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Applying the concept of the nature state to the United States is inherently difficult. Getting in the way is the leathery notion of American exceptionalism, in which the United States is considered outside the supposed normal path of historical development. Under this influential idea, the United States is considered a prototype of civil society, while ‘Europe’ is characterized as dominated by big states. In exceptionalist thought, the United States is also considered a republic, not an empire, a dichotomy that complicates discussion of any colonial nature-state project. To work one’s way through this ideological thicket, great attention has to be paid to the specific articulation of American power. This is not to say that the United States lacked a state apparatus at any time in its history as a nation, but that the composition of the actually existing ‘state’ has changed over time. In the nineteenth century, federal power was limited, though the individual state and local authorities had a disproportionate role in both regulation of the economy and promotion of public welfare. Nevertheless, as the century wore on the institutions of the ‘state’, particularly the federal state, focused increasingly upon the harnessing, rationalization and disposition of natural resources, particularly land, to the private sector. Within political economy, their chief function was seen as enabling capitalism to grow boundlessly. Abundant natural resources have played a key role in underpinning this political economy.1
On the basis of the historical record, many Americans felt by the end of the nineteenth century that capitalism’s further growth was far from assured. One reason was the expected future diminution in the availability of natural resources. As a result, reformers, scientists, politicians and members of the wider public worked to develop conservation organizations and policies that would regulate the exploitation of natural resources, making more efficient use of them to prolong supplies. Since the largest landowner in the American west was the federal government, there was still ample opportunity to use the federal state to ensure the future survival of the republic, albeit in a modernized form that ran counter to the certainties of American exceptionalism. But that required precisely the development of a state apparatus in which the regulation of natural resources was key. Arguably the United States became a nature state in ways not completely dissimilar to what happened in Germany, or to some extent also in some other European countries over water and timber policies as well as broader issues of nature conservation.2 Whether that be true or not requires a comparative treatment almost entirely absent in the current literature. Nonetheless, ‘nature’ understood as the physical resources available to the human race probably played a more important part in the reconfiguration of the US state in the early twentieth century than in practically any other country. Only since 1941 has the warfare state intruded dramatically upon the nature state for greater prominence in the configuration of the American polity and power.
This is not the way American historians have cast the issues of conservation. They have not recognized the pivotal role of nature conservation in the so-called Progressive Era, c.1898–1917, and have typically used the language not of ‘state’ but ‘nation’. They have certainly emphasized the pioneering role of national park legislation in creating what could be termed a nature state. This national park concept has been described as ‘America’s best idea’, and, so the mythology goes, was exported to the remainder of the world.3 The national park movement spurred an important bureaucratization process popularizing the idea of the United States as ‘nature’s nation’.4 The latter term has been used in US historiography but not problematized as an analytical category grounded in the peculiar development of a state rather than a transcendent idea embodying American nationalism.5 That this outcome was achieved with the National Park Service (1916), a US government bureaucracy, and through the exercise of political power and legal force to remove lands from commercial use or indigenous occupation for several decades before that, shows that a nature state within the United States both existed and yet was not purely utilitarian in emphasis. The national parks operated within the confines of the wider conservation of natural resources. To succeed politically, however, the movement for national parks had to embody ideas of efficiency and utility through promotion of both tourism and human physical wellbeing more than just an intrinsic appreciation of nature. 6
With the establishment of the National Park Service, the project of identifying and protecting a unique American nature became thoroughly institutionalized in the nation-state apparatus. Almost simultaneously, during the so-called Progressive Era from around 1900 to US entry into the First World War, the American nation-state itself was shaped in a global engagement with the wider world of ‘high’ or ‘Victorian’ imperialism. Part of this broader engagement concerned the appropriation of nature in the colonies that the United States acquired after the Spanish–American War of 1898. The two themes, empire and nation-state building through regulation of the natural world, have rarely, if ever, been brought into the same frame within the historiography.
As already noted, the United States itself was in the process of creating a nature state in which the conservation of natural resources, particularly water and forests, would occur under national government purview. The means was the creation of a federal bureaucracy. The most prominent example was the Forest Service, which became, between 1898 and 1909, a major instrument of nature-state management. Its numbers rose dramatically from just 10 to 2,500 employees over that period, and the acreage covered jumped by nearly 400 per cent in the same period, to reach almost 200 million acres by 1910. The Forest Service was self-consciously a national project from the point of view of its champions, led by Gifford Pinchot, the Chief Forester of the United States (1898–1910) and main adviser on domestic policy to President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9). Under the leadership of Pinchot and Roosevelt, both efficient use and conservation by withdrawal of public lands for future use where possible became the guiding principles of a nature state. In the continental United States, national parks and monuments fell outside the control of the Forest Service, but the service had more influence over these matters in the colonial possessions. The efficiency form of conservation, not national park promotion, was critical to the complicated nature state that the US government attempted to project upon the nation’s new colonial possessions.7
The key bureaus of the US nature state were duplicated in the colony, though not connected directly to their US equivalents, since they reported to the Philippine Commission (established in 1900). The latter was in effect the colonial government, and a body with a majority of non-elected US representatives. In turn, Philippine government bureaucrats (initially largely Americans) reported not to the US Congress or individual specialized departments such as the US Department of Agriculture, but the Bureau of Insular Affairs within the War Department in Washington. In this ‘insular’ nomenclature, the United States concealed its embarrassment over the colonial relationship and avoided the use of the term ‘Colonial Office’. These complicated manoeuvrings were a concession to ideological American exceptionalism and its political force within the US Congress.
In the same exceptionalist vein, Americans trumpeted their form of colonialism as one of temporariness and modernity in comparison with the empires of old Europe. Yet national parks never became an important part of the colonial regime’s enterprise, nor were other forms of protection such as wildlife reserves or national monuments prominent in the possessions acquired between 1898 and 1917. Only Hawaii, which became an incorporated territory eligible for statehood, was a partial exception to this rule. Given that the claim of originating the national park idea is a deeply rooted one in US historiography and popular thought, and given that colonial national parks have come to be identified in historical literature with the promotion of modernity, symbolizing national identity, development and citizenship in the making, this absence is a curious one.8
Delving deeper into the history of resource management in the US-occupied Philippine Islands from 1898 to the creation of the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935 is necessary to supply answers to these apparent anomalies. Thereby, light can be thrown on how American policymakers understood the place of national parks within wider nature protection and utilization. This case reveals that US colonial nation-building was indeed premised on utilitarian conservation. Nature and nation were closely related, but nature in the colonial setting was to be fashioned as rationalized space and resources for the sustainable economic development of the colony. But it was also expected to be a colonial state that paid for itself. For this fiscal reason, much of the responsibility for the enforcement of conservation and other policies was – especially after the passage of the Jones Act in 1916 to Filipinize the lower echelons of the civil service – delegated to these officials or to local municipal authorities dominated by Filipinos. This was another legacy of American exceptionalism as, despite the defeat of anti-imperialists in the US presidential elections of 1900, 1904 and 1908, there was little stomach in the US Congress for an expensive external empire.9 Empire was expected to operate on the cheap. Educated colonials could easily live with a relatively light colonial bureaucracy, since it quickly served to augment their local power and underpinned the emergence of a savvy political elite that campaigned within parliamentary means for eventual self-government.10
The colonial elite had a different view, however, of the role of the colonial state. It was not simply there to cover the expenses of stationing American troops and putting down rebellions, but to spread a Philippines-wide consciousness in a polity fragmented ethnically and regional. The colonial state needed to be converted into an instrument for the gradual assumption of indigenous power that had been lost in the so-called Philippine Insurrection after the American occupation. The educated elite, heavily Catholic and Filipino, saw national park and monument creation as important to the colonial state due to its promotion of nascent national feeling. They drew upon American national park ideas but modified them to incorporate traditional Filipino peasant mythology concerning humans and the wider natural world, and to suit a story of heroic resistance to both European and American imperialism. From their point of view, the state should use national parks to promote a cohesive national identity necessary to foster economic and social development. In practice, this would mean cementing the colonial elite’s power. One might express this process as a form of legitimation for the nature state in its anti-colonial guise.
This was not the only modification in the American model of a national park that occurred in the US colonial empire. The emphasis on natural resource management faced a challenge not from preservationist sentiment, but indigenous traditions and prerogatives of land use. The outcome was a compromise over land management that incorporated traditional human use of forested areas that, because of the pressures of economic modernization, impinged heavily upon national parks when they were finally proclaimed in the 1930s. This was a different pattern from national park development in the United States, and the concessions made by the colonial government towards land use within all reserved spaces, notably the forest reserves, spilled over into the management of parks. One can conclude that the provenance of park spaces is essential to understanding park outcomes.
Nature and protected spaces in the American colonial rule
The American ‘Insular’ government in the colony, with the American-dominated and unelected Philippine Commission at its apex, treated the Philippines as a natural resource...
