How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  A powerful country setting its largest colony free without threat of violence—it was unheard-of. The nearby Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) had been under Dutch control for three hundred years, and in the 1930s its governor-general predicted that it would be another three hundred before the colony would see independence.29 But the Philippines, held by the United States for about one-tenth that time, was about to go free.

  To be fair, the Philippine Independence Act did not grant independence immediately. It permitted Filipinos to establish a new government, a “commonwealth,” akin to Australia or Canada within the British Empire. If Congress approved the commonwealth constitution and if the commonwealth met certain benchmarks over a ten-year period, then the Philippines would be independent.

  Meanwhile, the Philippines, though still part of the United States, would be “considered to be a foreign country” for the purposes of immigration.30 It would also eventually start paying tariffs, low at first but steadily increasing with the years. In principle, the transitional decade would give the Philippines enough time to restructure its economy and build an army.

  Manuel Quezon ran for president of this new commonwealth. He beat out Emilio Aguinaldo, who ran on a protest platform of immediate independence. To celebrate his inauguration, Quezon arranged a ceremony outside Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building. The Philippine flag,31 which for years had been prohibited, would ascend the flagpole and rise to the same height as the U.S. flag. Quezon wanted a twenty-one-gun salute, too, but Roosevelt forbade it—that honor was reserved for heads of sovereign states, and the Philippines was still a colony. After hinting at war and briefly threatening to boycott his own inauguration, Quezon acquiesced to nineteen guns.

  Not enough guns. That would be a recurring theme in the years to come.

  *

  The Philippines was the largest U.S. colony. A similar story played out in the second-largest, Puerto Rico. The Depression had wreaked havoc on the island: unemployment, strikes, and—egged on by Pedro Albizu Campos—violence. It was the assassination by nationalists of Police Chief E. Francis Riggs that truly rattled the colonial authorities. He was one of them—the protégé, as it turned out, of Senator Millard Tydings, the chief congressional sponsor of the Philippine Independence Act.

  Ernest Gruening was furious. He demanded that Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico’s leading liberal politician, condemn Riggs’s assassination. But Muñoz Marín refused—he understood why the nationalists had lashed out, and he was unwilling to confront them. “By his silence he was condoning murder,32 and indeed the whole Nationalist campaign of violence,” Gruening fumed.

  Gruening and Tydings joined forces and drafted another piece of independence legislation, based on the Philippine Independence Act but intended for Puerto Rico. On the surface, it was anti-imperialist. But Muñoz Marín could see its vindictive intent—“revenge disguised as political freedom,”33 he called it. Whereas the Philippine Independence Act began imposing the U.S. tariff only in the sixth year of transitional government and increased it slowly thereafter, the bill for Puerto Rico dropped the tariff’s full weight in four years. Given that, in 1930, more than 95 percent of Puerto Rico’s off-island sales were to the mainland,34 a sudden tariff would be catastrophic. Among Puerto Rican leaders, only Albizu, monomaniacally focused on independence, was enthusiastic.

  Tydings withdrew the bill in a few weeks—just long enough for Muñoz Marín and his colleagues to grasp the threat. If Puerto Ricans kept pushing for independence, they just might get it.

  Back in the Philippines, meanwhile, Manuel Quezon contemplated the arrival of independence, and he, too, began to sweat. Would the United States aid in Philippine defense once the colony was independent? “As a matter of cold actuality,”35 a former governor-general told him, “the American people will not jeopardize their interests in the future for an independent Philippines any more than they will for any other nation.”

  A movement to reverse Philippine independence grew in the late 1930s,36 especially among Filipino businessmen and mainland officials. The high commissioner of the Philippines, then the colony’s top-ranking official, called for a “realistic reexamination” of the independence act.37 “If our flag comes down, the Philippines will become a bloody ground,” he warned in a radio broadcast. Quezon sent him a congratulatory note on the speech, pronouncing its “presentation of the facts” to be “unassailable.”38

  Filipinos were shocked. Had Quezon, the leader of the Nationalist Party, really just endorsed a call to reverse the independence process? Quezon realized this was a bridge too far, and he backed down the next day, claiming to have misunderstood the high commissioner’s message.

  But privately Quezon was desperate and clawing in every direction. He made secret overtures to Japan. He declared June 19 to be Loyalty Day—an over-the-top demonstration of the “wholehearted and unswerving loyalty of all the elements of our population to the United States”—in the hopes of wringing more defense funding from Congress.39 He quietly approached the British embassy about the possibility of Britain annexing the Philippines if the United States abandoned it.41

  A 1936 one-peso commemorative coin showing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Manuel Quezon gazing ahead, presumably toward independence.40 The highly unusual design, featuring two leaders rather than one and showing the U.S. eagle over the Philippine seal, expresses the complex sovereignty of the Philippine commonwealth. “Commonwealth of the Philippines” is printed on the obverse, “United States of America” on the reverse.

  At the same time, Quezon began a mad dash to create his own national defense force, funded from the commonwealth’s meager budget. To build it, he recruited one of the only men in U.S. officialdom who actually felt a strong connection to the Philippines: the army chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur.

  *

  Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur.

  A psychoanalyst could have a field day with any member of that trio, though perhaps with MacArthur most of all. He was carefree under enemy fire but lived much of his adult life under the reign of his controlling mother. He was an impeccable dresser who carried himself “as if he had a flagpole for a spine,”42 yet in the telling of his first wife he was an embarrassing sexual failure.43 Though he was regarded by many as a military genius,44 his career was punctuated by eye-popping blunders. And he spoke about himself in the third person.

  MacArthur was a distant cousin to both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and he had served briefly as an aide to Theodore Roosevelt. But MacArthur never fell in easily with those men. Where the Roosevelts and Churchills orbited the Atlantic, MacArthur arced out on a different path, as if obeying his own gravity. At the height of his fame, from 1937 to 1951, he lived entirely on the Asian side of the Pacific. Although he was frequently discussed as a candidate for president, he didn’t return to the mainland once in those fourteen years.

  If MacArthur had a home, it was the Philippines. His father, Arthur MacArthur, had been the governor during the Philippine War. It was there that Douglas did his first tour of duty, in 1903. It was where he first saw combat and first drew blood, killing a pair of what he called “desperadoes” (probably rebels,45 though possibly just criminals) on the still-unpacified island of Guimaras.

  MacArthur’s first wife, the loudly disap
pointed one, had originally been General John Pershing’s companion. Immediately after she switched from Pershing’s arm to MacArthur’s, Pershing ordered MacArthur back to the Philippines, presumably as punishment. But MacArthur flourished there. He worked for Leonard Wood, spent a summer in Baguio, and acquired a Filipina mistress—a stage and film actress whom he took back to Washington with him, stashing her in a Georgetown apartment, away from the watchful eye of his mother.

  MacArthur’s intimate ties to the Philippines put him at odds with the Europe-facing military establishment. Since the early twentieth century, war planners had contemplated the possibility of war with Japan. They generated a plan for this, Plan Orange,46 adopted first in 1924 and revised multiple times thereafter. But as officials in Washington played out the Japan scenario, they saw immediately how hard it would be to defend the United States’ Pacific outposts, particularly Guam and the Philippines. Mounting sufficient defenses would require far more money than an indifferent federal government was willing to pay—it was “not within the wildest possibility,”47 reported the commander of the army’s Philippine Department. Instead, the successive Plans Orange envisioned amassing a fleet in Hawai‘i or on the West Coast and leaving only small forces in the westernmost territories. If Japan attacked, it would get the western Pacific colonies, but then (the thinking went) the United States could stage a counterattack and eventually win them back.

  For MacArthur, the thought that the United States was planning to sacrifice the Philippines was unconscionable. As chief of staff of the army, a post he assumed in 1930, he pressed the issue. He envisioned creating a large Philippine army to hold off the enemy at the shoreline and organizing an immediate, massive relief of that army from Hawai‘i. But this was wild optimism, especially in an era marked by severe budgetary constraints and widespread antimilitarism. The director of the War Plans Division regarded MacArthur’s proposal as “literally an act of madness.”48

  Part of the problem was the apathy toward the colonies. Even Brigadier General Hugh Drum, one of MacArthur’s few allies in the cause of territorial defense, openly conceded that “both the Philippines and Hawaii might be lost to us without materially affecting the safety of the continental United States.”49 Public opinion polls suggested that few mainlanders supported a military defense of anything west of Hawai‘i. And when Fortune in 1940 asked its readers which “countries” the United States should use its military to protect,50 only a slight majority (55 percent) favored defending Hawai‘i itself,51 far fewer than the number who would defend Canada (74 percent).

  Officials in Hawai‘i protested vigorously to Fortune that Hawai‘i was not a “country.”52 It was “an integral part of the United States.”

  Another part of the problem was that the government simply didn’t trust its own subjects. A full defense of the Pacific would require arming the populations of Hawai‘i, American Samoa, Guam, the Philippines, and Alaska. Yet war planners hesitated to do that; they seemed as concerned with defending the United States against those colonized peoples as defending it with them.53 The early plans for Hawai‘i envisioned deporting or interning the large ethnic Japanese population—a group that had climbed to well over a third of the territory’s population by the 1920s. In the Philippines, the army’s planners spun out scenarios in which U.S. forces would have to fight Filipino uprisings.

  Perhaps they were right to fear colonized peoples. The 1930s, which had unleashed a violent Puerto Rican independence movement, also stirred up turmoil in the Pacific colonies. The late thirties saw a string of militant and racially charged strikes in Hawai‘i, spreading from the ports to the fields. In the Philippines, a low rumble of rural insurgency erupted in the “Sakdal rebellion” in 1935.54 Thousands of partially armed peasants and workers, impatient with Quezon’s temporizing, seized municipal buildings and demanded immediate independence. Their leader wanted them to kidnap the governor-general, raid armories, and storm the capital.

  Filipino police and soldiers suppressed the Sakdal rebellion, killing fifty-nine rebels and dispersing the rest before it got that far.55 But the army’s planners eyed with suspicion even those Filipinos in uniform. And again, they had reason. In 1924, hundreds of Filipino soldiers in the U.S. Army had staged a mutiny over their unequal pay compared with white soldiers. MacArthur himself had overseen the court-martial,56 in which more than two hundred mutineers received sentences of five to twenty years.

  Colonial defense, in other words, was a dicey business. But MacArthur’s faith did not waver. On Quezon’s invitation, MacArthur—still the army chief of staff—left Washington for the Philippines to undertake what he regarded as “an eleventh-hour struggle to build up enough force to repel an enemy.”57

  *

  Douglas MacArthur dragged along his favorite aide, Dwight Eisenhower. Whereas MacArthur regarded Philippine work as a calling, Eisenhower saw it as “just another job.” He also believed it to be a “hopeless venture,”58 given Manila’s lack of resources and Washington’s lack of interest.

  One of Eisenhower’s ideas was to secure leftover rifles from the U.S. Army at a nominal cost. These weren’t rifles the army needed. They were obsolete World War I–era Enfield models, and they didn’t work well. Still, Washington hesitated. The chief of the War Plans Division stood against the proposal: he worried that armed Filipinos might rise up against the United States.59 And would Japan regard the militarization of the Philippines as provocation? Eisenhower complained in his diary about the lack of “basic appreciation in the War Department of the local defense problem.”60 Eventually the army sold the rifles in cautious batches, some first, then more later if it went well. And it charged more than twice what Eisenhower had expected.

  While Eisenhower wrestled with the bookkeeping, MacArthur settled in. He’d met his second wife, Jean, on the trip over. His only son, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in Manila, with Manuel Quezon as the godfather. MacArthur took up residence in the penthouse of the Parsons-designed Manila Hotel. He became a fixture of Manila society, even receiving a birthday card from his father’s old nemesis,61 Emilio Aguinaldo.

  By all appearances, MacArthur intended to stay the course. When the War Department, nervous that his buildup of Philippine defenses might antagonize Japan, recalled MacArthur to the mainland in 1937, he took the extraordinary step of resigning from the army. It was an enormous sacrifice, given his long service (and his father’s) to the army, but it allowed him to remain Quezon’s military adviser. If MacArthur couldn’t be a U.S. general in the Philippines, he would be the field marshal (a grandiose title of his own choosing) of the army of the Philippine Commonwealth.

  Eisenhower was apoplectic. “General, you have been a four-star general … This is a proud thing. There’s only been a few who had it.62 Why in the hell do you want a banana country giving you a field-marshalship?”

  MacArthur was undeterred. He’d had a special uniform designed: a white sharkskin suit,63 black trousers, four stars on his shoulder, red ribbon at his lapel, and a gold-braided cap. He carried a gold baton.

  Ostensibly, the pomp was meant to buck up Philippine morale. But perhaps it was to boost MacArthur’s spirits, too. As the years went on, his hope of raising a Philippine reserve army looked increasingly delusional. The gun shortage was only the start of the problems. What little ammunition got shipped to the islands often arrived badly deteriorated, and the recruits didn’t have enough of it to train with.

  MacArthur asked Washington for help: $50 per Filipino trainee.64 It wasn’t an absurd request, given that the National Guard received a $220-per-traineee subsidy. Yet this one, too, was turned down.

  MacArthur understood the Philippines to be “an integral part of the United States,”65 as deserving of defense as New York. But he had to admit by 1940 that the military forces stationed there were “entirely inadequate for purposes of foreign defense and are little more than token symbols of the sovereignty of the United States.”

  In May 1941, a very frustrated field marshal cabled
Washington to say he was coming home.

  *

  Ernest Gruening, meanwhile, faced his own ordeal. Despite the large ambit of his job—the supervisor of all the colonies—he didn’t have much power. His office was small and could do little more than lobby on behalf of the colonies. Gruening spent most of his time on Puerto Rico, where he held a separate appointment as head of the New Deal administration there.

  Though he lacked power, Gruening still managed to acquire a rival, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Their politics didn’t differ much, but the pair nevertheless clashed with all the passion and pointlessness of two apparatchiks in the Soviet bureaucracy. Like any good Kremlin rivalry, it ended with exile in Siberia. Or, in this case, with Ernest Gruening being removed from Washington and sent to Alaska in 1939, where he was to be the colonial governor.

  From his new perch in Anchorage, Gruening saw the peril that the Pacific territories faced. Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands stretched out toward Japan, reducing the Pacific Ocean “to the width of a ferry boat channel,” as one journalist put it.66 When Alaska had been annexed, in 1867, this had been a promising feature: the islands were stepping-stones to Asia. Now, however, it seemed more likely that the foot traffic would go in the other direction, that Alaska would be the point of entry for a Japanese invasion of North America.