[This article is part of a series for Black History Month. Other articles in the series can be read here, here, here, here and here.—Editors]
In a 1952 song entitled “Bye Bye Big Brass,” anti-war singer Woody Guthrie dreamed up a scenario in which he is shipped off to the Korean War and, rather than kill a Chinese soldier he encounters, sits and talks with him by a campfire, hides out with him, and fights back against the U.S. Army with him.
Fifty years earlier, an African-American soldier named David Fagen did exactly what Guthrie envisioned after having been shipped off to the Philippines to fight a colonial war.
In 1900, Fagen deserted his unit, married a Filipino woman and took up arms with Filipino guerrilla units that fought against the U.S. military, which carried out genocidal crimes against the Filipino population in an attempt to subjugate it.
Taunting his American adversaries, Fagen would send U.S. military commanders threatening letters, planned ambushes and challenged to a duel a murderous general who pursued him (Frederick Funston).
After newspapers in the U.S. began to report on Fagen’s exploits, his name became practically a household word, especially in the African-American community where he was considered a folk hero.
U.S. Army commanders in the Philippines showed Fagen grudging respect: Sergeant Louis W. Mahaffey of the 41st U.S. Volunteers wrote to General Funston that Fagen “rules his gugu [racial slur for Filipino] soldiers with an iron hand and is greatly respected by them.”[1]
Fagen’s remarkable story is told in Michael Morey’s book, Fagen: An African American Renegade in the Philippine-American War, which has been made newly available in paperback.
An independent historian living in Sonoma County, California, Morey said that he first heard of Fagen when he came across a passage about him in Leon Wolff’s 1961 book, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Turn.
The passage read: “An enormous Negro named Fagen deserted the U.S. Army, taking with him all the revolvers he could carry and was commissioned a captain in the insurgent forces…Fagen drank heavily, played guitar, fought like a wildcat, and lived in a camp with a native woman.”[2]
The time of the Philippines-American War was one of sharpening racism and rising jingoistic attitudes that led to support for the establishment of a U.S. overseas empire.
Morey writes that Fagen’s revolt “harks back to the tradition of black revolutionaries from Toussaint L’Ouverture through Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. By his actions, he was a revolutionary, whether he thought of himself precisely as such.”[3]
Described by General Funston as a “nasty little war,”[4] the U.S. war in the Philippines aimed to establish a U.S. foothold in the Asia Pacific, open up Philippines’ economy to U.S. investors and establish a U.S. naval base that could help the U.S. access the great China market.[5]
The son of slaves who was born in Tampa, Florida, in October 1878, Fagen was characterized by his fellow soldiers as “light-hearted, careless and full of jokes.” His commanding officers viewed him as a “loud-mouthed trouble-maker” who “didn’t take well to military discipline.”[6]
Prior to enlisting in the military, Fagen worked at a rail yard in the port of Tampa offloading cargo ships where conditions were extremely harsh, pay was abysmal and abuse by white overseers was endemic.
Some of Fagen’s co-workers were locked up at night in stockades that were “but little more than cow sheds, horse stables or hog pens.” They were also imprisoned under discriminatory vagrancy and other laws that were designed to keep the Black population in bondage.[7]
Fagen became part of the 24th Infantry Division consisting of African-American or “Buffalo Soldiers” who had to dig ditches for all-white military units and were often sent on the most hazardous missions. A sergeant said that Fagen was “made to do all sorts of dirty jobs in his unit” which was a factor leading to his defection.[8]
Described as a “mob without discipline,” U.S. troops in the Philippines adopted brutal scorched-earth methods in suppressing the Philippines insurgency.[9]
During a national speaking tour, General Funston boasted of hanging 35 Filipinos without trial, while calling supporters of the American anti-imperialist league, who were against the Philippines War, “traitors” who should also be “strung up [i.e., hanged].”[10]
Of the Filipinos, Funston opined: “They are…illiterate, semi-savage people, who are waging war, not against tyranny, but against Anglo-Saxon order and decency.”[11]
General Arthur MacArthur, Jr. (Douglas MacArthur’s father), acknowledged popular support for the insurgency when he noted that, “whenever throughout the archipelago there is a group of the insurgent army, it is a fact beyond dispute that all of the contagious towns contribute to the maintenance thereof.”[12]
As with the use of native scouts and spies in the Indian Wars, U.S. military officers exploited rivalries among the Filipinos, recruiting soldiers from the Macabebe ethnic group, traditional enemies of the Tagalogs who had been a main source of colonial troops for the Spanish, to hunt down the insurgents.[13]
African-American soldiers were routinely addressed by white officers as “coons” and “niggers.”[14] American policy in the Philippines was recognized by many Blacks as a “gigantic scheme of robbery and oppression” cloaked in talk of benevolence and democratic ideals.[15]
The Filipino rebels called on Black soldiers to desert, stating: “It is without honor that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters have thrown you to the most iniquitous fight with double purpose. In order to be you the instrument of their ambition. Soon make the extinction of your race.”
Another appeal stated: “Why does the American Negro come from America to fight us when we are much a friend to him?…Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you.”[16]
Prior to Fagen’s defection, he was subjected to 30 days’ hard labor at a time when other members of his platoon were driven to suicide.
After news of Fagen’s defection spread, his story was profiled in Collier’s Weekly, which depicted him in prejudiced terms as a physically powerful but mentally weak Sambo-type figure known as “wild Fagan [sic].”[17]
According to Collier’s writer Rowland Thomas, Fagen was driven to defection because a white lieutenant from the North—an official “bully” who did not possess the Southern officers’ guilt for “dealing firmly yet kindly with the big black children committed to their charge”—repeatedly threw him in the guardhouse for petty offenses.[18]
Fagen’s commanding officer was actually a Louisianan and the real Fagen never broke out of a guardhouse—as Thomas had claimed.[19]
According to Morey, Fagen’s desertion was at its core a “conscious political act, evidence by his subsequent unwavering loyalty to the revolutionary cause. Fagen did not desert simply for personal reasons [as Thomas and Collier’s made it seem]. He deserted to make war on white Americans in concert with the Filipino revolutionaries.”[20]
Filipino General José Alejandrino who met Fagen in the spring of 1901, a year after his defection, wrote in his memoirs that he had “heard narration of feats of valor and the intrepidity of Fagan [sic], but his most outstanding characteristic was his moral hatred of the American whites.”[21]
After overtaking custody of some white American POWs, Alejandrino reported that Fagen was forced to kill them all when they tried to escape.[22] Other U.S. soldiers, however, reported on Fagen treating American POWs humanely.[23]
A May 1901 article in the Manila Freedom noted that Fagen “especially delighted in harassing his old company and regiment,” and that he “often sent insulting messages to the officers.”[24] Some of the “love letters,” as Fagen called them, revealed a “subtle sense of humor” that Fagen was known for—playful and menacing at the same time.[25]
Morey wrote that Funston and other colonial authorities found Fagen’s “impudence intolerable.” Their “desperation to kill him attested to the challenge that he posed to the U.S. colonial authority.”[26]
An article in Funston’s hometown newspaper, The Iola Register, noted “No other man who ever deserted from United States has been so relentlessly hunted by his comrades as Fagin [sic]…it was generally understood that the regiment that killed or captured him would stand high with the commanding officer, and for this reason, Fagin [sic] was sought as never a deserter before.”[27]
A report by Major Joseph Wheeler specified that two other African-American defectors served with Fagen’s renegade rebel unit.[28] There were thought to be about one to two dozen African-American defectors who took up arms with the Filipino rebels overall, along with nearly a thousand African American soldiers who married Filipino women and remained in the Philippines when their tours of duty were completed.[29]
Fagen himself learned Tagalog and was spotted gambling in Manila area salons (he was reportedly a master at stud poker).[30]
He was central to Filipino resistance in Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon and, according to Morey, led every successful engagement against U.S. soldiers serving under Frederick Funston and General Frederick Dent Grant, son of President Ulysses S. Grant, who also tracked Fagen.[31]
Morey believes that Fagen was the shooter in an ambush of American troops that killed Captain George J. Godfrey while he was standing behind his horse just ten yards away from General Funston.[32]
Fagen placed a 2,000-peso reward for Funston and signed the reward posters.[33] Funston had called Fagen a “bandit, pure and simple,” and said that he was “entitled to the same treatment as a mad dog.”[34]
An April 1905 article in New York Age magazine noted that “the name most dreadful in the ears of American soldiers in the Philippines during the insurrection was that of Fagen, an Afro-American soldier who deserted the Stars and Stripes and became, according to common belief, the most brilliant and dangerous of the Filipino chieftans, not excepting Aguinaldo himself. How much of this reputation Fagen owed to his exploits, and how much to the mythmaking faculty natural to mankind, we do not pretend to calculate; but his name did excite vividly among our soldiers a superstitious terror similar to that which made awful among the Saracens the name of Richard the Lion-hearted.”[35]
Fagen’s greatest battlefield success was an operation that resulted in the capture of Lieutenant Frederick Altstaetter, one of the top graduates in the West Point Class of 1897.[36]
Altstaetter recounted how, after his capture, Fagen took his West Point class ring, though when he and Fagen talked at length, they became friends.
Altstaetter said that Fagen’s “way with the natives was wonderful” and that he treated him kindly.[37] Ironically, Fagen displayed a similar kind of prejudice toward Filipinos as white U.S. troops, telling Altstaetter, in reference to his promotion to Captain in the Filipino army, that “we are way above these ignorant Filipinos; we are equals [you and I], we amount to something.”[38]
At the end of the book, Morey addresses the lingering mystery over Fagen’s death.
In December 1901, a hunter named Anastacio Bartolomé presented what he said was Fagen’s head to Lieutenant R.C. Corliss in Dingalan Cove, claiming that Fagen was killed by natives intent on collecting a financial reward.
Proof of Fagen’s death was seemingly confirmed by the seizure of Frederick Altstaetter’s West Point ring, and Lt. Corliss’s assertion that features of the head corresponded with a photograph of Fagen.[39]
Several journalists from the era, however, believed that Bartolomé’s tale sounded fishy, and speculated that Fagen may have faked his own death in order to throw off the authorities who were on his trail.[40]
Fagen’s name later came up in a 1938 history of the Philippines constabulary by Vic Hurley, and in another by James Harbord, where he was said to have been involved in cattle theft and resistance to the U.S. occupation as late as 1906 with the new Katipunen movement led by messianic peasant and socialist leaders Macario Sakay and Felipe Salvador.[41]
Harbord reported that Fagen’s band was “the most formidable in Northern Luzon and gave the constabulary great trouble.”[42]
Considering that the constabulary was formed after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Philippines in 1902, Fagen’s military exploits appear to be all the more remarkable given their longevity.[43]
While Woody Guthrie dreamed up such a scenario, there are no documented cases of deserters actually fighting with U.S. adversaries and killing U.S. soldiers or holding them as POWs, as Fagen did, in America’s 20th and 21st century wars.
One exception is William Pomeroy, a communist World War II veteran who defected to the Hukbalahap guerrilla movement in the Philippines that fought U.S.-trained counterinsurgent forces in the 1950s who were heirs to the Philippine constabulary that tracked Fagen.[44]
Pomeroy was white but, like Fagen, he recognized the injustice underlying U.S. foreign policy and the righteousness of the Filipino insurgents’ cause.
Michael Morey, Fagen: An African American Renegade in the Philippine-American War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), xvi. ↑
Morey, Fagen, xii. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 5, 290. According to Morey, Fagen was a “flamboyant and charismatic leader of men, a man who delighted in bedeviling his white would-be-masters, a guerrilla fighter of extraordinary skill and courage…who…as an African-American…took up arms against a country bent on empire at the expense of a dark-skinned people and rotten to the core with racism at home.” ↑
Morey, Fagen, 5. ↑
See https://peacehistory-usfp.org/1898-1899/. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 11. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 14, 15. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 260. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 51. The Filipino guerrillas fighting the U.S. were led by Emiliano Aguinaldo, a remarkable orator of Chinese background, with a gift for inspiring the masses in speeches, who previously fought against the Spanish and was deceived by the Americans. Another key revolutionary, Apolinario Mabini, believed strongly that independence had to go hand-in-hand with a social leveling; if a successful revolution led only to a continuation of rule by a privileged elite, then the Filipino masses would have every right to revolt. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 266. For more on the anti-imperialist league, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “With Trump Invoking William McKinley as Great American President, Progressives Should Revitalize Early 1900s Anti-Imperialist League,” CovertAction Magazine, April 7, 2025.Morey, Fagen, 206. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 97. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 102. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 87. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 102, 209. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 92. One of the appeals referenced the lynching of a Black man in Georgia, Samuel Hose, whom the Philippines had probably learned about from one of the Black defectors. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 93, 94. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 94. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 107, 108. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 109. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 120. ↑
Idem. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 183. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 126. ↑
Idem. ↑
Idem. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 222. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 127. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 210, 213, 237. Many white army officers also took up with Filipino women and often fathered Philippine children who were abandoned. Sex with native women can generally be considered a “spoil of empire.” ↑
Morey, Fagen, 209, 235. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 136. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 137, 141. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 145. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 255. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 165. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 168. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 220. ↑
Idem. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 262, 263. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 265. Some reports had Fagen being shot and killed by constabulary units in 1902, a year after the supposed presentation of his head at Dingalan Cove. Eyewitnesses said that they spotted Fagen in Manila, from where he was said to have been planning to escape to Singapore and Hong Kong. Whether he ever made it there is uncertain. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 275, 288, 289. ↑
Morey, Fagen, 290. ↑
For a history of the Philippines constabulary, see Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). ↑
See William J. Pomeroy, The Forest: A Personal Record of the Huk Guerrilla Struggle in the Philippines (New York: International Publishers, 1963). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
