Prior to 1898, it was well understood, as Justice Joseph Story explained in 1828, that “A citizen of one of our territories is a citizen of the United States.”  After all, as the famous Chief Justice John Marshall declared in 1820, “the United States” is “the name given to our great republic, which is composed of States and territories.” 

However, in the early 1900s, the McKinley administration wanted to expand U.S. sovereignty over places like Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa, but it did not want to recognize the people living in those places as U.S. citizens. The reason? Explicit racism towards the people living in those islands.

Breaking from longstanding precedent, the Department of War argued in 1900 that while people in these new territories owed “allegiance” to the United States, they had no right to U.S. citizenship. Motivated by racism, high-ranking U.S. military officials expressed concern that these new territories were “largely peopled by an alien race, ignorant of our laws, customs, and institutions, unable to distinguish the difference between the Constitution of the United States and a map of the country.” 

In 1901, the U.S. Department of Justice argued to the Supreme Court that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “did not refer to” the people of island territories “who belonged to other races in other climes in the distant islands of the sea, uncivilized tribes in Sulu or Panay [in the Philippines, or], uncivilized tribes in Tutuila [American Samoa].” The United States, DOJ explained, “never intended to make these tropical islands, with their savage and half-civilized … people, a part of the United States in the constitutional sense.”