From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (54 page)

Pacification of the Philippines proved much more difficult and costly. McKinley spoke eloquently of "benevolent assimilation" and insisted that "our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun. They go with the flag."
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But he also ordered the imposition of unchallenged U.S. authority. The United States soon found itself at war with Aguinaldo's insurgents.
The Filipinos naively expected to gain recognition of their independence and then counted on the U.S. Senate to defeat the peace treaty. Many Americans viewed the Filipinos with contempt. Tensions increased along their adjoining lines around Manila until an incident in February 1899 provoked war. Americans called it the "Philippine Insurrection," thus branding the enemy as rebels against duly constituted authority. The Filipinos viewed it as a war for independence fought by a legitimate government against an outside oppressor. It became an especially brutal war, hatreds on both sides fueled by nationalism, race, and a tropical sun. It provoked enormous controversy in the United States for a time and then was largely forgotten until obvious if often overdrawn parallels with the war in Vietnam revived interest in the 1960s.

The army of occupation and U.S. civilian officials took seriously McKinley's charge of "benevolent assimilation," seeking to defuse resistance through enlightened colonial policies. The military developed a "pacification" program to win Filipino support, building roads and bridges, establishing schools, tackling the twin scourges of smallpox and leprosy with public health facilities, and distributing food where it was most needed. They began to restructure the Spanish legal system, reform the tax structure, and establish local governments. McKinley sent fellow Ohioan William Howard Taft to the Philippines in 1900 to implement his policies. Taft shared the general American skepticism of Filipino capacity for self-government, but he also accepted McKinley's earnest sense of obligation to America's "little brown brothers." He launched a "policy of attraction," drawing to the United States upper-class
ilustrados
to govern the islands under colonial tutelage. They helped establish a Filipino political party with its own newspaper and American-style patronage. The United States' colonial policies drained support from Aguinaldo while sparing the nation some of the cost and stigma of direct imperialism. At the same time, U.S. officials on the scene reinforced ties with the old elite from the Spanish era, ensuring that it would remain in power long after they left. They began the process of Americanization of the islands.
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In time, U.S. forces also suppressed the insurgency, no mean feat in an archipelago of seven thousand islands, covering an area of half a million square miles, with a population of seven million people. American volunteers and regulars fought well and maintained generally high morale against an often elusive enemy under difficult conditions, suffocating heat and humidity, drenching monsoon rains, impenetrable jungles, and
rugged mountains. After a period of trial and error, the army developed an effective counterinsurgency strategy. Its civic action programs helped win some Filipino support and weaken the insurgency. Later in the war, it added a "policy of chastisement," waging fierce and often brutal campaigns against pockets of resistance. The United States did not commit genocide in the Philippines; atrocities were neither authorized nor condoned. Under the pressures of guerrilla warfare in the tropics, however, brutal measures were employed. Americans came to view the war in racial terms, a conflict of "civilization," in Roosevelt's words, against the "black chaos of savagery and barbarism." The U.S. troops often applied to their Filipino enemy racial epithets such as "nigger," "dusky fellow," "black devil," or "goo-goo" (the last a word of uncertain origin and the basis for "gook" as used by GIs in the Korean and Vietnam wars). The war also gave rise to the word
boondock,
derived from the Tagalog
bonduk,
meaning remote, which to soldiers had dark and sinister connotations.
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To secure information about the guerrillas, U.S. troops used the notorious "water cure," allegedly learned from Filipinos who worked with them, in which a bamboo tube was thrust into the mouth of a captive and dirty water—"the filthier the better"—was poured down his "unwilling throat." In Batangas, late in the war, Americans resorted to tactics not unlike those employed by the despised Weyler in Cuba, forcing the resettlement of the population into protected areas to isolate the guerrillas from those who served as their sources of supply. Following the "Batangiga massacre" in which forty-eight Americans were killed, Gen. Jacob Smith ordered that the island of Samar be turned into a "howling wilderness." Although not typical of the war, these events were used to discredit it and came to stamp it. They aroused outrage at home, provoked congressional hearings that lasted from January to June 1902, and revived a moribund anti-imperialist movement.
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Americans too often ascribe the outcome of world events to what they themselves do or fail to do, but in the Philippine War the insurgents contributed mightily to their own defeat. Aguinaldo and his top field commander, a pharmacist, military buff, and admirer of Napoleon, foolishly adopted a conventional war strategy, suffering irreplaceable losses in early frontal assaults against U.S. troops before belatedly resorting to guerrilla
tactics. By the time they changed, the war may have been lost.
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Although the Filipinos fought bravely—the bolo-men sometimes with the machetes for which they were named—they lacked modern weapons and skilled leadership. Given the difficulties of geography, they could never establish centralized organization and command. Split into factions, they were vulnerable to U.S. divide-and-conquer tactics. Aguinaldo and other insurgent leaders came from the rural gentry and never identified with the peasantry or developed programs to appeal to them. In some areas, the guerrillas alienated the population by seizing food and destroying property—some Filipinos, ironically, found their needs better met by Americans.
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The insurgents placed far too much hope in the election of Bryan in 1900 and found his defeat hugely demoralizing. The capture of Aguinaldo in March 1901 in a daring raid by Filipino Scouts allied with the United States and posing as rebel reinforcements came at a time when the insurgents were already reeling from military defeats. If not the turning point in the war, it helped break the back of the rebellion, although fighting persisted in remote areas for years.

On July 4, 1902, new president Theodore Roosevelt chose to declare the war ended and U.S. rule confirmed. Victory came at a cost of more than 4,000 U.S. dead and 2,800 wounded, a casualty rate of 5.5 percent, among the highest of any of the American wars. The cost through 1902 was around $600 million. The United States estimated 20,000 Filipinos killed in action and as many as 200,000 civilians killed from war-related causes. At home, the war brought disillusionment with the nation's imperial mission.

The United States had taken an interest in the Philippines in part from concern about its stake in China, and it is no coincidence that acquisition of the islands almost immediately led to a more active role on the Asian mainland. By the late 1890s, China had become a focal point of intense imperial rivalries. For a half century, the European powers—joined by the United States—had steadily encroached on its sovereignty. Following the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, the great powers exploited China's palpable weakness to stake out spheres of influence giving them exclusive
concessions over trade, mining, and railroads. Germany initiated the process called "slicing the Chinese melon" in 1897. Using the killing of two German missionaries as a pretext, it secured from the hapless imperial government a naval base at Qing Dao along with mining and railroad concessions on the Shandong peninsula. Russia followed by acquiring bases and railroad concessions on the Liaodong peninsula. Britain secured leases to Hong Kong and Kowloon, France concessions in southern China. The powers threatened to reduce the once proud Middle Kingdom to a conglomeration of virtual colonies.
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The U.S. government had shown little interest in China during the Gilded Age, but in the 1890s pressures mounted for greater involvement. Trade and investments enjoyed a boomlet, once again stirring hopes of a bounteous China market. The threat of partition after the Sino-Japanese War produced pressures from the business community to protect the market for U.S. exports. By this time, missionaries had increased dramatically in numbers and penetrated the interior of China. As certain of the rectitude of their cause as the Chinese were of the superiority of their civilization, the missionaries promoted an ideology very much at odds with Confucianism and undermined the power of local elites. Scapegoats in Chinese eyes for growing Western influence, the missionaries were increasingly subjected to violent attacks and appealed to their government to defend them against the barbaric forces that threatened their civilizing mission. Missionaries, along with the "China hands," a small group of diplomats who became self-appointed agents for bringing China into the mainstream of Western civilization, constituted a so-called Open Door constituency that sought to make the United States responsible for preventing further assaults on China's sovereignty and reforming it for its own betterment. Some influential Americans indeed came to view China as the next frontier for U.S. influence, the pivot on which a twentieth-century clash of civilizations might hinge.
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These pressure groups were pushing for an active role in China at precisely the point when the United States was becoming more sensitive to its rising power and prestige in the world. For years, the U.S. government had resisted appeals from missionaries for protection, reasoning that it could hardly ask the Chinese government to take care of Americans when it did not protect Chinese and when its exclusionist policies incurred
their wrath. Secretary of State Olney initiated the change. Acting as assertively with China as with the British in Latin America, he proclaimed in 1895 that the United States must "leave no doubt in the mind of the Chinese government or the people in the interior" that it is an "effective factor for securing due right for Americans resident in China."
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To support his strong words, he beefed up the U.S. naval presence in Chinese waters. The United States in the 1890s "dramatically broadened" the definition of missionary "rights" and made clear its intent to defend them.
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Once the Spanish crisis had ended, the McKinley administration also took a stand in defense of U.S. trade in China. The task fell to newly appointed Secretary of State John Hay. At one time Lincoln's private secretary, the dapper, witty, and multitalented Hay had worked in business and journalism and was also an accomplished poet, novelist, and biographer. He had served in diplomatic posts in Vienna, Paris, Madrid, and London before returning to Washington. Independently wealthy, urbane, and extraordinarily well connected, the Indianan was a shrewd politician. Like many Republicans, he had once opposed expansion, but he gave way in the 1890s to what he called a "cosmic tendency."
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Pressured by China hands like W. W. Rockhill, Hay concluded that a statement of the U.S. position on freedom of trade in China would appease American businessmen and possibly earn some goodwill among the Chinese that might benefit the United States commercially. It would convince expansionists the United States was prepared to live up to its responsibilities as an Asian power. In addition, according to one State Department operative, it could be a "trump card for the Administration and crush all the life out of the anti-imperialist agitation."
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Thus in September 1899, Hay issued the first Open Door Note, a circular letter urging the great powers involved in China not to discriminate against the commerce of other nations within their spheres of influence.

The following year, the United States joined Japan and the Europeans in a military intervention in China. Simmering anti-foreign agitation fed by bad harvests, floods, plague, and unemployment boiled over in the
summer of 1900 into the Boxer Rebellion, so named because its leaders practiced a form of martial arts called spirit boxing. Blaming foreigners for the ills that afflicted their country, the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists" sought to eliminate the evil. They bore placards urging the killing of foreigners. Certain that their animistic rituals made them invincible—even against bullets—they fought with swords and lances. Armed bands of Boxers numbering as high as 140,000 burned and pillaged across North China, eventually killing two hundred missionaries and an estimated two thousand Chinese converts to Christianity. With the complicity of the empress dowager, the Boxers moved on Beijing. In June 1900, joined by troops of the imperial army, they killed two diplomats—a German and a Japanese—and besieged the foreign legations, leaving some 533 foreigners cut off from the outside world. Often dismissed as fanatical and reactionary, the uprising, as one sensitive and empathetic China hand presciently warned, was also "today's hint to the future," the first shot of a sustained nationalist challenge to the humiliation inflicted on a proud people by the West.
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The great powers responded forcibly. After a first military assault failed to relieve the siege of the legations, they assembled at Tianjin an eight-nation force of some fifty thousand troops and on July 7 took the city. In August 1900, while the world watched, the multilateral force fought its way over eighty miles in suffocating heat and against sometimes stubborn opposition to Beijing. After some hesitation, McKinley dispatched A China Relief Expedition of 6,300 troops from the Philippines to assist in relieving the siege, setting an important precedent by intervening militarily far from home without seeking congressional approval.
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Although collaboration among the various powers was poor—each nation's military force sought to grab the glory—the troops relieved the siege, in the process exacting fierce retribution against the Chinese through killing, raping, and looting. Although late in arriving, the Germans were especially vicious. Kaiser Wilhelm II enjoined his troops to act in the mode of Attila's Huns and "make the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China, that no Chinese will ever again dare look askance at a German."
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The kaiser's statement and the Germans' brutal behavior gave them a name that would follow them into World War I. In a protocol
of September 1901, the powers demanded punishment of government officials who had supported the Boxers, imposed on China an indemnity of more than $300 million, and secured the right to station additional troops on Chinese soil.