The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 26

This does not sound to me like Batangas and Bell. It sounds like Smith and Samar. There were about 100,000 people, all told, gathered in the reconcentrado camps in Batangas under General Bell, [399]

and they were handled as efficiently as General Funston handled matters after the San Francisco fire. There was no starvation in those camps. All the reconcentrados had to do was not to cross the dead line of the reconcentration zone, and to draw their rations, which were provided as religiously as any ordinary American who is not a fiend and has plenty of rice on hand for the purpose will give it to the hungry. The reconcentrado camps and the people in them were daily looked after by medical officers of the American army. General Bell's active campaigning began in Batangas January 1, 1902, Malvar surrendered April 16 thereafter, and Batangas was thoroughly purged of insurrectos and the like by July. During this period the total of insurgents killed was only 163, and wounded 209; and 3626 insurgents surrendered. [400]

The truth is General Bell's "bark" was much worse than his "bite." The inestimable value of what he did in Batangas in 1901-02 lay in convincing the Filipinos once and for all that we were not as impotent as the civil-government coddling had led them quite naturally, but very foolishly, to think we were. Reference was made above to the fact that the population of Batangas in 1899 was 312,192, and in 1903, 257,715. Those figures were inserted at the outset to make General Bell's "bark" sound louder, but now that we are considering his "bite"--how many lives his Batangas lesson to the Filipino people cost--another bit of testimony is tremendously relevant. On December 18, 1901, the Provincial Secretary of Batangas Province reported to Governor Taft that the mortality in Batangas due to war, pestilence, and famine "has reduced to a little over 200,000 the more than 300,000 inhabitants which in former years the province had." [401] Considering that General Bell's 1901-'02 campaign in that ill-fated province cost outright but 163 killed,--how many of the 209 wounded recovered does not appear; they may have all recovered--the Bell programme in Batangas was indeed a very tender model, from the humanitarian stand-point, of civilizing with a Krag, a model of "suppressing insurrection under like circ.u.mstances." But it was never again followed. It had made too much noise at home. Senator Bacon's "corpse-carca.s.s stench" from supposed reconcentrado pens and his "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling on their orgies over the dead," so vividly reminded our people of why they had driven Spain out of Cuba, that the Administration became apprehensive. Until the noise about the Batangas business, our people had been led by Governor Taft and President Roosevelt to believe that the Filipinos were most sobbingly in love with "a benign civil government" and had forgotten all about independence. It was obvious that a repet.i.tion of such a campaign in any other province might create in the public mind at home a disgust with the whole Philippine policy which would be heard at the polls in the next presidential election. So the Batangas affair made it certain that the army was not going to be ordered out again in the Philippines before said next presidential election, at least; whatever castigation might be deemed advisable thereafter.

It was intimated above that Senator Bacon's army friend's "clouds of vampire bats softly swirling" over the corpses of reconcentrados, were doing said swirling not over Batangas at all, but over Samar. Any man familiar with the lay of the land in the two provinces can see from the letter that it was written from Samar. Moreover, Colonel Wagner afterwards testified before the Senate Committee of 1902 [402] that if there had been any great mortality in the reconcentration camps in Batangas, he would have known of it. He inspected practically all those Batangas camps. n.o.body who was in the islands at the time doubts but what such conditions may have obtained in some places under General Smith in Samar, or believes for a moment that any such conditions would have been tolerated under General Bell. General Bell has that aversion to either causing or witnessing needless suffering, which you almost invariably find in men who are both const.i.tutionally brave and temperamentally generous and considerate of others. But the moral sought to be pointed here is not that the Bell reconcentration in Batangas was as merciful as the Smith performances in Samar were h.e.l.lish, but that, in all matters concerning the Philippines, the army, as in the case of Senator Bacon's friend, is gagged by operation of law, and its enforced silence is peculiarly an a.s.set in the hands of the party in power seeking to continue in power, in a distant colonial enterprise. Senator Bacon withheld his friend's name, because for an army officer to tell the truth about the Philippines would be likely to get him into trouble with the President of the United States. The President, be it remembered, is also the leader of the political party to which he belongs. That is why the country has never been able to get any light from those who know the most about the Philippines and the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping them, viz., the army. In 1898 this republic was beguiled into abandonment of the faiths of the founders and started after a gold brick, thinking it was a Klond.y.k.e. Then and ever since, the most important and material witnesses concerning the wisdom or unwisdom of keeping the brick, viz., the army,--which best of all knows the rank folly of it--have been gagged by operation of law. All republics that have heretofore become monarchies, have become so through manipulation of the army by men in power seeking to continue in power. We should either resign our expensive kingship over the Philippines or get a king for the whole business, and be done with it. We have some ready-made coronet initials in T. R. [403]

"On June 23, 1902," says General Chaffee, in his report for that year, [404] "by Act No. 421 of the Philippine Commission, so much of Act No. 173, of July 17, 1901, as transferred the province of Batangas to military control was revoked. Civil government was re-established in the province at 12 o'clock noon, July 4, 1902." The rest of the 1,748,573 people herein above mentioned as const.i.tuting the population of Batangas, Cebu, Bohol, Laguna, Tayabas, and Samar, were also in turn made to "want peace and want it badly," and on July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt issued his proclamation declaring that a state of general and complete peace existed. This is the famous proclamation in which he congratulated General Chaffee and the officers and men of his command on "a total of more than 2000 combats, great and small,"

most of them subsequent to the Taft roseate cablegrams of 1900, and the still more roseate reports of 1901 from the same source. The proclamation appeared in the Philippines as General Orders No. 66, Adjutant General's Office, Washington, dated July 4, 1902. [405]

It directed, in the body of it, that it be "read aloud at parade in every military post." It thanked the officers and enlisted men of the army in the Philippines, in the name of the President of the United States, for the courage and fort.i.tude, the indomitable spirit and loyal devotion with which they had been fighting up to that time, alluded to the impliedly lamb-like or turn-the-other-cheek way in which they had been behaving (no special reference is made either to Batangas, Samar, or the water-cure), and closes with a bully Rooseveltian war-whoop about the "more than 2000 combats, great and small," above mentioned. It also referred to how, "with admirable good temper and loyalty to American ideals its (the army's) commanding generals have joined with the civilian agents of the government" in the work of superinducing allegiance to American sovereignty. This doc.u.ment is one of the most remarkable state papers of that most remarkable of men, ex-President Roosevelt, in its evidences of ability to mould powerful discordant elements to his will. It put everybody in a good humor. And yet, read at every military post, it served notice on the military that if they knew which side their bread was b.u.t.tered on, they had better forget everything they knew tending to show the prematurity of the setting-up of the civil government, sheath all tomahawks and scalping knives they might have whetted and waiting for Governor Taft's exit from office, abstain from chatty letters to United States Senators telling tales out of school, such as the one Senator Bacon had read on the floor of the Senate (already noticed), and dutifully perceive, in the future, that the war was ended, as officially announced in the proclamation itself.

The report of the Philippine Commission for 1902, declares that the insurrection "as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of the United States" is over (p. 3). They then proceed, with evident sincerity, to describe the popularity of themselves and their policies with the same curious blindness you sometimes find in your Congressional district, in the type of man who thinks he could be elected to Congress "in a walk" if he should only announce his candidacy, when as a matter of fact, the great majority of the people of his district are, for some notorious reason connected with his past history among them,--say his war record--very much prejudiced against him. They repeat one of their favorite sentiments about the whole country--always except "as hereinafter excepted"--being now engaged in enjoying civil government. But they casually admit also that "much remains to be done" in suppressing lawlessness and disturbances, so as to perfect and accentuate said "enjoyment."

Let us see just what the state of the country was in this regard according to their own showing. They say:

The six years of war to which these islands have been subjected have naturally created a cla.s.s of restless men utterly lacking in habits of industry, taught to live and prey upon the country for their support by the confiscation of food supplies as a war measure, and regarding the duties of a laborer as dull and impossible for one who has tasted the excitement of a guerrilla life. Even to the man anxious to return to agricultural pursuits, the conditions existing present no temptation. By the war and by the rinderpest, chiefly the latter, the carabaos, or water-buffaloes, have been reduced to ten per cent. of their former number.

Think of the condition of a country, any country, but especially one whose wealth is almost wholly agricultural, which has just had nine tenths of its plow animals absolutely swept off the face of the earth by war and its immediate consequences. The report proceeds:

The chief food of the common people of these islands is rice, and the carabao is the indispensable instrument of the people in the cultivation of rice,

adding also that the carabao is the chief means of transportation of the tobacco, hemp, and other crops to market, and that the few remaining carabaos, the ordinary price of which in normal Spanish times had been $10 was now $100. Then, after completing a faithful picture of supremely thorough desolation such as the Islands had never seen since they first rose out of the sea, certainly not during the sleepy, easy-going Spanish rule, they say: "The Filipino people of the better cla.s.s have received the pa.s.sage of the Philippine Act with great satisfaction"--meaning the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, the Philippine Government Act. Gott im Himmel! What did the people care about paper const.i.tutions concerning benevolent a.s.similation? What they were interested in was food and safety, not politics; food, raiment, shelter, and efficient police protection from the brigandage which immediately follows in the wake of all war, not details as to what we were going to do with the bleeding and prostrate body politic. But the Commission had started out to govern the Filipino people on a definite theory,--apparently on the idea that if Americans wore white duck and no bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, in lieu of khaki and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, the Filipinos would at once forget the war and be happy with an exceeding great happiness. Now the real situation was this. The Islands had not yet been thoroughly beaten into submission. Northern Luzon had been conquered. The lake region of Southern Luzon had been conquered. The most important of the Visayan Islands had been conquered. But the extreme southern portion of Luzon, the enormously rich hemp peninsula already described in a former chapter, and the adjoining hemp island of Samar, were still seething with sedition which later broke out. All through the winter of 1900-01 General MacArthur had tried to get Mr. Root to let him close the hemp ports. But some powerful influence at Washington had prevented the grant of this permission. On January 9, 1901, General MacArthur had wired Mr. Root:

Hemp in southern Luzon in same relation to present struggle as cotton during rebellion. [406]

Nothing doing. General MacArthur must worry along with the "blockade-runners" as best he could, no matter how much hemp money might be poured into the insurgent coffers. So that in the latter part of 1902, although the more respectable of the insurgent leaders had then surrendered, even in the hemp country, the flames of public disorder, which had flickered for a spell after the Batangas lesson, broke out anew in the province of Albay, and in parts of Sorsogon, the two provinces of the hemp peninsula having the best sea-ports. The man at the head of this Albay insurrection was a sorry scamp of some shrewdness by the name of Simeon Ola, with whom I afterwards had an interesting and in some respects most amusing acquaintance. But that is another story. I have simply brought the whole archipelago abreast of the close of 1902, relatively to public order. In this way only may the insurrections in Albay and elsewhere in 1902-03, described in the chapter which follows, be understood in their relation to a comprehensive view of the American occupation from the beginning, and not be regarded as "a local issue" like General Hanc.o.c.k's tariff, having no general political significance. In this way only may those insurrections be understood in their true relation to the history of public order in the Islands. The Commission always represented all disturbances after 1902 as matters of mere banditti, such as have been chronic for generations in Calabria or the Transcaucasus, wholly distinct from, instead of being an inevitable political sequel of, the years of continuous warfare which had preceded. Their benevolent obsession was that the desire of the Philippine people for independence was wholly and happily eradicated.

CHAPTER XVI

GOVERNOR TAFT, 1903

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly?

Paradise Lost.

Throughout the last year of Governor Taft's administration in the Philippines, 1903, both he, and the peaceably inclined Filipinos in the disturbed districts, were between the devil and the deep sea. The military handling of the Batangas and Samar disorders of 1901-2 had precipitated in the United States Senate a storm of criticism, at the hands of Senator Bacon and others, which had reminded a public, already satiated with slaughtering a weaker Christian people they had never seen in the interest of supposed trade expansion, of "the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa." [407] He did not want to order out the military again if he could help it, and this relegated him to his native munic.i.p.al police and constabulary, experimental outfits of doubtful loyalty, [408] and, at best, wholly inadequate, as it afterwards turned out, [409] for the maintenance of public order and for affording to the peaceably inclined people that sort of security for life and property, and that protection against semi-political as well as unmitigated brigandage, which would comport with the dignity of this nation. The better cla.s.s of Filipinos, though not so enamored of American rule as Governor Taft fondly believed, had by 1903 about resigned themselves to the inevitable, and would have liked to see brigandage masquerading under the name of patriotism stopped by that sort of adequate police protection which was so obviously necessary in the disturbed and unsettled conditions naturally consequent upon many years of war, and which they of course realized could only be afforded by the strong arm of the American army. But they knew that if the army were ordered out, the burden of proof as to their own loyalty would at once be shifted to them, by the strenuous agents of that strenuous inst.i.tution. The result was a sort of reign of terror for nearly a year, in 1902-3, in the richest province of the whole archipelago, the hemp-producing province of Albay, at the southern end of Luzon, and also in portions of the province of Misamis. These conditions had begun in those provinces in 1902, and, not being promptly checked, because the army was held in leash and the constabulary were crude and inadequate, by 1903 brigandage therein was thriving like a garden of weeds. Super-solicitude concerning the possible effect of adequately vigorous governmental action in the Philippines on the fortunes of the Administration in charge of the Federal Government at Washington, an att.i.tude not surprising in the colonial agents of that Administration, but which, as we have seen, had been from the beginning, as it must ever be, the curse of our colonial system, had rendered American sovereignty in the disturbed districts as humiliatingly impotent as senile decadence ever rendered Spain.

The average American citizen will admit that the average American statesman, even if he be not far-sighted, looks at least a year ahead, in matters where both his personal fortunes and those of the political party to which he belongs are intimately related to what he may be doing at the time. If in 1903 Governor Taft's administration of affairs in the Philippines was wholly uninfluenced by any possible effect it might have on President Roosevelt's chances for becoming an elected President in 1904, then he was a false friend and a very poor party man as well. a.s.suming that he was neither, let us examine his course regarding the disturbances of public order in the Philippines in that year, as related to the first and most sacred duty of every government, adequate protection for life and property.

In President McKinley's original instructions of April 7, 1900, to the Taft Commission, after quoting the final paragraph of the articles of capitulation of the city of Manila:

This city, its inhabitants * * * and its private property of all descriptions * * * are hereby placed under the special safeguard of the faith and honor of the American army;

the President had added:

As high and sacred an obligation rests upon the Government of the United States to give protection for property and life * * * to all the people of the Philippine Islands.

* * * I charge this Commission to labor for the full performance of this obligation, which concerns the honor and conscience of their country.

We will probably never again have a better man at the head of the Philippine Government than William H. Taft. We have no higher type of citizen in the republic to-day than the man now [410] at the head of it. In the Outlook of September 21, 1901, there appeared an article on the Philippines written in the summer previous by Vice-President Roosevelt, ent.i.tled "The First Civil Governor," which began as follows:

A year ago a man of wide acquaintance both with American public life and American public men [411] remarked that the first Governor of the Philippines ought to combine the qualities which would make a first-cla.s.s President of the United States with the qualities which would make a first-cla.s.s Chief Justice of the United States, and that the only man he knew who possessed all these qualities was Judge William H. Taft, of Ohio. The statement was entirely correct.

The writer subscribed then, and still subscribes, to the foregoing estimate of Mr. Taft, whether Colonel Roosevelt still does or not. Though I dissent most vigorously from more than one of President Taft's policies, and though this book is one long dissent from his chief pet policy, still it is to me an especial pleasure to do him honor where I may, not merely because he has greatly honored me in the past, but because my judgment approves the above estimate. Though as a party leader he is a very poor general, as Chief Magistrate of the nation he has certainly deserved and commanded the cordial esteem of the whole country, and the respectful regard of all mankind. With this admission freely made, if after reading what follows in this and the next chapter, and weighing the same in the light of all that has preceded, the reader does not decide that the writer, far from being animated by any intelligent high purpose, is merely a foolish person of the sounding-bra.s.s-and-tinkling-cymbal variety full of sound and fury signifying nothing, then he can reach but one other conclusion, viz., that colonization by a republic like ours, such as that we blundered into by purchasing the Philippines, is a case of a house divided against itself, a case of the soul of a nation at war with the better angels of its nature, a case where considerations of what may be demanded by home considerations of political expediency will always operate to the detriment of the Filipino people, and be the controlling factor in our government of them. And if I show that in the Philippines in 1903 Governor Taft failed properly to protect the lives and property of peaceably inclined people, as so sacredly enjoined in the language above quoted from President McKinley's original instructions to him, lest "the full performance of this obligation" might prejudice the presidential prospects of his friend, Mr. Roosevelt, and the success of the party to which they belonged, then I will have shown that for this republic to be in the colonizing business is an absolutely evil thing, and that any man who proposes any honorable way out of the conceded blunder of 1898, is ent.i.tled to a hearing at the hands of the American people, because it "concerns the honor and conscience of their country."

Having tried most of the cases which arose out of the public disorders in the Philippines in 1903, and knowing from what I thus learned, together with what I subsequently learned which Mr. Taft knew then, that the most serious of those disorders were very inadequately handled by native police, and constabulary, with much wholly unnecessary incidental sacrifice of life, in order to preserve the appearance of "civil" government and convey the impression of the state of peace the name implied, at a time when a reign of terror due to brigandage prevailed throughout wide and populous regions in whose soil lay the riches of agricultural plenty, while the United States Army looked on with a silent disgust which understood the reason, and a becoming subordination which regretfully bowed to that reason as one which must ever be the curse of colonization by a republic like ours, I know whereof I shall speak, and will therefore speak neither lightly nor unadvisedly, but soberly, charitably, and in the fear of G.o.d.

The insurrection in the Philippines against American authority which began with the outbreak of February 4, 1899, and whose last dying embers were not finally stamped out until 1906, systematic denials by optimist officialdom to the contrary notwithstanding, had three distinct stages:

(1) The original fighting in company, battalion, and regimental formation, with the ordinary wide-flung battle line; this having terminated pursuant to a preconcerted plan early in November, 1899.

(2) A period of guerrilla warfare maintained by the educated, patriotic, fighting generals, in a gradually decreasing number of provinces, until the summer of 1902.

(3) The final long drawn-out sputterings, which began to get serious in the fall of 1902, in provinces prematurely taken under the civil government, and stripped of adequate military protection before things had been given time to settle down in them to normal.

These last are the "gardens of weeds"--brigandage weeds--above mentioned. While the horticultural metaphor will help some, to really understand the case nothing so fits it as the more common ill.u.s.tration applied to grave public disorders having a common cause which likens such matters to a conflagration. The third and last stage through which the Philippine insurrection degenerated to final extinction is adequately and accurately described in the following extract from one of the military reports of 1902:

The surrender or capture of the respectable military element left the control of affairs and the remainder of the arms in the hands of a lot of persons, most of them ignorant, some criminal, and nearly all pertaining to a restless, irresponsible, unscrupulous cla.s.s of people, whose princ.i.p.al ambition seems to be to live without work, and who have found it possible to so do under the guise of patriotism. [412]

Such was the problem which confronted Governor Taft in 1903 as to public order and protection of the peaceably inclined people, in the two main provinces hereinafter dealt with.

It is a great pity that in 1903 President Roosevelt could not have called in Secretary of War Root and sent for Senator Bacon, and those of the latter's colleagues whose philippics in the Senate of the year previous against Generals Jake Smith and J. Franklin Bell had reminded an aroused nation of the days of Cicero and Verres, Tacitus and Africa, etc., and had a frank talk with them somewhat after this fashion:

Gentlemen, Governor Taft has a hard job out there in the Philippines. There is a big insurrection going on in the province of Albay, which is the very richest province in the whole archipelago, a province as big as the State of Delaware, [413]

having a population of about a quarter of a million people, and he has, for police purposes, a crude outfit of native constabulary, officered mostly by ex-enlisted men of the mustered-out American volunteer regiments. The personnel of the officers may be weeded out later and made a fine body of men, but just at present there are a good many rather tough citizens among them. Moreover, as soon as the constabulary was gotten together they were at once set to work chasing little remnants of the insurgent army all over the archipelago. So as yet they are as undisciplined an outfit as you can well imagine, and have never had any opportunity to act together in any considerable command. Moreover, hardly any Filipinos have yet had a chance to learn much about how to shoot a rifle. Also, they know practically nothing about the interior economy of large commands, such as handling and distributing rations systematically for troops and for prisoners, or doing the same as to clothing, and nothing at all about medical care of the wounded, or the sick, or prisoners. So you can see that to handle this insurrection with such an outfit as this is sure to mean trouble of one sort or another. Wholly unauthorized overtures through officious natives, to the insurgent brigand chiefs, may, possibly, be made, promising them immunity, when they ought to be made an example of; and that will embarra.s.s us in punishing them when we do finally get them, and be an encouragement to other cut-throats to do likewise in the future. Worst of all, you can see that if some five hundred or a thousand of these brigands, or insurgents, or whatever they are, suddenly surrender, the ordinary police accommodations for housing and feeding prisoners will be wholly inadequate; yet we will have to detain them all until our courts can sift them and see which are the mere dumb driven cattle and which are the mischievous fellows. Therefore, in case of such a surrender, the nature of this constabulary force, as I have already described it to you, makes it plain that its inadequacy to meet the serious conditions we are now confronted with may result in our having on our hands a series of little Andersonville prisons that will smell to heaven. The majority of the people of the province are really sick of the war. Their best men have all surrendered and come in. But there is an ignorant creature calling himself a general, by the name of Ola, who seems to have a great deal of influence with the lawless element that do not want to work. Ola has gathered together nearly a thousand malcontents, who obey him implicitly. He is terrorizing Albay province and the regions adjacent thereto, and as the constabulary are not adequate to patrol the whole province, the people do not know whether self-interest demands that they should side with Ola or with us. Clearly, therefore, this is a case for vigorous measures, if we all have a common concern for the national honor, for the maintenance of law and order in a territory we are supposed to be governing, and for the proper protection of life and property there. General Bell or somebody else ought to be sent there to comb that province just as Bell did Batangas. But we don't want any howl about it.

At this point of the supposed colloquy,--I say "colloquy," though tradition has it that most of President Roosevelt's "colloquys" with Senators were what Henry E. Davis, the Sidney Smith of Washington, calls "unilateral conversation"--one can imagine the senatorial Ciceros exchanging glances expressive of the unspoken thought: "The man certainly has his nerve with him. Does he think the Senate is an annex of the White House?" Then we can imagine President Roosevelt bending strenuously to his task with infinite tactfulness thus: