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Annals Of American History
The Water Cure
Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.
By Paul Kramer
21/02/08 "New
Yorker" --- Many
Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States
soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States,
throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the
language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the
language that, when coupled with expanding military and
commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars.
The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining
empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of
its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was
pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national
honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana
Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a
formally independent Cuba.
A picture of a
“water detail,” reportedly taken in
May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines.
“It is a terrible torture,” one
soldier wrote.
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The Americans were not
done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to
imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest
colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to
China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions
for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war,
and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet
at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore
George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary
Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated
Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines
independent in June, and organized a government led by
the Philippine élite.
During the next half year, it became clear that American
and Filipino visions for the islands’ future were at
odds. U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain—keeping the
army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering
the city—and President William McKinley refused to |
recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his
negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the
islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos’
need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his
advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model
republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became
increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a
period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino
soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war
erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with
Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange
for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops
waged a war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime
that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of
hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S.
soldiers.
Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S.
forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began
to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military
censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through
the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters
home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside
complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and
some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A
letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment,
published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how
Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner
to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the
way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on
their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put
a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth
and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They
swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”
On occasion, someone—a local antiwar activist, one
suspects—forwarded these clippings to centers of
anti-imperialist publishing in the Northeast. But the war’s
critics were at first hesitant to do much with them: they were
hard to substantiate, and they would, it was felt, subject the
publishers to charges of anti-Americanism. This was especially
true as the politics of imperialism became entangled in the 1900
Presidential campaign. As the Democratic candidate, William
Jennings Bryan, clashed with the Republican incumbent over
imperialism, which the Democrats called “the paramount issue,”
critics of the war had to defend themselves against accusations
of having treasonously inspired the insurgency, prolonged the
conflict, and betrayed American soldiers. But, after McKinley
won a second term, the critics may have felt that they had
little to lose.
Ultimately, outraged dissenters—chief among them the relentless
Philadelphia-based reformer Herbert Welsh—forced the question of
U.S. atrocities into the light. Welsh, who was descended from a
wealthy merchant family, might have seemed an unlikely
investigator of military abuse at the edge of empire. His main
antagonists had previously been Philadelphia’s party bosses,
whose sordid machinations were extensively reported in Welsh’s
earnest upstart weekly, City and State. Yet he had also been a
founder of the “Indian rights” movement, which attempted to
curtail white violence and fraud while pursuing Native American
“civilization” through Christianity, U.S. citizenship, and
individual land tenure. An expansive concern with bloodshed and
corruption at the nation’s periphery is perhaps what drew
Welsh’s imagination from the Dakotas to Southeast Asia. He had
initially been skeptical of reports of misconduct by U.S.
troops. But by late 1901, faced with what he considered
“overwhelming” proof, Welsh emerged as a single-minded
campaigner for the exposure and punishment of atrocities,
running an idiosyncratic investigation out of his Philadelphia
offices. As one who “professes to believe in the gospel of
Christ,” he declared, he felt obliged to condemn “the cruelties
and barbarities which have been perpetrated under our flag in
the Philippines.” Only the vigorous pursuit of justice could
restore “the credit of the American nation in the eyes of the
civilized world.” By early 1902, three assistants to Welsh were
chasing down returning soldiers for their testimony, and
Philippine “cruelties” began to crowd Philadelphia’s party
bosses from the pages of City and State.
PHOTOGRAPH: ATTRIBUTED TO CORPORAL GEORGE J. VENNAGE
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