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

by Daniel Immerwahr

“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.

A country that had started out resembling the British Empire, with centers of power in the East and subordinated territory in the West, had been turned by the population bomb into something different: a violently expansive empire of settlers, feeding on land and displacing everything in its path.

In the venerable U.S. tradition of naming places for the people who have been driven from them, the newly opened territory was called Oklahoma, a Choctaw word meaning “red people.”

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. In a section regrettably cut from the musical, Hugo outlined his plan for “a double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,” to carry it back to the fields.

The Peruvian penguin has fairly beaten the American eagle,” chortled The London Times).

It was an obscure word, appertaining, as if the law’s writers were mumbling their way through the important bit. But the point was this: those islands would, in some way, belong to the country.

“It is inexcusable that American laborers should be left within our own jurisdiction without access to any Government officer or tribunal for their protection,” he said. It was a thundering presidential endorsement of a principle that had until then remained nebulous. No matter how remote those shit-spattered rocks and islands were, they were, in the end, part of the United States.

In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.

WHAT THE FUCK

Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. 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.

Indeed, empire could seem, from the mainland, to be a regrettable drunken binge, best never spoken of.

Not enough vomit emojis in the world

Yet what struck observers, repeatedly, was how much poverty remained amid the plenty. Gravity-defying skyscrapers spoke to new accumulations of capital, but the shadows of those tall buildings fell over large, polluted slums that were crowded with the unfortunates sucked in by industrialism’s undertow. That the world’s richest country should at the same time be so squalid was hard to countenance. The press rumbled with proposals to tame the chaos, clean the cities, and fix whatever was broken. One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy. It imagined a man falling asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakening in the year 2000 to a luminously bright future, a future where everything worked.

A psychoanalyst could have a field day with any member of that trio, though perhaps with MacArthur most of all. He was carefree under enemy fire but lived much of his adult life under the reign of his controlling mother. He was an impeccable dresser who carried himself “as if he had a flagpole for a spine,” yet in the telling of his first wife he was an embarrassing sexual failure. Though he was regarded by many as a military genius, his career was punctuated by eye-popping blunders. And he spoke about himself in the third person.

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

Alaska was thus the “quietest war theater,” or the “hidden front,” as journalists called it. Today it is the forgotten war. Many people are surprised to learn that the Japanese even came near Alaska. They are also surprised to learn of the Aleut internment.

But Rock’s tests were burdensome, the side effects were serious, and the whole thing depended on the desperation of childless women. McCormick was impatient for large-scale field trials. “How can we get a ‘cage’ of ovulating women to experiment with?” she asked Sanger.

Y I K E S

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.

w h a t t h e f u c k

Another proposed reducing the length of condoms by half. It took his colleagues a moment to realize he was joking.

snafu. As in, Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

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.

Are you fucking serious

Worm food

“They are outsourcing torture because they know it is illegal”