As President McKinley privately acknowledged in writing — “when the war is over we must keep what we want” — seizing the Philippines was an act of national self-interest. Of the alternatives, it was the one that seemed best calculated to serve America’s strategic aims in Asia. But McKinley’s geopolitical decision had unintended consequences. For one, it provoked a bloody insurrection. For another, it challenged the United States’s democratic principles. As these consequences hit home, a divided Senate set up a special committee and held closed hearings. Congressional testimony is a source much prized by historians. Though some of it is prepared, once questioning begins, testimony becomes unscripted and can be especially revealing. The following documents are taken from the 1902 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Philippines.

Ideals

General Arthur MacArthur (1845–1912) was in on the action in the Philippines almost from the start. He commanded one of the first units to arrive there in 1898 and in 1900 was reassigned as the islands’ military governor and general commander of the troops. His standing as a military man — holder of the Congressional Medal of Honor from the Civil War — was matched later by his more famous son, Douglas MacArthur, who fought in the Pacific during World War II. Here the elder MacArthur explains in prepared testimony his vision of America’s mission to the Philippines.

At the time I returned to Manila [May 1900] to assume the supreme command it seemed to me that … our occupation of the island was simply one of the necessary consequences in logical sequence of our great prosperity, and to doubt the wisdom of [occupation] was simply to doubt the stability of our own institutions and in effect to declare that a self-governing nation was incapable of successfully resisting strains arising naturally from its own productive energy. It seemed to me that our conception of right, justice, freedom, and personal liberty was the precious fruit of centuries of strife … [and that] we must regard ourselves simply as the custodians of imperishable ideas held in trust for the general benefit of mankind. In other words, I felt that we had attained a moral and intellectual height from which we were bound to proclaim to all as the occasion arose the true message of humanity as embodied in the principles of our own institutions. …

All other governments that have gone to the East have simply planted trading establishments; they have not materially affected the conditions of the people. …There is not a single establishment, in my judgment, in Asia to-day that would survive five years if the original power which planted it was withdrawn therefrom.

The contrasting idea with our idea is this: In planting our ideas we plant something that can not be destroyed. To my mind the archipelago is a fertile soil upon which to plant republicanism. …We are planting the best traditions, the best characteristics of Americanism in such a way that they can never be removed from that soil. That in itself seems to me a most inspiring thought. It encouraged me during all my efforts in those lands, even when conditions seemed most disappointing, when the people themselves, not appreciating precisely what the remote consequences of our efforts were going to be, mistrusted us; but that fact was always before me — that going deep down into that fertile soil were the indispensable ideas of Americanism.

Skepticism

At this point, the general was interrupted by Colorado senator Thomas Patterson, a Populist-Democrat and a vocal anti-imperialist.

Sen. Patterson: Do you mean that imperishable idea of which you speak is the right of self-government?

Gen. MacArthur: Precisely so; self-government regulated by law as I understand it in this Republic.

Sen. Patterson: Of course you do not mean self-government regulated by some foreign and superior power?

Gen. MacArthur: Well, that is a matter of evolution, Senator. We are putting these institutions there so they will evolve themselves just as here and everywhere else where freedom has flourished. …

Sen. Patterson [after the General concluded his statement]: Do I understand your claim of right and duty to retain the Philippine Islands is based upon the proposition that they have come to us upon the basis of our morals, honorable dealing, and unassailable international integrity?

Gen. MacArthur: That proposition is not questioned by anybody in the world, excepting a few people in the United States. …We will be benefited, and the Filipino people will be benefited, and that is what I meant by the original proposition —

Sen. Patterson: Do you mean the Filipino people that are left alive?

Gen. MacArthur: I mean the Filipino people. …

Sen. Patterson: You mean those left alive after they have been subjugated?

Gen. MacArthur: I do not admit that there has been any unusual destruction of life in the Philippine Islands. The destruction is simply the incident of war, and of course it embraces only a very small percentage of the total population.

… I doubt if any war — either international or civil, any war on earth — has been conducted with as much humanity, with as much careful consideration, with as much self-restraint, as have been the American operations in the Philippine Archipelago. …

Realities

Brigadier General Robert P. Hughes, a military district commander, testified as follows.

Q: In burning towns, what would you do? Would the entire town be destroyed by fire or would only the offending portions of the town be burned?

Gen. Hughes: I do not know that we ever had a case of burning what you would call a town in this country, but probably a barrio or a sitio; probably half a dozen houses, native shacks, where the insurrectos would go in and be concealed, and if they caught a detachment passing they would kill some of them.

Q: What did I understand you to say would be the consequences of that?

Gen. Hughes: They usually burned the village.

Q: All of the houses in the village?

Gen. Hughes: Yes, every one of them.

Q: What would become of the inhabitants?

Gen. Hughes: That was their lookout.

Q: If these shacks were of no consequence what was the utility of their destruction?

Gen. Hughes: The destruction was as a punishment. They permitted these people to come in there and conceal themselves. …

Q: The punishment in that case would fall, not upon the men, who could go elsewhere, but mainly upon the women and little children.

Gen. Hughes: The women and children are part of the family, and where you wish to inflict a punishment you can punish the man probably worse in that way than in any other.

Q: But is that within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare? . . .

Gen. Hughes: These people are not civilized.

Cruelties

Daniel J. Evans, Twelfth Infantry, describes the “water cure.”

Q: The committee would like to hear … whether you were the witness to any cruelties inflicted upon the natives of the Philippine Islands; and if so, under what circumstances.

Evans: The case I had reference to was where they gave the water cure to a native in the Ilicano Province at Ilocos Norte … about the month of August 1900. There were two native scouts with the American forces. They went out and brought in a couple of insurgents. …They tried to get from this insurgent … where the rest of the insurgents were at that time. …The first thing one of the Americans — I mean one of the scouts for the Americans — grabbed one of the men by the head and jerked his head back, and then they took a tomato can and poured water down his throat until he could hold no more. …Then they forced a gag into his mouth; they stood him up … against a post and fastened him so that he could not move. Then one man, an American soldier, who was over six feet tall, and who was very strong, too, struck this native in the pit of the stomach as hard as he could. …They kept that operation up for quite a time, and finally I thought the fellow was about to die, but I don’t believe he was as bad as that, because finally he told them he would tell, and from that day on he was taken away, and I saw no more of him.

Source: From American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection, edited by Henry F. Graff (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969). Reprinted by permission of the author.