Part Three
William Cameron Forbes was a Boston Brahmin. The Boston Brahmins were, and I suppose still are, the ultra-wealthy elite of Boston Society. Many trace their heritage back to the earliest settlers in New England. In America’s early days, they created an aristocratic class to rival the one that they’d left behind in England. They socialized with each other, intermarried with each other, and went to Harvard.
W. Cameron Forbes was the son of William Hathaway Forbes, who was the president of Bell Telephone, and Edith Emerson, whose father was Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Forbes family fortune derived largely from Chinese trading.
In 1904 Teddy Roosevelt sent Forbes to the Philippines to serve as Commissioner of Commerce and Police. At the same time, the government sent the architect Daniel Burnham over to redesign both the capital city of Manila and to create a city in the mountains called Baguio.
Daniel Burnham reemerged into the contemporary zeitgeist a few years ago when Eric Larson’s book The Devil in the White City was published. It was a true account of a serial killer in the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Daniel Burnham was the architect who designed the Exposition. He’s also responsible for the iconic Flatiron Building here in New York as well as a lot of downtown Washington D.C.
For its first occupied colony, the template that the United States used to establish it, was the British one. The British occupied India for about ninety years. They set up local governments and built places for their people to live that looked like buildings from the motherland. High in the mountains, they built hill stations where they could flee during the sweltering summers. My mother was born in Shimla (then called Simla), which was one of those British-Indian hill stations. But I’m getting ahead of myself - one parent at a time.
Baguio was built to function as the summer capital of the Philippines where all the Americans could, themselves, escape the brutal heat of Manilla. That they built an entire city shows that the Americans clearly had no intention of giving up their new colony. They were digging in and altering the place to fit their needs. To this day, Burnham’s Beaux Arts buildings still define the architecture of Manilla and Baguio continues to be a favored resort destination of the rich. While vacationing there, you can go boating in Burnham Park.
In 1901, Lieutenant Colonel William Scott led the American forces that captured the island of Panay, and he briefly became its first Governor. On April 13, 1901, the United States Philippine Commission passed Act 114 extending the provisions of the Provincial Government Act that had been created to set up a colonial rule in the Philippines, to include the Province of Antique. Act 114 defined its territory and established its capital at San Jose town. It created the following offices with their respective salaries: provincial governor, provincial secretary, provincial treasurer, and provincial supervisor.
Scott convinced my great-grandfather to stay in the islands, following the war and appointed him the Provincial Treasurer of the province of Antique on the island of Panay.
Fred would spend the next eleven years working for the US Government in the Philippines. In 1903 he moved on to the province of Ilocos Sur on the main island of Luzon. In January of 1907, he went to Pampanga, which was closer to Manilla, but in August of the same year, he was back down on Panay in Iloilo. In 1911 he became the Treasurer of the Moro province on Mindanao.
My great-grandmother Jennie started down to the Philippines from Kentucky soon after Fred’s first appointment. They got as far as San Francisco when Eunice, who was three, got the croup. The doctor looked at the boat that they were about to get on and told Jennie that my grandmother would never survive the trip, so they went all the way back home. The following year, Fred traveled back to Kentucky and brought them both down with him.
Fred and Jennie clearly made up for lost time right away because my great-uncle Scott was born just about nine months later. They named him after General Scott. William Scott Wilson was born on March 19, 1903, in Vigan. Vigan was the resort town by the sea that the Americans would go to before the hill station of Baguio was created the following year. Fred had arranged for an American doctor to come from the Army base, but a storm had washed out the bridge. Instead, he found a Filipino doctor who had studied in Europe. The doctor was, by all reports, quite competent but did not know anything about anesthetics. Fred got a bottle of chloroform and poured it into a thick wad of cotton and held it over Jennie’s nose, himself, until she passed out. Everyone survived.
While Jennie had been brought up on a farm, her family seems to have been well-to-do. She wasn’t out working in the fields. She had a basic education, probably in a private girls’ day school. She had been exposed to music and literature. She probably had learned enough to know that she wanted more than the local provincial life of Versailles, Kentucky could offer her. The Philippines provided that. Jennie, and Fred, like most of the Americans there, could live like aristocrats.
In Ken Burns’ twelve-hour documentary on World War II, the thing I think that haunts me the most is a story that a guy from Waterbury, Connecticut tells. After the war, he meets a German man who had been a soldier for the Reich. The German asks the American where he’s from and the American responds that he’s from a small town that he’d never have heard of. The German presses him until the guy tells him that he lives in Waterbury. The German says that he knows it well because when the Germans won the war, that was where he was going to be posted to lead the occupying government. He’d been studying the town and the area and as he describes it, it becomes apparent that he knew more about it than the guy who’d lived there all his life did.
What would our lives be like here if the Germans had won? As far as I can tell from what I have learned so far, both sides of my family have always been the ones in charge. Jennie’s father fought for the Confederacy and they, of course, lost. I suppose that some of the south felt and still feels as if the North has colonized them and is ruling in its own interests. Was he resentful? While I consider myself a northerner, I was technically born in the south and my father’s entire side of the family were southerners. Plenty of them fought for the Confederacy so all of them lost to the north. I’ve never been aware, though, of any sort of resentment that has trickled down through the generations.
I can only imagine that for the African American population of our country it probably does feel as if the Germans won. They’ve had their culture and freedoms suppressed by European Americans for about the same length of time that the Filipinos were forced to live; first under the Spanish and then under the Americans. Filipinos assumed control of their destinies, finally, after being granted their independence following World War II. African Americans, however, are still trying to forge lives in what is, essentially, a foreign invader culture, albeit, at a remove of three or four centuries, I imagine the desire to regain one’s own culture remains fierce and strong, with the fire of it having been passed down through each generation, but the knowledge of all of what that culture was, must be cloudy.
William Howard Taft was the first Governor-General of the Philippines followed by Luke Edward Wright, Henry Clay Ide, and James Francis Smith. Following Smith, in 1911, W. Cameron Forbes was elevated to the office. While the Americans held ultimate authority over the islands and generally managed them, they allowed the Filipinos to elect governments under them to legislate their lives. Taft supported the Federalistas party, who, rather than fighting for independence were more interested in the Philippines gaining statehood. When Taft left office, his successors did not give them nearly the same amount of autonomy or support. By 1905 the Federalistas dropped the desire for statehood from their party platform. They were so unhappy with Wright that Taft, fearing a rise in unrest, brokered a deal by which Wright would resign and be succeeded temporarily by Ide. With the Federalistas somewhat mollified, Ide then resigned and was replaced by Smith. When Smith resigned, Taft appointed W. Cameron Forbes.
In essence, the Americans, like the Europeans, did not believe that any people of color had the ability to govern themselves. They weren’t considered fully human. In a 1909 diary entry, W. Cameron Forbes describes an afternoon of golf where he had a Filipino caddy. "I said to myself, 'Now how many am I?' and the boy replied, 'Playing five.' I was as much astonished as though a tree had spoken." Our public stance in regard to the Filipino people was one of paternalism – that of helping our little brown friends who were unable to help themselves. In truth, we just thought of them as cheap labor and a general nuisance to be dealt with while we exploited our lucrative outpost.
Forbes got David Burnham to add a country club and golf course to his plans for the summer city of Baguio. It was yet another way for the Americans to separate themselves from the Filipinos which created another level of resentment. Of the original 161 members, only six were Filipino. One of those was Manuel Quezon who would eventually become the second President of the Philippines after General Aguinaldo. Forbes described him as a "wonderfully trained hunting dog gone wild." In return, Quezon said of him that he loved the Filipino people in the same way that masters loved their slaves.
Fred and Jennie were now living in grand houses with servants. They usually employed two houseboys, a nanny, and a Chinese cook. Most of the houses they lived in were built on top of tall pilings because of flooding. The area underneath was used for parking carriages. At one time, when Fred was away, a typhoon struck and ripped their thatched roof off. Jennie, the two kids, and the nanny sat out the storm under the heavy mahogany dining room table.
Fred, Eunice, and Scott all learned Spanish, but Jennie never bothered. Eunice said that to keep the houseboys in line, Jennie would yell at them, “Watch out, or I will rumpa your cabeza!” Eunice and Scott also picked up some of the local languages which Jennie thought was a waste of time. One time Jennie was baking a cake and was worried that it would fall so left strict instructions to the cook not to open the oven door. She left the kitchen and when she came back, she caught the cook with the oven door open. The cake had collapsed. She was so angry she pushed the cook into the oven.
Jennie, herself, would tell a story about a formal dinner party with many high-ranking guests. As the soup was served, ants were discovered in it. Plenty of wine had already been drunk and one of the officers stood up, drew his sword, and forced the cook to kneel on the floor and drink the soup out of the bowl like a dog. Jennie found this story hilarious. She didn’t care much for Howard Taft because once, at some gathering, he had danced with a Filipino lady.
For those eleven years, while Fred worked in the government, their lives were a swirl of societal luxury. They hobnobbed with the rich and famous and had their every need catered to. The last place that Fred served as Treasurer was in the Moro Province. Because of civil unrest, Taft appointed Brigadier General John. J. Pershing as Governor of the province. Pershing became a friend of the family and often dined in the Wilson house. My grandmother remembers answering the door once in her bare feet and being completely taken aback to find him standing there. She was breathless at how handsome he was. In 1910, for his fiftieth birthday, Jennie made his cake. She was very proud of herself for deciding to arrange most of the candles in a circle around the cake on the platter so that they would all fit.
Decades later when she was in her 90s and declining in the nursing home, my grandmother remembers her asking for help getting into her wedding dress. “Who are you going to marry?” my grandmother asked. “Why General Pershing!” Jennie responded.
Until now, I never quite understood how great-uncle Scott developed his elitist taste and connection to high society. I see now that he was born into it. The Wilsons may not have had the money, but they certainly were living amidst it. Scott grew up with people like John J. Pershing and W. Cameron Forbes regularly coming to dinner in his house. He grew up in beautifully hand-made clothes in large well-appointed houses with servants. Whereas all their fancy friends came from money, his parents did not – at least not enough to be able to exist in a society like this anywhere else. I wonder how much he was aware of that.
Fred and Jennie had to live off the money Fred got from his position. Nice though his salary probably was, there was a limit to it. Eventually, as the reality of that started hitting home, he left government service and went into business.
I am equally fascinated and horrified by all of this. We are living in a time when introspection and accountability are the norms. That was not the case, at all, a century or so ago. In the 1960s a whole movement began that examined and criticized the structures we were living under. Peace and harmony became the watchwords of the day. Then in the 1970s the pendulum swung back and created the “Me generation” and brought a sense of individualism with it that created a selfishness in all of us that we have never quite been able to shake. Neither of these had happened yet, however, after the turn of the last century.
Fred and Jennie were people of their time. I am starting to get to know them a bit, but of course, I am having to fill in the enormous gaps from a great remove. Pictures and letters are just fleeting moments and slivers of time. Sometimes putting them side by side with a timeline of events can give them some context, but sometimes even that is impossible.
In all the pictures I have, the only one that I can find of Fred smiling at all is the one where he’s sitting on the porch with Pershing. It is not a big smile, it’s just the faintest trace of one. He looks completely relaxed and at home being in that company.
What it looks like to me, is contentment.
I just love your Philippine story! I’ve never known anyone else that has a family history similar to mine.