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November 20 - November 24, 2025
“The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which 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.
Since 1945, U.S. armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.
Throughout the territories, colonized subjects were obliged to use bills with the faces of U.S. leaders on them. Extraordinarily, this Philippine bill was the basis for the design of the familiar U.S. dollar, not the other way around.
As Franklin pointed out, the bulk of it was handled the old-fashioned way, a fire hose of fecundity spraying settlers up and down the North American continent.
"fire hose of fecundity" is objectively so funny
It is a little-noted feature of world history that in the past few decades, the map hasn’t changed much.
Even Victor Hugo couldn’t run his harried hero Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables (1862) without pausing—pausing, indeed, for a whole chapter—to remark that it really would be better if some use could be found for Paris’s waste.
Omg
In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
But the timing of her suicide and some of the testimony from those who knew her have led many to interpret it as a protest of her husband’s invention.
From the start, the census had declined to count most indigenous people. Thus, for more than a century, a government that had reliable decennial tallies of its toymakers and chimney sweeps, of its cows and its horses, could not say how many Indians lived within its borders.
Of the more than twenty thousand trials conducted in one of Honolulu’s provost courts in 1942, 98.4 percent resulted in guilty verdicts.
“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.”
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.
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.
In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, it was down to one in fifty.
To this day, the drawer in the mahogany table used by the Republican leadership has a jagged bullet hole in it.
Still, he got one thing right. As Sondheim put it, indelibly, in West Side Story: “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”
One has to keep in mind the wrenching technological innovations that the leaders of the United States had already witnessed in their lifetime. Dwight Eisenhower was born into a world containing only a countable handful of cars, a world where lightbulbs were still a novelty. Yet he lived to see computers, nuclear bombs, supersonic jets, and manned spacecraft.
To conserve what little rubber remained, the government forbade its use in many forms of manufacturing. A national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour was imposed to reduce the wear on the mainland’s tires.
Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes.
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.
It wasn’t until 1927 that traffic lights were standardized. Before that, drivers in Manhattan stopped on green, started on yellow, and understood red to mean “caution.” A different system prevailed in Cleveland, a different one in Chicago, a different one in Buffalo, and so on.
“If the Chinese … rule the world some day,” the linguist John McWhorter has written, “I suspect they will do it in English.”
In South Korea, parents alert to this dynamic have sent their young children, usually under the age of five, to clinics for lingual frenectomies, surgery to cut the thin band of tissue under the tongue. The operation ostensibly gives children nimbler tongues, making it easier for them to pronounce the difficult l and r sounds.
While everyone else pays the cognitive tax of learning English, English speakers can dispense with language classes entirely.
The United States, in other words, did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe. Today there are roughly eight hundred such bases, some of the most important of them on islands.
Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.
What he didn’t foresee—what no one foresaw—was that in using Japan to launch its military campaigns in Asia, the United States was sowing the seeds of its own deindustrialization.
Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.
“Imagine, a few years from now. It’s December and the whole family is going to see the big Christmas tree in Hirohito Center,” warned an ad by General Motors. “Go on, keep buying Japanese cars.”
After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.
