The Military Mind and Philippine-American Relations

The Military Mindand Philippine-American Relations Stuart CreightonMiller. ''Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest ofthePhilippines, 1899-1903. NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1982.340 + xiipp. Carol MorrisPetillo.DouglasMacArthur: The PhilippineYears.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.301 + xviiipp. Shiro Saito,compiler and editor. PhilippineAmerican Relations:A Guide to Manuscript Sowces inthe UnitedStates. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.256 + xx pp. BrianJenkins "Sophisticatesin the last quarter of the twentieth century are disdainful of militaryintellect, but great captains have always been men of genius:' observedWilliam Manchester with an asperity born of defensiveness in his popularbiography of Douglas MacArthur. And nowhere has the disillusion with the military been more manifest than in the United States. In the light of thesordid conflict in Vietnam, and especially in the somber gloom of the Americandefeat, it is scarcely surprising that the military mind has excited a somewhatscornful renewed interest. Not that it has ever inspired great confidenceamong the rank and file of academic and intellectual civilians. Therehave been all too few Napoleons and all too many Neys; for every ''Stonewall" there has been a company of stoneheads. Anecdotes, both accurateand apocryphal, to illustrate this point are themselves legion. Field MarshalHaig saw no future for the machine gun and is alleged to have declaredthat the tank would never replace the horse; Kitchener certainly dismissedthe tank as a "toy;' while Joffre thought so little of the telephone thathe declined to have one installed in his headquarters. Eventhe reputations of some of history's immortal military blunderers are nolonger secure. Stephen Ambrose removed much of George Custer's lingeringromantic glamor by demonstrating that his epic foolhardiness was nomore important in bringing him and his unfortunate men (and relations) to griefat the Little Big Horn than the superior generalship of Crazy Horse. CanadianReviewof American Studies, Volume 15,Number 4, Winter 1984,441-449 442 BrianJenkins Inevitably, time has tarnished the sheen also of some of the heroes ofthe battlefield. Although he long survived as a monument to military grandeur Robert E. Lee has recently suffered a number of interpretive reverses'. Thomas Connelly and Archer Jones explored his strategic limitations inThe Politics of Command (1973), and he is never far from the center of the recent study by Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil WarTacticsand Southern Heritage (1982).Admittedly, the generals are treated with sympathy and generosity by Jones and Herman Hattaway in their recent military history of the Civil War, How the North Won (1983), but the authors could not escape the long reach of the war in Indo-China. "In its stressupon the importance of guerrillas and raids:' they noted in the introduction, "this book takes advantage of knowledge gained from the recent war in Vietnam; our country's experience with this kind of struggle makes its importance more comprehensible." Of course, this self-same experience had alreadv prompted historians to look anew at another American war characterized by guerrillas and raids-the conflict in the Philippines. At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement Daniel B. Schirmer wrote Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (1972).The book was one of a number of efforts by historians to trace the origins of the Vietnam experience to the struggle in the Philippines at the turn of the century, and to show that frightened, frustrated and confused Americans had resorted then to the odious practices and at times inhuman behavior exposed by "investigative reporters" following events in South Vietnam. Only three years before the publication of Schirmer's indictment, selections from the hearings in 1902 before the Senate Committee on the Philippines had appeared under the title of American Imperialism andthe Philippine Insurrection. In 1974Peter Stanley offered a more dispassionate study-A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States 1899-1921-which ostensibly ignored Vietnam analogies but challenged any notion that the Americans had at the beginning of the century frustrateda war of national liberation. He viewed nationalism as the connective rather than the cause of the initial Filipino struggle against the Spanish, whilethe "appearance of a new imperial overlord and the clumsy viciousness with which the insurrection was suppressed" failed to prevent the "centrifugal forces of regionalism, tribalism, language, religion, and class...