FIFTY
YEARS IN HOLLYWOOD
All happy occupations, like Tolstoy’s families,
resemble one another; but each unhappy occupation is unhappy in
its own way. Of course it is too early to tell which our occupation
of Iraq—not to mention Afghanistan—will be, happy
or unhappy. As of this writing, the portents are ominous, with
mounting numbers of Iraqis dead in violent street demonstrations;
the Shiite, Iranian backed clergy clearly positioning themselves
to make a power grab; and the remnants of the Taliban still conducting
hit-and-run attacks in Afghanistan. We are only at the beginning
of what promises to be a years-long process, however, and it remains
to be seen what men of good will and patience can do.
The Bush administration, of course, prefers not
to use the word “occupation” at all, and when it must
it prefers to dote on the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after
World War II, our shining successes of the twentieth century.
Ironically, though, the very ferocity of the Second World War
actually abetted those occupations. Both nations had been completely—and
literally—pulverized, discrediting their old, fascist regimes,
and leaving their people physically dependent upon the Allied
occupiers. They were, as well, largely homogenous, industrial,
Western states, with at least some past experience in democracy.
A more analogous occupation to that of Iraq—an
ethnically divided, Arabic state jerry-rigged into existence by
the British Empire in 1920, after four centuries of Turkish rule—might
be our very first exercise in nation-building.
The Philippines came into our possession before
most Americans knew where they were; an enormous, gorgeous, tangled
archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, and almost as many different
ethnic groups, religious sects, and aboriginal tribes, located
halfway around the world. They had been claimed by Spain since
Magellan stumbled upon them in the sixteenth century, and their
political history would be most famously described as “Three
centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.”
“Hollywood” arrived in the form of
Commodore George Dewey, early on May 1, 1898, just days after
the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Over the course of a
morning, Dewey reduced the Spanish fleet to so much flotsam and
jetsam in Manila Bay, and we had our first colony—more or
less. The only hitch was that Dewey had virtually no men available
to occupy our new possession. Instead, Manila was surrounded by
some 30,000 Filipino rebels, under a 29-year-old general named
Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy.
Spanish rule had become both vicious and senile,
and the Filpinos had been fighting for their independence for
some two years already by the time Dewey arrived. A nine-month
interval now ensued, during which time the U.S. and Spain negotiated
a formal end to the war, and America held a caustic debate over
whether we should annex our first colony. President William McKinley
used the time to rush some 22,000 American troops out to replace
the Spanish in the fortifications around Manila—the first
U.S. troop commitment outside the continent of North America.
He also sent Brigadier General Thomas Anderson, to assure Aguinaldo
that “In one hundred and twenty-two years we have established
no colonies. I leave you to draw your own inference.”
McKinley was torn between a small but influential
phalanx of progressive imperialists, led by a young Theodore Roosevelt,
fresh from San Juan Hill, who wanted the Philippines as a naval
base to project American power, as a portal to the China trade;
above all as proof that the U.S. was a real Western power, ready
to take up what Rudyard Kipling had so infamously dubbed “the
white man’s burden”—and the anti-imperialists,
as weird a collection of political bedfellows ever assembled,
who feared that the islands would become an intolerable burden,
or despised the Filipinos on racial grounds, or who, like Mark
Twain, believed that taking on a colony would permanently distort
and betray the principles the American republic was based on.
In the end, McKinley came down on the side of
the imperialists. He could not, he claimed, “fling them,
a golden apple of discord, among the rival powers.” Later,
he also told a visiting committee of Methodists that he had received
a religious vision exhorting him to “civilize and Christianize”
the Filipinos—apparently either not realizing they had already
been Catholics for over three hundred years, or not expecting
his Methodists to accept the “Church of Rome” as sufficiently
Christian. The Senate ratified the peace treaty with Spain by
a single vote, and accepted the “burden.” With Americans
and Filipinos occupying trenches just a few yards apart from each
other, it now needed only the slightest spark to set off a new
round of war, and it was provided when a pair of Nebraska volunteers
fired on some inebriated Filipinos who stumbled toward their sentry
patrol without giving a password.
The American troops, bored and disgusted with
their long inaction, erupted from their trenches with all the
fury of their own “shock and awe” offensive. Before
the first day was over, they had broken the rebel lines and killed
at least 3,000 Filipinos. A desperate Aguinaldo tried to offer
a truce, only to be told by Major Gen. Elwell Otis, “The
fighting, having once begun, must go on to the grim end.”
And
so it did. His army shattered, Aguinaldo turned to guerrilla warfare,
but as the scion of a wealthy, Chinese-Spanish mestizo
family he was hardly adept at this, and was captured before very
long.
The rebellion went on, the fighting degenerating
into a savage and merciless struggle. Both sides resorted to torture.
U.S. troops, increasingly frustrated by their inability to tell
friend from foe, repeatedly avenged the deaths of their comrades
by killing every man, woman, and child they found in nearby villages,
then burning the huts to the ground.
When Filipinos ambushed and hacked to death some
54 American soldiers on the remote island of Samar, Brigadier
Gen. Jacob W. Smith actually proclaimed that Samar “must
be made a howling wilderness” and ordered that his soldiers
kill any Filipino they encountered over the age of ten: “I
want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill
and burn the better you will please me.”
Smith earned the sobriquet “Howling Wilderness”
Smith in the U.S. press, and was subsequently cashiered, but his
tactics were not unique, and the war seemed to be sinking into
the proverbial quagmire. By the summer of 1900, the war had there
were 75,000 Americans, or three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army,
in the Philippines.
If all of this sounds like an eerie precursor
to Vietnam, nothing was more familiar than the seeming schizophrenia
of American troops and administrators toward the people whose
land they were occupying. U.S. soldiers cursed the Filipinos continually
as deceitful, lazy, “brainless monkeys,” “niggers,”
and “gugus,” and longed to go home. At the same time,
they threw themselves into all sorts of efforts to improve life
in the country they were occupying, building sewers, distributing
food, vaccinating people against smallpox, and even replacing
the Spanish judiciary with Filipino courts. American G.I.s started
and taught makeshift schools throughout the islands, bringing
formal education to many rural areas for the first time.
It was, as one observer put it, “a harsh
and philanthropic war at the same time.” By the time President
Theodore Roosevelt declared the conflict officially over, on July
4, 1902, the war in Cuba ended up costing the U.S. 4,234 dead
and 2,818 wounded, not including “thousands” more
who later died at home of diseases they had caught in the islands.
Another 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 civilians died, out
of a population estimated at 8 million—a higher percentage
of the total population, in other words, than died in the ten
years of our involvement in Vietnam.
Even before the war was over, though, our occupation
had taken a more “philanthropic” turn, when a federal
judge named William Howard Taft arrived to serve as the islands’
first civilian governor. Taft was no more tolerant than he was
slender; he considered most of the rebels no better than murderers,
started a private club that excluded Filipinos, and had the unfortunate
tendency to refer to his new subjects as his “little brown
brothers.” Yet he was also a highly competent administrator,
and imbued with a strict sense of public duty.
“We hold the Philippines for the benefit
of the Filipinos, and we are not entitled to pass a single act
or to approve a single measure that has not that as its chief
purpose,” he declared on arriving in the islands, and in
his considerable wake came thousands of American volunteers, who
would quickly transform our first colonial possession. They would
build roads and railroads everywhere, along with ports and mines,
dams and water systems, dams and irrigation systems. They would
reform the archaic law and tax codes left over from the Spanish,
stimulate industry and finance; break up the old, monastic estates
and distribute the land to rural villagers. They would tie the
islands together both symbolically and literally for the first
time, giving the Philippines its first, more-or-less common language—even
if it was English. Before long, Filipinos would enjoy the highest
literacy rate in Southeast Asia. Vast improvements in public hygiene
and health care would go a long way toward doubling the population
of the islands by 1920.
“Compared
to European colonialism, the United States was indeed a model
of enlightenment,” journalist Stanley Karnow writes in his
seminal work on the subject, In Our Image, America’s
Empire in the Philippines. As early as 1901, Taft had encouraged
the formation of a Filipino political party. Local elections followed
soon after, and a national legislature was elected in 1907. In
1916, an act of Congress pledged eventual independence to the
Philippines, the islands were made a semi-autonomous commonwealth
in 1935, and while full independence was delayed by the war, it
became a reality in 1946.
Yet in Karnow’s assessment, the American
performance in the Philippines “was neither as brilliant
as their publicists claimed nor as bleak as their critics contended”.
The Americans pushed through dramatic reforms in the Philippines,
but to ease the burdens of occupation they also left the country’s
neo-feudal class system largely intact. They tried to make the
Philippines over into another America, but made clear they considered
the Filipinos their racial inferiors. They preached democracy,
but dispersed patronage to those Filipino politicians who supported
U.S. policies. They fought side by side with their “little
brown brothers” against the Japanese, during some of the
most ferocious combat in World War II, and against Asian communism
during the Cold War—but felt free to suborn the Philippines’
nascent democracy for years, backing the grotesque Marcos dictatorship.
Since the Reagan administration’s tardy
but decisive backing of Cory Aquino’s “People Power”
movement, U.S.-Filipino relations have attained a more even keel.
But it was not enough to keep Aquino’s successors from closing
key American military bases in 1990s—the primary reason
we took the islands in the first place.
Of course, Iraq presents its own, unique challenges
and possibilities. Among other differences, the U.S. does not
view it as a colony at all, and certainly not a possession upon
which its national “manhood” is predicated. But if
we can learn anything from our long adventure into the Philippines,
it is that we need a policy that will be consistent not only in
deed, but in word and attitude as well; one that will avoid condescension,
and will be directed toward making a restored, democratic Iraq
truly independent.
