Tapping a civilian corporate lawyer as the nation’s top military official earned its share of skeptics. “No appointment seemed to me more ridiculous,” said Nicholas Murray Butler, Root’s friend and President of Columbia University. “I could not imagine Root as knowing anything about war or of military organization.” Root himself had his doubts. He had no real military experience, having spent the Civil War prancing around with a student militia company and playing baseball.
Still, McKinley insisted, because corporate experience, not battlefield experience, was what he was after. “I don’t need anyone who knows anything about war or the army,” said McKinley. “I need a lawyer to administer these Spanish islands we’ve captured, and you are the lawyer I want.”
The results were devastating. Root struggled to shore up the Philippines’ colonial government—led by future president and Supreme Court chief justice William Howard Taft—and his efforts to professionalize the army’s officer corps did nothing to stop American forces from committing horrific atrocities, such as the infamous “water cure.” American soldiers would force Filipino prisoners to drink water until their bellies swelled, then expel the water by beating the prisoners’ stomachs with the butts of their rifles.
Philip C. Jessup, Root’s close friend and biographer, stressed that Root never explicitly commanded American forces to kill civilians, and ordered an end to the “water cure.” But according to the anti-imperialist lawyer Julian Codman, a contemporary of Root’s, the Secretary of War deliberately misled the public about the scale and nature of American atrocities, never meaningfully enforced his anti-torture orders, and tacitly approved of his forces’ ruthless conduct.
The historical record supports Codman’s claims. Root, though well aware of American atrocities, asserted that his forces conducted their operations in the Philippines “with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare, with careful and genuine consideration for the prisoner and the non-combatant, with self-restraint, and with humanity never surpassed, if ever equalled, in any conflict.” The former United States Attorney also displayed remarkably little interest in prosecuting war criminals within his ranks. He forced Jacob Smith into retirement, but went no further. Waller was court-martialed, but acquitted by the military’s old boys club. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, the province commander infamous for forcing Filipino civilians into disease-ridden concentration camps, never received so much as a reprimand, despite the thousands of deaths attributed to his policies.