Menace to Empire

Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State

Moon-Ho Jung

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520387768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

One of Smithsonian Magazine 's Favorite Books of 2022 This history reveals how radical threats to the United States empire became seditious threats to national security and exposes the antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism. Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious history of race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from the Philippines and Hawai?i to California and beyond. Jung examines how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that engendered and haunted the national security state—the heart and soul of the US empire ever since.

CHAPTER 1

Suppressing Anarchy and Sedition

I’ve chased the wild Apache through his God-forsaken land,

I’ve tracked the daring horsethief where his footprints marked the sand,

I’ve summered with the robbers down at Coney by the sea,

But the gentle Filipino! Say, he beats them all for me.

He beats them all for me, son, the whole immortal lot,

In his lushy, mushy country, where the climate’s good and hot.

I’ve tracked the red and yellow, and I’ve tracked the wild and tame,

But the gentle Filipino is high, low, jack, and game.

With his timid little manners and his sweet and loving smile,

And his easy way of swearing that he loves you all the while;

With a white flag on his shanty, hanging there to catch your eye,

And his little rifle ready to plunk you by and by.

For to plunk you by and by, boy, to shoot you in the back,

And to slip away as swiftly as a sprinter down the track,

To come ’round when they plant you just to drop a little tear,

For the gentle Filipino is a tender-hearted dear.

He’s as playful as a kitten, and his pastime as a rule

Is shoot the flag of truce man as sort of April fool;

And if he can find a tree top and get up there with his gun

And pick off the lads all wounded, then he knows he’s having fun.

He knows he’s having fun, boys, a grand good time all ’round,

They look so awkward tumbling from the stretchers to the ground.

It was such fun to shoot them and kill them where they lay,

For the gentle Filipino loves his sweet and childish play.

But I know that he’s an angel, pure and white as ocean foam,

’Cause I read it in the papers that they sent me from home;

And I know I am a butcher, ’cause the pamphlet says I am,

But I think I’ll keep a-fighting just the same, for Uncle Sam.

Just the same for Uncle Sam, boys, and just bear this in mind,

That the watchdog is much better than the cur that sneaks behind.

And I’ll try to bear up somehow under this, my murderous taint,

For the gentle Filipino is a damned queer kind of saint.

—Jack Daly, Eighth US Infantry, “The Gentle Filipinos,” August 1902

A month before President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the formal end to the Philippine-American War on July 4, 1902, a massive wave of labor strikes rocked the Philippines, involving printers, lumbermen, sawyers, tailors, butchers, stevedores, and tobacco workers. Although the strikes were largely uncoordinated walkouts by aggrieved workers in particular industries and locales, there was no question that the formation of the first Filipino labor federation in February 1902 had ignited the spark. Building on a tradition of mutual-aid labor associations under Spanish rule and a history of organized labor strikes dating back to at least 1872, the Unión Democrática de Litógrafos, Impresores, Encuadernadores y Otros Obreros (Democratic Union of Lithographers, Printers, Bookbinders and Other Workers) immediately attracted throngs of “other workers” by the summer of 1902. Within six months, the Unión Obrera Democrática (UOD), as it came to be known popularly, had branches composed of barbers, carpenters and sawyers, cigar makers, office workers, draftsmen and painters, dressmakers and seamstresses, sailors and shipyard workers, tobacco workers, and farmers. UOD’s mass appeal, a Manila newspaper editorialized, represented a “new revolution . . . rapidly approaching, more formidable than the one [Emilio] Aguinaldo headed.”¹

Isabelo de los Reyes, UOD’s founding president and a major figure of the Philippine left, conceived the idea of organizing “other workers.” He had been a respected newspaper writer and owner in 1897, when his criticisms of the Spanish empire led to his summary arrest and deportation to Spain. De los Reyes’s incarceration in Montjuich, a prison notorious for its torture chambers, radicalized him, as fellow political prisoners introduced him to anarchism. “I repeat, on my word of honor, that the so-called anarchists, Nihilists or, as they say nowadays, Bolsheviks, are the true saviours and disinterested defenders of justice and universal brotherhood,” he would state later. “When the prejudices of these days of moribund imperialism have disappeared, they will rightfully occupy our altars.” After his release in 1898, de los Reyes immersed himself in the world of Spanish radicalism, savoring the relative freedom of political expression in the metropole. He began publishing Filipinas ante Europa during the Philippine-American War—with the motto, “Contra Norte-America, no; contra imperialismo, sí, hasta la muerte”—before deciding to return to the Philippines in October 1901. When asked to head the UOD a few months later, de los Reyes leaped at the chance. It was an opportunity, he recalled later, “to put into practice the good ideas I had learned from the anarchists of Barcelona who were imprisoned with me in the infamous Castle of Montjuich.”²

US officials struck back, unconstrained by the US Constitution in the revolutionary Philippines. From the moment de los Reyes returned to the Philippines, they had tried to stifle his activities, forbidding him to publish a newspaper, which was to be titled El Defensor de Filipinas, and to form an independent political party. Having already branded him a “radical” and an “agitator and anarchist” before the strikes, American-owned newspapers in Manila printed fiery attacks on de los Reyes that linked his labor organizing to the ongoing uprising against the US empire. De los Reyes was arrested immediately and sentenced to four months in prison for violating a Spanish law against affecting “the price of labor” or regulating “its condition abusively,” a law that the US Supreme Court had recently ruled unconstitutional in relation to a Puerto Rican labor organizer. De los Reyes’s appeals went nowhere until William H. Taft, the governor-general of the Philippines, pardoned him in January 1903. Taft used the occasion to defame de los Reyes further, calling him “a born agitator, entirely irresponsible, fecund in writing and in speech, who has at times earnestly and vigorously, in Spain and elsewhere, striven to subvert this Government.” The Manila American lamented that de los Reyes should have been deported to the US mainland, where “he would have at least supplied the roast beef for a tree hanging.”³

The UOD briefly, if dramatically, survived de los Reyes’s resignation in September 1902. Reorganized into a political party by the succeeding president, its membership multiplied exponentially through bold labor confrontations and subversive theatrical productions. Those nationalist melodramas, in particular, proved infectiously popular in the early years of US invasion and occupation, playing before packed houses of working-class audiences. With characters not so discreetly representing foreign intruders, local collaborators, and Filipino patriots engaged in a moral struggle for the motherland, historian Vicente L. Rafael argues, they projected “profoundly felt and widely shared social experiences of revolution, colonial occupation, war, and intense longing for freedom (kalayaan).” And the vernacular plays made US officials very nervous. Without notice, productions could include improvised verses for Philippine independence, defiant trampling of the Stars and Stripes, and momentary displays of the banned Philippine flag through actors’ costumes and movements. Arm in arm with American soldiers destroying stage equipment, US officials harassed and arrested playwrights, casts, and crews for “sedition,” the same charge that dogged the UOD. Taft accused UOD’s new president of inciting “the ignorant classes of people to disorder by means of deftly worded and staged seditious and treasonable dramas and in many other ways,” an accusation that translated into formal charges of sedition and embezzlement. In quick order, the first Filipino labor federation and the “seditious plays” were driven underground, where Filipino demands for kalayaan took root for another time.⁴

FIGURE 2. Isabelo de los Reyes. Courtesy of Filipinas Heritage Library.

The US state’s draconian responses in the Philippines emerged out of local and global contexts that conjured multiple and convergent threats to US security, insecurities that appeared to beckon and rationalize a state fortified with new laws, agencies, and powers. Particularly as US officials confronted anticolonial movements heralded by de los Reyes, an anticolonial revolutionary versed in a wider world of anarchism, they began to imagine a racial and radical enemy who confused and collapsed the bounds of race, gender, and politics. That was the “gentle Filipino” that Jack Daly’s poem mocked and feared. “In his lushy, mushy country,” the new enemy recalled “the wild Apache” but combined “the wild and tame” to become “high, low, jack, and game.” Gendered male, yet exhibiting “his timid little manners and his sweet and loving smile” that seduced and diverted US troops to their death, Filipinos represented duplicity—the inscrutable, passive “Oriental,” incarnated as a guerrilla soldier, biding his time up “a tree top.” Conceding the US soldier’s portrayal as “a butcher,” the poem’s protagonist ultimately defended his racial and masculine violence on behalf of “Uncle Sam,” against “a damned queer kind of saint.”⁵ In the end, Filipinos represented new racial and radical possibilities, embodying histories of colonialism and anticolonialism that the US state recognized and disavowed. To contain those possibilities, the US state criminalized and racialized anticolonial Filipinos firmly alongside Asian workers and revolutionary anarchists as seditious and “foreign” subjects requiring national exclusion and political death.

RACE WAR AGAINST ANARCHY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Defeating the vestiges of the Spanish empire in the spring and summer of 1898 produced tensions and contradictions that US officials had not planned for. The US empire faced revolutions on the ground. Spain had been trying for three years to suppress anticolonial insurgencies in the Philippines and Cuba, campaigns that had left its forces depleted and besieged even before the US troops arrived. As Commodore George Dewey awaited reinforcements to wage war on land, Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipino revolutionary leader exiled in Hong Kong, returned aboard a US cruiser and promptly declared the Philippines independent on June 12, 1898. The US government never recognized Aguinaldo’s declaration and, with the arrival of the US Army, saw Filipino revolutionaries no longer as necessary allies but as troublesome obstacles to the US mission. When US commanders prepared their final offensive on Manila, they had already agreed with their Spanish counterparts to keep Aguinaldo’s troops out of the city, a plan that resulted in tense encounters and armed skirmishes between putative allies. The raising of the US flag over Manila in August 1898 hardly restored peace to what a US Army officer called “this revolutionary and insurrectionary city of . . . 250,000 inhabitants of the most diverse nationality.”⁶ With the Spanish surrender materialized a greater enemy, a racial, revolutionary enemy.

The ensuing Philippine-American War was a race war, historian Paul A. Kramer argues, in that US forces engaged in a mutually reinforcing process of casting Filipinos and themselves as racially unequal and justifying colonial violence in racial terms. While Aguinaldo attempted to gain US recognition of his “Revolutionary Government” in the months leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Spain and the United States in December 1898, President William McKinley revealed his intent to claim sovereignty over the entire archipelago. The United States agreed to pay Spain $20 million for the Philippines. McKinley, in turn, vowed that his nation came “not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends,” and would strive to “win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.” His racializing language of uplift—and attendant feminizing demand of submission—found a receptive hearing on the domestic front but not on the front lines, where a standoff between US troops and Filipino forces erupted in gunfire on February 4, 1899. A protracted war of US colonial conquest had begun.⁷

US military personnel and politicians predictably turned to entrenched, gendered racial idioms to make sense of an armed enemy in a distant land. An African American sergeant wrote, “I feel sorry for these people and all that have come under the control of the United States. . . . The first thing in the morning is the ‘Nigger’ and the last thing at night is the ‘Nigger.’ ” White troops, another Black soldier related, “talked with impunity of ‘niggers’ to our soldiers, never once thinking that they were talking to home ‘niggers’ and should they be brought to remember that at home this is the same vile epithet they hurl at us, they beg pardon and make some effiminate [sic] excuse about what the Filipino is called.” Theodore Roosevelt, for his part, liked to draw a different racial analogy. “We have no more right to leave the Filipinos to butcher one another and sink slowly back into savagery,” he preached before American audiences, “than we would have the right, in an excess of sentimentality, to declare the Sioux and Apaches free to expel all white settlers from the lands they once held.” The US forces, he vowed, were fighting for “the greatness of the Nation—the greatness of the race.”⁸

The new context, across the Pacific, and the new enemy, of “Asiatic” and mixed origins, also produced a new race vernacular conducive to perpetrating violence on Filipinos more specifically. The Philippine Islands presented new challenges since they were populated by, in Roosevelt’s worldview, “half-caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, with wild pagans.” The heterogeneity and indefinability of Filipinos came to define the Philippines, a racial projection critical to the delegitimation of the “insurrection” and “insurrectos.” “The Filipinos are not a nation, but a variegated assemblage of different tribes and peoples, and their loyalty is still of the tribal type,” concluded the Philippine Commission...