So like I mentioned in that other post, I'm going through A People's History right now. I want to share this one part about American imperialism at the turn of the century that I found really interesting.
The war in the Philippines came directly out of the Spanish-American war. The Cubans were already in revolt against the Spanish at the time the war broke out. The U.S. government claimed one of the reasons for the war was to support the oppressed Cuban rebels. We had a just cause. We ignored them entirely once we got there. Corporations arrived just as quickly as the boots of marines, and we proceeded to take the place of the Spanish. The rebels were cut out from the peace negotiations. Rebel general Calixto García wrote a letter of protest to American general William Shafter:
I have not been honored with a single word from yourself informing me about the negotiations for peace or the terms of the capitulation by the Spaniards.
. . . when the question arises of appointing authorities in Santiago de Cuba . . . I cannot see but with the deepest regret that such authorities are not elected by the Cuban people, but are the same ones selected by the Queen of Spain. . . .
A rumor too absurd to be believed, General, describes the reason of your measures and of the orders forbidding my army to enter Santiago for fear of massacres and revenge against the Spaniards. Allow me, sir, to protest against even the shadow of such an idea. We are not savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare. We are a poor, ragged army, as ragged and poor as was the army of your forefathers in their noble war for independence. . .
At the end of the war, the United States acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. President McKinley didn't even want the Philippines at first. It was all the way next to Australia, and he didn't really know what to do with it. But the Filipinos would be lost without white people telling them what to do. ". . . [T]hey were unfit for self-government--and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was." We had to "uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died." These are McKinley's words.
The Filipinos rose up in rebellion, striving for self-government, and they received God's love McKinley described, in the language of bullets and massacres. Our government didn't even try to hide its imperialist interests. Senator Albert Beveridge said on January 9, 1900:
The Philippines are ours forever. . . And beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . .
It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.
A small group of American intellectuals formed the Anti-Imperialist League in response to the war. A soldier from Kansas wrote to them:
Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native.
A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote:
Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill niggers. . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces.
A Manila correspondent wrote in November 1901:
. . . our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners, and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such as little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.
A major named Littletown Waller was accused of massacring eleven defenseless Filipinos. Other marine officers described the testimony:
The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten."
Black American soldiers started seeing parallels to how they were treating the Filipinos, and how they themselves were treated by whites. One black soldier, William Simms, wrote:
I was struck by a question a little Filipino boy asked me, which ran about this way: "Why does the American Negro come . . . to fight us where we are much a friend to him and have not done anything to him. He is all the same as me and me all the same as you. Why don't you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you . . . ?"
Many black soldiers defected, and started to fight for the Filipinos. The most famous of these was David Fagan, who "accepted a commission in the insurgent army and for two years wreaked havoc upon the American forces." Source:
David Fagen was the most celebrated of the handful of African American soldiers who defected to the Filipino revolutionary army led by Emilio Aguinaldo during the Filipino American War of 1899-1902. Fagen was born in Tampa, Florida around 1875. Details of his life remain sketchy. His father was a merchant and a widower. For a time he worked as a laborer for Hull’s Phosphate Company.
On June 4, 1898 at the age of 23, Fagen enlisted in the Twenty-fourth infantry, one of the four black regiments of that time that was coincidentally based in Tampa. Fagen would see combat a year later as he shipped off from San Francisco to Manila on June 1899. By then, the Filipino American war had been raging for four months, as Filipino patriots sought to defend their newly established Republic which they had won in a revolution against Spain. Fagen was soon in combat against Filipino guerillas in Central Luzon. Reports indicate that he had constant arguments with his commanding officers and requested to be transferred at least three times which contributed to his growing resentment of the army.
On Nov. 17, 1899, Fagen defected to the Filipino army. Winning the trust of the Filipinos he took sanctuary in the guerilla-controlled areas around Mount Arayat in Pampanga province. Fagen served enthusiastically for the next two years in the Filipino cause. His bravery and audacity were much praised by his Filipino comrades. Fagen was promoted from first lieutenant to captain by his commanding officer, General Jose Alejandrino on Sept. 6, 1900. Such was his popularity that Filipino soldiers often referred to him as “General Fagen.” His exploits earned him front page coverage in the New York Times which described him as a “cunning and highly skilled guerilla officer who harassed and evaded large conventional American units.”
Clashing at least eight times with American troops from Aug. 30, 1900 to Jan. 17, 1901, Fagen’s most famous action was the daring capture of a steam launch on the Pampanga River. Along with his men, he seized its cargo of guns and swiftly disappeared into the forests before the American cavalry could arrive. White officers were frustrated at their inability to capture Fagen whose exploits by now had begun to take on legendary proportions both among the Filipinos and in the U.S. press. Fagen’s success also triggered the fear of black defections (of which there were actually only twenty).
By 1901, American forces captured key Filipino leaders including Alejandrino and by March, Aguinaldo himself. Filipino leaders tried to secure amnesty for Fagen, but the Americans refused, insisting that he would be court-martialed and most likely executed. Hearing of this, Fagen, by now married to a Filipina, refused to surrender and sought refuge in the mountains of Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon. Branded a “bandit,” Fagen became the object of a relentless manhunt, with a $600 reward for his capture, “dead or alive.” Posters of him in Tagalog and Spanish appeared in every Nueva Ecija town, but he continued to elude capture.
On Dec. 5, 1901, Anastacio Bartolome, a Tagalog hunter, delivered to American authorities the severed head of a “negro” he claimed to be Fagen. While traveling with his hunting party, Bartolome reported that he had spied upon Fagen and his wife accompanied by a group of indigenous people called Aetas bathing in a river. Recognizing him from the wanted posters, the hunters attacked the group and allegedly killed and beheaded Fagen, then buried his body near the river. But this story has never been confirmed and there is no record of Bartolome receiving a reward. Official army records of the incident refer to it as the “supposed killing of David Fagen,” and several months later, Philippine Constabulary reports still made references to occasional sightings of Fagen.
To this day, it remain unclear what exactly became of David Fagen. His life after the war continued to be as mysterious as his existence before it. But his actions, largely forgotten in the United States, continue to be remembered in the Philippines as that of an African American man who heroically cast his lot with the Filipino revolutionaries to resist the injustice of American imperial designs.
History is important. The history we would rather forget is especially important. More than anything, history gives us a blueprint to how power acts. Power is sociopathic. It disassociates itself from the human impact. It's why U.S. officials described Hawaii in 1898 as "a ripe pear ready to be plucked." It's why the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1996 described the deaths of half a million children in the First Gulf War as "worth it." We can easily get to sleep at night thinking that we're somehow wiser than we were only a hundred years ago. What people have a hard time grasping is just how connected we are to this. Our grandparents knew people who fought in these wars. This was not a long time ago. We're being run by the exact same government, the exact same corporations, the exact same people. Nothing has changed. That's why no matter what, we should never, ever stop yelling.
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