Bombs, Bureaucrats, and Rosary Beads: The United States, the Philippines, and the Making of Global Anti-Communism, 1945-1960.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the Philippines became the primary postwar site for the development and dissemination of a transnational anti-communist politics. I examine how Philippine elites and their U.S. allies managed local struggles over land reform, armed insurgency, democratic governance, and religion between 1945 and 1960. During the late 1940s and 1950s, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites developed what they conceived of as exportable models for postcolonial development. They designed projects across a range of social arenas, including military bases, universities, and churches, which were to be implemented in the Philippines and throughout the developing world. These globally charged discourses were formed against such local political movements as the Huk rebellion, which sought to challenge the political, economic, and cultural status quo of the colonial world order. My dissertation considers how these local political struggles, characterized by Filipino leaders and U.S policymakers as early sites of tension in a global Cold War, were transformed into laboratories for the development of a globally oriented anti-communist movement. Engaging multilingual sources, this dissertation draws from state, military, personal papers, and civic institutional records in the Philippines and the United States. I highlight the ways that Americans and their Filipino allies continually crossed the political borders of the world throughout this era and brought with them an accumulated knowledge of their experiences in the Philippines. My approach is not strictly bound by national boundaries but instead follows actors and events as they traveled widely throughout the postwar period. This methodology, informed by recent trends in transnational and global history, allows me to focus on the ways in which ideas or movements flow through networks of historical actors. It also highlights the ways that the politicized geographic scales of the Cold War resulted, at moments, in contradictory U.S. foreign policy missions. This dissertation thus not only reveals the collaborative constructions of a transnational anti-communist politics, it highlights the deep fissures in postwar U.S. global power.