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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea.

Just as Germany was caged in by neighboring countries, Japan was hemmed in by empires: the British Empire (Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong), the Dutch Empire (the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia), the U.S. Empire (the Philippines, Alaska, Hawai‘i, Guam), and China, in which every imperialist had a hand. The Japanese called this “ABCD encirclement” (American-British-Chinese-Dutch), and it meant that Japan’s access to oil, rubber, tin, and even food depended on foreign markets.

“This seemed demonic work.” Demonic, maybe, but not indiscriminate. The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.

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.

Oscar Villadolid, a boy at the time, remembers a familiar scene from the aftermath of Manila’s “liberation.” A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name. When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?” he asked. Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled. Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals. He thought he was invading a foreign country.

Together with innovations in chemistry and industrial engineering, the U.S. mastery of logistics would diminish the value of colonies and inaugurate a new pattern of global power, based less on claiming large swaths of land and more on controlling small points.

That word MacLeish chose, global, was new. There are scattered instances of its use to refer to the world starting in the nineteenth century, but not many before the 1940s. It took the war to make it popular. With it came entirely new words: globalist, globalism, and the pejorative globaloney, coined by the writer Clare Boothe Luce in reference to the ideas of Vice President Henry Wallace. If the last war was a world war, this one was, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it in September 1942, “a global war.” That was the first time a sitting president had publicly uttered the word global, though every president since has used it incessantly.

When Japanese politicians failed to write a constitution to MacArthur’s satisfaction, he had one drafted, in English, in nine days. “We the Japanese people,” it starts, and it goes on to affirm individuals’ rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But though it borrowed from the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the Japanese constitution was far more liberal, the result of a sort of unchecked New Deal that occupation authorities imposed on the country. The new constitution banned war, prohibited racial discrimination, guaranteed academic freedom, forbade torture, and granted all citizens the right to the “minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.”

Somehow, in the anything-goes atmosphere of the occupation, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Beate Sirota had made it onto the constitutional drafting committee (she had spent part of her childhood in Tokyo and was one of the few whites who spoke Japanese fluently). It was largely owing to her influence that the constitution mandated equal rights within marriage and prohibited sex discrimination—things that the U.S. constitution conspicuously does not do. That is still Japan’s constitution today. In more than sixty years, it hasn’t been amended once.

In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland. In other words, if you looked up at the end of 1945 and saw a U.S. flag overhead, odds are that you weren’t seeing it because you lived in a state. You were more likely colonized or living in occupied territory. Probably somewhere in the Pacific.

The United States is the only country whose flag, by law, must change when the shape of the country does.

In late 1945, counting the occupations, 51 percent of the population of the Greater United States lived outside the states. But by 1960, after Hawai‘i and Alaska entered the union, that number had fallen to around 2 percent, which is roughly where it has been ever since. Today, all U.S. overseas territory, including base sites, comprises an area smaller than Connecticut.

In a shockingly short period of time, colonized peoples dismantled the world’s great empires. In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, it was down to one in fifty.

Watching from afar, the Harlem poet Langston Hughes offered a prediction. Europe and the United States would take their former possessions back, he wrote. “But when they do, those great cities of the East will never be the same again. The brownskin natives will look at those tall European-style buildings and say, ‘Colored people lived there once!’ And in their minds they will think, ‘We have a right to live there again.’”

“From one end of the vast continent to the other,” wrote a journalist in Asia, “it has seldom been possible since Japan’s collapse to escape the sound of continuing gunfire.”

After the First World War, the United States had returned virtually its whole army to civilian status within a year. But in the face of the postwar tumult, the Truman administration worried about relinquishing the army. “We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world,” explained George Marshall, the army chief of staff. “And the peace can only be maintained by the strong.”

“What kind of government is this?” asked one of the soldiers. “What are we that scream piously, ‘the world must be free,’ then keep it to ourselves?”

To accept Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, mainland politicians would have to reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control.

The former president of Columbia University and Nobel laureate Nicholas Murray Butler warned that admitting Hawai‘i and Alaska to the union would “mark the beginning of the end of the United States as we have known it.”

Hawai‘i, well-known for its mixing of Native, Asian, and European strains, seemed particularly threatening. “We do not want those people to help govern the country,” a Massachusetts newspaper put it baldly. “When future issues arise in the United States Senate, we do not want a situation where vital decisions may depend upon two half-breed senators.”

In party politics, the two territories were balanced, it being widely assumed that Hawai‘i would be a Republican state and Alaska a Democratic one (exactly wrong, it turned out). But their admission would quite obviously unbalance national politics on another axis. Whatever the party allegiances of these new states, their racial composition would put them firmly in the civil rights camp. Southern Democrats in the Senate, nervous about what these states would do to Jim Crow, threatened to filibuster.

Well-known among the civil rights movement’s triumphs are the desegregation of schools won in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the prohibition of racial discrimination at the polls secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less touted in the 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.

Hawai‘i, for its part, immediately elected nonwhite congressmen: Hiram Fong to the Senate and Daniel Inouye, veteran of the fabled 442nd Infantry Regiment, to the House. Fong was the first Chinese American to serve in the Senate, Inouye the first Japanese American to serve in Congress.

The first experiment used medical students at the University of Puerto Rico. Despite having their grades held hostage to their participation in the study, nearly half dropped out—they left the university, were wary of the experiment, or found it too onerous. The researchers then tried female prisoners, but that plan fizzled too. In 1956 they began a large-scale clinical trial in a public housing project in Río Piedras.

The practice began in Puerto Rican hospitals in the early 1940s, just as Luis Muñoz Marín was rising to power. It quietly spread, typically administered after the birth of a child. By 1949, a survey revealed that 18 percent of all hospital deliveries were followed by “la operación.”

Worried that Puerto Ricans lacked the education to use other methods of birth control, they steered their patients toward the surgical procedure. Sometimes, hospitals offered it free. Did doctors go beyond mere steering? At times, yes. One hospital refused to admit women for their fourth delivery unless they agreed to be sterilized after. And most sterilizations were performed within hours of childbirth—hardly ideal conditions for informed consent.

In 1965 a governmental survey found that more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers between the ages of twenty and forty-nine had been sterilized, at the median age of twenty-six. Of the mothers born in the latter part of the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized.

Such numbers, stunning on their own, become even more so in comparative context. This was a time when India’s rate—one of the world’s highest—was six sterilizations for every hundred married women. Puerto Rico had more women sterilized, by far, than anywhere else in the world.

When economic forces carry sojourners from a poorer area to a richer one, the fortune seekers are usually men. But the Puerto Rican Great Migration was strikingly female—in the half decade after World War II it was 59 percent so. That was partly because foreign women had a harder time crossing U.S. borders, which left an opening for Puerto Rican women, often in domestic service. But it also owed to the encouragement of the island government, which was eager to see the departure of women of childbearing age. Many did leave. In 1950 about one in seven Puerto Ricans lived not on the island, but on the mainland. By 1955, it was closer to one in four.

They have largely stayed forgotten. Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history. He’s not in comprehensive scholarly series such as the Oxford History of the United States or The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, and I haven’t found a single textbook used in mainland schools that mentions him. Even books designed to uncover suppressed histories, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, ignore Albizu. The most important academic venue in U.S. history, The Journal of American History, has never discussed him.

Sondheim was nervous. “I can’t do this show,” he protested at first. “I’ve never even known a Puerto Rican.” His lyrics bore that out. In one draft, the characters fantasize, like the farmers and cowmen of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, about statehood. “When we’re a state in America, then we migrate to America!” they sing excitedly in broken English. Of course, Puerto Ricans were already citizens with the right to move anywhere in the country they chose. And, the commonwealth constitution having just passed, statehood was a dim prospect.

Because their motives were political, Sondheim explained, they were “less complex psychologically” than the other assassins.

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.

Between 1930 and 1950, the volume of plastics produced annually in the world grew fortyfold. By 2000, it had grown to nearly three thousand times its 1930 size.

“The truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed economies is that they can have—in anything but the shortest run—the kind and scale of resources they decide to have,” he marveled. “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.”

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.

It is fitting, then, that oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire. When faced with an Arab oil embargo, Henry Kissinger suggested that the United States “may have to take some oil fields.” “I’m not saying we have to take over Saudi Arabia,” the secretary of state continued. “How about Abu Dhabi, or Libya?” It is hard to imagine Kissinger embarking on such unbounded flights of imperialist reverie on behalf of rubber, tin, or any other former colonial commodity.

What was harder to find up in space was anything that might once have grown in a colony. Raw materials just weren’t as important as they’d once been. The fifty-star flag that the astronauts planted, marking humankind’s highest ambition, was sewn of DuPont nylon.

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.

At peak, U.S. plants churned out more than one plane every four minutes—a Luftwaffe every eleven days.

Walt Whitman’s characterization of war as “nine hundred and ninety parts diarrhoea to one part glory” was apt well into the twentieth century.

We rarely contemplate this, but for most of history, objects hadn’t been built to travel.

As he saw it, the true problem with the economy was neither the injustice of capitalists nor the impatience of workers, but the inefficiency of objects. So much time and money were wasted on things that just didn’t work. Solve that problem, Hoover thought, and there’d be more than enough to go around. Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind, the keys to prosperity.

“The screw thread is a simple device,” one senator put it, “but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization.”

Aligning nursing practices in the Philippines with those of the mainland made the empire run smoother. But it has also had a profound unintended consequence. Once standards are firmly established, they are hard to dislodge, and the Philippines has remained, even after independence, extraordinarily U.S.-centric in its nursing practices. So, as the U.S. population has aged, requiring more health care, and as the Philippine economy has faltered, more and more nurses from the Philippines have left to work in the United States. Today, a massive pipeline carries tens of thousands of Filipino nurses to jobs in U.S. health centers. At this point, not only are Filipino nurses training in preparation for emigration, but Filipino doctors are retraining as nurses so that they too can find work abroad.

A Canadian naval officer deemed it a “frightful commentary” on the state of international cooperation that at the start of the war, “there was not a single gun or a single round of ammunition” that could be shared among the Allies.

The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A.

In industry after industry, the world tuned itself to the United States.

But by my count, at least 91 percent of the world’s population stops at red octagons. Even the North Koreans do.

You had to colonize to standardize, roughly speaking (and with important exceptions).