American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  Some imperialists cited the colonization of Hawai’i as reason for optimism in taking civilization to the Philippines. “The example of Hawai’i gives great encouragement to the philanthropist and the Christian who may look hopefully to the future,” as Senator John T. Morgan put it. While some based their opposition to the Philippine intervention on assumption of responsibility for inferior races, Morgan turned the argument on its head by suggesting that the Philippines might serve as a colonial space to alleviate the “Negro problem” at home. The Alabama senator argued that the South might purify itself by shipping to the Philippines the “alien race” of African-Americans.19

  Guerrilla Resistance and Indiscriminate Warfare

  Having been driven into the countryside by the occupiers, the Filipinos waged a guerrilla resistance encompassing tactics of sniping, stabbings with their bolos (long knives easily hidden in clothing), ambush and hit-and-run assaults, sabotage of roads and telegraph lines. The rebels could move seamlessly in and among the populace, which largely supported them but whose loyalty could otherwise be demanded at penalty of death. The United States responded by waging indiscriminate warfare while demanding unconditional surrender of the enemy.

  Enraged by the Filipinos’ resort to guerrilla resistance against the civilizing efforts of a superior race, the American occupiers embarked on a lethal campaign of counterinsurgency warfare. Alfred McCoy describes the conflict as “a dirty war marked by clandestine penetration, psychological warfare, disinformation, media manipulation, assassination, and torture.” Citing the “barbarous savagery” of the Filipino rebels, the Americans rationalized an indiscriminate campaign of exterminatory warfare.20 As savage tribes in the midst of an irrational revolt, the various Negritos, Tagalogs, Malays, and Moros would be met, as were the Mexicans, Indians, and Confederates, with uncompromising aggression. Once they had been pacified, like the Indian tribes, the Filipinos could then be shepherded to civilization.

  Confronted with the age-old problem of identifying rebels within the populace, the army took the approach, as General Elwell S. Otis, military governor of the Philippines, acknowledged, that “every Filipino was really an insurgent.” The lack of discrimination led to “the oppression of thousands of innocent natives,” Otis admitted. Like the Union during the Civil War, the Americans invoked General Order 100, based on the Lieber Code in which irregular forces could be denied protection under the international laws of war. Torture, collective punishment, and indiscriminate killing followed. As US forces patrolled the cities and set out into the “boondocks” (bunduk, in Tagalog, for mountains), only those Filipinos who displayed “strict obedience” to US authority were safe. And even they often were not given a chance.21

  US forces spoke openly of indiscriminate killing, employing the metaphors of “hiking” or “hunting” as did earlier generations on the US borderlands, as well as other colonials across the Australian outback, the South African veld, and myriad other settings. As Americans reinforced segregation at home through law, lynching, and terror, they went on “nigger hunts” abroad. The troops were “hiking all the time killing all we come across … killing niggers by the hundreds.” It was merely “sport to hunt the black devils,” soldiers acknowledged. The islands would not be pacified, a soldier from Kansas explained, “until the niggers are killed off like the Indians.” “Just back from the fight,” wrote a US infantryman. “Killed twenty-two niggers captured twenty-nine rifels [sic] … we just shot the niggers like a hunter would rabbits.”22

  Nearly 90 percent of generals and many other officers were veterans of the Indian wars and thus experienced in campaigns focused on “extirpation of guerrilla bands.” Many officers had little interest in disciplining soldiers in a race war against “treacherous and cowardly” rebels who, like Indians, engaged in sniping and hit-and-run attacks. In addition to indiscriminate killing, Americans deported and tortured prisoners, notably by the water cure, carried out collective punishments and arbitrary arrests; conducted summary executions; raped Filipino women; destroyed food, crops and farm animals; and confined masses of people in disease-ridden camps contributing to the staggering death toll of the conflict. US forces generally occupied “the best houses in every town” which they frequently “ransacked in hope of booty of Eastern lands … They looted everything and destroyed for the fun of it.” “In considering possible violations of the laws of war,” Brian Linn notes, “most senior officers preferred a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ”23

  As in previous wars, the United States depended on a large volunteer force that proved to be better trained and more organized and effective than in the earlier nineteenth-century conflicts. In contrast to the Mexican War, for example, army officers effectively led both the state and national volunteers and often praised their efforts. Taken as a whole, the US volunteers were “outstanding soldiers” and “far from being the bloody-handed butcher of fable,” Linn avers. Linn is no doubt correct that most soldiers were not butchers yet many did kill indiscriminately and regular officers criticized as well as praised them.24

  The Volunteers sometimes did “things too scandalous to write,” as Major Matthew A. Batson put it. During the capture of San Fernando north of Manila in the spring of 1899, as Batson informed his wife, the volunteers

  ransacked churches, private houses, and wantonly destroyed furniture … they enter the cemeteries, break open the vaults and search the corpses for jewelry … They make no distinction, they simply loot everything they come to … We come as a Christian people to relieve them from the Spanish yoke and bear ourselves like barbarians … Why, if I was a Filipino I would fight as long as I had a breath left.

  The volunteers were equally undisciplined in battle, Batson complained, as “they hear a shot, and then they turn loose and fire on everything they see— man, woman, or child. Then they report that they have been attacked by the Insurgents, and have driven them off with great loss to the Insurgents.” Batson’s ambivalence, much like George Crook’s in Indian country, had its limits: he later ordered an entire town destroyed after rebels ambushed and killed a close friend.25

  The army carried out a deadly assault and occupation of Cebu in which from 1898 to 1906 some 100,000 of the approximately 600,000 residents died from warfare and disease. In 1901, as guerrilla attacks continued on the mountainous island in the center of the archipelago, “American troops took to the field in earnest.” Angered by the continuing guerrilla resistance, “many of the American sorties at this time were plain killing expeditions.” Reports revealed “many cases of Filipinos killed or imprisoned on mere suspicion of being insurgents: carrying a bolo, refusing to act as a guide, transporting rice to the mountains, or ‘acting like a spy.’ “ The destruction of houses, farms, and food supplies forced the population into concentration camps, where disease especially cholera spread rapidly. “Death and famine stalked the land.”26

  As in the Indian Wars, atrocities against indigenes went unpunished whereas the US forces went on the rampage in response to “massacres” directed against them by the Filipinos. In September 1901, in the famous incident at Balangiga on the island of Samar, villagers orchestrated a surprise attack with their bolos, slaughtering 48 unsuspecting American soldiers at an early Sunday morning breakfast. In the weeks leading up to the attack the officer in charge of US forces in Balangiga, Capt. Thomas Connell, had tried to clean up the city and attempted to keep a tight rein on his rowdy soldiers who had arrived in Samar pumped up by “two months of drinking and whoring in Manila.” The US infantrymen had little interest in winning over hearts and minds in “the heart of Googooland” and believed their “nigger lover” commander was too hard on them and too soft on the indigenes. Rapes and other assaults enraged the villagers, who began to plot their revenge.27

  Similar to the response to Indian massacres, the traumatized Americans responded to Balangiga with an indiscriminate campaign not just in Samar but also throughout the Philippine archipelago. Reviving American cultural memory of th
e aftermath at Little Big Horn, the dead at Balangiga were reported to have been “mutilated and treated with indescribable indignities.” The victims included Connell, who was found decapitated. The Americans claimed that other victims had their bodies cut open and filled with food from the mess hall, though the Filipino guerrilla leader strongly disputed such accounts, explaining that there had been no time for desecrating bodies and that such acts violated indigenous taboos. Newspapers avoided such subtleties as they filled in the nation, already in shock over the McKinley assassination, with detailed accounts of the “treacherous savagery” on the part of the “despicable” natives. The images of slaughter and the trope of the “treachery” at Balangiga became “the guiding principle of American actions on Samar,” Louise Barnett explains. To most Americans Balangiga provided “indisputable evidence that force was the only proper policy.”28

  The recently appointed new commander of US forces in the Philippines, General Adna Chaffee, drawing on his experience in the Indian wars, had little patience with “false humanitarianism.” He blamed the Balangiga assault on “soft mollycoddling of treacherous natives” by civilian officials. Chaffee relished the authorization received from the newly inaugurated President Roosevelt to apply “the most stern measures to pacify Samar … in no unmistakable terms.” Primed for a campaign of “Injun warfare,” Chaffee declared, “The situation calls for shot, shells and bayonets as the natives are not to be trusted.”29

  The enraged Americans thus responded to the trauma inflicted at Balangiga with a spurt of genocidal violence and military injustice. General Jacob H. Smith, a close associate of Chaffee in the Indian Wars and a veteran of Wounded Knee, issued his famous order to convert Samar into a Biblical “howling wilderness,” as he authorized the killing of any Filipino aged ten or above. “I want no prisoners,” Smith famously advised. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.” The troops followed their orders, as they razed the town and killed indiscriminately. “We did not take any prisoners,” a volunteer acknowledged. “We shot everybody on sight.” As a result of his blatant violations of the rules of war, Smith was brought before a court martial and convicted but merely admonished and retired. Another officer who summarily burned scores of villages and executed his Filipino auxiliaries in a fit of rage was found not guilty. The verdict in this case, which outraged even the hardliner Chaffee, came after “Every military witness ritualistically invoked treachery, this central principle of Filipino character and motivation.”30

  The boomerang of indiscriminate violence reverberated throughout the archipelago in the wake of Balangiga. In 1902, US forces, both volunteers and regulars, under General J. Franklin Bell conducted an undisciplined and brutalizing campaign to subdue the rebels in the province of Batangas on Luzon. Reminiscent of previous and future US wars, Americans meant to punish the Filipinos until they surrendered unconditionally to the superior US forces.

  Angered by the continuing Filipino campaign of homeland defense, Bell asserted, “civilization demands that the defeated side, in the name of humanity, should surrender and accept the result.” When the rebels refused to comply, Bell believed they deserved whatever consequence they might suffer, the same as Indians who had refused to report to the reservations, or Mexicans, Confederate rebels, and subsequently “Viet Cong” who persisted in guerrilla resistance. Bell’s forces conducted summary executions and tortured other captives, as they liberally employed the water cure. “It got results,” one veteran later recalled, sentiments echoed more than a century later by defenders of torture in the Iraq War.31

  The US forces wantonly destroyed Filipino property to punish acts of resistance. “After an attack on one of their patrols, the US troops usually burned the houses in the nearest barrio” regardless of whether the residents were in any way connected with the resistance. In the course of search and destroy operations “women were molested by officers and soldiers alike without any kind of consideration; those who resisted such barbarity were threatened with imprisonment, deportation, or death.”32 As in the previous wars, the Americans conducted scorched-earth policies by killing cattle and other farm animals, destroying crops and gardens, and generally laying waste to the province. “Much of the devastation occurred for the simple reason that Bell’s subordinates wanted to destroy and Bell chose not to upbraid them for doing so,” Glenn May explains. “The predictable result of such behavior was ecological destruction on a massive scale.”33

  One of the officers unleashed by Bell, Col. William E. Birkhimer, increasingly frustrated over the pace of the pacification effort, proposed one of two genocidal approaches to end it: “first, to kill off all the males; second, capture and deport them … Either plan properly put into execution would accomplish the object sought,” he explained. Unsurprisingly, such attitudes produced an “astoundingly high level of civilian mortality in the zones of concentration and led to widespread abuses on the part of the U.S. military.” Bell acknowledged that US confiscations of food stores “have made it difficult for the people to obtain rice,” hence many were starving.34

  While the US forces carried out torture, assassination, and indiscriminate killing, diseases took the greatest toll on the people of Batangas as a result of their close confinement in horrific conditions in the US re-concentration camps. Much like the destruction of Indian horses and food stores, the policy in the Philippines “aimed at the isolation and starvation of guerrillas through the deliberate annihilation of the rural economy,” Kramer explains. The army conducted a “scorched-earth policy, burning residences and rice stores, destroying or capturing livestock, and killing every person they encountered” while driving the peasantry into the fortified encampments. Tens of thousands died of malaria, measles, dysentery, and cholera as “wartime health and sanitary conditions facilitated the spread of the disease.” As May notes, it is “clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that death rates soared in the province during the period January–April 1902, when the civilians were confined.”35

  As a result of “rigorous censorship of foreign correspondents by the U.S. Army,” news of atrocities filtered across the Pacific slowly, but Bell’s egregious campaign eventually came under investigation. Lodge, however, closed to the public the hearings of his Committee on Insular Affairs while the army conducted a “charade” in which it claimed that war criminals had been brought to justice. In fact—consistent with virtually the entire history of American warfare—very few were actually punished, the overwhelming majority of those in the Philippines for minor offenses.36 “By early 1903, the Philippine-American War was already becoming a dim memory to the U.S. public,” notes May, hence Bell escaped unscathed and went on to become army chief of staff.37

  Worn down and brutalized by US forces, the Philippine revolutionaries were also demoralized by the marginalization of the ambivalent anti-imperialists in the United States, who had been repudiated by McKinley’s reelection in 1900. At the same time US counterinsurgency efforts prompted defections by Filipino elites including insurgent leaders. In March 1901, the revolutionary forces suffered a crippling blow with the capture of Aguinaldo. The rebel leader acknowledged US suzerainty, prompting the defections of additional insurgent leaders. Sporadic resistance continued, however, even after the last of the revolutionary leaders surrendered in June 1902.38

  Indiscriminate violence infused with Orientalist religious discourse characterized the US occupation of Muslim Mindanao, the second largest island, located in the far south of the Philippine archipelago. The “Moro problem … was not only a question of governing uncivilized tribes but of controlling the dominant Mohammedan element,” a US official explained.39 In 1899 the United States in a strategic move signed an agreement recognizing the Muslim faith and allowing the sultan to rule “Moroland.” At the time Mindanao was not a high priority in the US pacification campaign and the agreement pleased the sultan, as the Muslims had long been in conflict with Christian Filipinos to the north.

  Despite
the agreement with the sultan, the Americans viewed the “Moros,” as the Spanish had dubbed the various ethnic groups who had converted to Islam, as religious fanatics. Following the defeat of the revolutionary forces in 1902, Muslims in Mindanao violently opposed the US-backed Filipino colonial government led by Catholic elites. Ultimately, “Force seems to be the only method of reaching them,” Secretary of War William Howard Taft avowed. The Americans would impose control “through a series of merciless military campaigns,” a “brutal pacification program” carried out through the establishment of army outposts and police forces placed in strategic locations throughout the province.40

  As a vast and sparsely populated “frontier,” Mindanao “inevitably drew comparisons with the Western frontier where ‘unexplored’ territory was populated with small groups of ‘savage Indians.’ Indeed, the most effective Americans in this tropical frontier were the veterans of the Apache war,” Patricio Abinales points out. General Leonard Wood, a fellow Rough Rider hero and close confidant of Roosevelt, drew such comparisons, noting that a Muslim leader was of “the Geronimo type.”41

  Wood viewed the Muslims as “religious and moral degenerates” and proceeded to launch a genocidal campaign against them. Driven by a “toxic confluence of careerism, progressive ideology, and Muslim discourse,” Wood set out to overthrow “the ridiculous little sultan of Sulu.” In March 1906 Wood unleashed a three-day artillery assault against some 1,000 “Moro malcontents” who had taken refuge in Bud Dajo, an extinct volcano. “At least six hundred Muslims, including hundreds of unarmed women and children, perished” compared to 20 US personnel dead. Army Major Hugh Scott acknowledged that the people on Dajo “declared they had no intention of fighting—ran up there only in fright.” The slaughter of these terrified refugees “would soon vanish from public consciousness” and like many Indian and colonial massacres remains widely unknown today.42