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The Saga of David Fagen:
Black Rebel in the Philippine Insurrection
by Joseph Ryan
Corporal David Fagen is a man whose name is rarely known today. But slightly less than 100 years ago, this young, Black soldier was the subject of sensational headlines in American newspapers.
Serving with American forces during the Philippines insurrection of 1899-1901, Fagen defected from the U.S. Army, accepted a commission from Filipino insurgents, and embarked on a career as a guerilla who, as one author put it, “for two years raised havoc with the American forces.”
The months of April thru August of this year mark the 100th anniversary of the Spanish-American War, American capitalism’s first foray into the world of imperialist conquest. It was, as American Secretary of State John Hay said at the time, “a splendid little war.”
After only three months fighting, Spain was forced to abandon Cuba to complete U.S. dominance, a situation “splendidly” corrected 60 years later when Fidel Castro and the July 26 movement marched into Havana on Jan. 1, 1959, and instituted the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere.
Paradoxically, 100 years later, the U.S. ruling class is still obsessed with Cuba; except now instead of getting Spain out, they want Castro and the socialist revolution out.
The Spanish-American War was a very profitable venture for up-and-coming U.S. imperialism. Along with kicking Spain out of Cuba, the United States, as part of the armistice signed in August 1898, was given the Hawaiian Islands and Puerto Rico – and Spain was forced to cede the Philippines for a paltry $40 million.
Inheriting an insurrection
In the Philippines, however, the U.S. not only acquired an archipelago rich in natural resources, it also inherited an insurrection.
In February 1899, the Filipino people rose up against the American occupiers – as they had against Spain earlier – and demanded independence. What ensued was a brutal three-year (1899-1901) war of extermination against the Filipino people as 70,000 American troops were dispatched to the islands to quell the revolt.
It was a war saturated with racism. The Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported in 1901, “Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads up to 10, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was letter better than a dog . . .”
White American troops referred to Filipinos as “niggers,” “Black devils,” and “gugus.” One white soldier wrote, while describing his experiences in one battle: “Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill ‘niggers.’ . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces.”
Serving with the American troops in the Philippines were four Black regiments. These Black soldiers had months earlier served with distinction in the Cuban campaign. But despite their heroic exploits – for example, one regiment, the 10th Cavalry, had rescued Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at the battle of Santiago – the racism and abuse the faced from white officers and enlisted men continued unchecked. One Black private wrote that “the white man’s prejudice followed the Negro to the Philippines, then thousand miles from where it originated.”
Many Black troops were in a dilemma, being treated the same way that Filipinos were. They became sympathetic to the insurrectos, a “colored” race not unlike them, who were fighting for their freedom.
The Filipino insurrectos actively appealed to Black troops for solidarity. One soldier related a conversation with a young Filipino boy: “Why does the American Negro come to fight us where we are a friend to him and have not done anything to him. He is all the same as me and me the same as you. Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you?”
Another Black soldier, when asked by a white trooper why he had come to the Philippines, replied sarcastically: “Why doan’ know, but I ruther reckon we’re sent over here to take up de white man’s burden.”
Fagen reject’s “white man’s burden”
A handful of Black troops, however, refused to carry that burden. David Fagen as the most famous.
Fagen had served with the 24th Regiment in Cuba and was honorably mustered out at the end of that campaign. After working for nearly a year as a laborer in Tampa, FL, he was permitted by his commanding officer to reenlist with the same regiment less than a year later.
Shortly after his arrival in the Philippines, Fagen and the 24th Regiment were engaged in major battles against the insurrectos in central Luzon. But Fagen was also experiencing difficulties with his superiors. One sergeant has stated that Fagen was “picked on” by superiors and “was made to do all sorts of dirty jobs.”
While it is not clear what ideological effect the brutal war against the insurrectos might have had on Fagen, one thing is certain: He made a decision to defect from the army and join the rebels.
On Nov. 17, 1899, Fagen, “assisted by an insurrecto officer who had a horse waiting for him near the company barracks, “slipped into the jungle and headed for the rebel’s sanctuary at Mount Aryat.
Fought with audacity and vigor
As one excellent study of Fagen’s guerilla career indicates (David Fagen: An Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines 1899-1901, by Michael C. Robinson and Frank N. Schuber, Pacific Historical Review, March 1975), “The combination in which the many alienating forces acted on him is unknown, but the audacity and vigor with which he led insurrectos over the next two years illustrates the depth of his commitment to the Filipino cause.
“David Fagen seems wholeheartedly to have embraced the revolution, and, as George Rawick notes in his study of Afro-American slaves, men ‘do not make revolution for light and transient reasons.’”
Referred to as “General” Fagen by his men, The New York Times paid the 23-year-old Black rebel the same compliment in a front-page headline after his exploits became known. He became a skilled guerilla officer who became legendary for his ability to harass and evade American forces sent against him. From August 1900 to January 1901, he battled eight times with American troops.
One of the Americans most frustrated by Fagen was General Frederick Funston, known as one of the best “guerilla hunters in the Philippines.” Twice he clashed with Fagen’s forces and both times came up empty-handed. Funston was so agitated with his lack of success that he began to make excuses for it in his memoirs. His sister-in-law rubbed salt in the wound by writing him a Christmas taunt in 1900:
By Jimmy Christmas Fred
What’s this I see?
Poor old Fagen
Hanged to a tree?
How did it happen
This is queer
Tell us about it
We’re dying to hear
As Fagen’s exploits continued, especially his uncanny skill at eluding capture, his public image took on mythical proportions. One time, while soldiers were scouring throughout the Mt. Aryat area in search of Fagen, he was reported by the Manila Times to have been seen in that city at the same time.
The reporter described him as wearing “a blouse, similar to those of the native police . . . his trousers were dark in color and topped a pair of patent leather shoes. A brown soft felt hat completed his apparel.”
Two white civilians claimed this was Fagen, and that when they approached him, “he rose from his chair, placing his foot upon it and grasping his concealed revolver in his right hand and a small sword or bolo in his left.”
A cordon was immediately thrown around the city, but to no avail. If it was Fagen, he had escaped again. Fagen’s boldness and audacity so enraged the American military that they tried to racially stereotype him, saying he had little intelligence, proved by the fact that his head was small.
They also accused Fagen of atrocities, saying that he tortured and executed prisoners. However, one Black soldier who was one of Fagen’s captives repudiated those charges; and a white officer who was also captured by Fagen’s men stated that he was treated “very kindly” by Fagen.
But as the year 1901 approached, it was obvious that the insurrection would be defeated. As one insurrecto leader after another surrendered with the promise of amnesty, Fagen and his party were more and more isolated, and constantly hunted as bandits by the army.
Execution a certainty
On several occasions, insurrecto leaders tried to negotiate amnesty for Fagen, but the U.S. Army insisted that if caught, he would be tried as a traitor and hanged. As General Funston told one Filipino rebel leader who pleaded for Fagen’s life, “This man could not be received as a prisoner of war, and if he surrendered it would be with the understanding that the would be tried by a court-martial – in which event his execution would be a practical certainty.”
In fact, of the 20 American soldiers who had defected to the insurrectos during the war only two were executed, both of them Black.
For the next six months Fagen, who had a $1000 price on his head, led his dwindling band in a cat-an-mouse game to avoid capture by the U.S. Army.
The end of Fagen’s career and the circumstances surrounding it are almost anti-climactic and only added to his legend. At the end of 1901, a native hunter named Anastacio Bartolome, walked into and American army outpost with the slightly decomposed head of a “Negro” in a sack, claiming it was Fagen.
He said he had killed the fugitive guerilla when his hunting party came upon Fagen’s group near a river in the jungle. With this grisly evidence in hand, the army closed the case of David Fagen.
Or did they? The official file of the incident is listed as “the supposed killing of David Fagen.”
At the time, there was a widespread opinion among the native population that Fagen was alive, that the had fabricated his own murder, and now lived peacefully in the mountains with his Filipina wife.
But the significance of David Fagen is not in the myth that surrounds almost all those who fight for the downtrodden and oppressed against overwhelming odds. It lies in appreciating how one individual decided who were his real brothers and sisters and who were his real enemies.
One Indianapolis newspaper editor grudgingly recognized this in his obituary for David Fagen:
“Fagen was a traitor, and died a traitor’s death, but he was a man, no doubt, prompted by motives to help a weaker side, and one to which he felt allied by ties that bind . . . He saw, it may be, the weak and the strong; he chose, and the world knows the rest.”
This article first appeared in the June 1998 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
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