Looking for a Fight: A New History of the Philippine-American War
What is striking about “Honor in the Dust,” Gregg
Jones’s fascinating new book about the Philippine-American War, is not
how much war has changed in more than a century, but how little. On
nearly every page, there is a scene that feels as if it could have
taken place during the Bush and Obama administrations rather than those
of McKinley and Roosevelt. American troops are greeted on foreign soil as saviors and then quickly despised as occupiers. The United States triumphantly declares a victorious end to the war, even as bitter fighting continues. Allegations of torture fill the newspapers, horrifying and transfixing the country.
Nowhere will this book resonate more profoundly with modern readers,
however, than in the opening episode, which is as difficult to read as
it is jarringly familiar. Jones describes the use of an interrogation
technique whose name alone instantly brings to mind a recent, highly
contentious tactic. To force information from a Filipino mayor believed
to have been covertly helping insurgents, American soldiers resort to
what they call the “water cure.” After tying the mayor’s hands behind
his back and forcing him to lie beneath a large water tank, they pry his
mouth open, hold it in place with a stick and then turn on the spigot.
When his stomach is full to bursting, the soldiers begin pounding on it
with their fists, stopping only after the water, now mixed with gastric
juices, has poured from his mouth and nose. Then they turn on the spigot
again. The technique, which was perfected during the Spanish
Inquisition, produced in its victims the “simultaneous sensations of
drowning and of being burned or cut as internal organs stretched and
convulsed.”
Jones, who was once a correspondent in Manila and whose first book, “Red
Revolution,” took readers inside the New People’s Army, has a thorough
understanding of the Philippines. But it is on the United States that
“Honor in the Dust” casts the brightest, and at times harshest, light.
After America first entered the Philippines in 1898, during the course
of the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley insisted that
it was the Filipinos’ “liberty and not our power, their welfare and not
our gain, we are seeking to enhance.” The American people, however,
flush with victory, had started to dream of expansion, even empire, and
pressure mounted on McKinley not just to free Spanish colonies but also
to lay claim to them. By 1900, an election year, McKinley had begun to
give in, arguing that “territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war
in a holy cause.” Addressing a campaign crowd in Nebraska, he asked,
“Shall we deny to ourselves what the rest of the world so freely and
justly accords to us?” The answer, as he knew it would be, was an
instantaneous and uproarious “No!”
There was within the United States a strong and vocal anti-imperialist
movement, which included former President Grover Cleveland, Andrew
Carnegie and Mark Twain, but it struggled to tamp down the country’s
growing expansionist zeal, and to compete with the energy, tenacity and
bulldog ambition of one man in particular: Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, who in the course of his meteoric six-year rise from New York
City police commissioner to president, nurtured a deep and unshakable
contempt for what he called the “unintelligent, cowardly chatter for
‘peace at any price.’ ” Not only had the “clamor of the peace faction”
left him unmoved, Roosevelt wrote, it had served to strengthen his
conviction that “this country needs a war.”
To Roosevelt’s great frustration, McKinley was as reluctant to go to war
as Roosevelt was eager. McKinley, who had been commended for his
bravery during the battle of Antietam, wanted to be re-elected, but he
wanted nothing to do with war. “I have been through one war,” he said.
“I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.” When
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge recommended Roosevelt for assistant secretary
of the Navy, McKinley made the appointment hesitantly, guessing,
rightly, that the young man would not give him a minute’s peace until he
sent troops into battle. “I want peace,” he told another Roosevelt
supporter, “and I am told that your friend Theodore . . . is always
getting into rows with everybody.”
Although Roosevelt moves in and out of Jones’s narrative, disappearing for long stretches, he still manages to steal the spotlight, just as he does in every book in which he appears. When McKinley dragged his feet before sending troops to Cuba, Roosevelt sneered that the president had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” In the Department of the Navy, Roosevelt gleefully took over while his boss was on summer vacation, anointing himself the “hot weather secretary” and crowing to a friend that he was having “immense fun running the Navy.” In Cuba, after choosing his regiment of Rough Riders from 23,000 applicants, he ordered his famous charge up Kettle Hill wearing a custom-made fawn-colored Brooks Brothers uniform with canary-yellow trim.
By the time Roosevelt became McKinley’s running mate in 1900, he had all
but moved into the White House. “ ’Tis Tiddy alone that’s a’running,”
the political humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote, “an’ he ain’t runnin’,
he’s gallopin’.” It was as president, however, that Roosevelt’s hunger
for expansion was finally tempered. When he suddenly found himself at
the helm after McKinley’s assassination — an event Jones mentions almost
in passing, his eyes fixed on Roosevelt — the national mood had already
begun to shift. Stories of American soldiers torturing Filipino
insurgents and slaughtering civilians had become too prevalent, and too
convincing, to ignore. “There have been lies, yes, but they were told in
a good cause,” Twain wrote, ridiculing the government with his acidic
satire. “We have been treacherous, but that was only in order that real
good might come out of apparent evil.”
The American people were finally beginning to realize that pacification
of the Philippines was not going to be a replay of the Spanish-American
War. The Filipinos were poor, but they were not unsophisticated. They
developed shadow governments, used an underground system to finance
their insurgency — collecting donations and even taxes — and repeatedly
surprised American troops with guerrilla attacks, killing a few men at a
time and leaving the rest in a constant, exhausting state of vigilance.
Enraged, the soldiers responded by employing the same tactics for which
they had so recently criticized the Spanish. They burned whole
villages, executed suspected guerrillas and felt justified in using any
interrogation technique at hand, including the water cure.
What was intended, in McKinley’s mind at least, as an effort to help the
Filipinos, ended up igniting a deep hatred of Americans. In the spring
of 1902, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, who had argued against the war
from the beginning, delivered an excoriating three-hour speech on the
Senate floor that left the nation stunned and Roosevelt fuming. “You
have wasted 600 millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly 10,000
American lives — the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces.
You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to
benefit,” he said. “Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in
converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of
the garment of the American and to welcome him as liberator . . . into
sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries
cannot eradicate.”
In the end, “Honor in the Dust” is less about the freedom of the
Philippines than the soul of the United States. This is the story of
what happened when a powerful young country and its zealous young
president were forced to face the high cost of their ambitions. There
finally came a point, Jones writes, when even Theodore Roosevelt
realized that “America’s dream of empire had passed.”
Candice Millard’s most recent book is “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale
of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President,” about James A.
Garfield.
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