Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [93]
Along with General Smith’s Samar expedition, the Batangas military campaign led to Senate hearings on Army misconduct that sullied the Army’s reputation for years. Still, General Bell’s Third Separate Brigade accomplished its mission. By February 1902, several guerrilla bands had surrendered, some after killing their own leaders. On April 16, General Malvar, his wife seriously ill, surrendered, followed soon after by the remaining insurgents in Batangas and on Samar.
President Theodore Roosevelt chose the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—July 4, 1902—to declare a formal end to the Philippine “insurrection.” More than 4,200 American soldiers died in the war, adding to the toll of 2,910 killed by combat and disease in the Spanish-American War. The death toll among the Filipinos reached a different order of magnitude. In addition to some 20,000 Filipino soldiers, hundreds of thousands of civilians perished from causes attributable in full or in part to the war, including killing by U.S. soldiers, famine, and especially diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, smallpox, and a horrific two-year epidemic of cholera. All of which helps to explain why so many of the Filipinos interviewed for an oral history project during the 1950s would remember the first lethal years of the American colonial regime less for its battles or its atrocities than for its plagues.104
In the spring and summer of 1902, the U.S. Senate hearings and newspaper reports confronted the American public with shocking stories of Army misconduct in the Philippine War: interrogations by water torture, summary executions, and scorched-earth tactics. To many, the most disturbing revelation was that the U.S. Army had resorted to methods reminiscent of the “Weylerism” that had helped arouse American support for a war against Spain in the first place. In the end, General Bell survived with his reputation impugned but his career intact. At the height of the postwar debate, a veteran of the Army Hospital Corps named Edward Curran tried to set the record straight. In a letter to The New York Times, Curran praised General Bell for the “humane and meritorious concentration” in Batangas, where the corpsman had proudly participated in the strenuous effort to “vaccinate all of these people.”105
Curran’s letter was one small entry in a much larger argument unfolding in American public life, an argument that extolled the exceptional humanity displayed by the U.S. Army and colonial governments during and after the Spanish and Philippine wars. Beginning in 1902 and extending to President Taft’s 1911 Philadelphia speech and beyond, an outpouring of official commentary, newspaper and magazine editorials, books, and personal remembrances urged that the sanitary work of the Army Medical Department had shown that characteristic which Chief Surgeon Greenleaf had described as distinctly American—“humanity in war.” Arriving in San Francisco in June 1902, Major General Loyd Wheaton offered a humanitarian balance sheet of the Philippine War. “The devastations of war have cost many lives and the loss among the natives has no doubt been large,” General Wheaton said, “but when one takes into consideration the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been saved by reason of the sanitary precautions of the American Army and Civil Commission, that loss by war seems infinitesimal.” Wheaton referred specifically to the “compulsory vaccination [that] was held in every province, town, and throughout the country. In that way we saved thousands of lives.”106
The New York