DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
The 'Liberators' were not 'Splendid'
Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance and the Birth of the American Empire
Joe Jackson, 2025
The title of Joe Jackson's history of the Spanish American War and the subsequent war/police action in Cuba and the Philippines is ironic or actual mockery. The war between Spain and the U.S. in Cuba and the Philippines, following the sinking of the battleship, Maine, was brief as Spanish forces offered little more than token resistance to overwhelming U.S. forces, which entered the war enthusiastically to liberate Cuba from Spanish oppression and as an opportunity for martial glory. However, U.S. forces in Cuba were decimated by infectious diseases such as malaria and (greatly feared) yellow fever ("the Black death of its day") that left soldiers, nurses and other medical staff desperate to escape the island. Both in Cuba and the Philippines the war with Spain evolved into years of violent conflict with local insurgents determined to be free of colonial rule, either by Spain or the U.S.
The main subject of "Splendid Liberators" is the brutal U.S. response to insurgent forces that employed guerrilla warfare against U.S. occupation at the very beginning of the American empire. As discussed by Jackson, U.S. forces in the Philippines engaged in systematic atrocities endorsed by political and military leaders that included torture and mass murder of insurgents (including captured insurgents) and civilian populations suspected of supporting them. In response to the killing and occasional mutilation of U.S. soldiers by guerrillas, U.S. forces engaged in widespread campaigns of extermination that included entire districts of the islands, did not spare women and children, and utilized destruction of crops, farm animals and any other source of livelihood. Furthermore, these actions were justified in racist language, such as referring to Filipinos as "niggers" and describing them as uncivilized "savages," per the widespread denigration of American Indians by white settlers.
One of the most disturbing themes of "Splendid Liberators" is the discussion of the intense racial enmity that existed between White and Black U.S. soldiers in the Philippines. Racial tensions increased on ships transporting U.S. troops to the Philippines and intensified upon arrival, in part because most Filipinos clearly preferred Black soldiers to White troops. Jackson asks:
"What was the source of such anger? No one really knows the whys, but its appearance in the Philippines seemed immediate: the ferocious racial hatred toward both American Blacks and Filipinos was almost simultaneous and it soon merged."
Stories of atrocities committed by U.S. forces in the Philippines were impossible to deny because some soldiers bragged about them, criticized or (at least) acknowledged them in letters home that were sometimes published in newspapers. First Lieutenant John Hall, a platoon leader, stated in a letter published in the San Francisco Examiner that his commanding officer "ordered no prisoners to be taken." According to Hall, [the commanding officer] Funston's friend and subordinate, Wilder Metcalf, was the worst offender, killing several prisoners in an assault and then admitting to Funston that he had done so. Perhaps it goes without saying that Metcalf was not punished or disciplined in any way.
Refusing to take prisoners or killing prisoners was only a part of the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers. Following an attack on Manila "The towns around Manila burned as Americans spread from the center. In Tondo, Paco and Santa Ana, churches became rubble and thatch houses turned to rubble. Squads of troops stalked the streets, destroying buildings to flush out snipers. To one Englishman, the Yanks seemed possessed by a "mad fury": he watched as "houses were ransacked, women raped, jewels taken and villages burned under the pretext of searching for hidden arms. In Pandacan, when soldiers chanced upon some "bewildered women carrying their small pox- stricken children," (they) ripped them from their embrace "and threw them in the flames." A letter in The North American Review gloried: "I tell you that this war is great and I love it, as long as I am not killed in it. .. Destroy, burn, kill -- It's beautiful! As soon as your blood is up, nothing stops you; you become enraged and destroy as much as you can."
Soldiers wrote letters of this type because they had been encouraged by military officers to run amok and to kill and torture Filipinos without restraint, and because they were proud of their actions and expected the approval of family and friends at home. Eventually, after several years there was a backlash in U.S. public opinion leading political leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt to distance themselves from those who stubbornly defended the worst of American actions in the Philippines. Nevertheless, the careers of U.S. officers who had set in motion and supported mass murder and widespread torture (including waterboarding) in the conflict with Filipino insurgents largely flourished, according to Jackson.
A main theme of "Splendid Liberators" is the dramatic transformation of American values and character occasioned by the opportunity of acquiring an empire through war with Spain. During the two years prior to the sinking of the Maine, a likely accident that was taken as a cause of war, a war "fever" seized U.S. public opinion, which was strongly supportive of Cuban revolutionaries fighting Spanish rule. President William McKinley in his inauguration speech on March 4, 1897 said: "We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. And, he added, "Peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency." Yet McKinley's opposition to war with Spain over Cuba was overwhelmed by demand for U.S. intervention in Cuba following the sinking of the Maine which was widely blamed on Spain despite lack of strong evidence, in part because of the news coverage and editorial comment by Hearst newspapers.
Once the U.S. had defeated Spain and occupied Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, social attitudes toward local national liberation forces quickly changed. It was incomprehensible and intolerable to U.S. forces that they were viewed in the same light as Spain, i.e., as colonial oppressors, and Cuban and Filipino insurgents were despised for their use of guerilla warfare. In short order, many U.S. soldiers came to intensely dislike the entire Cuban and Filipino populations, any of whom might suddenly attack them.
Idealistic motives for intervention were quickly supplanted by commercial interests and national security concerns. The Platt amendment "created infringements on Cuban sovereignty that defined U.S. and Cuban relation until its 1934 repeal by Franklin Delano Roosevelt," Jackson asserts. The U.S. could intervene at any time "to protect life, property and individual liberty, " and did so in 1906, 1912, 1917 and 1920. The wars in Cuba and the Philippines initiated decades of frequent U.S. intervention in countries around the world. Jackson states:
"At the very least, the nation changed. After 1898-2002, interventionist fever seized the United States over and over. After assuming the presidency in 1909, Taft ordered the overthrow of regimes in Nicaragua and Honduras to protect American businesses. Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Russia. ... After W.W. I, Calvin Coolidge returned troops to Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic in the name of "stability" ...”
However, none of these countries came close to experiencing the death and destruction during and in the aftermath of U.S. involvement in the Philippines. Jackson asserts:
"It appears that the American war contributed directly or indirectly to the loss of more than a million persons" from a base population of 7 million. That is an astounding number ... more than were killed or died of mistreatment during the three and a half centuries of Spanish rule." This number was so high due in large part to the U.S. policy of destroying the foundation of the food supply for entire civilian populations, a practice widely used to force American Indian tribes onto reservations.
This level of destruction was only the beginning for Filipinos. During W.W. II, Jackson states, "the historian Daniel Immerwahr in his "How to Hide an Empire" estimates 1.6 million Japanese, American and Filipino dead, much of that from American carpet bombing of Philippine population centers." In his enlightening history of U.S. territories, Immerwahr comments that most American soldiers stationed in the Philippines during W.W. II were unaware that the Islands were a U.S. territory. Immerwahr asserts: "It (the bombing of Philippine population centers) was by far the most destructive event to ever take place on U.S. soil."
"Splendid Liberators" is a lengthy book that does much more than describe the ruthless actions involved in building and maintaining a U.S. empire. Most of the book tells the stories of a wide range of persons who were at the forefront of conflicts in Cuba and the Philippines: McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur MacArthur, Clara Barton, Fredrick Funston, George Dewey, David Fagen (a Black soldier who defected to the side of Filipino insurgents and was the nemesis of U.S. forces for years), William Randolph Hearst, Carl Sandburg, Stephen Crane, Emilio Aguinaldo, Tomas Palma and many others both in Cuba and the Philippines. Taken together, these are stories of people who found what it meant to be a part of a young emerging country that becomes aware of its power to expand beyond its current borders, and sheds one identity while adopting another to fulfill its "manifest destiny" to acquire an empire; or to be at the mercy of liberators who have predatory traits.
-- Dee Wilson