Note 3 — Chapter XVIII · Governor Wright—1904

Samar and Leyte are separated, where nearest together, by a most picturesque winding strait bordered with densely wooded hills. San Juanico Strait is much narrower than the inland sea of Japan at its narrowest point, and almost as beautiful. In fact, at its narrowest point it seems little more than a stone’s throw in width. It is as pretty as the prettiest part of the Golden Horn. Leyte had been put under the Civil Government in 1901, and this premature interference with the military authorities in the midst of their efforts to pacify the island had had the usual result of postponing pacification, by filling local politicians, wholly unable to comprehend a government which entreated or reasoned with people to do things, with the notion that we were resorting to diplomacy in lieu of force because of fear of them. Leyte and Samar were strategically one for the insurgents, just as the provinces of the Lake district of Luzon, described in an earlier chapter, were, because they could flee by night from one province to another in small boats without detection, when hard pressed by the Americano. The main insurgent general in Samar, Lucban, had surrendered to General Grant in 1902, but the cheaper fellows stayed out much longer, preying upon those who preferred daily toil to cattle-stealing and throat-cutting as a means of livelihood, and continuing the political unrest intermittently in gradually diminishing degree, through 1903. By the spring of 1904, however, there still remained in Samar riffraff enough, the jetsam and flotsam of the insurrection—professional outlaws—to get up some trouble, so that, as brigand chiefs, they might resume the rôles of Robin Hood, Jesse James, et al. During the first half of that year the opportunity these worthies had been waiting for, while resting on their oars, developed. The crop of municipal officials resulting from the original McKinley plan of beginning the work of reconstruction during, instead of after, the war, and among the potential village Hampdens, instead of among the Cromwells, had resulted in some very rascally municipal officials who oppressed the poor, getting the hemp of the small farmer, when they would bring it to town, at their own prices—hemp being to Samar what cotton is to the South. From the lowland and upland farmers the ever-widening discontent spread to the hills, where dwelt a type of people constituting only a small fraction of the total population of the Islands—“half savage and half child”—but loving their hills, and wholly indisposed, of their own initiative, to start trouble, unless manipulated. Obviously, then, “the public mind” of Samar—those who know Samar will smile with me at the phrase, but it will do, for lack of a better—was likely soon to be in a generally inflammable condition. By July, 1904, the Robin Hoods, Jesse Jameses, et al., touched the match to the material and a political conflagration started, apparently as unguided—save by the winds of impulse—and certainly as persistent, as a forest fire. Every native of the Philippine Islands, whether he be of the 7,000,000 Christians or of the 500,000 non-Christian tribes, is born with a highly developed social instinct either to command or to obey. The latter tendency is quite as common in the Philippines as the former is in the United States. Hence the Samar disturbances of 1904–5-6, though made up at the outset of raids and depredations by various roving bands of outlaws yielding allegiance only to their immediate chief, soon took on a very formidable military and political aspect.3 The roving bands would ask the peaceably inclined people our flag was supposed to be protecting, “Are you for us or for the Americans?” promptly chopping their heads off if they showed any lack of zeal in denouncing American municipal institutions and things American in general. Pursuant to Mr. McKinley’s original scheme—concocted for a people he had never seen, under pressure of political necessity—to rig up in short order a government “essentially popular in form,” a lot of most pitiable municipal governments had been let loose on the people, a part of our series of kindergarten lessons. The plan was as wise as it will be for the Japanese—some one please hold Captain Hobson while I finish the analogy—when they conquer the United States, to go to the Bowery and the Ghetto for mayors of all our cities. Thus by our pluperfect benevolence, we had contrived in Samar by 1904 to rouse the highland folk, or hill people, whom the Spaniards had always let alone, against the pacific agricultural lowland people and the dwellers in the coast villages. The latter, or such of them as did not join the hill folk for protection, we permitted to be mercilessly butchered by wholesale, from August to November, 1904, as hereinafter more fully set forth, because ordering out the army to protect them might have been construed at home to mean disturbances more serious and widespread than actually existed, and might therefore affect the presidential election in the United States by renewing the notion that the Administration had never been frank with the American people concerning conditions in the Philippines.