No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Dismantling Rights: Forthcoming Independence and the Revocation of US Military Benefits from Filipino WWII Veterans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2023
Abstract
This article explores the plasticity of rights by examining how the US government promised and revoked naturalization rights and military benefits from Filipino colonial soldiers who served on behalf of the United States in World War II. Rarely have legal scholars of the US military, citizenship, and the welfare state addressed the rights of colonial subjects. Drawing on data collected from six libraries and archives, the Congressional Record, and oral histories, I document how key actors in the US government dismantled the rights of Filipino soldiers. I find that colonialism, war, and a rapidly changing geopolitical situation—forthcoming Philippine independence—allowed members of the US Congress and the administrator of Veterans Affairs to dismantle rights. By arguing that the Philippines was not a colony, that colonial subjects were not entitled to equal treatment, and that Filipino veterans were not US military, members of the US executive and legislative branches casually eroded rights. US state actors thus were able to claim that Filipino veterans’ rights were merely cumbersome and expensive foreign aid. This case suggests that rights are more malleable during times of state transition.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation
References
REFERENCES
Ablavsky, Gregory. “Administrative Constitutionalism and the Northwest Ordinance.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 167, no. 7 (2018): 1631–68.Google Scholar
Allsup, Carl. The American G.I. Forum: Origins and Evolution. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Atkinson, David C. The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books, 2016.Google Scholar
Azuma, Eiichirō. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldoz, Rick. The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946. New York: NYU Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Barkawi, Tarak. Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017a.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkawi, Tarak. “States, Armies and Wars in Global Context.” Global Historical Sociology, edited by Go, Julian and Lawson, George, 58–76. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017b.Google Scholar
Brandwein, Pamela. Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Burk, James. “Theories of Democratic Civil-Military Relations.” Armed Forces & Society 29, no. 1 (2002): 7–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnett, Christina Duffy. “Empire and the Transformation of Citizenship.” In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by McCoy, Alfred W. and Scarano, Francisco A., 332–41. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Burnett, Christina Duffy, and Marshall, Burke, eds. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cabotaje, Michael A. “Equity Denied: Historical and Legal Analyses in Support of the Extension of US Veterans’ Benefits to Filipino World War II Veterans.” Asian Law Journal 6, no. 1 (1999): 67–97.Google Scholar
Capozzola, Christopher. Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century. New York: Basic Books, 2020.Google Scholar
Castañeda Anastacio, Leia. The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State: Imperial Rule and the American Constitutional Tradition in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1935. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Clayton, Anthony. France, Soldiers, and Africa. London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1988.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: The Free Press, 1935.Google Scholar
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Epp, Charles R. The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erman, Sam. Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FitzGerald, David Scott, and Cook-Martín, David. Culling the Masses. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fogarty, Richard S. Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper Collins, 2011.Google Scholar
Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Franqui-Rivera, Harry. Soldiers of the Nation: Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868–1952. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frymer, Paul. “Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State.” Politics & Society 32, no. 4 (2004): 475–509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fujitani, Takashi. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Gabaccia, Donna R. Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective. Vol. 9. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Go, Julian. “‘Racism’ and Colonialism: Meanings of Difference and Ruling Practices in America’s Pacific Empire.” Qualitative Sociology 27, no. 1 (2004): 35–58. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:QUAS.0000015543.66075.b4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Go, Julian. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during US Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golay, Frank Hindman. Face of Empire: United States-Philippine Relations, 1898-1946. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997. http://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/ocm39253738.Google Scholar
Gonzalves, Theo. “‘We Hold a Neatly Folded Hope’: Filipino Veterans of World War II on Citizenship and Political Obligation.” Amerasia Journal 21, no. 3 (1995): 155–74. https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.21.3.g5mn36615v323501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guglielmo, Thomas A. Divisions: The Untold Story of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutman, David. The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915. Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Race and Racialization: Essential Readings, 2
nd ed., edited by Tania Das Gupta et al., 85–95. Toronto, CSP Books: 1992.Google Scholar
Haney-López, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. “The Constitution of Aspiration and ‘The Rights That Belong to Us All.’” The Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (1987): 1013–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/1902163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, Barnor. “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (2007): 643–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701356064.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honda, Michael. “Justice for Filipino Veterans, at Long Last.” Asian American Law Journal 16 (2009): 193–96.Google Scholar
Hong, Jane H. Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hsu, Madeline Y. The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ileto, Reynaldo C. “World War II: Transient and Enduring Legacies for the Philippines.” In Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia, edited by David Koh Wee Hock, 74–91. Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2007.Google Scholar
Janowitz, Morris. “Military Institutions and Citizenship in Western Societies.” Armed Forces & Society 2, no. 2 (1976): 185–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jose, Ricardo Trota. The Philippine Army: 1935-1942. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1992. http://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/ocm29206631.Google Scholar
Jung, Moon-Kie. Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira, and Mettler, Suzanne. “On Race and Policy History: A Dialogue about the G.I. Bill.” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 3 (2008): 519–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592708081267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, Jeremy K. “New Look Constitutionalism: The Cold War Critique of Military Manpower Administration.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 167, no. 7 (2018): 1749–82.Google Scholar
Khoshneviss, Hadi. “Accruing Whiteness: Power and Resistance in Prerequisite Citizenship Cases of Immigrants from the ‘Middle East.’” Citizenship Studies 25, no. 5 (2021): 620–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2021.1923658.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Krebs, Ronald R. Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Krebs, Ronald R. “The Citizen-Soldier Tradition in the United States: Has Its Demise Been Greatly Exaggerated?” Armed Forces & Society 36, no. 1 (2009): 153–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawson, Gary, and Seidman, Guy. The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, Robert C. Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Man, Simeon. Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Michelle. “The Young Algerians and the Question of the Muslim Draft, 1900–14.” In Algeria Revisited: History, Culture and Identity, 39–55. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.Google Scholar
McCoy, Alfred W., Scarano, Francisco A., and Johnson, Courtney. “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformations in the US Imperial State.” In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by McCoy, Alfred W. and Scarano, Francisco A., 3–33. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Menezes, Lt. General S. L. Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Mettler, Suzanne. Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Millhiser, Ian. Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. New York: Nation Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Moskos, Charles C., Bowman, William, Little, Roger, and Thomas Sicilia, G.. “The Marketplace All-Volunteer Force: A Critique.” In The All-Volunteer Force after a Decade: Retrospect and Prospect, 15–17. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Nakano, Satoshi. “Nation, Nationalism and Citizenship in the Filipino World War II Veterans Equity Movement, 1945-1999.” Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 32, no. 2 (2000): 33–53.Google Scholar
Nakano, Satoshi. “Nation and Citizenship in the Filipino World War II Veterans Equity Movement, 1945-2011.” In “We the People” in the Global Age: Re-Examination of Nationalism and Citizenship, edited by Oshiba, Ryo, Rhodes, Edward, and Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru, 205–28. Osaka: The Japan Center for Area Studies, 2002.Google Scholar
Nakano, Satoshi. “The Filipino World War II Veterans Equity Movement and the Filipino American Community.” In International Philippine Studies Conference, 1–34. 2004.Google Scholar
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Nieva, Antonio A. Cadet, Soldier, Guerilla Fighter: Remembering Bataan and Corregidor. 2
nd ed., edited by Nieva, P.. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.Google Scholar
Onkst, David H. “‘First a Negro … Incidentally a Veteran’: Black World War Two Veterans and the G. I. Bill of Rights in the Deep South, 1944-1948.” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (1998): 517–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paralitici, Ché. No Quiero Mi Cuerpo Pa’tambor: El Servicio Militar Obligatorio En Puerto Rico. San Juan, PR: Ediciones Puerto, 1998.Google Scholar
Parker, Christopher S. Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Frederick William. The Commonwealth Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Phillips, Kimberley L. War! What Is It Good For?: Black Freedom Struggles and the US Military from World War II to Iraq. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Pimentel, Kevin. “To Yick Wo, Thanks for Nothing: Citizenship for Filipino Veterans.” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 4, no. 2 (1999): 459–93.Google Scholar
Priagula, Citadelle B. “Examining Race-Conscious Remediation through the Pilipino/a American Experience.” Asian Pacific American Law Journal 15, no. 1 (2010): 135–59.Google Scholar
King, Quisumbing, Katrina. “The Structural Sources of Ambiguity in the Modern State: Race, Empire, and Conflicts over Membership.” American Journal of Sociology 128, no. 3 (2022): 768–819.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raimundo, Antonio. “The Filipino Veterans Equity Movement: A Case Study in Reparations Theory.” California Law Review 98, no. 2 (2010): 575–623.Google Scholar
Rana, Aziz. The Two Faces of American Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Ray, Victor. “Militarism as a Racial Project.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, edited by Batur, Pinar and Joe, R. Feagin, 161–68. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reyes, Victoria. Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Rivera, Paul Daniel. “We’ve Been Waiting a Long Time - The Struggle to Pass the Filipino Veterans Equity Act and a Bittersweet Ending to a Sixty-Three-Year Battle.” Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal 7 (2010): 447–82.Google Scholar
Rosales, Steven. “Fighting the Peace at Home: Mexican American Veterans and the 1944 GI Bill of Rights.” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 4 (2011): 597–627.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roux, Michel. Les harkis, ou, Les oubliés de l’histoire. Textes à l’appui. Série Histoire contemporaine. Paris: La Découverte, 1991.Google Scholar
Salyer, Lucy E. “Baptism by Fire: Race, Military Service, and US Citizenship Policy, 1918–1935.” Journal of American History 91, no. 3 (2004): 847–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segal, David R. Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1989.Google Scholar
Sherman, David W. “Naturalization of Filipino War Veterans.” San Diego Law Review 22, no. 5 (1985): 1171–92.Google Scholar
Sinnar, Shirin. “Institutionalizing Rights in the National Security Executive.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 50 (2015): 289–357. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2636326.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda. “The GI Bill and US Social Policy, Past and Future.” Social Philosophy and Policy 14, no. 2 (1997): 95–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sohoni, Deenesh, and Vafa, Amin. “The Fight to Be American: Military Naturalization and Asian Citizenship.” Asian American Law Journal 17 (2010): 119–51.Google Scholar
Sparrow, Bartholomew H. The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006.Google Scholar
Stanciu, Cristina. “Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20, no. 2 (2021): 252–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781420000080.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanley, Peter W. A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899-1921. Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Takaki, Ronald. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. New York: Back Bay Books, 2000.Google Scholar
Thompson, Lanny. Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under US Dominion after 1898. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Vergara, Vanessa. “Broken Promises and Aging Patriots: An Assessment of US Veteran Benefits for Filipino World War II Veterans.” Asian American Policy Review 7 (1997): 163–82.Google Scholar
Volpp, Leti. “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship through Marriage.” UCLA Law Review 53, no. 2 (2005): 405–84.Google Scholar
Whittington, Keith E. Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann. Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.Google Scholar
CASES CITED
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831).Google Scholar
Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901).Google Scholar
Gonzales v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (1904).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toyota v. United States, 268 U.S. 402 (1925).Google Scholar
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).Google Scholar
Worcester v. Georgia,31 U.S. 515 (1832).Google Scholar
STATUTES CITED
Alien Naturalization Act, 40 Stat. 542 (1918).Google Scholar
1935 Alien Veteran Naturalization Act (Nye-Lea Act), Pub. L. No. 74-162 (1935).Google Scholar
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Pub. L. No. 111-5 (2009).Google Scholar
An Act to Provide for the Complete Independence of the Philippine Islands, to Provide for the Adoption of a Constitution and a Form of Government for the Philippine Islands, and for Other Purposes (Tydings–McDuffie Act), Pub. L. No. 73-127 (1934).Google Scholar
Filipino Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2015, Pub. L. No. 114-265 (2016).Google Scholar
Filipino World War II Veterans Naturalization Act of 1989, 101 H.R. 525 (1989-1990).Google Scholar
First Supplemental Surplus Appropriation Rescission Act, 1946. Pub. L. No. 79-30 (1946).Google Scholar
General Allotment Act, 24 Stat. 388 (1887).Google Scholar
Immigration Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-649 (1990).Google Scholar
The Jones–Shafroth Act, Pub. L. No. 64-368 (1917).Google Scholar
National Service Life Insurance Act of 1940, Pub. L. No. 76-801 (1940).Google Scholar
Second War Powers Act of 1942, Pub. L. No. 77-507 (1942).Google Scholar
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, Pub. L. No. 78-346 (1944).Google Scholar