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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. population. Again taking 1940 as our year, slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in twelve was African American. If you lived in the United States on the eve of World War II, in other words, you were more likely to be colonized than black, by odds of three to two.

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

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.

On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over. If De Bevoise’s calculations are right, it had claimed more lives than the Civil War.

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.

Life in a war zone was a life shaped by precaution. It meant carrying around a gas mask when out (the University of Hawaii graduates processed in cap and gown and gas mask).

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.

The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials. Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths—Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands”—in one of the world’s poorest countries.