The Spanish-American War returned him to the fighting: he did well at the Battle of El Caney in Cuba, getting shot in the chest in the process. Coming over to the Philippines, he served under MacArthur in the central Luzon campaign and again distinguished himself to the commanding general. MacArthur recommended him for promotion to brigadier general in early 1901, a recommendation that Taft agreed with, though with the ambiguous caveat that Smith “has reached a time when promotion … would worthily end his services, for I believe that it is his intention to retire upon promotion.”23
This was wishful thinking. Smith accepted the promotion and continued his career, and when the situation on Samar arose, Chaffee appointed him commander of the Sixth Separate Brigade without hesitation. Historians have remembered this as a bad decision, and it was.24 But Smith’s actions on Samar, while extreme, were initially spurred on and encouraged by the American command, both military and civilian. It was time, all agreed, for harshness on Samar.
Smith is reported to have told his subordinates to turn the interior of the island into a “howling wilderness,” and to execute all male inhabitants of the island over the age of ten. How serious Smith was when he said it remains in some doubt, but the general stringency of his policies is not. Smith tightened a vise on Samar by land and sea. A naval blockade closed around the island. American gunboats captured or sank boats moving without a license from the American command. By the end of 1901, 226 ships and boats had been so treated. On land, the population was forced into zones of concentration around the major towns and anything left outside was considered fair game. American units burned villages, killed animals, and destroyed crops.
Worse, the American presence in Samar in late 1901 and early 1902 was marked by vicious brutality in too many instances. A fair number of American officers, encouraged explicitly or implicitly by Smith, tortured and executed insurrectos, prisoners, and civilians without evidence or trial. Though many officers attempted to mitigate Smith’s orders and avoid cruelty, many did not. It may not have been a howling wilderness, but it was still bad. William Keane, who took part in the campaign, recalled, “We did not take any prisoners. We shot everybody on sight.”25 That this was largely an aberration in the American effort does not excuse it.
Things were bad enough by the beginning of 1902 that Taft insisted Chaffee do something. The commanding general sailed down to Samar in January and spent several weeks there, insisting that Smith drastically scale back the violence and depredations. He did so, and Samar began, to an extent, to recover. This recovery was aided in May and June by the surrender of General Lukhban and the general collapse of the insurgency.26 By the summer of 1902, the insurgency on the island had been crushed for the most part. The rebel bands that remained were scattered, ill-equipped, and incapable of serious action. American rule, for the most part, was unchallenged. The stringency had worked, at some cost in pain and suffering. How much of that suffering was unnecessary will never be known.
Cholera
The tactics of civilian concentration had been successful on Samar, as they had been elsewhere. But they had created a dangerous situation that finally came to a head in 1902. Cramming thousands together at close quarters in areas without sufficient capacity led to extreme problems with sanitation and hygiene. An army surgeon remarked on the situation:
I find excreta, dead animals, slop, stable manure, and other filth made by the Army have been dumped from 100 to 300 yards from the spring which furnishes drinking water for the entire town. … I am surprised that any office should have allowed such vile filth to be dumped on ground where it is liable to contaminate the water supply.27
The unsanitary conditions often combined with a lack of sufficient food, as farmers were unable to bring in their crops for want of field hands to harvest them or because the crops were destroyed by American units. The result was a tightly packed, somewhat malnourished population with severe sanitation problems and compromised immune systems, a perfect situation for an epidemic.
That it did not occur in 1901 can be laid to the weather. The concentration policy did not really gather steam until the fall, and the cooler weather of the fall and winter slowed down disease transmission. But with the warming of spring 1902, all the above factors came into play. The result was a catastrophic outbreak of disease.
The culprit was cholera, a disease spread through contaminated food and water. Once ingested, cholera bacteria take up residence in the small intestine. The toxins they give off cause the intestinal walls to leak fluid, leading to an extreme case of diarrhea, vomiting, and massive dehydration. Without rehydration, the person soon dies of water and electrolyte loss.
Prevention requires extensive sanitation efforts and a commitment to personal and societal hygiene. Treatment in the current day is rehydration using a combination of intravenous fluid and electrolytes, antibiotics to shorten the course of the disease, and rest. Today, cholera is considered a rare but easily treatable disease. In the Philippines at the turn of the century it was a death warrant. Antibiotics had not been invented, and the need for rehydration was not understood clearly. Nor was rehydration straightforward. The supply of sterile water was low, given the large quantities needed, and it was difficult to produce enough of it by boiling.
George C. Marshall was then a young lieutenant, just graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, who was journeying to his unit in the Philippines. He arrived in Manila to find it wracked by the disease. That slowed his journey substantially; though he could leave the city on an interisland steamer, he had to sit on the ship for five days as it anchored offshore of Mindoro, under quarantine. After the passage of five days made it clear that no one on board had the illness, Marshall landed. But it was only a month or so before cholera broke out there. It started with extraordinary suddenness. Marshall remembered meeting three nuns early one May morning and chatting with them briefly. Then:
I mention these sisters in particular because suddenly the cholera broke out. It broke out almost in a day. We had no warning of it there. We thought we were safe. It broke out and the three sisters—I helped bury them by three o’clock that afternoon.28
The soldiers had no means of curing the disease. All they could do was watch the natives suffer and attempt to prevent transmission.
The outbreak was severe enough that they were hard-pressed not to fall victim to it themselves. The army enforced strict hygiene, as Marshall remembered:
Spread not by contact with the sick, but by contamination of food and drink, [cholera] could be checked by meticulous cleanliness. Men in Calapan were confined to barracks; everything they ate or drank was thoroughly boiled; hands had to be scrubbed, mess kits scoured and thoroughly rinsed. These procedures were rigorously enforced by military discipline lest the soldiers, like soldiers everywhere, took shortcuts. A very little skimping could cost you your life.29
Marshall’s unit set up a “cholera isolation camp” for the sick Filipinos, in hopes of reducing the spread of the disease. There, the only constant was death, as Marshall found when he visited:
The first time I went I found the soldiers [on guard] peacefully eating their supper off a pile of coffins. Later on, there weren’t any coffins. The deaths came too rapidly and they were buried by dozens in a trench. A sheet was put over them and disinfectant poured on them. It was a tragic sight. The sides of the tents were rolled up so you could see the patients on these gold metal cots without any sheets, their legs drawn up almost under their chins, generally shrieking from the agony of convulsions. But they didn’t last long. … I don’t remember anybody recovering at that time.30
The Americans were trying. Marshall worked himself to exhaustion during the epidemic. One evening he was chatting with a doctor friend named Fletcher Gardener, who emphasized a point by saying that he believed he had come down with cholera and was going to die. Marshall then dozed off in the middle of the conversation. The next morning he woke up to see Gardener, who did not have cholera, but shook his fist at the young
lieutenant and mockingly shouted, “There’s the damn fellow who went to sleep when I told him I was dying.”31
There was nothing funny about the epidemic. It hit some areas particularly hard. The densely populated parts of central Luzon had a high casualty rate, as did the southern province of the Batangas. But all the provinces were affected to one degree or another. Exactly how many died is difficult to figure precisely. Those who died, as we have seen from Marshall’s remembrances, were often simply laid out in mass graves without record. The only population counts from the pre-American period are deeply unreliable Spanish censuses, which makes comparisons to post-epidemic censuses less than useful. But the most plausible estimates for cholera deaths seem to be in the range of 150,000 to 200,000. The result was a demographic catastrophe that resembled the ones of the 1880s, the decade of death, as it had been called.
The last year of the war should thus be seen against this background. Even as the insurgents fought to sustain themselves and hold on to the last remnants of their revolution, hundreds of thousands of their compatriots were dying. They themselves suffered greatly from the illness and a large number surrendered while sick, or simply died in their refuges, disappearing from the fight without recollection or record. Even as the Americans sought to chase the insurgents, hundreds of thousands of their new subjects died, and a fair number of U.S. soldiers fell prey to the disease.
Thus, even as the embers of the fight flickered only fitfully, the conflict—colored by the atrocities of Samar and the wave of cholera—took a darker, more apocalyptic hue. The Philippines seemed to be collapsing into barbarity and chaos, compounded by a locust swarm that accompanied the cholera epidemic in a number of provinces. The situation seemed biblical, and the book of choice, Revelations.
Domestic Reaction
It did not take long for news of Jacob Smith’s actions on Samar to trickle back to North America. The horror of the situation confirmed for many anti-imperialists what they had been warning about all along. The United States would not civilize the Filipinos; instead, the situation would see Americans descend into cruelty and callousness. In response, the anti-imperialists raised a storm of protest.
The most concrete form of this was the convening of hearings in the Senate to examine events in the Philippines. That politics played a role is undoubtedly true; the 1902 midterm elections were looming, and the Democrats sensed vulnerability in a Republican Party shocked by the loss of its leader and still coming to terms with Theodore Roosevelt. The committee members were aided by the secret intriguing of the ambitious commanding general of the U.S. Army, Nelson A. Miles. Miles, appointed to the largely ceremonial post in 1895, had felt continually slighted by first Root and McKinley and then Root and Roosevelt. The resentment had festered in the fall of 1901 when a number of indiscreet comments on Miles’s part had led to both private and public rebukes by the secretary of war and the president and included a confrontation with Roosevelt at a White House reception in December. Miles saw his opportunity in the Philippine situation to wreak political revenge on the administration, and he worked behind the scenes to do so.
But to ascribe all or even most of the motivation to politics is grievously to underestimate the genuine concerns that senators like George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts had. He believed that empire was utterly incompatible with the spirit of the American republic and here, he worried, was confirmation.
The hearings started on January 26, 1902, before the cholera outbreak reached epidemic levels. They were held in private, without much publicity, a surer sign of the lack of political calculation than any assurance the senators made. For months, a parade of witnesses, including Elwell Otis and Arthur MacArthur, sat in front of the Senate committee to testify about the situation in the Philippines.
Even as this searching examination was taking place behind closed doors, the public news from the archipelago continued to be unsettling. Cholera deaths were one thing; another was the full flowering of the results of Samar. A series of trials drove home to the American public the violence and brutality committed there. First in the docket was William Littleton Waller, a Marine major who, after a disastrous reconnaissance mission that might have served Joseph Conrad well for a model, had summarily ordered the execution of eleven native guides for no more real crime than assisting Marines starving in the jungles of Samar. Put in front of a court-martial, Waller defended himself with reference to General Order 100. Things might have remained confined to that, but the prosecution put Jacob Smith on the stand, and the general essentially perjured himself in denying the orders he had given his subordinates. Smith’s testimony was swiftly rebutted by a series of witnesses, leading to Waller’s exoneration. Next in the docket was Smith himself, his court-martial ordered by Roosevelt personally.
What emerged from the court-martial to a distressed America was a catalog of questionable behavior. For the first time, the grimy details of the campaign in Samar became public and the public did not like what it saw. Combined with the release of information from the Senate hearings on the Philippines, the result was a political firestorm centered on Elihu Root and Theodore Roosevelt. “If we are to ‘benevolently assimilate’ Filipinos by such methods, we should frankly so state, and drop our canting hypocrisy about having to wage war on these people for their own betterment,” wrote The Times-Picayune (New Orleans).32
Roosevelt’s difficulties were compounded by the timing. The postassassination honeymoon period was well over by the spring of 1902 and Republican thoughts were beginning to turn to the midterm elections and the presidential race of 1904. Large sections of the GOP were not convinced that Roosevelt was the man to lead them in either the short or long term. To replace him, they hoped to convince a man of eminence, popularity, and unquestioned ties to the policies of McKinley: Sen. Mark Hanna.
Outrage over the Philippines thus hit Roosevelt at his most vulnerable. From the start, he had been clearly identified with the imperial adventure in both the Philippines and Cuba. He had played a large role in getting the nation involved in the Philippines, from war planning with the Asiatic fleet, to the telegram message of February 25, 1898, sending Dewey to Manila Bay, to the unstinting support he had expressed in the years afterward. A substantial chunk of his public popularity had come from his exploits in Cuba. He saw himself as a new breed of Republican, carrying the United States forward into a twentieth century of American power and prominence. The weakness of this was, of course, the suspicion of the old-line Republican establishment, personified by the man who might now take his place on the Republican ticket.
Roosevelt went on the counteroffensive. A series of articles in Republican newspapers condemned the criticism and minimized the atrocities. The capstone of the effort was a speech by Roosevelt’s close friend Henry Cabot Lodge in the Senate on May 5. In it, the senator admitted that American soldiers had committed atrocities and expressed regret over their actions. But, Lodge pointed out, atrocities had occurred on both sides. He went on to list a catalog of horrors visited on Americans by the insurrectos, listing a variety of dismemberments, mutilations, and other vicious acts. American atrocities, he concluded, may not have occurred “altogether without provocation.”33
The counterattack was enough to moderate the storm. Further moderation occurred after the results of Smith’s court-martial. His legal counsel had been smart enough to keep the general off the stand, and thus prevented him from making further imprudent statements. Though Smith was found guilty, it was only of using improvident language to his subordinates, and the court gave as punishment only an admonition. To that, Roosevelt added involuntary retirement. The result did not please those at the far ends of the argument, but for most it was enough, and the furor settled down and allowed Congress to debate and pass a permanent government act for the Philippines.
That act organized the American infrastructure in the islands for the long term. The post of military governor would be abolished, and the governor of the islands would be a civilian, if still support
ed by the continuing presence of American forces. With the insurgency flickering out, the risk of turning the entire government over to civilian administrators was relatively minimal. The situation had changed since the fall of 1901, and there was little to suggest that the insurgents could make anything that resembled a concerted effort.
The government act was passed in July 1902, giving Roosevelt the opportunity to issue a proclamation declaring an end to the conflict on July 4. The date, obvious in its symbolism, was well timed for the run-up to the 1902 midterm elections. It also put the final capstone on any discussion of American atrocities. The war was over, Roosevelt was saying implicitly, and now was the time to move forward. As a final sop, Roosevelt included in the proclamation an amnesty offer to any insurrectos still active who wished to surrender themselves.
Roosevelt’s proclamation, of course, had no actual effect on the ground. There was still fighting going on, and there would be for years to come. The Americans could call those attacking them whatever they wished, as Pvt. Evan Wyatt did in December 1902 when talking about an ambush suffered by his unit. Wyatt’s detachment was marching through the jungle. Warned of a Filipino band, they attempted to preempt an assault but, “not knowing the exact location, we marched right into them, and they opened fire and got three of us on the first volley.” Wyatt himself was wounded in the arm, but kept firing. Gradually, the Americans recovered. “The enemy retreated, but kept firing. We followed them for some distance, firing at every one we saw … and I continued with the boys till the firing stopped and the chase was ended.” The ambush strongly resembled any number of insurgent assaults during the war, but Wyatt was careful to note that this was a “band of outlaws,” not insurgents.34
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