Note 6 — Chapter XI · Otis and the War

The leaders believed that the American people did not fully understand the identity of the Philippine situation with that in Cuba, and that if they had, the treaty would not have been ratified. They also knew the supreme futility of trying to get the facts before the American people by peaceful means. And it was really with the abandon of genuine patriotism that they plunged their country into war. We did not know it then, but we do know it now. It would be simply wooden-headed to affirm that they ever expected to succeed in a war with us. Of course some of the jeunesse dorée, as General Bell calls them in one of his early reports,6 grew very aggressive and insulting toward the last. But the thinking men went into the war for independence in a spirit of “decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” to correct the impression General Otis had communicated to Mr. McKinley, and through him to our people, in the hope that the more lives they sacrificed in such a war (they risked—and many of them lost—their own also), the nearer they would come to refuting the idea that they did not know what they wanted. It was the only way they had to appeal to Cæsar, i.e., to the great heart of the American people. As the war grew more and more unpopular in the United States, the impression was more and more nursed here at home that the people did not really want independence, but were being coerced; and that they were like dumb driven cattle. The striking similarity of these suggestions to those by which tyranny has always met the struggles of men to be free, did not seem to occur to the American public. They were accepted as authoritative, being convenient also as an antidote to sympathy. General Otis had suppressed such words as “sovereignty,” “protection,” and the like from his original sugar-coated edition of the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, offering an elaborate cock-and-bull explanation of why he did so. The Filipino answer to this took the form of a very clever newspaper cartoon, representing an American in a carromata—a kind of two-wheeled buggy—with a Filipino between the shafts pulling it; which cartoon of course, never reached the United States. The Filipinos had never heard the story on General Mahone about “tie yoh hoss an’ come in,”7 but they had heard of the jinrickshaws of Japan, and they had read in Holy Writ and elsewhere of conquered people becoming hewers of wood and drawers of water to invading conquerors. And they are not without a sense of humor. It is a common mistake with many Americans—for quite a few among us suffer intellectually from over-sophistication—to suppose we monopolize all the sense of humor there is, and that that alone is proof of a due sense of proportion. At any rate, the Filipinos, with all due respect to General Otis’s good intentions, understood that “sovereignty” and “protection” meant alien domination, so there was nothing in the Otis notion that for them those words had a “peculiar meaning which might be advantageously used by the Tagalo war party to incite,” etc.8