John Scott Reed. The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines: Counterinsurgency, Pacification, and Collaboration, 1899–1901.

Abstract

As stated by the author, the purpose of this book is to direct historians’ attention to the achievements of the United States Volunteers (USV) in the country’s “single most successful counterinsurgency campaign” outside the Western Hemisphere (xi). John Scott Reed sets out to narrate a story of a force he argues was driven by strong sense of patriotic duty, of men who held “a high standard of personal behavior” and did not resort to excessive violence (195). These volunteers were “stoically indifferent to wound, hardship, and illness,” achieving a magnificent victory while fighting for the righteous cause (197). In short, Reed tells a story of American heroes. Reed is clearly rooting for the military force he writes about. His eyes are clearly set on rebuking some of the recent scholarship, by Paul Kramer and others, that has stressed excessive violence at the heart of the US colonial project on the islands. Due to Reed’s premise and approach, readers might find his analysis troubling, as did this reviewer.