166 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy
it. Two hundred thousand US soldiers fought in the Philippines, suf
fering seven thousand casualties (3 .5 percent). Twenty percent of the
Philippine population died, mostly civilians, as a result of the US Ar
my's scorched-earth strategy (food deprivation, targeting civilians
for killing, and so on) and displacement.7 In 190 4 Roosevelt pro
nounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in "chronic
wrong-doing" -that is, did anything to threaten perceived US eco
nomic or political interests-would be disciplined militarily by the
United States, which was to serve as an "international police power."8
As the US economy rapidly industrialized, the army also inter
vened frequently on the side of big business in domestic conflicts be
tween corporations and workers. Troops were used for this purpose
in the Great Railroad Strike of 187 7-the first nationwide work
stoppage-begun by railroad workers protesting wage cuts. Begun
in West Virginia, the strike soon spread along rail lines from ocean
to ocean and from north to south. General Philip Sheridan and his
troops were called in from the Great Plains, where they had been
campaigning against the Sioux, to halt the strike in Chicago.
Industrialization affected fa rming as machinery replaced farm
ers' hands and cash crops came to prevail. Large operators moved in
and banks foreclosed on small farmers, leaving them landless. Farm
ers' movements, most of them socialist-leaning and anti-imperialist,
opposed military conscription and US entry into World War I-the
"rich man's war," as they called it. Tens of thousands protested and
carried out acts of civil disobedience. In August 1917 , white, Black,
and Muskogee tenant fa rmers and sharecroppers in several eastern
and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscrip
tion, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government
to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded
grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union
(WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous
Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan
was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working
people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a
day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Okla-