Colorado's Volunteer Infantry in the Philippine Wars, 1898-1899 (review)

One conclusion that could be drawn from Geoffrey R. Hunt's story of the Colorado national guard in the Spanish-American and Philippine wars is that imperialism is largely the pursuit of elites. Aside from the hurt feelings of prewar officers who failed to keep their ranks when Colorado's two national guard regiments merged to form the three-battalion 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry, the state had little problem finding 1,364 men (of whom 90 percent or so were not born in Colorado) eager to fight Spain in 1898. Nor did the men mind doing so in the Philippines, rather than in Cuba, as they had anticipated. But once the war with Spain was over, most just wanted to go home. Arthur Johnson, a soldier-journalist for the Rocky Mountain News who served in the islands, facetiously wrote that "the government could better afford to bring the boys home than hire an extra army of clerks" to deal with all the paperwork generated when soldiers' families and representatives "bombarded the War Department with demands and requests to release the troops" (p. 202) from the unsought task of adding the Philippines to the new American empire.

One strength of Hunt's book is a clear description of army tactics and weapons from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century; others are the attention paid to the Colorado home front's support of the regiment and of the postwar activities of the veterans. The Soldiers' Aid Society, for example, sent Dr. Rose Kidd Beere to Manila to help care for wounded and sick soldiers. A Florence Nightingale wannabe, Beere got much the same reception from the army medical establishment as Nightingale had found in Scutari. Beere quit the job in disgust after the Society repeatedly demanded that she justify her dollar-a-day allowance; meanwhile, in Denver, the head of the Society's relief committee paid herself a weekly stipend of forty dollars. After the war, former Colorado soldiers were instrumental in founding the Society of the Army of the Philippines, which, along with another veterans' groups, became the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States in 1914.

Not all the Coloradoans came back from the war. Twelve of the regiment's soldiers were killed in action or died of wounds; twenty-three died of disease. This placed the Coloradoans at about midpoint on the scale of losses suffered by state regiments in the Philippines. Another 133 decided to remain in the Philippines, either reenlisting in regiments staying in the islands or intending to live off their travel pay "until they could find employment" or convert it "into some lucrative enterprise" (p. 206). Curiously, Hunt does not cite Brian Linn's The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (2000), but nothing in Colorado's Volunteer Infantry challenges Linn's characterization of the state volunteers as spirited fighters but poorly disciplined and too often noted for their propensity to ignore the property rights of Filipinos.