Exclusion and Empire, 1898–1941
Around midnight, May 1, 1898, nine U.S. warships slipped past the strangely quiet guns on Corregidor Island, past the old Spanish fort guarding the entrance to Manila Bay, and sailed silently toward the Philippines’ capital city. After about five hours, the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Squadron dipped down close to Sangley Point, just to the southwest of Manila, where a dozen Spanish ships rested at anchor. As dawn broke, the Luneta battery onshore began firing at the intruders.
What Quezon saw from the beaches of Manila Bay was the dawn of America’s overseas empire. In a sudden energetic burst, the country defeated Spain in the War of 1898 (traditionally called the Spanish-American War) and took control of territory in the Caribbean while, in the Pacific, the United States annexed the Philippines and negotiated to obtain Hawaii.2
What became a relatively straightforward conflict—U.S. diplomat John Hay, speaking for many at the time, famously boasted that it was a “splendid little war”—gave way to enormously complicated ramifications.3 Since 1789 American policymakers had encouraged the country’s often violent westward expansion—displacing many American Indian nations as eastern settlers established new towns, territories, and, eventually, states on the push toward the Pacific coast. Beginning in 1898, Congress, for the first time in American history, became responsible for overseeing territories that existed beyond the shores of North America. Millions of new people were suddenly swept up into America’s global footprint. Their very presence challenged long-held assumptions about citizenship and race and forced Congress to confront what it meant to be American.4 Would the islands become states, and would their inhabitants become citizens? Was there room in the national narrative for Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders?
But as the number of Asian immigrants rose out west, Congress developed laws targeting them specifically. Over the course of 70 years, federal legislators and the courts worked to bar immigrants from China and Japan from coming to America while prohibiting those already stateside from becoming naturalized citizens. These exclusion acts were compounded by state laws that prevented Asian immigrants from owning land or participating in the political process in any way. This simple fact, more than anything, explains why there is not a single Asian or Pacific Islander American elected as a voting Representative or Senator before 1956.
The title of this section, “Exclusion and Empire,” is meant to underscore the two major forces at work in the United States’ policy toward the Pacific prior to World War II: the process of expanding America’s global presence while simultaneously restricting who could belong. In large measure, the two themes informed each other. By the time Congress assumed control over territory in the Pacific, it had decades of experience excluding people of Asian descent—especially the Chinese—from the American story. Over the next 40 years, as Congress supervised territorial governments in the Philippines and Hawaii, lawmakers continued to revise the requirements for citizenship.
Footnotes
1On the Battle of Manila Bay, see Michael Blow, A Ship to Remember: The Maine and the Spanish-American War (New York: William Morrow, 1992): 224–234. For Quezon’s account, see Manuel Luis Quezon, The Good Fight (New York: Appleton-Century, 1946): 34–35. See also Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989): 103–105.
2The War of 1898 is traditionally called the Spanish-American War, but recent scholarship has begun using the War of 1898 in order to include Cuban and Filipino combatants in the narrative. See George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 309.
3For the Hay quote, see Herring, From Colony to Superpower: 316.
4Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961); Robert L. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, WV: Harlan Davidson, 1986); and Warren Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).