The Massacre America Forgot

MASSACRE IN THE CLOUDS: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History, by Kim A. Wagner

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.”