William Cameron Forbes

During the administration of President William Howard Taft, Forbes was Governor-General of the Philippines from 1909 to 1913.[3] Previously, during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, he had been Commissioner of Commerce and Police in the American colonial Insular Government of the Philippines from 1904 through 1908; and he was Vice Governor from 1908 through 1909.[2][4]

Forbes was an enthusiastic supporter of the summer capital at Baguio designed by Daniel Burnham, and had a country club and golf course added to the plans. The summer capital drew resentment from local Filipinos, as it put the government at a distance from the people and was paid for with money earmarked for postwar recovery. Forbes had a low opinion of Filipinos, regarding them as naturally subordinate and unready for self-government. He interacted with them as little as possible. In a 1909 diary entry he recounted an incident when he was playing golf with an Igorot caddy. Forbes wrote "I said to myself, 'Now how many am I?' and the boy replied, 'Playing five.' I was as much astonished as though a tree had spoken." Of the original 161 country club members only six were Filipino. One of them was future Philippines president Manuel Quezon. Forbes likened him to a "wonderfully trained hunting dog gone wild." Quezon in turn remarked that Forbes loved Filipinos "in the same way the former slave owners loved their Negro slaves." In 1908 diary entry, Forbes described how he and the other lawmakers completed their business at Baguio in "about an hour or less" and devoted the remainder of the day to leisure.[5]

Forbes, who was a polo enthusiast, founded the Manila Polo Club in 1919 in Pasay, Rizal.[6] It was the first polo field in the Philippines.[7] Forbes had envisioned the club as a venue for polo and leisure for "gentlemen of a certain class" assigned to work in the Philippines like himself.[8] He served as delegate of the club until the outbreak of World War II.[9] The clubhouse was inaugurated on November 27, 1909.[6]

In 1921, President Warren G. Harding sent Forbes and Leonard Wood as heads of the Wood-Forbes Commission to investigate conditions in the Philippines.[2][10] The Commission concluded that Filipinos were not yet ready for independence from the United States, a finding that was widely criticized in the Philippines.[11]

The gated community of Forbes Park in Makati, was named after him; and this community is the residence of some of the wealthiest people in the country. Lacson Avenue (formerly Gov. Forbes Street) in Sampaloc, Manila is still called "Forbes" by some up to the present day.

Forbes was appointed by President Herbert Hoover in 1930 to lead a commission charged with investigating the reasons for ongoing minor rebellions in Haiti. Forbes gave Hoover a plan to stabilize Haiti and remove the US Marines. An agreement in August 1931 started the withdrawal and a similar plan led to Hoover's withdrawal of troops from Nicaragua. Franklin Roosevelt later completed the process, calling it the "Good Neighbor policy."[12]

Forbes was nominated by President Hoover and confirmed as United States Ambassador to Japan. He served from 1930 to 1932.[2]

In 1935, Forbes headed an American Economic Mission to Japan and China to promote good business relations. The April 9, 1935 photo to the right presents Forbes meeting with the Japanese Minister of Commerce and Industry, Machida Chūji, at the official residence of Machida, in Tokyo. Together, they renegotiated agreements that would improve commercial relations between the two nations.[13]

W. Cameron Forbes was a life-long friend of George Santayana, who was a young professor at Harvard during Forbes's last three undergraduate years there. Forbes was one of the models for the protagonist Oliver Arden in Santayana's novel The Last Puritan.[14]

Santayana was a frequent guest at Naushon, an island in Buzzard's Bay, Cape Cod, that belonged to Cam's grandfather, John Murray Forbes, and at the family estate in Milton, Massachusetts ...[14]

Forbes received an LL.D. from Bates College in 1932. He was on the Board of Trustees, Carnegie Institution of Washington and a Life Member of the Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was on the original standing committee of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles from 1941. He died unmarried in 1959.

His seasonal home Birdwood, a mansion built in the 1930s for him in southern Georgia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Forbes' papers are in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Copies of his annotated journal are at the Library of Congress and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. The report of the Forbes Commission's Haitian analysis is at the Library of Congress.

Philippine administrator:

• Peter W. Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921 (1974)
• Rev. Camillus Gott, "William Cameron Forbes and the Philippines, 1904–1946" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1974)
• Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946 (1965).

Ambassador to Japan:

• Gary Ross, "W. Cameron Forbes: The Diplomacy of a Darwinist," in R. D. Burns and E. M. Bennett, eds., Diplomats in Crisis (1974).
• Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover-Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929–1933 (1957)
• Armin Rappaport, Henry L. Stimson and Japan, 1931–1933 (1963)
• James B. Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy (1966).

• Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm

• Bangs, Outram. Notes on Philippine birds collected by Governor W. Cameron Forbes (Litres, 2021).
• Spector, Robert M. "W. Cameron Forbes in the Philippines: A Study in Proconsular Power." Journal of Southeast Asian History 7.2 (1966): 74-92.
• Spector, Robert M. "W. Cameron Forbes in Haiti: Additional Light on the Genesis of the 'Good Neighbor' Policy" Caribbean Studies (1966) 6#2 pp 28-45.
• Spector, Robert Melvin. W. Cameron Forbes and the Hoover commissions to Haiti, 1930 (University Press of America, 1985).
• Stanley, Peter W. "William Cameron Forbes: Proconsul in the Philippines." Pacific Historical Review 35.3 (1966): 285-301. online

• Media related to William Cameron Forbes at Wikimedia Commons