That left U.S. acquisition, undertaken in behalf of “the welfare and happiness and the rights of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. [Great and long-continued applause.]” True, the people there had not given their consent to this acquisition, but how could they in the heat of a war and the chaos of its aftermath? He continued:
Every present obligation has been met and fulfilled in the expulsion of Spanish sovereignty from their islands; and while the war that destroyed it was in progress we could not ask their views. Nor can we now ask their consent. Indeed, can any one tell me in what form it could be marshaled and ascertained until peace and order, so necessary to the reign of reason, shall be secured and established? [Applause.] . . . It is not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers. [Applause and cheering.]
Here’s where McKinley showed the iron resolve normally kept shrouded behind his countenance of magnanimity. Having explained how the stark forces of reality had imposed upon America the unsolicited duty of receivership, the president made clear there would be no turning back, no wavering, and no hand-wringing. “Grave problems come in the life of a nation,” said McKinley, “however much men may seek to avoid them. They come without our seeking,—why, we do not know, and it is not always given us to know,—but the generation on which they are forced cannot avoid the responsibility of honestly striving for their solution.”
The solution was twofold: convey to the Filipinos through word and deed that America’s intentions were benevolent; and crush the rebellion that was thwarting America’s uplifting mission. Ultimately, said the president, the task of determining the Philippine future would fall to Congress, “the voice, the conscience, and the judgment of the American people.” But in the meantime the job resided with him as commander-in-chief. He concluded:
Until Congress shall direct otherwise, it will be the duty of the Executive to possess and hold the Philippines, giving to the people thereof peace and order and beneficent government; affording them every opportunity to prosecute their lawful pursuits; encouraging them in thrift and industry; making them feel and know that we are their friends, not their enemies, that their good is our aim, that their welfare is our welfare, but that neither their aspirations nor ours can be realized until our authority is acknowledged and unquestioned. [Loud and enthusiastic applause.] . . .
I cannot bound my vision by the blood-stained trenches around Manila,—where every red drop, whether from the veins of an American soldier or a misguided Filipino, is anguish to my heart,—but by the broad range of future years, when that group of islands, under the impulse of the year just past, shall have become the gems and glories of those tropical seas. [Prolonged applause.]
As he did so often, the president wrapped himself in his country’s flag. Patriotism dripped from his words. But he added a new element to the American story: the idea that the nation was venturing into the world not for conquest or exploitation but to lift up less civilized peoples and foster productive and healthy nations where none before had existed. There was a certain patronizing tone in these passages, even a condescension. Perhaps that was inevitable in a world dominated by Western power, technology, mobility, and wealth, and when most other regions untended by Western colonialism seemed backward and helpless by comparison. And the president’s particular brand of idealistic expansionism certainly lent itself to allegations of hypocrisy, given the exploitation that inevitably accompanied most colonial enterprises, as Senator Hoar had noted. Indeed the anti-imperialists savaged the speech, none more vociferously than Godkin in The Nation. “There was not a spark of initiative or leadership in it,” said the magazine, portraying McKinley as “one of those rare public speakers who are able to take a good deal of humbug in such a way as to make their average hearers think it excellent sense and exactly their idea.”
Perhaps Godkin’s underlying complaint was that public sentiment coincided largely with the president’s vision and not the anti-expansionist thinking of his magazine. It was clear, in any event, that the Boston speech gave much of the country precisely what it wanted: an agreeable rationale for America’s bold new venture into the world. The anti-imperialists would continue their agitations, but the country’s majority sentiment favored the expansionist surge—so long as it was executed smoothly and at an acceptable cost.
* * *
IN THE PHILIPPINES, meanwhile, Aguinaldo saw his job as raising the cost. After his initial defeats outside Manila in early February, he began massing troops twelve miles north for a counterattack before Otis received reinforcements scheduled to arrive soon under General Henry Lawton. “If Regular troops enroute were here,” reported Otis, “could probably end war, or all active opposition, in twenty days.” But it soon became clear that Aguinaldo posed a more serious threat to Otis’s forces than the general realized. “Situation in Manila critical,” he wired Lawton. “Your early arrival necessary.”
Even before Lawton’s arrival, Otis managed to dislodge rebel troops when they became most threatening. On March 6, after an insurgent ambush on U.S. forces near the Manila reservoir, the Americans scattered the insurgents. The next day, the Post reported that a series of rapid U.S. advances, followed by flank movements, resulted in the enemy being “completely routed.” The paper added, “The rebels bolted at the first sign of the advance, but they separated into small bodies whenever the [cover] afforded opportunities, and kept up a running fire.”
This was significant, reflecting a pattern that soon defined the war. Aguinaldo’s troops would mass here or there, inflict whatever damage they could, then scramble before Otis could attack. The Filipinos were no match for the Americans in firepower or arms accuracy, and America’s superior weaponry inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy whenever Otis managed to engage. But often he couldn’t engage because Aguinaldo’s troops simply disappeared into the jungle. They displayed remarkable agility in darting from place to place, avoiding decisive set-piece battles, and preserving themselves for future small-scale attacks. Thus did Aguinaldo settle in for a long war.
Otis, focusing on minutiae as usual and lacking a big-picture vision, missed the significance of the Aguinaldo strategy. Early in the war, after a U.S. unit charged a Philippine sniper field and found it vacant, the general reported that the enemy had “skulked back to their homes disguised as civilians” and suggested such behavior betokened a lack of resolve that would render the insurgents ineffective fighters.
The general didn’t know his enemy. As General Arthur MacArthur moved north on Luzon and the Filipinos evaporated before him, Otis thought things were going well. The casualty ratio overwhelmingly favored the Americans, and Aguinaldo’s troops couldn’t stop them or even inflict serious losses. In late March, when MacArthur reached Malolos, site of Aguinaldo’s provisional government, he expected “desperate resistance” from the Philippine forces. But Aguinaldo just faded away with his government and command structure before MacArthur could enter the city. Otis, sensing victory, wired Washington, “Present indications denote insurgent government in perilous condition; its army defeated, discouraged and scattered. Insurgents returning to their homes in cities and villages between here and points north.”
Once again Otis got it wrong. Clinging to a strategic concept fast losing its plausibility, he couldn’t see that Aguinaldo’s chief aim was to avoid debilitating set-piece battles and preserve his army for future assaults designed to enervate U.S. forces over time. Part of the problem was a misconception of Philippine society and the inhabitants’ view of the U.S. arrival. The idea, shared by most Washington officials, including McKinley, was that Aguinaldo represented a small minority of Tagalog people and that most other Filipinos would embrace the U.S. presence as soon as they perceived McKinley’s promised benevolence. Then they would assist in bringing down the insurgency. No doubt this described many Filipinos who wanted the U.S. civic project to proceed in earnest as soon as possible.
But this view underestimated Aguinaldo’s support and also missed the capacity of his forces to intimidate countryside inhabitants into providing insurgents with food, supplies, and safe shelter as they scampered here and there before the advancing Americans.
Meanwhile the president’s Philippine Commission under Jacob Schurman had arrived in Manila and begun extensive fact-finding efforts. On April 4 it issued a proclamation designed to clarify to Filipinos the American policy. It promised “an enlightened system of government” providing “the largest measure of home rule and the amplest liberty consonant with the supreme ends of government and compatible with those obligations which the United States has assumed toward the civilized nations of the world.” It also made clear, though, that the United States would enforce its Philippine sovereignty. Commission interviews with Philippine elites convinced the commissioners that “Filipinos in general incapable of self government,” as Schurman put it in a memo to Hay. “Masses ignorant and the few capable are without experience, except Spanish misgovernment.”
In late April MacArthur surrounded Aguinaldo’s army at the leader’s new makeshift capital, Calumpit, and delivered a debilitating blow. In four hours of fighting, his troops took the town, moved beyond it, crossed the important Rio Grande River in a brilliant maneuver, and routed a large Philippine force under General Antonio Luna. But Aguinaldo scrambled to a nearby railhead and escaped with a large force. Meanwhile Lawton pushed the enemy north and west and entrenched himself comfortably at Angat, east of Calumpit.
Fighting ceased with the onset of the rainy season in May, and both sides assessed their positions. For McKinley, a big question was how many troops were needed to finish the job once the dry season returned. By late April, 7,000 regulars were on their way to Luzon, with another 8,000 scheduled for departure shortly. With volunteers returning home as their enlistments expired, Otis would have some 30,000 troops, mostly regulars. “This is believed at the War Department to meet all of the needs of the summer season,” reported the Washington Post.
But by May 7 MacArthur realized an insurgent force of 7,000 men had dug in at Bacolor, within artillery distance of his troops. This seemed to suggest that more troops would be needed when fighting resumed. Otis’s army could sweep large swaths of territory with ease but lacked sufficient strength to hold captured lands. At a June 2 Cabinet meeting, it was determined that, while Otis’s 30,000 men would suffice for the summer, a reassessment would be required in the fall.
Around the same time, Schurman bundled up his thoughts into a long telegram whose transmission cost, Hay wryly suggested to the president, could perhaps have been used to buy off Aguinaldo and get him back to Hong Kong. Schurman dismissed the idea of a quick Philippine victory. Insurgent leaders, he warned, planned guerrilla warfare, with both active and passive resistance designed to enervate the U.S. effort “and win by dividing American opinion, of which they keep well informed.” Further, he argued that Aguinaldo’s cadre had instilled in the uneducated rank and file a stark view of U.S. perfidy, reflected in the fate of America’s native Indians at Anglo-Saxon hands. “Masses ignorant,” he wrote, “amazingly credulous with childish grasp of actual facts, great cunning, unbounded suspicion, primitive passions uncontrollable when once aroused and unreasonable sense honor excellent material for able and unscrupulous leaders.” America could not get to the leadership corps by influencing this peasant class, suggested Schurman; it would have to get to the peasant class by dealing with the leaders. The time was ripe because the commission’s proclamation, combined with Otis’s battlefield strength, had divided Aguinaldo’s leadership, with some advocating acceptance of U.S. sovereignty if it included significant Filipino autonomy.
This split at the top, argued Schurman, offered an opportunity to pursue a negotiated end to the war. “Continuation of fighting,” he wrote, “tends to make Filipinos consider us as conquerors rather than as liberator. . . . Believe magnanimity our safest, cheapest and best policy.”
Indeed for nearly a month the Americans and Filipinos had been exploring prospects for a negotiated settlement. This gavotte of a negotiation began on April 28, when two of General Luna’s officers, Colonel Manuel Arguelese and Lieutenant José Bernal, entered MacArthur’s lines under a truce flag to propose a cessation of hostilities pending a peace agreement. They were promptly escorted to Manila, where they told Otis and Schurman during a three-hour conference that they came at the behest of General Luna and Aguinaldo. They asked for a two-week armistice so Aguinaldo’s congress could convene and enter into negotiations with the Americans. The Filipinos wanted to avoid a humiliating battlefield surrender—and still held out for Philippine independence.
Impossible, replied the Americans. They could not negotiate with Aguinaldo’s congress because America didn’t recognize any such congress or any such government. The best they could do was guarantee amnesty for all insurgents. And there would be no discussion of Philippine independence. Besides, Luna’s massing of 7,000 troops in front of MacArthur’s army raised questions about whether the Filipinos actually desired peace or were merely “sparring for time” to rehabilitate their demoralized army. Otis refused to accept any formal armistice, though he ordered his generals to refrain from aggressive actions while the talks continued.
In the end the exchange came to naught. The insurgent negotiators conceded on May 22 that they had no authority to negotiate terms without clearing them with Aguinaldo, who already had issued a statement declaring he would never accept any U.S. autonomy plan. Otis meanwhile insisted upon an insurgent surrender without terms. He wanted to “whip the insurgents so thoroughly that they will be glad of the opportunity to surrender,” as the Post put it. Any compromise, Otis believed, would embolden the Filipinos to prepare for another insurrection a few years hence.
Schurman disagreed. “I believe force was necessary,” he told reporters, “because they thought us weaklings and cowards; but I believe also that conciliation should accompany force.”
McKinley sided with Otis. Early in the gavotte, hoping for a breakthrough, he had instructed the Philippine Commission to avoid any unnecessary or humiliating conditions in order to ease the way toward a settlement. But Aguinaldo’s continued insistence on independence exhausted the president’s patience. Rejecting Schurman’s call for conciliation after receiving his long telegram of early June, he wired the commission chief, “Those of the leaders who have willfully and for their own purposes placed us in a false position before their deluded followers cannot be relied upon to set us right.”
Seeing himself outnumbered and marginalized, Schurman headed for home—leaving in place Denby and Worcester, who aligned with Otis in recommending “prosecution of war until insurgents submit,” along with eventual establishment of a civil government as outlined in the president’s communications.
Thus would the U.S. war effort continue—and expand. When War Secretary Root traveled to Plattsburgh, New York, to confer with McKinley during a presidential vacation there, he was accosted by an A.P. reporter asking if the Philippine war would be prosecuted with vigor. “Yes, sir,” replied the secretary. “. . . All the men, all the arms, and all the supplies necessary to end the trouble in the islands will be furnished at the earliest possible moment.”
How large a force?
“There will be fifty thousand men there ready for active service at the close of the rainy season . . . and more will be sent there if necessary.” A 66 percent increase in military manpower, possibly more. Clearly it was dawning on official Washington that the Philippine challenge was proving far more arduous than initially thought.
* * *
BEYOND THE PHILIPPINES, a host of other issues required the president’s leadership during this time. Foremost among them was urgent legislation to reorganize the military and authorize a standing army of up to 100,000 officers and men. McKinley’s authorization for wartime troop levels would expire with Spain’s treaty ratification. Then the army would fall from 65,000 men to 25,000, a number compl
etely inadequate to handle the Philippines situation, not to mention Cuba and Puerto Rico. The president threatened an extra congressional session if he didn’t get the authorization before Congress’s early March adjournment.
But opposition was widespread and intense. Even members who favored the treaty found the idea of a 100,000-man standing army tough to swallow. It smacked of European-style militarism. “While the President . . . is hurrying the army and navy across the seas to inflict upon an alien people a government against their will,” declared Indiana’s Republican representative Henry Johnson, “I propose fearlessly . . . to make a plea for liberty and . . . against the perpetuation of the injustice.” He compared McKinley unfavorably to Aguinaldo, whom he hailed as a statesman while the president was merely a weak reed in the winds of popular opinion, “to which he bows right or wrong.”
That was too much for Charles Grosvenor, who rose on the House floor to denounce Johnson’s speech as “the fiercest and most vindictive attack upon the Administration” he had heard in the House. Declaring Aguinaldo to be hardly a statesman, he accused the Philippine leader of ordering the execution of anyone who sought to print the president’s proclamation on America’s Philippine policy.
“Aguinaldo was our ally a few months ago,” interjected Johnson.
“Why did he not remain our ally?” retorted Grosvenor, with more passion than logic. “Benedict Arnold was our ally also before he became a traitor.”
The House passed the bill easily—168 to 126—on a party-line vote, but everyone knew the real test was the Senate, where opponents planned to kill it with continuous debate (called a “filibuster,” after a widely used term for pirates) extending right up to adjournment. That forced a compromise in which the president got his 100,000-man army, including 65,000 regulars and 35,000 two-year recruits, as well as the organizational structure he wanted. But the authorization would expire on July 1, 1901. The revised bill passed the Senate on February 27 on a vote of 55 to 13 and quickly cleared the House with little debate. The president signed it on March 2. The permanent size and scope of America’s standing army would be settled later, though few doubted that the country had entered a new era of ongoing military preparedness.
President McKinley Page 43
