Union by Law

Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism

Michael W. McCann, George I. Lovell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226680071
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

Starting in the early 1900s, many thousands of native Filipinos were conscripted aslaborers in American West Coast agricultural fields and Alaska salmon canneries. There, they found themselves confined to exploitative low-wage jobs in racially segregated workplaces as well as subjected to vigilante violence and other forms of ethnic persecution. In time, though, Filipino workers formed political organizations and affiliated with labor unions to represent their interests and to advance their struggles for class, race, and gender-based social justice. Union by Law analyzes the broader social and legal history of Filipino American workers' rights-based struggles, culminating in the devastating landmark Supreme Court ruling, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989). Organized chronologically, the book begins with the US invasion of the Philippines and the imposition of colonial rule at the dawn of the twentieth century. The narrative then follows the migration of Filipino workers to the United States, where they mobilized for many decades within and against the injustices of American racial capitalist empire that the Wards Cove majority willfully ignored in rejecting their longstanding claims. This racial innocence in turn rationalized judicial reconstruction of official civil rights law in ways that significantly increased the obstacles for all workers seeking remedies for institutionalized racism and sexism. A reclamation of a long legacy of racial capitalist domination over Filipinos and other low-wage or unpaid migrant workers, Union by Law also tells a story of noble aspirational struggles for human rights over several generations and of the many ways that law was mobilized both to enforce and to challenge race, class, and gender hierarchy at work.

PART I

American Capitalist Expansion, Colonialism, and Empire

PROLOGUE TO PART I

The American Colonial Project in the Philippines

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.—BROOKS ADAMS (1895, 165)

You, who say the Declaration (of Independence) applies to all men . . . how dare you deny its application to the American Indian? And if you deny it to the Indian at home, how dare you grant it to the Malay abroad? . . . There are people in the world who do not understand any form of government . . . (and) must be governed.—ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE (1900)

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.—W. E. B. DU BOIS ([1903] 2007, 7)

During the twilight years of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new epoch of imperial expansion overseas extending as far as the islands of the Philippines. America’s novel experiment in colonial rule over populated islands in the Pacific and Caribbean built on the rubble of brutal governance by the Spanish monarchy. Spain’s control of the Philippines began over three hundred years earlier after explorer Ferdinand Magellan chanced upon the islands while circumnavigating the globe in his quest for profitable spices in the Indies. Over the next few centuries, Manila became a harbored haven for Spanish galleon trade ships as well as a source of land, minerals, and forced labor. Spain put down a political anchor with land grants to Spanish settlers who formed the oligarchy of mestizo families that ruled into the twentieth century. The island archipelago also offered the Europeans a fertile terrain for moralistic projects of conversion to Christianity and, later, other disciplining forces of modern civilization. Spain ruled the Philippines and its other island colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean, it is commonly portrayed, by both “the sword and the cross” (Truxillo 2001). Much of the vast empire was lost to multiple wars of independence early in the nineteenth century, but Spanish monarchists who regained power in the 1860s renewed the national commitment to control over the islands in a vain effort to restore a semblance of an imagined glorious past. The Philippines and Puerto Rico both were important subjects of this mission, yet Spanish rulers viewed Cuba, with its tropical beauty and sugar plantations, as its most important remaining gem.

The Cuban jewel was snatched from Spain’s grasp by century’s end, however. After Spanish rulers failed to make good on promised concessions following their defeat of a sustained provincial revolt in Cuba decades earlier, an independence movement mobilized in the 1890s under the leadership of Jose Marti. The Cuban Revolutionary Party was established, and in 1895 it initiated a formidable struggle for Cuba libre. Spain’s military responded with a concerted and cruel campaign to quash the rebels. Among the most ruthless of its tactics was General Valeriano Weyler’s “reconcentration policy,” begun in early 1896, that relocated Cuban civilians in detention centers under military control, resulting in the deaths of an estimated four hundred thousand people due to disease, squalid housing, and scarce or contaminated food (O’Toole 1984). While Spain offered the remaining rebels some modest concessions to restore order, the European state commenced with “waging a total war against revolutionaries who made a reasonable claim that their opponents were committing systematic acts of lawlessness” (Weiner 2006, 54).

A host of American leaders expressed anguish about the bloody clash over independence in Cuba; many US elites voiced support for the revolutionaries against the colonial tyrants. The motivations for such support varied widely, from general backing of anticolonial independence movements to antipapist contempt for Spain to concern about implications for US commercial interests. But other leaders, including President McKinley, were wary about US involvement. Eventually, the explosion that sunk the battleship USS Maine, increasing revelations about humanitarian crisis, and pressure from sensationalist “yellow” journalists such as Hearst and Pulitzer galvanized American resolve to enter into war against Spain and, ostensibly, to free Cuba. “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain” became the animating cry for the Spanish-American war. The war was relatively short and lopsided. United States military action began in April of 1898, the two sides declared war against one another in late April, Roosevelt joined the Rough Riders cavalry unit and rode up San Juan and Kettle Hills in July, the City of Santiago soon surrendered, and Spain signed an armistice in August 1898. The United States quickly ended forever Spain’s rule over Cuba.

Meanwhile, Filipino nationalists also initiated a revolt against long-standing Spanish rule over the Philippine islands. Filipino dissidents had been mobilizing over the previous quarter of a century, inspired by increased exposure to modern European Enlightenment ideas and culture. Jose Rizal formed La Liga Filipina and mobilized other liberal illustrados challenging Spain’s authority. In 1895 Andres Bonifacio organized the Katipunan, a brotherhood of Filipino nationalists dedicated to independence. Katipunan collaborator Emilio Aguinaldo led Philippine rebel forces to a number of victories over the Spanish in 1896 as Rizal awaited execution. Once the United States initiated war with Spain over Cuba, the Philippines formally allied with the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy and not quite yet a Rough Rider but eager for war, ordered a fleet led by Commodore Dewey to the Spanish Philippines as the battle in Cuba commenced. Early on May 1, 1898, Dewey piloted into Manila Bay and, in roughly seven hours, destroyed the archaic Spanish Armada.

In June ninety-eight Philippine leaders signed a Declaration of Independence modeled on the American prototype and unfurled a Filipino flag; the proclamation was promulgated in August. Following other defeats, Spain sued for peace, and the United States acquired multiple islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean through the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. Aguinaldo, expecting that the US alliance would bring Filipinos the promised self-rule, was declared president of the First Philippine (Malolos) Republic in January 1899. To the surprise of Filipino nationalists, however, the United States denied recognition to the new government of the self-proclaimed independent state. The Philippines declared war on the US forces in the islands just two days before the US Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris. The Philippine-American War, dismissed as a mere “insurrection” and “splendid little war” by American officials, ground on for several years before it was declared over by President Roosevelt on July 4, 1902. Independence Day in the United States signaled imperial conquest and the repudiation of Philippine national independence along with the deaths of a great many soldiers and civilians.

The new era of American empire commenced with a grant of formal but limited independence to Cuba plus agreement to establish a US military base at Guantanamo Bay, the US purchase of the Philippines for $20 million, and annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and later the independent state of Hawaii and parts of Samoa.

Empire Old and New: Capitalist Expansion and Racial Hierarchy

The Settler Frontier Legacy of Racial Capitalism

At the time of Dewey’s military triumph in Manila Bay, no grand American strategy had developed for annexation of the Philippines. President William McKinley barely knew where to locate the Philippines on a map, so as the popular legend had it, he appealed on bended knees to God for guidance about how to handle the situation. McKinley quickly determined that the United States should take control of the Philippines in order to make its denizens into Christians and introduce the rule of law, if by largely barbarous and lawless means. The moralistic justifications for the policy of “benevolent assimilation” barely masked the interests of sugar importers and other corporate interests who long had urged expansion (Lynch 2009). Robust debate among American elites was fully displayed as the US Senate considered approving the treaty in February of 1899, and divisions quickly escalated about what to do with the archipelago. Understanding these exchanges of divergent views requires some attention to the larger historical context of American national expansion.

Over nearly three previous centuries, American colonists had developed and enacted their own version of the imperial commitment to race-based territorial expansion and control inherited from Great Britain (Robinson 1983). The settler experience from early on was animated by an ideology that fused values of economic independence, republican freedom as self-rule, and white entitlement (Rana 2010). The project of expanding control of land required both settlers, who would turn land into commodified property, and laborers, whose work would turn propertied capital into profit. On the one hand, white northern Europeans were viewed as coparticipants in American expansion; open immigration and naturalization laws invited them to participate as property-owning settlers in the colony and then young nation (Frymer 2017).

On the other hand, laborers from early on included indentured servants (Irish, Slavs, Jews, and others) from Europe but increasingly featured nonnorthern Europeans who were conscripted and entitled neither to own land nor to naturalization. Continuing many centuries of European-initiated Atlantic slave trade, as many as twelve million slaves were imported from Africa to the new world in the eighteenth century; many tens of thousands died in route, and three-quarters of a million slaves landed in what became the United States during this period. The distinction between settler and laborer established divisions of class and citizenship grounded in constructions of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender difference, thus continuing European traditions in the preindependence era (Rana 2010; Robinson 1983). These unfree, dependent laboring classes, and especially dark-skinned slaves, became explicitly identified by whites as inherently distinct, inferior, and incapable of self-governance in line with the emerging “settler supremacy” principle.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as African slaves gradually replaced indentured English servants on plantations, Europeans newly freed from indenture gained access to land or privileged employment, social standing, and opportunities for prosperity along with landed elites (Rana 2010, 47). Routine hereditary succession of blacks born to slave parents of African lineage similarly solidified the racialization of chattel slavery, especially but not exclusively in the South. New hybrid forms of repressive, punitive legal control were developed specifically to sustain white governance over slaves (Tushnet 1981). After the British acquisition of Canada in 1763, the privileged status of white settlers who remained British subjects became threatened, providing additional impetus to equate property ownership and citizen freedom with white European lineage and the laboring classes as religiously, ethnically, and especially racially different, undisciplined, and inferior Others. European immigrants in urban areas, fearing loss of their artisan status and modes of work, increasingly found reason to invest in constructed racial distinctions to insulate themselves from servitude as the lowest of wage laborers, indentured status, and of course as owned slaves. “Free labor” came to connote white-male contractual independence of workers while “free soil” conferred status as owners as opposed to “unfree” dependent labor that was both racialized in absolute terms of difference as “nonwhite” and gendered as female in patriarchal domestic confines (Foner [1970] 1995; Fraser 2016; Nakano Glenn 2002). Hence emerged the development in early colonial North America of a “two-track” legal logic of property rights and political citizenship. “Anglo settlers enjoyed core liberties and common law protection, while indigenous (and imported dark skinned laboring) subjects were governed by whatever means the Crown viewed as necessary to maintaining authority” (Rana 2010, 47). In other words, white citizens could claim rights to what was later heralded as liberal law, and racialized and gendered Others were largely rightsless, restricted to slave or low-wage labor, and subject to more arbitrary, violent, repressive control authorized by state law. Racial hierarchy and violent oppression were constitutive of the American capitalist polity from the very start (Goldberg 2002; Charles W. Mills 2008; Robinson 1983; Smith 1997; Winant 2001).

These developments built on British class and racial traditions, but institutionalized slavery throughout the South deepened the racialization of class distinctions that denied legal status to nonwhites in the young American republic. This development can be traced in no small part to the fact that the United States constitutional government was constructed on a compromise providing protection for the institution of slavery and a substantial electoral advantage to slaveholding states (Davis 2006). The result was that the country was dominated by Southern interests from the American Revolution until the Civil War, and white supremacy was normalized as a premise of American civil religion and routine institutional practice for many. At the same time, slave labor and the great profits it generated, especially through cotton production, was the fuel for industrial capitalist development along the eastern corridor. The Atlantic slave trade long before had catalyzed Western capitalism; banks capitalized the slave trade, insurance companies underwrote it, and profits were channeled into northern businesses, including shipbuilding (Williams 1994). The slave trade had created world trade, Karl Marx argued, “and world trade is the necessary condition for large scale machine industry” ([1846] 1982, 101–2). Westward expansion opened opportunities for growth of slave-based economic development for many in and beyond the South. Hence the observation by Du Bois that “Black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry, and . . . became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire” ([1935] 1998, 5). In this regard, the material interests of whites and ideological construction of those interests in westward movement developed in tandem. Westward expansion thus was central to the continued growth of settler ideology inextricably connecting republican freedom, property ownership, and deeply entrenched racial, class, and gender hierarchies.

Rather than “conquering” local subjects for labor and resource extraction, in ways typical of European colonial projects, the Anglo-American settler project of westward movement across the mainland generally aimed to avoid interaction with rival populations until white landowners amassed majorities or land became scarce and hence more valuable (Frymer 2017). Settler-based empire building thus proceeded initially by claiming territories on empty land or on land emptied by removing and/or killing indigenous peoples, who were viewed as uncivilized nonsettlers and incapable of property ownership or self-governance (Frymer 2017; Rana 2010). Replacing those on the land with those whites who would own the land required sustained, systematic violence. Settlers in the American West who were allocated land were largely charged with providing their own security and urged to eschew conflicts with other peoples, but settler expansion always entailed a state-building project that required organized military force to take and then defend new territories from indigenous peoples and other nations viewed as threats (Frymer 2017). Following the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, it was assumed that annexed territories in the West were subject to the Constitution and eventually would be incorporated as official states. The expansionist impulse materialized by the 1840s into the ideology of “manifest destiny,” which underlined the exceptional character of American white people and their institutions, their redemptive mission of remaking the West in their image, and the fated destiny of completing this project (Merk 1995).

The promise of westward expansion thus facilitated capitalist economic development, promised bountiful opportunities for white northern Europeans, and morally justified continued violent subjugation of nonwhites (Rogin [1975] 1991). The imperial logic propelled murderous removal of Natives, the war against the “mongrel race” of Mexicans, and similar projects validating what the young Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as “The Genius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race” (Rana 2010, 165–66). To be sure, there was disagreement among white elites about various meanings and implications of manifest destiny as well as the racial boundaries of qualification for citizenship rights status (Frymer 2017). Many whites opposed territorial expansion largely out of fear about incorporating nonwhite populations and compromising racial purity. But the premise that western expansion was to be carried out by self-governing, property-owning settlers of Protestant northern European lineage was a widely shared, bipartisan premise in the emergent dominant culture. As such, the idea of appropriating and governing large swaths of land heavily populated by (nonslave) non-Anglos was relatively unnecessary and unappealing to Americans before the late nineteenth century (Frymer 2017).

Postbellum America: Between Old and New

The experience with frontier freedom and promises of manifest destiny that impelled and justified the white-settler republic faced important challenges as the twentieth century approached, however. Frontier enlargement had always been more difficult, uneven, and perilous than national mythology envisioned. For one thing, antebellum American expansionism had been led largely by the aggressive designs of Southern slave owners who wanted to extend the “peculiar institution” across the continent, including beyond the mainland. The divisive push to annex Texas and to take the territories gained by the Mexican War was led by Southerners. As these campaigns for expansion were stymied and openness to continued political compromises waned, the struggles between the South and North to control the political economy of the western mainland territories escalated inevitably into the bloody, destructive Civil War. After the Civil War, Reconstruction designs gave way to Southern efforts to consolidate by legal and extralegal means new terms of racial hierarchy, exacerbating a wide variety of racial and class tensions in the South and the entire nation (Du Bois [1935] 1998, 187). This included clashes among Southerners increasingly dependent on Chinese “coolie” laborers, which complicated dualistic legal classifications of race, class, and national status and prepared the way for later Chinese exclusionary legislation in 1882 (Jung 2006). Northern Republican efforts to effect meaningful Reconstruction by...