William Cameron Forbes

During the administration of President William Howard Taft, Forbes was Governor-General of the Philippines from 1909 to 1913.[2] 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.[1][3]

Forbes, who was a polo enthusiast, founded the Manila Polo Club in 1919.[4] It was the first polo field in the Philippines.[5] 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.[6] He served as delegate of the club until the outbreak of World War II.[7]The clubhouse was inaugurated on November 27, 1909.[4]

In 1921, President Warren G. Harding sent Forbes and Leonard Wood as heads of the Wood-Forbes Commission to investigate conditions in the Philippines.[1][8] The Commission concluded that Filipinos were not yet ready for independence from the United States, a finding that was widely criticized in the Philippines.[9]

As modest legacy from those years of service in Manila, 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.[1]

Forbes was nominated By President Hoover and confirmed as United States Ambassador to Japan. He served from 1930 to 1932.[1]

April 9, 1935 - Former Ambassador to Japan, W. Cameron Forbes heads an American Economic Mission to Japan and China to promote good business relations.

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.[10]

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

• William Cameron Forbes at Find a Grave