CHAPTER XX

GOVERNOR IDE--1906

The Tariff is a local issue.

General W. S. Hancock.

After Governor Wright left the Islands finally on November 4, 1905, Vice-Governor Henry C. Ide acted as Governor-General until April 2, 1906, when he was duly inaugurated as such. He resigned and left the Islands finally in September thereafter.

All through 1905, Governor Curry, as Governor of Samar, which is the third largest island of the archipelago, wrestled with the Pulajan uprising there, aided, as has been stated in the previous chapter, by the native troops, scouts, and constabulary, and also by the regular army. But at the end of 1905 "the situation" was not yet "well in hand." Since his election to Congress in 1912, Governor Curry has told me that in 1905 many thousands of people of Samar participated actively as part of the enemy's force in the field during that period. By the spring of 1906 Governor Curry was getting a grip on the situation, and in the latter part of March of that year, some of the main outlaw chiefs agreed to surrender to him. The report of Colonel Wallace C. Taylor, commanding the constabulary of the Third District, which included Samar states [464]: "After several weeks of negotiating, during which time the camp of the Pulahanes was visited by Governor Curry, and the Pulahan officers visited the settlement at Magtaon"--a settlement in south central Samar--"an understanding was arrived at by which the Pulahanes were to surrender, March 24, 1906. Instead of surrendering as agreed, the Pulahanes, commanded by Nasario Aguilar, made a treacherous attack on the constabulary garrison on the day and hour appointed for the surrender." The constabulary numbered some fifty men, the pulajans about 130. After the pulajans opened fire they made a rush on the constabulary and a hand-to-hand fight ensued. Colonel Taylor's report continues:

After the first rush the fighting continued fiercely, and when the last of the pulahanes disappeared there remained but seven enlisted men of the constabulary able to fight. Seven more were lying about more or less seriously wounded and twenty-two were dead. Captain Jones received a bad spear thrust in the chest early in the fight, but fought on, regardless. Lieutenant Bowers received a gunshot wound through the left arm, which, however, did not put him out of the fight. Thirty-five dead pulahanes were found on the field and eight more have since been found some distance off. The number of wounded who escaped cannot be determined. The unarmed Americans present with Governor Curry escaped to the river and afterwards rejoined Captain Jones who armed them.

The explanation of this treachery, as given by Governor Curry, is curious and interesting. The outlaws had intended in good faith to surrender as a result of his negotiation with them, but at the last moment there arrived to witness the surrender certain native officials and other natives bitterly hated by the Pulajans and wholly mistrusted by them. Their arrival caused the outlaws to suspect treachery themselves and that was the cause of their change of plans. It was not until the end of the year 1906 that the various energetic campaigns which followed the Magtaon incident finally began to work more or less complete restoration of public order by gradual elimination of the enemy through killings, captures, and surrenders. An idea of the seriousness and magnitude of these operations may be gathered without going into the details, from the annual report for 1906 of General Henry T. Allen commanding the Philippines Constabulary. This report, dated August 31, 1906 [465], states:

At present seventeen companies of scouts and four companies of American troops under Colonel Smith, 8th U. S. Infantry, are operating against the pulahanes, but with success that will be largely dependent upon time and attrition.

General Allen adds: "The entire 21st Regiment [of Infantry] is also in Samar." These facts are here given because they relate to the period covered by the certificate of the Philippine Commission of March 28, 1907, heretofore alluded to, and which will be more fully dealt with hereinafter, which stated that "a condition of general and complete peace" had prevailed throughout the archipelago for two years prior to March 28, 1907. Without a brief exposition of all these matters, it would be impossible to enable the reader to feel the pulse of the Filipino people as it stood at the time of the election of their assembly in 1907. The fact of our having been unable to discontinue Filipino-killing altogether for any considerable period from 1899 to the end of 1906 is too obviously relevant to the state of the public mind in 1907 to need elaboration.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 [466] deals at some length with disturbances which occurred in the island of Leyte (area 3000 square miles, population nearly 400,000), beginning in the middle of June. It describes among other things a visit of Governor-General Ide to Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, made in consequence of said disturbances, and conferences held by him there with Major-General Wood, commanding all the United States forces in the Philippines, Brigadier-General Lee, commanding the Department of the Visayas (which included Leyte, headquarters, Iloilo), Colonel Borden, commanding the United States forces in the island of Leyte, Colonel Taylor, the chief of the constabulary of the District, etc. Certainly from this formidable gathering of notables, it is clear that there was about to take place in Leyte what our friends of the Lambs' Club in New York would call "An all star performance." Leyte was four to five hundred miles from Manila. Yet so serious was the disturbance that the highest military and civil representatives of the American Government in the archipelago deemed it necessary to meet in the island which was the scene of the trouble with a view of handling it. Yet in the Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 one finds the usual rotund rhetoric treating the disturbances as of no "political" significance--which was only another way of claiming that they were not serious. It is difficult to handle this aspect of the matter without imputing to the civil authorities intent to deceive, but to leave such an imputation unremoved would be to miss the whole significance of the matter. As has already been made clear, when Judge Taft, Judge Ide, and their colleagues of the Philippine Commission had left Washington for Manila in 1900 Mr. McKinley had assured them he had no doubt that the better element of the Philippine people, once they understood us, would welcome our rule. As soon as they set foot in the Philippine Islands they had at once begun to act upon the theory that there was no real fundamental opposition to us on the part of the people of the Philippines and had continued obstinately to act upon that theory ever since. Certainly the attitude of the civil government toward the disturbances in Leyte in 1906 is not surprising when the mind adverts for a moment to the panorama of the five more or less sanguinary years already fully described hereinbefore and then takes the following bird's-eye glance at the official reports for those years.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1900, (page 17) had said:

A great majority of the people long for peace and are entirely willing to accept the establishment of a government under the supremacy of the United States.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1901 (page 7) had said:

The collapse of the insurrection came in May.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1902 (page 3) had said:

The insurrection as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of the United States in these islands is entirely at an end,

referring farther on to "the whole Christian Philippine population" as "enjoying civil government." If the "enjoyment" thus described had been genuine, continued, profound, and sincere, it would have been another story. But the net attitude of the civil government toward the general health of the body politic, relatively to public order, reminds one of the cheerful gentleman who remarked of his invalid friend, "He seems to be 'enjoying' poor health."

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1903 (page 25) says:

The conditions with respect to tranquillity in the islands have greatly improved during the last year.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1904 (page 1) says:

The great mass of the people, however, were domestic and peaceable.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1905 (part 1, page 59) says:

On the whole life and property have been as safe as in other civilized countries.

The Report of the Philippine Commission for 1906 (page 40) says:

Viewing the entire situation the islands are in a peaceable and orderly condition aside from----

various disorders which fill some ten pages of the report.

The inflexible attitude of the Commission from the beginning, of treating each successive disturbance of public order as a purely "local issue," after General Hancock's method with the tariff, is thus sufficiently apparent. They always refuse to see in successive outbreaks in various parts of the Islands any evidence of general and unanimous lack of appreciation for a benign alien civil government. Therefore it was of course clearly a foregone conclusion, in 1906, that Governor Ide, who had been in the Islands all these years, was going to be wholly unable to see anything in the disturbances in Leyte in the least tending to show that American rule was unpopular. And yet it was a matter of common knowledge all over the Visayan Islands that Jaime Veyra, then Governor of Leyte, elected by the people, was one of the most obnoxious anti-Americans in the archipelago. Both the army and constabulary were ordered out in Leyte and a good deal of fighting occurred before order was restored. The report of General Allen, commanding the constabulary for that year [467] shows one engagement with the outlaws in Leyte participated in by the constabulary and the 21st Regular Infantry, in which the enemy numbered 450 and left forty-nine dead upon the field. All this period is covered by the certificate of general and complete peace of 1907, in the fall of which year a Philippine legislature was elected. And those of the membership of that body not in favor of Philippine independence were almost as few as the Socialist party in the American House of Representatives, which, I believe, consists of Representative Berger. True, the peace certificate does not ignore the Leyte outbreak. It "forgets and forgives it," so to speak, as we shall see.

Governor Ide left the Islands finally on September 20, 1906, having resigned. Why he should have resigned, it is difficult to say. Take it all in all, he made a splendid Governor-General, and ought to have been allowed to remain. He knew the Islands from Alpha to Omega and had been there six years. His going out of office to make way for still another Governor-General was wholly uncalled for. So far as the writer is informed, he was, when he left, still blessed with good health. He had filled a very considerable place in the history of his country most creditably. He had drawn up a fine code of laws for the Islands known as the Ide code. He had made a great minister of finance, successfully performing the perilous task of transferring the currency of the country from a silver basis to a gold basis, and in so doing had proven himself fully a match, in protecting the interests of the Government, for the wiley local financiers representing the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the chartered bank of India, Australia, and China, and other institutions run by experienced men of more or less piratical tendencies. As Governor-General of the Islands, his justice, firmness, and courtliness of manner combined to produce an administration in keeping with the dignity of his great office. After returning to the United States, he remained in private life for a time, and was finally given a comparatively unimportant post as minister to a second-class country, Spain, which post he still occupies (in 1912).

When, fresh from the memory of the Samar massacres of 1904, I landed at Seattle, at the end of my last homeward-bound journey across the Pacific, in April, 1905, one of the "natives" of Seattle asked me: "Have those people over there ever got quiet yet?" The question itself seemed an answer to the orthodox official attitude at Manila, which had so long been elaborately denying, as to each successive local outbreak, that such outbreak bore any relation to the original insurrection, or was any wise illustrative of the general state of public feeling in the Islands. At the time the question was asked, the answer was, "Not entirely." Not until toward the end of 1906 did "Yes" become a correct answer to the question. In other words, there were no more serious outbreaks after 1906, nor was a state of general and complete peace ever finally established until then. Since 1906 there have been occasional despatches from Manila recounting small episodes of bloodshed, several of which have had quite a martial ring. These have related merely to the country of the Mohammedan Moros, who are as wholly apart from the main problem as the American Indian to-day is from our tariff and other like questions. The Moros are indeed what Kipling calls "half savage and half child." They never did have anything more to do with the Filipino insurrection against us than the American Indian had to do with the Civil War.