684 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad
Philippines. Filipinos had been fighting a war against Spain since 1896. After
Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, established a
provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of the United
States. But once McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Fili-
pino movement turned against the United States. The result was a second war,
far longer (it lasted from 1899 to 1903) and bloodier (it cost the lives of more
than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans) than the Spanish- American con-
flict. Today, the Philippine War is perhaps the least remembered of all Amer-
ican wars. At the time, however, it was closely followed and widely debated in
the United States. Both sides committed atrocities. Insurgents killed Filipinos
who cooperated with the Americans. The U.S. Army burned villages and moved
the inhabitants into camps where thousands perished of disease, and launched
a widespread campaign of torture, including the infamous “water cure” or sim-
ulated drowning, later revived in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the 21st cen-
tury and known as waterboarding. Press reports of these practices tarnished
the nation’s self- image as liberators. “We do not intend to free the people of the
Philippines,” complained Mark Twain. “We have gone there to conquer.”
The McKinley administration justified its policies on the grounds that its
aim was to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos (although most
residents of the islands were already Roman Catholics). William Howard Taft,
who became governor- general of the Philippines in 1901, believed it might take
a century to raise Filipinos to the condition where they could appreciate “what
Anglo- Saxon liberty is.”
Once in control of the Philippines, the colonial administration took seri-
ously the idea of modernizing the islands. It expanded railroads and harbors,
brought in American schoolteachers and public health officials, and sought
to modernize agriculture (although efforts to persuade local farmers to substi-
tute corn for rice ran afoul of the Filipino climate and cultural traditions). The
United States, said President McKinley, had an obligation to its “little brown
brothers.” Yet in all the new possessions, American policies tended to serve
the interests of land- based local elites— native- born landowners in the Philip-
pines, American sugar planters in Hawaii and Puerto Rico— and such policies
bequeathed enduring poverty to the majority of the rural population. Under
American rule, Puerto Rico, previously an island of diversified small farmers,
became a low- wage plantation economy controlled by absentee corporations.
By the 1920s, its residents were among the poorest in the entire Caribbean.
Citizens or Subjects?
American rule also brought with it American racial attitudes. In an 1899 poem,
the British writer Rudyard Kipling urged the United States to take up the “white
man’s burden” of imperialism. American proponents of empire agreed that the