Talk:Philippine-American War

Cleanup
This article requires a lot of cleanup. Besides some small problems that I just fixed (like some heading case and spelling fixes, removing links inside headings, and adding a category and a little spacing to make editing easier), it:

That's what I came up with just a quick skim of the article to fix simple problems. I'd like to ask interested editors to help clean up this intriguing article to Wikiquote standards. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:24, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
 * places all of its numerous sources in a separate section, instead of citing them with the quotes per standard practice Huh?
 * uses deprecated ref/note templates for the citations (these have been replaced with ref/references XHTML tags)
 * uses formatting that makes the start and end of some long quotes unclear
 * quotes large, potentially copyright-violating sections of documents
 * uses URLs instead of wiki links for WikiMedia project pages
 * needs a lot of punctuation cleanup
 * may need a POV tag


 * Hi, I am the original author of the page. I will start reworking it. Thanks for the heads up. FYI, I personally find myself that writing a message on a talk page is usually ignored, and I have to do the work myself. Travb 08:02, 24 June 2006 (UTC)


 * (Later) Reworked article for a half hour. I struck out the sections that I finished. I will come back to this later. Travb 08:29, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Commentary moved from talk page
The question is whether McKinley said any such thing as is bold-faced in point #4, especially that God told him to do so, or regarding "Christianize" the natives. Or did Rusling make up those parts? McKinley was a religious person but never said God told him to do anything. He never used the term Christianize (and indeed it was rare in 1898). McKinley operated a highly effective publicity bureau in the White House and he gave hundreds of interviews to reporters, and hundreds of public speeches to promote his Philippines policy. Yet no authentic speech or newspaper report contains anything like the purported words or sentiment. The man who remembered it, James F. Rusling was -- a Civil War veteran who had written a book on the war that was full of exaggeration. The supposed long exact quote from memory years after the event is unlikely enough--especially when the quote uses words like "Christianize" that were never used by McKinley. The quotation was discovered in an obscure religious magazine by a historian decades later--no one at the time attributed any such sentiment to McKinley. Conclusion of historians such as Lewis Gould: it is remotely possible but highly unlikely McKinley said the last part. For an in-depth discussion of this question, see Lewis Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley 1980, pp. 140-142 --


 * I moved this commentary from the actual article to here, and added a footnote about this. Travb 08:36, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

How about including balance in article
Any quotes from the Phillipino Rebels exist? 168.122.83.28 13:37, 19 June 2007 (UTC)