We should not overestimate either of those factors, though. Had the war truly been universally vicious, it seems deeply unlikely that the Filipinos would have reconciled themselves to the Americans so quickly and, even after independence, found themselves in an affectionate relationship with their erstwhile overlord. The forgetting of the war that Raymond Ileto pointed to is the clearest evidence that neither Samar nor the cholera epidemic were typical.
In the end, it was a war of crossroads for all involved. For the Spanish, it was, along with the war in Cuba, the end of an empire long past its days of glory. For the Americans, it was the final war of a frontier ethos that had driven them across a continent and the first war of a global ethos that would send them out over the oceans. For the Filipinos, it was a defeat that looked, in later decades, a lot like victory. A collection of islands, fractured by culture and society, became, largely because of the shared experience of revolution, war, and insurgency, a self-conceived nation. They had reached for independence and found, for a brief moment then and longer later, something that looked more like sovereignty.
Further Reading
Distressingly enough, the literature on the Philippine-American War is not of particularly high quality, with a number of important exceptions. The war itself has long been neglected, and those who have turned to it have tended to do so to promote their own agendas. Those agendas sometimes led to history that was more interesting for what it said about the author and the author’s era than about 1899–1902.
Immediately after the war, most of the works celebrated the civilizing influence of the American presence. There were some anti-imperialist works as a counterweight, but for the most part America’s role in the Philippines was one of progress. The Philippine-American War largely disappeared as a topic of much study in the 1930s and ’40s. Philippine-American relations were relaxed and amicable and—the prevailing attitude seemed—nothing should disturb that, certainly not the minor unpleasantness of 1899–1902. The start of World War II in 1941 pushed the conflict further out of historical consciousness, an exile that continued into the postwar years.
The war only reappeared in the 1960s as a stand-in for a current conflict. Historians looking aghast at the war in Vietnam discovered suddenly that America had fought another such war in Southeast Asia more than sixty years previously. That earlier war, they thought, could be mined for lessons for the current war, or simply to illustrate the appalling nature of all such guerrilla campaigns. Unfortunately the history this produced focused to the exclusion of almost all else on the malevolence and futility of the American effort. One practical effect of this was to overestimate the importance of the last year of the war. Another effect was the dawning surprise of the historians at the fact that—unlike in Vietnam—the United States actually managed to win in the Philippines. The contorted hand waving necessary to deal with the victory often produced a breeze that might have cooled American and Filipino tempers alike in that hot Manila summer of 1898. The two wars in Southeast Asia seemed linked as tragedy and farce, and the history that this vision produced was not of the highest grade.
A concurrent historiography developed in the Philippines, which reimposed a national vision on what had been a fragmented archipelago. Searching for an event to use as the founding date for Filipino nationalism, Filipino scholars found the war, and liked it. The sleepiness of the last several centuries of Spanish rule provided little in the way of inspiration. But the decade and a half after José Rizal’s 1889 visit to the Wild West show in Paris was stirring and martial and seemingly Filipino. There, the nation could be born. The Philippine-American War thus became, in retrospect, a national revolution. This made for stirring tales, but, unfortunately, rarely for sober history. The result has been a cascade of solid local studies but few good large-scale accounts of the war.
Only in the late 1980s did a set of serious scholars emerge who would reexamine the war in the Philippines carefully and with diligent scholarship. The work they have produced over the last two decades has begun the process of reclaiming the Philippines from ideology and is well worth reading. But the lesson remains: one should pick carefully when exploring the era and the war. What follows are my recommendations of particularly useful or interesting works, and those topics that I found particularly interesting. Thus, the recommendations are more eclectic than categorical.
Perhaps the best place to start is with Brian Linn’s foundational work on the Philippine conflict, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). His earlier The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989) is also valuable but more focused on the American army’s experience. An earlier work by John Gates, Schoolboys and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), serves as a useful corrective to the “Philippines as Vietnam” school.
No exploration of the history of the Philippines would be complete without reading something by Renato Constantino, the noted Filipino scholar. In this context, Renato Constantino and Letizia R. Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Quezon City, Philippines: Tala Publishing Services, 1975), would be the best place to start. It should be noted that Constantino is sometimes more interested in the war as a national event than in the war as it really was. Finally, there is always the daunting prospect of John R.M. Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection against the United States, 5 vols. (Pasay City, Philippines: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971). This work, all five volumes of it, is a remarkable accomplishment that combines history and documentation. Taylor, a U.S. Army officer who had served in the Philippines, was tasked with writing the official history. He did so, using thousands of intercepted insurgent messages, but the project, because of bureaucratic infighting, was not published until nearly seventy years later by a press in the Philippines.
There are specific topics within the larger war that are worthy of further exploration. The reaction of African-Americans, both civilians and soldiers, to the Philippine conflict is admirably handled in William B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). His follow-up volume, William Gatewood, Jr., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), provides the raw letters of African-American soldiers writing home. The day-to-day specifics of the military campaign on both sides also make for a choice subject. Unfortunately, the Filipino side has not been graced yet with a work that looks at the nuts and bolts of the Army of Liberation’s conventional campaigns against the Spanish and Americans and the guerrilla campaign against the United States. On the American side, for the battle of Manila, I do not think that Karl Irving Faust, Campaigning in the Philippines (San Francisco: Hicks-Judd, 1899), has been matched. William Thaddeus Sexton, Soldiers in the Sun (Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Publishing Company, 1939), is good for the whole war.
On the Philippine side of things, there are a range of fascinating works. Glenn Anthony May’s Inventing a Hero (New York: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) is an exploration of the situation before the United States arrived and the mythmaking that has grown up around that period and the figure of Andres Bonifacio. May’s earlier work, The Battle for Batangas: a Philippine Province at War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), is also useful. A similar study of the experience of a province during the war is Resil B. Morales, The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu: 1899–1906 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999). Also interesting, albeit highly defensive, is Aguinaldo’s work: Emilio Aguinaldo and Vicente Albano Pacis, A Second Look at America (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1957). His later memoirs offer a similar level of special pleading, at greater length.
For a sense of the larger world that gave the conflict its context, a number of works are good: Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750
(New York: Norton, 1989), offers a concise view of the foreign policy situation that confronted McKinley and Roosevelt. David Traxel’s 1898 (New York: Knopf, 1998) focuses on that year but is still valuable for before and after. Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003) is an excellent introduction to the domestic scene. Joel H. Silbey’s The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991) guides the reader through the evolution of the American political systems of the nineteenth century. Ronald Spector’s biography of Admiral Dewey is well written and useful: Ronald Spector, Admiral of the New Empire: The Life and Career of George Dewey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974). To understand the U.S. Navy at the turn of the century, see Harold Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939, 1967). Finally, two works by Edward Coffman explain the U.S. Army of the era perhaps better than anything else: Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784– 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Edward M. Coffman, The Regulars: The American Army, 1898–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
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Notes
Introduction: The Urgency of the Asking
1. Resil B. Morales, The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu: 1899–1906 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), 1.
2. Renato Constantino, Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1978), 261. See also, for a similar American view, John M. Gates, The United States Army and Irregular Warfare, self-published on the Internet at http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/book-contents.html, 11.
3. Brian Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
4. John Larkin, “Philippine History Reconsidered: A Socioeconomic Perspective,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (June 1982): 595–628.
1. A War of Frontier and Empire
1. The account of the meeting appears in a diary kept by Simeon Villa. Captured and translated by the American military, it offers a useful insight into Aguinaldo’s thoughts in late 1899. Obviously, the translation may not be perfectly reliable. It is, nonetheless, the best we have. See John R.M. Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection against the United States, vol. 5 (Pasay City, Philippines: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971), 7–10.
2. Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 4.
3. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 195.
4. John Leddy Phelan, “Free Versus Compulsory Labor: Mexico and the Philippines 1540–1648,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1, no. 2 (January 1959): 189–201.
5. John Larkin, “Philippine History Reconsidered: A Socioeconomic Perspective,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (June 1982): 613.
6. Ibid., 616.
7. Peter C. Smith, “Crisis Mortality in the Nineteenth Century Philippines: Data from Parish Records,” Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (November 1978): 51–76.
8. Glenn May, “150,000 Missing Filipinos: A Demographic Crisis in Batangas, 1887–1903,” Annales de Démographie Historique 21 (1985): 215–43, 216–18.
9. David Barrows, “The Governor-General of the Philippines under Spain and the United States,” American Historical Review 21, no. 2 (1916): 288–311.
10. Quoted in Sharon Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 27.
11. Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerilla in History (New York: Morrow, 1994 [1976]), 122; Delmendo, Star-Entangled Banner, 21–46.
12. For an analysis of one particular set of ethnic suspicions see David Porter, Ilokos: A Non-Tagalog Response to Social, Political, and Economic Change, 1870–1910 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980).
13. Asprey, War in the Shadows, 123.
14. Renato Constantino, Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1978), 270.
15. Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 190.
16. Quoted in William Thaddeus Sexton, Soldiers in the Sun (Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Publishing Company, 1939), 27.
17. Quote and statistics in Edward Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1986), 215.
18. Ibid., 263.
19. Dodge quote in ibid., 329. Marshall quote in Larry Bland, ed., George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue (Lexington, Va.: George C. Marshall Foundation, 1996), 130.
20. Quoted in Coffman, The Old Army, 231.
21. Quoted in ibid., 230.
22. Quoted in ibid., 284.
23. Brian McAllister Linn, “The Long Twilight of the Frontier Army,” Western Historical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (summer 1996): 141–67.
24. Quoted in Kenneth Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), 178.
25. Roosevelt to Mahan, May 12, 1890, in H. W. Brands, ed., The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 72.
26. Benjamin Harrison, Public Papers and Addresses of Benjamin Harrison, March 4, 1889–March 4, 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 32.
27. Quoted in Hagan, This People’s Navy, 195.
28. Harold Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967 [1939]), 215.
29. Harrison, Public Papers and Addresses of Benjamin Harrison, 114.
30. Richard Welch, Jr., The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 173–74.
2. McKinley and American Imperialism
1. Harry Sievers, ed., William McKinley, 1843–1901: Chronology, Documents, Bibliographical Aids (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1970), 24.
2. David Trask, 1898 (New York: Knopf, 1998), 90.
3. “Directive from the State Department to Stewart Lyndon Woodford,” July 16, 1897, quoted in Sievers, ed., William McKinley, 30–31.
4. McKinley’s State of the Union Address, December 6, 1897, in Sievers, ed., William McKinley, 30–31.
5. Hearst quote in Trask, 1898, 108; Dawes quote, entry for March 28, 1898, Charles Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1950), 150; newspaper quote from the Sacramento Evening Bee, March 11, 1898, quoted in Julius Pratt, “American Business and the Spanish-American War,” Hispanic American Historical Review 14, no. 2 (May 1934): 163–201.
6. “Submarine mine” from McKinley, “Special Message to Congress,” March 28, 1898, in Sievers, ed., William McKinley, 30–31. Dawes quote from Dawes, Journal of the McKinley Years, 153.
7. Louis Stanley Young, The Life and Heroic Deeds of Admiral Dewey (Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing Company, 1899), 55.
8. Quoted in Trask, 1898, 111.
9. Richard Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1965]), 173–200, 195.
10. Emilio Aguinaldo and Vicente Albano Pacis, A Second Look at America (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1957), 19.
11. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: Norton, 1989), 193.
12. John McCutcheon, diary entry for April 1898, in A. B. Feuer, ed., America at War: The Philippines, 1898–1913 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 3.
13. Quoted in Kenneth Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), 219.
14. McCutcheon, diary entry for May 1, 1898, in Feuer, ed., America at War,
19.
15. Quoted in Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” 173–200, 193.
16. Quoted in Young, Heroic Deeds, 111.
17. For cigarettes, see Hagan, This People’s Navy, 220; for statues, see William McElwee, The Art of War from Waterloo to Mons (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 277; for quote, see Young, Heroic Deeds, v.
18. Aguinaldo’s side of things can be found in Aguinaldo and Pacis, A Second Look at America, 36–39.
19. Ibid., 70–71.
20. Proclamation, June 23, 1898, in John R.M. Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection against the United States; A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction (Pasay City, Philippines: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971), 31.
21. Edward Coffman, The Hilt of the Sword: The Career of Peyton C. March (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 13.
22. William Thaddeus Sexton, Soldiers in the Sun (Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Publishing Company, 1939), 24.
23. Diary entry for June 27, 1898, Theodore Wurm Papers, Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.
24. Quoted in Sexton, Soldiers in the Sun, 20.
25. Smell and coffee from Sexton, Soldiers in the Sun, 20, 31. Christner quote from R. Jay Gift, Attitudes of the State Volunteer Soldiers Who Fought in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection (Shippensburg, Pa.: Shippensburg State College, 1976), no page number.
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