III
To the Philippines
The United States Army Transport Hancock had been assigned to the Commission for the trip from San Francisco to Manila and it was at noon on a pleasant day in mid-April—the seventeenth—that she pulled away from the crowded dock and headed straight for the Golden Gate and the long path across the Pacific that leads to the other side of the world. There were forty-five people in our party and, although most of us had met for the first time in San Francisco, we soon became well acquainted, as people do on shipboard, and proceeded at once to prove ourselves to be a most harmonious company.
The Hancock was the old Arizona, a onetime greyhound of the Atlantic, which the Government had purchased and remodelled for service as an army transport. A considerable fleet of such vessels plied the Pacific at that time, carrying large consignments of troops to and from the Philippines and, though there are not so many now, I still read with interest of the comings and goings of ships whose old, friendly sounding names became so familiar to us in the course of our residence in the East. The Grant, the Sherman, the Sheridan, the Thomas, and others, all named for great American generals, awaken memories of interesting days. The Hancock was later given up by the Army and turned over to the Navy on account of her heavy consumption of coal. She is now used as a recruiting ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
We found her very comfortable. There were few people aboard besides the members of our party, and, as she was equipped to carry the officers and men of an entire regiment, we found ourselves commodiously quartered. Moreover, the commissary of the transport service had received instructions to give us excellent fare; this, I believe, through the thoughtful kindness of Mr. McKinley himself.
Mr. McKinley never failed to take a personal interest in the everyday welfare of all those in his administration who came under his own observation and we were made to feel this throughout our experience on the Philippine Commission, while he lived. On every appropriate occasion we were certain to receive from him some kindly compliment, a cablegram or other communication, and it made everybody who came within range of his influence anxious to serve him well and to make the work which was being done satisfactory and pleasing to him. I owe to our connection with President McKinley’s administration some of my happiest recollections.
The men who made up the second Philippine Commission were Mr. Taft, General Luke E. Wright of Memphis, Tennessee; Judge Henry C. Ide of Vermont, Professor Dean C. Worcester of the University of Michigan, and Professor Bernard Moses of the University of California. A short introduction of my husband’s colleagues and the members of their families who went with them to the Philippines will be necessary at this point, because I was destined to be constantly associated with them during four of the most interesting years of my life. Our cooperation, social and governmental, was based upon a common purpose, and our attachment to this purpose, as well as the bonds of friendship which united us, were greatly strengthened by the opposition we had to meet for some months after we reached Manila, not only from the Filipinos, but also from the military government which the Commission was sent out gradually to replace.
The men of the Commission, coming, as they did, from different parts of the United States, were widely contrasted, no less in associations than in their varied accents and family traditions.
General Wright was, and is, one of the ablest lawyers in Tennessee, and enjoyed, at the time of his appointment on the Commission, the finest practice in Memphis. He is a Democrat; and old enough to have been a lieutenant in the Civil War on the Confederate side. But perhaps his finest laurels for bravery and devotion to duty were won at the time when he exerted himself to save Memphis in the days when she was in the grip of a terrible epidemic of yellow fever. I don’t know the exact year, but the epidemic was so out of control that all who could, left the city, while General Wright remained to organise such resistance as could be made to the spread of the dread disease.
Mrs. Wright was a daughter of the famous Admiral Semmes of the Confederate Navy and for some time after the war she travelled with her father in Mexico and abroad, thereby acquiring at an early age a very cosmopolitan outlook. Admiral Semmes was a great linguist and Mrs. Wright inherited his gift. She had learned to speak Spanish in her girlhood, so when she arrived in Manila she had only to renew her knowledge of the language. General and Mrs. Wright had with them their daughter Katrina, who was then about fourteen years old, but their two sons, one a naval officer, did not join them in the Philippines until later.
General Wright had, on the whole, the most delightful social qualities of anybody on the Commission. He had a keen sense of humour and could recount a great number of interesting personal experiences with a manner and wit which made him, always, a delightful companion. He was a devotee of pinochle and he instructed the entire party in the game until it was played from one end of the ship to the other. He was slow to anger, very deliberate and kindly in his judgments, and offered at times a decided contrast to his wife who was a little more hasty and not infrequently founded judgments on what he would jocosely criticise as “a woman’s reason.”
Judge Ide was born and bred a Vermonter and had many of the rugged characteristics of the Green Mountain State, not the least among which is a certain
