The Philippine War: White Man's Burden

January 7, 2012 Michael Streich. Copyright

The Philippine War broke out before the United States Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris, ending the Spanish-American War. Conflict in the Philippines represented American endeavors to join the club of imperialist nations. Efforts to turn the archipelago into an American colony were motivated, in part, by the notion of exceptionalism, a view still held today and used to justify foreign policy initiatives. The Philippine War carried Manifest Destiny into the twentieth century and continues to characterize a lesson still unlearned in American foreign policy.

 

American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny

 

During the November 22, 2011 debates involving Republican candidates for the presidency, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney encouraged people, “to take advantage of the extraordinary examples of the West and freedom represent for their people.” Romney was referring to U.S. policy in the Middle East, pointing to American exceptionalism, a term he has used in the past to refer to the U.S. as, among other things, the bearer and guarantor of democracy.

 

The Filipino people in 1899 could corroborate this view of Anglo-Saxonism. Emilio Aguinaldo is often portrayed as an insurgent leader of a Philippine guerilla movement rejecting American goodwill and brutally killing U.S. soldiers after the Spanish-American War ended; President McKinley, goaded by the same imperialists that had steered the nation into war with Spain, became convinced that God had given the Asian nation to the U.S.

 

Historian James Ford Rhodes, writing in 1922, states that “President McKinley was a conscientious Methodist, and he fully believed that in the Philippines the white man’s burden was laid upon the U.S.” Rhodes, citing two McKinley-administration sources, notes that the Filipinos “attacked the American soldiers at Manila.” Recent scholarship, however, demonstrates that an American sentry fired first, killing a Filipino soldier who had been drinking. That shot led to a war resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. In some cases, entire villages were massacred, including the killing of local priests.

 

Conducting the Philippine War

 

Over one hundred years before the Abu Ghraib disclosures (Spring 2004) and the national debate over water-boarding as a method of torture, American soldiers used the “water cure” on the Filipino people. One of the atrocities that galvanized the nation into supporting a war against Spain was the Spanish concentration camp system in Cuba. After the war ended, the U.S. used the same strategy in the Philippines to pacify the Filipinos and end the insurgency.

 

Writing in 1935, historian Albert Weinberg notes that, “…American expansionists conceived force in its various degrees as the means of fulfilling the destined duty of extending civilization to the unappreciative race of color.” Weinberg, as do other historians, concedes that expansionism under McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt was merely an extension of a century characterized by continental conquest over European land claims, Mexican sovereignty regarding the western territories, and Native American claims. According to Weinberg, “…the principle of consent of the governed had been violated in letter so often that imperialism should have seemed as traditional as philosophical democracy.”

 

Imperialism in the Name of Freedom

 

Aguinaldo was given verbal assurances by American diplomats as well as Admiral Dewey that the United States wanted nothing more than to assist the Filipino people in their struggle for independence. While Dewey’s flotilla destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila, Aguinaldo’s soldiers defeated Spanish forces on land.

 

The United States, however, viewed the Filipinos as a people unfit for self-government. Additionally, there was anxiety that other European nations, notably Germany, might attempt to annex the island nation. In a letter to McKinley, Secretary of State John Hay warned of Germany’s “intriguing” with Spain to gain control of the Philippines.

 

Support for the war resulted from propaganda and misinformation. The Filipinos were depicted as barbaric and uncivilized. Colonizing endeavors were assisted by the same Philippine elites that had collaborated with Spanish rule. According to Renato and Letizia Constantino, many of these elites, “…went over to the American side, demoralizing the people in their anti-colonial resistance and giving the American imperialists the necessary propaganda tools…”

 

The Philippine War represented one of the first steps toward an American foreign policy that, though well meaning, was misguided and littered with what today is called collateral damage. Rather than mentoring a new nation in the ideals of freedom and justice, American action in the Philippines created animosity and long-held suspicions. Exceptionalism as a definition for superiority and the arrogance of power will never win the hearts and minds of freedom-seeking people. This was the lesson not learned by the Roosevelt administration when it declared mission accomplished in the Philippines and began the process of colonial rule.

 

References:

 

James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (Back Bay Books, 2009)

Frank Bruni, “Torture and Exceptionalism,” The New York Times, November 14, 2011

Renato and Letizia Constantino, The Philippines: The Continuing Past (Quezon City: The Foundation For Nationalist Studies, 1999)

G.J.A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic 1898 (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984)

James Ford Rhodes, The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations 1897-1909 (The Macmillan Company, 1922)

Albert K Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935)