On May 6, 1900, Otis was relieved; MacArthur was appointed his replacement and invested with the title of Philippines military governor. The war continued to drag on. Filipinos made superb guerrilleros — it took 150,000 goddamns 28 months to catch Aguinaldo—and when MacArthur offered him amnesty it was rejected. Still, MacArthur approached his task imaginatively. The harsh Spanish code was revised, habeas corpus introduced, a tariff system organized, schools and hospitals built, artesian wells dug. American officers and wives who drew the color line were rebuked. Aguinaldo was befriended by MacArthur, and so was his aide, Major Manuel L. Quezon, the fiery, nineteen-year-old mestizo of mixed Spanish and Malayan blood whose surrender General MacArthur received in person. The general founded the Philippine Scouts as a branch of the U.S. Army and encouraged antiguerrilla Filipinos to join it. He allowed Filipino societies to meet provided they gave him their word that they would not become “centers of insurrection,” and placed a standing order with Kelly’s, the Hong Kong bookshop, for every book published “on Far Eastern matters, particularly those devoted to colonial administration.”38
Major General Arthur MacArthur, Jr., in the Philippines, 1899
Major General Arthur MacArthur, Jr., (second from left), 1905
Nothing worked, and in December he publicly called for “precise observance of the laws of war,” promising Draconian penalties for Filipinos caught helping the guerrilleros. Privately he had become convinced that his enemies were not confined to the hills, that he faced a nation in arms. The previous autumn he had sent Washington a report to that effect. President McKinley had received it skeptically, partly because his advisers were assuring him that the archipelago yearned for American guidance but also because of MacArthur’s incredible prose. The vocabulary built up during all those years of study in frontier outposts had burst forth like a purple skyrocket. In one passage the President was warned that “the adhesive principle comes from ethnological homogeneity, which induces men to respond for a time to the appeals of consanguineous leadership.” In another the general charged that the Filipinos had been “maddened by rhetorical sophistry,” an accusation which the President may have felt might have been leveled against the man who was trying to subdue them.39
The effect of this bombast was not what Arthur had intended. If the islands’ inhabitants had been antagonized, the men around McKinley reasoned, the antagonizes had been Americans wearing army uniforms. What was needed, therefore, was a wise civilian in Manila, a man who would understand the aspirations of the people and would, at the same time, have the administration’s best interests at heart. As it happened, such a proconsul was available. He was already in Manila, having arrived the previous June as president of the U.S. Philippine Commission, which in September would become part of the archipelago’s government. It would be hard to miss him, since he weighed 326 pounds and spent much of his time complaining about the heat. This elephantine figure, who would become the nemesis of Major General Arthur MacArthur, was William Howard Taft.40
“The Philippines for Filipinos,” Taft had been saying, and he liked to refer to the natives as his “little brown brothers.” That did not endear him to the goddamns, who composed a lewd ballad which began, “He may be a brother of William Howard Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.” MacArthur’s sympathies were with his men. He was doing everything he could think of to pacify the Philippines, but reading the daily casualty lists he could summon no brotherly feelings toward those responsible for them. He also disliked meddlesome civilians. Already he had censored the dispatches of correspondents critical of his stewardship, and in an astonishing ipse dixit he observed that in sending Taft, McKinley had been guilty of “an unconstitutional interference” with his own prerogatives as “military commander in these islands.”41
That hadn’t been his first reaction. “Cordial greeting and warm welcome await the Commission,” he had wired Taft and his colleagues when their steamer, the Hancock, paused at Hong Kong on its way toward him. There had been an omen when the Hancock reached Manila; instead of greeting the commissioners himself, MacArthur had sent an officer in a launch, and when he did receive Taft at Malacañan Palace, which would soon be known as “the Philippine White House,” the civilian noted that the general’s hand “dripped icicles” to such an extent that he momentarily stopped perspiring. Still, the Ohio judge was an affable man, always willing to overlook minor slights. He thought his host “a pleasant man, very self-contained,” and wrote his brother that “I find him a very satisfactory man to do business with.”42
Slowly he came to reconsider that impression. For one thing, the general made no allowances for the judge’s huge stomach. He established the commissioners and their five secretaries in a room so small that Taft had trouble struggling past the desks. Then there was his vocabulary. MacArthur said he felt the commission had “mediatized” him, and Taft, although a Yale man, had to fetch a dictionary to learn that the general believed Taft was reducing him to a vassal. These matters were trivial, but symptomatic; MacArthur was extremely jealous of his prerogatives, ready to take offense at any contradiction of his insistence that the Philippines needed a decade of military rule. By the end of Taft’s first month on Luzon he was writing his wife that he doubted that the general was politically “keen-witted” or “clear-headed.” MacArthur was undeniably “a very courtly, kindly man,” Taft declared, but he was also “lacking somewhat in a sense of humor; rather fond of profound generalizations on the psychological conditions of the people; politely lacking in any great consideration for the views of anyone as to the real situation who is a civilian and who has been here only a comparatively short period of time, and firmly convinced of the necessity for maintaining military etiquette in civil matters and civil government.”43
To Secretary of War Elihu Root, Taft wrote that MacArthur trusted only “the strong hand of the military” and regarded his task “as one of conquering eight millions of recalcitrant, treacherous and sullen people.” He did not regard fraternization with his civilian rivals as part of that task, and presently Taft was grumbling that he had to conduct what business he had with the general “through the medium of formal correspondence.” Though several of the commissioners invited MacArthur to dinner, he himself entertained only what Taft called “a select military circle” at Malacañan Palace. The civilians were offended. It seemed to them that the general was behaving like a man on horseback, or even a petty sovereign; when he postponed a palace ball upon receiving news of Queen Victoria’s death, Commissioner L. E. Wright said dryly, “In view of the death of a royal sister, he must pay her memory proper respect.”44
Washington was responsible for some of the friction in Manila. Secretary Root hadn’t clarified the line between MacArthur’s authority and Taft’s. The general held executive power, for example, while the commission held the purse strings. Both men asked Root for guidance but received none. Another part of the problem lay in the character of MacArthur’s previous military service. If he was behaving more like a viceroy than a soldier, that was because he was accustomed to a magisterial role. In the 1870s and 1880s officers like him, not hanging judges like Roy Bean, had been the real law west of the Pecos. In New Orleans during the Reconstruction and in Pennsylvania during the labor violence of 1877 Captain MacArthur had arbitrated dozens of civilian disputes. He seems to have regarded the Philippine commissioners as cut from the same cloth as frontier traders, cotton brokers, and Molly Maguires, all trespassers on army property.
But the chief abrasive in Manila was the irreconcilable difference between a prosaic Ohio politician and an imperious, grandiloquent professional soldier. There was no way these two could mesh. Taft appears to have tried harder. In his letters to Root, Charles P. Taft, and Helen Taft he generously acknowledged the general’s eagerness to cultivate the goodwill of the Filipinos, his apparent lack of racial prejudice, and, above all, his military skill. Nevertheless Taft’s hostility toward MacArthur was genuine, and growing. He thought him “pseudo-pr
ofound,” a “military martinet who was “very set in his opinions.” His editing of journalists’ stories was “revolting” and “utterly un-American.” To Helen, Taft wrote that “the more I have to do with M. the smaller man of affairs I think he is. His experience and his ability as a statesman or politician are nothing. He has all the angularity of military etiquette and discipline, and he takes himself with the greatest seriousness.” In a bitter letter to Root, Taft complained:
It is not at all too strong an expression to say that he is sore at our coming. He is sore at the diminution of his authority . . . and his nerves are so tense on the subject that the slightest inadvertence on the part of any one of the Commission leads to correspondence which shows it only too clearly. . . . General MacArthur in his correspondence assumes the position of lecturing us every time he gets an opportunity on the military necessities, and the obligation we feel under courteously to answer his communications involves a great waste of time and energy . . . . It would seem as if he were as sensitive about maintaining the exact line of communication between the Commission and himself as about winning a battle or suppressing the insurrection.45
Clearly this could not go on, and MacArthur seems to have been the first to realize it. He told subordinates that he felt personally humiliated, that he couldn’t stand the strain much longer. The Boxer rebellion briefly seemed to offer a way out; learning of plans to send an expeditionary force to Peking, he cabled Washington: “As paramount situation has for time being developed in China, request permission to proceed thereto in person to command field operations until crisis has passed.” Instead Root sent Major General Adna R. Chaffee against the Boxers and, despite MacArthur’s apoplectic protests, reinforced the expedition with American troops from the Philippines. After a year of wrangling in Manila, Root took the only course he felt was open to him. He relieved General MacArthur of all commands. He ordered Chaffee to replace him, stressing the fact that the new general would be subordinate to Taft. “An officer who has exercised both civil and military power,” Root said of MacArthur, “and who is called upon to surrender a portion of his power to another cannot, unless he is free from the ordinary characteristics of human nature, altogether divorce himself from the habit of exercising civil power and the tendency to look with disfavor upon what seems to be a curtailing of his power.” On July 4, 1901, Taft moved into Malacañan Palace and MacArthur sailed home. “We have had a long, hard year with General MacArthur,” Taft wrote John Warrington. The New York Sun, speaking for newspapers which were outraged by the relief of the general, raged: “Now MacArthur, divested of every legitimate privilege of his rank and record, vanishes into the boscage of disfavor and neglect.”46
But the old soldier wasn’t destined to fade away quite yet. Inevitably there was a Senate investigation. Both Taft and MacArthur testified. Among other things, the inquiry looked into the conduct of U.S. troops stationed in the Philippines, and the general was given a clean bill. During his appearances before the committee he displayed global strategic vision, and in places the yellowing transcript foreshadows 1951 testimony after his son’s relief. Arthur suggested that the archipelago was
the finest group of islands in the world. Its strategic position is unexcelled by that of any other position on the globe. The China Sea, which separates it by something like 750 miles from the continent, is nothing more or less than a safety moat. It lies on the flank of what might be called a position of several thousand miles of coast line; it is in the center of that position. It is therefore relatively better placed than Japan, which is on a flank, and therefore remote from the other extremity; likewise, India, on another flank. The Philippines are in the center of that position. It affords a means of protecting American interests which, with the very least output of physical power, has the effect of a commanding position in itself to retard hostile action.47
He saw his late command as the fulcrum of the U.S. future: “The presence of America in these islands is simply one of the results, in logical sequence, of great national prosperity, and in remote consequences is likely to transcend in importance anything recorded in the history of the world since the discovery of America. To doubt the wisdom of the United States remaining in the islands is to doubt the stability of republican institutions, and amounts to a declaration that a nation thus governed is incapable of successfully resisting strains that arise naturally from its own freedom, and from its own productive energy.” Despite his friendship with Aguinaldo and Quezon, and his disapproval of the color bar in Manila, there were overtones of racism in his conclusions. He felt that he had grasped the “psychological” and “ethnological” characteristics of the Filipinos and predicted that history would judge his stewardship there as a high point in the march of the “Aryan race,” introducing “republicanism” and “Americanism” among peoples less blessed than their masters. In short, he believed that he had opened a new U.S. frontier not much unlike the old one.48
Taft saw things differently, and in retrospect his crystal ball appears to have been clearer than his adversary’s. In his opinion the conflict over who should occupy Malacañan Palace had planted “the seed of a controversy” between civil and military authority. The seed took a long time to flower—a half-century—but in the end its fruit would be extraordinary.49
Dagupan was the last Filipino strongpoint seized by Arthur MacArthur. He may have thought he would be back there once he had explained the situation to the senators, but the next time a MacArthur would hear gunfire in that city was to be in 1944, when Dagupan became one of the first Luzon communities to be liberated by Douglas MacArthur. The reason that Arthur’s hopes were dashed was the precipitous decline in his fortunes after his relief, and that, in turn, may be attributed to the assassination of William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz. Theodore Roosevelt, the new President, was Tart’s friend and ally. He appointed him secretary of war and then anointed him as his successor in the White House. In Manila MacArthur may have thought he was crossing swords with an obscure Ohio jobholder. As it turned out, he was alienating the one man who would stand between him and a successful culmination of his career.50
During the next eight years we see him as a familiar, depressing figure: the overqualified man serving in a series of posts beneath his talents. He commands the Departments of the Colorado, the Great Lakes, and the East; and the Division of the Pacific. War breaks out between Russia and Japan; he asks Washington to send him to Manchuria as an observer; his petition is snarled in red tape and then granted, but before he can reach Asia, Nipponese troops have won a decisive victory at Mukden and the heavy fighting is over. After the peace conference he is assigned to Tokyo as military attache—Pinky joins him there—and then Arthur, Pinky, and young Douglas, now a lieutenant and his father’s aide, set off on what the War Department vaguely describes as an extended “reconnaissance,” an eight-month grand tour of China, French Indochina, Malaya, Siam (Thailand), Burma, Ceylon, and India. General MacArthur is still a hero to Congress, which promotes him to lieutenant general, the highest rank in the army; he is the twelfth American to hold it, and the congressional measure stipulates that it be abolished after he steps down, but no one knows what to do with him, so he goes home to Milwaukee.*51
Arthur’s reputation for bluntness and flamboyance grew during the twilight of his career. In San Francisco he managed to control his temper during a humiliating assignment—welcoming Taft home from Manila—and his design of an artificial harbor for Los Angeles was so successful that the fort protecting it was named after him, but when he dissipated this goodwill by interfering in local government, California businessmen protested to Taft that he was “taking upon himself the duties of administration in municipal affairs.” He simply could not refrain from speaking out of turn. This was awkward enough when he publicly criticized the War Department and the White House, which he often did; it became intolerable when he predicted war between the United States and other countries. Speaking in Milwaukee’s Old Settler’s Club on February 22, 1908,
he warned: “It will be impossible for Americans to keep the sea unless we meet quickly the desperate attack which Japan is now organizing against us.” Another time he objected vehemently to accepting German-American recruits in the U.S. armed forces; war between Germany and the United States, he argued, was inevitable. This time Theodore Roosevelt intervened. The President wrote Taft, “Recently I had to rebuke MacArthur for speaking ill of the Germans. I would like a statement about this matter. Our army and navy officers must not comment about foreign powers in a way that will cause trouble.”52
Although he was the army’s senior general, MacArthur was passed over for Chief of Staff. Protesting, he wrote Taft: “I have been painfully conscious for some time that my present assignment is not compatible with the traditions of the Lieutenant Generalcy,” a rank which, he said, was “now so much depressed that in effect it has become merely a title. By process of current events it has been mediatized”—that word again—“and divested of prestige, dignity and influence.” When Taft left the War Department for the White House, MacArthur knew he was beaten. Three months later, on June 2, 1909, he resigned his commission at the age of sixty-four. The New York Post hailed him as “an accomplished gentleman, an admirable officer, and a splendid general,” and the rest of the press was equally eulogistic. But he was bitter. He told Pinky that when he died he did not want to be buried in his uniform, did not want a grave in Arlington National Cemetery, and did not, in fact, want any military honors at all.53