How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people.

When the census did begin to count Alaska Natives, in 1880, and mainland Indians, in 1890, it separated them from the rest of the population lest they contaminate statistics about “the United States.” This was the start of the segregated census, the practice of taking some of the enumerated inhabitants to be part of the country and consigning others to a sort of statistical purgatory.

Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness.

Further, given the serious doubts at the time as to whether Anglo-Saxons could live in the tropics, it seemed unlikely that the inhabitants of Spain’s island colonies would ever be displaced by whites in the way that the Native Americans had.

By the time the shooting stopped and the treaties were ratified, the United States had gained more than seven thousand islands holding 8.5 million people. Counting Alaska, the overseas empire encompassed an area nearly as large as the entire United States had been in 1784 and held a population of more than twice the size.

In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two. In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.

The inalienable rights of man and the injustice of taxation without representation—these were bedrock political values. But imagine, Bryan warned, what would happen if the United States took colonies. Anyone setting forth to speak about republican virtues—say, at a Fourth of July celebration—would be urged to keep silent “lest his utterances excite rebellion among distant subjects.”

“God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”

The imperialists offered a different solution to the trilemma. They were willing to sacrifice republicanism, at least as applied to so-called backward races. Roosevelt scorned those “who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” He continued: “Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.”

There was, of course, a third option: jettison white supremacy. The overseas territories could be treated as embryonic states and their inhabitants as full citizens. This solution commanded a great deal of enthusiasm within the territories themselves, where political parties in Puerto Rico and the Philippines inserted demands for statehood into their platforms. With the western co...

Ostensibly, this was a way for the public to meet the people at the center of the empire controversy. But it’s telling to note how the public would meet them: not giving lectures or speaking with fairgoers, but living on display in model villages, as if they were animals in a zoo.

The court affirmed that “the Constitution deals with states” and that territorial rights were at Congress’s discretion.

The main majority decision contained warnings about including “savages” and “alien races” within the constitutional fold. Doing so, one of the justices concurred, would “wreck our institutions,” perhaps leading the “whole structure of the government” to be “overthrown.”

The Insular Cases are far less well-known. Until very recently, it was not unusual for constitutional scholars to have never heard of them. But they are nevertheless still on the books, and they are still cited as good law. The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.

Similarly, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee to anyone born in the United States doesn’t apply to the unincorporated territories. In them, citizenship came late and only after struggle. What is more, it arrived as “statutory citizenship,” meaning that it was secured by legislation rather than by the Constitution and could therefore be rescinded. Puerto Ricans became citizens in 1917, U.S. Virgin Islanders in 1927, and Guamanians in 1950, though in all cases, because their citizenship is statutory, it can be revoked.

But statehood is, like so many other things, at the sole discretion of Congress—a legislative body in which neither Puerto Ricans nor other colonial subjects have a vote.

The Philippine Declaration of Independence set the flag’s colors as red, white, and blue, “commemorating the flag of the United States of North America, as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards this Great Nation for its disinterested protection.”

“There must be two Americas,” he mused. “One that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.” For that second America, Twain proposed adding a few words to the Declaration of Independence: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.” He suggested a modified flag: red, black, and blue, with the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones.

“No nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” it warned. “Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”

The imperial policy was affirmed, and it would never arise as a serious electoral issue again.

Somewhat awkwardly, though, reconcentration was the very tactic that Spain had used against the Cubans, the one that had provoked the United States to “liberate” Cuba in the first place. It “sounds awful,” confessed one U.S. official to his diary. “It works, however, admirably.”

Glenn was fined and suspended for a month (“nobody was seriously damaged” by the water cure, Roosevelt insisted).

Beriberi, it should be noted, is an extremely hard disease to contract. To get it as an adult, you have to eat a profoundly restricted diet, such as milled rice and virtually nothing else, for months.

Massacres like this weren’t unknown in the United States. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Bloody Island—the Indian wars had painted the West red. Yet Bud Dajo dwarfed them all. “We abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” wrote a bitter Mark Twain, privately. “This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”

Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.

Whereas British children were made to examine the world map, U.S. children venerated the national flag, which had a star for each state but no symbol for territories.

The “Greater United States” maps in vogue a decade earlier were no doubt still hanging on some classroom walls, but by 1916 few such maps were being newly commissioned. Cartographers had returned to the logo maps, showing only the states. Nationalism was seizing the country, all the more so as the First World War approached. 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.

As Wood saw it, Cuba wouldn’t be pacified until it had a stable government. And what was a stable government? One in which “money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest” and “capital is willing to invest” was Wood’s definition. He wrote to McKinley: “When people ask me what I mean by stable government, I tell them ‘Money at six percent.’”

In fact, the McKinley administration wanted more than that. It wanted to ensure that U.S. property claims were protected (a serious concern, given that the Cuban revolutionaries had torched sugar plantations), and it wanted the right to intervene if Cuban politics started looking wobbly. Using the threat of continued military occupation as leverage, Wood got the Cuban legislature to agree to both demands—not only agree to them but write them into law. For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).

This was, to put it mildly, an extraordinary deal. It gave the United States many of the benefits of colonization without the responsibility. Nobody had sought this arrangement—it was a work-around designed to circumvent the restrictions anti-imperialists had enacted. But it opened a fork in history: the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam went one way; Cuba went another.

The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial “stability,” U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934.

The defeated powers’ colonies, instead of being liberated, were redistributed among the victors. The only novelty was that they were now classified as “mandates” under the League of Nations (this was Smuts’s proposal). The mandates were arranged in a transparently racial hierarchy, with Middle Eastern territories on top (“Class A,” en route to independence) and African and Pacific Island territories below (“Classes B and C”).

“It appears to me,” Bellamy’s time traveler marveled in a retrospectively hilarious passage, “that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limits of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”

Hookworms have stowed away in humanity’s small intestines for some twelve thousand years, a side effect of domesticating dogs.

Is that where the “lazy white Southerner” stereotype came from? Is that why Southern whites looked funny—lanky, pale, and slack?

The governor believed that restricting births “among the lower and more ignorant elements of the population” was “the only salvation for the Island.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt joked grimly to an adviser—at least, I think and fervently hope he was joking—that “the only solution is to use the methods which Hitler used effectively.”

It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans—they are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far. The matter of consideration for the patients’ welfare plays no role here—in fact, all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.

“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order,” Albizu declared.

Albizu’s birthplace, once known for being “delirious” with enthusiasm for the United States, was now etched in memory as the site of the Ponce Massacre. To this day, it remains the bloodiest shooting by police in U.S. history.

One GI who participated in the tests on San José Island (and later developed stomach and throat cancer) observed that more than two-thirds of his fellow soldiers had Spanish surnames and couldn’t understand the instructions in English.

The mainland may not have depended on the Philippines, but after decades of U.S. rule, the Philippines depended on the mainland very much. By the 1930s, about four-fifths of its trade was going there. And although the colonial government had built a small native army to quash local rebellions, the Philippines had been prevented from developing an outward-facing military able to repel a foreign invader. A sudden, simultaneous loss of U.S. military protection and tariff-free access to mainland markets spelled catastrophe.

“War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

Of the more than twenty thousand trials conducted in one of Honolulu’s provost courts in 1942, 98.4 percent resulted in guilty verdicts.

Martial law in Hawai‘i lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands.

The Alaska Command ordered that all Natives living on the Aleutians west of Unimak and on the nearby Pribilof Islands be removed and sent farther inland. This wasn’t from fear of disloyalty. It was, rather, a “for your own good” internment, a way to keep civilians out of a war zone (though Aleuts noticed that the white residents of Unalaska Island were allowed to stay).

In the West Coast camps, the death rate of internees was no greater than that of normal civilians. But in Alaskan camps, by the war’s end, 10 percent had died.

Would the Japanese in the Philippines side with Japan or the United States? Nearly unanimously, they chose Japan.

Instead, the inhabitants of Hawai‘i and Alaska broke the other way and stood behind the United States as few others did. Much in the way that many African Americans fought abroad to vindicate their demands for equality at home, the inhabitants of the Pacific territory joined the war effort with a clear determination, as if they had something to prove.

“How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”

Yet in mainlanders’ eyes, the whites who had faced Japan were heroes, MacArthur most of all. While the generals in charge of Hawai‘i on December 7 were relieved of their commands and subjected to repeated investigations, MacArthur got a Medal of Honor for his “gallantry and intrepidity.” Congress declared June 13, 1942, to be Douglas MacArthur Day, and button makers sold MACARTHUR FOR PRESIDENT pins.