Gentleman Soldier: John Clifford Brown and the Philippine-American War (review)

John Clifford Brown was not your typical private soldier. Born into the wealthiest family in Portland, Maine in 1872, Brown had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was working as an electrical engineer in New York when the Spanish-American War began. He quit his job to serve as an officer in a volunteer regiment. Like most national guardsmen in 1898, he never left the United States, so he enlisted in the regular army for service in the Philippines, where he arrived in August 1899. Brown was seriously ill when he returned to the United States at the end of 1900 and died, probably of complications of typhoid, in January 1901. Later that year, his family had his letters and journals published as Diary of a Soldier in the Philippines, a now-rare volume of which Gentleman Soldier is an annotated reprint.

Brown crowded a lot into his fourteen months in the islands. He marched through Central Luzon with the forces of Brig. Gen. Arthur MacArthur—the editor writes that Brown's account of the fighting at Porac, Pampanga, "may be the finest description of the battle extant" (p. 79)—and joined Brig. Gen. S. B. M. Young's attempt to cut off Emilio Aguinaldo's retreat into northern Luzon. Brown later oversaw the construction of a bridge at Paranaque and drew maps in Manila, a number of which were reproduced—and credited to him—in the War Department's annual report for 1900. To some extent, Brown's advanced engineering and cartographic skills meant that the army got an officer for the price of an enlisted man. In the letters and notes he intended "to expand into something" (p. 63) after he returned home, Brown wrote vividly of the Philippine countryside and was a careful (if unenlightened) observer of the Filipinos and their lifestyle. He took an almost anthropological interest in his fellow soldiers. The result is a book rich in detail and insight.

Editor McCallus, the author of a book about American exiles in the Philippines, is familiar with the literature on the war, benefitted from acquaintance with the Brown family, and even retraced Brown's movements in the Philippines. One other source he would have found useful is Herbert Kohr's Around the World With Uncle Sam, or Six Years in the United States Army (1907). Kohr served in the same company as Brown at the same time, but their lives could not have been more different. Kohr had been in the peacetime army and fought in Cuba before transferring to the engineers. His is the more-authentic enlisted man's voice, and John Clifford Brown, the self-described "gentleman in disguise" (p. 212), apparently left no impression on him. That aside, Gentleman Soldier is well edited and well worth consulting by all who are interested in the army and its experiences in the Philippine-American War.