John R. M. Taylor

John Roger Meigs Taylor was a captain of the 14th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army. He was placed in charge of what became known as the Philippine Insurgent Records. That is, the collection of documents seized from Philippine revolutionaries during the Philippine–American War.

Taylor was a West Point graduate of 1889 and served in the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899. Subsequently, he was transferred to the Philippines in the same year. General Elwell Stephen Otis, Military Governor of the Philippines, instructed him to collate original documents captured from "insurgents' and to translate them for the United States Department of War and the United States Senate.

In 1901 he returned to the US and was detailed to the Bureau of Insular Affairs where he supervised the filing, selection and translation of a representation of some of the 200,000 documents. For five years Taylor supervised the transcription and translation (from Spanish or Tagalog) of these pre-selected documents in order to present what he claimed would be a "truthful version" of the Philippine revolution and the subsequent war between the Philippine revolutionaries and the American colonialists.

In his letter of transmittal for the compilation, Taylor wrote of the documents in the compilation:

Taylor ordered the Government Printing Office to typeset galley proofs, with two volumes dedicated to his analytical history of US-Philippine relations and three other volumes containing 1,340 supporting papers of original documents. Then Secretary of War William Howard Taft decided to defer its publication for fear of antagonizing both Americans and Filipinos. In 1909 a second attempt was made to publish the volumes when President Taft's former secretary James A. LeRoy wrote a scathing critique objecting to its publication. The Bureau of Insular Affairs then abandoned the project. It was subsequently published in the Philippines in 1968 by the Eugenio Lopez Foundation.

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