both sides became restless, shouting insults at each other. Hopes for a diplomatic solution were dashed in December, when McKinley’s government signed its treaty with Spain to buy the Philippines for $20 million. That news was “received in the Revolutionary camp like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky,” wrote Aguinaldo.
McKinley issued a proclamation that the military government of Manila was “to be extended with all possible dispatch to the whole of the ceded territory.” Aguinaldo issued a counter-proclamation, denouncing this “violent and aggressive seizure” of the Philippines. He established a new government, this time a republic, and took the oath of office as the Philippines’ first president. His inaugural banquet was a sumptuous affair, with a European-style menu written in French.
The more McKinley and Aguinaldo doubled down on their claims to sovereignty, the more skittish Manilans became. In the first week of January 1899, some thirty thousand of them fled the city. Two weeks later, a Chinese man tried to kick a Spaniard’s dog, but his wooden shoe flew off his foot and struck a Filipino in the face. Anywhere else, this would have been a nonevent, leading to a fistfight at best. But in Manila, a city on the edge, it was a spark on dry tinder. Doors banged shut, locks slid into place, guns came out, and city dwellers raced for refuge. “Within an area of twenty-five square miles, there was not a man, woman, or child who was not aware that his neighbor was fleeing from some dreadful, unknown monsters,” reported the paper. “All were simultaneously affected by the startling awe inspiring stampede.”
The International Dog-Shoe-Face Incident subsided with minimal bloodshed. The only casualty was the dog (somebody shot it). But two weeks later, the thing touched off in earnest. Private William W. Grayson and Private Orville H. Miller of the First Nebraska Volunteers (the regiment that would later limp through the parade grounds of the Greater America Exposition) encountered three or four Filipino soldiers while on a nighttime patrol of the Manila suburbs. Grayson ordered them to halt. But who was he to give orders? They ordered him to halt.
“I thought the best thing to do was shoot,” remembered Grayson, and he did. He and Miller shot three Filipinos and then ran back for reinforcements. “Line up, fellows,” Grayson called. “The niggers are in here all through these yards.”
“The British are coming!” this was not. But as a call to arms, it sufficed. Within hours, the United States had mounted an offensive. The war had begun.
Someone following the war from afar might have judged the two armies to be well matched. The U.S. Army had about twenty thousand soldiers in or around Manila. The Army of Liberation’s numbers are harder to know, but estimates ranged from fifteen thousand to forty thousand. The United States Army had better weapons, but the Philippine Army knew the terrain.
Yet the first full day of fighting revealed just how unbalanced things were. On February 5, the bloodiest battle of the war resulted in 238 U.S. casualties and thousands of Filipino casualties. The U.S. Army’s official report put the number at four thousand, though that was sheer guesswork.
Weapons were part of the reason. Aguinaldo’s men had a few usable guns but little ammunition. A third of the troops surrounding Manila lacked rifles. One unit was armed with spears; another—facing off against the Utah Battery—had bows and arrows. And then there was the “battalion” composed of children instructed to throw stones at the enemy.
A galling gun shortage would cripple the Philippine forces throughout the war. Aguinaldo’s men made do with whatever weapons they could smuggle from Asia (not many, given the U.S. blockade) or capture. They gathered tin cans that the U.S. Army had discarded and tried to convert them into cartridges. They melted church bells down for bullets, scraped the heads off matches for fulminate, and used tree resins for gunpowder. Later in the war, independence fighters sent pearl divers to scour the ocean floor for ammunition that the retreating Spaniards might have dropped.
But it was more than just arms. Warfare is, if not a science, then at least an art, requiring practice. U.S. soldiers were trained, and many were seasoned. Many of the generals who led them had fought in the Civil War or against Indians. In 1898, most were in their fifties or sixties.
Not so on the Philippine side. As the colonized subjects of Spain, Filipinos had never had their own army. Many of those who had gained military experience in the 1896 revolt or the 1898 war had died, leaving what Aguinaldo called a “residual army,” a “motley crowd of crude recruits and volunteers.” Most were untrained even in basic firearms technique.
And their leaders were astonishingly young. The “Father of the Philippine Army,” General Artemio Ricarte, was 32 in 1898. General Emilio Jacinto, regarded as the brains of the revolution, was 24. The other principal commanders were General Antonio Luna (32), General Mariano Noriel (34), General Miguel Malvar (33), General Gregorio del Pilar (23), and—the youngest—General Manuel Tinio (21). Tinio had dropped out of high school to join the revolution in 1896, and two years later he was a general. His aide-de-camp was 15.
Aguinaldo himself was 29 in 1898. He lived until 1964.
This hatchling army fared poorly against the armed forces of the United States. The war had begun in February 1899. In March, the United States seized the capital of the Philippine Republic, Malolos, at the cost of only a single fatality. Aguinaldo escaped and moved his government to San Isidro. When that fell, he moved it to Cabanatuan. Then to Tarlac, his fourth capital. Tarlac fell in November, ten months into the war. Aguinaldo fled to the mountains, refusing to tell even his field commanders his location.
General Arthur MacArthur (father of the better-known Douglas MacArthur), who was commanding the U.S. forces, concluded that the war was over. There was simply “no organized insurgent force left to strike at.”
MacArthur was wrong, though. The following months saw engagements between the two sides double, then triple. What MacArthur had taken for the end of the war was instead the debut of a new strategy. Recognizing how badly he was outmatched, Aguinaldo had given up establishing capitals and fighting conventional battles. Instead, he’d ordered his followers to become guerrillas.
It wasn’t a bad idea. If set-piece battles had exposed Aguinaldo’s weaknesses, guerrilla warfare played to his strengths: knowledge of the land and the popularity of his cause. “Insurrectos,” as they were called, could ambush U.S. patrols, hide their weapons, and then melt into the populace. They could draw on towns for food, shelter, and information, even when those towns were officially under U.S. control.
One boy at the time remembered how women haggling in the marketplace would encode observations about U.S. troop size and movement into the mango and guava prices they demanded, which the fruit vendors would then convey to the guerrillas. He remembered how children seeing U.S. sentries approaching would send warnings by “accidentally” throwing balls into the guerrillas’ homes.
All this required the support of the populace, which Aguinaldo was not above using force to ensure. But he didn’t need much compulsion in 1899. “I have been reluctantly compelled to believe,” MacArthur confessed, “that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo.”
Filipinos weren’t the constituency that Aguinaldo worried about, at least not at first. He worried about U.S. voters. As he saw it, the point of guerrilla warfare was not to defeat the U.S. Army—nobody thought he could do that—but to wear it down. If Aguinaldo could keep the fight alive through November, he hoped he might influence the 1900 presidential election.
Filipinos couldn’t vote in that election, of course. But perhaps they could sway its outcome in other ways. McKinley was running again, this time with Roosevelt as his vice president, so there was little help to be got from the Republicans. Aguinaldo was more interested in McKinley’s Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who had run in 1896 and was also running again. Bryan sought to set the Philippines free.
This was, from Aguinaldo’s perspective, a war for hearts and minds. He gambled that mainland voters were uneasy about being colonizers and that the sight of Filipinos dying for independence might make enough of an impression on them that the 1900 election would turn out differently from the one in 1896.
Was there some deep-seated aversion to empire woven into the U.S. national character? Some lingering anti-imperialism held over from the Revolutionary War? Historians have debated that question for decades. But if one were arguing the affirmative side, one could do no better than to introduce into evidence, as Exhibit A, the case of Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.
Twain was an unusual sort. He defied the buttoned-up conventions of the Victorian age, delighting instead in rude talk and taboo subjects. In his day, this made Twain a court jester, outclassed by such authors as William Dean Howells and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But today they are hard to remember, whereas Twain is impossible to forget. He seems more “American” than they do, than nearly anyone does.
The best comparison is not Howells or Longfellow, but Twain’s British counterpart, Rudyard Kipling. Both are cherished to this day as authors who wrote in everyday language about life in the backcountry. Twain is best remembered for a novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), about a young white boy and an older black man making an odyssey on the Mississippi River. Kipling, who regarded Twain as “the largest man of his time,” read Huck Finn with admiration. Then he wrote his own major novel, Kim (1901), about a young white boy and an older Asian man on an odyssey through colonial India. Twain reread Kim every year.
Yet there was a difference between the two authors, one that perhaps reflected a larger divergence between the cultures of Britain and the United States. Kipling was the age’s great champion of empire. He befriended Roosevelt and observed the brewing Philippine conflict with interest. He offered his advice in the form of a wildly popular poem. An advance copy went to Roosevelt, but the poem was first published, by an extraordinary stroke of coincidence, on the very day the war broke out. It was called “The White Man’s Burden: An Address to the United States,” and it began this way:
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.
Today, with imperialism everywhere in disrepute, Kipling’s poem stands as a sort of intellectual ruins from a bygone time. It’s the single best-remembered paean to empire in the English language.
At the time the poem was published, Twain would probably have endorsed its sentiment. He was a “red-hot imperialist,” he recalled. “I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific.” But as he watched the Philippine conflict unfold, Twain could no longer toe the line. In 1900 he declared himself to be “an anti-imperialist.”
Twain was not just an anti-imperialist, he was the most famous anti-imperialist in the country. He became the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York and chronicled the expanding war with withering sarcasm. “There must be two Americas,” he mused. “One that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
For that second America, Twain proposed adding a few words to the Declaration of Independence: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.” He suggested a modified flag: red, black, and blue, with the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones.
This was strong speech, but remarkably, it wasn’t even that far out. As Aguinaldo had hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party—hardly a radical organization in the age of Jim Crow—could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was “criminal aggression,” the Democratic platform charged in 1900, born of “greedy commercialism” and sure to ruin the country. “No nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” it warned. “Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”
Empire dominated the 1900 election. Kipling, who lived in England, couldn’t vote. Twain declined to (though he allowed that any candidate running on an “Anti-Doughnut” platform could have had his support). But for the rest of the country, this was the first time overseas empire was put to a vote. And since the candidates hadn’t changed since the last election, it wasn’t a bad gauge of the national mood concerning empire.
If it was a test, though, the anti-imperialists flunked it. In 1896 McKinley had won 51 percent of the popular vote. In 1900 he won 52 percent, meanwhile increasing his share of the electoral college from 61 percent to 65 percent. The imperial policy was affirmed, and it would never arise as a serious electoral issue again.
Twain felt the ground shift beneath his feet. Though he continued to criticize imperialism, he kept his most incisive writings private, as he could find no way to publish them. After Twain died, in 1910, his literary estate suppressed them. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when those writings were released and taken up by opponents of the Vietnam War, that the reading public grasped the full depth of Twain’s hatred for empire.
Back in the Philippines, the gloves came off. The election had shone a spotlight on the war, and General MacArthur had obliged McKinley by steering clear of anything that the Democrats might paint as an atrocity. Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling.
The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos not as fellow Americans, but as irksome “natives.” When William Howard Taft, then the colony’s chief lawmaker, called Filipinos “our little brown brothers,” the soldiers scoffed. A song they sang, frequently and loudly, captured their view:
I’m only a common Soldier-man in the blasted Philippines;
They say I’ve got Brown Brothers here, but I dunno what it means.
I like the word Fraternity, but still I draw the line;
He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine.
Brother, indeed, was a word rarely used. The soldiers preferred gugu, a word that historians think was the etymological precursor of the epithet gook, which featured so prominently in the Korean and Vietnam wars. White soldiers also made use of a tried-and-true favorite from back home: nigger. They sang it proudly, as in the extremely-hard-to-misinterpret ballad “I Don’t Like a Nigger Nohow.”
The black soldiers in the Philippines heard this and winced. They connected the racism that pervaded the war to the racism they had just left at home—the 1890s were the high noon of lynching. Aguinaldo’s men made the connection, too, and issued propaganda suggesting that black soldiers might be better off switching sides.
Remarkably, one did. David Fagen of the 24th Infantry accepted a commission in Aguinaldo’s army. The U.S. Army, eager to nip this sort of thing in the bud, placed a $600 reward on Fagen’s head, equivalent to three years of a private’s pay. And that’s what it got: Fagen’s head—or, at least, a head purported to be Fagen’s—dropped off in a cloth sack by a Filipino hunter.
But Fagen was the exception. In general, soldiers closed ranks. To win Filipinos over, they inaugurated an extensive campaign of sanitation, road-building, and education in the areas they controlled. In those they didn’t, they staged raids, shooting insurgents and torching villages.
Soldiers used both the carrot and the stick, but it was stick-wielding that shaped their identities. If troops in the Second World War understood themselves as “G.I. Joes”—general-issue cogs in a vast bureaucracy—those who fought in the Philippines understood themselves to be “hikers,” humping through hostile territory in search of guerrillas. Today you can find statues named The Hiker in dozens of towns. They are the most visible mainland monuments to the war.
The “hikes” did great damage, but they couldn’t themselves extirpate the rebellion. The guerrillas remained at large, and the towns kept feeding them. Perhaps Filipinos helped the rebels out of enthusiasm for Aguinaldo’s cause; perhaps they simply realized that the nationalists were a lot better at identifying and punishing traitors than the U.S. Army was. Whatever the reason, it was clear that the U.S. inability to distinguish friend from foe was a serious disadvantage. A colonel described the U.S. Army as a “blind giant”—“powerful enough to destroy the enemy, but unable to find him.”
Too clumsy to excise the rebellion with a scalpel, the army reached for a bone saw. Adopting a practice called “reconcentration,” it herded rural populations into fortified towns or camps where they could be more closely monitored. From the army’s perspective, this contributed a satisfying clarity to an otherwise murky situation. Those inside the reconcentration zones were “pacified.” Those outside were not, and could be treated accordingly: cutting off their food supplies, burning their homes, or simply shooting them.
Somewhat awkwardly, though, reconcentration was the very tactic that Spain had used against the Cubans, the one that had provoked the United States to “liberate” Cuba in the first place. It “sounds awful,” confessed one U.S. official to his diary. “It works, however, admirably.”
It did seem that the war was winding down. The disappointment of the 1900 election and sheer exhaustion wore the insurrection thin. Rich, educated Filipinos, meanwhile, started to accommodate themselves to U.S. rule. A month after the 1900 election, more than one hundred members of the colony’s elite formed the Federalist Party, which, as its name suggests, sought inclusion within the United States and eventual statehood. And the less likely Philippine independence seemed, the less inclined Filipinos were to support the rebels, an action for which they could be harshly punished by the U.S. Army.
Another blow came in March 1901: the capture of Aguinaldo. Not only did he surrender, he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. “Let the stream of blood cease to flow,” he wrote in a proclamation. “Let there be an end to tears and desolation.” A spate of surrenders of other high-ranking officers followed. Satisfied that the war was over, McKinley handed most of the Philippines over from the military to the civil government under Taft on the Fourth of July, 1901.
George Frisbie Hoar, the leading anti-imperialist in Congress, shook his head. “We crushed the only republic in Asia.”
The fantasy of conquest is always the same: defeat the leader and the country is yours. The United States had learned the folly of this when it won the Philippines from Spain, only to find itself fighting the Philippine Army. It was about to learn the lesson again.
The Philippine archipelago contains more than seven thousand islands. The war against Aguinaldo took place mainly on the largest, Luzon, the northern island that contained Manila and half the population. Spain had ruled from Luzon, Aguinaldo had ruled from Luzon, and the United States now sought to do the same.
Defeat the leader, the country is yours.
Yet the farther south you went in the Philippines, the less relevant events in Luzon seemed to be. Particularly Aguinaldo’s surrender: in theory, it should have meant the end of the Philippine Republic. But as the United States sought to extend its control south over Samar, the third-largest island in the archipelago, it found a land still beholden to the nationalist cause. In May 1901 MacArthur ordered “drastic measures” to “clean up” Samar “as soon as possible.”
Those drastic measures were by now standard fare: interrupting trade, burning crops, resettling civilians, and conducting “hikes” against guerrillas. Yet here, the civilians resisted. A group of five hundred townspeople in Balangiga—who had seen their food supplies destroyed, their agricultural tools confiscated, and their neighbors incarcerated—launched a surprise attack on a U.S. camp. They killed forty-five soldiers in a single day.
The Balangiga Massacre, as it became known, struck terror into the hearts of the colonizers. “Half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds,” remembered Taft’s wife, Nellie.
The army kicked back into high gear. “They have sown the wind,” one captain said. “They shall reap the whirlwind.”
The whirlwind came in the form of Major Edwin F. Glenn, who ordered a sweeping investigation. Glenn was a violent interrogator, fond of a technique that had become popular in the army and is uncomfortably familiar today. If the men he was questioning—and these included town officials and priests—failed to answer to his satisfaction, Glenn administered the “water cure.” Here is how a soldier explained it: “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads.”
The site of the Balangiga Massacre is today marked by a large statue group celebrating the heroism of the Balangigans, here shown bursting into an army tent.
The whirlwind also took the form of General Jacob Smith. He had fought the Lakota at Wounded Knee and adopted a similarly unyielding approach to Filipinos. “I want no prisoners,” Smith allegedly told his subordinate. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.” All rice was to be seized, Smith insisted, and any male over the age of ten who did not turn himself over to the U.S. government should be killed. “The interior of Samar,” he ordered, “must be made a howling wilderness.”
Smith fell far short of that heinous goal, but the Samar campaign showed the war at its worst. Samar also revealed that whatever they thought in Washington, the war wasn’t over. In fact, it wasn’t even over in Luzon. There, too, the embers of rebellion glowed hot, with the Province of Batangas in open rebellion and insurgents continuing their attacks throughout the island.
The longer the war wore on, the dirtier it got. Nationalists, finding it increasingly hard to win support and much-needed supplies from the towns, used terror tactics: kidnapping, torturing, and executing “collaborators,” sometimes in extravagant ways. The U.S. Army, for its part, expanded its policy of reconcentration. And, though this was prohibited, the men continued to torture their captives. Yet again, like the cast of some hellish musical, the soldiers expressed their feelings in song. One of the men wrote this rousing number, titled “The Water Cure in the P.I.”:
Get the good old syringe boys and fill it to the brim
We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him
Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
Hurrah. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah. Hurrah. The flag that makes him free.
Shove the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
News of these atrocities aroused scandals when they reached the mainland. Major Glenn was tried for torture. General Smith, having ordered a massacre, also faced trial, though not for crimes against Filipinos, but for “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.”
Smith’s actions were unrepresentative and clearly embarrassing to the administration. But it was hard to see them as entirely out of step with the higher purposes of the war. Roosevelt himself, who ascended to the presidency after McKinley’s assassination, had long understood the fight against “savages” to be a form of warfare “where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity.” And yet it was, in his judgment, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars.”
Glenn was fined and suspended for a month (“nobody was seriously damaged” by the water cure, Roosevelt insisted). Smith was reprimanded and retired from active duty. “Taken in the full, his work has been such as to reflect credit upon the American Army and therefore upon the nation,” Roosevelt said. “It is deeply to be regretted that he should have so acted in this instance as to interfere with his further usefulness.”
However deeply harsh tactics were “regretted” once they came to light, they had a grim efficacy. While U.S. public works campaigns undermined support for the rebels, tortures, torching, and food deprivations punished the holdouts harshly. Insurgents surrendered, or they simply died. A Republican congressman who toured Luzon in 1902 reported what he saw to a newspaper. “The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner,” he said. “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”
From accounts like this, it can sound as if most Filipinos who perished died at the hands of the zealous “hikers,” as if the whole war were Samar. Doubtless, the guns and torches did kill tens of thousands. But the full story of Philippine mortality is considerably more complicated. As was often the case in the nineteenth century, most victims of the war died from disease.
Muddying the waters further, the diseases started under Spanish rule. The late nineteenth century had brought tumult to the Philippines, moving people around the archipelago and disrupting long-standing economic arrangements. Both motion and instability carried lethal epidemiological consequences, most notably during the cholera epidemic in 1882–83, which killed hundreds of thousands, and the rinderpest outbreak in 1887, wiping out nine in ten cattle and carabao. Before Dewey ever set eyes on the lights of Manila Bay, the horsemen of the apocalypse were already stalking the Philippines.
When the war with the United States came, those horsemen charged forth, now all at once and galloping: cholera, malaria, dysentery, beriberi, rinderpest, tuberculosis, smallpox, and bubonic plague. “Everything that could possibly happen to a country had happened or was happening,” Nellie Taft remembered.
The armies—both sides—carried disease with them on the march. So did the prostitutes who flocked to Manila and the countless refugees the war produced. People moved, as they never had before, in and out of malaria zones, carrying the infection in their bloodstreams. Aguinaldo contracted malaria, and it gutted the troops who fled with him to the mountains.
If movement spread disease, so did confinement. Reconcentration was, from an epidemiological perspective, a particularly horrifying tactic. It forced populations with different immunities and diseases together into close quarters in unsanitary conditions. At the same time, it cut Filipinos off from their fields, leaving them reliant on imported food, often nutritionally poor rice from Saigon, if they got food at all. Malnutrition increased susceptibility to many diseases, and it led directly to beriberi.
Beriberi, it should be noted, is an extremely hard disease to contract. To get it as an adult, you have to eat a profoundly restricted diet, such as milled rice and virtually nothing else, for months. But Filipinos, separated from their farms and able to purchase only the cheapest food, suffered from it in large numbers, probably in the tens of thousands. It struck babies the hardest. Although infantile beriberi was unknown to doctors at the time (thus unrecorded as a diagnosis), it is doubtless the reason why Manila during the war had the world’s highest recorded infant mortality rate.
Reconcentration took its toll on the countryside, too. Fields went untilled as farmers were forced into garrison towns. In a biblical turn, those untended fields attracted swarms of locusts, which further eroded the food supply. The U.S. Army exacerbated the situation by making war on food: burning grain stores, confiscating or killing animals, and installing blockades to stop trade. Guerrillas starved, but so did everyone else.
Everyone, that is, but the U.S. soldiers. They sucked much of the rice, eggs, chickens, fruit, fish, and meat from the Philippine economy with their purchase orders. And after there was no longer enough meat left in the Philippine economy, the army bought refrigerated beef from Australia. With vaccines, fresh water, sanitation, and ample food, U.S. forces were only grazed by the diseases that decimated the colony.
Up to mid-1902, the U.S. military lost 4,196 men, more than three-quarters of whom died of disease. It counted around 16,000 combat fatalities on the opposite side. But that number represents only recorded war deaths and is a tiny fraction of total mortality. General J. Franklin Bell, the architect of the reconcentration strategy, estimated that on Luzon alone the war had killed one-sixth of the population, roughly 600,000. Textbooks usually offer an estimate of 250,000 for the whole archipelago, though there is no hard evidence behind that figure. The most careful study, made by the historian Ken De Bevoise, found that in the years 1899–1903, about 775,000 Filipinos died because of the war.
“Of course, we do want military glory,” wrote Twain, noting the death toll, “but this is getting it by avalanche.”
On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over. If De Bevoise’s calculations are right, it had claimed more lives than the Civil War.
Roosevelt’s announcement wasn’t the first time the authorities had declared an end to the war. It wasn’t even the second time. The Washington Post reminded readers that Taft had announced the “fourth and final termination of hostilities” two years earlier and that “the war has been brought to an end on six different occasions since.”
“A bad thing cannot be killed too often,” the paper concluded.
Having pronounced the war over only to see it rise from the grave time and again, colonial officials shouldn’t have been surprised when it turned out that Roosevelt’s proclamation was, like the others, too hasty. As before, the trouble lay outside of Luzon, though this time even farther south.
“Moroland”—the islands of Mindanao, Palawan, and Basilan plus the Sulu Archipelago—comprised the less-populated bottom third of the Philippines. It was like a different country. Inhabited mainly by Muslims (called “Moros”) rather than Catholics and governed by a system of sultans and datus, it adhered to Islamic law and practiced both polygamy and slavery. With every free Moro man carrying a blade at all times, Moroland was also armed to the teeth.
Spain had never managed to control the area and had settled for something akin to a nonaggression pact with the sultan of Sulu. The United States followed suit, signing an agreement with the sultan that left his legal authority intact. Did this mean that slavery was once again legal in the United States? anti-imperialists wondered. “Slaves are a part of our property,” the sultan insisted. “To have this property taken away from us would mean a great loss.” Washington decided to turn a blind eye, which was all the easier to do once the Insular Cases established that the Thirteenth Amendment didn’t apply to the Philippines.
Still, it was hard to imagine that this tenuous peace would last forever, especially as the U.S. Army presence in the south grew. Hostilities erupted in the Battle of Bayan in May 1902, two months before Roosevelt declared the Philippine War over. And those reading Roosevelt’s proclamation closely would have realized that even with the war “over,” civilian authorities controlled only the Christian areas. In Moroland, and in the Luzon highlands, the military still ruled.
What the military would do with Moroland, however, was an open question. This was the first time the United States was governing Muslims, and attitudes among officials varied enormously.
One approach was championed by Captain John Pershing, who held a post on the shore of Lake Lanao, a large body of water in Mindanao, around which nearly half the Muslim population of Moroland lived. Pershing made the news during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump described, with relish, how Pershing (“rough guy, rough guy”) had captured fifty “terrorists,” dipped fifty bullets in pig’s blood, lined up his captives, and then shot forty-nine of them, letting the last go to report what happened. “And for twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem, okay?” Trump concluded.
Actually, not okay. Setting the ethics of extrajudicial killing aside, Trump’s history was wildly off base. In fact, Pershing proved to be extraordinarily sympathetic toward the Moros. He made diplomatic visits to them, unarmed. He studied their language and customs, ate their food (“I have never tasted more delicious chicken”), and counted some as “strong personal friends.” By 1903 he was taking low-level meetings without an interpreter.
The friendly overtures worked: Pershing was elected a datu—the only datu within U.S. officialdom—and became honorary father to the wife of the sultan of Bayan. Pershing undertook a seventy-two-mile expedition around the lake, firming up alliances where he could and making war where he couldn’t. It was the first time any U.S. or Spanish official had made it all the way around.
For all this, Pershing made headlines. Young, handsome, and peace-seeking, he was the opposite of General Jacob “Howling Wilderness” Smith. Roosevelt made him a brigadier general, jumping him over 909 more senior officers.
But of course, Pershing’s desire to conciliate meant tolerating Moro customs, including slavery. Not everyone was willing to do that. Particularly hostile to Pershing’s approach was General Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s old comrade in arms from the Rough Riders, who became governor of Moro Province in 1903. Wood was an uncompromising man—“intolerant, arrogantly superior, and cocksure of his rightness” is how a colleague described him—and he had little patience for Moro self-government. At a meeting with the datus of Jolo, Wood announced that “a new order of things has come about. A new and very strong country now owns all these islands; that is the United States.”
Wood withdrew from the noninterference agreement, abolished slavery, and established a head tax, knowing full well that these actions would provoke a fight. “One clean-cut lesson will be quite sufficient for them,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “but it should be of such character as not to need a dozen frittering repetitions.”
In what was by now something of a custom, Wood established reconcentration zones and launched a series of raids.
Wood hoped for “one clean-cut lesson.” Instead, he got what he feared: a dozen frittering ones. His raids killed thousands of Moros but never managed to end the war. In 1905, hundreds of resisters—entire families—fled up to the crater of a dormant volcano, Bud Dajo. Objecting to Wood’s abolition of slavery and above all to his tax, they had essentially seceded, creating a micro-Confederacy on a hilltop.
It was the fight Wood had been spoiling for. In March 1906 he sent up an expeditionary force. The “battle,” lasting four days, was profoundly one-sided—a soldier described the Moros as falling “like dominoes” under machine-gun fire. Wood lost twenty-one men and estimated that six hundred Moros had died, although the Filipino interpreters working with the army put the figure at nearly one thousand. “All the defenders were killed,” Wood reported.
Massacres like this weren’t unknown in the United States. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Bloody Island—the Indian wars had painted the West red. Yet Bud Dajo dwarfed them all. “We abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” wrote a bitter Mark Twain, privately. “This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”
“I would not want to have that on my conscience for the fame of Napoleon,” Pershing wrote to his wife. Yet Pershing got his own chance to burden his conscience when he became Moro Province’s governor in 1909. Despite Wood’s hope that “one clean-cut lesson” would end things, the war continued: raids, counterraids, armed bands, and military rule. In 1911 an exasperated Pershing issued an executive order to completely disarm the province, requiring that Moros turn in not just their guns but their bladed weapons, too.
Had a federal official given an order like that on the mainland, it would have violated the Second Amendment. Here, it merely incensed and alarmed the populace. Six to ten thousand fled their homes and moved up another volcanic mountain, Bud Bagsak, taking with them some three hundred rifles.
Soldiers stand over a trench filled with men’s and women’s corpses after the Bud Dajo Massacre, 1906. W.E.B. Du Bois declared this photograph to be “the most illuminating thing I have ever seen” and proposed displaying it in his classroom “to impress upon the students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.”
Pershing was more patient than Wood. He waited for months, and eventually, once the food started running out, most of the rebels came back down. But Pershing’s patience stretched only so far, and in June 1913 he launched a surprise attack. “The fighting was the fiercest I have ever seen,” he wrote, and the Moros were “given a thrashing which I think they will not soon forget.” In the end, Pershing lost fifteen men and guessed he had killed some two hundred to three hundred Moros, including women and children. Historians’ estimates range from two hundred to more than five hundred.
Bud Bagsak did not end the fighting. It went on, with further battles taking place later that month. Violence would rack the region for years. Nevertheless, Moro Province was brought under civilian rule in 1913, ending fourteen years of martial law.
Since 1903, the highest position in the U.S. Army has been chief of staff. J. Franklin Bell, architect of the reconcentration policy, held that post after his time in the Philippines. So did Leonard Wood, four years after the Bud Dajo Massacre. After leaving Moro Province, Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, becoming a hero of the First World War. Then he, too, became chief of staff.
Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.