Chapter XIII · MacArthur and the War

Damn, damn, damn the Filipino,

Underneath the starry flag

Civilize him with a Krag,

And return us to our own beloved home.

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 them. The President had called for volunteers. That was enough. When they reached the islands, instead of finding a lot of outlaws, brigands, etc., such as that pestiferous, ill-conditioned outfit of horse-thieves and cane-field burning patriots we volunteers of ’98 had to comb out of the eastern end of Cuba under General Wood in the winter of 1898–9, they found Manila, on their arrival, practically almost a besieged city. They knew that the erroneous impression they had brought with them was the result of misrepresentation. Who was responsible for that misrepresentation they did not attempt to analyze. They simply set to work with American energy to put down the insurrection. Nobody questioned the unanimity of the opposition. There it was, a fact—denied at home, but a fact. In the course of the fight against the organized insurgent army they lost a great many of their comrades, and in that way the unanimity of the resistance was quite forcibly impressed upon them. By kindred psychologic processes equally free from mystery, their determination to overcome the resistance early became very set—a state of mind which boded no good to the Filipinos. The army song given at the beginning of Chapter XI (ante), in which General Otis is made to sing, after the fashion of some of the characters in Pinafore, that pensive query to himself

Am I the boss, or am I a tool?

the first stanza of which closes

Now I’d like to know who’s the boss of the show,

Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo?

was a point of departure, in the matter of information, which served to acquaint them with all that had gone before. They resented the loss of prestige to American arms and desired to restore that prestige. While engaged in so doing, they became aware, during the Presidential year 1900, that the campaign of that year in the United States was based largely upon the pretence that the majority of the Filipinos welcomed our rule. Naturally, their experience led them to a very general and very cordial detestation of this pretence. For one thing, it was an unfair belittling of the actual military service they were rendering. People hate a lie whether they are able to trace its devious windings to its source or sources, or to analyze all its causes, or calculate all its possible effects, or not. The real rock-bottom falsehood, not as fully understood then as it became later, consisted in the impression sought to be produced at home, in order to get votes, that the great body of the Filipino people were not really in sympathy with their country’s struggle for freedom, and would be really glad tamely to accept the alien domination so benevolently offered by a superior people, but were being coerced into fighting through intimidation by a few selfish leaders acting for their own selfish ends. While our fighting generals in the field,—General MacArthur, for instance, whose interview with a newspaper man just after the fall of Malolos, in March, 1899, subsequently verified by him before the Senate Committee of 1902, has already been noticed—at first believed that it was only a faction that we had to contend with, they soon discovered that the whole people were loyal to Aguinaldo and the cause he represented. But, while the point as to how unanimous the resistance was remained a disputed matter for some little time among those of our people who did not have to “go up against it,” the most curious fact of that whole historic situation, to my mind, is the absolute identity of the disputed suggestion with that which had previously been used in like cases in all ages by the powerful against people struggling to be free, and the cotemporaneous absence of any notation of the coincidence by any conspicuous spectator of the drama, to say nothing of us smaller fry who bore the brunt of the war or any portion of it.

Those men of ’99 in the Philippines realized in 1900, vaguely it may be, but actually, that they were waging a war of conquest after the manner of the British as sung by Kipling, but under the hypocritical pretence that they were doing missionary work to improve the Filipino. They did not know whether the Filipinos could or could not run a decent government if permitted. It was too early to form any judgment. And even then there was no unanimous feeling that they could not. Brigadier-General Charles King, the famous novelist, who was in the fighting out there during the first half of 1899, was quoted in the Catholic Citizen, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June, 1899, as having said in an interview given at Milwaukee:

There is no reason in the world why the people should not have the self-government which they so passionately desire, so far as their ability to carry it on goes.

The cold, hard, practical question alone remains: “Will the possession of the islands benefit us as a nation?” If it will not, set them free to-morrow.

But in the same magazine, the Forum, for June, 1900, in other words to the very same audience, in an article whose title is a protest, “Do we Owe the Filipinos Independence?” we find this same distinguished diplomat sagaciously deferring to that not inconsiderable element of the American public which is opposed to wars for conquest, with the rank hypocrisy which must ever characterize a republic warring for gain against the ideals that made it great, thus:

adding some of the stale but ever-welcome salve originally invented by General Otis for use by Mr. McKinley on the public conscience of America, about the war having been “fomented by professional politicians,” and not having the moral support of the whole people. “A majority of the Filipinos are friendly to us,” he says. Even as early as January 4, 1900, in the New York Independent, we find Mr. Denby abandoning all his previous honesty of 1899 about “the cold, hard, practical question,” and rubbing his hands with invisible soap to the tune of the following hypocrisy:

War is a great silencer of hypocrisy. In the presence of real sorrow and genuine anger, it slinks away and is seen no more until more piping times. The lists of casualties had been duly bulletined to the United States from time to time between February, 1899, and June, 1900, so that by the date last named it had become “good politics” to throw off the mask. Hence, at the Republican National Convention held in Philadelphia June 19–21, 1900, we find that astute past-master of the science of government by parties, Senator Lodge, boldly throwing off the mask thus:

We make no hypocritical pretense of being interested in the Philippines solely on account of others. We believe in trade expansion.

Now the words of a United States Senator are much listened to by an army in the field. When a war breaks out, it is usually your Senator who gets your commission for you originally, and has you promoted and made captain, colonel, or general, as the case may be, if you do anything to deserve it, or lifted from the ranks to a commission, if you do anything to deserve it, or sees that something fitting is done if you die in any specially decent way. An army in the field thinks a United States Senator is about one of the biggest institutions going—which, seriously, is not far from the truth, with all due respect to the blasé pessimists of the press gallery. Consider then how wholly uninspiring, as a sentiment to die by and kill by, the above senatorial utterance was to the men in the field in the Philippines, who did not even then believe the islands would pay. The “cold, hard, practical” fact was, if the Senator was to be believed, that we were fighting for what is generically called “Wall Street;” that it was primarily a Wall Street war: an expedition fitted out to kill enough Filipinos to make the survivors good future customers—“Ultimate Consumers”—and only incidentally a war to make people follow your way of being happy in lieu of their own. Yet we had most of us, but shortly previously to that, gone trooping headlong to Cuba, in the wake of the most inspiring single personality of this age—Senator Lodge’s friend, Colonel Roosevelt—some of our American thoraxes inflated with sentiments thus nobly expressed by the same distinguished Senator in his speech on the resolution which declared war against Spain:

“We are there” (meaning in the then Cuban situation), Senator Lodge had said in the Senate, in the matchless outburst of eloquence with which he set the keynote to the war with Spain—

The foregoing is all a record made and unalterable. It is a fair sample of the initial stages of one more of the experiments in colonization by a republic which are scattered through history and teach but one lesson. All the gentlemen concerned were personally men of high type. But look at the net result of their work. The impression it produced in the United States, at a tremendously critical period in the country’s history, when the men at the helm of state were bending every energy to railroad the republic into a career of overseas conquest, and using the army for that purpose, can be called by a short and ugly word. The splendor of Mr. Root’s intellect is positively alluring, but he is a dangerous man to republican institutions. Mr. Taft’s part in that conspiracy for the suppression of the facts of the Philippine situation in 1900 was really due to kindliness of heart, regret at the war, and earnest hope that it would soon end. Mr. Denby’s part was that of the out-and-out imperialist who has frank doubts in his own mind as to whether it is axiomatic, after all, that the form of government bequeathed us by our fathers is the best form of government yet devised. But the conspiracy was really a sin against the progress of the world, because it deceived the American people as to the genuineness and unanimity of the desire of the Filipino people to imitate the example set by us in 1776, which has since served as a beacon-light of hope to so many people in so many lands in their several struggles to be free.

This would seem rather an odd point at which to terminate a chapter on “MacArthur and the War,” seeing that General MacArthur continued to command the American forces in the Philippines and to direct their strenuous field operations until July, 1901, more than a year later, when he was relieved by General Chaffee, on whom thereafter devolved the subsequent conduct of the war. But we must follow the inexorable thread of chronological order, and so yield the centre of the stage from June, 1900, on, to Mr. Taft, else the resultant net confusion of ideas about the American occupation of the Philippines might remain as great as that which this narrative is an attempt in some degree to correct.