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If you lived in the United States on the eve of World War II, in other words, you were more likely to be colonized than black,
the histories of African Americans and colonized peoples are tightly connected (and sometimes overlapping, as for the Afro-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands). The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery engulfed the territories, too.
Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of
the rights of full citizens, called “nigger,” subjected to dangerous medical experiments, and used...
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They would have seen a country whose largest minority was Asian,
Though celebrated abroad, he wasn’t much revered at home during his lifetime.
Its founders had wrested liberty from an oppressive empire—turning subjects into citizens and colonies into states—and were eager to push their republican form of government westward across the continent, from sea to shining sea.
“What Fritz has gained in these last eight years, that—and even more—I have lost, and what is left of me fills with the deepest dissatisfaction.”
Clara Immerwahr.
Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” he explained, “because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”
appurtenant,
Navassa case had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, the new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.
a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.
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
Rudyard Kipling. Both are cherished to this day as authors who wrote in everyday language about life in the backcountry.
Kipling,
Kim (1901), about a young white boy and an older Asian man on an odyssey through colonial India.
But as he watched the Philippine conflict unfold, Twain could no longer toe the line.
“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.”
Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism.
The imperial policy was affirmed, and it would never arise as a serious electoral issue again.
gugu, a word that historians think was the etymological precursor of the epithet gook, which featured so prominently in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
nigger. They sang it proudly, as in the extremely-hard-to-misinterpret ballad “I Don’t Like a Nigger Nohow.” The black soldiers in the Philippines heard this and winced.
David Fagen of the 24th Infantry accepted a commission in Aguinaldo’s army.
troops in the Second World War
“G.I. Joes”—
those who fought in the P...
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“hik...
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U.S. inability to distinguish friend from foe was a serious disadvantage.
“blind giant”—“powerful enough to destroy the enemy, but unable to find him.”
reconcentration was the very tactic that Spain had used against the Cubans, the one that had provoked the United States to “liberate” Cuba in the first place.
members of the colony’s elite formed the Federalist Party, which, as its name suggests, sought inclusion within the United States and eventual statehood.
March 1901: the capture of Aguinaldo.
Not only did he surrender, he took an oath of allegiance to the United States.
George Frisbie Hoar, the leading anti-imperialist in Congress, shook his head. “We crushed the only republic in Asia.”
The Philippine archipelago contains more than seven thousand islands.
Samar, the third-largest island in the archipelago,
the civilians resisted.
They killed forty-five soldiers in a single day. The Balangiga Massacre,
Major Glenn was tried for torture. General Smith, having ordered a massacre, also faced trial,
Before Dewey ever set eyes on the lights of Manila Bay, the horsemen of the apocalypse were already stalking the Philippines.
cholera, malaria,
dysentery, beriberi, rinderpest, tuberculosis, smallpox, and bubonic plague. “Everything that could possibly happen to a country had happened or was happening,” Nellie Taft remembered.
People moved, as they never had before, in and out of malaria zones, carrying the infection in their bloodstreams.
The most careful study, made by the historian Ken De Bevoise, found that in the years 1899–1903, about 775,000 Filipinos died because of the war.
claimed more lives than the Civil War.
“the war has been brought to an end on six different occasions since.” “A bad thing cannot be killed too often,”
“Moroland”—the islands of Mindanao, Palawan, and Basilan
the Sulu Archipelago—
Battle of Bayan
