American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  As with indigenes on the mainland, the Depression–New Deal and World War II era brought significant changes. In 1931, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to extend services to the Alaska indigenes. In 1936, Congress applied the comprehensive Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) to Alaskan indigenes, “thereby equating the status of Alaska Natives to that of Native Americans in general.” The IRA provided for the creation of local indigenous governments, though with only six indigenous reserves created these failed to extend throughout the vast reaches of the territory.96

  US involvement in World War II brought another burst of settler colonial expansion to Alaska and attendant marginalization of indigenous people. Fearing a Japanese assault on the Aleutians, US authorities subjected the indigenous Alaskans to the same internment program that they enforced on Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants primarily in the Western states of the mainland—property seizures, prolonged confinement in makeshift camps, and wholesale violations of civil liberties. For reasons that defy rational explanation, the US military subjected 881 Aleuts to wartime internment. “Evacuations were marked by confusion and chaos, poor accommodations and meager rations, and an appalling degree of insensitivity,” Mitchell points out. “From forced evacuation, to dubious confinement, to desolate homecoming, it is very difficult to imagine that American citizens of the white race would have been treated in a similar manner.”97

  As in Hawai’i, the ultimate impact of World War II was the militarization of Alaska and the closing of ties with the United States leading to eventual statehood. The Americans fortified the Aleutians, built military installations throughout the state, and constructed the Alaska Highway, all of which pumped billions of dollars into the territory. By 1943, some 154,000 American servicemen were stationed in Alaska. As the territory never became a major theater of the war, the men had plenty of time to hunt, fish, carouse, and alter the landscape.98

  The discourse of global cold war increased the militarization and strategic significance of Alaska. It also unleashed competition for control of the Arctic involving the Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, Greenland, and Denmark. Caught in the middle were the indigenous Arctic residents, among them the Inuit. Over the years indigenous people of the Arctic, including more than 650,000 in Alaska, have been subjected to land loss and forced relocations, mining intrusions, and pollution. Not surprisingly, many now advocate a sovereign Arctic state.99

  Anxious to disassociate itself from colonialism in the postwar era, the United States moved toward statehood for Alaska and Hawai’i. In 1946, the same year as Philippine independence, Alaskans voted 9,630 to 6,822 for statehood. Alaska became a political football, however, as congressional Republicans during the Eisenhower years feared that statehood would tilt political power in favor of the Democrats. Over the next few years Alaska politicians led by Ernest Gruening and Robert Bartlett persisted in lobbying and publicizing the territory’s colonial status. Both the House and Senate eventually passed bills for statehood, which Eisenhower signed into law on January 3, 1959, making Alaska the 49th state in the Union.100

  Statehood did not liberate the indigenous people of either Alaska or Hawai’i from the profound legacies of settler colonialism, as the postcolonial history of the two states (Chapter 9) would reveal.

  8

  “Things Too Scandalous to Write”: The Philippine Intervention and the Continuities of Colonialism

  Postcolonial analysis illuminates continuity in the history of US colonialism. The counterinsurgency war waged by the United States at the turn of the century in the Philippine archipelago, though not a settler project, was nonetheless a colonial project. The argument for viewing the “Spanish-American War” and the “Philippine Insurrection” as discontinuous rests on a disavowal of the prior history of settler colonialism. By relegating Indian removal to domestic history, thus keeping it quarantined from the broader history of US foreign relations, a colonialist historiography has obscured the fundamental continuities of US empire building.1

  In the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States established a new hegemony in the Caribbean and, with Hawai’i and Alaska as the pivot, emerged as a Pacific and global power. By seizing Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Samoa, “the United States had become a formal overseas colonial empire just like its European counterparts,” Julian Go observes.2 After 1898, as Lanny Thompson explains, “The culture of imperialism in the United States drew upon and extended the continental colonial experience in the elaboration of the fundamental alterity of the subject peoples.”3

  Entering into new colonial spaces in Southeast Asia, the United States carried out an intensive counterinsurgency campaign that would ensconce the Philippine archipelago within an emerging American global security regime. As with the history of settler colonialism on the continent, the United States engaged in indiscriminate warfare to defeat the Philippine revolutionaries. In order to achieve “pacification” of the Philippine archipelago through a lethal application of asymmetrical warfare, the United States caused the deaths albeit mostly indirectly of at least 250,000, probably closer to 400,000, and perhaps as many as 800,000 Filipinos, while suffering a dramatically disproportionate 4,234 deaths of its own.4

  As in the Indian wars, colonial ambivalence materialized alongside exterminatory violence in the Philippines. The United States ultimately succeeded in quelling the “insurrection”—in actuality an anticolonial revolution—through the ambivalent inducements of “nation building” in tandem with the willingness to kill and to destroy. The US Army capitalized on the disorganization and weaknesses of the resistance as it effectively combined lethal aggression with effective civic action programs and cooptation. While the US intervention ultimately proved effective, only by overlooking the high level of death and destruction and the essence of the intervention as a colonial project can it ultimately be viewed through a triumphal lens.5

  Rather than simply “exporting” racial discourse and colonialism abroad, the United States had to adopt different approaches and strategies to fit “specific patterns of imperial rule.” The new possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific constituted an “internally differentiated imperial archipelago” requiring “multiple ruling strategies.” Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal Zone facilitated regional economic linkages and reinforced the Monroe Doctrine, whereas Guam and Samoa served primarily as coaling stations and naval bases. In the Philippines removal of the indigenous people followed by direct US settlement was neither desirable nor remotely possible; the archipelago instead facilitated the emergence of the United States as a Pacific power. In all of these cases the Americans instituted colonial rule that precluded the pursuit of self-determination by the subject peoples.6

  In 1898, at the outset of the conflict, the Spanish, not the Filipinos, constituted the enemy of the United States, thus enabling as in Cuba an alliance between the Americans and the indigenous people. Several US officials told Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino elite and leader of the anti-Spanish rebels, that the United States came as a liberator and had no intention of colonizing the islands. In June 1898, a few weeks after the US Navy crushed the decadent Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, Aguinaldo declared the Philippines independent. He called the United States an “honorable friend” and set about much the same way that many Indians and Hawaiians had done to try to impress the Americans with the potential of the Philippines to adapt and stand on its own as a “civilized” society.

  As they attempted to bring to fruition the first successful nationalist revolution in Asia, the Philippine revolutionaries drafted a constitution, opened a newspaper, refrained from indiscriminate slaughter of the Spaniards, and discussed Philippine culture and their plans for its advancement. Apolinario Mabini, a close adviser to Aguinaldo and “one of the most determined and acute proponents of independence,” suspected the United States of harboring imperial ambitions that would blunt Filipino nationalism. He called for preempting US colonization by convincing the Americans that they would confro
nt “a strong and organized people who know how to defend the laws of justice and their honor.”7

  Much like the history of settler colonization in North America, nothing would deter the Americans once they had set their course of empire. The United States took Spain’s surrender by treaty in December 1898, hoisting the American flag in Manila and pointedly excluding the Filipinos from the diplomatic stage. President William McKinley framed his decision to annex the islands as “benevolent assimilation” of the indigenes, a discourse that paralleled Indian assimilation under the Dawes Act. “Benevolent assimilation” also constituted a familiar discourse of disavowal of the colonizing act.8

  The American colonialist fantasy as applied to the Philippines perceived the United States as undertaking a humanitarian project of replacing savagery with “uplift” to the ultimate benefit of the indigenous “tribes.” Common application of the trope “tribes” to the Philippines reinforced continuity with the history of North American Indian removal. Americans began to “racialize Philippine society into a set of fragmented and warring ‘tribes’ that were incapable of nationality,” Paul Kramer explains. Citing various groupings—Malays, Tagalogs, Moros— US “experts” depicted the Philippines as an inchoate colonial space inhabited by an “aggregate of tribes,” Thompson notes. “The analogy of tribes, which originally suggested a rough equivalence of the North American Indian tribes and those of the Philippines, provided a powerful justification for U.S. hegemony.”9

  On February 4, 1899, as Americans undertook their new colonial project, a firefight broke out outside Manila and quickly escalated into a full-scale war. The American public blamed the savage and backward Filipinos, as typically had occurred in Indian “uprisings,” for the outbreak of violence. The New York Times declared that the Filipinos’ “insane attack … upon their liberators” was sufficient evidence of “their incapacity for self-government.” The elite US newspaper, purveyor of all the news fit to print, thus equated anticolonialism with madness, which in turn justified the ensuing counterinsurgency campaign. As in previous and future wars, “The overriding sentiment of the American press was enthusiasm for war and empire,” David Brody points out.10

  The US soldiers who had crossed the Pacific to go to war with Spain had been left unfulfilled and languishing in “masculinist angst” as a result of the quick Spanish capitulation. Reminiscent of volunteers in the Mexican War, “The soldiers all want to fight, and would be terribly disappointed and chagrined if they didn’t get what they came over here for.” Branding the Filipinos as disrespectful and ungrateful for their liberation, many of the soldiers expressed “an earnest desire to be turned loose on them and kill them.” Added a US volunteer, “If they would turn the boys loose, there wouldn’t be a nigger left in Manila twelve hours after.”11

  Unleashed by the outbreak of the resistance, the Americans quickly established military supremacy over Philippine conventional forces, as they “inflicted terrible casualties on Aguinaldo’s soldiers.” On February 5 the United States prevailed after fighting in and around Manila in the largest and bloodiest battle of the entire Philippine War waged over a 16-mile front. The Americans went on to capture several cities, including the Revolutionary capital of Malolos to the north of Manila, which they subjected to a punishing naval bombardment with a high rate of civilian casualties. In a sign of things to come, dead bodies, human as well as horses and dogs, littered the streets of the town in which “every house was burned.” Although the United States had shown its military superiority, the army lacked a sufficient force to hold the areas that it had “liberated.” The Americans soon learned they were in for a much longer struggle than anticipated when in November 1899 Aguinaldo abandoned the conventional war effort and called for guerrilla resistance.12

  While the regular troops and the thousands of volunteers showed a zeal for war, US commanders were not uniformly sanguine. The Americans had taken control of Manila and other urban enclaves, taking thousands of Filipino casualties, but a major effort would be required to quell guerrilla resistance throughout the countryside. General Samuel B. Young declared it was “doubtful whether in modern days any military force has ever found itself with a more difficult problem … the task of dealing with eight millions of primitive people of various races, tribes, customs, and languages, dispersed over many islands, embracing an area of fifty thousand square miles.” In order to defeat and pacify “a despotism of the worst Asiatic type,” the US forces would have to track down Aquinaldo, now branded “a fugitive and an outlaw” for waging a war for independence against foreign invaders.13

  As the fighting unfolded, Americans justified the Philippine intervention with “racial stereotypes that were previously used to justify the enslavement of Africans, the removal of the Indians, and the expulsion of the Mexicans.” “Imagine an Indian ‘crossed’ with a negro, the product of this union married to a Chinese” and one could grasp the inferior “mental and moral attitudes” of the Filipino, one soldier explained. Scores of American newspaper editorial cartoons depicted McKinley or Uncle Sam attempting to tame caricatured, recalcitrant natives replete with bones through their noses or engaged in chucking spears. Nearly always darkened in skin color, “the Negrito became the metaphor for the Filipinos.” Some, as in an editorial cartoon in the magazine Judge, explicitly linked Filipinos to Indians. The cartoon depicted an Indian drawing on his direct experience with the United States to inform a Filipino native, “Be good or you will be dead!”14

  As the American public, geographically challenged in any case, had focused attention overwhelmingly on Cuba, the eruption of major conflict in the Philippines came as a shock. It also provoked over time a vocal albeit minority opposition. The so-called anti-imperialists, having disavowed the long history of colonialism on the North American continent, viewed the Philippine war as discontinuous. They thus depicted the intervention as a deviation from republican virtue and what they believed to be an American history of anticolonialism. Between the signing of the Treaty of Paris in December 1898 and its narrow ratification February 6, 1899, Congress debated the issue of overseas empire. Despite disagreement virtually all of the speakers in these exchanges “believed that the United States was a nation of white Protestants under a special mandate from God to represent freedom.”15

  The leading imperialists were better historians than their opponents, as they directly linked Indian and Philippine resistance to colonialism, thus justifying the violence that ensued. Their arguments ultimately proved convincing, as most Americans understood that “wild” Indians had needed to be tamed on the “frontier.” If the Filipinos like the Indians were backward peoples resisting civilization by means of dishonorable and “savage” guerrilla resistance, then it made sense to most Americans that they should be brought under the control of a superior and chosen race.

  Imperialists argued convincingly that subduing and civilizing savages was both legitimate and continuous with national history. During congressional debate in 1900, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the main architects of Pacific expansion, declared that if subjugation of the Philippines was a crime, as anti-imperialists charged, “then our whole past record of expansion is a crime.” Senator Orville Platt, architect of an amendment that enabled US hegemony over “liberated” Cuba, declared that anti-imperialists “would have turned back the Mayflower from our coast and would have prevented our expansion westward.” The outspoken imperialist Senator Albert Beveridge explained that the United States had long “governed the Indian without his consent. And if you deny it to the Indian at home how are you to grant it to the Malay abroad?” Former Senator Henry Dawes drew on his reputation for expertise on assimilation to advise that the history of Indian relations should guide the nation’s “experience with other alien races whose future has been put in our keeping” as a result of the Spanish-American War. “Our policy with the Indians becomes an object lesson.” As guerrilla resistance unfolded in the Philippines, Secretary of War Elihu Root urged adoption of “methods th
at have proved successful in our Indian campaigns in the West.”16

  The most prominent and popular imperialist, however, was the Rough Rider hero of the battle of Cuba’s San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt. A man of boundless energy, a unique amalgam of patrician and rugged individualist, Roosevelt resonated authority not only because of his courage under fire but also as the author of the four-volume The Winning of the West, published from 1889 to 1896. The account emphasized atavistic Indian violence and atrocities in defiance of the march of civilization. The settlers “had justice on their side. This great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages,” Roosevelt explained in the first volume. In a tidy summation of settler colonialism, Roosevelt declared, “The man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill.” Roosevelt famously played off Philip Sheridan’s reference to genocidal violence against Indians as he quipped, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”17

  Roosevelt accurately invoked the authority of history to counter the argument that the United States was “violating” a mythic anti-colonial tradition. The Seminoles, he explained, “rebelled and waged war exactly as some of the Tagals have rebelled and waged war in the Philippines … we are making no new departure.” For the United States the conflicts were “precisely parallel between the Philippines and the Apaches and Sioux.” Reports of atrocities upset many Americans, but Roosevelt reminded them that they “happened hundreds of times in our warfare against the Indians,” as extreme violence was an inevitable component of the struggle between savagery and civilization.18