Category: Philippine-American War

The Spanish American War and the Philippine “Insurgency” were very fascinating events to learn about in the film and the sources that were given. Entering the Imperial Age, America was in its reconstruction era and was culturally divided due to the recent conclusion of the civil war. During this time America was very interested in expanding its empire and turning itself into a world superpower. America felt that it was their destiny to be on the top as shown by this quote from Modern History Sourcebook: Albert Beveridge: The March of the Flag “I answer, The rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self­government We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent”(Internet History Sourcebooks)America felt that it was their duty to help struggling countries and try and impose their “superior” values in their governments. In the documentary film Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War which was directed by Daniel A. Miller in New York for PBS, America was searching for a reason to expand their territory and saw the Cuban War of Indepences as a perfect opportunity to do this. At the time Cuba had been trying for years to gain its independence from Spain and The Cubans were crying for help from America. Newspapers at the time were flooded with horrific atrocities that were being committed against the Cuban people and the American people felt that they had no choice but to help the struggling people. William Randolph Hearst was a lobbyist for the aid of the Cubans as supported by this quote “ Hearst took up the Cuban independence movement as a jingoistic way to bring America together. We were a nation in that period that was at each other’s throats….And Hearst saw that the way to pull everybody together was with some war.” (Film: Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War, act 1). Although there were many supporters of this war some felt that diving into the war was not the route for America to go down. A very famous and outspoken anti-imperialist was Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie wrote about his feelings toward imperialistic views in a journal entry in the North American Review. Carnegie claimed that America was not ready to take the next step in becoming a world power. This is supported by this quote. “I say, that no American statesman should place his country in any position which it could not defend, and relying only upon its own strong right arm.” (Carnegie, Andrew. “Americanism versus Imperialism”). Despite the fact that there were many anti-imperialistic supporters, in February of 1898 the USS Maine sunk in Havana harbor as a result of an explosion on the ship. Newspapers spread across the United States and blamed the ship sinking on the Spanish and that was the last straw for America. On April 22nd the united states sent its naval fleet into Cuba which led to Spain declaring war on the United States.

The major differences between the way America handled Cuba and the Philippines were very different. While the Americans had made the teller amendment that stated that after the war America would not establish control over Cuba but there was no such document for the Philippines. In fact, the United States wanted to keep control of the Philippines and use it as a naval base to keep a foot in that region of the world. Another difference between the way America handled the united states and Cuba was who fought in the battles. In Cuba, the United States men were made up of cowboys, Indians, rich aristocrats, and a few squadrons of African American soldiers led by Theodore Roosevelt. In the Philippines, the men were mostly comprised of volunteers that were getting sick due to the disease they were exposed to on the islands. Additionally, the fighting in Cuba compared to the fighting in the Philippines was very minimal. The Insurgency of the Philippines was very brutal and there was constant battling as shown by this quote from American Soldiers in the Philippines Write Home about the War “There has not been a night for the last ten days we have not had fighting. Our force is too weak, and we cannot spare any more men and will have to wait for more troops. Then we will have hard fighting, for there are so many that, no matter how many we kill or capture, it doesn’t seem to lessen their number.”(American Soldiers in the Philippines Write Home about the War.” HISTORY MATTERS). The final difference between the two conflicts is that America at the end of the war started to fight the Philippines while after the war America left Cuba alone.

After watching the film documentary and reading the sources given I have learned a lot about the Philippines insurgency and the Spanish American War. one thing that I learned while watching the documentary was how involved Theodore Roosevelt was in this war. I had no idea that Roosevelt was in the middle of some of the battles in Cuba and I found that very interesting. Another thing that I found interesting was how much of an effect the media had on convincing America to rally for the war. I had no idea that the media was so invested in the war at the time and I found some of the propaganda very interesting. America had a very sked view of the Filipinos as shown by this quote from the textbook “Americans spoke of the “savage” Filipinos; one soldier declared that the Philippines “won’t be pacified until the Filipinos are killed off like the Indians.”(“9-5a Philippine Insurrection and Pacification” A People & a Nation: a History of the United States). I believe that if Americans saw through this propaganda and were given completely truthful information they would not have supported the Insurgency of the Philipines and would have forced the government to take its troops out of the country.

Political power is the ability to control or influence the behavior of people, and the bigger your sphere of influence, the more political power you attain. In the Spring and Summer of 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. The Americans were victorious, which meant that they held major world and political power. Because America had won the war with Spain, they acquired new lands; Cuba and the Philippines. Cuba was granted a sort of semi-independence. However, The US had three choices regarding the Philippines – hand the islands back to Spain, give the Philippines its independence, or annex the Philippines under some kind of American government. The United States decided it would annex. Generally, there are many contradictions concerning the annexation of the Philippines. The majority of Americans supported the annexation. Anti-imperialists believed that policy of Imperialism was rather severe.

In each country people should have the right to fight for independence and national identity. It is vital to understand the meaning of liberty and consent. The annexation of the Philippines was unfair and selfish, and extending a country’s power to other countries is unjust. The Americans were following Spanish methods by restraining, restricting and depriving the Filipinos of their rights. While Americans claimed that the Filipnos would receive proper protection, they were denied education and deprived of their independence. Spoken in a speech by Albert Beveridge, “Shall we turn these people back to the reeking hands from which we have taken them? Shall we abandon them, with Germany, England, Japan hungering for them?…” America was convinced that by annexing the Philippines, they were “rescuing” them and doing them a favor. “The rule…that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government.” Here Beveridge is implying that the Filipinos were unfit to govern themselves. By annexing the Philippines, the Filipinos were left with no freedom. Spoken by the Antiimperialist league, “We hold with Abraham Lincoln, that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism.” Lincoln believed that no man should be governed without consent. However, in this situation, that was what the United States was trying to do, making Americans highly hypocritical.

Annexing the Philippines would be acceptable if the United States did it purely to benefit the Filipinos. William McKinley described to a group of clergymen in 1899 the benefits that would come with annexation. “That we could not give (the Philippines) back to Spain – that would be cowardly and dishonorable; That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace.” While McKinley may have figured that he was constructing a remarkable plan, it is against basic human morals to force religion among anybody and these “benefits” described the surface of America’s plan. He did not mention that the Filipinos would be deprived of their freedom, liberty and rights throughout the process of annexation.

In 1898, the United States defeated Spain and ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and, most importantly, the Philippines. While there was much debate going on about if the Philippines should be annexed or not, many political groups began forming to express their opinions on the matter. Eventually it became known to the Filipino people that the United States was intent on colonizing and controlling them. The Filipino people had been oppressed by Spain since 1896 and did not want to be taken over again, and the United States was intent on becoming an imperialist nation. This clash in desires between two nations led to the Philippine-American War for Philippine’s independence in 1899.

There were many implications of the Philippine-American War, most notable being the social implications. The United States as a whole was divided over the annexation of the Philippines, and when it was reveal that the United States planned to take over the Philippines and war broke out, the people were divided. Many of the people were very opposed to the United States control over the Philippines due to the feeling of betrayal that came with oppressing a country’s freedom, and those who felt this way became the Anti-Imperialist League. A global implication of the Philippine-American War was the United States acquiring the Philippines are an oversees colony. This meant the Philippines could be used as a base for United States business and military interests. This could be seen as threatening to other powerful nations that compete with the United States.

Primary and secondary sources are used for historical analysis. Primary sources are considered original sources, documents that are considered “fact”. Secondary sources are often interpretations or analysis of the primary, original document. For the topic being discussed, the Platform of the Anti-Imperialist League is the primary source and is the textbook the secondary source. Secondary sources are often most helpful for students at the introductory level due to the analysis and explanations they provide. For students not well versed in history analysis, interpreting a primary document may not come easy, so secondary documents are very useful.

The United States government made a choice to not grant independence to the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. This led to war in the Philippines for their own independence against the United States and a large divide in the nation’s support of the decision to not give independence to the Philippines. This 3 year long, brutal war had grave consequences (over four thousand American solider deaths, over twenty thousand Filipino solider deaths, and as many as two hundred thousand Filipino citizen deaths) only to lead to the United States government allowing the Philippines to self-govern themselves and eventually gain their independence many years later. The United States greed for control led to war that could have most likely been prevented if the Philippines were given their independence in the first place. The United States, whom was famous for having fought and declared their independence against a nation of greater power, was now the bully trying to prevent independence of a nation. The Anti-Imperialist League was founded because they believed we were not holding true to our founding beliefs. They saw the United States government being hypocritical and hoped to change the way the government was handling the Philippines.

The Philippine-American War is still very relevant today due to the reminder it gives us about what can happen when we betray ourselves and oppress those who seek freedom and independence. The clash of imperialism and nationalism that took place just proved that those who are determined to be free will not stand to be oppressed by anyone, even those stronger than themselves. The United States is one of the most powerful countries in the world, and though we are capable of conquering other countries, we should not. We should not conquer people and take their land because it goes against everything we were founded upon. We are the symbol of independence around the world, and we should encourage others to seek independence themselves.

Mark Twain was the most prominent opponent of the Philippine-American War. In its annual report for 1910, the year he died, the Anti-Imperialist League noted that he “employed in the cause of Anti-Imperialism and in behalf of the Filipino those wonderful weapons of satire which were so absolutely at his command, and the members of the League were able to appreciate what is not yet justly understood: that, more than a brilliant humorist, he was a passionate and zealous reformer.” What was “not yet justly understood” in 1910 remains so today. Nearly eclipsed by his deserved but overwhelming reputation as a humorist, Mark Twain’s writings on the war are among his least known. His relationship with the Anti-Imperialist League has received even less attention.

The Philippine-American War, the United States’ first protracted war in Asia, marked the beginning of what Henry Luce would later name the “American Century.” When it purchased the Philippines from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States held only Manila and its suburbs. The Filipinos, having waged a successful revolution for independence, controlled the rest of the country. To become a major power in Asia, with a naval coaling station in the Philippines providing easier access to the seemingly unlimited commercial markets in China, the United States first had to defeat the Filipinos’ poorly armed but popular army and abolish their newly established republic. The war that accomplished this feat officially lasted from February 1899 to July 1902, but regional guerrilla warfare and sporadic rebellions continued well into the next decade. Known at the time as the “Philippine Insurrection,” this war lasted longer, involved more U.S. troops, cost more lives and had a more significant impact on the United States than the three-month SpanishAmerican War that preceded it.

The conquest of the Philippines was part of a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy. Central and South America had long been within its sphere of influence, but the annexation of the Philippines was the country’s first major step into Asia as a world power. Supported by the rapid development of an integrated commercial and military route from the eastern seaboard of the United States to its Asian possession, the archipelago was to be the logistical hub for U.S. commercial expansion in Asia. From 1898 to 1903 the United States formally annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and acquired the Panama Canal Zone to facilitate trade between the oceans. “Thus the old America passes away,” a jubilant contemporary historian observed, “behold a new America appears, and her face is toward the Pacific!”

Supporters of imperialism hailed it as essential for economic expansion and justified it as “the white man’s burden” of extending civilization to peoples considered incapable of governing themselves. Senator Albert Beveridge balanced these themes with remarkable dexterity: “The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world.’

Many others, however, viewed the creation of an empire as a threat to the country’s democratic and anticolonial political traditions. The opposition was organized by the Anti-Imperialist League, which was founded in Boston in November 1898 and soon had branches throughout the country. Its leaders ardently supported the Filipinos, but they consistently described Filipino goals as a secondary concern. Their first priority was to defend their own democratic republic from the new “un-American” policy of imperialism. Citing such documents as the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, they argued that imperialism was an adoption of the “government without representation” the country had fought two wars to end.

Although they came late in the debate, Mark Twain’s statements against the war made an important contribution to the anti-imperialist movement. His most influential article, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” was published shortly after William McKinley was reelected in a contest widely viewed as a “referendum on imperialism.” The essay sparked an intense controversy that revitalized the movement and restored some of the momentum it had lost following the election. The country’s leading anti-imperialist newspaper, the Springfield Republican (Mass.), editorialized that “Mark Twain has suddenly become the most influential antiimperialist and the most dreaded critic of the sacrosanct person in the White House that the country contains.” His writings on the war are not only those of a great literary figure, they are those of a great anti-imperialist whose protest had a potent political impact.