Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization 9781501749155

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Freedom Incorporated

A VO LUME IN T H E S ER I ES

THE UNITED STATES IN THE WORLD edited by David C. Engerman, Amy S. Greenberg, and Paul A. Kramer A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

Freedom Incorporated

Anticommunism and Philippine In­de­pen­dence in the Age of Decolonization

Colleen Woods

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, NY 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Woods, Colleen, 1980– author. Title: Freedom incorporated : anticommunism and Philippine   independence in the age of decolonization / Colleen Woods. Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2020. |   Series: The United States in the World | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019047028 (print) | LCCN 2019047029 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781501749131 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501749148 (epub) |   ISBN 9781501749155 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Anti-communist movements—Philippines. |   Anti-imperialist movements—Philippines. |   Decolonization—Philippines. | Postcolonialism—Philippines. |   Philippines—Politics and government—20th century. |   United States—Foreign relations—Philippines. |   Philippines—Foreign relations—United States. Classification: LCC DS685 .W775 2020 (print) |   LCC DS685 (ebook) | DDC 959.904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047028 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047029 Cover image: General of the US Army Dwight D. Eisenhower inspects the Philippine Scout Detachment at Clark Field, Pampanga Province, May 6, 1946. Signal Corps Photographs of American Military Activity. Courtesy of National Archives.

Contents

List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Decolonized Empire

vii 1

1. An Amazing Rec­ord of Red Plotting: Policing Radical and Racial Bound­aries in the Colonial Philippines

20

2. State Vio­lence and the Prob­lem of Po­liti­cal Legitimacy: WWII, Philippine In­de­pen­dence, and the Hukbalahap

59

3. The Anticommunist International: The Philippine Front in a Global War against Communism

94

4. Efficient, Honest, and Demo­cratic: U.S. Aid, Public Administration, and the Campaign against Corruption

130

5. A Dirty, Half-­Hidden War: The CIA and U.S.-­Philippine Covert Operations in Southeast Asia

159

Epilogue: A Friendship Written in Blood

185

Acknowl­edgments

191

Notes 195 Bibliography 235 Index 261

Abbreviations

AAAIL All-­American Anti-­Imperialist League AFL American Federation of ­Labor AFP Armed Forces of the Philippines AMCOMLIB Liberation of the ­People of the USSR AWIL Agricultural Workers Industrial League CCP Chinese Communist Party CIA Central Intelligence Agency CIC ­Counter Intelligence Corps CIG Central Intelligence Group CLO Congress of ­Labor Organ­izations COF Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (Philippine Workers’ Union) Comintern Communist International CPP Communist Party of the Philippine CPPI Communist Party of the Philippine Islands CPUSA Communist Party of the United States of Amer­ic­ a CREST CIA Rec­ords Search Tool CUFA Committee on Un-­Filipino Activities DA Demo­cratic Alliance DCI Director of Central Intelligence, United States EDCOR Economic Development Corps FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation FCP Freedom Com­pany Philippines

viii   A b b reviations

FMACC

Foreign Military Assistance Coordinating Committee, United States FOA Foreign Operations Administration FOIA Freedom of Information Act FOR Fellowship of Reconciliation GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade HMB Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (­People’s Liberation Army) HUAC House Un-­American Activities Committee ICA International Cooperation Administration IIA International Information Administration ILD International ­Labor Defense IPA Institute of Public Administration (Philippines) JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Department of Defense JUSMAG Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group KAP Congress Katipunan ng mga Anakpawis sa Filipinas (Proletarian ­Labor Congress of the Philippines) KPMP Kalipunang Pambasa ng mga Magsasaka sa Pilipinas (National Society of Philippine Peasants) LAI League against Imperialism and for National In­de­pen­dence MAAG Military Assistance Advisory Group MDAP Mutual Defense Assistance Program MID Military Intelligence Division, U.S. Army MPC Military Police Command, Philippines MSA Mutual Security Agency NAMFREL National Citizens’ Movement for ­Free Elections NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization NCFE National Committee for a ­Free Eu­rope NSC National Security Council ONI Office of Naval Intelligence, U.S. Navy OSS Office of Strategic Ser­vices, United States PC Philippine Constabulary PCLA Philippine Chinese Laborers’ Association PIA Philippine Information Agency PKM Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubukid (National Peasant Union) PKP Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Philippine Communist Party) Politburo Po­liti­cal Bureau RG Rec­ord Group (Archives II)

A b b reviations    ix

RILU SMM TUUL UdelTF

Red International of ­Labor Unions Saigon Military Mission Trade Union Unity League Unión el Trabajo de Filipinas (Workers Union of the Philippines) UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration UODF Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina (Demo­cratic Workers Union of the Philippines) USAFFE U.S. Army Forces in the Far East USAFIP U.S. Army Forces in the Philippines (Guerrilla Group) USAID U.S. Agency for International Development USIA U.S. Information Agency USIS U.S. Information Ser­vice USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics UTF Unión de Tabaqueros de Filipinas (Tobbaco Workers Union) WFTU World Federation of Trade Unions WILPF ­Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom WWI World War I WWII World War II

Freedom Incorporated

Introduction

A Decolonized Empire

On July 4, 1946, in Manila’s Luneta Park, a crowd of thousands gathered to witness the end of nearly a half ­century of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines. Neither the sudden onset of a tropical rainstorm nor the absence of U.S. president Harry S. Truman—­who would relinquish U.S. sovereignty over the “territory and ­people of the Philippines” from Washington, DC—­would dampen the day’s ceremonies.1 Luneta Park was bordered by thoroughfares named for George Dewey, the lionized hero of the Spanish-­American War, and William Howard Taft, the first civilian governor of the U.S. colonial state, showing how deeply U.S. colonization had marked Manila’s built environment.2 The event’s main stage, however, was placed on a site that, in the nineteenth c­ entury, Spanish imperial authorities used to repress its critics.3 As the U.S. press reported, a flagpole erected where Spanish imperial authorities in 1896 executed Jose Rizal, the “famous martyr of the Philippines fight for freedom,” was the focal point of the ceremony.4 As a U.S. Army band played “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” Paul V. McNutt, the last U.S. high commissioner, lowered the American flag while Philippine president Manuel Roxas raised the red, white, blue, and yellow flag of the Philippines over the Rizal monument. The monument to Rizal had been constructed in 1908–1913 by a U.S. colonial state ­eager to cast the “national hero” in a starring role in the Philippines’ developing nationalism, a pro­cess that would reach its end point thanks to U.S. benevolence.5 That U.S. colonization stood as an aberration in a Western colonial pattern other­wise marked by exploitation, subjugation, and oppression—as General Douglas MacArthur intoned in his In­de­pen­dence

2   I ntroduction

Day address—­was reiterated by Roxas, who, in his own speech, claimed that U.S. colonization was “so nobly and unselfishly accomplished” that it had successfully turned the Philippines into the “staging area for democracy in this part of the world.”6 During the July 4 cele­bration, Americans and Filipinos projected an image of in­de­pen­dence they wanted the world to see, created by the anti-­imperial, global power of the United States. The layers of colonial history on display at the Philippine In­de­pen­dence Day cele­bration w ­ ere not simply about how the colonial past would be remembered in the Philippines or in the United States. Indeed, during Truman’s recorded address—­broadcast in the Philippines as well as in twenty-­five other countries around the globe—­the U.S. president claimed that the United States’ “­great experiment in Pacific democracy” had “chartered a pattern of relationships for all the world to study.”7 Philippine in­de­pen­dence was historically significant, especially for Filipinos, who had lived for centuries u ­ nder two imperial powers. But even as it shed its largest territorial possession in the Pacific, the United States was extending its power across the globe. And the U.S.-­Philippine “pattern of relationships” was key to this extension of global power. The investment of U.S. policymakers, and Filipino elites such as Roxas, in defining and controlling the meaning of Philippine in­de­pen­dence—­and the relationship ­between the United States and the Philippines—­reveals the entanglement of Philippine colonial history with the expansion of U.S. global power in the context of emerging Cold War global politics and the era of decolonization.8 Freedom Incorporated argues that the Philippines was the lynchpin in the construction of a decolonized U.S. empire and that anticommunist ideologies and po­liti­cal proj­ects ­were critical pieces in the United States’ effort to expand imperial power in the age of decolonization. As a history of U.S. imperialism and anticommunism, this book details how, in the Philippines, the two became intertwined with U.S. po­liti­cal ideas about the colonial order and the place of the United States in it. Tracing the development and deployment of two specific operations of anticommunism—­maintaining an ideology of imperial exceptionalism and repressing po­liti­cal dissent—­this book details how Filipinos and their U.S. allies transformed local po­liti­cal strug­gles into sites of global communist revolution and international warfare. By linking po­liti­cal strug­gles over local resources and power in the Philippines to a global war against communism, U.S. and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of vio­lence as a means to capture and contain the alternative forms of po­liti­cal, economic, and social organ­ization as ­imagined by a diverse range of nonelite po­liti­cal actors. Both U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the Philippines as a testament to the United States’ benevolent policies t­oward colonialism and colo-

A D E C O L O N I Z E D E M P I R E    3

nized ­people, and therefore it was a critical site for politicians of the two nations to demonstrate the successes of their ideological beliefs. Global anticommunism in the Philippines thus worked to affirm the pro­cesses of global decolonization while si­mul­ta­neously containing challenges to colonial rule. ­Because enemies of the Philippine Left used anticommunism as a way to discredit and marginalize challenges to elite rule, Filipino elites and their U.S. allies made U.S. imperial exceptionalism and anticommunist politics—­two ideological formations that took shape in the colonial period—­defining features of the postcolonial relationship between the two nations. From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, U.S. policymakers, state agents, and Filipino elites used anticommunist policies to quash leftist opposition locally and internationally and to explain how U.S. intervention could exist alongside Philippine in­de­pen­dence. Inverting Vladimir Lenin’s linking of self-­determination to anticolonialism, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites insisted that an imperialistic, global communism threatened Philippine sovereignty, while the United States and its po­ liti­cal allies in the Philippines stood for freedom and in­de­pen­dence. Freedom Incorporated suggests that Americans and Filipinos used anticommunist politics to drive a stake through the radical anticolonial ideologies that located imperialism, capitalism, and racism as distinct proj­ects of the West, including the United States.9 Furthermore, this book argues that understanding how the extension of U.S. power in the age of decolonization took shape requires returning to the colonial period in the Philippines, where, beginning in the late 1920s, anticommunist politics intersected with a U.S. discourse of imperial exceptionalism that depended on the Philippines’ role as a modern, model, postcolonial democracy on the global stage. In placing the history of anticommunism in the Philippines within an imperial framework, this book reveals the function of anticommunist politics beyond just curtailing the popularity of communism in the nation or cultivating a par­tic­ul­ar kind of anticolonial nationalism, although anticommunist politics certainly aimed to achieve both goals. Freedom Incorporated traces a motley assemblage of U.S. and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs who advanced U.S. imperial power by mobilizing anticommunist politics that disarticulated the United States from histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order.10 For U.S. policymakers, who, as one scholar recently noted, w ­ ere more focused on the decline of Western colonialism and its “inseparable” features of racialism, white supremacy, and underdevelopment than on the Cold War conflict between superpowers, the U.S. relationship to the Philippines was an overture to decolonizing countries.11

4   I ntroduction

The Cold War and decolonization are undoubtedly interrelated temporally, and numerous studies of their intersection have complicated understandings of the Cold War and twentieth-­century international history. However, the U.S. role in decolonization foregrounds Cold War geopolitics and, as a result, overlooks the history of U.S. empire in the Philippines.12 In 1947, the term “Cold War” came into common use, and soon a second word, “containment,” revealed the spatial framework of U.S. global power.13 Yet Truman and his national security team quickly identified containment’s limits.14 In 1948, deciding that containing Communists’ territorial “conquests” was not enough, the newly created U.S. National Security Council (NSC) argued that defense of the “­Free World” necessitated a set of policies and actions that would “reduce the power and influence of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] to limits which no longer constitute a threat to peace.”15 In diplomatic history, Truman’s decisions to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947, the creation in 1949 of the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), and the massive mobilization of military aid called for by the NCS in its 1950 report “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” (known as NSC-68) characterize Americans’ ratcheting up of the conflict with the Soviets, the mission having changed from containment to rollback, and defense spending and military aid soared as U.S. policymakers de­cided to “arm the f­ree world.”16 This most familiar guise of Cold War anticommunism—­singularly ­shaped by the sense of a world split in two, in which global politics revolved around two centers of gravity—­has been central to studies of U.S. Cold War interventions in decolonizing countries. In this conventional narrative, it is easy to interpret anticommunism as an unchanging and ready-­made answer to any U.S. Cold War question. To be sure, the United States’ ideological b­ attle with the Soviet Union was significant. Yet, as Prasenjit Duara has argued, understanding how the Cold War intersected with decolonization requires tracing a longer history of imperial relationships.17 Indeed, two polices that historians identify as the primary vehicles for the extension of anticommunist U.S. global power in the postwar era—­aiding anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey in 1947 and the burst of military spending and the fortification of U.S. military bases around the world that ­resulted from the ac­cep­tance of NSC-68 in 1950—­had precursors in the ­Philippines. In fact, the first postwar U.S. military aid program was created for the Philippines in 1946. Shortly before the July 4, 1946, ceremony that marked the transfer of sovereignty from the United States to the in­de­pen­dent Philippine Republic, Truman approved the Philippine Military Assistance Act, which provided for the transfer of $100 million worth of war­time munitions to the

A D E C O L O N I Z E D E M P I R E    5

Philippine Republic and authorized the U.S. military to train the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on terms “consistent with military and naval requirements of the United States and with the national interest.”18 U.S. policymakers transferred $100 million worth of military goods to the newly in­de­pen­dent republic for two interconnected reasons: one, to ensure the permanent presence of the U.S. military on the islands and, two, to repress growing protests against the return of the colonial status quo in the Philippines. Intended to ensure “the preservation of internal order” in the Philippines, the 1946 Military Assistance Act was Washington weighing the po­liti­cal scales ­toward the Philippine po­liti­cal elite and their efforts to restore the prewar order.19 A year ­after the Military Assistance Act, the 1947 Military Bases Agreement gave the United States ninety-­nine-­year leases on twenty-­three military installations carving into the sovereign Philippine territory. In a hearing on the bill, Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman argued that the Philippines was a “keystone in the foundation of a base system essential to the security of the United States.” The Philippine Military Assistance Act and the Military Bases Agreement clearly demonstrated that, despite U.S. claims other­wise, not only would the United States continue to assert its ­will over the islands’ internal po­liti­cal strug­ gles, but the islands would serve as a key site for the exertion of U.S. military power in Asia and the Pacific.20 The Philippines is not simply a case study for understanding the postwar expansion of U.S. global power, nor is this book a corrective to “top-­down” histories that obscure the agency of non-­Western individuals.21 Instead, focusing on the Philippines uncovers how anticommunist Filipinos, who believed that the postcolonial world would be marked by the interdependence of nations, sought to enact national policies to draw the island country closer to its former colonizer. Filipino elites, who had amassed both po­liti­cal and economic power in the colonial Philippines, ­imagined themselves to be part of an emerging postcolonial leadership and, in order to maintain their hold on power, fought to keep the colonial order intact in the in­de­pen­dent Philippine Republic. They played impor­tant roles in constructing and promoting the sense that U.S. global power and the global war against communism w ­ ere inherently anti-­imperialist. Understanding how Filipino elites played key roles in constructing the space of global warfare makes for a sharper analy­sis of new racial formations—­many of which cut across national lines and blurred older definitions of colonizer and colonized—as integral to the construction and maintenance of twentieth-­century U.S. global power.22

6   I ntroduction

U.S. Imperial Exceptionalism In 1906, George A. Malcolm, a twenty-­five-­year-­old from a small town, graduated with a law degree from the University of Michigan and set out with “determination to become a fledgling colonial officer in the faraway Philippines.”23 Initially, Malcolm worked in the Bureau of Health and the Bureau of Justice; in 1912, he helped establish and then became dean of the College of Law at the University of the Philippines, where the main office building in Manila still bears his name. In addition to serving in the colonial state and at the university, Malcolm authored a 763-­page tome titled The Government of the Philippine Islands, published in 1916, and also textbooks on Philippine civics and constitutional law.24 An appointee of Woodrow Wilson to the Philippine Supreme Court in 1917, Malcolm remained on the bench ­until the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935, at which point he took a position as l­egal adviser to the U.S. high commissioner, the top U.S.-­held position on the islands. From 1939 to 1943, Malcolm served as attorney general of Puerto Rico, another U.S. imperial site, but six years l­ater he returned to teach l­egal and judicial ethics at the University of the Philippines.25 Malcolm practiced what he considered to be efficient ways for managing “dependent ­peoples” in the Philippines, and from ­these experiences he extrapolated theories to apply to the broader colonial world. As both a scholar and a statesman, he was part of a cadre of men who translated their experiences in colonial administration into new realms of academic pursuit. Culling data from colonial sites, scholars from varied disciplinary backgrounds—­from historians and economists to po­liti­cal scientists and ethnologists—­cataloged ­peoples, environments, and terrains all in the name of improving colonial administration.26 As is well documented, the expansion and consolidation of global empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on this production of knowledge as a mode of imperial power. The classification of colonial subjects into, for example, racial or tribal categories served both as the organ­izing princi­ples for the daily ins and outs of colonial administration and as the building blocks for hierarchies of difference legitimating Anglo-­European claims to civilizational superiority. On the global terrain of imperial cooperation and competition, colonial administration legitimated the rule of colonizer over colonized and the efforts of the “architects and agents of empire” to declare the superiority of one imperial nation over another.27 During his thirty-­ year ­career in the Philippines, Malcolm—­like ­others in the U.S. colonial service—­was guided by William McKinley’s belief that Americans’ purpose was “not to exploit, but to develop, to civilize, to educate, to train in the sci-

A D E C O L O N I Z E D E M P I R E    7

ence of self-­government.”28 Malcolm’s reflections on his own c­ areer in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and his belief that his ser­vice demonstrated a resolute “adherence to Amer­ic­ a’s revolutionary anti-­colonial policy,” demonstrate the pervasiveness and purpose of U.S. imperial exceptionalism.29 Freedom Incorporated draws on the work of scholars who propose imperial exceptionalism as a fundamental feature in the exercise of imperial power. Claiming exceptionalism—to be dif­fer­ent, to be exceptional—­was a shared feature of imperial politics, and exceptionalist ideologies w ­ ere, as Paul A. Kramer has argued, “produced on imperial terrain.”30 Like the hierarchies of difference that or­ga­nized and justified imperial rule, exceptionalist ideologies functioned as a mode of imperial power. Exceptionalist ideologies could also, importantly, serve to legitimate one empire’s form of rule over another’s. Illustrating just how “unexceptional” U.S. imperial policy was in the Philippines helps to explain why—­even as the United States moved t­oward granting the Philippines in­de­pen­dence during the 1930s—­Americans continued to portray and even understand the United States’ version of imperialism as inherently dif­fer­ent from that of its Eu­ro­pean counter­parts, as anti-­imperial even. In an examination of the transformation in the U.S.-­Philippine relationship from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, the discursive and structural components of U.S. imperial power come into view in concrete ways. The point ­here is not to draw out the historic differences between the United States and other imperial powers in Southeast Asia; rather, it is to analyze and elucidate how claims of U.S. imperial exceptionalism changed as the Philippines transitioned from colony to in­de­pen­ dent republic and as anticolonial movements gained steam through the early Cold War period. Despite the title of Malcolm’s 1957 memoir—­American Colonial Careerist—­ and a belief that Americans and Britons shared an Anglo-­Saxon culture that uniquely suited them to imperialism’s civilizing mission, Malcolm did not believe that the United States was part of the imperial world order. His 1906 arrival in the Philippines occurred, as he described it, “at the heyday of Imperialism when Eu­ro­pean powers ruled colonies covering half the globe.” The colonization of the Philippines was decidedly not a part of this history.31 To Malcolm, U.S. control of the Philippines was a relationship of support rather than one of imperial domination, one that was instructive, not oppressive.32 Despite the destructive racial and civilizational hierarchies that underpinned ­these rationalizations, and that enabled Malcolm to forge a ­career in “the American equivalent” to what other empires “called the ‘Colonial Ser­vice,’ ” Malcolm believed the United States was an empire only in that it was guided by the noble aspirations of “liberty and justice for all.”33 In American Colonial Careerist,

8   I ntroduction

written in the midst of the Cold War and wars of decolonization, Malcolm offered a version of colonial history that dovetailed with the views of U.S. foreign policymakers in the Philippines: that U.S. colonial tutelage had successfully produced a shining example of colonial rule and a model of peaceful decolonization in Southeast Asia. However, ideologies of U.S. imperial exceptionalism produced and disseminated by the “architects and agents of empire” did not go unchallenged.34 Following World War I (WWI), Leninist and Wilsonian ideas about nationalism, imperialism, and self-­determination galvanized anticolonial movements.35 Marxist-­and Leninist-­inspired anticolonial movements, in par­tic­u­lar, forced U.S. policymakers to grapple with what the conquest of the Philippines meant for the United States’ place in the colonial racial order, as well as in the global imperial one. Americans’ own racialized and classed conceptions of Filipinos’ perceived lack of po­liti­cal capacity seemed to legitimate colonial rule, but exempting the United States from colonialism’s “global color line” was a difficult feat. Despite long-­standing exceptionalist beliefs shared by U.S. colonial officials such as Malcolm, a radical anti-­imperial movement—­one that countered notions that the United States acted as an anti-­imperial force for good in the world—­did emerge in the Philippines. In fact, in his position on the Supreme Court, Malcolm confronted the challenge of Philippine radical anticolonialism when, in 1932, he ruled to outlaw the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), or Philippine Communist Party.36 As global imperial policies shifted from increased self-­governance and “colonial development” proj­ects in the interwar period to outright wars for in­de­pen­dence in the postwar era, U.S. imperial formations adapted as well. Following World War II (WWII), the contradiction between the rhe­toric of U.S. exceptionalism—­the idea that the United States was an inherently anti-­imperial nation—­and real­ity sharpened as the United States expanded its military and po­liti­cal influence globally and sided with Eu­ro­pean empires in the face of anticolonial conflicts. As a history of U.S. imperialism in transition, this book is a story of asymmetrical power. This imperial relationship shapes the archive; reflecting on the relationship across power, archives, and the writing of imperial histories, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler observes, “Transparency is not what archival collections are known for.”37 This is particularly true when it comes to topics that fall ­under the broad rubric of “national security issues,” as the concerns in this book overwhelmingly do.38 That said, U.S. government rec­ords remain the disproportionate source of material for this study, a reflection itself of the uneven power between the two nations. And though documents collected by U.S. authorities, particularly during the war­time and immediate postwar years, provide

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an entry into the perspectives and motivations of well-­known groups—­for example, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (­Peoples’ Army against the Japa­ nese), known as the Hukbalahaps, or Huks—­gaining access to the Philippine side of this story has been a consistent challenge.39 The structural imbalance between the United States and the Philippines also s­haped the terrain of possibilities on which Filipino elites could maneuver; yet, despite the unevenness, U.S. policymakers’ commitment to the strategic and symbolic significance of the Philippines created an environment in which Filipinos could exert more agency than might be expected. In Freedom Incorporated, elite Filipinos play an impor­tant role: driving the anticommunist campaign against the Huks, leveraging the symbolic and strategic role of the Philippines to gain disbursements of U.S. military and development aid, and testifying on the global stage that the United States had “inaugurated” decolonization by “setting the Philippines ­free.”40 Thus the voices and actions of elite Filipinos are crucial to this history despite the overwhelming power possessed by the United States vis-­à-­vis the islands.

Empire and Anticommunism Throughout the twentieth ­century, U.S. actors including politicians continually espoused exceptional ideas and, in ­doing so, contributed to the erasure of U.S. imperial history. Primary sources that continue to inform historical work are littered with examples of imperial exceptionalism, although ­these are seldom detected. Relying on materials of high-­profile anticommunist events in the United States, such as the 1930 U.S. House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States hearings, also known as the Fish Committee hearings, has likely led many historians of U.S. anticommunism to conclude that U.S. politicians cared ­little about anticommunism in the U.S. colony. Yet, analyzing the proceedings of the Fish Committee in the context of U.S. exceptionalism and imperial history helps show that anticommunist politics worked in tandem with the notion that the United States was an exceptional colonial power. By neglecting to connect U.S. colonial history in the Philippines with a wider history of anticommunism in the colonial world, and therefore ignoring the ways imperialism has ­shaped U.S. culture and politics—­including the way that U.S. po­liti­cal leaders thought about colonialism and the Philippines—­historians, intentionally or not, have reinforced the ideology of U.S. imperial exceptionalism.41 Moreover, attending to both interwar and postwar U.S. imperial history helps lend

10   I ntroduction

nuance to understandings of U.S. anticommunism that have focused primarily on the development of domestic laws, networks, and institutions.42 Historians’ endeavors to highlight continuity across pre-­and post-­WWII antisubversive politics by uncovering state-­level anticommunist policies have tended to connect the first Red Scare of 1917–1920 to the Cold War; b­ ecause of that, they have reconstructed the networks of local anticommunist po­liti­cal actors and institutions in the 1920s and 1930s that fueled broader Cold War anticommunist politics. But even this work has all too often ignored U.S. imperial history and viewed anticommunism as a response to local conditions rather than as a facet of the politics of U.S. imperial power.43 Moreover, despite the recent growth in lit­er­a­ture on the colonial Philippines, histories of U.S. imperialism and U.S. anticommunism have continued to flow in relatively separate historiographical streams. Though historians of the Cold War have begun to bridge the two, few scholars examine the connections between U.S. anticommunism and U.S. rule in the colonial Philippines, viewing the first as a domestic proj­ect and the second in terms of foreign policy. This separation is particularly striking in light of historians’ increased interest in transnational history.44 This prob­lem is not simply the product of historians choosing to focus solely on histories within the continental United States.45 Although historians have emphasized the ways that anticommunism did not simply equate to an anti-­ Soviet position but instead encompassed a much broader range of po­liti­cal positions, the divide between the “foreign” and the “domestic” has remained firmly entrenched in the lit­er­at­ure on interwar U.S. anticommunism.46 Although a rich body of scholarship has revealed the breadth and diversity of anticommunist politics—­emphasizing the flexibility of this discourse that, as historian Landon R. Y. Storrs has argued, historical actors employed “at vari­ous places and moments in defense of class, religious, and racial hierarchies”—it has nonetheless also overlooked the imperial dimensions of U.S. society.47 As a result, the ways that imperial encounters have s­haped historical actors’ sense of social relations—­ranging from race and gender to l­abor and conceptions of civilizations—­remain unexamined. Moreover, while historians of the Cold War have emphasized the importance of anticolonial rhe­toric in the United States’ ideological ­battle with the Soviet Union, less attention has been paid to how central the colonial relationship to the Philippines was for U.S. policymakers who sought to win the f­ avor of anticolonial nationalists in Southeast Asia. The role of the United States, usually considered a “latecomer” to the imperial game and frequently characterized as an aberrant empire that ceded territorial control for economic hegemony, is often refracted through the lens of the Cold War, thus obscuring its imperial history of the pre-­and postwar

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eras. This is not to suggest that U.S. imperialism was not dif­fer­ent from Eu­ro­ pean variants; however, as numerous comparative studies of Eu­ro­pean imperialism have detailed, imperial power and colonial rule qualitatively differed between imperial powers and even across imperial sites of the same empire. Like other colonial powers in the region, the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines repressed communism as well as other radical l­abor and anticolonial movements through increased policing, mass imprisonment, and the criminalization of party-­based communist politics. As home to many U.S. military installations, the Philippines was a strategically critical site for expanding and maintaining U.S. power in Asia, and thus geopo­liti­cal considerations explain one reason why U.S. policymakers committed this military assistance. But U.S. policymakers also made t­ hese decisions ­because they believed in the symbolic import of the model colony to shape, positively or negatively, the U.S. relationship to the “Afro-­Asian bloc” during the Cold War. Both U.S. and Filipino anticommunists believed in the centrality of the Philippines in the fight against communism; as the first president of the in­de­pen­dent republic, Manuel Roxas, put it, the Philippines was the “staging area for democracy” in the Far East, the model of enlightened colonial and postcolonial policy.48 And, in the context of the Cold War and decolonization, U.S. and Filipino elites’ exceptionalist commitment to conceiving the Philippines as a model colony enabled the use of vio­lence against Philippine civilians in the name of anticommunism. To be sure, both U.S. and Philippine politicians believed that communism posed a threat to the way of life in their respective countries. Moreover, although anticommunists tended to view discrete and disparate progressive and reform movements as “communistic,” ­there also ­were self-­described communist individuals and groups in the Philippines who truly believed that the USSR represented the best example of a just society and welcomed Soviet assistance. But during the 1930s and the immediate post-­WWII years, t­ hose who identified as communist or Marxist tended to focus on organ­izing for social reforms, such as giving “tenants an equitable share in the harvest”; indeed, the vast majority of individual Communists advocated for reforming the po­liti­cal system, not overthrowing it.49 However, as a tactic in their larger fight against communism, Filipino and U.S. anticommunists branded dissent as subversion, repressed alternative visions for the postin­de­pen­dence Philippine po­liti­cal and economic order, and strengthened the elite po­liti­cal class’s po­liti­cal hold.50 Furthermore, by wedding anticommunist politics and vio­lence to concepts of economic security and freedom, anticommunists worked to consolidate a par­tic­u­lar definition of po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence in the Philippines, one that was divorced

12   I ntroduction

from economic equality e­ither among nations or within nations and that Washington policymakers and their anticommunist allies would go on to use throughout the Cold War. ­Because most histories of U.S. engagement with global decolonization efforts proffer a teleological narrative of sovereignty and in­de­pen­dence that invariably begins ­after WWII—­a periodization that also aligns with Philippine in­de­pen­dence—­accounts of the United States’ role in decolonization usually ignore U.S. empire in Southeast Asia. As a consequence, continuities between U.S. imperial power across the traditional pre-­and post-1945 division fall from view. This is not to say that anticommunist politics crafted in the colonial period ­were deployed unchanged a­ fter 1945 or that the roots of anticommunist U.S. foreign policy lay solely in the Philippines. Instead, it is to say that colonization and decolonization in the Philippines—­including the development and deployment of anticommunist politics—­shaped U.S. responses to decolonization more broadly. The intention of this book is not to emphasize colonial-­postcolonial continuities, but rather to illuminate the legacies and adaptations of U.S. imperial power—by tracing anticommunist politics—­ during moments of profound local, regional, and global transitions.51

Freedom Incorporated In June 1953, Edward Lansdale of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) boarded a plane at Clark Air Force Base, the sprawling, 130,000-­acre U.S. military installation located just north of Manila. Three years before, agent Lansdale had traveled to the Philippines to advise Ramón Magsaysay, the Philippine secretary of national defense and head of the nation’s armed forces, on issues of internal security. From 1950 to 1953, Lansdale, flush with U.S. funding, helped the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in its war to eradicate the Huks. Formed in 1942, ­after the Japa­nese invasion and occupation of the Philippines, and largely made up of peasant u ­ nion members, the Huks spent the years of WWII believing they ­were part of a global strug­gle against fascism. Citing a “profound faith in the four freedoms proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter,” the Huks believed their war­time contributions would enable them “to bargain for better living conditions for the peasants and laborers” at the end of the war.52 Instead, Americans and Filipinos, both ­eager to restore the prewar social and po­liti­cal order in advance of Philippine in­de­pen­dence, cast the Huks as communist revolutionaries who plotted to overthrow the Philippine state. By 1953, however, as Lansdale was leaving the islands, the nearly seven-­year-­long

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campaign against the Huks was fi­nally coming to an end. The campaign was celebrated in the U.S. press as “the first victory over Asian communism,” and U.S. and Filipino policymakers—­including Lansdale—­believed that they had created a universally applicable model for successful anticommunist warfare. When Lansdale got off the plane, he was in Saigon. And within a year, he would bring the “Freedom Com­pany,” a CIA-­funded Filipino paramilitary organ­ization, and with it the strategy of the Huk campaign—­“all-­out friendship or all-­out force”—to the war of decolonization in Vietnam.53 Ten years ­later, in the summer of 1964, before the United States sent its first ground troops into Vietnam, Lansdale reiterated the importance of the Philippine campaign in a CIA working paper, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam.” In Lansdale’s victory plan, the United States would send to Vietnam a “­Free World Action arm” made up of “men who have proven their ability to defeat Asian Communist subversive insurgents.” This “small team of winners” would include “a U.S. counterinsurgency leader” and volunteers from the United States and from “the Philippines, Nationalist China, and Thailand.” The team would have the full backing of Washington but would enjoy “­great freedom of action” in the field.54 In fact, Lansdale had already floated the idea in 1958, extolling the added benefit of using “foreign manpower” or “volunteers to satisfy national objectives in foreign areas” as a means to cloak the hand of the United States.55 To allow for maximum l­egal deniability, Lansdale proposed establishing a corporation, the “international Freedom Com­pany,” modeled on the Freedom Com­pany in the Philippines. The “international Freedom Com­pany”—or, as he put it in 1958, “Freedom Incorporated”—­would function as “a public corporation pledged to the cause of man’s liberty.”56 The enterprise, he believed, would attract freedom-­loving volunteers “from Cambodia, Laos, and even North Vietnam” who wanted an opportunity “to join the good fight . . . ​before it [was] altogether too late.”57 In the fight to secure victory for the “­Free World”—­and to ensure his desired “Pax Americana” across the globe—­Lansdale was convinced that “the conventional is not enough.”58 In fact, the unconventional had become, for Lansdale, indispensable to successful war making in Southeast Asia. Agent Lansdale’s plan to arm international companies of men who simply “love liberty and want to join the good fight,” underscores how the counterrevolutionary vio­lence—or “­g reat freedom of action”—­endorsed by Washington had become a convention of “Pax Americana.”59 Anticommunism was both the drive and the legitimating doctrine for the type of warfare Lansdale promoted. And while he clearly connected the worldwide spread of anticommunist politics to the maintenance of U.S. global power,

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the incorporation of non-­U.S. actors into the imperial sphere of the United States was critical to Lansdale’s vision. The extension of foreign-­led paramilitary organ­izations based on the Freedom Com­pany model was only “logical”; to Lansdale, it made perfect sense to have t­ hose who had already succeeded in “countering Communist subversive insurgency” enlisted to “help ­ people throw off Communist tyranny” in other areas. Like corporate franchisors entering new markets, teams from each new Freedom Com­pany would “enter the country as advisors and technicians to help f­ ree the country.”60 Helmed by a “U.S. board of directors selected from distinguished Americans thoroughly familiar with top police needs,” however, the global network of anticommunist subsidiaries comprising “Freedom Incorporated” would be wholly controlled by the United States.61 In Lansdale’s Freedom Incorporated, the corporate body Freedom—­the United States, which traditionally views itself as a symbol of freedom—­would oversee its composite members, “incorporated” companies in the freedom-­loving client states of the world. Figuratively, therefore, the name Freedom Incorporated reveals the management structure and components of a U.S. empire called Freedom, an empire that was—­ according to its fundamental charter—­not one. Lansdale’s ­career as an expert in counterinsurgency skyrocketed ­because some of the highest-­ranking U.S. policymakers—­including Dwight Eisenhower and CIA director Allen Dulles—­praised his work in the Huk campaign and the 1953 election of Ramón Magsaysay to the Philippine presidency.62 Lansdale was certainly one of the more colorful characters in the history of postwar U.S. foreign policy, and his influence on counterinsurgency warfare, a recent biography claimed, “was rivaled only by that of T. E. Lawrence.”63 This is surely debatable, and Lansdale’s c­ areer ­will, no doubt, continue to be scrutinized and debated by historians. Yet the comparison between the two is useful for highlighting the presence, in Lawrence’s case, and absence, in Lansdale’s, of an imperial context.64 While British imperialism inevitably ­f actors into histories of Lawrence, the erasure of U.S. imperialism is a notable feature in histories of Lansdale.65 In fact, Lansdale’s c­ areer in the Philippines and his efforts to transfer the knowledge of “unconventional warfare” he learned on the islands to operations in Vietnam, Laos, the Ca­r ib­bean, and Latin Amer­i­ca unfolded in the context of, and contributed to, shifts in U.S. imperial power.66 It is not coincidental that Lansdale’s vision to create “Pax Americana in the world” through anticommunist warfare emerged in the Philippines, ­because anticommunist politics became a crucial part of a U.S. effort to proj­ ect the Philippines as a model of postcolonial statehood.67 Anticommunists in the Philippines also believed the islands could serve as a laboratory for

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exportable models of decolonization as well as anticommunist warfare. ­After WWII, the U.S. imperial proj­ect shifted, and, as Washington learned, Filipino anticommunists ­were already contributing to forging anticommunism’s global frame in the Philippines. Indeed, by 1946, Philippine po­liti­cal elites had already branded the Huks as a communist threat. Americans ­were not as convinced. For example, in the hearing that led to the passage of the Philippine Military Assistance Act in 1946, General W. H. Arnold, a deputy assistant in the Operations Division of the U.S. War Department, was asked about the “guerrilla threat” in the Philippines and ­whether he believed that the Huks actually posed a revolutionary danger warranting so many million dollars’ worth of U.S. military aid. In response, the general demurred and requested to provide his answer off the rec­ord.68 Nonetheless, in the end the Military Assistance Act passed, marking the seed money for what would become a multiyear campaign to ensure the “internal order” of the Philippines.

Huklandia and Anticommunist Geography In most accounts of the “global Cold War,” the geographic scale of the “global” is assumed to be the way in which h ­ umans understand, describe, and or­ga­nize their worlds. The “global” was not a new, mid-­twentieth-­century creation, nor did the global war against communism emerge solely from the Philippines. In this study, the “global” is not an all-­encompassing synonym for the world or a space where history “took place.”69 Following the lead of Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, who argue that a critical ele­ment of late nineteenth-­century imperialism—­and one that wove through economic, po­liti­cal, and cultural threads—­was a spatial logic based on the sense that geopolitics ­were governed by an imperial world order, this book pays attention to the functioning of spatial definitions, such as the “global,” as modes of power.70 While the Philippines was certainly an impor­tant part of global anticommunism, it was also just one part of a broader global movement that, despite deep tensions and points of friction, gained meaning and constituted power through the spatial logic of global warfare.71 This book is not a history of anticommunism around the world. Instead, Freedom Incorporated analyzes global anticommunism as a pro­cess and a discourse, in Ballantyne and Burton’s terms, a “spatial idiom of imperial power.”72 In this analy­sis, examining the “spatial idiom” means attending to the ways that anticommunists determined the geographic scale of events and turned “local” strug­gles into fronts in a “global” war. For example, in August 1946, the Field

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Artillery Journal—­a monthly publication read by U.S. Army and Marine Field Artillery soldiers stationed around the world—­published a piece about an ongoing war between the newly in­de­pen­dent Philippine Republic and the WWII Philippine guerrilla army, the Hukbalahaps. In the article, author Col­on ­ el Conrad H. Lanza, a veteran of the First World War, warned that the “civilizing effects of contact with the white races” threated to be undone by the violent and “practically communist” Huks. Lanza’s description of the Huks’ takeover of the “governments of three provinces—­Bulacan, Pampanga, and Nueva Ecija” recalled the same racial logic that had originally justified the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines. Repeating a sensationalist yet unconfirmed rumor that the Huks “had flayed alive prisoners” and “roasted them while living over a fire,” Lanza’s depiction of the Huks as lawless, brutal, and recalcitrant made it clear to his readers that they placed the United States’ “civilizing mission” in the Philippines in jeopardy. Americans ­were not the only ones who believed in the “civilizing effects” that Lanza referenced in his piece. Like Lanza, a class of Philippine po­liti­cal elites who had been brought into the colonial state by U.S. officials also believed that the “civilizing effects” of U.S. colonial rule had succeeded in transforming some Filipinos into modern po­liti­cal subjects. It was this group of “civilized Filipinos” whom, according to Lanza, the “communistic Huks” sought to unseat. Lanza warned his readers that the Huks had already been so successful that the Central Luzon provinces of Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Bulacan, and Tarlac ­were “now commonly referred to as “Huklandia.”73 Lanza’s 1946 account of the war with the Huks conveyed his assumption that the U.S. colonial proj­ect—or, as he phrased it, “the civilizing effects of the white races”—­had been a success and was now, only one month ­after Philippine in­de­ pen­dence, threatened by communist agitation. Even though it was not an official territory, by the time Lanza wrote his article in August 1946, “Huklandia” had indeed already begun to appear on military maps and in the archipelago’s major En­glish daily newspapers. And, from 1946 to 1954, Huklandia would be the place where the AFP, with the assistance of U.S. military advisers, would wage a brutal counterinsurgency war. In only a short span of time, Huklandia had become a place. More importantly, it became the place where “­Free World” scored “its first victory over Asian communism.”74

Overview of Chapters The story of global anticommunism begins in the colonial Philippines in the 1920s. Chapter 1 examines how anticommunist politics emerged alongside

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international socialist and communist anti-­imperial movements during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when U.S. and Philippine po­liti­cal and military officials turned to anticommunism politics to explain the rise of ­labor and peasant protest, proscribe class-­based anti-­imperial critiques, and bolster the nationalism of the governing Filipino po­liti­cal elites. Indeed, even before the official formation of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in 1930, U.S. and Philippine officials deployed “anti-­red” politics to limit the acceptable range of po­liti­cal debate and protest in the archipelago.75 Throughout the 1930s, U.S. and Filipino policymakers attempted to eliminate socialist, communist, and peasant ­labor activists’ ideas from the po­liti­cal sphere through state repression. Yet by 1939, with the rise of fascism in Eu­rope and Japan and the subsequent embrace of the “popu­lar front” by Western communist parties, Franklin D. Roo­se­velt pressured the Philippine Commonwealth to minimize its persecution of the po­liti­cal Left. Focusing on the economic, po­liti­cal, and social structures of the colonial state that gave rise to anticolonial critiques and movements, chapter 1 shows how a transnational po­liti­cal class of Americans and Filipinos anticipated in­de­pen­dence by tightening their hold on social, economic, and po­liti­cal power within the islands. The Japa­nese invasion of the Philippines, mere hours ­after the attack on the U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, left the islands exposed to the brutal collision between warring imperial powers. By early May 1942, Japa­ nese forces quickly overwhelmed the unsupported U.S. Army in the Philippines, and the Japa­nese occupation from 1942 to 1945 loosened the grip that po­liti­cal elites had maintained in the rural areas. This marked a shift for the Philippine Communist Party and peasant activists, who allied with the United States and some Filipino elite to overthrow the Japa­nese imperial forces. A ­ fter WWII, however, state policy ­toward ­these dissident groups shifted again. Chapter 2 describes how, ­after the war and the reinstatement of elite control, the Filipino guerrillas who allied with the United States during WWII w ­ ere cast as threats to national order. ­After the war, peasant uprisings in Central Luzon, l­abor strikes on U.S. military bases in the islands, and the appeal of the Philippine Communist Party—­grounded in concrete po­liti­cal demands such as higher wages, adequate housing, and the ability to attain credit to buy farming tools—­threatened to dissolve U.S. policymakers’ efforts to promote Philippine in­de­pen­dence as a testament to the benevolence and anti-­imperial impulses of U.S. foreign aid and policies. In opposition, a multiyear counterinsurgency campaign brought millions of dollars of U.S. military aid into the country, resulting in the increased militarization of Philippine society as well as the near total defeat of peasant and

18   I ntroduction

working-­class alternatives to Philippine elite control of the state. But while Filipino politicians such as Carlos P. Romulo—­who served as president of the United Nations General Assembly—­affirmed decolonization in Southeast Asia, they also faced the challenge of explaining how Philippine in­de­pen­dence could effectively coincide with the substantial U.S. po­liti­cal, economic, and military intervention needed to quell the vio­lence in Central Luzon. Despite U.S. and Philippine pronouncements that the nation represented a “showcase of democracy,” the bloodletting in Central Luzon would eventually attract the attention of the international press, which also called into question the stability and legitimacy of the newly in­de­pen­dent Philippine Republic. In response, Americans and Filipinos effectively collaborated to reinterpret peasant complaints against the state through the lens of a global war against communism. Thus chapter 3 outlines how, by the late 1940s, the Philippine state—­with the support of U.S. military dollars, equipment, and advisers—­launched a war against its own citizens in the name of global anticommunism. The vio­lence in the countryside was not the only challenge faced by Philippine po­liti­cal elites during the first fifteen years of in­de­pen­dence. Despite the almost complete repression of the Huk movement in the early 1950s, the Philippines continued to flounder eco­nom­ically, and this threatened the U.S. and Philippine elites’ promotion of the Philippines as a model of postin­de­pen­ dence statehood. As early as 1953, U.S. technocrats in the Philippines raised alarms over the counterinsurgency war, state bankruptcy, a stagnating economy, and elections marred by endemic vio­lence and intimidation. It seemed that the U.S. model for decolonization and postcolonial statehood in the Philippines did not, in fact, look much dif­fer­ent from the rest of Southeast Asia. Chapter 4 analyzes the United States’ technocratic response to the crisis: how the United States sent “technical” experts to the Philippines to reform corruption, create a Philippine ­middle class, and jump-­start the economy. For as Lansdale inquired, “How can Communists ask ­people [to] overthrow [a] gov[ernmen]t which they feel belongs to them?”76 Turning ­toward considerations of economic development and technical aid, chapter 4 illustrates technocratic attempts to enact local or national reforms that collapsed u ­ nder the weight of global anticommunist imperatives demanding that U.S. policymakers continue to cultivate relationships with the same elite class identified as the source of the Philippine government’s prob­lems. Chapter 5 examines the formation of a private paramilitary organ­ization in the 1950s by CIA agents who w ­ ere associated with Lansdale, as well as by a group of veterans from the AFP. This “Freedom Com­pany” was meant to transport the “lessons of the Huk campaign” to sites elsewhere in Asia and Latin

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Amer­i­ca. As an organ­izing princi­ple, the Freedom Com­pany and its U.S.-­based supporters assumed that U.S. colonialism had imparted “modern po­liti­cal knowledge” to Filipinos; as the most “po­liti­cally modern” Asians, therefore, they ­were best equipped to “export democracy” throughout the region. The Freedom Com­pany Philippines (FCP), staffed entirely by Filipinos in an effort to distance con­temporary U.S. interventions from a history of Western imperialism, actively promoted the idea that the U.S. colonial proj­ect in the Philippines had succeeded, while Eu­ro­pean imperial practices had failed to develop Asian socie­ties properly. Though steeped in racialized perceptions regarding the po­liti­cal capacities of colonized or formerly colonized ­peoples, anticommunists contended that U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and con­temporary U.S. interventions demonstrated the United States’ interests in liberating Asians from colonialism across the region.77 By 1957, George A. Malcolm argued that the racist language of the turn-­of-­ the-­century U.S. conquest of the Philippines was simply “a pitiful footnote” to a longer history in which “Americans [had] figured out how to develop liberal policies t­owards dependent p­ eoples.”78 In this way, anticommunism was an ele­ment of a broader shift in U.S. imperial power and a constitutive piece in the ideology of U.S. imperial exceptionalism. Indeed, as the era of empires gave way to the era of decolonization, policymakers such as Malcolm transformed their studies of colonial management into stories of national development wherein “the United States had set a pattern in the Philippines of anti-­colonialism leading to self-­government for ­others to emulate.”79 Together, Americans and Filipinos collaborated to produce an anticommunist ideology that, in the era of decolonization, would fuse large-­scale U.S.-­driven proj­ects, such as the promotion of cap­it­al­ist development and the spread of U.S. military bases around the world.

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,

A n A mazing R ec­ord of R ed P lotting    21

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 Ca­r ib­bean. 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

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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 Ca­r ib­bean, 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 p­ eoples 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

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in Latin Amer­ic­ a, 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 a­ ctual 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 e­ very 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

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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 P ­ eople (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 e­ ither limit or surveil the mobility of colonial subjects generated vari­ous types of protests that ­were not always demands for immediate in­de­pen­ dence but nonetheless posed prob­lems that colonial authorities w ­ ere forced to 32 solve. 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

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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 in­de­ pen­dence within the framework of Western imperialism in Asia, interwar Philippine radicals challenged the exceptionalist ideology that the United States was an inherently anti-­imperial nation intent only on “modernizing” the world.34 From the cantaloupe fields of California’s Imperial Valley to the chamber of the Supreme Court in the Philippines, Filipinos joined a diverse array of laborers and activists to critique the United States as part of the oppressive worldwide system of cap­i­tal­ist exploitation and white colonial rule over nonwhite ­peoples.35 By 1930, when the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), or Philippine Communist Party, was established in Manila, a revolutionary critique that directly challenged the exceptionality of U.S. imperialism was already coursing through international cir­cuits. Like their peers elsewhere, revolutionary anti-­imperialists in the United States and the Philippines quickly became subject to antiradical surveillance and anticommunist state policies employed by imperial powers. Though the surveillance and policing capacities of the U.S. state during the interwar period w ­ ere ­limited as compared to the post-1945 era, a range of state agencies—­from the U.S. State and War Departments to the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and the Philippine Constabulary (PC)—­employed available technologies to track Filipinos and Americans who traveled in communist and anti-­imperial internationalist networks during the 1920s and 1930s.36 Anticommunists also closely watched communications between anti-­imperial activists in the Philippines and other parts of the world, in par­tic­u­lar when Communists’ anti-­imperial critiques purportedly failed to differentiate between U.S. and Eu­ro­pean policies in Southeast Asia. U.S. colonial officials discovered that the deployment of anticommunist politics was an effective tool for maintaining colonial power in the archipelago; yet, for Americans, squelching the rise of radical politics in the Philippines was not simply about influencing the course of Philippine politics. It was also critical for

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ensuring a continued U.S. global influence. Attending to the relationship between anticommunism and U.S. imperialism in the Philippines reveals how Americans attempted to maintain the asymmetries of U.S. power and manage the challenge that revolutionary anti-­imperial ideologies posed to the imperial system, while still insisting that the United States stood exceptionally apart from the Eu­ro­pean imperial world.37 Undoubtedly, imperial exceptionalism was not the only rationalization that U.S. policymakers offered to explain the extended reach of U.S. influence in the twentieth c­ entury. Beliefs regarding Euro-­ American racial and civilizational superiority, concerns about rising Japa­nese influence in the Pacific, and the anticipated economic costs of defending the Philippines in the event of another global war ­were all useful legitimating discourses as well. However, tracking how and why Americans deployed anticommunism alongside exceptionalism—­that is, how and why the United States employed anticommunism to deny its own empire—is critical in plotting the shifts of U.S. imperial power before 1945.

Interwar Imperialism The structural and ideological transformations of WWI and its aftermath bared threads that, when tugged, help explain the post-1945 unraveling of the imperial order.38 The shock of mechanized mass killing, systemic programs of racial discrimination, and the contradictions of imperial “civilizing missions” undercut Anglo-­European claims to global civilizational superiority.39 For the workers and soldiers conscripted to b­ attle or ­labor in munitions factories whose po­liti­cal rights, before the war, ­were circumscribed by varying degrees—­from the nearly two hundred thousand African Americans in the Allied Expeditionary Force to the half million colonial subjects in France’s troupes indigènes—­the internationalist Treaty of Versailles offered ­little redress.40 Indeed, historians have widely recognized that Woodrow Wilson’s edicts on the right to self-­ determination w ­ ere not universally applicable and w ­ ere constrained by his and other Atlantic policymakers’ views regarding the ability of “dependent p­ eoples” to govern themselves.41 For anticolonial and transnational movements aimed at dismantling what W. E. B. DuBois famously termed “color bar regimes,” the real­ity of liberal internationalism looked far more like “liberal imperial internationalism.”42 Still, the intensification of anticolonial agitation, the rising discourse of “self-­determination,” and the birth of international regulatory agencies during the interwar years make it appear, in retrospect, that the demise of Western

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imperialism was imminent. But, as is well documented, the imperial system did not crumble during the interwar period, even though the ­g reat powers of Eurasia—­tsarist Rus­sia and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires—­would not survive. League of Nations “mandates”—­territories carved from the former Ottoman Empire and handed to Britain and France—­endowed the imperialists with the power to determine timelines for self-­government. Sovereignty in the League of Nations mandate system—­not dissimilar to the “calibrated colonialism” of the post-1898 U.S. colonial state in the Philippines wherein Americans both set the criteria “by which Filipinos would be recognized as having the capacity to responsibly exercise power” and determined when Filipinos met U.S. expectations—­allowed the promise of self-­determination to exist alongside the denial of po­liti­cal rights.43 Imperial nations introduced varying levels of self-­government but they also, in response to localized po­liti­cal contests, ­adopted new forms of control, including regimes of surveillance and policing. In effect, the imperial system was challenged but then reworked on a global scale. The rise of in­de­pen­dence movements in the colonial world did not necessarily undermine the workings of power in the U.S. empire.44 Rather, “calibrated colonialism” permitted the development of Philippine nationalism and a Philippine governing elite who would become one of the targets of Leftist organizers. In a 1928 letter to Pablo Manlapit—­a Filipino ­labor activist in Hawai‘i and fellow AAAIL member—­Anacleto Almenana expressed his frustration with Filipino nationalists who swallowed the U.S. line on eventual Philippine in­de­pen­dence. Filipinos needed to “stop flattering ourselves by imagining [that] a ­great American cap­i­tal­ist statesman” would “someday come down from heaven and crown us with freedom,” Almenana exclaimed.45 In­ de­pen­dence movements that ignored cap­i­tal­ist subjugation did not square with Almenana’s views of how imperial power worked. Furthermore, to ­radicals like Almenana, two de­cades of U.S. policy ­toward the Philippines provided ­little evidence that the United States was any dif­fer­ent than other imperial powers. For figures who, like Wilson, advocated for greater U.S. influence in the world, the extension of U.S. power over po­liti­cally sovereign nation-­states did not automatically contradict the belief that the United States was an inherently anti-­imperial nation. Even as U.S. intervention in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­r ib­bean increased in the early twentieth c­ entury, Americans continued to mea­sure themselves against Eu­ro­pean models of empire, arguing that U.S. expansion eschewed territorial conquest, followed economic laws, and avoided direct rule.46 Yet, this exceptionalist distinction was not always easy to maintain in the Philippines, where the United States, a­fter all, had both conquered territory

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and established a colonial state, no ­matter how convincingly it was sold as tutelage. Rosenberg’s critique of the “Wilsonian moment” points not just to the contradictions of Wilsonian ideology but also to the ways that U.S. exceptionalist concepts continue to distort historical assessments of U.S. imperial history. This is particularly true of histories of decolonization, where the Philippines ­f actor ­little, if at all. Though many studies of the Cold War and decolonization have questioned the conceptual and narrative limits of the traditional post1945 chronology, the rise of communist anti-­imperialism is still all too often explained as a result, as Ang Cheng Guan writes in a study on the Cold War in Southeast Asia, of “Washington’s failure to support” Southeast Asians’ “aspiration for equality and sovereignty.”47 Guan is not wrong. Yet, casting Washington’s response in terms of failure runs the risk of assuming that American policymakers would, if they had not misunderstood anticolonial movements, be on the side of equality and sovereignty. Moreover, exceptionalist viewpoints overlook the crucial agitation efforts of radical anti-­imperialists that mounted considerable challenges to the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism.”48 Although studies of interwar black internationalism and Pan-­African movements have detailed the connection between black radicalism, global anti-­imperial movements, and U.S. racial regimes, the work of individuals who or­ga­nized against U.S. imperialism and worked to build solidarity across colonial and national borders with other anti-­imperial movements ­factor all too ­little in studies of interwar U.S. imperialism. The lack of attention paid to radical anti-­imperial critiques of U.S. imperialism ultimately, as Rosenberg suggests, works to reinforce claims that U.S. imperialism was uniquely modern and guided by policies intended to eventually liberate individuals and nations from oppressive traditions of the past.49 In effect, historical assessments render the United States “comfortably but erroneously within a zone of exceptionalism—­seemingly unlike Eu­rope, with no consequential imperial holdings and no impor­tant anti-­imperialist movement.”50 Although the United States’ rise to economic prominence ­after WWI disrupted the international balance of power, it did not lead to an unraveling of the global imperial system that had integrated disparate world locales and caused uneven economic development during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The expansion of U.S. power was part of a global rush among industrial-­ capitalist nations to gain a competitive edge on the world’s natu­ral resources and potential markets, and it relied on a familiar set of global imperial practices, including steadfast beliefs regarding the “lesser” civilizational status of racial “­others,” the drive to expand an already transnational cap­i­tal­ist system, and the

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willingness to use military force or vio­lence to ensure the opening of markets. Still, Americans continued to distance their practices from t­hose of the Eu­ro­ pean imperial powers, despite not seeking to disturb the imperial order. During the twentieth ­century’s first two de­cades, po­liti­cal officials from both U.S. parties supported the private sector’s drive to extend capital deeper into Latin American and Ca­rib­bean nations.51 As Anne L. Foster has demonstrated, in the 1920s the United States also expanded its economic influence in Southeast Asia, although an accounting of the po­liti­cal economy of U.S. imperial power at the time demonstrates that, in material terms, the United States had far fewer investments at stake in Southeast Asia than peers in Eu­rope.52 Thus, even as U.S. influence in the region waxed, the United States still pursued a modest set of economic and social objectives in Southeast Asia.53 Nonetheless, the United States purchased Southeast Asian exports in increasing numbers, facilitated by U.S. capital investment in Eu­ro­pean colonies—­such as French Indochina—­while at the same time transmitted U.S. cultural beliefs and values via the sale of consumer goods and U.S. films in the region.54 Despite ­these activities, Americans tended not to use the term “imperialist” to describe themselves: Americans conceived of imperialism as a form of po­liti­cal rule practiced by Eu­ ro­ pe­ ans and rooted in the exploitation of dependent ­peoples. Although they did not see the similarity with their Eu­ro­pean peers, U.S. officials and businessmen believed that the spread of U.S.-­style cap­i­tal­ist social relations would slowly transform the social and po­liti­cal values of the region.55 To be sure, cooperation between the state and private business interests was rife with tension, but leading private and public figures maintained that fostering and implementing cap­i­tal­ist market-­oriented policies abroad could not be equated with imperialism b­ ecause they followed objective “truths” of economic law and sought only to ensure the stability provided by the ­legal and po­liti­cal framework of liberal nation-­states. The Philippines served as one metric against which U.S. officials mea­sured the shortfalls of Eu­ro­pean imperialism, and although they could at times be quick to judge their imperial counter­parts, Americans also tended to view cap­i­tal­ist development of any sort—­particularly in the Dutch East Indies—in positive terms.56 As Foster demonstrates, one way that U.S. officials and businessmen defined the difference between “modern” U.S. power and Eu­ro­pean imperial power was through the assumed benefits brought by cap­i­tal­ist social relations, including l­abor and consumption practices. As president of the New York Stock Exchange E. H. H. Simmons claimed in 1927, if U.S. economic policies ­were “misinterpreted by other countries as imperialistic,” it was ­because “Eu­rope is judging us in this re­spect by her own past history.”57 Although the

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onset of the Depression would pose a considerable challenge to capitalism, during the 1920s Americans of vari­ous po­liti­cal stripes held fast to the same exceptionalist belief that Simmons did; by defining U.S. policies against an ­imagined Eu­ro­pean imperial past and pre­sent, Americans argued that U.S. power advanced the cause of global economic, cultural, and po­liti­cal modernity.

Filipinization and Class Politics In 1902, ­after U.S. troops had suppressed a sustained Philippine insurrection against U.S. rule, the U.S. Congress passed the Philippine Organic Act, which established the contours of civilian government in the islands, including the formation of the Philippine Assembly. Elite Filipinos and U.S. colonial officials served in the Philippine Assembly, the legislative body of the U.S. colonial state. In 1916, the U.S. Congress transferred greater governing power to Filipinos with the passage of the Jones Act, which stipulated that only Filipinos could serve in the Philippine Assembly. The 1916 Jones Act, which retained a U.S. governor-­general as the colonial government’s executive and delegated daily governing operations to Filipino politicians, legitimated U.S. rule by deferring Philippine in­de­pen­dence in­def­initely. It also worked to mask the appearance of colonial rule by allocating even more roles to Filipinos within the colonial governing state through a program referred to as “Filipinization.” The passage of the 1916 Jones Act did demonstrate a U.S. commitment to eventual Philippine po­liti­cal sovereignty and greater Filipino participation in the current colonial government. When Philippine Senate president Manuel L. Quezon—­who served as resident commissioner in Washington, DC, from 1909 to 1916 and who had pushed for the passage of the Jones Act—­traveled to Washington in 1919 as head of the Philippine In­de­pen­dence Mission, he convinced President Wilson that the Philippines had “succeeded in maintaining a stable government.”58 In his farewell address to Congress the next year, Wilson recalled the United States’ promise of sovereignty, stating: “It is now our liberty and our duty to keep our promise to the p­ eople of t­hose islands by granting them the in­de­pen­dence which they so honorably covet.”59 Filipinization did not, however, translate into greater po­liti­cal, economic, or social equality for the majority of Filipinos. Instead, the policy allowed Filipino elites to shape the islands’ po­liti­cal and economic conditions to their own benefit.60 Despite internecine differences, the elite Filipinos who gained increased power u ­ nder the provisions of the Jones Act, and who believed that the Philippines would eventually gain its in­de­pen­dence, ­were motivated to enact

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reforms that left many structural inequalities and their own positions at the helm of the colonial state intact.61 A particularly striking example is that of the expanded franchise: a­ fter the passage of the Jones Act, voting rights remained tied to the owner­ship of property, which resulted in only 9 ­percent of the population registering to vote in the 1916 election. Limiting suffrage to property holders ensured that po­liti­cal power remained the exclusive domain of the Filipino elite. Even when the property requirement was dropped in 1935, voter registration that year only reached 11 ­percent.62 Filipinization had its detractors: among them, the U.S. Catholic Church, the Philippine-­U.S. business lobby, and former governors-­general William Howard Taft—­who had spearheaded the establishment of civil government in the islands—­and William Cameron Forbes.63 Opponents of Filipinization targeted its supporters in Washington, DC, for “prematurely” giving “the reins of power” to Filipino po­liti­cal elites before its p­ eople, or its markets, w ­ ere ready. In fact, a­ fter Republicans took control of the White House in 1921, the U.S. view of the islands’ “stable government” changed. ­Those who advocated the U.S. retention of the Philippines often sought to make their case by referencing the underdevelopment of class relations and the long-­standing prob­lem of economic in­equality in the Philippines, an issue that in their view was made worse by the Jones Act and Filipinization. Though Washington’s partisan divide mattered and fierce po­liti­cal ­battles did exist, critics targeting Philippine class relations and economic in­equality also obscured how U.S. colonial policies since the Philippine-­American War had facilitated the consolidation of Philippine elite power and the in­equality that accompanied it. Nonetheless, in 1928, former governor-­general Forbes argued that elite dominance of the Philippine po­liti­cal and economic realms demonstrated that “Filipinos ­were very far from understanding the fundamental princi­ples of democracy.”64 In par­tic­u­lar, Forbes pointed to entrenched “caciquism” in the islands—­the idea that an elite class exploited the Philippine tao (common man) through corrupt and “authoritarian” rule.65 He argued that this racially determined tendency “­toward absolutism” could be tempered by an education that would instill “ambition and enable the laborer to learn and apply scientific methods” and inspire “the laborer [to look] for better ­things.”66 Forbes, who hailed from “one of Boston’s wealthiest families,” certainly did not advocate for a leveling of class relations in the Philippines.67 Despite his criticism, Forbes remained committed to a belief in the superiority of U.S. colonial methods, and, in par­tic­ul­ar, he believed that “the treatment of l­abor” was “the greatest fundamental divergence of American practice from that of other colonizing countries.”68 Unfortunately, Forbes argued, administrative changes resulting

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from partisan policies in Washington, DC, had resulted in educational policies that failed to fully educate laboring Filipinos in the science of economics. Forbes determined that the “cacique held sway” in Philippine society ­because the majority of Filipinos exhibited unreformed “habit[s] of mind.”69 For Forbes, the issue at hand was that U.S. social engineering had not gone far enough in the Philippines; as a result, the antimodern or “traditional” class relations that Forbes often attributed to the Spanish imperial system persisted.70 Critics such as Forbes held that t­ here was still a need for U.S. leadership on the islands, especially in terms of economic policy. Yet, the formation of the Filipino po­liti­cal elite was intertwined with U.S. colonial land and trade policies that had already disproportionately and consistently benefited the wealthiest and most po­liti­cally connected sectors of Philippine society. In 1902, the Public Lands Act, modeled on the U.S. government’s western homesteading policies, had sought to grant individuals “unoccupied, unreserved, and unappropriated public land”—­much of it former Catholic Church estates—­for a low fee, which was meant to redistribute land to small landholders as a way to quell widespread re­sis­tance to U.S. rule.71 Although Americans had originally planned to prevent the development of U.S.-­owned colonial plantations by preventing land sales larger than twenty-­five hundred acres, by the end of the ­century’s first de­cade, colonial policies had strengthened the islands’ largest landholders.72 As a result, poor Filipinos, and particularly ­those peasants who worked as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, faced a continuing cycle of accumulating debt owed to increasingly wealthy landowners. Meanwhile, Philippine commodities enjoyed duty-­free access to the United States, and access to the U.S. market allowed large landowners, particularly sugar planters, to broaden their ambitions and expand their production capacities. In 1913, in a move to spur investment in Philippine export agriculture, the Underwood-­Simmons Act removed fixed quotas on tobacco and sugar exports. As a consequence, this led to a Philippine economy that was largely oriented around producing raw materials and benefitted the economic and po­liti­cal power of large landholders.73 As Philippine agricultural products became integrated into the U.S. marketplace, conditions of agricultural l­abor changed as well. Landholders generally or­ga­nized agricultural production around the need to generate capital for ­f uture investments, thus squeezing ever-­greater profit out of their land and tenants.74 But greater profit did not mean higher wages for agricultural workers. The structure of this relationship meant that tenants bore the brunt of the uncertainties of agricultural production, including market fluctuations and environmental f­actors such as typhoons. U ­ nder the deeply uneven expansion of cap­i­tal­ist relations in Central Luzon, working conditions

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on the rice and sugar plains of the Philippines worsened even before the onset of the ­Great Depression. While U.S. politicians and manufacturers promoted the reform of colonial economic relations rather than their complete dissolution in the interwar ­period, internationally minded U.S. policymakers saw the f­uture in terms of an increasingly integrated global trade that would require the further loosening of imperial economic controls.75 Thanks to policy changes, Philippine foreign trade grew from ₱195 million to ₱623 million per year between 1914 and 1929.76 And although the Philippines did not attract high levels of U.S. capital investment, U.S. consumer goods—­which w ­ ere able to enter the Philippines without tariff—­nonetheless had an effect on the islands’ economic landscape. According to a U.S. government economic study from 1934, the Philippines was the “first world market for truck and bus tires,” was second only to Japan as a market for U.S. automobiles, and was “first in the Orient as an outlet for meat products.”77 The islands also “retained their position as the best market for American cotton, galvanized steel sheets, dairy products and cigarettes.” Partly b­ ecause the islands represented such an impor­tant market for specific sectors of the U.S. economy, and ­because some U.S. companies had benefited from the low wages paid to Filipinos who had migrated to the United States in the 1920s, U.S. politicians fiercely debated the date and terms of eventual Philippine in­de­pen­dence during the 1920s and early 1930s.78 With the increasing reach and depth of capitalism also came the extension of cap­i­tal­ist social relations, which, in the Philippines as elsewhere, linked ­people in new ways: not simply through improved technologies of communication but also through trade, market relations, and transnationally circulating ideas about the rights of laborers. Workers and peasants responded by forming federations such as the Kalipunang Pambasa ng mga Magsasaka sa Pilipinas (KPMP; National Society of Philippine Peasants), in 1922.79 The KPMP joined Manila-­based groups already agitating for better treatment, such as the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF; Philippine ­Labor Congress). ­Later, members from t­hese groups would unite to campaign against U.S. imperial control, especially in the formation of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). Other po­liti­cal and affinity groups, especially nationalist ones like the Sakdalistas and Ang Bagong Katipunan, would also make the connection between U.S. colonialism and economic deprivation.80 Thus the po­liti­cal and social transformations of the 1910s and 1920s also produced new forms of opposition to U.S. empire in the late 1920s and the 1930s. ­After Demo­crats lost the U.S. presidency in 1920 and Warren G. Harding took control of the White House, followed by Calvin Coo­lidge from 1923 to

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1929, Republicans quickly set themselves on a reverse course in regard to Philippine in­de­pen­dence. In a 1930 article in Foreign Affairs, Nicholas Roosevelt—­ Council of Foreign Relations member and ­future vice-­governor of the Philippines—­cited the loss of “Amer­i­ca’s influence in the East” as a reason to retain control of the islands. He also argued that the United States had not yet completed its duty in establishing “a stable government” on the islands. In short, Roo­se­velt determined that Filipinos w ­ ere not yet fit for self-­rule. Moreover, anticipating the primary “security” rationale for post-­WWII U.S. imperial expansion, Roo­se­velt also claimed that a continued U.S. presence in the islands was necessary to ensure regional stability in the face of Japa­nese expansion and “anti-­European outbreaks.”81 The U.S. tendency was to explain its in­effec­tive policies as a prob­lem of Filipino culture, colonial land policies, and U.S. congressional tariffs, all of which played a significant role in worsening Philippine in­equality u ­ nder U.S. 82 rule. Still, critiques of Filipinization did not depart from the idea universally promoted by colonial policymakers: that cap­i­tal­ist social relations w ­ ere inherently beneficial and that U.S. commercial, l­abor, and consumption practices marked U.S. power as modern and superior to Eu­ro­pean versions.

Internationalism and the PKP Despite, or perhaps b­ ecause of, the islands’ endemic economic in­equality, and ­later spurred by changing U.S. policies, the early twentieth c­ entury was a crucial era for l­abor organ­izing in the Philippines. Although guilds and mutual aid socie­ties had been active before the U.S. takeover of the island, they only began to develop as trade u ­ nions per se, such as Unión Impresores y Litografos de Filipinas (Printers’ and Lithographers’ Union of the Philippines), a­fter the Philippine-­American War.83 According to Daniel F. Doeppers, however, the colonial state did not tolerate trade ­unionism as such ­until ­after the 1907 seating of the new Philippine Assembly and the 1908 creation of the Bureau of L ­ abor.84 The Bureau of ­Labor legitimized ­labor ­unionism but also sought to control the ­labor movement; ­after 1917 all ­unions and mutual benefit socie­ties ­were required to file annual reports with the bureau.85 Initially, ­labor organ­izations ­were ­limited to Manila and other port cities. In 1917, however, the Pagkakaisa ng Magsasaka, or Farmer’s Union, was founded in Bulacan, and by 1922—­ when the KPMP began—­workers’ and peasant laborers’ ­unions ­were being founded in provincial capitals and plantations across the islands, especially in the heavi­ly agrarian provinces of Central Luzon.86

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As elsewhere, many Philippine ­unions began in response to local needs and provided ave­nues for mutual cooperation and collective action; some, like the Unión de Tabaqueros de Filipinas (UTF), founded in 1909, had national confederations as well as local branch organ­izations.87 Filipino workers established federated trade u ­ nions as well, such as the Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina (UODF; Demo­cratic Workers Union of the Philippines) and Unión del Trabajo de Filipinas (UdelTF; Workers Union of the Philippines), organ­izations meant to address more holistic concerns, particularly t­hose of Philippine in­de­ pen­dence.88 In the spring of 1913, delegates representing ­unions such as the UODF, UdelTF, and UTF, as well as nationalist and mutualist socie­ties, met at a theater in downtown Manila to establish a new workers’ association. The resulting Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF), which comprised a “combined total of 40,000 members,” brought together thirty-­five organ­izations, out of which six represented workers’ workplace needs.”89 A ­f uture founding member of the PKP, Crisanto Evangelista, a printer and Unión de Impresores de Filipinas member, was among the thousands of COF members.90 In the Philippines in the early 1920s, several increasingly radical l­abor organizers—­like Evangelista—­had already begun to express themselves in Marxist-­Leninist rhe­toric and to make contacts with the Communist International (Comintern), which in 1920 had shifted its focus from the faltering revolutions in Eu­rope and ­toward strug­gles in the colonial world. According to Comintern instructions, metropolitan parties w ­ ere to provide assistance to comrades in the colonies, a policy that in practice was often fraught with tension. In Asia, the Red International of ­Labor Unions (RILU) was tasked with connecting unaffiliated ­labor ­unions to the Comintern’s international networks, and connecting Filipino organizers with members of the Communist Party of the United States of Amer­i­ca (CPUSA).91 To that end, Alfred Wagenknecht, a representative of the CPUSA, traveled to the islands in 1924 to assess Philippine trade ­unions and the general in­de­pen­dence movement. In the report he wrote in June, Wagenknecht acknowledged that “­labor ­unions and other forms of workers’ organ­izations do exist” in the Philippines, but he found Filipino workers to be lacking in class consciousness, which he equated with more advanced workers’ movements. Finding greater hope in the peasant ­unions, where he observed that the “class strug­gle has taken a definite form,” Wagenknecht nonetheless concluded his report as follows: “At this time t­here does not exist in the Philippine Islands even a vestige of an organ­ization of enlightened and revolutionary proletarians.”92 Wagenknecht’s critique was characteristic of the views of U.S. Communists, a handful of whom traveled to the Philippines in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and whose enthusiasm for helping to build a

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working-­class movement in the islands was almost always tempered by their perception of orga­nizational weaknesses and the slow pace at which Filipinos advanced ­toward building a “mass party.”93 Wagenknecht wrote his report from Canton, where “representatives of transport workers from South and North China, from Java and the Philippine Islands gathered in a conference called by the Red International of L ­ abour 94 Unions.” Similar to other Comintern-­affiliated organ­izations launched before 1928, the Transport Workers Conference in China featured discussions on anti-­ imperialism. Its manifesto argued that, although “six years [had] elapsed” since the conclusion of WWI, “the oppressed nations of the East, whose manpower, raw materials and other necessity ­were taken in order to help win the war,” had still not received their “promised in­de­pen­dence.” The manifesto emphasized the importance of adopting an international strategy, and it drew “no fundamental difference” across the imperial powers—­all of which it accused of continuing to exploit “oppressed ­peoples, depriving them of the possibility to live and develop freely”—­thereby rhetorically flattening the differences between the varied forms of colonial administrations.95 Though Southeast Asian Communists, most notably Tan Malaka of the Dutch East Indies, would also travel to the Philippines in the second half of the 1920s, Wagenknecht’s trip did connect Filipino workers to a broader international network of radical l­abor and anti-­imperial activists, including t­hose living in the United States.96 The CPUSA’s newspaper, the Daily Worker, published stories on the Philippines’ peasant and ­labor movement. In 1928, the Pan-­Pacific Monthly, the Pan-­Pacific Trade Union’s San Francisco–­based newsletter, featured an article by Evangelista, in which he argued that the Filipino ­labor movement was part of the world strug­gle for “po­liti­cal and economic freedom of all colonial and semi-­colonial ­peoples.”97 Indeed, the U.S. communist press sought to educate “the American working class” on conditions in the Philippines ­because, as a 1929 article claimed, “­little [was] known of the Philippines in the international trade ­union movement.”98 But the party’s support was never extensive, and U.S. Communists frequently offered harsh critiques of what they perceived to be the slow pace of Filipino organ­izing. Nevertheless, the CPUSA’s support to the fledgling communist ­labor movement in the Philippines brought wider U.S. attention to the l­abor movement in the Philippines and facilitated the international travel of Filipino activists, such as the contingent Wagenknecht took to China. Indeed, Filipino activists traveled widely and interacted with ­people from all over the world. In addition to Anacleto Almenana’s attendance at the LAI congress in Brussels, in 1928 Evangelista, Jacinto Manahan, and Cirilo Bognot—­all three of whom became founding

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members of the PKP—­attended a Pan-­Pacific Trade Union conference in Shanghai and then went on to join the Fourth Congress of the Profintern, the commonly used term for the RILU, in Moscow. In 1928 and 1929, a small cadre of Filipino activists left for the Soviet Union to study at the Communist University of Toilers of the East, the party’s school for colonial activists, where their schoolmates hailed from China, Indochina, Indonesia, ­Korea, India, and the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics in central Asia. The circulation of activists and ideas helped to solidify the internationalist outlook of Philippine Communist Party. But the party’s origins also emerged from a late-1920s rupture in that Philippine l­abor movement. The Tagalog newspaper Pagkakaisa reported on the widening rift on its front pages. One 1929 article, for example, castigated Manahan for having claimed to represent “Filipino workers” at an LAI conference in Paris without COF approval.99 The PKP was born, in par­tic­u­lar, from the belief that conservatives in the COF ­were too ­eager to appease the U.S. cap­i­tal­ists and Filipino elites who sought to maintain the status quo. A faction of ­unionists centering around Evangelista had become increasingly frustrated with the kind of u ­ nionism permitted by the Bureau of L ­ abor and ruling Nacionalista leaders.100 In Evangelista’s estimation, by confining the l­abor movement to campaigns aimed at winning l­imited economic benefits for par­tic­ul­ar trades, the Bureau of ­Labor did ­little to improve the standard of living of the working class. “The workers and peasants of the Philippines become poorer and poorer e­ very day,” he explained in a 1929 article, as po­liti­cal leaders and conservative ele­ments in the COF failed to make much pro­gress on issues that would improve the lot of the Philippine masses, such as better working conditions, higher wages, unemployment relief, and land reform.101 With seasoned veterans of the Philippine peasant ­labor movement and KPMP members Manahan and Juan Feleo, as well as the support of the Partido Obrero, Evangelista set himself on a course to redirect the COF ­toward a proletarian internationalist position.102 The international travels of Evangelista and Manahan also caught the attention of Manuel L. Quezon, who had already warned Evangelista’s left-­ wing COF faction to curtail its interactions with international communist groups.103 Domingo Ponce, a Quezon ally and COF secretary, claimed that a majority of COF workers supported Evangelista’s “rojas,” or red campaign. In a letter to Quezon on January 21, 1929, Ponce recounted how “the red seed” had been “planted in this country” by the transport workers who had traveled to Canton with CPUSA member Alfred Wagenknecht. Ponce did not, however, accuse the CPUSA of funding Evangelista’s efforts; instead, he claimed that Evangelista’s ally Antonino D. Ora had used his personal wealth to fund the

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“Reds.”104 Although Ponce believed that the “red danger” could provide the U.S. public and the U.S. Congress with yet another reason to deny the Philippines its in­de­pen­dence, he also expressed that ­there was a lack of other options within the current COF to change the situation.105 Thereafter, Nacionalista leaders allied with conservative l­abor leaders to hatch a plan to win back the COF. In the end, the plot only worked to definitively split the group, as Evangelista and his faction left to form a breakaway ­labor ­union, the Katipunan ng mga Anakpawis sa Filipinas (KAP)—­literally, the “Sons of Sweat”—or Proletarian ­Labor Congress of the Philippines, allied with the increasingly radical Partido Obrero.106 Leaders of the KAP had a po­liti­cal vision in which Filipinos would strategically join with other workers laboring in any of global capitalism’s varied landscapes. As such, the group positioned itself as the Philippine wing of a growing international working-­class solidarity movement. In 1930, KAP organizers announced a public meeting to be held on the eve­ ning of November 7, a date that, around the world, commemorated the 1917 October Revolution and the inauguration of the USSR. A crowd of an estimated six thousand workers gathered in Tondo to listen to anticapitalist and anti-­imperialist speeches. According to a pamphlet distributed at the meeting, the KAP was initiating a new campaign to unify workers and peasants in the Philippines. In fact, the meeting marked the KAP’s inauguration of a new po­ liti­cal party, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP)—­the Philippine Communist Party. In August, a group of KAP members held a small, four-­day convention during which they elected a Central Committee, composed of thirty-­five members, as well as a seven-­person Po­liti­cal Bureau (Politburo).107 Evangelista was elected general secretary, and Ora chairman of the party. Evangelista’s PKP followed the Comintern’s “ultraleft” turn, or the initiation of a “class vs. class” strategy, which was, in part, a response to the collapse of the united front in China and the subsequent massacre of Chinese Communists at the hands of Chiang Kai-­shek’s Kuomintang in 1927.108 The shift meant eschewing alliances with noncommunist trade u ­ nions or nationalist movements and, as a result, weakened organ­izations like the League of In­de­pen­dence, which had employed a united front strategy in order to build solidarity across the colonial world.109 While the change did not indicate the Comintern’s turn away from colonial strug­gle, as Sobhanlal Datta Gupta has argued, it did pose prob­lems for Communists in colonies like the Philippines where the party was small and might have benefited from an organ­izing strategy that favored maintaining a united front.110

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The PKP embraced ideas about international solidarity, but not at the expense of nationalist politics. Drawing on the internationalism of interwar communism, the PKP demanded immediate in­de­pen­dence from U.S. colonial rule and a shift in the global po­liti­cal economy. In January 1931, Manahan, peasant or­ga­nizer and PKP founding member, spoke to a crowd of nearly thirty thousand at the funeral of Ora, who had died suddenly in a car accident while in the custody of the Philippine Constabulary (PC).111 Manahan argued, “­Under the pre­sent order, we work and somebody e­ lse gets the money . . . ​we do not promise heaven to the masses ­under the communistic regime . . . ​but we want to try a new experiment. We want to eliminate the injustice of the pre­ sent economic system.”112 Drawing on internationally circulating Marxist-­ Leninist ideas—­including the belief that imperialism was a product of cap­i­tal­ist competition—­the PKP advanced the position that, in addition to ­legal sovereignty and po­liti­cal self-­determination, Philippine in­de­pen­dence required an alternative economic system. At its first congress in 1931, the PKP castigated the partnership between U.S. imperialism, Filipino cap­i­tal­ists, and Filipino landlords for having systematically driven the Philippines, and in par­tic­u­lar the peasantry, “ever deeper into bondage & debts.”113 The party maintained that the enrichment of a Filipino po­liti­cal elite was part of the mutually constitutive pro­cesses of capitalism and imperialism: as Evangelista wrote in 1931, “It is clear that the dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal parties of the [Filipino] burgesses are no dif­fer­ent from one another . . . ​they have but one aim; to rise into power and exploit with in­de­pen­dence or not; to enrich themselves and strengthen the control of a government which is pro-­capitalist and pro-­imperialist.”114 In seeing itself as part of the con­temporary anticolonial strug­gle waged by communist parties in “India, Indo-­China, Indonesia, Malaya, K ­ orea, [and] Formosa,” the PKP argued that the United States, like Eu­ro­pean empires, was a central actor in creating and maintaining the oppressive global imperial system.115 In labeling the United States as one of the primary powers in the shaping of the global cap­it­al­ist system—­and in identifying the prob­lem as linked to the relationship between U.S. capital and Filipino elites—­the PKP countered the notion that the United States acted as an exceptional empire or an anti-­imperial force in the world and that the nationalism of Filipino elites would eventually lead to social, economic, and po­liti­cal equality for all Filipinos. In linking U.S. imperialism to capitalism, radical anti-­imperialists in the Philippines argued that their liberation had to include the eradication, or at the very least the transformation, of both systems.

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Race and Radicalism One of the issues that drove a wedge between Evangelista’s faction of the COF and the COF’s conservative faction was the “pact of unity” he had made with the Philippine Chinese Laborers’ Association (PCLA). Despite the fact that Chinese mi­grants had traveled to and lived in the Philippines for several centuries, Chinese residents continued to be seen as “foreigners” in Philippine society and ­were subject to discrimination and hostility. To make ­matters worse, Chinese mi­grants w ­ ere banned from immigrating to the Philippines u ­ nder the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and although the act was poorly enforced in the archipelago, it fueled, as Richard Chu has argued, anti-­Chinese animus and encouraged further “segregation of the Chinese from the Filipino.”116 In the 1920s, conservative COF members argued that their ­union could not admit PCLA members. But at a “Class Solidarity Night” hosted in Manila by the PCLA and COF in 1929, PCLA member L. H. Chu warned that cap­i­tal­ists used ethnic and racial differences to divide the l­abor movement: “The Filipino bourgeoisie [­were] inciting Filipino workers to antagonism against the foreign-­ born.”117 Likewise, Antonino D. Ora exhorted laborers to “let not the differences in races” derail working-­class efforts to win “freedom from capitalism and imperialism.”118 Nonetheless, the joint event exacerbated tensions in the Philippines’ l­abor movement.119 As Chu and Ora recognized, cap­i­tal­ists and imperialists readily exploited racial antagonisms in order to undermine solidarity efforts and further widen internal divisions among workers. Therefore, when members of the COF formed the PKP, they emphasized the need to bridge racial divides in order to build solidarity among laborers in the Philippines as well as working ­people around the world.120 In fact, as part of the effort to build a global movement, the Comintern grappled with the issue of the global color line at the instigation of its members across the colonial world. Anticommunists who argued that communism uniquely worked to “incite race feeling” or “stir about trou­ble” among nonwhite p­ eople ­were, in a way, responding to this organ­izing. Moreover, working-­ class organ­izations in the United States had historically fragmented over race and the issue of foreign-­born ­labor. The CPUSA contended that the United States, like Eu­ro­pean empires, had contributed to the global color line. Although the CPUSA itself was in no way f­ree of racial discrimination, its organizers did speak publicly about racial in­equality and did sign on to the princi­ple that racial prejudice was “part and parcel of a system of American imperialism,” and it encouraged racial unity as a way to inflict grave damage on U.S. capital’s power.121

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In 1929, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), a communist-­affiliated cross-­racial organ­ization, broke from what it believed ­were the conservative and racial exclusionary politics of the American Federation of ­Labor (AFL). TUUL or­ga­nized African American workers in the U.S. south and, through the Agricultural Workers Industrial League (AWIL), Filipino workers in California, where thousands of Filipino agricultural workers labored in the lettuce and cantaloupe fields of the Imperial Valley. In the previous de­cades, thousands of Filipinos had traveled to Hawai‘i and the U.S. mainland for work and particularly to the West Coast; as “U.S. nationals”—­a category that excluded them from U.S. citizenship but exempted them from Asian immigration exclusion laws—­their movement was unimpeded, but their working conditions w ­ ere far from ideal. The CPUSA’s Daily Worker reported that the AWIL’s organ­izing in the Imperial Valley was “the beginning of mass rebellion by all the scores of thousands of bitterly exploited Mexican, Filipino, Hindu, Japa­nese, and Chinese agricultural laborers who slave for the big open-­shop fruit growers and packers ­under conditions bordering closely on peonage.”122 In response, anticommunists used vio­lence and draconian antisyndicalism laws to crush an upsurge of militant ­labor actions. In the United States, antiradical repression had long been s­ haped by racialized beliefs about the alleged ­mental incapacities, assumed susceptibility to manipulation, and supposed cultural deficiencies of nonwhite ­people. Indeed, U.S. colonial governance depended on constructions of racial and civilizational hierarchies in order to justify U.S. rule in the archipelago. In 1925, six years before the founding of the PKP, the wealthy Philadelphia l­awyer Francis Ralston Welsh wrote to U.S. secretary of state Frank Kellogg, urging him to have “local authorities” look into an interfaith peace organ­ization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) on suspicion of “communistic” activities.123 Welsh had worked for the Department of Justice during WWI and, since the end of the war, had de­cided to continue his investigation into “subversive organ­izations” in the United States as an in­de­pen­dent citizen. Welsh regularly supplied U.S. military intelligence with reports on subversive organ­izations. During a 1919 House Judiciary hearing on “sedition, syndicalism, sabotage, and anarchy,” Representative Thomas Blanton contended of Welsh, “[He had] done more to ferret out [subversive] propaganda and to help the Government rid itself of ­these anarchists than any other man I know of in the country.”124 Reflecting the ways in which anticommunists often conflated a range of po­liti­cal positions into the single category of “communism,” Welsh, in his 1925 letter, told Kellogg that the FOR was “thoroughly communistic” and in the pro­cess of “exciting what [it] calls ‘subject ­peoples’ against countries controlling the territory in

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which they live.”125 Characteristic of the racialized nature of interwar antiradical repression, Welsh’s conclusions w ­ ere rooted in a belief about the susceptibility of nonwhite ­peoples to the po­liti­cal agitations of white Communists. In the Philippines, as in the United States, racial animus and xenophobia became particularly efficient tools of interwar antiradical repression, especially at a time when anticommunist tactics ­were already shifting. During the first Red Scare (1917–1920), federal authorities had stoked xenophobia and used notoriously strong-­arm tactics such as raiding “radical” meetings, arresting organizers, and deporting “aliens.” By 1925, however, Attorney General Harlan Stone began to rein in the U.S. federal government’s antiradical policing. In par­tic­ul­ar, Stone eliminated the antiradical division of the Department of Justice, citing the unit’s unsavory use of “unlawful searches, seizures, and wiretappings.”126 But in the federal government’s absence, state and local governments stepped in to wage vari­ous repressive campaigns and push a range of po­liti­cal groups—­from ­labor ­unions to civil rights organ­ izations—to the margins of U.S. po­liti­cal culture.127 States and municipalities passed their own sedition, criminal syndicalism, and “red-­flag” laws (­those that banned the flying of revolutionary banners) and equipped their police departments with special “Red Squads”—­units tasked with monitoring, infiltrating, and suppressing u ­ nions and other po­liti­cal organ­izations. In large cities like Los Angeles, major corporations worked in tandem with the city’s Red Squads, and business leaders regularly sought to delegitimize workers’ organ­izing by “red-­ baiting” u ­ nions and their members.128 Additionally, “patriotic socie­ties” like the Better American Federation and the American Legion pursued their own wars on or­ga­nized ­labor: in their open-­shop campaign the former portrayed ­labor activists as “Bolsheviks,” while the latter “dominated the agenda of educational conferences” and encouraged the institution of loyalty oaths for public school teachers.129 In the Philippines, federal oversight of antiradical activities was never curtailed in the way it had been in the United States. Moreover, ­because the Philippines fell ­under U.S. jurisdiction, federal officials policed the bound­aries of po­liti­cal protest. In the Philippines, much of this was handled through the Philippine Constabulary (PC). The PC was established in 1901, early in U.S. colonial rule, and originally empowered to “prevent and suppress brigandage, unlawful assemblies, riots, insurrections, and other breaches of the peace and violations of the law.”130 As an armed force ­under the supervision of the governor-­general, the PC was also authorized to supervise municipal police forces that had been deemed lacking in discipline or efficiency. In 1907, the colonial government established a permanent Constabulary School in Baguio

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City to train Filipino cadets. In the colonial era, the PC also constructed a legacy of regulating vice, mobilizing rumors and scandals to achieve po­liti­cal ends, and, ultimately, using the power of a central state apparatus to influence po­liti­cal terrains at the barrio, provincial, and national level. To be sure, before the late 1920s, the PC put more effort into regulating the illicit economy—­ predominantly disrupting gambling and opium smuggling in the islands—­ rather than policing communist or anti-­U.S. agitators.131 Nonetheless, the capacity and the motivation for the surveillance of communist and ­labor leaders ­were ­there, even in the interwar period. In fact, some antiradical tactics used in the U.S. had originated in the Philippines. During the Philippine-­American War, U.S. military officer Ralph Van Deman had or­ga­nized counterintelligence operations in Manila, pioneering a system for managing intelligence on anti-­U.S. activists.132 The PC’s Information Division soon had hundreds of Filipino agents collecting intelligence for the antiradical campaign, relying on surveillance, monitoring, and infiltration and producing detailed reports to send back to Manila and sometimes on to Washington.133 Following the successes of the PC’s intelligence procedures, ­these techniques w ­ ere brought back to the United States during WWI to police Germans, anarchists, and citizens of vari­ous po­liti­cal stripes whom the U.S. state deemed subversive to the war effort. Through the PC, Americans partnered with po­liti­cally power­ful Filipinos to produce a vast, deep, and technologically advanced security state in the islands—by 1926, the Manila Police Department had collected an index of “alphabetized file cards for two hundred thousand Filipinos,” or “the equivalent of 70 ­percent of Manila’s entire population”—­ that was first used to repress nationalist re­sis­tance to U.S. rule and then to “demobilize Manila’s masses and demoralize their leaders.”134 In order to successfully track the movement of po­liti­cal targets, the PC also relied on information supplied by Americans stationed in consulates and embassies in vari­ous places throughout the world. In late October 1928, Dwight F. Davis, who was then serving as secretary of war, forwarded a report to the governor-­general of the Philippines, Henry Stimson, regarding “red activities among certain Filipino ­labor leaders.”135 In June, the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Nelson Johnson, had written to the U.S. secretary of war with concerns over a letter sent by Earl Browder, a member of the CPUSA and secretary of the Pan-­Pacific Trade Union. Two years ­later, in February 1930, C. H. Bowers, the U.S. chief of the PC’s intelligence department, wrote to Davis, who had moved from his position as secretary of war to that of governor-­general, to inform him that a communication from the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Helsinki revealed that Jacinto Manahan had traveled through Finland on a nearly

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five-­month-­long journey that, according to Bowers, took him through Shanghai, Moscow, Berlin, and Frankfurt, where he participated in “the last days of the [All-­American] Anti-­Imperialistic [sic] League Conference.”136 Americans stationed around the globe fueled anticommunist politics through reports on the travels of anticolonial activists. The anticommunist repression confronting radical activists in the United States and the Philippines was not simply a reaction to the establishment of the USSR, nor was it directly solely at the eradication of the Communist Party. The attacks w ­ ere also meant to curb the challenge that communism posed to existing social o ­ rders, especially racial and economic ones in the continental United States. By 1930, a nativist backlash—­worsened by the onset of the Depression—­saw violent attacks against Filipino laborers, their places of work, and their homes. A race riot that started in Watsonville, California, had been ignited, in part, by a racist and incendiary screed published in the local press, in which antiradical Watsonville judge D. W. Rohrbach demanded that the United States “give the Filipinos their liberty and then send ­those unwelcome inhabitants from our shores.”137 The five days of rioting not only rocked the mi­grant Filipino community in Watsonville, but it also spread to other areas of California. News of the race riot made its way across the Pacific and was met with protests in Manila. Immigration to California slowed, but organ­izing ­there continued. ­After Danny Roxas, a Filipino agricultural worker and secretary of the AWIL, was arrested and jailed in San Quentin Prison in 1930, Communists increased their efforts to highlight the issue of racial discrimination against Filipinos workers in California. The high-­profile case of the 1930 “Imperial Valley strikers”—­one of whom was Roxas—­originated when police and civilians armed with “revolvers and sawed-­off shotguns” raided a meeting of “over one hundred Mexican, Filipino, Negro, and white workers” in El Centro, a city in the southernmost part of Imperial Valley.138 U.S. author John Dos Passos attributed the arrest to “the crime of attempting to or­ga­nize the brutally exploited Filipinos and Mexicans who work in the cantaloupe and lettuce fields along with the white American workers.”139 Both the Western Worker, the CPUSA’s West Coast newspaper, and the New York City–­based Daily Worker connected the need to support Philippine in­de­pen­dence to the race-­based in­equality and vio­lence that Filipinos faced in California’s agricultural economy.140 As one article in the Daily Worker described, “Filipino workers, especially in Pacific Coast agriculture, are subjected to the most brutal oppression and exploitation,” which the article named “imperialist terror.”141 ­After the state charged Roxas and nine other “Imperial Valley prisoners” with violating the state’s harsh criminal syndicalism law, the

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International L ­ abor Defense (ILD)—­the ­legal advocacy organ­ization famous for defending Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—­joined the cause. Filipino workers, who ­were described in an ILD pamphlet as “the most militant section of the Valley toilers,” joined left-­wing interracial organ­izing efforts in the United States that, like ­those in the Philippines, linked capitalism, imperialism, and racism together in an interlocking oppressive and exploitative system.142 Concerns that Communists would destabilize racial and by extension social ­orders ­were mediated by efforts to monitor the communications between po­liti­cal activists in the Philippines, the United States, and the rest of the world. Indeed, limiting the circulation of communist or anti-­imperial ideas was a key strategy that U.S. and Philippine officials used to curtail internationally oriented ­labor activism and critiques of U.S. imperialism from finding a wider audience outside of the Philippines and prevent Filipino activists from participating in a wider world of communist, l­abor, or anti-­imperial networks. In Manila, colonial officials policed the city’s ports, seizing “communist lit­er­a­ture” shipped from Eu­rope and the United States to “radical ­labor organ­izations” in the Philippines.143 What counted as “communist lit­er­at­ure” was, of course, entirely subject to the determination of individuals tasked with ensuring the stability of U.S. imperial power. For example, in 1927—­four years before the PKP would even hold its first congress and five years before the colonial state would outlaw the PKP—­a message from a Harbin-­based U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent warning of an imminent series of worldwide “communistic uprisings” made its way to the U.S. secretary of state. The ONI agent based his assessment on a memorandum written by an attaché stationed in Harbin—­a city in the northeastern Chinese territory formerly known as Manchuria—­ who had received information from an undisclosed source. Citing a series of tele­grams, the in­for­mant claimed a worldwide rebellion would germinate in Mexico and then “an uprising was to take place in Panama and Chile” followed by additional insurrections in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, and Liege and “in Germany.” According to the unnamed in­for­mant, a “commission was on its way to the Philippines with plans to start trou­ble in the Philippines, [the] Dutch East Indies, and French Indo-­China.” The ONI’s report for the U.S. State Department, titled “Soviet Activities in the Philippines Islands and Other Places,” prompted the State Department to share the memo with its Far Eastern, Mexican, and Eastern Eu­ro­pean affairs divisions within six weeks. To be sure, the geographic range of suspected uprisings mentioned in the memo makes it clear as to why the State Department chose to share the intelligence across its divisions. Yet the report did not comment on the suspected uprisings in Latin

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Amer­i­ca or Eu­rope: the Harbin ONI agent only requested that the State Department pay “special attention” to the paragraphs “regarding activities in connection with the Philippine Islands.”144 Alerted to the Philippine role in the transnational circulation of communist politics, anticommunists in the Philippines stepped up their efforts to prevent the mobility of ­people, goods, and ideas in and out of the archipelago. The following year, in 1928, the PC submitted a detailed report to the Bureau of Insular Affairs that raised concerns over communication between ­Jacinto Manahan, a longtime l­abor and peasant or­ga­nizer, and Manuel Gomez, the secretary of the U.S. Section of the All-­American Anti-­Imperialist League (AAAIL). In par­tic­u­lar, the PC believed that Gomez had sent Manahan pamphlets that might damage “American prestige in the islands” if they ­were distributed “among the ignorant classes in the Philippines.”145 The report was based on intelligence gathered from surveilling communications between ­Gomez, a Filipino ­labor activist in Hawai‘i named Pablo Manlapit, and Anacleto Almenana. In fact, the PC kept tabs on “red activities” among “certain Filipino ­labor leaders,” including intercepting and reading the correspondence between activists, following leaders as they traveled to and from meetings, and infiltrating meetings to spy and collect lit­er­at­ure.146 The racialized and classed hierarchies legitimating and sustaining U.S. imperial power led anticommunists to assume that the “ignorant classes in the Philippines” w ­ ere unable to develop a critique of the U.S. colonial state simply based on their lived experiences. Yet ensuring that the “ignorant classes” did not damage “American prestige” in the islands was not simply about maintaining po­liti­cal power in the islands. Stemming the tide of class-­based critiques of U.S. imperialism occurred alongside of Americans’ tolerance of the nationalist politics of the Philippine po­liti­cal elites. Censoring the rise of radical nationalist politics melded with a longer-­term imperial strategy in which Americans shared power with an elite Philippine po­liti­cal class; restricting challenges to elite nationalism would, in the minds of Americans, ensure support from Philippine po­liti­cal elites who could, in turn, testify to what Americans wanted the rest of the world to believe about the exceptionality of U.S. power. Yet the ideology of U.S. imperial exceptionalism was never stable; U.S. officials consistently worried about the vulnerability of imperial racial order and the possibility that the AAAIL’s efforts to unite nonwhite p­ eople across national lines in a campaign against U.S. imperialism could, in the ­f uture, catch like wildfire. In fact, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been monitoring the AAAIL the previous summer, in connection to a boycott of U.S. goods in Mexico.147 Federal officials learned more about the AAAIL

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when the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad” leader William “Red” Hynes testified in front of the House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States hearings in Los Angeles in October 1930.148 Hynes also provided the Fish Committee—it was named a­ fter the chair, New York’s Republican congressman, Hamilton Fish Jr.—­with thousands of pages documenting ­labor, communist, and other radical organ­izations in Los Angeles. In his testimony, Hynes reported that not only did the AAAIL recruit Asians—­including Chinese, Japa­nese, and Filipino laborers—­but it also or­ga­nized white U.S. workers to advocate for immediate in­de­pen­dence in the Philippines on the basis of working-­class solidarity.149 Despite Hynes’s warnings about workers organ­izing across imperial or national bound­aries, the Fish Committee acutely focused on communist subversion within the U.S. continental bound­aries and did not take seriously the notion that Asians or Latin American workers viewed the United States as an imperial power or that U.S. workers sought an end to U.S. imperialism in the Philippines.150 Yet other anticommunists understood the ways that the AAAIL had linked U.S. interventions in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­r ib­bean, and the violent discrimination against African Americans in the United States, to colonialism in the Philippines and had even described repression of the PKP in the Philippines as part of a broader proj­ect of managing the ways in which foreign populations conceived of U.S. race relations. In 1931, a State Department official argued against forming an official intercolonial, anticommunist police force, stating that the United States needed to be careful of being overly vis­i­ble in a situation where “the white colonial powers [are] on one side and the color-­conscious masses of Asia on the other.”151 Similarly, a 1931 letter from Governor-­General Dwight F. Davis to General F. Le J. Parker, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs in the United States, regarding his decision to “[take] a stronger hand” with the Communists, reported that he had asked the colony’s secretaries of Justice and the Interior—­ both of whom w ­ ere Filipinos—to bring sedition charges against communist leaders. Conveying his strategy for ensuring that his actions did not damage the carefully managed image of U.S.-­Filipino racial relations, Davis told Parker that he had arranged to “be away on a trip” when the charges ­were filed, so as to “remove any possibility of confusing the issue by injecting the ele­ment of racial prejudice.”152 In other words, Davis wanted it to seem as if the Filipino officials, without input from Americans, had charged the Filipino Communists, thereby avoiding the appearance of white U.S. officials curtailing the rights of Filipino po­liti­cal organ­izations. Ironically, Davis used a long-­standing strategy of ­imperialism—in which natives held key roles in colonial states—to distance

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U.S. policymakers from the racialized order that characterized Eu­ro­pean colonial rule in Southeast Asia.

Accelerating Anticommunism On an early January night in 1931, a bus carry­ing a band of seventy peasants ­stopped on the outskirts of Tayug, a small town in the Central Luzon province of Pangasinan, near the western coast of Luzon. ­After letting off fourteen ­women, the bus carried the remaining fifty-­six men—­armed with knives and pistols—to the barracks of the PC. The men burst into the barracks, killing three soldiers and setting the structure ablaze before reuniting with the group’s female members and heading to the municipal building. ­There, the group broke in and set fire to stacks of government documents, including land deeds.153 PC reinforcements who arrived the following morning engaged the rebels in a firefight; some managed to escape, but the rest eventually surrendered, and the PC placed fifty-­seven peasants u ­ nder arrest for murder and sedition.154 Anticipating further disturbances, hacienderos (large estate o ­ wners or landlords) in the province requested additional PC patrols of their properties, “despite the heaviest guard.”155 The event that became known to U.S. officials as the “Tayug affair” momentarily shook a colonial state already grappling with an uptick in peasant and ­labor activism. This included l­abor strikes in the port of Iloilo in 1930 and 1931, among them a 3,000-­worker general strike that had shut down the shipment of sugar for twenty-­eight days.156 Another general strike para­lyzed shipping and commerce in late January 1931.157 ­After Tayug, C. H. Bowers spoke to the press about the anx­i­eties that ­labor strife on the islands would spread.158 Yet, officials could not agree on the motivations of the group ­behind the Tayug affair. What could have prompted a group of peasants to target police forces and municipal rec­ords?159 The Philippine secretary of the Interior, Honorio Ventura, identified the group members as colorums—­a general name for spiritually inspired peasant nationalist movements—­motivated by “fanat­i­cism” and allegedly responsible for previous acts of vio­lence in the islands.160 Colonial officials also believed that the nationalist organ­ization Ang Bagong Katipunan—­led by ­f uture president Manuel Roxas—­was instigating peasants.161 Bowers argued that his division’s investigations had proved that “Reds” had instigated the event, an opinion that the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) confirmed in a report to the War Department.162 In the Manila Times, Philippine legislator Tomás Confesor described the affair as “communist seeds sprouting.”163 How-

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ever, nearly all officials agreed that economic in­equality, worsened by the global economic depression, had created the conditions in which power-­hungry individuals could sway the po­liti­cal actions of what the MID called the “unthinking masses” for their own gain.164 Racialized and classed conceptions of the perceived lack of po­liti­cal capacity of the Philippine peasantry—­particularly their susceptibility to outside forces—­were not new in the Philippines; but ­these conceptions ­were never stable, and they w ­ ere always subject to social, po­liti­cal, and economic contexts. The dif­fer­ent backgrounds and positions—­U.S. colonial officers, U.S. military officers, Filipino colonial officers, Filipino politicians, Filipino police—­reflect the vari­ous ways that the Philippines’ peasantry was seen as, and was, instrumentalized for dif­fer­ent c­ auses. A 1931 memo written by governor-­general of the Philippines Dwight F. Davis, in which he explained that the communist movement had to be contained b­ ecause “­there are many very ignorant p­ eople in the country districts,” reveals the extent to which anticommunists continued to use the racialized thinking of U.S. imperialism against the “Philippine masses” in pursuing anticommunist proj­ects. Davis made it known that he thought Filipinos had neither the intelligence nor the po­liti­cal capacity to assess communist ideologies themselves.165 Filipino po­liti­cal leaders, such as Manuel L. Quezon, agreed with this assessment, but with a crucial distinction: the manipulation of the masses was due not only to their gullibility but also to the worsening economic situation in the countryside. During his term as president of the Philippine Senate, Quezon told foreign correspondents that “demagogues and communists who spread subversive doctrines against peace and order to gain popularity or money” w ­ ere taking advantage of the “feeling of discontent due to the economic depression” to incite peasant protests.166 Quezon saw the peasants as pawns in a game to gain power, ­whether through popularity or money. Other officials also routinely asserted that international communism and its agents in the Philippines exploited the inequalities of the colonial po­liti­cal economy for their own interests. Only a few months ­after the events in Tayug, PC agents stationed in Pangasinan warned that another clandestine society was busy fomenting a “Communist [and] anti-­American” uprising in the province. Nationalist rebels known as Ricaristas—­­ after their leader General Artemio Ricarte—­ were allegedly working with support from Japan.167 Although the PC maintained that the “obvious prevalence of Red propaganda” in Pangasinan was proof that Communists had infiltrated the province, U.S. officials in Washington informed the U.S. press that they knew nothing “of a serious anti-­American plot with a pronounced Soviet character” on the islands.168 Indeed, the 1930 annual report of the governor-­general of the Philippines had stated that the “small group” of

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individuals who ­were “more or less active in attempting to spread the princi­ples of Bolshevism” was not a “serious menace to the government.”169 Even the New York Times cited “frequent ­labor trou­bles” as the likely source of tension in Pangasinan and noted that no previous dispatches had indicated that “any considerable body of or­ga­nized Reds” was active in the U.S. colony.170 But by the spring of 1931, police and juridical figures in the colonial state w ­ ere increas171 ingly treating “Reds” as a serious threat to the colonial state. ­After the founding of the PKP in late 1930, the Tayug affair in January, another round of sedition charges against “Reds” in February, and the Ricarista plot in March—­and in tandem with the economic downturn and the anticolonial uprisings in neighboring colonies—­the colonial government de­cided to increase its “intensive war on Bolshevism.”172 In fact, it did not take long for anticommunists to mobilize the colonial police regime in late 1930 ­after the PKP established itself as a formal party seeking to loosen the grip that elite Filipinos maintained on the colonial state. Immediately a­ fter the party’s founding, the colonial state intensified its persecution of communist-­inspired anticolonial activists, banning individuals associated with the party from using the mail ser­vice and forbidding them from holding large meetings.173 The colonial state further attempted to limit the spread of communist ideology across the archipelago when, during the first few months of 1931, it instructed provincial governors not to issue permits for meetings managed by “red agitators.”174 The PC also began to arrest radical leaders on charges of sedition across the island of Luzon: longtime peasant or­ga­nizer and PKP member Juan Feleo in the province of Nueva Ecija; Evangelista, Manahan, and Dominador Ambrosio faced sedition charges in Manila; in Bacolod, on the island of Negros, the constabulary seized Guillermo Capadocia and accused him of the same.175 While the jails filled with “Reds,” colonial officials threatened radical leaders that the U.S. Army would provide “tear-­gas bombs and riot-­guns” to squelch a planned May 1 parade. The parade plans continued anyway, and the PC arrested sixty-­two additional activists.176 On May 31, the PC launched the “largest raid in the history of the Philippines,” according to the New York Times, when officers arrested more than three hundred individuals attending a KAP meeting in Manila.177 Following the arrests, Mariano Albert, a Filipino judge who had held numerous positions in the colonial state, found twenty-­three leaders of the PKP guilty on “charges of sedition and crime against the fundamental laws of the state.” In addition to one-­year imprisonments and fines, the state required twenty leaders to relocate to seven dif­fer­ent provinces in Luzon, with the promise that they would be surveilled by the PC.178 The defendants promised to appeal.

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Evangelista filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Manila, Tomas Earnshaw, for unfairly revoking the group’s assembly permits. Evangelista did not deny his membership in the PKP, though he maintained that the KAP—­not the PKP—­had requested the permit for the mass meeting and parade. In revoking it, Evangelista claimed the mayor had “erected himself above the law” and, citing the provisions of the 1916 Jones Act, accused Earnshaw and the courts of denying “our freedom of speech, of association, and peaceful assembly.”179 The Philippine Supreme Court took the Evangelista case in 1932. In his defense, Evangelista described to the court how, in front of “hundreds of armed soldiers and municipal police,” he had tried to invoke the “provisions of the Jones law” to protect his civil rights. Nonetheless, when Evangelista “mounted on a bench and spoke,” he was quickly grabbed by the commanding officer, taken to the PC headquarters in Manila, and charged with sedition. The Supreme Court ruled against Evangelista, finding that he was indeed guilty of “seditious speeches . . . ​urging the laboring class to unite by affiliating to the Communist Party of the Philippines in order to be able to overthrow the pre­sent government.” In their decision, the justices cited a U.S. Supreme Court pre­ce­dent from 1925 that permitted the suppression of speech that directly advocated the overthrow of the government, as well as a colonial statute on the suppression of re­sis­tance to Spanish rule.180 As such, Justice James Ostrand—­a U.S. veteran of the Philippine-­American War who had held a seat on the Supreme Court since 1921—­declared that the PKP had no constitutionally protected rights to ­free speech.181 The Philippine Supreme Court argued that, if left unrestricted, the PKP might resort to threatening, violent dissent and even commended Mayor Earnshaw “for having taken a prompt, courageous, and firm stand ­towards the said Communist Party of the Philippines before the latter could do more damage.”182 Although Evangelista’s case hinged on his PKP affiliation, the revoked permit had belonged to the KAP: in effect, officials had conflated the KAP, a trade ­union organ­ization, with the PKP, a po­liti­cal party. This was not particularly notable. Anticommunist repression in both the United States and the Philippines had always cast a wide net. In practical terms, however, it allowed the prosecution to rely, as Evangelista claimed, “emphatically on data contained in the so-­called Fish Report,” which emphasized how “communists all over the world advocate the cause of force and vio­lence.”183 Evangelista excoriated the fact that the verdict in his case had been based in part on Fish Committee testimony that was unrelated to his case. In effect, the sedition case against Evangelista and his codefendants had been built on anticommunist hearings, hearings that had originated with Fish’s claim that the U.S federal government had a

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“do-­nothing policy” with re­spect to alleged communist infiltration of the United States.184 Ultimately, the colonial state’s ability to demarcate certain po­liti­cal visions as potentially violent threats to the social order revealed exactly what colonial anticommunists hoped to achieve in their repression of the PKP. By banning Communists from po­liti­cal participation, anticommunists used the authority of the state to remove alternative visions of in­de­pen­dence from the po­liti­cal sphere, while at the same time shoring up the dominant class’s hold on state power. The court’s claim that the PKP, and ­those affiliated with the organ­ization, aimed to “incite class strug­gle”—­and that the “purpose of such association [was] to alter the social order”—­was not wrong. The PKP did advocate for a reordering of the social order in the Philippines. But the court’s decision cast the PKP’s vision for transforming colonial rule in the Philippines as outside the bounds of the acceptable po­liti­cal order—an order that, of course, was constructed to protect the U.S. colonial state from challenges to its rule.

Negotiating Imperial Anticommunism The PKP was only one of many groups in the archipelago to link ­labor and living conditions to anticolonial politics in the first half of the twentieth ­century. As communist anti-­imperial movements grew during the interwar period, not only in the Philippines but across the colonized world, Americans and colonial elites scrambled to find ways to contain their popularity out of fear that they would not only destabilize the racial-­colonial order but also bind the United States to what Americans argued was a distinctly Eu­ro­pean imperial order. Radical anti-­imperial activists in both the United States and the Philippines challenged U.S. exceptionalism, and, in d­ oing so, they threatened the central ideology of U.S. colonial power in the Philippines as well as Americans’ justification for infringing on the sovereignty of p­ eople from Latin Amer­ic­ a to the Pacific. Yet U.S. and Filipino officials treated Communists as if they w ­ ere the only ones to challenge the notion that U.S. rule in the Philippines was an exception to the racial rule of colonialism elsewhere. In order to protect challenges to the colonial state in the Philippines, and with it notions of U.S. colonial exceptionalism, the PC and the larger colonial intelligence apparatus relied on information supplied by Americans stationed in consulates and embassies in Eu­ro­pean colonies. T ­ hese U.S. policymakers stationed in Eu­ro­pean colonies in Southeast Asia tended to view communism

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through the lens of racialized anticolonialism, which was further tinted by the smoldering politics of the region. For example, in 1930, Henry S. Waterman at the U.S. consulate in Saigon informed the U.S. State Department that Laos was “still in a state of savagery” and Laotians “could not understand revolutionary doctrine.” Cambodians ­were a “lazy and good natured race, who have fish in abundance,” he wrote. U ­ nder t­ hese circumstances, he concluded, “it is obvious that among such p­ eople communism could find no foothold.”185 This was an impor­tant assurance to share, for Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) was then living in Thailand and serving as a se­nior Comintern agent in Southeast Asia. Quoc’s organ­ization of nationalists and Communists in French Indochina, if not Laos or Cambodia, ­were gaining ground, and the United States was keeping watch.186 By June 1931, leaders of the Communist Party in Indochina, including Quoc, would be arrested in Hong Kong. The following month, Waterman sent the State Department a report titled, like his 1930 report, “Investigation of Communism in French Indo-­China,” which was essentially a summary of articles by Franco-­Vietnamese journalist and colonial politician Henry Chavigny de Lachevrotière. In the articles, Lachevrotière argued that communism in Indochina differed greatly from Eu­ro­pean communism, ­because “­here it is not a question of a strug­gle between classes.” In Waterman’s interpretation, the journalist portrayed the Communist Party as a group of terrorists who wreaked havoc on “unfortunate peasants” through kidnapping, torture, and extortion. Lachevrotière tied Indochinese communism to the overthrow of the colonial government, warning that the party’s “ultimate aim” included “expelling whites from the country.” Waterman added that “most of [Lachevrotière’s] articles are supported by alleged facts,” and he called for the United States’ “constant vigilance.”187 Waterman also offered his reports to Governor-­General Davis, writing that they should be of interest “as showing the methods of operation of the communist party in Asia.” Davis had said that U.S. colonial officials in Southeast Asia should compare regional information on communism and anticolonialism, but sharing information across colonial bound­aries was a complicated affair: all reports from Americans ­were routed through Washington first and only forwarded elsewhere if the State Department deemed it prudent. In other words, it was not up to e­ ither Waterman or Davis to decide what information was shared. Moreover, officials in Washington discouraged U.S. foreign ser­vice officers from formalizing any kind of coordinated trans-­colonial intelligence gathering or enforcement efforts. Cooperation with other colonial powers,

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according to the State Department, might lead to a globe divided by race, with “the white colonial powers on one side and the color-­conscious masses of Asia on the other.”188 Yet, despite the State Department’s clear protocol, Waterman and Davis ­were not the only colonial officials who sought to streamline the pro­cess of information sharing. In fact, U.S. secretary of war Patrick Hurley believed that communication among colonial officials in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia was routine. He even knew that the Algemeene Recherche, the Dutch Secret Ser­vice in Batavia, had requested information on communist activities in the Philippines from the United States. The Dutch believed that the repression of Chinese Communists in the Philippines would drive them to “Netherland India.”189 In 1931, Hurley wrote to Secretary of State Stimson—­ who had also served as governor-­general of the Philippines—­informing him that Davis had proposed authorizing officials “both in the Philippine government and the representatives of the State department” to keep in better contact and suggested it “might be too late to take effective action” if reports had to go through Washington first.190 Stimson agreed with Hurley’s request and granted permission for U.S. colonial officials and officers of the State Department stationed in Southeast Asia to participate. However, Stimson emphatically stated that participation from members “in the Philippine government” could not be permitted. Although colonial officials in Eu­ro­pean outposts regularly shared information with their native counter­ parts, a letter to Hurley from the assistant secretary of state, W.R. ­Castle, conveyed the State Department’s view regarding the difference between the U.S. and Eu­ro­pean imperial powers: “Our position in Asia differs substantially from that of the Eu­ro­pean colonial powers,” C ­ astle wrote, explaining that the State Department did not want to institutionalize a “special police regime ­toward any par­tic­ul­ar aspect of Asiatic politics.”191 The refusal of U.S. officials to join an intercolonial police force in Southeast Asia was not an indication of their ambivalence ­toward communist-­inspired anticolonial movements. Rather, it reflects the extent to which U.S. officials recognized the already unstable governing and racial fabric of the colonial world. U.S. policymakers w ­ ere careful about exerting power in ways that could enable anticolonial Communists to draw comparisons between the U.S. and Eu­ro­pean imperialisms, and blaming ­labor or peasant uprisings on foreign ideologies or the ambitions of local religious or po­liti­cal leaders allowed the colonial state to maintain that distance. Another 1931 memo, this one from the chief of the Western Eu­ro­pean Affairs Division of the State Department, clarifies how U.S. policymakers rationalized the repression of anti-­imperial Communists in the Philippines as

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a safeguard of Philippine nationalism: “We have disclaimed all intention of permanent occupation of the Philippines and have pledged ourselves to fit them for and accord them eventual in­de­pen­dence.”192 The arrest, jailing, and eventual prosecution of Communists was distinctly in-­line with the U.S. “position vis-­à-­vis Asiatic nationalism,” which inverted Lenin’s connection between self-­ determination and Western colonialism by insisting that imperialistic communism threatened Philippine sovereignty but that the United States and its po­liti­cal allies stood for freedom from colonial rule. And U.S. policymakers in the State Department instructed its colonial officials to participate in intercolonial anticommunist policing only so long as it did not imply that the United States was a member of the imperial bloc. As Communists in the Philippines threatened notions of U.S. imperial exceptionalism during the interwar period, U.S. and Philippine policymakers built anticommunist politics into a formulation of U.S. imperial power that allowed for Philippine nationalism but nonetheless retained the hierarchies of the imperial order. In turn, in the era of decolonization, this formulation of power would become a central ele­ ment of U.S. foreign policies during the Cold War.

Legitimate Philippine Nationalism The idea that capitalism and U.S. imperialism w ­ ere the sources of the deteriorating standards of life and ­labor in the Philippines provoked repressive, anticommunist mea­sures throughout the 1930s and across the divide between colony and Philippine Commonwealth. However, the rise of fascism in Eu­rope and Japan and the embrace of the “popu­lar front” by Communists in the United States—­the strategy of Western communist parties to unite against fascism—­ prompted U.S. president Franklin Roo­se­velt to pressure the Philippine Commonwealth into minimizing its persecution of the po­liti­cal Left. In that spirit, the president of the Philippine Commonwealth, Manuel L. Quezon, pardoned the convicted PKP activists in late December 1938. Due to this act and other “softened” policies, Quezon would ­later be accused of “befriending and pampering” radical leaders and holding too weak a position against communism.193 Despite ­these changes in anticommunist strategy, the de­cade’s ­earlier repressions would continue to animate po­liti­cal debate in the Philippines, and anticommunist sentiments would persist in the public sphere, especially as they related to the question of nationalism. When the Philippine secretary of l­abor, Leon G. Guinto, told the 1941 graduating class of the Philippine School of Arts and Trades that communism

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was a threat to Philippine nationalism, he was warning them that oppositional politics had no place in the movement for Philippine in­de­pen­dence. “Soviet or Rus­sian communism” had “stalked freely over our land like a grim specter sowing discontent, discord, and terror among the peace-­loving population,” Guinto described, and it had “preach[ed] internationalism among our ­people” to make them “forget they are Filipino citizens.”194 In his speech, Guinto naturalized colonization and the extension of capitalism—­two interlocking pro­cesses that also “globalized” social relations in the Philippines—as composite ele­ments of legitimate Philippine nationalism. While the Philippine nationalism that Guinto upheld supported in­de­pen­dence from the United States, it also displayed a central feature of U.S. imperialism in that its stability as a po­liti­cal ideology ­depended on the suppression of groups and individuals who believed that ­constructing an alternative economic system, within a demo­cratic system, was pos­si­ble.195 The marginalization and even criminalization of reform and progressive movements seeking to spark debate regarding the relationship between democracy and the economy ­were, as Guinto’s speech illustrated, part of an effort to weld anticommunism and elite nationalism to po­liti­cal freedom. One could not be a Filipino nationalist in support of Philippine in­de­pen­dence, Guinto suggested, and a Communist or l­abor internationalist at the same time. Moreover, the conflation of leftist internationalism and Soviet intervention allowed leaders in the colonial state, such as Guinto, to claim that the commitment to building solidarity among workers or connecting anticolonial movements across borders emerged solely from Comintern directives—­not from activists’ understanding of the world and their place in it. Assuming that Filipinos blindly followed Joseph Stalin, the CPUSA’s Earl Browder, or the Comintern ignores the experiences of individuals within a diverse range of committed po­liti­cal movements in the colonial Philippines. It elides the fact that organ­izing requires the meeting of daily needs and desires: when leaders of the communist, socialist, or peasants’ rights movements in the Philippines spoke about what they understood to be the tenets of communist politics, they did so in a language that made sense to local populations. Yet, as activists may have been crafting a vision of communism that was responsive to the needs of the Philippines’ p­ eople, Philippine anticommunists w ­ ere ­doing the same. For ­these ­were not just ­orders coming from Washington, but rather they ­were ­genuinely held commitments to a par­tic­u­lar sense of the world’s order, one in which policing the deep divisions between ordinary Filipinos and the Filipino elite was essential to maintaining the balance of po­liti­cal power in elite hands. Debates about the place of communism in the Philippines would continue into the early 1940s. In May 1941, José P. Laurel, associate justice of the Phil-

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ippine Supreme Court, sent a confidential memorandum to President Quezon in response to a recent mayoral election in Arayat, Pampanga, that had resulted in victory for the Communist Party candidate Casto Alejandrino. Laurel—­who came from an influential po­liti­cal ­f amily—­urged the president to declare the results invalid “on the ground of disloyalty to the Commonwealth in view of his affiliation with the Communist Party.”196 He also pressed Quezon on the need to send a “warning in clear and categorical terms” to p­ eople in Pampanga and across the Commonwealth. Communism, Laurel wrote, “is an evil that should be extirpated outright.” The “kind of communism that has been implanted and seems to be gaining ground in the province of Pampanga,” cautioned the Yale-­educated ­lawyer, “is the Rus­sian or Society brand of communism.” In fact, he warned that the vari­ous communist parties around the world ­were “but sections of the Third International with headquarters at Moscow,” and their members w ­ ere all agents who sought “to realize the ideal of communism through vio­lence.” The protests, strikes, and acts of vio­lence across the islands in the 1930s and into the 1940s, in Laurel’s opinion, ­were not about the conditions of daily life: instead, they ­were expressions of a movement “which seeks to realize the ideal of communism through vio­lence.” Citing the U.S. economist, ­labor adviser, and former Brookings Institution member Lewis L. Lorwin, Laurel wrote, “The main task of the communist parties is to watch developments in each country and to be ready, whenever a country reaches the breaking point, to step into the breach, seize power and establish a proletarian dictatorship.” Laurel implied that the vio­lence in the Philippines was a sign of the Commonwealth reaching that “breaking point.” Using Lorwin to lay bare the signs of proletariat revolution, Laurel excerpted a portion of Lorwin’s text for Quezon, including the idea that “any movement which upsets the equilibrium of capitalism has revolutionary possibilities and revolutionary value.” Acknowledging that “industrial countries” w ­ ere due to the higher percentage of industrialized workers, Laurel made sure to include Lorwin’s warning that “in backward countries it is pos­si­ble to unite such workers as t­here are with the poorer strata of the peasantry” and that such unification could be achieved through “the strug­gle for national in­de­pen­dence.”197 In case Quezon had not yet made the connection, Laurel put a finer point on it, this time in his own words: The Communist Part[y] of the Philippines is an organ­ization which promotes class strug­gle and antagonism, which is pictured as the only means of freeing the proletariat from the alleged tyranny and exploitation of the bourgeoisie or the cap­it­al­ists; aims at the overthrow and seizure of the power of

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government by force through concerted and united action of the laboring class; it is an extension of communism in Rus­sia, professing the same princi­ ples, devoid of patriotism and love of country, and is completely a destructive and subversive organ­ization which can not [sic] and should not be allowed or tolerated to exist.

He concluded by again pressing Quezon to nullify the results in Arayat, to “declare the office vacant,” and to make a show of strength by “repress[ing] communism in the Philippines” and anyone belonging “to the communistic or radical organ­izations, using the forces of the government if and when necessary at the least sign of re­sis­tance or a­ctual defiance.” Laurel condemned Quezon’s previous “social justice program” and his apparent leniency t­oward radical leaders, advising that especially in light of the current international crisis, “we cannot afford to give the impression of weakness on the part of our government.” Just over six months ­later, in December 1941, the Philippine Commonwealth would reach its “breaking point.” Contrary to what Laurel had predicted, it would be Japa­nese troops—­not Quezon’s ­will—­that would meet force with force.

Chapter 2

State Vio­lence and the Prob­lem of Po­liti­cal Legitimacy WWII, Philippine In­de­pen­dence, and the Hukbalahap

On February 5, 1945, the day U.S. troops arrived in Manila, an Associated Press report in the New York Times recounted a violent confrontation “between two Filipino factions” in Malolos, a historic town in Bulacan Province just north of Manila. Villa­gers who lined the streets and “joyously received the American liberation force” from the capital scattered at a “crack of gunfire,” even though an unnamed Filipino bystander described the exchange between “Malolos guerrillas and Socialist Huk Bahalap [sic] guerrillas” as unremarkable. In fact, “sharp skirmishing between the two factions” had become a regular occurrence during the previous several months.1 Since General Douglas MacArthur started his “comeback trail to the Philippines” on the sandy beaches of Leyte in October 1944, Americans had assumed that the “cycle” of war and vio­lence on the islands was almost complete.2 U.S. president Franklin Roo­se­velt, who had received news of MacArthur’s Manila victory while attending the “Big Three” conference at Yalta, viewed the city’s recapture as a signal to imperial Japan that the beginning of the war’s end was near.3 Despite the “liberation” proffered by the Allied forces, the regional and po­liti­cal divisions that existed before and during the Japa­nese occupation had not been unified by the U.S. presence. As a version of the article that appeared in the Washington Post stated, the Philippines’ “po­liti­cal pot” was “boiling.” In the New York Times, the Associated Press report summarized the incident as “natives near Manila fight[ing] their own war.”4 Despite the article’s recollection that Malolos had been the “incubator of the insurrection against the United States” at the turn of the ­century, the idea of Filipinos fighting

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“their own war” just as the United States was marching to victory was peculiar enough to land the article on the newspaper’s back pages. The 1945 liberation of the Philippines by U.S. forces fit into an imperial ideology, one that was shared by Americans and many Philippine colonial elites, in which the Philippines represented the world’s only example of a just and demo­cratic transition from colony to in­de­pen­dent nation. Indeed, just three days ­after he landed at Leyte the previous November, MacArthur, commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), expressed the U.S. Army’s determination to “avoid even the slightest suggestion of an imperialistic attitude.”5 He planned to turn the functions of civil government over to the Philippine Commonwealth state as quickly as pos­si­ble and to begin reestablishing the authority of the Commonwealth, which would then transition to the in­de­pen­ dent Philippine Republic. But a­ fter nearly three years of Japa­nese occupation, the liberating Allied forces ­were alarmed to discover that Filipinos w ­ ere waging war against one another. In fact, fighting among Filipino factions intensified throughout the provinces of Central Luzon between the arrival of U.S. troops in the Philippines in December 1944 and Philippine in­de­pen­dence on July 4, 1946. Not all of the fighting was between “Filipino factions”: during the occupation, t­here was coordination between U.S. forces and guerrilla armies—­ including both the Malolos and the Hukbalahaps (referred to as “Huk Bahalap” in the articles)—in campaigns of sabotage, de­mo­li­tion, and disruption of Japa­ nese supply and communication lines. But the widespread vio­lence not only threatened the Allied mission; it also threatened Filipino po­liti­cal elites’ ability to reclaim their positions of authority at the helm of the Commonwealth state and U.S. claims to colonial superiority, which, in part, rested on the notion that colonial nation-­building had been a success.6 The catastrophic effects of the war undoubtedly forced individuals to make decisions based on meeting their immediate and basic needs; starvation, displacement, and disease plagued many parts of the islands. Despite ­these dire circumstances, the public held generally favorable views of Americans both during and a­fter liberation, and Americans and Filipinos alike w ­ ere ­eager to interpret the liberation of Manila as “the beginning of a new era” in which, as one Washington Post journalist put it, “Filipinos [would] have a ­great opportunity to demonstrate the fruits of democracy and freedom in the Far East.”7 Construing the war as an interruption in what was other­wise a “narrative of Philippine pro­gress” from colonial tutelage to model republic was not, however, a uniformly shared view.8 The effects of U.S. colonization ­were not so easily relegated to history. Indeed, insecurity felt across the islands led many to question the idea that Americans ­were exceptional imperialists who eschewed

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self-­interest and only sought to secure the promise of modernity for p­ eople whom William Howard Taft had once termed their “­little brown ­brothers” in the Pacific.9 Tracing the final years of re­sis­tance against the Japa­nese through the first years of in­de­pen­dence, this chapter explores how the remobilization of colonial anticommunism in postwar politics was fundamentally connected to the legitimation of state vio­lence and the strategic and symbolic value of the Philippines to U.S. empire in the age of decolonization. The chaos in Central Luzon not only prolonged fighting in a country that had already suffered conquest and occupation, but it also highlighted the inability of the Philippine central state to maintain a mono­poly on vio­lence within its own territory.10 This lack of effective state power represented an on-­the-­ground refutation of the U.S. and Philippine po­liti­cal elites’ picture of what a peaceful and prosperous postcolonial state should look like, which in turn was a power­ful rebuke to the idea that the United States was unlike any other imperial power. The task of reinstating colonial-­era politics would not be an easy one. Discerning the po­liti­cal and social terrain in the post-­occupation period would prove far more complicated for U.S. troops than simply figuring out who had been an Allied loyalist and who had collaborated with the Japa­nese. The war years had laid bare contentious class politics within the Philippines, and emboldened by the opportunities for leadership and power that the war had opened, both elite and guerrilla groups vied to shape the postwar era. Moreover, as e­ ager as Americans and Filipino elites w ­ ere to reconstitute the prewar social order, the dominance of the colonial elites in the postin­de­pen­dence state was far from inevitable. Americans w ­ ere especially unwilling to abandon the cadre of colonial elites they had cultivated within the proj­ect of U.S. empire in the Philippines. Some U.S. policymakers w ­ ere more apprehensive than ­others to support the return of a colonial elite, many of whom, as business leaders, sold supplies to the Japa­nese Army and Navy or, as politicians, helped administer the occupation state. Even more problematic, a­ fter the 1943 inauguration of the Philippine Republic, ­these same po­liti­cal leaders issued a declaration of war against the United States.11 Colonial-­era leaders ­were, however, in the minds of U.S. policymakers, known figures who could provide comprehensibility in a complex postwar environment. However, supporting the return of colonial-­era politicians meant opposing left-­wing, demo­cratic movements that had roots in the colonial era but had grown in both ambition and popularity during the war. The upsurge and demand for social change in the postwar Philippines took many forms, from protests across barrios and villages of Central Luzon to large-­ scale ­labor strikes and the formation of new po­liti­cal parties. One par­tic­u­lar

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group, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon—­the ­People’s Army against the Japanese—­had fought against the Japa­nese occupation but had no intention of welcoming colonial elites back into power. As a consequence, Filipino po­liti­ cal elites and their U.S. allies, intent on rebuilding the social order constructed during the U.S. colonial period, deemed the Hukbalahaps, or Huks, as threats to national—­and eventually international—­security. In effect, postwar U.S. policies in the Philippines not only helped to recriminalize peasant, l­abor, and progressive social movements, but they also helped fuel a nearly six-­year-­long civil war that would have long-­standing effects on how both Americans and Filipino politicians and policymakers conceived of the Cold War and the wars of decolonization in Southeast Asia. In the context of the region, the inter-­guerrilla and civil warfare reported in Central Luzon was not unique. Across East and Southeast Asia, WWII—­a brutal clash between warring imperial powers on an almost unimaginable scale—­had profound effects on civilian populations and, most importantly, on anticolonial nationalist movements. The war did not simply raze physical structures and ravage the natu­ral environment of the region: the presence of two countries’ war machines dramatically altered the economy of vio­lence, leaving civilians, men and ­women, in the possession of firearms and, in some cases, even trained for combat. In the British Empire, the arming of civilians and “ethnic minorities” had even been a strategy of the Allied and Japa­nese forces, both ­eager to win adherents to their c­ auses. The retreat of colonial or Commonwealth armies in Indonesia, the Philippines, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, and India enabled a “revolutionary moment” where individuals and groups throughout the region found an opening to “shape their own f­utures” in the absence of colonial authorities. Competing visions of what the f­uture should look like in a region rich in ideological, religious, linguistic, class, and ethnic diversity fractured socie­ties as Allied forces returned to reassert control from 1944 to 1946.12 With in­de­pen­dence promised prior to the war and reaffirmed by Roo­se­ velt during the war and MacArthur during liberation, the United States’ stance t­oward its own colony in the region was notably dif­fer­ent from that of its Eu­ro­pean allies. Yet the United States did encounter some similarities; an active prewar socialist-­and communist-­inspired peasantry had led to an or­ ga­nized and active guerrilla re­sis­tance movement. And, as elsewhere in the region, in the Philippines, the war brought millions of dollars’ worth of armaments and noncombat army supplies to the islands. The U.S. high commissioner in the Philippines—­the highest-­ranking U.S. position in the Philippine Commonwealth—­estimated that “almost a billion dollars” in goods and sup-

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plies, in “excess of the needs of the armed forces,” remained in storage depots and noted that civilians and guerrillas frequently pilfered from them.13 At war’s end, guns, nonperishable rations, clothes, boots, tents, trucks, tanks, and countless other accoutrements of war ­were available in nearly ­every province. “Surplus property,” the U.S. military’s term for the war supplies it had left in the Philippines, fed a lucrative black market that sprung up around the more quotidian necessities of war. U.S. dollars, canned food, tires, cigarettes, and even Bibles ­were all part of a network that spread throughout East and Southeast Asia. The story of the six-­year civil war in Luzon, the eventual suppression of the Huks, and postwar politics is inseparable from the history of WWII, as leftover arms resulted in a significant shift in the Philippines’s economy of vio­ lence.14 Though much has been written on WWII in the Pacific, particularly on the destruction of the islands’ industries and infrastructure as well as the loss of hundreds of thousands of ­human lives, historians have overlooked how the sheer scale of the war dramatically altered this economy of vio­lence. Understanding how and why WWII gave way to a civil war—­the suppression of which ultimately required millions in U.S. military aid—­between the Huks, their supporters, civilian guards or the hired non-­state security of landlords, and the Philippine state’s police forces requires an appreciation of war­ time guerrilla politics. In analyzing the effect of WWII on postwar Philippine democracy and nationalism, however, historians have tended to focus primarily on the issue of collaborationist Filipino politicians.15 Major po­liti­cal figures such as the first president of the in­de­pen­dent republic, Manuel Roxas, and Senator José P. Laurel, who had been president of the Second Philippine Republic during the occupation, served ­under Japa­nese rule, while Filipino civil servants continued their work as bureaucrats and individuals took jobs in Japanese-­run firms.16 Most claimed that they served for reasons of “national survival” and that their role had mitigated the severity of Japa­nese rule for Filipino civilians. Undoubtedly, the issue of collaboration posed prob­lems for a multitude of actors during the Philippines’ liberation and reconstruction. Initially, the United States took the issue of collaboration seriously; in Manila, the U.S. Army’s ­Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigated myriad cases of collaboration, arresting and imprisoning many politicians who had held positions in the Japanese-­occupied government.17 The structural conflicts that made the work of restoring the social order in the Philippines so complex, however, went beyond the issue of collaboration. For many, including the Huks, the return of “treacherous puppets and collaborators” to positions of power in the postwar state not only represented a failure of justice but also indicated a continuation of a U.S. imperial-­allied government that would disproportionately serve the

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interests of the wealthiest or most po­liti­cally connected classes of Filipinos and usher in the return of a deeply unequal society.18 To the Huks, if the Philippine government was filled with collaborators who had allied with both the U.S. and Japa­nese imperial powers, then the government’s claim to democracy was illegitimate; for them, as well as for many of the guerrilla and activist groups, the war for liberation was far from over.

An Imperial War Despite diplomatic negotiations throughout the 1930s and a U.S.-­led trade embargo against Japan enacted in the summer of 1941, the two imperial powers ultimately went to war for hegemonic control over Asia and the Pacific in December of that year.19 In the Philippines, Commonwealth president ­Manuel L. Quezon’s government had been preparing for a pos­si­ble war with Japan since the inauguration of Commonwealth rule in 1935. As part of the plan for developing the islands’ defenses for in­de­pen­dence, the Philippines’ 1935 National Defense Act stipulated the formation of a national army, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). To grow the armed force, Quezon hired the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, who left the position he had held since 1930 to join Quezon in Manila.20 When Japa­nese forces invaded southern Indochina on July 25, 1941, U.S. president Franklin Roo­se­velt issued an executive order to incorporate the nascent Philippine Army into the U.S. Army’s Philippine Department. The Philippine Army had developed slowly. Although MacArthur had called up over 100,000 men and 4,800 officers as a reserve force, in general, the embryonic army lacked in training, equipment, and officer leadership.21 The U.S. Army’s forces in the islands, the Philippine Department, consisted of 22,532 troops, 11,937 of whom ­were Philippine Scouts, a military group created by the U.S. Army in 1901 that, along with the 9,000 Americans in the Philippine Department, served as the United States’ first line of defense in the Pacific.22 Two days ­after Roo­se­velt’s executive order, on July 27, MacArthur returned to active duty in the U.S. Army and assumed command of USAFFE, headquartered in Manila. Although Roo­se­velt’s executive order increased the number of U.S. forces in the islands, ­limited funding from the U.S. War Department meant that the combined USAFFE Filipino and U.S. troops ranged widely in terms of training and up-­to-­date equipment, leaving the region less than prepared to mount a defense against a Japa­nese offensive.23 On December 8, 1941, less than twenty-­four hours a­ fter the bombing of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor,

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Japa­nese planes and ships launched successive waves of bombardments against targets in British Malaya, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Guam, and the Philippines. Imperial forces destroyed nearly half the fleet of USAFFE aircraft stationed in the Philippines within the first twenty-­four hours. The first major land invasion occurred two weeks l­ater when 43,000 Japa­nese soldiers landed in Lingayen Gulf on the island of Luzon; within another two weeks, 60,000 Imperial Japa­nese Army soldiers ­were or­ga­nized on the archipelago’s most populous island. Both Japan and the United States valued Southeast Asia for its geographic location, raw materials, and sea-­lanes, and this bombing campaign signaled Japan’s intent to take control of the impor­tant region.24 During negotiations prior to the war, Japa­nese diplomats had informed U.S. counter­parts of their nation’s interest in building an economic and po­liti­cal bloc in Asia; in 1940, the foreign minister of Japan had announced the formation of the Greater East Asia Co-­ Prosperity Sphere.25 Grounded in a Pan-­Asianist ideology, the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere provided a logic that made it pos­si­ble for Japa­nese officials to trumpet conquest and occupation in Manchuria, Taiwan, K ­ orea, and eventually Southeast Asia, as acts of liberation from Western dominance. Not entirely dissimilar from U.S. promises made to Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth ­century, the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity framework allowed Japa­nese ­people to imagine themselves as Asia’s superior race, and, as such, they ­were committed to uplifting Asians across colonial and semicolonial countries.26 Drawing on ideas of a shared Asian racial heritage, Japa­nese occupiers tried to convince the Filipino population that Japa­nese rule would mean liberation from centuries of Western imperialism.27 ­After the December 1941 bombing campaign that essentially destroyed the U.S. fleet and closed the way to pos­si­ble reinforcements, Japa­nese propaganda targeted Filipino soldiers with the message that the United States had abandoned the Filipino p­ eople.28 The messages praised soldiers for their bravery and courage and encouraged them not to “bleed” for the Americans.29 However, USAFFE forces had not been entirely defeated yet, so Japa­nese efforts to convince Filipino soldiers not to fight a war on behalf of U.S. interests existed alongside warnings that Filipino troops who refused to surrender would be “completely annihilated” by Japa­nese forces.30 Japa­nese Army officials also began their effort to co-­opt sectors of the Philippine state, economy, and the loyalties of the Commonwealth’s po­liti­cal elite. In December 1941, Quezon’s former secretary, Jorge Vargas, was charged with constituting a commission that comprised “the most eminent leaders of Philippine public life” to oversee civilian affairs ­under Japa­nese military rule.31

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Meanwhile, by early February, Quezon, who had evacuated to the fortressed island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, could barely contain his frustration at the lack of U.S. assistance to the Philippine war effort. On February 9, 1942, he telegraphed U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall to complain: “­After 2 months of war not the slightest assistance has been forthcoming from the United States.”32 He wrote to Marshall, describing the imperial dimensions of the war in the most diplomatic terms available: “Two ­great nations are now at war in the Western Pacific,” and the “Commonwealth of the Philippines is still a possession of one of t­hose nations.” Looking for a way to “save [the] country from further devastation as the battleground of two ­great powers,” Quezon proposed that the United States grant the Philippines in­de­pen­dence so it could declare neutrality, move the “battleground” elsewhere, and rebuild.33 Compelling the United States to cut loose the Philippines in the midst of a wave of Japa­nese offensives in the Pacific was a long shot, and it seems likely Quezon also knew his proposal would not be accepted.34 Nonetheless, sensing that the United States would be reluctant to lose the Commonwealth to its ­enemy, Quezon increased the stakes of his request by relaying Japan’s willingness to “­offer the Filipino p­ eople in­de­pen­dence with honor.” It was a promise that would not have surprised U.S. policymakers, yet Marshall’s response to Quezon dismissed Japan’s promise of Philippine in­de­pen­dence when he characterized Japa­nese actions as an attack on “individual freedom and government in­de­pen­ dence throughout the entire world.” Invoking U.S. imperial exceptionalism, Marshall recalled that the U.S. government, “for over forty years,” had already supported the Filipino ­people “in their aspirations to become a self-­governing and in­de­pen­dent ­people.”35 He saw no way in which imperial Japan would do for the Philippines what the United States had done for the islands. Unconvinced, Quezon’s response reiterated the desire for immediate in­de­pen­dence. Sensing perhaps the possibility of defection, Roo­se­velt bluntly forbade Quezon from “communicat[ing] with the Japa­nese Government without the express permission of the United States Government,” invoking the United States’ own imperial prerogative and sovereign control over the Philippine Commonwealth’s foreign policy.36 The U.S. president had no intention of allowing Quezon to exchange one “liberator” for another. Only a c­ ouple of weeks ­later, Quezon and his vice president, Sergio ­Osmeña escaped to Australia and eventually landed in Washington, DC, where they, along with industrialist and onetime leader of the Falange, or Spanish pro-­ fascist, movement in the islands, Andres Soriano, and scion of the wealthy Elizalde f­amily, Joaquin “Mike” Elizalde, reconstituted the Commonwealth government in exile.37 On March 11, 1942, with defeat to Japan imminent,

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MacArthur and thirteen members of his staff left the Philippines u ­ nder o ­ rders to reconstitute USAFFE headquarters in Australia. Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, and Japa­nese forces immediately set their seventy-­eight thousand U.S. and Filipino prisoners on a notorious seventy-­mile “death march” to the former Philippine Army installation at Camp O’Donnell.38 This left the island of Corregidor’s Fort Mills as the only remaining Allied-­held area in the Philippines. By early May, the Japa­nese Imperial Army had captured the last holdouts of overwhelmed and undermanned USAFFE troops on Corregidor.39 At the end of the year, in December 1942, “Awit sa Paglikha ng Bagong Pilipinas,” or “Song for the Creation of a New Philippines,” was performed for an audience of “Filipinos as well as Japa­nese” at Manila’s Metropolitan Theater and broadcast to “the most distant homes in the islands.”40 Radio sets ­were mostly U.S.-­made and reportedly widespread throughout the islands, though Japa­nese forces did seek to control the airwaves and required all radios to be registered.41 Commemorating “the First Anniversary of the Greater East Asia War,” the song’s lyr­ics heralded the birth of a “New Society” in the islands, which, as the chairman of the occupation’s Philippine Executive Commission, Jose Vargas, commented, was the result of Japan’s “liberation of the subject ­peoples of Asia.”42 Rhetorically, Philippine society u ­ nder the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere was, as the “Song for the Creation of a New Philippines” lyricized, “changing ­towards prosperity.”43 Japa­nese promises of prosperity and in­de­pen­dence would not, however, convince the tens of thousands of Filipinos who would soon decide to take up arms and wage their own war for liberation and in­de­pen­dence.

Guerrilla Wars Japan had not captured all of the U.S. or Filipino fighters; some soldiers had escaped during the Bataan Death March, while ­others had slipped ­behind ­enemy lines to hide out as Japa­nese forces moved across the islands.44 Almost immediately, t­hose remaining at large began to or­ga­nize a re­sis­tance movement. During the occupation, numerous U.S. and Filipino guerrilla officers attempted to carve up the territory of Luzon into military commands that could eventually, upon U.S. invasion, be incorporated into USAFFE forces. In May 1942, the same month that Corregidor fell, an escaped U.S. soldier named Claude Thorpe issued “General Order No. 1” to other U.S. soldiers who had managed to evade capture. The directive, which Thorpe claimed had originated from verbal instructions from General MacArthur, ordered t­ hese soldiers to infiltrate

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Japa­nese lines and proceed northward on the island of Luzon to regroup. Thorpe chose a spot near Mount Pinatubo in the Zambales Mountains, a range of steep slopes and ravines that separated the central plains of Luzon from the western seacoast, to serve as a headquarters for his guerrilla forces. From this isolated position, far from MacArthur’s official USAFFE headquarters, Thorpe attempted to unify and direct the countless guerrilla armies forming across Luzon. Unlike the guerrilla armies in Mindanao and the Visayan islands that could make contact with MacArthur, guerrilla outfits in Luzon lacked radio access to Australia for the majority of the war. With no ability to contact USAFFE and few ways to communicate among each other, hundreds of relatively autonomous guerrilla armies, as a 1944 report crafted by guerrilla forces in western Luzon noted, “seem[ed] to be working in­de­pen­dent of each other.”45 The lack of clear lines of command would pose significant prob­lems for the U.S. Sixth Army when it crossed the mountains and plains of Luzon in 1945 with ­orders to coordinate with Filipino guerrilla forces. T ­ here, they found the separate armies, fractured by disagreements over territory, resources, and uncertain alliances. Eventually, U.S. Army officials would decide that one, the Huks, was at the center of Luzon’s guerrilla conflicts. In March 1942, active participants in prewar l­abor, communist, socialist, and peasant activist circles met in Nueva Ecija Province to or­ga­nize their re­ sis­tance to Japa­nese rule that would initially ally with Thorpe’s efforts.46 At the meeting, participants elected a leadership committee for their nascent re­sis­ tance force that included Bernardo Poblete, Mateo del Castillo, Felipe Culala—­ all three also members of peasant unions—­and Casto Alejandrino, who, in 1940, was elected mayor of Arayat (in Pampanga) on the Socialist ticket.47 Luis Taruc, another veteran of peasant organ­izing, was elected military commander.48 ­After learning of Thorpe’s effort to or­ga­nize guerrillas, Taruc made contact with Thorpe at the end of May. Knowing well the hardships of sustaining guerrilla troops, the Huks offered to send provisions to Thorpe and extended a willingness to “establish the closest coordination of operation” with Thorpe’s growing guerrilla army.49 Within two weeks, Thorpe sent a reply to “congratulate” the Huks on their “past accomplishments” and “pre­sent ­enemy effort.”50 However, the Huks resisted turning over “complete military authority” to Thorpe, citing that as the military arm of the “National Anti-­Japanese United Front movement,” the military committee did “not have the right to turn over the control” of the group’s army. Nonetheless, at a conference with two Americans u ­ nder Thorpe’s command, the Huks made clear that they intended to “fight to the last man with the guerilla units or­ga­nized by the USAFFE.”51 Thorpe, however, would not survive the war. His capture and execu-

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tion by Japa­nese forces in 1943 led to an almost immediate souring of guerrilla relations on Luzon. Yet, even before Thorpe’s death, leaders of guerrilla armies allied with Thorpe on Luzon—­many, but not all, of whom ­were Americans—­ raised suspicion regarding the po­liti­cal dimensions of the Huk army. Although ­after the war their detractors would argue other­wise, the war­ time Huks believed that the United States was a “demo­cratic power” in the war against Japa­nese fascism and that only the United States, not Japan, could guarantee Philippine in­de­pen­dence (figure 1).52 Thus, in the organ­ization’s bylaws, two objectives—­driving out “the Japa­nese fascist aggressor” and “secur[ing] the territorial integrity and national in­de­pen­dence of the Philippines”—­defined in broad terms the group’s rationale for fighting.53 Citing the “right to self-­ determination of our country as guaranteed in the Atlantic Charter,” the Huks’ bylaws cast the war against fascism as inseparable from the strug­gle for national liberation.54 (Of course, the Huks ­were not unique in this view; ­after the fall of Singapore to Japa­nese forces, famed U.S. journalist Walter Lipp­mann argued as much in a column for the Washington Post.55) While the Huks’ po­liti­cal princi­ples and their articulation of the relationship between politics, guerrilla re­sis­tance, and warfare referred to liberal antifascist doctrines like the Atlantic Charter, they also, importantly, referred to communist ones.56 Although not all Huks ­were members of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), the Huk army grew out of the PKP’s call for an “Anti-­Japanese United Front.”57 Like other communist parties around the world, the PKP had embraced the idea of an antifascist united front. In January 1942, the Japa­nese occupiers had struck a devastating blow to the PKP when they arrested PKP leaders including Crisanto Evangelista, Pedro Abad Santos, Guillermo C ­ apadocia, and Agapito del Rosario. Neither Evangelista nor Abad Santos would survive the war. Still, the rallying slogans of the PKP’s “Anti-­Japanese United Front” continued to occupy a central place in the Huk movement. The Huk military committee also drew inspiration from Mao Tse-­tung’s Red Army and its re­sis­tance to Japa­nese rule, and Squadron 48 of the Huk army even counted among its ranks a few Chinese soldiers who had fought against the Japa­nese in China prior to immigrating to the Philippines.58 Following Mao, the Huk leaders crafted a strategy that integrated the military and po­liti­cal dimensions of the war, although Mao was certainly not the first to offer a strategic vision regarding the relationship between war and politics. Yet for the Huks, the concept of “po­liti­cal work”—or the notion that part of a guerrilla army’s task was to raise the consciousness of “the masses” so that they would choose to fight oppression—­ echoed Mao’s writings on guerrilla warfare as well as PKP philosophy.59 The Huk military committee’s articulation of the war as part of an international

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Figure 1: ​Hukbalahap guerrilla, January 1945 (National Archives and Rec­ords Administration).

p­ eople’s strug­gle against fascism, with the United States as an ally, underscored the strategic pragmatism of their war­time socialist and communist politics.60 Undoubtedly, Philippine nationalism and in­de­pen­dence also motivated many civilians to join the guerrilla force, and a heterogeneous blend of liberal, communist, and even spiritual traditions characterized the philosophy of the war­ time Huks.61

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To the Huks, the strategy of the Japa­nese Military Authority, which granted nominal in­de­pen­dence to the Philippines on October 15, 1943, necessitated a counterpropaganda effort, as the l­abor of Filipinos was essential to the Japa­nese occupation. Recognizing that many individuals compelled to comply with the Japa­nese ­were likely “in extreme poverty,” the military committee of the Huks did not think the population was “all willing to become tools of Japa­nese imperialism.” However, a successful re­sis­tance would require an all-­encompassing effort that reached down into the everyday lives of Filipino citizens and, as the military committee expressed, tried to “make them understand that by working for the ­enemy they are fighting their own friends.” Therefore, Huk squadrons w ­ ere expected to “educate” the masses of the Philippine population through “writing, lecturing, giving correct explanations, and propagandizing po­liti­cal facts.” The lessons w ­ ere even meant for t­hose families and friends of “the unfortunate fellows who have been forced to serve in the ­enemy army.” The military committee understood that the threat of immediate vio­lence, in this case at the hands of the Japa­nese occupiers, had left some “unfortunate fellows” with few choices; their education campaigns strove to recuperate ­these defectors and ensure that the broader civilian population understood what was at stake. Indeed, documents from 1942 and 1943 indicate that the Huk military committee believed Filipinos who had been conscripted into ser­vice by the Japa­nese, as well as their close associates, could be redeemed.62 Politics, in other words, was not simply a deeply held set of beliefs or a vision for the ­future of the Philippines; for the Huks, po­liti­cal work was a tactic of warfare. Rec­ords from 1945, however, demonstrate that the option of education and redemption was not extended to all Filipinos who had served in the Second Philippine Republic, the occupation state.63 In fact, the New York Times article that reported the February 1945 “encounter” between the Malolos and Huks alluded to the severity of the Huk position on suspected collaborators. That month, Huk commander Taruc wrote a letter to MacArthur in which he admitted that his troops had targeted and killed units that ­were calling themselves “USAFFE guerrillas.” Several guerrilla units, including in Malolos, had a­ dopted the U.S. Army’s acronym despite not actually being official U.S. forces, and Taruc recognized the need to explain this alleged fraud to MacArthur. Many of the targeted groups had “cooperated with the Japs,” he offered, and therefore the killings he rationalized “cannot be considered as the Huks’ fault.” Some had even waged armed campaigns against the Huks and had only “changed their position” ­after the U.S. invasion. He claimed that the Huks could prove that members of ­these so-­called USAFFE guerrillas had collaborated with the Japa­nese.64 In his

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memo to MacArthur, Taruc argued that the killings, though regrettable, ­were justified. While it is not clear that MacArthur ever responded to Taruc’s letter, ­MacArthur’s command clearly already knew about ongoing vio­lence between vari­ous guerrilla armies in Central Luzon. Seven months before U.S. troops waded ashore in Leyte, and ten months before the invasion of Luzon, army intelligence had raised the concern that three hundred thousand guerrillas in Central Luzon—­ostensibly all allied against the Japanese—­lacked unity and, in fact, ­were battling with each other over contested territory and scarce resources.65 Guerrilla units always depend on civilian populations for active assistance in obtaining food, supplies, communication, and even intelligence. During WWII, such resources ­were in short supply in the Philippines. To make ­matters worse, this scarcity was coupled with sentiments of war­time suspicion fueled by the Japa­nese Army and its allies in the consistent efforts of the Philippine Constabulary (PC) to eradicate the guerrilla re­sis­tance.

Communist Bandits Japa­nese occupation forces ­were aware of the b­ itter strug­gle between guerrilla groups in the country and even attempted to fuel intra-­guerrilla vio­lence.66 But the majority of the guerrilla forces, and certainly the ones that comprised U.S. or U.S. and Filipino fighters, ­were sympathetic to the idea of an “Anti-­Japanese United Front.” This did not mean that the groups allied with each other, however; nor w ­ ere the Huks the only group that clashed with fellow anti-­Japanese guerrillas. In 1944, the “Hunters,” a guerrilla army that operated near Manila, wrote to Bernard L. Anderson, a U.S. guerrilla who had taken command of seven thousand guerrilla fighters in the province of Bulacan, to complain about the actions of “Marking’s guerrillas,” a rival group that the Hunters claimed was seeking to dominate Central Luzon.67 The Hunters claimed Marking’s guerrillas had killed two of their own and had sought to disarm other units in the area, including their “Hukbalahap b­ rothers.”68 (Calling the Huks “­brothers” demonstrated that, contrary to postwar reports, the Huks did align with other guerrilla forces.) In the absence of a command hierarchy, the Hunters appealed to Anderson ­because, as a U.S. military officer, he presumably would be reconnected to the U.S. military and, eventually, with U.S. military supplies. Philippine guerrilla armies did negotiate and collaborate with each other even before fighting alongside U.S. forces against the Japa­nese. But they also had to pre­sent themselves as legitimate armies in order to gain U.S. military

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recognition and access to supplies. Connections with U.S. officials in the islands proved invaluable during liberation. The Huks, however, had few Americans who would vouch for their war­time actions. A ­ fter the war, the rush to influence the U.S. Army’s policy t­oward guerrillas and suspected collaborators resulted in the U.S. C ­ ounter Intelligence Corps (CIC) being inundated by guerrillas who expected the U.S. Army to take action against “alleged spies and informers.”69 According to the 441st CIC unit, based in Manila, t­hese requests w ­ ere sometimes coupled with vio­lence. In one instance, intelligence officers described guerrillas bringing suspects to CIC officers “by the truckload, often trussed up and badly beaten.”70 Guerrillas led by U.S. commanders, unlike the Huks, undoubtedly had an easier time demonstrating their legitimacy and this became a new source of in­equality that exacerbated factional tensions. In fact, inter-­ guerrilla warfare intensified once the Philippine Civil Affairs Units, the U.S. Army’s units responsible for restoring civil society, began reestablishing civilian rule on Luzon. The Japa­nese occupation had disrupted the relations of power in Central Luzon, when many of the region’s landed elite fled to Manila from the country’s provinces. Once towns ­were liberated from Japa­nese forces, but before the Civil Affairs Units arrived, many civilians chose to replace occupation mayors and other municipal officials by staging elections to form provisional governments.71 For the Huks, the opportunity to shift demo­cratic representation—­ particularly in areas where the landed elite had long controlled local governments—­fit into their antifascist conception of the war. They used this period as an opportunity to elect supporters to the quickly forming municipal councils. Rival groups saw Huk maneuvers as proof that the group harbored subversive intentions against the United States and the Philippine Commonwealth. On February 1, 1945, Carlos Nocum, a commander of the USAFFE guerrillas, penned a memo to prominent U.S. guerrilla Robert Lapham claiming that the Huks had established “dictatorships” in liberated towns. Nocum warned that the Huks ­were “communist agitators” with a “lust for power” and sought to form a “dictador Anak-­Pawis,” or what he termed a “dictatorial government of the masses.”72 Nocum offered a compelling case to U.S. commanders of the myriad ways the Huks could impede the transition from war­time to peacetime.73 Nocum clearly believed that the Huks posed a threat to Philippine society, but his viewpoint also dovetailed with Japa­nese propaganda. As part of their effort to root out the guerrilla re­sis­tance, Japa­nese forces had branded the Huks as “communist bandits” who sought only to exploit the common Filipino.74 Still, in the waning days of WWII, U.S. CIC agents crafted dozens of

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reports based on intelligence from Filipino guerrillas that echoed Nocum’s opinions. One report even raised the prospect of a transnational movement by pointing to the similarities between the Huks and the “communistic organ­ izations in China.”75 ­These documents, which w ­ ere often derived from anti-­Huk guerrillas and routinely cast the Huks as a dogmatically driven communist organ­ization, undoubtedly s­ haped the way that the U.S. Army engaged and interpreted Huk actions during the earliest days of liberation. The CIC also gathered intelligence that told a dif­fer­ent story of the Huks and their war­time conflicts, and, as a result, their reports contradicted t­hose written by the CIC agents who had received information from anti-­Huk sources. Indeed, a long report written by a U.S. Army officer for the Guerrilla Affairs Section of MacArthur’s command, admitted that the guerrilla groups that made first contact “when American forces first landed in Northern Luzon” had given “the organ­ization a bad name.” The report furthermore expressed the group’s “profound faith in the four freedoms proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter” and the hope that “through their actions they would eventually be able to bargain for better living conditions for the peasants and laborers.”76 In another example, a CIC agent in Magalang, Pampanga, tasked with observing a municipal election, contrasted Nocum’s claim that the Huks established dictatorships in liberated towns. The unnamed agent wrote that the Huks had “instigated the election and supervised it” but that the “barrio ­people [had] expressed their ­free ­will.” According to his report, the Huks “did not compel the ­people to vote for any par­tic­ul­ar candidate,” and the townspeople did not, in fact, even elect a Huk to office. Instead, they selected a tailor with “no definite po­liti­cal convictions.”77 Undoubtedly, guerrillas fed intelligence to CIC agents in order to win ­f avor from the U.S. Army as well as to counteract potentially negative reports. In the province of Bulacan, Huk leader Agaton Bulnong told a U.S. commander that any intelligence offered by USAFFE guerrillas in regard to the Huks would inevitably be filled with “malicious slander.”78 Bulnong maintained that many USAFFE guerrillas had previously served in the PC, the military police force of the puppet government, and had fought “the Hukbalahap instead of the Japa­nese.” In ­doing so, they had also “perpetrated harmful acts to the civilian population by robbing, torturing, and killing them.”79 Bulnong’s words mirrored Taruc’s justification for the Huk killings of USAFFE guerrillas. The same treacherous individuals who had “hunted” the Huks at the behest of the occupation state had now, Bulnong explained, slandered the Huks to appeal to the U.S. Army and secure a favorable position within the Commonwealth government.

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In some cases, CIC detachments vouched for the veracity of Huk claims and confirmed that current members of the USAFFE guerrillas had previously served in the PC, concurring that some, as Taruc had told MacArthur, had “changed their position” upon the U.S. invasion.80 For example, in March 1945, the 221st CIC detachment investigated a USAFFE guerrilla, Amado Aleta, who was suspected of having previously served in the PC. Eventually, the CIC concluded that Aleta “was directly responsible for the capture of many innocent civilians, who ­were executed in the public plazas at his command” during the Japa­nese occupation.81 Yet it seemed that for ­every Huk affirmation of allegiance to the antifascist war­time co­ali­tion and the U.S. Army, CIC units submitted an equal if not larger number of negative reports. Many confirmed the Huks’ use of extrajudicial vio­lence, namely, the kidnapping or targeted assassinations of individuals suspected of collaboration.82 The ongoing war between guerrilla units exacerbated an already complex liberation campaign, and Huk and non-­Huk requests for U.S. intervention in inter-­guerrilla murder cases tested MacArthur’s promise to have his army avoid an “imperialistic attitude.” But, ultimately, the U.S. Army’s policies t­oward the guerrilla conflict created, as one officer noted, “many difficult and delicate prob­lems” for both CIC agents and civilian affairs soldiers tasked with providing relief and establishing civilian order in liberated towns.83 Moreover, the CIC’s role in fomenting the conflict between the Huks and USAFFE went beyond issuing inconclusive or conflicting intelligence reports. As a result of the Malolos-­Huk conflict in Luzon, in mid-­February, the Sixth Army commander, Walter Krueger, ordered CIC units to investigate the “alleged inter-­guerrilla strife” and establish order in the territories where the two units openly fought.84 As part of this mission, CIC officers found themselves forced to adjudicate a particularly brutal murder and kidnapping case. The outcome of this CIC investigation, which ended with the U.S. Army arresting and imprisoning Huk leaders, eventually become a rallying point for the Huks who believed the U.S. Army had turned against them.

A ­Bitter Massacre Following his memo to MacArthur acknowledging the death of USAFFE guerrillas at the Huks’ hands, Luis Taruc traveled with the Huk vice commanding officer, Casto Alejandrino, to the Sixth Army’s intelligence office to discuss recent disastrous events near the town of Malolos. Taruc and Alejandrino stated that “troops of the XIV Corps” had unfairly “disarmed” two Huk squadrons.

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According to the history of Huk Squadron 77 submitted to U.S. Army’s Guerrilla Affairs Section, ­after ten days of “fighting side by side with American forces” in Obando, Bulacan, a coastal town south of Malolos, the Huk unit was disarmed ­under the ­orders of a lieutenant col­o­nel in the U.S. Army, despite objections of three U.S. officers who had reportedly served with the Huk unit soldiers.85 Though it was a “­bitter moment,” the Huk squadron complied, and while trekking back to Pampanga unarmed, they w ­ ere set upon and captured by a group of rabidly anti-­Huk USAFFE guerrillas led by Adonis Maclang. According to the Huks, the USAFFE guerrillas “massacred” 109 of the disarmed Huks.86 Captain A. S. Miller, an investigator in the army’s inspector general’s office, partially confirmed Taruc’s account. In a report to his superiors, Miller detailed discovering two bodies, based on a tip from a Huk who escaped from Malolos. One had been “shot in the back of the head and the other in the ­middle of the back,” and they both had “their hands bound ­behind them.” Although acknowledging that he had not seen the other victims, he predicted that “other bodies [would] be found as t­here was evidence of hastily dug graves in the vicinity.” As a result of Miller’s report the U.S. Army arrested Maclang.87 But any sense that the U.S. Army would levy justice equally in the feud between guerrilla factions faded when Col­o­nel Harry Emigh, chief of the Sixth Army’s Provost Marshal Division, released Maclang from prison within five days. Emigh claimed that another guerrilla, Captain Santos, a d­ ivision commander of a guerrilla army that had ­adopted the name U.S. Army Forces in the Philippines, or USAFIP, had killed one of the two victims located by Miller. However, Emigh planned to capture and arrest Taruc instead. Similar to the contradictory intelligence reports the CIC issued on the Huks, Emigh’s explanatory memo to the Sixth Army headquarters recounted a dramatically dif­fer­ent story than the one Captain Miller had offered.88 Emigh explained that a tip from a USAFFE guerrilla had led him to believe that “the Hukbalahaps had held as captive some sixteen ­people.” He therefore directed his team to raid a building near the village of San Luis in Pampanga, where they expected to find the captives. Making no further mention of the other missing individuals who had originally prompted his investigation, Emigh next reported on a cache of guns and “subversive documents” found at the site. Based on this, Emigh arrested nine individuals.89 Then he arrested Taruc, Alejandrino, and six ­others in San Fernando, and he charged all seventeen men with “subversive activities” as well as “murder, kidnapping, rape, robbery, and other crimes.”90 Taruc and the other Huk leaders ­were eventually freed in September 1946, but only ­after promising to submit rosters of Huk squadrons

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to the U.S. military and the Commonwealth state and, more importantly, announcing the disbandment of the Huk army. Emigh’s procedure with the Huks was unlike U.S. Army policies t­oward other guerrilla groups being followed at the time. For instance, in the case of Amado Aleta, the USAFFE guerrilla whom the CIC discovered had served in the PC during the occupation and had been responsible for killing civilians and Huks, the Sixth Army de­cided that Aleta’s offenses ­were “of a civil nature” and “further confinement of the subject [was] not warranted.”91 But Emigh’s arrest of Taruc and Alejandrino on charges of subversion marked a clear shift in the U.S. military’s policy ­toward the Huks. In fact, in early February 1945, MacArthur’s headquarters—­the top of the U.S. military’s hierarchy of command in the Philippines—­had ordered subordinate commanders to disarm the Huks.92 The intelligence officer who had demanded the Huks’ weapons in Malolos and left the group defenseless in the face of Maclang’s attack had merely been acting on MacArthur’s ­orders. The order stood in contrast to other policies the army pursued at the same time. And although certainly not every­one in the U.S. military believed that the Huks sought “to establish their own Communist form of government in e­ very municipality,” in February the U.S. military began to treat the Huks as the most pressing threat to U.S. forces and an obstacle to the task of restoring civilian rule in the islands.93 In a move that would further confound and enrage Huk supporters, the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs Unit appointed Maclang—­the USAFFE guerrilla accused of murdering Huks—to serve as the mayor of Malolos. Huk supporters took to the streets to protest U.S. policy, claiming that it freed collaborators and imprisoned t­hose who had fought on the side of the Allies (figure 2).94 The fact that Maclang became mayor while Taruc and Alejandrino shared prison space with leading collaborators, and that Huks w ­ ere being shut out of po­liti­cal positions, convinced many that MacArthur’s vow to avoid enacting military control over Filipino citizens, or to interfere in the reestablishment of the Commonwealth government, was far from po­liti­cally disinterested. The Huks noticed the po­liti­cal valences of MacArthur’s policies. In early August, the CIC reported that five thousand laborers on the army payroll had staged a protest in Concepcion, Tarlac. In response, the army broke up the protest and arrested fifteen Huks whom it believed had instigated the action.95 The appointment of Courtney Whitney—­who had worked for fifteen years as a l­awyer in Manila before the war, had investments in Philippine mining corporations, and was connected to the islands’ po­liti­cal and financial elite— as head of the army’s Civil Administration Unit indicated that the situation

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Figure 2: ​Hukbalahap supporters gather to hear speeches in San Fernando, Luzon, on March 12, 1945 (National Archives and Rec­ords Administration).

was likely ­going to get worse for the Huks. Not only did Whitney ­f avor individuals he had known in the Philippines before the war, but he also openly advocated the notion that the Huks and their supporters threatened U.S. war efforts and actively prevented Huks from assuming positions in provisional governments. For example, just a few days before the arrest of Taruc and Alejandrino, Whitney denied a request made by Juan Feleo—­a peasant or­ga­nizer, member of the PKP, and, most importantly, a Huk—to form a provisional government in the province of Nueva Ecija.96 Acting ­under ­orders from ­MacArthur, Whitney informed Feleo that he could not confirm Feleo’s request ­because it was the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth government, even though the army had allowed provisional governments to form elsewhere. It was not only by affecting the formation of provisional governments and pursing the Huks that the United States weighed the postwar scales; the insistence that the Commonwealth government ­handle all collaboration cases also unduly influenced Philippine affairs. CIC investigators compiled hundreds of case files on suspected collaborationists, but MacArthur made it clear that they would eventually turn them all over to the Commonwealth government. This hands-­off policy t­oward collaboration issues troubled the U.S. counsel general in Manila, Paul Steintorf. In August 1945, Steintorf wrote to the U.S. State

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Department to express his belief that “­little or no action [would] be taken by the Commonwealth government” in regard to collaboration.97 As evidence, he cited the release by Manuel Osmeña—­who had taken over as president of the Commonwealth a­fter Quezon’s death—of four thousand individuals, including Philippine senators and representatives, whom the CIC had imprisoned as collaborators. Steintorf wrote that the former collaborators themselves ­were now all ­free to “[in]fluence legislation affecting persons accused of collaboration including themselves.”98 In fact, one of the Commonwealth Congress’s first legislative acts, commenced in a special session in June 1945, had been to appropriate some ₱10 million in back pay for congressmen who had missed their salaries during the three-­year occupation, some of whom w ­ ere the politicians Osmeña had released. The U.S. counsel general was not alone in his unease: the U.S. secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, and Dean Acheson, the acting secretary of state, also voiced concern over the Commonwealth’s collaboration policies. Ramon Diokno, a prominent l­awyer writing for Amerasia, a left-­leaning journal associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations, criticized the law for rewarding the congressmen—­most of whom had collaborated with the Japanese—­and ignoring other federal employees who had lost wages.99 Despite t­hese concerns and despite Roo­se­velt’s and MacArthur’s war­time promises to exclude collaborators from public life, nothing changed. Instead, the U.S. Army, and l­ater the U.S. high commissioner—­the top-­ranking U.S. position in the Philippine Commonwealth government—­assisted and even armed the forces that would attempt to eradicate the Huks. On September 2, 1945, Victory over Japan (V-­J) Day, the CIC ceased its investigations and handed over rec­ords to the Philippine government, leaving the Commonwealth in possession of a large amount of collaboration-­related evidence in which a number of Commonwealth politicians ­were also implicated. MacArthur’s policy, in both ­these ways, had decisively sided with forces seeking to reconstruct the colonial status quo. Without a doubt, the postwar in­de­pen­dent Philippine state faced continued challenges that appeared to belie the promises that U.S. imperial exceptionalism proffered. While the war years momentarily ruptured the colonial social order, in the short months leading to in­de­pen­dence, prewar class conflicts quickly reemerged as opposing factions continued to assert their interests.100 ­After the war, t­ hese conflicts turned increasingly violent.101 By August 1945, local newspapers reported that four municipalities in the Central Luzon province of Pampanga, where support for the Huks was strongest, neared the brink of rebellion. In response, the state’s police forces and armed civilian groups flooded in to assist landowners’ efforts to reassert control.102 Before Allied and

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Japa­nese representatives had even gathered on the deck of the USS Missouri to sign Japan’s instrument of surrender on September 2, 1945, the weapons of the United States and the Commonwealth state had already begun an anticommunist campaign against ­those who had been their fiercest defenders in Central Luzon.103

The Postcolonial Model In 1946, Edward W. Mill, the assistant chief of the Division of Philippine Affairs, a part of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs in the U.S. State Department, argued that a successful and peaceful Philippine Republic was critical to the maintenance and extension of U.S. global power in a postwar world. Mill’s piece, titled “The Philippines Prepares for In­de­pen­dence,” appeared in the Department of State Bulletin, which is the “official monthly rec­ord of United States foreign policy” and a publication aimed at informing the U.S. Congress, U.S. government agencies, and the public about U.S. foreign policy.104 Mill began the article by repeating the familiar claim that “the United States was not in the Philippines for purposes of exploitation,” nor had it been “from the moment of the silencing of Dewey’s guns in Manila Bay” in 1898 to the pre­sent.105 He also repeated another standard line of U.S. policymakers: that the United States had only taken control of the Philippines in order to train Filipinos in the art of self-­governance. In confirmation of this ideal, Mill promised that the United States would “voluntarily relinquish its sovereignty” on July 4, 1946, and on this date would begin a new phase in “the most unique and fruitful experiments in the history of dependent governments.”106 “The Philippines Prepares for In­de­pen­dence” made clear a central ele­ment of U.S. policy in regard to imperialism and decolonization: that in heralding in­de­pen­dence as a testament to the success of U.S. colonial management and U.S. policymakers’ commitment to self-­determination elsewhere, the Philippines represented proof of the United States’ “enlightened policies t­owards dependent ­people.”107 Yet, during the war, U.S. Navy officials had argued for the annexation of Japan’s mandate islands in the Pacific. The U.S. secretary of war, Henry Stimson, who had previously served as governor-­general of the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines, maintained that since the objective of such annexation would be to bring security to t­hose islands, in the model of the Philippines, it therefore did not amount to colonization.108 In light of the anticolonial attitude of Americans in Asia at the conclusion of the war, however, this trusteeship smacked of hy­poc­risy to British officials also keen on

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maintaining colonial territories.109 Ignoring the Allied critique, and instead believing that “the Far East has tended to judge us by what we have done or not done in the Philippines,” Mill argued that the U.S. decision to grant in­ de­pen­dence to the Philippines “cannot but fail to make a deep impression on the ­peoples of Asia.”110 On this point, Mill was certainly correct; relinquishing sovereignty over the Philippines was significant. Mill sought to place the United States squarely on the side of anti-­imperial politics at a moment when even U.S. allies pointed to the incongruity between U.S. rhe­toric and U.S. policy in Asia and the Pacific. His piece reflected the complete devotion to the ideology of U.S. imperial exceptionalism common to U.S. policymakers, an exceptionalism that often blinded ­these policymakers to the viewpoints of o ­ thers, particularly t­hose in the colonial world.111 It also wedded policymakers such as Mill to maintaining an image of the Philippines as a peaceful and prosperous in­de­pen­dent nation. In spite of Philippine in­de­pen­dence, U.S. postwar policy in the Pacific tilted ­toward increasing, not decreasing, the U.S. imperial presence in the region. And while the policy of reverting authority to the Commonwealth, as MacArthur had favored, buttressed U.S. claims of imperial exceptionalism, or its “enlightened policies ­towards dependent ­people,” it also allowed many individuals who had served in the occupation government to retake their roles in the state. ­Because an assertion of U.S. authority over Philippine postwar politics could bring charges of continued imperialism, maintaining the self-­conscious distinction also enabled the Philippine po­liti­cal class to wage a violent campaign against the oppositional forces that, a­ fter the war, had expected a fundamental shift in Philippine society. Yet, immediately, the worsening bloodletting in Central Luzon, and the United States’ support of the Philippine state’s violent campaigns against ­those who resisted the return of the colonial order, called into question the stability and legitimacy of the new republic. Positioning dissidents such as the Huks as “troublemakers” in the path of Philippine in­de­pen­dence allowed the Philippine state to legitimate its use of U.S.-­funded police forces to repress them.112 ­Doing so rhetorically severed the Huk rebellion from the post-­WWII wave of anticolonial uprisings that ­were fought in the name of national self-­determination, which further affirmed the ideology that the Philippines represented an exceptional colony in Southeast Asia. Rather than the conflict being treated as a legitimate po­liti­cal debate, increasing anticommunist accusations offered proof that the protests and developing peasant rebellion in Central Luzon came at the behest of what the New York Times termed “a secret government” threat to Philippine in­de­pen­dence.113

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In that May 1946 New York Times article, the veteran correspondent and editor of the Manila Bulletin, H. Ford Wilkins, contended that “approximately 150,000 traditionally malcontent Filipinos,” supported by a “liberally armed” peasant army, ­were imposing a “system of government” that followed “the pattern of communism as closely as anything outside of Rus­sia.” Based on information from an unnamed government source, Wilkins wrote that the “secret government” had “been conducting a small-­scale civil war against the Philippine Army’s military police.”114 The notion that the Huks operated, as Wilkins described it, a “nation-­within-­a-­nation,” supported an anticommunist discourse that coupled the po­liti­cal demands of the Huks and the Demo­cratic Alliance (DA)—­a new po­liti­cal co­ali­tion that had also formed out of the war’s antifascist front—­with a foreign ideology that was, according to Philippine and U.S. officials, inimical to Philippine in­de­pen­dence. Thus, anticommunist politics enabled both Americans and Filipinos to claim that the state’s attacks on the Huks defended Philippine sovereignty and, as such, ­were fundamentally anti-­ imperial in nature. The development of the Cold War and the increasing tensions between the United States and the USSR could make the reemergence of anticommunist politics in the Philippines seem inevitable. But anticommunism in the Philippines did not emerge directly from ­these tensions. Prior to Philippine in­de­pen­dence in 1946, the islands’ wealthiest and most po­liti­cally connected class had figured out how to enrich themselves within the ­limited sovereignty of U.S. colonial rule. Strategically, the mobilization of anticommunist ideologies disarticulated the issues of social in­equality and po­liti­cal injustice that the Huks and their supporters argued ­were the connected results of colonial history. The clashes in Central Luzon fundamentally centered on disagreements over the kind of society that the in­de­pen­dent Philippines would be, not on United States–­USSR relations. Certainly, Communists, the Huks, and the DA sought to upend the hold of the po­liti­cal elite and landlord class on Philippine po­liti­cal life. B ­ ecause Communists had comprised a significant part of the antifascist co­ali­tion, the Huks, the DA, and their broad network of supporters had i­magined the postwar years as ones in which Socialists, Communists, l­abor activists, and peasant organizers would gain repre­sen­ta­tion through electoral politics.115 But the DA’s vision of a just po­liti­cal economy also had much in common with U.S. New Deal liberalism. In par­tic­u­lar, the DA platform offered voters a guarantee of the right to collective bargaining by laborers and peasants, the enforcement of tenancy and tax laws, pensions for the el­derly and the disabled, and public works improvements.116

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For its part, the DA ramped up po­liti­cal organ­izing to challenge the colonial elite at the ballot box.117 Led by Jesus “Judge” Barrera, a well-­respected ­lawyer and judge who had refused to take a post in the occupation government, the DA brought together a range of organ­izations from ­labor ­unions to the Philippine Civil Liberties Union and the Philippine ­Lawyers Guild. The DA arose in part b­ ecause many government officials had chosen to participate in the occupation government, and despite the fact that the executive committee was made up of individuals who ­were on the po­liti­cal Left but from prominent families, the party’s platform illustrated the place of class politics in the antifascist war effort as well.118 For, like the Huks, DA leaders understood the war in the Philippines as part of a worldwide strug­gle against fascism: Everywhere in the liberated countries of Eu­rope, in Asia, in the U.S. and in Britain the common ­people—­the workers, peasants, intellectuals, and other ­middle class ele­ments—­are no longer contented to live ­under the domination of the fascist or reactionary landlords or finance capitalism. ­These ­g reat masses of the ­people are coming to their own and are everywhere establishing ­people’s demo­cratic governments, which serve their own welfare.119

The prob­lem with the status quo was not simply that elite politicians had collaborated with the Japa­nese during the war. In fact, the DA argued, before the war, the “most reactionary feudal landlords and vested interests” had come to dominate the Nacionalista Party, which was at the time the only dominant ­po­liti­cal party in the islands. Though the Nacionalistas continually promised social reform, it rarely followed through on promises to address economic and social in­equality.120 According to the DA, the Nacionalistas had “done nothing substantial” to improve the life of the masses and had ultimately failed to govern on behalf of the majority of Filipinos. To be sure, it was the failure of the Nacionalista Party to follow through on prewar reforms and the experience of the war—­and not a communist revolutionary agenda—­that had motivated the broad co­ali­tion of progressive and left-­wing groups to form the DA at the end of the war. In an article for the left-­wing New China Review, Luis Taruc, a member of the DA as well as the Huks, claimed that during the occupation “the ordinary worker or peasant learned much and changed a lot . . . ​he knows his worth, mea­sured by what he offered the community during ­those years.” “War and fascism [had] torn asunder [the] past servile mentality,” and, in consequence, “the masses of Central Luzon” felt emboldened to demand fair compensation.121 Moreover, the guerrillas—or the community members who had risked their safety to aid

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them—­knew how most landlords, merchants, and politicians had spent the war years. In preparation for the official transition to Philippine in­de­pen­dence scheduled for July 4, 1946, Filipinos went to the polls in April to elect the first government of the Third Republic of the Philippines. In a strategic move, the DA supported Sergio Osmeña, the Commonwealth president, against MacArthur’s candidate, Manuel Roxas. Roxas had served as director of the Rice Procurement Agency during the occupation, an office whose purpose was to attain rice from Philippine peasants to feed Japa­nese troops. Roxas had split from the Nacionalista Party to form the Liberal Party in order to run against Sergio ­Osmeña, the Nacionalista candidate who spent the war years in exile. The DA made anticollaboration an impor­tant issue during the campaign, and Roxas’s Liberal Party in par­tic­ul­ar was tainted by collaboration; according to a 1945 report, of its nearly three hundred party members, “barely 30 in number refused to serve ­under the Japa­nese.”122 Roxas nonetheless defeated Osmeña with 54 ­percent of the vote. But demonstrating the popularity of the Huk and DA cause, Taruc was elected, along with six other candidates on the DA’s ticket. Edward W. Mill’s piece on the importance of an in­de­pen­dent Philippines to U.S. policy acknowledged the challenges the new nation faced, but it did not acknowledge the war that had broken out almost immediately ­after WWII in Central Luzon. In par­tic­u­lar, it did not mention that over one hundred thousand U.S. troops remained in the islands, and in early January 1946, in preparation for the April election, the U.S. Army reactivated the Eighty-­Sixth Division “along b­ attle lines.” U.S. soldiers who expected to be demobilized and sent home remained stationed in an Allied country. In that month, thirty thousand U.S. soldiers marched on Manila to protest their role in Philippine politics, chanting “We do not want to fight the Filipinos” as they walked.123 Some of ­these soldiers a­ dopted a “resolution paying tribute to the Hukbalahap” and condemning the “fascist attack of the Filipino MPs [military police] on the Filipino ­people.”124 The American Veterans of the Philippines Campaign, a group of U.S. veterans, wrote newspaper articles and letters to U.S. congressmen in an effort to publicize the Philippine state’s attack on the Huks.125 The State Department and the U.S. Army’s public narrative, however, claimed that the transition to in­de­pen­dence was “was peaceful and orderly.”126 To do other­ wise could have tarnished the “enlightened” colonial policies that U.S. policymakers encouraged other empires to emulate and would have undercut the legitimacy of the U.S.-­influenced Filipino po­liti­cal class in control of the postin­de­pen­dence state.

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Economy of Vio­lence In the waning days of May in 1946, nearly a year ­after the Philippines had been declared liberated from the Japa­nese occupation, the Manila Times began ­running a special four-­part series titled “The Tangled Web in Luzon.” Sourced with on-­the-­ground reporting from the provinces immediately north of the nation’s capital, the newspaper pieces sketched a far dif­fer­ent image of Philippine life on the eve of in­de­pen­dence than the celebratory version promoted by U.S. policymakers. Pondering why “blood still flows in Central Luzon,” the Times journalist A. Arguilla sought to explain the distrust some Filipino peasants felt of the government and its police forces.127 Several ­people interviewed cited the U.S. treatment of the Huks.128 The article noted that “in clashes between Huks and MPs, Huks and ex-­USAFFEs . . . ​Huks mostly die.” One peasant said that “to ­really trace the trou­ble” in Central Luzon required understanding “the pre-­ war days” as well as the “history of a progressive movement that had its roots in desire for agrarian reforms.”129 As a result of the war, many of the citizens who worked for reform had unpre­ce­dented access to weapons, and Arguilla noted the Roxas administration’s policy of collecting ­these war­time arms. He did not note that Roxas’s policy worked to suppress po­liti­cal dissent and buttress the rule of the landed elite. Instead, “The Tangled Web in Luzon” mainly focused on the impact of in­de­pen­dence and did not mention how much the war had altered the dynamic between peasant protest and government response. Central Luzon had a long history of popu­lar protests, but access to war­time weaponry made the immediate postwar period uniquely volatile.130 Before the war, the state controlled firearm possession and regulated it tightly. Civilians could purchase or possess firearms only with an expensive license from the Philippine Constabulary (PC). The PC enforced the laws, and the state criminalized leftist opposition primarily through juridical means. Landlords leveraged the threat of vio­lence and imprisonment to retain control of production, l­abor, and profit, and vio­lence certainly occurred. But in the postwar era, a war­time weaponry economy fueled open gun ­battles in barrio streets.131 In 1935, U.S. military intelligence estimated that Filipino civilians owned approximately 30,000 ­legal and 20,000 illegal firearms, meaning t­here was a total of 50,000 arms across the islands.132 By the autumn of 1945, the presence of nearly 650,000 armed Japa­nese soldiers, and 379,000 U.S. military personnel, significantly changed ­those numbers. Rec­ord keeping during the war had been lax, and Philippine and U.S. military and intelligence agencies did not have an accurate sense of how many weapons remained in the archipelago at the war’s end. As late as four years ­after the war ended, intelligence officials for

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the Philippine state still believed that “loose firearms” fueled a wider web of arms traffickers that supplied buyers in “Indo-­China, Thailand, Borneo, Singapore, Batavia, Hong Kong, Argentina, and even Israel.”133 The large numbers of “loose firearms” that remained unaccounted for meant that countless civilians, including the primary target of the state’s anticommunist attacks, the Huks, ­were armed or could find ways to access weaponry. The Philippine state responded to the shifting economy of vio­lence by criminalizing the possession of war material. This policy demonstrated the ­legitimacy of the government by its demonstration of “law and order” enforcement in the provinces. However, the term “loose firearms” was not applied to all of the war’s leftover guns. In fact, the Philippine ­Lawyers Guild claimed that CIC officers, both U.S. and Filipino, had also issued weapons licenses to civilian guards, “while peasants found with arms [­were] severely treated.”134 Private ­militias and anti-­Huk guerrillas retained firearms as part of the state’s campaign to repress po­liti­cal dissent. The Philippine state’s loose firearm policy was aimed at ending the violent conflict in Luzon, something that all sides of the conflict desired. But for the Huks and their supporters, the administration’s efforts to curb vio­lence only further proved that the state’s police forces did not levy justice equally to all citizens.135 Certainly, many civilians, including Huks, saw the state’s effort to collect war­time armaments as necessary and turned in their arms willingly, but the growing sense that the policy was biased worsened the conflict by making some hold on even more tightly to their weapons. In the Manila Times’ “Tangled Web” series, self-­proclaimed Huk sympathizer Vivencio Cuyugan argued that “the Huks ­will not now lay down their arms ­because they are afraid they ­will have no protection—­either from the MPs or from the USAFFE [guerrillas].”136 While decrying the tragedy of “Filipinos . . . ​fighting Filipinos,” Cuyugan also described Huks’ retention of firearms as a reasonable response to a sense of persecution. In fact, the Philippine state did collect “loose firearms” discriminately, and the po­liti­cal affiliation of a civilian with a weapon was one way that the Military Police Command (MPC) determined who would become subject to the “loose firearm” policy and who would not.137 News reports from the spring and early summer of 1946 make clear that, ­under the Roxas administration, the MPC permitted civilian guards to retain their firearms for protection. However, the administration claimed that the harassment and imprisonment of Huk and National Peasant Union (Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubukid, or PKM) activists was justified as part of its attempt to collect “loose” war­time arms. The “loose firearm” policy was seemingly meant for the order and protection of the

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elites, not the peasant activists. Not only did U.S. officials know of the discrepancy in the Philippine state’s policies, but the Office of the U.S. High Commissioner even sanctioned a practice wherein civilian guards provided “assistance” to MPs in their collection efforts.138 U.S. policymakers knew that the “order” sought by the Philippine state was, in fact, dramatically disordered ­because it failed to address all of the armed ele­ments of society, particularly the landlord militias. Although state vio­lence ­toward the peasants accelerated u ­ nder Roxas—­ who was elected prior to in­de­pen­dence—it did not originate with him. Even in 1945, the DA had argued that wealthy landowners in the provinces of Central Luzon w ­ ere “subsidizing certain ele­ments and maintaining private armies to clash with members of the Huks and PKM.”139 The politicized vio­lence had not gone unnoticed by Americans. In 1945, the High Commissioner’s Office had even noted the role civilian guards played in the election and reported that a “group of armed guards” had killed the head of the DA in Pampanga, Edilberto Joven.140 The DA continued to speak out against the administration’s discriminatory practices and tried to raise awareness of what it called “MP terrorism.”141 It accused civilian guards of acting on behalf of landlords to regain control over land and also of restoring the social and po­liti­cal order of Central Luzon by conducting “raids, illegal searches, kidnappings, killings, and zonings” of peasants.142 The DA also accused MPs of torturing and executing accused Huks and PKM members. In 1946 in Tarlac Province, a DA representative claimed “on April 25, MPs assisted by the municipal police took three PKM members[,] who have now dis­appeared.”143 The Manila Times also stated that “the [DA] reports tell of many peasants languishing in the torture cells of Magalang, Lubao, Bacolor, San Fernando, and Porac.”144 In June 1946, Luis ­Taruc reported that MPs had murdered his seventeen-­year-­old nephew during a raid on the barrio of San Luis.145 The terrorism, Taruc said, continued. The targeted and discriminatory vio­lence of the MPs was unacceptable, but Taruc also publicly pressed Roxas on his unwillingness, or inability, to disarm the private armies that ­were or­ga­nized and financed by power­f ul landlords. Taruc told the Manila Times: “My ­people expect sympathy and understanding. Food not bullets. Housing not prison.” In seeking what the DA termed “Demo­cratic justice, not fascistic treatment,” the co­ali­tion of Huks, peasant activists, ­unionists, and leftist intellectuals defined the terms on which they would agree to lay down their arms: “We all want peace,” Taruc stated, “but [the] peace of ­free men.”146 Pressed to find a solution and end the vio­lence, the Roxas administration promised to address the population’s grievances over land and social justice.147

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Yet, in practice, his administration still maintained a policy based on the belief that the Huks and the DA represented a threat to internal security and thus pursued a campaign against the Huks rather than putting its po­liti­cal weight ­behind substantive land or economic reforms.148 Notably, the Roxas administration also used the drive to collect war­time guns in order to raid Chinese newspapers, businesses, and schools, claiming an attempt to drive Chinese Communists off the islands.149 The MPC, personal militias, and civilian guards would ensure that the powers that be could continue to police re­sis­ tance to the state with the threat of violent retaliation. Challenges to the Roxas administration’s po­liti­cal legitimacy also arose from its willingness to work with and through U.S. imperial power. Despite Philippine in­de­pen­dence, U.S. policymakers fully intended on maintaining an unequal po­liti­cal and economic relationship with the former U.S. colony. In par­tic­ul­ar, the United States sought concessions that would allow U.S. military bases in the islands and the passage of a controversial trade act, the Bell Trade Bill, that would compel the Philippine government to grant U.S. business ­people and corporations “parity,” or the same rights as Filipinos, to develop Philippine natu­ral resources.150 In addition, the trade act would allow U.S. corporations to import goods duty-­free and require the Philippine government to peg its currency, the peso, to the U.S. dollar. Critics of parity, including some Philippine industrialists, argued that the policy would only further entrench the development of principal agricultural exports, which only favored U.S. business interests and the Philippines’ landed elite.151 The Bell Trade Bill clearly v­ iolated the 1935 Philippine Constitution, which had been agreed on by U.S. policymakers and signed by Franklin Roo­se­velt and had stated that Filipinos must own 60 ­percent of any corporation. Nonetheless, postwar U.S. policymakers pressured the Roxas administration into accepting the bill anyway by tethering it to congressional legislation that would provide funds to the Philippines for war rehabilitation.152 Since the U.S. Congress thus left the Roxas administration with few options, the Philippine president lobbied for the passage of the bill. To be sure, some U.S. officials worried over the pre­ce­dent the Bell Trade Act of 1946 would set, recognizing that it would continue the colonial era’s preferential trade agreement between the United States and the Philippines. In fact, U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes raised concerns that the preferential treatment was “inconsistent with our promise to grant the Philippines genuine in­de­pen­dence.” Byrnes was particularly concerned about how the bill would be received “in the Far East”—­meaning in China, K ­ orea, and colonies currently posing significant challenges to Eu­ro­pean rule—­because he

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suspected it would call into question the United States’ anti-­imperial reputation. But ­others, such as former governor-­general Francis Sayre, argued that the Bell Act and the continued presence of U.S. military bases w ­ ere examples of anti-­imperial U.S. foreign policy.153 Indeed, the Bell Trade Act appeared to embrace the same characteristics of the imperial world order that Washington policymakers claimed did not belong in the postwar world.154 Although the Bell Act would ostensibly extend preferential trade—­a colonial economic relationship—­into the postin­de­pen­dence era, U.S. high commissioner Paul V. McNutt, who had been the highest-­ranking U.S. foreign policy official in the Philippines prior to in­de­pen­dence, described it as part of war rehabilitation efforts and thus an effort to ensure, not undermine, Philippine in­de­pen­dence.155 Furthermore, McNutt warned that without the Bell Act the Philippines would experience “a sudden reversal of the economy.” The results, according to McNutt, would spell “a disastrous end to our experiment” in the Philippines that could lead to “disillusionment for all of Asia and a reinforcement of Eu­ro­pean imperialism.” Like Byrnes, McNutt believed that the Philippines represented a model for an i­magined postcolonial world. In a memo to Washington, he wrote: “We have assumed that the example of [Philippine] in­de­pen­dence ­will serve to destroy Eu­ro­pean imperialism in Asia.” He further claimed that the U.S. policy in the Philippines would promote the “transcendental cause of world democracy” as well as “the expansion of the economic horizons of the entire Orient.”156 Like McNutt, Roxas described the legislation as part of the United States’ efforts to meet its “obligation . . . ​to liberate our country and help ensure the security of our freedom.”157 The Bell Act grew out of postwar reconstruction, not imperialism, he asserted. Roxas’s economic rationale was sensible. But, when coupled with U.S. efforts to retain military bases in the Philippines—­two of which would become the largest U.S. overseas military bases during the Cold War—it is easy to see how it seemed, as oppositional senator Tomás Confesor put it, that the Philippines remained “within the orbit of expansion of the American empire.”158 While the Bell Act’s advocates argued that it would further incorporate the island’s economy into a “mutually beneficial” relationship with the United States, dissent was rife. In addition to Confesor’s disapproval, Roxas knew that Taruc and his DA colleagues would vote against it and, in so ­doing, prevent its passage. As a solution, Roxas charged all six DA candidates with fraud and electoral vio­lence in order to prevent them from taking their seats in the Philippine legislature. The day Truman signed the Bell Act into law fifty thousand Filipinos marched on Manila in protest.159

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By barring DA representatives from taking their demo­cratically elected seats, Roxas all but guaranteed that the civil war between peasants and the state’s police forces would worsen. But Roxas had gained an unforeseen advantage over his opposition: during negotiations over U.S. military base rights, Roxas had won additional U.S. military aid for his campaign against the Central Luzon peasants, unmistakably binding state vio­lence in the Philippines to the U.S. empire’s “orbit of expansion.”

The Mailed Fist In a 1947 interview with the Manila Bulletin, which was then submitted by the Bulletin’s editor, H. Ford Wilkins, to the New York Times, Mariano Cuenco, senator and po­liti­cal ally of Roxas, insisted that the Huks followed “a pattern set by communists all over the world.” Cuenco based his assessment on documents obtained by the Philippine Army and covered with the hammer and sickle insignia, which he cited as proof that the Huks denounced “the United States as imperialistic” in deference to Moscow. Cuenco claimed that Huk propaganda used the “same tone as the voice of Moscow.” He argued that the 1932 Supreme Court ruling, which declared the PKP to be illegal, had not gone far enough; to rid the archipelago of an ideological movement that sought nothing less than, in his words, a “bloody revolution” and the establishment of a “Communist dictatorship,” Cuenco called for more than “mere declarations” by “law enforcement agencies.”160 Cuenco was a power­ful politician whose ­family dominated politics in Cebu, and his claim that he had uncovered an indisputable link between the Huks and revolutionary communist movements “all over the world” undoubtedly worked to legitimate the Roxas administration’s brutal campaign in the Philippine countryside.161 Despite Cuenco’s accusations of an impending “bloody revolution,” peasant organ­izations in Central Luzon had already proposed plans for peace that ­were far from revolutionary. In 1946, the PKM, which was affiliated with the Huks, delivered a list of proposals to the Roxas administration.162 Both the U.S. colonial state and the Philippine Commonwealth acknowledged the prob­lem of land in­equality, but, like Quezon before him, Roxas had failed to produce the real change he had promised as the leader of the in­de­pen­dent republic. PKM members believed the state could end the vio­lence by expanding—­not eradicating—­the system of private property rights and financial institutions in the countryside. The “purchase of big landed estates and their subdivision into

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small lots to be resold for the peasant occupants,” the PKM asserted, would redistribute wealth and also address the concern of Central Luzon’s landless peasants, whose tenancy rates far outpaced ­those elsewhere in the country.163 According to the 1948 census, seven out of ten agricultural laborers in Central Luzon w ­ ere landless, as compared to the four “Ilocos provinces,” where “small in­de­pen­dent farmers” accounted for nearly 87 ­percent of agricultural ­labor.164 The PKM proposed that the government should support “small crop loan banks” so that Central Luzon’s new landowning peasants could have access to farming-­related funds.165 Their proposed changes to farming conditions would have brought Central Luzon closer in line with agricultural patterns across the archipelago. The PKM urged the state to craft laws that would alter the land market, as well as the po­liti­cal economy, but its recommendations did not equate to a w ­ holesale revolution. Indeed, as organ­izations, the PKM and the Huks ­were far from being the dogmatic Stalinists that Cuenco made them out to be. However, both groups did count Communists among their ranks. And, as Cuenco suggested, both the Huks and the PKM came to see vio­lence as an unavoidable ele­ment of their politics, not least ­because of the unequal application of the “loose firearms” policy.166 Still, the PKM’s and Huks’ demands that the Roxas administration disarm the civilian guards demonstrated a belief that change could come by reform, not only by force. In late summer of 1946, Roxas and his secretary of interior, Jose Zulueta, had met several times with Huk and DA leaders in an attempt to broker a peace. But the republic’s first president lacked po­liti­cal ­will.167 Instead, Roxas oversaw a state that wielded an iron hand or a “mailed fist.”168 Rather than instituting changes to address peasant alienation, the Philippine president challenged the po­liti­cal legitimacy of individuals and groups that advocated for change. Roxas reneged on promises to abolish the use of civilian guards, and, worse, as U.S. military advisers in the island noted, he failed to “maintain law and order without undue bloodshed.”169 His police forces shelled and burned barrios, tortured and killed suspected rebels, and continued to allow civilian guards to operate with impunity. Negotiations between the Huks, the DA, and the administration eventually collapsed a­ fter Juan Feleo, a longtime peasant-­organizer and founding member of the PKP, was kidnapped by “men in MP uniforms” while en route to a meeting in Manila with Taruc, Alejandrino, and the secretary of the interior in late August. Feleo’s headless body was discovered floating in the Pampanga River over one month ­later, but the murder has never officially been solved.170 A published exchange of letters between Luis Taruc and Manuel Roxas, however, indicates that Roxas accepted that his police forces, which had

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Feleo in custody at the time of his disappearance, had allowed civilian guards to kidnap and murder the peasant or­ga­niz­er.171 For peasants, Feleo’s murder, according to Kerkvliet, marked “the beginning of the rebellion in Central Luzon.”172 A year and a half ­later, in March 1948, a second murder demonstrated that ­little had changed. Like Feleo’s, Manuel Joven, the executive secretary of the Congress of ­Labor Organ­izations (CLO), a ­labor group affiliated with the DA, appeared to have been targeted by the state’s police forces. And his murder, again like Feleo’s, resulted in Roxas privately acknowledging to his secretary of the interior that “special agents of the Philippine Constabulary” had participated in the murder of another high-­profile leader.173 The same month Joven was murdered by the PC, in March 1948, despite the mounting evidence that all sides of the conflict—­Huks, civilian guards, and the state’s police forces—­committed acts of vio­lence, Roxas declared the Huks and the PKM illegal organ­izations. He promised to arrest and prosecute “any active member” of the Huks or the PKM, and he also threatened to prosecute “any person voluntarily giving assistance” to e­ ither organ­ization.174 In effect, Roxas branded the Huks, the PKM, and their supporters as “anti-­citizens” of the Philippine Republic: as enemies of the state, they had no right to the benefits of Philippine citizenship or to the protections of the Philippine state.175 Describing the communist infiltrators who “brazenly proclaim their allegiance to a foreign power” as controlling peasant organ­izations, Roxas’s anticommunist rhe­toric recalled Mariano Cuenco’s own a year ­earlier. Anticommunism enabled Roxas to transform a war to protect class privilege into a war to save Philippine democracy. The establishment of the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group ( JUSMAG), a U.S. military office tasked with managing U.S. military aid and providing recommendations to the Philippine government that had been enabled by the 1947 U.S.-­Philippine Military Assistance Act, only furthered the U.S. military’s aid and support of the Philippine state’s violent campaign against po­liti­cal dissent. However, ­because JUSMAG served in an advisory capacity, it was part of the effort—­similar to MacArthur’s war­time policy—­intended to demonstrate that the Philippine government was the sole arbiter of law and order in the islands. Ensuring that the Philippine state controlled the economy of vio­lence in the country, even if it meant suppressing its own population, was critical to confirming that the Philippines had successfully transformed from colony to in­de­pen­ dent republic. Filipino politicians and military leaders requested U.S. military aid in the name of anticommunist warfare, not imperial intervention, and this had worked to legitimize state vio­lence as an acceptable means of managing protest. To U.S. administrators, it explic­itly proved to the world that the Philippines had

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benefited and learned from U.S. colonialism and, by extension, proved that con­ temporary U.S. interventions ­were not a continuation of Western imperialism. As in the colonial period, state repression became a crucial tactic for maintaining the veneer of U.S. imperial exceptionalism while ensuring that the oppressive economic, po­liti­cal, and social structures of colonial rule remained intact.

Chapter 3

The Anticommunist International The Philippine Front in a Global War against Communism

On April 15, 1948, Philippine president Manuel Roxas stepped in front of the microphone at Clark Air Force Base and gave the last speech of his life. Standing on the tarmac of the United States’ largest overseas military installation, Roxas assured the Thirteenth Air Force Division that if another war ­were to engulf the Philippines, he was certain that “Americans and Filipinos ­will again fight side by side.”1 As the first president of the in­de­pen­dent Philippine Republic, Roxas cut a path for the ­future of the islands and the nation’s relationship to the United States by strategically negotiating with U.S. policymakers and largely aligning his policies with theirs. Washington had supported Roxas’s candidacy, and Roxas in turn supported the continuing U.S. military forces on the islands. The 1946 Treaty of General Relations, also known as the Manila Treaty, relinquished U.S. sovereignty over the islands, but the United States retained sovereignty over its military installations in the islands.2 ­These carve-­outs from Philippine sovereignty ­were further negotiated in the 1947 Military Bases Agreement, which gave the United States ninety-­nine-­year leases on enormous swaths of Philippine territory, including the 130,000-­acre Clark Air Force Base. Publicly, Roxas sold the base agreement as a guarantee of security and “the protection of our national sovereignty.”3 The U.S. military’s presence would help consolidate elite control of the state, as Roxas had strategically tied base negotiations to his request for U.S. military aid for the ongoing war in Central Luzon.4 But the postwar influx of U.S. po­liti­cal, economic, and military aid and advisers also risked undermining U.S. and Filipino policymakers’ insistence that the Philippines was truly in­de­pen­dent and

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sovereign.5 The circumstances of Roxas’s death enacted the same tacit contradictions and tensions that marked the Philippines’ transition from colonial outpost to in­de­pen­dent nation. For one, while his death occurred geo­graph­i­cally in the Philippine archipelago, on the island of Luzon, the in­de­pen­dent Philippines’ first president officially died within the sovereign territory of the United States. ­After his speech, Roxas retired to the residence of Major General Eugene L. Eubank to rest. By the next morning he was dead, the victim of a heart attack at age fifty-­six. A few days ­later, Maximo Kalaw, a po­liti­cal scientist and delegate to the orga­nizational meeting of the United Nations, eulogized Roxas in front of a graduating class on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, describing him as a soldier in the g­ reat “ideological conflict” between “countries espousing the Communist cause and demo­cratic governments.” Kalaw told the gradu­ ates that their late president was “the first casualty in the cold war between Democracy and Communism.”6 In 1948 and 1949, British, French, and Dutch officials continued to wrestle with nationalist movements transformed by the experience of WWII and Southeast Asian socie­ties in flux. The British Empire in Asia was shrinking in territory with the birth of new nations; India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma had all, by 1949, become in­de­pen­dent. The empire held on in Singapore and Malaya, where British officials initially rehabilitated colonial rule by constructing new partnerships, u ­ ntil, in 1948, the declaration of the “Malayan Emergency” resulted in an unpre­ce­dented militarization of Malaya.7 In Indochina, a war between French forces and Ho Chi Minh’s Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam unfolded alongside Viet­nam­ese civil conflicts in both the north and south of the country.8 The United States, ­after initially supporting the Dutch, would back Indonesian in­de­pen­dence in 1949.9 Dutch po­liti­cal leaders eventually calculated the costs of retention and turned their energies t­oward the Eu­ro­pean continent, where they allied with the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization (NATO).10 When Eu­ro­pean allies faced unpre­ce­dented challenges to their authority, the United States breathed life into British and French efforts to restore colonial power in Southeast Asia. Anticolonial agitation, and the increasing sense that the “Far East” would be the site of a “decisive” showdown with the USSR, compelled U.S. policymakers to emphasize the Philippines as a significant ally in “the Far East.”11 U.S. intelligence agents and policymakers, moreover, believed that the Philippines’ generally pro-­U.S. and anti-­Soviet position was an impor­tant tool in an overall strategic plan to check USSR power in Asia. Recognizing that the Soviet Union and communist ideology had historically advocated for national

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self-­determination and that U.S. support for Eu­ro­pean colonial powers in the region (especially France in Indochina) had the potential to turn anticolonial forces against the United States, they invested the U.S.-­Philippine relationship with a particularly exceptional value and argued that the Philippines provided a model for the transition from colony to in­de­pen­dent state.12 ­These dynamics revealed how Cold War conceptions of democracy took shape in the midst of an anticommunist po­liti­cal war that aimed to influence the outcomes of decolonization in Southeast Asia and how strategically impor­tant it was to maintain the peace in the region.13 Despite the vio­lence of the first two years a­ fter Philippine in­de­pen­dence, most policymakers in Washington, DC, and Manila had come to believe that U.S. diplomatic and military support for the Philippine state’s ideological and military campaigns against communism had produced favorable results; however, their objective was to distinguish the United States from Eu­ro­pean imperial nations—­and therefore the Philippines’ conflict from other anti-­imperialist strug­gles—to ensure that anticolonial actors and, eventually, postcolonial nations would remain friendly to U.S. interests. Policymakers worried less about a literal Soviet invasion in the region and more about the USSR “exploiting the colonial issue.”14 But they also believed that Communists’ stoking of “­racial antagonism between white and native ­peoples” would implicate the United States as a colonial power.15 As a 1948 CIA intelligence report indicated, ensuring that U.S. policies in the Philippines occurred on “a non-­imperialist plane” was a central piece in a U.S. strategy ­toward anticolonial movements in Southeast Asia.16 This situation was made more difficult by the fact that leftist leaders in the Philippines—­Huks and non-­Huks alike—­argued that the ­battle in Central Luzon was a continuation of anti-­imperial re­sis­tance. Leftist leaders such as Pedro Castro urged Filipinos to see their fight as part of a broader strug­gle aimed at overturning an international imperial economic and po­liti­cal system, and, as such, he called “Filipino p­ eople [to] unite with all colonial and semi-­ colonial ­peoples.”17 Castro’s vision of anti-­imperial solidarity relied on—­and projected—­a strategic, ­imagined geography that united the ­people and places of Asia through a shared history of colonization. Anticommunists, in response, countered this growing anti-­imperial solidarity movement with their own ­imagined geography, one that cast the Philippines as a battleground in the global war between communism and freedom. As elsewhere in decolonizing Southeast Asia, beginning in 1950, U.S. anticommunists shifted from characterizing the Huks’ re­sis­tance as a local conflict to representing it as one front in a global Cold War. U.S. policymakers

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who had previously seen the Huk conflict as a local prob­lem—­and who had advocated aiding Philippine elites to ensure the po­liti­cal legitimacy of the in­ de­pen­dent republic—­continued to do so; but as they did, their expression of the impor­tant role that the Philippines played on the world stage as a model of democracy, and in terms of extending U.S. power, took on a dif­fer­ent guise. In the face of accusations that the United States maintained a tight imperial grasp on its former colony, U.S. and Filipino anticommunists continued to insist on the exceptionality of U.S. colonial rule and the anti-­imperial thrust of U.S. interference in Philippine politics a­ fter in­de­pen­dence. The turn ­toward seeing the Huk conflict as part of a global strug­gle between the communist and noncommunist world did not contradict the idea of the Philippines as a model of postcolonial transition, but rather it represented an adaptation of U.S. imperial power. In an anticommunist counterinsurgency campaign, both U.S. and Filipino anticommunists used techniques depicting the po­liti­cal strug­gles over land, resources, and power on the islands—­strug­gles that w ­ ere actually extensions of colonial-­era ­battles over rampant in­equality—as conflicts inflamed or even inspired by imperial-­ minded Communists who sought to subject Filipinos to Soviet or Chinese domination.18 Anticommunists saw this foreign incursion not only as threatening to the security of the Philippines but also as a global threat to the entire “­Free World.” Thus reframing the vio­lence in Central Luzon as a significant front in a larger, global war against communism cast U.S. intervention as legitimate protection—­not the ­abrogation—of Philippine sovereignty.19 Ultimately, in order for the Philippines to assume its role as an anticommunist leader in the region, U.S. policymakers had to ensure a strong, stable, and secure state based on the legitimate support of the p­ eople, instead of one based on (arguably imperial) U.S. interference.20 Furthermore, as argued by Major General Graves B. Erskine, head of the Southeast Asia Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP) survey mission, ensuring the “restoration of internal security and the in­de­pen­dence of the Philippine islands” was critical to U.S. policies in the region. His information, reportedly based on “discussions with officials and civilians in Indochina, Malaya and Thailand,” led him to conclude that “failure in the Philippines” would be “exploited to the maximum by the Communists in the USSR and China.”21 The Cold War “got hot” in the Philippines when, as in the colonial era, U.S. and Filipino anticommunists discredited progressive movements in the islands by connecting them to the specter of global revolution. This chapter outlines the pro­cesses by which global anticommunism became the dominant framework for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. As outlined in the book’s introduction, the “global” is a contingent,

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­ uman construction that can be used to po­liti­cal ends and is not just another h synonym for “the world”; as a po­liti­cal category, the term gained meaning precisely by denoting a global anticommunist politics. The “global” aspect of global anticommunism, in this discursive context, referred to an i­magined, rhetorical space rather than a genuine repre­sen­ta­tion or reflection of geographic real­ity. The spatial logic of anticommunist global warfare that constituted “Huklandia,” for example, reterritorialized—­and deterritorialized—­U.S. power relations in a sense that became far removed from the physical plains of Central Luzon. U.S. and Filipino anticommunists rationalized the increasing level of U.S. po­liti­cal and military interference in the islands by rescaling the geo­graph­i­cal significance of the civil war in Luzon. ­Little changed in territorial or material terms; abusive treatment from the Philippine Constabulary (PC) and civilian guards had only galvanized more p­ eople to join, but as a peasant army that lacked an external sponsor, the Huks had an insufficient amount of supplies to provide to ­people who wanted to join the strug­gle.22 What did change substantially ­were the meanings anticommunists attached to the conflict. In this effort, Filipino elites ­were particularly impor­tant in convincing skeptical U.S. allies of the severity of communism’s threat on their islands. Some Americans, including Leland Hobbs, who took over as chief of the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group ( JUSMAG) in July 1950, arguably at the peak of the Huks’ strength, remained skeptical even as they facilitated a greater U.S. role in the conflict.23 For this reason, the ­imagined geography of a global Cold War developed unevenly through the actions of vari­ous U.S. and Filipino policymakers who, for dif­fer­ ent purposes, reframed the Huks in a dominant narrative of binary, global conflict.24 Radical Filipinos and their comrades, in the meantime, “globalized” their own strug­gle in response. In labeling the United States as a primary power in the shaping of the global cap­i­tal­ist system—­and in identifying the prob­lem as linked to the relationship between U.S. capital and Filipino cap­i­tal­ists—­ anticolonial radicals countered the notion that the United States acted as an exceptionalist, anti-­imperial force in the world. Moreover, in seeing themselves as part of the con­temporary anticolonial strug­gle waged by other communist-­ inspired anticolonial movements in India, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya, and ­Korea, Philippine radicals argued that the United States, like Eu­ro­pean empires, contributed to an oppressive “global color line.” ­Because Philippine radicals saw ­little difference across “capitalistic-­imperialistic” countries of the world, they directly threatened the notion that the United States functioned as an exceptional empire.

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The global scale of anticommunism emerged both from “above,” in terms of U.S. policymakers’ attention to international contexts, and “below,” through the successful use of anticommunist “counterguerrilla warfare” as a technique of po­liti­cal repression. Both U.S. and Filipino anticommunists believed the Philippines could serve as a model of successful anticommunist warfare and a crucial node in Southeast Asian anticommunist networks. The result was complex. The suppression of the Huk rebellion in the Philippines was represented as a “success story”—­the first decisive victory for the “­Free World” in “the cold war between Democracy and Communism”—­despite the real­ity of local politics in which the prob­lems the Huks and their allies had or­ga­nized around remained endemic in the islands. The Americans and Filipinos who claimed that the Philippines had been engulfed as part of a global war ­were not simply manipulating the truth; as is well known, raising the specter of communist infiltration was one way “small countries” could convince the United States to disperse critically needed aid. However, the rescaling of the Philippine conflict from the “local” to the “global,” and the discourse of global anticommunist warfare, emerged from what both U.S. and Filipino actors thought was an evolving truth about the state of the world. For them, local conflicts bled into global ones. As a discourse, or set of ideas and practices, global anticommunist warfare functioned as a power­f ul organ­izing princi­ple that did not determine decision-­making pro­cesses, but it did structure “the field of possibility” and shape visions of what could and could not be done.25 As the campaign against the Huks began to wind down in 1953, the rescaling of the Huk conflict would lead a team of counterinsurgency experts to decide that they had formulated a transferrable, modular strategy that could be used to c­ ounter communist insurgents elsewhere in the expanding territory of the global Cold War.

A Lonely Aggregation In addition to the nationalist challenges to empires, large-­scale transformations in the po­liti­cal order affected the course of history on both local and global scales. By the end of 1949—­the year the USSR tested its first nuclear weapon—­seismic shifts shook the region: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the ­People’s Republic of China (PRC), opposing forces in ­Korea clashed along the border of the thirty-­eighth parallel, and multiple insurgent groups threatened the stability of the new Burmese state. In Japan,

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U.S. occupation officials waged a “red purge” and tightened controls not only on suspected Communists but on members of the ­labor movement as well. The United States had occupied territories in the region before 1950, but during the late 1940s U.S. policymakers prioritized Eu­ro­pean reconstruction. The Truman administration viewed the worsening relations with the Soviet Union as primarily a European-­based conflict: for example, the conflict on the Korean peninsula was thought to be more about the United States and the USSR than K ­ orea or the PRC.26 Though not the only f­actor, U.S. policymakers’ reactions to the unfolding events in Asia significantly contributed to the migration of the Cold War from Eu­rope to Asia. The geographic expansion of the Cold War supported the notion, held by anticommunists in both the United States and the Philippines, that the Cold War was best understood as a global, ideological confrontation between “freedom” and communism. Yet the Cold War logic that pitted freedom versus communism also predated the war’s migration to Asia in 1949.27 This was most evident in the example of the guerrilla wars in the Philippines and in the rhe­toric used by anticommunists during the Roxas years to explain the state’s military campaign against its own civilian population. This Cold War rhe­toric fueled social repression even as evidence of a Philippine connection to the Soviet Union or the PRC—­the only major communist powers at the time—­went unsubstantiated. In fact, in 1948, the U.S. Embassy reported that “the Communist Party [was] a lonely aggregation” in the Philippines.28 U.S. policymakers treated the ongoing conflict with the Huks as a prob­lem of Philippine po­liti­ cal legitimacy, not an invasion of global communism, up to mid-1950. Even then, the intensification of anticommunist warfare in the Philippines did not correspond to an external communist threat. In fact, the Soviet Union offered ­little in the way of support to decolonization movements in Southeast Asia.29 Instead, local events in the Philippines, and the need to ensure that the Philippines remained a model of postcolonial success, prompted U.S. policymakers to reinterpret the global significance of the war in Central Luzon and to intensify their support for the Philippine state’s anticommunist crusade. Historians have long argued that a 1950 U.S. National Security Council (NSC) paper titled “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”—­more commonly known as NSC-68—­consolidated U.S. policymakers’ position that “Soviet expansionism” threatened not just the “­Free World” but “civilization itself.”30 A second NSC report, “The Position of the United States with Re­spect to Asia,” or NSC 48/1 and NSC 48/2, committed the United States to a robust military presence in Asia and to other high-­cost “containment” programs.31 Historians generally agree that Truman’s

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a­pproval of the two NSC policy papers increased the militarization of the Cold War as well as the tensions between the United States and the USSR. The NSC’s policy pronouncements consolidated an ideological Cold War and spurred the U.S. Congress’s willingness to fight on the side of “freedom.” But the triumph of the “containment” doctrine does not fully explain the course of anticommunist history in the Philippines, ­because the invasion of a global communist movement t­here was not the primary lens through which U.S. policymakers saw the island nation in 1949. Although the Philippine state had not resolved the conflict with the Huks or eased peasant unrest in Central Luzon, members of the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines and JUSMAG had expressed faith in Roxas and a steadfast belief that his “strict control of the National Defense Forces” would eventually establish and maintain order throughout the archipelago.32 Instead of a rising communist threat, Americans saw an inefficient and corrupt government, which seemed to confirm their racialized characterizations of Filipinos, and the government they led, as “po­liti­cally immature.”33 Roxas’s sudden death and the succession of his vice president, Elpidio Quirino, in April 1948, however, shook the confidence of U.S. policymakers stationed in the islands. For although Quirino had come up through the po­ liti­cal ranks of the colonial state, Americans perceived him as po­liti­cally weak, inexperienced in foreign and military affairs, and plagued by corruption.34 Nonetheless, the U.S. Embassy and State Department officials initially viewed favorably Quirino’s decision to shift away from Roxas’s martial policies and to declare a fifty-­day amnesty period.35 Furthermore, U.S. officials pressured the Quirino administration to institute a widespread reform of the military as a way of dealing with what they believed was endemic corruption.36 Yet, as his pre­de­ces­sor had done before him, Quirino viewed the vio­lence enacted by the civilian guards and state MPs on behalf of landlord interests as a means to end communist influence rather than understanding it as a product of an endemic system that maintained class in­equality, and the war continued.37 Although Americans increasingly saw Quirino as an ineffectual leader—­and as they witnessed a Filipino population rapidly losing faith in the United States—­ they continued to offer diplomatic, military, and financial support to the Quirino government. Despite the influx of aid, U.S. diplomatic and military officials worried that Filipinos felt neglected by the United States and felt that the United States neglected the Pacific more broadly.38 Their worries ­were not unfounded. In June 1949, military officials also reported public outrage related to both the U.S. diplomatic decision not to require Japan to pay the Philippines reparations for war­time damage and the

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United States’ own refusal to pay military benefits to many WWII Filipino veterans.39 In addition, the results of a 1949 survey, which had been taken by a U.S. military advisory team tasked with assessing the need for additional aid, revealed a troubling increase in “in­de­pen­dent thought” among Philippine Army officers. Without decisive U.S. action, the team reported, “anti-­American” and “anti-­Western” sentiment could easily become the dominant ethos on the islands.40 The U.S. State Department’s assessments of military aid to the Philippines also reflected the same concerns. In the belief that the Philippines could act as a vehicle of U.S. interests when it came to influencing the “growth and development of nationalism in Asia,” the State Department advocated for additional military aid, warning that the “failure of the Philippine experiment” would have “grave consequences.”41 To make ­matters worse for the United States, in November 1949, Quirino’s Liberal Party faced a strong electoral challenge from a candidate whom U.S. officials viewed even less favorably than Quirino himself: José P. Laurel. A longtime politician who had served as president during the Japa­nese occupation, Laurel became the standard ­bearer of the Nacionalista Party, the major opposition to the Liberals. To protest the Liberal Party’s h ­ andling of the war in Central Luzon, and despite emerging tensions between the groups, both the Huks and the PKP also endorsed Laurel.42 Happily for the United States, Quirino won the election, but the broad support for Laurel, the collaborationist politician, was a sign of just how far anticollaboration politics had fallen in po­liti­cal calculations on the left. Quirino’s victory, however, did not allay the worries of U.S. officials. Both the domestic and foreign English-­language press expressed skepticism about the integrity of the election: a Chicago Daily Tribune article titled “More Voters than P ­ eople in the Philippines” facetiously claimed that “Douglas Fairbanks and many other American films stars, many of them dead, are expected to vote in Tuesday’s Philippine Presidential Election”; the New York Times reported that ballot fraud had marred what it considered “the most violent of national elections”; the Manila Daily Bulletin confirmed several incidents of electoral vio­lence, including the death of twenty-­four ­people and the wounding of thirty-­two o ­ thers.43 This press coverage only compounded U.S. officials’ anx­i­eties regarding the international optics of Philippine po­liti­cal legitimacy. PKP leaders, breaking with the Nacionalista Party over their milquetoast response to electoral vio­lence and irregularities, declared that “a revolutionary situation” was at hand.44 Nonetheless, U.S. officials in Manila continued to believe that neither the Huks nor the PKP posed a direct threat to the state. A 1950 U.S. Army intelligence report, for example, argued that “many of the

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depredations and acts of vio­lence credited to the Huks are actually committed by small bands of bandits and ‘trigger happy’ youths who have no affiliations what­ever with the Huks.”45 The PKP’s attempt to reinvigorate leftist energies through the hardening of its revolutionary politics, however, did coincide with U.S. policymakers’ increasing concern that Quirino had not quelled violent dissidents within the country and had failed to gain popu­lar support.46 In addition to the ongoing hostilities in Luzon, the Quirino administration faced mounting criticism from U.S. policymakers when a United Nations mission published a detailed assessment of the Philippine economy. Even more damaging, the study resulted from the United Nation’s partnership with Quirino’s own President’s Action Committee on Social Amelioration, an initiative created to address in­ equality.47 But U.S. diplomatic and military officials in the islands focused on the need to reform the Philippine military and law enforcement institutions, arguing that the be­hav­ior of the PC’s officers alienated rural populations. According to the embassy, the officers regularly stole food, extracted “information by inhumane methods,” abused ­women, became “drunk and disorderly,” and turned gunfire on country towns.48 Though the embassy did not explic­itly admit it, the litany of PC malfeasance confirmed complaints that peasants had been voicing since the end of WWII. Rather, the embassy described t­hese actions as proof of corruption and of Quirino’s par­tic­u­lar inability to control rural vio­lence or garner popu­lar legitimacy for the Philippine state.

Arsenal of Freedom Deeply disturbed by the degree to which po­liti­cal vio­lence continued to plague the Philippines, U.S. policymakers in both Manila and Washington saw the need for a shift in policy ­toward the former U.S. colony. Into the spring of 1950, ­these policymakers—­based in a range of institutions from the State Department and the NSC to the U.S. Embassy in Manila—­still attributed the ongoing vio­lence to the “failure of the Philippine government” and not to communist subversion.49 By midyear, however, this had started to change, and U.S. policymakers ­stopped using the language of “internal security” to describe the Huk threat. The Huks had become, instead, an arm in a global communist movement. Tellingly, that September the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS) informed the U.S. secretary of defense that a Soviet takeover of the Philippines would inevitably lead to a “rapid disintegration of the entire structure of the anticommunist defense in southeast Asia.”50 The transformation from local security prob­lem to front in a global war was uneven, and certainly not all U.S. policymakers or Philippine politicians

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subscribed to this viewpoint. Nonetheless, as demonstrated in a November speech made by Ramón Magsaysay, Philippine secretary of defense, something had changed over the course of the spring and summer of 1950. On November 9, 1950, Magsaysay delivered a speech on the parade grounds of Camp Murphy, the headquarters of the Philippine Army, to bid farewell to U.S. ambassador Myron Cowen. The diplomat had recently been offered a new position as U.S. ambassador to Belgium, and Magsaysay praised the man who, even “within the ­little time at his disposal,” had been “able to do [so] much.” ­These accomplishments, Magsaysay added, ­were Cowen’s “warm testimonial of friendship to us,” illustrative of the “harmonious relations that have always been typical of Filipino-­American amity.”51 Secretary Magsaysay’s choice of the word “amity” belied the vio­lence, fraudulent elections, and continued U.S. presence that characterized po­liti­cal life in the Philippines since in­de­pen­dence.52 Moreover, by the late 1940s, many Filipinos no longer felt that maintaining the bonds of “friendship” was a priority of U.S. lawmakers, notwithstanding their commitment of U.S. resources to the badly war-­damaged nation. The November farewell cele­bration for Cowen, of course, was a choreographed po­liti­cal per­for­mance and not an occasion for airing diplomatic grievances. Magsaysay therefore played his part well: ending his speech, he asserted that Ambassador Cowen could leave the islands knowing that “the American arsenal of freedom” had protected the Philippines “against the scourge of communism.”53 Philippine politicians, since the end of WWII, had advocated for U.S. aid and assistance on the basis that the Philippines represented another front in the war against communism. Yet the shift apparent in Magsaysay’s autumn 1950 speech praising “the American arsenal of freedom”—by which time characterizations of the civil war in Luzon and the Huk threat had begun to take on a global cast—­was significant.54 Magsaysay’s message at Camp Murphy was consistent with what he had been saying for almost half the year: as early as April 1950, he had sought to convince Louis Johnson, the U.S. secretary of defense, that international Communists ­were to blame for the ongoing vio­lence in Luzon, and he had accordingly requested increased funding for national protection.55 In his November speech, Magsaysay mentioned that U.S. policymakers had agreed to double the funding provided by the U.S. Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP). But, as Magsaysay knew, MDAP aid—­which would eventually account for nearly half of all U.S. foreign aid expenditures on the islands—­typically came in the form of U.S. military supplies rather than U.S. dollars.56 In other words, MDAP funding could provide new equipment for the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), but it could not pay for the maintenance, training, or salaries

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of additional ser­vicemen who would ostensibly use the additional supplies. A greater amount of MDAP funds, in other words, was not enough. Already by 1950 the Philippine government was spending 40 ­percent of its entire bud­get on the armed forces. Even so, Quirino warned U.S. officials that his nation might not be able to pay its soldiers, or could only do so at the expense of other government employees such as schoolteachers. That spring, intelligence estimates presented to the JCS began to frame the prob­lem in the Philippines in terms of a global, bipolar conflict with the Soviet Union. Intelligence estimates did not excise the language of previous assessments. Instead, they simply coupled previous critiques of the Philippine government—­the lack of stability, deteriorating economic conditions, and a “widespread loss of confidence in the government”—­with claims that dissidents ­were “increasingly exploited” by the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that t­here was no evidence of Soviet influence in the country, intelligence estimates asserted that “Soviets” ­were working “through dissident Philippine ele­ments” to achieve three primary goals: the installation of a communist regime, the elimination of U.S. influence “as soon as pos­si­ble,” and the “den[ial of ] military bases to the United States.”57 The JCS intelligence estimate was not representative of all foreign policymakers’ views. In closed-­door conversations, the Philippine prob­ lem was discussed in terms of ending “dissidence” absent any mention of Soviet communism, reflecting the fact that neither U.S. nor Philippine officials offered concrete evidence that the Soviet Union was aiding Philippine proxies. What is more, in August, JUSMAG chief Leland Hobbs had reported that the press was exaggerating the Huk threat due, in part, to the pressures of U.S. businessmen.58 None of this, however, had ­stopped Magsaysay from attempting to convince Americans that the Filipinos’ real prob­lem was with communism.59 In his April communications with Secretary Johnson, Magsaysay explained that he was not requesting increased U.S. aid for a campaign to be waged solely against Philippine citizens. The fact of the m ­ atter, he wrote, was that the Philippines stood “face to face with the militant, armed, well-­managed and well-­financed international communists,” who w ­ ere “trained in the art of proselytizing p­ eople and destroying their government.”60 Magsaysay’s effort to connect the Huks to “well-­financed international communists” coincided with the sense among U.S. policymakers that po­liti­cal vio­lence and what they believed was a spike in anti-­Western sentiment in the Philippines could no longer “be viewed as a local prob­lem.”61 Although it is difficult to know the extent to which Magsaysay’s personal appeals influenced policy, it is clear that by September 1950 the JCS, at least, saw communist infiltration as both a Philippine and a regional prob­lem.62

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Increasing military aid to the Philippines and addressing the bud­get shortfalls about which Quirino had warned required a delicate balancing on the part of policymakers. In 1951, the secretary of defense, the secretary of the Trea­sury, and policymakers from the State Department, JUSMAG Philippines, and the JCS held a conference to discuss the strategic purpose and feasibility of issuing a $50 million “emergency grant” to the Philippine government. The JCS, in fact, recommended an additional “10 million for the support and maintenance of the Philippine Armed Forces.”63 However, security officials in Washington ordered that the emergency grant, which came in the form of dollars, not supplies, be “kept in top secret classification” in order to prevent widespread knowledge that the U.S. government was paying the salaries of the Philippine Republic’s soldiers. The JCS recommended using “confidential funds” from the executive branch to keep the emergency grant from public scrutiny.64 Advertising a direct transfer of dollars, as opposed to military supplies, could possibly—as one U.S. official put it—­“lead to increased Rus­sian propaganda attacks” or prompt other allied countries to demand additional financial aid.65 To the secretary of defense, the JCS suggested that, in the event of disclosure, the “special relationship that exists between the U.S. and the Philippines” could be used to explain the unpre­ce­dented transfer of U.S. dollars.66 By the early 1950s, the United States had become far more involved in the internal politics of Southeast Asia than e­ ither the Soviet Union or communist China. However, the hardening of the U.S.-­Soviet conflict, as well as other global events, led U.S. policymakers to reevaluate regional policy and to intensify anticommunist efforts in the Philippines. Po­liti­cal upheavals in neighboring territories prompted them to think about the relationships between ­people and politics in new ways.67 Appealing to a generalized fear of communism was strategic. Thus, while ­behind closed doors in Washington high-­ranking policymakers tended to assess the situation in the Philippines through their perceptions of Philippine po­liti­cal culture and the par­tic­u­lar personalities of leading politicians, intelligence estimates w ­ ere already beginning to lay the groundwork that would justify increasing military aid disbursements to the Philippines. Stoking the fear of global anticommunism garnered the support that advocates for U.S. intervention in Asia needed in the U.S. Congress.68 It may other­wise have been difficult to fulfill peacetime requests to support po­liti­cal and economic reforms on the islands.69 In other words, embracing the idea of global anticommunist warfare had distinct material incentives.70 By mid-1950, the interests of U.S. and Filipino anticommunists aligned to reframe the Huk conflict as an international crisis. In September, a U.S. military group had even argued that the Huks likely received aid from Chinese

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Communists.71 That same month, the JCS intelligence expressed concern over Soviet infiltration. Magsaysay, for his part, emphasized the danger of “well-­ managed and well-­financed international communists” to the exceptional “amity” that had long characterized U.S.-­Filipino relations.72 The speed at which proponents of anticommunist warfare ­were able to transform the language, scope, and stake of the conflict in Central Luzon—­a ­battle that pitted a mass-­ based peasant movement against a po­liti­cal elite that controlled the state and sought to retain the po­liti­cal and social order of the colonial period—­was made pos­si­ble by the entrenchment of anticommunist politics in both the Philippine and U.S. po­liti­cal spheres.73

Global and Local Anticommunism At the end of the 1940s, the “real­ity” of a bipolar Cold War emerged through a multifaceted confluence of global events, and while leftist anticolonial movements did share similar aims and tactics, t­here ­were also discrete differences in approach and strategy, depending on local contexts.74 In the Philippines, the turn to global anticommunist warfare overlapped with a national anticommunist articulation that was unique to the Philippines’ context. In 1948, the Philippine Congress approved the formation of the Committee on Un-­Filipino Activities (CUFA), which was modeled on U.S. anticommunist policies and particularly the House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC).75 Tasked with investigating the link between communist propaganda and the ongoing vio­lence between civilians and the state and chaired by the Liberal Party’s ­Cornelio Villareal, CUFA policed the bound­aries of Philippine politics. Its congressional hearings, like ­those in the United States, w ­ ere meant to “ferret out” individuals or organ­izations deemed “un-­Filipino” by the committee.76 CUFA embraced the princi­ple that “the country was in the midst of an ideological war,” and it drew both on the existing anticommunist politics in the Philippines and on the legislative investigative procedures of the United States to understand the wider scope of ideological warfare at home.77 In addition to holding public hearings, CUFA printed and distributed reports on communist history, conducted forums and rallies against communism across the country, and sponsored lectures on the danger of communist ideologies for Philippine schoolteachers, police officers, the National Bureau of Investigation, and the AFP.78 CUFA also helped naturalize the idea that capitalism was the only method for organ­izing economic relations in a demo­cratic society. Using rhe­toric that linked capitalism and democracy in one of its reports,

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CUFA insisted that Philippine “safety requires that we make ­every day a day of profit, not only for our legitimate businesses and professionals but especially for the happiness of our p­ eople. When we close our books at the end of each working day, let us see that the accounts always show a clear gain for democracy.” U.S.-­style democracy and market capitalism, the committee implied, ­were not only the best and most modern methods of social and po­liti­cal organ­ ization, but they ­were also the morally superior choices that would bring “happiness for our ­people.”79 In its efforts to reassert the limits of po­liti­cal debate in the Philippines, CUFA did not actually engage the specific demands of the Huks or the PKP, but instead relied on non-­Filipino Marxist tracts—­works by Lenin, Stalin, and Marx—to make its case. In d­ oing so, CUFA contributed to the idea that communism was an undifferentiated ideology that was foreign and fundamentally incompatible with the “true nature of Filipinos.”80 The committee’s monolithic treatment of communism and communist history actively worked to discipline Filipinos into joining a global strug­gle and affirm the idea that conflicts in the Philippines ­were a part of a larger global war. However, the anticommunist policies aimed at the Chinese community in Manila reflect another strain of anticommunism that tied the local specific to the global general in the Philippines. While both U.S. and Philippine anticommunists feared the spread of Chinese communism, they differed over their use of anticommunist tactics on the Chinese Filipino community. Although Chinese mi­grants had traveled to and lived in the Philippines for several centuries, the Chinese community continually ran the risk of being seen as “foreigners” within the broader society.81 ­After in­de­pen­dence, Philippine nationalists ste­reo­ typed Chinese mi­grants as singularly driven by commerce, and they enacted legislation to limit Chinese Filipino economic and po­liti­cal power.82 ­After 1949, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) only intensified anti-­Chinese sentiment in the Philippines, despite the fact that the Philippine Army informed the U.S. Embassy that year that perhaps only “100 Chinese of [an] estimated 240,000 in the Philippines” ­were Communists.83 Nonetheless, fearmongering press reports claimed that Chinese communist agents w ­ ere traveling to the islands by the hundreds. Indeed, as anxiety gripped Chinese Filipino communities, the success of the revolution in China only fueled Philippine politicians’ accusations that the CCP provided or intended to provide material support to local communist groups. By May 1950, Philippine intelligence agents contended that “6000 Chinese who compose the first batch of Gradu­ates from a Red intelligence school in China” ­were ­either already in the Philippines or en route to the islands.84 In response, the Philippine Immigration Board advocated for tightened immigration and deportation laws.85

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­After a wave of raids on Chinese neighborhoods sponsored by the Philippine government—­raids resulting in mass detentions—­Chinese community leaders emphasized their anticommunist sentiments. However, ­because Chinese mi­grants regularly sent remittances to ­family members in China, they feared that the Immigration Board might falsely identify ­those payments as funding communism.86 Therefore, in 1950, the community leaders issued a statement requesting that the board admit five representatives from Manila’s Chinese population to participate in reviewing evidence against potential deportees.87 The Immigration Board refused the request, and the Philippine state continued to craft a set of anticommunist laws and policies grounded in a longer history of Sino-­Philippine hostility and anti-­Chinese sentiment. Not only did U.S. policymakers not endorse ­these anti-­Chinese actions of Philippine leaders; they also warned their counter­parts that ­those policies or other antiforeigner legislation could have the effect of driving foreign investment from the islands.88 Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Manila argued that the Philippine government’s policies placed “intolerable exactions and restrictions” on the Chinese community and that t­hese actions could alienate Chinese Filipinos from the global anticommunist cause, including the Chinese opposition to the CCP.89 The U.S. embassy’s position on anti-­Chinese policy, which was relayed to the state department in Washington D.C., also indicated that American officials in Manila viewed Philippine intelligence reports, and particularly t­hose warning of a Chinese invasion, with doubt. In fact, it was not uncommon for Americans stationed at the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines to express skepticism about Philippine intelligence reports; in 1950, for example, the U.S. Embassy in Manila reported to Washington that the Philippine government had likely overstated the threat of Chinese communist infiltration and had relied on statistics “taken from thin air.”90 Noting that the “Chinese in the Philippines are doubtless predominantly anticommunist in sentiment,” the embassy also raised concern regarding the broader effects of anticommunist politics in the Philippines. Nonetheless, despite their differences, proponents of global anticommunist warfare drew on ­these preexisting anticommunist politics to create widening cir­cuits of anticommunist policies during the Cold War.91

Erasing Empire The CCP’s rise to power made an impact in the United States as well as the Philippines. In Washington, for example, a loose grouping of congressmen and journalists termed the “China Lobby” harangued the Truman administration

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for “losing China.”92 The China Lobby included both Demo­crats and Republicans, but a largely Republican caucus of anticommunists within this lobby called themselves the “Asia Firsters.”93 Seeking to dispel the Republican Party’s association with isolationism, Asia Firsters—­not only on Capitol Hill—­contended that the Truman administration’s preoccupation with Eu­ro­ pean politics came at the expense of protection against the growing communist threat in Asia. Asia Firster and publishing magnate Henry Luce ran stories in Time and Life that confidently asserted that greater U.S. involvement in Indochina to dispel communism would not be seen as an extension of Western colonial rule b­ ecause “the United States [had blown] the trumpet note which was to end colonialism” in the Philippines.94 Like U.S. policymakers, Luce assumed that the Philippines could be used as a model of U.S. anti-­ imperial intentions in Asia. The communist victory in China and the worsening conflict on the Korean peninsula brought a wider audience to Republican Asia Firsters, whose attacks on the Truman administration converged with an increasingly feverish anticommunist crusade led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.95 Still, anticommunists’ politics did not always align; Luce eventually came to view McCarthy’s efforts as both ineffectual and demagogic.96 Yet, by July 1950, the Truman administration, which maintained that McCarthy had ­little effect on policymaking, committed $4 billion of U.S. military aid to the anticommunist effort in Asia.97 The Asia Firsters’ use of anticommunism to seek an advantage over Democrats—­and the Demo­crats’ response—­helped secure funding from a U.S. Congress that had previously been committed to reducing military spending ­after WWII. Anticommunism was an effective weapon in partisan politics, and McCarthy’s anticommunist attacks against the State Department—­and in par­tic­u­lar his threat to declare that the entire Demo­cratic Party was a “bedfellow of international communism”—­demonstrated the utility of anticommunist po­liti­cal warfare to bipartisan consensus building. But the Cold War consensus also grew out of fundamental assumptions s­haped by both parties. First, both parties embraced a U.S. imperial worldview that saw the vast majority of nonwhites in the colonial world as largely uncivilized, irrational, and exploitable.98 Second, Demo­crats in the Truman administration and Republican Asia-­Firsters both agreed that the United States was inherently an anti-­imperial nation. Third, Republican and Demo­cratic politicians agreed that the Philippines could and should serve as a model of anticommunist postcolonial statehood. Thus, even when used as a weapon in bipartisan politics, anticommunism retained an

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imperialist edge that naturalized a racialized U.S. worldview in which territories and ­peoples around the world ­were the United States’ to win or lose. Vocal ele­ments within the Philippine Left, however, presented a direct challenge to the idea that the United States was an anti-­imperial force in the world. Manila councilman and president of the Congress of ­Labor Organ­ izations (CLO) Amado Hernandez responded to anticommunist attacks by accusing anticommunists in the Philippines of waging a “systematic propaganda” campaign in order to undermine the “genuine organ­ization of workers and peasants, f­ree of foreign communist influence.”99 In 1949, CIA intelligence claimed that the CLO was likely to come ­under the sway of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), an international organ­ization founded in 1945 that had taken a critical stance t­oward U.S. foreign policies. In 1949, British, U.S., French, Italian, and Spanish federations split from the WFTU to form a rival organ­ization, the International Confederation of ­Free Trade Unions. However, before the U.S. federation left the body, the WFTU notably passed resolutions criticizing “racial discrimination in the [Panama] Canal Zone” and “­labor conditions in Puerto Rico.”100 Illustrating the tendency to associate any critique of U.S. imperialism with communism, the CIA argued that the WFTU was an effective ave­nue for propaganda in “colonial and dependent areas.”101 The CLO opposed anticommunist politics that, Hernandez claimed, constrained the l­abor movement in the Philippines. Anticommunist attacks worked to delegitimize and criminalize the “­free and genuine trade ­union movement” while, at the same time, valorizing business-­friendly “com­pany ­unions.”102 The CLO also opposed the Philippine state’s war against the Huks and pointed to the obvious influence of U.S. aid on the islands’ politics. Speaking for the Huks, Luis Taruc contended in vari­ous press outlets that accusations of Soviet or Chinese interference in Philippine politics masked the real­ity that the only foreign power wielding influence in the islands was the United States. In a 1949 interview with the Manila Times, Taruc explained that the only substantiated evidence of foreign interference was the Philippine government’s use of U.S.-­ supplied guns “used to shoot down our peasants.”103 Taruc cast attempts to connect the Huks to foreign agents as an imperial tactic employed by both U.S. and Philippine “professional red-­baiters and propagandists of imperialism.”104 Taruc certainly understood the relationship between his country and the United States in imperial terms. He was not alone; Eu­ro­pean imperialists, who looked to the U.S. state’s success in expanding and integrating the North American continent as a model for turn-­of-­the-­century imperial expansion,

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as well as Marxist-­Leninist anti-­imperialists, who identified the United States as one of the “­great powers” that had advanced capitalism to its imperial stage, interpreted nineteenth-­century U.S. history in terms of global imperial expansion.105 Taruc did not always, however, equate the United States or the ascendance of U.S. economic and po­liti­cal power with imperialism. Instead, in a letter to the Manila-­based Star Reporter, he contended that con­temporary U.S. policies in the Philippines betrayed American demo­cratic and anti-­imperial values. Citing the demo­cratic legacies of “Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roo­se­velt,” Taruc expressed disappointment in the failure of U.S. policymakers to live up to the “promises” of the U.S. demo­cratic heritage.106 His critique of U.S. policy was not ­limited to the Philippines. In fact, as evidence that “the ideals of liberty and equality” ­were in short supply in the con­temporary United States, Taruc pointed to U.S. domestic politics, including antiblack vio­lence, segregation, voting restrictions, and the passage of the antilabor Taft-­Hartley Act.107 While Taruc implied that U.S. democracy had once been opposed to racism, in spite of evidence to the contrary, he condemned con­temporary policies such as the Bell Trade Act and the maintenance of U.S. military bases in the islands as “incompatible with Philippine in­ de­ pen­ dence.” Unlike the three popu­lar figures Taruc associated with a just brand of U.S. democracy—­Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt—he accused the new “imperialists” of using “the word democracy as a cloak to hide their aims of dominating and exploiting the world.”108 Even though the conception of U.S. imperialism that Taruc gave to the Star Reporter was distinctly not Marxist-­Leninist in content, to anticommunists in both the Philippines and the United States opinions such as Taruc’s and Hernandez’s—­which tied anticommunist politics to U.S. imperialism—­ still served as proof that the Philippines had become a front in a global war against communism. For Americans, any association of the United States with imperialism was intolerable ­because it ran ­counter to U.S. imperial exceptionalism—­which was a central ideological component of U.S. anticommunist interventions in Asia. U.S. policymakers worked hard to differentiate U.S. influence in the region from a history of Western colonial rule. Therefore, anti-­imperial critiques of the United States—­even ­those, like Taruc’s, that expressed other­wise positive associations with the United States—­were excised from the Philippine context and used as evidence of communist infiltration. Although Philippine politicians did, from time to time, criticize U.S. policy, they did not do so through a language of anti-­imperialism. In fact, deeply anticommunist politicians, such as Ramón Magsaysay, also claimed that the prevalence of anti-­imperial politics in the Philippines proved that “foreign communists” ­were aiding the Huks.109 To

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be sure, both U.S. and Philippine anticommunists legitimately worried about the destabilizing effects of the Chinese civil war.110 But they also used the communist victory in China and the onset of the Korean War to leverage aid and increase pressure on their po­liti­cal enemies. And as Filipino po­liti­cal elites sought increased U.S. aid to ensure their hold on the state, and as Americans committed to massive military spending in Asia, their viewpoints on the global significance of the Huk rebellion converged. Although U.S. and Philippine po­liti­cal figures came to agree on the global significance of the Huk rebellion, it did not mean this belief was held at all levels of Philippine society. Anticommunists faced the challenge of explaining to a Philippine population uprooted by the state’s ongoing war in the countryside how Philippine in­de­pen­dence could coexist alongside a substantial U.S. po­liti­cal, economic, and military intervention. In other words, anticommunists had to convince local populations that the Huks ­were, as the chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), Major General Mariano Castaneda, claimed, “not a mere movement for agrarian reform” but instead a “part of the same pattern of communist aggression practices” as in “other parts of the world.”111 Yet, by the fall of 1950, the civil war in the Philippines was firmly plotted on the map of global anticommunist warfare, where nothing short of the U.S. “demo­cratic experiment” was at stake. Communism represented the new imperialist force disrupting the world order, and anticommunism stood as the worldwide protector of freedom and in­de­pen­dence. As Castaneda put it, “the eyes of our neighbors in the Far east” ­were locked on the Philippines.112 When U.S. officials in Manila and Washington discussed strategies for aiding the Philippine government’s war against the Huks, they demonstrated an awareness of the potentially damaging optics of U.S. intervention in the islands. The State Department, in par­tic­ul­ar, recognized the need to tread carefully: military aid might solve the legitimacy prob­lem faced by the Quirino government, but obvious U.S. assistance could be viewed as undermining Philippine in­de­pen­dence.113 Not only would overt intervention feed into Soviet propaganda campaigns, but it could also undermine U.S. attempts to distinguish U.S. power from the history of Western imperialism in the region.114 Moreover, although the NSC believed an “excellent rec­ord in the Philippines” could insulate the United States from the “danger of white-­colored polarization” in colonial Southeast Asia, U.S. policymakers ­were well aware of the racial dynamics of colonial rule in the region.115 U.S. policymakers’ recognition that the racial division of colonialization continued to permeate postwar politics, however, does not mean that they ­were racially enlightened; in fact, U.S. policymakers’ own racialized imperial worldview—­which led them to believe the

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colonial world was theirs to “lose” in a contest between superpowers—­ demonstrates their inability or unwillingness to take seriously the diversity of ambitions, desires, or po­liti­cal acuities expressed by anticolonial movements and their leaders. Rather, their recognition of the racialized contours of colonialization highlights the tendency to consider their presence in the Philippines in terms of strengthening U.S. power. Yet the late 1940s and early 1950s ­were a transitional moment in regard to how Americans understood race in the context of U.S. foreign policies. As such, U.S. policymakers’ views concerning the f­uture in Southeast Asia w ­ ere ­shaped by a tension between existing ideas regarding racialized cultural hierarchies and an emerging Cold War racial liberalism that projected the United States as a racially inclusive nation, disavowed older forms of race-­based rule, and triumphed the right to equality for all individuals.116 This shift would not, of course, be ­wholesale; beliefs about the assumed ­limited po­liti­cal capacities of Asian ­people and social scientific efforts to understand the “Asian mind” would echo older, racialized discourses of “civilization.”117 Still, the ways in which anticommunist Americans defined racial difference marked a distinct shift in the racial politics of U.S. imperialism that accompanied the globalization of anticommunist warfare. In 1950, an enterprising U.S. Air Force officer in the CIA, Edward Lansdale, approached his bosses with a plan that would transform the anticommunist campaign against the Huks. Lansdale’s efforts in the Philippines, and particularly his contention that the “success” in defeating the Huks could be easily translated to other sites, illustrate how the complex relationship between race and the imaginative geography of global warfare. At some moments, Lansdale’s conception of global anticommunist warfare relied on and projected a geography of undifferentiated p­ eople and spaces. Flattening Asian p­ eople into a single cultural and racial category allowed him to imagine, and convince o ­ thers in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, that his model of counterinsurgent warfare could be easily replicated elsewhere.118 At other moments, the shift in imaginative geography facilitated by the Huk conflict—­from national security threat to front in a global Cold War—­required a coeval shift in how the Philippines and Filipinos w ­ ere represented, racialized, and made meaningful on a global stage by Americans invested in spreading anticommunist warfare and extending U.S. power. In this way, U.S. anticommunism was a constitutive ele­ ment of a broader shift in racial formations and U.S. imperial power. ­After Lansdale’s campaign in the Philippines, Filipinos would not simply be the inhabitants of the U.S. model colony and in­de­pen­dent republic. Instead, as U.S. imperialism adapted to distinguish the United States from a history of white

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rule in colonial Southeast Asia, Filipinos became key participants in the spread of anticommunist warfare in Southeast Asia.

Freedom versus Slavery Edward Lansdale’s mission in the Philippines was the first covert operation overseen by “Amer­i­ca’s spymaster,” Allen Dulles, a former Office of Strategic Ser­vices (OSS) officer and b­ rother of f­uture secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.119 Lansdale himself had served in the OSS and the U.S. Army during WWII, and he had experience in the Philippines, having worked as chief of the intelligence division at the U.S. Army Forces Western Pacific Headquarters in Manila and as a public information officer for the Philippines-­Ryukyus Command at Fort McKinley in Luzon.120 His proposal for counterinsurgent warfare drew on this prior work in the Philippines, and he recruited two individuals he had met ­there, Charles T. R. Bohannan and Napoleon D. Valeriano, both of whom had participated in guerrilla warfare during WWII. Lansdale believed Valeriano’s and Bohannan’s guerrilla experience gave them expertise in the type of psychological warfare he sought to implement against the Huks. Lansdale’s strategy, and the increased military aid that accompanied him in the early 1950s—­aid that funded a range of military necessities, from providing military transport to ensuring that soldiers in the AFP received their paychecks—­helped turn the tide in Central Luzon. Though remnants of the conflict remained, the Huk movement had essentially crumbled by 1953, the year Ramón Magsaysay was elected president. In February, the U.S. press congratulated the Philippines and its new leader on giving the “­Free World” its “first victory over Asian communism.”121 Lansdale’s arrival in Manila marked the completion of U.S. policymakers’ shift from a more overt strategy of bolstering anticommunist politicians—­ militarily, financially, and diplomatically—to providing covert military advisers and support. The U.S. secretary of defense’s internal notes suggested that both U.S. and Philippine po­liti­cal leaders recognized the need, as the U.S. Embassy stated, to “minimize the propaganda disadvantages” and “[clothe] in ­every manner pos­si­ble” U.S. interference in Philippine politics “with the pretense . . . ​of local action and responsibility.”122 For this reason, Lansdale’s assignment to serve “as an adviser on gathering intelligence about the Huks” was reported to have come directly from President Quirino.123 Definitions of insurgency and counterinsurgency abound; however, most characterizations center on the need for militaries not simply to defeat an

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e­ nemy but also to win the “peaceful loyalty” of the population.124 Though lionized as a “master of po­liti­cal warfare” in the most recent biography to chronicle his life, Lansdale’s ­career in counterinsurgency was not as “pioneering” as the ambitious operative made them out to be.125 Counterinsurgent warfare, or what Lansdale and his team at the time termed “counterguerrilla” warfare, was not new to the U.S. military. In fact, the U.S. Armed Forces had diverse experiences in counterinsurgent warfare that ranged from conflicts with Native Americans to the turn-­of-­the-­century Philippine-­American War and the Latin American “banana wars” during the first two de­cades of the twentieth ­century. In 1940, the U.S. Marine Corps had even published a book, Small Wars Manual, that detailed strategies and tactics gleaned from experiences in “irregular warfare.”126 Yet Lansdale believed he had created a new type of warfare that was inexorably linked to Cold War dynamics; the term “counterinsurgency” had in fact emerged from Lansdale’s conversation with the director of instruction at the U.S. Army’s Special Warfare School. Irregular or small wars, as Douglas Porch has argued, had been linked to imperial conquest. The shift to the term “counterinsurgency”—­chosen over “counterrevolutionary,” the term favored by Communists—is a legacy of Lansdale’s work in the Philippines, an experience that solidified his reputation as a foreign policy innovator.127 Thus, when Lansdale described his team’s success in winning support “down among the ­people,” he emphasized “politico-­military” innovations that w ­ ere in fact not all that new.128 Although it remains difficult to discern just how consequential his “innovations” actually ­were during the campaign against the Huks, he and his partners, Valeriano and Bohannan, would go on to make ­careers out of their “success” in the Philippines, and Lansdale would use the methods they developed to combat insurgencies in other countries throughout the 1950s and 1960s.129 Lansdale’s counterinsurgency tactics grew out of the violent anticommunist politics of the war­time and immediate postwar years in the Philippines. In this, the contributions of his “unconventional operations” team members Valeriano and Bohannan ­were crucial. Charles T. R. Bohannan was an American who had trained as an anthropologist before serving in the New Guinea and Philippine campaigns of WWII. In the Philippines, he served as a counterintelligence officer for the U.S. Army’s ­Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which is where he met Lansdale. While working with the CIC, Bohannan conducted intelligence operations on suspected collaborators and tracked a motley assemblage of suspected Communists: the latter included peasant and ­labor leaders, leftist l­awyers, intellectuals, “white Rus­sians,” and even U.S. merchant seaman.130 While undoubtedly some of the individuals Bohannan tracked ­were Communists, this wide-­ranging list exemplifies Bohannan’s tendency to

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attribute a range of po­liti­cal positions to “communism” and to assume that all Communists worked on the behalf of the Soviet Union.131 Lansdale’s second recruit, Col­o­nel Napoleon D. Valeriano, cut his teeth fighting Huks during WWII and in the postwar period.132 ­After the war, Valeriano served as a major in the Philippine Military Police Command (MPC), where he developed a reputation for using unusual—­often violent and illegal—­tactics. In fact, a 1949 presidential order removed Valeriano from his post as a provincial commander in San Fernando, Pampanga, and even temporarily jailed him for allowing use of the “­water cure”—­a cruel interrogation technique in which victims are forced to rapidly consume large amounts of ­water to avoid drowning—on three members of the San Fernando Police Force.133 Despite his checkered rec­ord, Lansdale praised Valeriano for his approach to counterinsurgent warfare. The adoption of the term “counterinsurgency” in 1961 cast the type of war Lansdale advocated in a strictly Cold War context, divorcing it from the imperial history of irregular warfare. The tactics and strategies Lansdale promoted as the “innovative” adaptations that would transform “counterguerrilla” warfare into counterinsurgent warfare also downplayed the use of vio­lence against a civilian population. A 1962 U.S. Army Civil Affairs lesson based on the campaign in the Philippines asserted that “the triumph of democracy” was a result of the successful implementation of “civil-­military programs.”134 The term described nonmilitary tactics, which included reforming the AFP and the PC, establishing an electoral commission that would ostensibly ensure f­ree and fair elections, and creating a land-­development corporation that promised to provide repentant Huks with a plot of land on the southern island of Mindanao.135 Adopting such programs—­which ­were directed at alleviating the chronic prob­lems that gave rise to widespread discontent—­was undoubtedly appealing to individuals caught in the m ­ iddle of the conflict.136 But the millions of dollars of U.S. military aid that U.S. foreign policymakers and military officials pumped into the islands would not all be spent on the seemingly humanitarian “civil affairs” dimensions of the campaign. The AFP would also employ other tactics, such as using napalm and “padding the totals” of enemies killed in action, a practice that would l­ater gain notoriety during the Vietnam War.137 Lansdale drew on his own background in the advertising industry and public relations, and the adoption of psychological warfare was perhaps the most significant contribution he offered to the AFP’s ongoing b­ attle in Luzon. Psychological warfare was not, of course, new: during WWII both U.S. and Japa­nese forces deployed propaganda in the form of leaflets and posters in order to sway Philippine loyalties to their respective sides. Furthermore, the

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creation of propaganda in Manila was not strictly related to the campaign against the Huks—in fact, by 1950, Manila was the U.S. government’s “regional ser­vice center” responsible for printing material for use throughout Asia.138 To create printed material aimed at convincing the population that a communist invasion would fundamentally alter Philippine culture, including religion and ­f amily life, Lansdale turned to contacts in the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) office in Manila. His marketing acumen helped guide the production of anticommunist comics, photo­g raphs, and illustrations—­many of which ­were printed in the most widely spoken languages of Central Luzon—to convince viewers that communism would mean terror, slavery, and death for the ­people of the Philippines. As the Philippine and U.S. governments sought to legitimize aid and intervention, Lansdale and his team bombarded the peasants of Central Luzon with messages about the threat of global warfare. Tagalog-­language anticommunist propaganda used in the campaign contended that the Soviets—­and Stalin in particular—­sought to overthrow the Philippine government. For example, an early 1950s pamphlet, Banta ng Komunismong Sobyet sa Pagtuturo (The threat of Soviet communism to education), portrayed a dark ­future of life ­under Soviet domination.139 The pamphlet’s cover featured a young Filipino schoolboy attempting to read a textbook titled Katotohan (Truth), while a Stalinesque figure standing b­ ehind him held a larger book, Kasinungalingang Komunista (Communist lies), which obscured the boy’s text (figure 3). The image conveyed the danger of infiltration through communist publications, reflecting the side of anticommunist politics that aimed to ­counter communist lit­er­a­ture through the production and dissemination of anticommunist tracts. According to Lansdale’s propaganda, supporting the Huks—or any of the l­abor or left-­wing movements that w ­ ere lumped together ­under the umbrella of communism—­could only lead to brainwashing at the hands of slick communist agents.140 By this logic, oppositional movements in the Philippines ­were not simply related to international geopolitics; they ­were in fact pieces of a Stalinist master plan in which no one was safe from communist influence—­not even schoolchildren. The Philippine Department of National Defense also distributed propaganda that, like ­those publications produced ­under official U.S. auspices, equated communism with imperialism and the penetration of “foreign” ideas on the Philippine population. One such pamphlet opened with a question, Ano ang magiging kahulugan sa iyo ng komunismo? (What w ­ ill be the significance of communism for you?). The answer, portrayed through a series of images, depicted communism as a malignant, Soviet force aimed at undermining “traditional” Philippine culture, especially Filipinos’ Catholic religion. Unlike the

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Figure 3: ​Anticommunist propaganda produced by the U.S. Information Agency (National Archives and Rec­ords Administration).

image of Stalin threatening the schoolboy, this tract drew an explicit link between Stalin and the Huks. On the first page, beneath a photo­graph of two Filipino ­women, one holding an infant, a message warns that “the bad fruit of communism is already ­here,” while a hand-­drawn hammer and sickle hovered above an oversize picture of Stalin. Below, several figures who appeared to be

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enforcing Stalin’s w ­ ill dominated a group of p­ eople, saddled with ­children and belongings, who ­were fleeing a burning Christian church. The text reads: “Huks have one country—­Russia! And one leader—­Stalin!” The pamphlet warned that, despite the Huks’ claims to be Filipino nationalists, their ultimate goal was to subject the Philippines to Stalin’s ruthless, godless authority.141 To prove the foreignness of communist culture and politics, anticommunist propaganda not only connected the Huks to the Soviet Union, but it also linked the civil war in Luzon to the Cold War by insisting that the Huks w ­ ere, as Bohannan wrote, “part of the same tide of Communist conquest which had just engulfed China, and was seeking to roll over Indo-­China, and ­Korea.”142 Even though the goals of the communist-­inspired peasant movement w ­ ere grounded in local issues—­such as land reform, po­liti­cal recognition, and equal justice ­under Philippine law—­propagandistic references to international communism allowed anticommunist actors to influence the conditions of peasant activism by recasting demands for land reform as threats of communist world domination. Philippine peasants ­were unlikely to ­mistake the psychological danger this posed; even if they did not believe that Soviets w ­ ere involved in the fighting between the Huks and Philippine state forces, fear of another world war in the Philippines—­territory that had been occupied by two foreign powers in fifty years—­would likely have resonated with the war-­weary peasantry.143

Targeting Peasants Despite Lansdale’s insistence that successful counterinsurgencies required knowledge of native cultures, he never learned Tagalog or any of the other languages used in the Philippines, and the anticommunist propaganda his team deployed uniformly depicted the peasants of Central Luzon—­the po­liti­cal base of the Huks—as lacking po­liti­cal consciousness, history, and agency. And despite his team’s mixed U.S. and Filipino nationalities, they appeared to share sentiments that ­shaped their inability to see the demands of peasants as serious po­liti­cal convictions rather than ideological brainwashing. In fact, anticommunists viewed peasants as a potentially disruptive demographic in international politics. To them, global communism functioned as a near-­agentless structural force that could easily overwhelm Philippine peasants, who w ­ ere mired in a “premodern” culture.144 Indeed, one of the primary themes that ran through all aspects of the Philippine campaign—­from anticommunist propaganda to ­later counterinsurgency seminars based on the Philippine campaign—­was an em-

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phasis on the vulnerability of peasant cultures and the singularity of communist politics.145 The notion that peasants ­were particularly vulnerable to communist ideologies was derived in part from the team’s conception of peasants as a group defined by their “underdeveloped” socioeconomic status.146 To be sure, race continued to be an impor­tant category through which Americans defined difference, but “the construction of the peasant” as an identifiable sociopo­liti­cal group illustrated the extent to which new concepts—­such as “developed” and “underdeveloped”—­were beginning to replace the difference-­defining terms of an ­earlier colonial era. To put it another way, though anticommunists certainly did believe the Soviet Union sought to gain popularity in “colonial and former colonial areas” by exploiting the “racial animosity of East ­toward West,” it was not only race but also the social and economic position of Filipino peasants that, in the eyes of Lansdale’s counterinsurgency team, made them more susceptible to communist ideologies.147 Although the anti-­Huk counterinsurgent team would not use the language of class, as it hewed too closely to communist interpretations, their attention to socioeconomic categories and the enactment of “civil affairs” programs directed at the “development” of the peasant demonstrated how the two central features of postwar U.S. imperialism—­the spread of U.S.-­dominated capitalism and the expansion of the U.S. military’s reach—­came together in counterinsurgent warfare. Lansdale’s team recognized the pernicious role that poverty played in the conflict in Central Luzon and, in response, instituted programs that they believed would remove peasants “from the conditions that the Huks had exploited.”148 One such program was the Economic Development Corps (EDCOR), which promised to provide repentant Huks with a plot of land on the island of Mindanao, the archipelago’s southernmost island, which since the colonial period had been the destination for internal colonial migration schemes. EDCOR, in fact, did address the peasant demand for land. But it also sought to geo­g raph­i­cally disperse politicized peasants from the Huk strongholds of Central Luzon and therefore, in a ­limited way, to transform the culture and po­liti­cal economy of agricultural l­abor and industry in the islands. Lansdale’s team had traveled to the Philippines to eradicate communism, not to alleviate poverty, and EDCOR was ultimately about ideology, not humanitarianism.149 Yet Lansdale knew that social conditions such as land in­equality, poverty, or generally poor living conditions went a long way in explaining communism’s attractiveness, and U.S. military advisers ­were not ignorant about the islands’ inequalities. To be sure, Lansdale promoted counterinsurgency strategies in which the army listened to the “­people on the land” and looked to address

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their plight.150 For example, during a lecture at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in late 1959, Lansdale argued that his team’s success derived from combining military action with “missions of public works, welfare, health and education.”151 Lansdale and his team saw unequal social conditions as the tinder and communism the spark that ignited decolonization’s vio­lence.152 Even as they devised tactics of warfare based on the socioeconomic category of the Philippine peasantry, anticommunists ­were careful not to link con­ temporary conditions to the policies or decisions made by Americans during the colonial period.153 Valeriano and Bohannan, in their 1962 textbook on the Philippine campaign, Counter-­guerrilla Operations: The Philippine Experience, ­argued that it was the culture of Filipino peasants, not the historical structure of the Philippine po­liti­cal economy, that accounted for their impoverishment and susceptibility to communist indoctrination. In the authors’ assessment, the Philippine peasant tended to attribute “the fact that often he does not have enough rice left to feed his ­family” exclusively to “the malice of the ricos [rich], or the bias of the government.”154 This mind-­set, they claimed, made peasants “easy prey [for] guerrilla propagandists.” While Valeriano and Bohannan certainly insisted that communist leaders implanted ideas—­for example, that the government was po­liti­cally corrupt or that class position should not determine land rights—in the minds of the country’s peasants, they also located the under­ development of the Philippine peasantry in the rootedness of caciquism in the islands. Valeriano and Bohannan claimed that altering the Philippines’ po­liti­cal economy of land, as the Huks proposed, would result in positive changes only if a shift in “cultural patterns” occurred si­mul­ta­neously. By all accounts, the Americans on Lansdale’s team had ­great re­spect for Filipinos who shared their anticommunist worldviews. Yet they also assumed that Filipino leftists all followed communist dogma and, with promises of a better life, had tricked Filipino peasants into blindly following their lead. They claimed that adherence to “outdated cultural values,” including the Spanish-­derived hierarchal relationship between the elite and peasant classes and even ste­reo­typical visions of Asian lassitude, w ­ ere to blame for the uneven pro­gress of cap­i­tal­ist social relations during and ­after the U.S. colonial proj­ect.155 This version of anticommunist politics provided a handy explanation for why, during the colonial period, capitalism—­a system that communist, l­abor, and peasant leaders argued was the engine of in­equality—­had not fully “modernized” Philippine society. Instead of an explicit reference to skin color, a racialized conception of Philippine “cultural patterns” and socioeconomic standards—­and particularly ­those that equated cap­i­tal­ist development with modernity—­served as the operational categories that determined the po­liti­cal capacity of the peasant class.156

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As part of his counterinsurgency strategy, Lansdale also urged a proactive U.S. foreign policy based on the idea that Americans shared a “vital bond of brotherhood with our fellow man throughout the world.”157 Given Lansdale’s partnerships with Filipino and Viet­nam­ese anticommunists, the language of “brotherhood” might appear to be race-­neutral. Indeed, it seems to illustrate how, through the ideology of anticommunist global warfare, anticommunists believed themselves to have dispensed with the overtly racialized dimensions of U.S. imperial power.158 By bringing Filipino “­brothers” into the fold of anticommunist warfare as equals, Lansdale and o ­ thers worked to circumvent the United States’ place on the white side of colonialism’s color line and to produce new racial formations that destabilized older definitions of colonizer and colonized. Still, the fact that Lansdale could not imagine the possibility of nonwhite peasants with the po­liti­cal capacity or po­liti­cal consciousness to understand the social structures that ­shaped their lives revealed how race remained entangled with a belief that the “civilizing pro­cess” of colonial rule was incomplete among the Philippine peasant class. Similar to Valeriano’s and Bohannan’s arguments that “cultural patterns” of Philippine peasants made them susceptible to communist propaganda, Lansdale’s notion of a multiracial “brotherhood” demonstrated how the categories that had previously defined difference and, in turn, buttressed imperialism in the island had shifted as U.S. imperialism adapted in the age of Asian decolonization. As the first major conflict between U.S.-­ aided allies and an army of peasants, the Philippine campaign served as an example of how—­and how not—to engage with both “national armies” and peasant populations. Lansdale would go on to lead seminars on counterinsurgent warfare in which he claimed that, while in the Philippines, he learned that “the real battleground” in the Cold War was “down at the grassroots, among the p­ eople of the nation.”159

Global to Grassroots Lansdale and his counterinsurgency team brought the geography of global warfare down to the grassroots by, as Bohannan put it, sticking “their noses in every­thing . . . ​­whether it be the press, or the army, or the business community, or politicians from the President down to ward-­heelers” to convince Filipinos to contribute to the war against global communism.160 In fact, Magsaysay’s successful presidential campaign was part of their counterinsurgency effort, although this is not to suggest that Lansdale single-­handedly assured Magsaysay’s election.161 Their influence involved the actions of a civilian-­led election

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watchdog group, the National Citizens’ Movement for ­Free Elections (NAMFREL), which, though funded in part by the CIA and the U.S. Information Ser­vice (USIS), defined its mission as “a broad and self-­determined course to preserve democracy in the Philippines.”162 Similar to Lansdale’s advisory work with the AFP, NAMFREL’s role was to build consent among the Philippine population in support of the idea that the Philippines was part of a global war against communism. Similar to how Lansdale’s counterinsurgency plan operated through the AFP with Americans serving only in advisory roles, NAMFREL was designed to be “exclusively Filipino led” so as to conceal the U.S. role in the organ­ization.163 Ramón Magsaysay’s election represented a key opportunity for anticommunists to publicize their work in the Philippines and to portray the nation as a model of successful anticommunist warfare. In 1953, an interview with the new president appeared in a U.S. News and World Report article provocatively ­titled “ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” Describing Magsaysay as a “new Asian nationalist” and a “barrio boy” with firsthand knowledge of jungle warfare, the article posited his new nationalism as a counterpoint to Marxist-­ Leninist-­ inspired anticolonial nationalism.164 By promoting Magsaysay, an ardent anticommunist with pro-­U.S. sentiments, the article contributed to the broader aims of the global anticommunist warfare that sought to displace anti-­imperial critiques against the United States and replace them with the view that communism represented the “new” imperial threat to the region. Moreover, anticommunist nationalism in the Philippines demonstrated that anticommunism was never simply about combating Communists. In fact, anticommunist nationalism played a central role in the construction and continuation of an anticommunist geographic imaginary that insisted that communism was just a new guise for the foreign domination and dependent relationships that had characterized the colonial world’s relationship to the West. The threat of communism, directed by Moscow or China, explained how the territorialization of the globe by U.S. military bases, and particularly in a former U.S. colony, protected the nationalism of young nations against the potential domination of foreign force.165 Magsaysay’s anticommunism reaffirmed an ideology of U.S. anti-­imperialism, a central current of U.S. imperial exceptionalism.166 Magsaysay was born during the U.S. colonial period in the Philippines, and he emphasized the altruism of the U.S. foreign policies of his youth, including colonial policies. Magsaysay consistently spoke of U.S. colonialism as a pro­cess of benevolent liberation, and he even admitted to using the Philippine-­American War as a model in his effort to win over the Philippine peasantry. He explained his belief that “Amer­ic­ a [had] conquered the Philippines” at the turn of the ­century

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b­ ecause U.S. soldiers had “made friends . . . ​fed hungry p­ eople” and “gave the ­children candy.”167 Thus, during the counterinsurgent war against the Huks, he instructed the AFP to treat “the ­people” as the Americans had when they “came ­here to fight us in 1901.” By glossing over the vio­lence of the U.S. colonial conquest and by affirming the idea—­which both U.S. and Philippine politicians espoused—­that the U.S. colonization of the islands had been a positive experience for Filipinos, Magsaysay’s statements worked to separate the United States from the histories of Western imperialism. He furthermore claimed that the supposedly anti-­imperialist U.S. policies and the model of anticommunist counterinsurgent warfare could be transported throughout Asia. In Magsaysay’s view, both Philippine history and the recent campaign against the Huks allowed Filipinos to “show [other] Asians that this business of being an ally of the United States is something far dif­fer­ent from the colonialism they knew.” In Magsaysay’s formulation, the Philippines was a model of a peaceful transition from colony to in­de­pen­dent nation, and Filipinos alone could help other Asians see how the United States differed from Eu­ro­pean colonial powers. “We are not just the show win­dow of democracy in Southeast Asia,” he told U.S. News and World Report, “we should be exporting democracy.”168 Magsaysay also informed the U.S. press that he would “show Asians” that the United States’ anticommunist foreign policies w ­ ere, in fact, anti-­imperial. For Magsaysay and his supporters, this “new Asian nationalism” would give Filipinos a vital role in supporting anticommunist politics in the region.169 Moreover, the model of anticommunist warfare he had helped build in the Philippines could easily be translated to other conflicts in Asia. Indeed, his description of events in the Philippines, published during the long months of the Korean War, encouraged U.S. readers, many of whom had ­limited knowledge of the region, to consider the civil war in ­Korea and the Huk rebellion in the Philippines as the same strug­gle in dif­fer­ent locations.170 The U.S. public was war-­weary, but it had also been whipped into an anticommunist fervor and the promise to reveal “why communists thrive in Asia”—­and how they ­were “smashed”—­was enticing. But in its explanation, the article predictably provided an oversimplified explanation of decolonization that conflated all anticolonial strug­gles and erased U.S. imperial history in the region.171 Casting counterinsurgent warfare in the Philippines as “the ­Free World’s first victory over Asian communism,” U.S. News and World Report portrayed “Asian Communists” as one undifferentiated group. The interview’s claim that Communists “thrived in Asia” worked to bind ­peoples, cultures, and territories together such that an “Asian Communist” in the Philippines could stand in for a Communist in

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­ orea, China, or Vietnam. In flattening Asia into a singular, coherent, naturalK ized space instead of a socially produced geo­graph­i­cal category, U.S. News and World Report reproduced a geographic imaginary that was based on an assumption that the p­ eople, their histories, and their con­temporary social worlds could be explained and understood through a geographic category, “Asia.”172 Interestingly, a July 1, 1949, State Department report to the NSC reflected an awareness amongst U.S. policymakers that “the Southeast Asian [SEA] region is to a large extent an arbitrary geographic designation” united by name and location. According to the report, it could “be argued that the countries included in this region have ­little in common beyond their geographic position.” Yet the report ultimately contradicted itself, arguing that “the p­ eople of the region” w ­ ere “racially related,” that the “native economy” was “based on rice culture,” and that “nationalism, both po­liti­cal and economic,” dominated public life “in all SEA countries.”173 One of the most impor­tant “common characteristics among the countries of SEA,” the report stated, was the fact the “region has become a target of a coordinated offensive plainly directed by the Kremlin.”174 In other words, the State Department offered a more complicated assessment of Southeast Asia than the U.S. News and World Report. Still, the constructed geography of a monolithic “Asia,” the spatial schema Philippine and U.S. anticommunists used to or­ga­nize the conflicts into two categories, the “­Free World” against “Asian communism,” justified U.S. policymakers’ claims that military assistance and po­liti­cal interventions in the Philippines ­were not imperial extensions but rather a defense of in­de­pen­dence in the face of communist aggression. The type of anticommunist “exporting” that Magsaysay advocated, in fact, had already begun. Indeed, the successful transformation of the civil war in Luzon into a front in a global anticommunist crusade enabled Filipinos to take active roles in anticommunist warfare in Southeast Asia. In its annual report for 1953, JUSMAG stated that, within the past year, dozens of Philippine officers had completed at least one “intelligence specialist” course conducted by U.S. advisers.175 In 1955, Wayne C. Smith, a U.S. military adviser in the Philippines, wrote, “I believe strongly in the training of Asiatics by Asiatics.” He sensed “a big potential h ­ ere in the Philippines to carry out that [‘Asiatics by Asiatics’ training] policy,” and he advocated that the funding of the AFP continue and include training for Filipino officers in the United States. Then, Filipino soldiers could share their knowledge in Asia. Already, he observed, “­there has been some training by the AFP of Indonesian and Vietnam students h ­ ere in Manila, the latter students on Psy War [psychological warfare].” Filipino soldiers could even share their instruction with U.S. ones. When Smith was asked “to give a week’s indoctrination to the US Psy War team ­going to

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­ ietnam,” he called on the Filipino soldiers to help.176 As it did for Lansdale’s V team and Magsaysay, the expanding geography of a global Cold War in Asia enabled Smith to imagine that Filipinos, schooled in U.S. military tactics, could serve as model “tutors” for the anticommunist cause in the region. In rescaling the significance of the civil war in Central Luzon, U.S. policymakers and colonial elites did not solely seek to control the territorial space of Central Luzon. They also sought to control its meaning. The anticommunist campaign against the Huks erased the national liberation and anti-­imperialist aspirations of the Huks, the PKP, and other left-­wing movements that challenged the elite hold on the Philippine government. This not only cloaked the history of U.S. imperialism in the islands; it also discredited the connection that po­liti­cal progressives made to this history and to the con­temporary state of national politics.177 By ­doing so, anticommunist propaganda unlinked the Huks’ anti-­imperialist rhe­toric from the social, economic, and po­liti­cal conditions that U.S. colonialism had built and sustained in the islands, thereby sidestepping the politics of U.S. military aid to the Philippines and positioning the United States as the ultimate protector of freedom and self-­determination.

Anticommunist Solidarity On June 15, 1961, at the Fort Bragg U.S. military installation in North Carolina, three Filipino AFP veterans and two U.S. soldiers conducted a daylong seminar, “Counter-­guerrilla Operations in the Philippines, 1946–1953,” for a class of international military officers.178 During the seminar, Medardo T. Justiniano, a veteran of the anti-­Huk campaign, addressed the group on “combat intelligence” and psychological warfare. Peppering his speech with anecdotes of the counterinsurgency campaign, Justiniano spared no details of the gruesome tactics used by Lansdale’s team during the offensive against the Huks.179 One of the iconic stories of the campaign that Lansdale often repeated involved draining the blood of a captured Huk and leaving it on a trail used by a Huk patrol. According to Lansdale, the remaining Huks in the area fled, believing their blood-­drained comrade had been the victim of an Aswang, or Filipino spirit.180 Justiniano described in his talk at Fort Bragg how soldiers killed Huks and piled their bodies into a truck, driving it around to frighten off anyone who might be thinking of supporting the Huk cause. Well aware of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that had updated the rules of war—­which included humane treatment of ­ enemy dead—­ Justiniano recognized the potentially shocking nature of his account. “I suppose I ­will be criticized about some of the

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t­hings I w ­ ill discuss with you,” he acknowledged when he began, before arguing that in wars against “communist bondage and oppression,” one could not afford to put limits on intelligence, counterintelligence, and psychological warfare tactics. Drawing on his experience in the Philippines, Justiniano told the group that successful anticommunist counterinsurgent wars required military officers who embraced untraditional, perhaps even morally questionable, military strategies. Such tactics, ­after all, had led to the defeat of the Huks. Justiniano concluded by urging the officers in his audience to “fortify the framework of international solidarity” by standing “united as one race and one nation . . . ​ with freedom as our ­battle flag” in the fight against global communism.181 What Justiniano’s speech revealed is how anticommunists concealed global proj­ects that undermined national sovereignty—­such as the proliferation of U.S. military bases overseas—­through the guise of anticommunist warfare. In co-­opting the leftist language of “international solidarity,” for example, Justiniano demonstrated how anticommunists used the doctrines of communist thought as proof that communism constituted a globally oriented (“international”) revolutionary movement and as justification for action. Rooted in the language of interdependence or “mutual security,” global anticommunism aimed to contain the global spread of an “international solidarity” of Marxist-­ Leninist anti-­imperial ideologies, which argued that imperialism, capitalism, and racism w ­ ere distinct proj­ects of the West, and replace them with an ideology that, as Roxas had conveyed during his final speech at Clark Air Force Base, equated the expansion of U.S. po­liti­cal and military influence with security and the defense of national sovereignty. Justiniano’s message also conveyed how the ­imagined geography of an anticommunist “global war”—or a war fought on the broadest, most supraterritorial scale—­was produced from the bottom up: by the peasants of Central Luzon, the ­careers of counterinsurgency experts, the diplomats and foreign policy officials in the embassies of Manila and Washington, DC, and countless ­others. Global anticommunist warfare was concretized through the infrastructure of martial warfare—­from the proliferation of U.S. military bases and U.S. soldiers abroad to the importation of U.S. consumer goods, cultural productions, and technical experts—as well as the material portrayals of a deterritorialized, globally positioned ­enemy. In turn, this spatial ordering of global warfare enabled anticommunist actors and networks, such as Lansdale’s team of counterinsurgency experts, to cross po­liti­cal bound­aries for the next several de­cades, easily transporting the tactics they developed to other conflicts around the world.

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­After leaving the Philippines, Lansdale and his team utilized and extended transnational cir­cuits of power that grew from the increasing militarization of the Cold War to further mobilize the ideology of global anticommunist warfare. ­These cir­cuits ran through the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and their counter­parts in other nations, many of which received direct training from U.S. advisers. As early as 1954—­a year a­ fter the Huk defeat—­the CIA began hiring veterans of the anti-­Huk campaign, such as Justiniano, to teach “lessons in counterinsurgency,” as Lansdale called them, to operatives in other theaters.182 In Vietnam, the CIA or­ga­nized seminars on psychological warfare for Viet­nam­ese military officials that included a “History of the Huk Movement” and “The Communist Movement in the Philippines.” At U.S. war colleges, U.S. officers and officers of allied nations studied Valeriano and Bohannan’s Counter-­guerrilla Operations and attended guest lectures on the “nature of communist insurgency.” In 1960, Lansdale’s closest allies, Bohannan and Valeriano, traveled to Colombia as part of a CIA team assessing la violencia, a de­cadelong civil war. They even trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion.183 As qualitatively dif­fer­ent threats to the United States’ effort to expand the U.S. sphere of influence emerged in equally disparate sites, U.S. and Filipino anticommunist networks channeled them into the cir­cuits of global warfare. In effect, the global spread of counterinsurgency doctrine, alongside the disproportionally influential po­liti­cal economies of U.S. military aid, helped rescale the spatial contours of the Cold War from the grassroots to the global.184

Chapter 4

Efficient, Honest, and Demo­cratic U.S. Aid, Public Administration, and the Campaign against Corruption

In 1954, as part of the Governmental Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Act, Philippine president Ramón Magsaysay declared the second week of November “Public Administration Week.” Ceremonies, religious ser­vices, “business machines,” and office equipment exhibits—as well as radio and press forums—­would all be dedicated to furthering an ongoing conversation on the roles, functions, and efficacy of Philippine governance. The week was recommended by a group of public administration professors from the University of Michigan, one among many groups of technocrats—­members of the “technical” elite—­who had been tasked by the U.S. and Philippine governments with identifying flaws in the Philippine system. In the early 1950s, technocrats from U.S. and Philippine universities, private businesses, and nongovernmental agencies identified corruption, elite control of the state, and the absence of a Philippine ­middle class as primary barriers to stability and economic development in the Philippines. ­Those technocrats, including the group of U.S. professors who planned the Public Administration Week, ­were specifically troubled by what they saw as a growing crisis of corruption among the Philippines’ elite po­liti­cal class. Like their counter­parts in U.S. foreign aid departments, t­hese technocrats also believed that publicly and privately funded U.S.-­sponsored technocratic proj­ects could serve as checks against the destabilizing forces of elite corruption. Technocrats feared that elite corruption bred public discontent and thus created the conditions for communism.

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But ­these technocrats’ concerns about corruption—­and, specifically, the Philippine po­liti­cal elites’ implication in the corruption—­created a prob­lem for U.S. policymakers and Philippine politicians alike. Efforts to “clean up” the government in the Philippines chafed the tightly woven fabric of interde­ pen­dency between Filipino elites and the U.S. establishment that had been threaded into the colonial and postin­ de­ pen­ dence po­ liti­ cal and economic ­order. Rooting out corruption implicated t­hose same Filipino leaders who had become increasingly power­ful over the ­century and who had been controlling the country since the colonial period. What is more, although the U.S. military recognized the prob­lem that government corruption created for the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the military’s mission presumed that communism—as a global threat to humanity—­took pre­ce­dent over local or national issues and thereby, at times, overrode the technocrats’ and policymakers’ recommendations. Ultimately, the conundrum boiled down to a prob­lem of optics for the United States. On the one hand, corruption appeared to undermine democracy as well as the ability for the United States to cultivate postcolonial democracies in the region. On the other hand, addressing corruption directly appeared to undermine the Philippines’ sovereignty and therefore harm the United States’ claims to anti-­imperialism and, again, its ability to cultivate governments friendly to U.S. interests in the region. If U.S. advisers and dollars could not create the conditions for a U.S.-­style democracy in the Philippines, what would happen to other decolonizing nations in Asia that had not been “tutored” in U.S. demo­cratic practices? The answer, for Filipino elites, was to blame corruption on the Communists, thereby turning anticommunist politics into a technique for deflecting U.S. criticism and holding on to power. For U.S. policymakers, the solution was to train a new Filipino m ­ iddle class to rein in the corruption of the current ruling class, a m ­ iddle class that would be educated in the latest doctrines of scientific democracy and thereby inoculated against both communism and corruption. Anticommunism offered a knife with which to cut the Gordian knot entangling both U.S. technocrats and Filipino elite. Through university and public educational programs, U.S. technocrats sought to create a bureaucratic middle-­class workforce to manage governance from local barrios up through the national level. Moreover, technocrats envisioned that ­these education programs would help to cultivate a new middle-­class workforce that would, in turn, create a new market of middle-­class consumers. The idea that practices of scientific, demo­cratic management—­modernization—­ could be taught and transferred to foreign bureaucrats by “technical exchanges”

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and thereby “built in to the cultural structures” of foreign countries explic­itly highlights one of the ways technocrats ­imagined shaping a broader postwar world. But could the technocrats spark the cap­it­al­ist development promised by their proj­ects while, at the same time, masking the influence of U.S. power? The Philippines held a par­tic­u­lar importance for U.S. policymakers in the early 1950s b­ ecause U.S. policymakers recognized the symbolic power of the Philippines as a global model for postcolonial transitions. Indeed, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk wrote in 1951, the Philippines “is generally regarded by Asia as evidence of American sincerity and capability, and if we fail ­there the rest of Asia ­will surely consider we have nothing to offer elsewhere. For ­these reasons, it is vital that we hold the Philippines what­ever the cost—­unless we are prepared to write off Asia.”1 A few years removed from in­de­pen­dence, the Philippine state was still bogged down in a counterinsurgent war, and its coffers ­were nearly empty. As the United States sent advisers to Central Luzon, Philippine politicians sought increased levels of U.S. foreign aid in order to address chronic bud­get shortfalls. But the appearance of this financial aid looked to undermine the legitimacy of the Philippines as an in­de­pen­dent state. Moreover, U.S. policymakers w ­ ere increasingly concerned that the stagnating economy, elections marred by endemic vio­lence and intimidation, and the war against the Huks exposed the ways the U.S. model for decolonization and postcolonial statehood did not, in fact, look much dif­ fer­ent than the rest of chaotic Southeast Asia. In order to promote democracy and “hold the Philippines what­ever the cost,” U.S. civilian programs relied on technocratic proj­ects that focused on the world of education and management. This chapter investigates t­hose U.S.-­ sponsored technocratic development and aid programs in the Philippines in the context of the local anticommunist politics that coexisted—­and sometimes conflicted—­under the umbrella of a globally oriented, U.S.-­driven anticommunist proj­ect. Beginning in 1949, U.S. policymakers began to gain a sense of the scale of corruption in the new nation, and, into the 1950s, programs to address the prob­lem ­were proposed on vari­ous technocratic levels; Public Administration Week, proposed in 1954, was just one of t­hose proposals, but it would not be staged for another two years. In the interim, Filipinos saw a flurry of technocrats and specialists arrive to “clean up” their country, but they also heard increasingly ominous warnings about the threat of communism. In effect, two sets of anticommunist actors clashed over the most impor­tant geographic scale of the Cold War conflict: the local or the global. In both cases, anticommunist ideology helped Filipino elites and U.S. administrators push back against the

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vision of po­liti­cal and economic equality that was most vocally promoted by the targets of anticommunist campaigns.

Locating the Crisis In the immediate postwar years, U.S. policymakers granted nonmilitary U.S. aid to the Philippines in order to “get the war-­torn Philippine economy on its feet.”2 The devastation wrought by four years of warfare had left the Philippines with the highest levels of war damage among the Allied nations, with the exception of Poland. ­After in­de­pen­dence, Americans ­were particularly attuned to the issues of security and popu­lar legitimacy. With an ongoing war in Central Luzon and the shocking vio­lence of the 1949 election, the legitimacy of an in­de­pen­dent Philippines seemed more precarious than ever. T ­ hese “internal security” prob­lems garnered the attention of high-­ranking officials in Washington who believed that the conflict was one of the primary sources of economic instability. At the same time, a number of U.S. advisers produced studies of the islands’ housing, urban planning, cottage industries, and agricultural systems, and they pointed to land in­equality as the fundamental structural prob­lem in the Philippine economy.3 Indeed, immediately a­fter the war, foreign relief workers—­such as individuals working for nongovernmental organ­izations including the Philippine War Relief Inc. and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)—­largely delivered long technocratic reports assessing the direction relief and reconstruction should take. Based in the logic of market capitalism rather than ideas of pro­gress not necessarily tied to the growth of a national economy, ­these reports used a technocratic language that took as truth the assumption that a cap­i­tal­ist marketplace was a central component of democracy. When it came to land reform, a key ele­ment of postwar reconstruction and decolonization across East and Southeast Asia, technocratic relief workers sometimes referenced—as they did in a 1948 UNRRA study in the Philippines—­the need to promote “legislation for an equitable sharing of the crop between landlords and tenants.” Yet, in the UNRRA report that evaluated and prescribed agricultural reconstruction policy, “agrarian discontent” was listed as number fourteen on a list of fifteen “­factors” needing attention.4 More generally, t­hese reports centered on hyperlocal topics such as crop yields rather than critiques of the ways war rehabilitation funds had helped to reconstruct the prewar era’s economic inequalities.

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The Philippines’ recovery from the war, in the first three years ­after in­de­ pen­dence, had generated optimism. Between 1945 and 1949, investments amounting to nearly one-­fifth of the national income had reinvigorated impor­ tant commercial, agricultural, and transport industries.5 But the Bell Trade Act, as critics in 1946 had warned, weighted the economy t­oward labor-­intense, cash crop agriculture, meaning that Filipinos had to continue importing much of their food and consumer goods. As a result, “more than twice the prewar volume of imports” flowed into the country, while “less than two-­thirds” of the “prewar volume of exports” left.6 In the immediate postwar years, an influx of military expenditures and war damage payments had helped close the gap in the Philippine’s trade deficit. But as neither w ­ ere recurring sources of income, U.S. observers looked upon the Philippine economic situation with increasing concern.7 To make ­matters worse, the projected U.S. foreign aid payments for 1951 had dropped to half of the 1949 level, a decline of $180 million.8 Indeed, few could ignore the fact that, at the end of 1949, the Philippine government was in financial straits: that year alone the Quirino government had drawn down its foreign exchange reserves from $420 million to $160 million.9 Following the recommendations of the joint U.S.-­Philippine Finance Commission, the Central Bank Act of 1948—­which established a central bank the following year—­enabled the government to finance its government debt.10 Still, a concern that public conversations regarding the insufficiencies of U.S aid would lead to widespread feelings of anti-­Americanism soon gave way to qualified reports of dissatisfaction, including with the United States’ decision not to force Japan to pay reparations and the United States’ refusal to honor its promise of military benefits for WWII Filipino veterans.11 By the time the “economic crisis” hit in 1949, the U.S. perception focused almost exclusively on how Filipino leaders had “mismanaged” the economy. In effect, the narrative of elite corruption worked to displace the long-­term effects of U.S. colonial rule on the accumulated structural inequities in the Philippine social, po­liti­cal, and economic system. Critics in Manila, however—­including Salvador Araneta, Quirino’s secretary of economic coordination—­were less inclined to see the “crisis” as a product of Philippine postwar economic management. In the journal Pacific Affairs in 1948, Araneta had argued that “while the United States may take pride in its efforts to improve public education and health” during the colonial era, “­there [was] no blinking the fact that it imposed a colonial-­type economy on its ward.” Noting that “American capital [had] not [followed] the flag to the Philippines in significant quantity,” Araneta described colonial economic relations in stark terms: ­free trade had encouraged

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“American entrepreneurs to send consumer goods, not capital” to the Philippines, and while ­free trade had benefited the lumber, sugar, and coconut oil industries, other Philippine industries failed to develop ­because they could not compete with duty-­free consumer goods from the United States. Upon in­de­pen­dence, the Bell Trade Act, according to Araneta, brought “economic salvation” to the “islands’ sugar interests,” but it had also pegged the Philippine peso to the U.S. dollar at a one-­to-­one ratio, inflating its value to a level “much higher than its economic development warrant[ed]” and devaluing everyday purchasing power.12 If Americans and indeed “the architects of the postwar global community” had designed a system in which “responsibility for economic regulation” lay at the national level, Araneta’s rebuke attempted to re­orient the conversation on the perceived economic crisis t­oward the long-­term structural effects of U.S. colonization.13 Araneta’s status as a member of the po­liti­cal elite provided legitimacy to his argument regarding the enduring asymmetric relationship between the United States and the Philippines.14 And although he believed the colonial relationship between the two countries had structured the postin­de­pen­dence economy in substantial ways, he also believed U.S. domestic economic policy—­namely, New Deal and Keynesian deficit spending—­provided a useful model for economic development.15 Despite Araneta’s position in the Quirino administration, his enthusiasm for a New Deal–­style industrialization program would not come to fruition. His vision competed, however, with that of Miguel Cuaderno, the governor of the newly established central bank, and Araneta would eventually leave his position in the Quirino government. Assessing the depth of the crisis—or w ­ hether the economic conditions in the Philippines even constituted a crisis—­was a ­matter of interpretation. Corruption in all realms of Philippine society dominated U.S. press coverage, with accusations of “growing lawlessness and po­liti­cal thuggery” and “widespread lack of confidence not only in the government, but in the ­whole order of ­things.”16 Some influential Americans in the islands located the source of the Philippines’ economic woes in patronage politics. In 1950, U.S. ambassador to the Philippines Myron Cowen informed the State Department that “ineptitude and wastefulness” ­were the “principal prob­lems” of the Philippine economic and financial system. The nation was once seemingly on the verge of a rapid cap­i­tal­ist development with the islands’ rich natu­ral resources ready for exploitation, but in a brief span of time the Filipino elite’s mismanagement had sullied Philippine democracy, endangered its self-­sufficiency, and plunged the country into another period of national crisis. Illustrating how a racialized language of cultural and personal deficiency had started to eclipse explanations of poverty

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that had previously relied on biologically determined conceptions of race, Cowen argued, the “current trend of deterioration” was the result of the “morbid psy­chol­ogy” of the Third Republic’s second president, Quirino.17 Moreover, the narrative that Filipino politicians w ­ ere “corrupt beyond what Western nations could consider the toleration point” explained why, despite Americans’ best efforts, the Philippines’ “chance of making a go of self-­rule” was straining ­toward a breaking point.18 Not all Americans agreed with the predominant narrative of Philippine corruption. Responding to what he termed as the “destructive thinking” of some of his foreign policy peers, JUSMAG chief Leland Hobbs informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS) in Washington that Quirino was not “the crooked weakling he [was] made out to be.”19 Hobbs’s confidence in Quirino notwithstanding, by the start of 1950, exports had not yet met prewar levels; the deficit was high, as was inflation; and the government was poised to run out of cash.20 U.S. policymakers, Philippine politicians, and business interests all believed that the Philippines needed U.S. dollars to keep the state and its economy afloat, although dif­fer­ent arms of the U.S. state disagreed as to the extent and the specificities of assistance.21 However, ­there ­were also reasons to be optimistic about the economy’s ­future. The onset of the Korean War had given it a boost by contributing to a 19 ­percent increase in foreign exchange earnings.22 Yet despite improvements in the economic situation in the summer of 1950, U.S. news reports again “suggested a growing crisis in Philipino [sic] affairs.”23 Feeling internal and international pressure, Quirino, in 1950, filed a “somewhat reluctant request” to Truman, asking him to send a U.S. economic team to examine his country’s failing economy and make policy recommendations on which his administration could then act.24 The Economic Survey Mission to the Philippines, headed by banker and former undersecretary of the U.S. Trea­sury Daniel W. Bell, was a five-­ member team assisted by eigh­teen technical advisers from U.S. government agencies, the world of private business, and U.S. universities.25 ­After two months of study, the Bell Report was handed to Quirino in October 1950. It summarized a litany of ills, all of which the mission members concluded had contributed to the islands’ economic malaise. ­These highlighted the very dif­fer­ent lives that the state had structured for elite versus ordinary Filipinos: although the main industry was agriculture, incomes for workers ­were very low, and employees had ­little power in negotiating or improving their position; small farmers ­were practically non­ex­is­tent, thanks to a “feudal land organ­ization”; the vast accumulation of landholdings by an elite few left most tenants with l­ittle power against their wealthy landlords; taxes ­were high on the poor but low on the rich;

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and in the private sector, agricultural and business leaders disregarded their “responsibility ­toward low income groups.” Findings also stressed “widespread inefficiency,” and, as suspected, “graft and corruption” ­were omnipresent.26 Due to cronyism and mismanagement, “the exceptional economic opportunities” of the postwar years had “largely dissipated.”27 The book-­length Bell Report recommended multiple areas of reform, including the increase of taxes (especially on nonessential imports); land reform and small farmer assistance; the diversification of industry and improvement of transportation infrastructure; the introduction of adequate public health, education, and housing programs; the institution of a minimum wage for agricultural laborers and higher salaries for civil servants; encouragement to form u ­ nions; elimination of barriers on employing “foreign technicians”; and the complete reor­ga­ni­za­tion of public administration.28 Portions of the entire Bell Report, which was unsparing in its detail, ­were reprinted by most of the Manila newspapers. To assist the Filipino ­people in their reforms, the United States would pledge $250 million in loans and grants explic­itly tied to a five-­year program of development and technical assistance to be advised by a U.S.-­led “Technical Mission.”29 U.S. policymakers recommended the aid be spent on large-­scale infrastructure proj­ects, such as developing a more extensive and reliable power grid and building roads, and on industrial development and social welfare programs.30 The ac­cep­tance of this money was, on Quirino’s part, contingent on the “continued supervision and control of the Technical Mission.”31 In general, the Bell Report argued that the Philippines was in a state of crisis and that the United States just “might have another China” on its hands.32 Indeed, American news coverage often drew a parallel between Quirino’s Philippines and Chiang Kai-­shek’s China, “just before it fell to the Communists.”33 The rhetorical use of “China,” particularly in 1950, was also a po­liti­cal strategy to force fiscal conservatives into committing more dollars for U.S. foreign aid proj­ects. For despite the United States’ previous support for Chiang Kai-­shek’s Kuomintang, the Truman administration had eventually determined that no amount of U.S. dollars could “save China.” The comparison between China and the Philippines worked to situate the prob­lem in the context of the global strug­gle against communism. The U.S. anticorruption campaign in the Philippines, on the other hand, focused its attention on national politics and explic­itly identified Filipino elite politicians’ near total control of the state as a primary prob­lem. In fact, the Bell Report explic­itly targeted elites in recommending a thorough “house­cleaning” at all government levels. This, obviously, threatened Quirino’s and other elites’ hold on power, but t­hose in control ­were determined to stay ­there.

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Quirino’s administration refused to accept the full blame for the nation’s trou­bles. While not denying the prob­lem of corruption, his private secretary suggested to the Manila press that the vast disparity between Philippine and American wealth explained why the corruption appeared so blatant: “When you are wealthy, such as Amer­i­ca is, you can afford to step on anybody,” but the so-­called corrupt Filipinos ­were “not rich enough to cover up their own stink and to be lofty and moral about it before a devastated and hungry world.”34 Turning the U.S. ideology of tutelage on its head, Quirino’s administration even implied that Philippine politicians had learned the art of corruption from Americans, the “more accomplished and eminently successful mentors” of Filipino politicians.35 While the pushback aided Quirino’s effort to assert his in­de­pen­dence from U.S. influence, he found that anticommunism was a better tool. Indeed, Filipino elites fought back against their portrayal as gangsters and crooks by blaming the real crime on the Communists. In June 1950, Quirino had already stated that “outside forces [­were] systematically campaigning to make the Philippines a second China.”36 Although Quirino did not want to be associated with the corruption that had plagued Chiang Kai-­shek’s Kuomintang, Filipino po­liti­cal elites doubled down on anticommunist accusations and intimations that the islands might soon pass “into the Asian Communist orbit.”37 Congressman Tito Tizon, chair of the Committee on Un-­Filipino Activities (CUFA), even argued that Americans had mistakenly blamed the po­liti­cal elites when they should have blamed the Communists. “Communism encourages graft and corruption,” he argued, and it does so “to prove the basic Marxian conception of the rottenness of the capitalistic system.”38 Likewise, House Speaker Eugenio Perez said the accusations of corruption w ­ ere “exactly what the Communists want to hear b­ ecause the Communists are the only ones who get any good out of it.”39 Washington Post journalist Harold Isaacs, striking a note of reflection, attempted to turn the focus back on corruption in the summer of 1950 with an alternate anticommunist analy­sis. “The danger ­here is not a Russian-­Communist conspiracy to snatch the Philippines,” he wrote in a six-­part series on the Philippines for the newspaper. Instead, the “danger” came from “the complete failure of ­those now ruling the islands to come to grips with its ­peoples’ prob­ lems.”40 His assessment rang a dif­fer­ent tone than articles that dwelled on cultural habits, including a 1953 Life magazine piece that juxtaposed “the wealthy few who flaunt diamonds” with the “salokot (straw-­hat) wearing millions [who went] barefoot.”41 Isaacs wrote from experience; in the 1930s, he had traveled to China and, in collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),

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started an English-­language journal, the China Forum. He also published a book, the Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, chronicling the 1925–1927 worker and peasant strug­gles.42 His attention to working-­class and peasant issues was reflected in his articles on the Philippines, and his background made him more likely than not to focus on class divisions. Americans, Isaacs worried, could not see that the Philippine elite ­were on one side and the “­great mass of ­people who want something better” on the other.43 In Isaacs’s accounting, U.S. policymakers needed to or­ga­nize the masses against the elite and encourage “a sweeping renovation of Filipino affairs by Filipinos.”44 Isaacs’s focus on elite rule and his reference to “the loss of China” was pointed not at Filipinos but at U.S. policymakers. U.S.-­style anticommunism, he predicted, would compel U.S. policymakers to stay the course in the Philippines. As Isaacs had diagnosed, it was all part of “the well-­established Washington po­liti­cal philosophy: ‘He may be an S.O.B, but he’s our S.O.B.’ ” Isaacs explained that the philosophy applied to the U.S. attitude t­owards Chiang Kai-­ shek and Bao Dai in Vietnam and was the result of “simplistic, anti-­Communist thinking that substitutes American cold war abstractions for living po­liti­cal and ­human facts.” To be sure, Isaacs was not advocating for communism. Rather, the seasoned journalist warned that the current U.S. approach risked “play[ing] directly into the hands of the Communists” and could “deal new blows to the crumbling American position in Asia.”45 As Isaacs intuited, the policymakers stuck with Quirino and ensured he would not be thrown out with the bathwater. And though his administration initially bristled at some of the accusations put forth in the Bell Report, ­because U.S. foreign aid dollars ­were tied to the implementation of the Bell Report’s recommendations, Quirino was ultimately compelled to acquiesce to U.S. suggestions.

Public Administration In the context of decolonization and hardening Cold War b­ attle lines, Southeast Asian foreign aid was unavoidably politicized, leading both Americans and Filipinos to manage its optics and messaging. In light of both contexts, the Philippines took on new meaning in U.S. foreign policies, and Americans acted accordingly by remaining attentive to questions of Philippine sovereignty. Members of the Bell survey mission, for instance, expressed concerns that technical assistance training programs might find themselves “on ticklish ground” ­because of how they would likely infringe on “the sovereignty of the Philippine

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government.” If policymakers wanted the solutions proposed through technical aid proj­ects to be ­adopted, then it could not appear as if they had been entirely directed or controlled by the United States.46 Americans wanted to avoid accusations of imperial interference in the Philippines; but, ironically enough, when, in 1951, a group of U.S. policymakers gathered to discuss the Mutual Security Agency’s (MSA) “Action Plan in Asia,” they met in the Philippine city of Baguio, home to “the Mansion House,” built in 1908 to serve as the summer residence for the American governor general of the colonial state. The Philippine government had rehabilitated the mansion a­ fter it had suffered damage during WWII and used the mansion and its guest­house as meeting venues, including for the second meeting of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organ­ization in 1948. Nonetheless, the fact that Quirino met U.S. officials at the site served as a reminder that the built environment of the U.S. colonial state remained vis­i­ble in the in­de­pen­dent state. The MSA, a newly formed governmental division whose director served on the National Security Council (NSC), was modeled in part on the Marshall Plan in Eu­rope, which U.S. policymakers believed, thanks to “their joint endeavors,” had “preserved Eu­rope and its civilization from collapse.” Citing President Truman’s belief that U.S. foreign aid should support the “­free nations of Asia in their efforts to strengthen the economic foundations of in­de­pen­dence,” the Baguio group identified training in public administration as a primary goal of U.S. foreign aid dollars.47 The Bell Report had already recommended a program of technical assistance for the Philippines, and the MSA group in Baguio identified the specific priority of public administration education. As an academic discipline and subfield of po­liti­cal science, public administration originated in the late nineteenth ­century when academics—­including ­future president Woodrow Wilson—­argued for the need to study, and educate about, the bureaucratic systems of increasingly complex governments.48 Advocates of public administration suggested that it made democracy pos­si­ble through the efficient use of resources, scientific methods of management, and the enforced separation of politics from administration; put another way, they stressed the benefits of a government bureaucracy run by experts rather than po­liti­cal appointees. As a result, universities began developing academic programs in the subject.49 In 1917, the po­liti­cal science department at the University of Michigan, for example, began granting master’s degrees in municipal administration to promote efficiency in local governance; twenty-­two years ­later, the university broadened its reach by founding the Institute of Public and Social Administration and, in 1946, its Institute of Public Administration (IPA). The postwar boom in U.S. foreign aid drew many scholars of public adminis-

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tration overseas, which likewise influenced a shift t­oward modern po­liti­cal theory. Po­liti­cal scientist Dwight Waldo’s influential 1948 book The Administrative State provided a theoretical basis for the field’s turn away from ideas of po­liti­cal neutrality and t­oward a reconciliation with “demo­cratic values.”50 Efficiency would remain an impor­tant vector of analy­sis, but U.S. public administrators not only believed in making the trains run on time or implementing cost-­saving strategies; their missions would blend “technical education” with the promotion of “the ideals and values of the Western world.”51 The University of Michigan’s IPA in the Philippines was one of the first of many foreign academic programs for technical assistance established and funded by the MSA following the Second World War. It began when, on an MSA-­ sponsored trip to Manila in late January 1952, two University of Michigan professors—­James K. Pollock and John Lederle—­met with officials from the Philippine government and the University of the Philippines to discuss the feasibility of bringing U.S. professors to teach governance to Philippine public servants. Pollock, chair of the Department of Po­liti­cal Science at Michigan, was not new to working with U.S. and foreign government agencies. He had previously served as an adviser to the U.S. military government in occupied Germany. Lederle, a l­awyer and po­liti­cal scientist, would go on to serve as the IPA’s first director. Foreshadowing the nature of the relationship between the professors and the MSA staff in the Philippines and in Washington, DC, was that Pollock and Lederle attended the meeting believing that the idea for the IPA had come from the highest public officials in the Philippines.52 The proj­ect was originally conceived as a private effort between universities. Yet ­because MSA-­funded proj­ects required partial funding from host nations—­meaning the Philippine government—­Quirino would have to sign on to the institute’s creation. Yet, when they met with President Quirino, Pollock and Lederle ­were surprised to discover that he seemed to know ­little of the program. Indeed, the president only warmed to the professors when he realized they ­were colleagues of Joseph Hayden, former vice governor-­general of the Philippines, with whom Quirino claimed to be “on the friendliest of terms.” Quirino, who changed his tune upon learning of their mutual friendship with Hayden, had perhaps de­cided that the two professors had a closer proximity to power than he had initially ­imagined. Or, it is pos­si­ble that the connection to his old friend led Quirino to believe he could turn a program he originally did not want to his advantage.53 Regardless of the calculation that led him to change his mind, by the end of the 1952 meeting, Pollock and Lederle proudly announced that Quirino and his government “not only have the desire but we have the

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d­ etermination to support the program.”54 In less than six months, the IPA began operations on the campus of the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, which had, in 1948, replaced Manila as the nation’s capital.55 U.S. officials in the MSA promoted a private contract model as a way to “secure the advantages of flexibility” and “freedom from government red tape.” But they also believed in the diplomatic benefit of private contracts; private entities, they believed, helped “avoid the appearance of American governmental interventions.”56 In practice, their contracts ­were never exclusively private arrangements. The institute’s contract, in fact, had four signatories: the University of Michigan, the University of the Philippines, the U.S. government’s MSA, and the Philippine Council on United States Foreign Aid (PHILCUSA), a department within the Philippine government. In July 1953, MSA director Howard Stassen sent a circular air-­gram to “certain diplomatic officers” in U.S. embassies in Jakarta, Kabul, Karachi, New Delhi, and Rangoon informing them that the “principal device” of the new Philippine institute was the private contract. Stassen wrote that private contracts “minimized the direct participation of the two governments and thus tends to reduce opposition on the part of certain persons who feel that public administration is a particularly sensitive field.” This air-­gram indicates that U.S. offices used private contracts, at least in part, to mask U.S. intervention and that officials such as Stassen understood that such intervention, particularly when connected to foreign governments, was controversial and worth concealing.57 Even if the contribution from the Philippine government was small, the joint monetary requirement cinched an impor­tant tie from the Philippine state to the U.S. state. With both national governments financially invested in the IPA’s success, both states ­were also committed—at least in their public pronouncements—to accepting feedback from technocratic U.S. advisers. In practice, U.S. academics worked closely with Philippine academics, solicited feedback from government employees enrolled in the institute’s courses, and contributed to a shared ethos that they ­were educating Filipinos to be better bureaucrats so that the daily workings of government would run more smoothly and be a benefit to more p­ eople. The private-­public contract continued a long-­standing U.S. institution-­building proj­ect in the islands that, while encouraging Filipino participation, also endowed Americans with the power to determine both the scope of prob­lems and their proposed solutions. The IPA’s effort to eradicate corruption conflicted, at times, with the elite power establishment the U.S. colonial state had built in to the Philippines’ ­po­liti­cal and economic order. The demographics of the Filipino elite population did not shift in the transition from colony to in­de­pen­dence.58 Yet the

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relationship between U.S. experts and the Filipino elite took on a new discursive frame ­after 1946. Americans ­were ­eager to support what diplomat Raymond Fosdick called “the indigenous leadership.” To be sure, this had been a legitimating strategy of colonial rule and an indication that postin­de­pen­dence relations had retained ele­ments of the colonial era. In the context of the Cold War and rising anticolonial nationalist movements, however, the U.S. NSC advised that it was impor­tant “that the Filipinos act to the maximum extent pos­si­ble on their own initiative and that other countries, particularly in Asia, recognize that the Philippines are truly in­de­pen­dent.”59 As Americans embarked on programs for material reasons, the development of “technical schools in the Far East,” according to the State Department, was critically impor­tant to securing “the reservoir of basic materials on which continued economic growth of the f­ree world depends.”60

Managing Democracy U.S. technocrats saw corruption as the plague contaminating the economic and po­liti­cal pro­cesses in the archipelago, and the U.S. professors who traveled to the Philippines did so to institute a program in public administration that would diagnose and propose solutions for the islands’ governing structures and po­liti­cal culture. The treatment would, ideally, cultivate and empower a bureaucratic middle-­class workforce that could offer a check on elite corruption.61 The IPA curriculum reflected the attempt to balance technical education with the recognition that, as one American technocrat put it, “technical study does not automatically expose trainees to demo­cratic ideas.”62 Indeed, courses in the IPA’s undergraduate degree program, which began in the fall of 1953, included two years of study at the University of the Philippines’ College of Liberal Arts. During ­these first two years, students w ­ ere required to take economics, accounting, sociology, psy­chol­ogy, and po­liti­cal science, as well as En­glish and Spanish courses. A ­ fter the first two years, the IPA’s “course of study became much more oriented ­toward cultivating specific technical skill sets.” This included “courses on taxation and government finance, municipal government and administration, as well as governmental accounting.” Additionally, the program required that students enroll in “specially emphasized electives,” such as courses on prob­lems and techniques in urban planning, international administration, comparative public administration, industrial management, and transportation economics.63 In the final year, students took upper-­level public administration courses that w ­ ere focused on administrative organ­ization, gov-

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ernmental planning, “ethics in public ser­vice,” administrative law, and fiscal administration.64 In contrast to the rigid curriculum for undergraduates, the program in public administration for master’s students was “designed to suit [each student’s] needs, taking into account his e­ arlier preparation, his par­tic­u­ lar field of interest, and the requirements of government employment.”65 In 1953–1954, ­there ­were two hundred students enrolled in the institute’s academic courses, over half of whom w ­ ere government employees.66 To accommodate the high number of working students, most courses at the institute w ­ ere offered in the late after­noon or eve­ning. ­After February 1954, many ­were held at the new Rizal Hall, home to the University of the Philippines Medical College, which was located within walking distance of governmental buildings in central Manila rather than at the main campus of the University of the Philippines, farther out, in Quezon City (although the nation’s capital had been relocated to Quezon City, many government offices remained in Manila). Built in 1908 on the original site of the University of the Philippines, Rizal Hall had been badly destroyed during the Second World War; ­after its reconstruction, the regal and storied Manila edifice undoubtedly lent an extra air of legitimacy to the institute. Indeed, the three-­story building—­ with its Spanish-­tile roof and long line of elegant columns framing the front—­ projected an aura of authority through decorum. The hall’s newly rebuilt interior matched its elegant exterior design. The library and classrooms, according to a pamphlet promoting the institute, ­were also equipped with “modern facilities.” In addition to serving as the institute’s classroom and library space, with specialized training halls equipped with oversize chalkboards and large flow charts describing the Philippine governmental system, Rizal Hall was also used as a site for conferences and meetings of public officials. Certain conference rooms in Rizal Hall, in fact, resembled palatial or presidential spaces rather than faculty buildings. T ­ hese rooms included heavi­ly upholstered furniture, long glass-­topped bamboo t­ables, ornate curtains, and gold-­plated light fixtures and doorknobs. To ­those passing by, ­whether they knew what went on inside or not, Rizal Hall looked like a site of importance. The location of Rizal Hall within walking distance of many government offices, as well as its stately presence, aided in recruiting public ser­vices workers into the institute’s academic and training programs. Indeed, by 1955, the institute claimed to have trained “over 2,500 government officers and employees.”67 The U.S. professors who traveled to the Philippines to establish the IPA assumed the general tenets of modernization theory—­a po­liti­cal and economic theory based on the idea that the historical development of socie­ties

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could be plotted on a spectrum of states from “traditional” to “modern.” Cast as both “universal” and po­liti­cally “neutral,” modernization theory, as Bradley R. Simpson has argued, “conflated the historically contingent roles that states played in regional economies and the world system with their stage of development.”68 Industrialized Western cap­i­tal­ist democracies served as the model of effective “modern” states for underdeveloped, recently in­de­pen­dent nations, or “emerging states.” An influx of technical advisers, capital, or aid as well as the promise of modern technology could hasten the speed at which “emerging states” moved along the predetermined path of development.69 In the Philippines, the future-­oriented gaze of modernization theory prac­ti­tion­ ers worked to veil the effects of U.S. colonization even further. While the enactment of development proj­ects—­including the IPA—­often involved disempowering individuals who supported alternative ideas or ways of living, modernization theory’s discourse—­laden as it was with terms of mutuality, assistance, nurturing, and ­human welfare—­justified any uneven power relations by promising they ­were temporary.70 In the language of 1950s social science circles, the difference between relief programs and technical assistance programs was akin to the “transfer” of goods versus the “transfer” of knowledge.71 As pursued by the United Nations ­after WWII, technical assistance was “the or­ga­nized transfer of knowledge from government to government and from p­ eople to p­ eople.”72 ­These programs largely relied on the expertise of professionals and academics rather than po­liti­cal advisers. Yet, as anthropologist Tanya Murray Li has suggested, “rendering technical” constitutes uneven power relations between t­hose “with the power to diagnose prob­lems” and ­those who are “subject to the solution.” In this sense, technical experts do not have to be governmental agents to enact the kinds of unequal power relations that replicate the unequal relations between governments.73 Moreover, technical assistance programs often partook in the “mission civilisatrice” heritage of previous colonial proj­ects, in seeking to “contro[l] social and cultural change” through the transfer of “technical and social science knowledge.”74 As explained by a representative from the United Nation’s Technical Assistance Administration in 1955: It must be said that technical assistance, and all that is encompassed in that term, rests fundamentally on a moral foundation. . . . ​Its real motivation is found in the fact that it is the right t­hing to do. You in the United States and we in Canada have been born and have grown up in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy. It is simply not pos­si­ble for ­human beings with such a

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tradition, in Amer­i­ca or in other fortunate lands, to rest in comfort and indifference when we know that by a concerted and determined effort we can put an end, within a relatively short time, to a mea­sur­able part of the unnecessary ignorance, disease, and hunger that affect so many ­human beings—­men, ­women, and ­little ­children—­with needs and fears and hopes like our own.75

Following this demo­cratic ethos, t­hese programs looked to “assist p­ eoples to participate demo­cratically in the solution of their own prob­lems,” and in that way they tacitly, but importantly, forwarded the larger proj­ect of anticommunism.76 During the 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. professors, such as ­those from Michigan, articulated theories of technical assistance, development, and public administration that ­were clear extensions of U.S. anticommunist ideologies. ­These U.S. technocrats’ ideas about democracy w ­ ere underwritten by the newly created international organ­izations in which the United States and the countries of Western Eu­rope exerted disproportionate power. Proponents of U.S.-­inspired democracy claimed that WWII had proved that peace and prosperity was on the side of victors. A demo­cratic state, in the eyes of the “international community,” accepted the mandates on postwar economics developed by the United Nations, in General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations, and at the Bretton Woods conference. Policymakers and technocrats argued that f­ree markets and trade, l­imited government welfare programs, and periodic elections defined modern democracy. For Filipino leftists who supported what the Huks called a “New Democracy,” however, U.S. democracy was irreducibly linked to imperialism. Therefore, U.S. policymakers and Philippine elites who stood to benefit from continued U.S. aid and intervention enacted strategies and technologies aimed at limiting what they believed ­were the potentially negative effects of popu­lar or mass democracy, which ultimately helped justify U.S. intervention on a global scale.77 The University of Michigan’s institute at the University of the Philippines was, from the outset, envisioned as one of a few “pi­lot programs.” It was a particularly impor­tant site ­because, as one diplomat argued, Manila stood “at the crossroads of Eastern Asia” and thus could serve as a “strategic center” for U.S. policy in the region.78 Furthermore, given the colonial history between the United States and the Philippines, the establishment of technical schools in the islands afforded policymakers the ability to test programs that could potentially be exported to other decolonizing nations. One of the centerpieces of the vision in which the institute was a training center for government officials from other Southeast Asian countries was the construction of a library that, according to the IPA’s cata­log for 1953–1954,

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would “eventually be the finest special public administration library in the Far East, and one of the finest in the world.”79 For the new library, professors proposed that the collection should contain ten thousand to twelve thousand volumes of foreign and domestic publications on public administration and “twenty to thirty filing cases of vertical file materials.”80 In numerous letters written by University of Michigan faculty, the library is cited as one of the preeminent aspects of the institute and an “American gift” to the Filipinos. Considering the destruction that WWII wrought on the urban infrastructure of Manila—­which included the national library and many government departmental libraries—­the creation of the library and the arrival of twelve thousand new books to the University of the Philippines certainly benefited Filipino scholars and students. Yet the organ­ization of the library—­which University of Michigan professors demanded follow a U.S. rather than Philippine system—­ reflected the subtle ways that technocratic ideas infiltrated and transformed Philippine practices. U.S. professors wanted their own orga­nizational system put in place at the institute’s new library, even though it was “scoffed at by many Filipino librarians.” In the Philippines, the customary method for library management was known as the “closed-­shelf system.” This meant that books w ­ ere only accessible to the librarian and retrieved on patron request. According to reports by a Michigan professor, part of the explanation for using this system was that the Philippine law held librarians legally responsible for any loss of library materials, and this system let them mitigate that liability, however slightly. But how well the closed-­shelf system functioned or ­whether the librarian liability law was ever enforced was not discussed by the professors. Instead, they insisted on using their “open stack system” despite Philippine custom and laws ­because, as Lederle explained, it coordinated with “demo­cratic practices” and “­free access.” One might think that a disagreement over the library would not garner much attention; Lederle, however, deemed it worthy enough to publish an article about it in a U.S. journal on public administration, in which he wrote, “We ­were teaching ‘demo­cratic’ administration in our courses; we w ­ ere practicing it in our library operation.” Equating the use of the U.S. organ­ization system with the designation of a “modern” library, U.S. professors used the discursive power of “demo­cratic” practices to legitimize their policies.81 The IPA library did provide a space for all professors and students at the University of the Philippines to use its new resources during their training. Yet, at the same time, the forced shift in library management techniques—as well as the language the professors used to rationalize the change—­reflected the power that U.S. technical advisers had to determine that even seemingly mundane ­things,

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such as how books w ­ ere or­ga­nized in a library, w ­ ere indicators of the “retrograde” Philippine system. As an illustration of how deeply U.S. policymakers believed in the ideology of exceptionalism, the U.S. Embassy in Manila informed the State Department that “colonial imperialism” was not a relevant topic for a library’s collection to include, ­because it “was not experienced ­here ­under the U.S.” In fact, the author claimed that “colonial imperialism” applied only to “pre­ sent and former Eu­ro­pean colonies in this part of the world.”82 Despite differentiating between U.S. and Eu­ro­pean colonialism, the embassy encouraged attentiveness to “any evidence of racial in­equality” between “the Philippines and the U.S.”83 The library undoubtedly offered hundreds of books to individuals without access. At the same time, material emphasized in special displays or collections emphasized that democracy’s “truths” ­were to be found in U.S.-­curated spaces. Though aid workers who worked on the ground did at times express a re­spect for indigenous cultures and institutions, they often did so in terms that disavowed any sense of U.S. colonialism. Instead, they addressed the prob­lem of what one librarian characterized as a “psy­chol­ogy” of Filipino “dependence on the U.S.”84 The establishment of libraries was in fact a component of a broader U.S. messaging campaign in the islands. While the library helped establish the institute as an academic institution, the objective of “in-­service training,” or the direct training of governmental employees, was the approach that aligned most neatly with the goal of cultivating a bureaucracy to police the corruption of elites. Paul R. Hanna—­a Stanford University education professor who served as the MSA’s director of education ­until 1953—­believed that the direct training of governmental employees, or, as it was termed, “in-­service training,” would produce a class of bureaucrats that could police elite corruption and provide the “educational foundations” that would allow the common man to “withstand the pressure of communism.”85 Moreover, “in-­service training” would eventually be taken over by Filipinos, who would also assume management of the entire training pro­cess in a few years. In fact, not dissimilar from patterns of the colonial era, U.S. professors at the institute positioned themselves as temporary leaders. They saw their role as central to a two-­phase pro­cess of “stimulation and facilitation.” In the first phase, U.S. experts educated Filipinos in how to identify and address government corruption. ­After this technically skilled group was thoroughly inculcated, U.S. professors i­magined that they would produce cultural knowledge to convince the Filipino electorate that the state was fair, well trained, and efficient. The professors referred to this two-­phase proj­ect as the “management pro­cess in a democracy.” The foreign policy of “managing

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a democracy” implied that Filipinos simply did not know how to rule themselves and therefore needed to be “technocratically trained” in the proper ways to participate in a demo­cratic system. The IPA was not the only U.S.-­foreign-­aid-­funded educational proj­ect in the Philippines. For this reason, the MSA sought to define the primary difference between its own education programs and another U.S. foreign policy organ­ization involved in educational programs, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). In response to the Korean War, the International Information Administration (IIA) stepped up its propaganda campaigns and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Manila served as the regional hub for the production of American propaganda. In 1953, the creation of the USIA led to a further coordination of U.S. messaging, particularly ­toward non-­European populations. If modernization theory’s language of “modern” and “traditional” ran the risk of replicating the hard hierarchies of the colonial era—­something Filipino critics noticed and commented on—­the USIA’s messaging was explic­itly aimed at separating U.S. influence from the “racialism” of the colonial order.86 In a report titled “Summary of Education Policy,” the MSA stated that the purpose of the USIA was to “mold public opinion abroad in ways favorable to [the United States’] demo­cratic point of view.”87 The USIA, for example, was responsible for a poster that featured Juan de la Cruz (the Philippine “everyman,” similar to the American “John Doe”) standing astride the Philippines archipelago with “Democracy” inscribed on the machete in his hand (figure 4). The poster’s caption asserts that every­one—­male and female, young and old—­must work to suppress communism. The MSA’s role, on the other hand, was “to assist directly in securing better administration, increased production, and economic stability.”88 If the USIA’s mission was to influence ideas, then the MSA’s was to create, support, and sustain institutions that, at least in the minds of policymakers, would produce results through on-­the-­ground training programs. Indeed, MSA policymakers sought to transform the institutions of Philippine po­liti­cal life through hands-on, in-­service training. This notion that Filipinos would be trained by Americans and then assume leadership roles in governance was not an unfamiliar line of argument in the Philippines.89 Yet postwar conditions—­including Philippine in­de­pen­dence—­led to a dif­fer­ent linguistic and cognitive framing of an old colonial claim. The idea that practices of “management in a democracy” could be transferred through “technical exchanges” and “built in to the cultural structures” of foreign countries explic­itly highlights one of the ways technocrats ­imagined shaping a broader postwar world.90 By 1953, thirty-­two institutions of higher education in the United States had established international programs in governance and ­public

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Figure 4: ​Anticommunist propaganda produced by the U.S. Information Agency (National Archives and Rec­ords Administration).

policy located in recently in­de­pen­dent or decolonizing nations in the global South.91 By casting U.S. intervention in newly decolonized nations u ­ nder the seemingly benign umbrella of education and development, technocratic proj­ ects help to balance the U.S. military and foreign aid presence around the

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world with a sense of intervention as an expression of the United States’ commitment to improving humanity. As one of the U.S. professors at the IPA at the University of the Philippines wrote, Americans contributed to international development not out of self-­interest but rather to help “­people who are still in the early developmental stages of many aspects of their culture.”92 Thus, while academics enthusiastically embraced international public administration work as the promotion of democracy and an in­de­pen­dent, postcolonial, Filipino-­led government, their worldviews ­were si­mul­ta­neously grounded in a discourse that situated the United States and the West at the advanced edge of modernity.93

Conflicting Missions In 1953, veteran reporter, editor, and Tokyo-­based correspondent Robert Sherrod posed a question to the readers of the October 3 issue of the Saturday Eve­ning Post: “Why should the United States concern itself with the shenanigans of the local politicians in the Western Pacific?”94 “­There are many vital reasons,” Sherrod answered. One was that “the history of the Philippines is inextricably entwined with the United States of Amer­ic­ a. . . . ​What the Filipinos know of democracy they learned from us.” Seven years removed from Philippine in­de­pen­dence, Sherrod believed that the United States needed to maintain its interest in Philippine politics b­ ecause democracy—­a practice of politics that Sherrod associated entirely with the U.S. influence in the islands—­was in danger. Democracy, he warned, “is truly at the crossroads in the Philippines.”95 But U.S. readers should not only be ideologically invested in the Philippines’ success, Sherrod argued; they held a financial interest as well, as the U.S. government had “poured two billion dollars” into the islands since the conclusion of WWII, which was, he reasoned, more than enough to maintain the country in the United States’ image. The foreign aid dollars Americans had selflessly dispensed to the islands, however, ­were not handled prudently. Instead, current leaders had squandered the aid on ­needless luxury items. Moreover, Sherrod suggested, the prob­lem was not simply a m ­ atter of managing the U.S. state’s pocket­book; it was that corrupt, mismanaged, or in­effec­tive politics would drive the Philippines t­oward communism, and demo­cratic failures in the Philippines could lead all of Asia to the “communist bloc.”96 Sherrod urged his U.S. audience to consider the significance of corruption and the U.S.-­Philippine relationship in terms of a wider U.S. anticommunist

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proj­ect in Southeast Asia. In 1946, Sherrod recalled, the United States “g[a]ve the Philippines their liberty, partially as a gesture of good faith which reverberated throughout all the colonies of the world.” This, despite warnings by the Dutch, French, and British—­“all old hands at colonialism”—­that “­these Asiatics c­ an’t govern themselves.” With the transfer of power, “the curtain was drawn from our ‘show win­dow of democracy’ before an interested audience sometimes called ‘all the oppressed and benighted millions of Asia.’ ” The islands ­were a model of demo­cratic princi­ples for the world to admire and to emulate. But a­ fter the United States had turned its “ ‘show win­dow of democracy’ over to in­de­pen­dent management,” Sherrod complained, the “wares in the win­ dow” ­were beginning to fade: in other words, the United States’ “gift of in­de­ pen­dence” had fallen ­under the mismanagement of corrupt elites during the postin­de­pen­dence period. “The kindest t­hing one can say,” he continued, “is that the win­dow is horribly flyspecked and the merchandise inside appears shoddy.” The “show win­dow of democracy” was no longer dazzling, and “if democracy ­can’t work ­here,” Sherrod wrote, “what kind of chance has it got in the less favored among the new nations like Indonesia or Viet Nam?” Sherrod’s use of the meta­phor of the “show win­dow” corresponded with the views of U.S. policymakers and a romanticized version of U.S.-­Philippine history that drew on nearly a half c­ entury of imperial discourse. In this v­ ision, the United States played tutor to an allegedly immature ward and had thereby taught an elite Filipino po­liti­cal class how to implement U.S.-­style demo­ cratic practices.97 Sherrod depicted the con­temporary po­liti­cal elite—­most of whom had served in the colonial and commonwealth state—as having taken a complete detour from the path set out by Americans during the colonial period. Casually denigrating Filipinos by comparing them to shoddy goods and bad man­ag­ers, Sherrod’s article also infantilized Philippine po­liti­cal culture and ignored the long history of U.S. machine politics, and even if his critique of elite control held an ele­ment of truth, his ideological interpretation of U.S. colonial history led him to conclude that Philippine politics consisted mainly of “shenanigans” perpetrated by uncouth “rascals.” Yet, in the era of anticolonial upheavals, the Philippines needed to function as “Amer­i­ca’s show-­ window,” and Sherrod saw in Ramón Magsaysay—­the “Huk-­fighter” and Nacionalista candidate for president—­a reason to hope.98 The 1953 Philippine presidential election campaign pitted incumbent Elpidio Quirino against Magsaysay, Quirino’s former secretary of defense. During his tenure as secretary of defense, Magsaysay had cultivated a close relationship with CIA operative Edward Lansdale, who, utilizing his skills in advertising and public relations—as well as financial support from the CIA—­crafted

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the message of Magsaysay’s campaign around the two issues Sherrod spoke to in his article: corruption and anticommunism. Magsaysay’s campaign song, the “Magsaysay Mambo,” brought the two together in a catchy jingle. With its opening lines—­“Everywhere that you would look / Was a bandit or a crook”—­ the tune immediately established anticommunism and anticorruption as the two central planks of Magsaysay’s campaign platform. The tune’s final line, half in Tagalog—­“Our democracy ­will die / Kung wala si Magsaysay”—­was less than subtle: without Magsaysay, democracy in the Philippines was doomed.99 Sherrod drew his assessment of the precarious state of democracy in the Philippines from observing the campaign, and throughout his account of the 1953 election, Sherrod led U.S. readers to believe that the United States had constructed a clean, efficient, and solid demo­cratic structure in the Philippines that, only a­fter in­de­pen­dence, Filipinos had corrupted. “Have the p­ eople the power to rise up and throw the rascals out? Can the Philippines hold an honest election?” he asked.100 He described a campaign event in Leyte where he saw a placard that read “Elect Magsaysay to Clean Our Government,” confirming for his readers that the candidate was the responsible, anticorruption choice. Magsaysay would go on to win the November 10, 1953, election, pleasing Sherrod as well as the U.S. policymakers who had aided him and who promoted the vote as a watershed moment in both Philippine po­liti­cal history and U.S. policy ­toward Southeast Asia. In Magsaysay, U.S. policymakers had a close relationship with a leader they believed both stood against the elite in the Philippines and, more importantly, was a Filipino who embraced anticommunism as the fundamental antithesis of “honest democracy.” Not from one of the families that historically ruled politics in the Philippines, whom the IPA identified as the primary perpetrators of corruption, Magsaysay was praised in the United States, and the Philippines, as the symbol of a new hope for Philippine democracy, stability, and pro­gress. Magsaysay was heralded as an “example for working democracy through the Far East” by the U.S. media and the U.S. government.101 In 1954, the Saturday Eve­ ning Post described him as a sincere friend of the United States and “Asia’s most mature leader.”102 Magsaysay was also deeply anticommunist and committed to linking colonialism to communism, telling the Saturday Eve­ning Post, “the colonialism that threatens Asia ­today is world communism.” Linking the U.S. state and nation-­building efforts in the Philippines to anticommunism, Magsaysay contended that “a good defense against” the threat of communism is “healthy Asian nationalism.” Conversely, in 1953, University of Michigan professors began to see corruption in not Filipino but U.S. politics. In their estimation, the involvement

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of the U.S. government in the form of the MSA—­renamed the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) in 1953—­was a corrupting influence on their technocratic methods and, ultimately, a hindrance to the IPA’s success. Reflecting on his tenure as director of the institute in 1954, John Lederle wrote, “It was discovered that ­there ­were ­those in the United States government ser­vice who w ­ ere so po­liti­cally ‘sensitive’ as to be unable to clear even the seemingly uncontroversial m ­ atters . . . ​and reconcilement of differences was not a m ­ atter of weeks but months.”103 For a group of professors who understood their mission to the Philippines as, at times, a “moral obligation,” what Lederle identified as the “attitude” of non-­institute-­affiliated FOA employees was surprising, irritating, and disappointing.104 The animosity and frustration between the academics and the non-­institute FOA employees went both ways. In fact, some FOA employees neither approved of the U.S. financial investment in proj­ects such as the institute nor believed that university partnerships w ­ ere “a worthy enterprise.” In a similar expression of tension between the FOA and university faculty, Michigan professor Ferrel Heady wrote that “both in Washington and in the field the universities and their staffs are regarded as mendicant recipients of governmental largesse.”105 What is more, the professors thought this attitude interfered with their obligation to reform po­liti­cal corruption.106 In par­tic­u­lar, the professors thought that the U.S. military in the islands received preferential treatment and that the prioritization of military aid over civilian aid consistently delayed the professors’ proj­ects. By the summer of 1954—­the end of the first full academic year at the institute—­the academics’ idealistic pursuits grated against what the U.S. military saw as the strategic importance of the Philippines in a broader Cold War military scheme. Conversely, the University of Michigan professors felt that their “altruistic reasons” for engaging with the University of the Philippines and the Philippine state w ­ ere undermined by the politics and power relations that came with government contracts. In effect, the institute’s professors regularly interpreted the challenges faced by the IPA as an attitude prob­lem of the Manila-­based U.S. foreign policymakers. What they failed to see, however, ­were the ways in which, throughout the duration of the proj­ect, U.S. policymakers largely considered the institute not in terms of its local successes—­such as the training of twenty-­five hundred employees—­but rather as a result of a strategic global policy. In other words, in the minds of many American foreign policymakers, the creation of the IPA was a consequence of policies rooted in managing the optics of U.S.-­Philippine relations and projecting Philippine “success” on a global stage. On the surface, it would seem as if U.S. technocratic ideologies had meshed nicely with broader U.S. policy goals. For example, in a 1952 letter,

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Paul R. Hanna wrote that “the vast majority of Filipinos are not educated to the level where they understand the workings of a modern free-­enterprise economic system”107 The MSA educational proj­ects, such as the IPA, sought to build institutional structures that policymakers hoped would tie the Philippines not necessarily closer to the U.S. state but to a U.S.-­dominated global economic system. However, the institute’s professors w ­ ere certainly aware that their long-­term academic methods ran up against the need to produce results that met the larger goals of the FOA, the NSC, and the State Department. Lederle and his University of Michigan colleague Heady wrote about this tension in a journal article published in 1954, in which the professors stated that they had endeavored “to avoid any reaction that we w ­ ere a purely academic, impractical operation.”108 Still, Lederle complained, “From the day we got off the ship last August, we have been put to the embarrassment of pressuring for facilities which w ­ ere ours as a right.” In par­tic­ul­ar, Lederle focused on “furniture and automobile pools” and the Manila mission’s “continually [dragging] their feet in implementing [the] written promises of MSA/Washington and the Mission.”109 Implying that the professors had the added pressure of providing “results” to government officials in Washington who dictated the length and financial terms of their contracts, a series of letters from Lederle to Edward Prentice, chief of the MSA mission in Manila, highlights how University of Michigan professors began to see themselves as “the forgotten men in Manila.”110 Lederle blamed perceived neglect by the MSA mission in Manila on the “so-­called private contract approach.” According to Lederle, the prob­lem with the private contract was that it allowed the MSA to dictate some aspects of the institute’s policies, such as salaries and living allowances, while not allowing the institute’s personnel the “privileges” that formal government employees working in the Philippines enjoyed, such as U.S. Army Post Office and Post Exchange access. In short, Lederle accused the MSA mission of “wanting its cake (a private contract) while eating it too (denying our right to U.S. employee privileges).”111 While IPA professors regularly promoted their work as serving U.S. policy goals by cultivating a technically skilled m ­ iddle class that would manage the bureaucratic structures of the Philippine government, they also saw it as part of a Cold War or anticommunist strategy. Likewise, in Washington, the education programs such as the one at the institute ­were understood as part of the “longer-­term strug­gle” against communism. For example, in a 1956 State Department review of the university contract program, Assistant Secretary of State Francis Wilcox explained the diplomatic benefits of foreign education programs as a central piece in the war against communism: “I think the role of the colleges and the universities of the United States ­will be even more basic than it

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was in the past. As I see it, this strug­gle has now definitely taken on aspects of a longer-­range strug­gle, and ­whether it be 10, 20, 30, or 40 years it seems to me we have to be prepared to meet it.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also praised foreign academic proj­ects and the “missionary zeal” professors brought to “[making] ­people realize the ­g reat values which exist in our form of society.”112 While it is clear that State Department officials viewed the work of professors “in the field” as impor­tant, they also tended to frame academic work as less prescient than Cold War military efforts. Scholars of U.S. international development have shown how technocrats, empowered by foreign aid policymakers, contributed to the expansion of U.S. power and how they, in many cases, worked side by side with U.S. military interventions. Yet while technocratic development proj­ects often ideologically aligned with U.S. martial strategies, efforts to reform po­liti­cal corruption—as problematic as they could be—­ frequently floundered on prioritization of immediate solutions over long-­term ones. Unlike academics, who underscored the importance of proj­ects that cultivated foreign populations to the broader rhe­toric of Cold War geopolitics, Assistant Secretary of State George V. Allen understood the relationship in slightly dif­fer­ent terms: “It is educational contact between nations [that] keeps the basic relationships steady. As on the ocean, waves may buffet po­liti­cal relations on the surface, but the depth of relations between two nations depends on how the ­people feel ­toward each other and what direct impact one ­people make on another. That, gentlemen, you are ­handling. I have to worry about the waves on top.”113 To some U.S. military advisers and foreign policy experts, the technocratic proj­ects aimed at transforming the Philippines’ class structure meant plumbing the depths of the ocean. The professors at the IPA would not grow entirely disillusioned with the promises of modernization theory, but they did begin to see the ways modernization proj­ects functioned as lip ser­vice for a military-­driven pro­cess wherein fighting Philippine corruption meant threatening U.S. penetration in Southeast Asia.114 The University of the Philippines’ institute received only four years of U.S. foreign aid support.115 Writing in Public Administration Review in 1955, Lederle and Heady attributed the strife between the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the U.S. and Filipino academics at the institute as a prob­lem of time. They essentially argued that success required patience, something they believed “American foreign policy administrators responsible to a Congress restive for early dividends” lacked.116 Likewise, U.S. policymakers eventually lost enthusiasm for the IPA, and they ended the contract with the University of Michigan in June 1956. As the contract ran out, the direction of the institute

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was transferred to a Filipino staff member, and the University of Michigan professors returned to Ann Arbor. Policymakers in the State Department, the U.S. military, and the NSC—­ who recognized the extent of po­liti­cal corruption in the Philippines as troubling—­nonetheless prioritized supporting an elite po­liti­cal class whom they believed would ensure long-­term access to U.S. military bases in the Philippines.117 The technocrats had argued that efficiency and modernizing the bureaucratic structure of the state would bring stability to the islands. But to be successful, this transformation necessarily had to limit the influence of the oligarchic politicians and industrialists who controlled the Philippine state and economy. The U.S. military, on the other hand, crafted policy in the Philippines based on the islands’ geography in relationship to other nations. The Philippines was most valuable b­ ecause of its multiple U.S. military installations and the archipelago’s strategic location in Southeast Asia. To ensure a continued U.S. military presence, U.S. policymakers chose to support members of the same po­liti­cal class that the institute’s professors believed had corrupted Philippine democracy. While technocratic development proj­ects often ideologically aligned with martial strategies, in practice, reforming po­liti­cal corruption ran headlong into U.S. military advisers and foreign policy officials who subordinated what they considered “local politics” to a broader, global anticommunist mission.

Strained Relations The first Public Administration Week was held in 1956, just a few months ­after the University of Michigan professors left the Philippines. As participants opened the week’s printed program, which was decorated with the seal of the Republic of the Philippines, they would find an artistically rendered image of President Magsaysay watching over a group of industrious workers. Depicted in a barong tagalog—an embroidered dress shirt for Filipino men—­and with closely cropped hair, dark skin, and a stern gaze, the president hovered over a public administrator who was wearing a tie and eyeglasses, writing busily ­behind a neatly ordered desk. To the public administrator’s left, in front of a sharp line of modern buildings, two construction workers dug and drilled: one sported a hard hat and handled a jackhammer, and the other wore a traditional Filipino hat and used a shovel. To the right of the desk-­bound bureaucrat, a nurse administered shots to a child on its m ­ other’s lap, as two older ­children anxiously looked on. Unlike the detailed likeness of Magsaysay, no other face in the

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image was shaded. Framing the images, a bold text pronounced: “Good public administration means efficient, honest, and demo­cratic public ser­vices.” President Magsaysay, the program implied, had brought all of ­these t­hings to the Philippines.118 The ideological significance of Philippine politicians’ relationship to the state and to the United States underwent a significant change in the 1950s. Despite the fact that Magsaysay had seemingly solved the prob­lems of corruption and communism that had plagued the IPA’s work, cracks remained in the U.S.-­driven global anticommunist proj­ect in the Philippines. The Public Administration Week in 1956 concealed mounting tensions regarding U.S. foreign aid disbursements to the islands. That year, Magsaysay complained to U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles that “the aid we are receiving from the ICA [International Cooperation Administration] is not in my opinion, proportionate to the special relationship that exists between your country and mine.”119 Although intelligence reports determined t­here was “no reason to question the sincerity” of Magsaysay’s “pro-­American sympathies nor his firm anti-­Communist orientation,” Americans remained concerned regarding the “increasingly nationalist attitudes” in Magsaysay’s Philippines.120 Stressing the importance of maintaining that “special relationship” during a time of increasing communist threat, Magsaysay added, “The aid we get is quite unimpressive when compared with the aid you have given other countries.”121 Magsaysay was not wrong. By the late 1950s, U.S. aid—as well as the focus of U.S. policymakers—­was increasingly tilting ­toward Laos, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Chapter 5

A Dirty, Half-­Hidden War The CIA and U.S.-­Philippine Covert Operations in Southeast Asia

In November 1953, when Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles read Edward Lansdale’s report on the presidential election in the Philippines, he had been in his job for less than a year.1 But as a veteran of the Office of Strategic Ser­vices (OSS) and, a­fter 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Dulles was no stranger to the kinds of covert operations—­ often straddling ­legal and ethical bound­aries—­that characterized intelligence work.2 In the early days of the CIA, Dulles and a State Department counterpart helped design the National Committee for a ­Free Eu­rope, an anticommunist psychological warfare program that included the creation of Radio ­Free Eu­rope. Moreover, Dulles’s privilege and po­liti­cal connections virtually guaranteed him a spot among Washington’s elite foreign policymakers; ­after all, his ­brother John Foster Dulles was already Eisenhower’s secretary of state.3 Appointed DCI by Eisenhower in February, Dulles now oversaw the entirety of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, which had been enlarged and fortified by the 1947 National Security Act: from military intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to the nearly fourteen thousand employees of the CIA.4 Receiving the 1953 after-­action report from Lansdale marked the end of Dulles’s first operation as DCI. Ramón Magsaysay, the pro-­U.S. candidate, had just been elected president of the Philippines—­widely seen as “a U.S. victory”—­and the counterinsurgency war against the Huks was fi­nally coming to an end.5 Edward Lansdale—­who would be awarded the National Security Medal for this work—­had delivered Dulles his first CIA victory.6 He

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described it, in characteristically immodest language, as “the defeat of Communism in the country.” Unlike Dulles, Lansdale had not been groomed for a life among the Washington elite. As his most recent biographer opined, “­there was nothing elite about” Lansdale, although the up-­and-­coming CIA operative undoubtedly benefited from his position as a white, male, middle-­class American.7 Drawing on his background in advertising, Lansdale would spend a lifetime selling his ideas and policies couched in the language of support for the world’s downtrodden.8 Magsaysay’s election—­a race in which the CIA contributed over $1 ­million to place a pro-­U.S. politician in Malacañang, the presidential palace of the Philippines—he described, for example, as “a social revolution which would have delighted Thomas Jefferson.”9 He also openly described the election as part of a broader plan to intervene in Southeast Asian politics. For Lansdale and Dulles, the CIA’s efforts in the Philippines ­were always about more than simply defeating the Huk insurgency; they w ­ ere about engineering “a social revolution.” In his report, Lansdale described his Philippines operation as “divided into three phases,” the first of which—­“to meet and destroy the Communist attempt at armed revolution”—­was nearly complete. Phase two, “to bring about the social conditions wherein Communism cannot live,” he noted as more than halfway finished. Magsaysay’s election inaugurated the third: “to keep the Philippines secure as a base and to use the Philippine assets for establishing freedom elsewhere in Asia (Asiatics working with Asiatics).”10 The Philippines ­under Magsaysay would not only serve as a model of anticommunist nationalism; in phase three, the CIA would recruit, train, and transport anticommunist cadres to and from the Philippines throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Following Lansdale’s strategy, in November 1954 a group of Philippine nationals—­ supported by Lansdale and the anti-­ Huk campaign veteran Charles T. R. Bohannan—­established the Freedom Com­pany in Manila. According to its articles of incorporation, filed in the Philippines, the organ­ization existed “to promote, assist, train, and employ Filipino citizens and citizens of legitimate freedom-­loving countries in the techniques of preserving their freedom.”11 The Freedom Com­pany was a paramilitary group founded, as Lansdale described, to supply “Filipinos experienced in fighting the Communist Huks to help in Vietnam.”12 The “support ser­vices” operation it ran in Vietnam from 1956 to 1958—­training Viet­nam­ese military and civilian personnel—­for example, was called “operation show how.”13 On paper, the Freedom Com­pany appeared as a “public ser­vice organ­ ization”; in practice, it was, as the Pentagon Papers revealed in 1971, “a mechanism to permit the deployment of Filipino personnel in other Asian

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countries for unconventional operations.”14 As French forces left Indochina in 1954 ­after their decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the United States took over the training of the Viet­nam­ese Army and threw its financial and military weight ­behind Ngo Dinh Diem’s state-­building efforts.15 In June 1954, Lansdale traveled to Vietnam to serve as chief of the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), a clandestine CIA station instructed to “undertake paramilitary operations against the e­ nemy and wage political-­psychological warfare.”16 As part of the SMM’s clandestine campaign to bend the “restrictive rules” imposed by the Geneva Accords “upon all official Americans, including the Saigon Military Mission,” Filipino Freedom Com­pany members helped train paramilitary teams tasked with waging psychological warfare in the north.17 Within the com­pany’s first three years in operation, Filipino “technicians” traveled to Vietnam and Laos to train local armies and conduct paramilitary operations.18 With continued, covert support from the CIA, the Freedom Com­pany Philippines (FCP) continued to operate in Vietnam, Laos, and Indonesia into the 1960s.19 At first glance, the FCP appears as simply one of the many covert CIA organ­izations to grow from the expanded U.S. national security state during the Cold War, one in which anticommunist Filipinos participated, from which they profited, and through which they publicized the supposed benefits of U.S. intervention.20 On further scrutiny, however, it becomes clear that the Freedom Com­pany and, by extension, the CIA’s covert wars in Southeast Asia are a continuation of the longer, linked histories of imperialism and anticommunist politics in the region. The Freedom Com­pany was formed at a moment in which both global and U.S. domestic race relations compelled U.S. politicians and policymakers to pay close attention to how p­ eople on the other side of what author Richard Wright termed the “Color Curtain” perceived U.S. foreign policies.21 Wright’s idea of a Color Curtain—an obvious reference to the “Iron Curtain’s” East/ West axis—­was derived from a 1955 trip to Indonesia, where he reported on the Afro-­ Asian P ­eople’s Conference in Bandung.22 Spearheaded by Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesian president Sukarno, the conference did not include U.S., Eu­ro­pean, or Soviet participants.23 In advance of the conference, U.S. intelligence reported that “racial discrimination and racial prob­lems” and “pro­gress in Indochina” would likely be topics of discussion.24 The conference came at a time when U.S. race relations—­especially Jim Crow segregation—­had become entangled in the politics of the Cold War and decolonization, leaving policymakers anxious about the effect it would have on U.S. efforts to attract allies in the global South.25 U.S. policymakers would continue to craft policies, as Thomas Borstelmann has demonstrated, “partly on

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the basis of racial assumptions,” but they would do so in “explic­itly race-­ conscious terms.”26 Employing Lansdale’s tactic of “Asiatics working with Asiatics,” the Freedom Com­pany tried to convince populations in Southeast Asia that U.S. intervention was, as Magsaysay said, “something far dif­fer­ent than the colonialism they knew.”27 Yet the Freedom Com­pany also did so through a homogenizing racial discourse that equated geographic proximity with racial similarity. Filipinos became the Asian face of concealed U.S. power and U.S. policymakers who deployed the racial category “Asian” with ­little understanding of the racial and po­liti­cal dynamics implied by that grouping—­a practice that itself recalled the sharp and broad racial categories of imperial civilizationist proj­ects. Lansdale’s strategy corresponded with other U.S. efforts to invest in, as Simeon Man has argued, “good Asians” who could represent “American democracy for the age of decolonization.”28 Although Filipinos and the Philippines ­were crucial participants in the spread of anticommunist warfare in Asia, this does not mean that they ­were radically empowered in the U.S.-­driven anticommunist bloc. The CIA’s use of the Freedom Com­pany illustrates how actions explic­itly designed to remain hidden from view, such as covert operations, could also include aspects, including the hiring of Filipino paramilitaries, that ­were meant to seen. One way of navigating the politics of race in a moment when decolonization movements destabilized racial hierarchies, Americans de­cided, was to have Filipinos demonstrate the sincerity of the U.S.-­stated commitment to anticolonial nationalism.29 Yet Filipino participation did not, in itself, compel Americans to be more reflective about their own nation’s history of racism or racial vio­lence. Instead, they treated race as a m ­ atter of optics; including Filipinos in U.S. covert actions did not mean that Americans, in the g­ rand scheme of t­ hings, looked to a hand-­off of power from whites to Asians. In fact, in the 1953 report he sent to Dulles, Lansdale wrote that his experience in the Philippines gave “the lie to the adage that the white man is through in Asia.” “Hellsfire,” he wrote with enthusiasm, “­we’re just getting started!”30 As U.S. imperial power became increasingly entrenched in Southeast Asia, Filipino and U.S. anticommunists transported the ideologies and practices of global anticommunist warfare throughout the region via inter-­Asian operations such as the Freedom Com­pany in an attempt to sever the link between the racial order of colonialism and anticommunist U.S. policies in the region. Reconstructing the fragmented archive of the Freedom Com­pany reveals the success of its covert operations, which—­following Lansdale’s “third phase” description to a tee—­maintained an impor­tant cover of visibility as “Asiatics working with Asiatics.” The FCP essentially became a freedom contractor, first working with

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U.S. military and development agencies and ­later in the guise of a private enterprise, the Eastern Construction Com­pany. Even in this latter incarnation, however, the intra-­Asian aspect of the organ­ization was crucial, not only as a way to deflect attention from the CIA and U.S. power, but also as a vehicle for transporting global anticommunism. Initially, Lansdale had hoped the FCP would serve as model for a string of similar nonprofit organ­izations in countries across the world. ­These would all be arms of an i­magined “Freedom Incorporated,” a U.S.-­based firm that would “sponsor and advise the foreign affiliates.” Freedom Incorporated would not have l­egal ties to foreign affiliates but instead would act as an intermediary between established U.S. foreign policy figures or offices—­including ambassadors, the U.S. Office of Foreign Missions, or the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—­and affiliated companies such as the FCP. B ­ ecause the Freedom Com­pany was designed to contract directly with foreign governments and not U.S. foreign policy agencies, Freedom Incorporated, in Lansdale’s vision, would ensure coordination with U.S. foreign policy goals and provide a “vital spark for freedom’s cause.”31 Freedom Incorporated’s manifold Freedom Companies would be based on the all-­ volunteer “international force of f­ree men” model of the FCP.

The Freedom Com­pany From the beginning of his c­areer in the military, Lansdale recognized the importance of the United States’ image abroad. In his role as a public relations officer in the army division of intelligence in 1947, Lansdale urged his colleagues to “keep the journalists (particularly the Americans) so busy with favorable news that any bad breaks for the U.S. Army w ­ ill be merely incidental.”32 “Bad breaks” in the postwar Philippines included at least two “accidental” shooting deaths of young Filipino boys by U.S. soldiers, an open gunfight between African American and white American soldiers a­fter the murder of a black solider, multiple car crashes involving U.S. military vehicles, and a growing black market for U.S. surplus products.33 As cognizant as Lansdale was of the prob­lems that might arise if Americans lost their popu­lar appeal in the Philippines, he also knew that his ­career advancement depended on congressional funding and the approval of authorities at the helm of the U.S. national security state. Seemingly always aware of his multiple audiences, Lansdale believed that good publicity should speak “not only to Filipinos and the U.S. public generally,” but also to “the War Department and our congress.”34 His position in the U.S. Army’s public relations office allowed him to make contacts

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and create a network of Filipinos and Americans with access to ave­nues of power in the islands, a network that he would call on in the creation of the Freedom Com­pany.35 In 1954, ­little more than a year ­after the campaign against the Huks had begun to wind down, the FCP set up its main headquarters on Natib Road in Quezon City, a suburb of Manila that had served as the nation’s capital since 1948.36 Not far ­were the Philippine Republic’s two major military facilities: Camp Murphy (now Aguinaldo), headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), and Camp Crame, headquarters of the national police, the Philippine Constabulary (PC). The FCP office was in Cubao, a section of Quezon City that was at the time becoming a lively, dense, shopping and entertainment destination and which had formerly been farmland owned by the influential Araneta f­ amily. Just down the road was the shopping center that would ­later be anchored by the Araneta Coliseum, a 30,000-­seat arena that hosted the “Thrilla in Manila” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1975. The com­pany’s prime location positioned it among the two central ele­ ments of power in the Philippines: a landed po­liti­cal elite who ­were expanding their commercial empires—­and who, in the aftermath of WWII, had stood with Manuel Roxas against the demands of the Demo­cratic Alliance (DA)—­ and a Philippine military establishment that was increasingly bankrolled by U.S. foreign aid. Founded as a nonprofit organ­ization, the FCP acted as an intermediary for the worlds of military, development, and state-­building and maintained the contacts to prove it. The articles of incorporation it filed with the Philippine government made it explicit that Filipino, rather than U.S., advisers would travel with the FCP to “legitimate freedom-­loving countries.”37 Indeed, the country’s promotion of its ser­vices hinged on advertising its all-­ Filipino workforce. The FCP’s original board of directors testifies to the connections it held in government and military sectors—­U.S. and Filipino—as well as its links to the intelligence community. The seven-­person board was led by president Col­o­nel Agustin G. Gabriel, head of the Philippines’ National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), and Juan Orendain, the U.S.-­educated ­lawyer who had served as Roxas’s public relations secretary, was secretary-­treasurer. Other board members included Jose Razon; a former executive of Central Azucarera Don Pedro, one of the country’s largest sugar centrals; Bernard L. Anderson, former USAFFE guerrilla and man­ag­er of Philippine Airlines; Ricardo C. Galang of the AFP; Frisco “Johnny” San Juan, another WWII guerrilla leader who became part of the CIA-­sponsored organ­ization National Citizens’ Movement for ­Free Elections (NAMFREL) in the Philippines during Magsaysay’s election;

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and former lieutenant col­o­nel in the U.S. Armed Forces John “Jack” Wachtel, who served as the FCP general man­ag­er.38 Other active members w ­ ere Filipino and American, such as CIA agents Lucien Conein and Alfonso Enrique, and a few Viet­nam­ese officials, including President Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Ngoc Le, head of the Viet­nam­ese National Police, w ­ ere listed as holding honorary status. Also given honorary status ­were the original Freedom Com­pany found­ers: Lansdale, Charles T. R. Bohannan, and Napoleon D. Valeriano, as well as President Magsaysay.39 ­These names betray the lasting influence of the U.S. military’s Huk campaign, with its resulting officers, counterinsurgency experts, and intelligence agents. In addition to locating its offices so significantly inside the Philippine national establishment, at No. 39 Natib Road—­where the FCP also maintained its bachelor officer quarters—­the com­pany also ordered custom stationery with ­great symbolic import. For the emblem at the top of its letterhead, the FCP chose the head of a white kalabaw (­water buffalo), a farming animal and symbol of self-­sufficiency, positioned in front of a red, stylized, eight-­rayed Filipino Sun—­which is depicted on the national flag. Despite its nationalist credentials, the FCP traced its origins not only to the anti-­Huk campaign in the Philippines but also to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.40 As early as December 1954, a month a­ fter the FCP was incorporated, members Alfonso Enriquez and Frisco San Juan traveled from Manila to Saigon to assist Diem in creating a “patriotic civic organ­ization” made up of loyal Viet­nam­ese veterans.41 At the time, Lansdale was head of the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), and the two FCP members soon set up a headquarters across the street from their old friend’s mission.42 San Juan served as head of the Freedom Com­pany in Vietnam.43 Valeriano, who had been a central member of Lansdale’s Philippine team, arrived that month to train Diem’s security team, the Presidential Guards Battalion.44 According to Lansdale, Diem “had become enthusiastic about the friendship with the Philippines” ­because the FCP employees w ­ ere “imparting the true spirit of freedom and democracy among Viet­nam­ese.”45 In Vietnam, FCP associates, the SMM, and CIA agents ­were involved in activities above and below the seventeenth parallel, the boundary, de­cided on in the Geneva Accords, separating the north from the south. The FCP would assist Lansdale with the development of paramilitary forces, coordination of the tactical movement team, the caching of arms, and “black” psychological warfare strikes.46 Freedom Com­pany members Rufus “Rufe” Phillips and John Wachtel both traveled to Vietnam in 1955 to work with the Philippines Veterans League and the Vietnam Veterans League, the “patriotic civic organ­ization”

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San Juan worked with Diem to establish.47 Phillips had additional duties working with refugees, with the Community Self-­Help Program, and on the army’s psychological warfare.48 SMM agent Edward Williams arrived ­earlier, in ­August 1954, to “work with revolutionary po­liti­cal groups,” as did SMM agents Edward Bain and Richard Smith, who both provided “support.”49 SMM agent Fred Allen worked with Viet­nam­ese Army general Nguyen Van Vy’s paramilitary group in the south, which started to deploy in September.50 In November, twenty-­one agents from the Philippines and “2 cooks” went to join Vy’s group in Saigon; in March 1955, they traveled with the navy to Haiphong, in the north, with eight and a half tons of equipment.51 By 1955, Filipinos ­were involved in a range of activities including covert operations and military advising. Also in December 1954, before leaving the Philippines, Wachtel and Bohannan along with Enriquez began planning the construction of a “small Freedom Com­pany training camp in a hidden valley” within the territory of Clark Air Force Base outside Manila.52 The group christened it Camp Batson “­after the first U.S. officer with the Philippine Scouts.” At Camp Batson, Filipino and U.S. “technicians” would train Viet­nam­ese soldiers in a monthlong “antiguerrilla course” that featured lectures on the Huk campaign, a tour of “Huklandia” by air, and instruction in special operations including “psychological warfare” and “jungle survival.”53 In 1959, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon reported that the government officials reacted favorably to the opening of a “program of counter-­subversion and internal security” in the Philippines.54 Within South Vietnam, the continuity of the FCP and U.S. policy seemed clear, but the cover of intra-­Asian friendship cloaked the fact that the organ­ ization was explic­itly designed to carry out the interests of U.S. foreign policy. In 1958, FCP advocates had described the organ­ization as a vehicle that “gives the US unofficial means for accomplishing necessary and approved missions,” but it could also extend the reach of U.S. military operations when “the proposed operations exceeded the capability of the CIA.”55 Simply put, the FCP was a tool that U.S. military and intelligence institutions could use to undertake missions they could not other­wise legally or po­liti­cally pursue, that is, a covert means for skirting the prohibitions of the Geneva Accords and facilitating the use of Lansdale’s favorite forms of “unconventional warfare.” The FCP developed plans for the “country of combat” and coordinated with foreign corporations and governments, while the U.S. government provided secret financial support by channeling money through opaque and confusing funding structures. In this way, the United States, in effect, maintained no official or overt relationship with the FCP.56 The FCP acted as a third-­party contractor, facili-

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tating training ser­vices for U.S. client governments such as Vietnam, ­Indonesia, or Ceylon.57 In September 1956, two years ­after its founding, the Freedom Com­pany published This Is ­Free Vietnam, adorned with a colorful cover depicting a traditionally dressed Viet­nam­ese rice farmer, recognizably “Oriental” typography, and a note announcing itself as “informational” and published by “Freedom Com­pany Philippines.” Containing sections on food, dress, geography, and climate, the publication could have passed for a traveler’s handbook. The booklet’s introduction, however, makes clear that it was not any ordinary guidebook, but was rather a field manual for Filipinos traveling to Vietnam to “assist the South Viet­nam­ese Army in logistical prob­lems.” Its opening pages represented “­Free Vietnam,” like the other “border lands . . . ​lying on the circumference of the Communist world,” as a nation where “all the facets of the world strug­gle to come into sharpest focus.” It described Vietnam as a young, innocent nation “rising out of the paralysis of colonial domination,” yet vulnerable to the forces of a new imperial foe, global communism.58 Filipinos, according to the booklet, ­were best positioned to offer assistance to “their traditional friend,” the Viet­nam­ese, ­because they had also gone through two periods of colonization and emerged a “freedom-­loving nation” (for all intents and purposes, “freedom-­loving” simply meant aligned with the U.S.-­led anticommunist bloc).59 Consistent references to the ­peoples’ shared commitments to freedom and demo­cratic princi­ples not only resonated with the bipolar language of the Cold War; it also concealed the connection of the two nations to the United States: on the one hand, as the Philippines’ former colonizer and, on the other, as the financial and military promoter of the con­temporary crisis in Vietnam. Beyond just its publication, the Freedom Com­pany’s talking points linked Filipinos to the Viet­nam­ese through a mutual history of colonialism, assumed racial similarities, and the Cold War geography of Southeast Asia. Moreover, in 1962, Frisco San Juan argued that the FCP had been successful ­because it addressed the “gap of distrust” that newly in­de­pen­ dent nations “have for whites.” Filipino volunteers, he felt, did not provoke the same cognitive link between whiteness and imperialism that U.S. advisers did. Proj­ects like the Freedom Com­pany demonstrate that CIA agents and their supporters in Washington and Manila w ­ ere cognizant of colonial-­era racial divisions as well as Southeast Asians’ potential animosity ­toward U.S. intervention and ­were looking for ways around it.60 Lansdale’s vision of the Freedom Com­pany as “a volunteer force largely indigenous to the geographic area in which the emergency exists” spoke to

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concerns of top-­ranking U.S. foreign policymakers, especially with the racial divisions of the colonial order. For example, a 1954 National Security Council (NSC) report suggesting that U.S. policies should be crafted with “more cognizance of Southeast Asia as a geo­graph­i­cal and ethnic entity” also proposed that “an Asiatic known to be friendly to U.S., Ramon Magsaysay, might be held up as an example since he represents a ­people who have thrown off the colonial yoke and could represent a similar hope to the ­people of Southeast Asia.”61 ­These policies would be based on an assumed affinity between Asian ­peoples and enacted to influence the impression that anticolonial nationalists w ­ ere building new racial solidarities across decolonizing territories. For t­hose who believed in covert warfare, the Freedom Com­pany also provided a way to create anticommunist solidarity that cut across the idea that imperialism had built a global color line. Indeed, Lansdale’s insistence that the com­pany’s “largely indigenous” makeup would relieve the “stigma of being a force for Western imperialism” proved compelling.62

Covert Operations The lineage of the policy that supported the creation of the FCP stretched back to the creation of the CIA. In the midst of a downward trend in defense spending, spurred on by a Republican Congress, the CIA evolved from an executive branch creation called the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), formed in January of 1946. The CIG was the first nonmilitary source of international intelligence that reported to the president’s office, and it was formed over the objections of foreign policy conservatives in Congress who, associating robust security apparatuses with ultranationalist fascist states, likened the idea to an “American Gestapo.”63 Through the 1947 National Security Act, foreign policy liberals and President Truman changed the CIG into the CIA as a permanent civilian intelligence agency and created the NSC, to which the CIA directly reported. The agency was charged with providing the NSC with intelligence policy recommendations that w ­ ere based on h ­ uman (rather than signal) intelligence estimates and reports, and it was to perform “such other functions” and intelligence-­related duties as required by the NSC. The mechanisms that funded the CIA’s covert operations developed over the course of 1947 and 1948.64 The CIA received its first inquiries for secret paramilitary and po­liti­cal action campaigns from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the fall of 1947.65 Yet the 1947 law made no mention of covert operations, special operations, or the other euphemisms for secret warfare; it was the elasticity of “such

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other functions” that provided cover for such operations.66 Anxious about the legality of the proposed proj­ects, CIA director Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter sought advice from CIA general counsel Lawrence R. Houston, who informed him that if Congress allocated the funds, the agency would have l­egal footing to carry out covert actions.67 Instead, in June 1948, the NSC issued NSC 10/2, which created a panel ­later known as the “Special Group,” consisting of representatives from the Offices of the Secretaries of State and Defense as well as the CIA. This panel could dictate the direction of CIA policy and would receive an allocation from the CIA annual bud­get to funnel into covert operations.68 Thus, the CIA received no direct authorization from Congress, in spite of Houston’s advice. Moreover, the structure of the CIA within the executive branch and its relationship to the NSC largely removed CIA directives from ongoing congressional debate and, importantly, oversight.69 A series of operations against leftist groups seeking electoral victories in the po­liti­cal contests of postwar Eu­rope commenced with an operation in Italy, where the CIA used front organ­izations such as the Free-­Trade Union Committee as well as business connections to ensure victories for Italy’s center-­r ight Christian Demo­cratic Party in 1948.70 The National Committee for a ­Free ­Eu­rope (NCFE), begun in 1949, was another early CIA operation employed in Soviet satellite countries to convince Eastern Eu­ro­pe­ans of the promise of a “­Free Eu­rope,” similar to the American Committee for the Liberation of the ­People of the USSR (AMCOMLIB). The CIA also targeted press operations, supporting the NCFE’s pro-­U.S. propaganda broadcast ser­vice, Radio ­Free Eu­ rope, in 1949 and, in 1953, the Russian-­language broadcaster Radio Liberation. From the perspective of the CIA, front organ­izations allowed it to operate through nongovernmental, (allegedly) citizen-­driven institutions. In this way, they provided cover for programs aimed at influencing foreign populations.71 In print and on the airwaves, t­hese covert operations used the techniques of psychological warfare to fight the “Soviet menace.” Like many of the “front organ­izations” operated by the CIA during the Cold War, the Freedom Com­pany’s corporate status cloaked its ties to the U.S. government as well as to the CIA’s foreign policy goals. But military-­oriented organ­izations such as the Freedom Com­pany ­were not only CIA front organ­ izations; they ­were also part of the broader national security state’s institutionalization of covert warfare. Beginning in 1953, the Office of the Secretary of Defense also included an Office of Special Operations, which oversaw “psychological warfare planning, operations, and research and development” as well as “unconventional warfare.”72 ­After Lansdale returned from Saigon, he worked as a deputy in the Office of Special Operations.73 From his post in the Defense

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Department, Lansdale advocated for the greater use of “foreign manpower” to “satisfy national objectives in foreign areas.”74 When Lansdale returned to the Philippines, it was in a position that, on ­paper, placed him in the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines’ Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group ( JUSMAG). JUSMAG consulted officers of the AFP about their military needs and offered detailed feedback in weekly reports and briefings describing every­thing from helping to construct napalm bombs from U.S. supplies to inspecting the standards of Philippine military hospitals, none of which Lansdale authored.75 Technically, Lansdale was stationed at Clark Air Force Base with JUSMAG; however, it is clear that he operated outside of the U.S. military hierarchy and irritated JUSMAG officers. Despite the large influx of militarized aid and the formation of relationships between U.S. and Philippine military officers, the FCP, too, remained outside of the JUSMAG structure, which meant therefore that the FCP was not subject to official oversight by ­either the U.S. military or the Philippine government. The cover was useful, however, b­ ecause the United States could legally transfer military aid to JUSMAG, which could then be funneled to covert CIA operations like Lansdale’s. As described in chapter 3, the U.S. Congress created the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP) in 1949 to distribute aid to anticommunist U.S. allies, and numerous countries received MDAP support during the immediate postwar era.76 In Southeast Asia, the program directly funded anticommunist forces, and countries such as Vietnam w ­ ere encouraged to use MDAP funds to hire Freedom Com­pany members as con­sul­tants and military advisers. South Vietnam, for example, received $1.2 billion in MDAP funding in 1954, which it in fact drew on to pay the Freedom Com­pany.77 Although the U.S. government maintained no overt relationship with the FCP, the MDAP funding would seem to link it directly to the U.S. state; this form of circuitous funding, however, actually insulated the U.S. government. This is not to say that ­there ­were not obstacles and objections—­some officials balked at the roundabout funding—­yet the CIA usually found ways around them, and the Freedom Com­pany was paid.78 While Lansdale was in the Philippines in the early 1950s, he learned how to secure covert funding for his operations. Seeking to secure $500,000 worth of funding for “black propaganda”—­propaganda that inaccurately attributed authorship to ­enemy sources—he suggested that e­ ither the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) “or any other agencies” should write a check to be “drawn in ­f avor of Secretary Magsaysay, not P.I. [Philippine Islands] government.”79 The multiplicity of U.S. foreign agencies abroad, like the MSA, afforded the CIA ample ave­nues to funnel money, although the relationship across dif­fer­ent

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U.S. foreign policy institutions appeared at times tenuous and strained. In 1955, a tele­gram sent from JUSMAG in the Philippines to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Vietnam stated that Col­o­nel Bernard L. Anderson, member of the Freedom Com­pany and man­ag­er of Philippine Airlines, had contacted the JUSMAG offices to gain “unofficial support and technical advice” for a mission in Vietnam. The tele­g ram went on to state, “According to Anderson[,] Freedom Com­pany recently received [a] request from Vietnam Govt to recruit and employ sixteen twin engine crews to fly troop carrier and cargo missions in Charlie dash four sevens to be provided by Vietnam.” According to the tele­gram, Anderson was “presently recruiting ­these crews principally from Phil Air Lines and Phil [Air Force officers] who would be placed on indefinite leave status.” Donald MacGrain, executive officer of JUSMAG Philippines and author of the tele­gram, assured the MAAG chief in Vietnam that “although JUSMAG is interested in aims of the proj­ect[,] it cannot participate or be connected with it in any way without specific directive from higher military authority.”80 The chief of JUSMAG when Lansdale was in the Philippines had bristled at the CIA agent’s involvement in the 1953 Philippine elections, believing it v­ iolated the princi­ple of po­liti­cal neutrality that ser­ vice members ­were expected to uphold. But, in this case, MacGrain simply asked for directives from higher up the chain of command before he signed on to participating.81 Non–­Department of Defense U.S. foreign aid agencies, such as the U.S. Operations Mission’s International Cooperation Administration (ICA)—­ predecessor to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—­did facilitate the hiring of the Freedom Com­pany by foreign governments. In 1955, the ICA authorized the FCP to “act as the agent of the United States Operations Mission to the Philippines-­ICA” in making arrangements with the AFP and the other Philippine government agencies “for one month’s worth of training for five Indonesian police officials.” The Freedom Com­pany or­ga­nized sessions with the Manila Metropolitan Police Department, the National Bureau of Investigation, the PC, and an AFP battalion combat team so that the officers could observe “mea­sures for the control of dissidents” and the use of “psychological warfare at field troop level.”82 The month of training also allowed the Indonesian officials to confer with the FCP on “­matters relative to police administration as it applies in the Far East, to observe the practical application of police theory to prob­lems common to all Far Eastern police entities.83 The FCP lodged the officers at their bachelor officer quarters in the Natib Road office in Quezon City. The FCP also arranged for meals and transportation and acted as a liaison between the Indonesian officers and Philippine officials.84

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While the travel and training of Indonesian police appeared within the realm of acceptable ICA policy and billing procedures, other FCP activities demanded more ambiguity. In ­these cases, the com­pany used the job title “technician” in MAAG-­Vietnam reports as cover. In 1957, for example, MAAG arranged to transfer to the ICA “necessary funds to support 290 Filipino technicians” at a cost of $1,055,000.85 Nowhere in the invoice is the FCP mentioned.86 Channeling funding for CIA operations through other U.S. foreign policy agencies did at times raise the hackles of non-­CIA policymakers. A series of letters between Lansdale and high-­ranking CIA officials from 1957 reveals that “criticisms of jurisdiction” plagued the relationship between the Department of Defense and the CIA.87 By 1957, Lansdale had left the SMM in Vietnam and was working as the deputy assistant secretary of special operations in the Department of Defense, the office in the Pentagon that liaised with the CIA, providing weapons or equipment for covert operations.88 Never one short on ideas, Lansdale drafted a memo, “Cold War Program for Defense,” wherein he recommended that the Defense Department hire Napoleon D. Valeriano, a Philippine veteran and founding member of the original Freedom Com­pany, to lead counterguerrilla seminars. Working in the heart of the Defense Department, Lansdale worked hard to keep the cir­cuits of covert warfare he had built between the Philippines and Vietnam in operation. However, ­because he was a former CIA agent working in the Defense Department, high-­ranking officials in the Defense Department and the CIA interpreted Lansdale’s ideas in the context of Washington politics. In fact, ­after reading Lansdale’s “Cold War Program for Defense,” officials in the CIA thought that Lansdale was moving activities that w ­ ere “reserved to the CIA,” such as psychological warfare, to the Defense Department.89 Lansdale still had friends in the CIA, including some who expressed concern that Lansdale’s “enemies” ­were looking for “ammunition to support their charges that he is a ‘CIA plant’ in the office of the Secretary of Defense.”90 If Lansdale’s broader “Cold War Program” was r­unning aground in Washington’s bureaucratic po­liti­cal fights, it did not appear to affect the Defense Department’s and CIA’s cooperating in Freedom Com­pany missions. In 1957 and 1958, MAAG-­Cambodia recruited and successfully placed anticommunist troops in the Freedom Com­pany’s antiguerrilla training program.91 Despite the distance that the CIA provided the Freedom Com­pany from the U.S. government, military and civilian policymakers in Washington ­were aware of the work it was conducting. A July 1960 agreement negotiated by the assistant secretary of national defense between the Republic of Vietnam and the Freedom Com­pany for a nearly $1.6 million contract that would bring Filipino technicians to train Viet­nam­ese Army mechanics required a “letter of

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commitment” from the ICA.92 As this contract indicated, the relationship between the CIA and the Freedom Com­pany was not so distant as to completely conceal its ties to the U.S. state.

Asian Brotherhood Strategies directed at integrating decolonizing countries into the U.S. imperial sphere required figuring out how to prove that U.S. foreign policies w ­ ere separate from a longer tradition of white, imperial control. U.S. policymakers understood that publics across Southeast Asia read the terms of po­liti­cal strug­ gles differently than they did. The CIA and Defense Department w ­ ere not the only foreign policy organ­izations that saw a “po­liti­cal advantage for Asians to train Asians.”93 For example, the Michigan State Vietnam Advisory Group— an ICA-­funded program that brought Michigan State faculty to Vietnam to work on technical assistance proj­ects and to the Philippines to study public administration—­hired Freedom Com­pany employees to help run its police training program. As the United States sought to integrate decolonizing territories into what corporate leaders and policymakers argued was a “new world economy,” U.S. agents in decolonizing areas had to transform the traditional modes of social regulation. Based on categories of difference such as race, gender, and class, t­ hese modes had long stabilized the colonial world.94 Not unlike their Eu­ro­pean counter­parts, liberation movements provoked intense racial anx­i­eties among U.S. policymakers. The “gap of distrust” that Freedom Com­ pany founder Frisco San Juan had described was an ele­ment of international relations of which U.S. policymakers, despite their belief in U.S. exceptionalism, w ­ ere well aware. Circumventing the link between whiteness and U.S. foreign policies by recruiting Filipinos through the Freedom Com­pany required severing the connection between con­temporary U.S. practices in the region and the history of U.S. colonial conquest in the Philippines. It meant discrediting colonial practice and insisting that self-­determination was not only po­liti­cal sovereignty but economic sovereignty as well.95 This was a strong message coming out of the State Department in the 1950s, a period that saw colonialism as being effected in economic, as well as territorial, ways.96 The effort to recast the history of colonialism in the Philippines emerged in surprising and contradictory ways. On the one hand, with the Freedom Com­pany, the CIA intervened in the racial politics of decolonization by promoting Filipinos as exemplary Asian po­liti­cal subjects not in spite of colonization but ­because of U.S. colonization. If the

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Viet­nam­ese could see Filipinos as po­liti­cally modern subjects ­because of U.S. colonial practices, as U.S. policymakers had hoped, then they might look more favorably on the influence and intentions of white U.S. advisers in their nations. This formulation, which i­magined that white Americans had successfully imparted “modern po­liti­cal knowledge” to Philippine p­ eoples, attempted to alter Southeast Asians’ perception, not of white foreigners in general, but only of white Americans. In a sense, this exceptionalist tactic de-­emphasized race—­ the whiteness shared by Eu­ro­pean and U.S. policymakers—in f­avor of emphasizing nationality and geography instead. Americans w ­ ere not white foreigners, they ­were Americans. And Filipinos and Viet­nam­ese ­people had shared a history not only as colonized, subject ­peoples but indeed as “­brothers” in Southeast Asian nationalist, and anticommunist, politics. Communism, according to the ideology promoted by the CIA and their Filipino allies, only worked to exploit race-­based conflict. ­Because Lansdale, the CIA, and the members of the Freedom Com­pany tended to associate racial conflict with imperial legacies that did not involve the United States, they argued that communism was the new imperialism and that continued U.S. intervention in the form of military po­liti­cal advisement and aid strengthened the foundations of Philippine sovereignty. Southeast Asia, as referenced and understood by U.S. policymakers, subsumed internal differences within nations (for example, differences based on class, ethnicity, or religion) and external differences among nations (linguistic, cultural, or, again, religious) so as to create the “imaginative geography” of a coherent and unitary region.97 More than that, it implied an inherent relationship, as in that held by members of the same ­f amily. For U.S. public diplomats, promoting Southeast Asian regional identity was a po­liti­cal proj­ect.98 The Freedom Com­pany’s call to Filipinos to assist their Viet­nam­ese and Laotian “­brothers” suggests the power of this South Asian geographic imaginary. This is not to suggest that U.S. policymakers, and particularly t­hose working in the realm of public diplomacy, did not recognize cultural differences among dif­fer­ent nations. For instance, in advance of the Bandung conference, a CIA intelligence report warned that the “emotionalism of nationalist leaders might erupt.”99 Even though the State Department advised against using overtly racialized language, policymakers also tended to lump p­ eople together in broad and racialized categorical assertions about the cultural tendencies of nonwhite ­people.100 Yet, just as the Freedom Com­pany positioned Philippine volunteers as racially Southeast Asian, and therefore suited to bridge racial divisions with white Americans, it also promoted the po­liti­cal culture of the Philippines as distinct.101 It is unsurprising that one of the central touchstones of U.S. and

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Filipino anticommunist rhe­toric engaged—or acknowledged—­the history of U.S. colonialism in terms of success. The CIA and Freedom Com­pany line was that while other colonial practices had unjustly failed to develop modern Asian socie­ties, the U.S. proj­ect in the Philippines, in fact, had fulfilled the “white man’s burden.” In other words, Americans continued to cast themselves as the right kind of white liberators: as tutors of democracy and freedom and absolutely unlike other white colonists such as the British, the Dutch, or, especially, the French. The CIA’s attempt to sever the link between whiteness, U.S. intervention, and U.S. colonial history was central to the formation and ­f uture work of Freedom Com­pany, but it depended on an exceptionalist history of U.S. colonial policy in the Philippines. The Freedom Com­pany and the CIA rooted the idea that anticommunist Filipinos ­were the most po­liti­cally modern Asian subjects in a par­tic­u­lar ideology that maintained and defended the ongoing legitimacy of the U.S. colonial proj­ect. This need to legitimate U.S. colonial history in the Philippines, even ­after Philippine in­de­pen­dence, emerged not simply out of policymakers’ recognition of the racial divides scarring the colonial world but also within the dynamics of a Cold War politics in which both U.S. and Soviet policymakers accused the opposing nation of imperialism. Filipino po­liti­cal elites did exert autonomy in their relations with the United States, but many, though not all, si­mul­ta­neously spoke about the benevolence of U.S. colonialism and its promises.102 Modern Filipino politicians, many of whom had been educated in U.S. universities—­for example, Carlos P. Romulo—­represented the ideal of U.S.-­aided “pro­gress.” Romulo, a Filipino diplomat to the United States who had been educated at Columbia University, self-­consciously contributed to the proj­ect of disassociating con­temporary forms of U.S. intervention with colonization. In a typical proclamation, he said in 1945 that “the world [should] copy the successful U.S. policy ­toward the Philippines in [order to prevent] a pos­si­ble war between the white and yellow races.” Specifically, he counseled the British Empire to grant in­de­pen­dence to its colony, the Federated Malay States, to avoid such a war.103 Yet, Romulo argued, due to the “warped and selfish” colonization practices of the British, Malayans ­were “not yet ready for the complexities of self-­government.” Thus, Romulo inverted the same U.S. imperial language of “incapacity” that had been used for de­cades to deny Philippine in­de­pen­dence. The British, Romulo suggested, had not been good enough colonial tutors. Although a consistent supporter of Asian anticolonial movements, Romulo also rewrote the history of colonialism in the Philippines through a lens of U.S. colonial exceptionalism.104 In December 1950, in a statement about the con­temporary conflict in ­Korea, Foreign Secretary Romulo proclaimed: “By setting the Philippines

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f­ree, the United States inaugurated a series of acts of colonial emancipation in Asia that has included the in­de­pen­dence of India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and Indonesia. We are convinced that this pro­cess w ­ ill continue ­until the last colony is ­free.”105 Not all Filipino politicians or anticommunists felt the same way about U.S. foreign policies or the role of the Philippines in Southeast Asia; some resisted U.S. influence to an extent, particularly when U.S. policy intersected the contentious lines of party politics and po­liti­cal factions. O ­ thers, like the Freedom Com­pany’s Frisco San Juan or Oscar Arellano of Operation Brotherhood, looked for f­ uture opportunities. Indeed, Romulo did criticize the United States, but he was also an ardent anticommunist whose overall policy positions lined up enough with t­hose of the United States that he avoided being cast as a communist sympathizer or, like another critic of U.S. policy, Claro Recto, who charged Magsaysay with being an “American puppet,” deemed an “ultra nationalist.”106 Even if Filipino po­liti­cal figures exerted a mix of collaboration and re­sis­ tance to U.S. policies, it is impor­tant to note that anticommunists—­U.S. and Filipino—­also built popu­lar support for their politics through material inducements, such as promising access to contracts or U.S. foreign aid dollars.107 U.S. foreign aid always came with strings attached. Some Philippine politicians who attempted to steer U.S. politics favorably ­toward their interests did so while defending their nationalist credentials. In defending his administration’s reliance on U.S. foreign aid, Elpidio Quirino, in 1951, argued that “­people have to get used to the fact, not so much of in­de­pen­dence absolute and complete, as of inter-­dependence and mutual assistance.”108 The communist threat, Quirino argued, meant that the Philippines could only secure in­de­pen­dence and freedom through its partnership with the United States and the security the Americans offered. Interdependence was neither a product of colonialism nor a reflection of postcolonial power relations, but was a result of the global ambitions of imperial communism. In positioning the United States on the side of anticolonial movements and in speaking publicly as formerly colonized Asians, Quirino and Romulo in their messages helped to sever the link between the United States and the racial hierarchies of Eu­ro­pean imperialism by using the discourse of anticommunism. The Freedom Com­pany explic­itly responded to and further reproduced t­hose anticommunist efforts that sought to delink the racial dynamics of colonization from U.S. foreign policy interventions. Although agencies of the United States worked very hard to distinguish their policies as distinctively postcolonial in public discourse, colonial racial hierarchies continued to influence a range of CIA operations, from covert warfare to humanitarian assistance. Lansdale was involved with another CIA-­sponsored

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Filipino organ­ization, Operation Brotherhood, which provides a contrast in visibility with the FCP. Operation Brotherhood grew out of a June 1954 meeting in Saigon of Lansdale and Charles T. R. Bohannan with Oscar Arellano, vice president for Southeast Asia of the International Ju­nior Chamber of Commerce ( Jaycees).109 Arellano, Lansdale l­ater recalled, “had participated in my Manila coffee klatsches and had or­ga­nized one of the volunteer groups for the f­ree election campaign of 1953 in the Philippines.”110 Their discussion, over dinner with the Jaycees chapter in Saigon, chiefly focused on the medical needs of Catholic refugees from the north, and they established of a plan for “medical teams of ­Free Asians to aid the ­Free Viet­nam­ese.”111 Soon, arrangements ­were made for “Operation Brotherhood” to send Filipino medical professionals to Bien Hoa, outside Saigon, where they provided relief and training, and over time the Jaycees contributed volunteers and funds from elsewhere in Southeast Asia.112 ­Because Operation Brotherhood employed Filipinos (and ­later other Southeast Asians), it demonstrated what Lansdale described as an “empathy for the Lao” that was meant to ­counter the sense that Americans looked “down their noses at the ‘natives’ and ‘gooks.’ ”113 The plan for Operation Brotherhood was to treat refugee and rural villa­ gers’ needs and thereby to turn them away from the cause of the Viet Minh. SMM’s David Smith arranged for Operation Brotherhood to take over two former French (but U.S.-­supplied) military field hospitals. According to Lansdale, they brought 105 Filipino doctors and nurses to Vietnam and by April ­were treating two thousand patients a day at ten dif­fer­ent sites.114 He reported that Operation Brotherhood volunteers treated four hundred thousand Viet­ nam­ese patients in the first year.115 Operation Brotherhood not only countered the po­liti­cal promises of communist organ­izations like the Viet Minh; they also provided information to transform “peasants” into disciplined cap­i­tal­ist subjects through programs focused on “proper diets” and market-­oriented agricultural development. They also launched programs that demonstrated the benefits of “­free enterprise.” Filipino and U.S. anticommunists believed that Asian peasants ­were a ripe target for communist exploitation, but this classed and racialized understanding of po­liti­cal movements in Southeast Asia blinded them to the possibility that a peasant in Southeast Asia made choices based on an in­de­ pen­dent po­liti­cal consciousness that was potentially wholly separate from, or syncretic with, ­those espoused by the United States or Soviet Union. Lansdale’s SMM, CIA, and Freedom Com­pany contacts facilitated Operation Brotherhood’s connections.116 In fact, t­ here was considerable overlap between the ­people, funding the supplies, and the targets of most of Lansdale’s operations in Vietnam. With cooperation from the U.S. Army, MAAG, and

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Diem’s government, this operation became part of the government of Vietnam’s National Security Action (Pacification) Directive and generated a new unit within MAAG, of which Lansdale was head. That is to say, he and his Operation Brotherhood team—­and therefore SMM—­were now in charge of “pacification support” in Viet Minh–­controlled areas, such as the border with Laos. Like the FCP, Operation Brotherhood used Air Amer­i­ca, which also employed Filipinos, to transport Filipino employees throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s.117 In 1955, Operation Brotherhood brought medical professionals to the Bolovens Plateau, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail crosses the eastern border of Laos, and to Ca Mau, a National Liberation Front stronghold in southern Vietnam, to deliver vaccinations and to perform routine care and surgeries.118 Operation Brotherhood undoubtedly offered much-­needed medical care to thousands of individuals in need, but along with ban­dages and vaccines, the team also brought with them anticommunist propaganda and anticommunist warfare.119 The humanitarianism of “­free enterprise,” of course, promised financial benefits in the form of government contracts. In Laos, for example, Lansdale proposed that the Office of the Secretary of Defense consider hiring Operation Brotherhood to manage the construction of a road from Pakse, a city in southern Laos at the crossroads of the Mekong and Xe Don Rivers, to Kon Tum, a province in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam near the Laos and Cambodian borders. The “­labor pool” for the proj­ect would “be readied” in areas where Operation Brotherhood already had established programs, in this case, the “primitive inhabitants” of the Bolovens Plateau. The road, Lansdale wrote, would not only open Laos to a port on the China Sea; it would also provide access to “one of the most promising areas of Laos” in terms of natu­ral resources.120 Protecting ­those in regions “currently endangered by Communist activities” meant advancing a proj­ect—­funded by the CIA and carried out in the name of “Asian brotherhood”—­that would transform the landscape of Laos and mold Laotians into a disciplined workforce.121 Unlike FCP and other covert operations, however, Operation Brotherhood’s actions ­were widely known and even publicized. Lansdale l­ater boasted that the East German “socialist comrade volunteers” who established a hospital in Hanoi ­were committing an act of flattery through imitation.122 Secretary of State Dulles visited Operation Brotherhood operations in Vietnam in February 1955, and in Washington the operation was widely regarded as a success, in par­tic­ul­ar ­because of the visibility of “brotherhood.” Southeast Asians, not Americans, ­were volunteering to help their “­brothers” in a time of need.123

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The history of the Freedom Com­pany is not a ­simple story of U.S. imperial domination. The FCP and the CIA navigated the racial formations of Southeast Asia together, and their collaborative proj­ects aimed at spreading global anticommunist warfare reveal the limits of nationalist histories. Both Americans and Filipinos took pride in their national identities, as proponents of an expansive anticommunist geographic imaginary. Nonetheless, national distinctions ­were central to the Freedom Com­pany and to the CIA’s effort to cast the Philippine po­liti­cal class as the moral of a colonial success story, and anticommunists did not see the purpose of their missions solely in terms of national interests. Assuming that the CIA and the Freedom Com­pany acted only in a sense of competition with the Soviet Union also assumes that the spread of the Cold War to Southeast Asia—­a region of the world where U.S. intelligence consistently reported l­ittle Soviet influence—­was all but inevitable. U.S. anticommunism in Southeast Asia hinged less on the United States’ relationship to the Soviet Union and more, as two generations of scholars of the Vietnam War have argued, on U.S. reactions to decolonization and anticolonial movements.124 Lansdale and his Filipino allies who participated in CIA-­sponsored organ­ izations believed that their efforts fulfilled the dual mission of spreading democracy in the region and providing humanitarian ser­vices wherein “Asians helped Asians.” For the CIA, ­these missions ­were complementary.

Colonial Exceptionalism Though Lansdale, the Freedom Com­pany, and its CIA sponsors believed in the mobility of anticommunist warfare—or the notion that one could easily transfer anticommunist success from the Philippines to Vietnam—­their experience on the ground had uneven results. The counterinsurgent war against the Huks not only lived on as an example of what Lansdale called the “dirty, half-­hidden war” being waged in Southeast Asia, but the rescaling of the conflict as part of a global war against communism also created new possibilities for anticommunist actors to mobilize their politics beyond the borders of the Philippines.125 In its mission statement, the Freedom Com­pany proclaimed that it aimed to turn Filipinos and the Philippines from Asia’s “Show Win­dow of Democracy” into a “down-­to-­earth, workaday exponent of Asiatic freedom.” Freedom Com­pany proponents argued that Filipinos, ­because of their colonial past and recent in­de­pen­dence, ­were in the “best position to acquaint other Asians with demo­cratic princi­ples.”126 Interestingly, this formulation situated Filipinos

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and the Philippines as racially, geo­graph­i­cally, and culturally a part of Asia but not a part of the Asia that U.S. policymakers identified with antimodern, colonial paralysis. In other words, one of the reasons Freedom Com­pany personnel ­were positioned so well to help their “Asian ­brothers” was ­because they had experienced colonialism based in demo­cratic governance, unlike, for instance, the Viet­nam­ese ­people, whom they perceived had been negatively influenced by the practices of the indulgent French Empire. Apart from positive associations with U.S. democracy, the Freedom Com­ pany largely overlooked U.S. colonialism. Instead, com­pany organizers drew on the colonial legacy of the Philippines’ first imperial power, the Spanish. The Freedom Com­pany primarily identified with Filipinos’ conception of liberation ideology that developed during their strug­gle against the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, especially its most famous in­de­pen­dence movement, the Katipunan. In fact, the Freedom Com­pany’s insignia of the white kalabaw and red sun evoked the flag of the Katipunan—­which depicted a white sun on a red background—­rather than the (red, white, and blue) flag of the Republic of the Philippines. The Katipunan was a secret, revolutionary organ­ization founded in 1892 to overthrow Spanish rule of the Philippines. Emilio Aguinaldo, first president of the Philippine Republic, had been well known as a Katipunero. In claiming this revolutionary mantle, the FCP positioned the com­pany’s members and employees as the inheritors of the Philippine freedom movement as well as the con­temporary protectors of Philippine democracy. FCP lit­er­a­ture called on the “Freedom Sun of the Katipuneros” to “spread the light of Democracy to the p­ eoples of Asia” and reveal “Freedom in Asia.”127 In this way, the FCP engaged in a discursive war over the definitions of freedom. Moreover, the incorporation of a rigid anticommunist rhe­toric into its definitions of what freedom and in­de­pen­dence meant in the Philippines worked to delegitimize leftist politics, not only in the Philippines but also in the larger Southeast Asian region. Therefore, with the financial and advisory support of the CIA, the Freedom Com­pany contributed to the restrictive narrowing of po­liti­cal debate particularly in the Philippines, but also in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Yet unlike its neighbors—­which ­were considered mired in the stagnant past of French, British, or Dutch colonial policy—­the Philippines, the Freedom Com­ pany claimed, was exceptional. In looking backward to the liberation movements of the late nineteenth ­century, the Freedom Com­pany rewrote history so that the true “liberation” of the country occurred in 1898, and the subsequent fifty years of U.S. rule was framed as a laborious course in demo­cratic governance, which the

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­ hilippines passed with flying colors. This narrative served to erase the vio­ P lence of the U.S. colonial past and the bloody wars that had established U.S. dominance. By placing the FCP and its volunteers in a genealogy of anti-­ Spanish colonization—­rather than a generically anticolonial narrative—­the FCP contributed to the power­f ul discourse that the United States intervened in Southeast Asian politics not for selfish or imperial reasons but rather to “spread the light of Democracy” for the good of humanity. Like his Freedom Com­ pany colleagues, Edward Lansdale also fancied himself a descendant of a revolutionary freedom movement, and so his signature on the Katipunan re-­creation is also clear. In the brief preface to his 1972 memoir, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia, Landale cites Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson as his ideological kin: “You should know one ­thing at the beginning: I took my American beliefs with me into t­hese Asian strug­gles, as Tom Paine would have done.”128 Lansdale’s embrace of Paine’s libertarian impulses suggests his deeply held belief in a Cold War variant of U.S. exceptionalism in which freedom was rendered interchangeable with U.S. democracy and the effort to universalize a U.S. po­liti­cal ideology as a messianic global mission. Lansdale’s adoption of Paine as a pre­de­ces­sor also indicates another impor­tant aspect of Lansdale’s actions in Southeast Asia and one that applies directly to his connection with the Freedom Com­pany: his propensity to operate outside the structures of demo­cratic procedures. Despite this incongruity, Lansdale continually used democracy, and the inherent freedom located in his version of U.S. democracy, as the advantage of hiring Filipinos. With the Freedom Com­pany, Lansdale aided in the construction of what was essentially a foreign policy actor that, in its designation as a private corporation, could operate ­free from conventional constraints. But this insistence on Filipino exceptionalism also backfired. In a report to his bosses in Washington, Lansdale exaggerated the quality of the “friendship” between Diem’s government and Filipino technicians.129 In 1957, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon reported that Diem’s government had “taken a hard line” on issuing further work visas for Filipinos. This was due, according to the embassy, to “a certain aversion among Viet­nam­ese to accept that other Asians can teach them anything,” a feeling that Lansdale had sensed for at least two years.130 In addition, a 1956 report from the Freedom Com­pany’s se­nior overseas representative, Alfonso Enriquez, to Tran Trung Dung, Viet­nam­ese assistant secretary of state for national defense, stated that “quite a few” Viet­nam­ese military officers, soldiers, and civilians had acted with “uncooperativeness and indifference” ­toward Filipino technicians. Enriquez lamented the Viet­nam­ese men who “think and believe that the presence of [Filipino] technicians would mean

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the loss of their jobs.”131 In an ammunition depot near Saigon, the Freedom Com­ pany sought to work around linguistic barriers by providing En­glish classes to Viet­nam­ese technicians, but in this report and o ­ thers that followed, Enriquez referenced numerous incidences where language differences hampered cooperation between Filipino and Viet­nam­ese technicians.132 The patronizing notion that even the most ardently anticommunist Viet­nam­ese soldier would accept the authority of Filipino technicians ­because of their alleged common racial characteristics ignored the fact that l­abor conditions—­not simply a commitment to the anticommunist cause—­shaped the experiences of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (the army in South Vietnam) soldiers and Freedom Com­pany technicians.133 Even if Filipino po­liti­cal figures exerted a mix of collaboration and re­sis­ tance to U.S. policies, it is impor­tant to note that anticommunists, both U.S. and Filipino, also built popu­lar support for their politics through material inducements, such as promising access to contracts or U.S. foreign aid dollars. At the same time, U.S. foreign aid came with a number of strings attached, and though Philippine politicians attempted to steer U.S. policies favorably t­oward their interests, many of t­hese same leaders spoke openly about the merits of U.S. colonialism. T ­ hese proclamations, such as Quirino’s insistence that “destiny [had] thrown [the Philippines] into a special relation with the United States,” contributed to anticommunist attempts to control the history of U.S. imperialism in Asia and subsume decolonization strug­gles ­under the umbrella of a global war against communism.

Accusations of Intervention Selling U.S. policymakers as friends or potential liberators of former colonial nations did not, however, always work to sever the link between U.S. aid, imperialism, and whiteness. In fact, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Freedom Com­pany had come u ­ nder suspicion for its “clandestine activities on behalf of the government” and “its close relationship and identification with Americans operating in Vietnam.” As the com­pany’s members stated, to “obviate unfounded criticism and accusations of intervention and meddling,” the Freedom Com­pany was dissolved in 1962 and reor­ga­nized into a commercial entity: the Eastern Construction Com­pany.134 In its new iteration, it ceased the practice of contracting through foreign governments and instead contracted directly with U.S. agencies, identifying its customers as “primarily U.S. agencies engaged in the American foreign military and economic aid programs.”135 Nonetheless,

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the Eastern Construction Com­pany continued to promote the Cold War c­ auses of the United States in Southeast Asia. Although the governance and cultural expectations of a nonprofit organ­ization versus a commercial com­pany differed, the com­pany retained offices in Vientiane, Saigon, and Manila, and the com­ pany’s 1962 “prospectus” reaffirmed its role in proj­ects that w ­ ere “mutually advantageous to both the United States and the Philippines and beneficial to the cause of the security of the ­Free World.”136 The Freedom Com­pany, and ­later the Eastern Construction Com­pany, vouched for the sincerity of U.S. intentions through the language of an assumed racial similarity, just as Quirino did through the language of the Cold War and the idea of interdependence. In 1962, eight years a­ fter the first Freedom Com­pany mission in Vietnam, an Eastern Construction Com­pany memo, written by Frisco San Juan, an original Freedom Com­pany member, reflects on this fact. It states that the “personal composition” of the com­pany demonstrated “to the indigenous p­ eople with whom the ECCOI [Eastern Construction Com­pany Incorporated] personnel work that p­ eople of a newly developing nation have acquired technical knowledge, experience and skills through their own effort and with U.S. assistance, which enabled them to develop their own country.”137 The Filipinos of the Freedom Com­pany and the Eastern Construction Com­pany represented the potential of the United States’ developmental promises, or the idea that technical knowledge could be transferred from the United States in order to modernize the Philippines, and potentially, all of Southeast Asia. Although the Freedom Com­pany provides only one example of anticommunist discourse in the Philippines, the connection to the CIA, Laos, and Vietnam linked Freedom Com­pany members to a larger audience and network of po­liti­cal actors. In this way, the global reach of Freedom Incorporated served as a network for empire, spreading the power­ful discourse of communism as imperialism and freedom as U.S.-­style liberalism. Filipinos and Americans in the Freedom Com­pany crossed the borders of Asia, bringing with them military strategies and weaponry as well as cultural practices and assumptions. T ­ hese included resolute definitions of the meaning of imperialism, military assistance, decolonization, and freedom in the Philippines and the emerging postcolonial Southeast Asia. Crucially, ­these proponents of U.S. influence, both U.S. and Filipino, had the power to define the range of legitimate po­liti­cal discourse and remove ­those who countered their interests through ­either the enactment or threat of physical vio­lence. Just as the CIA attempted to manage Western racial anx­i­eties, it also contributed to a racialized sense of knowledge about the region and the intersection between imperialism, race, and the Cold War. This

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par­tic­u­lar formation meant that the United States and its allies in the region could define anticommunism, communism, and the geographic scope of the Cold War in a way that elided the nuance of local politics or histories as well as the ways that ­people identified or located themselves within that history. The proj­ect of anticommunist global warfare centered on the effort to integrate the geography of the colonial world in the ser­vice of a U.S. empire that required new notions of race, nationality, and geography in Southeast Asia. The Freedom Com­pany illustrates how the United States disavowed its own racialist logics at strategic moments by empowering Filipinos rather than Westerners to come to the aid of other Asian nations. At the same time, by reformulating the colonial history of the Philippines, the CIA and its Philippine allies reinforced and reshaped colonial narratives regarding the capacity and po­liti­cal modernity of Asian ­peoples.

Epilogue A Friendship Written in Blood

In the summer of 1961, Philippine journalist A. L. Valencia placed editorials in three U.S. newspapers, the Washington, DC–­based Sunday Star; the New York Herald-­Tribune; and the New York World-­Telegram. Mobilizing in his editorials nearly all of the rhetorical tropes used to characterize the colonial and postin­de­pen­dence relationship between the United States and the Philippines, Valencia rosily reflected on his assignment covering the first Philippine in­de­ pen­dence cele­bration fifteen years before. “­After nearly four centuries of Spanish rule, more than 40 years of American tutelage, and three years of Japa­nese occupation,” Valencia glowed, on July 4, 1946, “the Philippines was a nation at last.” In response to a growing critique of U.S. policy in the Philippines, Valencia’s editorials sought to “honor a friendship with the ­people of the United States—­written in blood for all the world to see and remember.” He argued that the “friendship” between the two nations was a product of their shared history of strug­gle: the overthrow of Spanish colonialism, the rigors of U.S. demo­cratic tutelage, the triumph over Japa­nese imperialism, and the defeat of the Huk insurgency. The Philippine Information Agency (PIA), a Washington, DC–­based public relations office for the Philippine government, had long sought to place stories in the U.S. press that, as a Philippine presidential aide put it in 1949, would “justify continued American concern for and interest in the Philippines.”1 Valencia’s three pieces ­were some of ­these PIA-­placed stories, and in 1961 the agency compiled them into a pamphlet called Success Story: Given Their Choice 28 Million Filipinos Chose Freedom, which was circulated around the Washington policymaking network. By the end of July 1961, Minnesota

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senator Hubert H. Humphrey moved to have Valencia’s Success Story editorials incorporated into the Congressional Rec­ord, stating that the United States could “point with pride to this ­great bastion of freedom and democracy in a troubled and strategic Southeast Asia.”2 A de­cade ­later, in September 1972, simmering anticommunist politics boiled over when Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. Marcos was faced with challenges on multiple fronts. The First Quarter Storm, a series of protests against the Marcos government and U.S. imperialism, rocked Manila from January to March 1970, and vio­lence on the southern island of Mindanao had led to the death of over fifteen hundred ­people and the displacement of upward of one hundred thousand.3 The 1955 Laurel-­Langley Agreement, an amendment to the 1946 Bell Trade Act, was set to expire in 1974.4 And President Richard Nixon had recently signaled a new direction in U.S. foreign policy that, if applied to the Philippines, would increase defense costs for a Philippine state that had depended for years on U.S. military aid. Despite ­these internal prob­lems, Marcos’s rationale for martial law hinged on trumped-up fears of communist rebellion. Although he also promised to reform a po­liti­cal and economic system that had long been dominated by power­f ul ­f amily networks, anticommunist politics served as the basis for Marcos’s insistence that martial law was required to restore “law and order” to the islands.5 Officially, martial law began in 1972 and ended in 1981. Yet Marcos remained in power ­until 1986, and, even ­after 1981, he retained much of the power he had consolidated ­under martial law. During the entirety of the Marcos dictatorship, from 1972 to 1986 an estimated 92,000 ­people ­were arrested for violating “public order.”6 From 1975 to 1985, an estimated 2,520 ­were “tortured, executed, and displayed” in public places, and nearly 1,000 w ­ ere 7 “dis­appeared.” Among the gross violations of h ­ uman rights, military tribunals replaced civil courts, elections ­were suspended, the press operated ­under severe censorship, l­abor strikes w ­ ere prohibited, and a curfew was imposed on the civilian population.8 As is well known, the end of democracy in the Philippines was met with no public disapproval from U.S. policymakers, and, instead, the United States supported the Marcos administration as it stripped Philippine citizens of their basic rights. Even though the Philippines had long represented the United States’ “show win­dow of democracy” in Asia, U.S. policymakers—­not for the first time—­prioritized economic and military considerations over humanitarian concerns. U.S. policymakers in the early 1970s did not believe the stated anticommunist rationale for Marcos’s martial law: that the Maoist-­oriented Commu-

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nist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New P ­ eople’s Army, ­were capable of overthrowing the government. In fact, in 1969 the New ­People’s Army reportedly possessed a mere seventy firearms. Instead, the U.S. State Department concluded that the declaration stemmed from Marcos’s “uncertainty of being able to remain in power beyond 1973 u ­ nder normal ­legal arrangements.”9 By 1974—­less than two years ­after the martial law declaration—­ the U.S. Embassy in Manila revealed that U.S. policymakers had no illusions about the kind of government that U.S. aid was supporting, noting that “the [Marcos] regime [had] expanded the frontiers of authoritarianism in concept and in practice.”10 Nonetheless, U.S. administrations from Richard Nixon’s to Jimmy Car­ter’s advocated against cutting U.S. aid to the Philippines during the Marcos era. In fact, U.S. military assistance to the Philippines increased from 1972 to 1976; in 1977, the Car­ter administration awarded the Philippines $500 million in “security assistance.”11 What is more, the conservative American Chamber of Commerce expressed its support for the dictator, believing the Philippine president could quell the rising tide of Philippine nationalism and serve U.S. business interests in the islands.12 Similar to historical studies of other U.S. “security assets,” historical analyses of the United States’ support for the Marcos regime most often identify a constellation of geopo­liti­cal and economic concerns plaguing U.S. policymakers at the end of the Vietnam War as the primary reason for backing, as U.S. policymakers referred to it at the time, a “martial law ­gamble.”13 Although t­ hese assessments ­were largely well founded in order to understand how state repression and acts of extrajudicial vio­lence ­were normalized ­under Marcos’s rule, we must take a longer view of anticommunist politics. Understanding the militarization, the strengthening of illiberal forces, and the disconnection of freedom from collective equality that characterized the Marcos era requires looking back to the immediate postwar period, when anticommunist techniques ­were built in to the in­de­pen­dent state.14 Valencia’s 1961 Success Story usefully illustrates how the transformation of anti-­imperial strug­gles into Cold War “fronts” enabled and legitimated the Philippine state’s use of repression and coercion. By portraying the “success story” of the Philippines as a preeminent example of the benevolent intentions of U.S. global power, Valencia’s 1961 piece effaced local strug­gles regarding class in­equality and demo­cratic repre­sen­ta­tion and, in par­tic­u­lar, erased the importance of anti-­imperialist politics in ­these debates. This erasure of anti-­imperialism was a central goal and component of anticommunist politics in the Philippines. Indeed, as this book has shown, numerous postwar

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po­liti­cal movements that found themselves anticommunist targets—­from the Hukbalahap rebellion to left-­leaning ­labor unions—­centered a critique of U.S. imperialism in their demands for economic, social, and po­liti­cal change. At the same time that U.S. policymakers knew Philippine Communists w ­ ere not a dire threat—­the U.S. Embassy, for example, reported that the Philippine “Communist Party [was] a lonely aggregation”—­the United States supported the Philippine state’s campaign against local dissidents. In ­doing so, the United States legitimized state vio­lence as an acceptable means of managing protest. The U.S. engagement with postwar vio­lence in the Philippines was not accidental. The 1947 U.S.-­Philippine Military Assistance Act established the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group ( JUSMAG), a U.S. military office tasked with managing U.S. military aid and providing recommendations to the Philippine government. JUSMAG served in an advisory capacity only, part of an effort intended to demonstrate that the Philippine government was the sole arbiter of law and order in the islands. To be sure, Filipino politicians and military leaders requested U.S. military aid by invoking the threat of global communist expansion. Indeed, the Philippine state coded its campaign against po­liti­cal opposition as a fight against communism. By the time Humphrey praised the Philippines as the “­great bastion of freedom and democracy” in 1961, anticommunist politics ­were firmly entrenched in Philippine state institutions. In addition to looking to the past to understand the state repression of the 1970s, we can also see the legacies of Cold War anticommunist politics—­including ­those of the 1970s—in recent history and our con­temporary world. As historian Gilbert M. Joseph has argued with regard to Latin Amer­i­ca, one of the legacies of Cold War–­era anticommunist campaigns is that nations long subject to U.S. intervention, such as the Philippines, continue to experience the historical outgrowths of anticommunist politics through the “bubbling up” of extrajudicial vio­lence.15 As elsewhere, anticommunism in the Philippines was never simply about combating adherents to the communist cause; the widespread dissent and uprisings in the immediate postwar period challenged a U.S. foreign policy agenda that relied on the Philippines to serve as a model of “orderly” decolonization. In response, the Philippine government, with U.S. aid and support, enacted a campaign of state vio­lence that equated dissent with disloyalty and cast alternative ideas regarding the po­liti­cal and economic direction of postin­de­pen­dence years outside the ­legal bounds of po­liti­cal debate. In effect, the state was not required to allow t­hose who w ­ ere deemed to be Communists the same freedoms that a liberal state other­wise promised its citizens. In ways strikingly similar to ­those of the 1950s and the Marcos era, Philippine activists continue to face the real­ity of state-­sanctioned po­liti­cal terror-

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ism ­today. In 2010, within the first hundred days of the presidency of Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III—­ ironically, the son of anti-­ Marcos politicians—­ extrajudicial forces murdered sixteen po­liti­cal activists. One victim, the Bayan Muna po­liti­cal activist Fernando Baldomero, from the Aklan Province in the Visayas, was gunned down ­after receiving threats from the Third Division of the Philippine Infantry, which had labeled him a leader of the “communist-­terrorist movement” in Aklan.16 Aquino’s successor, Rodrigo Duterte, elected in 2016, launched a “war on drugs” that, within the first year, resulted in an estimated eight thousand deaths.17 Duterte’s “war on drugs” has unleashed a wave of extrajudicial killings targeting activists, such as the twenty-­five “farmer-­activists” killed in the Compostela Valley in Mindanao in the summer of 2017. In fall 2018, Duterte announced a plan to arm “death squads” in a campaign against the New ­People’s Army; this is a decision that h ­ uman rights advocates argue w ­ ill only worsen the country’s endemic po­liti­cal vio­lence. Meanwhile, the United States continues to provide military aid to Duterte’s government. From January 2017 through August 2018, the United States provided $95 million worth of equipment to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). ­After an August 2018 visit by U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs Randall G. Schriver, the U.S. Embassy in Manila announced that the Philippines would be “the largest recipient of US foreign military financing in Asia.”18 Cold War anticommunist mobilizations successfully—­though not wholly or uniformly—­have silenced the ability of movements with alternative ideological and po­liti­cal formulations to legitimately participate in po­liti­cal debate and civil society. In many cases, Cold War politics have resulted in an intense polarization of the po­liti­cal field. The subsequent repression of reform and progressive movements in the name of anticommunism still terrorize individuals in the name of “law and order” with the support of the United States in the ser­vice of a “friendship written in blood.”

Acknowl­edgments

This book took seed in a generous community of scholars, friends, and colleagues at the University of Michigan and Amherst College and began to blossom thanks to the intellectual community and comradeship I found at the University of Mary­land. Before I typed a word, Penny von Eschen implored me to “be bold,” to not shy away from asking and answering big questions. As she is always willing to talk through ideas, formulations, and exciting archival discoveries, this book is very much a product of our conversations, started while I was a gradu­ate student and continuing through the book’s final stages. In addition to Penny, Howard Brick, Deirdre de la Cruz, Matt Lassiter, and Damon Salesa offered valuable insights into how to expand my vision while, at the same time, encouraging me to trust my instincts as a historian. I was fortunate to have taken my first gradu­ate course in history with Gina Morantz-­Sanchez and Geoff Eley. Gina and Geoff modeled the collaborative spirit and commitment to critical scholarship that represent the kind of academic community I always ­imagined myself being a part of. Kathleen Canning, Matthew Countryman, Phil Deloria, Kevin Gaines, Sue Juster, Michele Mitchell, Leslie Pincus, Ron Suny, Alan Wald, and my Tagalog professor, Joi Barrios, all had a hand in shaping my scholarship. My friends in the department—­and in the Gradu­ate Employees Organ­ization, my union—­kept me sane. Thank you, Emma Amador, Matt Blanton, Crystal Chung, Sara Crider, Mathieu Desan, Kara French, Alice Gates, Lauren Hirshberg, Federico Helfgott, Sara Lampert, Kirsten Leng, Suzi Linsely, Elspeth Martini, Afia Ofori-­Mensa, and Lani Teves. And perhaps most of all, thanks to Lorna Altsetter, Sheila Coley, Diana Denney, and

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Kathleen King in the Department of History office for keeping me on track (and making sure I did not miss an impor­tant deadline)! The year I spent at Amherst College on a fellowship allowed me to deepen my research while developing and teaching my own courses. In addition to the faculty of the Department of History, I want to thank the community of friends—­Nusrat Chowdhury, Stephanie Elsky, Hannah Holleman, Pinky Hota, Jeff Humphrey, and Dwaipayan and Meredith Sen—­for helping to make that year of transitions one of the best in my life. My colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Mary­land have become some of my most impor­tant interlocutors as well as my biggest supporters. Thank you to Sabrina Alcorn, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rick Bell, Janna Bianchini, Chris Bonner, Antoine Borrut, Holly Brewer, Sarah Cameron, Alejandro Caneque, Rob Chiles, Patrick Chung, Bernie Cooperman, Misha Dobilove, David Freund, James Gao, Saverio Giovacchini, Julie Greene, Shay Hazkani, Jeffrey Herf, Ahmet Karamustafa, Kate Keane, Piotr Kosicki, Clare Lyons, Nancy Mirabel, Robyn Muncy, Mircea Rainu, Chantel Rodriguez, Karin Rosemblatt, Mike Ross, Leslie Rowland, Marsha Rozenblit, David Sartorius, David Sicilia, Phil Soergel, Jon Sumida, Julie Taddeo, Stefano Villani, Peter Wein, Janelle Wong, Madeline Zelfi, Tom Zeller, and Ting Zhang for making UMD an excellent academic home. Thank you also to Courtney Dahlke, Jodi Hall, Lisa Klein, and Gail Russell for every­thing that you do. This book would not have been pos­si­ble without the generous support provided by the University of Michigan’s College of Lit­er­a­ture Science and the Arts, Rackham Gradu­ate School, the International Institute, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the Center for International and Comparative Studies, the Southeast Asian Studies Center, and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Socie­ties (ACLS). ­After joining the history department at the University of Mary­land, I was fortunate to receive another year of support from the ACLS as an Oscar Handlin Fellow as well as research support from the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). A work of research always depends on a network of librarians, archivists, and other scholars. My book would not have been pos­si­ble without help at the Truman Library, Hoover Institute at Stanford University, Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Douglas MacArthur Library (Norfolk, ­Virginia), Historical Collections and ­Labor ­Archives at Penn State, New York Public Library, Tamiment Library at New York University, United Nations Archives (New York), National Archives at College Park, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Camp Aguinaldo (Quezon City, Philippines), Gonzalez Library at the

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University of the Philippines (Quezon City), Ramon Magsaysay Collection (Manila), the Ayala Library (Manila), Ateneo de Manila University, and University of Santo Tomas (Manila). I would especially like to thank Engracia Santos at the American Historical Collection at the Ateneo de Manila University and Eric Van Slander at the National Archives at College Park. I was particularly lucky to have a group of scholars and friends in the Philippines who each provided help along the way, including Francis Gealogo, Sarah Raymundo, Judy Taguiwalo, and Rolando Tolentino. To my editor at Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy, and his entire staff, thank you for your incredible support. Thank you as well to the two anonymous reviewers of my manuscript, who both helped push it to the next level. Jane Lichty worked through my draft in a thorough, thoughtful, and generative way. Thank you also to series editors Mark Bradley, David Engerman, Amy Greenberg, and Paul Kramer. I owe Paul a par­tic­ul­ar debt of gratitude; I first met him when I was a gradu­ate student at the University of Michigan, where we ­were both members of a U.S. empire reading group. Paul’s astute insights on the history of U.S. imperialism transformed the ways I thought about my own research. Since then, Paul has continued to generously support my scholarship and helped shepherd this book to fruition. I have also benefited from conversations with and feedback from David Anderson, Darien Brahms, Karen Caplan, Chris Cappozzola, Leon Fink, Andrew Friedman, Mike Hawkins, Reto Hoffman, Daniel Immerwahr, Josh Jackson, Scott Kirsch, Heonik Kwon, Mitch Lerner, Jana Lipman, Allan Lumba, Melanie MacAlister, Hajimu Masuda, Hiro Matsusaka, David Sartorius, Naoko Shibusawa, Sayuri Shimuzu, Brad Simpson, Suzanne Smith, Martin Thomas, and Marilyn Young, as well as from gradu­ate students and faculty at the University of North Carolina, Ohio University and Cornell University. Thank you to my friends who have lived with this proj­ect for as long as I have. Many years ago Christine Sermak was the first person to tell me I had a “writer’s voice,” and she encouraged me to pursue my goals with fearless ambition. Karen Miller has been a collaborator on this proj­ect from the beginning. She has read ­every chapter—­some more than once—­and worked out ideas with me ­every step of the way. Thank you also to Oscar Miller and Emily Drabinski. Urmila Venkatesh and Annah MacKenzie keep me sane and inspired and never fail to make me laugh. Over a short period of time Annah read the entire manuscript and provided critical insights and copyediting. Vince Messana is like a b­rother to me. Monica Kim always impresses me with her brilliance—­she read a portion of the manuscript at an impor­tant juncture, and her thoughtful suggestions helped make this a better book. Julie Greene and

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Jim and Sophie Maffie (and Koba!) made me feel instantly at home when I moved to Mary­land in 2013. Julie offered feedback on my introduction at a critical stage; she has also been an incredible mentor—­always willing to chat and offer guidance. In addition to my friends, f­amily has sustained me through humor, love, and knowing not to ask if I finished my book yet. Thank you to Kevin Jones, Zoey Jones, Charles Osborn, Laura Walker, Rebecca and Julian Popp, Cindy, Art, and Elizabeth Morley, Pat McKane, Angela Smith, Jessica Ice, Stephen Mucher, and Mike Mucher. No words can express my gratitude to Chris and Cindy Mucher; thank you for welcoming me into your f­amily. To my parents, Bob Woods and Jan Shanahan, none of this would have been pos­si­ble without your support. Thank you. To my partner, Christen Mucher—­you simply are the best. Fi­nally, this book is dedicated to my older ­sisters, Jessica Woods and Kate Woods. Thank you for every­thing.

Notes

Introduction 1. ​“Philippines Proclamation,” New York Times, July 5, 1946. 2. ​Torres, Americanization of Manila, 60–61. Other recent works on the colonization of the Philippines include but are not l­imited to Castañeda, Foundations of the Modern Philippine State; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies; Caronan, Legitimizing Empire; Delmendo, Star-­Entangled Banner; Go and Foster, American Colonial State; Go, American Empire; Golay, Face of Empire; Hawkins, Making Moros; Kramer, Blood of Government; McCoy, Policing Amer­i­ca’s Empire; McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral; Nagano, State and Finance in the Philippines; Rafael, White Love; Hedman and Sidel, Philippine Politics and Society; Steinbock-­Pratt, Educating the Empire; Ventura, “From Small Farms.” 3. ​Luneta Park, formerly known as Bagumbayan, or New Town, was a notorious execution site. In 1872, Spanish colonial authorities executed three Filipino priests, Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora, charged with inciting a mutiny in Cavite. The martyrdom of the priests, known collectively as Gomburza, represented an incidence of colonial repression and a spark in a burgeoning anticolonial movement in the Philippines. Twenty-­four years ­later, Spanish officials again used the park as a site for colonial repression, this time murdering Jose Rizal, a medical doctor trained in Spain and cofounder of La Liga Filipina, a movement aimed at reforming Spanish colonialism. Anderson, ­Under Three Flags, 58. 4. ​“Philippine In­de­pen­dence Celebrated,” Baltimore Sun, July 5, 1946. On the Rizal monument, see Rafael, Promise of the Foreign, 36–37. 5. ​Kramer, Blood of Government, 333–38. 6. ​“Philippine In­de­pen­dence Celebrated.” 7. ​“Texts of Statements on the Philippines,” New York Times, July 4, 1946. 8. ​Goscha and Ostermann, Connecting Histories; Ryan and Pungong, United States and Decolonization; Hahn and Heiss, Empire and Revolution; Duara, Decolonization; McMahon, Cold War in the Third World; McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War; McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery; McMahon, Limits of Empire; Statler and Johns, Globalization of the Cold War; Westad, Global Cold War. 9. ​Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 3.

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10. ​On U.S. imperial historiography, see Kramer, “Power and Connection.” 11. ​Parker, Hearts, Minds,Voices, 4–5. 12. ​The lit­er­at­ure on the United States and the Cold War is vast. On the historiography of the United States in the Cold War, see Westad, Reviewing the Cold War; Isaac and Bell, Uncertain Empire; Immerman and Goedde, Oxford Handbook of the Cold War; Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History of the Cold War; Gaddis, We Now Know. 13. ​Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” 26. 14. ​Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind. 15. ​“Report to the National Security Council by the Department of State: Summary of Conclusions, August 18, 1948,” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, General;The United Nations, ed. Neal H. Petersen et al. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 609. 16. ​Harry S. Truman, “Radio and Tele­vi­sion Address to the American P ­ eople following the Signing of the Defense Production Act,” September 9, 1950, The American Presidency Proj­ect, ed. Gerhard Peters and John  T. Woolley, https://­www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu​/­node​/­230233. 17. ​Duara, “Cold War as a Historical Period.” 18. ​Text of the Philippine Military Assistance Act, quoted in Wolf, Foreign Aid, 22. 19. ​United States Congress, Committee on International Relations, “Hearing on the Republic of Philippines Military Assistance Act,” June 7, 1946, in Selected Executive Session Hearings of the Committee, 1943–1950, 11, 26. 20. ​Friedman, Creating an American Lake. 21. ​Cullather, Illusions of Influence. 22. ​Dirlik, “Postcolonial Aura.” 23. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 21. 24. ​Malcolm, Government of the Philippine Islands. Additional books by Malcolm include Philippine Civics: A Textbook for the Schools of the Philippines (1919); The Constitutional Law of the Philippines (1936); The Commonwealth of the Philippines (1936); and The First Malayan Republic: The Story of the Philippines (1951). 25. ​Manuscript of “Sunset of Colonialism,” n.d., box 1, George A. Malcolm Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 26. ​Vitalis, White World Order. See also Go, “Sociology’s Imperial Unconscious.” 27. ​Stoler and McGranahan, “Introduction: Reconfiguring Imperial Terrains,” 12. 28. ​Quoted in Secretary of War, “Government of the Philippines,” 9. 29. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 23. 30. ​Kramer, Blood of Government, 18. 31. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 21. 32. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 25. 33. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 21. 34. ​Stoler and McGranahan, “Introduction: Reconfiguring Imperial Terrains,” 12. 35. ​Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 6–9. 36. ​Though one can find brief histories of the Philippine Communist Party in many books, for comprehensive histories, see Fuller, Forcing the Pace; Richardson, Komunista; Saulo, Communism in the Philippines. For debates on Philippine Marxism, see Third World Study Center, Marxism in the Philippines; Abinales, Revisiting Marxism in the Philippines; Hoeksema, “Communism in the Philippines.” 37. ​Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 8–9. 38. ​Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 8–9. On management of colonial archives, see Beredo, Import of the Archive. Over the course of my research for this book, I submitted dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, only some of which ­were ever returned. ­Those that did come

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back ­were, unsurprisingly, heavi­ly redacted, testimony to the fact that much of the material in my archive remains classified. 39. ​Moreover, the Philippines is a country with many languages; my efforts to learn one, Tagalog, could take me only so far. My hope is that Freedom Incorporated ­will help point the way for ­f uture scholars to fill in some of the gaps that I could not. 40. ​“Statement by General Carlos P. Romulo, Foreign Secretary of the Philippines, on the Chinese Communist Intervention in K ­ orea,” December 7, 1950, Elpidio Quirino Papers, Ayala Museum, Manila. 41. ​It has become commonplace for historians to qualify statements about the emancipatory promises of international communism and the Soviet Union with acknowl­edgments of the vio­ lence that the consolidation of power in the USSR and other post-­WWII communist states wrought. Indeed, on one hand, historians have treated the outlook of the international communist movement as having embraced ­either a naively or strategically flawed utopianism, while, on the other hand, they analyze the politics of anticommunists e­ ither as rational responses to a real or perceived threat or as an expression of irrational, mass politics. Though a full discussion of this subject is outside the scope of this introduction, this book seeks to treat the world vision of anticommunists—­ and their attempts to shape the world to match their vision—as utopian in their own right. 42. ​Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; Fischer, Spider Web; Heale, American Anticommunism; Heale, McCarthy’s Americans; Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty. 43. ​Kim, Ends of Empire. 44. ​For readings of transnational history informed by the work of imperial historians, see contributions in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire; Burton, ­After the Imperial Turn; Thompson, Writing Imperial Histories. 45. ​An impor­tant exception is Foster, “Secret Police Cooperation.” 46. ​Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire; Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism. In contrast, beginning with Theodore Draper’s two-­volume history Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Rus­sia, historical studies on the Communist Party of the United States of Amer­i­ca (CPUSA) have centered the question of “foreign” influence on the relationship between the party and the Soviet Union. A generation of revisionist histories, best represented by Maurice Isserman’s Which Side ­Were You On?, moved away from the Communist International (Comintern) question to focus on the social history of the CPUSA. ­After the fall of the Soviet Union, a school of “traditionalists” led by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr became particularly interested in the Comintern relationship and the question of “espionage.” See Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, Soviet World of American Communism; Klehr, Haynes, and Frisov, Secret World of American Communism. For a rebuttal to Haynes and Klehr, see Zumoff, Communist International and US Communism; Haberlen, “Between Global Aspirations and Local Realities.” 47. ​Storrs, Second Red Scare, 6. 48. ​Quoted in Mill, “New Republic of the Philippines,” 16. 49. ​“The Following Is the Platform of the Demo­cratic Alliance,” August 12, 1945, Paraguay to Philippines, Military Attaché Files, 1938–1948, Military Intelligence Division, box 187, rec­ord group (RG) 165, Rec­ords of the War Department General and Special Staffs (hereafter RG 165), United States National Archives and Rec­ords Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter Archives II). 50. ​I draw on Reg Whitaker’s definition of state repression as “forms of coercive control exercised through the official state apparatus.” For the difference between state repression and po­liti­cal repression, see Whitaker, “Fighting the Cold War.,” 24. 51. ​­Because some of the U.S. and Philippine policymaking elites operated in multiple locations and participated in international po­liti­cal venues, their views of the Philippines are critical to understanding conceptualizations of global politics writ large.

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52. ​Edmond Ryan to Headquarters U.S. Army Forces Western Pacific, G-3 Guerrilla Affairs Section, November 23, 1945, Guerrillas, Hukbalahap, box 239, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Rec­ords of the Adjutant General’s Office (hereafter RG 407), Archives II. 53. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists,’ ” U.S. News and World Report, February 13, 1953, ser. 11, Ramón Magsaysay Papers, Magsaysay Center, Manila. 54. ​Edward Lansdale, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam,” team working paper, June 8, 1964, box 74, Speeches and Writings, Edward Geary Lansdale Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 55. ​Edward Lansdale, “OSO Working Paper,” September 10, 1958, Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff FOIA Reading Room, accessed August  21, 2019, https://­www​.­esd​.­whs​.­mil​ /­Portals​/­54​/­Documents​/­FOID​/­Reading%20Room​/­Special​_­Collections​/­13​-­M​-­13460001​.­pdf (hereafter Lansdale FOIA NSA). 56. ​Lansdale, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam.” Lansdale offered the names of Dean Acheson and Allen Dulles, among o ­ thers, as potential board members. 57. ​Lansdale, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam.” 58. ​Lansdale, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam”; Lansdale, “OSO Working Paper.” 59. ​Lansdale, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam.” 60. ​Although Lansdale’s ­favor in Washington was waning, his “international Freedom Com­ pany” idea made its way into a memorandum sent to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy only two weeks ­later. “One method of deployment would be to send some of the elite into a critical area, as a replacement for a complete country team and with s­imple o ­ rders to win U.S. goals. When the elite had won, it would leave ­behind a blueprint for follow-up actions and return home for deployment elsewhere or for splitting up into cadres.” Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940–1990, accessed August 6, 2019, https://­www​.­statecraft​.­org​/­chapter8​.­html#43. 61. ​“Freedom Incorporated,” n.d., Box 46, Edward Lansdale Papers. 62. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, 163, 191. 63. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, xlv. 64. ​On Lawrence and Britain’s “covert empire” in the M ­ iddle East, see Satia, Spies in Arabia, 7–11. 65. ​Said, Orientalism, 230–46. Jonathan Nashel does consider imperialism in Edward Lansdale’s Cold War, 69, 110. Additional works on Lansdale include Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars; Currey, Edward Lansdale. 66. ​Even ­after he fell out of f­ avor in Washington’s policymaking circles, Lansdale’s tactics continued to be used in counterrevolutionary operations in Africa, Asia, and the ­Middle East. McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, 384. In a 1971 interview, Lyndon B. Johnson referred to Lansdale’s CIA operations in the Ca­r ib­bean as “Murder Inc.” Janos, “Last Days of the President.” 67. ​Edward Lansdale, n.d., (routing memo attached to this document has October 18, 1957 as date), “A Cold War Program for Defense,” CIA-­RDP80R01731R000300160011-4, CREST, Archives II. 68. ​United States Congress, House Committee on International Relations, “Hearing on the Republic of Philippines Military Assistance Act,” June 7, 1946, in Selected Executive Session Hearings of the Committee, 1943–1950, vol. 7, pt. 1, United States Policy in the Far East (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 11, 26. 69. ​As geographer Edward Soja has suggested, geographic territories do not “set the stage” for the play of history. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 14. Other works on spatial politics that have informed my analy­sis include Lefebvre, State, Space,World; Brenner, New State Spaces; Elden, Terror and Territoriality; Smith, “Politics of Scale”; Smith, “Scale Bending.” 70. ​Ballantyne and Burton, “Empires,” 295–305.

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71. ​For a recent history of international anticommunism, see Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right. 72. ​Ballantyne and Burton, “Empires,” 307. 73. ​Lanza, “Huklandia,” 479. 74. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” 75. ​From its founding in 1930 ­until the merger of the socialist and communist parties in 1938, the PKP was known in En­glish as the Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (CPPI). Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, Communism in the Philippines. ­Because the Philippines was a U.S. colony, the PKP was originally u ­ nder the wing of the CPUSA. McLane, Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia, 171–72. 76. ​Edward Lansdale, “Specific Example: Vietnam, Dec 54–­May 55,” Lansdale FOIA NSA. 77. ​Man, Soldiering through Empire, 1–16. 78. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 263. 79. ​Malcolm, American Colonial Careerist, 45.

1. An Amazing Rec­ord of Red Plotting 1. ​Richard V. Oulahan, “Moscow Directly Accused,” New York Times, January 13, 1927. 2. ​Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 1–4. 3. ​“Mexico Involved as Borah Assails Nicaraguan Policy,” New York Times, January 9, 1927. 4. ​“Text of Kellogg’s Charges against Latin American Reds,” New York Times, January 13, 1927. 5. ​Hopkins, American Empire, 446–50; Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 192–93. 6. ​Nichols, Promise and Peril, 319. 7. ​Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism, 3–4; Nichols, Promise and Peril, 287. 8. ​Go, Patterns of Empire, 67–68. 9. ​“American Imperialism,” Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1927. 10. ​“Kellogg Discloses Amazing Rec­ord of Red Plotting,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1927. 11. ​Hudson, Bankers and Empire, 269–75. 12. ​Gregory and Flores, “Communist Party Membership.” 13. ​For a particularly succinct description of the “alien external force” idea in U.S. countersubversive traditions, see Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 46–48. 14. ​On the WILPF, Borah, and the Kellogg-­Briand Pact, see Nichols, Promise and Peril, 274–312. 15. ​Jacobson, Soviet Union, 237–38. 16. ​Patch, “Soviet-­American Po­liti­cal and Trade Relations.” 17. ​“Text of Kellogg’s Charges.” 18. ​Streets-­Salter and Getz, Empires and Colonies, 460. 19. ​Sedgewick, “What Is Imperial about Coffee?” 20. ​Rosenberg, “Wilsonianism.” 21. ​Steel, Walter Lipp­mann, 237–38. 22. ​League against Imperialism and for National In­de­pen­dence General Council, “Agenda,” World Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, Brussels, February 10, 1927, ARCH00804.11, League against Imperialism Archives, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 23. ​“Organisations and Delegates Attending the Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism,” February 10, 1927, League against Imperialism Archives. 24. ​“All-­American Anti-­Imperialist League,” n.d., fond 515, opis 1, delo 575, reel 39, Rec­ords of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 25. ​“Philippine Resolution,” December 9–11, 1927, ARCH00804.116, League against Imperialism Archives.

200   N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 4 – 3 0

26. ​“List of Organisations and Delegates Attending the Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism,” n.d., ARCH00804.2, League against Imperialism Archives. On Almenana’s party status, see Manuel Gomez to Jay Lovestone, October 4, 1927, fond 515, opis 1, delo 1067, reel 80, Rec­ords of the CPUSA. 27. ​“Minutes: Subcommittee of DEC on Imperialism,” January 14, 1927, fond 515, opis 1, delo 1212, Rec­ords of the CPUSA. 28. ​Eley, “Marxism and Socialist Revolution,” 47–48. 29. ​Streets-­Salter, World War One, 169–72. 30. ​Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and Amer­i­ca, 26. 31. ​Ballantyne and Burton, “Empires,” 428–29. 32. ​Thomas, Vio­lence and Colonial Order; McKeown, Melancholy Order. 33. ​Young, “Law and Order,” 128–29. See also Foster, “Secret Police Cooperation.” 34. ​On U.S. imperial exceptionalism in the Philippines, see Kramer, Blood of Government, 15–17. 35. ​On Filipino l­abor migration to the United States, see Poblete, Islanders in the Empire; Baldoz, Third Asiatic Invasion; Fujita-­Rony, American Workers. 36. ​Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director to Robert F. Kelly, February 5, 1928, FBI FOIA File: 64-­HQ-200-239-4; “Report: Communist International Activities,” March 8, 1931, FBI FOIA File: 64-­HQ-200-239-4; “What Happens at a Communist Meeting,” April 25, 1936, FBI FOIA File: 64-­HQ-200-239-4. 37. ​Tooze, Deluge, 27–29. 38. ​Gerwarth and Manela, “­Great War.” 39. ​Ballantyne and Burton, “Empires,” 413–31. 40. ​Lentz-­Smith, Freedom Strug­gles; Fogarty, Race and War in France. 41. ​Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 5. 42. ​Ballantyne and Burton, “Empires,” 418. 43. ​Kramer, Blood of Government, 191; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 386. 44. ​Abinales, “American Rule.” 45. ​Investigation of Communist Propaganda: Hearings before a Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States of the House of Representatives, 75th Cong., pt. 5, vol. 4, 1270 (1930) (Anacleto Almenana to Pablo Manlapit, January 5, 1928). 46. ​Smith, American Empire, 186–87. 47. ​Ang, Southeast Asia’s Cold War, 16. 48. ​Rosenberg, “Wilsonianism,” 854. 49. ​Kramer, Blood of Government, 15–17; Rosenberg, “Wilsonianism,” 861. 50. ​Rosenberg, “Wilsonianism,” 863. 51. ​Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World, 1–4. 52. ​Foster, Projections of Power, 44–52, 69–71; Hopkins, American Empire, 447–49. 53. ​Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 138. 54. ​Foster, Projections of Power, 70, 82. 55. ​Foster, Projections of Power, 70, 82. 56. ​Gouda and Zaalberg, American Visions, 67. 57. ​“Foreign Financing a Business ­Matter: President of the New York Stock Exchange Calls American Financial Imperialism a Myth,” Wall Street Journal, February 18, 1927. 58. ​On the Philippine legislature’s instructions to the Philippine mission in 1919, see Kalaw, Self-­Government in the Philippines, 196–202. 59. ​Woodrow Wilson, “Eighth Address to Congress,” December 7, 1920, transcript, Miller Center, University of ­Virginia, https://­millercenter​.­org​/­the​-­presidency​/­presidential​-­speeches​/­december​ -­7​-­1920​-­eighth​-­annual​-­message.

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60. ​On elite dominance of Philippine politics prior to Filipinization, see Paredes, “Origins of National Politics.” 61. ​Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines.” On the expansion of state bureaucracy, see Doeppers, Manila, 1900–1941, 137–38. 62. ​Franco, Elections and Democ­ratization, 45–46. 63. ​Kramer, Blood of Government, 357. 64. ​Forbes, Philippine Islands, 1:186. 65. ​Forbes, Philippine Islands, 1:186. 66. ​Forbes praises Dutch and British colonial administrations for their public health efforts. Forbes, Philippine Islands, 2:394. 67. ​Moore, American Imperialism and the State, 189. 68. ​Forbes, Philippine Islands, 2:404. 69. ​Forbes, Philippine Islands, 1:186. For a thorough discussion of racial capitalism, economic knowledge, and the colonial state in the Philippines, see Lumba, “Monetary Authorities.” 70. ​Abinales, “American Rule.” 71. ​Public Laws Passed by the Philippine Commission (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1905), 3:64. 72. ​Ventura, “From Small Farms”; Putzel, Captive Land, 49–61. 73. ​Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines, 23–26. 74. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 26–55. 75. ​Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 20. Foster, Projections of Power, 43–44. 76. ​Corpuz, Economic History of the Philippines, 24. 77. ​Economic Notes on the Philippine Islands, July 1, 1934, Regional Files, 1922–1944, entry 77, box 1843, Military Intelligence Division, RG 165, Archives II. 78. ​On congressional debates, see Barreto, “Imperial Thoughts.” On Filipino migration to the United States, see Poblete, Islanders in the Empire; Baldoz, Third Asiatic Invasion; Fujita-­Rony, American Workers. 79. ​Originally the Kalipunang Pangbasa ng mga Manggagawa at Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (Philippine National Confederation of Workers and Peasants). On the 1922 program, see “Palatuntunan ng Kalipunang Pangbasa ng mga Manggagawa at Magbubukid sa Pilipinas,” National Library of the Philippines, Manila; Richardson, Komunista, 57. 80. ​The Sakdalista po­liti­cal party was officially established in 1933. Sturtevant, Popu­lar Uprisings in the Philippines, 219. On Sakdals, see Terami-­Wada, Sakdalistas’ Strug­gle for Philippine In­de­pen­dence; Milagros Guerrero, “Peasant Discontent and the Sakdal Uprising,” Praxis (August-­September, 1968): 40– 56. On Ang Bagong Katipunan, see Takagi, Central Banking, 42–43. 81. ​Roo­se­velt, “Philippine In­de­pen­dence.” 82. ​Ventura, “From Small Farms.” 83. ​Doeppers, Manila, 1900–1941, 118. 84. ​Doeppers, Manila, 1900–1941, 118. See also Kerkvliet, Mutual Aid and Manila Unions. 85. ​As required by section 1638 of the Administrative Code of 1917. Annual Report of the Trea­ surer of the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1917), 45. 86. ​Doeppers, Manila, 1900–1941, 119, 122; Richardson, Genesis, 70. In 1918, the Bureau of ­Labor reported 147,331 ­union members and 143 ­unions in Manila. Report of the Governor General of the Philippine Islands to the Secretary of War, 1918 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 210. 87. ​Doeppers, Manila, 1900–1941, 172n53. See also Chiba, “Cigar-­Makers.” 88. ​Kerkvliet, Manila Workers’ Unions, 6. 89. ​The remaining twenty-­nine organ­izations represented “mutual aid and fraternal, patriotic organ­izations.” Kerkvliet, Manila Workers’ Unions, 32; Richardson, Komunista, 28.

202   N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 5 – 4 0

90. ​On Evangelista, see Simbulan, Si Crisanto Evangelista. 91. ​Stolte, “Uniting the Oppressed ­Peoples.” 92. ​Alfred Wagenknecht, “Fifth Letter: Final Report on Situation in the Philippine Islands,” June 27, 1924, East Asia Trip: Philippines, box 1, Alfred and Hortense Wagenknecht and Helen and Carl Winter F ­ amily Papers, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagener L ­ abor Archives, New York University. 93. ​ See Carpio, “Situation in the Philippines,” 1111. CPUSA members, including Earl Browder and Eugene Dennis—­both f­uture general secretaries of the party—­also traveled to the Philippines in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 94. ​Executive Committee of the Communist International, “First Transport Workers Conference,” 697. 95. ​Executive Committee of the Communist International, “First Transport Workers Conference,” 697. 96. ​Foster, Projections of Power, 34–37. 97. ​Crisanto Evangelista, “Class Solidarity in the Philippines,” Pan-­Pacific Monthly, no. 78 ( July 1929), folder 18, box 25, Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 98. ​“The Split in the ­Labor Congress,” Daily Worker, August 10, 1929. 99. ​“Ang Pagtungo sa Paris Ni Manahan Ay Lilikha Ng Gusot Sa Piling ng Mga Obero,” Pagkakaisa, June 28, 1929; J. Quirante, untitled, Pagkakaisa, June 17, 1929. 100. ​Lorimer, “Philippine Communism,” 462. Even though the COF was encouraged (by the American Federation of ­Labor [AFL]) to be nonpo­liti­cal, the majority of its members tended to support Nacionalista Party politics. Richardson, Genesis, 104. 101. ​Evangelista, “Class Solidarity in the Philippines.” 102. ​On Feleo, see Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 51–52. According to Kerkvliet, the KPMP eventually “denounced” Manahan ­after “discovering that he had agreed to work secretly for the government.” Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 47. 103. ​Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 35. 104. ​Ponce to Quezon, “las actividadas rojas,” January 21, 1929, Justice Department and ­Labor Subfiles, box 177, ser. 7, Manuel L. Quezon Papers, National Library of the Philippines, Manila. 105. ​Ponce to Quezon, “las actividadas rojas.” 106. ​Esteban Gonzalez, June 29, 1931, Central Decimal Files, 1930–1939, 811b.00/28, box 5291, RG 59, General Rec­ords of the Department of State (hereafter RG 59), Archives II. 107. ​Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, Communism in the Philippines, 124. 108. ​Gupta, “Communism and the Crisis,” 221. 109. ​Young, Postcolonialism, 153–55. 110. ​Gupta “Communism and the Crisis,” 228. 111. ​ Communist Party of the United States of Amer­ ic­a, Workers Monthly 11 (March–­ September 1932), 641. 112. ​“Ora Funeral,” Manila Bulletin, January 31, 1931. 113. ​Carpio, “First Congress.” 114. ​Quoted in “The ­People of the Philippine Islands vs. Crisanto Evangelista, Jacinto Manahan, and Dominador Ambrosio, Official,” Official Gazette, vol. 31 (September 7, 1933), box 25, folder 17, Hayden Papers. 115. ​Evangelista, “Class Solidarity in the Philippines.” 116. ​Chu, “The ‘Chinaman’ Question,” 19. 117. ​Speech by L. H. Chu, Pan-­Pacific Monthly, no. 78 ( July 1929). 118. ​Speech by Antonino D. Ora, Pan-­Pacific Monthly, no. 78 ( July 1929).

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119. ​When thirteen Chinese workers w ­ ere arrested for participating in a May Day rally in 1931, the Pan-­Pacific Trade Union (PPTUS) or­ga­nized to avoid their deportation and delivery “into the clutches of the Kuomintang hangman.” Urgent Appeal by the PPTUS to Save the Chinese Workers Threatened with Deportation from the Philippines into the Clutches of the Kuomintang Hangman, n.d., Central Decimal Files, 1930–1939, 811b.00B/28, box 5291, RG 59, Archives II. 120. ​As recent scholarship on black internationalism has shown, it was black and Asian anticolonial Communists who demanded a greater engagement of race in the Comintern, not vice versa. Fowler, Japa­nese and Chinese Immigrant Activists; Makalani, Cause of Freedom. 121. ​ Investigation of Communist Propaganda, 473 (1930) (Workers Party Platform, 1928). 122. ​ Daily Worker, January 6, 1930. 123. ​Francis Ralston Welsh to Frank B. Kellogg, October 28, 1925, Central Decimal Files, 1910–1929, 811b.00b/5, box 7718, RG 59, Archives II. 124. ​“Sedition, Syndicalism, Sabotage, and Anarchy,” Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-­Sixth Congress, 2nd Session, December 1919 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 53. 125. ​Francis Ralston Welsh, October 28, 1925. 126. ​Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, 243. 127. ​Olmsted, Right out of California, 21. 128. ​Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, 14. 129. ​Fischer, Spider Web, 188. 130. ​Philippine Constabulary, General Manual, 9. 131. ​Annual Report of the Governor General of the Philippines Islands, 1930 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932), 15. On the PC’s 1930 activities, see Annual Report of the Governor General, 52–53. 132. ​McCoy, Policing Amer­i­ca’s Empire. 133. ​McCoy, Policing Amer­i­ca’s Empire, 181–82. 134. ​Quoted in McCoy, Policing Amer­i­ca’s Empire, 28, 158. 135. ​Davis to Stimson, n.d., Philippine Files, Regional Files, 1922–1944, entry 77, box 1842, Military Intelligence Division, RG 165, Archives II. 136. ​Headquarters, Philippine Constabulary, February 19, 1930, General Classified Files, 1914– 1945, entry 5, box 1296, RG 350, Rec­ords of the Bureau of Insular Affairs (hereafter RG 350), Archives II. 137. ​Quoted in Habal, “Radical Vio­lence in the Fields,” 2. 138. ​Spector, Story of the Imperial Valley, 5. 139. ​Quoted in Spector, Story of the Imperial Valley, 3. 140. ​­There are dozens of articles on the Philippines in the communist press. Examples include “Filipino Masses Hit Suppression,” Daily Worker, April 24, 1930; “Solidarity for the Emancipation Strug­gle of the Filipino Proletariat,” Daily Worker, June 21, 1931; “U.S. Workers Fight for Filipino In­de­pen­dence,” Daily Worker, December 24, 1932; “A Filipino Worker in the U.S. Tells Why He Joined Communist Party,” Daily Worker, October 23, 1934; “Filipino Peasants in Strug­gle against U.S. Imperialism,” Western Worker, November 28, 1932; “Filipino and Mexican Workers Join,” Western Worker, August 15, 1932; “Call for Defense of Philippine C.P. Leaders,” Western Worker, November 28, 1932; “Fight for Unconditional In­de­pen­dence!,” Western Worker, March 20, 1933. 141. ​“Against the Imperialist Terror in the Philippines,” Daily Worker, February 20, 1931. 142. ​K. S. Patton to Secretary of State, Central Decimal Files, November 18, 1930, 1930–1939, 811b.00/20, box 5291, RG 59, Archives II. 143. ​Secretary of State to Secretary of War, August 26, 1930, Central Decimal Files, 1930– 1939, 811b.00/13A, box 5291, RG 59, Archives II.

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144. ​“Soviet Activities in the Philippines and Other Places,” August 15, 1927, Central Decimal Files, 1910–1929, 811b.00b/6, box 7718, RG 59, Archives II. 145. ​C. H. Bowers, Memorandum for Chief of Constabulary, September 12, 1928, Central Decimal Files, 1910–1939, 898.00b/675, box 7718, RG 59, Archives II. 146. ​C. H. Bowers, Memorandum for Chief of Constabulary. 147. ​United States, Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Anti-­Imperialist League,” San Antonio, TX, June 3, 1927, FBI Rec­ords: The Vault, August  21, 2019, https://­vault​.­f bi​.­gov​/­All%20American​ %20Anti%20Imperialist%20League%20​/­All%20American%20Anti%20Imperialist%20League%20 Part%201%20of%201​/­view, 19. See also Bao, “Anti-­Imperialist League.” 148. ​Goodall, “Red Herrings?,” 74–75. Hynes was a former “­labor spy” who had famously infiltrated the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical ­labor ­union, in 1923. See Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 59–61. 149. ​ Investigation of Communist Propaganda, 32 (1930). 150. ​Jung, “Seditious Subjects.” 151. ​Department of State, Division of Western Eu­ro­pean Affairs, to W. R. ­Castle Jr., May 14, 1931, Central Decimal Files, 1930–1939, 811b.00/24, box 5291, RG 59, Archives II. ­Castle served as Henry Stimson’s undersecretary of state. 152. ​Davis to Parker, February 6, 1931, General Classified Files, entry 5, box 1296, RG 350, Archives II. 153. ​Guerrero, “Colorum Uprising.” 154. ​“­Battle in the Philippines,” New York Times, January 11, 1931; “Rebels Lose B ­ attle for Philippine Town,” New York Times, January 12, 1931; Narcisco Ramor, “57 Colorums Face Murder, Sedition Charges in Court,” Manila Bulletin, January 20, 1931. Ultimately, only twenty w ­ ere charged. 155. ​C. H. Bowers quoted in “Philippine Rising Linked to Religion,” New York Times, January 13, 1931. 156. ​Frank Sherman, “General Strike in Philippines Halts Shipping,” New York Herald-­Tribune, January 28, 1931; “Officials Join Forces in War against Reds,” New York Herald-­Tribune, February 2, 1931. On the 1930 and 1931 Iloilo general strikes, see McCoy, “Iloilo General Strike.” 157. ​Sherman, “General Strike in Philippines.” 158. ​“Philippine Rising Linked to Religion.” 159. ​On a longer history of peasant revolts, see Kessler, Rebellion and Repression, 5–27. 160. ​“Re: Colorums Outbreak,” n.d., Philippine Files, Regional Files, 1922–1944, entry 77, box 1842, Military Intelligence Division, RG 165, Archives II. The term “colorum” refers to a movement that began ­under Spanish rule and originally centered on the Catholic Church’s refusal to accept Filipinos in the clergy; it came to mean any millenarian peasant movement. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression, 12. 161. ​Roxas helped lead a faction of politicians who supported the passage of the Hare-­Hawes-­ Cutting Act, a 1933 bill that established a ten-­year timetable for Philippine in­de­pen­dence, which Sakdalistas opposed. The bill included provisions that would gradually institute tariffs on Philippine exports to the United States, which the sugar bloc in the Philippines as well as Quezon opposed. On the po­liti­cal ­battle over the act, see Terami-­Wada, Sakdalistas’ Strug­gle for Philippine In­de­pen­dence, 29–35; Gopinath, “President Manuel Quezon.” 162. ​“The Tayug Affair,” n.d., Philippine Files, Regional Files, 1922–1944, entry 77, box 1842, Military Intelligence Division, RG 165, Archives II. 163. ​“Communist Seeds Sprouting in North Warns T. Confesor,” Manila Times, January 11, 1931. 164. ​“Tayug Affair.” 165. ​Davis to Parker, February 6, 1931.

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166. ​Quoted in Guerrero, “The Colorum Uprising,” 77. 167. ​“Manila Reports Plot of 4,000 Reds to Rebel; Says They Planned to Get Arms from Japan,” New York Times, March 4, 1931. On Ricaristas, see Terami-­Wada, Sakdalistas’ Strug­gle for Philippine In­de­pen­dence, 137–41. 168. ​“18 More Reds to Be Charged with Sedition,” Manila Bulletin, February 21, 1931. 169. ​ Annual Report of the Governor General, 15. 170. ​“Manila Reports Plot of 4,000 Reds.” 171. ​“18 More Reds to Be Charged.” 172. ​“Officials Join Forces in War”; “18 More Reds to Be Charged.” 173. ​“Says Soviet Spreads Philippine Sedition,” New York Times, March 20, 1930; “Activities of Communist in Philippines Revealed,” New York Herald-­Tribune, March 21, 1930. 174. ​Memorandum for the Superintendent, n.d., Intelligence Division, Subject Files, Constabulary, Philippines, 1929–1943, ser. 7, Quezon Papers. 175. ​“Red Doctrines Are Seditious Fiscal Rules,” Manila Bulletin, March 12, 1931; “Fear Union of Colorums and Red Force,” Manila Bulletin, February 2, 1931; “Fiscal ­Will Accuse 18 Men ­Here ­Today of Seditious Acts,” Manila Times, February 2, 1931; box 25, Hayden Papers. 176. ​“Red Doctrines Are Seditious Fiscal Rules”; “Fear Union of Colorums and Red Force”; “Fiscal ­Will Accuse 18 Men.” 177. ​“300 Filipino Reds Arrested for Sedition; All Refuse Bail, Jamming Overtaxed Jails,” New York Times, June 1, 1931. 178. ​“23 Reds Sent to Jail, ­Will Appeal Cases,” news clipping, n.d., box 25, Hayden Papers. 179. ​Evangelista, Communism and Capitalism, 32. 180. ​CUFA, “Illegality of the Communist Party.” 181. ​CUFA, “Illegality of the Communist Party.” 182. ​Official Gazette, “The ­People of the Philippine Islands vs. Crisanto Evangelista.” 183. ​Evangelista, Communism and Capitalism, 37. 184. ​Investigation into the Activities of Communists in the United States: Hearing before the Committee on Rules, House of Representatives, 71st Cong. (1930); Investigation of Communist Propaganda, 36 (1930). 185. ​“Communist Activities in French Indo-­China,” May 12, 1930, Henry S. Waterman, U.S. Consulate, Saigon, French Indochina, Consular Posts, Saigon, French Indochina, vol. 133, RG 84, Rec­ords of Foreign Ser­vice Posts of the Department of State (hereafter RG 84), Archives II. 186. ​The French colony faced considerable challenges to colonial rule during the Yen Bay mutiny in February 1930 and the Nghe Tinh strikes in 1930–1931. On colonial police response, see Thomas, “Fighting ‘Communist Banditry.’ ” 187. ​“Investigation of Communism in French Indo-­China,” July 30, 1931, Henry S. Waterman, U.S. Consulate, Saigon, French Indochina, Consular Posts, Saigon, French Indochina, vol. 134, RG 84, Archives II; Waterman to Secretary of State, Copies of Po­liti­cal Reports for the Governor-­General of the Philippines, May 20, 1931, Consular Posts, Saigon, French Indochina, vol. 133, RG 84, Archives II. 188. ​Department of State, Division of Western Eu­ro­pean Affairs, to ­Castle, May 14, 1931. 189. ​Secretary of War to Secretary of State, March 31, 1931, General Classified Files, entry 5, box 1296, RG 350, Archives II. 190. ​Patrick Hurley to Secretary of State, February 28, 1931 and May 8, 1931, Central Decimal Files, 1930–1939, 811b.00/21, box 5291, RG 59, Archives II. 191. ​W. R. ­Castle Jr. to Patrick Hurly, July 20, 1931, Central Decimal Files, 1930–1939, 811b.00/24, box 5291, RG 59, Archives II. 192. ​Department of State, Division of Western Eu­ro­pean Affairs to ­Castle, May 14, 1931.

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193. ​José P. Laurel, Confidential Memorandum for His Excellency, Manuel L. Quezon, President of the Philippines, May 31, 1941, Subfile: Justice Department 1934–1941, ­Labor 1928–1931, box 177, ser. 7, Quezon Papers. 194. ​­Labor Bulletin, vol. 4, nos. 3–4 (March–­April 1941), Commonwealth of the Philippines, Department of ­Labor, entry 5, RG 350, Archives II. 195. ​Latham, Liberal Moment, 162–63. 196. ​Laurel, Confidential Memorandum. 197. ​Laurel, Confidential Memorandum.

2. State Vio­lence and the Prob­lem of Po­liti­cal Legitimacy 1. ​“Natives near Manila Fight Their Own War,” New York Times, February 5, 1945. The same article ran in the Washington Post as “Po­liti­cal Pot Begins Boiling in Philippines.” 2. ​“This Is MacArthur’s Goal: Mighty Blow Answers Bataan’s Plea,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1945; Yates McDaniel, “MacArthur’s Luzon Landing Begins Completion of Cycle,” Baltimore Sun, January 10, 1945. Other examples include “I Have Returned!,” Atlanta Constitution, January 11, 1945; “Back to Bataan!,” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1945. 3. ​“FDR Hails Manila as Axis Warning,” Atlanta Constitution, February 5, 1945. 4. ​ New York Times, “Natives near Manila Fight Their Own War.” 5. ​“Army’s Civil Affairs Sets New High Mark in US-­Philippine Relations,” ­Free Philippines, November 23, 1944. 6. ​Kramer, Blood of Government, 308. 7. ​“Liberation of Manila,” Washington Post, February 5, 1945. 8. ​Ileto, Knowledge and Pacification, 206–12. 9. ​Taft served as governor-­general of the Philippines from 1901 to 1903. Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 134. 10. ​Kelly, State of the Po­liti­cal. 11. ​CIA, “Pos­si­ble Developments Resulting from the Granting of Amnesty to Accused Collaborators in the Philippines,” April 28, 1948, accessed May 17, 2017, https://­www​.­cia​.­gov​/­library​ /­readingroom​/­docs​/­DOC​_­0000258331​.­pdf. 12. ​Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 517. 13. ​United States High Commissioner to the Philippines, Seventh and Final Report of the High Commissioner to the Philippines, Covering the Period from September 14, 1945 to July 4, 1946 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947), 6. 14. ​For the institutionalization of vio­lence, see Steinberg, Philippines, 105. 15. ​Jose, “War and Vio­lence”; Ileto, “Philippine Wars.” For the debate over w ­ hether the war represented continuity or a break from prewar history, see McCoy, “ ‘Politics by Other Means’ ”; Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration; Steinberg, Philippines, 101–15. 16. ​For a decidedly hagiographic but detailed biography of Laurel, see Quirino, Laurel Story. 17. ​Collaboration remains an open question, particularly in regard to Manuel Roxas. See Bello, “Class Politics of World War II.” The historical rec­ord on Roxas is mixed: MacArthur famously verified Roxas’s war­time ser­vice, but postwar summaries of war­time intelligence reports claimed Roxas had fed information to guerrillas. T ­ hese reports ­were prepared within MacArthur’s command, and MacArthur’s personal relationship with Roxas was well known. See “Personal Narrative of Lt. Col. Emilio Cruz sent to C. A. Willoughby, 30 July 1946,” in Intelligence Activities in the Philippines during the Japa­nese Occupation (Tokyo: General Headquarters, Far East Command, 1948), 126.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 6 4 – 6 7    207

18. ​“To all our fellow citizens,” March 12, 1945, Rec­ords Relating to Hukbalahap, 1945, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Rec­ords of General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific (hereafter RG 496), Archives II. 19. ​Pash, Currents of War, 194; LaFeber, Clash, 40–45, 214–46; Pike, Hirohito’s War, 744; Marshall, To Have and Have Not. 20. ​Jose, Philippine Army. 21. ​Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 12–17. 22. ​Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 24. 23. ​Many in the ten divisions of the Philippine Army carried outdated 1903 Springfield ­r ifles or Enfield r­ ifles from WWI. Bailey, Philippine Islands, 7. 24. ​Marshall, To Have and Have Not. 25. ​Ambassador Joseph C. Grew to Secretary of State, October 2, 1940, in United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Japan, 1931–1941, ed. Joseph V. Fuller (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 2:171. 26. ​As part of the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere, Japan granted nominal in­de­pen­ dence to the Philippines on October 15, 1943. Duus, “Greater East Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere.” 27. ​Matthiessen, Japa­nese Pan-­Asianism. 28. ​Morton, War in the Pacific, 96. 29. ​“Totoo na nag sundalong Filipino ay may lakas loob,” n.d., Japa­nese Leaflets and Misc. Pictures, Japa­nese Occupation, box 244, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II; “Bonit isla Filipinas,” n.d., Japa­nese Leaflets and Misc. Pictures, Japa­nese Occupation, box 244, entry 1084, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 30. ​“To the Officers and Men of the Filipino Scouts, XIth Division,” March 1942, Japa­nese Leaflets and Misc. Pictures, Japa­nese Occupation, box 244, entry 1084, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 31. ​United States High Commissioner to the Philippines, Seventh and Final Report, 6. 32. ​“The Chief of Staff (Marshall) to the Commanding General of United States Army Forces in the Far East (MacArthur), 9 February 1942,” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1942, vol. 1, General:The British Commonwealth;The Far East, ed. G. Bernard Noble and E. R. Perkins (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 897. 33. ​“The Commanding General of United States Army Forces in the Far East (MacArthur) to Chief of Staff (Marshall), 8 February 1942,” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1942, 1:894. 34. ​Marshall, To Have and Have Not. 35. ​Marshall communicated with Quezon via tele­grams to MacArthur. “The Chief of Staff (Marshall) to the Commanding General of United States Army Forces in the Far East (MacArthur),” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1942, 1:897. 36. ​“The Assistant Chief of Staff (Gerow) to the Adjutant General (Adams),” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1942, 1:900. 37. ​Friend, Between Two Empires, 179. 38. ​ The Japa­ nese Imperial Army marched 78,000 soldiers—66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans—­from the Bataan Peninsula to the prison at Camp O’Donnell. 39. ​MacArthur’s withdrawal, the forced “Bataan Death March” to Japa­nese prisoner of war camps or “hell-­ships,” and the ­battle at Corregidor are among the most well-­known narratives of WWII in the Philippines. For a comprehensive account on the “defensibility” of the Philippines and the likelihood of an attack by imperial Japan, see Linn, Guardians of Empire.

208   N O T E S T O P A G E S 6 7 – 7 1

40. ​“Awit Sa Paglikhila ng Bagong Pilipinas,” n.d., Japa­nese Propaganda Publications, Japa­nese Occupation, box 224, entry 1094, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 41. ​“Radio and Propaganda,” n.d., Correspondence of Luzon Guerrillas, Guerrillas, Guerrilla Rec­ords, box 256, entry 1094, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 42. ​Official Gazette 1, no. 1 ( January 1942): 205. 43. ​Castro, Musical Renderings, 129–30. 44. ​Memoirs and historical studies on the guerrilla campaign often emphasize the role of U.S. soldiers. Examples include Lapham and Norling, Lapham’s Raiders; Hunt and Norling, ­Behind Japa­ nese Lines; Holmes, Wendell Fertig. 45. ​“Guerrilla Forces Western Luzon,” April 29, 1944, Correspondence of Luzon Guerrillas, Guerrillas, box 257, entry 1094, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 46. ​Ryan to Headquarters U.S. Army Forces Western Pacific, November 23, 1945, Guerrillas, Guerrilla Affairs Section, Hukbalahap, box 257, entry 1094, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 47. ​The two most comprehensive studies of the Huks are Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, and Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion. 48. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 89. 49. ​“The Military Committee,” May 21, 1942, Rec­ords Relating to Hukbalahap, 1945, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 50. ​“Military Committee,” May 21, 1942. 51. ​“Minutes of the Conference Held at Barrio San Juan,” July 5, 1942, Rec­ords Relating to Hukbalahap, 1945, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 52. ​Quoted in Lorimer, “Philippine Communism,” 470. 53. ​“Minutes of the Conference Held at Barrio San Juan,” July 5, 1942. 54. ​“Minutes of the Conference Held at Barrio San Juan,” July 5, 1942. On the Atlantic Charter, see Borgwardt, New Deal for the World, 14–88. 55. ​Walter Lipp­mann, “The Post-­Singapore War in the East,” Washington Post, February 21, 1942. For a discussion of Lipp­mann’s piece in relation to the Atlantic Charter and conflicts between British and U.S. views on colonialism during the war, see Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 134–35. 56. ​With assistance from U.S. Communists James S. Allen and Helen Marcy (aliases for Sol Auerbach and Isabelle Auerbach), the PKP instituted a “Popu­lar Front” strategy as prescribed by the Seventh Comintern meeting in 1936. Allen, Radical Left; Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 105–15. 57. ​The “Anti-­Japanese United Front” was a ten-­point program aimed at building or­ga­nized re­sis­tance to the Japa­nese Army and, eventually, the Japa­nese Military Authority. See Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 160. 58. ​Most ­were from the Chinese community in Manila. The squadron was also known as the Wa Chi, which Ken Fuller argues is a “contraction and corruption of Hua Chiao—­‘Overseas Chinese.’ ” Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 167. See also Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 92–93. 59. ​On the po­liti­cal dimensions of protracted warfare, see Karl, Mao Zedong, 57–59. 60. ​On January 1, 1945, the PKP issued a statement that ended with “Long live the United Front against fascists.” “PKP Statement,” January 1, 1945, Rec­ords Relating to Hukbalahap, 1945, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 61. ​On spiritual ele­ments, see Carlson, “Born Again of the ­People.” 62. ​“Minutes of the Conference Held at Barrio San Juan, Municipality of San Luis, Province of Pampanga,” n.d., Rec­ords Relating to Hukbalahap, 1945, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Military

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Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 63. ​“Minutes of the Conference Held at Barrio San Juan,” n.d. 64. ​The proof that Taruc referred to in his letter is unclear. “Memorandum to MacArthur and Osmeña,” n.d., Rec­ords Relating to Hukbalahap, 1945, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 65. ​Estimates on the total number of guerrillas vary. This estimate is taken from U.S. Army Sources. “The Guerrilla Re­sis­tance Movement in Central Luzon,” October 25, 1944, Intelligence Reports and Guerrilla Narratives and Historical Reports, Guerrillas, box 255, entry 1094, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 66. ​In a study of the Sakdals and Ganaps, two organ­izations that believed Philippine in­de­pen­ dence was best achieved through alliance with Japan, Motoe Terami-­Wada claims that a group of Hukbalahaps sought an alliance with the Makapilis, an all-­Filipino, pro-­Japanese army. I do not doubt this could have happened; however, I have not uncovered any documents corroborating this event. See Terami-­Wada, Sakdalistas’ Strug­gle for Philippine In­de­pen­dence, 193–94. 67. ​Lapham and Norling, Lapham’s Raiders, 109. 68. ​“Captain Ners to Hunter and All Other G’s, March 3, 1944,” Guerrillas, Guerrilla Rec­ ords, box 246, entry 1087, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. An intelligence report from October 1944 reiterates the theme of territorial conflict. “The Guerrilla Re­sis­tance Movement in Central Luzon.” 69. ​441st ­Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, February, 1945, Information Report, Central Intelligence, WWII Operations Reports, 1941–1948, box 14587, entry 427, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 70. ​441st ­Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, February, 1945, Information Report. 71. ​Elite collaboration and re­sis­tance was a complex ­matter, and dynamics differed depending on region. McCoy, “ ‘Politics by Other Means.’ ” See also Kintanar et al., Kuwentong Bayan; Constantino, ­Under Japa­nese Rule. 72. ​Carlos Nocum to Robert Lapham, February 1, 1945, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 2, entry P 50488, RG 338, Rec­ords of U.S. Army Operational, Tactical, and Support Organ­izations (hereafter RG 338), Archives II. 73. ​One of the Huks’ rival guerrilla organ­izations conducted a campaign to “clean up the Huks and Makapilis,” an all-­Filipino, pro-­Japanese army, in January and February 1945. “Rogelio Del Rio to General Ser­vice Troops in the Fields,” January 20, 1945, Guerrillas, Guerrilla Rec­ords, box 246, entry 1087, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 74. ​“Watari Group Intelligence Report B,” July 1944, Guerrillas, Guerrilla Rec­ords, box 251, entry 1093, Philippine Archives Collection, RG 407, Archives II. 75. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 115. 76. ​Ryan to Headquarters U.S. Army Forces Western Pacific, November 23, 1945. 77. ​“Activities of Detachment in Magalang, Pampanga,” February 12, 1945, G-2, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 78. ​“Bulnong to Commander of U.S. Forces in Bulacan, February 2, 1945,” Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 2, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 79. ​“Bulnong to Commander of U.S. Forces in Bulacan, February 2, 1945.” 80. ​“Memorandum to MacArthur and Osmeña,” n.d. 81. ​“Memo to Col­o­nel M. E. Jones, March 17th 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 2, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II.

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82. ​“Bulnong to Commander of U.S. Forces in Bulacan, February 2, 1945.” 83. ​“Tele­gram 19 February 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. See also “Civil Affairs and Military Government,” 1945, Correspondence File, Military Government Section, Headquarters Sixth Army, box 1, RG 338, Archives II. 84. ​“Tele­gram 19 February 1945.” 85. ​“History of Squadron 77” and “History of Squadron 97,” n.d., G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 86. ​“Whither Hukbalahap?,” n.d., G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 87. ​“Memo to Chief of Staff,” February 7, 1945, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 88. ​“Synopsis of impor­tant telephone conversation between Captain Miller, 35th Criminal Investigation Section, and Col­o­nel Emigh at 2000 hours 23 February 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 89. ​“Memo, February 25 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 90. ​“The Hukbalahap in Central Luzon,” May 26, 1945, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 2, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 91. ​“Memo to Provost Marshall, 22nd March 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 92. ​“Memorandum to C/S, 5 February 1945,” Memos to Chief of Staff, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 2, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. See also “Memorandum to C of S, 3 February 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 93. ​U.S. Armed Forces did attempt to broker an agreement to cease hostilities between the USAFFE guerrillas and the Huks immediately. “Agreement between USAFFE and Hukbulahap [sic] Party,” February 23, 1945, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. See also “Andres Laderas to CG Sixth Army, February 7th, 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, ­Archives II. 94. ​For an example of the Huk protest against the imprisonment of Taruc and o ­ thers, see “Whither Hukbalahap?” 95. ​F. L. Worcester (CIC) to Seventh Fleet Intelligence, August 6, 1945, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 96. ​Whitney to Feleo, February 17, 1945, G-2, Reports Relating to the Hukbalahaps, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 97. ​“Steintorf to U.S. Secretary of State, 24 August 1945,” Classified General Rec­ords, 1945, file 800, U.S. Consulate, Manila, Philippines, Department of State, box 1, RG 84, Archives II. 98. ​“The Consul General at Manila to Secretary of State, 5 September 1945,” 811B.00/9-545: Tele­gram, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1942, 1:1233. 99. ​Ramon Diokno, “Roxas Violates the Constitution,” Amerasia, December 1946, box 2, folder 2.1, Ira Gollobin Papers, New York Public Library. The Office of Strategic Ser­vices (OSS) and the FBI began investigating Amerasia in 1945, ­after OSS agents broke into Amerasia offices and discovered classified government documents. The FBI arrested editors Philip Jaffe and Kate Mitchell along with two naval officers suspected of leaking the classified documents. The journal also came u ­ nder congres-

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sional scrutiny and became a touchstone in anticommunist attacks against “China Hands” within the State Department and the foreign ser­vice. See Klehr and Radosh, “Amerasia” Spy Case. 100. ​“Notice to All Officers and Soldiers of the Organ­ization,” June 19, 1945, Reports Relating to the Hukbalahaps, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II; “To all our fellow citizens,” March 12, 1945. 101. ​This clash was particularly intense in areas such as Central Luzon, with long-­term class divisions. 102. ​“Tatlong Munisipyo Ng Kapampangan Ang Umano’y Hawak Na Ng Hukbalahap Na Naghihimagsik,” Ang Bayan, August 20, 1945. 103. ​Major General George Decker, chief of staff of the U.S. Sixth Army, reportedly called the Huks “one of the best fighting units I have ever known,” as recorded in the Congressional Rec­ord for August 1 1946. 92 Cong. Rec. 4721 (1946). 104. ​The State Department began publishing the bulletin in 1939. 105. ​Mill, “Philippines Prepares for In­de­pen­dence,” 1. 106. ​Mill, “Philippines Prepares for In­de­pen­dence,” 1. 107. ​Mill, “New Republic of the Philippines,” 15. 108. ​The issue caused a rift between the War Department, the army, and the navy on one side and the Department of the Interior and the State Department on the other. See Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 473–96. 109. ​Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 550. 110. ​Mill, “Philippines Prepares for In­de­pen­dence,”5. 111. ​The idea that U.S. exceptionalism produced a “uniquely American blindness to the nature of po­liti­cal change” is derived from Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 135. 112. ​“Abibuag to Provost Marshal, 6th Army Headquarters, 8 June 1945,” G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 3, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 113. ​H. Ford Wilkins, “Outlaws Disturb Philippines: Huks a State within a State,” New York Times, May 20, 1946. 114. ​Wilkins, “Outlaws Disturb Philippines: Huks a State within a State.” An October 1946 article in Collier’s reported that an “agent of the American government” believed “­there ­were fewer than 50 communists” in the Philippines. Weldon, “Jungle Fever.” See also Crippen, “American Imperialism.” 115. ​Chapman, “Note on the Philippine Election.” 116. ​“The Following Is the Platform of the Demo­cratic Alliance,” August 12, 1945, Military Attaché Files, 1938–1948, Military Intelligence Division, box 187, RG 165, Archives II. On New Deal politics in a global context, see Patel, New Deal. 117. ​“To Our Compatriots in Pampanga,” March 12, 1945, Reports Relating to the Hukbalahaps, Military Intelligence Section Administration, U.S. Army in Southwest Pacific, box 338, entry 52, RG 496, Archives II. 118. ​Members of the DA executive committee included Jose Hilario, Rafael Ledesma, Manuel M. Crudo, Vicente Lava, Jose B. L. Reyes, and Antonio Araneta. Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 140. 119. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 140. 120. ​For example, the Nacionalistas passed the Rice Tenancy Law in 1932, the “first-­ever law on landlord-­tenant relations,” but it was in­effec­tive ­because it required municipal councils—­largely controlled by landowners—to petition the governor-­general before the law could be enforced. See Corpuz, Economic History of the Philippines, 291. 121. ​Luis Taruc, “Peace and Order in Central Luzon,” New China Review, March 1, 1946, box 2, folder 2.1, Gollobin Papers. 122. ​Chapman, “Note on the Philippine Election.” On Roxas’s war­time position, see Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 212.

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123. ​Emma Arce, “G.I. Joe Comes of Age,” New China Review, January 16, 1946, 12–15, box 2, folder 2.1, Gollobin Papers. 124. ​Arce, “G.I. Joe Comes of Age.” 125. ​“Statement by American Veterans of the Philippine Campaign,” June 1946, box 2, folder 2.1, Gollobin Papers. Articles by U.S. soldiers include Millon, “Fascism, Philippine Style”; Pontius, “MacArthur and the Filipinos”; Owens, “A ­Free Philippines?” 126. ​F. L. Worcester to the United States High Commissioner, “Po­liti­cal Developments,” April 30, 1945, box 1, RG 110, Frederic Worcester Papers, MacArthur Memorial Library, Norfolk, VA. 127. ​A. Arguilla, “The Tangled Web in Luzon,” Manila Times, May 30, 1946, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines. 128. ​Arguilla, “Tangled Web in Luzon.” 129. ​Arguilla, “Tangled Web in Luzon.” 130. ​Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines, 23–29. 131. ​Joseph Hayden to Betty Hayden, September 7, 1926, B28, F26, Joseph Ralston Hayden Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 132. ​ Handguns made their way illegally into the hands of civilians via transpacific gun-­ smuggling operations. “Public Order and Safety,” August 15, 1935, file 2780.11, Philippine Islands, Regional Files, 1922–1944, Military Intelligence Division, RG 165, Archives II. 133. ​“Smuggling in the Philippines,” Republic of the Philippines, Office of the President, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, Elpidio Quirino Papers, Ayala Museum, Manila. 134. ​See “Freedom for the Philippines: Fact or Fancy?,” Congressional Rec­ord, August 2, 1946, box 2, folder 2.1, Gollobin Papers. 135. ​“Quick Action Urged to Nip ‘War’ in Luzon,” Manila Times, May 4, 1946. 136. ​“Quick Action Urged to Nip ‘War.’ ” 137. ​The PC was temporarily referred to as the MPC. 138. ​Worcester to the United States High Commissioner, “Po­liti­cal Developments.” 139. ​Worcester to the United States High Commissioner, “Po­liti­cal Developments.” 140. ​Worcester to the United States High Commissioner, “Po­liti­cal Developments.” 141. ​“D-­A Solons Tell Osmena of MP Abuses,” Manila Times, May 3, 1946. 142. ​Zoning, a strategy employed by Japa­nese forces during the occupation, consisted of surrounding a village and demanding that civilians, ­under threat of vio­lence, identify Huks living within the village. 143. ​“D-­A Solons Tell Osmena of MP Abuses.” The police w ­ ere not exempt from long-­held anti-­Chinese sentiments. See Ambassador in the Philippines to Secretary of State, September 8, 1946, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1946, vol. 8, The Far East, ed. John G. Reid and Herbert A. Fine (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 909. 144. ​“Taruc Scores Truce Break, Says Terrorism Continues,” Manila Times, June 27, 1946. 145. ​“Taruc Scores Truce Break.” 146. ​“Taruc Scores Truce Break.” 147. ​Roxas promised a new tenancy law that would grant peasants a greater share of the harvest. See Mill, “New Republic of the Philippines,” 15. 148. ​Worcester (CIC) to Seventh Fleet Intelligence, August 1, 1945, G-2, Assistant Chief of State for Intelligence, Sixth U.S. Army, box 1, entry P 50488, RG 338, Archives II. 149. ​On the Filipino-­Chinese community during the Cold War, see Kung, “Ideological O ­ thers.” 150. ​For a detailed discussion on the b­ attle over the Bell Trade Act, see Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 49–51; Takagi, Central Banking, 76–80.

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151. ​Coconut oil, copra, sugar, and hemp—­the four products identified in the Bell Trade Act—­represented the primary products of the colonial economy; despite the promises of its promoters in Washington, the act ensured that the Philippine economy would remain “a four-­product economy.” See Bernard Seeman and Laurence E. Salisbury, “Cross-­Currents in the Philippines,” 1946, Institute of Pacific Relations, box 3, Laurence E. Salisbury Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 152. ​In 1943, Roo­se­velt established a commission to begin Philippine reconstruction planning. 153. ​Sayre, “Freedom Comes to the Philippines.” 154. ​Philippine Trade Act of 1946: Hearings before the Senate Committee on Finance, on H.R. 5856, an Act to Provide for Trade Relations between the United States and the Philippines, and for Other Purposes, 79th Cong., 2nd Sess., 252 (1946); “Memorandum of Secretary of State to President Truman, April 18 1946,” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1946, 8:873. 155. ​While “mutually beneficial,” McNutt also acknowledged that U.S. foreign policy was designed to “expand our own trade and promote our business and commercial interests.” McNutt, “Amer­i­ca’s Role in the Orient.” 156. ​“U.S. High Commissioner (McNutt) to Richard E. Ely, of the Office of United States High Commissioner, Washington, 18 January 1946,” in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1946, 8:863–66. 157. ​Manual Roxas, “Address on the Parity Question,” November 19, 1946, American Heritage Collection, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines. 158. ​Quoted in Shalom, “Military Bases Agreement,” 9. 159. ​“Freedom for the Philippines: Fact or Fancy?” 160. ​Quoted in H. Ford Wilkins, “Philippine Huks Linked to Soviets: Senator Cites Army Documents to Show Dissidents Are Openly Communist,” New York Times, May 20, 1947. 161. ​Other influential f­amily members included Congressman Miguel Cuenco and Governor Manuel Cuenco of Cebu. McCoy, Anarchy of Families, 225. 162. ​“Peasants Appeal to Roxas,” Manila Times, June 6, 1946. 163. ​“Peasants Appeal to Roxas.” 164. ​A Report on Philippine Land Tenure Prob­lems (Manila: Land Tenure Administration, 1961), 3–9, National Library of the Philippines, Manila. 165. ​“Peasants Appeal to Roxas.” 166. ​“Army Interim Report on Philippine Islands,” Military Group Joint MDAP Survey Mission, September 25, 1950, Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–­May 1953, International Security Affairs, box 74, entry 18, RG 330, Rec­ords of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (hereafter RG 330), Archives II. Although in 1946 and 1947 the PKP declined to support armed strug­gle as a strategy, by May 1948 the Central Committee had reversed its position. See Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 188. 167. ​In contrast, the CIA attributed the “new drive” against the Huks to “Taruc’s recent refusal to surrender.” See “Intelligence Highlights, Week of 13 January–19 January 1948,” Office of Reports and Estimates, CIA Far East / Pacific Branch, CIA-­RDP87-01617A00400020002, CREST (CIA Rec­ords Search Tool), Archives II. 168. ​“Roxas to Force Huk Showdown,” Manila Chronicle, January 23, 1948. 169. ​“Military Assistance to the Republic of the Philippines ­under Public Law 454, 79th Congress,” September 9, 1948, Philippine Islands, box 47, Geographic File, 1948–1950, RG 218, Rec­ ords of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (hereafter RG 218), Archives II. 170. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 153.

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171. ​“Taruc-­Roxas Correspondence,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 20 (October 9, 1946): 314–17. On the shelling of barrios, see Sidney Reitman, “Tarlac,” February 2, 1947, Philippine News Ser­ vice, box 2, folder 2.3, Gollobin Papers. 172. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 154. 173. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 198. 174. ​“Press Statement of the President on the Outlawing of the Hukbalahap and the PKM,” n.d., Public Relations Office, Philippine Constabulary, box 3, folder 3.2, Gollobin Papers. 175. ​On the concept of “anti-­citizen,” see Singh, Black Is a Country, 23.

3. The Anticommunist International 1. ​Roxas, Papers, Addresses and Other Writings, 2:261. 2. ​Conley, “Foreign Bases,” 178. 3. ​Quoted in Shalom, “Military Bases Agreement,” 9. 4. ​Shalom, “Military Bases Agreement,” 11. 5. ​NSC-51, “A Report to the National Security Council by the Secretary of State on U.S. Policy ­towards Southeast Asia,” July 1, 1949, box 1, RG 273, Rec­ords of the National Security Council (hereafter RG 273), Archives II. 6. ​Maximo Kalaw, “Roxas Cold War Casualty,” Manila Times, April 19, 1948. 7. ​Harper, End of Empire, 150. 8. ​Goscha, Vietnam, 206–12. 9. ​Gouda and Zaalberg, American Visions. 10. ​Foster, “Avoiding the Rank of Denmark.” 11. ​Military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials collaborated on a study to assess the Far East’s strategic importance to the United States and the USSR; the report was disseminated to the top policymaking offices in Washington in May 1949. See CIA, “The Strategic Importance of the Far East to the US and USSR,” ORE 17-49, May 4, 1949, CIA-­RDP78-01617A003400130008-2, CREST, Archives II. According to the State Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the study relied on “unwarranted presumptions regarding U.S. plans and policies” and an exaggerated notion that the Far East would be the site of a “decisive” showdown with the USSR. Despite t­hese objections, both agencies agreed with the portion of the study addressing par­tic­ul­ar countries’ orientations ­toward the United States or the USSR. CIA, “Notice to Holders of the CIA Estimate ORE 17-49,” June 1, 1949, CIA-­RDP78-01617A003400130008-2, CREST, Archives II. 12. ​Soviet politics in the early postwar years remained narrowly focused on Eastern Eu­rope; in fact, as Jeremy Friedman has argued, the Sino-­Soviet split derived in part from Nikita Khrushchev’s shift t­oward the decolonizing world, which, in turn, challenged Mao Tse-­tung’s interest in guiding global anti-­imperialist movements. The dif­fer­ent communist revolutionary traditions—­the Soviets emphasized anticapitalist politics, whereas the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cast its revolution in anti-­imperialist terms—­furthered the rift between two power­ful nations and their respective relationships to the decolonizing world. See Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 7–13. 13. ​For a succinct sketch of the lit­er­a­ture on decolonization and the Cold War, see Bradley, “Decolonization.” 14. ​CIA, “The Break-up of the Colonial Empires and Its Implications for US Security,” September 3, 1948, p. 2, 3CIA, ORE 25-48, Office of Reports and Estimates, Intelligence Publication Files, 1945–1950, entry A 22, box 2, RG 263, Rec­ords of the Central Intelligence Agency (hereafter RG 263), Archives II. 15. ​CIA, “Break-up of the Colonial Empires,” 2.

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16. ​For anticolonial actors in Southeast Asia, the Marshall Plan—an enormous aid package for Eu­ro­pean colonial powers—­showed that the United States was willing to support colonial rule. The 1948 CIA intelligence report indicated that U.S. support for its Eu­ro­pean allies “lay the US open to charges of inconsistency and imperialism.” CIA, “Break-up of the Colonial Empires,” 5. 17. ​Castro, “Imperialism and the Liberation Movement.” 18. ​Putzel, Captive Land. 19. ​For scholarship that explores the relationship between colonialism and spatial politics, see Lester, “Spatial Conflicts and Historical Geographies.” 20. ​Although members of the National Security Council (NSC) believed that the United States was anti-­imperial and “prob­ably the most benign g­ reat in history,” they also understood that, as part of an “Atlantic Community,” anticolonial nationalists might equate the United States with British, French, and Dutch colonial rule. On the effects of the “current trends in Asia” and the decision to focus attention on and emphasize the strategic importance of the Philippines, see Secretary of Defense to Secretary of State, September 16, 1949, Philippine Islands, 1949–­February 1950, Plans and Operations, Proj­ect Decimal File 091.3, entry 153, box 553, RG 319, Rec­ords of the Army Staff (hereafter RG 319), Archives II. For additional primary source references, see “Report by Joint Staff Planners,” October 14, 1947, Decimal Folder 686.9, Philippine Islands, box 46, Geographic File, 1948–1950, RG 218, Archives II. On “evidence of imperialism,” see Secretary of Defense, May 22, 1950, Decimal Folder 689.6, Philippine Islands, sec. 15, Geographic File, 1948–1950, box 48, RG 218, Archives II. 21. ​“Summary Report No. 4,” September 27, 1950, Proj­ect Decimal File 091.3 Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 22. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 210. 23. ​Leland Hobbs to Omar Bradley, August 7, 1950, Proj­ect Decimal File 091.3 Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 24. ​Recent work on Cold War cartography has aptly demonstrated the spatial construction of the bipolar world. In par­tic­u­lar, see Barnes, Mapping the Cold War; Farish, Contours of Amer­i­ca’s Cold War. 25. ​Ninkovich, Global Dawn, 320. 26. ​Truman reportedly knew ­little about Asia and only devoted one page in his two-­volume memoirs to the founding of the PRC. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 173. 27. ​For an essay that refutes the 1949 turning point, see Wallerstein, “What Cold War in Asia?” 28. ​“Communist Influence on the Philippine ­Labor Movement,” n.d., folder 4203, Philippines, 1945–1948, Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–1958, box 98, RG 263, Archives II. 29. ​The exception being Indonesia at the end of the 1940s. Ang, Southeast Asia’s Cold War, 52. 30. ​For an excellent discussion of NSC-68, see Cardwell, NSC-68. On NSC-68 as the instigation for U.S. anticommunist commitments in Southeast Asia, see Thompson, Sense of Power, 258. 31. ​On NSC 48/2, see Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, 160–63. 32. ​“Military Assistance to the Republic of the Philippines ­under Public Law 454, 79th Congress,” September 9, 1948, Decimal Folder 686.9, Philippine Islands, Geographic File, 1948–1950, box 46, RG 218, Archives II. 33. ​“U.S. Policy t­owards the Philippines: Annex,” April 28, 1949–­February 1950, Plans and Operations Division, box 553, entry 153, RG 319, Archives II. 34. ​Lopez, Elpidio Quirino. On negative assessments of Quirino, see “Philippine General Election,” October 21, 1949, 1949–­February 1950, Plans and Operations, Decimal Files, entry 153, box 553, RG 319, Archives II.

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35. ​CIA, “Weekly Summary,” May 21, 1948, CIA-­RDP78-01617A002000010001, CREST, Archives II. U.S. support for Quirino’s amnesty is reiterated in CIA, “Current Situation in the Philippines,” Intelligence Memorandum No. 296, June 6, 1950, CIA-­RDP78-01617A000900270001, CREST, Archives II. 36. ​“Appeal on Bud­get Markings on Philippine Military Program,” n.d., Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 37. ​“Communistic Activity: The Testimony of General Mariano Castaneda, Commanding Officer of the Philippine Constabulary,” November 23, 1948, Philippines, Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–1958, box 98, RG 263, Archives II. 38. ​Memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Combat Operations, June 9, 1949, Philippine Islands, 1949–­February 1950, Plans and Operations, Decimal Files, entry 153, box 553, RG 319, Archives II. 39. ​Memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Combat Operations. 40. ​Memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Combat Operations. 41. ​Merchant to Bruce, Objectives and Basic Policies, Military Assistance Program, FY 1951, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, February 2, 1950, Tab E, 3, Vietnam Archives Collection, box 0001, folder 0932, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock. 42. ​Gregorio Santayana [ Jose Lava], “Twenty Years of Strug­gle of the CPP,” Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas Series, Exhibit O, box 3, Gonzalez Library, University of the Philippines. For a deeper analy­sis of the PKP’s 1949 election strategy, see Fuller, Forcing the Pace, 282–83. 43. ​Walter Simmons, “More Voters than ­People in the Philippines,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 5, 1949; “Quirino Is Leading in Philippine Vote,” New York Times, November 9, 1949. Election coverage dominated the entire November 9, 1949, issue of the Manila Daily Bulletin. 44. ​Santayana, “Twenty Years of Strug­gle.” 45. ​“Army Interim Report on Philippine Islands,” Military Group Joint MDAP Survey Mission, September 25, 1950, Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 46. ​“Philippine General Election,” October 21, 1949. 47. ​President’s Action Committee on Social Amelioration, Philippine Social Trends: Basic Documents Pertinent to Long-­Range Social Welfare Planning in the Philippines (Manila: Bureau of Print, 1950), Irene Murphy Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. See also Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 80–84. 48. ​From Manila to Department of State, April 7, 1950, Decimal Folder 686.9 Philippines, sec. 7, Geographic File, 1948–1950, RG 218, Archives II. 49. ​J. T. Forbes, State Group, to Chairman of Mission and Foreign Military Assistance Coordinating Committee (FMACC), September 27, 1950, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 50. ​JCS to Secretary of Defense, September 6, 1950, Decimal Folder 689.6, Philippine Islands, sec. 15, Geographic File, 1948–1950, box 48, RG 218, Archives II. 51. ​Ramón Magsaysay, “Speech Delivered by Secretary Magsaysay at the Camp Murphy Parade Ground,” November 9, 1950, Ramón Magsaysay Papers, Magsaysay Center, Manila. 52. ​On the dynamics of postwar elections and their relationship to vio­lence, see Fegan, “Entrepreneurs in Votes and Vio­lence.” 53. ​Magsaysay, “Speech Delivered.” 54. ​Magsaysay, “Speech Delivered.” 55. ​Magsaysay to Louis Johnson, U.S. Secretary of Defense, April 19, 1950, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II.

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56. ​Pach, Arming the ­Free World, 183–84. 57. ​“Intelligence Estimate of the Internal Security Situation in the Philippines,” May 2, 1950, Decimal Folder 689.6, Philippine Islands, sec. 15, Geographic File, 1948–1950, box 46, RG 218, Archives II. 58. ​According to Hobbs, unnamed businessmen exaggerated the extent of the peasant unrest ­because they believed the weak central government was not properly addressing a situation they believed was “bad for business.” Leland Hobbs to General Omar Bradley, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, August 7, 1950, Decimal Folder 689.6, Philippine Islands, sec. 15, Geographic File, 1948– 1950, box 48, RG 218, Archives II. 59. ​Magsaysay to Johnson, April 19, 1950. 60. ​Magsaysay to Johnson, April 19, 1950. 61. ​J. H. Burns to Dean Rusk, “Intelligence Estimate of the Internal Situation in the Philippines,” June 15, 1950, Decimal Files, 1950–1954, 796.5/6-1350, box 4323, RG 59, Archives II. 62. ​JCS to Secretary of Defense, September 6, 1950. 63. ​MDAP funding in 1950 was $5.7 million, which the U.S. State Department “for po­liti­cal reasons” extended to $11 million, but JUSMAG reported that it would need an additional $25 m ­ illion. Office of Secretary of Defense, conference regarding Philippine request for $50 million of financial aid, March 15, 1951, Decimal Folder 686.9, Philippine Islands, box 48, Geographic File, 1948–1950, RG 218, Archives II. 64. ​JCS to Secretary of Defense, September 6, 1950. 65. ​JCS to Secretary of Defense, September 6, 1950. 66. ​Draft Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, n.d, Decimal Folder, 686.9, Philippine Islands, box 48, Geographic File, 1948–1950, RG 218, Archives II. 67. ​Friedman, Shadow Cold War. 68. ​Report by the Joint Intelligence Committee, Internal Security Situation in the Philippines, May 1950, Decimal Folder 686.9, Philippine Islands, box 46, Geographic File, 1948–1950, RG 218, Archives II. 69. ​On how policymakers who sought foreign aid disbursements to address a worldwide “dollar gap” turned to the apocalyptic language of Soviet domination, see Cardwell, NSC-68, 11–13. 70. ​Welch, “Amer­i­ca’s Philippine Policy,” 299–300. 71. ​“Military Group Joint MDAP Survey Mission to Southeast Asia,” September 27, 1950, Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 72. ​Magsaysay to Johnson, April 19, 1950. 73. ​Franco, Elections and Democ­ratization, 76–77. 74. ​Masuda, Cold War Crucible, 248. 75. ​CUFA, Illegality of the Communist Party; “The Functions of the Special Committee on ­Un-­Filipino Activities,” 1950, Filipiniana Collection, Gonzalez Library. 76. ​CUFA, Illegality of the Communist Party, 140; “Functions of the Special Committee on Un-­ Filipino Activities.” 77. ​Ileto, “Reflections,” 509. 78. ​CUFA, Illegality of the Communist Party; “Functions of the Special Committee on Un-­ Filipino Activities,” 140. 79. ​CUFA, Illegality of the Communist Party, 141. 80. ​CUFA, Illegality of the Communist Party, 10. 81. ​Hau, Chinese Question, 6. See also Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life; Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos; Wilson, Ambition and Identity.

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82. ​Hau, Chinese Question, 6. In 1946, Roxas signed the Market Stalls Act, which gave non-­ Chinese Filipinos preferential access to spaces in public markets. The administration used this as a pretext to raid Chinese businesses, schools, and newspaper offices, ultimately driving fifteen thousand Chinese shop­keep­ers in Manila out of business. Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 61. 83. ​“Confirmation of Report That Relatively Few Chinese in the Philippines Are Affiliated with the Communist Party,” U.S. Embassy in Manila to Department of State, December 7, 1950, Philippines, Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–1958, box 98, RG 263, Archives II. 84. ​“Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 4,” May 22–28, 1950, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, Elpidio Quirino Papers, Ayala Museum, Manila. See also “Decision of the Supreme Court of the Philippines in Case Involving Deportation of Alien Chinese Communists,” October 25, 1948, Philippines, Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–1958, box 98, RG 263, Archives II; “Testimony of Immigration Commissioner Engracio Fabre,” October 21, 1948, Philippines, Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–1958, box 98, RG 263, Archives II. 85. ​“Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 4.” In October 1948, the Philippine immigration commissioner claimed that t­here ­were “at least 561 known Communist agents in the Philippines.” 86. ​“Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 4.” 87. ​“Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 4.” See also “Decision of the Supreme Court of the Philippines in Case Involving Deportation of Alien Chinese Communists”; “Testimony of Immigration Commissioner Engracio Fabre.” 88. ​Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 61–62. 89. ​Manila to Department of State, “Extent of Pro-­Communist Attitudes among Chinese in the Philippines,” May 23, 1950, Philippines, Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–1958, box 98, RG 263, Archives II. 90. ​Manila to Department of State, “Extent of Pro-­Communist Attitudes.” 91. ​On the mutual constitution of the global and the local scales, see Chang, “Circulating Race and Empire.” 92. ​On the “loss of China,” see Cohen et al., “Lost Chance in China.” 93. ​Mao, “Specter of Yalta.” 94. ​Quoted in Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, 169. 95. ​On U.S. Conservatives and their relationship to China, see Chang, Friends and Enemies, 49–50. 96. ​Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, 158–59. 97. ​In response to the Republican Party’s withering attacks on Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Truman defended his administration’s rec­ ord of “re­ sis­ tance to communist imperialism.” Quoted in Acheson, Pre­sent at the Creation, 368. See also United States Department of State, History of the Bureau, 153. 98. ​Vitalis, White World Order, 122–27. 99. ​“Manifesto of the Congress,” May, 1, 1948, box 2, folder 2.6, Ira Gollobin Papers, New York Public Library. 100. ​See CIA, “Role of WFTU in Soviet Drive in Southeast Asia,” Intelligence Memorandum No. 261, December 14, 1949, CIA-­RDP78-011617A00080022002, CREST, Archives II. 101. ​CIA, “The Significance of the World Federation of Trade Unions in the Pre­sent Power Conflict,” ORE 21-48, June 14, 1948, CIA-­RDP78-0000258339, CREST, Archives II. 102. ​Amado Hernandez, “CLO Po­liti­cal Action Committee, ‘Katanungan at Kasagutan,’ ” Progresibong Pilipinas, July 1949; Congress of ­Labor Organ­izations, Action Committee, “Ano ang Pac?,” Progresibong Pilipinas, July 1949. “Who Are the Enemies of the CLO?,” in For a Demo­cratic Peace in All in the Philippines, rally pamphlet, May 1948, box 2, folder 2.6, Ira Gollobin Papers, New York Public Library.

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103. ​“Taruc Not Getting Aid from USSR, China, Impliedly Attacks NAP [National Action Plan],” Manila Times, April 10, 1949. 104. ​“Taruc Not Getting Aid.” 105. ​Beckert, “American Danger”; Noonan, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, 79–85. 106. ​Luis Taruc, “Message from Taruc,” Star Reporter, September 21, 1948. 107. ​Taruc, “Message from Taruc.” 108. ​Taruc, “Message from Taruc.” 109. ​Magsaysay to Johnson, April 19, 1950. 110. ​Memorandum for Major General L. Lemnitzer, July 9, 1950, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–1953, International Security Affairs, entry 18, box 74, RG 330, Archives II. 111. ​Cornelio Villareal, Chairman National Defense Committee, and Major General Mariano Castaneda, Chief of Staff, Armed Forces of the Philippines to Carlos Romulo, Chairman Military Mission, 1951, 090-112, General Administrative File, 1949–1953, Adjutant General Section, United States Military Advisory Group, Philippines, box 1, entry 242, RG 334, Rec­ords of Interser­vice Agencies (hereafter RG 334), Archives II. 112. ​Villareal and Castaneda to Romulo, 1951. 113. ​Forbes, State Group, to Chairman of Mission and FMCC, September 27, 1950. 114. ​In 1946, the Soviet Navy’s newspaper, the Red Fleet, argued that the Philippines was not truly in­de­pen­dent b­ ecause the Roxas administration acted in “American colonial interests.” Department of State, Incoming Tele­gram, October 10, 1946, RG 59, 896.00/10-2146, Archives II. 115. ​U.S. Policy ­towards Southeast Asia, 1949. 116. ​Man, Soldiering through Empire, 2–3. 117. ​Aldrich, Rawnsley, and Rawnsley, Clandestine Cold War in Asia, 5–6. 118. ​McMahon, “How the Periphery Became the Center,” 23–24. 119. ​For an excellent biography of Allen Dulles, see Kinzer, ­Brothers. 120. ​I relied on the following sources for Lansdale’s biography: Kinzer, ­Brothers; Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars; Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. USAFFE and the U.S. Army Ser­vices of Supply, Southwest Pacific Area, ­were absorbed by the U.S. Army Forces, Western Pacific, in 1945. Lansdale served in the Central Group of the Office of Policy Coordination, a department that would soon be merged into the CIA. On Lansdale and the Office of Policy Coordination, see Currey, Edward Lansdale, 57–73. 121. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists,’ ” U.S. News and World Report, February 13, 1953, ser. 11, Magsaysay Papers. 122. ​“Economic Aspects of US Military and Pos­si­ble Economic Aid to the Philippines,” September 1950, Philippines, Office of Military Assistance, April 1949–­May 1953, International Security Affairs, RG 330, Archives II. 123. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 17. Lansdale wrote in his memoir that a group of JUSMAG officers believed that he should not, as an air force officer, have had “anything to do with an Army operation,” and they “vetoed strongly” his plan to train Filipino paratroopers. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 79. 124. ​Black, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 4. See also Porch, Counterinsurgency, 2–4. 125. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, XLV. Though Boot interprets Lansdale as a pioneer of counterinsurgent warfare, he also acknowledges Lansdale’s propensity to “embell[ish] accounts of his deeds,” L. 126. ​Griffith, “Small Wars Manual,” 55–62. 127. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, 320–22. 128. ​In his testimony before the Church Committee in 1975, Lansdale explained that his work in the Philippines had convinced him that winning popu­lar support was essential to “countering revolu-

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tions.” Testimony of Edward Geary Lansdale, Regarding Cuban Operation, July 8, 1975, rec­ord number 157-10005-10236, President John F. Kennedy Assassination Rec­ords Collection, Archives II. 129. ​Edward Lansdale, “Fundamentals for Americans,” speech at the Military Government Association meeting, Washington D.C., June 13, 1959, Edward Geary Lansdale Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. In fact, Lansdale’s name barely appears in the relevant archival rec­ords of key U.S. foreign agencies, including the U.S. Embassy, the State Department, JUSMAG, and the Department of Defense. 130. ​For a brief account of Bohannan’s work with the CIC, see Ridler, “Fertile Ground of Hell’s Carnival.” Jason Ridler misidentifies a prominent peasant organ­ization, the Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubukid (PKM), or the National Peasants Unions, as the “PKM, Communist Party.” The Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubukid (PKM), or National Peasant Union, did replace the KPMP in the postwar years, but the PKM was not the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). 131. ​Rec­ords of Bohannan’s CIC documents, including a dossier on Luis Taruc, are h ­ oused in the Charles T. R. Bohannan Papers, box 28, Hoover Institution Archives. 132. ​Hosmer and Crane, Counterinsurgency: A Symposium. 133. ​“Col­o­nel Valeriano Is Relieved,” Manila Times, February 2, 1949. The article reported that Valeriano was removed from “his command as provincial commander of the PC” in San Fernando. Complaints w ­ ere also filed against Lieutenant Cuadrato Palma of the PC for “maltreating, torturing, and applying the ­water cure to Epifano Canilao, Domingo Sunga, and Teodoro Evangelista,” all members of the San Fernando Police Force. U.S. forces used the “­water cure” during the Philippine-­American War. Kramer, “­Water Cure.” 134. ​“Civic Action,” n.d, box 45, Lansdale Papers. 135. ​For a discussion on the community development side of counterinsurgent warfare, see Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 101–32. 136. ​Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, 208. 137. ​CIA, “Possibility That the 7th Battalion Combat Team Has Filed Misleading Reports on Conduct of Anti-­HMB [Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan] Campaign,” January 31, 1951, CIA-­ RDP82-00457R006700800006-8, CREST, Archives II. 138. ​Parker, Hearts, Minds,Voices, 46. 139. ​The pamphlet Banta ng Komunismong Sobyet sa Pagtuturo is undated, but the fact that it was produced in conjunction with the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange program implies a pre-1953 publication date b­ ecause the U.S. Information Ser­vice (USIS) replaced the latter in 1953. Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils; Belmonte, Selling the American Way. 140. ​Carruthers, Cold War Captives. 141. ​May isang lider—si Stalin!, Civil Affairs Office, Philippine Department of National Defense, American Heritage Collection, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines. 142. ​Charles T. R. Bohannan, “Question Outline of Significant ­Factors Affecting the US ­Advisory Role in Philippine Actions Countering the Hukbalahap Insurgency,” box 8, Bohannan Papers. A draft of this paper appears also in Ridler, “Lost Work of El Lobo.” 143. ​Lanzona, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion. On how fear of WWIII heightened Cold War anx­i­eties throughout the world, see Masuda, “Fear of World War III.” 144. ​On treating historical ideas as structural forces, see Conrad, What Is Global History?, 109. 145. ​Lansdale argued that Communists tried to adapt to local conditions so the movement “appear[ed] to be a homegrown product,” but fundamentally he believed that communism was an “international effort” with a pattern “substantially the same everywhere.” “Counter-­guerilla Operations in the Philippines, 1946–1953: A Seminar on the Huk Campaign,” June 15, 1961, pt. I-­V, folder 13, box 17, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 03—­Insurgency Warfare, Vietnam Center and Archive. 146. ​Kearney, Reconceptualizing the Peasantry, 33–40.

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147. ​CIA, “Break-up of the Colonial Empires,” 9. 148. ​“Lesson Plan: Civic Action and Community Programming, A Philippines Case Study,” US Army Civil Affairs School, August 1962, folder 17, box 02, United States Armed Forces Manuals Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive. 149. ​Bohannan, “Question Outline.” 150. ​Lansdale, “Fundamentals for Americans.” The Military Government Association formed ­after WWII to advocate for a focus on civil affairs within the U.S. Army. See Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance, 111. 151. ​U.S. Army War College Lecture—­Southeast Asia, December 3, 1958, folder 7, box 1, Vladimir Lehovich Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, accessed May 23, 2016, http://­www​ .­vietnam​.­ttu​.­edu​/­virtualarchive​/­items​.­php​?­item​=­1205010701. 152. ​Military officials assessed the Philippine campaign on a “success” or “failure” binary, with success marked by a reduction in the number of Huks cited in military intelligence reports. Unlike the contemporaneous Korean War, which cost 36,940 U.S. lives (with another 92,134 wounded in action), the war against the Huks did not produce a single U.S. fatality. On Korean War casualties, see Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, 35. 153. ​Price, Cold War Anthropology, 120. 154. ​Valeriano and Bohannan. Counter-­guerrilla Operations, 41. 155. ​Abinales, “American Rule.” 156. ​For an accessible synthesis on race and U.S. foreign policy, see Krenn, Color of Empire. On historiographical trends, see Kramer, “Shades of Sovereignty.” 157. ​Lansdale, “Fundamentals for Americans.” 158. ​On “inclusionary racism” in the Philippines, see Kramer, Blood of Government. 159. ​NSC-51, “Report to the National Security Council.” 160. ​Bohannan, “Question Outline.” 161. ​Cullather, “Amer­i­ca’s Boy?”; Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War; Hedman, “Late Imperial Romance.” 162. ​“Program of Proposed Activities with NAMFREL,” March 2, 1952, CIA FOIA, https://­ www​.­cia​.­gov​/­library​/­readingroom​/­document​/­5197c267993294098d50e8f b, accessed August  21, 2019/. 163. ​“Program of Proposed Activities with NAMFREL.” 164. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” 165. ​Moreover, this erasure of anti-­imperial history in the Philippines continues to inform the absence of the Philippines in lit­er­a­ture on the history of decolonization. 166. ​In October 1950, Magsaysay’s underfunded army conducted a raid on twenty-­two homes in Manila, capturing over one hundred activists, including high-­ranking members of the PKP’s Politburo. Six months ­later, a judge found twenty-­five leading members of the PKP guilty based on evidence that “their final aim was the surrender of the Philippines to foreign control.” See “Verdict of Judge Castelo,” U.S. Embassy to State Department, May 21, 1951, Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Philippine Republic 1945–1959, reel 8 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of Amer­i­ca, 1986). 167. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” 168. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” 169. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” 170. ​On attempts to shape the U.S. public’s view of Asia, see Klein, Cold War Orientalism; Shibusawa, Amer­i­ca’s Geisha Ally. On convincing the U.S. public that the Korean War was fought not for Koreans but for Americans, see Casey, Selling the Korean War. 171. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists.’ ” 172. ​On absolute and abstract space, see Smith, Uneven Development, 92–132.

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173. ​U.S. Policy ­toward Southeast Asia, National Security Council Report, July 1, 1949, item PD00145, National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, DC. 174. ​United States Department of Defense, “NSC 48/1, The Position of the United States with Re­spect to Asia, December 23, 1949,” in United States–­Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 225–64. 175. ​“Annual Report, 1 January–31 December 1953,” JUSMAG Philippines, General Correspondence, 1941–1961, box 11, entry 242, RG 334, Archives II. 176. ​Wayne C. Smith to A. G. Trudeu, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, August 20, 1955, JUSMAG Philippines, Adjutant General Files, General Administrative Files, box 2, NM016 241-­A, RG 334, Archives II. 177. ​In 1951, Jose Lava, a leading intellectual in the PKP, connected the anti-­imperial politics of the PKP to the turn-­of-­the-­century anti-­imperial wars against Spain and the United States. See “Jose Lava, Philippine Communist, Analyzes the Pre­sent Philippine Situation,” May 29, 1951, Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Philippine Republic 1945–1959, reel 8 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of Amer­i­ca, 1986). 178. ​Paddock, US Army Special Warfare. In 1952, the Psychological Warfare Division of the Army General School in Fort Riley, Kansas, was moved to Fort Bragg. By 1956, the division was renamed the U.S. Army Center for Special Warfare. 179. ​Justiniano, “Combat Intelligence,” 49. 180. ​Edward Lansdale, “Military Psychological Operations: Part Two,” Lecture to the Armed Forces Staff College, Norfolk, VA, March 29, 1960, box 73, Lansdale Papers. 181. ​Justiniano, “Combat Intelligence,” 49. Amid reports that U.S. soldiers had collected “war trophies” from the bodies of dead Japa­nese soldiers, ­lawyers for the U.S. Armed Forces reminded U.S. commanders that the mutilation of ­enemy dead ­violated the 1929 Geneva Convention. Weingartner, “Trophies of War.” 182. ​Edward Lansdale, “The ­Free Citizen in Uniform,” in Readings in Counter-­guerrilla Operations (Fort Bragg, NC: U.S. Army Special Warfare School, 1960), Lansdale Papers. See also Hosmer and Crane, Counterinsurgency: A Symposium. 183. ​On the Bay of Pigs, see Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified. 184. ​Both of t­hese details are listed as part of the author biographies in Valeriano and Bohannan, Counter-­guerrilla Operations.

4. Efficient, Honest, and Demo­cratic 1. ​Dean Rusk to H. Freeman Matthews, January 31, 1951, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, vol. 6, pt. 1, Asia and the Pacific, ed. Paul Claussen et al. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 24–25. 2. ​Storer, “Philippine Economic Pro­gress,” 89. 3. ​W. H. Pawley to General Glen Briggs, Chief Agricultural Rehabilitation Officer, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), November 24, 1945, UNRRA–­ Philippines Mission, box 1, Agricultural Survey, United Nations Archives, New York; Nicholas J. Demerath, “City Planning in the Philippines,” 1945, box 3, Foreign: Philippine Planning, Housing, Nicholas J. Demerath Papers, Historical Collections and ­Labor Archives, Pennsylvania State University. On housing studies, see Kwak, World of Homeowners, 111–115. 4. ​United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNRRA in the Philippines, 1946– 1947, Operation Analy­sis Papers, No. 50 (Manila: UNRRA–­Philippines Mission, 1948), box 1, Agricultural Survey, United Nations Archives.

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5. ​Golay, Philippines, 72. 6. ​Golay, Philippines, 73. 7. ​Jenkins, “Financial and Economic Planning,” 33. 8. ​Dorfman, review of Report to the President, 692. 9. ​Golay, Philippines, 76. 10. ​Golay, Philippines, 217–19. 11. ​Memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Combat Operations, June 9, 1949, Philippine Islands, 1949–­February 1950, Plans and Operations Division, box 553, entry 153, RG 319, Archives II. 12. ​Araneta, “Basic Prob­lems,” 280, 281, 282, 285. 13. ​Young, “Currency for Sudan,” 132. 14. ​Simbulan, Modern Principalia, 69, 119–20. 15. ​Takagi, Central Banking, 110–12. 16. ​Harold Isaacs, “Philippines Reported near Po­liti­cal, Economic Collapse,” Washington Post, June 12, 1950. 17. ​Memorandum from the Secretary of State to the President, February 2, 1950, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, vol. 6, pt. 1, 14013–411. 18. ​Max Ways, “Chaos in Asia,” Life, June 6, 1950. 19. ​Leland Hobbs to General Omar Bradley, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, August 7, 1950, Decimal Folder 686.9 Philippine Islands, sec. 15, Geographic Files, 1948–1950, box 48, RG 218, Archives II. 20. ​Golay, Philippines, 73–77; Dorfman, review of Report to the President, 690. 21. ​Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 71–94. 22. ​Golay, Philippines, 225. 23. ​Isaacs, “Collapse.” 24. ​Eggan, “Bell Report,” 17. 25. ​Dorfman, review of Report to the President, 690. 26. ​Tele­gram to Secretary of State Dean Acheson from Daniel Bell, n.d., Bell Mission, Subject File: February to October 1950, box 1, RG 59, Archives II. 27. ​Dorfman, review of Report to the President, 690. 28. ​Dorfman, review of Report to the President, 690–92. 29. ​Monk, “Civilization and the Typhoon,” 76. 30. ​Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 85. On community development, see Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 101–32. 31. ​Eggan, “Bell Report,” 17. 32. ​“Cuaderno Questions Predictions,” Manila Times, October 20, 1950. 33. ​Isaacs, “Collapse.” 34. ​“Palace Hits U.S. Attitude,” Manila Bulletin, October 26, 1950. 35. ​Palace Hits U.S. Attitude.” 36. ​Quoted in Isaacs, “Collapse.” 37. ​Isaacs, “Collapse.” 38. ​Our Nations Safety, Committee on Un-­Filipino Activities, Congress of the Philippines, House of Representatives (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1949), Filipiniana Collection, Gonzalez Library, University of the Philippines; Harold Isaacs, “Status Quo Can Doom the Philippines,” Washington Post, June 18, 1950. 39. ​Quoted in Isaacs, “Collapse.” 40. ​Isaacs, “Collapse.” 41. ​“The Strutting Rich Are Linked to the Mess in Manila,” Life, November 2, 1953.

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42. ​Jane Perlez, “Harold Isaacs, 75, Author and M.I.T. Professor Emeritus,” New York Times, July 10, 1986. On Isaacs’s other famous book, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India, see Foster, Projections of Power, 105–6. 43. ​Isaacs, “Status Quo.” 44. ​Isaacs, “Status Quo.” 45. ​Isaacs, “Status Quo.” 46. ​U.S. Economic Survey Mission to the Philippines, Breakfast Conference with President Quirino and Secretary Romulo, August 21, 1950, Bell Mission, Subject File: February to October 1950, box 1, RG 59, Archives II. 47. ​Baguio Draft, n.d., Mission to the Philippines Executive Office, 1948–1961, Subject Files, 1951–1959, box 13, RG 469, Rec­ords of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies (hereafter RG 469), Archives II. 48. ​Wilson, “Study of Administration.” Public administration also had its origins in urban management organ­izations. 49. ​Stone and Stone, “Education in Public Administration.” 50. ​Durant, “Institutional Values,” 179–80. 51. ​George Taylor, “Scientific Method and Demo­cratic Values,” Central Decimal Files, 1955– 1959, 511.96/3-3152, box 2248, RG 59, Archives II. 52. ​John W. Lederle and Ferrel Heady, “Institute of Public Administration, University of the Philippines,” reprinted from Public Administration Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (Winter 1955), Philippine Institute of Public Administration Proj­ect Series, University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Rec­ords (hereafter, Philippine Institute of Public Administration Series), Bentley Historical Library. 53. ​J. K. Pollock to R. R. Renne, January 30, 1952, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Collection. 54. ​Pollock to Renne, January 30, 1952. 55. ​Quezon City remained the capital ­until 1976, when President Ferdinand Marcos reinstated Manila as the nation’s capital. By that time, Quezon City was one of seventeen cities included in Metro Manila, which Marcos had established in 1975. 56. ​Lederle and Heady, “Institute of Public Administration.” 57. ​ Howard Stassen, Circular Air-­ gram, “Philippine Institute of Public Administration,” July 31, 1953, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 58. ​Simbulan, Modern Principalia, 76–79. 59. ​NSC evidence quoted in Cullather, Managing Nationalism, 13–14. 60. ​Raymond B. Fosdick to Dean Rusk and Phillip Jessup, October 3, 1949, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, Office of Southwest Pacific, Office of the Officer in Charge of Philippine Affairs, Office Files, 1948–1957, box 1, RG 59, Archives II. 61. ​“American Educational Activities in the Philippines,” December 17, 1955, Central Decimal Files, 1955–1959, 511.96/4-555, box 2248, RG 59, Archives II. 62. ​“American Educational Activities in the Philippines.” 63. ​Proposed Curriculum: Appendix C, n.d., “The Undergraduate Curriculum in Public Administration, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 64. ​ University of the Philippines, Institute of Public Administration, Cata­ logue and Announcements, 1953–1954, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 65. ​Institute of Public Administration, Cata­logue and Announcements, 1953–1954. 66. ​Ferrel Heady, “Programs and Prob­lems of the Institute of Public Administration, University of the Philippines,” 1953, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 67. ​Lederle and Heady, “Institute of Public Administration.”

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68. ​Simpson, Economists with Guns, 7. 69. ​Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 1–21; Engerman and Unger, “Introduction: T ­ owards a Global History.” 70. ​Economic Cooperation Administration, Economic Cooperation Administration in the Philippines (Manila: Economic Cooperation Administration, Special Economic and Technical Mission in the Philippines, 1951). On development as disempowering, see Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 183. 71. ​Keenleyside, “Technical Assistance Program.” 72. ​Keenleyside, “Technical Assistance Program,” 68. 73. ​Li, ­Will to Improve, 7–9. 74. ​Eggan, “Bell Report,” 21. 75. ​Keenleyside, “Technical Assistance Program,” 72. 76. ​Eggan, “Bell Report,” 21. University of Chicago anthropologist Fred Eggan positively reviewed the Bell Report’s recommendations, writing that “the Filipino p­ eople as a w ­ hole are entitled to the best we have to offer.” 77. ​Historians have demonstrated that variance in international aid and development proj­ects—­ oriented ­either from the state down or the “grassroots” up—­legitimated U.S. intervention in recently decolonized nations. 78. ​Raymond B. Fosdick to Dean Rusk and Phillip Jessup, October 3, 1949. 79. ​Institute of Public Administration, Cata­logue and Announcements, 1953–1953. 80. ​Lederle and Heady, “Institute of Public Administration.” 81. ​Lederle and Heady, “Institute of Public Administration.” 82. ​U.S. president Harry S. Truman, in his 1949 “Point Four program,” identified “old-­ imperialism” as “exploitation for foreign-­profit.” See López, “Conscripts of Democracy,” 165. 83. ​American Embassy Manila to the Department of State, April 14, 1952, 1952: Philippines through 1954: Burma, Far Eastern Libraries and Centers Branch, Country Files, 1947–1965, Information Center Ser­vice / Cultural Operations Divisions, box 5, entry P 51, RG 306, Rec­ords of the U.S. Information Agency (hereafter RG 306), Archives II. 84. ​“Concerning Long Rang USIS Proj­ects,” January 12, 1953, 1952: Philippines through 1954: Burma, Far Eastern Libraries and Centers Branch, Country Files, 1947–1965, Information Center Ser­vice / Cultural Operations Divisions, box 5, entry P 51, RG 306, Archives II. 85. ​The in-­service training program was slower to start than the degree programs, ­because much of the first year was spent bringing in managerial specialists from the United States, including the famous industrial management expert Lillian Gilbreth, to lecture at the institute in Manila. 86. ​Parker, Hearts, Minds,Voices, 6–7. 87. ​“Summary of Education Policy,” n.d., University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 88. ​“Summary of Education Policy.” 89. ​Paul A. Kramer argues that the idea of “capacity” was a crucial ele­ment of imperial politics in that the United States “retained the power to recognize Filipino capacities and exchanged colonial power for Filipino recognition of, and fulfillment of, their standards.” In this way, “ ‘capacity’ found its power in being protean; it could mean—­and often meant all at once—­capacity for self-­ discipline, for loyalty, for rationality, and for communication, each of which pointed t­oward capacity for self-­government and nationality.” Kramer, Blood of Government, 310–22. 90. ​MacDonald Salter to Dean Russell A. Stevenson, December 27, 1955, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Collection. 91. ​Technical Assistance, November 1956, folder “International Cooperation Administration,” University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series.

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92. ​Post Report, Institute of Public Administration, University of Michigan / Philippine Annex, December 1, 1954, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series.. 93. ​Bowden, Empire of Civilization. 94. ​Sherrod, “Is Democracy ­Dying,” 28. 95. ​Sherrod, “Is Democracy ­Dying,” 144. 96. ​Sherrod, “Is Democracy ­Dying,” 144. 97. ​Go, American Empire; Foster, Projections of Power; Kramer, Blood of Government; McCoy, Colonial Crucible Empire. 98. ​Sherrod, “Is Democracy ­Dying,” 28. 99. ​George S. Carapas, “Songs in the Key of Politics,” May 9, 2004, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, http://­pcij​.­org​/­stories​/­songs​-­in​-­the​-­key​-­of​-­politics​/­. 100. ​Sherrod, “Is Democracy ­Dying,” 29. 101. ​“A Filipino Emerges as a New Asian Leader,” November 22, 1953, New York Times. 102. ​“ ‘Asia for the Asians’ Is a Fake Slogan,” June 12, 1954, Saturday Eve­ning Post. 103. ​Lederle and Heady, “Institute of Public Administration.” 104. ​Ferrel Heady to Wilbur K. Pierpont, October 1, 1954, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 105. ​Heady to Pierpont, October 1, 1954. 106. ​In a letter addressed to MacDonald Salter, adviser on public administration in the “Far East” division of the FOA, research assistant Theodore Drews expressed his exasperation: “I am ­really at a loss as to how to make Washington see how frustrating the Mission-­Michigan relationship is.” Theodore Drews to MacDonald Salter, July 27, 1954, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 107. ​Hanna to R. R. Renne, FY 53 and FY 64 Proj­ects in Education, December 18, 1952, Mission to the Philippines Executive Office, 1948–1961, box 35, RG 469, Archives II. 108. ​Lederle and Heady, “Institute of Public Administration” 109. ​John Lederle to Edward Prentice, July 31, 1953, Mission to the Philippines Executive Office, 1948–1961, box 13, RG 469, Archives II. 110. ​Lederle to Prentice, October 31, 1952, Mission to the Philippines Executive Office, 1948– 1961, box 13, RG 469, Archives II. 111. ​Lederle to Prentice, July 31, 1953. 112. ​“Department of State Conference: Education and Foreign Operations,” Office on Institutional Proj­ects Abroad of the American Council on Education, June 27, 1956, University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 113. ​“Department of State Conference: Education and Foreign Operations.” 114. ​Nick Cullather discusses how landowning and po­liti­cally connected families used po­liti­cal power to steer aid into their growing manufacturing empires. Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 92. 115. ​­After the IPA lost its governmental funding, the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation began to financially support it. 116. ​“Institute of Public Administration, University of the Philippines,” 8. 117. ​Cullather argues that the United States helped maintain what he calls a “patrimonial state” in the Philippines. Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 91. 118. ​“National Public Administration Week,” November 1956, folder “International Cooperation Administration,” University of Michigan School of Public Administration Series. 119. ​President Ramón Magsaysay to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, March 15, 1956, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, vol. 22, Southeast Asia, ed. Robert J. McMahon, Harriet D. Schwar, and Louis J. Smith (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989), 640–42.

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120. ​NSC Briefing: Orientation of Philippine President Magsaysay, February 18, 1957, CIA-­ RDP79R00890A000800040025-8, CREST, Archives II. 121. ​Magsaysay to Dulles, March 15, 1956.

5. A Dirty, Half-­Hidden War 1. ​Edward Lansdale to Allen Dulles, November 23, 1953, box 34, Edward Geary Lansdale Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 2. ​In 1945, Dulles ran Operation Sunrise, a series of negotiations that resulted in the surrender of German Army forces in northern Italy. As a result, Karl Wolff, his counterpart in the negotiations and a high-­ranking official in the Nazi SS, was spared standing trial at Nuremberg and served as a witness for the prosecution instead. Lingen, Allen Dulles, 2–7. 3. ​Kinzer, ­Brothers. On the elite po­liti­cal culture in Cold War Washington, see Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 5–7; Herken, Georgetown Set. 4. ​Prados, Ghosts of Langley, 46. 5. ​“The ­People’s Choice,” Time, November 23, 1953, 36–37. 6. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, 164. Nick Cullather analyzes the impor­tant and misunderstood role of the U.S.-­Magsaysay “legend” in “Amer­i­ca’s Boy?” 7. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, 4. 8. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, xlv–­xlvi. 9. ​Lansdale to Dulles, November 23, 1953. 10. ​Lansdale to Dulles, November 23, 1953. 11. ​“Freedom Com­pany Philippines,” n.d., box 29, Charles T. R. Bohannan Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 12. ​“Freedom Com­pany Philippines.” 13. ​“Man­ag­er’s Report,” n.d., box 29, Bohannan Papers. 14. ​On July 8, 1971, South Dakota senator George McGovern added t­hese lines—­taken from Lansdale’s 1961 memo to John F. Kennedy’s military adviser, Maxwell Taylor—in the Congressional Rec­ord. McGovern speaking on the Pentagon Papers: 92 Cong. Rec. 24235–36 (1971). 15. ​Goscha, Vietnam, 280. In July 1954, the Soviet Union, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and the ­People’s Republic of China (PRC) conferenced on the Korean and French-­ Indochina wars. The resultant Geneva Accords ended open warfare between Vietnam and France, temporarily partitioned Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, and provided three hundred days for civilians to move between the north and the south. Although the United States participated in the conference in Geneva, it did not sign the accords. Nonetheless, the United States did agree to abide by the accord’s rules. For perspective on the Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam, see Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 11–43. 16. ​Lansdale to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Deputy Secretary of Defense Ros­well Gilpatric, “A Cold War Win,” August 1, 1961, box 95, Lansdale Papers. 17. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 18. ​“Man­ag­er’s Report.” 19. ​The archival rec­ord for CIA operations is fragmented, and the picture of the Freedom Com­pany remains incomplete. This is a legacy of the CIA’s original obfuscation strategy. However, the paucity of sources should not discourage scholars from attending to organ­izations such as the Freedom Com­pany. 20. ​For a useful collection of essays on the creation of the national security state, see Heiss and Hogan, National Security State.

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21. ​Parker, Hearts, Minds,Voices, 79–91. 22. ​Wright, Color Curtain; Roberts and Foulcher, Indonesian Notebook, 1–32. 23. ​Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era.” 24. ​CIA, “The Asian-­African Conference,” April 1955, CIA-­RDP80R01443R000300300002-5, CREST, Archives II. 25. ​On Philippine participation at Bandung, see Espiritu, “ ‘To Carry ­Water.’ ” 26. ​Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line, 8–9. 27. ​“ ‘We Smashed the Communists,’ ” U.S. News and World Report, February 13, 1953, ser. 11, Ramón Magsaysay Papers, Magsaysay Center, Manila. 28. ​Man, Soldiering through Empire, 3. 29. ​Man, Soldiering through Empire, 49–76. 30. ​Lansdale to Dulles, November 23, 1953. 31. ​Edward Lansdale, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam.” 32. ​Memo from Edward Lansdale, July 10, 1947, Lansdale Papers. 33. ​“GIs in Target Practice Kill Boy,” Manila Times, November 11, 1945; “3 Killed as Army Truck Smashes into Barrio Chapel,” Manila Times, April 4, 1947; “17 US Army Officers, Enlisted Men, Nabbed for Base ‘R’ Steal,” Manila Times, April 10, 1947. 34. ​Memo from Lansdale, July 10, 1947. 35. ​Lansdale’s web of acquaintances, revealed through a list of guests at his 1954 “bon voyage fete,” included influential individuals from the military and the Philippine Constabulary (PC) (Rafael Jalandoni, Calixto Duque, Agustin G. Gabriel, Napoleon D. Valeriano, Manuel Lapus, Manuel Castaneda); the press (H. Ford Wilkins, editor of the Manila Bulletin; Go Puan Seng, editor of the leading Chinese-­language daily, Fookien Times; Manuel Manahan, editor of the leading Tagalog-­ language daily, Bagong Buhay, and Magsaysay administration official; Eugenio Lopez, owner of the Manila Chronicle); and politics ( Juan Orendain; Philippine senator Lorenzo Tañada; Arsenio “Arsenic” Lacson, journalist and mayor of Manila from 1952 to 1962). “Guest List,” 1954, box 34, Lansdale Papers. 36. ​George A. Malcolm estimated that Quezon City had grown to a population of four hundred thousand ­people by 1950. Malcolm, Commonwealth of the Philippines, 182. 37. ​“Freedom Com­pany Philippines,” Bohannan Papers. 38. ​John Wachtel to Harry Brenn, December 12, 1955, Mission to the Philippines Executive Office, Public Administration–­Public Relations, 1954–1955, box 88, RG 469, Archives II; Boot, Road Not Taken, xv. 39. ​“Report of the Secretary to the Membership,” n.d., box 46, Lansdale Papers. Additional honorary members included Manuel Manahan, South Viet­nam­ese military officer Duong Van Duc, and the chief of the South Viet­nam­ese Joint General Staff, Cao Thai Bao. 40. ​Lansdale recalled the events of November 1954 as a period when “support was being constructed to help SMM, in expediting the flow of supplies, and in creating the Freedom Com­pany.” In 1961, Lansdale shared a fifty-­four-­page report with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in which he summarized his August 1954–­August 1955 work for the SMM. Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 41. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 42. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win”; Ahern, Vietnam Declassified. Thomas Ahern argues that from 1954 to 1963 ­there ­were two autonomous CIA stations in Saigon. One, led by Lansdale and reporting directly to Allen Dulles, was the SMM, and the other was managed by two ­career officers in the Far East Division. Lansdale’s station dissolved in late 1956. 43. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, xv. 44. ​Edward Lansdale to Ambassador J. Lawton Collins, December 29, 1954, Vietnam War, 1954–1958, Lansdale FOIA 2013 NSA.

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45. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 46. ​This information comes from Lansdale, handwritten note, n.d., Lansdale FOIA NSA. 47. ​On the Philippine Veterans League and the Freedom Com­pany, see Man, Soldiering through Empire, 66–73 48. ​Lansdale, handwritten note. 49. ​Lansdale, handwritten note. 50. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 296. 51. ​Lansdale, handwritten note. 52. ​Napoleon Valeriano to Edward Lansdale, Antiguerrilla Course, January 17, 1956, Foreign Ser­vice of the Republic of the Philippines, Office of the Military Attaché, Vietnam War, 1954– 1958, Lansdale FOIA NSA. 53. ​Valeriano to Lansdale, Antiguerrilla Course. 54. ​Security Training Center, Counselor of Embassy for Po­liti­cal Affairs in Saigon to Department of State, Washington, DC, August 25, 1959, Office of Public Safety, Vietnam Division, Subject File, box 2, entry HM 1991, RG 286, Rec­ords of the Agency for International Development (hereafter RG 286), Archives II. 55. ​Lansdale, “Freedom Incorporated,” n.d., Box 46, Edward Lansdale Papers 56. ​Lansdale, “Freedom Incorporated.” 57. ​“Man­ag­er’s Report, Summarizing Year 1955,” box 28, Bohannan Papers. 58. ​Freedom Com­pany, This Is ­Free Vietnam, box 28, Bohannan Papers. 59. ​Freedom Com­pany, This Is ­Free Vietnam. 60. ​Connelly, “Taking off the Cold War Lens.” 61. ​Appendix “C,” Southeast Asian Regional Concept, 1954, Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, NSC Staff Papers, Disaster File Series, box 56, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 62. ​Appendix “C,” Southeast Asian Regional Concept. 63. ​Hogan, Cross of Iron, 61. 64. ​Callanan, Covert Action, 23. 65. ​ CIA, Functions of the Office of Special Operations, October 25, 1946, CIA-­ RDP8​ 0R01731R001100010009-4, CREST, Archives II. 66. ​James Callahan distinguishes between three dif­fer­ent types of covert action: defensive covert action, defined as countering communist efforts to undermine U.S.-­allied states; offensive covert action, or attempts to destabilize or remove communist regimes; and preventative covert action, meaning attempts to intervene in neutral countries so as to prevent the spread of Soviet influence. Callanan, Covert Action, 3–7. 67. ​Prados, Safe for Democracy, 39. 68. ​NSC 10/2 stated that covert actions “conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups” would be “so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” NSC 10/2, June 18, 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, ed. C. Thomas Thorne Jr. and David S. Patterson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), Document 292. 69. ​Prados, Safe for Democracy, 39. 70. ​Callanan, Covert Action, 24–76; Ventresca, From Fascism to Democracy, 91–99. 71. ​Wilford, Mighty Wurlitzer, 8. 72. ​CIA, Memorandum for the Secretaries of the Military Departments, Reorganization–­Office of Special Operations, Office of the Secretary of Defense, July 15, 1953, CIA-­RDP80R01731​ R000300140001-7, CREST, Archives II.

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73. ​Graves B. Erskine to Allen Dulles, Assistance for Intelligence, Office of Special Operations / Office of the Secretary of Defense, March 1, 1960, CIA-­RDP80b0167R00090005058-7, CREST, Archives II. 74. ​Lansdale FOIA NSA, September 10, 1958. 75. ​DEPTAR [Department of the Army] to JUSMAGPHIL, December 22, 1951, JUSMAG Philippines, General Administrative File, 1949–1953, Adjutant General Section, box 1, entry NM16 241-­A, RG 334, Archives II. 76. ​Pach, Arming the ­Free World, 4. 77. ​Pro­gress Report on NSC 5405,April 13, 1955, U.S. Objectives and Courses of Action with Re­spect to Southeast Asia, NSC Staff Files, Operations Coordinating Board Central Files, box 79, Eisenhower Library. 78. ​ICA Saigon to ICA 838, “Civil Police Administration Program,” December 11, 1955, Lansdale FOIA NSA. 79. ​“Funds for Psychological Warfare,” n.d., box 34, Lansdale Papers. 80. ​MAAG to JUSMAG, 1955, n.d., JUSMAG Philippines, General Administrative File, 1949– 1953, Adjutant General Section, box 1, entry NM-16 241-­A, RG 334, Archives II. 81. ​American Embassy in Manila to Department of State, March 14, 1953, General Rec­ords, U.S. Consulate, Manila, Philippines, box 84, UD 3100, RG 84, Archives II. 82. ​Wachtel to Brenn, December 12, 1955. 83. ​Harry Brenn to John Wachtel, October 24, 1955, Mission to the Philippines Executive Office, Public Administration–­Public Relations, 1954–1955, box 88, RG 469, Archives II. 84. ​Wachtel to Brenn, December 12, 1955. 85. ​Wachtel to Brenn, December 12, 1955. 86. ​A contract approved in 1956 concerned FCP ser­vices in Vietnam: it was paid and approved by the Defense Department, and sent through Wells Fargo in San Francisco. “Freedom Co. Contract, Viet Nam,” August 23, 1965, Lansdale FOIA NSA. 87. ​Col­on ­ el Lansdale’s Cold War Program for Defense, Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, October 17, 1957, Lansdale FOIA NSA. 88. ​Boot, Road Not Taken, 315. 89. ​CIA, “Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence,” October 17, 1957, CIA-­ RDP80R01731R0003000160011-4, CREST, Archives II. 90. ​ CIA, “Rec­ ord and Routing Sheet,” October 24, 1957, CIA-­ RDP80R​ 01731R0​ 0030​ 00160011-4, CREST, Archives II. 91. ​Lee Miller to Sak Sutsakhan, May 12, 1957, Military Advisory Group Cambodia, Administration Division, General Rec­ords, 1957, box 2, entry A1 4, RG 472, Rec­ords of the U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia, 1950–1975 (hereafter RG 472), Archives II. 92. ​By this time, the FCP had changed its name to the Eastern Construction Com­pany. “Vietnam Contract, Eastern Construction Com­pany, July 29, 1960,” 1948–1961, Office of Far Eastern Operations, Subject Files, 1960–1961, box 52, RG 469, Archives II. 93. ​U.S. Embassy Saigon, October 10, 1955, Office of Public Safety, Vietnam Division, Subject File, box 2, RG 286, Archives II; National Institute of Administration (NIA), Philippine Institute of Public Administration, Correspondence, November 11, 1957, box 665, folder 83, Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections, Vietnam Center and Archive. 94. ​The phrase “new world economy” derives from a 1949 Fortune magazine article heralding Truman’s plan to focus U.S. power on the Third World. Quoted in Panitch and Gindin, Making of Global Capitalism, 105. 95. ​Simpson, “Curious History of Self-­Determination.”

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 7 3 – 1 7 9    231

96. ​“Colonialism,” May 22, 1952, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, International Information Administration, Assistant Administrator for Policy and Plans, Rec­ords Relating to Worldwide Program Objectives, 1948–1957, lot 58D459, box 3, entry A1 1587A, RG 59, Archives II. 97. ​Glassman, “On the Borders.” Foster advocates for a pre–­Cold War understanding of Southeast Asia as a “coherent geo­graph­ic­ al region.” Foster, Projections of Power, 13. 98. ​Frey, “Tools of Empire.” 99. ​CIA, “The Asian-­African Conference,” April 1955, CIA-­RDP80R01443R000300300002-5, CREST, Archives II. 100. ​Frey, “Tools of Empire,” 557–58. 101. ​“ECCOI Prospectus,” n.d., box 28, Charles T. R. Bohannan Papers. 102. ​Man, Soldiering through Empire, 72–76. 103. ​“Statement by General Carlos P. Romulo, Foreign Secretary of the Philippines, on the Chinese Communist Intervention in K ­ orea,” December 7, 1950, Elpidio Quirino Papers, Ayala Museum, Manila. 104. ​“Romulo Urges World to Copy Policy of US t­owards PI to Avoid Race War,” Manila Times, October 10, 1945. 105. ​“Statement by General Carlos P. Romulo” 106. ​CIA, “Current Intelligence Weekly Summary,” August 4, 1955, CIA-­RDP79-00927A0​ 0600030001-4, CREST, Archives II. 107. ​Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 4. 108. ​“Address of President Quirino on the Occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of the In­de­pen­ dence of the Philippines,” Official Gazette, July 4, 1951, Quirino Papers. 109. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 110. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 169. 111. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 112. ​Man, Soldiering through Empire, 61–66. 113. ​CIA, “Pakse-­Kontum Road,” November 27, 1959, CIA-­RDP02T06408R000100010036-0, CREST, Archives II. 114. ​Lansdale, handwritten note. 115. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 170. 116. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 169. 117. ​Joe F. Leeker, “Com­pany Management, Administration, and Ground Support II—at the Times of Air Amer­i­ca; Part 1: 1959–1973,” June 17, 2016, The Civilian Air Transport (CAT)/Air Amer­i­ca Archive, Special Collections, University of Texas, Dallas, https://­www​.­utdallas​.­edu​/­library​ /­specialcollections​/­hac​/­cataam​/­Leeker​/­history​/­CompanyManagement2​.­pdf. 118. ​On Operation Brotherhood’s links to the CIA, see Chester, Covert Network, 153–56. 119. ​Operation Brotherhood affiliate David Smith arrived in Vietnam in December 1954, and he liaised with the U.S. Information Ser­vice (USIS) to create three million leaflets for “Operation Liberty,” which ­were ready by April. Lansdale, handwritten note. 120. ​CIA, “Pakse-­Kontum Road.” 121. ​CIA, “Pakse-­Kontum Road.” 122. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, 170. 123. ​Lansdale, handwritten note. In a July 1960 letter, Allen Dulles wrote, “Operation Brotherhood is largely CIA financed.” Dulles to General Goodpastor, July 10, 1960, Office of the Staff Secretary Rec­ords, International File, box 9, Eisenhower Library. 124. ​On U.S. critiques of French colonialism and the supposed merits of U.S. imperial management, see Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and Amer­i­ca, 59–67.

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125. ​“Lecture to Army War College,” December 3, 1958, box 79, Lansdale Papers. 126. ​Freedom Com­pany, “Freedom in Asia,” n.d., The Freedom Com­pany, “Freedom in Asia,” January 1955, Box 33, Edward Lansdale Papers. 127. ​Freedom Com­pany, “Freedom in Asia.” 128. ​Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, xxi, xiv–­xxii. 129. ​Lansdale, “Cold War Win.” 130. ​Saigon to Department of State, August 10, 1957, Office of Public Safety, Vietnam Division, Subject File, box 2, RG 286, Archives II. 131. ​Alfonso Enriquez to Tran Trung Dung, “Report of Activities and Job Pro­gress of the First Group, Filipino Ordnance Technicians,” December 10 1956, General Rec­ords, 1954–1959, Adjutant General Division, Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Vietnam, box 10, entry A14, RG 472, Archives II. 132. ​Enriquez, “Report of Activities and Job Pro­gress.” 133. ​On housing, pay, and other features of Viet­nam­ese soldiers’ life, see Brigham, “Dreaming Dif­fer­ent Dreams.” 134. ​“Memorandum for the Rec­ord,” n.d., box 33, Lansdale Papers. 135. ​The ICA Saigon continued to follow the terms of a 1958 Freedom Com­pany contract, even when it was paying over $1 million a year to the Eastern Construction Com­pany. “PA 5390 Freedom Com­pany Contract,” ICA Saigon, March 26, 1958, 1941–1961, Office of Far Eastern Operations, Vietnam Subject Files, 1957–1959 Communications, box 30, RG 469, Archives II. 136. ​“Memorandum for the Rec­ord.” 137. ​“ECCOI Prospectus.”

Epilogue 1. ​Vicente Albano Pacis, Memorandum for the President, March 30, 1949, Republic of the Philippines, Department of Foreign Affair, Elpidio Quirino Papers, Ayala Museum, Manila. 2. ​Congressional Rec­ord, Monday, July 31, 1961, box 16, General Correspondence, Myron Cowen Papers, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, In­de­pen­dence, MO. 3. ​On the First Quarter Storm and the CPP, see Abinales, “Philippines,” 261–65; Kaufman, Nationalist Passions, 81–82. 4. ​Henze, “U.S.-­Philippine Economic Relations.” 5. ​CIA, “Martial Law in the Philippines: The Road Ahead,” November 19, 1972, Office of National Estimates, CIA-­RDP79R00967A000500030010-6, CREST, Archives II. 6. ​“Statistical Summary of ­Human Rights Abuses and Public Order Violation Arrests in the Philippines 9/72 to 2/86,” Archival Collections at the University of Hawai‘i School of Law Library, accessed December  20, 2019, http://­archives​.­law​.­hawaii​.­edu​/­items​/­show​/­5470. 7. ​McCoy, Torture and Impunity, 124. 8. ​For an extensive report on the multiple facets of martial law, see L ­ awyers Committee for International ­Human Rights, The Philippines: A Country in Crisis, 1983. New York: ­Lawyers Committee for International ­Human Rights, 1983. 9. ​“NSSM 155: Philippine Policy—­Annex on Martial Law,” National Security Study Memorandum, October 17, 1972, Department of State, The Philippines: The Marcos Years, Digital National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, DC (hereafter DNSA). 10. ​Manila to Department of State, December 13, 1974, The Philippines: The Marcos Years, DNSA. 11. ​Glassman, Drums of War, 482.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 8 7 – 1 8 9    233

12. ​President, American Chamber of Commerce, to Ferdinand Marcos, September 27, 1972, The Philippines: The Marcos Years, DNSA. 13. ​“NSSM 155: Philippine Policy.” 14. ​Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre, xxii. 15. ​Joseph, “What We Know and Should Know,” 6. 16. ​Bayan Muna is a leftist party in the Philippines. Ronalyn V. Olea, “Kin of Victims of Killings, Disappearances Hit Aquino Gov’t for Inaction on Rights Cases,” Bulatlat, October 21, 2010, http://­www​.­bulatlat​.­com​/­main​/­2010​/­10​/­21​/­kin​-­of​-­victims​-­of​-­killings​-­disappearances​-­hit​-­aquino​ -­govt​-­for​-­inaction​-­on​-­r ights​-­cases. 17. ​Quimpo, “Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs.’ ” 18. ​Sung Kim, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, “US-­PH Friendship Rings Stronger in 2018,” December 28, 2018, Manila Bulletin, https://­news​.­mb​.­com​.­ph​/­2018​/­12​/­22​/­us​-­ph​-­friendship​ -­r ings​-­stronger​-­in​-­2018​/­.

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Index

Afro-­Asian bloc, 11 Agricultural Workers Industrial League (AWIL), 41, 44 Albert, Mariano, 50, 90, 92, 113 Alejandrino, Casto, 57, 68, 75, 77, 91 Aleta, Amado, 75, 77 All-­American Anti-­Imperialist League (AAAIL), 20–24, 27, 46–47 Almenana, Anacleto, 23–24, 27, 36, 58 Amerasia, 79 American Civil Liberties Union, 24 American Federation of ­Labor (AFL), 41 Anderson, Bernard L., 72, 164, 171 Ang Bagong Katipunan, 33, 48 anti-­Chinese discrimination, 40, 108–109 anticolonialism, 3, 8, 23, 53, 125 anticommunism. See also counterinsurgency and Cold War politics, 4, 10, 82, 183–184, 189 and empire, 9–12 global war against, spatial logic of, 3, 15, 18, 96–99, 106, 108, 112, 114, 124, 128, 163, 179, 182, 184 remobilization of, in postwar politics, 61 and U.S. imperial exceptionalism, 2, 3, 19, 26, 124, 179 and warfare, global anticommunist, 13–15, 92, 99, 100, 106–107, 109, 113–115, 124–128, 162, 178, 179, 186–188 as weapon, in partisan politics, 110–111

anti-­imperialism, 5, 7–8, 17, 21–28, 36, 112, 124, 131, 187 Aquino, Benigno III, 189 Arellano, Oscar, 176, 177 Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), 5, 12, 16, 18, 64, 104, 107, 113, 115, 117, 124–127, 131, 164, 170–171, 189 Asia Firsters, 110, See also China Lobby Associated Press, 59 Atlantic Charter, 12, 69, 74 Australia, 23, 66, 67, 68 Bandung Conference, 23, 161, 174 Barrera, Jesus, 83 Bataan Death March, 67 Bell, Daniel W., 126 Bell Report, 137–139, 140 Trade Bill, 88 Better American Federation, 42 Blanton, Thomas, 41 Bognot, Cirilo, 36 Bohannan, Charles T. R., 115–116, 160, 165, 177 Bolshevism, 21, 22, 50, Bowers, C.H., 43, 44, 48 British Empire, 62, 95, 154, 175 Browder, Earl, 43, 56 Bulnong, Agaton, 74 Bureau of Insular Affairs, 46–47

262   I nde x

Bureau of ­Labor, 34, 37 Burma, 62, 95, 176 Caciquism, 31, 122 Cambodia, 13, 53, 172, 178, 180 Camp Batson, 166 Capadocia, Guillermo, 50, 69 ­Castle, W.R., 54 Castro, Pedro, 96 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 12, 96, 111, 114, 124, 129, 152, 159–184 and anticommunism, Philippines, 160 and covert wars, Southeast Asia, 173 evolution of, 168–169 and Freedom Com­pany, 179–180, 183–184 and psychological warfare, 129, 159, 161, 165–166, 169, 171, 172 Central Intelligence Group (CIG), 168 Chicago Daily Tribune, 102 China and Bell Report, 137 “China Lobby,” 109–110 and Comintern, “ultraleft” turn in, 38 in report, Wagenknecht, Alfred, 36 rhetorical use of, as U.S. po­liti­cal strategy, 137–139 in victory plan, Lansdale, Edward, 13 at World Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, 23–24 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 99, 108–109, 138 Chinese Exclusion Act, 40 Chu, L.H., 40 Chu, Richard, 40 Clark Air Force Base, 12, 94, 128, 166, 170 colonialism. See also anticolonialism and Freedom Com­pany, recasting history of, 162, 167, 173–175 and Magsaysay, Ramon, links to communism, 143, 162 racial order of, 3, 19, 162, 167 Spanish, in Philippines, 80, 85 U.S. vs. Eu­ro­pean, 148, 152, 175, 180, 185 and U.S. exceptionalism, 8, 175, 182 Comintern, 24, 35, 36, 38, 40, 53, 56 Committee on un-­Filipino Activities (CUFA), 107–108, 138 Commonwealth, Philippine, 6, 17, 25, 55, 57–66, 73–74, 77–81, 84, 90

Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), 187. See also Philippine Communist Party (PKP) Communist Party of the United States of Amer­i­ca (CPUSA), 21–22, 24, 35–37, 40–44, 56 Communist University of the Toilers of the East, 37 Confesor, Tomás, 60, 89 Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF; Philippine ­Labor Congress), 33, 35, 37–38, 40 Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (Philippine Workers’ Union), 33, 35, 37–38, 40 Congress of ­Labor Organ­izations (CLO), 92, 111 Constitution, Philippine, 88 containment, 4, 100–101 Corregidor, islands of, 66, 67 corruption, 18, 101, 103, 130–138, 142, 143, 148, 151, 153–158 ­Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), 63, 73–79, 86, 116 counterinsurgency. See also anticommunism as Anti-­Huk campaign to cast U.S. intervention as protection of Philippine sovereignty, 97, 99, 125, 159, 179 definitions of, 115–116, 117 doctrine, global spread of, 129 and Lansdale, Edward, team and strategy in Philippines, 114–115, 116, 120–124, 128, 165 seminars on, 120, 123, 127–128, 129, 166 and warfare, anticommunist, 13–15, 99, 106–107, 109, 113–115, 123–129, 162, 178, 179 and warfare, “counterguerilla,” 116, 117, 121, 127, 129 Cuaderno, Miguel, 135 Cuba, 21–22, 129 Cuenco, Mariano, 90–92 Culala, Felipe, 68 Daily Worker,The, 36, 41, 44 Davis, Dwight F., 43, 47, 49, 53, 54 de Lachevrotière, Henry Chavingny, 53 decolonization and anticolonial strug­gles, Asian, conflation of, 125–126 era of, and interrelation with Cold War, 4, 8, 11, 19, 28, 55, 61–62, 96, 123, 139, 161–162

I nde x    263

history of U.S. engagement with, in Philippines, 9, 12, 18, 80, 132, 179, 182, 188 racial politics of, 173 Demo­cratic Alliance (DA), 82–84, 87–92, 164 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 161, 165–166, 178, 181 Doeppers, Daniel F., 34 Dos Passos, John, 44 Dulles, Allen, 14, 115, 159–160, 162, 178 Dulles, John Foster, 115, 156, 158, 159, Duterte, Rodrigo, 189 Earnshaw, Tomas, 51 Eastern Construction Com­pany, 116, 182–183 Economic Development Corps (ED-­COR), 121 Economic Survey Mission to the Philippines, 136 Elizalde, Joaquin “Mike,” 66 Emigh, Col­o­nel Harry, 76–77 empire and anticommunism, 9–12 British, 62, 95, 175 era of, 19, 23 erasing of, 109–115 Eu­ro­pean models of, 8, 27, 39, 40, 98 Freedom Incorporated as network for, 183 French, 180 nationalist challenges to, 99 Ottoman, 27 U.S., in Philippines, 2–4, 12, 14, 27, 33, 39, 61, 84, 89–90, 98, 184, 193 Enriquez, Alfonso, 165–166, 181–182 Erskine, Graves B., 97 Evangelista, Crisanto, 35–40, 50–51, 69 Evarts Doctrine, 20 exceptionalism U.S. colonial, 175, 179–182 U.S. imperial, ideology of, 2–3, 6–9, 19, 26, 28, 46, 55, 66, 79, 81, 93, 112, 124 fascism global strug­gle against, Huks, 12, 69–70, 83 rise of, in Eu­rope and Japan, 17, 55 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 46, 159 Feleo, Juan, 37, 50, 78, 91–92 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 41 Filipinization, 30–34 Fish Committee, 9, 21, 47, 51 Forbes, William Cameron, 31–32 Foreign Operations Administration (FOA), 154–155 Fort Mills, 67

Freedom Com­pany (FCP), 13–14, 18–19, 160–184 Freedom Incorporated, 12–15, 163, 183 Gabriel, Agustin G., 164 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 146 geographic imaginary, 124, 126, 174, 179 global color line, 8, 22, 40, 98, 168. See also race global, as po­liti­cal category, 97 Gomez, Manuel, 46 Governmental Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Act, 130 ­Great Depression, 21, 30, 33, 44 Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere, 65, 67 Guam, 21, 65 Guinto, Leon G., 55–56 Gupta, Sobhanlal Datta, 38 Haiti, 21–22 Harding, Warren G., 33 Hawai‘i, 21, 27, 41, 46 Hayden, Joseph, 141 Hernandez, Amado, 111 Hillenkoetter, Roscoe, 168 Hobbs, Leland, 98, 105, 136 Hong Kong, 53, 65, 86 House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC), 107 Houston, Lawrence R., 168 Hukbalahap (Huk) Rebellion, 81, 99, 113, 125, 188 Huklandia, 15–16, 98, 166 Hurley, Patrick, 54 Hynes, William “Red,” 47 Imperial Valley strikers, 44 imperialism. See also anti-­imperialism; exceptionalism, U.S. imperial and capitalism, 39, 56, 112, 121, 128 colonial, 148 Eu­ro­pean, 7, 19, 29–30, 52, 54, 89, 96 Interwar, 26–30 Japa­nese, 17, 64, 67, 71, 185 U.S., racial politics of, 114 India, 23, 37, 39, 54, 62, 95, 98, 161, 176 Indochina, 29, 37, 53, 62, 64, 95–98, 110, 161 Indonesia, 24, 37, 39, 62, 98, 152, 158, 161, 167, 176, 180 Institute of Public Administration (IPA), 140–147, 149, 151, 153–156

264   I nde x

International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 158, 171–173 International Information Administration (IIA), 149 International ­Labor Defense (ILD), 45 internationalism, 21, 23, 26, 28, 56 and PKP, 34–39 Isaacs, Harold, 128 Japan. See also imperialism; propaganda; Victory over Japan (V-­J) Day “Anti-­Japanese United Front,” 68, 69, 72 and Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere, 65, 67 Imperial Japa­nese Army, 17, 58, 65, 67, 72 and interwar anticolonial imagination, 24 invasion, southern Indochina, 64 occupation/military rule, in Philippines, 12, 17, 59–60, 62, 63, 65, 67–69, 71, 73, 75, 85, 102, 185 “red purge” in, 99–100 and Ricaristas, support of, 49 rise of fascism in, 17, 55 trade embargo against, U.S.-­led, 64 Johnson, Louis, 104, 105 Johnson, Nelson, 43 Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group ( JUSMAG), 92, 98, 101, 105, 106, 126, 136, 170–171, 188 Jones Act, 30–31, 51 Joven, Edilberto, 86 Justiniano, Medardo T., 127–129 Kai-­shek, Chiang, 38, 137–139 Kalipunang Pambasa ng mga Magsasaka sa Pilipinas (KPMP), 33, 34, 37 Katipunan ng mga Anakpawis sa Filipinas (KAP), 38, 50, 51 Kellogg-­Briand Pact, 21 Kellogg, Frank, 20–23, 41 Korean War, 113, 125, 136, 149 Krueger, Walter, 75 ­ abor, Bureau of, 34, 37 L ­labor movement, Philippine, 34, 36–38, 40, 48, 111 strikes, 17, 48, 57, 61, 186 Lansdale, Edward, 12–14, 18, 114–118, 120–124, 127–129, 152, 159–163, 165–179, 181 Laos, 13–14, 53, 121, 158, 161, 178, 180, 183

Lapham, Robert, 73 Laurel-­Langley Agreement, 186 Laurel, José P., 56–58, 63, 102, 186 League against Imperialism and for National In­de­pen­dence (LAI), 23–24, 36–37 League of In­de­pen­dence, 38 Lederle, John, 141, 147, 154, 155, 156 Liberal Party, 84, 102, 107 liberalism, 82, 114, 183 Liberation of the ­People of the USSR (AMCOMLIB), 169 Lorwin, Lewis L., 57 Luce, Henry, 110 Maclang, Adonis, 76–77 Magsaysay, Ramón, 12, 14, 104–105, 107, 112, 115, 123–127, 130, 152–153, 157–160, 162, 165, 168, 170, 176, 193 Malolos, 59–60, 71, 75–77 Manahan, Jacinto, 36–37, 39, 43, 46, 50 Manila Daily Bulletin, 102 Manila Times, 48, 85, 86, 87, 111 Manlapit, Pablo, 27, 46 Mao Tse-­tung, 69, 186 Marcos, Ferdinand, 168, 186–189 Marshall, George, 66 martial law, 172, 186–187 Marxism, 11, 138 anticolonial movements, Marxist-­and Leninist-­inspired, 8, 128 rhetoric/ideas, Marxist-­Leninist, global circulation of, 35, 39, 108, 111–112, 124 McCarthy, Joseph, 110 McNutt, Paul V., 1, 89 Mexico, 22, 23, 45, 56 Michigan State Vietnam Advisory Group, 173 Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), 171–172, 177–178 Military Intelligence Division, U.S. Army (MID), 25, 48–49 Military Police Command, Philippines (MPC), 86, 88, 117 Mill, Edward W., 80–81, 84 modernization theory, 144–145, 149 156 Mutual Defense Assistance Program, Southeast Asia (MDAP), 4, 97, 104–105, 170 Mutual Security Agency (MSA), 140–142, 149, 154–155, 170

I nde x    265

Nacionalista Party, 37, 38, 83–84 102, 152 National Citizens’ Movement for ­Free Elections (NAMFREL), 124, 164 National Committee for a F ­ ree Eu­rope (NCFE), 159, 169 National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), 164 National Security Council (NSC), 4, 100–101, 103, 113, 126, 140, 143, 155, 157, 168–169 nationalism anticolonial, 3, 10, 124, 162, 168 Asian, 124, 125, 153, 174 Philippine, 1, 3, 8, 17, 25, 27, 39, 46, 55–56, 63, 70, 124–126, 153, 160, 187 New China Review, 83 New P ­ eople’s Army, 187, 189 New York Times, The, 20, 50, 59, 71, 81–82, 90 Nicaragua, 21, 23 Nocum, Carlos, 73 North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization (NATO), 95 October Revolution, 38 Office of Naval Intelligence, U.S. Navy (ONI), 45–46 Office of Special Operations (OSS), 115, 159 Office of Strategic Ser­vices (OSS), 115, 159 Office of the Secretary of Defense, 169, 178 Operation Brotherhood, 176–178 Ora, Antonio, 27–40 Osmeña, Sergio, 66 Pakistan, 95, 176 Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbukid (National Peasant Union), 86–87, 90–92 Pan-­Pacific Trade Union, 36–37, 43 Panama, 21, 45, 111 ­People’s Republic of China (PRC), 99–100 Philippine Assembly, 30, 34 Philippine Chinese Laborers’ Association (PCLA), 40 Philippine Commonwealth, 6, 17, 25, 55, 58, 60, 62, 66, 73, 79, 90 Philippine Communist Party (PKP), 8, 17, 25, 33–41, 45, 47, 50–52, 69, 78, 90–91, 102, 103, 108, 12 Philippine Constabulary (PC), 25, 39–40, 42–43, 46, 48–52, 72, 74, 75, 77, 85–88, 92, 98, 103, 117, 164, 171

Philippine Council on United States Foreign Aid (PHILCUSA), 142 Philippine Executive Commission, 67 Philippine Information Agency (PIA), 185 Philippine Republic, inauguration of, 4–5, 16, 18, 60, 61, 71, 80, 84, 92, 94, 106, 157, 164, 180 Philippine Scouts, 64, 166 Philippine-­American War, 31, 34, 43, 51, 116, 124 Pollock, James K., 141 Ponce, Domingo, 37–38 popu­lar front, 17, 55 Prentice, Edward, 155 propaganda, anticommunist, 21, 41, 111, 118–120, 127 “black,” 170 and International Information Administration (IIA), 149 Japa­nese, 65, 73, 117 and Operation Brotherhood, 178 and peasant targeting, 120–127 and Radio ­Free Eu­rope, 169 “Red,” 49 Soviet campaigns, 106, 113 and U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 149–150 Public Administration Week, 130, 132, 157, 158 public administration, as academic discipline 139–151, 173 Public Lands Act, 32 Puerto Rico, 6–7, 21–22, 111 Quezon, Manuel L., 30, 37, 49, 55, 57, 58, 64–66, 79, 90 Quirino, Elpidio, 101–103, 105, 106, 113, 115, 134–141, 152, 176, 182, 183 race and civilizational hierarchies, discourse of, 41, 110, 114, 123, 149, 162, 176 and colonialism in Philippines, racial order of, 3, 8, 46, 162, 167–168 and colonized ­peoples, racialized language and perceptions of, 19, 23, 41, 46, 49, 101, 122, 135–136 and (Filipino) peasant, construction of, 49, 121 and radicalism, 28, 40–52

266   I nde x

race (continued) relations, U.S., and Cold War politics, 114, 161–162, 183–184 and U.S. imperialism, 40, 113–114, 123 183 and warfare, imaginative geography of, 114 “red flag” laws, 42 Red International of ­Labor Unions (RILU), 35, 37 Red Scare, 10, 42 Ricaristas, 49 Ricarte, General Artemio, 49 Romulo, Carlos P., 18, 175–176 Roo­se­velt, Franklin  D., 17, 55, 59, 62, 64, 66, 79, 88, 112 Rosario, Agapito del, 69 Roxas, Manuel, 1–2, 11, 48, 63, 84, 85–92, 94–95, 100–101, 128, 164 Rusk, Dean, 132 Saigon Military Mission (SMM), 161, 165–166, 172, 177–178 San Juan, Frisco, 164–167, 173, 176, 183 Sandino Rebellion, 20 Santos, Jose Abad, 69 Saturday Eve­ning Post, 151, 153 Second Philippine Republic, 63, 71 sedition, 24, 41–42, 47, 48, 50–52 self-­determination, discourse of, 3, 8, 26–27, 39, 55, 69, 80–81, 96, 127, 173 Sherrod, Robert, 151–153 Simmons, E. H. H., 29–30, 32 social order, Philippine colonial, 44, 45, 52, 61–63, 79, 107 solidarity anticommunist, 127–129, 168 international, 22, 39, 128 Soriano, Andres, 66 sovereignty in mandate system, League of Nations, 27 national, Philippine, 3–4, 30, 39, 55, 82, 97, 128, 131, 139, 173–174 U.S., defense of, 21 U.S., relinquishment of, 80, 81, 94 Soviet Union. See also propaganda; Communist University of the Toilers of the East and National Committee for a F ­ ree Eu­rope (NCFE), 169 and Soviet Communism, discourse of, as threat to Philippine nationalism, 55–56, 57–58

and “Soviet takeover,” fear of, accusations of, 22, 95, 97, 100, 103, 107, 111, 116–117, 118, 126 and suspected infiltration, 21–22, 45, 105, 107 and U.S.-­Soviet conflict, 4, 10, 11, 82, 95, 100, 101, 106, 175, 179 Stalin, Joseph, 56, 91, 108, 118–120 Star Reporter, 112 Steintorf, Paul, 78–79 Stimson, Henry, 43, 54, 80 Stone, Harlan (General), 42 surveillance. See Philippine Constabulary (PC) Taft, William Howard, 1, 31, 61, 112 Taruc, Luis, 68, 71–72, 74–78, 83–84, 87, 89, 91, 111–112 Tayug affair, 48, 50, technical assistance programs, 145–146 technocrats, 18, 130–133, 142–143, 146–147, 149–151, 154, 156–157 Thorpe, Claude, 67–69 Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), 41 ­unions Katipunan ng mga Anakpawis sa Filipinas (KAP), 38 National Peasant Union, 86, 87, 90–92. See also Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubikid (PKM) Pagkakaisa ng Magsasaka (Farmer’s Union), 34 Pan-­Pacific Trade Union, 43 Red International of ­Labor Unions (RILU) Unión de Tabaqueros de Filipinas (UTF), 35 Unión el Trabajo de Filipinas (UdelTF), 35 Unión Impresores y Litografos de Filipinas (Printers’ and Lithographers’ Union of the Philippines), 34 Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina (UODF), 35 United Nations, 18, 95, 103, 145, 146 Food and Agricultural Organ­ization, 140, 145 Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 133, 145 Technical Assistance Administration, 125, 145 University of Michigan, 6, 130, 140–142, 146–147, 153–157 Institute of Public Administration (IPA), 140–146, 149, 151, 153–156

I nde x    267

University of the Philippines, 6, 141–144, 146–147, 151, 154, 156 Rizal Hall, 144 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 163, 171 U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), 60, 64–65, 76–68, 71, 73, 74–77, 85, 86, 164 U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division (MID), 25, 48–49 U.S. ­Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), 63, 73–79, 86, 116 U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 118, 149 U.S. News and World Report, 124–126 U.S. Office of Foreign Missions, 163 U.S. Operations Mission’s International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 158, 171–173 U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 20, 23 U.S.-­Philippine Military Assistance Act, 92, 188 USSR. See Soviet Union Valencia, A.L., 185–187 Valeriano, Napoleon D., 115–117, 122–123, 129, 165, 172 Van Deman, Ralph, 43 Vargas, Jorge, 65, 67 Ventura, Honorio, 48 Victory over Japan (V-­J) Day, 79 Vietnam and CIA psychological warfare seminars, 129, 161 Concept for Victory in, 13 and Freedom Com­pany, 160, 161, 165, 167, 170–172, 174, 177–183. See also Operation Brotherhood Michigan State Vietnam Advisory Group, 173 Saigon Military Mission (SMM), 161, 165

Vietnam Veterans League, 165–166 Vietnam War, 13, 117, 179, 187 Viet­nam­ese Army, 161, 166, 167, 172, 182 war of decolonization in, 13 U.S. relationship with, involvement in, 13, 24, 165, 167 Wagenknecht, Alfred, 35–37 warfare anticommunist, to legitimize state vio­lence, 13–15, 92, 99–100, 178, 179 counterinsurgent/“counterguerilla,” 116–117, 121–123, 125 covert, 168, 169, 172, 176 global anticommunist, 99–100, 106–109, 110, 113–115, 123–124, 128–129, 162, 179, 184 global, spatial ordering of, 98, 128 psychological, 115, 117, 126–129, 159, 161, 165–166, 169–172. See also Lansdale, Edward regional, inter-­guerilla in Central Luzon, 62, 69, 73 threat of, global, 118 Washington Post, 59, 60, 69, 138 Waterman, Henry S., 53–54 Welsh, Francis Ralston, 41–42 Whitney, Courtney, 77–78 Wilcox, Francis, 155 Wilkins, H. Ford, 82 ­Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 22 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 111 World War I (WWI), 8, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 36, 41, 43 World War II (WWII), 8, 10–12, 15–17, 34, 59, 62–63, 72–73, 81, 84, 95, 102–104, 110, 115–117, 134, 140, 145–147, 151, 164