Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [91]
The narrow military imperative of the cordon sanitaire was, during the course of the war, yielding something grander, a more far-reaching system of public health. As it did so, Army surgeons, U.S. officials, and other commentators began to publicize these measures as not merely efficient but humane. As early as 1901, Colonel Greenleaf declared that the Army’s sanitary measures were winning hearts and minds. “This object lesson in one of the most important characteristics of the American people, humanity in war, has made a deep impression on the Filipinos, and has been an important factor in winning their allegiance to our Government.” The following year, James LeRoy declared that the surgeons’ “little and big services to the natives . . . not only helped make the name ‘Americanos’ more acceptable” but “were also genuine responses to the call of humanity.” But as Greenleaf and LeRoy well knew, willing submission to vaccination remained far from universal in the pueblos and barrios. Understandably, Filipinos associated the vaccinators, even those who were native physicians, with the foreign army they served. The work of vaccinating the natives, conceded Greenleaf, was “by no means devoid of danger, and several instances occurred where the vaccinators were captured by insurrectos or kidnapped by the inhabitants and killed.”95
A fuller articulation of the humanitarian argument did not emerge until the final, brutal months of the Philippine-American War. The argument gained momentum at precisely the moment when the American public learned of the scale of atrocities carried out by the U.S. Army in the Philippines and the devastating effects, upon Filipino civilians, of the Army’s counterinsurgency policy of reconcentration. That policy would forever be associated with a single forsaken place: Batangas.
In the days before Christmas, 1901—as anti-imperialists in the U.S. Congress denounced the nation’s Philippine policy (“We have witnessed the spectacle of an American Army numbering over 70,000 men engaged in conquering a people struggling for independence,” thundered Representative Samuel W. McCall of Massachusetts)—the peasants of Batangas province made their way, by winding paths and rough roads, to the pueblos. Market towns in a prostrated agricultural region with precious little left to sell or barter, the pueblos were fast taking on a new kind of urban life as Army “reconcentration zones.” Traveling alone, with families, or alongside their entire uprooted barrios, the Batanguenos stepped past soldiers, through fences, and around garbage into the teeming camps. They carried rice, chickens, and the pieces of their bamboo and nipa palm huts. On the day after Christmas, by order of Brigadier General James Franklin Bell of the Third Separate Brigade, all property remaining beyond the perimeters would be subject to confiscation or the torch. Any man they found out there without proper papers would be arrested, or shot if he dared to run away.96
Located in southwestern Luzon, just a few hundred miles from the offices of the U.S. colonial government in Manila, Batangas province was one of the last strongholds of the Filipino resistance, the base of operations for insurgent leader General Miguel Malvar. The Army command had organized the Third Separate Brigade for this chief purpose: to “pacify” Batangas and thus bring an end to an increasingly unpopular colonial war.97
By the fall of 1901, that war had seemed all but over. Guerrilla bands laid down their arms in one province after another. Then came Balangiga. In a village on the island of Samar, guerrillas and villagers wiped out a U.S. infantry company. American newspapers likened the “Balangiga Massacre” to Little Big Horn. Dispatched on a punitive campaign against Samar, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered his men to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the island into a “howling wilderness.”98
In Batangas, too, the customary distinctions between hostiles and civilians yielded to claims of military necessity. “Practically the entire population has been hostile