Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [105]
In February, 1899, after the vote on the treaty, he made his choice. Although he said nothing publicly at this time, rumors that he intended to withdraw from politics began to appear in the press. When reporters came to ask him about his hostility to the Philippines policy and the Nicaragua Canal bill, he brushed aside their questions with an expression of “fatigue and disgust.” In April, after the close of the Fifty-fifth Congress, he authorized an announcement. The unbelievable proved true. Speaker Reed would retire from Congress and after a vacation in Europe would take up the private practice of law in New York as senior partner in the firm of Simpson, Thacher and Barnum.
“Congress without Tom Reed! Who can imagine it!” exclaimed an editorial in the New York Tribune. Everywhere was felt a half-frightened sense as of some great landmark being removed, leaving a gaping hole at the feet of observers. The Times, never one of his admirers, was moved to a full-column editorial on the “national loss.” It felt “there must be something wrong in the political condition” that made such a man leave public life for the private practice of law. Its Washington correspondent called the event a “calamity” for Congress in the degree to which it would reduce the level of ability after the Speaker departed. Godkin in the Evening Post mourned the passing from political life of that rare phenomenon, “a mature, rational man.”
Reed himself offered no public explanation of his going except to say, in a farewell letter to his constituents in Maine, “Office as a ribbon to stick in your coat is worth no-one’s consideration.” Cornered in the Manhattan Hotel in New York by reporters who urged that the public would want to hear from him, he replied, “The public! I have no interest in the public,” and turned on his heel and walked away.
Military operations in the Philippines swelled in size and savagery. Against the stubborn guerrilla warfare of the Filipinos, the U.S. Army poured in regiments, brigades, divisions, until as many as 75,000—more than four times as many as saw action in Cuba—were engaged in the islands at one time. Filipinos burned, ambushed, raided, mutilated; on occasion they buried prisoners alive. Americans retaliated with atrocities of their own, burning down a whole village and killing every inhabitant if an American soldier was found with his throat cut, applying the “water cure” and other tortures to obtain information. They were three thousand miles from home, exasperated by heat, malaria, tropical rains, mud and mosquitoes. They sang, “Damn, damn, damn the Filipino, civilize him with a Krag …” and officers on occasion issued orders to take no more prisoners. They won all the skirmishes against an enemy who constantly renewed himself. A raiding party which missed Aguinaldo but captured his young son made headlines. Reed, coming into his office that morning, said in mock surprise to his law partner, “What, are you working today? I should think you would be celebrating. I see by the papers that the American Army has captured the infant son of Aguinaldo and at last accounts was in hot pursuit of the mother.”
Aguinaldo fought for time in the hope that anti-imperialist sentiment in America would force withdrawal of the forces already sickening of their task. The longer the war continued, the louder and angrier grew the Anti-Imperialist protests. Their program adopted at Chicago in October, 1899, demanded “an immediate cessation of the war against liberty.” They collected and reported all the worst cases of American conduct in the Philippines and all the most egregious speeches of imperialist greed and set them against the most unctuous expressions of the white man’s mission. They distributed pamphlets paid for by Andrew Carnegie, and when the League’s executive head, Edward Atkinson, applied to the War Department for permission to send the pamphlets to the Philippines and was refused,