Non-fiction Corner: The Massacre America Forgot

Jennifer Szalai

They are sites of atrocity so shameful that they have become a searing shorthand: Wounded Knee, where American troops murdered as many as 300 Lakota men, women and children in 1890; My Lai, where American troops murdered as many as 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers in 1968.

But few Americans today have heard of Bud Dajo, a volcanic mountain in the southern Philippines. As Kim A. Wagner recounts in his impassioned new book, “Massacre in the Clouds,” in early March 1906, American soldiers attacked an enclave of Muslim Moros on Bud Dajo and killed, by some estimates, nearly 1,000 people — a death toll that exceeded Wounded Knee and My Lai combined.

What makes the historical amnesia especially curious is that “Bud Dajo is probably the best-documented massacre of its time,” Wagner writes, “at least from the perpetrators’ perspective.” It was initially treated as a scandal, dominating newspaper headlines in the United States for the first few weeks. Yet the scrutiny was short-lived: “Bud Dajo simply disappeared from the public eye.”

Wagner, a historian who has written several books about British imperialism in India, argues that such forgetting was the result of a sustained campaign: an attempt at first to legitimize the atrocity as a civilizing mission and then, when such rationalizations didn’t work, to cover it up. He anchors his investigation to one particular photograph, a gruesome scene of American soldiers gathered around a ditch filled with twisted corpses. The Anti-Imperialist League, an organization formed to protest the American annexation of the Philippines, considered the photograph so damning that in January 1907 the organization mailed hundreds of copies to members of Congress — to no effect.

This may have been a matter of indifference — or, more disturbingly, a belief that the grisly image was a source of American pride. Wagner connects it to photographs of lynchings, featuring Black victims and grinning white spectators, that were sold as souvenir postcards. He quotes American soldiers who used the N-word to refer to the Moros murdered on Bud Dajo. The expedition’s commander compared the Moros to “so many wild animals.” Another soldier derided anyone who labored “under the delusion that the Filipinos and Moros are actually human beings.”

As Wagner explains, such dehumanization was common to the imperial project. Even after the Philippine-American War officially ended in 1902, the Islamic parts of the country in the south eluded full U.S. control. At first, the Americans settled for indirect rule, promising the sultans and Moro chiefs — known as datus — autonomy in religion and customs. But the Americans had a hard time sustaining a hands-off approach. After an escalating series of confrontations, a group of Moros fled to Bud Dajo.

Among the sticking points was a prohibition, imposed by the Americans, on the Moro practice of slavery, which Wagner says was more like “indenture or debt servitude” — but it was a form of slavery nonetheless. Another generator of resentment was the cedula, or head tax, that the datus were supposed to collect from their people and send on to the U.S. government. The Moros who decamped to the mountain were therefore defying not only the colonial rule of the Americans but also the authority of their traditional chiefs. As a Moro chief put it, “These people would not follow the governor, they would not follow the sultan, they would not follow anybody.”

Wagner recreates the massacre and its aftermath in unsparing detail, and he is helped along by startlingly frank accounts from the Americans who did the killing. Among the dead were women and children, including wounded babies described by one American captain as “groping amid the mass of the dead for the mother’s breast.” Such revelations led Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, the governor of Moro Province, to insist that “the unavoidable killing of women and children” occurred because the Moro women “wore trousers” and the Moro men used children as human shields. Wood was so worried about the possibility of an official investigation that, according to the book’s painstaking timeline, he conspired to “create a paper trail” that would “provide a formal pretext for the assault.”

This is a powerful book, a vivid account of atrocity written with striking verve and backed up by a plethora of evidence. Through assiduous sleuthing Wagner pieces together the identity of the photographer who took the infamous picture, a fact that was previously obscured. But he has a bigger indictment to make. He starts by delineating the limits of his study, describing his project as “unapologetically focused on this one image and this one atrocity,” making “no claim to being exhaustive in my account of either U.S. imperialism or the history of the southern Philippines.” Then he goes on to do something more sweeping, presenting himself as valiantly bucking the trend of historians who have either unduly neglected what happened at Bud Dajo or depicted it as a “brutal exception to an allegedly enlightened rule.”

My eyes would probably have glided over such lines if it weren’t for the fact that at least some of the examples Wagner gives of historical whitewashing aren’t nearly as gentle on American imperialism as he makes them out to be. He singles out books by Daniel Immerwahr and Ronald K. Edgerton for introducing Wood and the Bud Dajo massacre “merely as foils” to the “allegedly heroic and humane approach to colonial governance” shown by John J. Pershing, who later served as governor of Moro Province.

It’s a strange characterization. Neither Edgerton nor Immerwahr is guilty of anything so reductive. They describe how Pershing started out pursuing the more hands-off approach that prevailed before Wood, but they are unstinting in chronicling how Pershing’s rule could also be autocratic and violent. In 1913, Pershing’s troops murdered hundreds of Moros on Bud Bagsak. Both Edgerton and Immerwahr bluntly call it a slaughter.

Wagner’s denunciation of such scholarship is as gratuitous as it is puzzling. Vilifying other accounts as morally obtuse is beneath the story he tells, which is formidable enough to stand on its own. To read this book is to be moved. Interspersed throughout his meticulously recreated scenes are verses of Moro songs that have been passed down through generations: “Bud Dajo will not surrender/The Moros would rather face death./That is the end.”