The Politics of Intervention

12 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

and compared Leonard Wood, the local commander, with

Cortez and Pizarro. On the floor of the House, John Sharp

Williams recited a parody to the vast amusement of the

Democratic members:

Chased them from everywhere



Chased them all onward



Into the crater of death,



Drove them—six hundred!



"Forward, the Wood Brigade!



Spare not a one," he said.



"Shoot all six hundred."^23

Although the administration quieted the clamor by publishing
the after-action reports of the Bud Dajo fight, Secretary of
War Taft felt the need to caution Wood against the wanton
killing of women and children.^24 When it came to putting
down insurrections, the officers of the United States Army
could see that pacification was not a popular instrument of
public policy.

Military Pacification

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army
mastered a difficult kind of warfare: the military pacification
of a rebellious civil population by military, psychological, and
economic methods. Its leaders knew that pacification was full
of political and social impications at home and abroad that
could threaten the Army's reputation and its ability to defend
the nation. Its officers did not always agree on the Army's
tactics in pacification operations or to what extent it should
function in areas reserved to civil government in the United
States. Yet, the Army was well aware that America's ex­
panding interest in the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific,
could once more put it in the business of administering a
foreign land.
The United States Army's approach to colonial policy was
in step with its own institutional history and its view of
human behavior.^25 Basically, the Army's philosophy of human