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THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF THE PHILIPPINES
1898-1912
By
JAMES H. BLOUNT
Officer of United States Volunteers in the Philippines, 1899-1901
United States District Judge in the Philippines, 1901-1905
With a Map
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1912
Copyright, 1912
By
James H. Blount
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
To
JOHN DOWNEY WORKS
OF CALIFORNIA
AS FINE A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN
AS EVER
GRACED A SEAT IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
WHO
BELIEVING, WITH THE WRITER, AS TO THE PHILIPPINES, THAT
INDEFINITE RETENTION WITH UNDECLARED INTENTION
IS
INDEFINITE DRIFTING
HAS READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS WORK
AS IT PROGRESSED
LENDING TO ITS PREPARATION THE AID AND COUNSEL OF
AN OLDER AND A WISER MAN
AND
THE CONTAGIOUS SERENITY OF
CONFIDENCE THAT RIGHT WILL PREVAIL
THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED BY
The Author
PREFACE
Pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirit that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object.
Henry V.
To have gone out to the other side of the world with an army of
invasion, and had a part, however small, in the subjugation of a
strange people, and then to see a new government set up, and, as
an official of that government, watch it work out through a number
of years, is an unusual and interesting experience, especially to
a lawyer. What seem to me the most valuable things I learned in the
course of that experience are herein submitted to my fellow-countrymen,
in connection with a narrative covering the whole of the American
occupation of the Philippines to date.
This book is an attempt, by one whose intimate acquaintance with two
remotely separated peoples will be denied in no quarter, to interpret
each to the other. How intelligent that acquaintance is, is of course
altogether another matter, which the reader will determine for himself.
The task here undertaken is to make audible to a great free nation the
voice of a weaker subject people who passionately and rightly long to
be also free, but whose longings have been systematically denied for
the last fourteen years, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes viciously,
and always cruelly, on the wholly erroneous idea that where the end is
benevolent, it justifies the means, regardless of the means necessary
to the end.
At a time when all our military and fiscal experts agree that having
the Philippines on our hands is a grave strategic and economic mistake,
fraught with peril to the nation's prestige in the early stages of our
next great war, we are keeping the Filipinos in industrial bondage
through unrighteous Congressional legislation for which special
interests in America are responsible, in bald repudiation of the
Open Door policy, and against their helpless but universal protest,
a wholly unprotected and easy prey to the first first-class Power with
which we become involved in war. Yet all the while the very highest
considerations of national honor require us to choose between making
the Filipino people free and independent without unnecessary delay,
as they of right ought to be, or else imperilling the perpetuity
of our own institutions by the creation and maintenance of a great
standing army, sufficient properly to guard overseas possessions.
A cheerful blindness to the inevitable worthy of Mark Tapley himself,
the stale Micawberism that "something is bound to turn up," and
a Mrs. Jellyby philanthropy hopelessly callous to domestic duties,
expenses, and distresses, have hitherto successfully united to prevent
the one simple and supreme need of the situation--a frank, formal,
and definite declaration, by the law-making power of the government,
of the nation's purpose in the premises. What is needed is a formal
legislative announcement that the governing of a remote and alien
people is to have no permanent place in the purposes of our national
life, and that we do bona fide intend, just as soon as a stable
government, republican in form, can be established by the people
of the Philippine Islands, to turn over, upon terms which shall be
reasonable and just, the government and control of the islands to
the people thereof.
The essentials of the problem, being at least as immutable as human
nature and geography, will not change much with time. And whenever
the American people are ready to abandon the strange gods whose
guidance has necessitated a new definition of Liberty consistent with
taxation without representation and unanimous protest by the governed,
they will at once set about to secure to a people who have proven
themselves brave and self-sacrificing in war, and gentle, generous,
and tractable in peace, the right to pursue happiness in their own way,
in lieu of somebody else's way, as the spirit of our Constitution,
and the teachings of our God, Who is also theirs, alike demand.
After seven years spent at the storm-centre of so-called "Expansion,"
the first of the seven as a volunteer officer in Cuba during and after
the Spanish War, the next two in a like capacity in the Philippines,
and the remainder as a United States judge in the last-named country,
the writer was finally invalided home in 1905, sustained in spirit,
at parting, by cordial farewells, oral and written, personal and
official, but convinced that foreign kindness will not cure the
desire of a people, once awakened, for what used to be known as
Freedom before we freed Cuba and then subjugated the Philippines; and
that to permanently eradicate sedition from the Philippine Islands,
the American courts there must be given jurisdiction over thought
as well as over overt act, and must learn the method of drawing an
indictment against a whole people.
Seven other years of interested observation from the Western Hemisphere
end of the line have confirmed and fortified the convictions above
set forth.
If we give the Filipinos this independence they so ardently desire
and ever clamor for until made to shut up, "the holy cause,"
as their brilliant young representative in the American House
of Representatives, Mr. Quezon, always calls it, will not be at
once spoiled, as the American hemp and other special interests so
contemptuously insist, by the gentleman named, and his compatriot,
Senor Osmena, the Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, and the rest of
the leaders of the patriot cause, in a general mutual throat-cutting
incidental to a scramble for the offices. This sort of contention is
merely the hiss of the same old serpent of tyranny which has always
beset the pathway of man's struggle for free institutions.
When first the talk in America, after the battle of Manila Bay,
about keeping the Philippines, reached the islands, one of the
Filipino leaders wrote to another during the negotiations between
their commanding general and our own looking to preservation of
the peace until the results of the Paris Peace Conference which
settled the fate of the islands should be known, in effect, thus:
"The Filipinos will not be fit for independence in ten, twenty, or a
hundred years if it be left to American colonial office-holders drawing
good salaries to determine the question." Is there not some human
nature in that remark? Suppose, reader, you were in the enjoyment
of a salary of five, ten, or twenty thousand dollars a year as a
government official in the Philippines, how precipitately would you
hasten to recommend yourself out of office, and evict yourself into
this cold Western world with which you had meantime lost all touch?
The Filipinos can run a far better government than the Cubans. In 1898,
when Admiral Dewey read in the papers that we were going to give Cuba
independence, he wired home from Manila:
These people are far superior in their intelligence, and more
capable of self-government than the people of Cuba, and I am
familiar with both races.
After a year in Cuba and nearly six in the Philippines, two as an
officer of the army that subjugated the Filipinos, and the remainder
as a judge over them, I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral
Dewey, but with this addition, viz., that the people of those islands,
whatever of conscious political unity they may have lacked in 1898,
were welded into absolute oneness as a people by their original
struggle for independence against us, and will remain forever so
welded by their incurable aspirations for a national life of their
own under a republic framed in imitation of ours. Furthermore, the one
great difference between Cuba and the Philippines is that the latter
country has no race cancer forever menacing its peace, and sapping
its self-reliance. The Philippine people are absolutely one people,
as to race, color, and previous condition. Again, American sugar and
tobacco interests will never permit the competitive Philippine sugar
and tobacco industries to grow as Nature and Nature's God intended;
and the American importers of Manila hemp--which is to the Philippines
what cotton is to the South--have, through special Congressional
legislation still standing on our statute books--to the shame of the
nation--so depressed the hemp industry of the islands that the market
price it brings to-day is just one half what it brought ten years ago.
If three strong and able Americans, familiar with insular conditions
and still young enough to undertake the task, were told by a President
of the United States, by authority of Congress, "Go out there and
set up a stable native government by July 4, 1921, [1] and then come
away," they could and would do it; and that government would be a
success; and one of the greatest moral victories in the annals of
free government would have been written by the gentlemen concerned
upon the pages of their country's history.
We ought to give the Filipinos their independence, even if we have
to guarantee it to them. But, by neutralization treaties with the
other great Powers similar to those which safeguard the integrity and
independence of Switzerland to-day, whereby the other Powers would
agree not to seize the islands after we give them their independence,
the Philippines can be made as permanently neutral territory in
Asiatic politics as Switzerland is to-day in European politics.
James H. Blount.
1406 G Street, N. W.,
Washington, D. C.,
July 4, 1912.
P.S.--The preparation of this book has entailed examination of a
vast mass of official documents, as will appear from the foot-note
citations to the page and volume from which quotations have been
made. The object has been to place all material statements of fact
beyond question. For the purpose of this research work, Mr. Herbert
Putnam, Librarian of Congress, was kind enough to extend me the
privileges of the national library, and it would be most ungracious
to fail to acknowledge the obligation I am under, in this regard,
to one whom the country is indeed fortunate in having at the head
of that great institution. I should also make acknowledgment of the
obligation I am under to Mr. W. W. Bishop, the able superintendent
of the reading-room, for aid rendered whenever asked, and to my
life-long friends, John and Hugh Morrison, the most valuable men,
to the general public, except the two gentlemen above named, on the
whole great roll of employees of the Library of Congress.
J. H. B.
CONTENTS
Pages
Chapter I
Mr. Pratt's Serenade 1-15
Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States at Singapore,
in the British Straits Settlements, finding Aguinaldo a political
refugee at that place at the outbreak of our war with Spain,
April 21, 1898, arranges by cable with Admiral Dewey, then at
Hong Kong with his squadron, for Aguinaldo to come to Hong Kong
and thence to Manila, to co-operate by land with Admiral Dewey
against the Spaniards, Pratt promising Aguinaldo independence,
without authority. Mr. Pratt is later quietly separated from the
consular service.