government. While McKinley initially relied upon military government in the Philippines, he soon afterwards decided upon a civilian version of colonial government to supplement the military. While Arthur MacArthur served as military governor, McKinley sent a civilian commission headed by future president William Howard Taft to also function as the American government in the Philippines. Without clear lines of authority the two men never got along. In letters home Taft begged McKinley and anyone else he could in Washington to order Arthur MacArthur home. But officials in Washington worried that the insurrection might have widespread support, suggesting the army should remain in charge. Once, however, the insurrection had dwindled to a small group of incorrigibles, then a civilian government could take charge. In this regard, Arthur MacArthur and Taft sent conflicting reports: Taft insisted the rebellion had spent itself and the last remnants would melt under the heat of more aggressive military action; Arthur MacArthur insisted that the rebellion had popular support, and aggressive military action would prove self-defeating.20
When rebel activity in fact began to decline, Washington officials decided to finally give Taft sole authority in the Philippines. On July 4, 1901, he relieved Arthur MacArthur and assumed all executive power in the occupation. The shift proved ironic. Taft’s civilian supervision inspired the bloodiest period of the occupation, with more than two hundred thousand Filipinos dying as part of a broad-based pacification. In the end, the Filipinos were subdued, but at extraordinary cost in blood and treasure. As opponents of imperial policy liked to point out, the United States spent $20 million to buy the Philippines and another $200 million to subdue it. In the meantime more than four thousand Americans died from disease and wounds.21
While the conflict between Taft and Arthur MacArthur certainly involved each man’s pride, it also turned on genuine questions of law and policy. Since they found themselves in a new kind of state, outside the norms of American governance, they often fought over the nature of their authority. Taft took the position that American government in the Philippines functioned under the authority of the president. Arthur MacArthur agreed. But he insisted that the president’s authority came through his role as commander in chief, and, thus, it extended only through the military. A civilian authority (such as Taft possessed) required an “organic act” (an act of congress creating or establishing a territory of the United States).22 Taft, a jurist and aspirant to the Supreme Court (he became chief justice in 1921), could hardly stand hearing MacArthur lecture him in areas where he saw himself as expert, even if MacArthur had a point.
The question of authority grew more complicated when it came to mundane tasks. If, for example, Taft ordered the construction of a sewer (a task that seemed civilian in nature), he needed help from the Army Corps of Engineers. To whom should an officer in the corps report, MacArthur or Taft? As it turned out, some of the nastiest fights between Taft and Arthur MacArthur turned on exactly these kinds of questions.23
In 1902, Congress resolved the question in the Philippine Organic Act, which “approved, ratified, and confirmed” Taft’s position as civil governor. At the same time, it declared that “inhabitants of the Philippine Islands … shall be deemed and held to be citizens of the Philippine Islands” and that this citizenship entitled them “to the protection of the United States,” but not American citizenship. The Act guaranteed for Filipinos the rights contained in the U.S. Constitution. It also provided for the creation of a Philippine republic able to pass its own laws, enter into treaties, and mint its own currency. However, it limited this power by declaring that “all laws passed by the Government of the Philippine Islands shall be reported to Congress, which hereby reserves the power and authority to annul the same.”24
While the law clarified Taft’s power in the Philippines, it muddied the relationship of the United States to its new territories. Ultimately, the Supreme Court tried to resolve the legal status of America’s new colonial possessions (including Puerto Rico and Guam) in the Insular Cases (so called because “insular” served as a synonym for “islands”). The Supreme Court explained that the new territories were “not a foreign country” since they were “subject to the sovereignty of” and “owned by the United States.” However, they were “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” since they “had not been incorporated into the United States” as new states and were instead “merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”25 And therein lay the nature of the confusion: whether out of racism, or fear of upsetting the domestic political balance, or whatever else, no branch of the federal government contemplated the eventual incorporation of the new possessions into the constitutional design of the country.26 At the same time, the federal government did not create an institutional framework that looked like the kind of imperial ministries developed by the British, French, and other European powers. Indeed, in an era in which progressive Americans borrowed so many ideas from Europe, no broad effort emerged to administer the new American possessions through a ministry modeled on European precedents.27 Instead, the Philippines remained in a state of semi-independence, codified in 1916 by the Jones Act, which dramatically expanded self-government and promised Filipinos that “tutelage” would eventually come to an end, while nevertheless insisting that the time had yet to come.
In a general sense, the complications that resulted from annexing the Philippines left a bad taste in the mouth of future policy makers. “If Old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed the Spanish fleet,” McKinley once observed to a friend, “what a lot of trouble that would have saved us!”28 Indeed, after the Spanish-American War the United Stated did not attempt to duplicate the outcome of that war and colonize on a semipermanent basis new territory. Yet it has frequently ventured abroad and conquered foes under a wide variety of circumstances. After 1900, these forays took the army to Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Europe; and with each foray, territory outside the United States came under the sovereignty of the United States without becoming a part of the United States. Elihu Root, secretary of war under William McKinley, and later Theodore Roosevelt, famously described the relationship this way: “As near as I can make out, the Constitution follows the flag, but doesn’t quite catch up with it.”29 Precisely because the country refused to create a distinct and lasting bureaucracy dedicated to governing new territories as part of an American empire, the task of governing the space between flag and Constitution fell to the military. As a result, after the Spanish-American War the United States army began to grow governing capacities almost in spite of itself, out of sheer necessity.
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If the federal government spent little time thinking about how to govern territories outside the boundaries of the U.S., it is fair to say that army leaders spent just as little time contemplating the way the army had started to expand its governing capacities into an external state. Military leaders saw counterinsurgency operations (including what today is called “nationbuilding”) as an aberration, as something unlikely to be repeated and unnecessary to future missions. As the army intervened in Latin America, West Point added a course in Spanish but little else to note this new experience in modern warfare. The army’s new War College focused on “catching up” to European powers and preparing the American army for set-piece battles against the Great Power armies. It did not plan to repeat the experience of military government.30
In fairness, the army had a great deal of “catching up” to do. The Spanish-American War had revealed this fact. While John Hay, secretary of state in 1898, called it a “splendid little war … favored by that Fortune that loves the brave,” and while the Spanish-American War lasted only one summer and resulted in a total victory for the United States, the war hardly cast the army in a favorable light.31 In reviewing the conduct of the war afterward, congressional investigators realized that the military’s command structure had been deeply disorganized and unprepared. Victory had, indeed, come through “fortune” more than American military know-how.32 Theodore Roosevelt, a firsthand witness to the disorganization, wanted a “thorough shaking up” of the War Department even before becoming president, largely to streamline the army’s command structure.33 Once in the presidency, he turned to his war secretary Elihu Root to create a
