How do you feel? Are you Philippines? Filipino?
Ok I’ll stop. My name is Mr. Beat, and I often put really bad jokes into my videos like the
one you just heard. (Stop trying to be funny) Yeah, in this video, I’m definitely NOT going
to try to be funny, as this is serious stuff. This video is about a war you probably don’t
know much about. If you’re an American, you likely didn’t hear much about it in
American history class, and that’s likely because it’s a war that the American government
has preferred you just…uh…not remember. You see, this war makes the United States look bad.
Very bad, as a matter of fact. It’s a war that some historians say killed as many
as one million people. A war in which American soldiers committed all kinds of
atrocities, including pillage, torture, rape, and the massacre of civilians. A war of
imperialism, in which the United States wanted to control the Philippines to exploit its resources
and use it to expand trade throughout Asia. Here’s the story of the Philippine-American War. Once upon a time….well specifically, on April 30,
1898, an American Commodore named George Dewey sailed a small fleet into the Philippines, an
archipelago made up of at least 7,100 islands in Southeast Asia. At the time, Spain controlled the
islands, but it was quickly losing its grip over them. You see, for the past couple years, Filipino
nationalists, or those who wanted the Philippines to break free from Spain so that it could be its
own country, had been revolting. Led by Emilio Aguinaldo, these Filipino revolutionaries had had
lots of success by the time Dewey showed up. All that was mainly left was for them to capture was
Manila, the capital of the Spanish East Indies. Meanwhile, the United States was now ALSO at war
with Spain, in what became known as the Spanish American War. So that’s what had led Dewey
to take his fleet to the Spanish-controlled Philippines. On May 1, Dewey’s forces attacked
the Spanish navy stationed at Manila Bay, easily defeating it. You see, Dewey’s ships were
made of steel, and the Spanish ships were wooded. The Spanish lost 350 men…the Americans lost zero,
in what became known as The Battle of Manila Bay. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo wasn’t even in
the Philippines at this time. He was in Hong Kong. After hearing about
the American victory in Manila Bay, he returned to the Philippines
to resume the revolution. And here’s the thing, while the Americans were
showing up acting like they were gonna save the day, in reality the Filipinos were likely going
to kick the Spanish from the islands anyway. Under Aguinaldo’s leadership, the
Filipinos surrounded Manila and turned over 15,000 Spanish prisoners to the Americans.
Aguinaldo and his forces also officially declared independence from Spain. Aguinaldo also declared
himself president of the Philippines. Meanwhile, the German navy also decided to show up
acting like THEY were going to take over the Philippines now. Dewey sent a telegraph
back to the United States to request more troops so that the AMERICANS could fully
take over the Philippines. That said, Aguinaldo and Dewey had both agreed that
they would join forces to take Spain down. Eh, we’ll figure out the details later. Over the next two months, more and more
American troops arrived in the Philippines, enough to scare the Germans away. Soon the 13,000
Spanish troops in Manila were completely cut off from the outside world. After Basilio Augustin,
the Spanish Governor-General of the Philippines, tried to surrender to the Filipinos, the Spanish
parliament was embarrassed and kicked him out of office, replacing him with a dude named Fermin
Jaudenes. Jaudenes secretly worked out a deal with Dewey to have a fake battle in which Spain would
surrender the Philippines to the United States, NOT the Filipinos. That fake battle,
often called the Mock Battle of Manila, took place on August 13, 1898. Even though the
battle was fake, 19 Americans and 49 Spanish died in it. Regardless, Jaudenes surrendered
Manila to the Americans, not the Filipinos, as they had agreed to, and that was the end of the
Spanish American War in the Philippines, for real. After this, the Americans sent a message to
Aguinaldo and his forces to not enter the city, and this, you could say,
made Aguinaldo quite upset. President William McKinley even
sent out a telegram that said: “There must be no joint occupation with the
[Filipinos]...The [Filipinos] and all others must recognize the military occupation
and authority of the United States.” This made imperialists in the United States,
or those who wanted to expand the country’s military and political influence
beyond the boundaries of the country, quite happy. One such imperialist was Mark Hanna,
a U.S. Senator from Ohio. “With a strong foothold in the Philippine Islands…we can and will take
a large slice of the commerce of Asia,” he said. On August 12, the United States and Spain
signed a cease-fire agreement. On December 10, the two countries agreed on a peace
treaty unoriginally called The Treaty of Paris. That’s the treaty that,
among other stuff, gave Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam to the United
States, but also let the United States buy all of the Philippines from Spain for $20
million, or $722 million in today’s money. Uh, yeah. The Spanish and Americans didn’t allow NOT ONE Filipino representative to attend
the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris. Now that the United States was an official
imperial power, a big debate splintered the country about whether or not being an imperial
power was actually a good thing. Anti-imperialists opposed the taking over of the Philippines mostly
because it went against the values and ideals of the U.S. Constitution- the Filipinos, after
all, wanted independence, they didn’t have a revolution to kick one colonial power out only
to have yet another colonial power come in to oppress them. One of the most well-known of the
anti-imperialists was the great Mark Twain, who wrote, “I have read carefully the treaty of Paris,
and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines.
We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.” Still, President McKinley traveled the
country trying to convince everyone that the American occupation of the Philippines
was actually a good thing, arguing that if the United States didn’t control them, Germany
or Japan would. Not only that, McKinley argued, the Philippines could make the United States
more prosperous with its resources, eh? Yeah, the occupation of the
Philippines remained controversial, especially after Aguinaldo decided that now he
was starting a NEW revolt, a revolt against the NEW colonial power. The United States.
He declared war on the United States. On February 4, 1899, around the time that
Congress and President McKinley ratified the Treaty of Paris, a firefight broke out
between American soldiers and Filipino soldiers in Manila. Later that day, Aguinaldo
officially declared “That peace and friendly relations with the Americans be broken and that
the latter be treated as enemies, within the limits prescribed by the laws of war.”
The Philippine-American War had begun. Over the next day and a half, 55 Americans died
and 238 Filipinos died in the first and biggest battle of the war, the 1899 Battle of Manila. When
the Filipinos tried to deliver a truce, Elwell Stephen Otis, the American Military Governor of
the Philippines, rejected it. While the United States won that first battle, soon Aguinaldo and
his troops had managed to take control of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, and
they refused to let American ships dock there. In response, President McKinley sent a
fleet of new ships there to put down what the American government called an “insurrection.” Aguinaldo had around 100,000 “soldiers” on
his side, most of them untrained and armed only with spears, knives, bows and arrows,
and other simple weapons. The Americans? Oh, they had guns, of course. In the early
months of the war, the United States mostly had success in conventional battles due
to their superior weapons. Because of this, Aguinaldo had decided that the Filipinos'
best hope was conducting guerrilla warfare, or a war fought by unconventional means.
Aguinaldo had noticed that his soldiers were most successful with ambushes, or surprise
attacks from concealed positions. He also had a very talented general on his side- Antonio
Luna. Under Luna’s leadership, the Filipino army was able to effectively terrorize American
soldiers. Oh, and Luna’s soldiers actually had guns. Luna’s elite unit of sharpshooters
even got the nickname “Marksmen of Death.” After this, the atrocities
got significantly worse. First of all, American troops became increasingly
frustrated with guerrilla warfare tactics because it eroded their trust with the civilian
population. In other words, they generally stopped trusting pretty much all Filipinos. They
began scorched earth campaigns, basically just destroying a bunch of the Filipinos’ resources.
They began relocating civilians to concentration camps. Yes, you heard that right. Concentration
camps. Where thousands, at the very least, ultimately died from disease and starvation. They
often cut off food from being transported to the villages they DIDN’T burn down. There were also
reports of American soldiers robbing civilians of everything they owned of value. There were
reports of rape. Some American soldiers tortured prisoners. One well documented way they did this
was through something called “the water cure.” When a Filipino prisoner wouldn’t say the right
thing, American soldiers would hold them down and force them to drink a bunch of water in a short
amount of time. They’d often hold their mouths open with a stick and close their nose with
pincers so the water couldn’t come back up. On November 27, 1900, American soldiers gave
Joveniano Ealdama, a Filipino who was the mayor of the town of Egbaras, the water cure.
Sergeant Edward Davis later testified about it: “After they filled him up with water he swelled
way up and then these two soldiers would roll the water out of him. They had an interpreter over
him and they asked him if he would tell what information they were after. He told some,
and then after they released him . . . they wanted further information out of him . . .
and he would not give it. So they took him down right there and they took a syringe and
squirted water up his nostrils. He would not give the information then and they put salt
in the water. Then he was willing to tell.” I should say that most American
soldiers were NOT doing this. In fact, they were just as disturbed as
you right now hearing about this. Many began writing to the media to tell them of
the atrocities. One soldier from New York wrote: "Last night one of our boys was found shot and his
stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill
every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women and children were reported
killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my
gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger." After the media published stories like this, many
Americans back home got angry and began to protest the war. The War Department even conducted a major
investigation. When Elwell Otis found out about his soldiers writing to the media, he freaked
out, launching a major PR campaign to downplay these reports. He even tracked down some of the
soldiers who wrote the letters, forcing them to write a retraction and court-martialing them
if they refused to do so. But even generals were turning against Otis. General Reeve,
of the Thirteenth Minnesota Regiment, wrote: “It seems to me that we are doing something
that is contrary to our principles in the past.” But it wasn’t just the American
soldiers guilty of atrocities. The Filipino soldiers tortured American prisoners, too. There were reports that they buried American
soldiers alive. Here’s another uh…report….uh “ [An] American prisoner… had been buried in
the ground with only his head projecting. His mouth had been propped open with a stick, a
trail of sugar laid to it through the forest, and a handful thrown into it.
Millions of ants had done the rest.” Goodness Filipino soldiers reportedly
mutilated American soldiers and slowly killed them so that they
would suffer. By the end of the war, Filipino sharpshooters were targeting chaplains,
doctors, nurses, and even wounded soldiers. On June 5, 1899, the Filipino Army lost
its best general, in kind of a crazy way. Members of Aguinaldo’s OWN cabinet assassinated Antonio Luna. This was a HUGE
loss for the Filipino Army. On December 20, 1900, General Arthur MacArthur, who had taken over as the American
Military Governor of the Philippines after Otis stepped down a few months prior, placed the
entire Philippines under martial law. However, this just further eroded trust between
American soldiers and Filipino civilians. By early 1901, things were not going well
at all for the The Philippine Army. They had lost control of most of their territory
and thousands of soldiers. But things really got discouraging for them after the capture of
their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, on March 23, 1901. American soldiers were able to capture him
after pretending to be prisoners of war escorted by other American soldiers in Philippine
Army uniforms. Aguinaldo didn’t give up much of a resistance- he was exhausted by that
point, and tired of seeing Filipinos killed. On April 1, Aguinaldo swore an oath accepting
that the United States did now officially control the Philippines. He even swore allegiance
to the American government. On April 19, he issued a formal surrender, telling his
followers to put down their weapons and give up the fight. That said, not all Filipinos
were ready to do that, and sporadic hostilities would continue over the next 12 years. General
Miguel Malvar took Aguinaldo’s place as the new leader of the Filipino government. While he
launched a series of new attacks on American troops for the rest of the year, ultimately
he’d surrender, too, on April 16, 1902. By this time, Theodore Roosevelt was now President
after the assassination of William McKinley a few months prior. Once a huge imperialist, by
now even Roosevelt was questioning why the heck the United States was still fighting this
war. He pushed for a solution to end the war and a path for the Filipinos to eventually
govern themselves. To help them do that, he appointed his friend William Taft
as civil governor of the archipelago. Ultimately, the war, well the main part of it,
at least, ended when the Americans promised the Filipinos that they could govern themselves, as
long as the United States could still kind of control and protect them…and…ya
know…exploit their natural resources. The main part of the Philippine-American
War officially ended on July 2, 1902 after Congress passed the Philippine Organic
Act, a law that included the establishment of a bill of rights for Filipinos and a
Filipino-led representative government, assuming hostilities ended. Heck, President
Roosevelt even proclaimed full and complete forgiveness and amnesty to all Filipinos
who had participated in the conflict. Well hostilities did end….ok…they mostly ended. Technically the war still carried on in the
southern Philippines, where a group known as the Moros continued to resist American
occupation in what became known as the Moro Rebellion. The Moros were only finally defeated
after the Battle of Bud Bagsak on June 15, 1913. After this, the United States controlled
the Philippines and protected it (sighs) for the next 33 years. That’s when the
Philippines finally achieved full independence. The Philippine-American War was objectively
a disaster for everyone involved. It was a painful reminder that imperialism often
just leads to the horrible subjugation of a people. In fact, this war single handedly
turned Americans against imperialism, and even got the once staunch imperialist Teddy
Roosevelt questioning himself. The war highlighted the importance of respecting the sovereignty
of other nations. It also exposed the terrible racism toward Filipinos. American soldiers
done messed up with their treatment of them. In conclusion, you probably weren’t taught
much about the Philippine-American War in history class, (turning) unless you’re
Filipino, of course, (turning), but it’s an important war that we should learn from.
(turning) but Mr. Beat, are you bringing this war up because you hate America? (turning)
No, I am bringing this war up because we must continue to learn from our mistakes of the past in
order to work toward our goals of peace, justice, and equality. After all, ignoring our mistakes
just means that we’ll probably repeat them. A shout out to Yuriel for looking over this
script. He’s from the Philippines. Heck, a shout out to all the beautiful people from the wonderful
country of the Philippines. Every Filipino who has reached out to me over the years has been
gracious and thoughtful. Which event in American history should I cover next? Let
me know down below. Thanks for watching.
