In this massive study that draws on public archives in the United States and the Philippines, numerous collections of private papers, and a wealth of secondary source materials, Alfred McCoy argues that the pacification of the Philippines served as both “blueprint” and “bellwether” for Washington's nascent security state (p. 17). McCoy constructs his argument through a careful analysis of the security system the U.S. Army put in place to bring to heel the population of the Philippines, which thought it had achieved independence after the ouster of the Spanish in 1898.
He then tracks some of the officers and officials involved in this surveillance and intelligence scheme to the United States during and after World War I, where they became key figures in setting up Army intelligence and in the postwar “Red Scare” suppression of longshoreman unions, miners, and other “subversives.” McCoy argues that this early iteration of the surveillance state was linked to the development of a much more robust national security state after 1945, one whose agents repeatedly trampled on the civil rights of American citizens deemed to be security threats.
McCoy's central contribution is to connect the American twentieth-century state formation sphere to developments in the outside world—to insist that American historians cannot understand the trajectory of U.S. history unless they are cognizant of the “capillaries of empire” (pp. 15–56) linking the far-flung U.S. overseas commitments and interventions to the domestic scene. This, in a sense, is very much like the argument made some time ago by Peter Marshall and others to bring the British empire back into modern British history. In the wake of the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975) and the more recent Senate report on CIA torture techniques during the seemingly endless “War on Terror,” McCoy's argument is difficult to dismiss.
In the Philippines, McCoy traces the creation of a policing and information network that diffused or undermined Philippine resistance and contrasts it with European imperial formations, where there was an emphasis on language and culture. He suggests that the American effort was “superficial” (p. 42) because there was little interest in either the Filipino languages or the history of the islands. Instead, the Americans placed emphasis on “cadastral mapping, census taking, geography, photography, police surveillance, and scientific reconnaissance” (p. 44). They also enrolled into their information apparatus numbers of Filipinos, some of whom eventually staffed the middle and upper echelons of the colonial constabulary and government. These collaborators then provide a link to the post-independence state and help to explain a peculiar political culture of repression and corruption in the postcolonial Philippines.
In all of this, there is a suggestion that the American security apparatus was ahead of colonial regimes in other parts of Asia and Africa. This creates certain narrative and interpretative problems. One involves the fact that having put together a security apparatus during World War I, the U.S. government dismantled it almost immediately after the war. Continuity then becomes an issue. McCoy places the burden of transmission primarily on General Ralph Van Deman. After a career of collecting data on Filipino “subversives,” a retired Van Deman built his own private archive in San Diego, California, in the 1930s, filling his files with any bit of data and gossip at hand, with practically no mechanism for verifying the veracity of the material. He was so successful at this that he became the go-to guy for ambitious, red-baiting California politicians and J. Edgar Hoover himself. Yet, from what McCoy is able to draw from Van Deman's archive, it seems that there was much that was good fodder for blackmail, extortion, and red baiting, but little else. The Van Deman approach may only have lingered on in Hoover's FBI.
Meanwhile, a far more robust postwar American state built new institutions, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and Agency, and upgraded military intelligence units. The resources and global mission of this security regime dwarfed the occupation of the Philippines and redefined what constituted security information. In the new regime, the acquisition and management of information was rationalized; it was taken out of the hands of under-resourced government agencies, private organizations, and patriotic individuals and placed in those of systems and information processing experts.Footnote 21
A second issue involves the claim about the uniqueness of the American security scheme. The sorts of elements enumerated above as central to the American information system in the Philippines were very much part of British, German, Austrian, and French army intelligence by the 1880s. The differences between the Americans and others may, in other words, have been between an emergent field of professional military intelligence in European armies and older, “Orientalist” notions of managing colonized populations. This certainly seems to have been the case in British India, for example. Nevertheless, McCoy helps us understand a version of colonial security on the cheap, in all its ad hoc messiness, criminal violence, and dubious influence on those it subjugated and those it purportedly represented.
