Elwell Stephen Otis

Elwell Otis commanded American forces in the Philippines at the outbreak of the war there and censored the reporting of it so thoroughly that his own correspondents published a joint protest. He was a Harvard-trained lawyer who joined the 140th New York in 1862, was shot in the head at Chaffin's Farm and carried the wound for life, and stayed in the army afterwards, fighting on the plains and founding the school at Fort Leavenworth that became the Command and General Staff College. Sent to Manila in 1898, he became military governor after the Spanish surrender, faced with a Filipino republic under Aguinaldo that had fought the Spanish alongside the Americans and expected independence. He was ordered to assert American sovereignty and did, publishing an edited version of McKinley's proclamation that removed the words most likely to inflame opinion, which was discovered and inflamed it further. Fighting began in February 1899. He won the conventional battles and reported repeatedly that the insurrection was almost over while it was turning into a guerrilla war that ran for three more years and killed perhaps 200,000 Filipinos, mostly civilians and mostly of disease and displacement. The Manila correspondents cabled a round-robin in 1899 accusing him of suppressing the truth. He asked to be relieved and went home in May 1900, was promoted and given a corps area command, and retired in 1902. His estimate that the war was nearly finished was repeated in Washington for three years after he left. The censorship is the part usually remembered, and it mattered less than the assumption underneath it: that an independence movement which had already fought one empire would accept another if the fighting could be described as banditry.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history