But quagmires do not end swiftly. Six months after the capture the occupation forces suffered their gravest defeat when Filipino guerillas, armed with little more than bolos, massacred 45 officers and enlisted men in Samar. Some pro-Imperialist papers felt they had been “hoodwinked,” others compared it to the Custer massacre at the Little Big Horn, and General Adna Chaffee conceded it was “utterly foolish to pretend that the war was over or even that the end is in sight.” The San Francisco Call  said Americans should know from their history that “a conquered people” do not remain conquered for long. The Call carried these fearful headlines:

o Warlike Spirit Revives Throughout the Philippines
o American Troops Facing Hard Fighting
o Tribes Regarded as Pacified Taking Up Arms

The African American press and many Black leaders, as George P. Marks III shows in The Black Press Views American Imperialism, 1898-1900, strongly denounced U.S. motives, and many paper embraced Aguinaldo's cause. “We glory in his spunk,” wrote the Parsons Weekly Blade. Salt Lake City's Broad Ax insisted,  “no negro possessing any race pride can enter heartily into the prosecution of the war against the Filipinos, and all enlightened negroes must necessarily arrive at the conclusion that the war is being waged solely for greed and gold and not in the interest of suffering humanity.” The editor wondered if Filipino resistance did not rest on a sound knowledge of history: “Maybe the Filipinos have caught wind of the way Indians and Negroes have been Christianized and civilized.” “I don't think there is a single colored man, out of office or out of the insane asylum, who favors the so-called expansion policy,” said Howard University Professor Kelly Miller.

Some African Americans urged resistance to the war effort. Anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells insisted that her people oppose U.S overseas expansion until it protects its Black citizens. Stanley Ruffin of Boston announced: “We shall neither fight for such a country or with such an army.” Bishop Henry Turner rejected the Army's recruitment of African Americans and expressed contempt for Black soldiers “fighting to subjugate a people of their own color,” “ I can scarcely keep from saying that I hope the Filipinos will wipe such soldiers from the face of the earth.”

During Philippine occupation as well as in the Viet Nam war and today's Iraq thousands of Americans formed anti-imperialist and peace societies, held protest meetings and circulated petitions that denounced atrocities and called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The most visible anti-imperialist voice was Mark Twain who caustically suggested a new Philippine flag: “We can have our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”

However, the U.S. experience in the Middle East today is sharply different from the Philippines. First, Saddam Hussein was no Emilio Aguinaldo, a beloved liberator of his people who admired the Declaration of Independence and sought a republican form of government.

Second, George W. Bush is no Teddy Roosevelt, a gifted orator, an avid reader, a man committed to the Constitution, intellectual and author of many respected books, and the first American to win the Noble Peace Prize. For all his pugnacious nationalism and warmongering, TR did not try to impose his vision on the world. In two races for the White House he neither undermined the Constitution nor subverted the election process. In office he appointed not inexperienced cronies but seasons, competent public servants. His “New Nationalism” dared to support women's suffrage, child labor laws, and old age pensions. And he lived the life he advocated.

Race played a role in both occupations, but a hundred years had changed its rhetoric and rules. In a rigidly segregated Army in 1906 the Buffalo Soldiers never knew when they would have to defend themselves against white civilians, the bigotry of their officers or their commander in chief in the White House. The inflammatory racism casually espoused by statesmen a hundred years ago has disappeared. An integrated Army requires symbols such as General Colin Powell to aid recruitment and prevent disorder within the ranks. President Bush initially announced a “crusade” in the Middle East, but he did not return to this theme. In Iraq only occasionally did the media reveal that U.S. soldiers fulminated about “rag-heads.” However, the abuses at Abu Gharib, the destruction of 70% of the holy city of Fallujah, desecrating the Koran to humiliate prisoners, and the routine invasions of Iraqi homes indicate that racial animosity is alive and operational in the U.S. military.

The Philippine war had a unique feature. Twenty U.S. soldiers, including twelve African Americans, defected to the insurgents. Most reviled by the U.S media was Corporal David Fagen of the Black 24th Infantry Regiment who was made a Captain. Appalled by Army discrimination and atrocities against Filipinos he witnessed in 1899, in six months he fled to the foe. Called “General Fagen” by his men, for two years he deftly mauled U.S. forces eight times. The United States offered a $600 reward for Fagen dead or alive, but he fought until the spring of 1901 when he and his Filipino wife disappeared into the interior and reportedly lived out peaceful lives.

In 1898 Teddy Roosevelt returned to New York and in November was elected governor. Two days later in Wilmington, North Carolina, a racist election campaign ended with a white mob driving African American office-holders and residents from the city. This only coup d'etat in U.S. history, known as the “Wilmington Riot,” drew no federal intervention. But it did introduce a quarter century of coordinated daylight mob assaults on African American communities south and north that continued into the 1920s.

In 1900 Roosevelt became Vice President, and after a deranged anarchist assassinated McKinley in 1901, he became the youngest man to enter the White House. TR labeled anarchists “and passive sympathizers with anarchists" as "the enemy of all mankind” and asked Congress to bar them from the country. He also sought to keep out foreigners who failed literacy or "economic fitness" tests, or did not "appreciate American institutions." Congress ignored his suggestions and he moved on.

Although TR promised the average citizen a "square deal," his leading advisors were six men from the J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller financial empires. He also pursued a "big stick" foreign policy. When "contemptible little creatures in Bogotá" rejected his offer to build a canal through Columbia's Panama region, he prepared a message to Congress urging seizure of Panama "without any further parlay with Columbia." TR struck this smoking gun from his final draft, but in 1903 when Panamanians revolted in a plot shaped at the Morgan offices on Wall Street, he dispatched a fleet that deterred Columbia from intervening. The President granted Panama recognition in ninety minutes, and was rewarded with a generous ten-mile wide area for his canal. The President, the New York Times said, swayed by the "heady wine of territorial adventure," chose "the path of scandal, disgrace and dishonor." TR denied he "had any part in preparing, inciting or encouraging the revolution," but in 1911 he admitted, "I took the Canal Zone and let the Congress debate."

From the White House, TR continued to defend the occupation, referred to Filipinos as “Chinese half-breeds,” and called the conflict "the most glorious war in our nation's history." Meanwhile in the archipelago the U.S. had entered its first quagmire in Asia. Troops lived in fear of deadly assaults, and morale began to sink. In 1901 a U.S. correspondent reported that sporadic guerilla attacks took the lives of one or two U.S. soldiers, and these deaths created a “spirit of bitterness [in] the rank and file of the army.” The writer concluded: “that the Filipino hates us . . . and permanent guerilla warfare will continue for years.”

The Democrats made imperialism their issue in the election of 1900, and again when they opposed TR in 1904. They lost both times, and in 1904 the popular war hero overwhelmed their effort by more than two million votes, and carried an additional half a dozen states.

In 1911 military actions came to an end in the Philippines. The United States in more than a dozen years of warfare had fought 2,800 engagements and lost 4,234 soldiers. More than two hundred thousand Filipinos died and a U.S. Congress that promised the islands self-determination spent $170 million fighting their independence movement.
Congress finally granted the Philippines independence after World War II and Aguinaldo was still a national hero.

In 2003 George W. Bush called the Philippine occupation a model for Iraq. On October 18, 2003 he traveled to Manila seeking allies for his war on terrorism and told a joint session of the Philippine parliament: "Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule."

Though imperial ambitions arrived late in the United States, they found fertile soil in its long history of racial ferocity. The trajectory that brought the U.S. to Iraq started in 1492. On his first day in the West Indies, Columbus's Diary stated, “I took some of the natives by force” and during his first two weeks in the New World his Diary mentioned gold 75 times. Columbus began the trans-Atlantic slave trade by shipping ten Arawak men and women to Spain. His quest for riches introduced genocide to the Americas.

In 1898 a country that forced Indians onto reservations and lynched African Americans - and for centuries had justified slavery and genocide -- reached overseas. Hearst's New York Journal welcomed imperialism as glory and destiny: “The weak must go to the wall and stay there . . . . We'll rule in Asia as we rule at home. We shall establish in Asia a branch agent of the true American movement towards liberty.”

The first people to pledge their lives and sacred honor for self-determination and to shed their blood to overthrow a foreign tyrant in 1898 wrote the script for modern colonial oppression. A lethal mix of U.S. commercial greed, unbridled militarism, haughty Anglo-Saxon entitlement and Christian piety devastated Filipino villages. It introduced the world's most violent century and became a template for 20th century foreign interventions in Asia, Africa and elsewhere.

The Philippines had sequels: the bloodbath of World War I, fascist aggressions culminating in World War II, undeclared wars, interventions, and an Iraq invasion that introduced the 21st century.

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