How can a nation perpetrate atrocities yet retain the conceit that it is acting as a force for good in the world? This is the “simple question” that Kim Wagner, professor of global and imperial history at Queen Mary University of London, poses in his impressive book Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History. He presents a forensic study of the massacre at Bud Dajo on Jolo, an island in the southwest Philippines, in March 1906, when units of the US Army killed more than 1,200 Moro men, women and children—more than the number of dead at My Lai (1968) and Wounded Knee (1890) combined—with a loss to themselves of 21 killed and 73 wounded. Few Moros were left alive; the soldiers machine-gunned surrendering women and children and finished off many of the wounded.
Though it was widely known as the First Battle of Bud Dajo, Mark Twain regarded “slaughter” as the more appropriate term for the actions of the US Army—and considered it the work of “Christian butchers”. In his annual report from June 1906, Major Hugh L Scott of the 14th Cavalry, who was district governor of Jolo but on leave in the US at the time, retrospectively stated that the Moros who had fled to the crater of the extinct volcano Bud Dajo “declared they had no intention of fighting, ran up there only in fright, and had some crops planted and desired to cultivate them”. In other words, the people on Bud Dajo posed no military threat to US rule in the southern Philippines. Entrenching themselves on the hill was, in Wagner’s words, “an act of desperation to defend their faith and community” against the American authorities encroaching on their traditions, customs and way of life. As Wagner points out: “One of the defining features of the imperialist project during the turn of the century was the inability of colonizers themselves to recognize their primary role in creating the conditions for mass violence in the first instance.” He continues: “Given the tenuous nature of their rule in the Moro Province, the Americans had to back up their authority with brute force, and fear of failure created an escalatory dynamic that made their response to any resistance inherently excessive.”
At the same time, Wagner also situates Bud Dajo in a distinctly American tradition of racialised violence. Crucial for both the act of killing and for its subsequent justification and/or trivialisation was the dehumanisation of the victims. American forces persistently depicted the Moros of Jolo as dangerous outlaws and irredeemable religious fanatics. American officers advocated the use of dum-dum bullets—whose tips were filed down, thus causing them to expand upon impact, resulting in a much larger and more destructive exit wound—as “about the only thing that assured the stopping in his tracks of a Moro running amuck”. A private in the Army Signal Corps, who was with the troops who went over the southern crest of Bud Dajo and killed the last surviving Moros, used dum-dums and confirmed in a letter home that “every nigger that was hit above the waist dropped”.
American officers advocated the use of dum-dum bullets—whose tips were filed down, resulting in a much larger exit wound
Even Life magazine dehumanised the victims in its attempt to portray the extermination of the Moros as a necessity: “It was done, faithfully, by as good soldiers and officers as we ever had, and it was hard, dangerous, inglorious work – a kind of rat-killing.” Major General Leonard Wood, governor of Moro Province and commander of the Philippine Division, who, as such, was the man who made the final decisions concerning the Bud Dajo expedition, did his best to control the information filtering out of the southern Philippines following the massacre and to portray the event as a straightforward, conventional military operation. When news of the slaughter of women and children eventually reached the US, as it inevitably did, Wood sought to justify these actions by emphasising, as he saw it, the victims’ savagery. Writing to the secretary of war, William Howard Taft, he claimed: “Moro women wore trousers and were dressed, armed much like the men, and charged with them. The children were in many cases used by the men as shields while charging troops.” According to Wood’s logic, Moro women had forfeited their right to be treated as women by failing to conform to the Americans’ gendered expectations of female behaviour.
Despite repeated calls for an official explanation and the release of all correspondence related to the assault on Bud Dajo, the US government gave up only a handful of telegrams that were already in the public domain. It never published any evidence that would allow for a more critical assessment of what had occurred in Jolo, thus prompting some newspapers to suggest that there had been a deliberate coverup. Until detailed information emerged in the summer of 1906 via un-official channels, as correspondents and officers on leave from the Philippines began arriving back in the US, the press attempted to make sense of what had happened. Coming down firmly in support of Major General Wood, a Harper’s Weekly editorial offered the “victors at Dajo Hill” its “respectful and sympathetic thanks for having completed what seems to have been a warrantable job of extermination”.
The events at Bud Dajo in March 1906 were also intensely debated in the Senate and the House of Representatives later the same month. Criticism by the Democrats prompted the New York Sun to ask rhetorically, “Why Do These Democrats Hate the Army?” Though Mark Twain reserved his withering account of the massacre for a future autobiography, which was not published until well after his death in 1910, he recognised not only that the massacre “was no brilliant feat of arms”, but also that “our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag”, instead they had “dishonored it”.
‘I suppose civilization has to be shot into them,’ wrote one infantry captain
Far more Americans, however, “saw nothing but a military victory to celebrate or, at best, a tragic but necessary part of the civilizing mission”, as Wagner notes. The full perversity of the so-called civilising mission is perhaps best summed up by the following quote from a letter by Captain Oscar J Charles of the US 17th Infantry, sent from Jolo in 1905, a year before the massacre: “It seems a shame to have to kill any more Moros, but I suppose civilization has to be shot into them.” An editorial in the Washington Post pointed out the obvious on 15th March, a week after the massacre: “There is no authority in the Constitution to shoot civilization into savages on the other hemisphere… If we cannot govern the Moros without murdering women, better that we withdraw and let them govern themselves.” However, the Declaration of Independence, written only 11 years before the 1787 Constitution, does contain an infamous passage referring to “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”. It is impossible to overlook the hypocrisy contained in this passage: at Bud Dajo, the US Army was guilty of precisely the “undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”.
Regardless of this, the perpetrators and their advocates back home continued to think of themselves as the “good guys”. As Wagner makes clear, “What ultimately enabled the whitewashing of the massacre was the ideological narrative that framed the violence.” According to one soldier who had participated in the massacre and whose letter home was reproduced in the Cincinnati Enquirer on 26th April 1906, the “slaughter of so many” was, apparently—in another example of mental gymnastics—“the only way […] to show them that we want to be good and kind”. In private correspondence with a friend, Major General Wood drew a direct line from the pilgrims (specifically the way in which the first settlers in North America had dealt with the Pequot people in the 1630s, namely by extinguishing them as a tribe) to Bud Dajo, thus invoking, in the words of Wagner, “the kind of redemptive violence that was a defining feature of America’s founding myth”.
With his articulate, authoritative and deeply humane reconstruction of the events of March 1906 and his sensitive representation of Moro voices, Wagner succeeds in rescuing the massacre and its victims from obscurity and restoring them to their rightful place in the grim history of American imperial violence. In doing so, he ensures that it will not be the narrative of the perpetrators that ultimately defines how we remember what happened at Bud Dajo.
