The American Future (16 page)

Just in case McKinley needed it to overcome his doubts (and earlier convictions), he called on a higher authority to help him out. “I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance,” a practice that has become so routine in the White House in the past century that carpets must suffer undue wear and tear. God was in. And He spake to the president thus, saying 1) you're not going to give the Philippines back to the Spanish, 2) to walk away from responsibilities now would be cowardly and dishonorable, and 3) those Filipinos aren't ready for self-government and never will be without a prolonged dose of decent strong American administration. So “there was nothing for us to do but to take them…and to educate the Filipinos, to uplift and civilise and Christianise them.” Apparently McKinley hadn't noticed that the Filipinos were actually already Catholic, or perhaps that didn't count. At any rate all was well for “I went to bed and slept soundly.”

The motion to annex went through the Senate, although not before opponents expressed their pain and rage at what the government was making of America: a ruthless empire indistinguishable from the British or French. George Frisbie Hoar, the other senator from Massachusetts, was eloquent in a way that sounds through the generations: “You have no right at the cannon's mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence, your Constitution and your notions of what is good.” But his voice and that of a newly formed Anti-Imperialist League were drowned out in the jingo. Furious at their betrayal by the Americans, the Filipino Republicans, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, decided on resistance. Inevitably, hostile confrontations turned into a shooting war. Once blood had been shed and a call had been made for 70,000 volunteers, America was swept by a wave of patriotic fury. There were more movies featuring Americans against Filipinos, although much of the footage was shot in a back lot in New Jersey with the National Guard dressing up in white pajamas to pretend they were the enemy. Shoot, duck, RUN! In the presidential election campaign of 1900 Teddy Roosevelt traveled over 12,000 miles by train, accusing William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats of being the heirs to the “Copperheads” who wanted to make peace with the Confederacy; pounding tables on behalf of the gallant volunteers who were already sacrificing themselves in battles with the ungrateful Filipinos.

McKinley liked to think that God was watching over his work, but even God had the odd day off, and on one of those days in September 1901 the president was assassinated by an anarchist. TR rushed to Buffalo, where he was sworn in. Though the war in the Philippines had become something no one in Washington had anticipated—a wretched slog with American troops taking heavy casualties from determined insurgents and unable to maneuver in any kind of conventional military manner—President Roosevelt was not about to reverse course. He sent General Arthur MacArthur (West Point) to the Philippines, and the conflict settled down into a horrifying slaughter: Filipinos picking off infantrymen; Americans wreaking revenge by burning villages and crops, and treating villagers, whom they usually called “niggers” or “gu-gus” (after their coconut oil shampoo), as subhuman. Since it was said to be difficult to distinguish between native guerrillas and noncombatants, the massacre of villagers in any area thought suspicious became commonplace and even expected. Torture of prisoners to extract information, especially the “water cure,” became routine. Water was poured through a funnel in quantities to distend the stomach and give the prisoner a sense of drowning. If the torturers didn't get to hear what they wanted, soldiers would jump or stamp on their prisoners' stomachs to induce vomiting, and the process would start all over again. Naturally, photographs were taken of the torture. In one of them a soldier stands watching from a few feet away while his comrades administer the cure. With one hand he leans on a pile of rifles; the other is on his hip at his belt. His left leg is crossed jauntily over his right, and on his face is the unmistakable beginning of a smile. Albert Gardner of the 1st Cavalry actually specialized in songs that made the business into a jolly rigmarole: “Get the old syringe boys and fill it to the brim / We've caught another nigger and we'll operate on him.”

America was not morally dead to the atrocities. By early 1902 anti-imperialist writers had gathered enough information on torture and indiscriminate massacre to publish a report titled
Atrocities Perpetrated Against the Civilian Population.
Senate hearings were called during which the junior and senior senators from Massachusetts divided exactly down the middle on the issue: Henry Cabot Lodge making sure that much of the testimony appeared behind closed doors to the “Insular Affairs Committee,” while his nemesis George Hoar conducted the
hearings as best he could in public. In a post–Abu Ghraib world the defenses are familiar: we're told not much of this happened, and when it did the army conducted its own thorough investigations and discovered that most of the accusations were unfounded or exaggerated. Yes, there were bound to be a few rotten apples, but these were either the occasional American soldier driven mad by tropical fevers, or else a handful of native allies, the Macabebe. And in any case, it could not be expected in such a place that war could be played by the rules that obtained among the civilized. These were savages who would cut your throat as soon as look at you. Either America wished to win this war, or it did not. If it did it must be expected to take savagery to the enemy. Anything else was a dereliction of duty.

This was, pretty much, the view of the most important living American, President Roosevelt. But it was not the view of the second most important—or at any rate famous—American living, namely Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. As much as TR, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, Edison, and Henry Adams were one kind of American voice, loud with their Hamiltonian sense of global destiny, Twain and Henry Brooks Adams and W. E. B. DuBois had the other kind of patriotic voice, which saw in military intoxication a perversion of everything the American democratic experiment was supposed to stand for.

Twain was no pacifist. He had been in Vienna when the Spanish-American War began, on yet another of the trips meant to right his perpetually shaky fortunes. Predictably he had been lionized but equally predictably found himself having to defend American intervention in Cuba. As best he could he insisted that this would be no war of imperial annexation, but a disinterested assistance to the Cuban revolutionaries, who would reap the benefits of victory. There would be a free Cuban republic with its own constitution; everything would be hunky-dory between benefactor and protégé, and they would all live happily ever after.

By the time Twain returned to New York on the SS
Minnehaha
on 16 October 1900, American foreign policy had become, in his mind, tragically indefensible. He was the country's greatest celebrity; his white whiskers and mischievous eyes known through the many photographs, right across the nation. And almost the first thing out of his mouth after he had walked down the gangplank was an attack on the Philippine
annexation and war. “I have read the Treaty of Paris [between Spain and the United States] carefully,” said Twain to the reporter from the
New York Herald
, “and I have seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer and not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and our duty, to make those people free and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” Ten days earlier he had already sounded off along the same lines for the
World
in London. “It [the Philippines regime] was not to be a government according to our ideals but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extraction immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it and all it means to us as a nation.”

Instantly Twain became the voice (and vice president) of the Anti-Imperialist League. In 1901 he published a withering attack on the sanctimonious pretensions of missions to the uncivilized: “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The tone was acid, caricaturing the civilizing mission as a rum business: “Extending our blessings to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well on the whole and there is money in it yet.” American policy had been enthralled by the British, by Cecil Rhodes and the appalling Joseph Chamberlain, and the Boer War. That's what drove the Philippine War: naval envy. “It was a pity, it was a great pity, that error, the one grievous error, that irrevocable error. For it was the very place and time to play the American game again. And at no cost. Rich winnings to be gathered in again, too rich and permanent, indestructible; a fortune transmissible forever to the children of the flag. Not land, not money, not dominion—no something worth many times more than that dross: our share, the spectacle of a nation of long-harassed and persecuted slaves set free through our influence; our posterity's share, the golden memory of that fair deed.” And Mark Twain—the embodiment of everything American, the scourge of humbug—ended by directly attacking two of his countrymen's most cherished objects, the uniform and the flag: “our flag—another pride of ours, our chiefest.
We have worshipped it so; and when we have seen it in far lands—glimpsing it unexpectedly in that strange sky, waving its welcome and benediction to us—we have caught our breath, and uncovered our heads and couldn't speak for a moment for the thought of what it was to us and the great ideals it stood for. Indeed we
must
do something about these things…We can have a special one…just our usual flag with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”

Twain paid dearly for his temerity. He never ceased being seen as the greatest of all American writers although he was now also regarded as a bitter and unpatriotic eccentric. Society invitations were fewer and far between, not that Twain cared all that much for them (though he did care some). But honors still came his way, including an honorary degree at Yale in 1901. Theodore Roosevelt happened to be there on the same day. The assassination of McKinley meant that the president was kept away from crowds but he must nonetheless have heard the roar of applause that went up for Twain as he received his degree. Later in private he said that “when I hear what Mark Twain and others [meaning the Anti-Imperialist League] have said in criticism of the missionaries I feel like skinning them alive.” It had become personal. Twain wrote vicious attacks parodying Roosevelt and his worldwide popularity. The president was “the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century always hunting for a chance to show off…in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum and Bailey circus with him for a clown and the whole world for an audience.” And he let it be known that he thought the president “clearly insane” and “insanest on the subject of war.” But as the public hostility mounted there were moments when he chose to pull his punches. When a particularly horrifying case of the water cure involving a priest, Father Augustine, came to light and the league asked its vice president to write something appropriately damning, he retreated. He was sixty-seven; he was tired; there was only so much he could do. Understandable. Sad.

TR affected to brush all this off. The last thing he wanted to be thought of was bookish. But he was a writer and a prolific one at that, and in other circumstances Mark Twain was
his
kind of writer: the voice of the people. (In fact it was Roosevelt who had the sententious voice; Twain the genuine rasp of American comedy.) But nothing
stopped Teddy. On Memorial Day 1902, he went to pay his respects to the gallant dead at Arlington National Cemetery. He passed (as we all do) through the McClellan Memorial Gate that Montgomery Meigs had erected, presumably in a fit of forgetfulness of all the aggravation “little George” had caused him. And there, arrayed before him, some stooped, many gray-bearded, their medals hanging from lank frames, were the veterans of horror: from Bull Run, from Antietam, from Gettysburg, from Lookout Mountain, from the Wilderness. “Oh my comrades,” the president shouted, much overcome, “the men who have for the past three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine islands are your younger brothers, your sons.”

It was no fault of those men, off in Mindanao, but no, they weren't. The old boys had fought an American war for freedom. The young boys were fighting to extinguish it.

If only Teddy Roosevelt had been able to sit in on Monty Meigs's course on “Why presidents go to war when they don't have to.”

Sonofabitch, if it was this cold then you'd think the mud would have frozen. But it got loose enough to clog up the caterpillar treads; slowed the whole damned thing down; made the battalion sitting ducks for antitank guns, 88s coming in every which way. No wonder the 4th had had it after months of mud, taking it on the nose. Now it was the turn of the 12th, his outfit, most of them still green, snotnoses, never under fire before; him too if he thought about it, nothing Fort Benning prepared you for. You got used to it pretty damned quick though. What was he doing commanding a tank battalion anyway? Pop was navy; Grandpa too; Annapolis folks, like the Rodgers. A good place Annapolis, the piebald plane trees right down to the water; a good place for the baby to come while he was off in Lorraine trying to finish off the Reich. Maybe there was snow on the ground in Maryland. Was any of this America's business, his business? Liberating the French? Hell, they had built the damned Maginot Line to stop the Germans, much good that had done them in 1940, and now here's where the
Panzers had dug themselves in, sixteen-year-olds and old guys, they'd said, but it sure didn't sound like kids and pensioners. The line wasn't what it had been in 1940, they'd said. No electricity after we cut it. Not much of anything for them to survive on. But for an army with no prospects they were putting on a hell of a show. So why was he here? Ah yes, “Duty, Honor, Country,” all that West Point horseshit. Or was it? It was a West Point war now with Bradley and Eisenhower making the decisions. That had to be good. He'd been a kid, wet behind the ears, seventeen, for Christ's sake, when he went up the hill, put on his plebe's gray. The family, they'd wanted him in the navy, where Meigses went lately, but he wanted something else. Maybe it had something to do with all that hurting, the broken neck; the iron brace that had pinned him; made him grit his teeth and be damned if he wouldn't make his own way. Obstinate, the Meigses. Maybe they had all been a tad ornery, the quartermaster and his wire ropes. There they were up on Arlington Hill, the old boy and his son with his boots pointing to the stars. He wasn't ready to join them, not yet awhile, not with the baby coming. But he had a record of getting into trouble; those motorbike accidents at Fort Benning that had nearly done him in. Dumb. It was late, how late? Needed to take a look at the maps again; figure out a way through. Better get some sleep, though; this the second night in a row; not good to be drowsy; needed to be sharp to lead the attack tomorrow, everyone in the 23rd depending on him, had better find a way to punch through to Rohrbach, get rid of the artillery, give the guys on the ground a fighting chance. Clean it out, get into Deutschland, finish them off, good guys win, bad guys, very bad guys, lose. Patton, Ike, all of them happy. Europe free of the lousy Nazis. Go home. Go home to baby Meigs. Suppose it was a boy? They'd have to call him Montgomery. Baby Monty. Why not? That's just how it was.

 

On the morning of 11 December, Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery Meigs led the first wave of attacks on German positions at Rohrbach. The night before the battle he had argued against a frontal attack on enemy guns hidden behind twenty feet of concrete. He lost the argument. He was killed instantly while standing in the turret as the tanks advanced. The following day the badly mauled 23rd Battalion, supported by other units of the 12th Cavalry, took the objective. For
his “utter disregard for his own life in leading his battalion,” Meigs was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. His widow worried about whether his body should be brought back to the United States but opted in the end to have him rest in the American Cemetery of Lorraine at Saint-Avold. There is, however, a grave marked with his name in Arlington.

Exactly a month after his father's death, on 11 January 1945, his son was born. His mother named him Montgomery C. Meigs.