Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [59]
Not content with this, Roosevelt dictated an open letter to Miles, full of recriminations. “I do not like the clear implication … that brutalities have been committed by our troops in the Philippines.” He admitted that there had been “sporadic cases” of violence against prisoners. But these were inevitable in war, as the general must surely remember from the days when he was tracking Geronimo. “In the Wounded Knee fight the troops under your command killed squaws and children as well as unarmed Indians.”
The letter was deemed too confrontational to send, let alone publish, so he unbosomed himself in a series of memoranda to Elihu Root. He wanted the record to show that Miles had once approached him in an “utterly fatuous” attempt to run against William McKinley. “To my mind his actions can bear only the construction that his desire is purely to gratify his selfish ambition, his vanity, or his spite.”
The memos were classified Confidential, Private, and Personal. Root filed them, knowing such strictures, in Roosevelt’s parlance, usually meant “Hold for Publication.” He had hardly done so, indeed, before Congress asked for documents relating to Miles’s insinuations, and the President sanctioned their release.
Root wrote separately to Henry Cabot Lodge, whose Senate Committee on the Philippines was considering a transition from military to civil government in the archipelago. He acknowledged forty-four cases of documented cruelty, of which thirty-nine had already resulted in convictions under the military justice system. Aside from these isolated lapses, “the war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army … with self-restraint, and with humanity, never surpassed, if ever equaled, in any conflict.”
Root’s words masked embarrassment, for he knew that Miles had gotten hold of a secret report that indicated otherwise. It came from the military governor of Tayabas, Major Cornelius Gardener, and described how the barrios of that once-peaceful province had been brutalized by American soldiers. Gardener spoke of “deep hatred toward us,” and, more disturbingly, of reciprocal prejudice against the Filipinos: “Almost without exception, soldiers, and also many officers, refer to the natives in their presence as ‘niggers’, and the natives are beginning to understand what ‘nigger’ means.”
So damning was the Gardener Report that Governor William Howard Taft had suppressed it for seven weeks, on the hopeful ground that it might be “biassed.” Root was guilty of delay himself, having sent his copy back to Manila, by slow sea mail, for “verification.” He had done so, however, for sensibly strategic reasons. The insurrection was in fact almost over, and a final surrender by holdout guerrillas was expected within weeks. The honor of American arms, of Republican foreign policy, demanded a clean, decisive victory.
GENERAL MILES MOVED adroitly during the next few weeks. He made no attempt to leak the Gardener Report, beyond letting Democrats in Congress know it existed. They began to press for its publication. Meanwhile, he set about sabotaging another aspect of Administration policy. Tall and dignified in his coruscating uniform, he dominated the Senate Committee on Military Affairs hearings on the Army Bill.
This measure, the most profound review of American military organization in more than a century, was the fruit of several years’ hard labor by Elihu Root. It sought to make line and staff officers interchangeable, to promote by merit rather than seniority, and to create a general staff answerable to the Secretary of War. More to the point, it also sought to abolish the system whereby Root administered, and Miles commanded,