The US would lose more soldiers in the war fought with Filipino rebels after the Treaty of Paris than in the war with the Spanish. The Filipinos were well schooled in guerilla-style resistance in their years under the Spanish and were on their home ground, which could not be said for the US forces of the time, who resorted to increasingly brutal tactics in response. Candice Miller, in a New York Times book review of a book by Gregg Jones,”Honor in the Dust,” writes that confronted with constant surprise attacks “killing a few at a time,” American soldiers eventually “burned whole villages, executed suspected guerrillas and felt justified in using any interrogation technique at hand, including the water cure.” Sadly this would not be the last time that water-based torture techniques, ironically an innovation of the Spanish inquisition, would controversially emerge in association with US interrogations.
These developments were not unknown to the US public. In 1901, Twain wrote a famously furious essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” that played on the patronizing concept of bringing enlightenment to people “in darkness,” to save them from themselves, a sort of literary counterbalance to Kipling. In it he comments on how the US ships should have sailed away after defeating the Spanish in the Philippines, that the “golden memory of that fair deed” would have been worth much more to the soul of the United States than land, money, or dominion. He muses then on what inhabitants of the Philippines must be thinking: “The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: “There is something curious about this — curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
Massachusetts Senator George Frisbee Hoar addressed this issue of torture directly in a 1902 address to the US Congress, saying “You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.”
US policy in the Philippines changed, however, with Woodrow Wilson in 1913, emphasizing education and institution building, and the Jones Law or Philippine Autonomy Act was passed in 1916, although the real promise of Philippine independence did not consolidate until the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 which launched the Commonwealth phase and set a date for independence: 1946. But by then, of course, the world itself would be changed.
In his 1902 speech, Senator Frisbee Hoar stated that had the US acted as liberator and not oppressor in the Philippines, the country would have earned the “undying gratitude of a great and free people and the undying glory which belongs to the name of liberator,” but then goes on to cite what shortly would prove to be a historically ill-advised example, saying that the Philippine people “would have felt for you as Japan felt for you when she declared last summer that she owed everything to the United States of America.” Honestly, I have no clue what he was referring to here. US Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 with large ships- and large cannons- “requesting” that the previously isolationist Japan open its ports to trade, which resulted in a treaty and subsequently a vast modernization project in Japan that eventually developed the nation in to a formidable power by the time it’s planes flew over Pearl Harbor. I suppose somewhere along the way in better days, a diplomatic envoy must have thanked the US for its role in what would become Japanese prosperity.
But it was under the famously brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II that Americans and Filipinos fought and starved- as in the infamous Bataan Death March of 1942- and died together, and Filipino guerrillas fought with and facilitated US General MacArthur’s return in 1944, including a large force in Mindanao. Still, in 1946, against the majority wishes of its inhabitants, Mindanao was incorporated into the new Philippine republic.
So what do we say to those today who are still “in darkness?” Not a darkness of their own nature or culture, but of the long shadows of empires, wars, and other people’s “destinies?” Which way is “enlightenment” today?