Mark Twain and the Balangiga Bells
Mark Twain, the American writer who bitterly attacked the US colonization of the Philippines. says that the humiliating defeat chilled America to the bone. From the new President, Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, came an anguished cry to put an end and finish the “insurrection” speedily and with all necessary firmness. The US Army ’ s retaliation was swift, vicious and brutal. Military orders couched in broad terms assigned General “Jake” Smith the job of pacifying Samar island. His first move was to order all civilians out of the interior. When they came straggling to the coastal towns, they were thrown, one and all, into stockades.
“I want no prisoners,” Gen. Smith said, “I wish you to kill and burn; the more you burn and kill, the better it will please me.”
He directed that Samar be converted into “a howling wilderness.” All persons who had not surrendered and were capable of carrying arms were to be shot.
“Who was capable?” asked Major Littleton Waller of the Marines. Anyone over 10 years of age, replied Smith. Samar boys of bolo, he insisted; they were just as dangerous as their elders. The major executed his orders more or less to the letter, and within six months Samar was as quiet as a cemetery.
The real Balangiga Massacre, as Samar folks know it, and as recorded in world history, was motivated by the “kill and burn” scorched- earth policy of the US Army. More than a thousand natives, mostly noncombatants, civilians, men, women and children older than 10 were killed, whole villages were systematically burned, crops and foodstuff destroyed, farm work animals shot and slaughtered to avenge the American soldiers who perished in the Balangiga attack. It was gruesome and ghastly.
Twain’s ringing philippics
Mark Twain [aka Samuel L. Cle-
American soldiers with their war booty and a ‘ little brown brother’. mens], the eminent American auoccupation. Twain supported thor, satirist and Anti-Imperialist the struggle and declaration League leader must have someof Philippine Independence in how inspired the Filipino 1898. Referring to the Filipino
He gave the Filipinos nationalist movement, he wrote, a voice in the American press. Aguinaldo was “their leader, Through his essays, he articulated their hero, their hope, their sentiments against America’s ocWashington.” Twain knew the cupation of the Philippines. With Spaniards “surrendered” to the his caustic tone, he even suggested Americans after a mock battle because of the Spanish code “of honor not to surrender to a former colony. The Philippine revolutionary forces had already surrounded Intramuros, Manila, the seat of the crumbling Spanish government, and were poised to win the revolutionary war against Spain even before the American land forces arrived.
Twain, who vehemently objected to American imperialism, denounced the American policy decision to colonize the Philippine Islands as “treachery.” In public forums, he was indignant, and his language vitriolic. His “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which appeared in the February 1901 issue of the
is perhaps his most popular and influential anti- imperialist essay. He said that the continued stay of the American forces in the Philippines was a “stab at the back against a legitimate revo-
He became an active speaker at anti-war rallies letters of protests. He could, in a way, have prevented the horrors of the war and the carnage had the imperialists paid heed. He opposed having the “American eagle put its talons on any other land.” The American policymakers led and guided by Mckinley’s Manifest Destiny policy refused to read his riveting and incisive writings. Or, they ignored his ringing philippics against imperialism.
Aguinaldo and Mark Twain
Mark Twain admired General Emilio Aguinaldo who resisted Spanish rule and continued the fight against the American lution for self- determination.” Twain thundered:
“I thought we should act as them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders - mensely greater. I’m sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”( New York, London, October 6, 1900)