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59 2 Colonial Coercion J  8: 00 ..  A 30, 1903, the Pacific Mail steamship carrying one of America’s most influential imperialists dropped anchor into the mud of Manila Bay. After five years of U.S. colonial rule, the capital was ready for his return. Thousands of American flags fluttered from city spires in the brisk morning breeze. Over a hundred ships sounded their steam whistles to hail the returning colonial hero. Towering above the Filipino and American reporters who clambered up the gangway to catch his first words, the American vice-governor, Luke E. Wright, said simply, in the drawl of his native Tennessee, “This seems like home.” After his launch steamed across the bay past a line of Coast Guard cutters, thevice-governorsteppedashorebeneathManila’smassivestonebattlements.The guns of Fort Santiago roared. The Philippines Constabulary band struck up the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Sabers gleaming, the U.S. Thirteenth Cavalry escorted Wright’s open carriage down the mile-long Malecon Drive, washed by a morning rain and lined with thousands of brightly dressed Filipino spectators. From a reviewing stand wrapped in American flags, Wright gazed approvingly as representatives of the U.S. colony’s social hierarchy and military might passed in review. First came the parade’s grand marshal, Chief Henry T. Allen, leading his paramilitary constabulary. The U.S. Army’s Thirtieth Infantry, two Philippine Scouts companies, and two batteries of light artillery followed. Next was Manila’s police chief, John E. Harding, leading a detachment of first-class police, all Americans, and another of second-class police, some of them Filipinos. Then, with a clatter of hooves, the city Fire Department’s spirited horses and gleaming engines rolled past. Last of all, just ahead of the street sweepers, trailed hundreds of Manila workers carrying union banners and twenty-five carriages filled with Filipino politicians, the leaders of the rival Nacionalista and Federalista parties. At the parade’s close Wright swept through the walled city of Intramuros to the seat of colonial government, the grand Ayuntamiento building, and up its marble staircase to the waiting crowd. There colonial commissioner James Smith hailed the legislation that Wright had won from the U.S. Congress, saying, “Public order has you to thank for the Constabulary Bill, business prosperity is grateful for the Currency Bill.” After Smith’s statements were translated into Spanish for the Filipinos, Wright rose to warm applause, assuring the audience, “There is no doubt but that the great heart of the American people beats warmly for the Philippine people . . . Knowing this, I think that all . . . Americans and Filipinos may touch shoulders and work without ceasing for the betterment of these islands.” In its lead editorial, the Manila Times, voice of the American colony, praised Wright’s Constabulary Bill, saying it would increase security by making U.S. Army troops “available for police duty.”1 With every footfall, every hoofbeat, this procession showed the centrality of coercion to U.S. colonial rule over the Philippines. From its start in 1898, the American regime had been shaped by the imperatives of crushing a national revolution and then containing the dreams that had been its inspiration. During its first, formative years in these islands, the United States devoted an extraordinary effort to pacification, starting with open warfare and then eliding into a counterinsurgency campaign that would drag on fitfully for another decade. Throughout these years of turmoil, the U.S. regime met any challenge with a mailed fist to crush the resistance and political concessions to co-opt its leadership. The first civil governor, William Howard Taft, erected a comprehensive apparatus for colonial repression, with harsh laws and an efficient police network that gave him the means to suppress both armed resistance and political dissent. In the months that followed its founding in July 1901, Taft’s civil government drew on military precedents to form a three-tiered security structure that would persist for nearly a century: a lightly armed Filipino force for each of several hundred municipalities ; a binational unit, the Manila Metropolitan Police, to contain radical nationalists and militant workers in the capital; and the Philippines Constabulary, a paramilitary police of Filipino soldiers and U.S. officers, to patrol the countryside . Supporting the constabulary in its pacification efforts were the Philippine Scouts, a Filipino infantry integrated into the U.S. Army and led by white American officers. These formal structures were the core of a security apparatus that imposed overlapping grids of control...

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