Colossus (13 page)

As McKinley portrayed it, annexation was an onerous duty, thrust upon the United States by the will of Providence.
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Such religious appeals doubtless had considerable public resonance.
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The decisive arguments for the occupation within the American political elite were nevertheless more military and mercenary than missionary.
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The rebellion against American annexation, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, began soon after the publication of the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded the Philippines to the United States in return for twenty million dollars (roughly the same price that had been paid for Texas, California and the other Mexican cessions fifty years before, and therefore a good deal less land per dollar). The islands turned out to cost the United States even more than that. In the space of three years the number of American troops committed to the Philippines rose from just 12,000 to 126,000.
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Although Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901, and the war declared officially over in July 1902, resistance continued on some islands for years afterward. It was not a pleasant war; nor was it to be the American military’s last taste of jungle warfare against guerrillas indistinguishable from civilians.
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Senior officers swiftly resorted to harsh measures: Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered his men on the island of Samar to take no prisoners—a breach of the laws of war—adding: “I wish you to kill and
burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the better you will please me … I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms.”
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By the time the fighting was over, more than 4,000 American servicemen had lost their lives, over 1,000 more than had been killed in the war against Spain. Approximately four times as many Filipinos were killed in action, to say nothing of civilians who died because of war-related hunger and disease.
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Meanwhile, William Howard Taft, a judge from Ohio, was put in charge of a five-man civilian commission that sought to win Filipinos over by building schools and improving sanitation, proving, as one of the commissioners ingenuously put it, that “American sovereignty was … another name for the liberty of the Filipinos.”
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The war alone had cost six hundred million dollars. How much would postwar reconstruction add to the bill?

It was not, however, its cost that aroused the initial domestic opposition to the war in the Philippines so much as the principle of the thing. We should not imagine, of course, that the Anti-Imperialist League spoke for a majority of voters.
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But its membership included two former presidents, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, a dozen senators from both parties, eight former members of Cleveland’s cabinet, to say nothing of the millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The league had enough leverage to make Filipino independence a part of the 1900 Democratic Party platform.
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And in Mark Twain it had on its side the most influential American man of letters of the day.

Twain’s attitudes anticipate those of future generations of American antiwar intellectuals. He had begun by welcoming the “liberation” of the Philippines from Spain, writing to a friend in June 1898: “It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom. It is another sight finer to fight for another man’s. And I think this is the first time it has been done.” But by October 1900 he had “read carefully” the Treaty of Paris and concluded “that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines…. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons in any other land.” Twain’s voice was muffled.
Harper’s Bazaar
rejected his short story “The War Prayer,” in which an aged stranger utters the following prayer before a congregation: “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! … O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of
their patriotic dead; … help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children wandering and unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land.” Privately, but not publicly, Twain described McKinley as the man who had sent U.S. troops “to fight with a disgraced musket under a polluted flag” and suggested that the flag in question should have “the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”
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His disapprobation carried weight. Opponents of a war do not need to command majority support to undermine a war effort. Although the Democrats failed to thwart annexation in Congress,
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and although their candidate was defeated by McKinley, the extent of opposition to annexation in the Democratic press was impressive.
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The revelation that General Smith and Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller had ordered the summary execution of Filipino prisoners gave the antiwar campaign a glaring opportunity to embarrass the government.
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McKinley could be sure of victory in 1900 only by distancing himself from full-blown imperialism.
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Theodore Roosevelt had once likened the Filipinos to the Apaches and Aguinaldo to Sitting Bull.
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Thrust into the presidency by McKinley’s assassination, he nevertheless hastened to create at least the semblance of democracy in the Philippines, privately admitting that he would “only be too glad to withdraw” from what seemed to be America’s Boer War.
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The first elections to the national legislature called into being by the Organic Act saw fifty-eight out of the Assembly’s eighty seats go to nationalists who had campaigned for immediate independence. Within less than a decade the so-called Jones Act (1916) confirmed that the islands would be granted independence “as soon as a stable government can be established.” Yet it was not nationalist pressure that determined when that day would come. Nor did the decision to grant the Philippines their independence reflect a wholly sincere repudiation of the original annexation on the part of the United States. The decisive campaign for Filipino independence was in fact waged by a coalition of sectional lobbies within the U.S. Congress, motivated almost solely by their own self-interests: sugar, dairy and cotton producers who wanted to exclude Philippine cane sugar and coconut oil from the U.S. market, hand in glove with trade unionists pressing for immigration restrictions against Filipino workers. Indeed, so harsh were the provisions of the original American independence offer of 1933 that the islands’ legislature refused
to accept it. Although the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 was somewhat less punitive—it left the future of the American military bases on the islands open to negotiation—its economic provisions remained essentially the same. Independence would mean a phased imposition of American tariffs on Philippine products, a heavy blow to an economy that by this time relied on the American market to buy more than three-quarters of its exports.
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There was much less for Filipinos to celebrate when independence finally came in 1946 than is generally appreciated.

It is perhaps too harsh to dismiss American rule over the Philippines as a failure. But it was certainly far from the success that Franklin Roosevelt later made out.
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Quite apart from the economic plight of the islanders as they were squeezed out of the American market, the strategic gains of American rule proved to be negligible. First, the grandiose American plans for the economic penetration of Asia—which were, after all, the whole point of establishing bases across the Pacific—were no more than half realized. Secondly, when the Japanese launched their military challenge against the United States in December 1941, the American bases from Pearl Harbor to Subic Bay proved to be easy targets.

DICTATING DEMOCRACY

There was, however, an alternative to formal European-style imperialism; indeed, the decision to grant the Philippines political (if not commercial) freedom was part of that alternative. Instead of occupying and running fully fledged colonies, the United States could instead use its economic and military power to foster the emergence of “good government” in strategically important countries. Initially, that meant not just pro-American government but also American-style government. The development of this new approach to empire, which had something in common with the British notion of indirect rule, owed much to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. But the underlying idea can be traced back to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (December 1904), which declared: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately
require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
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Wilson, however, went further. Just a week after entering the White House, the new president declared to the press that, in future, cooperation with Latin American countries would be possible “only when supported at every turn by the orderly processes of just government based on law, not upon arbitrary or irregular force…. We can have no sympathy with those who seek to seize the power of government to advance their own personal interests and ambition.” The implicit Wilson Corollary was that only certain types of government would be tolerated by the United States in Latin America. Military dictators were out, but so too were revolutionaries. “The agitators in certain countries wanted revolutions,” he remarked, “and were inclined to try it on with the new administration … he was not going to let them have one [a revolution] if he could prevent it.”
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The future would therefore lie with governments that had the good sense to position themselves between the abhorrent extremes of “arbitrary … force” and “revolution” Against unacceptable regimes the United States reserved the right to use force.
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Just where such a policy might lead became suddenly clear to the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1913, when Wilson declared his intention not to recognize the government of General Victoriano Huerta, who had seized power in Mexico following the assassination of the liberal premier Francisco Madero. After Walter Page, the American ambassador in London, had explained his government’s position to Grey, the following conversation ensued:

GREY: Suppose you have to intervene, what then?

PAGE: Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.

GREY: But suppose they will not so live?

PAGE: We’ll go in and make ’em vote again.

GREY: And keep this up 200 years?

PAGE: Yes. The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.
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Thus was born the paradox that was to be a characteristic feature of American foreign policy for a century: the paradox of dictating democracy, of enforcing freedom, of extorting emancipation.

It should be said at once that, alongside this “new principle,” the older imperialist impulses continued to work. Economic and strategic considerations, plus the usual assumptions of racial superiority—all these played their part in U.S.-Latin American relations. Indeed, the Wilsonian approach was in many ways simply grafted onto preexisting policies in the region.

The strategic crux of American policy was the Central American isthmus and the long crescent of islands–stretching from the Straits of Florida to the island of Trinida–that separate the Caribbean from the Atlantic, what Henry Cabot Lodge called the “outwork essential to the defense” of the continental “citadel.”
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The countries that therefore mattered most in the region were Nicaragua and Panama as well as the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, divided since 1844 between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
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What seemed the vital question of control over the projected canal across the isthmus was resolved by military means in 1903. The U.S. Marines had in fact been sent to Colombia on two previous occasions (in 1885 and 1895), but it was their third intervention, this time in support of Panamanian separatists, that proved to be decisive. In essence, Roosevelt used the U.S. Navy to establish Panama as an independent state after the Colombian Senate refused to ratify an agreement leasing land for the construction of the canal.
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Within ninety minutes of the secessionists’ coup, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama, which obligingly granted Washington a ten-mile-wide strip of territory through which the canal would be built.
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This was achieved with an almost laughably small show of force. The sole reported casualties were “a Chinaman in Salsipuedes Street and … an ass.”
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