Stories about my Father - 27
Part Two
The Philippines is a cluster of over 7,500 islands in the Western Pacific Ocean. If you made an X with one line going between Japan and Borneo and the other one going through China and New Guinea, the islands would basically lie where the lines meet in the center.
While there have been people living there for millennia, the first modern humans are presumed to have been the Negrito people who were directly descended from those who first migrated out of Africa. After that other people started pushing south into the islands from Taiwan. The intermingling of these two peoples is what led to the modern Filipino ethnic groups.
Both China and India have been trading in the islands for many centuries and have added much to their culture as well as to their gene pool. In 1521, The explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who was leading the expedition trying to become the first Europeans to circumnavigate the globe, arrived in the islands and claimed them for Spain. Not all Filipinos were as excited about being subjugated by a distant European power as one might think, and a band of resistance fighters under the command of a man named Lapulapu killed Magellan in the Battle of Mactan. A little over twenty years later in 1543, another Spanish explorer, Ruy López de Villalobos, returned and named them, Las Islas Filipinas in honor of King Philip II.
The Philippines ended up being ruled, not directly by Spain itself, but indirectly through their empire based in occupied Mexico. That rule lasted for more than three centuries. Over three hundred years of somebody else telling them what to do in their own country. Generations lived under that regime never knowing any other way of life.
In 1896, an anti-colonial organization called the Katipunan started speaking out against the Spanish who were struggling across the ocean with Cuba. They created a revolutionary government and began a nationwide armed revolt. When the Maine exploded and sparked the Spanish-American War in April of 1898, one of the first things that happened was that the US Navy’s Asiatic Squadron under the command of Commodore George Dewey attacked and defeated the Spanish Navy in Manilla Bay to keep them from heading to Cuba to help. The Filipino revolutionaries under the command of Emilio Aguinaldo allied themselves with the Americans and resumed fighting against the Spanish. The understanding between Aguinaldo and Dewey was that once they drove the Spanish out that the US would give the Philippines its independence.
The commander of the United States Asiatic Squadron, Admiral George Dewey, would not, however, put that promise in writing.
With the defeat of the Spanish everywhere in the Islands except for the city of Manilla, itself, Aguinaldo announced on June 12, 1898, that the Philippines was now an independent country. He established a Revolutionary Government with himself as President. He then organized a Congress and created a constitution which led to the formal creation of the Philippine Republic.
Major General Thomas Anderson who commanded a division of the Eighth Army under Major General Wesley Merritt, started reporting back to the United States that Aguinaldo had declared himself "Dictator and President, and is trying to take Manila without our assistance." He further reported that be believed that Aguinaldo was secretly negotiating with the Spanish.
One of the things that we all learned during these last few years from the Republicans, is that when they start accusing the Democrats of doing something wrong that you can be sure that it is something that they are doing themselves. That’s exactly what was happening here.
Major General Wesley Merritt had been put in charge of the Eighth Army Corps by President McKinley to take the city of Manilla. Aguinaldo believed that these forces were going to support the Filipino troops in achieving this for the glory of the newly independent Philippines. Behind his back, however, Merritt and Dewey had themselves worked out a deal with the Spanish that they would invade the city, the Spanish would make a token effort to defend it to save face, and then they would surrender to the Americans.
And that is what happened. The Americans took Manilla and immediately set up a Provincial Government led by now, Governor General, George Merritt. Despite all the assurances that Dewey had given Aguinaldo, the United States refused to accept the Philippine Declaration of Independence. So, on February 4, 1899, the Filipinos under Aguinaldo and the Americans started fighting what my family and the rest of the Americans called the Philippine Insurrection, which history now calls the Philippine-American War.
My great-grandfather Fred had been discharged from the 4th Kentucky Volunteers on Halloween of 1898. In August of 1899, six months after the revolution in the Philippines started, he was commissioned by President McKinley as a 1st Lieutenant in Company E, 44th United States Volunteer Infantry. He left Jennie and Eunice behind in Lexington, Kentucky, and embarked from San Francisco for the Philippines with his unit in November.
His job became that of an adjutant, or assistant, to Lieutenant Colonel William Scott. He also saw plenty of active duty. In 1900, he was ordered by Scott with a unit of twenty-five men into the thickly jungled mountains to find and destroy a gunpowder factory used by the revolutionaries. When he was ultimately discharged at the end of the war, his record included a “recommendation for brevet of Captain for gallantry in action and extremely hazardous duty near Lambayan on September 16, 1900”. After the war, my great-grandfather maintained a close relationship with Scott who eventually became a Brigadier General. My great-uncle William Scott Wilson, who would be born in the Philippines, in 1903 was named for him.
In 1899, General Aguinaldo wrote Reseña Veridica de la Revolucion Filipina or The True Version of the Philippine Revolution. In it, he meticulously outlines how he was duped by the Americans. He had been living in exile in Hong Kong and was asked to come back by Dewey to lead the Filipino forces. The Americans knew that the islanders would not follow them, so they needed a local leader. They kept making promises and assurances to Aguinaldo to keep him engaged which they never intended to keep.
In the book, Aguinaldo writes, “Oh dear Philippines! Blame your wealth, your beauty for the stupendous disgrace that rests upon your faithful sons. You have aroused the ambition of the Imperialists and Expansionists of North America, and both have placed their sharp claws upon your entrails.”
That X that you can make over the islands on the map translates to the Philippines being an extremely strategic location both militarily and in terms of trade. It means that everyone wants to control it.
My grandmother Eunice said that her father said that the fear at the time was that if we gave the Philippines their independence, the Japanese would immediately move in and take them over. In fact, ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, that’s exactly what they did.
Because our aircraft had been wiped out, MacArthur was ordered out, leaving his men behind in Corregidor to endure the Bataan Death March. That’s when he said, “I shall return.” Two years later, true to his word, he relaunched a successful invasion of the islands with my great-uncle Scott and his Red Cross brigade in tow. In 1946, after World War II, the United States finally granted the Philippines its independence. All of that, however, was more than forty years later.
The Philippines recognizes the date of April 16, 1902, as the official end of the war. The year before, on March 3, 1901, Congress passed the Army Appropriation Act which gave McKinley the right to establish a civilian government in the Islands. In truth, there were still insurgents fighting the Americans there as late as 1913. Muslim Moros still battle against the Filipino government in some of the islands today.
Before the Philippines, our expansion was limited to land that abutted us on continental North America. That geographical X on the other side of the world, though, was much too tempting. Our control of the islands brought with it a whole new wave of US foreign involvement. Where we had styled ourselves the victims of imperialism in the American Revolution, now we became its perpetrators. White supremacy was so profoundly established that nobody believed that the Native Americans we were subjugating on the continent were any more human than the Filipinos were. Nobody in the US government really thought that Filipinos could govern themselves. The idea was preposterous to them.
McKinley spent much of his time in office attempting to establish foreign markets for American goods and to increase trade among our international neighbors. He started the groundwork for the building of the Panama Canal. In September of 1901, however, he was assassinated by an anarchist, so he never lived to see it completed. His Vice-President, Teddy Roosevelt would see not only that through but also the development of the American bureaucracy in the Philippines.
On April 13, 1901, a month after Congress declared we could set up governments in the Philippines, Fred Lockhart Wilson became the Provincial Treasurer of Antique on the island of Panay. It was the first of many such positions he would hold in the islands. I can’t find the appointment for Antique but two years later he became the Treasurer of Llocos Sur and I have that one. It is signed by William Howard Taft who had been appointed by McKinley to be the Governor General of the Philippines. Taft would go on to be the Secretary of War under Teddy Roosevelt, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under Warren G. Harding and then he, himself, became the 27th President of the United States after Roosevelt.
I don’t know how much of this my great-grandfather knew about at the time. I also don’t know how much of this he’d have cared about. After the war when he was about to be shipped home, the opportunity to go into government presented itself and he jumped at it. My great-grandmother and grandmother would soon join him and live in the Philippine Islands for many years.
Life takes us in strange directions if we let it.