Freedom Incorporated

Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization

Colleen Woods

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749148
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Freedom Incorporated demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era.

In this broad historical account, Colleen Woods demonstrates how, in the mid-twentieth century Philippines, US policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Officials at Malacañang Palace and the White House touted the 1946 signing of the liberating Treaty of Manila as a testament to the US commitment to the liberation of colonized people and celebrated it under the moniker of Philippine–American Friendship Day. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted US hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order.

Woods finds that in order to justify US intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources, like the Hukbalahap Rebellion in central Luzon, to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, in Freedom Incorporated Woods illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.

Chapter 1

An Amazing Record of Red Plotting

Policing Radical and Racial Boundaries in the Colonial Philippines

In January 1927, U.S. secretary of state Frank Kellogg appeared before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Facing off against Idaho senator William Borah—the committee’s chair and outspoken critic of U.S. intervention in Central America—Kellogg was there to defend the decision of Calvin Coolidge’s administration to redeploy U.S. marines to Nicaragua.¹ The United States occupied the country from 1912 to 1933, but the 1927 outbreak of the Sandino Rebellion, which pitted Augusto Sandino’s peasant-based guerrillas against U.S. marines and the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, prompted the deployment of additional U.S. marine troops.² In the lead-up to the hearing, the New York Times reported on the purported foundations of the administration’s Nicaragua policy, including the precedent of the 1878 Evarts Doctrine, which posited that the United States had the right to intervene in foreign countries to protect U.S. lives and property. But the White House had also “made it known,” according to the Times, that an equally important “recognized principle” was guiding its course: that is, encouraging “the Central American republics” to “take certain measures to put a stop to their frequent revolutionary tendencies.”³ Kellogg was on Capitol Hill to testify to this “recognized principle,” to which he alluded in a memorandum submitted to the committee that described the efforts of the All-American Anti-Imperialist League (AAAIL) to end “what they term ‘American imperialism,’ ” as Kellogg put it.⁴

In contrast to the usual assumption that the United States was “isolationist” during the 1920s, historians have shown how the decade was, in fact, crucial to the expansion of U.S. global power.⁵ Indeed, the successes of anti-interventionist foreign policies and peace movements in the early decade of the 1920s—as well as the pacifistic Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, Kellogg’s most lasting achievement—represented a “new” internationalism based on a strenuous defense of U.S. sovereignty and the spread of U.S. economic practices and political cultures outside its borders.⁶ After WWI and before the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, American anti-imperialist politics did reemerge in response to U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, not dissimilar from turn-of-the-century anti-imperial politics, interwar anti-imperialist and noninterventionist groups rooted their critiques in ideas of national exceptionalism.⁷ During the interwar period, U.S. politicians, policymakers, and members of the public insisted that the United States was not an imperial power; defending U.S. sovereignty and ensuring the United States’ status as a world power could never be equated with the “old style” European imperialism that bred militarism and war.⁸ In fact, as a Chicago Tribune editorialist put it in 1927, most Americans would “stoutly deny that we are imperialists.”⁹ This, despite an ongoing U.S. presence in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama. At his hearing, Kellogg also rejected any accusation that the United States was an imperial nation. In front of Borah’s committee, he asserted that the AAAIL’s politics were not the result of alleged U.S. imperialism but were instead the result of an “amazing record of red plotting.”¹⁰

During the 1920s and 1930s, discussions of Bolshevism, imperialism, and the potential for both to destabilize domestic and global racial orders frequented debates over the character, purpose, and direction of the United States’ role in the world.¹¹ But at the time, Communists posed little threat in terms of mounting either an electoral or a revolutionary challenge to the status quo in the United States. Prior to the Great Depression, the combination of anticommunist repression and factional divisions within the U.S. Communist Party had left the organization with a shrinking membership and marginal political influence. At the time of Kellogg’s hearing, the party counted only 8,490 members, and by 1929 only 6,933 members remained, down from its pre-Depression peak of 17,363 members in 1924.¹² Nonetheless, fear based largely on the interception of propaganda regarding communism’s foreign dimension led administrators such as Kellogg to view any hint of “red” activism with suspicion. Though high-profile anticommunist efforts—such as the “Fish Committee” or the U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States hearings—would focus much of their attentions and energies on suspected Soviet infiltration, the radical version of international solidarity developed by Communists and the noncommunist Left caused concern in Washington.¹³

Yet, in a political climate where pacifist internationalists from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) found common cause with Borah’s cadre of “irreconcilable isolationists,” stoking fears of Bolshevism was not Kellogg’s most persuasive course of action.¹⁴ Furthermore, although Kellogg himself was undoubtedly hostile to the Soviet Union, and the United States would not extend diplomatic recognition to the USSR until 1933, the integrity of anti-Soviet accusations would be belied by the economic relationship the U.S. government had helped facilitate with the USSR over the course of the 1920s.¹⁵ During that decade, trade between the two nations had “increased to a point several times greater” than pre-WWI levels.¹⁶ The gravest danger posed by the AAAIL, Kellogg attested, was not its alleged relationship to the USSR, but rather it was the potential for communist ideologies to spark bonds of solidarity across territories and national or colonial political boundaries and, as Kellogg explained, the organization’s campaign to unite people from “the Philippines, Porto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, etc.” against U.S. imperialism.¹⁷

This chapter examines how, despite existing tensions between the communist and noncommunist Left, the Communist Party’s critique of imperialism and global race relations proved to be an effective strategy for unifying “the Philippines, Porto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti” and beyond. For many people in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, the racial, political, and economic dimensions of U.S. interference had been clear for years: the United States was on the side of the colonial order, not on the side of equal political and economic sovereignty for subject peoples. U.S. and European powers had long claimed that the alleged inferiority of nonwhite peoples explained and legitimated forms of white dominance, including imperial relationships. Communists, however, argued that capitalist exploitation, not racial inferiority, explained the imperial order and global color line.¹⁸ In providing a conceptual framework for individuals to both make sense of and transform their material experiences of oppression, Communists positioned themselves at the forefront of efforts to overthrow the existing racial, imperial, and capitalist order.¹⁹

Kellogg’s concerns regarding the ability of anti-imperialists to connect across a broad geography reveals that at least some foreign policymakers understood that the United States was not immune to the effects of anti-imperialism as a prominent structuring force in global politics. Maintaining an anti-imperialist stance while simultaneously holding colonies, launching military interventions in Latin America, and deploying the racialized language of white paternalism was difficult to manage, especially in a period when empires around the world were targets of anticolonial critiques, particularly those from the communist Left.²⁰ By posing the Nicaragua or AAAIL problems as “red” agitation, moreover, Kellogg demonstrated how anticommunist politics could be put to work both to dismiss the notion that the United States comprised part of the imperial world order and to contain revolutionary critiques that linked imperialism and capitalist exploitation.

When Kellogg addressed the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 1927, the AAAIL existed more on paper than in actual strength of membership. While Kellogg might not have known the organization’s true size, he may also, as his critics charged, have strategically exaggerated his assessment of its danger.²¹ Either way, what Kellogg likely did know is that, in little less than a month, members of the AAAIL would travel to Brussels for the World Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism. The landmark conference would result in the creation of a new international organization, the League against Imperialism and for National Independence (LAI), which would go on to challenge U.S. claims that the United States was either inherently anti-imperial or exceptionally imperial. At the conference in Brussels, the LAI General Council heralded “coordination between the national emancipation movements [and] the labor movements of countries, colonial as well as imperialist,” as a top priority.²²

Often considered a precursor to the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, the World Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism and the LAI were born of the discursive and organizational intersections of socialist internationalism, pacifism and antimilitarism, anticolonialism, and racial solidarity movements during the interwar period. This 1927 conference encouraged imperial subjects from all over the world to cross paths and seek solidarity with people who also believed the anti-imperial struggle for independence required a complete transformation of the global political and economic system. Attendees in Brussels hailed from every continent, outside of Australia and Antarctica: they included nationalists and labor activists from Egypt, French West Africa, South Africa, the Netherland Indies, Mexico, China, and India.²³ Vowing to, among other tasks, “establish the solidarity of all those oppressed and menaced by American imperialism,” the conference sought to forge the very connections about which Kellogg warned.²⁴ In fact, Anacleto Almenana—a Filipino student living in Chicago who served on the LAI General Council—helped craft a resolution on Philippine independence that was based on the idea that to “win back their freedom” Filipinos would need help from “the workers of North and South American countries, the workers and nationalists of Indonesia and China, and the workers and nationalists of the Philippines.”²⁵

The U.S. delegation to the LAI conference is one example of a number of alliances that, during the 1920s and early 1930s, joined people and publications situating struggles for independence within an imaginary of global revolution. In addition to Almenana—who was reportedly not a member of the Communist Party—other delegates from the United States came from various organizations: they included William Pickens of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Richard Moore of the American Negro Labor Congress, as well as a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin.²⁶ The individuals who attended the 1927 congress were by no means unified in vision. Indeed, both the AAAIL and the LAI took seriously the need to function as a nonpartisan organization. The AAAIL’s New York branch, for example, worried that if “only the communist[s] and a few foreigners” filled their membership lists, their ability to organize a broad-based movement could be hampered by charges of “red imperialism.”²⁷ Although the LAI and AAAIL were not officially Communist Party organizations, Communists did spearhead both. Moreover, the USSR and the Communist International (Comintern) undeniably enabled the connections that linked activists into global networks.²⁸

Opposition to imperial authorities emerged in nearly every corner of the globe during the interwar era. As is well known, the rise of anticolonial movements and ideas across Asia was significant both during and after WWI.²⁹ Illustrating the complexity of interwar imperial and anti-imperial politics, both the United States and Japan—two nations with colonial holdings—factored in anticolonial imaginations. Some anticolonial activists looked to the United States as a potential ally, and, notably in the case of Vietnam, the United States “played a critical symbolic role” in their efforts to “redefine the relationship between the individual and society.”³⁰ Others drew inspiration from Japan’s rise in international politics.³¹ Yet not all challenges to colonial authority were explicitly anticolonial in orientation. To be sure, increased taxes, lower wages, and new techniques to either limit or surveil the mobility of colonial subjects generated various types of protests that were not always demands for immediate independence but nonetheless posed problems that colonial authorities were forced to solve.³² Even if repressing anticolonial politics did not account for all kinds of colonial policing during the interwar years, all colonial powers in Southeast Asia sought to control the rise of communist anti-imperialist politics. In British Malaya and the U.S. Philippines, for example, authorities used sedition laws to prevent the circulation of communist literature and curtail the growth of communist parties.³³

Certainly, many Americans had never viewed the colonization of the Philippines favorably, and from the late 1920s through the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935 nativists mobilized virulent anti-Filipino campaigns as they argued for Philippine independence. However, this chapter argues that the Philippines in particular is an important site for understanding the imperial workings of U.S. interwar power because U.S. policymakers believed the Philippines, as a U.S. colony, was a model for enlightened methods of managing “dependent peoples.” Yet, in placing Philippine nationalism and independence within the framework of Western imperialism in A...

Table of contents

• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. An Amazing Record of Red Plotting
• 2. State Violence and the Problem of Political Legitimacy
• 3. The Anticommunist International
• 4. Efficient, Honest, and Democratic
• 5. A Dirty, Half-Hidden War
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index