Note 8 — Chapter XIII · MacArthur and the War

What difference, however, did it make to men under military orders, and that far away from home, where American public opinion could not and never can affect any given situation in time to help it, whether they were serving God or the devil? Everything disappeared but the primal fighting instinct. So the slaughter proceeded right merrily, at a ratio of about sixteen to one, and many a Filipino died with the word “Independence” on his lips,8 while many an obscure American life went out, fighting under the Denby-Lodge dollar-mark flag of pseudo-trade expansion. Can you imagine a more thankless job? Do you wonder at the song that heads the chapter? Still, war is war, once you are in it. All through 1900 the volunteers of 1899 kept on, cheerfully doing their country’s work, not in the least hampered by whys or wherefores, so far as the quality of their work went. They knew that the Filipinos were not heathen, and they were not perfectly clear that they themselves were doing the Lord’s work, unless “putting the fear of God into the heart of the insurrecto”—one of their campaign expressions—was the Lord’s work. However, if any of them gave any special thought to the ethics of the situation, this did not in the least affect their efficiency in action, nor their determination to lick the Filipino into submission. When the brief organized resistance of the insurgent armies in the field (February to November, 1899) underwent its transition to the far more formidable guerrilla tactics, they realized that they were “up against” a long and tedious task, in which would be no special glamour, as there had been in Cuba, because the war was not much more popular at home than it was with them. The rank net hypocrisy of the whole situation, as they viewed it, is expressed in the song which heads this chapter. It is an answer to the Taft nonsense of 1900 about “the people long for peace and are willing to accept government under United States.”9 That is why the Caribao Society do not sing it to Mr. Taft when he attends their annual banquet, notwithstanding that it is the star song of their repertoire.10 This statement of Judge Taft’s, as well as other like statements of his which followed it during the presidential campaign of 1900, would have been perfectly harmless in home politics. It was made in the same spirit of optimism in which a Taft man will tell you to-day, “The people are willing to see the Taft Administration endorsed.” But at that time in the Philippines there was no possible way to prove or disprove the statement to the satisfaction of anybody at home—or elsewhere, for that matter. And, under the circumstances, it was at once a libel on Filipino patriotism and an ungracious belittling of the work of the American army. It was a libel on Filipino patriotism because it denied the loyal (even if ill-advised) unanimity of the Filipino people in their struggle for independence, and was a statement made recklessly, without knowledge, in aid of a presidential candidate in the United States. That it was highly inaccurate was well known to some 70,000 American soldiers then in the field, who were daily getting insurrecto lead pumped into them, and also well known to their gallant commander, General MacArthur, who told Judge Taft just that thing. That it was an ungracious belittling of the work of the army is certainly obvious enough, and it was so considered by the army, and its commanding general aforesaid, who practically told Judge Taft just that thing. But Mr. Root, then Secretary of War, was as much interested in Mr. McKinley’s re-election as Judge Taft was. So he spread the Taft cablegrams broadcast throughout the United States during the presidential campaign, and pigeonholed the MacArthur messages and reports on the situation in the dusty and innocuous desuetude of the War Department archives. Four years later at the Republican National Convention of 1904, Mr. Root told the naked truth, thus: