Centerfield

From a quick read, I don't think I would say that Twain was taking acid to the soldier who later won the Medal of Honor, but to the uses propagandists in the government put him and his wounds.

On the larger issue, historical American colonial practices don't always give us much to be proud of.

It's true that Teddy Roosevelt didn't believe the Filipinos were immediately ready for democracy, so the U.S. placed heavy emphasis on education in the Philippines.

Rudyard Kipling thought Roosevelt was right. Mark Twain thought Roosevelt was wrong.

The result of TR's policy was that the Philippines in 1907 had Asia's first democratically elected parliament. In addition, the U.S. presence gave the Philippines, which had no navy, some protection from the land-hungry Japanese.

Had the Philippines fallen to Japan in 1910, when Korea fell to Japan, or even in 1937, when China fell, Japan would have been in a much more powerful position by 1941. Instead of invading the Philippines and bombing Hawaii, Japan would have been invading Hawaii and bombing California.

Whe the Filipinos were beaten, the US told them they weren't ready for this hard Democracy and Liberty stuff.

Um, maybe because they'd spent three centuries slaughtering the Spanish, and a millenia or so slaughtering each other under the usual bloody sultanates, and both the Christians and the Moros were loudly announcing that they would eradicate the other? Not that the US military was exactly peacekeepers (they weren't--the "lifers" were mostly career veterans of the Indian Wars having their last hurrahs) but the major Filipino factions thought we were softies after the Spanish rule.

Twain was part of the leadership of the Quaker-founded anti-Imperialists, and he hated Teddy Roosevelt and absolutely DESPISED Leonard Wood, the military governor of the Moro area. His dissection of Johnston was in large part a sub-set of that. The massacre was indeed a massacre, but the Moros themselves were no innocents, save for the children.

Wood was by all accounts one mean bastard, who learned soldiering during the Indian Wars and in the Cuban campaigns. But he was also a smart bastard, and laid the foundations for a modernized US military. Twain's likely still spinning in his grave over Fort Leonard Wood being in Missouri...but I see he never mentioned Wood's abolition of slavery in Moro province, or the building of schools, or....

Yep, times were a little different then than now.

Mark Twain is one of my absolute all-time favorites. My 7th grade English teacher told us he was a misanthrope. The more I read the more I was sure she was wrong.

A favorite Twain quote of mine is that censorship is like outlawing steak because a baby can't chew it.

We ought to have a multi-blog carnival of Twain for his birthday and ask instapundit to give us a plug! And Twain must be all or mostly public domain by now, so can excerpt to our hearts' content.

Pat, of course you're right. Good point.

Frank, thanks for stopping by. I loved the article. You're right about the strategic consequences of having bases farther out (especially given range limitations of the day). But they could've been served without having to rule the populace, as Guantanamo shows. But imperialism was the custom of the day, even among a majority of Americans, it's clear.

Tully, I think you're overromanticing imperialism a bit. Remember, its very basis is that all people are not equal, that some are better than others.

Filipino resistance to Spanish rule might've had something to do with the clearly documented fact that the Spanish effectively enslaved and killed their native populations on vast scales.

Now, what IS true is that no doubt the levels of killings and workings to death probably declined dramatically after the handover; US imperial rule was far preferable to most other imperial rules. But you can be certain that plenty of US killings, effective enslavements, and other nastiness failed to make it to the history books.

Slavery may've been abolished, and that was surely a good. But imperialism shares a fair number of slavery's downsides. The people were expected to obey their white rulers, on the basis that they were inherently superior. Never mind that said superior rulers had few clues about native customs or how the people they ruled lived. Neither of those happens WITHIN a democracy. Thus, our imperial rule was decidedly worse than our internal rule.

Imperialism was as similarly corrupting as slavery. Americans and Europeans in ruled territoriies came to expect high levels of service and servility. Plenty of them learned to take advantage of their native populations in plenty of ways.

The schools were taught in English in a region where very few spoke English. Only the rulers did. They taught the pupils that they were inherently inferior to white men at every opportunity.

Brian: yeah, I love Twain, too. Hmm... like the birthday idea. Plenty of time to organize it.

This reminds me of the comments he made about King Leopold, and superior European “civilization”.

Tully, I think you're overromanticing imperialism a bit.

I'm not "romanticing" [sic] imperialism at all. I'm pointing out (once again) that imposing the moral values of 2007 on the world of the past is a futile exercise in emotive projection. I'm not the one imposing the cultural relativism of 2007 liberalism (or 1906 Connecticut pacifism) on century-old events taking place in a bloody tribal sultanate culture on the other side of the world. Who's "romnaticing" here?

The sultans as well ruled by "inherent superority," established Darwinistically. They didn't have much problem with Wood's crushing of the Moro rebels. They understood it quite well as a necessary response from a ruling power, and it saved them from having to do it. Indeed, there's indications they encouraged their own local malcontents to join the rebels, knowing that the Americans would crush them sooner or later. They were a bit surprised it was later, but hey, all the more time to cull the rogue wolves out of the herd and send them off to doom. (Sound familiar?)

Nor was the First battle of Bud Dajo an unprovoked assault on some innocent band of peace-loving innocents. Far from. The Moro rebels were a nasty vicious lot who repeatedly provoked and challenged the American forces, and publicly and repeatedly swore they would fight to the last soul. Wood's big mistake was letting Scott talk him out of crushing the crater base months earlier, before Pala had time to gather greater numbers, and before the rebels had time to gain enough confidence to bring their families into the base.

It was that "no slave-trading, no cattle rustling, no women-stealing and oh yeah, send your kids to school" bit that really puzzled the sultans and PO'd the rebels. And the poll tax, of course. The American forces, as I believe I mentioned, were largely veterans of the Indian Wars, and not exactly sweethearts. No "white hats" on either side that I can see. They viewed "pacification" of natives as either packing them off to the reservation (i.e., back to their sultans) or killing them to stop their depredations, with no in-betweens. The sultans didn't really want the rebels back. Nor did the ruling sultans want "freedom" as we think of it, they wanted to keep their own power structure in place--themselves as absolute rulers, complete to their fraternal fights for territory and booty, and their traditional rights of piracy and conquest.

Bud Dajo wasn't another Chivington special, troops wantonly slaughtering an unarmed and peaceful bunch of natives. The Moros slightly outnumbered the US forces, the crater was a very defendable position, and the Moros refused repeated offers to leave and return to their own areas. Even on the second day of the battle they refused to send their women and children out of the crater, despite the opportunity and ability to do so, and despite repeated offers of safe passage for them. Yes, it was a very unequal battle, and the US forces utterly crushed and annihilated the rebels, but the battle itself was inevitable.

If I can lighten things up...

Don't know much about history, but I'm not too bad with biology. Anyway, I haven't read a whole lot of Twain, but I've read few things that give me more pleasure than his rippings of Fenimore Cooper. What a smart smart-ass Twain was.

imposing the moral values of 2007 on the world of the past is a futile exercise in emotive projection.

You're mischaracterizing my position. Nowhere did I say that those involved in the Philippine-American War were evil for having done so. I understand that to them, this was the noble occupation of bearing the White Man's Burden, and that Imperialism was thought to be good by a majority of Americans and plenty of other imperialistic nations as well.

That said, I see nothing wrong with looking back at what happened with regret at bad results from the point of view of contemporary ethics. You can learn a lot more that way. We both agree, I think, that this war was nasty. The contemporary viewpoint might well have spared us that war.

To be fair, I probably mischaracterized your position, too, in my first response, making it sound like you were planning on personally conquering and oppressing the whole world, bwahaha.

You're equating your anti-imperialist thoughts and assumptions and moral views with Twain's, but no one's imposing their own moral views on that conflict? Pull the other one. :-)

Yeah, it was a nasty war. Violent culture clashes usually are, and there are very few clean wars in history. But notice that the sultan got where they were through their own form of imperialism. The Indonesian/Filipino Moros did not become Muslims through subliminal osmosis. They were conquered. Is it imperialist to conquer imperialist conquerors?

Historical cultural relativism is a silly game. But I've said that before. It was just as futile for Twain to impose HIS moral views from 1906 Connecticut on the Philippines conflict as it is for us to do so in 2007.

It was indeed a nasty war, but that does not mean it did not serve a national purpose. We were there for the same reason nations usually act--in their perceived self-interest. As Frank Warner pointed out, had we not been there we would have suffered much more during WW2. As would have Australia and environs. We can argue about the moral aspects, even about the effectiveness of the tactic in furthering national purposes, but we didn't hold onto the Philippines because we thought it was a neat vacation destination. We held onto it because it served strategic national purposes.

(Uh oh. I see you're onto my plans for global domination!)

Twain's takedown of Cooper is priceless.

Jon, I doubt that, even 100 years ago, most Americans favored imperialism. That's why Mark Twain's group was called the Anti-Imperialist League.

The question then was, was preparing the Philippines for democracy imperialism? Did the Americans consider themselves the Filipinos' masters, or their educators?

From Day 1, the United States did not intend to keep the Philippines as an American territory, and did not consider the Philippines resources as America's.

However, the U.S. didn't want the Philippines, recently freed from the tyranny of Spanish colonialism, to be handed off to another unelected government. As Marcos later showed, even tyrant with a Filipino face is still a tyrant.

Make that: "A tyrant with a Filipino face is still a tyrant."

James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer and Last of The Mohicans were one of the few books I was forced to read (my parents stopped reminding me to make progress after I stalled halfway through Mohicans). I could make it through Deerslayer, albeit without enthusiasm. Mohicans felt like one of Cooper's Indian tortures.

So I also loved the job Twain did on Cooper.