Asians or Filipinos or Veterans? Service and Citizenship after 1898

• In Event: Legacies of Spanish-American War: Political, Governmental, and Constitutional

Abstract

The Spanish American and Philippine Wars launched American empire. Asian American and Filipino soldiers and sailors occupied a little-recognized and complex space in the larger narrative of reunifying war and the rise of American empire. American imperialism shook up some longstanding divisions over race, producing strange political bedfellows who lined up together in support of or in opposition to a project of territorial expansion beyond the continental limits. This paper explores two different struggles for citizenship and the anxieties these struggles provoked.
The first was the longer term evolution of anti-Asian sentiment that began in relation to mass Chinese immigration beginning in 1850 and continued into the early twentieth century, ultimately conflicting with rights claims by Chinese and Japanese individuals who served in the American Army and Navy during these military engagements. The second was the more acute conflict raised by the United States’ entrance into the world of empire. National policymakers had to decide whether Filipinos were citizens, subjects, or something in between. They also had to decide how to handle claims by Filipinos who had served either in the Navy or as members of the Army’s scout program.
Military veterans’ claims for access to citizenship revealed both the difficulty of defining racial fitness for citizenship and national policymakers’ struggles in determining how to account for service. As national institutions collaborated to create policies closing access to citizenship and to the country itself by Asians, courts grappled with claims by veterans seeking recognition and citizenship on the basis of their service. The veterans hoped that their claims would gain them access to citizenship and perhaps advance their groups’ standings, but the question all too often came down to whether these individuals were Asians or veterans first. By considering the public debates and litigation, we see how policymakers struggled to make sense of these service members’ claims that their contributions to an explicitly imperial enterprise demonstrated their allegiance to the United States and fitness for civic recognition.

Author

• Julie L. Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY