10
FORTRESS AMERICA
For the inhabitants of U.S. territories, empire was an inescapable daily presence. They saluted the U.S. flag. They studied the English language and U.S. history in school. Their money had George Washington’s face on it. They observed U.S. holidays—Lincoln’s Birthday, the Fourth of July—as well as the anniversary of the U.S. occupation (an occasion that Puerto Rican nationalists celebrated in 1938 by trying to shoot the governor).
Yet on the mainland, empire slipped easily from view. Consider the coverage in The New York Times in a representative year, 1930. Its readers were nearly twice as likely to encounter articles about Poland or Brazil as they were about the Philippines. The 13 articles the paper ran about Albania (PLOT AGAINST KING ZOG FOILED, etc.) far outstripped the 6 it printed about Alaska. Hawai‘i appeared seven times that year, Guam not once. In contrast, the Times ran 639 articles about India, Britain’s largest colony. That was nearly three times as many as it ran about all U.S. territories combined, territories in which more than 10 percent of the U.S. population lived.
It wasn’t much different in the realm of books. Scanning the library shelves, it’s easy to find high-profile books from the interwar period depicting Native Americans and the western frontier (Little House on the Prairie is one), but prominent treatments of overseas territories are rare. The only one with a truly large audience was Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, a wildly popular ethnography that featured frank discussions of Samoan sexuality and launched Mead’s career as one of the most famous scholars in the country. Yet Mead wrote of “Samoa,” not “American Samoa” (the colony’s legal name), and avoided mention of colonies, territories, and empires altogether. It is entirely possible to read Coming of Age without realizing that the “brown Polynesian people” she describes encountering on “a South Sea island” are U.S. nationals.
The indifference toward the colonies in the culture was met with an equal indifference in the government. Whereas Britain governed its possessions from large, prominent, and imposing edifices, the United States had no colonial building in its capital. Nor did it have a school to train colonial officials. Its territories were ruled by a haphazard and improvised set of bureaucratic arrangements under the army, navy, and Department of the Interior.
It showed. The men sent to run the territories, unlike the trained administrators who oversaw European colonies, simply didn’t know much about the places to which they’d been assigned, and they cycled rapidly through their posts. Between Guam’s annexation in 1899 and World War II, it had nearly forty governors. FDR’s first governor of Puerto Rico, who served for six months, spoke no Spanish and left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn’t know where the island was. There was a period of several months when the territory of Alaska, which is half the physical size of India, didn’t have a single federal official in it.
Colonial subjects complained, of course, but few mainlanders listened. As one Filipino Harvard graduate noted in 1926, “It has been impossible to induce the American people to take more than a passing interest in the conduct of Philippine affairs.”
Even the people who should have been interested weren’t. The Anti-Imperialist League, which in 1899 had claimed more than half a million contributors, atrophied badly after the 1900 election. In 1924, progressives associated with The Nation magazine revived the league, but in its new incarnation it had a different focus. Ernest Gruening, who had been The Nation’s managing editor, suggested giving the organization a new name, the Pan-American Freedom League. That suggestion accurately captured the organization’s interests: not advocating on behalf of the formal territories (only some of which were in the Americas), but resisting U.S. interference with the sovereign states of the Americas. It was an organization, in other words, concerned not with Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, or the Philippines, but with Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico.
Mainland inattentiveness had always been a strain on the territories, but by the 1930s it became an outright danger. That was a decade of economic desperation and military peril, when “Fortress America” built protective barriers against a hostile world. Yet the colonies received little protection. Instead, they watched from the outside as the walls around the mainland grew tall.
The blurry haze that enshrouded colonial policy was a constant source of complaint. To firm things up, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established a central office in 1934: the Division of Territories and Island Possessions within the Interior Department. For the first time, Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the U.S. Virgin Islands were under a single authority, and within five years it would cover the Philippines and the major guano islands, too. The only inhabited territories remaining separate were Guam and American Samoa, kept as fiefdoms of the navy.
To head the new office, Roosevelt tapped Ernest Gruening of the revived Anti-Imperialist League. Gruening’s colleagues at The Nation were ecstatic. “Not in all the years that I have been writing for the press can I recall an appointment which has given me more satisfaction,” the magazine’s editor wrote. “His whole career would seem to have led right up to this post.”
Gruening had enjoyed quite a career. Though trained in medicine at Harvard (no overlap with Albizu or Rhoads, unfortunately), he had made his living in journalism and politics. As a (white) member of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he’d led the campaign to prevent The Birth of a Nation from opening in that city. He was also a founding member of the American Birth Control League, the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. He had edited a Spanish-language daily in New York, supervised The Nation’s critical coverage of the Haitian occupation, and written an important book about the Mexican Revolution.
Few outsiders had mastered Caribbean affairs as thoroughly as Ernest Gruening had. Yet, typical for his generation of anti-imperialists, Gruening knew little of the United States’ actual colonies. “Imperialism” was for him a more diffuse notion, one that referred not to formal territorial conquest, but to the informal bullying of weaker states, particularly those in Latin America. In fact, for all his travels, Gruening had spent only a single day in a U.S. colony—a brief stopover in Puerto Rico.
And now he was in charge of the whole empire.
Gruening sought guidance from the president. Roosevelt rattled off his assessments of the territories. Hawai‘i was in “pretty good shape.” The Virgin Islands needed work. Alaska should be used as a settlement outlet for Dust Bowl refugees—The Grapes of Wrath on Ice. “As for Puerto Rico,” he continued, “that place is hopeless, hopeless.”
“This new division is really the equivalent of the British colonial office, isn’t it, Mr. President?” Gruening asked.
“I suppose it is.”
“Well,” Gruening hesitantly probed, “a democracy shouldn’t have any colonies.”
Roosevelt smiled. He held his arms out, palms up. “I think you’re right. Let’s see what you can develop.”
Let’s see what you can develop? This was hardly the faith of the fathers. It was even a new tack for Roosevelt. Early in his career, he had followed in the footsteps of his distant cousin Teddy, serving as assistant secretary of the navy and fantasizing about annexing the Caribbean.
Yet the times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932.
This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t.
The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals.
Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories.
What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy.
In fact, they were potentially a threat. Since colonial sugar competed with mainland cane and beet sugar, mainland farmers demanded protection from it. Ernest Gruening objected to the farmers’ lobbying. Discriminating against colonial sugar, he testified to Congress, would perpetuate the notion that there were “two kinds of territory” in the country, “a continental and offshore America.” But Congress enacted sugar production quotas anyway. The territorial quotas were restrictive; those for continental cane and beet sugar were obliging. Through these and other legal mechanisms, the mainland secured economic relief while the colonies paid the cost.
Beet growers in Colorado weren’t the only ones worried about the colonies. West Coast labor unions nervously eyed the tens of thousands of Filipinos who competed with whites for agricultural jobs—since Filipinos were U.S. nationals, no law stopped them from moving to the mainland. Then there was the military situation to consider. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and seemed poised to advance on Southeast Asia in pursuit of colonies. The Philippines and Guam stood right in its path. Would the United States really go to war over these faraway, barely known, and not-very-profitable possessions?
Maybe it wouldn’t have to. Two years into the Depression, Calvin Coolidge noted a “reversal of opinion” about Philippine independence. A number of politicians, FDR included, were coming around on the issue. Rather than absorbing the Philippines’ trade and migrants and defending it against Japan, the new thinking went, why not just get rid of it?
The 1930s are known as a decade of protectionism, when the United States put up hefty tariffs to barricade itself against the world. Now it seemed that this spirit was going to change the very borders of the country. The Philippines was going to be dumped over the castle walls.
The sentiment behind the campaign in Washington for Philippine independence was hardly noble. “It would be a mortifying spectacle to see the United States readjust its Philippine policy to fit the balance sheets of a select group of industrial and agricultural interests,” chided The Christian Science Monitor. A comprehensive survey in 1931–32 of nearly three hundred major mainland newspapers found 92 percent against it, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Daily Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Still, for Filipinos, it was an opportunity, and even more so after Roosevelt’s 1932 election brought the first Democrat to the White House since Woodrow Wilson. The fortunate alignment of Democrats and depression would “surely never happen again within any reasonable human foresight,” noted the president of the University of the Philippines.
There was a third necessary element, though: Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippine Senate and the indispensable power broker in the colony. Quezon was a master politician, adept at playing all sides at once. He had served on Aguinaldo’s staff (at age twenty) during the war, but after Aguinaldo’s surrender, he’d spied for the colonial government and helped bring the holdouts to heel. He led the Nationalist Party, but he was also one of the Baguio Country Club’s six Filipino founding members.
Cameron Forbes likened Quezon to a “wonderfully trained hunting dog run wild.” Handled correctly, he would bring in the sheep. “But alone or in bad company, he goes wrong and ends up killing lambs and devastating hen yards.”
A fairer way to put it would be to say that Manuel Quezon embodied the contradictions of colonialism. The desire for the colonizer’s approval, the demand for autonomy, conciliation, violence—Quezon contained multitudes. One journalist compared talking with him to trying to pick up mercury with a fork.
Quezon proved especially fluid when it came to independence. Most Filipinos wanted it badly, Quezon knew, and he won votes by demanding it. “I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans” was his famous slogan. Yet he also saw, better than anyone, the dangers involved. The mainland may not have depended on the Philippines, but after decades of U.S. rule, the Philippines depended on the mainland very much. By the 1930s, about four-fifths of its trade was going there. And although the colonial government had built a small native army to quash local rebellions, the Philippines had been prevented from developing an outward-facing military able to repel a foreign invader. A sudden, simultaneous loss of U.S. military protection and tariff-free access to mainland markets spelled catastrophe.
In the past, Quezon had squared the circle by publicly demanding independence while privately assuring his contacts in the federal government that this was just empty talk. As long as Washington remained resolute in hanging on to its colony, that strategy worked. But now, in the 1930s, Quezon found himself leaning against an open door. A bill granting the Philippines independence in eight years sailed through the House in forty minutes, with Democrats for it voting unanimously. Panicked, Quezon arranged to have it blocked by the Philippine Legislature. But this was not ultimately a tenable position for the head of the Nationalist Party, so he supported a nearly identical bill that Congress passed the next year. Again acting on Quezon’s direction, the Philippine Legislature ratified this version unanimously on May 1, 1934, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the U.S. occupation.
A powerful country setting its largest colony free without threat of violence—it was unheard-of. The nearby Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) had been under Dutch control for three hundred years, and in the 1930s its governor-general predicted that it would be another three hundred before the colony would see independence. But the Philippines, held by the United States for about one-tenth that time, was about to go free.
To be fair, the Philippine Independence Act did not grant independence immediately. It permitted Filipinos to establish a new government, a “commonwealth,” akin to Australia or Canada within the British Empire. If Congress approved the commonwealth constitution and if the commonwealth met certain benchmarks over a ten-year period, then the Philippines would be independent.
Meanwhile, the Philippines, though still part of the United States, would be “considered to be a foreign country” for the purposes of immigration. It would also eventually start paying tariffs, low at first but steadily increasing with the years. In principle, the transitional decade would give the Philippines enough time to restructure its economy and build an army.
Manuel Quezon ran for president of this new commonwealth. He beat out Emilio Aguinaldo, who ran on a protest platform of immediate independence. To celebrate his inauguration, Quezon arranged a ceremony outside Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building. The Philippine flag, which for years had been prohibited, would ascend the flagpole and rise to the same height as the U.S. flag. Quezon wanted a twenty-one-gun salute, too, but Roosevelt forbade it—that honor was reserved for heads of sovereign states, and the Philippines was still a colony. After hinting at war and briefly threatening to boycott his own inauguration, Quezon acquiesced to nineteen guns.
Not enough guns. That would be a recurring theme in the years to come.
The Philippines was the largest U.S. colony. A similar story played out in the second-largest, Puerto Rico. The Depression had wreaked havoc on the island: unemployment, strikes, and—egged on by Pedro Albizu Campos—violence. It was the assassination by nationalists of Police Chief E. Francis Riggs that truly rattled the colonial authorities. He was one of them—the protégé, as it turned out, of Senator Millard Tydings, the chief congressional sponsor of the Philippine Independence Act.
Ernest Gruening was furious. He demanded that Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico’s leading liberal politician, condemn Riggs’s assassination. But Muñoz Marín refused—he understood why the nationalists had lashed out, and he was unwilling to confront them. “By his silence he was condoning murder, and indeed the whole Nationalist campaign of violence,” Gruening fumed.
Gruening and Tydings joined forces and drafted another piece of independence legislation, based on the Philippine Independence Act but intended for Puerto Rico. On the surface, it was anti-imperialist. But Muñoz Marín could see its vindictive intent—“revenge disguised as political freedom,” he called it. Whereas the Philippine Independence Act began imposing the U.S. tariff only in the sixth year of transitional government and increased it slowly thereafter, the bill for Puerto Rico dropped the tariff’s full weight in four years. Given that, in 1930, more than 95 percent of Puerto Rico’s off-island sales were to the mainland, a sudden tariff would be catastrophic. Among Puerto Rican leaders, only Albizu, monomaniacally focused on independence, was enthusiastic.
Tydings withdrew the bill in a few weeks—just long enough for Muñoz Marín and his colleagues to grasp the threat. If Puerto Ricans kept pushing for independence, they just might get it.
Back in the Philippines, meanwhile, Manuel Quezon contemplated the arrival of independence, and he, too, began to sweat. Would the United States aid in Philippine defense once the colony was independent? “As a matter of cold actuality,” a former governor-general told him, “the American people will not jeopardize their interests in the future for an independent Philippines any more than they will for any other nation.”
A movement to reverse Philippine independence grew in the late 1930s, especially among Filipino businessmen and mainland officials. The high commissioner of the Philippines, then the colony’s top-ranking official, called for a “realistic reexamination” of the independence act. “If our flag comes down, the Philippines will become a bloody ground,” he warned in a radio broadcast. Quezon sent him a congratulatory note on the speech, pronouncing its “presentation of the facts” to be “unassailable.”
Filipinos were shocked. Had Quezon, the leader of the Nationalist Party, really just endorsed a call to reverse the independence process? Quezon realized this was a bridge too far, and he backed down the next day, claiming to have misunderstood the high commissioner’s message.
But privately Quezon was desperate and clawing in every direction. He made secret overtures to Japan. He declared June 19 to be Loyalty Day—an over-the-top demonstration of the “wholehearted and unswerving loyalty of all the elements of our population to the United States”—in the hopes of wringing more defense funding from Congress. He quietly approached the British embassy about the possibility of Britain annexing the Philippines if the United States abandoned it.
A 1936 one-peso commemorative coin showing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Manuel Quezon gazing ahead, presumably toward independence. The highly unusual design, featuring two leaders rather than one and showing the U.S. eagle over the Philippine seal, expresses the complex sovereignty of the Philippine commonwealth. “Commonwealth of the Philippines” is printed on the obverse, “United States of America” on the reverse.
At the same time, Quezon began a mad dash to create his own national defense force, funded from the commonwealth’s meager budget. To build it, he recruited one of the only men in U.S. officialdom who actually felt a strong connection to the Philippines: the army chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur.
Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur.
A psychoanalyst could have a field day with any member of that trio, though perhaps with MacArthur most of all. He was carefree under enemy fire but lived much of his adult life under the reign of his controlling mother. He was an impeccable dresser who carried himself “as if he had a flagpole for a spine,” yet in the telling of his first wife he was an embarrassing sexual failure. Though he was regarded by many as a military genius, his career was punctuated by eye-popping blunders. And he spoke about himself in the third person.
MacArthur was a distant cousin to both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and he had served briefly as an aide to Theodore Roosevelt. But MacArthur never fell in easily with those men. Where the Roosevelts and Churchills orbited the Atlantic, MacArthur arced out on a different path, as if obeying his own gravity. At the height of his fame, from 1937 to 1951, he lived entirely on the Asian side of the Pacific. Although he was frequently discussed as a candidate for president, he didn’t return to the mainland once in those fourteen years.
If MacArthur had a home, it was the Philippines. His father, Arthur MacArthur, had been the governor during the Philippine War. It was there that Douglas did his first tour of duty, in 1903. It was where he first saw combat and first drew blood, killing a pair of what he called “desperadoes” (probably rebels, though possibly just criminals) on the still-unpacified island of Guimaras.
MacArthur’s first wife, the loudly disappointed one, had originally been General John Pershing’s companion. Immediately after she switched from Pershing’s arm to MacArthur’s, Pershing ordered MacArthur back to the Philippines, presumably as punishment. But MacArthur flourished there. He worked for Leonard Wood, spent a summer in Baguio, and acquired a Filipina mistress—a stage and film actress whom he took back to Washington with him, stashing her in a Georgetown apartment, away from the watchful eye of his mother.
MacArthur’s intimate ties to the Philippines put him at odds with the Europe-facing military establishment. Since the early twentieth century, war planners had contemplated the possibility of war with Japan. They generated a plan for this, Plan Orange, adopted first in 1924 and revised multiple times thereafter. But as officials in Washington played out the Japan scenario, they saw immediately how hard it would be to defend the United States’ Pacific outposts, particularly Guam and the Philippines. Mounting sufficient defenses would require far more money than an indifferent federal government was willing to pay—it was “not within the wildest possibility,” reported the commander of the army’s Philippine Department. Instead, the successive Plans Orange envisioned amassing a fleet in Hawai‘i or on the West Coast and leaving only small forces in the westernmost territories. If Japan attacked, it would get the western Pacific colonies, but then (the thinking went) the United States could stage a counterattack and eventually win them back.
For MacArthur, the thought that the United States was planning to sacrifice the Philippines was unconscionable. As chief of staff of the army, a post he assumed in 1930, he pressed the issue. He envisioned creating a large Philippine army to hold off the enemy at the shoreline and organizing an immediate, massive relief of that army from Hawai‘i. But this was wild optimism, especially in an era marked by severe budgetary constraints and widespread antimilitarism. The director of the War Plans Division regarded MacArthur’s proposal as “literally an act of madness.”
Part of the problem was the apathy toward the colonies. Even Brigadier General Hugh Drum, one of MacArthur’s few allies in the cause of territorial defense, openly conceded that “both the Philippines and Hawaii might be lost to us without materially affecting the safety of the continental United States.” Public opinion polls suggested that few mainlanders supported a military defense of anything west of Hawai‘i. And when Fortune in 1940 asked its readers which “countries” the United States should use its military to protect, only a slight majority (55 percent) favored defending Hawai‘i itself, far fewer than the number who would defend Canada (74 percent).
Officials in Hawai‘i protested vigorously to Fortune that Hawai‘i was not a “country.” It was “an integral part of the United States.”
Another part of the problem was that the government simply didn’t trust its own subjects. A full defense of the Pacific would require arming the populations of Hawai‘i, American Samoa, Guam, the Philippines, and Alaska. Yet war planners hesitated to do that; they seemed as concerned with defending the United States against those colonized peoples as defending it with them. The early plans for Hawai‘i envisioned deporting or interning the large ethnic Japanese population—a group that had climbed to well over a third of the territory’s population by the 1920s. In the Philippines, the army’s planners spun out scenarios in which U.S. forces would have to fight Filipino uprisings.
Perhaps they were right to fear colonized peoples. The 1930s, which had unleashed a violent Puerto Rican independence movement, also stirred up turmoil in the Pacific colonies. The late thirties saw a string of militant and racially charged strikes in Hawai‘i, spreading from the ports to the fields. In the Philippines, a low rumble of rural insurgency erupted in the “Sakdal rebellion” in 1935. Thousands of partially armed peasants and workers, impatient with Quezon’s temporizing, seized municipal buildings and demanded immediate independence. Their leader wanted them to kidnap the governor-general, raid armories, and storm the capital.
Filipino police and soldiers suppressed the Sakdal rebellion, killing fifty-nine rebels and dispersing the rest before it got that far. But the army’s planners eyed with suspicion even those Filipinos in uniform. And again, they had reason. In 1924, hundreds of Filipino soldiers in the U.S. Army had staged a mutiny over their unequal pay compared with white soldiers. MacArthur himself had overseen the court-martial, in which more than two hundred mutineers received sentences of five to twenty years.
Colonial defense, in other words, was a dicey business. But MacArthur’s faith did not waver. On Quezon’s invitation, MacArthur—still the army chief of staff—left Washington for the Philippines to undertake what he regarded as “an eleventh-hour struggle to build up enough force to repel an enemy.”
Douglas MacArthur dragged along his favorite aide, Dwight Eisenhower. Whereas MacArthur regarded Philippine work as a calling, Eisenhower saw it as “just another job.” He also believed it to be a “hopeless venture,” given Manila’s lack of resources and Washington’s lack of interest.
One of Eisenhower’s ideas was to secure leftover rifles from the U.S. Army at a nominal cost. These weren’t rifles the army needed. They were obsolete World War I–era Enfield models, and they didn’t work well. Still, Washington hesitated. The chief of the War Plans Division stood against the proposal: he worried that armed Filipinos might rise up against the United States. And would Japan regard the militarization of the Philippines as provocation? Eisenhower complained in his diary about the lack of “basic appreciation in the War Department of the local defense problem.” Eventually the army sold the rifles in cautious batches, some first, then more later if it went well. And it charged more than twice what Eisenhower had expected.
While Eisenhower wrestled with the bookkeeping, MacArthur settled in. He’d met his second wife, Jean, on the trip over. His only son, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in Manila, with Manuel Quezon as the godfather. MacArthur took up residence in the penthouse of the Parsons-designed Manila Hotel. He became a fixture of Manila society, even receiving a birthday card from his father’s old nemesis, Emilio Aguinaldo.
By all appearances, MacArthur intended to stay the course. When the War Department, nervous that his buildup of Philippine defenses might antagonize Japan, recalled MacArthur to the mainland in 1937, he took the extraordinary step of resigning from the army. It was an enormous sacrifice, given his long service (and his father’s) to the army, but it allowed him to remain Quezon’s military adviser. If MacArthur couldn’t be a U.S. general in the Philippines, he would be the field marshal (a grandiose title of his own choosing) of the army of the Philippine Commonwealth.
Eisenhower was apoplectic. “General, you have been a four-star general … This is a proud thing. There’s only been a few who had it. Why in the hell do you want a banana country giving you a field-marshalship?”
MacArthur was undeterred. He’d had a special uniform designed: a white sharkskin suit, black trousers, four stars on his shoulder, red ribbon at his lapel, and a gold-braided cap. He carried a gold baton.
Ostensibly, the pomp was meant to buck up Philippine morale. But perhaps it was to boost MacArthur’s spirits, too. As the years went on, his hope of raising a Philippine reserve army looked increasingly delusional. The gun shortage was only the start of the problems. What little ammunition got shipped to the islands often arrived badly deteriorated, and the recruits didn’t have enough of it to train with.
MacArthur asked Washington for help: $50 per Filipino trainee. It wasn’t an absurd request, given that the National Guard received a $220-per-traineee subsidy. Yet this one, too, was turned down.
MacArthur understood the Philippines to be “an integral part of the United States,” as deserving of defense as New York. But he had to admit by 1940 that the military forces stationed there were “entirely inadequate for purposes of foreign defense and are little more than token symbols of the sovereignty of the United States.”
In May 1941, a very frustrated field marshal cabled Washington to say he was coming home.
Ernest Gruening, meanwhile, faced his own ordeal. Despite the large ambit of his job—the supervisor of all the colonies—he didn’t have much power. His office was small and could do little more than lobby on behalf of the colonies. Gruening spent most of his time on Puerto Rico, where he held a separate appointment as head of the New Deal administration there.
Though he lacked power, Gruening still managed to acquire a rival, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Their politics didn’t differ much, but the pair nevertheless clashed with all the passion and pointlessness of two apparatchiks in the Soviet bureaucracy. Like any good Kremlin rivalry, it ended with exile in Siberia. Or, in this case, with Ernest Gruening being removed from Washington and sent to Alaska in 1939, where he was to be the colonial governor.
From his new perch in Anchorage, Gruening saw the peril that the Pacific territories faced. Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands stretched out toward Japan, reducing the Pacific Ocean “to the width of a ferry boat channel,” as one journalist put it. When Alaska had been annexed, in 1867, this had been a promising feature: the islands were stepping-stones to Asia. Now, however, it seemed more likely that the foot traffic would go in the other direction, that Alaska would be the point of entry for a Japanese invasion of North America.
Like MacArthur in the Philippines, Gruening begged for help. He needed it badly. Though Alaska shared a continent with the mainland, no road connected them (the secretary of war had judged the value of such a road to be “negligible”). Alaska had an air force, but only six obsolescent medium bombers and twelve obsolete pursuit planes were able to fly—and there wasn’t much gasoline. The assistant secretary of war described the army in Alaska as existing “in little more than name only.” There was no navy.
Gruening petitioned Congress for funding, as Alaskans had been doing for years, but with little luck. The New Deal’s massive infrastructural investments had passed Alaska by. It wasn’t a state, so it had no congressmen to lobby for it. And pleading military peril did nothing to change that. “‘We’re not going to waste any money on Alaska,’ was the consensus,” Gruening remembered.
It took the Japanese movement into French Indochina in mid-1941 to break the congressional stonewalling. With Japan on the march, Congress finally saw the wisdom of fortifying its Pacific-facing territory. The Japanese movement terrified the British even more. They feared losing Singapore and pleaded with Roosevelt to mount an Asian defense.
Roosevelt agreed. MacArthur, who had threatened to quit the Philippines, was ordered to stay. He would be welcomed back into the U.S. Army, this time as the commander of all the U.S. forces in Asia, and his Philippine army would be absorbed into the U.S. Army. Although Washington held the line on modern rifles, it began shipping massive B-17 bombers (“flying fortresses,” they were called) to the colony. The idea was that, with 128 bombers by February 1942, MacArthur should be able to defend not only the Philippines but the whole theater, including the British possessions. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall saw the B-17s as “the decisive element in deterring Japan.”
But the B-17s didn’t begin arriving until September 1941. There were other priorities that interfered: hauling as much rubber as feasible from Southeast Asia before a Pacific war closed the markets, shunting destroyers across the Atlantic to aid the British. The matériel intended for Pacific outposts piled up at the ports. “More speed! Congress!” the exasperated editors of a Hawaiian magazine demanded. “More and more speed!”
If you had made a flight around the Pacific in late 1941, here’s what you’d have seen. Hawai‘i’s defenses were substantial but incomplete, lacking especially long-range bombers (it had only twelve B-17s in commission). Guam had practically nothing: its one rudimentary base was too small for a bomber to land. Guam’s governor despaired that the colony was “absolutely indefensible,” and in the military it was common to refer to it in the past tense. Alaska, despite the last-minute reversal of congressional opinion, wasn’t much better off. “By no stretch of the imagination” concluded its air force chief, could Alaska’s planes “defend the territory against any attack in force.”
MacArthur’s Philippines was mixed. There was a small regular U.S. Army contingent of 31,095 troops, more than a third of whom were Filipino, plus MacArthur’s half-finished reserve army of about 120,000 Filipinos. The reservists were barely trained and badly equipped: canvas shoes, coconut-bark helmets, outmoded rifles, artillery that dated from 1898, and little by way of ammunition. Many had never even fired their rifles. More promising was the growing air force, which, with its fighters and long-range bombers, represented the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside the mainland. Still, the planes trickled in slowly, and by the end of 1941 only 35 of the planned 128 flying fortresses had arrived.
MacArthur remained sanguine, insisting loudly to all within earshot that “the Philippines could be defended, and by God, they would be defended.” But a confidential report by the high commissioner warned of “glaring deficiencies” in Philippine defenses. It also noted Quezon’s private admission that war would find the populace “unprepared and unprotected.”
That report was sent on November 30, 1941. A week later, Filipinos noticed some unfamiliar planes in the sky.