Concentration Camps during the Philippine-American War 1901
The Batangas and Laguna provinces in Luzon were the site of fierce insurgent activity against the American occupying forces in the Philippines during the war which followed America’s seizure of the Philippines from Spain. To counter the insurgency the American commanding officer, Brigadier General James Franklin Bell order the civilian community to be sealed off to prevent contact with the insurgents. To accomplish this strategy he ordered the establishment of concentration camps, which were described in reports to the US Senate as zones of protection.
Civilians were forced to enter the camps as winter came on in 1901. By the end of the year, almost the entire population of the two provinces were in the camps. When leaving their homes under escort they were informed that anything left behind was subject to confiscation or destruction by the US Army, to deny seizure by the insurgents. This included homes, farms, livestock, personal property, and anything else. Nearly 300,000 Filipinos were herded into the camps, which were overcrowded, lacking in sanitation facilities, and soon ridden with disease.
The US Army’s Public Relations Office released press reports which described the camps as being well stocked with food and supplies, and welcomed by the Filipino civilians as protection from the insurgents. The Army also claimed that the camps were introducing standards of hygiene and diet which were previously unknown to the Filipinos. Letters home from servicemen in the Philippines soon revealed a much different situation than that reported by the Army when some of these letters began to be printed in several newspapers. The appearance of the letters led to military reprisals upon their authors, including incarceration in the stockade unless a retraction was issued.
Following Christmas Bell ordered that anything outside of the camps – the property of the people within – was to be destroyed and anyone found outside of the camps was to be considered an insurgent. Homes and farms were burned, wells contaminated with either salt or poison, and livestock either confiscated for the use of the Army or shot. Meanwhile, within the camps the overcrowded conditions, poor hygiene, and inadequate nutrition led to the spread of infectious diseases as well as beriberi and scurvy. By April of 1902 more than 8,000 Filipino civilians had died in the camps.
Mark Twain was one of the many influential Americans who opposed both the American presence in the Philippines and the conduct of the war, which he described as one of conquest by the Americans, rather than an insurgency. “…I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines,” he wrote in the New York Herald. “We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.” Twain was not alone in his opposition, but the Philippines became an American territory when the war officially ended in July 1902 with the islands becoming an unincorporated territory of the United States. Further rebellions flared in the islands for the next eleven years.