In our image, p.14
In Our Image, page 14
He became an overnight hero. Cavite, with its dense growth, deep ravines, swamps and maze of rivers and streams, was ideal terrain for his guerrillas—most of them peasants armed only with knives, staves and homemade rifles. Within days after the revolt broke out, he controlled three towns. He then scored a major victory at the town of Imus, where one group of his men smoked out Spanish soldiers besieged in a monastery by setting fire to an adjacent grain silo, while another ambushed a relief column. The Filipinos hid at the approaches to a bridge and, at dawn on September 3, surprised five hundred Spanish troops as they attempted to cross. Routed, the Spaniards plunged into the river or waded into flooded rice fields as the pursuing rebels cut them to shreds. Aguinaldo seized seventy Remington rifles, along with a sword dropped by the retreating Spanish commander. The blade was inscribed Made in Toledo—1869, the year of his birth. Seeing the coincidence as an omen, Aguinaldo wore it proudly until the Americans captured and disarmed him in 1901. Charles Bohlen, the U.S. ambassador in Manila, returned it to him at a nostalgic ceremony in 1960—when Aguinaldo was ninety-two.
In October 1896 Aguinaldo announced his intention to create a government like “that of the United States”—its motto, borrowed from the French Revolution, to be “liberty, equality and fraternity.” By now the insurgents dominated the region around Manila. Lacing Cavite with trenches, barricades and parapets of earth and plaited bamboo, they improvised cannons made of water pipes and iron hoops, which shot scrap iron and bits of telegraph wire. They mobilized the local peasantry to provide them with food, and Aguinaldo, maintaining strict discipline, decreed death for looters and levied taxes fairly. He also treated the Spanish humanely, once asking forgiveness of a dying friar who had been hit by a stray rebel bullet.
Blanco, in an attempt to regain Cavite, personally led a Spanish amphibious force of two thousand men in landings along the coast. The rebels drew them deep into the area, then burst out of the mangrove thickets, brandishing spears and knives. By dusk, they had killed or wounded five hundred Spaniards, and the rest fled. Beaten by a Filipino novice half his age, Blanco fell prey to the friars, who hated him for his leniency toward Rizal. When, at their instigation, he was replaced by General Polavieja, the new governor directed his troops to “wash all offences in blood.” A Spanish officer amplified the order in a banquet toast to a newly arrived regiment: “The cannibals are still in the forests. The wild beasts are hiding in their lairs. The hour has come to exterminate the savages. Destroy! Kill! Show no mercy!”
Polavieja launched a reign of terror. A veteran of the war in Cuba, he imported the severe measures employed there, such as herding peasants into controlled areas. He relieved congested jails by executing prisoners after drumhead trials, as he did Rizal, or simply had them shot. Reinforced from Spain with fresh troops, he also stepped up the campaign against the insurgents in Cavite during the spring of 1897, recapturing most of the province.
But realizing that despite his success he lacked the resources to crush the Filipinos completely, he proposed to Queen María Cristina either negotiations or escalation of the war; she would have neither. As defender of the faith, she dared not offend the Spanish clergy by bargaining with the rebels. Nor, with the Cuban war draining her coffers, could she afford Polavieja’s request to add forty thousand men to the twenty-five thousand already under his command. Nevertheless she wanted results, and she considered Polavieja’s recommendations a sign of weakness. She replaced him with General Fernando Primo de Rivera, the governor of the Philippines thirteen years before, who had departed under a cloud of corruption.
Naively anticipating an imminent Spanish collapse, the Filipino leaders were already jockeying for power. Aguinaldo, in a dream of grandeur, had arrogated for himself the rank of “generalissimo,” thereby infuriating Bonifacio, and tensions between them rose. In March 1897, their lieutenants met at an abandoned estate in Cavite to resolve the quarrel. Aguinaldo’s supporters maneuvered the group into agreeing to form a republic with him as president. Angrily rejecting the decision, Bonifacio planned a rival regime. He also ceded several areas under his control to the Spanish troops, who in one undefended spot killed Aguinaldo’s brother Crispulo.
Aguinaldo tracked down Bonifacio and had a kangaroo court condemn him to death. He then commuted the sentence to “indefinite exile … in an isolated place”—but, he lamely claimed afterward, the pardon reached the executioners too late. Bonifacio had been wounded in the chase and, on a rainy morning in May 1897, they carried him by hammock to a forest clearing and shot him and his brother Procopio. Aguinaldo’s command was now secure. The dispute had enfeebled his ranks, however, strengthening the Spanish as a result. His position was particularly precarious in Cavite, his former stronghold.
If retreat is the most difficult military maneuver, Aguinaldo demonstrated remarkable skill as a soldier by extracting his troops from Cavite. They traveled with their families, camp followers and cattle—and he led them all, more than a thousand men, women and children, around the Spanish cordon. They marched across streams, through jungles and into the mountains of Bulacan province, sixty miles northeast of Manila. There, at the site of an old iron mine in the Biacnabato valley, he found an impregnable sanctuary. The only road, which cut through precipitous cliffs, could be blocked with boulders and defended from the surrounding slopes. Aguinaldo set up his headquarters in a cave.
First he offered to recognize Spanish rule on condition that the friars be expelled from the archipelago and, among other things, that the Philippines be represented in Spain’s parliament. When the Spanish rebuffed him, he proclaimed a republic with himself as president. “To arms, noble hearts, to arms!” he intoned. “Enough of suffering!”
The fiery pronouncement did nothing for his predicament. He was locked into his bastion, which now resembled a refugee camp rather than an army camp. Pressed by Spanish attacks, five thousand more rebels and their families swelled the area. They lacked food and water, sanitation was primitive and smallpox and leprosy appeared. But Aguinaldo was determined to hold out for Spanish concessions.
Primo de Rivera’s repeated attempts to storm the redoubt had failed, and his men were stalled by torrential rains and rebel assaults. He advised Queen María Cristina, as Polavieja had, that the deadlock could only be broken either by all-out war or by compromise. She opted for a settlement. The Cuban revolt was depleting her treasury, and the political balance in Madrid had also changed. In August 1897 an anarchist had assassinated Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the conservative prime minister and, despite her reactionary views, she named Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, a liberal, to succeed him. A champion of conciliation, he ordered Primo de Rivera to discuss peace.
A Filipino fixer with a foot in each camp volunteered to mediate. Pedro Alejandro Paterno, a Spanish mestizo, was a lawyer and sometime scholar who had hobnobbed with the Filipino reformists in Madrid, where he had also known Primo de Rivera. A dubious opportunist, he later requested a dukedom in Spain and a million dollars for his services, receiving neither. But he performed creditably.
Primo de Rivera instructed him to inform Aguinaldo that Spain wanted an honorable agreement, and Paterno began the arduous process. Borne in a hammock by porters, he shuttled for seven months between Biacnabato and Manila, an agonizing trek along muddy roads, down turbid rivers and over mountain trails. The main issue was money. Finally, late in 1897, the two sides reached an accord: Spain would pay the rebels 800,000 pesos—half immediately, a quarter when they laid down their arms and the rest after a Te Deum marking the armistice was chanted in the Manila cathedral. In exchange, Aguinaldo agreed to go abroad. A check in his pocket, he sailed for the British colony of Hong Kong along with a group of aides. His escort was the governor’s nephew, Colonel Miguel Primo de Rivera, who was to become dictator of Spain twenty-five years later. As he departed, Aguinaldo disavowed his rebellion, declaring “our loyalty to Spain … and to the government and laws of the fatherland.”
Manila celebrated with fireworks, balls and the Te Deum, and with good reason. The Spanish had decapitated the revolt and banished its leader—without committing themselves to real reforms. Aguinaldo was also satisfied. He had gained time while amassing the funds to purchase weapons for the next outbreak. Soon after landing in Hong Kong, he disavowed his disavowal of the insurrection.
Felipe Agoncillo, his agent in Hong Kong, had already dangled a proposal before the American consul, Rounsevelle Wildman. Foreseeing a future war between the United States and Spain, he suggested that the Americans and Filipinos join forces. The Filipinos would buy twenty thousand guns and two hundred thousand rounds of ammunition from the United States on credit, paying when they won independence. Aguinaldo’s republic, which only existed on paper, would meanwhile pledge two Philippine provinces and the receipts from the Manila customs bureau as collateral. Wildman was enthusiastic. Agoncillo was “not particular about the price,” he reported to Washington, calculating that the United States could reap a profit of twenty-five or thirty percent on the transaction. As it turned out, he anticipated a healthy commission from the deal. The State Department snubbed the offer. Wildman subsequently developed an admiration for Aguinaldo and, though he was a veteran diplomat, he later snarled the ties between the Americans and Filipinos.
As both Aguinaldo and the Spanish expected, peace proved to be only a truce. The Filipinos had not abandoned their dream of independence and Spain could not face the prospect of a lost empire, and their war resumed shortly thereafter. But the Filipinos soon discovered that a new and stronger power had come to supplant their decrepit Spanish masters as the United States arrived to taste the glories and the perils of imperialism for the first time in its history.
4. AMERICA GOES GLOBAL
* * *
At about half past eleven on the night of April 30, 1898, Commodore George Dewey’s squadron of nine ships slipped through the Boca Grande channel and past the island of Corregidor, entering Manila Bay. Squalls occasionally relieved the heat and humidity. Clouds concealed the moon and, in the distance, streaks of lightning illuminated the dark sky. Dewey’s flagship, the Olympia, led the American vessels in column formation as they advanced slowly, waiting for daybreak to show them the deployment of the Spanish armada. Dawn came quickly, as it does in the tropics, and shells from Spanish shore batteries began to lob overhead, falling wide. Dewey, preserving ammunition, gave no reply. Dressed in a white uniform and golf cap, he sat calmly in a wicker armchair on the bridge, fingering his lucky rabbit’s foot, rising from time to time to train a telescope on the scene as his fleet headed toward Sangley Point, at the tip of Cavite. There the entire Spanish force of twelve ships, lined up in a row, faced the approaching Americans. Their cannons flashed, again without effect, and still the American guns held back. Finally, at a quarter to six on the morning of May 1, within two and half miles of the enemy, Dewey issued the command that was to become his escutcheon. He leaned over the rail and gently called down to Captain Charles V. Gridley, the Olympia’s skipper: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”
Seven hours later, only a single Spanish ship remained afloat, tattered beyond recognition. Not one American vessel had been damaged, and only one American had died, of heat prostration. Nearly two hundred Spaniards had perished.
Americans at home, elated by the victory, celebrated Dewey with hysterical enthusiasm. Cities across the country honored him with prayers, parades, fireworks and other ceremonies, one in Manhattan’s Madison Square drawing a crowd of more than a hundred thousand. He was extolled in jingles, songs and poems. Public buildings and private homes alike displayed his portrait, the red face, white mustache and blue naval uniform tinted to personify the national colors. His name suddenly adorned everything from avenues, hotels, yachts and racehorses to souvenir dishes, silverware, paperweights, canes, shaving mugs, watch charms and teething rings for the hundred of babies who, by accident of birth, were to go through life named Dewey. Young women sported nautical Dewey blouses and jaunty Dewey sailor hats, while their boyfriends wore Dewey neckties, Dewey stickpins and Dewey cufflinks. A candy company labeled a new brand of gum “Dewey Chewies,” and a pharmaceutical firm advertised a laxative featuring Dewey’s picture above the slogan “The Salt of Salts.” By special act, Congress promoted Dewey to rear admiral, and soon afterward elevated him to full admiral—awarding him a Tiffany sword almost as big as himself, its gold-plated hilt set in jewels. Dewey, no model of modesty, accepted the acclaim as his due. Rather than return home promptly, he was to remain at the scene of his glory for another year, a distant idol, holding court aboard his flagship for the correspondents who came to validate his immortality. “The Battle of Manila Bay,” he wrote to his son, “is one of the most remarkable naval battles of the ages.”
The exultation over Dewey’s triumph reflected more than the flush of victory. Americans, having conquered their own continent, were now being driven by a new dynamism toward a global role. The annihilation of the Spanish fleet was not only a remarkable battle, but a rite of passage. The United States, at times reluctantly, would henceforth rise into the ranks of the world powers.
The war with Spain—a “splendid little war” as the future secretary of state John Hay flippantly dubbed it—began as a pious endeavor to liberate Cuba from Spanish oppression. But an inexorable momentum propelled the United States into ejecting Spain from the Philippines and then, in a confused series of events, into a conflict to crush the Filipino independence movement. The episode marked a pivotal point in the American experience. For the first time, U.S. soldiers fought overseas. And, for the first time, America was to acquire territory beyond its shores—the former colony itself becoming colonialist.
The prospect of war with Spain had polarized America’s politicians, editors, businessmen, clergy and other makers of opinion. Their controversy, however, revived a question that had been debated with increasing intensity for years: Should the United States reach outside its natural frontiers to seek the benefits, yet risk the burdens, of international status? In various guises and over different issues, isolationalists and interventionists have recurrently debated essentially the same question ever since.
The champions of expansion prevailed in 1898. A cabal of willful men, notably Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Alfred Thayer Mahan, they largely owed their success to their ability to manipulate President William McKinley, whose sincerity and virtuous innocence were exceeded only by his ignorance and almost paralytic indecisiveness. But the expansionists were also attuned to the mood of the American public.
Regional concerns sharply divided the United States at the time. The preoccupations of New England factory workers bore little resemblance to the problems of Middle West farmers, and both were remote from the difficulties facing the Deep South. Meanwhile, waves of immigrants from Europe were pouring into the country, their exotic traits reshaping the profile of the population. Amid this diversity, though, the nation was searching for unity to efface the nightmare of the Civil War, still a traumatic memory after a generation.
The quest for cohesion found expression in patriotism, intuitive or contrived. Their imagination stimulated by a jingoistic press, Americans conjured up a heady vision of the United States: flags flying, drums beating and troops marching, soaring like its emblematic eagle to heights of imperial grandeur. They were intoxicated by stirring parades, martial music and flamboyant oratory—all flushed with a sense of high moral purpose. In contrast to the Europeans, who merely lusted for power, Americans would mobilize their might to spread the blessings of their exceptional civilization to the world. McKinley was swept up by these sentiments, which he had neither the courage to curb nor the skill to direct, and he stumbled into a war with Spain whose purpose he neither fully believed nor understood.
Ironically, the most fervent imperialists of the era later disavowed their original purpose. Henry Cabot Lodge emerged as the apostle of isolationism following World War I, when he blocked U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Theodore Roosevelt, the romantic warrior, had already turned prudent after Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, anticipating the rise of Japanese power in the Pacific. Forecasting the Japanese invasion during World War II with uncanny accuracy, he warned that America’s continued rule of the Philippines would make them “our heel of Achilles if we are attacked by a foreign power.” He favored their independence “at an early date, and without any guarantee that might … commit us to staying on the Asiatic coast.” But as U.S. obligations abroad deepened, Asia in particular became America’s new frontier.
History is often a series of expedients that grow into dogmas—today’s pragmatism becoming tomorrow’s doctrines; thus the American presence in Asia evolved. The U.S. foray into the Philippines, a diversion to the war in Cuba, implanted America in the Far East. John Hay soon articulated the Open Door, a pledge to preserve the “territorial and administrative entity” of China against the encroachments of the European and Japanese imperialists—in reality, it was to protect American interests there. Hence the United States assumed a special responsibility for China that was to be, for decades, both the object of emotional solicitude for the American public and an article of faith of American foreign policy. American missionaries, educators and advisers flocked to China, hoping to teach its masses to pray and brush their teeth. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of sentimental motives, insisted on including China among the major Allied powers during World War II. The Communist takeover of China in 1949, exacerbated by the outbreak of the Korean war a year later, spotlighted Asia as never before as vital to U.S. security. Vietnam eventually came into focus as an illusory barrier against Chinese Communism, with tragic consequences. Though the United States withdrew from the Asian mainland in the aftermath of the Vietnam tragedy, it remains preeminent in the Pacific, still hostage to the place where its thrust began, the site of its two largest overseas bases—the Philippines.
