How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  But of course, the war had made a shambles of all that. Could the commonwealth government protect life and property? Clearly not, since it had been forced into exile, where it watched from afar as more than a million lives and more than 10 percent of the country’s buildings were lost. Could it take over the bonds? Absolutely not.41 The government, banks, and insurance companies were insolvent, inflation ran rampant, and the high commissioner, Paul McNutt, warned of a looming “food crisis.”42 Furthermore, most of the leading politicians had collaborated with Japan, and there were thousands of armed peasants calling for their heads. Prospects for smooth regime change were inauspicious, to say the very least.

  In fact, top officials seriously contemplated retaining the Philippines. The U.S. National Archives contains three sets of orders—all awaiting only the president’s signature—to dissolve the commonwealth government. Had any been signed, it’s hard to imagine that independence would have gone through, as the chief requirement for independence was that the Philippines show itself capable of self-government.

  The first order, drafted with the approval of the Departments of State, War, Navy, and Interior, would have declared martial law and placed the Philippines under the U.S. Army for failing to “provide adequately for its own preservation or maintenance.”43 The second, prepared by the Department of the Interior, dealt with a more obscure problem, “the death or capture of the President of the Philippines.”44 President Quezon had died in 1944 while in exile, when there was no way to run new elections. What if something happened to his vice president and successor, Sergio Osmeña? The order proposed to resolve the constitutional crisis by dissolving the government.

  The most intriguing order, drafted right before the sack of Manila, came from the high commissioner’s office. It would have liquidated the government for its failure to find any “acceptable or legitimate” successor in the postwar Philippines.45 In the mind of the official who drafted the order, this was not a hypothetical scenario. The easy collaboration of the Philippine elite with the Japanese regime had already shown the Philippines unable to establish a legitimate postcolonial government. “There is little doubt,”46 he warned, “that the United States will be asked on or before July 4, 1946, to grant independence to a Philippine republic which will be in the control of those who served the enemy.”

  Two weeks after the army mutiny had set off in Manila in January 1946, High Commissioner McNutt sent Truman a desperate cable. “This situation here is critical,”47 he pleaded. The Philippines had been ravaged by war, it was split between “loyalist and enemy collaborators,” and “several sizeable well-armed dissident groups” were “still at large.” McNutt asked if it was “humanly possible” for Filipinos to cope with independence amid all this.

  This was a serious question, posed by the highest-ranking Philippine official. And yet the White House didn’t waver: independence was not up for debate.

  Why not? Certainly the reasons that had motivated the mainland drive for independence in the thirties had lost their relevance. The Depression was over, and there was little chance that the war-mangled colony would swamp the mainland market with its produce. And with Japan subdued, the Philippines was no longer a military liability. Just the opposite. If anything, military planners were adamant about holding their position in the Philippines, which would allow them to project force into Asia.

  Yet if old reasons no longer held sway, new ones had arisen. Policymakers in the 1930s hadn’t cared what the Indonesians, Indians, or Indochinese thought about Philippine politics. But now Asia was off the leash, and Washington was searching for its grip. Now it mattered. Dropping the badly bruised Philippines in exchange for goodwill within the tumultuous decolonizing world wasn’t a hard choice.

  Even High Commissioner McNutt could see this. “All Asia,48 the billion-peopled Orient, will be watching us in the Philippines,” he remarked. The promise of independence had “attracted the wonder and respect of the colonial peoples of the Far East.”49 To renege on that promise, McNutt conceded, would be “to betray Americanism as a byword in this great part of the world.”

  And so, rather than trying to forcibly retain its colony, as its European counterparts had done, the United States rushed it out the door. “This is the first instance in history where a colony of a sovereign nation has been voluntarily given complete independence,”50 Truman bragged (somewhat stretching the facts). “Its significance will have world-wide effect.”

  That left the question of the collaborators. FDR, before he died, had insisted that those who served the Japanese during the war be removed from authority. But who had “served” and who hadn’t could be a murky question. The mists of uncertainty swirled with a special thickness around Manuel Roxas, a former aide to MacArthur (it was Roxas who had signed over the $500,000 check that MacArthur illegally accepted from the Philippine government before leaving Corregidor). During the war, Roxas had served in the cabinet of the Japanese-backed government. He was “undoubtedly seriously involved” with the Japanese,51 reported the U.S. consul general, but he had “played safe by helping both sides.”

  That was enough for MacArthur. “Roxas is no collaborationist,”52 he declared, insisting (though providing no evidence) that Roxas had been “one of the prime factors in the guerrilla movement.”

  Acting swiftly, MacArthur exonerated Roxas, restored him to his former rank in the U.S. Army, and gave him full back pay for the time he was “captured” by the Japanese. MacArthur also reconvened the Philippine Assembly, even though many of its members had served the enemy. Predictably, they voted Roxas in as president of the senate, understanding that he would seek amnesty for collaborators. Which he did.

  “Not a single senator can be justly accused of collaboration!” Roxas declared in the senate,53 to great applause.

  Roxas’s government turned immediately on the guerrillas.54 Hukbalahap leaders were arrested for crimes ostensibly committed during the war. On one occasion, 109 guerrillas were surrounded by governmental forces, disarmed, forced to dig a mass grave, and shot.

  The next year, with the support of some of the most powerful men in Philippine society, Roxas was elected president of the independent Philippines. His vice president was Elpidio Quirino, the politician whose family had been killed during the U.S. reconquest.

  “We are a troubled people,”55 Roxas admitted in his speech on July 4, 1946. With the cities in ruins and violence brewing in the countryside, that was impossible to deny. But there was joy, too. A specially sewn U.S. flag,56 with one star stitched in each of the Philippines’ forty-eight provinces, was ceremoniously lowered. Up the same cord rose the Philippine flag, to deafening applause.

  MacArthur turned to Carlos Romulo. “Carlos,” he said, “America has buried imperialism here today.”57

  *

  It was a moment worth marking. When Filipinos had declared independence in 1898, the United States had fought a bitter, fourteen-year war against them. Generations of politicians had insisted, with some wavering during the Wilson years, that Filipinos were unfit for self-governance. Yet now, with no law or army forcing it to do so, the United States was letting its largest colony go. And it was doing this, remarkably, so as not to look bad in the eyes of Asians.

  What is more, it didn’t stop. The U.S. Virgin Islands received its first black governor in 1946 and its first native governor in 1950. Guamanians won citizenship and a civil government in 1950, after decades of advocacy. American Samoans remained “nationals” rather than citizens, but they, too, saw naval rule replaced with government by civilians, in 1951.

  Larger changes were afoot in Hawai‘i and Alaska.58 As “incorporated” territories, they had been slated—in a nonbinding way—for statehood. But that projected future had been based on the expectation of white settlement, and the white settlers had never arrived in the expected numbers. By the end of World War II, Alaska remained about half Native and half white. In Hawai‘i, whites were an outright minority. Many of the territory’s inhabitants,
because they had come from Japan, weren’t even eligible for naturalized citizenship.

  Countenancing Philippine independence had required U.S. leaders to let go of the racist fear that Filipinos couldn’t govern themselves. Ending the colonial status of Hawai‘i and Alaska required overcoming racism of a different sort. To accept Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, mainland politicians would have to reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control. In 1898 the fear of nonwhite states had motivated the resistance to empire. Decades later, in a country governed by Jim Crow, it was still present. The former president of Columbia University and Nobel laureate Nicholas Murray Butler warned that admitting Hawai‘i and Alaska to the union would “mark the beginning of the end of the United States as we have known it.”59

  Hawai‘i, well-known for its mixing of Native, Asian, and European strains, seemed particularly threatening. “We do not want those people to help govern the country,”60 a Massachusetts newspaper put it baldly. “When future issues arise in the United States Senate, we do not want a situation where vital decisions may depend upon two half-breed senators.”

  Such racism had long held Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood at bay, but global decolonization changed things. “Can America lead the world—effectively—toward its principle of government by consent of the governed,61 when it retains its own obsolete colonialism in Alaska and Hawaii?” Ernest Gruening asked. Or, as he asked privately, “How can we fervently plead for self-determination etc.62 for Indonesia and every other G-string people when we deny the most elementary expression of self government to our own?”

  As the former director of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, Gruening knew what a sore point this was, and he pressed on it hard. He urged Alaskans to “shout about ‘colonialism’ at the top of their lungs”63 and recommended “Boston tea party tactics” for Hawai‘i.64 He drafted a book with the distinctly unsubtle title Alaska Is a Colony.65 He threatened frequently to air colonial matters before the United Nations. That wasn’t a toothless threat. To their bottomless embarrassment, U.S. officials were obliged to submit regular reports to the United Nations on the “non-self-governing territories” of Alaska and Hawai‘i.

  Truman, having already agreed to Philippine independence and the hollowing out of the army, saw which way the winds were blowing. “These are troubled times,”66 he wrote. “I know of few better ways in which we can demonstrate to the world our deep faith in democracy and the principles of self-government than by admitting Alaska and Hawaii to the Union.”

  From 1948 on, Truman actively pursued that end, conscious of the “tremendous psychological influence” that converting those territories to states would have on “the hearts and minds of the people of Asia and the Pacific islands.”67

  The problem was that statehood, unlike other concessions to decolonization, required Congress’s assent. And here Truman came up against a hard fact. In party politics, the two territories were balanced, it being widely assumed that Hawai‘i would be a Republican state and Alaska a Democratic one (exactly wrong, it turned out). But their admission would quite obviously unbalance national politics on another axis. Whatever the party allegiances of these new states, their racial composition would put them firmly in the civil rights camp. Southern Democrats in the Senate, nervous about what these states would do to Jim Crow, threatened to filibuster.

  Thus opened a front in the war for civil rights that rarely gets mentioned. Racial liberals supported statehood, pointing to Hawai‘i especially as proof that integration worked. The champions of Jim Crow, meanwhile, replayed the greatest hits of 1900, rallying the old imperialist rhetoric in defense of their precarious position. Arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, one of the longest-serving congressmen in the country’s history, lectured his colleagues on the “impassible difference” between Western civilization and Eastern ways.68 “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he admonished, quoting Kipling.

  Southern opposition stymied Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood through the forties and fifties, but it could not hold out forever. Well-known among the civil rights movement’s triumphs are the desegregation of schools won in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the prohibition of racial discrimination at the polls secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less touted in the textbooks are the admission of Alaska and Hawai‘i as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959. But those, too, were serious blows against racism. For the first time, the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood.

  Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a Hawaiian lei on his historic march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965. King had visited Hawai‘i, which he regarded as a paragon of racial harmony.

  For racists, this spelled catastrophe—“the beginning of the end of the United States as we have known it,” as Nicholas Murray Butler had put it. In a way, Butler’s prediction turned out to be right. Alaska sent to the Senate Ernest Gruening, who had made a decades-long career of opposing racism and imperialism. In 1964 Gruening achieved national fame as one of only two congressmen—out of 506 voting—to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the direct U.S. entry into the Vietnam War.

  Hawai‘i, for its part, immediately elected nonwhite congressmen: Hiram Fong to the Senate and Daniel Inouye, veteran of the fabled 442nd Infantry Regiment, to the House. Fong was the first Chinese American to serve in the Senate, Inouye the first Japanese American to serve in Congress. Inouye held congressional office in an unbroken stretch from Hawaiian statehood in 1959 until his death in 2012, surpassing even Strom Thurmond’s forty-seven-year record of longevity. By the time he died, Inouye was president pro tempore of the Senate, which put him third in the line of succession to the presidency.

  Fong and Inouye proved to be, just as white supremacists feared, champions of civil rights. And had the segregationists gazed farther into the future, they would have been still more troubled by something else taking place in Hawai‘i at the time.

  Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of statehood. The next year, 1960, a Kenyan student met a Kansan one in the Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The two married—an interracial marriage illegal in two dozen states at the time—and had a son, who would grow up partly in Hawai‘i, partly in Indonesia. In typical Hawaiian fashion, his profoundly multiracial extended family would grow by marriage to incorporate African American, British, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Chinese elements. And in 2009 that son, Barack Obama, would become the first black president of the United States.

  15

  NOBODY KNOWS IN AMERICA, PUERTO RICO’S IN AMERICA

  In 1936 a twenty-four-year-old Wenzell Brown made his way from New York to Ponce, Puerto Rico. Brown would later make a name for himself as an author of pulp fiction, writing such ageless classics as Teen-Age Mafia, Prison Girl, and The Murder Kick. But for the moment he was just a young schoolteacher in a strange, new place.

  Brown didn’t speak a word of Spanish,1 nor did he know anything about the island. In fact, he couldn’t remember Puerto Rico being mentioned once during his years in high school and college. When he’d applied for his teaching post, he had confused Puerto Rico for Costa Rica and so believed that he was going abroad.

  It was a quick education. Ponce was Pedro Albizu Campos’s hometown, and Brown saw Albizu’s Liberation Army march regularly through its streets. He was there for the Ponce Massacre, when, as he put it, “complete madness descended upon the place” and the police went “berserk,”2 shooting more than 150 civilians. He saw poverty, too. “One cannot look at the slums of any Puerto Rican town without feeling that there has been grievous neglect and an obligation unfulfilled,” Brown wrote.

  Yet what struck him most was the bitterness. Brown recorded with alarm his students’ anger as he sought to teach them English. He noted how, years after the publication of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads’s letter (which had described physicians delighting in the “abuse and torture” of their p
atients), many Puerto Ricans still refused to enter governmental hospitals. They feared that mainland doctors were plotting to kill them.3

  Brown left the island in 1939 but returned in 1945 and found things no better. The war had brought military investment to Puerto Rico, but it had also brought soldiers, censorship, the threat of martial law, shipping shortages, and frequent unrest. Brown perceived an “intense, fanatical nationalism” in the air.4 The island was, he warned his fellow mainlanders, “dynamite on our doorstep.”

  *

  Wenzell Brown wasn’t the only one to recognize Puerto Rico’s incendiary potential. The celebrated journalist John Gunther gasped when he saw the island’s crowded slums. The sight offered a “paralyzing jolt to anyone who believes in American standards of progress and civilization,”5 he wrote. Life magazine ran an exposé of the “cesspool of Puerto Rico” in 1943 and concluded that the colony was an “unsolvable problem.”6

  “El Fanguito,” a notorious slum in San Juan, 1941. Such slums, wrote the governor at the time, “would have revolted a Hottentot.”7

  Technically, it was Washington’s unsolvable problem. Puerto Rican affairs were the remit of the colonial office Ernest Gruening had established, the Division of Territories and Island Possessions. But that agency was—as was typical of U.S. imperial endeavors—laughably small. Though responsible for virtually all the United States’ empire, it had a skeleton crew for a staff. In 1949 it had only ten employees above the level of secretary.8

  With Washington offering little direction, responsibility fell to the appointed governor in San Juan. Yet, though governors held a great deal of formal power—they could, for example, veto laws—they struggled to use it effectively. Most knew too little and left too quickly to master Puerto Rican politics. FDR’s administration alone saw seven governors come and go, not counting three interim appointments.