My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism.
Here is Mark Twain writing way back in March 1906:
source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051228150639/http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/cr/moro.htm
"Comments
on the Moro Massacre"
by Samuel
Clemens (March 12, 1906).
Samuel
Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain. Twain is remembered for his
novels Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Far less well known
are his scathing writings against the expansion of the U.S. empire, (such as this piece).
Text from
Voices
of A People's History, edited by Zinn and Arnove
This incident bum
upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our
forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it
was as follows:
A tribe of Moros,
dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater
not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us
because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from
them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard
Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six
hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit
of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, and very
difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood
ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out. Our
troops climbed the heights by devious and difficult trails, and even took some
artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not specified, but in one place
it was hoisted up a sharp acclivity by tackle a distance of some three hundred
feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the battle began. Our soldiers numbered
five hundred and forty. They were assisted by auxiliaries consisting of a
detachment of native constabulary in our pay—their numbers not given—and by a
naval detachment, whose numbers are not stated. But apparently the contending
parties were about equal as to number— six hundred men on our side, on the edge
of the bowl; six hundred men, women and children in the bottom of the bowl.
Depth of the bowl, 50 feet.
Gen. Wood's order
was, "Kill or capture the six hundred."
The battle began—it
is officially called by that name—our forces firing down into the crater with
their artillery and their deadly small arms of precision; the savages furiously
returning the fire, probably with brickbats—though this is merely a surmise of
mine, as the weapons used by the savages are not nominated in the cablegram.
Heretofore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly; also ineffectual
trade-muskets when they had any.
The official report
stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a
day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American
arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the
six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is
established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only
fifteen lost their lives.
General Wood was
present and looking on. His order had been, "Kill or capture those
savages." Apparently our little army considered that the "or"
left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their
taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there—the
taste of Christian butchers.
The official report
quite properly extolled and magnified the "heroism" and
"gallantry" of our troops; lamented the loss of the fifteen who perished,
and elaborated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suffered injury, and
even minutely and faithfully described the nature of the wounds, in the
interest of future historians of the United States. It mentioned that a private
had one of bis elbows scraped by a missile, and the private's name was
mentioned. Another private had the end of his nose scraped by a missile. His
name was also mentioned—by cable, at one dollar and fifty cents a word.
Next day's news
confirmed the previous day's report and named our fifteen killed and thirty-two
wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the
right adjectives.
Let us now consider
two or three details of our military history. In one of the great battles of
the Civil War ten per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed
and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the
two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving
three hundred and fifty thousand sound and all right for further adventures.
Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we
summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy
battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred and sixty-eight men
out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field,
and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the
hospitals and camps. We did not exterminate the Spaniards—far from it. In each
engagement we left an average of two per cent of the enemy killed or crippled
on the field.
Contrast these
things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater!
There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed
outright, and we had thirty-two wounded—counting that nose and that elbow. The
enemy numbered six hundred—including women and children—and we abolished them
utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is
incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian
soldiers of the United States.
Now then, how has
it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in
every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants,
on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial
columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the
evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon
our vast achievement. Next days additional statistics and particulars appeared
in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a
mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening
papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the
columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday
and Saturday, nobody said a word about the "battle." Ordinarily those
columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go
by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his
joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I
have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves. So
far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who
allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion—that
was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously
silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to
say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. If I know President
Roosevelt—and I am sure I do—this utterance cost him more pain and shame than
any other that ever issued from his pen or his mouth. I am far from blaming him.
If I had been in his place my official duty would have compelled me to say what
he said. It was a convention, an old tradition, and he had to be loyal to it.
There was no help for it. This is what he said:
Washington, March
10.
Wood, Manila:—I
congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant
feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American
flag.
(Signed) Theodore
Roosevelt
His whole utterance
is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He
knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in
a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a
day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat
of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian
America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles
and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our
uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done
as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines—that is
to say, they had dishonored it.
The next day,
Sunday,—which was yesterday—the cable brought us additional news—still more
splendid news—still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this
information at us in the stentorian capitals: "women slain in moro
slaughter."
"Slaughter"
is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged
Dictionary for this occasion. The next display line says:
"With Children
They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together."
They were mere
naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word
children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest
symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence
color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are
children—merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble,
our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the
small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small
hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children
that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we
know and love.
The next heading
blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:
"Death List is
Now 900."
I was never so
enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!
The next heading
explains how safely our daring soldiers were located. It says:
“Impossible to Tell
Sexes Apart in Fierce Battle on Top of Mount Dajo.”
The naked savages
were so far away, down in the bottom of that trap, that our soldiers could not
tell the breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of a man—so far away that
they couldn’t tell a toddling little child from a black six-footer. This was by
all odds the least dangerous battle that Christian soldiers of any nationality
were ever engaged in.
The next heading
says:
“Fighting for Four
Days.”
So our men were at
it four days instead of a day and a half. It was a long and happy picnic with
nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people
down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile
glory upon glory. Those savages fighting for their liberties had the four days
too, but it must have been a sorrowful time for them. Every day they saw two
hundred and twenty- five of their number slain, and this provided them grief
and mourning for the night—and doubtless without even the relief and
consolation of knowing that in the meantime they had slain four of their
enemies and wounded some more on the elbow and the nose.
The closing heading
says:
“Lieutenant Johnson
Blown from Parapet by Exploding Artillery Gallantly Leading Charge.”
Lieutenant Johnson
has pervaded the cablegrams from the first. He and his wound have sparkled
around through them like the serpentine thread of fire that goes excursioning
through the black crisp fabric of a fragment of burnt paper. It reminds one of
Gillette’s comedy farce of a few years ago, “Too Much Johnson.” Apparently
Johnson was the only wounded man on our side whose wound was worth anything as
an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any
similarly colossal event since “Humpty Dumpty” fell off the wall and got
injured. The official dispatches do not know which to admire most, Johnson’s
adorable wound or the nine hundred murders. The ecstasies flowing from Army Headquarters
on the other side of the globe to the White House, at a dollar and a half a
word, have set fire to similar ecstasies in the President’s breast. It appears
that the immortally wounded was a Rough Rider under Lieutenant Colonel
Roosevelt at San Juan Hill—that extinguisher of Waterloo—when the Colonel of
the regiment, the present Major General Dr. Leonard Wood, went to the rear to
bring up the pills and missed the fight. The President has a warm place in his
heart for anybody who was present at that bloody Collision of military solar
systems, and so he lost no time in cabling to the wounded hero, “How are you?”
And got a cable answer, “Fine, thanks.” This is historical. This will go down
to posterity.
Johnson was wounded
in the shoulder with a Slug. The slug was in a shell—for the account says the
damage was caused by an exploding shell which blew Johnson off the rim. The
people down in the hole had no artillery; therefore it was our artillery that
blew Johnson off the rim. And so it is now a matter of historical record that
the only officer of ours who acquired a wound of advertising dimensions got it
at our hands, not the enemy’s. It seems more than probable that if we had
placed our soldiers out of the way of our own weapons, we should have come out
of the most extraordinary battle in all history without a scratch.
The ominous
paralysis continues. There has been a slight sprinkle—an exceedingly slight
sprinkle—in the correspondence columns, of angry rebukes of the President for
calling this cowardly massacre a “brilliant feat of arms,” and for praising our
butchers for “holding up the honor of the flag” in that singular way; but there
is hardly a ghost of a whisper about the feat of arms in the editorial columns
of the papers.
I hope that this
silence will continue. It is about as eloquent and as damaging and effective as
the most indignant words could be, I think. When a man is sleeping in a noise,
his sleep goes placidly on; but if the noise stops, the stillness wakes him.
This silence has continued five days now. Surely it must be waking the drowsy
nation. Surely the nation must be wondering what it means. A five-day silence
following a world-astonishing event has not happened on this planet since the
daily newspaper was invented.
At a luncheon party
of men convened yesterday to God-speed George Harvey, who is leaving to-day for
a vacation in Europe, all the talk was about the brilliant feat of arms; and no
one had anything to say about it that either the President or Major General Dr.
Wood, or the damaged Johnson, would regard as complimentary, or as proper
comment to put into our histories. Harvey said he believed that the shock and
shame of this episode would eat down deeper and deeper into the hearts of the
nation and fester there and produce results. He believed it would destroy the
Republican party and President Roosevelt. I cannot believe that the prediction
will come true, for the reason that prophecies which promise valuable things,
desirable things, good things, worthy things, never come true. Prophecies of
this kind are like wars fought in a good cause—they are so rare that they don’t
count.
Day before
yesterday the cable-note from the happy General Dr. Wood was still all
glorious. There was still proud mention and elaboration of what was called the
“desperate hand-to-hand fight.”—Doctor Wood not seeming to suspect that he was
giving himself away, as the phrase goes—since if there was any very desperate
hand-to-hand fighting it would necessarily happen that nine hundred
hand-to-hand fighters, if really desperate, would surely be able to kill more
than fifteen of our men before their last man and woman and child perished.
Very well, there
was a new note in the dispatches yesterday afternoon—just a faint suggestion
that Dr. Wood was getting ready to lower his tone and begin to apologize and
explain. He announces that he assumes full responsibility for the fight. It
indicates that he is aware that there is a lurking disposition here amidst all
this silence to blame somebody. He says there was “no wanton destruction of
women and children in the fight, though many of them were killed by force of
necessity because the Moros used them as shields in the hand-to-hand fighting.”
This explanation is
better than none; indeed it is considerably better than none. Yet if there was
so much hand-to-hand fighting there must have arrived a time, toward the end of
the four days’ butchery, when only one native was left alive. We had six
hundred men present; we had lost only fifteen; why did the six hundred kill that
remaining man—or woman, or child?
Dr. Wood will find
that explaining things is not in his line. He will find that where a man has
the proper spirit in him and the proper force at his command, it is easier to
massacre nine hundred unarmed animals than it is to explain why he made it so
remorselessly complete. Next he furnishes us this sudden burst of unconscious
humor, which shows that he ought to edit his reports before he cables them:
“Many of the Moros
feigned death and butchered the American hospital men who were relieving the
wounded.”
We have the curious
spectacle of hospital men going around trying to relieve the wounded
savages—for what reason? The savages were all massacred. The plain intention
was to massacre them all and leave none alive. Then where was the use in
furnishing mere temporary relief to a person who was presently to be
exterminated? The dispatches call this battue a “battle.” In what way was it a
battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. In a battle there are always as many
as five wounded men to one killed outright. When this so-called battle was
over, there were certainly not fewer than two hundred wounded savages lying on
the field. What became of them? Since not one savage was left alive!
The inference seems
plain. We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering
those helpless people.
The President’s joy
over the splendid achievement of his fragrant pet, General Wood, brings to mind
an earlier presidential ecstasy. When the news came, in 1901, that Colonel
Funston had penetrated to the refuge of the patriot, Aguinaldo, in the
mountains, and had captured him by the use of these arts, to wit: by forgery,
by lies, by disguising his military marauders in the uniform of the enemy, by
pretending to be friends of Aguinaldo’s and by disarming suspicion by cordially
shaking hands with Aguinaldo’s officers and in that moment shooting them
down—when the cablegram announcing this “brilliant feat of arms” reached the
White House, the newspapers said that that meekest and mildest and gentlest and
least masculine of men, President McKinley, could not control his joy and
gratitude, but was obliged to express it in motions resembling a dance. Also
President McKinley expressed his admiration in another way. He instantly shot
that militia Colonel aloft over the heads of a hundred clean and honorable
veteran officers of the army and made him a Brigadier General in the regular
service, and clothed him in the honorable uniform of that rank, thus disgracing
the uniform, the flag, the nation, and himself.
Wood was an army
surgeon, during several years, out West among the Indian hostiles. Roosevelt
got acquainted with him and fell in love with him. When Roosevelt was offered
the colonelcy of a regiment in the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish war, he took the
place of Lieutenant Colonel and used his influence to get the higher place for
Wood. After the war Wood became our Governor General in Cuba and proceeded to
make a mephitic record for himself. Under President Roosevelt, this doctor has
been pushed and crowded along higher and higher in the military service—always
over the heads of a number of better men—and at last when Roosevelt wanted to
make him a Major General in the regular army (with only five other Major
Generals between him and the supreme command) and knew, or believed, that the
Senate would not confirm Wood’s nomination to that great place, he accomplished
Wood’s appointment by a very unworthy device. He could appoint Wood himself,
and make the appointment good, between sessions of Congress. There was no such
opportunity, but he invented one. A special session was closing at noon. When
the gavel fell extinguishing the special session, a regular session began
instantly. Roosevelt claimed that there was an interval there determinable as
the twentieth of a second by a stop-watch, and that during that interval no
Congress was in session. By this subterfuge he foisted this discredited doctor
upon the army and the nation, and the Senate hadn’t spirit enough to repudiate
it.
Footnotes
1 Samuel
Clemens, "Comments on the Moro Massacre" (March 12,
1906).
Fust published in
Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed.
Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924). Reprinted in
Mark
Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American
War, ed. Jim Zwick (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), pp.
170-73. From the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of
California at Berkeley.
Notes:
- Here's a reading on Youtube by Vaude deVille of Mark Twain's "Comments on the Moro Massacre." Posted in 2007 by the Rachel Corrie Foundation Presents "Voices of A People's History".
- Published reaction to Duterte September 13, 2016: Bud Dajo: Americans, Filipinos, and Moros. The Explainer: Manuel L. Quezon III Posted at Sep 13 2016 11:17 PM | Updated as of Sep 14 2016.
- Published reaction to Duterte October 14, 2016. OPINION: President Duterte and our revolutionary history. Written by Gina Apostol. Updated Oct 14, 2016.
But a couple of
times early this year, Mount Pulag was actually cloud-free and its bald peak quite
clear from the Halsema Highway in Atok 15 kilometers away. I thought this was a
good time (off-peak for Mt Pulag) as any to hike up its summit. Pulag (from
pul-ag meaning bald) at 2926m elevation, is the highest peak of
the Cordillera mountain range in Luzon.
There was the option to travel by motorbike (as a pillion
passenger), between Ambangeg and Babadak which is about a 35-to-40-minute ride.
I looked at my kit. Aside from the clothes I had on, there was only a small
overnight bag. And I had plenty of time to while away, so I chose to hike.
