The Burdens of World Power 7The determining factor was the quick cooling of the evange
listic fervor that had helped sweep Americans into war in 1898.
Although the war with Spain reshaped the United States
Army, it was the Philippine Insurrection that was the Army's
major experience between the Indian wars and World War I.
In crushing Philippine resistance to American tutelage, the
Army lost ten times as many battlefield casualties as it suffered
in Cuba. The insurrection was a costly, unpopular war, long
on hardship and short on measurable victory. It was fought, in
the view of many educated Americans, in a distasteful manner
for confused goals. The Philippine Insurrection brought public
censure to the Army, and it also put the Army into the business
of colonial government, for which its frontier service provided
only partial education.
11
Because the Army had to draw upon its own resources
and experiences in pacifying the Philippines and because
its past was most closely linked with its constabulary service
on the Great Plains, the Army was guided by some definite
assumptions about controlling rebellious subject peoples. The
Army, dealing with the Plains Indians, had used a simple code
of justice: good behavior was rewarded and breaches of the
peace were punished as quickly as possible. There was little
room for negotiation and compromise. There was, however,
some humane concern for the Indians, but the Army's approach
was distinctly paternalistic. In all, the Army found force or the
threat of force the best method of subduing the Indians, and
it received little meaningful education in governing complex
and alien societies. An interesting insight into the residual
effects of this experience is the respect the American officers
felt for the Moros, a savage, primitive Moslem people who
inhabited the southernmost Philippines. American officers, on
the other hand, could scarcely hide their distaste for the
Hispanized, Christian Filipinos of Luzon.
The outbreak of the Philippine Insurrection in 1899 pro
duced shock in the United States. Even so, there was little
criticism of the subsequent Luzon campaigns, which shattered
conventional resistance by the end of that year. But the