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April 1 - October 10, 2023
Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands—those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No.
“It is one thing to admit scattered communities of white, or nearly white, men into the rights of citizenship,” one writer put it, “but quite a different matter to act in the same way with a closely packed and numerous brown people.”
And, like Plessy, the Insular Cases were about race. The main majority decision contained warnings about including “savages” and “alien races” within the constitutional fold. Doing so, one of the justices concurred, would “wreck our institutions,” perhaps leading the “whole structure of the government” to be “overthrown.”
The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.
The significance of the Insular Cases goes beyond the law. In distinguishing between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” parts of the United States, these cases enshrined the notion that some places in the country weren’t truly part of the country. Some territories—namely, the ones filling up with white settlers—could hope for statehood. Others would hang, as the chief justice put it, like a “disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”
Today, around four million people live in those unincorporated territories—people who have no representation in Congress, who cannot vote for president, and whose rights and citizenship remain a gift from Washington. They could seek statehood, as indeed a large number in Puerto Rico would like to do. But statehood is, like so many other things, at the sole discretion of Congress—a legislative body in which neither Puerto Ricans nor other colonial subjects have a vote.
Filipinos couldn’t vote in that election, of course. But perhaps they could sway its outcome in other ways. McKinley was running again, this time with Roosevelt as his vice president, so there was little help to be got from the Republicans. Aguinaldo was more interested in McKinley’s Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who had run in 1896 and was also running again. Bryan sought to set the Philippines free.
Twain was not just an anti-imperialist, he was the most famous anti-imperialist in the country. He became the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York and chronicled the expanding war with withering sarcasm. “There must be two Americas,” he mused. “One that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
For that second America, Twain proposed adding a few words to the Declaration of Independence: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.”
When William Howard Taft, then the colony’s chief lawmaker, called Filipinos “our little brown brothers,” the soldiers scoffed. A song they sang, frequently and loudly, captured their view: I’m only a common Soldier-man in the blasted Philippines; They say I’ve got Brown Brothers here, but I dunno what it means. I like the word Fraternity, but still I draw the line; He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine.
Beriberi, it should be noted, is an extremely hard disease to contract. To get it as an adult, you have to eat a profoundly restricted diet, such as milled rice and virtually nothing else, for months. But Filipinos, separated from their farms and able to purchase only the cheapest food, suffered from it in large numbers, probably in the tens of thousands. It struck babies the hardest. Although infantile beriberi was unknown to doctors at the time (thus unrecorded as a diagnosis), it is doubtless the reason why Manila during the war had the world’s highest recorded infant mortality rate.
In the end, Pershing lost fifteen men and guessed he had killed some two hundred to three hundred Moros, including women and children. Historians’ estimates range from two hundred to more than five hundred.
Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.
Whereas British children were made to examine the world map, U.S. children venerated the national flag, which had a star for each state but no symbol for territories.
They lay, as Wilson put it, “outside the charmed circle of our own national life.”
Wilson didn’t think of nonwhites as subhuman, as some around him did. But he regarded many of them as “children,” requiring “training” before they could rule themselves.
Other reviewers shared Turner’s admiration for Wilson’s history, yet they couldn’t help but notice the author’s fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose mission, in Wilson’s words, was “to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.” Wilson scolded Klan members for being hotheaded, yet he defended their motives. They were acting, he wrote, out of “the mere instinct of self-preservation.”
The Birth of a Nation became the country’s most popular film. The Klan, which by 1915 had become defunct, was relaunched. Its recruiters used the film to draw in millions of members. Five months later, Wilson virtually reenacted the plot of The Birth of a Nation by sending the marines to the black republic of Haiti to wrest control from the “unstable” government. The occupation lasted through the rest of Wilson’s presidency—and didn’t end until 1934.
The year 1919 was, for the colonies, when the switch was thrown, when nationalist movements abandoned polite petitioning. It was the year when Gandhi gave up his hope that India might be an equal partner within the British confederation and set his sights on independence. It was the year when everything seemed to spin out of control for the British in India: Gandhi’s nonviolence campaigns, government repression (the “Amritsar Massacre”), an invasion by Afghanistan, and an uprising of Indian Muslims that acquired all-India proportions.
And Albizu? Pedro Albizu Campos would become the most dangerous domestic anti-imperialist the United States would ever face.
“Here is a stronger and more enduring argument as to the capacities of the Filipino race than any that the most enthusiastic of the American friends of the Filipinos can formulate,” a newspaper wrote. “The pessimists who said that Filipinos were not capable of doing anything have not a leg to stand on.”
Such were the joys of empire. The colonies were, for men like Burnham, playgrounds, places to carry out ideas without worrying about the counterforces that encumbered action at home. Mainlanders could confiscate land, redirect taxes, and waste workers’ lives to build paradises in the mountains.
Now Ashford had a more immediate concern: the refugees. He eyed their “flabby flesh and ghastly pallor” with alarm. His wife, María, explained that what he was seeing was not just the work of the hurricane, but the work of centuries. This was just what peasants looked like, she explained. They are weak and anemic. They die.
Peasants didn’t just look like that. They weren’t simply malnourished because they were oppressed. Nearly all—Ashford would later estimate nine in ten rural Puerto Ricans—were suffering badly from an intestinal parasite.
The physicians supplied medicine and spoke to their patients about hygiene, explaining the importance of shoes and latrines. In 1905 the Puerto Rican legislature funded a national program, again under the supervision of Ashford and Gutiérrez. By 1910, they estimated that nearly 30 percent of the population had been treated, for less than a dollar per patient.
“What on earth is that?” he asked—he hadn’t seen anyone like that in Iowa. Page explained that this was a poor white, an all-too-familiar type in the South. Such men were called “dirt eaters.”
Again, the veil lifted. Is that where the “lazy white Southerner” stereotype came from? Is that why Southern whites looked funny—lanky, pale, and slack?
To this day, many Puerto Ricans are convinced that Rhoads was guilty and that the government covered up his crimes.
The governor insisted that the Nationalists had fired first. But an FBI agent reported privately to J. Edgar Hoover that it was a “common fact” that the police were “almost 100 percent to blame.” Indeed, an independent investigation, headed by the general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out glaring holes in the government’s story. It concluded that the affair was not an unfortunate mishap, but rather a “massacre.”
Jay Katz, the Yale bioethicist who made the 2003 study of the Rhoads affair, also took part in a review of the chemical warfare tests. Those experiments, he concluded, ran on the principle of the “cheap availability of human beings,” with little thought given to how to minimize harm. The soldiers were “manipulated, exploited, and betrayed.” What happened, in his judgment, was “unconscionable.”
Today, Cornelius Rhoads lives in Puerto Rican memory as a villain. On the mainland, however, he’s been remembered differently: as a pioneer of chemotherapy.
Indeed, more than remembered, he has been honored. Starting in 1980, with money from an anonymous donor, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) gave the prestigious Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award annually to the young investigator who showed the most promise in cancer research. Rhoads recipients have gone on to be field leaders; one was a Nobel laureate. But so complete was the informational segregation between Puerto Rico and the mainland that the prize was given for twenty-three years before anyone objected. When a biologist from the University of Puerto Rico lodged a
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Colonial subjects complained, of course, but few mainlanders listened. As one Filipino Harvard graduate noted in 1926, “It has been impossible to induce the American people to take more than a passing interest in the conduct of Philippine affairs.”
“War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
An anthropologist working among the First Nations of Canada in the region decades later found that any discussion of family histories inevitably gave rise to talk of relatives who had “died in ’42.”
“Are we foreigners out here?” an Alaskan asked. “Aren’t we Americans, too?”
Alaska was thus the “quietest war theater,” or the “hidden front,” as journalists called it. Today it is the forgotten war. Many people are surprised to learn that the Japanese even came near Alaska. They are also surprised to learn of the Aleut internment.
In 1988 Congress apologized for the “fundamental injustice” of this and awarded each internee $20,000—a rare instance of the government paying reparations.
Because Gruening and his colleagues had resisted the notion of Aleut internment, there were no plans in place. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were shoved hastily onto ships (“while eating breakfast,” an officer on Atka recalled—“the eggs were still on the table”) and dropped off in unfamiliar Southeast Alaska. They found this new environment unsettling. By all accounts, the large stands of trees unnerved them. “Feels funny,” the chief of the Atka tribe noted with alarm. “No room to walk.” The trees, though, were the least of the Aleuts’ problems. Their new “homes” were whatever spaces the navy
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“no place for a living creature,”
And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.
The story of internment in the Greater United States does not end with Hawaiian martial law or the Aleuts’ relocation. Though the episode is barely known, the United States interned Japanese in the Philippines, too.
Osawa and his fellow internees are never mentioned in U.S. accounts of Japanese internment. That’s partly because of the general tendency to exclude the colonies from U.S. history, though it surely also has to do with the short-lived nature of the affair.
Colonized subjects had cause for complaint against the United States—internees especially so. It wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that some might side with Japan during the war, as Osawa did. Certainly that fear pervaded the minds of colonial officials throughout the Pacific empire.
Alaska Natives endured a harsh Jim Crow system: separate seating in theaters, segregated schools, and NO NATIVES ALLOWED signs on hotels and restaurants. Gruening confessed that he “did not know what resentment might lurk behind their smiling faces.” Nor did the mainland soldiers, who worried that Alaska Natives, if armed, might turn their guns against the army.
Manuel Quezon vibrated with anger. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror,” he exclaimed. “How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”
In a despondent moment, Romulo confessed to being “shocked and horrified” by mainland indifference to the Philippines. Washington seemed to him to be “crowded with little Neros, each fiddling away blithely” while the empire burned.
In the late 1930s Romulo had toured Asia. Everywhere he went, he found “a sense of betrayal at white hands.”
In British-owned Burma, the people he met seemed positively eager for a Japanese invasion. Weren’t they worried about how the Japanese would treat them? Romulo asked. “No change could be for the worse,” they replied.
Yet white powers would never allow Asian independence, the Japanese insisted. It had to be seized. Emperor Hirohito claimed that the war’s origins lay “in the past, in the peace treaty after World War I,” when Woodrow Wilson had blocked Japan’s attempt to introduce racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. With the most idealistic of the Allies unwilling to concede even the principle that all races deserved the same consideration, what were the chances that Asians would ever be accepted as equals?
