McKinley and the US-Philippines War
* What: The crushing of the Filipino independence movement immediately after the Spanish-American War. US President McKinley ordered the conquest and betrayal of the Filipino people they were supposedly there to liberate in what is variously called the Filipino War, the Filipino Insurrection, or the US-Philippines War.
* The Body Count: At least 200,000 to up to 1.4 million deaths, almost all civilians. Many Filipino rebels and civilians were also tortured, including the first time US troops used water boarding against an enemy. The biggest losses were due to deaths from disease, mostly dysentery, directly caused by American troops herding Filipinos into concentration camps ironically named “zones of protection.” Famed Filipino historian E. San Juan Jr. argues this war constituted genocide. However, almost no other historians have agreed.
* Who Also Gets the Blame:
* Tabloid tycoon William Randolph Hearst created an atmosphere of hysteria pushing America into war based largely on falsehoods. Hearst was the Rupert Murdoch of his day, a propagandist owning most US newspapers, the main source of information most Americans had at the time. Hearst's main intent was to agitate for independence for Cuba, where an independence struggle had also long been waged, both based on his own beliefs but also to make money by raising circulation for his papers.
* The declining, incompetent, and corrupt Spanish Empire resorted to great brutality for several decades to hold on to the Philippines. Even peaceful protesters like Jose Rizal, Filipinos' independence hero, were executed by Spanish authorities.
* Once Spanish military authorities faced off with more numerous and better armed US troops, they in fact collaborated with American military leaders to betray Filipino rebels. Governor General Fermin Jaudenes made a secret agreement with US Admiral George Dewey to surrender only to US troops and to hand over the Philippines to the US. Jaudenes and Dewey even agreed to stage a mock battle before handing over the capital of Manila. The first elected president of the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo, was even warned Filipino troops would be fired on if they tried to take part in the “battle” or possession of the capital.
* General Elwell Otis commanded US troops during the worst atrocities. Otis often acted on his own, without approval or consultation with Washington, and did his best to conceal atrocities under his command. He repeatedly ignored orders from his superiors to avoid fighting and actually turned down an early offer from Aguinaldo to end the war. Otis had earlier commanded US troops during campaigns against the Lakota in the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn, and more than a few historians see similarities in the tactics used against and the treatment of the enemy and civilian populations in both wars.
* US troops, writing in their diaries, letters home, and interviews with journalists in fact often referred to Filipinos as “Indians” when describing the enemy's guerilla war tactics. But when justifying atrocities, many US troops described Filipinos as “niggers” and described going “nigger hunting.” Otis's tactics and the heavier US troop losses that resulted led to a great deal of opposition to the war within the US. Otis was relieved of command after two years and replaced by Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas MacArthur who would command US troops in the Philippines prior to World War II.
* Pseudo scientific racism and Anglo-American attitudes of racial superiority are often blamed by scholars as the cause for US abuses of not just Filipinos but also invasions in Latin America and interventions in other parts of Asia at the time. The scientific professions were flooded at the time with poor science trying to justify European and Anglo-American conquest and exploitation of African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern peoples around the world and within their own countries as well. In its most extreme form, pseudo scientific racism would eventually mutate into eugenics, which sought to sterilize “inferior” races. Pseudo scientific racism led American authorities to set up a Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes to “civilize” certain Filipino tribes, modeled on the Bureau of Indian Affairs inside the US.
* Certainly misguided paternalistic racist notions of American benevolence and civilization also played a central role. Many Americans, including Presidents McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, thought of themselves as humanitarians who invaded other countries for their own good. All four were openly racists, but paternalistic racists who imagined they had, in Rudyard Kipling's words, “the white man's burden.” They believed it a racial duty to “educate the Filipinos, uplift and Christianize them” as McKinley argued. Taft, for one, believed Filipinos were “our little brown brothers.” Such notions were quite ignorant of the cultures they claimed to be superior to, not knowing Filipinos had already been Christians for over three centuries.
* Filipino collaborators with America and Spain are also often blamed. The Macabebes helped capture Philippines President Emilio Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo himself had briefly accepted Spanish money to go into exile, and once captured by the US military he issued a declaration urging Filipinos to lay down their arms. Over time, many Filipinos chose to join the Philippines Constabulary and then the Philippine Scouts. Some historians, including Filipino ones, argue there is a pattern of Ameriphilia among many Filipinos which delayed Filipino independence for decades.
* But Filipino guerilla fighting did continue a decade after the war was declared “over” by US authorities. In the southern mostly Muslim island of Mindanao, resistance continued all the way until independence, almost 50 years. Some Muslim fighters continued fighting for independence from the new nation of the Philippines. One Muslim separatist guerilla group, the Moro National Liberation Front, continues to fight even today.
* How did President William McKinley wind up presiding over a war to suppress peoples he claimed originally to be helping gain their independence? The original Spanish-American War was one he did not seek either. McKinley was elected as the most pro-business president America had seen up to that point, and big business was divided over the Spanish-American War. Some opposed it as bad for business, notably steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. McKinley was definitely pushed from below by popular sentiment.
* Hearst's media campaign agitating for war against made it increasingly harder to avoid war. The campaign received an unexpected dramatic boost with the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor. Sent by McKinley as a show of force, the ship blew up mysteriously, killing hundreds of sailors. Most forensics experts in later years concluded the explosion was almost certainly an accident, a spark near ammunition.
* Spain had the most to lose and the least to gain from a war, its empire in decline, incompetently run, and with much unrest at home as well. Spain lost the war quickly, in less than three months. The island of Guam, for example, surrendered without a fight since its garrison had no ammunition. Spain's aging navy near Manila was sunk in less than an hour.
* Filipino fighters, though armed almost entirely with spears, arrows, and knives, still managed to drive Spanish forces from all of the Philippines except the capital Manila. McKinley, in his own words, was uncertain what to do with the new territories under US control, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico as well. There was strong opposition in the US to conquest, led by the Anti-Imperialist League. Unions, most churches, some business, and the Black population all strongly favored independence for all subject peoples and did not want an American empire.
* McKinley described pacing the floor and praying in the White House over the right course to take. He then issued his Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation:
* “The military government maintained by the US government in...Manila is to be extended...to the whole....We come, not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives...The mission of the United States is one of BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.”
* General Otis, in yet one more controversial decision, delayed the proclamation for two weeks and posted a heavily censored version, removing any mention of US sovereignty over the islands. An original version of the proclamation was sent to US General Marcus Miller. Miller accidentally posted the original proclamation, which Filipinos quickly discovered.
* Otis's atrocities and other actions were never approved of by McKinley or virtually anyone else in Washington. But it was McKinley's decision to continue the war, blinded by his own paternalistic racism that he and other “civilized” whites knew what was best for the Philippines far better than any Filipino could. McKinley did send the Schurman Commission to investigate the war and make recommendations. Only one of the five members was a Philippines expert. Two were military commanders in the field, including Otis, and the commission's head, Jacob Schurman, was an English literature and philosophy professor. Schurman's group came to the same paternalistic racist conclusions as McKinley, insisting Filipinos were incapable of ruling themselves.
* McKinley was killed by an anarchist assassin in 1901. His successor, Teddy Roosevelt, reversed course in several ways. Roosevelt offered an amnesty for Filipino fighters and declared the war over in 1902. Military rule of the island passed to US civilians. In 1907 the Philippines elected one house of their legislature. In 1916 they elected both houses.
* Yet the US held onto the islands for thirty more years. It was not until 1946 that the Philippines finally were allowed independence from the US, in part as recognition of Filipino struggles against the Japanese occupation. The Philippines have remained democratic ever since, except for nine years of martial law under Ferdinand Marcos.
* Marcos, it should be pointed out, had US diplomatic and military support during almost his entire dictatorship. Only at the end, with Filipino anger over Marcos's assassination of an opponent, did the US government finally drop support for the dictator, and even then he was granted exile in the US. Obviously, US colonial control of the Philippines was never about democracy, and there is no reason to assume democracy would have come any sooner or later thanks to US rule. Obviously, if democracy were the true reason for US conquest, the country would have become independent shortly after 1916, when Filipinos first elected their own congress.
* What could McKinley have done differently? General Otis certainly played a central role in provoking and then worsening the war. McKinley should have relieved him almost immediately, and Otis should have faced criminal charges. McKinley's failure to punish Otis makes the president guilty of horrendous callousness with regards to Filipino lives.
* Not only was Otis never punished for atrocities, virtually no other US soldiers were either. Only a few officers were reprimanded. In one of the best known cases, Major Edwin Glenn was convicted of torture for water boarding prisoners, and only received a fine. A US congressional investigation concluded that responsibility went all the way up to Secretary of War Elihu Root, and Root should have faced charges. But McKinley failed to hold anyone in his administration responsible, either civilian or military.
* McKinley could have granted Filipino independence almost immediately, much like happened with Cuba. For the latter nation, it did not happen as benevolently as it might seem. The US government ordered the Cuban constitution have the “US right to intervene” written in, and the US frequently did. These US invasions of Cuba were one of the biggest reasons leading eventually to Fidel Castro's rise to power.
* Some imperialists insisted US conquest was for the good of “inferior” peoples, and that other nations would simply conquer them instead. That possibility was there. Britain, Germany, and Japan all might have tried to take the Philippines as a colony. Germany actually had warships off the coast as the US invaded the Philippines.
* The simplest way to prevent other imperialists' conquest would be to make the Philippines a protectorate. This would not be a new practice. The British and French did have treaties accepting Thailand's independence, one of the few Asian countries to remain so. One consequence of Thai independence is that the nation was far more stable and avoided most of the wars that happened in other Asian nations.
* The US-Philippines War remains one of the least known wars to most Americans. Most public schools do not teach about it, and even university history courses often neglect it. Remembering the war and its atrocities could go a long way towards teaching Americans about the folly of so called benevolent invasions or assimilation.