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In 1988 Congress apologized for the “fundamental injustice” of this and awarded each internee $20,000—a rare instance of the government paying reparations. Yet internment is one of those episodes
civilians hunted for any Japanese who remained hidden. Filipinos who helped hide them were arrested.
That’s partly because of the general tendency to exclude the colonies from U.S. history, though it surely also has to do with the short-lived nature of the affair. Whereas
Alaska Natives endured a harsh Jim Crow system: separate seating in theaters, segregated schools, and NO NATIVES ALLOWED signs on hotels and restaurants.
Manuel Quezon vibrated with anger. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror,” he exclaimed. “How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”
Quezon gave Douglas MacArthur half a million dollars from the Philippine treasury—a reward for services rendered. MacArthur, as an officer in the U.S. military, was forbidden to accept it, but he did anyway. Quezon
“No change could be for the worse,” they replied.
In the second week, the military government specified seventeen acts punishable by death. They included rebelling, giving false information, damaging anything of military value (including clothing), concealing food, speaking ill of Japanese currency, disobeying orders, obstructing traffic, or acting in any way “against the interests” of the military. Even suggesting these acts was grounds for execution.
The United States then interned thousands of “liberated” Guamanians, over their objections, in camps while the navy tore down what remained of the capital to build a military base. It was yet another occasion when the United States interned its own people during the war.
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.
Together with innovations in chemistry and industrial engineering, the U.S. mastery of logistics would diminish the value of colonies
(it was Roxas who had signed over the $500,000 check that MacArthur illegally accepted from the Philippine government before leaving Corregidor).
To accept Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, mainland politicians would have to reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control.
“Can America lead the world—effectively—toward its principle of government by consent of the governed, when it retains its own obsolete colonialism in Alaska and Hawaii?” Ernest Gruening asked. Or, as he asked privately, “How can we fervently plead for self-determination etc. for Indonesia and every other G-string people when we deny the most elementary expression of self government to our own?”
“wanting independence but not wanting economic upheaval.”
Puerto Ricans had a history of serving as subjects for experimental medical research, from anemia to mustard gas. Their poverty and marginal position in U.S. society made them all-too-convenient fodder.
Nor was it just the pill. With a supportive government and a network of clinics, Puerto Rico became a laboratory for all sorts of experimental contraceptives: diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, spirals, loops, intrauterine devices, hormone shots, and an “aerosol vaginal foam” known as “Emko” distributed to tens of thousands
“We live in the era of the scientific savage,” he reflected, “where all the wisdom of science, mathematics and physics are used for the purposes of assassination.”
powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.
Colonies were useful for their produce, and they were useful strategically.
rayon, an artificial silk made from wood pulp that alleviated dependence on trade
What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off 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.
Nearly two-thirds were plastic. Plastic is a chemical cousin of synthetic rubber—the ontological line between them can get blurry.
This was the start, the chemist Jacob Rosin predicted, of the “synthetic age.” It would bring “freedom from the plant” and “freedom from the mine.”
Industrial economies got so good at inventing substitutes that the suppliers of raw materials panicked. Places that had once been the objects of imperial lust now scrambled to find buyers.
snafu. As in, Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
moving things is hard. It’s a point easily forgotten today, when people, objects, and ideas glide easily across the planet’s surface. Now markets scamper across borders, planes land anywhere, and communications satellites connect the most seemingly distant places.
It was a known bug: humans didn’t travel well. Take them from one part of the planet to another and their typical response was to get sick and fall down. Things didn’t travel well, either.
Panamanians who had lived with those mosquitoes their whole lives had acquired immunity to yellow fever and resistance to malaria.
aviation—but others were no less important. Radio, cryptography, dehydrated food, penicillin, and DDT: these technologies laid the foundations of today’s globalization.
In 1904 a massive fire ravaged Baltimore. Engine companies sped from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and Harrisburg to help. Yet there was little they could do, for when they arrived, they found that their hoses couldn’t connect to Baltimore’s hydrants (or, indeed, to one another’s hoses). For thirty helpless hours they watched as 1,562 buildings burned.
Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind, the keys to prosperity. When he took his position as secretary, he rearranged the Commerce Department to ensure that he’d supervise the Bureau of Standards personally.
Empires imprinted colonies with new laws, ideas, languages, sports, military conventions, fashions, weights and measures, rules of etiquette, money, and industrial practices.
It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.
revolt of colonized peoples worldwide.
A group of Indians, the Pauquunaukit Wampanoag, watched them flail from afar. Finally, in the spring, after many of the colonists had perished, the Pauquunaukit
The norm in history has been linguistic difference, not sameness.
enforcing English as a national language proved to be a more violent undertaking. Slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language. Those caught speaking their home languages could face serious punishment; there are reports of some having their tongues cut out.
Starting in the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed tens of thousands of Native American children into white-run boarding schools. There, cut off from their families and communities, the students studied English.
they found ways to impose their language on weaker countries. They did that in large part through education. The hundreds of thousands of foreign students streaming into U.S. universities (120,000 a year by 1969) didn’t just study math and sociology. They studied math and sociology in English. They then carried English back to their home countries, where they ranked among the most educated and powerful.
there had to be one language, and the United States at that point was responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles.
Air traffic control and scientific research turned out to be mere preludes. The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet.
English is not the language with the most native speakers today. Mandarin Chinese is, followed by Spanish.
what’s remarkable about English is that it’s the language with the most nonnative speakers.
Today there are roughly eight hundred such bases, some of the most important of them on islands.
MacArthur censored the press, ran the economy, and set the curriculum of the schools.
Killings, rapes, and assaults by the men on the bases were not uncommon.
On the base, Japanese found jobs as interpreters, stenographers, drivers, maids, and construction workers. Off the base, the bars and brothels did a steady business.
Japan surrendered a great deal of autonomy. It had to stand aside as the United States used Japanese land to launch Asian wars, spy on the Soviet Union, and store nuclear weapons, with all the
Today, 20 percent of the island is used by the U.S. military.
