Abstract This article analyzes the influence of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence and the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) during congressional debates in 1949 that focused on establishing a territorial government for American Samoa. In these hearings, naval leaders argued that Supreme Court decisions that had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment as demanding colorblindness and others that established property ownership as a fundamental right, along with the creation of the UDHR, meant that Samoans might not be able to protect their land from further white-settler colonialism if Congress passed legislation establishing a civilian government in American Samoa. U.S. military leaders believed that the Court’s decisions in Buchanan versus Warley (1917) and Shelley versus Kraemer (1948), and the UDHR, could prohibit American Samoa from enforcing race-based land ownership restrictions if lawmakers extended citizenship, equal protection, or due process to American Samoa. Members of Congress, however, believed that the Court’s past rulings in the Insular Cases, models set in other unincorporated territories (e.g., the Philippines and Hawaii), and Federal Indian law established legal precedents that meant Samoans would be able to continue restricting land ownership on the basis of race if they became U.S. citizens and were governed by equal protection and due process. Samoan leaders demonstrated the unsettled nature of constitutional law in American politics by emphasizing that any congressional act that extended citizenship, equal protection, or due process to American Samoa would ultimately be reviewed and interpreted by the Court. For these Samoans, even if members of Congress were interpreting past Court precedents correctly, a future majority of justices could adopt a different understanding of what the extension of U.S. citizenship, equal protection, or due process meant for American Samoa by ruling that non-Samoans had fundamental constitutional rights to land ownership in American Samoa. This article thus helps explain how and why Samoan and naval leaders influenced U.S. lawmakers when Congress was considering legislation that would extend citizenship, equal protection, and due process protections to American Samoa in 1949. This legal history demonstrates how different interpretations of the Constitution, the UDHR, and fundamental rights influenced various actors within the context of the U.S. empire, illuminating the ambiguous nature of constitutional law in the U.S. unincorporated territories.
Ross Dardani (Tue,) studied this question.