“The American people know how precious national freedom and human liberties are,” the Free Trade Union News of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) announced in a front-page editorial on January 7,1949.Our American ancestors also fought a bold revolutionary war to gain our nation's independence, the article stated.“We therefore view with the keenest sympathy”the dreams of millions of Indonesians striving for their own country's sovereignty.The author,Andrew Woll, ended his editorial with a note of incredulity:“We simply can't believe that the Dutch will condone the use of their forces and resources for depriving other people of their national independence and democratic rights.”

This commentary, supporting Indonesia's quest for freedom after the Netherlands Army had mounted its second full-scale military attack on the Republic's headquarters in Yogyakarta in late December 1948, established a straightforward analogy with America's struggle for independence in the late eighteenth century. In linking the two revolutions, the politically moderate and anti-communist Free Trade Union News was not alone.Other publications across the vast North American continent, whether they embraced a progressive perspective or harbored more conservative views, also invoked the analogy with the United States in 1776 with great frequency.A range of US newspapers and magazines, when reporting on the anti-colonial struggles in Southeast Asia, suggested that the Indonesians’ desire to live a self-governing existence revealed similarities with the birth of Americans’ own independent nation.The creation of the United States of America, after all, had also entailed the severing of colonial ties with a maritime nation located across the English Channel from the Netherlands.

Inevitably, the contrasts between the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Indonesian Proklamasi in 1945 were striking. In fact, the dissimilarities were more profound than resulting merely from the different historical conditions under which North American colonists and Indonesian nationalists were compelled to draft their resolutions.The Indonesian proclamation of independence on August 17, 1945,was a brief apodictic statement issued by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, two of the paragons of the nationalist movement, who presumed to speak for a nation of 70 to 80 million people who were overwhelmingly illiterate.