Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

3 Surveillance and Scandal

94 3 Surveillance and Scandal O J 2, 1902, fifty American colonials gathered at the Army-Navy Club for “the most sumptuous banquet ever given in Manila,” a farewell dinner for the local Associated Press (AP) correspondent, the dashing English gentleman Capt. Edgar G. Bellairs. Led by Gen. Adna Chaffee, the U.S. Army commander in these islands, this distinguished crowd of officers, bankers, editors, and judges raised their glasses to an intrepid reporter who had chronicled every chapter in America ’s rise to empire. For four years Captain Bellairs had followed the U.S. Army halfway round the globe. From Cuba, where he reported on Gen. Leonard Wood’s rule as American military governor. To China, where he marched with General Chaffee’s expedition against the messianic Boxer rebels. All the way to the Philippines, where he covered the army’s bloody pacification campaign. Now this roomful of empire builders wished him good luck and Godspeed on his greatest adventure yet—a trip across the Pacific to New York City for the publication of a sensational book, an exposé that would surely oust William Howard Taft as civil governor of the Philippine Islands and install General Wood as his successor, putting the hero of San Juan Hill on a path to the U.S. presidency in 1908.1 Matters did not quite go as planned, of course. Governor Taft, not General Wood, won the presidential election of 1908. Instead of putting Wood in the White House, the bid to discredit Taft backfired, producing press attacks and Senate investigations that exiled Wood to a secondary command in the southern Philippines and sent Bellairs to the Arizona Territory in search of a new career. Although his name has been erased from the collective memory, Edgar G. Bellairs was an important actor in the history of America’s early empire.2 In the story of U.S. imperial expansion dominated by presidents, senators, and generals , this con man, ex-convict, and alleged pederast, born Charles Ballentine, played a surprisingly central role. Spinning a web of deception after his parole from a Florida prison farm in 1896, Ballentine borrowed the name of an English gentry family to baptize himself Edgar Bellairs. With this new persona he wangled an appointment as an AP correspondent in Cuba during the SpanishAmerican War. In mid-1898 Bellairs arrived at Santiago de Cuba where he befriended another adventurer whose ambitions equaled his own, General Wood, an army doctor who would be president.3 From this colonial periphery, criminal and general set out to shape America’s destiny through skillful media manipulation that made Wood governor-general of Cuba in 1899 and aspired to make him president of the United States within a decade. As a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, Bellairs wrote wire service dispatches carried by 90 percent of U.S. newspapers, shaping the views of millions of Americans about their expanding empire. Although he ultimately failed, his scheming to advance General Wood from Havana via Manila to the White House got surprisingly far. More significantly, Captain Bellairs personi fies, in both his success and his failure, the imperceptible historical process that allows criminal and colonial peripheries to shape politics at the center of modern empires. Indeed, his uncommon career shows how U.S. national politics became entwined with colonial intrigues in this imperial age, seamlessly weaving together Manila intrigues, Ohio machine politics, New York media, and Washington policy. Most important, in his dual roles as correspondent and ad hoc press agent for Wood, Bellairs exemplifies the importance of information and its control in the politics of empire. Without discounting his charm and cunning, it was his access to the AP wire service, the most powerful news network in America’s first information age, that elevated Bellairs from ex-convict to colonial power broker. If he rose rapidly by means of his brilliant manipulations of the new information regime , he was destroyed just as quickly because he underestimated its capacities and mistook Governor Taft for a mere proconsul instead of a fellow player. As the first civil governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft was constructing a new kind of state based not on physical coercion but on control over information. Through a unique convergence of historical forces, he had the autonomy to establish himself as an imperial plenipotentiary with unchecked civil powers. Under his instructions from Secretary of War Elihu Root dated June 1901, Taft was to “exercise the...