While in exile in Hong Kong, he had met with U.S. The rebels were led by a young general named Emilio Aguinaldo. As a Spanish colony, the Philippines was a logical military target for the United States, and Filipino revolutionaries were drawing closer to ending more than 300 years of colonial rule. But it was also fueled by rising American nationalism, as the United States began flexing its muscles as a world power. The war was the bloody sequel to a conflict with Spain in 1898, which had purportedly been waged in support of Cuban revolutionaries fighting for independence. troops sent to fight in the Philippines, first against the Spanish and then against the Filipinos. On Union Square, a monument commemorates the departure of U.S. He pointed to the former military camp's Lombard Gate, depicted in a famous photo showing the 51st Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment marching out before departing for the Philippines.įarther south, by the Pacific Coast, is Fort Funston, named after the general who captured the leader of the Filipino resistance.
In San Francisco, there are many reminders of the war.Īt the Presidio, military historian Steve Haller pointed to the Ordonez Gun, a damaged canon captured from the Filipino rebel army that sits on a grassy plain overlooking San Francisco Bay.
"It makes you angry at a certain level, this erasure of historical memory." "That whole period is completely passed over," said Dawn Mabalon, a Filipino American doctoral student at Stanford University who has studied the war. For years, many historians and academics considered it not a war, but a minor, insignificant rebellion. Few Americans are even aware it took place. Filipinos are now one of the largest Asian communities in the nation.īut a century later, the Philippine-American War remains a small blip on the radar screen of U.S. The war also paved the way for migration from the Pacific archipelago.
And it prompted one of America's greatest writers to speak out against those who advocated the expansion of U.S. The conflict popularized the concept of the "white man's burden," an exhortation to Western domination. military involvement overseas, a precursor of the outcry over the Vietnam War more than half a century later. It started a bitter national debate over U.S.