What it said
not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends
Kipling sent "The White Man's Burden" to Theodore Roosevelt. McClure's printed it in February 1899 with the subtitle "The United States and the Philippine Islands." Roosevelt passed it to Senator Lodge as "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." On 25 January 1899 Puck ran "School Begins": Uncle Sam tutoring pupils labeled Philippines, Hawaii, Porto Rico, and Cuba, the blackboard saying the United States must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.
Who made it and why
The Treaty of Paris, 10 December 1898, ceded the islands from Spain to the United States. Filipino revolutionaries already had a government and a press. La Independencia, edited by Antonio Luna, had published its first issue on 3 September 1898. McKinley's proclamation was edited before General Otis released it on 4 and 5 January 1899: references to U.S. sovereignty came out of the public version. The full text reached Filipino leaders via Iloilo. Aguinaldo's answer, as Miller (1982) is cited in the archive, said his government "cannot remain indifferent" to "such a violent and aggressive seizure" by a nation that had "arrogated to itself the title of champion of oppressed nations."
Fighting began at Manila on 4 February 1899. Official American usage called it the Philippine Insurrection, which assumes the sovereignty the other side denied. That word is the propaganda. It is also the legal theory of the occupation.
What it got right or wrong
The proclamation's friendship was false to the policy. You do not "assimilate" a people who have declared a republic, at the point of the army you just used on Spain, and remain a guest. The word "insurrection" was wrong in the same way: it tried the political question in the dictionary. Atrocities and mutual charges followed, including American cartoons and Filipino appeals. This page does not need a new atrocity count to reach the judgment. Taking the islands, and fighting the government already there, was a departure from the claim Americans had just made against Spain. Anti-imperialists said so at the time. They were right.
Otis's censorship was a separate, documented wrong. In February to July 1899 the Postmaster General ordered seized, in the mails, anti-imperialist pamphlets Edward Atkinson had addressed to soldiers. On 9 July, Manila correspondents handed Otis a protest that censorship was hiding "a knowledge of the real condition of affairs" from the American public, not merely keeping news from the enemy. A war government that seizes a citizen's pamphlet on the way to its own troops is afraid of the argument, not of a spy.
Forms are not consent of the governed
The Constitution's war power and the treaty power were the forms used. Forms are not consent of the governed, which is the American standard the Declaration states and the Constitution was built to approximate. Governing "with or without their consent," the line on the Puck blackboard, is the sentence a republic should not be willing to letter. Colonial subjects are not a third thing the Bill of Rights forgot on purpose. They are people the policy chose not to count.
The libertarian reading here is not subtle, because the record is not ambiguous. Voluntary trade, even voluntary alliance, is one relation. Benevolent assimilation enforced by infantry is another. The anti-imperialist press, Atkinson's pamphlets, and the soldiers who were not allowed to receive them are the constitutional side of 1899. The blackboard is the other side, drawn so a child could get it.
Its legacy
The phrase survived as a euphemism for later occupations: we are here as friends, the fighting is not a war, the censorship is only operational. The correction is in the American archive itself, which kept the cartoons, the proclamation, and the protest of the correspondents. Use the duller words. It was a war of conquest. Friendship was the caption.
Sources
- FRAME case study "'Benevolent assimilation': the Philippine-American War and the propaganda on every side," citing McKinley's 21 December 1898 instruction, the Treaty of Paris, Otis's edited release, Aguinaldo's reply (Miller 1982), Puck 25 January 1899, Roosevelt's note on Kipling to Lodge, the Atkinson mail seizure, and the 9 July 1899 correspondents' protest.
- Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (Yale University Press, 1982).