CHAPTER V

OTIS AND AGUINALDO

Where people and leaders are agreed, What can the archon do?

Athenian Maxims.

Major-general Elwell S. Otis and staff arrived at Manila August 21, 1898. [124] He relieved General Merritt and succeeded to the command of the American troops in the Philippines, August 29th. Archbishop Chapelle, who was papal delegate to the Philippines in 1900, once said to the writer at Manila, in that year, that General Otis was "of about the right mental calibre to command a one-company post in Arizona." The impatience manifested in the remark was due to differences between him and the commanding-general about the Friar question. The remark itself was of course intended, and understood, as hyperbole. But the selection of General Otis to handle the Philippine situation was a serious mistake. He was past sixty when he took command. He continued in command from August 29, 1898, to May 5, 1900, a period of some twenty months. The insurrection was held in abeyance for some five months after he took hold, the leaders hoping against hope that the Treaty of Paris would leave their country to them as it did Cuba to the Cubans; and during all that time General Otis was apparently unable to see that war would be inevitable in the event the decision at Paris was adverse to Filipino hopes. A member of General Otis's staff once told me in speaking of the insurrection period that his chief pooh-poohed the likelihood of an outbreak right along up to the very day before the outbreak of February 4, 1899, occurred. Before the insurrection came he would not see it, and after it came he--literally--did not see it; that is to say, during fifteen months of fighting he commanded the Eighth Army Corps from a desk in Manila and never once took the field. His Civil War record was all right, but he was now getting well along in years. He was also a graduate of the Harvard Law School of the Class of 1861, rather prided himself on being "a pretty fair jack-leg lawyer," and had a most absorbing passion for the details of administrative work. They used to say that the only occasion on which General Otis ever went out of Manila the whole time he was there was when he went up the railroad once to Angeles to see that a proper valuation was put on a then recently deceased Quartermaster's Department mule. When he left the Islands he remarked to a newspaper man that he had had but one "day off" since he had been there. Unswerving devotion to a desk in time of war, on the part of the commanding general of the army in the field, seemed to him an appropriate subject for just pride. This showed his limitations. He was a man wholly unable to see the essentials of an important situation, or to take in the whole horizon. He was known to the Eighth Corps, his command, as a sort of "Fussy Grandpa," his personality and general management of things always suggesting the picture of a painfully near-sighted be-spectacled old gentleman busily nosing over papers you had submitted, and finding fault to show he knew a thing or two. However, he had many eminently respectable traits, and did the best he knew how, though wholly devoid of that noble serenity of vision which used to enable Mr. Lincoln, amid the darkest and most tremendous of his problems, to say with a smile to Horace Greeley: "Don't shoot the organist, he's doing the best he can."

Before General Otis relieved General Merritt, the latter had written Aguinaldo politely requesting him to move his troops beyond certain specified lines about the city, [125] and Aguinaldo had replied August 27th, agreeing to do so, but asking that the Americans promise to restore to him the positions thus vacated in the event under the treaty the United States should leave the Philippines to Spain. [126] August 31st, Otis notified Aguinaldo, then still at Bacoor, his first capital, that General Merritt had been unexpectedly called away, and that he, Otis, being unacquainted with the situation must take time before answering the Aguinaldo letter to Merritt of the 27th. On September 8th, he did answer, in a preposterously long communication of about 3000 words, which says, among other things: "I have not been instructed as to what policy the United States intends to pursue in regard to its legitimate holdings here"; and therefore declines to promise anything about restoring the insurgent positions in the event we should leave the Islands to Spain under the treaty. Commenting on this in the North American Review for February, 1900, General Anderson says: "I believe we came to the parting of the ways when we refused this request." General Anderson was right. General Merritt had on August 21st sent Aguinaldo a memorandum by the hand of Major J. Franklin Bell which promised: "Care will be taken to leave him [Aguinaldo] in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the government." [127] In the role of political henchman for President McKinley, which General Otis seems to have conceived it his duty to play from the very beginning in the Philippines, it thus appears that he was not troubled about keeping unsullied the faith and honor of the government as pledged by his predecessor. His 3000-word letter to Aguinaldo of September 8th ignores Merritt's promise as coolly as if it had never been made. His only concern appears to have been to leave the government free to throw the Filipinos overboard if it should wish to. He peevishly implies later on that Aguinaldo's requests in this regard were merely a cloak for designs against us (p. 40). But his real reason is given in a sort of stage "aside"--a letter to the Adjutant-General of the army dated September 12, 1898, wherein he explains: "Should I promise them that in case of the return of the city to Spain, upon United States evacuation, their forces would be placed by us in positions which they now occupy, I thoroughly believe that they would evacuate at once. But, of course, under the international obligations resting upon us * * * no such promise can be given." [128] In the sacred name of National Honor what of the Merritt promise? You only have to turn a few pages in the War Department Report for 1899 from the Merritt promise to the Otis repudiation of it. Yes, General Anderson was right. It was when General Otis practically repudiated in writing the written promise of his predecessor, General Merritt, that we "came to the parting of the ways" in our relations with the Filipinos. Let no American suppose for a moment that the author of this volume is engaged in the ungracious, and frequently deservedly thankless task of mere muck-raking. He never met General Otis but once, and then for a very brief official interview of an agreeable nature. He is only attempting to make a small contribution to the righting of a great wrong unwittingly done by a great, free, and generous people to another people then struggling to be free--a wrong which he doubts not will one day be righted, whether he lives to see it so righted or not. General Otis's letter to the Adjutant-General of the army of September 12th, above quoted, shows that he was holding himself in readiness to carry out in the Philippines any political programme the Administration might determine upon, which would mean that he would afterwards come home and tell how entirely righteous that programme had been. Had the Administration hearkened back to Admiral Dewey's suggestion that the Filipinos were far superior to the Cubans, and decided to set before General Otis in the Philippines the same task it had set before General Wood in Cuba, we would have heard nothing about Filipino "incapacity for self-government." General Otis would have taken his cue from the President, his commander-in chief, and said: "I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral Dewey." Then he would have gone to work in a spirit of generous rivalry to do in the Philippines just what Wood did in Cuba. And the task would have been easier. Had the Administration taken the view urged by Judge Gray, as a member of the Paris Peace Commission, that "if we had captured Cadiz and the Carlists had helped us [we] would not owe duty to stay by them at the conclusion of the war," [129] and therefore we were not bound to see the Filipinos through their struggle, General Otis would have adopted that view with equal loyalty and in the presidential campaign of 1900, he would have furnished the Administration with arguments to justify that course. This would have been an easy task, also, for two of Spain's fleets had been destroyed by us, leaving her but one to guard her home coast cities, and making the sending of reinforcements to the besieged and demoralized garrison of Manila impossible. The native army she relied on throughout the archipelago had gone over bodily to the patriot cause, and there was no hope of successful resistance to it. But General Otis did not have the boundless prestige of Admiral Dewey and so volunteered no advice. As soon as the Administration chose its course, he set to work to prove the correctness of it. From him, of course, came all the McKinley Administration's original arguments against doing for the Filipinos as we did in the case of Cuba. He was the only legitimate source the American people could look to at that time to help them in their dilemma. They were standing with reluctant feet where democracy and its antithesis meet, and Otis was their sole guide. But the guide was of the kind who wait until you point and ask "Is that the right direction?" and then answer "Yes." Four days after General Otis sent his above quoted letter of September 12th, to Adjutant-General Corbin, Mr. McKinley signed his instructions to the Paris Peace Commissioners, directing them to insist on the cession of Luzon at least, the instructions being full of eloquent but specious argument about the necessity of establishing a guardianship over people of whom we then knew nothing. From that day forward General Otis bent himself to the task of showing the righteousness of that course. "I will let nothing go that will hurt the Administration," was his favorite expression to the newspaper correspondents when they used to complain about his press censorship. Hypocrisy is defined to be "a false assumption of piety or virtue." The false assumption of piety or virtue which has handicapped the American occupation of the Philippines from the beginning, and which will always handicap it, until we throw off the mask and honestly set to work to give the Filipinos a square deal on the question of whether they can or cannot run a decent government of their own if permitted, is traceable back to the Otis letter to the Adjutant-General of September 12, 1898, ignoring General Merritt's promise to leave Aguinaldo "in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the government" in case we should, under the terms of the treaty of peace, leave the Islands to Spain.

General Otis's letter of September 8th to Aguinaldo is apparently intended to convince him that he ought to consider everything the Americans had done up to date as exactly the correct thing, according to the standards of up-to-date, philanthropic, liberty-loving nations which pity double-dealing as mediaeval; and that he should cheer up, and feel grateful and happy, instead of sulking, Achilles-like, in his tents; and furthermore--which was the crux--that he must move said tents. General Otis does not forget "that the revolutionary forces under your command have made many sacrifices in the interest of civil liberty (observe, he does not call it independence) and for the welfare of your people"; admits that they have "endured great hardships, and have rendered aid"; and avers, as a reason for Aguinaldo's evacuating that part of the environs of Manila occupied by his troops: "It [the war with Spain] was undertaken by the United States for humanity's sake * * * not for * * * aggrandizement or for any national profit." After stating, as above indicated, that he does not yet know what the policy of the United States is to be "in regard to its legitimate holdings here," General Otis proceeds to declare that in any event he will not be a party to any joint occupation of any part of the city, bay, and harbor of Manila--the territory covered by the Peace Protocol of August 13th--and that Aguinaldo must effect the evacuation demanded in the letter of General Merritt "before Tuesday the 15th" (of September), i.e., within a week. Aguinaldo finally withdrew his troops, after much useless parleying and much waste of ink.

There was some of the parleying and ink, however, that was not wholly wasted. But to properly appreciate it as illustrative of the fortitude and tact which the early Filipino leaders seem to have combined in a remarkable degree, some prefatory data are essential.

Aguinaldo's capital was then at Bacoor, one of the small coast villages you pass through in going by land from Manila to Cavite. From Manila over to Cavite by water is about seven miles, and by land about three or four times that. The coast line from Manila to Cavite makes a loop, so that a straight line over the water from Manila to Cavite subtends a curve, near the Cavite end of which lies Bacoor. Thus, Bacoor, being at the mercy of the big guns at Cavite, and also easily accessible by a land force from Manila, to say nothing of Dewey's mighty armada riding at anchor in the offing, was a good place to move away from. There it lay, right in the lion's jaws, should the lion happen to get hungry. Aguinaldo had reflected on all this, and had determined to get himself a capital away from "the city, bay, and harbor of Manila," that is to say, to take his head out of the lion's jaws. General Otis's demand of September 8th that he move his troops out of the suburbs of Manila determined him to move his capital as well. He moved it to a place called Malolos, in Bulacan province. Bulacan lies over on the north shore of Manila Bay, opposite Cavite province on the south shore. Malolos is situated some distance inland, out of sight and range of a fleet's guns, and about twenty-odd miles by railroad northwest of Manila. Malolos was also desirable because it was in the heart of an insurgent province having a population of nearly a quarter of a million people, a province which, by reason of being on the north side of the bay, was sure to be in touch, strategically and politically, with all Luzon north of the Pasig River, just as Cavite province, the birthplace of Aguinaldo, and also of the revolutionary government, had been with all Luzon south of the Pasig. Should the worst come to the worst--and as has already been indicated, the insurgents played a sweepstake game from the beginning for independence, with only war as the limit--northern Luzon had more inaccessible mountains from which to conduct such a struggle for an indefinite period than southern Luzon. But while the Otis demand of September 8th decided the matter of the change of capital, Aguinaldo could not afford to tell his troops that he was moving them from the environs of Manila because made to. He was going to accept war cheerfully when it should become necessary to fight for independence, but he still had some hopes of the Paris Peace Conference deciding to do with the Philippines as with Cuba, and wished to await patiently the outcome of that conference. Besides, he was getting in shipments of guns all the time, as fast as the revenues of his government would permit, and thus his ability to protract an ultimate war for independence was constantly enlarging by accretion. The Hong Kong conference of the Filipino revolutionary leaders held in the city named on May 4, 1898, at which Aguinaldo presided, and which mapped out a programme covering every possible contingency, has already been mentioned. Its minutes say:

If Washington proposes to carry out the fundamental principles of its Constitution, it is most improbable that an attempt will be made to colonize the Philippines or annex them. [130]

On the other hand, the minutes of this same meeting as we saw recognized that America might be tempted into entering upon a career of colonization, once she should get a foothold in the islands. The programme of Aguinaldo and his people was thus, from the beginning, not to precipitate hostilities until it should become clear that, in the matter of land-grabbing, the gleam of hope held out by the American programme for Cuba was illusive. According to the minutes of the meeting alluded to, such a contingency would, of course, "drive them, the Filipinos * * * to a struggle for their independence, even if they should succumb to the weight of the yoke," etc. Such a struggle, as all the world knows, did ultimately ensue. That part of the parleying following Otis's demand of September 8th (that Aguinaldo move his troops) which was not useless was this: In order to "save their face," with the rank and file of their army, the Filipino Commissioners asked General Otis "if I [Otis,] would express in writing a simple request to Aguinaldo to withdraw to the lines which I designated--something which he could show to the troops." [131] So, on September 13th, General Otis wrote such a "request," and Aguinaldo moved his troops as demanded, but no farther than demanded. He wanted to be in the best position possible in case the United States should finally leave the Philippines to Spain, and always so insisted. Long afterward General Otis insinuated in his report that this insistence, which was uniformly pressed until after the Treaty was signed, was mere dishonest pretence, to cloak warlike intentions against the United States. Yet, as we have seen above, one of our Peace Commissioners at Paris, Judge Gray, just about the same time, was taking that contingency quite as seriously as did Aguinaldo. And early in May, 1898, our Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Long, had cabled Admiral Dewey "not to have political alliances with the insurgents * * * that would incur liability to maintain their cause in the future." [132] Before moving his troops pursuant to the Otis demand of September 8th, the Otis "request" was duly published to the insurgent army, and as the insurgents withdrew, the American troops presented arms in most friendly fashion. "They certainly made a brave show," says Mr. Millet (Expedition to the Philippines, p. 255), "for they were neatly uniformed, had excellent rifles, marched well, and looked very soldierly and intelligent." "The withdrawal," says General Otis (p. 10), "was effected adroitly, as the insurgents marched out in excellent spirits, cheering the American forces." Absolute master of all Luzon outside Manila at this time, with complete machinery of government in each province for all matters of justice, taxes, and police, an army of some 30,000 men at his beck, and his whole people a unit at his back, Aguinaldo formally inaugurated his permanent government--permanent as opposed to the previous provisional government--with a Constitution, Congress, and Cabinet, patterned after our own, [133] just as the South American republics had done before him when they were freed from Spain, at Malolos, the new capital, on September 15, 1898. The next day, September 16th, at Washington, President McKinley delivered to his Peace Commissioners, then getting ready to start for the Paris Peace Conference, their letter of instructions, directing them to insist on the cession by Spain to the United States of the island of Luzon "at least." [134] In other words, the day after the little Filipino republic, gay with banners and glad with music, started forth on its journey, Mr. McKinley signed its death-warrant. The political student of 1912 may say just here, "Oh, I read all that in the papers at the time, or at least it was all ventilated in the Presidential campaign of 1900." Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Paris Peace Commission were not made public until after the Presidential election of 1900. To be specific, they were first printed and given out to the public in 1901, in Senate Document 148, having been extracted from the jealous custody of the Executive by a Senate resolution. It was not until then that the veil was lifted. By that time, no American who was not transcendental enough to have lost his love for the old maxim, "Right or wrong, my country," cared to hear the details of the story. The Filipinos and "our boys" had been diligently engaged in killing each other for a couple of years, and the American people said, "A truce to scolding; let us finish this war, now we are in it."

But to return from the death-warrant of the Philippine republic signed by Mr. McKinley on September 16th, to its christening, or inauguration, the day before. Mr. Millet gives an intensely interesting account of the inaugural ceremonies of September 15th, which as Manila correspondent of the London Times and Harper's Weekly he had the good fortune to witness. Says he:

The date was at last * * * fixed for September 15th. A few days before Aguinaldo had made a triumphant entry into Malolos in a carriage drawn by white horses, and there had been a general celebration of his arrival, with speeches, a gala dinner, open air concerts, and a military parade. Mr. Higgins (an Englishman), the manager of the Railway, kindly offered to take me up to Malolos to witness the ceremony of the inauguration of the new government. * * * The only other passenger was to be Aguinaldo's secretary * * * a small boyish-looking young man. * * * [135]

It seems there had been a strike of the native employees of the railway up the road.

Mr. Higgins calmly remarked to the secretary that, in his opinion, if the affairs of the Filipino government were managed in the future as they were at present, the proposed republic would be nothing but a cheap farce. The secretary timidly asked what there was to complain about.

Then came a tirade from Higgins, ending with, "I am going to lay this * * * before Aguinaldo to-day, and I shall expect you to arrange an interview for my friend and myself." Then, turning to the astonished Millet, he said in English: "It does these chaps good to be talked to straight from the shoulder. Since they came to Malolos, the earth isn't big enough to hold them."

This scene on the train is, decidedly, as Thomas Carlyle would say, "of real interest to universal history." Mr. Millet's Government was a lion about to eat a lamb, but the head of his nation, Mr. McKinley, clothed with absolute authority in the premises for the nonce, was balking at the diet. Now, Mr. Millet rather admired the British boldness, just as a Northern man likes to hear a Southerner talk straight from the shoulder to a "darkey." As soon as the era of good feeling was over, our people quit treating the Filipinos as Perry did the Japanese in 1854, and began calling them "niggers." In fact the commanding general found it necessary a little later to put a stop to this pernicious practice among the soldiers by issuing a General Order prohibiting it. But Mr. Millet's admiration would have been somewhat toned down had he known what we found out later. The real secret of Higgins's personal arrogance was this. The Filipino government needed his railroad in its business. During the war which followed, the insurgents long controlled a large part of this railway, from Manila to Dagupan, which was the only railway in the Philippines. The railway properties suffered much damage incident to the war, and--just how willingly is beside the question--the company rendered material aid to the insurgent cause. So much did they render, that when Higgins had the assurance later to want our Government to pay the damages his properties had suffered at the hands of the insurgents, our government at Manila promptly turned his claim down. Subsequently the London office of his company actually inveigled the British Foreign Office into making representation to our State Department about the matter--obviously a very grave step, in international law. The claim was promptly turned down by Washington also, and, happily, that "closed the incident." [136]

Having exploded Mr. Millet's bubble, let us resume the thread of his story:

We reached the station [at Malolos] in about an hour and a half. * * * The town numbers perhaps thirty or forty thousand people. * * * From the first humble nipa shack to the great square where the convent stands, thousands of insurgent flags fluttered from every window and every post. * * * Every man had an insurgent tri-color cockade in his hat.

Then follows a detailed account of being introduced, after some ceremony, to Aguinaldo, who is described as "a small individual, in full evening black suit, and flowing black tie." Higgins made his complaint about the strikers, and Aguinaldo said, "I will attend to this matter of the strikers," and then changed the topic, asking if the visitors did not wish to attend the opening of the Congress--which they did.

From Mr. Millet's account, it is evident that, like Admiral Dewey and most of the Americans who first dealt with the Filipinos except Generals Anderson, MacArthur, and J. F. Bell, he failed to take the Filipinos as seriously as the facts demanded. At that time the Japanese had not yet taught the world that national aspirations are not necessarily to be treated with contumely because a people are small of stature and not white of skin. Consul Wildman at Hong Kong at first wrote the State Department quite peevishly that Aguinaldo seemed much more concerned about the kind of cane he should wear than about the figure he might make in history. Wildman did not then know, apparently, that canes, with all Spanish-Filipino colonial officialdom, were badges of official rank, like shoulder-straps are with us. The reader will also remember the toothbrush incident hereinbefore reproduced, told by Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee, in 1902. That incident, naturally enough, amused the Committee not a little. But we who know the Filipino know it was merely an awkward and embarrassed answer due to diffidence, and made on the spur of the moment to cloak some real reason which if disclosed would not seem so childish.

Misunderstanding is the principal cause of hate in this world. When you understand people, hatred disappears in a way strikingly analogous to the disappearance of darkness on the arrival of light. The more you know of the educated patriotic Filipino, the more certain you become that the government we destroyed in 1898 would have worked quite as well as most any of the republics now in operation between the Rio Grande and Patagonia. The masses of the people down there, the peons, are probably quite as ignorant and docile as the Filipino tao (peasant), and I question if the educated men of Latin America, the class of men who, after all, control in every country, could, after meeting and knowing the corresponding class in the Philippines, get their own consent to declare the latter their inferiors either in intelligence, character, or patriotism.

But to return to the inauguration. Mr. Millet saw the inaugural ceremonies in the church, and heard Aguinaldo's address to the Congress. Of the audience he says "few among them would have escaped notice in a crowd for they were exceptionally alert, keen, and intelligent in appearance." Of this same Congress and government, Mr. John Barrett, who was American Minister to Siam about that time, and is now (1912) head of the Bureau of American Republics at Washington--an institution organized and run for the purpose of persuading Latin-America that we do not belong to the Imperial International Society for the Partition of the Earth and that we are not in the business of gobbling up little countries on pretext of "policing" them--said in an address before the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce on January 12, 1899:

He [Aguinaldo] has organized a government which has practically been administering the affairs of that great island [Luzon] since the American occupation of Manila, which is certainly better than the former administration; he has a properly constituted Cabinet and Congress, the members of which compare favorably with Japanese statesmen.

The present Philippine Assembly had not had its first meeting when I left the Islands in the spring of 1905. It was organized in 1907. In the summer of 1911, I had the pleasure of renewing an old and very cordial acquaintance with Dr. Heiser, Director of Public Health of the Philippine Islands, who is one of the most considerable men connected with our government out there, and is also thoroughly in sympathy with its indefinite continuance in its present form. The Doctor is a broad-gauged man likely to be worth to any government, in matters of Public Health, whatever such government could reasonably afford to pay in the way of salary, and is doubtless well-paid by the Philippine Insular Government. He can hardly be blamed, therefore, for being in sympathy with its indefinite continuance in its present form. Doctor Heiser is a man of too much genuine dignity to be very much addicted to slang, but when I asked him about the Philippine Assembly, I think he said it was "a cracker-jack." At any rate, I have never heard any legislative body spoken of in more genuinely complimentary terms than those in which he described the Philippine Assembly. I learned from him incidentally that their "capacity for self-government" is so crude, however, as yet, that the members have not yet learned to read newspapers while a colleague whose seat is next to theirs is addressing the house and trying to get the attention of his fellows, nor do they keep up such a buzz of conversation that the man who has the floor cannot hear himself talk. They listen to the programme of the public business.

Some five years ago in an article written for the North American Review concerning the Philippine problem, the author of the present volume said, among other things: "During nearly four years of service on the bench in the Philippines the writer heard as much genuine, impassioned, and effective eloquence from Filipino lawyers, saw exhibited in the trial of causes as much industrious preparation, and zealous, loyal advocacy of the rights of clients, as any ordinary nisi prius judge at home is likely to meet with in the same length of time." [137] Any country that has plenty of good lawyers and plenty of good soldiers, backed by plenty of good farmers, is capable of self-government. As President Schurman of Cornell University, who headed the first Philippine Commission, the one that went out in 1899, said in closing his Founder's Day Address at that institution on January 11, 1902: "Any decent kind of government of Filipinos by Filipinos is better than the best possible government of Filipinos by Americans." The Malolos government which Mr. Millet saw inaugurated on September 15, 1898, would probably have filled this bill. Had the Filipino people then possessed the consciousness of racial and political unity as a people which was developed by their subsequent long struggle against us for independence, and which has been steadily developing more and more under the mild sway of a quasi-freedom whose princely prodigality in spreading education is marred only by its declared programme that no living beneficiary thereof may hope to see the independence of his country, and that the present generation must resign itself to tariff schedules "fixed" at Washington, there is no reasonable doubt that the original Malolos government of 1898 would have been a very "decent kind of government."

All through the last four months of 1898, the two hostile armies faced each other in a mood which it needed but a spark to ignite, awaiting the outcome of the peace negotiations arranged for in September, commenced in October, and concluded in December. While they are thus engaged about Manila, let us turn to a happier picture, the situation in the provinces under the Aguinaldo government.