He was the son of William Hathaway Forbes, president of the Bell Telephone Company, who was part of the Boston Brahmin family that made its fortune trading in China, and wife Edith Emerson, a daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was grandson of Sarah Hathaway and John Murray Forbes and Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After education at the Milton Academy and Boston's Hopkinson School[1] and graduation from Harvard in 1892, he embarked on a business career, eventually becoming a partner in J. M. Forbes and Company.[2]
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.
Haiti
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]
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]
Friendship with George Santayana
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]
^Salman, Michael (2009). McCoy, Alfred; Scarano, Francisco (eds.). "The Prison That Makes Men Free": The Iwahig Penal Colony and the Simulacra of the American State in the Philippines, in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. p. 119. ISBN9780299231040.
^Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), p. 135, 130-131, 159.
^ Robert M. Spector, "W. Cameron Forbes in Haiti: Additional Light on the Genesis of the 'Good Neighbor' Policy" Caribbean Studies (1966) 6#2 pp 28-45.
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
Primary sources
Forbes, William Cameron. Report of the President's Commission for the Study and Review of Conditions in the Republic of Haiti: March 26, 1930 (US Government Printing Office, 1930) online.
Forbes, W. Cameron. "American Policies in the Far East." Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 73#2 (1939) online.
Forbes, W. Cameron. "The Philippines under United States Rule." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 168.1 (1933): 156-161.
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