Truth Seeker

favored expansion, Ingersoll replied, “Yes, I have always wanted more — I love to see the Republic grow.” He hoped that the Caribbean would in time belong to the United States, so long as the people there wanted it as well. As the United States and Spain grew closer to war, he declared that “all my sympathies are with the Cubans.”

While Ingersoll was typically the champion of the underdog, he had a further motivation for supporting the Cuban struggle against the Spanish, namely that Spain was a Catholic country which “has always been exceedingly religious and exceedingly cruel.” This was a sentiment shared by others. The Truth Seeker editor Eugene Macdonald said that because of the backwardness and religiousness of Spain, the war was “a battle of the nineteenth century against the sixteenth.”

The initial fight to kick Spain out of the Philippines was seen in much the same light as that in Cuba: a fight on behalf of an oppressed people against a cruel, Catholic nation. A cartoon by Watson Heston, the resident cartoonist of the Truth Seeker, entitled “What Will Uncle Sam Do About It?,” encouraged American intervention in defense of the Philippines. The cartoon showed a primitive-looking Filipino, weighed down by a white Catholic friar strapped to his back, reaching out to Uncle Sam for help (figure 1).

Following the purchase of the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris of December 1898, there were a few months of peace before war broke out between the Filipinos and the

Americans. During this time, freethinkers imagined that the new territory might be transformed in a secular image. In this way, they mirrored Protestant missionaries, who similarly looked upon the Philippines as ripe ground for proselytizing. For example, T.B. Wakeman, a prominent freethinker, wrote in the Free Thought Magazine about the need for “the introduction of Liberal, scientific, and secular literature among those newly-awakened people as fast as they can learn to read.”

Robert Ingersoll too was eager to bring the benefits of secular civilization to the Filipinos, yet he was careful to point out that while he favored expansion, he did not support it without the consent of the subject people. The Philippines might have great economic value to the United States, but, as Ingersoll said, this was ultimately unimportant: “We must do right. We must act nobly toward the Filipinos, whether we get the islands or not. I would like to see peace between us and the Filipinos; peace honorable to both; peace based on reason instead of force.”

While Ingersoll had supported the fight in the Philippines against Spain, he reacted angrily to the outbreak of war against the Filipinos. For Ingersoll, territorial ac- quisition had to be with the consent of the people, and this clearly failed his test. In an interview on February 20, 1899, two weeks after the start of the war, Ingersoll called it “a great mistake — a blunder — almost a crime.” Ingersoll insisted that “[w]e had no right to buy, because Spain had no right to sell the Philippines. We acquired no rights on those islands by whipping Spain.” On July 20, 1899, Ingersoll wrote to an Illinois newspaper: “It is true that I think the treatment of the Filipinos wrong — foolish. It is also true that I do not want the Filipinos if they do not want us. I believe in expansion — if it is honest.”

Ingersoll died a day later, before the fighting in the Philippines shifted from a conventional war to one based on guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics later in the year. The subsequent years saw atrocities committed by American soldiers come to light. In particular, the use of scorched earth tactics, the indiscriminate killing of Filipino civilians, and the “water cure” method of torture, in which prisoners were forced to ingest large quantities of water, all became known among the American reading public. Had Ingersoll lived longer, it seems likely he would have criticized these actions in a similar manner to Twain.