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September 1 - October 14, 2021
exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.
Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.
That is why Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma—all of which sought admission to the union—did not become states.
The cost, however, was that this would formally divide the country into unequal parts, a settler part and an Indian part.
It was as if someone had depopulated most of Europe and shunted remnants from each country to an allotment in Romania.
an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” It was an obscure word, appertaining, as if the law’s writers were mumbling their way through the important bit.
At every other stage in U.S. history, territorial expansion had been contentious, debated in newspapers and fought over in Congress. Now, if the law passed, any random adventurer would be “at liberty to tramp about the Pacific, or any other ocean, and annex islands to the United States,” as one paper
“The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”
“The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonised,” lamented the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The global frontiers had been closed.
The war may have begun as an empire-wide revolt by Spain’s colonial subjects, but it ended as the “Spanish-American War.”
enshrined the notion that some places in the country weren’t truly part of the country. Some territories—namely, the ones filling up with white settlers—could hope for statehood. Others would hang, as the chief justice put it, like a “disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”
And as the idea of the nation—a union of states sharing a culture, language, and history—grew in prominence, the colonies seemed more distant and nebulous, literally vanishing from maps and atlases.
For the inhabitants of the world’s colonies, there were two Wilsons: Wilson the liberator, Wilson the racist. And it wasn’t clear which one they would get.
Those civilians were “Americans,” too, even if no one treated them that way.
The Second World War in the Philippines rarely appears in history textbooks. But it should. It was by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.
textbooks are the admission of Alaska and Hawai‘i as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959. But those, too, were serious blows against racism. For the first time, the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood.
during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes. Throughout its economy, it replaced colonies with chemistry.
“It is no longer resources that limit decisions. It is the decisions that make the resources. This is the fundamental, revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary mankind has ever known.”
they changed the laws of geopolitics. The surface of the earth, with its strongholds, impassable barriers, and fortified borders, looked different from a cockpit. Contiguous access no longer mattered so much. The old imperialist logic—men with white mustaches coloring in countries on the map—lost a great deal of its force.
These were disparate technologies, but what united them was their effect on movement. They allowed the United States to move easily through foreign lands it didn’t control, substituting technology for territory.
Solidarity had relied heavily on Western radio, which Walesa credited with the collapse of communism in Europe. “The frontiers could be closed,” he wrote. “Words could not.”
Taken together, they have had a formidable effect. Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering—such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and “world-proofed” electronic equipment—further reduced the need for territorial control.
There’d never been a native language that stretched over such a large distance as the expanding United States without splitting apart. That it worked—that Virginians spoke the same language as Californians—can be credited to the settlement boom, which swiftly propelled a fairly homogeneous population over a vast expanse.
“It takes only 400 words of Basic to run a battleship,” Richards told Time. “With 850 words you can run the planet.”
Roosevelt sent Gruening on a Pacific tour. As Gruening saw it, legal claims dating from the nineteenth century weren’t enough. To “maintain the sovereignty of the United States,” he believed, the guano islands must be actively colonized. And so, playing the part of one of history’s last conquistadors, Gruening set off to plant the flag in the soil and claim the islands in the name of his country.
The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.
Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.
Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.
